This would-be viral video of a telekinetic girl having a bad case of PKMS in a coffee shop for the movie Carrie was pretty good. I didn't see Carrie, and basically no one else did either, but the prank was good.

So basically the viral ad didn't work, as far as getting people to actually see the retread movie.

Well, there are two things Hollywood likes to do a whole heck of a lot:

1. Imitate and copy things that worked before

2. Imitate and copy things that did not work before

Basically they just like to imitate and copy things. So there's a new movie coming up called Devil's Due, which I imagine is just ripoff of Rosmary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen, except with CGI, and so now they've rigged up a Possessed Devil Baby in a Haunted Baby Carriage to scare passers-by.

Video below.

Also from io9: A sculptor did a series of "Visible Body" sculptures, you know, where you can see the skeleton and internal organs. Except he did it with toys.

I call this "My Pretty Nightmare:"

Okay, that oversells it. It's not that scary. In fact, the sculptor says even kids aren't scared:

"Kids aren't scared by them. They're fascinated," says Freeny, the New York-based artist who's hand-sculpted hundreds of these inner anatomies, built into commercially-available toys, over the last seven years. "I believe that being frightened by inner anatomy is a learned thing. It's something that's taught to kids by society, rather than something that's innate."

His version of Barbie offers an anatomically correct view of the inside of one breast, as well as some detail of the pudendum, which, in scientific jargon, is called the mons junk.

Anyway, enough silliness. Let's get to that Possessed Devil Baby.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (185)
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What religion those beliefs arise out of is never specified. But, this being Canada, where the law says you could be fined or imprisoned for denigrating a particular religion's beliefs, I have a guess.

A student enrolled in York University's online program was assigned an in-person group project which included women. He told his professor he would not be able to work with women due to his religious beliefs and asked his professor to arrange it so that he wouldn't have to. The professor informed the student he would not be able to accommodate him. The York University administration overruled the professor and instructed him to honor the request.

The school stated a request by one of Grayson's students - who has yet to be identified - must be granted because of the university's obligations under the Ontario Human Rights Code when it comes to religious accommodation.

Grayson's response, which was obtained by QMI Agency on Monday, argues that the decision made by York University dean Martin Singer is based on weak ground and is a slap in the face to female students - whom, he argues, also have rights to be accepted and treated equally.

"I do not believe that we want to be known as a university in which the rights of female students can be compromised by religious concerns," Grayson said in his Monday statement, quoting himself in a letter he sent to the university's dean in October, shortly after the student made his request.

...

Grayson, who has acknowledged he grants such requests to some students for reasons of distance, initially did not want to agree to the student's request because of how it would make females in the class feel, and sent his reasoning to Singer.

...

"I have empirical evidence indicating that the granting of the accommodation would lead some female members of the class to feel belittled and humiliated," Grayson writes. "In other words, the accommodation would have a substantial impact on other students' experience of the class.

"This alone should have been sufficient to deny the accommodation."

As noted in the TV magazine segment on this below, the student actually accepted the professor's reasoning regarding the refusal to accommodate him. That is, he said, "Well okay then."

It's the school, now, which seems to be pressing the matter on his behalf.

I have two thoughts here. The first is the obvious one: This is an absurd request and should be denied.

The second one, though, is this: We all know that many in positions of authority are determined to impose their own values system on anyone who has the misfortune to find himself under their control.

I object to this student's backwards-ass religious imperative of regarding women only as baby-makers and homemakers. But so what? What do I care if he believes something, even if it is a stupid thing?

I don't respect his belief in the sense of finding any justification for it. But I can at least respect his right to be as wrong as he wishes, so long as it's not unduly burdensome for anyone else.

I guess that's what the question comes down to -- whether honoring this student's request would be "unduly burdensome" for the female students he was separated from in group projects. The professor's reasoning is that they'd feel "belittled," but that comes very close in my mind to the all-purpose justification for squashing minority beliefs and opinions -- someone's feelings will be hurt if you're permitted to go on believing this thing.

