Overnight Open Thread (4 Jan 2013)

—CDR M

The above map, according to Atlas Vans' Moving Company, Shows Where Everyone Is Moving In The Country. Frankly, I'm surprised that CA and MI are treading water on that chart but then again it is only one source and does not indicate what type of people are moving in and out (i.e. producers or takers). It is interesting to compare that map with the one at the bottom of the article that shows the business friendly states versus the not so friendly.

Panda Blood

You know, there just might be something to eating Panda. Giant Panda Blood Offers Possible Superbug Solution.

Biologists have discovered that a powerful antibiotic compound in Giant Panda blood may have a range of human applications.

The compound, cathelicidin-AM, kills bacteria and fungi in the pandas' bloodstream and biologists suspect it may have the potential to be used in a wide range of human medicine -- particular in treating drug-resistant superbugs.

Adventures In Parenting

Man, if my kid did this there would be hell to pay. Teens Drugged Parents To Use Internet Past Curfew. They could've at least used some good stuff. Jeez.

Now this story is probably something I would do only I would do it myself. Father Hires In-Game "Hitmen" To Deter Son From Playing Video Games.

Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Feng decided to hire players in his son's favorite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng. It is unknown where or how Feng found the in-game assassins—every one of the players he hired were stronger and higher leveled than Xiao Feng. Feng's idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job.

Dodgeball Fails Video

Vicious. I like it.

New Shoes

Um, these look like they could be painful. Twisty High Heels.

The Ultimate DIY Home Brew Machine

Oh yes! Ima gonna make one of these. The Ultimate DIY, All-In-One Beer-Brewing Machine. Y'all are invited when I finish this. Whenever that might be.


The delicious brew’s journey begins in the boil keg, where concentrated wort extract is heated by a propane burner for 90 minutes. The beer then travels through a heat exchanger—which cools the mix to about 55˚F (13˚C)—on its way to the fermenting keg. Here, a network of Freon-chilled copper tubes pumps cool water around the keg when the temperature gets too high. After two weeks, the Device pumps the beer into a settling keg, where a CO2 tank adds carbonation. When you pull the tap, the beer travels through the cold plate, so it’s chilled on the way to your glass. That’s right: The Device is always ready with a cold pour and consumes no power when it’s not actively serving or fermenting

Star Tweets

Captain Kirk Tweets With Astronaut Aboard The International SpaceStation. The rest of the crew joins in.

Doggeh Video

More Best Of 2012 Dog Videos.

Tonight's ONT brought to you by:

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Close it up

Friday Night Open Thread and Recommendations

—Ace

Recommendations as in got anything to recommend? I put up a lot of recommendations; I like hearing some, too.

Incidentally, to whomever recommended Matt Helm: Turns out Titan books (a paperback press) is going to republish them in 2013, so hopefully they'll be on Kindle. I assume they will. Now I kind of want to read some Matt Helm.

Anyone keeping to those New Year's declarations? I'm continuing trying to learn French (as you may have guessed by my sudden interest in French movies). It's slow going. I need a more systematic approach than the Think Method from the Music Man. I've been trying immersion-- natural learning, sort of -- and I guess I know some stuff but it's slow. And I still fall apart listening to it. Reading it, fine. I'm reading the Three Musketeers in French and, with the help of dozens of look-ups and guesses, I can manage to at least get the structure of the sentence, even though my actual comprehension is limited to "D'Artagnan placed his [something] against the guy's [other thing] and then had made [some reflexive verb I've never seen before, but context suggests it might have something to do with a horse. Shoeing a horse? Something like that.]."

I'm mostly using "French in Action," an immersion course from the 80s, which used to run on PBS. Anyone remember it? I actually did remember it -- seeing it here and there -- and it stuck in my mind chiefly because the main actress is gorgeous and has the highbeams on in 30% of her scenes (here, at about 1:40-2:00). I remember actually watching it just for the highbeams.

When the videos were used at Yale, three female students lodged a protest due to "sexism" -- because the girl's legs get featured a fair amount, and, of course, her highbeams. Which, in fairness, are halogen. Blinding.

But just further proof that Yale feminists are just hateful and horrible.

Anyway that's all over the internet now, on YouTube, and hosted at Annenberg Learning Center. It's actually got a fan site.

What are you guys up to?

Cotton Bowl

—Dave In Texas

Was just reading through old theory new theory list from ace's previous post. My theory is as societies and cultures become more prosperous, they get fatter. Cause Pizza Huts open there. As far as carbs go, when I put theory into practice and cut carbs, I lose weight. When I eat em I don't.

Also I pretty much hate him for linking that pic.

OU (11) and the Texas A&M Aggies (9) kick off in about 20 minutes. I can't offer up much for my Sooner and Aggies in this one, if it's any consolation I won't hate both teams tonight.

That's all I got. It'll have to do.

A&M doesn't do "cheerleaders", they do "Yell Leaders". Dudes in white pant suits.

Dudes. In White. Pant. Suits.

I like the dog. Collies are cute.

Hey, Maybe Being Fat Is Good For You

—Ace

I want to run this article with a picture, but if I ran it with this picture, people would scream for eyebleach. So, pretend this picture appears right under the headline, and note before you click it you're going to see a very fat man. A very fat man.

He was the world's fattest man, but got a gastric bypass, and now he just looks awesome.

Anyway I've been hearing this story going around for a week: a meta-study finds that overweight people actually live longer than those at normal weight. And one level of people defined as "obese" -- lower end of the scale -- have no worse mortality than the normal-weight.

Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality. The use of predefined standard BMI groupings can facilitate between-study comparisons.

Grade 2 and 3 obesity -- really fat and really fatter -- were, however, associated with worse mortality rates.

So, it's claimed, a little bit of comfort fat might be good for you, long-term.

Hey, it's a study. Must be true.

Here's a possibility: Given that we are generally never put through periods of starvation or hunger and have all the calories we could possibly want, our bodyweight has shifted upwards -- including our tendency to put on fat. Because we're just not built to have all the calories we could possibly want.

The people who remain thin tend to remain thin not because they're especially healthy but because they're a little on the unhealthy side, while the people who would -- in prehistoric times -- look healthy have tended to put on a bit of overweight.

Note that some very healthy and very active people are at "normal weight" -- they work out enough to keep off fat -- or thin but they're anomalies and don't impact the stats that much. Most people will wind up having weights in accordance with their metabolic bias.

So, anyway, my attempt to explain this postulates that it's not the overweight per se that makes people live longer, but those people are basically born a little healthier, and would have longer lives whether they were in prehistoric, lean times (in which case they'd be at the "right" weight) or in comfortable, flabby modern times (in which case they add 15 pounds).

I just made that up now. If it doesn't make sense, that would be why.

The other possibility is the Sleeper Hypothesis: That literally everything they once said was good for you is in fact bad for you, and vice versa.

There's also the possibility fact that there is a built-in bias in science to find positive results -- publish or perish -- and especially to overturn previous wisdom in a particularly dazzling way, so we might just be seeing imperfect science, made by imperfect humans, claiming to know things where we actually know little and periodically going through "revolutions" in thinking, not because we've made such great strides in our knowledge, but because our knowledge was so very limited in the first place it's relatively easy to postulate the complete opposite of the Old Theory and soon have a big glittering New Theory with just the same amount of (thin) evidence.

Old Theory: Carbs cause fat

Newer Theory: Carbs don't cause fat at all! Those old fuddy-duddies were all wet!

Newest Theory: Carbs cause fat. The last fuddy-duddies were all wet, while the fuddy-duddies previous to them had it just right.

When no one knows what the hell they're talking about it's a wide open field for paradigm-changing new studies.

