Pilgrimage

I might have been on TV on Thursday. Yes, I was one of the thousands in line to pay respects to Ronald Reagan at the Capitol rotunda.

I figured it might take an hour to get there, an hour in line, and an hour to get back. Yeah right - I was there from about 2:15 PM and didn't make it out of the rotunda until about 6:30. That was plenty long for me, but for others it was far longer. Then finally around 2AM on Friday the stragglers were shooed off because it was clear that they wouldn't have time to make the rotunda.

I don't know what kind of crowds they were expecting, but they had all sorts of support people around. Huge fans were all over, as was complementary ice water. Fortunately it wasn't really hot.

A Reagan crowd, especially one to honor his memory, wasn't likely to go too crazy with dress (imagine a Clinton crowd...). Even so, it wasn't quite up to the standards of a man who insisted on wearing a jacket in the Oval Office. Having come from work, I was in "business casual". WaPo has more here.

When I got there the line was doubled back on itself several times on the west side of the Capitol reflecting pool. From there it ran around the south side of the pool, just to the inside of the statue of James Garfield, then around the south side of the Capitol.

Eventually there was a frisker shack on the south end of the Capitol grounds, beyond which about everything inorganic was contraband. The line moved rapidly though, and whatever was not permitted to pass was tracked and forwarded ahead to a point past the Capitol for later recovery.

From there it was up to the outside of the Capitol, then up a flight of stairs to the rotunda. We were split into two semicircular groups - I chose the line with backs to the press because if I was going to lose composure it didn't have to be published.

There was profound silence but for press cameras, despite probably 100 or so of us being lined up behind the velvet ropes. That couldn't have lasted for more than a minute or so before we were herded out. Even more silent were the representatives from all of the armed services who stood at attention around the catafalque - they were so still that they almost appeared stuffed.

Finally we were sent back down another flight of steps and back outside. Conversation started again, and people with feet so sore they could barely walk and several blocks of walking yet to go swore they'd do it again.

Bryan Preston went also - his account is here.

What do you do with a kid like this?

A sex offender I happen to know is about to go to jail shortly for a parole violation. He failed to register with local authorities as a sexual predator when he changed his address. (Changing addresses in this case meant spending a few nights at his latest bimbette's place).

Alright, he violated the law. New Jersey's Megan's Law has specific mandates for active community notification which ensures that the community will be made aware of the presence of convicted sex offenders posing a risk to public safety. The actual case occurred elsewhere, but the issue is the same. What could be wrong with busting the guy?

I guess it depends on what you call a "convicted sex offender posing a risk to public safety". The perp's original offense was for having sex with a 13 year old girl. He was 18 or so at the time.

All of you who have ever had sex with a 13 year old girl, regardless of your own age at the time, please turn yourselves in immediately. You too can have your picture and address posted on the Internet labeled as a sexual predator for the rest of your life. Gulp....I'm guessing that that would catch more men than you think.

He broke the law for sure. And that there's plenty of evidence that this was rape only in the statutory sense is irrelevant - her Lewinskian prose was not admissible. He knew better, or certainly should have. But is this the kind of sex offense Megan's Law was intended to address?

To my knowledge this kid (he's 21 now) is not violent and doesn't have any weapons. In fact, if you knew him only casually you wouldn't suspect a thing - you might even think he was bright and glib and thus had potential. When he showed up for school and actually paid attention he did well, but he could never be as smart as he thinks he is. Nowadays he's learning about PCs, but his brashness and perpetual attraction to lowlives has already cost him a few new Windows reinstallations via viruses et al.

Can he be rehabilitated? Hmm - while he was locked up prior to his probation he did get his GED. But this was out of boredom rather than any change of heart IMO. He's the kind that used to get taken for a ride by persons unknown, beaten senseless and told to straighten up or get to hell out of town. It's ugly, but I have to call them like I see them.

I could be wrong. But one thing is for sure - the fact that he has a felony on his record and is labeled in perpetuity as a sex offender is not going to make it easier.

Fowl Play

Right here.

Civilization is a very elastic term

Now that we've seen a week of the coverage of Ronald Reagan's funeral activities, let's recall what happened when the Ayatollah Khomeini died. Wasn't it cool when the legions of swarming jackasses managed to dump Khomeini's corpse onto the ground?

