Ace of Spades HQ

May 09, 2013

And Hillary, Too, Accepts an Award for Her Public Service
— Ace

She was awarded the Distinguished Cover-Up Award, with Disinformation Cluster.

She accepted this award while the hearings were in progress-- while a man was telling the world someone at State had had demoted for exposing Hillary Clinton's lies.

Hillary 2016

Quick, let's elect her to a position where she gains the power to pardon herself.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (276)
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Mayor of London: England's Departure from EU Would be "Shot in the Arm" for Democracy
— Ace

Even this guy gets it, and he's British.*

Note he doesn't just get the conclusion -- he gets the underlying principle as well. Democracy is about people having control over their political fates. The more remote actual political power is made from the people, the more convoluted the pathway between citizen wish and government action, the less democratic a state is, and the less empower the citizen.

The public would welcome a British exit because people would feel they had won back control over their own lives from Brussels, the Mayor claimed.
"If we are honest, I think, democratically, it would be a shot in the arm because people would suddenly feel, yes, we are running our own destiny again, our politics is entirely independent, British electors can choose the people who are taking decisions that affect their lives.
"That would be a very important benefit."

Government never admits its real agenda. I don't mean this conspiratorially, though I suppose it reads that way. But every institution has its Stated Mission and its Real Mission. Teachers unions speak forever about their Stated Mission, to educate the young; they never announce their Real Mission, which is ever-escalating salaries, even for -- especially for -- its worst performing teachers, who are, due to their very incompetence at their jobs and their utter reliance on the union for their daily bread, the union's strongest supporters and shock troops.

The Real Mission of any government, democratic or tyrannical, is to insulate itself from the "whims of the public."

Every person, every institution, seeks autonomy, freedom of action, freedom to pursue his or its own wishes. Every single one. Politicians will say they love getting input from voters; they are lying. What they wish is to do as they please without having to answer to anyone about it.

This isn't really a "bad" impulse, as every person, every person who's ever breathed air, wishes to have maximum freedom of action and minimum responsibility to others, minimum restriction on freedom of action. This is why we praise people -- like parents -- who undertake the vital mission of putting the needs of others ahead of their own.

Because it's hard. Because every parent is giving up a little of himself in order to give his child life and instruction. Every parent is choosing to make himself responsible to his child -- a very heavy responsibility.

But people do have the feeling that they'd like to be free of obligations and utterly free to do exactly as they will. We envy Silicon Valley millionaires who retire at age 36, not because they are now living lives of sloth, but because they have attained a significant amount of personal freedom. They've made enough money to be free of the requirement of working for a living. They can work -- as it pleases them, as it interests them. But they are shorn of the obligation to work.

One would have to be an idiot, or a leftist (but I repeat myself), to imagine a government made up of human beings, each of whom privately wishes to have maximum power, maximum freedom of action, and minimum oversight, minimum responsibility to others, would somehow fail to gain this aspect of its constituent members.

If you collect up a thousand balls, each of which is more or less red, you know what you have? A big pile of red balls. The collection reflects the aspects of its individual constituents.

The secret mission of all government is to become free of the "whims of the people," to become self-empowered, to become self-willed, to become, itself, free.

And that we can never permit. For citizens to be free, the government must be a slave.

Every attempt by the government to escape the shackles of responsibility to its citizens must be firmly repelled and rebuked. The yoke should be tightened, not loosened.

The EU is a massive effort at making the government as remote and insulated from the people it ostensibly serves. It has worked misery already; it will work greater miseries. Because it must.

A government which does not answer to its people answers only to itself.

Like I said, this idiot gets it, and he's a British mayor of a left-leaning city in a country which has long ago given up its vitality and heart in exchange for the shabby promises of socialism.

What is it about this simple principle that so eludes the American political left?

* Correction regarding a mistake I never made: I have to say, I wrote this piece, in draft, stating that this mayor was "left-wing." I was thinking of Ken Livingston, even though this is Boris Johnson. But I guessed Johnson must be as left-wing as Livingston; if a city elects one left-winger, it's probably going to keep doing so.

But I checked, and he's actually a conservative.

But he's still British, and a British conservative is just a guy who wants some fox-hunting along with his socialism.

And yet, he still gets it: People feel empowered when they feel they are actually adult free citizens, in charge of their own political destinies.

I have a theory that political responsibility goes hand in hand with personal responsibility: Treat people as responsible free citizens as a political matter, and they will also tend to behave responsibly in their personal lives.

And the opposite is true as well: Treat them as children politically, and they will tend to behave as children personally.

Just a theory. But one can't look at the decline of American Democracy and fail to notice that the most free and politically-responsible people seemed to be the most personally-responsible and mature-behaving people as well.

And one can't help but look at the basket-cases of the world, where the public has been politically infantilized, without noticing that the people behave in a juvenile or even infantile manner in their personal lives as well.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (170)
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Old Married White Male Who Likes Wal*Mart and Chick-fil-A Says That There Was a Major Ommission from Administration's Reporting on Benghazi
— Ace

But he won't say what.

But Ed might have found what he's talking about-- this disclosure was reported by Yahoo news.