Democrats Introduce 8 Anti-Gun Laws on First Day of Work

—Ace

For some definitions of "work."

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) led the way with four bills introduced.

...

But McCarthy wasn’t alone. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), apparently ignoring the fact that his heavily gun-controlled home city of Chicago is the nation’s leader in murder with guns, introduced legislation that would create more stringent licensing for gunowners. So did Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ).

And Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) proposed a bill that would prevent anyone under age 21 from carrying a handgun – even though people of 18 can vote and serve in the military.

But wait – there’s more! Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) pushed forward a bill requiring background checks on all gun sales, which would essentially prevent non-gun-shop transfers of weapons.

Did Leaded Gasoline Fuel the 60s-80s Crimewave?

—Ace

Interesting article, which I can't evaluate at all because I don't have the data. I just have this guy's word for it (and he relies on other people's word).

Still, interesting.

[I]if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

...

In states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime declined slowly. Where it declined quickly, crime declined quickly.

...

If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.

The theory could also explain why big cities had higher per-capita criminality rates than smaller cities -- more cars churning out more leaded fumes in a denser environment. If there's a connection, then the theory also explains why big-city crime rates have declined to be about equal with smaller-city/large-town crime rates (per capita, again)-- without the increased ppm count of tetraethyl lead in the air, there is no built-in bias for higher crime rates in big cities.

A couple of days back Purple Avenger noted another epidemic-like cause for suboptimal brain functioning: infectious diseases and parasites might substantially knock down IQs in less-developed parts of the world.

Mother Jones is inclined to believe any Environmental Horror story because, well, Mother Jones. But while there are a lot of Boys Crying Wolf of the luddite left, there actually are some genuine wolves, too. Rickets became infamously common in children in Industrial Age Britain, and ultimately the cause turned out to be environmental -- shadows from buildings, soot from factories, and too much time indoors was blocking the body's natural production of Vitamin D from ultraviolet sunlight. (Which is why they started fortifying milk with the vitamin.)

I've harbored a bias towards pathogenic-type explanations for these sorts of things for a while now-- seizing on the theory that schizophrenia is caused by a virus.

The brain, being the most complicated organ, would I think naturally be the one most susceptible to bugs and glitches caused by small things. Simple things tend to be hardy; complicated things tend to be finicky and balky and prone to odd malfunctions.

"The State is My Shephard, I Shall Not Want"

—Ace

Funny/true.

Analysis: Anyone Who Acknowledges We Have a Major Debt Crisis Is a "Lunatic"

—Ace

"Lunatic Republicans" who believe crazy things like "you cannot spend a trillion more than you have every year and expect the math to work out in your favor."

Evans read a statement from an “overseas analyst” who said that the “economy was recovering” and that he expected bond yields to increase in coming months.

The analyst said that the only obstacle he sees to the continued expansion of the U.S. economy were “lunatic Republicans” who may bring about an “insane technical default” when they attempt to negotiate spending cuts as part of a deal to increase the debt ceiling limit.

...

“What about the lunatics that spent $16.4 trillion and want another check? Aren’t they the crazies, Kelly,” Santelli asked pointedly. “Why are the lunatics the people that say ‘overspending and creating too much debt’ are lunatics?’”

...

“Childish,” Santelli replied. “We need to get serious about this debt and quit calling people ‘lunatics’ that acknowledge it.”

If you have no actual logical response to someone's concerns, but are determined to avoid talking about those concerns, well, with logic not a path open to you, all you have on your side is emotionalism and deligitmization.

But don't worry, Top men are working on it.

Top. Men.

Mid-Day Open Thread

—Andy

C'mon, 'rons and 'ettes. You know you've missed the Ewok Signal.

First Paycheck Of The Year: Schadenfreude Is A Poor Substitute For Cash

—Andy

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. ~ H.L. Mencken*

As a CPA and member of the eevillll group of millionaires and billionaires with an annual family income over $450,000, I wasn't surprised at all when the direct deposit hit this morning. But for the low-information voter crowd, well ...

2% might not be a lot to you but I am NOT liking a smaller #paycheck

— Tess (@woohootess) January 3, 2013

Happy New Year and happy payday! Thank goodness our “lord and savior” Obama signed the fiscal cliff bill into law after proudly proclaiming, “Under this law, more than 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses will not see their income taxes go up.”

Promises, promises.

While PolitiFact will likely rate Obama’s statement “Mostly Swoon,” around 70 percent of Americans are going to pay more taxes in 2013. If you like your payroll taxes (and even if you don’t), you can keep them and pay two percent more than you did in 2012.

...

That's a nice collection of tweets the Twitchy folks pulled together. They of course referenced the awesome DU post in the sidebar, too. That one needs to be bronzed.

What happened that my SS withholdings in my paycheck just went up.

What. Happened?

You reelected a lying SCOAMF. That's what happened.

Now don't get me wrong, this tax increase sucks. I'd much rather have more money to spend on exotic vacations, foreign sportscars, yachts, precious jewels, private aircraft, small islands and other things we millionaires and billionaires making over $450,000 a year and living in one of the highest cost-of-living areas in the country waste our massive stacks of excess cash on. But the fact that we have to send that money to the government now instead hurts the folks that work in those industries a lot worse than it hurts us.

Drew M.'s been saying something for a while that can't be repeated enough (paraphrasing): shielding people from the consequences of voting for "free stuff" is a losing battle.

So welcome to your tax increase, Obama voters. Elections have consequences.

* Quote via today's Transom.

Friday Morning News Dump

—BenK

• Unemployment Rate Is 7.8%
• The Guardian UK's Views On Paedophilia Are About What You'd Expect
• Sandy Victim In Obama Photo Op Gets Form Letter Thanking Her For Supporting The Troops
• Under New Fiscal Cliff Deal, Those Making 30,000 Will Take A Bigger Hit Than Those Making 500,000
• Why Etsy Is A Danger To America
• Barney Frank Wants John Kerry's Seat?
• In Case You Missed It In The Sidebar, This DU Post Is Pure Comedy Gold
• Are You Ready For A Hillary Clinton Biopic
• Connecticut Town To Burn Video Games For Some Reason
• Tax Deal A Victory For Hollywood Cronyism
• MSNBC Guest Draws Parallel Between Gun Owners And Child Molesters
• Michael Medved's Stupid Column
• You Can't Buy Ipad's With Food Stamps
• The Most Persecuted Religion
• Japan Seeks New Ally In Game Of Thrones
• UK-Argentina-Falklands Row Reignites
• US Electricity Use Falls As Economy Greens

Follow me on twitter.

Top Headline Comments 1-4-13

—Gabriel Malor

Happy Friday.

The House will vote to increase borrowing authority for National Flood Insurance Program by $9.7 billion this morning, the first of two planned votes for "Sandy relief." A vote for another $51 billion is supposed to come before January 15, with that version apparently including most or all of the Senate's pork.

A first grader in Maryland was suspended for making a gun gesture with a finger, pointing it at a classmate, and saying "pow." I'm sure he's learned an important lesson about educators, or something.

Overnight Open Thread (1-3-2013)

—Maetenloch

Texas: Everyone Here Probably Owns a Gun, Is Carrying One, or Is Thinking About It

Bryan Preston points out that in Texas gun laws are remarkable simple - just like they used to be across the US - as this excerpt from a TX gun laws FAQ demonstrates:

Q: How long is the waiting period to buy a Handgun / Shotgun / Rifle in Texas?

A: There is no waiting period for purchasing a firearm in the state of Texas.

Q: I just moved to Texas, do I have to register my firearms?

A: No, there is no state registration of firearms.

