Wow.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking a “social media analytic tool” that will give the government access to “full Twitter historical data,” according to a solicitation released on Tuesday.

The agency is seeking feedback for a “possible future acquisition to provide near real time social media analysis.” HHS said it wants to use the tool for “ongoing monitoring” of public health issues.

HHS provides a long list of requirements, including “access to real-time social media posts,” and “access to full Twitter firehose.”

The agency requires an archive that goes back at least five years of “full Twitter historical data.” The government will also need “access to multiple account log-ins,” “real-time alerting,” the “ability to construct lengthy Boolean searches,” and a function that can filter search results based on the location of a Twitter user.

There are no words.

I wonder what "disease" they'll be monitoring.

Get in their faces.

Posted by: Ace at 11:36 AM | Comments (397)
Post contains 188 words, total size 1 kb.

No one believes these numbers, because Obama refuses to parse the numbers to determine how many people were already eligible for Medicaid, and how many became eligible due to Obamacare.

Even Politico raps Obama for deeming this basic question an "unreasonable" one which Obama's team refuses to offer answers to.

Two different groups have estimated the extent to which ObamaCare has expanded Medicaid to the uninsured. One is Acela, which estimates the figure at between 1.1 million and 1.8 million. Kessler also quotes Charles Gaba, who puts the number at 2.6 million. Both are far below Barack Obama’s claims, and also far below what the administration expected to see by this stage. The most motivated of all the uninsured should have been those eligible for Medicaid, and yet we haven’t seen a rush to enroll — and those who are motivated to do so probably already have. That means there won’t be a big spike coming in the next couple of months.

Omelets and eggs.

Meanwhile, Freddoso notes the "most brutal anti-Obamacare ad yet" running in Michigan.

The Administration and its supporters claim the ad is false. We'll see.

But in the meantime, the Democrats' candidate for the Michigan Senate, Gary Peters, is siccing lawyers on local tv stations to block them from airing the ad.

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (153)
Post contains 254 words, total size 2 kb.

Update: It's Old. Apparently this is a 2012 piece. But Brit Hume just Tweeted about it, hence me (and others) treating it as if it's new.

They urge the adoption of this terminology -- "after-birth abortion" -- over the morally judgmental and politically difficult term "infanticide."

This appears to be quite real:

[I]n order for a harm to occur, it is necessary that someone is in the condition of experiencing that harm. If a potential person, like a fetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all. Â… In these cases, since non-persons have no moral rights to life, there are no reasons for banning after-birth abortions. Â… Indeed, however weak the interests of actual people can be, they will always trump the alleged interest of potential people to become actual ones, because this latter interest amounts to zero.

Via Twitchy, which cites Brit Hume's stunned reaction.

One caveat:

This seems so outrageous that I suspect the possibility (only the possibility) of a Jonathan Swift-like"Modest Proposal" intent here -- that is, these philosophers, by taking the logic of pre-birth abortion and claiming it apples to post-birth abortion as well, may actually intend to cast the pro-choice argument as itself fatally flawed.

On the other hand, it could more easily be seriously intended. After all, there are those who seriously propose that the Human Species render itself extinct, voluntarily, to "save the earth."

So there are plenty of people willing to go there at the drop of a hat.

Apparently Real: Saletan apparently debated other abortion absolutists who make similar claims.

They may not have intended a Jonathan Swift-type case... but they've still done so inadvertently, as he notes:

Predictably, the article has sparked outrage. Last week, Reps. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., and Chris Smith, R-N.J., denounced it on the House floor. But it isn’t pro-lifers who should worry about the Giubilini-Minerva proposal. It’s pro-choicers. The case for “after-birth abortion” draws a logical path from common pro-choice assumptions to infanticide. It challenges us, implicitly and explicitly, to explain why, if abortion is permissible, infanticide isn’t....

As [a pro-choice absolutist Furedi] explained in our debate last fall, “There is nothing magical about passing through the birth canal that transforms it from a fetus into a person.”