40 years too late...

The press is finally finding out that Ralph Nader has ethical problems. I'm sure the fact that at last he is perceived as being harmful to the interests of the Democrats has nothing to do with this.

Theocrats?

Can we reserve the word "theocrats" for those who really deserve it, such as Moqtada al-Sadr and the like?

Just doing his job?

TV cameramen really don't have to have the manners of papparazzi, do they? I saw one scene of a camera stuck in the face of a serviceman who was losing his composure, and the @#$!@# cameraman wouldn't go away. What kind of voyeuristic BS is that?

Of course that could have wound up on the cutting room floor, but no, the producers used it. So they're no better.

IMO the cameraman and his entire management chain up through the likes of Sumner Redstone deserve 24/7 live in-their-face press coverage until they swear to treat the rest of us with respect and dignity.

Hang in there...

Best wishes to Matthew Yglesias and his mother.

Tivo and home networking

Right here.

UN inspectors: Saddam shipped out WMD before war and after

Right here.

The best advice for graduates

Right here.

We only want to have to do this once

Abusing your children is bad. But IMO coaching them to say that the other parent has abused them is also abuse of the children, not to mention abuse of the legal system. Hence we see this.

See the girls cry in the picture. Of course they will - they're 4 years old, they don't know what Mommy is so upset about and they're about to leave with a near-stranger who would have had them aborted when he found out his "fling" was pregnant. If ever ignorance were bliss...

Was justice done? I doubt it - for two cents I'd say horsewhip Mom and Pop both and have the kids raised by a third party with no visitation for either. A pox on both houses!

Then again, the worst Daddy appears to have done is to have a change of heart. Once they were fit for nothing but scrap, in case someone could suck some stem cells out of them - write one check and they're medwaste, and he doesn't even have to divorce his wife. But now they're apparently healthy twin girls, potty trained and ready to show off. Little did their mother know that she was a surrogate.

Mother OTOH has not only lied and accused Daddy of something beyond the pale of civilization, but she's made it harder to convict the next creep who really is guilty. She's paying a huge price, but it still beats the years in prison suffered by the Amiraults and others when they were falsely accused.

C'mon, Lileks, just try it...

Oh sure, he'll post a bunch of old stuff in Jetsam Cove, like the 1953 grocery store ad. But would he walk the walk like this guy, who was to live for 10 days in the city using the technology of 50 years ago?

"Still, I'm not a knee-jerk left-wing guy,"

Who said it?

John Curulewski

Who? Well, some of you who lived near Chicago in the 1970's might have heard of him. He was one of the original 2 guitarists with Styx, which stormed out of the south side of Chicago to sell millions of records in the late 70's and early 80's. I'm not sure, but I think he's the genius behind the immortal "Plexiglas Toilet" song that they included without acknowledgement on one of their early albums.

Curulewski was there during the lean local years. He sang, played guitar and wrote some songs, along with fellow guitarist James Young (JY is the tall blondheaded one, who happens to be an engineer). Twins Chuck and John Panozzo played bass and drums respectively, and Dennis DeYoung was the keyboardist who wrote much of the music and sang most of the leads.

Yeah, they had a hit with "Lady", but that didn't come about until a couple of years after its album "Styx II" was released. Mostly they were a Chicago phenomenon, and they recorded on Wooden Nickel records. Good luck finding any of those albums. (Styx, Styx II, The Serpent is Rising, and Man of Miracles).

Then came their 5th album, Equinox. It had hits on the top 40 (Lorelei), AOR (Suite Madame Blue), an anthem (Light Up), and the rest were good too. It got them a national contract, and then Curulewski decided to leave the band to spend more time with his family.

That didn't exactly wreck the band - JC was replaced by Tommy Shaw, a blondeheaded singer/guitarist who the babes seemed to think was just too cute for words.

The band's first album after Curulewski, Crystal Ball, scored no hits. But then they released The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight and suddenly they were everywhere.

Did Curulewski regret missing the ride? We can't ask him - he's dead. Not a musician's death though, from drugs or an accident - he died of a brain aneurysm in 1988.

