Video below, but here's some other stuff:

The 13 best short excerpts on Politico's piece explaining Why Tina Brown Is Awful. (Digested at Breitbart.)

Tina Brown annoys you further by trolling for attention with a stupid piece as to why Hillary shouldn't run. No, it's not because she's down on Hillary. It's that she thinks Hillary is Too Awesome for the Presidency.

Harry Reid's response to the announcement of a House Select Committee to investigate Benghazi mentions the Koch brothers in the second sentence.

Harry Reid smells like smelly balls.

Only if you can handle it -- a book has been published claiming that "something happened" in the bathroom in the Duke Hoax Rape Claim case. And the media are again buying into it -- they are incapable of learning, and they only know they're supposed to support narratives helpful to the Left.

Open Thread.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:49 PM | Comments (247)
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Wow.

via @charlescwcooke.

LET'S PURGE ALL THE THINGS

Caveat: I just saw this on Twitter and I honestly don't know if this is real. It didn't occur to me to check. I'll check now.

Well, seems sort of real:

Yeah, it seems real.

Posted by: Ace at 02:54 PM | Comments (495)
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Just a few weeks ago, some scientists declared the fragment of papyrus was not a fake, and of course the media rushed to promote the story.

A team of scientists has concluded that a controversial scrap of papyrus that purportedly quotes Jesus referring to "my wife," is not a fake, according to the Harvard Theological Review.

"A wide range of scientific testing indicates that a papyrus fragment containing the words, 'Jesus said to them, my wife' is an ancient document, dating between the sixth to ninth centuries CE," Harvard Divinity School said in a statement.

Scientists tested the papyrus and the carbon ink, and analyzed the handwriting and grammar, according to Harvard.

Radiocarbon tests conducted at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced an origination date for the papyrus of 659-859 CE, according to Harvard. MIT also studied the chemical composition of the papyrus and patterns of oxidation.

Other scholars studied the carbon character of the ink and found that it matched samples of papyri from the first to eight century CE, according to Harvard.

"None of the testing has produced any evidence that the fragment is a modern fabrication or forgery," the divinity school said.

I almost posted on this story when it was current, three weeks ago. I was curious how the claimed dating of the papyrus to the 6th-9th centuries AD proved it "wasn't a fake."

There have been fake religious texts for so long as there have been religions. After all, any atheist of course considers the whole of the Bible a hoax. Popular books claim that almost the entirety of the Bible is "Forged," as one book title puts it.

Intriguingly, the same CNN Religion Blog which now promotes the idea of antiquity being the equivalent of authenticity also was pretty psyched about the findings of that Forged book.

Kind of a contradictory impulse, when you think about it: When an academic says "basically, everything in the Bible is a forgery," the CNN Religion blog gets engorged and throbby about it.

But then someone comes forward with what is purportedly a papyrus containing Jesus' words and they're very credulous in claiming it's "real."

There are no shortage of acknowledged forged religious texts in the world.

Among Christians, there are dozens of texts which purport to be divinely inspired but which have long been considered Apocrypha, false texts, hoaxes. Some number of apocryphal would-be books of the Bible, for example, are rewrites of Aesop's ancient animal fables.

Thus it was very strange to me that the finding that this fragment could be dated to the 6th to 9th centuries AD (obviously long after Jesus' actual life) established, per these scientists, that it wasn't a "fake."

It could still be fake. Most religious texts are in fact spurious -- even religious people think most "religious texts" are false, apart from the few they acknowledge as real.

There have been multiple "new" books of the Bible "discovered" over the years. People invent such things for political purposes, or for intellectual gamesmanship (a prank), or to get rich.

So, someone writing 600-900 years after the fact... purporting to report on words directly spoken by Jesus noted by no other source in the world?

Maybe a little skepticism here, guys?

Yesterday a scholar wrote that it the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" is conclusively a forgery.

In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced the discovery of a Coptic (ancient Egyptian) gospel text on a papyrus fragment that contained the phrase "Jesus said to them, 'My wife . . .' " The world took notice. The possibility that Jesus was married would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New Testament and biblical scholarship.