The challenge posed to Furedi and other pro-choice absolutists by “after-birth abortion” is this: How do they answer the argument, advanced by Giubilini and Minerva, that any maternal interest, such as the burden of raising a gravely defective newborn, trumps the value of that freshly delivered nonperson? What value does the newborn have? At what point did it acquire that value? And why should the law step in to protect that value against the judgment of a woman and her doctor?

Posted by: Ace at 02:08 PM | Comments (307)
Post contains 492 words, total size 4 kb.

Here is the Harvard Crimson's blurb on the writer:

Sandra Y.L. Korn Â’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House. Her column usually appears on alternate Mondays.

Well I didn't see that coming.

She argues -- as the left always does -- for replacing the concept of freedom (which, as Loki can tell you, is actually enslaving) with the concept of "justice," meaning social justice, and politics.

Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do. Two years ago, when former summer school instructor Subramanian Swamy published hateful commentary about Muslims in India, the Harvard community organized to ensure that he would not return to teach on campus. I consider that sort of organizing both appropriate and commendable. Perhaps it should even be applied more broadly....

She turns to the academic boycott of Israel, which of course she wholeheartedly supports. She dismisses quaint liberal notions about the "free flow of ideas" as antithetical to real "justice," by which she means real leftist politics.

In this case, discourse about “academic freedom” obscures what should fundamentally be a political argument.

....

People on the right opposed to boycotts can play the “freedom” game, calling for economic freedom to buy any product or academic freedom to associate with any institution. Only those who care about justice can take the moral upper hand.

Freedom is a "game." You have the right to free speech, and the right to academic research into the truth, so long as the Committee of the Whole takes a vote on it and finds your research or speech to be in the interests of "social justice."

It is tempting to decry frustrating restrictions on academic research as violations of academic freedom. Yet I would encourage student and worker organizers to instead use a framework of justice. After all, if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just.

"Thoughtfully." Hm-hm.

Jonah Goldberg calls this what it is -- an attack on diversity of thought. The subhed of his piece -- which he may not have written -- says that "liberal" students threaten such thought, but that's not right: To call this Korn character a "liberal" is to do violence to the term.

She's a leftist. As noted last week, there is a sharp schism between old-timey liberals, who believe in "outdated" ideas like freedom of expression, and the hyperpoliticized new left, in which every freedom is subject to a vote.

He notices this is not confined to Harvard:

[Swathmore student Erin Ching's] school invited a famous left-wing Princeton professor, Cornel West, and a famous right-wing Princeton professor, Robert George, to have a debate. The two men are friends, and by all accounts they had an utterly civil exchange of ideas. But that only made the whole thing even more outrageous.

“What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion,” Ching told the Daily Gazette, the school’s newspaper. “I don’t think we should be tolerating [George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society.”

Why bother with all the fuss of proving your ideas when you can just take a vote and outlaw the expression of any criticism of them?

It's so much easier -- especially for people who, perhaps rather accurately, doubt they'd be able to win an argument on the merits.

CNN, which the New York Times informs us serves a "provincial" audience, has decided that "climate justice" should displace climate freedom. Or at least its senior media critic has decided that.

“Let’s begin with an important journalistic statement,” Brian Stelter declared Sunday on his show, CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “Some stories don’t have two sides. Some stories are simply true. There’s no necessity to give equal time to the ‘other side.’ One of these is climate change. Depending on which study or which expert you consult, between 95 and 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is happening now, that it’s damaging the planet and that’s it’s manmade. That seems pretty definitive, right?”

Thanks to @rdbrewer4 and @aoshqDOOM (Monty).

Posted by: Ace at 10:11 AM | Comments (529)
Post contains 875 words, total size 6 kb.

Also, of course, Caddyshack and Groundhog Day.

And of course he was one of several writers on "Animal House." I believe that he wanted to play "Boone," but was perceived as too old for the role, so they hired Peter Riegert, who was, of course, older than Ramis.

Analyze This, the underrated Michael Keaton clone comedy Multiplicity... the guy had a lot of funny in him.

Ramis, a longtime North Shore resident, was surrounded by family when he died at 12:53 a.m. from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, his wife Erica Mann Ramis said. He was 69.