The rest of the band isn't doing so well either. John Panozzo is dead of alcoholism-related problems, Chuck Panozzo is HIV positive, and Dennis DeYoung has some sort of chronic condition that keeps him from touring much (near as I can tell he's not so easy to get along with either). So only the Mutt and Jeff singer-guitarists are left to carry the banner with some new guys.

Need a Styx fix? Check out Paradise Radio here.

Ted Nugent and Toby Keith in the war zones

...at HughHewitt.com

Payback?

WASHINGTON, June 6 — From the shores of Normandy to President Bush's campaign offices outside Washington, Mr. Bush and his political advisers embraced the legacy of Ronald Reagan on Sunday, suggesting that even in death, Mr. Reagan had one more campaign in him — this one at the side of Mr. Bush.

At last the truth can be told. Those ghoulish Republicans have had Mr. Reagan on life support for all these years. His last words were "Dick and Karl, sometime when the polls are bad and the breaks are beating the boys, pull the plug and let the Gipper win one for you".

< /sarcasm off>Memo to NYT - the man died after years with a miserable illness. Even John Kerry managed to say something respectful without choking to death on the words. Can't you lay off long enough for the corpse to cool a couple of degrees? Don't you have some biases to deny?

Data mining ramblings

Rob expresses concern about potential govt abuse of information here. I agree in principle, but then I followed the link. The concern is about what is called "data mining". Now watch as I attempt to do some justice to such a vast and interesting field in a blog length post.

One source defines data mining as "the process of finding new and potentially useful knowledge from data". That's not too specific - let me try another angle. Historically we've gathered data in response to a specific need. Nowadays we have scads of data collected for innumerable purposes and we're attempting to learn from it in ways not anticipated when it was collected. IOW we're reusing others' data. Doing so effectively often requires a different way of thinking with new tools and methodologies, and it's new enough that definitions as vague as the above will have to do for now.

You can find any number of books attempting to describe data mining. Let me assure you that in many cases it is a lot like trying to draw conclusions about individual cattle by examining products from McDonalds. You can't. The best you can do is create a list of cattle like the ones you're eating.

The scope of application is almost limitless, but let's take it down to earth with an example of an application in a marketing context. XCo wanted to cross-market various products and they were looking for the most effective ways of identifying prospects. They went through millions of records for people who had bought various products and augmenting that with information available from other sources. Then analyses of the sales and demographic information permitted assigning various coordinates to the customers.

Concocting these coordinates well is something of a black art performed by experienced modelers. Consider "cluster analysis", for instance. You'll start with some customer information. You'll use it to construct some orthogonal "dimensions", conceptually not unlike the rectangular (Cartesian) coordinates from your calculus class. This is done by by powerful computers (big Unix boxes usually, but sometimes mainframes or others) using sophisticated software like SAS.

The "value" of any of these dimensions might be very complex functions of the customer data. Here is an example which is totally artificial but which gives a bit of the flavor: arbitrary coordinate value=.003*(owns a house)+ .044*(reads Wall Street Journal) -.34*(plays the horses) + .28*(went on a cruise in the last 5 years) + .00082*(household income) +.9*(number of cars owned). The form of these equations varies with the data available and the type of modeling chosen by the modeler. Incidentally, there is no "right" answer for the models, and different modelers would come up with different models - what's important is how well they predict consumer behavior.

Alright, now you've come up with several dimensions like the one above and you "plot" (conceptually) where your customers fall in the "space". If your data was relevant and you've developed a good set of dimensions, hopefully you'll find that your customers are "clustered" around certain sets of coordinates. (you'd like to see "clouds" to study instead of a uniform fog, so to speak).

A lot of effort has gone into studying such marketing clusters. For an example of of some identified by a major consumer research organization, look here. IMO it is clear that these different groups of people exist in a meaningful sense and will respond differently to marketing initiatives. In particular, some will be more profitable than others for a given firm, so effective marketers will take these factors into account. But those are generic classifications, and the more specific classifications that might arise from a well-crafted model are more useful for a particular firm.

For instance, suppose you're interested in cross-marketing product A with product B. Generic models cannot have taken your sales for these products by customer into account if only because you wouldn't release such detailed information. But with your own model, you'd look at the coordinates for the customers which have bought A and B. Then you'd look at the ones who had bought only one of the two to see which ones were closest to the ones who had bought both. Then you'd concentrate on those people to try to sell them the product they didn't already have.