Yet now it appears almost certain that the Jesus-was-married story line was divorced from reality. On April 24, Christian Askeland—a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my colleague at the Green Scholars Initiative—revealed that the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that is clearly a forgery.

Almost from the moment Ms. King made her announcement two years ago, critics attacked the Gospel of Jesus' Wife as a forgery. One line of criticism said that the fragment had been sloppily reworked from a 2002 online PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and even repeated a typographical error.

But Ms. King had defenders. The Harvard Theological Review recently published a group of articles that attest to the papyrus's authenticity. Although the scholars involved signed nondisclosure agreements preventing them from sharing the data with the wider scholarly community, the New York Times was given access to the studies ahead of publication. The newspaper summarized the findings last month, saying "the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery." The article prompted a tide of similar pieces, appearing shortly before Easter, asserting that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife was genuine.

Then last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used—with the "wife" fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.

"Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery," Mr. Askeland tells me. "First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century." Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and "concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries." In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the "Jesus' wife" fragment was written in a dialect that didn't exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.

Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel of John discovery: "It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus' Wife Fragment is a fake too." Alin Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: "Given that the evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic surrounding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus over."

If you can't follow that, this "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" is part of a collection of fragments, including a "Gospel of John." The Gospel of John is itself proven to be a fake, making the Gospel of Jesus' Wife-- written in the same ink, in the same handwriting, on the same sort of papyrus --also almost certainly a fake.

And now even CNN's Religion blog concedes as much.

It turns out that many phrases are copied directly from a gnostic text called "The Gospel of Thomas," which is widely available -- and one of the first texts people read when they study gnosticism.

More specific issues arose in the perceived familiarity of the document.

The text of the Jesus’ wife fragment is remarkably close to published editions, available online, of another Coptic Christian text, called the “Gospel of Thomas.”

So close, in fact, that one of the typographical errors in an online edition of the “Gospel of Thomas” is replicated, uniquely, in the Jesus’ wife fragment.

CNN also mentions something that was always a massive strike against the authenticity of the fragment:

The papyrus, along with a few other ancient papyri of lesser novelty, had been passed to King by an anonymous figure.

Anonymity, in the world of antiquities, is often a bad sign, compounding the inherent uncertainty when dealing with texts that are bought and sold rather than discovered in a firm archaeological setting.

This is huge grounds for intense skepticism, as almost any scholar or treasure-hunter or anyone who had discovered such a thing would certainly wish to have his discovery associated with his name.

Instead, he passes it along... anonymously?

Why? Why would anyone not want the world to know they'd discovered something huge?

The only possible scenario I could imagine here was the Dan Brown Scenario:

An honest priest discovers the Church-destroying fragment in the deepest crypt of the Vatican's "Black Books" library. Shortly before being murdered by an Argentine hunchback with a penchant for poison, he slips the paradigm-shifting scrap into a mundane book at a local lending library in Rome.

Rock-n-Roll archeologist Karen King had no idea she was about to set the world on fire when she slipped the Italian-translation of "50 Shades of Gray" from the shelf at her library...

I mean, as silly as that sounds, that's the only semi-plausible scenario I can see for someone slipping this fragment to King anonymously -- that the fragment is Banned by the Vatican, and he's a priest who wants the Truth About Jesus 'n His Gal to Come Out, but is afraid to do so himself.

But no-- no skepticism. The people who tell us we should be intensely skeptical of our religions seem to be incapable of rousing the slightest bit of doubt about their own.

Incidentally, the whole notion that if something is "written on old papyrus it must be authentic" is staggeringly naive. Forgers routinely use old paper and old materials to execute their modern forgeries.

This is such an obvious thing I'm surprised anyone even has to say it.

If you want to read more about all this, this article from the Harvard Theological Review -- calling the fragment, flat-out, a forgery copied with minor changes from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas -- is pretty interesting.

He notes that the first thing a would-be forger of paintings does is go out and buy and old piece of wood or canvas for the job.

He also notes that he finds it unlikely that in only seven lines of text, this "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" is suspiciously action-packed with Dan Brown-style Sacred Feminine agitation. It's not just the "My Wife" line; in just seven lines, the document pushes multiple feminist-oriented heresies (such as agitating for female priests).