Q: I just inherited / bought a gun from someone in Texas, do I need to transfer the gun to my name?

A: No, there is no state registration of firearms, thus there is no requirement transfer the firearm in your name.

...

Q: Can I carry a firearm in my vehicle?

A: Yes. With the passage of the Motorist Protection Act you may now readily carry handguns, loaded and within reach, so long as you conceal the firearm. Long guns (rifles / shotguns) do not have to be concealed and may be loaded and within reach.

Q: Are machine guns / suppressors / short-barreled firearms, etc. legal in the state of Texas?

A: Yes. All NFA rules apply. See this FAQ for more info regarding Class III / Title II items.

Q: Are "assault weapons" banned in Texas?

A: No. Texas abides by Federal law which at this time has no restrictions on so-called "assault weapons" such as semi-auto AR15, FAL, G3 / HK91 rifles.

Q: Is there a limit on the number of rounds a magazine may hold?

A: No. The only limit on magazines in Texas is the number of rounds you are physically able to cram into the thing and/or carry and/or afford.

Fiesta Bowl

—Dave In Texas

Oregon (4) and Kansas State (5). 8:30 EST. But enough about me.

One Of The Most Powerful Works Of Musical Art Produced In Recent Years

—LauraW.

Important. Profoundly stirring. Soulful.

Newspaper That Published Addresses of Gun Licence Holders Now... Hires Armed Security Due to Fears of Criminal Response

—Ace

I believe Andy covered this, but in case you missed it Taranto's writing about it now.

The story began with an alarming anecdote: An old man "approached a female neighbor on the street and shot her in the back of the head" last May. "What was equally shocking for some was the revelation that the mentally disturbed 77-year-old man had amassed a cache of weapons--including two unregistered handguns and a large amount of ammunition--without any neighbors knowing."

By way of explaining its rationale for providing the permit data, the paper quoted John Thompson, who directs something called Project SNUG at the Yonkers YMCA: "I would love to know if someone next to me had guns. It makes me safer to know so I can deal with that. I might not choose to live there."

The Journal News never got around to explaining how the commission of a violent crime with an unregistered gun could justify stigmatizing and invading the privacy of citizens--including many retired policemen, according to the report--who have complied with the law and obtained permits for their firearms. And if the public has a "right to know" when the fellow who lives next door has a gun permit, why doesn't the same right apply to those who live and work near the Journal News's offices?

This column does not begrudge the Journal News for exercising its Second Amendment right to armed self-defense. But doing so after attacking law-abiding citizens for doing exactly the same thing is the most stunning display of media hypocrisy we've seen since the "civility" frenzy of early 2011.

Those at the paper said they felt alarmed by the responses they were getting, which they considered threatening -- though none of them were actually threats.

But that's the whole point: What the paper did to lawful citizens was throw the spotlight of Internet Fame on to a group of people who'd done nothing to warrant it. The reason those people themselves did not like the Sudden Internet Spotlight is simple: Who knows what wackadoos will come crawling out of the wordwork to wreak some violence against you?

The paper didn't mind doing this to these people -- in fact, I think they intended it. They intended the lawful gun-license holders to feel intimidated, to feel as if their safety was compromised. That's how stalkers impose their wills on their targets-- the target is always aware that malicious intent lurks around them and may strike at any time.

And now the paper whines because that selfsame loss of the feeling of security, that same feeling that now a dozens of emotionally unstable people might commit random violence in order to vindicate some political point, is now felt by they themselves.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? Wasn't this the precise feeling of oppressive fear they intended their victims to have?

And isn't it something that to get a sense of security back they've hired guards armed with handguns to protect themselves.

Another example of the New Aristocracy asserting -- just as the old aristocracy did -- that only the noble class should be permitted the weaponry of the noble class.

I actually expect this to be an increasingly common tactic in our cowardly new world, this attempt to make people afraid by ginning up the possibly-violent interests of thousands of angry strangers. Just for kicks. Just because you can. Just for the hit-whoring. And just for the feeling losers derive from "fighting back" against their imagined oppressors via any means necessary.

Glenn Beck Tried To Buy Current TV, Too, But His Offer Was Rejected, As He Didn't Share Al Gore's Worldview

—Ace

And you know who did? Why, Al Jazeera, of course.

very once in a while a tweet appears that's so silly, it must be a joke. Like this one from Glenn Beck: "Before Al-Jazeera bought Current TV, TheBlaze looked into buying it but we were rejected by progressive owners." Guess what? He's totally serious. The Wall Street Journal caught the detail in its coverage: "Glenn Beck's The Blaze approached Current about buying the channel last year, but was told that 'the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view,' according to a person familiar with the negotiations."

Also, as @benk84 told you ten hours ago, Al Gore tried to hurry up the sale so he could avoid the increased taxes beginning January 1st.

Lot of interesting stories the media has no interest in, eh? The media justifies its intense coverage of Republican sexual affairs on grounds that they evidence hypocrisy, and so are more important than the affair itself; but when Al Gore tries to avoid the higher tax rates he agitates for, it's a single sentence in dispatch.

Recommendation: "OSS 117"

—Ace

Streaming on Netflix now (and available on disc, I imagine) are a couple of French movies. They're parodies of James Bond films, but a little backstory:

Apparently this "OSS 117" character predates James Bond by four years -- and the "117" might be where Fleming got his own "007." (A commenter reminds me that "007" was taken from the nom de cipher of Elizabeth I's occultist adviser, John Dee.) The writers, a guy named Bruce, and then, when he died, his wife and son, churned out over 250 books about OSS 117. (There's a tradition in France of hiring ghost writers to continue popular series.) There were some serious films about "the James Bond of France" made in the 50s and 60s.

While these new movies, 2006's OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and 2009's OSS 117: Lost in Rio feature the same character and same basic situation (a French secret agent operating in the 50's and 60's), they are parodies of spy movies, especially James Bond films, and pretty hilarious -- even in French.

I'd say it's a French version of Austin Powers but that's not quite right-- people say Austin Powers was a parody of James Bond, but Austin Powers was such a singular mutant creation it's hard to see much of James Bond in him. And to the extent he's a parody, he's more a parody of the 60s era James Bond parodies Matt Helm, Derek Flint, and the Avengers. Stuff that only real spy geeks even remember.

These movies are actually closer to a real parody of James Bond, down to having Connery's exact suits and haircut and a funny actor who looks strangely like a goofy version of Sean Connery. The main actor was the lead in The Artist, where he played a silly, goofily mock-heroic version of Douglas Fairbanks, and here does the same sort of thing with his Bond pastiche.

The schtick in the movies is that the title spy is dumb -- of course. But he's also sexist, absurdly patriotic, and a ridiculous cultural chauvanist; he hands out pictures of the French President to Egyptians he meets and tells them the the picture depicts France's king and will bring them great luck. He also comments, with charming aplomb, on the backwardness of Islamic countries -- "What kind of stupid religion bans alcohol?" He also punches out a muzzein for waking him up with his caterwauling morning call to prayer.

The movies are pretty damn funny -- again, even in French; it's not the wordplay that's funny, just this guy's never-ending cocksure dimness -- but what's really surprising to an American viewer is how politically incorrect this all is. The French are, to put it in a nice way, not as hung up as we are about cultural sensitivity, and, to put in a not nice way, completely racist. Now, the movies are lampooning OSS 117's cringe-worthy cultural insensitivity, but along the way you get some of the most shocking racial humor I've seen since Blazing Saddles.