The final deliverable in this example might be a list of names of existing customers who were most likely to respond to your initiative based on their past purchase activity and other characteristics. The results are transmitted to the sales force/direct mail/telemarketers/whatever for further action. They report on their results, and this information is used to refine future models.

(Don't let the above suggest that applications of data mining are limited to marketing. These are limited primarily by imagination and the availability of data. I'm particularly interested in those related to genetics, medicine, and bioinformatics.)

So what did we get for our trouble? Marketing costs are lower and the customers most likely to be interested are the ones contacted. Consumers get fewer solicitations, and the ones they get are more likely to be interesting. Everybody wins. Sheesh, is this something to fuss about?

Maybe not, in the commercial arena. But what about putting such information in govt hands? Outside of models which do not consider personal information, such as the Consumer Price Index or perhaps the distribution of variations of the human genome?

Hmm. Ask yourself this question - will the lack of good information prevent the govt from creating models? No, of course not. They'll just make lousier models, with more "misses" and "false positives" than they would have otherwise, and the resulting policies will be less useful and more expensive.

One can argue if the creation and use of such models with the intent of applying the results to individuals is justifiable by the govt. If a marketer uses it, about the worst outcome is a telemarketer phone call, while upsides might include special interest rate offers and other deals that might be interesting. But IMO the govt's powers and its obligations to treat all citizens equally under the law add complications that render almost anything it does with such modeling inherently suspect IMO.

Do I have a conflict of interest? Yep - that's why I know about stuff like this. I'm currently in the DC area, so govt work in this area potentially represents money in my pocket. Anyway, take it for what you paid for it...

Samaritan Virus

It's only fair that there should be some sort of virus that makes cancer cells sick.

Title and link stolen from Gene Expression

Eating the mossback's lunch

Yes, Richard Bennett, there is such a thing as race.

How do I know? Because some of us check one box on govt forms and some check others. That might well be the only difference in some peoples' views of the world, but so long as the govt decrees that such differences exist and behaves accordingly, race will exist as a practical matter.

And isn't it interesting that, if you analyze various characteristics of populations of people who check one of these blanks vs those who check others, one reaches the kinds of conclusions discussed provocatively at Gene Expression and in books like "The Bell Curve".

Are these people checking the wrong boxes? Then the gaps observed should not exist - they should disappear into a fog of statistical noise. Thus although there may be no clear-cut genetic distinction between these groups (for which I fault genetics, not any inherent flaws with the way people choose the boxes), we've stumbled onto a classification that looks a lot like what is casually referred to as "race". Under such circumstances claiming that race doesn't exist is at best sophistry.

"Racist" and "racism" are epithets. Mr. Bennett's use of them in this context deserve no more respect than if he'd been writing of "niggers".

Maryland Dancesport Championships in Baltimore this weekend

You've never seen DanceSport? Check it out - it's an interesting combination of art and athleticism that is accessible to about anyone yet can be refined to a professional level. (Like the picture? Meet the performers here).

I'm sitting this one out, but those of us toiling in the low end of the talent hierarchy will start competing on Thursday. The climax is Saturday night when the professionals compete in rhythm, Latin and standard. You'll see why they call it a sport and why it may someday be included in the Olympics.

So you don't know anything about DanceSport? I think you'll enjoy watching no matter what, especially if I aim low. Guys, if you think professional cheerleaders are hot you haven't seen jack - here you'll probably be closer than front row at the stadium watching some hot toned women perform some incredible routines. All the women have to look good at the pro level, and if you're a leg or butt man you'd better bring a bib.

Ladies, beyond the show itself it's an excuse to dress up for an evening and there might be chances to dance between events. By turns it's sophisticated, exciting and romantic and even erotic, and it's not super-expensive. Although a lot of the pros don't speak English well, they're very accessible when they're not actually competing or preparing. And don't even tell me that you don't check out the men.

But if you want to know more, as a rough guide I've posted about it here, here and here. There's more here.

For more information about the Maryland Dancesport Championships see this site.