I thought this was amusing:

he second fact—which I owe directly to Mark Goodacre, who noticed it independently even if others may have too—is that t = a (my) in the expression t = a-hime (my wife) is written in what looks like bold letters. To be clear, using bold letters for emphasis to my knowledge never occurs in ancient Coptic literary manuscripts; I have never seen it in any documentary texts that have come to my attention. As a student of Coptic convinced that the fragment is a modern creation, I am unable to escape the impression that there is something almost hilarious about the use of bold letters. How could this not have been designed to some extent to convey a certain comic effect? The effect is something like: “ My wife. Get it? MY wife. You heard that right.”

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (332)
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Court jester journalists. Pretty sad the President thinks that the toughest interview he faced in the 2012 election year was from a comedian.

Hopefully with the Benghazi coverup unraveling and some Presidential fluffers masquerading as journalists starting to realize how stupid they look parroting administration talking points, maybe future interviews will actually be tougher than those from comedians. I'm not holding my breath. One or two or three journalists asking hard questions will be marginalized. A large majority will have to remember what a journalist is supposed to do if they are going to save their profession and regain the public trust.

I don't want to hear one more damn thing about the reason why things suck is because of Bush. Evidently, two years is enough to get past something according to this dude. I dare this POS to say "dude, it was so two years ago" to the families of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone S. Woods. The President is fond of saying "I got your back". Well, evidently not when it is politically inconvenient to his personal fortunes. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:03 PM | Comments (631)
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Dr. Wehby released that great ad "Trust" a few weeks back, bragging on herself for saving children on a daily basis.

As Mark Pryor would say, she has a real sense of entitlement.

But apparently some voters think maybe she would be a good Senator, because she now has (per one poll) a not-statistically-significant lead of one point over Jeff Merkely, 40-39.

The poll also indicates that a plurality of voters in the deep-blue state see Obamacare as a mostly failed venture. Forty-six percent of respondents said Obamacare and Cover Oregon, the state’s disastrously flawed health care exchange, were failures, while 17 percent said they were successes, and 37 percent said they were “somewhere in between.”

And she's running against Obamacare, naturally. Another ad "signalized" her day job as a pediatric neurosurgeon, declaring it wasn't "brain surgery" to conclude Obamacare was a failure.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (379)
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Instapundit links this interesting piece.

In economics terms, political correctness would be called a "positional good," a good acquired not for its own inherent usefulness, but for what it signals about the owner. (He says "signalize" -- I guess this is a term of art.)

He notes that positional goods only retain their power to signal something about the owner -- that he is high-status -- so long as a relatively few people also possess the good. Once many, many people possess the good, it can no longer serve the function of being positional.

Think about any faddish mode of dress; the fad's ability to signal that the wearer is fashion-forward is destroyed the moment "everyone" begins wearing it. At that point, the fashion-chaser will have to find some new outrageous variation to wear in order to signal his high fashion status.

And of course he wouldn't be caught dead wearing the togs that everyone else is wearing.

Political Correctness works the same way. As 90% of the population has adopted the basic idea of tolerance, the basic ideas of tolerance can no longer serve as a positional good, as "everyone is wearing it now," and new, ever-more ostentatious signals of Moral/Intellectual High Status must be conceived.

Thus, for example: microaggressions. Begin by noting the "micro" that introduces the term; only those of exquisitely fine taste in Racism can detect such subtle notes. Rather like a wine connoisseur's acute palate permitting the detection and appreciation of trace notes of blackberry and even wet manure.

Those who wish to signal their absolute tip-top status in the #NoH8 camp now talk endlessly about microaggressions, because this signals their (self-believed) membership in a cognitive elite. Should "microaggressions" ever become a generally-accepted way to think about racial slights, they will immediately abandon this term, searching out a Hot New Fashion in Anti-Racism.

He says this:

Over the past few years, spiked online magazine has consistently and robustly defended the principle of free speech against the censorship demands of the politically correct, whatever quarter they may come from. It is great, of course, that there is at least one magazine in which the phrase ‘I believe in free speech’ is unlikely to be followed by a ‘but…’, and more likely to be followed by an ‘even for…’. But while I fully support the spiked line, I also think the spiked authors sometimes misinterpret the intentions of the ‘PC brigade’, and would like to offer an alternative interpretation rooted in boring, old-fashioned textbook economics.