And I think the movies, especially the sequel, go even further than Blazing Saddles. The first one had some limits, but once that became a hit, the second one pushed everything to 11. Unfortunately, in the second one, he teams up with the Mossad... and his ideas about Jews are, like so much about him, extremely French. The second one really starts to push the envelope into areas where I thought they shouldn't go. Because I like the movies, I sure don't want to think they let themselves go further with the spy's anti-semitism than they did with his anti-Islamism simply because the filmmakers are, in fact, anti-semitic. I'd prefer to think that, as the Spy Who Shagged Me was just the first one again but going even further with the same basic joke, it's just a matter of the sequel going further than the original, and, alas, the sequel explores the infamous French attitude about Jews. And, cringing aside, it's pretty funny.

That warning aside, the movies are pretty damn funny and the character -- a good-natured but dim bumbler like Maxwell Smart but sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, colonialist, and homohobic (but homophobic while barely suppressing strong homosexual tendencies) is completely likable.

Oddly enough the movies take a lot of shots at France, too, and almost none at America. (The only real America-bashing happens in the second when OSS 117 meets his CIA friend, a foul-mouthed Felix Leiter parody who actually looks, when we first see him, a little like Jack Lord in Dr. No. And the only bashing is that this character is a boor and an idiot. But then, so is the French hero.)

Really an unexpected treat. I hope I haven't oversold it. Kind of a must-see for any James Bond fan. The director really gets the look of the early Bond films (especially Dr. No) just right. And the actor is just hilarious.

Occupy Terrorist Says His Cache of Explosives Material Were Only for "Experimental Fireworks"

—Ace

From @benk84's link dump: the guy has a history of getting off very lightly for possession of heroin and stabbing a bartender. Because his dad is rich.

The media isn't covering this-- and let me note, the media isn't covering this, despite Newtown.

We learn in nearly every spasm of violence that the perpetrator was a Strange Young Man who had a record of antisocial behavior and an unsettling interest in instruments of death.

And yet, here we have a guy who previously served a year in jail for stabbing a bartender, discovered with a cache of explosives -- and the media, even post-Newtown, won't give this story any play, simply because it would reflect poorly on Occupy.

If the media is really as interested in stopping mass violence as it pretends -- rather than simply agitating for culture wars -- shouldn't they take an interest in Strange Young Men whose minds seem to fixate on weaponry and imagined enemies?

Suprise: Employers Cutting Hours, Reducing Hiring to Avoid ObamaCare's Expensive Mandate

—Ace

Well, in an economy this robust, I suppose we can afford to lose some employment.

About a quarter of businesses surveyed by consulting firm Mercer don’t offer health coverage to employees who work at least 30 hours a week. Half of them plan to make changes so fewer employees work that many hours. The health care law will particularly affect companies with 40 to 45 workers that plan to expand and hire. Many are holding off so they don’t cross the 50-employee threshold, says Christine Ippolito, principal at Compass Workforce Solutions, a human resource consulting firm in Melville, N.Y. Ernie Canadeo, president of EGC Group, a Melville-based advertising and marketing agency with 45 employees, planned to add 10 next year but now says he may add fewer so he’s not subject to the mandate…Others already over the 50-employee threshold plan to add more part-time workers or cut the hours of full-timers, says Rob Wilson, head of Employco, a human resource outsourcing firm. Many, he says, will hire more temporary workers, whom they won’t have to cover.

Claim: Liberals Lost the Fiscal Cliff Negotiations?

—Ace

This strikes me as an exercise in pure contrarianism but I suppose it's worth noting.

Those who think that opposing any deal would have somehow created the conditions for Republicans to insist on reinstating all the Bush tax rates after they expired have a far higher opinion of the backbone of Republican leaders than I do. But that’s a prudential debate about how, as the minority party in Washington focused on keeping taxes and spending down, to minimize the harm of a uniquely bad set of circumstances. Maybe Republicans did that, maybe they could have done a little better, but they probably couldn’t have done much better.

But the Democrats could have, and the story of their failure here has not yet gotten the notice it deserves. In the long run, when the dust has settled, I think that will be the real story of the fiscal cliff. For liberals, this was not a moment of danger to be minimized but by far their best opportunity in a generation for increasing tax rates (which is the only fiscal reform they seem to want) and for robbing Republicans of future leverage for spending and entitlement reforms. And it is likely the best one they will encounter for another generation. Many on the left have seemed convinced lately that the politics of taxes had changed dramatically in their favor, and that the opportunity presented by the cliff could result in the kind of surge in revenue that could put off the coming fiscal crunch for years (until, they seem to think, it will just magically go away at some point) and so could save our entitlement programs from the need for reform....

But that hasn’t happened here. This deal is projected to yield $620 billion in revenue over a decade — increasing projected federal revenue by about 1.7 percent over that time. And that’s about it. The Democrats have made the Bush tax rates permanent for 98 percent of the public, which Republicans couldn’t even do when they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. They did not get to pick and throw away the low-hanging fruit that could be used in future rate-reducing tax reform (in fact, they retained some “extenders” of tax credits and deductions that could better enable such reform, and the new and more honest CBO baseline that results from this deal eases the way for it), they did not get to claim that they have reformed Medicare without touching its structure, and they now have to move immediately into a debt ceiling fight. Right after a tax-only deal, and just as people start to notice higher payroll taxes, they’re not in a great position to demand more rate increases in that fight, or others to come.

If even under the conditions of the past month — with a very liberal president just re-elected, Republicans in disarray, public opinion on taxes seemingly friendlier to them than it has been in decades, and higher tax rates automatically taking effect — the Democrats can’t get more than a tiny pittance of revenue and no chips to use later, then their basic approach to fiscal issues just won’t work.

Apparently a Democratic priority was getting Republicans to sign on to sham Medicare reform -- "reform" which only consists of the government paying doctors and hospitals less, rather than changing it structurally. Yuval Levin suggests the Democrats wanted that to forestall genuine reform and also to get the Republicans to sign on to the Democrats' favorite sort of reform, which is to say, no reform at all.

Well, the Democrats didn't get that, but I'm not sure that was really the high priority Levin thinks it is.

Some suggest that the Democrats no longer have much leverage in the coming debates over the debt ceiling. They have less leverage, but that's mostly because they already got their top priority. And given that the Republicans surrendered on the debt ceiling last time, I don't see why they'd suddenly have the backbone for a fight now.

Election Of Speaker Vote.
Update: Unofficial Tally Puts Boehner Back In Speaker's Chair

—DrewM.

Above The Post Update:
C-SPAN's running count has Boehner at 219.

Marsha Blackburn and Michele Backmann didn't vote in first go round but when they called the missing voters, they came to push him over the top. Because Truuuuu Conservative.

Original Post:
Going on right now.

It will take 17 Republicans to vote for someone other than Boehner to throw the election to a second round. It's not a whoever gets the most votes but an outright majority so there's no chance of Pelosi sneaking in.

So far there are 3 votes for other people and crazy Michele Bachmann didn't vote (does she think she might be an actual option?).

The other votes so far have gone to Raul Labrador of ID, Eric Cantor (he voted for Boehner) and Allen West.

Boehner's going to win.

Jim Cooper of TN just voted for Colin Powell.

There's a freak show quality to some parts of the GOP. I take that back, Cooper is a Democrat, so that won't help the anti-Boehner faction.

Cantor, McCarthy, Price and Ryan all voted for Boehner. The revolution...it never showed up.

2012 NFL Pick'em Results

—BenK

This year's champion is drstanly with 145 correct picks.

There was a tie for second place. Black Palm Syndicate and DaveinNC's Swag Picks both had 143.

It should be noted that DaveinNC was suspected of using PEDs. We'll never know for sure as his urine sample was left in the HQ fridge and someone "accidently" drank it.