RamisÂ’ serious health struggles began in May 2010 with an infection that led to complications related to the autoimmune disease, his wife said. Ramis had to relearn to walk but suffered a relapse of the vaculitis in late 2011, said Laurel Ward, vice president of development at RamisÂ’ Ocean Pictures production company.

There have been many rumblings about a possible "Ghostbusters 3" sequel, although Bill Murray has announced he has no interest at all in such a thing. Without Ramis -- "Egon" -- it would be down to Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson.

Thanks to Tami.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (328)
Post contains 229 words, total size 2 kb.

As @slublog says, Cracked's reportage is more fair, more filled with detail, and more professional-seeming and accurate-sounding than anything in the allegedly "mainstream" media.

Read the whole thing. Here is an excerpt on the biological warfare some of the detainees resort to:

Some of [the prisoners] wanted revenge. For instance, every door has a slot that opens. You hand in their Motrin, they grab your hand and drop down -- boom, broken arm. And then there are the ones who will intentionally infect you.

These guys come from across the world to Cuba, loaded with foreign pathogens while simultaneously vulnerable to all of our gross shit. So already it was mutual, unconscious biological warfare (they had a distinct edge, because the Taliban apparently agrees with Jenny McCarthy on vaccines). These dudes wind up with tuberculosis, dysentery, hepatitis ... all kinds of terrible bugs, which means you don't want to exchange bodily fluids with them. But that's not so simple, because the inmates know this is what you're afraid of.

See, they know they're loaded with sicknesses we don't have, so a lot of times they'll try to cough on you. Those are the lucky times. The unlucky times involve what we call a cocktail: semen, blood, urine, and feces in a cup that they throw on you. We had one guy get cocktailed, and speculation on what he did ranged from "he insulted Islam" to, literally, "he made fun of a detainee's mom." Whatever happened, the detainees straight up told us, "Every time this guy comes back, we're going to make your life hell."

So we removed him. Nobody wanted to deal with cleaning that up every day.

The guy seems liberal in politics (he thinks Guantanamo should, in theory, be closed, though he has no idea what you'd do with these characters if you closed it) but harbors an animosity for reporters who have an "erection" to report any claim of abuse at the prison. He notes how the media went wild reporting that Guantanamo guards denied the poor prisoners bottled water -- but failed to report they had all the water they wanted, just not bottled water, because they would fill the bottles with sand to turn an ordinary water bottle into a club or heavy missile.

Posted by: Ace at 06:35 AM | Comments (187)
Post contains 403 words, total size 3 kb.

Andy says that problems with the M4/M16, specifically those regarding the need for cleaning, have been well known since... Vietnam.

But more recent reports have faulted the weapon's performance as well.

Documents obtained by The Washington Times show the Pentagon was warned before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that the iterations of the M4 carbine were flawed and might jam or fail, especially in the harsh desert conditions that both wars inflicted.

U.S. Special Operations Command in 2001 issued a damning private report that said the M4A1 was fundamentally flawed because the gun failed when called on to unleash rapid firing.

In 2002, an internal report from the ArmyÂ’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey said the M4A1 was prone to overheating and "catastrophic barrel failure," according to a copy obtained by The Times.

The linked Washington Times article quotes troops buying their own trigger mechanisms and own magazines in order to decrease the chances of failure.

“Realistically speaking, there’s been loss of life that is unneeded because there was a dumbing-down of the weapon system,” said Scott Traudt, who advised the Army on how to improve the M4 a decade ago.

...

In an independent overall survey of soldiers back from Iraq and Afghanistan, 20 percent reported that the M4 jammed during battle, and one-fifth of those said the stoppages made a “large impact.”

An Army historian alleges that reports of the M4's faulty performance in battle were covered up. That seems a bit overstated, as the argument, it seems, is about whether the weapon's "design flaws" contributed to its failure in action, or whether it due to the weapon being used for a high rate of fire (I assume for an extended period). This seems to me to be just another way of saying "design flaw," I think. Though I guess the Army can say the weapon performed as expected if they train people to not use the M4 for sustained rapid fire. But, while I realize all weapons have limitations, sustained fire during a long engagement is a common enough occurrence that the weapon should have been better designed to not have this flaw.

