Saturday, February 26, 2005

Friday, February 25, 2005

Riddle me this

Attention Catholics. Incidentally, I mean no disrespect in asking the following.

Pope John Paul II just got a tracheotomy to help him breath. It's not inconceivable that he might soon need extraordinary efforts to keep him alive.

Meanwhile in FL we have Terry Schiavo, whose husband wonders aloud "when is this bitch going to die?" He says she said she wouldn't have wanted to be kept alive with a feeding tube, so he advocates removing it. That way she can slowly die of thirst and he can have what's left of their malpractice settlement and marry the woman he's knocked up twice since Ms. Schiavo's misfortune.

So what would be done if the Pope, heaven forbid, were to find himself in Terry Schiavo's state? Who would pull the plug? Would they try to elect the next Pope first?

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Taking it like a man

At the recent CPAC convention in DC John Fund wound up using a blogger's PC to check his email without permission. It was a misunderstanding for which Fund certainly will hear no end of lip.

But now let's talk about the guy who left his PC unattended and signed on to the Net. Good going, bud. If you don't know what kinds of things could have happened to you or others as a result of that, please turn in your laptop and get off the Internet until you learn something.

Now we have this from Hindrocket at Powerline. Lefties had been calling the office phone and he'd been reading lefty abuse in email for a while - he finally lost it in a couple of emails. What's more, one of the emails went to a guy with a blog and an axe to grind - it's published here.

The recipient (let's call him "A sensitive soul") wrote "I must admit I was just a bit taken aback. It's not terribly unusual for people to simply refuse to address the issues, but the virulence and profanity was simply amazing to me". Wow - I hope he never goes to the Democratic Underground.

IMO the profanity shows that Hindrocket is strictly an amateur in the invective department - given how accomplished he and his team are in other areas, it suggests that he doesn't use it very often. I for one could have done far better, but I'm secure in the knowledge that I could make any dozen longshoremen with Tourette's blush, so it doesn't show up on this site.

Did A.S.S. deserve more consideration? What issues did he identify that weren't addressed? Read the post if it suits you, but IMO he just spouted lefty catechism, trying hard to make Jeff Gannon into some dark conspiracy to give President Bush's press secretary a softball question once in a while. It might be different if lefties had shown similar enthusiasm for investigating others who've occasionally received a press pass, with particular attention to which ones might be gay (not that there's anything wrong with that, unless they aren't liberals, right?). And the implicit concern for the President's security is really a riot, as if these lefty creeps would spit on President Bush if his guts were on fire.

And what's the point of A.S.S. writing to Hindrocket in the first place? A.S.S. says "Just one, just once, it would be nice to see a conservative with the ability to find fault with other conservatives". Ya know, when people are always defending themselves against groundless attacks, they don't have much time to turn on each other. Even so, it does happen once in a while, but the lefties can't hear anything over their own noise.

If the lefties really think that Bush & Co are misgoverning, they might want to pipe down on all these silly side issues so the problems worthy of note can shine through. They pay Bush a compliment with these silly diversions - if they knew important news were bad, they wouldn't have to amplify the chickenshit.

Back to Hindrocket. He has standards and realized that he failed to meet them, so he's standing up and taking the criticism. He won't claim that, say, someone else used his ID, or whatever lame crap lefties would repeat and defend until Doomsday if one of their own claimed it.

Hang in there, Powerline. You all are still one of the top blogs, but I'd lay off the profanity until I got better at it. Perhaps a tour here would help?

StationMasters Online

I'm not sure how long these guys have been around, but I sure could have used them when I first got to DC. It's info about the Metro train system augmented with information about the neighborhoods adjacent to the Metro stops.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

How high can birds go?

The highest floor I've ever lived on for more than a week is the 9th, and I recall seeing pigeons roosting outside my windows.

I'm guessing that there is no point in going beyond maybe a hundred feet or so. Their predators may chase them higher or they may chase prey higher, or maybe winds are favorable for long migrations at certain altitudes, but other than that why fly high?

Of course at some point the oxygen levels would be too low, and for something as metabolically supercharged as a bird I'd guess problems would start sooner than for other critters.

Silly me, thinking when I could have checked out the Straight Dope. There's more here, but it's suspect because Paul Ehrlich's name is on it (google "Paul Ehrlich error" and you get well over 100,000 hits).

"It's a black man's game"

We'll be hearing a lot more about comments by basketball legend Larry Bird here. The two choicest were where he said of basketball "it's a black man's game", and how it bugged him when the other team would have a white guy guard him.

Mr. Bird is no scientist, but he certainly has been in position to make subconscious firsthand empirical observations. The utter dominance of black players in the NBA is hard to miss.

Has there ever been any scientific basis at all for this silly idea that intellectual and physical gifts and tastes are evenly distributed by race and sex? Whether these result from geography, culture or genetics is beside the point - the result is still there.

When couch potatoes become activists

Yeah, I'm a Law and Order junkie.

This of course means you have to get used to cast changes. Especially for ADAs - 4 years seems to be the max.

The latest one to be replaced is Elisabeth Röhm. In an episode that first aired in January, she was the first one whose character was fired, and in a strange plot twist her final line was "is it because I'm a lesbian?"

She wasn't my favorite of the bunch, and I wasn't alone apparently - somebody actually had started an online petition to have her replaced.

I don't know if it had any influence or not, but she's gone.

Help a guy in need

Yeah, I know - it's probably better just to forget about John Kerry. But after all the BS we heard about his military record, IMO he shouldn't be able to get away without signing his Form 180 to release *all* of his military records.

You thought he had? You're not the only one.

I'm sure there's an innocent explanation. Say, maybe he hasn't had a pen handy?

Link via Kausfiles.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Jay Bryant on Social Security

If a private organization offered anything as bad as Social Security for retirement benefits, liberals would throw a fit. Not that they have any problem with screwing the American public - they just reserve that right to themselves. Here Jay Bryant tells how things have worked out for him.