And if you're in the Cleveland area, get ready for the NorthCoast championships from June 24 through 27.

Me too

More than one person has pointed to this - I don't recall who to credit. Probably the Corner or Glenn Reynolds. But in case you've missed it, check out the following, which was the intro to a review of a show in NY:

"No U.S. president, I expect, will ever appoint a Secretary of the Imagination. But if such a cabinet post ever were created, and Richard Foreman weren't immediately appointed to it, you'd know that the Republicans were in power. Republicans don't believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.
This opinion is presumably not shared by Foreman; you can gauge the breadth of his imaginative compassion from his willingness to extend it even toward George W. Bush, idiot scion of a genetically criminal family that should have been sterilized three generations ago."

Good grief - has this guy had his shots?

Graceless creep

On the death of President Ronald Reagan, Danny Glover had this to say: 'We all know Reagan's legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that.'Yeah, maybe because he showed that some actors can hold defensible political positions.

Misleading headline

The headline says "Segregation persists in town behind Brown". It goes on to tell of a local public school that is 99% black, and another one that is 90% white.

OK, but the 90% white school is a private school. Brown v. Board of Education was about public schools and certainly couldn't force the integration of private schools.

I've lived in the rural South, and one of my junior high schools had been the black senior high. I'm not under any illusions about why that private school is there, and there are countless others like it throughout the South.

But can no one else see something fishy about a statement like "separate is inherently unequal", such as is asserted in Brown? Someone actually claimed that "...if the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child's curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school curriculum cannot be equal under segregation." Yeah, right - black kids are automatically shortchanged if white kids aren't present. Am I the only one that sees that as insulting to blacks?

It's long past now, and IMO integration did me good. I didn't have to spend half my day commuting across town to satisfy some judge's idea of racial justice though. There had to be a way to make this happen without inflicting such questionable law on us in the process.

Feminism where it's needed, for a change

A group of Muslim women are "reclaiming the rights Islam gave women in the 7th century. Go sisters go!

Stolen from Instapundit.

Put me on that jury!

"Single mother says she can't afford $500,000 fine for daughter's downloads"

Bastards.

Voices of the dead

Well, sort of.

Where the rubber meets the road

"STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swedish aid organization will roll out a new line of defense to the country's emergency services next week -- the condom ambulance.

From Friday, June 4, amorous couples can call the telephone number 696969 and a white van featuring a large red condom with wings as a logo will deliver them a packet of 10 prophylactics.
'We need to increase the usage of condoms,' said Carl Osvald, marketing manager for the Swedish Organization for Sex Education, the non-governmental organization behind the initiative. 'It is 50 percent about pregnancy and 50 percent about sexually transmitted diseases.' "

Old English slang

No, we're not talking about Chaucer - this is just something I found from the Gutenberg project which lists some English slang from around 1800.

This explains a lot of things

Have you marveled at French behavior regarding Iraq and the Middle East. I have a theory - their moral philosophers have been sleeping.

Beaker's Corner points us here, where we learn that French aren't getting enough sleep (and we Anglo-Saxons are at fault).

I'll admit that the French have developed leisure as an art form. The products which they are best known for, wine and cheese, came about because the French learned that if they sat on their asses long enough, microorganisms would do their work for them. Too lazy to bathe or shower, they invented the bidet, and that only because they believed that venereal diseases came from riding horses.

But it doesn't stop there. In business, they find it easier to sell overpriced goods and services to dictators like Saddam Hussein than to compete against modern economies. There's the 35 hour work week, which may be even too slack for them. And let's not forget the millions of unassimilated immigrants - their next war with Algerians might happen on French soil.

IMO what they need is a wake-up call.

Grudgenetics

What do you know? - it turns out that all those stories about white masters beating black slaves here in the US weren't true after all. For those of you who find this controversial, the answer is right here.

You see, Isaac Cortez Bynum is charged with murder by abuse in the June 30 death of his son Ryshawn Lamar Bynum. He did so because African Americans today are affected by past centuries of U.S. slavery because the original slaves were never treated for the trauma of losing their homes; seeing relatives whipped, raped and killed; and being subjugated by whites.

