I just got an email from Jerrol LeBaron – who runs a screenwriting web site – (we’re talking Hollywood, here) with a link to Honor in Office.
I’m already on the record as wanting a law to force legislators to actually read the legislation they vote on. I may quibble with the wording here, but the idea is great.
Hey, Sacramento: When Hollywood comes gunning for you, maybe you’ve finally made more enemies than you can handle.
From Russia, with love.
Wealthy punters pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders.
When attacked, they retaliate with grenade launchers, machine guns and rocket launchers, reports Austrian business paper Wirtschaftsblatt.
Passengers, who can pay an extra £5 a day for an AK-47 machine gun and £7 for 100 rounds of ammo, are also protected by a squad of ex special forces troops.
Wait — That’s about $12.50 US for 100 rounds? Twelve and a half cents per round? That’s less than half of what you’d pay here in the US for the ammo if you could find any. You could take the cruise, conserve your ammo, and pay for the trip by selling your surplus stateside!
In case you weren’t aware, ammo is scarce in the U.S. ever since some anti-gun moron got elected president. I waited too long to try to stock up, and now I can’t find any.
A really fascinating article that quantifies what, to me, seemed obvious.
Scholars on the other side of the debate don’t find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don’t include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn’t mean that English speakers aren’t paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they’re not talking about them. It’s possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.
Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it’s distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.
I’m only bilingual, but one of the first things I noticed upon becoming fluent in Spanish was that I thought different things and in different ways in each language. I can’t believe that those who think language doesn’t shape our thoughts are polyglots.
“In theory, it is possible to use the Sudoku method to sequence more than a hundred thousand DNA samples,” says CSHL Professor Gregory Hannon, Ph.D., a genomics expert and leader of the team that invented the “Sudoku” approach. At that level of efficiency, it promises to reduce costs dramatically. A sequencing project that costs upwards of $10 million using conventional methods may be accomplished for $50,000 to $80,000 using DNA Sudoku, he estimates.
but maybe not the way you think I will.
“The old theory is that once a memory is wired in your brain, it stays that way,” explained Nader, William Dawson Scholar and EWR Steacie Fellow in the Department of Psychology. “But our discovery shows that once you remember something, it doesn’t stay wired in your brain, it becomes unwired and needs to be restored again – reconsolidation.”
How to be a good Islamic Iranian Goon:
Of course, if he were to show all due respect, he’d have to address her as “you stupid cow”.
Get the so-called Discovery Institute on the line. Yet another transitional fossil has been discovered.
It has four digits. The first is shrunken, while the second is enlarged, as if compensating for the dimunition of the first. And though this transitional creature didn’t yet have the feather-like structures found in later proto-bird dinosaurs, it did have a toothless upper and lower jaw — in other words, a beak.
Speaking of the liars at the DI…
It had to happen sooner or later. Someone has really put Pixar in its place.
Andy McCarthy is today’s required reading.
It’s a mistake to perceive this as “weakness” in Obama. It would have been weakness for him to flit over to the freedom fighters’ side the minute it seemed politically expedient. He hasn’t done that, and he won’t. Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely. That’s not weakness, it’s strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.
One problem the Mad Mullahs of Iran didn’t count on is that, if you stage some sham elections for the benefit of the gullible international press, you have to make sure that the Iranian people get the memo. Some of them seem to be operating under the delusion that the elections actually meant something.
I’ve seen Twitter reports of people chanting from the rooftops, videos of massive protests, and this:
The government is now cutting off electricity to Tehran. For grid repair. At 5am.
You can follow those tweets here. Michael Totten has a continuously updated page here. Jpod sums it up.
For more than a decade, we’ve been hearing about the real Iran—the one whose youth is Westernized, desirous of connection with the United States, and tired of living in a theocracy. It’s too soon to know whether the protests today in Iran represent the fruition of the ideas about popular sentiment and the possibility of an uprising. But it is clear that this is a time of testing for the idea that the mullahcracy can be shaken to its foundations by an aggrieved populace. If it can’t, then the regime will prove itself stronger than some of its most heated critics say it is, and the world will have to adjust accordingly. If this is Tienanmen II, and the regime crushes it, there will be no easy approach to regime change. And there will be no pretending any longer that Iran’s regime isn’t a unified, hardline, irridentist, and enormously dangerous one.