I also wonder about the female students this guy would be working with, should his request not be honored. Would they find working with him to be pleasant? Or a chore? If avoiding feelings of discomfort is the goal, I think I might choose to separate the female students from this cretin.

How much of a stake should society have in ensuring, with all its government power and government-supported institutions, that no one ever discovers that someone else in the world doesn't like her?

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Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (285)
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Of course. The multicultural cosmopolitan Superstars Internationale of the Obama Administration dug into their collective brain-trust of diverse white suburban backgrounds and produced yet another casa de caca.

[T]he translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read "for the caution of health."

"When you get into the details of the plans, it's not all written in Spanish. It's written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them," said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami.

...

There are a lot of Spanish-only speakers in America (el speako de spana) but their sign-up numbers are low.

Many blame at least some of the enrollment problems on the trouble-plagued site.

"In my opinion, the website doesn't work," said Grettl Diaz, a 37-year-old Miami gas station cashier who is originally from Cuba.

...

As for the language, Plaza, the New Mexico professor, said a recent examination by her research students concluded that the translations were done "by a computer-generated process" and came across as awkward.

...

Still, Gabriel Sanchez, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico, said the problems hurt the credibility of federal officials and reinforce the belief held by some that authorities are indifferent to the plight of Latinos.

Sanchez said, "They will look at this, and think, 'Man, they really don't care about us.'"

This is all of a piece with Obama's self-definition as the most cosmopolitan and Internationale of all Presidents, despite not speaking any foreign language apart from "Um."

More on this from Richocet's Professoro de Spanglish, Jon "El Camino" Gabriel.

El Web Sito Obamacare Es Written en Spanglish

Jon Gabriel, Ed. · 35 minutes ago

Cuidado

Presidente Obama y su personnel de la White House have launchar un websito del Obamacare en español. “¿Viva Obama?” Not so fasto.

El sito releasando muchos días late y it is un Disastero Grande, just like el sito Inglés. El Associado Press accusa la Administracción del Obama of using “Spanglish, not Spanish.” ¡Que lastima!

Translacións en la health mercado estan muy crapo y tenga glitchos multiplos...

As reported by the muy importanto Buzzmanga, the White House denies the claim that the website is written in Spanglish, calling such reports "over-torqued" (which they actually then translate as "wrong").

They say computer translations are not responsible for the Spanglish gibberish on the website. No, they proudly say, all the errors and nonsensical constructions were produced by human beings being paid a lot of money by the government.

Well Gracias Dios for that.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 AM | Comments (327)
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Fired Christie aide Bridget Kelly's friends are putting out the word that she's not the type to go rogue on a bridge closing.

The NYT reports:

“She follows the chain of command,” said a friend who, like nearly everyone contacted for this story, insisted on anonymity to avoid being caught up in the continuing investigations. “She’s not a cowboy.”…

The New York Times seems, get this, a bit invested in pushing its strong suggestion that Kelly acted under orders. Here are their other proofs for the proposition that Kelly would not have acted on her own initiative:

At first glance, nothing about Ms. Kelly’s life — not her strict Catholic upbringing; her close-knit extended family; her decision to send her children to the same Catholic schools she attended in her hometown, Ramsey; or her fierce loyalty to her political mentors — would suggest anything but a dutiful, behind-the-scenes role player.

Seriously, New York Times? Your main proof that she only acts as ordered is that she's Catholic?

Oh I see. Catholics, being zealous footsoldiers of the Invisible Army of Rome, are hierarchical to a fault.

I don't consider it silly to suggest that Christie ordered this or had knowledge of it. What I object to is the ludicrous lengths to which the New York Times is willing to go to sell its progressive readers on the preferred progressive narrative about the main threat to the progressive succession in 2016.