The results for management?

Ben 134
JohnE 125
JWF 123
Andy 119
CDR-M 117
RD 112

Better luck next year RD, better luck next year.

Thanks for playing everyone.

Oh and Andy is running a NFL.com Playoff Challenge. You can sign up here. Assuming you have an NFL account. If not, register one and then click the link. The group is "AOS" and the password is "LOLRomo".

Plan C: Boehner Says He's Done Negotiating Directly With Obama

—DrewM.

A day late and a couple of hundred billion dollars short.

In closed-door meetings since leaving the “fiscal cliff” talks two weeks ago, lawmakers and aides say the Speaker has indicated he is abandoning that approach for good and will return fully to the normal legislative process in 2013 — seeking to pass bills through the House that can then be adopted, amended or reconciled by the Senate.

"He is recommitting himself and the House to what we've done, which is working through regular order and letting the House work its will,” an aide to the Speaker told The Hill.

He should have been doing this all along but better late than never I suppose.

Of course this isn't simply about Boehner finally realizing he sucks at negotiating, it's also about the fact that the next two big showdowns (the debt ceiling and a Continuing Resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year) aren't likely to go any better for the GOP. Boehner's basically saying, call me when you're done I'm not going to get blamed for the next rounds of failure by myself.

Oh, you still think the GOP isn't going to cave on the debt ceiling and will go to the mattresses and shut down the government over the CR? Adorable.

I posted this yesterday at my little blog. I figured I'd spare you for a day from the most depressing part of this whole mess.

First, the concession the GOP got from the last debt ceiling hike was $1.2 trillion in cuts that have now been postponed. Assuming the next debt hike is in the same range that means we’ll have to get another $1.2 trillion in cuts for a total of $2.4 trillion just to keep pace with the debt hikes.

Does anyone honestly believe that’s going to happen in two months when we couldn’t find the first set of cuts in over 15 months?

So these “huge” $2.4 trillion cuts (that will never materialize) won’t even begin to touch the $16.5 trillion and growing debt we already have rung up.

And even in some fairy tale world where these cuts are made and are real, the Democrats will want more revenue as part of any deal (remember the $800 billion Boehner offered up instead of a tax rate hike? Now it will be in addition TO that hike).

And what leverage does the GOP have to get anything for a debt hike? The threat to not raise the ceiling? Well they blinked last year on that and they blinked at going over the cliff when the stakes were “only” tax hikes that could easily be undone quickly. Yet we’re supposed to believe the GOP is willing to hold firm on the ceiling, even if it means irreversible damage such as the “full faith and credit” of the US [technically what could happen is somewhat different from the political and market fallout], an interest rate spike that will balloon our out of control debt exponentially overnight and a global recession as the cherry on top?

It’s not going to happen and everyone knows it.

The last pressure point the GOP will have is the upcoming fight on a Continuing Resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year in September. The only leverage they will have then is the threat of a complete government shutdown.

After blinking on the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling, do you really think they will shut the government down? Really?

This is why Boehner will be reelected Speaker today. Who wants to fight a battle to get to preside over that pending disaster. Oh sure, a bunch will run if by some miracle Boehner doesn't get a majority on the first ballot but run an active coup against him? Nope.

Don't think of the New Years' Day Disaster as the end of a long and horrible year for the GOP, think of it as practice for the real disasters that lay ahead.

Thursday Morning Link Dump

—BenK

• NYC Occu-Bomb Suspect: Hey, I'm Just A Sportsman Or Something
• NAACP President: Tim Scott Doesn't Believe In Civil Rights
• Illinois Dems Press Forward With Gun Control Bill That Bans Almost Everything
• Glenn Beck Tried To Buy Current TV But Was Rejected
• Al Gore Was Eager To Sell Current TV By Dec 31, Otherwise He'd Be Subject To Higher Taxes
• Abesent Fathers And The Newtown School Shooting
• Japan's Population Falls By Record In 2012 As Births Decrease
• The Argentinian Economy Must Be In Bad Shape If They're Saber-Rattling Over The Falklands
• December Gun Sales Set New Records According To The FBI
• Illinois On The Cusp Of Major Pension Reforms?
• Moody's, More Action Needed To Avoid A Downgrade
• Erdogan Talking Turkey With Kurdish Leader
• Debt Now 103% Of GDP
• How Corporate Tax Credits Got In The Cliff Deal
• Blue On Blue: CALPERS Seeks To Sue San Bernadino Over Missed Pension Payments
• The Fasted Man With A Gun Who Ever Lived Just Passed Away
• New York Kept Secret A Preliminary Report That Said Fracking Was Safe
• Supreme Court Takes Up Florida's "Grand Theft Real Estate"
• More Evidence That A Healthy, Normal Weight Is Neither
• What Is The Future Of Conservatism?
• ESPN's Hannah Storm Returns To The Air After Gas Grill Accident
• Iowa Paper Publishes Insane Anti-Gun And Anti-Gun Owner Op-Ed

Follow me on twitter.

Top Headline Comments - 1/3/2013

—Andy

As expected, the House will take up the Hurricane Sandy relief bill this week.

After initially bungling this from a PR perspective, I'm highly confident that they won't ultimately pass the entire pork-laden monstrosity that the Senate sent over in the last congress. Otherwise the PR mess was completely avoidable.

Related: I have 100 acres of prime Wyoming oceanfront property for sale. Cheap.

Overnight Open Thread (1-2-2013)

—Maetenloch

The Last Words of Pilots

As transcribed from recovered cockpit voice recorders by the NTSB.

As you'd expect most are of surprise and confusion and a good amount of cursing but some (mostly foreign) seem rather fatalistic. I'm pretty sure mine would be some variant of "Fuuuuu###k!".

Sugar Bowl

—Dave In Texas

I don't do this because I'm any good at it.

I do this because it needs to be done.

Florida (3) and Louisville (21).

Al Jazeera Purchases Current TV; Will Create New Channel Called "Al Jazeera America"

—Ace

Synergy.

Al Jazeera on Wednesday completed a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago.

Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms. Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

Rather than simply use Current to distribute its English-language channel, called Al Jazeera English and based in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera will create a new channel, called Al Jazeera America, based in New York. Roughly 60 percent of the programming will be produced in the United States, while the remaining 40 percent will come from Al Jazeera English.

Some Current personnel will continue on with the Al Jazzera America channel, but most of its programming will be, ahem, original.

What can you say? The suitors found each other.

Liberal Media Gloated About Suspicions That Hilary's Concussion Wasn't a Concussion; Now Clam Up

—Ace

There used to be a time when the media was willing to entertain the possibility that Democratic politicians were lying, or at least fudging the truth. We all know that when someone quits office "to spend more time with his family," he was fired, for example.

The conservative media expressed skepticism about Hillary Clinton's concussion-by-falling, wondering if there wasn't more to the story -- like her attempting to evade testifying about Benghazi. (Which they've also decided we should express no skepticism about!)

The liberal media pounced -- because its role is no longer to question Democratic political authorities, or express any skepticism whatsoever about their claims, but to act as their Public Relations arm simply claim that everything a Democrat says is true -- "from a certain point of view," as Obi Wan might say. See, for example, this digest of the most egregious "fact checks" of 2012, where true claims made by Republicans are deemed false, because the liberal "fact" checkers don't like the implications made, and where false claims made by Democrats (especially Obama) are deemed "true," because, well. Let them explain.

Much of our method of flattering ourselves is by favorable comparison to others -- to look at others, deem what others do "bad," "stupid," or "crazy," and set ourselves up in opposition to that, thus reassuring ourselves that we are good, smart, and reasonable.