The slave theory is the work of Joy DeGruy-Leary, an assistant professor in the Portland State University Graduate School of Social Work. In the hands of Bynum's state-appointed lawyer, "I think it can be proven. The problem is it's brand new. It's not as easy to present in court as something that's been established over years."

Yeah really, especially if you try to do it with a straight face.

But really now - if this is the first case identified after all this time, then there must not have been so much abuse after all, right? Or has this been sneaking under the radar for all these years?

Or else maybe this is the leading edge of a wave. Soon there will be millions of cases of black men killing their children because of this effect. Someone call DCFS!

Yeah yeah, we must be able to study ideas and follow the truth where it leads us, and weird ideas are OK as long as we reject them. But this one doesn't pass the first order giggle test. As far as I'm concerned the lawyer who put this forward should be billed for wasting the court's time.

Like animals

Debra Saunders: Target of the week: "Animal-rights activists went to the home of a Chiron employee one night last year to send a message. They pounded on her front door, rang her doorbell and shouted, 'Open the door,' followed by an epithet. Another night, they shouted through bullhorns and then bragged about it on the Internet. Someone also exploded two pipe bombs in her workplace.

Her crime? She was a paralegal for the Chiron Corp. in Emeryville, Calif., which engages in animal research to develop vaccines and other lifesaving products. It was her bad luck that Chiron had contracted with the animal-research firm Huntingdon Life Sciences -- and worse luck that animal-rights activists had formed a group committed to putting Huntingdon out of business, a group that was willing to intimidate any individual toward that end."

Imagine the fuss if someone set off some pipe bombs at an abortion clinic. Why don't these creeps get the same kind of coverage anti-abortion protesters get?

"Our military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United States."

Quoth Reggie Rivers, star of the storied Denver Broncos backfield of the early 90's, who must have taken a few too many shots to the head. What an ignorant SOB!

He might be a one-trick pony - here he compares the treatment of gays to that of blacks in the '50s. I didn't see that, but my history books must have left out the gay high schools and how they all of them had to sit in the back of the bus. Imagine how horrible it would have been to have gay-only public bathrooms.

Incidentally, unless he was one heck of a blocker he wasn't so hot a pro player either. In the 1994 season, which happens to be the first one I found on Google, he was good for 1.9 yards per carry and 83 entire yards. In total yardage he fell between two quarterbacks (David Klingler and Neil O'Donnell), and they both had more yards per carry.

But that's enough from me. We'll let Baldilocks do the wet work here.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

It serves him right for hanging around with Madonna:

BOSTON - Stating that someone is homosexual does not libel or slander them, particularly in light of new court decisions granting gays more rights, a federal judge has ruled.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner came as she threw out a lawsuit by a former boyfriend of pop singer Madonna who claimed he was libeled because his name appeared in a photo caption in a book about Madonna - under a picture of Madonna walking with a gay man.

I'd be amused if some gay group sued this guy for defamation because he said calling him gay was defamatory.

Know your place

Mark's Bitch Letter Generator for women, and Mark's Apology Note Generator

Pictures and profiles of Al Qaeda suspects

Right here, via The Corner.

Stem cells - why can't the ESCR proponents be honest?

Call me a Cro-Magnon if you want, but sometimes the only response some people deserve is a good old-fashioned bust in the mouth. And these lying conniving embryonic stem cell advocates are heading rapidly for that territory. I've been sitting on this post for a few days gradually sucking out venom and haven't fully succeeded.

See this by Eric Cohen on National Review Online. First the general:

The promise of embryonic-stem-cell research is very real but wholly speculative. No human therapies of any kind have yet been developed or tested, and none are on the horizon. And the notion that embryonic stem cells will cure "cancer" and "heart disease," broad categories of disease that encompass a complex array of particular ailments, is unsupported by even informed conjectures.

Now more specific:

"There are estimated to be more than 400,000 IVF embryos, which are currently frozen and will likely be destroyed if not donated, with informed consent of the couple, for research." This implies that while the Bush policy funds research on only a few dozen lines, hundreds of thousands of embryos are out there for scientific use. But this is simply false. The same 2003 study that arrived at the 400,000 number made it clear that only about three percent of these frozen embryos are actually available for research — the others remain in the custody of the parents who created them, and are specifically designated for future use in initiating a pregnancy. Whether the parents really plan to implant them or not — some parents simply cannot bear to let them go — these embryos are not public property. The study further did the math, and concluded that if all available frozen embryos were used only for embryonic-stem-cell research, they would yield about 275 lines of stem cells. Not thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands, but 275 is all scientists can expect to get from frozen IVF embryos.