Gowdy provided one of the few surprises in the hearing, reading what he described as an email from the day after the attacks in which Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones said she had told the Libyan governor that Â“the group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.Â” That raised fresh questions about why top Obama aides emphasized the role of spontaneous demonstrations against the video in public remarks for days afterwards.

When Hicks called Beth Jones to ask her why the Administration was pushing the YouTube video talking point despite knowing the falsity of it, Beth Jones could only say "I don't know."

The Administration cannot claim they were right on this matter, of course. Clearly they were wrong. Their defense is that they were wrong in good faith, as opposed to deliberately false.

It is currently impossible to maintain even that in the face of every indicator stating that this was a planned attack by extremists either directly associated with Al Qaeda or with a jihadist group similar to Al Qaeda, and with no evidence whatsoever this was connected to a YouTube video. Hillary Clinton's wishing for it to be so is not "intelligence," though the Administration and its Palace Guard Media seems to want to credit it as such.

But while it is currently impossible to maintain this "good faith error" claim in the face of this evidence, obviously each new disclosure showing that everyone in the government knew immediately that this was a planned terrorist attack makes the lie even more absurd.

Who knows, at one point perhaps even the leftist media will find it too hard to believe in Fairy Tales.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:59 AM | Comments (290)
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Jay Carney Clinging to the ARB Like He Once Clung to the YouTube Video
— Ace

NiceDeb documents his shame in detail, noting all* the false statements he's made on this.

* Well, a bunch, anyway.

[Comments now appear fixed, but I had this Instapundit-like post in the hopper.]

Posted by: Ace at 07:50 AM | Comments (37)
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Susan Rice Honored with "Great American" Award
— Ace

That makes sense.

[With comments down, and there being no forum here to chew things over, I think I'll just do Instapundit-style links, at least until things are fixed.]

Posted by: Ace at 07:26 AM | Comments (132)
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Hall of Shame: The Politicians, Professors, and Pundits Who Pushed for Penalties for the YouTube Video
— Ace

Via @allahpundit, a very much partial list of the leftists who are pretty sure liberties will have to fall by the wayside in their quest for an orderly society.

[I know comments are down. I'm sorry about this. As Ben mentioned, Pixy has been alerted.]

Posted by: Ace at 07:10 AM | Comments (66)
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Thursday Morning News Dump
— Pixy Misa

Follow me on twitter.

[Update: We know the comments are down. We'll send someone out to fix them between 8am and 4pm on Friday]

Here is a link to the other site.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:15 AM | Comments (230)
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Top Headline Comments (5-9-2013)
— andy

Overheard in a washroom at CNN: "Man, I'm glad that Arias trial is over so we can devote proper time to this limo fire."

Posted by: andy at 02:56 AM | Comments (371)
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Moore's Law still good for the foreseeable future [Purp]
— Open Blogger

What's Moore's Law you ask?

...The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years"...

The move is going to be away from traditional Silicon in the future.

...The process of scaling down chip sizes will require lots of ideas, many of which are taking shape in university research being funded by chip makers and semiconductor industry associations, Holt said. Some of the ideas revolve around new transistor structures and also materials to replace traditional silicon...

The problem with traditional silicon as things get smaller and faster is that its not terribly heat tolerant. This has been the impetus behind multiple smaller "cores" rather than making one big honking uni-core that has the same raw computational power.

With multiple cores, they get physically spread out a bit and are easier to keep cool. Lots of stuff in one place gets hot fast.

One of the new contenders has actually be around for quite a while -- Gallium Arsenide. GaAs has lots of problems though. Its crystals don't grow as uniform as Silicon crystals do, which reduces usable wafer area and raises cost. Its a lot more nasty and toxic than Silicon too.

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is another player. It has outstanding heat resistance (like 2X the melting point of Silicon). Its significantly better at transferring heat than Silicon is. Alas, it too has crystal uniformity issues, although not quite as bad as GaAs. The cool thing about pure'ish SiC is its almost clear like glass. With lasers it can be doped at different depths and layers inside the material, not just on top like with traditional epitaxial methods. I've fiddled with SiC in a lab, its impressive stuff. If the crystal growth irregularity issues could be improved a bit, it could overtake Silicon overnight for high performance devices and things that need to operate in very harsh environments.

MOORE's LAW in action -- check out this low end 1973 vintage IBM 370 "mainframe"

...The Model 115 uses a minimum of two directly-attached IBM 3340 disk drives. Up to four 3340 disk drives may be attached, providing nearly 280 million characters of on-line storage...
...The Model 115 offers the smallest main memory size -- 65,536 characters of data - - in the System/370 line, but also is available with, or may be expanded to, 98,304 characters...
... Typical monthly rentals will range from $5,891 to $8,155...
...Purchase prices will range from $265,165 to $352,115...

A cool quarter mil in 73' bucks for a machine with 64k of memory. 10 years later, a 64k PC would have been considered anemically configured. By the early 1990's a 400M drive cost under $500, and machines were getting fitted with megabytes of memory, not kilobytes.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 01:41 AM | Comments (52)
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