I don’t hold out a lot of hope, really. A huge percentage of Iranians are still anti-Semites who believe in the Twelfth Imam. That kind of hatred and superstition is hard to combat. Note what the protestors are shouting:
“My next door neighbor is an Iranian immigrant who came here in 1977. He just received a SAT phone call from his brother in Tehran who reports that the rooftops of nighttime Tehran are filled with people shouting ‘Allah O Akbar‘ in protest of the government and election results. The last time he remembers this happening is in 1979 during the Revolution. Says the sound of tens of thousands on the rooftops is deafening right now.” It’s almost four in the morning in Iran. (emphasis added)
Update:
Another Twitter feed: ChangeforIran
I’m not a big fan of Beck, and some of what I’ve heard from him is definitely, as Allapundit puts it, “febrile”. But he gets Krugman where he lives in this video.
And I like the exit question.
How come all jihadist killers act alone but all “right-wing” killers have a million accomplices?
I almost gagged last night when my local CBS television “news” show was blathering about the elections in Iran. They breathlessly intoned about youth involvement, about the charismatic “reform” candidate who actually campaigned with his wife. And they said “some” (there goes that straw man again?) were calling it “The Obama Effect.”
Yes, they desperately wanted to credit the Messiah with changing an election in Iran.
Made me laugh right out loud.
The elections are just window dressing for the gullible international press. Just how gullible is probably beyond the mullahs’ wildest dreams. Every candidate in the election was selected by the mullocracy. It doesn’t matter who wins; the Sharia Sh*theads will still be calling the shots. The office of president in Iran has no real power, anyway. He’s a figure head for, mostly, the gullible international press.
But now it looks like I’mANutJob has won again anyway.
I wonder if the sycophants in the state-run media will credit that to the “Obama Effect”.
Here’s a primer from How the Mighty Fall on the stages failing companies pass through.
Remind you of any large countries?
This whole thing makes me sad. I was such a fan of David Letterman back in the 80’s. I time shifted his show and watched it religiously. He was hip, quick, and funny.
Not anymore. And CBS knows it.
I guess I owe the NY Times an apology from when I suggested they altered the Letterman transcript and failed to note it. Courtesy of Tim Blair, it seems that it was CBS itself that altered the transcript before it was released. They obviously knew it was problematic. Why haven’t they apologized as a network, at least to the Palins, for airing it?
Given that it was CBS, the only question that remains is, did they use a word processor, PC or an imitation of an old typewriter from Bush’s National Guard days to do it before they sent it out?
This makes me sad the way seeing an old friend go bats would. Like what happened with Ben Stein.
Update:
Credit where it’s due: NOW has added Letterman to its Media Hall of Shame. Of course, they manage to whine about what Rush Limbaugh said a decade or more ago:
On that point, it’s important to note that when Chelsea Clinton was 13 years old she was the target of numerous insults based on her appearance. Rush Limbaugh even referred to her as the “White House dog.” NOW hopes that all the conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren’t professed conservatives.
I remind the gals at NOW that Rush got just as much criticism from the right as from the left for that joke. He also offered a sincere apology. The moral equivalency game really breaks down when you compare calling a kid ugly to making jokes about raping one.
The Messiah beheld the murder of the Holocaust Museum guard by a deranged racist and deigned to pronounce:
This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.
Amen. Let us all remain vigilant against anti-Semitism on the part of deranged racists.
It’s official: There’s a new element. It needs a spiffy name. And no, unobtanium is not in the running.
Truly, our next Supreme Court Justice has a dizzying intellect.
Una Latina muy sábia. Sí.
My guess is that they tell these “jokes” around the White House with straight faces.
“We have a joke around the White House: We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working. And nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.” –Barack Obama **”Apologies if that caused you to spew coffee on your keyboard.” –James Taranto
It’s a body count.
With at least 168 kids dead so far, the CDC is fighting back with a video aimed at most of the bullcrap the antivaxers are peddling. Watch it all the way to the end for some extra cuteness.
Update, and bumped:
Somehow the video didn’t get embedded. Here you go:
Before it hits your email inbox with a zillion ‘>’ marks from being forwarded, let’s just use Snopes.com to confirm that Lou Pritchett really did write this open letter to The Messiah.
Hitch on The Messiah’s Cairo speech.
Take the single case in which our president touched upon the best-known fact about the Islamic “world”: its tendency to make women second-class citizens. He mentioned this only to say that “Western countries” were discriminating against Muslim women! And how is this discrimination imposed? By limiting the wearing of the head scarf or hijab (a word that Obama pronounced as hajib—imagine the uproar if George Bush had done that). The clear implication was an attack on the French law that prohibits the display of religious garb or symbols in state schools. Indeed, the following day in Paris, Obama made this point even more explicitly.