Spiked authors believe that PC is driven by a loathing for ordinary people. According to spiked, PC brigadiers view ordinary folks as extremely impressionable, easily excitable, and full of latent resentment. Exposure to the wrong opinions, even isolated words, could immediately awaken the lynch mob. PC, then, is about protecting ‘the vulnerable’ from the nasty tendencies of the majority population.
But if PC was not really about protecting anyone, and really all about expressing one’s own moral superiority, PC credentials would be akin to what economists call a ‘positional good’.

It seems to me that the "spiked online" explanation is the narrative of the PC brigades themselves -- that is, this is how they convince themselves of their superiority and how they justify their judgmental, and frequently thuggish and stupid, behavior. As a Cognitive Elite, after all, they have the duty to protect their lessors from cognitive faux pas, just as a Wine Connoisseur has the duty (he thinks) to inform people that the particular wine they're enjoying is actually jejune, crude, and lacking in angularity.

The snob has the duty to instruct his inferiors.

But I think this author is right-- while the PC Brigade explains its behavior by positing that, as the Cognitive One Percent, they have the duty to make life miserable for everyone else, the actual explanation is simply the signaling of a highly refined palate and a cultivated sense of racism connoisseurship.

I've written about this myself.

What is the point of connoisseurship? Well, as a primary matter, to develop a refined, cultured, and sensitive palate for detecting the most subtle effects of a thing. The wine connoisseur trains himself to pick out "smoky notes" and "hints of blackberry" and wines that profited from "good ash in the soil."

Of course connoisseurship is not restricted to the physical sense of taste; art connoisseurs are fond of saying things like "It's the colors that aren't present that really stand out!"

And connoisseurs of music are given to saying things as "What wonderful silences are in this piece, where you can simply enjoy the room's tone, the vibrations and echoes in the walls themselves."

The connoisseur is trained to sense things that no one else can sense, or, at least, no one but an elite cadre of dedicated Detectors of the Subtle and Sublime.

The secondary value of connoisseurship is, of course, impressing other connoisseurs, intimidating non-connoisseurs, and, by these effects, gaining a Social Advantage which maximizes one's chances for financial and sexual success.

I actually think the secondary value is really the primary one but let's be generous and just say it's a nice unintended consequence.

Now maybe I was goofing on connoisseurship a little bit there, but I have to admit, I'd like to pick up that kind of skill. So long as it does not take a great deal of time and effort, I mean.

But of course it would take that. One can fake these things, as one can fake most things, but there's nothing more embarrassing than a fake connoisseur outed as a poser.

I am suggesting, of course, that people of little talent and little liking of hard work and training have created a new connoisseurship, a connoisseurship rather easily achieved, requiring, as it does, so very little practice and so very little reading; they have created a connoisseurship of Racism, savoring (or so they say) each note so delicate as to be imperceptible to the proletarians whose sense are too unrefined to detect anything but the boldest, most obvious flavors.

And by demonstrating their connoisseurship of racism, they gain a social advantage, that of impressing the other would-be racist connoisseurs, and the various stooges and goons stupid enough to be impressed by this shabby parlor trick.

And, as with any fake connoisseur, as with any bluffer, they gain the most when they make the most ludicrous claims: "I can virtually taste the post-war global depression in this wine; there's a character in the sweat of the grape-stompers that imparts to it a sadness that is almost transcendent."

For connoisseurs, noting that a wine has a chocolate aftertaste is rather elementary and crude. No, to really impress people -- or to really bluff -- you have to really commit to it and claim that your tastes are so refined that they can perceive flavors which exist only on an atomic level:

"Mmm.. those d-orbital electrons are really a kick, aren't they? The complexity of flavors he's managed to achieve while working within the confines of just a few electron states is simply magnificent."

And so it is with the Connoisseurs of Racism.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (417)
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Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie joins Ace, Drew, John & me to talk about some "big L" Libertarianism.