Apart from the surface-level bias at play -- the obvious intellectual dishonesty, where "fact" checkers invent the category of "true but false" for Republicans and "false but true" for Democrats -- there is a deeper, psychologically rooted bias at play. Because conservatives have been so "Otherized" by liberals, and so then because virtually anything a conservative does is definitionally bad, stupid, or crazy, a liberal insecure in his status or his intellectual ability engages in an unwitting game of Let Me Take the Exact Opposite Position and by so Reflexively Doing, Prove My Worthiness.

Thus, when a conservative expresses skepticism, the intellectually-insecure liberal must vehemently take the position of absolute guilelessness, absolute credulity. If a conservative doubts the word of a liberal politician, the insecure liberal demonstrates how rational he is by assuming -- nay, insisting-- that everything a liberal politician tells him is 100% true.

In an effort, then, to define themselves against the Other, they have taken an unfortunate tendency of the out-party to engage in conspiracy-theorizing (as the left engaged in under George W. Bush, by the way) and made themselves into reflexive skeptics against the skeptics, or, more accurately, reflexive paranoids against the ostensibly paranoid.

But this puts them in a remarkable, risible position, far more incredible and lunatic than any position they're seeking to define themselves against:
postulating, incredibly, that there is an alien species upon the earth, a species which looks human but in fact is otherworldly, and which simply does not have the human capacity for deception or self-dealing behavior, and this strange absolutely-ethically-pure alien species is commonly known as "Liberal Politicians."

Is the conservative paranoia about Obama being a Manchurian candidate with malice in his heart excessive and unhinged? Perhaps. But is the liberal reverse paranoia -- what is the word? -- that Obama is constitutionally incapable of selfishness, deception, and self-dealing any more reasonable?

It is in fact less reasonable: For we know many humans who are in fact selfish and dishonest, but we know of not a single person still living on earth who is by definiton incapable of either sin, to the point where, as their claims carry them, to simply question Obama's, or Hillary''s honesty is to give evidence of a form of mania.

What a remarkable transformation of liberal views on the ethics with which political power is exercised -- just 5-6 years ago they considered the theory that the American President had deliberately permitted the murder of 3000 citizens in order to secure a short-term political advantage a theory which, while unproven, was no strong mark against its proponent, to a new theory, upon the Apotheosis of Barack Hussein Obama, that the American President and his lesser ministers have simply not told a single untruth in their lives and to suspect them of doing so is a mark of lunacy.

Jim Treacher responds to those toadies who now claim, preposterously, that a liberal politician's word is always presumptively true in all details. And I see this admission of this counter-lunacy -- liberals attempting to knock down what they take as the lunacies of the right by postulating even greater lunacies -- in in the Washington Post.

Head injuries are no joke, but the backlash against those who initially questioned whether Hillary Clinton’s concussion was for real seems like an overreaction, too; you don’t have to be hateful to have wondered if she really had the flu and fell down right before she was supposed to testify about the security situation at our consulate that was really just a house in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed by terrorists in September.

After all, public officials are routinely less than forthcoming about their health, even if we do know more now than we did when Edith Wilson was secretly running the country after her husband Woodrow’s stroke. Or when the public was protected from the sight of FDR’s wheelchair. Or when John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign flatly denied perfectly accurate, LBJ-inspired reports that JFK suffered from Addison’s disease.

...

I also can’t get too outraged by the early skepticism that Hillary had a blood clot in her brain yet was also doing just great because those two reports don’t seem to mesh. The latter certainly didn’t match the expression of worry on her daughter Chelsea’s face as she left the New York hospital where the secretary of state was admitted on Sunday.

And finally, it isn’t as though Clinton has never shaded a fact in her 65 years....
[W]ithout dragging the ancient White House travel office scandal or the Rose Law Firm into this century, she’s still the same person who repeatedly described coming under fire on a runway in Bosnia. During her ’08 campaign, she was eventually forced to apologize for saying, ”I remember landing under sniper fire,” in Tuzla back in 1996. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” That never happened, though the greeting ceremony did.

She also points out that many of the exact same liberal fans of Hillary's, who give her such props for the Machiavellian play of letting Susan Rice destroy her career by carrying the false Benghazi claims to market, while she herself had other Duties Unspecified, are the same people who now insist that the girl just don't have a devious bone in her body, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a stone-cold nutter.

That's all level-headed enough. I find it strange at this point in human history -- when so much of it has been recorded and is so easily available to us, as are whole volumes about human behavior and our basically selfish impulses -- it has to be seriously contended, as a contrarian point of view, that yes, human beings tend to lie, and politicians tend to lie especially.

Even the Democrats, if you can believe such blasphemous words.

This, in the Age of Obama, is counted as a controversial point. I have to cite a Washington Post blogger admiringly for noting this for the record. We're actually debating this proposition right now.

So that's where we are.

This is a dangerous moment. I keep saying this, but I do think Tyranny is in the air. When the press decides that our Dear Leaders are above suspicion, and any suspicion is evidence of both mental illness and treason simultaneously, we're living on the cusp of Chavez-like times.

Dear Self-Proclaimed Rationalists/Empiricists,

You're doing it wrong. Please note this for your records.

Respectfully,

People Who Would Like To Know What's In the Kool-Aid,
Before We Drink It,
If That's Quite All Right By You

Krauthammer: We Surrendered Completely, and Have Set the Stage for Future Surrenders

—Ace

One point he makes is that Obama insisted on rate hikes -- so that he later can insist on the deduction-reductions Republicans offered. That is, he'll get both.

And what did we get in return? Nothing.

And he Obama also did this to break the Republican Party, which he did.

He has some political victories. But Presidents are evaluated according to non-political "objective goods," as I've called them, things which are undeniably good no matter what your politics -- like prosperity.

We'll see how he comes out in the history books after the collapse he's engineered.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4.

Buzz: Boehner to Resign?

—Ace

There's a 5pm leadership meeting to discuss the intention of 17 20 Republicans to block Boehner's re-nomination as Speaker.

The buzz is that he'll step down from the post.

Counter-Buzz: I just checked Hot Air -- someone from Boehner's office says he's not stepping down, and that that story is just made up.

If I had to reconcile the two, and find a way they both could be a little bit true, I'd guess that Boehner still wants to argue for the job, and doesn't want to undermine himself by declaring it a fait accompli. But that he has discussed stepping down as his own personal Plan B.

I don't know that. Just speculatin'.

The Tipping Point Has Tipped, and the Wrong Way

—Ace

Watching "fiscal conservative" Chris Christie fail to say one word about those who demand that relief for his state be bought with unrelated spending for their own states, which weren't hit by catastrophe -- shouldn't it be noted that Lisa Murkowski and Don Young of Alaska won't vote for those left homeless by Sandy until some local businesses get their "cut"? -- it occurs to me that he is accommodating himself to reality.

The reality is vox populi, vox dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God. And the voice of this particular shabby god has decreed that we shall be financially reckless and we should go through a national bankruptcy, and there's no sense trying to avoid it, so we'll just run up a huge tab buying multiple 65 inch 3D tvs before we crash.

Given that the people wish to spend money they do not have, and soon will not have (for all the same reasons that people with bad credit can't rent a car -- your ability to borrow is precisely related to your projected future ability to make good on your loans), and will not be diverted from this disastrous course, what can anyone do?

This Guy Makes the Same Analogy: Kids, we're going shopping! We will worry about the long-term consequences -- such as being without a home or college fund or creditworthiness to secure loans for same -- later.

But for now, let's go get a few of those sweet 3D TV's and watch Pirates of the Caribbean IV.