AllahPundit observes:

It says “at first glance” because the article goes on to cite other Jersey pols who say Kelly seemed to change once she made Christie’s inner circle, becoming more “brusque” and insular and seemingly enjoying the payback she was dishing out. Peggy Noonan spitballed the same possibility in her column the other day: Give a low-ranking political hack a taste of real power and there’s no telling how they’ll behave.

Yeah, but that's normal political hacks, not, you know, Catholic Flesh-Robots of the Inexorable Papist Subversion.

And speaking of, Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on US News & World Report's argument that insane anti-Catholic bigotry is simply "fair commentary."

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (291)
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Actually that headline is slightly deceptive, because we only know the top military men about to meet with Barack Obama were told Benghazi was a "terrorist attack." And we probably don't have proof of that because of a corrupt invocation of Executive Privilege.

However, it defies reason to imagine that General Ham and the rest of them were told it was a "terrorist attack" but then immediately told Obama it was a spontaneous protest.

And yet the Administration began claiming the next morning that it was a spontaneous protest in which spontaneous participants happened to bring spontaneous mortars with spontaneously pre-ranged firing solutions.

Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation's top civilian and uniformed defense officials -- headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama -- were informed that the event was a "terrorist attack," declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president's Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward.

Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense Department combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the House in classified testimony last year that it was him [sic] who broke the news about the unfolding situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The tense briefing -- in which it was already known that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had gone missing -- occurred just before the two senior officials departed the Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.

...

"My first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey's office, to say, 'Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,'" Ham told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation on June 26 of last year. "I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta."

...

Numerous aides to the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly told the public in the weeks following the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans that night -- as Obama's hotly contested bid for re-election was entering its final stretch -- that there was no evidence the killings were the result of a premeditated terrorist attack, but rather were the result of a protest gone awry.

So, was Panetta confused about the nature of the attack, perhaps conveying incorrect information to the President?

Nope:

Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last year that it was him who informed the president that "there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi." "Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?" asked Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. "There was no question in my mind that this was a terrorist attack," Panetta replied.

Senior State Department officials who were in direct, real-time contact with the Americans under assault in Benghazi have also made clear they, too, knew immediately -- from surveillance video and eyewitness accounts -- that the incident was a terrorist attack.

Obama has conceded the story was false. However, he and his defenders (by which I mean chiefly the media) insist that the false story was not a lie. They claim that they had legitimate reasons to believe a false story themselves.

And yet nowhere in the record to we ever see any informed party offering up this false story. It seems cooked up entirely out of Hillary Clinton's office.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (251)
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As you know, Barack Obama, who heard about this when you did, was "outraged" by it all.

Turns out it was a lot of hoop-de-doo and much ado.

The DOJ lawyer whoÂ’s heading the investigation is an Obama donor and the FBI, after seven months of supposedly investigating this, only recently contacted tea-party groups targeted by the IRS. But other than that, everything here seems legit.

Cleta Mitchell, lawyer for a bunch of targeted groups, cries foul on the decision.

“As far as I can tell, nobody has actually done an investigation. This has been a big, bureaucratic, former-Soviet-Union-type investigation, which means that there was no investigation,” she said. “This is a deplorable abuse of the public trust, but I am not surprised.”

The investigation was relentlessly thorough.

The FBI finally has begun to contact some of the tea party groups targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for inappropriate scrutiny in the first public signs that the administrationÂ’s criminal investigation is progressing.

A lawyer representing some of the tea party groups that battled the IRS for tax-exempt status told The Washington Times that a “small number” of his clients were recently contacted, seven months after the investigation was supposed to have begun.

That's usually how you do investigations -- you figure out the conclusion and then, as you're finishing up your report, you reach out to the actual victim-witnesses to hear whatever lies you'll have to mention in your footnotes.

Posted by: Ace at 09:08 AM | Comments (391)
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This used to be a thing we talked about. Net Neutrality -- rules compelling broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic the same regardless of source --has to go back to the drawing board.

From the decision (PDF):

Even though the Commission has general authority to regulate in this arena, it may not impose requirements that contravene express statutory mandates. Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order.