This story also mentions the poor magazines issued with the weapon:

"The Army never looked at the type of magazines that were used," he said. "ThatÂ’s what we found would cause a lot of failures. If you used the standard old Army tin magazines that had been used in a couple of deployments, they really wore down and would cause a lot of jams just because of failure to feed and the springs were worn out in them.

"They just donÂ’t get replaced readily, and when they do, they still get replaced by a standard-issue magazine that just isnÂ’t a very good magazine at all."

To improve the M4 on the run, Chief Warrant Officer Stafford said, "A lot of us went out and bought our own magazines. They worked far better."

Posted by: Ace at 07:27 AM | Comments (178)
Post contains 534 words, total size 3 kb.

Actually, the reasons could include the British police's recent questioning of Piers "under caution" in regard to the 2011 phone hacking scandal.

What's astonishing to me is that the New York Times attributes Morgan's low ratings to the "provincialism" of CNN's audience.

There have been times when the CNN host Piers Morgan didn’t seem to like America very much — and American audiences have been more than willing to return the favor. Three years after taking over for Larry King, Mr. Morgan has seen the ratings for “Piers Morgan Live” hit some new lows, drawing a fraction of viewers compared with competitors at Fox News and MSNBC.

It’s been an unhappy collision between a British television personality who refuses to assimilate — the only football he cares about is round and his lectures on guns were rife with contempt — and a CNN audience that is intrinsically provincial. After all, the people who tune into a cable news network are, by their nature, deeply interested in America.

His evidence for this? The writer David Carr claims he himself is guilty of such provincial thinking:

. When something important or scary happens in America, many of us have an immediate reflex to turn on CNN. When I find Mr. Morgan telling me what it all means, I have a similar reflex to dismiss what he is saying. It is difficult for him to speak credibly on significant American events because, after all, he just got here.

Carr goes on to consider two other British hosts who have had success in America: Simon Cowell (?!!?!) and David Frost. But he finds them unlike Morgan, so he sticks to his "provincial" theory.

For some reason, he fails to consider the British/Iranian Christiane Amanapour.

Carr then blames it on America's provincial attitude towards guns:

In a sense, Mr. Morgan is a prisoner of two islands: Britain and Manhattan. While I may share his feelings about the need for additional strictures on guns, having grown up in the Midwest, I know that many people come by their guns honestly and hold onto them dearly for sincere reasons.

Mr. MorganÂ’s approach to gun regulation was more akin to King George III, peering down his nose at the unruly colonies and wondering how to bring the savages to heel. He might have wanted to recall that part of the reason the right to bear arms is codified in the Constitution is that Britain was trying to disarm the citizenry at the time.

He regrets none of it, but clearly understands his scolding of “stupid” opponents of gun laws was not everyone’s cup of tea.

That may be true, but what does that have to do with "provincialism"? If anyone's "provincial" here, it appears to be Morgan himself, confessedly, per Carr, a "prisoner" the islands of Britain and Manhattan.

But it's CNN's audience's fault for not appreciating this pudgy, poorly-informed histrionic doofus' take on the Second Amendment.

Posted by: Ace at 07:51 AM | Comments (303)
Post contains 533 words, total size 3 kb.

Mutiny against whom? Russia would like us to take this to mean that Ukraine has risen up in arms against their duly-elected (?) government, and so any group claiming to be the "government" is illegitimate and should not be recognized.

But what it really sounds like is that Ukraine is in "mutiny" against Russian control-- and Russia has no right to control the Ukraine, even if they claim that Ukraine is part of their "family."

Russian PM Medvedev said:

“If you consider Kalashnikov-toting people in black masks who are roaming Kiev to be the government, then it will be hard for us to work with that government."

Yulia Tymoschenko has been released from jail after being held for two and a half years on charges generally called "trumped up" and "political." While this recent jailing seems corrupt and, well, Soviet, a writer at the Daily Beast says that prior charges of corruption had merit.

While it's great that she has been released from jail, I'm not sure she's the best candidate to lead the opposition forces.

Tymoshenko was not universally welcomed by the protesters. Many point the finger at her for the chaos of the post Orange revolution years in Ukraine and accuse her of corruption while in power.