You'll think I'm a wonderful, well-providing father... for the next month or so.

After that, you may hold a different opinion of me. Major negative changes in circumstance tend to do that.

But for now-- 3D TVs. Have you ever seen such a clear, sort of three dimensional picture? Aren't I your hero? At this moment, I mean.

Chris Christie Blames Holdup on Sandy Relief on Boehner, House Republicans

—Ace

He continues running against Republicans, which I suppose improves his chances for being reelected Governor, but does little to recommend him to me as a national spokesman for limited government.

"There is only one group to blame," Christie said. "The House Majority and John Boehner."

"Last night, the House Majority failed the basic test of leadership and they did so with callous disregard to the people of my state," he said. "It was disappointing and disgusting to watch."

"Shame on you, shame on Congress."

Following his remarks, Christie doubled down on his criticism in a lengthy — and incredibly candid — press conference in which he laid into House Republicans for putting "palace intrigue" ahead of their actual jobs.

...

Asked who he thought was responsible on the holdup over Sandy aid, Christie laid the blame entirely on Boehner.

"It was the Speaker's decision — his alone," Christie said, adding that he tried to reach Boehner four times, but that the Speaker did not take his calls until this morning."

Meanwhile Peter King tells people not to donate to the NRCC or Republicans, and of course half of the "Sandy Spending" is pork for entirely unrelated matters, like Alaskan fisheries. Which is what happens-- when you have an attractively-named spending bill, something people will only vote against with great trepidation, you lard it up with all the spending you couldn't possibly get otherwise.

At this point I've stopped worrying about the epochal financial crisis and simply accepted it, and have begun just looking for the silver lining: Well, they'll finally reap what they've long sown.

Notice it's always those who attempt to get pork stripped out who are charged with "holding things up," even by nominal Republicans. They never lay the blame with those who have stuck unrelated spending items in the bill for holding it up. Those people are "just doing what needs to be done."

Looper/Primer Reviews

—Ace

So I've been waiting for Looper to be available on DVD. I finally saw it last night.

Very very meh. And it got such great reviews.

What I liked about the movie was that it tried to be a "real movie" science fiction movie. By "real movie," I mean it wasn't just a carnival attraction, a Universal Studios Theme Park ride without the actual ride part. 95% of movie science fiction is just that -- they dial up the comedy, action, and fantasy levels so high that the movie winds up being completely artificial. A funhouse attraction -- fun, maybe, if done well, but no one mistakes a funhouse for a genuine experience. Everything in it is designed to activate one of most primal and childlike responses -- laugh, cringe, say "Whoa."

Looper tries to be more like a real movie. I'm 99.9% sure Rian Johnson had in mind his own type of Philip K. Dick story. One thing Philip K. Dick does (I think) is casually introduce some crazy premise and just say: This is how it is. He doesn't defend it, he doesn't argue about it. It's just this way, okay? Accept it or don't.

Looper does that with both its time-travel premise (which is rickety and crazy enough-- in the future, they send people back in time to be executed? Really?) and the early introduction of a completely unrelated sci-fantasy premise, that in the future, about 10% of the population is telekinetic, but only comically so, able to levitate light coins and perform other useless tricks.

Well, as in Philip K. Dick, whether or not you buy these wacky premises determines whether you can enjoy the story. I didn't buy into either.

Tina Brown Tries Again, Fails

—Ace

Another post swiped from @benk84. No one wishes ill for Mrs. Clinton, but this is Tina Brown at her most insipid.

The idea of losing Hillary has seemed especially unbearable at this political moment. It’s as if she has become, literally, the ship of state. She stands for maturity, tenacity, and self-discipline at a time when everyone else in Washington seems to be, in more senses than one, going off a cliff—a parade of bickering, blustering, small-balled hacks bollixing up the nation’s business. She’s a caring executive too, and that takes its own emotional toll. What a disgrace that John Bolton and his goaty Republican ilk accused Her Magnificence of inventing a concussion to get out of testifying at the Benghazi hearings. Bolton is not fit to wipe her floor with his mustache.

Her determination to defy fatigue and keep going beggars belief....

It’s not just Washington’s antics that make us value Hillary the Stoic more than ever. These are scary times. Everyone feels terrified of economic and societal volatility. The pace of change from destructive innovation and cutthroat global competition and demographic shifts and media proliferation is making us a nervous, increasingly medicated nation....

In an era of quicksand, everyone is looking for a rock, and you’re one we depend on...

I should note that that final elipsis (...) is in the original. That's how she ends her article, dot dot dot. Like, portentously. Like, the question mark at the end of a suspense film.

Like, she's trying to hard and we can see the flop sweat.

This squeaking fart of a piece reminded me of this pre-Christmas article about Newsweek publishing its last print edition, and Tina Brown's desperate attempts to find "the zeitgeist." It's a key word for her-- she seems to think her metier is to sense the zeitgeist, or at least fake up an argument about what the zeitgeist is that will be discussed by other people.

She's been failing at this a great deal. I guess many would say she always failed, but earlier in her career she had least had the cachet to get her burblings talked about by other idiots. Now the other idiots seem to have caught on.

Betrayed by the Zeitgeist she once channeled, Tina Brown invokes it one last time

By Matt Haber

...

In an interview with Michael Kinsley in the Nov. 26 issue of New York magazine, Newsweek editor in chief and magazine legend Tina Brown gave a big-picture reason for the magazine's failure: "[E]very piece of the Zeitgeist was against Newsweek," Brown told Kinsley, a quote so telling, New York's editors even saw fit to tease it on the magazine's cover, the word Zeitgeist framed by inverted commas.

...

Back to Brown. Here she was arguing that the spirit of the current times is against these kinds of large, macro interpretations of daily life, the very things Newsweek tried to do every week, and that Tina Brown has been doing for her entire career: that is, pronouncing the Zeitgeist.

It's a conundrum. Tina Brown's pronouncement of the Zeitgeist here was that the death of Newsweek is an emblem of the Zeitgeist's rejection of magazine editors' pronouncements. It's therefore got to be her final pronouncement of the Zeitgeist, if it wasn't, by her own pronouncement, one too many.

...

The Zeitgeist, it would seem, betrayed Tina Brown after she spent the last three decades, as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk, The Daily Beast and then Newsweek, invoking it weekly or monthly. She packed the word itself in headlines, display copy, and in the bodies of her writers' work constantly. At The New Yorker, Brown found the Zeitgeist in many places as well, in everything from the tales of Bill Clinton to the tale of Joey Buttafuoco. For Brown, the Zeitgeist could be summoned anywhere, from anything that caught her eye during a given week.

But with Newsweek, her eye finally faltered. Or the Zeitgeist wasn't where she was used to finding it anymore.

The author suggests that with the flood of opinion and context and viral videos, "finding the zeitgeist" is a game open to millions, and, confronted with competition, (this is my gloss) Tina Brown turned out to be not particularly good at it.

In other words, there's no need for a Newsweek to explain What It All Means (serious capital letters included), when so many of us are doing so constantly and fluidly online.

And what is the Zeitgeist, after all? It's just a faux-elevated version of the desperate magazine writer's go-to fake story, the Trend Story, in which two incidents of the same thing happening Define an Era (for this week; two more incidents will Define the Era next week, as deadline approaches).

But then, Newsweek was always this way:

[I]t's worth remembering that as far back as 1969, Esquire's Chris Welles compared the magazine to its closest competitor, Time, and concluded that "Newsweek is much more anxious to make broad pronouncements about the significance of the week's events, to practice the art of the 'hype,' by which the routine is blown up into the incredible and the sensational. It is filled with 'crises,' turning points' and 'watersheds,' especially in the 'Violin,' Newsweek's slang for the lead story in the magazine."