The short version explaining this decision is that the FCC exceeded its statutory mandate in issuing net neutrality rules. It did so, by the way, over the dissents of two commission members.

If you're looking to catch up on the issue of Net Neutrality in general (like I did when I heard this decision had been issued), Drew had a good post on it a few years ago.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:02 AM | Comments (155)
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• Half Of US Counties Haven't Recovered From The Recession
  
• If You Think Communism Is Bad For People, Check Out What It Did To The Environment
  
• Democrats On Hillary Hit List: Please Don't Hurt Us
  
• Joe Scarborough Violating Network Rules
  
• Yeah, We Are A Banana Republic
  
• Criminal Charges Not Expect In IRS Probe
  
• 50 Years Later, A Permanent Underclass
  
• 6-Year Itch Could Fortify GOP Grip In The House
  
• It Looks Like Those Brosurance Campaigns Weren't All That Successful
  
• Israeli Defense Minister: "The US Security Plan Presented To Us Not Worth The Paper It Is Written On
  
• Oh, Now I Remember Why We Supported The Egyptian Military Dictatorship For Decades
  
• Obamacare Spanish Website Written In Spanglish
  
• Demographic Disaster, Obamacare's Missing Young Adults
  
• Senate Republicans Make New Offer On Jobless Benefits
  
• I Guess She Both Won And Lost This Argument
  

Sorry for the meager offerings but I woke up feeling real sick this morning.

blah blah blah twitter.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:37 AM | Comments (150)
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Happy Tuesday.

While you were sleeping, the details on the new spending bill dropped.

[ RSS]

[On iTunes]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (318)
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The New Misogyny: Questioning Gratuitous Lena Dunham Nudity on 'Girls'

Which is just what a reporter dared to do during a panel with 'Girls' producers at a Television Critics Association event.

"I don't get the purpose of all the nudity on the show. By you particularly. I feel like I'm walking into a trap where you say no one complains about the nudity on 'Game of Thrones,' but I get why they're doing it. They're doing it to be salacious. To titillate people. And your character is often naked at random times for no reason"

- TV critic, Tim Molloy, questioning Lena Dunham at TV Critics Association panel

And all hell broke loose. Executive producer Judd Apatow declared the very question offensively sexist and completely out of bounds:

"That was a very clumsily stated question that's offensive on it's face, and you should read it and discuss it with other people how you did that," Apatow said, speaking to the reporter who asked the question. "It's very offensive." "It's sexist and offensive, it's misogynistic," [Apatow] said.

And another producer Jenni Konner was still seething minutes later over the reporter's hate question:

"I literally was spacing out because I'm in such a rage spiral about that guy," she said pointing to the question-asker. "I was just looking at him looking at him and going into this rage [over] this idea that you would talk to a woman like that and accuse a woman of showing her body too much. The idea it just makes me sort of sick."

But then later during the discussions they admit that having Dunham nude so much was an deliberate artistic choice intended to normalize nudity as just another part of her character's life that could be used for comedic/dramatic effect without being salacious or sexy. And Dunham explained her frequent nudity this way:

It's because it's a realistic expression of what it's like to be alive, I think, and I totally get it. If you are not into me, that's your problem.

Okay granted the reporter could have asked his question in smoother way but wasn't he basically asking why there was so much non-titillating Lena Dunham nudity - which seemed to have been the exact intent of the writers and producers - and yet somehow that very question makes him an offensive misogynist bastard. Huh?

Oh and here's a recent pic of Lena Dunham. Given her age and current income this is probably the peak of her attractiveness. It's not that she's ugly - mostly she's a tiny bit weakly cute in a very average way. Which isn't a crime and just makes her average-ish. But I guess we're supposed to pretend she's a sex pot and swoon over her nudity or we're now misogynists or something.

[Full disclosure: I've never seen an episode of Girls so maybe Lena Dunham nudity is a glorious beautiful thing. But I'm going with my instincts on this one]

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:45 PM | Comments (809)
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