“We’re afraid of experiencing a repetition of Julia’s first attempt to lead the government a decade ago. Of course, she can say all those nice things but actions speak louder than words. Everybody at the top enriched themselves and all we got was nothing,” explained one protester.

Her run as Prime Minister occurred at a bad time -- 2007-2010, just as the global credit meltdown was occurring, and persisting -- and her term is generally thought to have been a failure. She lost an election for President in 2010 to Yanukovich, the current "president," who may not be so currently president any longer.

From the Hot Air link (first link of the post):

Meanwhile, the new government in Kyiv has transferred presidential power to the speaker of the parliament until elections can be held in May. They have issued an arrest warrant for deposed president Viktor Yanukovich, who tried to flee the country but was stopped by alert border guards. Activists want him tried for mass murder after 82 protesters died in shootings by police last week...

The most important thing to Russia seems to be the Crimea -- which sports a warm-water port on the Black Sea, and is over 55% Russian by ethnicity. Crimea is part of Ukraine, and the part Russia seems most determined to hold on to. Ethnic Russians in Crimea are girding themselves to fight their own counter-revolution to remain under the Russian heel.

[W]hen the forces of the revolution took over the national parliament on Friday, pledging to rid Ukraine of Russian influence and integrate with Europe, the people of Crimea panicked. Some began to form militias, others sent distress calls to the Kremlin. And if the officers of the Berkut riot police are now despised throughout the rest of the country for killing dozens of protesters in Kiev this week, they were welcomed in Crimea as heroes.

For Ukraine’s revolutionary leaders, that presents an urgent problem. In a matter of days, their sympathizers managed to seize nearly the entire country, including some of the most staunchly pro-Russian regions of eastern Ukraine. But they have made barely any headway on the Crimean peninsula. On the contrary, the revolution has given the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea their best chance ever to break away from Kiev’s rule and come back under the control of Russia. “An opportunity like this has never come along,” says Tatyana Yermakova, the head of the Russian Community of Sevastopol, a civil-society group in Crimea.

Although one quarter of Crimea's populace are Ukrainian, I think the best option here is to either cede Crimea to Russia, or, more likely, permit the fiction that Crimea is now an "independent state" which just happens to host one of Russia's biggest naval ports and 25,000 Russian troops.

There would be some ethnic sorting after such a partition -- Russia-identifying Ukrainians would tend to move towards a Russia-controlled Crimean satrapy, and ethnic Ukrainians would tend to move away from Crimea to a Ukrainian-controlled Ukraine.

It is better than war. Russia recently fought a war to keep a key part of Georgia:

Though the Kremlin has not yet responded to her plea for help, Russia used a similar appeal as a pretext for the land invasion of South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia, in 2008. That August, Russia claimed that the people of South Ossetia were at risk of genocide when the Georgian military tried to take control of the rebel region by force. Russia responded by sending in its tanks, and after a weeklong war, it seized a fifth of GeorgiaÂ’s territory, including all of South Ossetia.

And, of course, neither NATO nor the EU nor Obama is going to war with Russia over the Crimea. Any impulse for "toughness" must be tempered by this obvious fact-- very few people would support any kind of US action against Russia in Crimea. So, we can't really pretend that there is some 100%-win solution out there, if only we had the guts for it.

I don't see any way Ukraine keeps Crimea, if Russia wants to take it away. What I see is an invasion, and lots of dead Ukrainians, and Russia holding on to the Crimea -- and, given that they've already invaded one part of Ukraine, I see them maybe invading the whole of it.

Posted by: Ace at 06:50 AM | Comments (366)
Post contains 948 words, total size 6 kb.

Happy Monday.

The numbers of people that Obama claims have been helped by Obamacare are unbelievable.

The numbers for political organizations raising money during the shutdown are interesting.

The photographs of different places are amazing.

The inferences of shenanigans at Old Dominion University are disturbing.

The typos in this piece on the end of Piers Morgan's CNN show are amusing.

[ RSS]

[On iTunes]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (224)
Post contains 71 words, total size 2 kb.