Ah, there's the word: Hype. Audaciously drawing grand (and almost completely unsupportable) conclusions from small things. Carnival barking in print form. Everything's the Most Important, the Latest, the Best. News You Can Use; Is Your Hair-Dryer Giving You Brain Cancer? Tune in next paragraph to find out.

There's a lot of that on the internet (and look, there's a lot of that here). I guess it turned out that Tina Brown didn't have a skill so much as she had an inclination, and it turned out many thousands of other people had the same inclination, and the same level of skill. Her One Great Big Trick -- making splashy but daffy claims about What It All Means -- turned out to be a pretty small trick, easily duplicated.

I suppose glibness -- making superficial connections and writing about them, superficially -- is a type of skill, but it's not a particularly difficult skill, and it's not particularly useful.

Maureen Dowd does this too, of course. She was once the Reigning Queen of Soft, Superficial Zeitgeist pieces. People stopped reading her a dozen years ago, though. If Tina Brown's main gig were as a writer, rather than as an editor/executive, people would have stopped reading her 12 years ago, too. Maybe we all kind of hated Tina Brown, but no one ever asked us about it.

Who's Editing Tina Brown -- Meghan McCain? A commenter underlines this, which I completely missed:

It’s as if she has become, literally, the ship of state.

She's got the ballast for it, I guess.

Domino's Wins Temporary Injunction Against Birth-Control Mandate on Religious Conscience Grounds

—Ace

Previously, Hobby Lobby lost its own bid for an injunction. Now Domino's wins, creating a split that will have to be resolved by higher courts at some point.

A federal judge has ordered a temporary halt on the Obama administration’s birth-control coverage policy for Tom Monaghan, the Catholic billionaire who founded Domino’s Pizza.

Federal District Court Judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff issued the decision Sunday, less than two days before the policy would have taken effect and exposed Monaghan to fines for non-compliance.

“Plaintiff has shown that abiding by the mandate will substantially burden his exercise of religion,” Zatkoff wrote.

“The government has failed to satisfy its burden of showing that its actions were narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest. … This factor weighs in favor of granting Plaintiffs’ motion.”

How did we come to the point that religious liberty was worth violating in order to satisfy some people's demand to be subsidized $3-6 per month for birth control?

The feminists have an odd theory that religious strictures about sex and birth control are specifically about controlling women's reproduction, taking decisions from women and giving them to "the patriarchy." They insist that such strictures exist specifically to subtract rights from women to deliver them to men (or male-dominated institutions), rather than serving as directives that apply to both genders.

So they've ginned up $3-6 per month as a serious civil rights issue. If men needed birth control, it would already be paid for, they insist, overlooking the fact that men do need (or, at least, often want) birth control, and men's birth control expenses are also not covered.

As is true with so much of our politics -- and I think this is detestable -- the bottom-line consequences of what they seek are minor in the extreme. What is really sought is an encoded-into-law declaration of the legal supremacy of one culture over another, to the extent that the culture which has lost this political debate is actually now illegal and cannot exist as it previously had.

While such matters were previously left to each individual conscience -- each person herself or himself decided whether to use birth control, and paid using his own private money -- a law is now on the books stating that everyone must pay for birth control, no matter what one's religious beliefs may say about it.

This isn't about $3-6 per month, of course. It's specifically about using the law to win a cultural argument through coercive force. If you can't persuade them, criminalize them.

Kathy Griffin Offers Fellatio to Anderson Cooper

—Ace

Kathy Griffin, who is to comedy what Cher is to music, that is to say, irrelevant and old and weird-looking from plastic surgery, continues scrabbling at her last possible handhold of cultural relevance.

Again swiped from @benk84:

[C]ompletely out of the blue, Griffin said, “I'm going to tickle your sack. You can say sack. That's not bad.”

An obviously nervous Cooper responded, “I don't know what you're talking about. I have no sack of gifts here.”

Griffin then suggested the camera pan lower so the audience can see her “naughty gestures.”

...

National correspondent Gary Tuchman reported live that there’s a custom in the town to kiss a statue of an eight-foot sardine that they drop from the museum at the stroke of midnight. People were then shown kissing the sardine.

As Tuchman finished his report, Griffin in the left split-screen bent down and kissed Cooper's crotch.

As she continued to try to kiss it, Cooper asked her, “Did you drop something?”

“No, I was kissing your sardine,” Griffin replied.

“Thank you. I got it,” giggled Cooper.

“I can do it again,” Griffin said kneeling. “I can do this all night long."

“No, sweetie,” said Cooper lifting her back on her feet.

“I'm going on Letterman in two nights, and he wants a moment,” argued Griffin as she went down again.

“I'm going down,” she said. “You know you want to.”

I see a a great deal of cultural and political bias here. Almost all of the media continues chasing the same minority cohort -- liberal, urban, sexually loose. There is an awful lot of money to be made by chasing the majority cohort, which isn't those things.

But all networks (entertainment too) continue chasing smaller and smaller pieces of this minority pie instead of making an uncontested play for the fat majority of the pie. You have to be very hateful of group of people to essentially make the decision, "No, we're not interested in making a great deal of easy money if it means cottoning to your ilk."

Obama: I'm Not Even Going to Debate the Debt Ceiling

—Ace

Autocratic for the people.

From @benk84's linkdump:

In his remarks Tuesday, Obama issued a stern forewarning on the upcoming debates, and reiterated that he will not negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling.

"As I've demonstrated throughout the past several weeks, I am very open to compromise," he said. "But we cannot simply cut our way to prosperity."

"While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills they have already racked up," Obama said. "We can not not pay bills that we have already incurred."

He's very open to compromise, but will not consider things he refuses to consider.

And:

Immediately following the remarks, Obama left the White House to return to Hawaii, where his family is still on vacation.

Well he's certainly earned it.

Wednesday Morning Link Dump

—BenK

• New York's Putnam County Denies Gannett's Request For Gun Permit Database
• Famed Environmentalist Flying From Party Event To Party Event
• Boehner To Harry Reid: "Go F**k Yourself"
• After Heroically Saving Bulk Of Bush Tax Cuts, Obama Spends Millions To Fly Back To Hawaii
• Obama Won't Debate Debt Ceiling Deal
• VDH: Welcome To Very, Very Scary Times
• An Optimistic Take On The Fiscal Cliff Deal
• 2% SS Payroll Tax Cut Not Part Of Fiscal Cliff Deal. *
• Lawyer Suing For 100 Million On Behalf Of Sandy Hook 6 Year Old Withdraws Claim For Now
• INTEL To Challenge Cable By Offering People The Ability To Subscribe To Individual Channels
• Showing Pictures Of Starving People In Africa Has Stopped Working For Charities
• Russia Won't Renew Kyoto Protocol
• Let's Put America's Tax Hike In Perspective
• Fiscal Cliff Deal Adds 3.9 Trillion To The Deficit
• Hugo Chavez On His Last Legs
• Death Spiral For The Egyptian Pound?
• To Revive Economy, Cut Spending Now
• No Real Cuts In Fiscal Cliff Spending Cuts
• This Is CNN
• Democracy At Work In Israel
• More From Philadelphia's Asset Forfeiture Racket
• Tina Brown's Latest Piece Of Garbage
• Why The House Couldn't Amend The Bill
• America's Forgotten War

*Updated. Normally you pay 6.2% in withholding for Social Security. It had been cut to 4.2% some time ago. Now it is going back up to 6.2%. I should note that your employer never got a cut. They had to pay the 6.2% rate in full the entire time.

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