Intro/Outro: Warren Zevon-Lawyers, Guns & Money / U2-Beautiful Day

Questions & comments here: Ask the Blog

Listen: Stitcher | MP3 Download
Subscribe: RSS | iTunes

Browse (and even search!) the archives

Follow on Twitter:
AoSHQ Podcast (@AoSHQPodcast)
Ace (@AceofSpadesHQ)
Drew M. (@DrewMTips)
Gabriel Malor (@GabrielMalor)
John E. (@JohnEkdahl)
Andy (@TheH2 and @AndyM1911)

Open thread in the comments.

Posted by: andy at 12:32 PM | Comments (210)
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• The WH Has Electrolytes: "Dude, That Was Like Two Years Ago"
  
• Why Liberals Don't Care About Consequences
  
• Vapor Madness
  
• Some Thoughts On Nerd Prom
  
• The Heavy Hand Of The IRS Seizes Innocent Americans' Assets
  
• The Right Wrestles With The Inequality Debate
  
• Why Vox Dot Com Is A Smart Investment For General Electric
  
• Watch Obamacare Make Health Care Costs Soar
  
• Shellacking II: The Sequel
  
• No, George Orwell's "Animal Farm" Was Not An Endorsement Of Socialism
  
• General: We Should Have Tried A Rescue In Benghazi
  
• Ungrateful Loaf Writes Somewhere Else, Maybe You Should Read It
  
• Michaelangelo's David At Risk Of Collapse
  
• WTF Happened To AIPAC?
  
• Funny Video Of Shirtless Man Asking Out Reporter While Being Interviewed
  

The AOSHQ Decision Desk will be covering state primaries this month. Stay tuned for updates from CAC.

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:22 AM | Comments (499)
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Happy Friday.

It will not shock anyone to know that in his rush to criticize Justice Scalia for the error (now corrected) in his latest opinion, the New Republic's Brian Beutler made plenty of careless errors of his own.

How is this front page news?

More gossip on David Gregory's 'Meet the Press' troubles.

A Democratic group is suing—successfully—to enforce Citizens United at the state level. It's a good thing, but demonstrates once again Democratic protestations about the case are just noise. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (455)
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Michael Barone on All the Things Wrong with Thomas Piketty's Inequality Thesis

He starts with these.

But is his picture of current trends complete? The Manhattan Institute's Scott Winship points out that relying, as Piketty does, on tax returns for the U.S. statistics means omitting income from Social Security, food stamps, public housing, Medicare and Medicaid.

Tax returns count roommates and unmarried partners as separate units when they are part of a larger household.

They don't include employer-paid health insurance -- an increasing share of employee compensation in recent decades.

Including these factors, Winship notes, means that incomes below the top 10 percent have not stagnated but have risen significantly since the 1970s. Increasing inequality is compatible with increases in ordinary people's incomes.

Economist Tyler Cowen takes issue with another of Piketty's assumptions, that the rich can earn 4 to 5 percent on their wealth "automatically, with the mere passage of time, rather than as the result of strategic risk taking."

And here's why the 'moderate' MSM/Left's sudden Piketty-driven obsession with inequality may not amount to much politically:

Respondents were not particularly worried about income inequality, which President Obama identified in December as the "defining challenge of our time." Just five percent said that inequality was a major problem needing attention. And nearly all - 93 percent - of those who listed inequality as a problem said they were not at all or only slightly confident that the government could make real progress in addressing inequality in 2014.

Rich Owens: Oklahoma's Official Executioner

From a fascinating 1948 newspaper article on Rich Owens who executed condemned men for over three decades while serving as a guard at Oklahoma's McAlester State Penitentiary. In his life he killed 75 men: 65 by electrocution, one by the gallows, two with a knife, six with a gun and one with a shovel, not counting 'peckerwoods'.

And he took his job very seriously - studying techniques and learning from the failures of others as well as running execution rehearsals beforehand - in order to guarantee a smooth quick death with a minimum of pain, mess, or fuss.

Which leads to his story of how he once executed a friend of his who had raped and killed a girl while drunk. He spent the evening praying with the man in his cell and when the time came he walked him to the electric chair, prepped him, and then pulled the switch himself. Afterwards he gave his executioner's fee ($100) to the man's wife.

Given the in-artful demise of Clayton Lockett on Thursday perhaps it's time for Oklahoma to bring back a professional like Owens.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:38 PM | Comments (565)
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