But it gets worse:

This points to a serious question about the intentions of embryonic-stem-cell advocates. In the May issue of Scientific American, prominent embryonic-stem-cell researchers Robert Lanza and Nadia Rosenthal wrote that the actual therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells would be hampered by immune-rejection problems that could only be overcome by cell treatments compatible with the immune system of patients. "Hundreds of thousands of ES-cell lines might be needed to establish a bank of cells with immune matches for most potential patients," they wrote, and "creating that many lines could require millions of discarded embryos from IVF clinics."

We will likely never have "millions of discarded embryos," and nothing the president can do could change that. Moreover, the article suggests how far we might be from any workable treatments using embryonic stem cells. Does the House letter mean to call for a national project whose end is millions of embryos created for research? How many of the 206 signers understood that this might be necessary? And while it is true that many scientists believe we can find cures with fewer embryos, what will they do if Lanza and Rosenthal are right?

B-b-but we only have a few lines to work with!:

Finally, the letter offers no evidence that the number of available lines has already proven to be a barrier to any particular researcher's specific work at this point. No other advocate or scientist has offered such evidence either. It is certainly true that more money for more lines could mean more work would get done. But that is not the same as saying that ongoing work has hit a wall because of the limited number of lines now available for federal funding, or that it will soon hit such a wall.

But here's the part that really chaps me:

Stepping back, a pattern of facts emerges. Embryonic-stem-cell research is promising but so far purely speculative; the federal government in no way limits such research in the private sector; supporters of the research believe they can obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in private funding in the next few years, as the creation of new stem-cell institutes at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin demonstrates; and yet, despite the ethical objections of a very substantial portion of the public, stem-cell advocates insist that Congress should compel every American to support the research with tax dollars, and to make that happen they inflate the promise and distort the facts surrounding the research.

We have obscenely rich individuals like Ted Turner (giving a $billion in stock to the UN? He would have done better with Enron) and George Soros who fund fashionable lefty causes - why don't they pony up for this rather than roping in all of us? Obviously this isn't about human health, it's about getting their way and forcing the rest of us to participate - they can have what they want without involving the govt and they choose not to.

Enough - I'm not disgustingly rich, so if I know what's good for me I'll have to drop this now. Just read it all, and then ask yourself why it's more important for the govt to pay than it is to get the work done.

Food for thought

"For more than a decade I believed that the first President Bush made a massive mistake in leaving Saddam Hussein in power in 1991. I almost voted against him for this wobbliness in 1992. But the longer the fight drags on in Iraq today, the more I thank God that the first Gulf War stopped with the liberation of Kuwait."

Criminalizing policy disputes

Carl Bernstein has drunk the Kool-Aid. Whatsamatter Carl, been second banana to Bob Woodward for too long?

Today, the issue may not be high crimes and misdemeanors, but rather Bush's failure, or inability, to lead competently and honestly.

Yeah, I like the idea of a President leading competently and honestly, but unlike Bernstein I think we have that now. To hint at impeachment is far beyond the pale of even rabid partisanship.

Elsewhere in the article Bernstein rants about Abu Ghraib prison, going so far as to speak of an American Gulag. That's rich, because the original Gulags in the Soviet Union were often used for people guilty of "thought crime". You know, people who disagreed with the Establishment. Working from the wrong set of principles, such people obviously could not be competent or honest, so they had to be locked up.

And if Bernstein keeps this nonsense up maybe he should be confined himself. Not to a gulag, but an old-fashioned mental hospital.

Right answer, wrong reason

Back in engineering school it wasn't enough just to get the right answer. The staff went over the supporting work, and if they didn't like it you'd still get marked wrong. It cost me letter grades more than once when I was a little too terse for somebody's taste.

But I wanted to be an engineer. If I were willing to settle for lower standards I would have been a green.

That's not to say that greens can't come up with the right answer sometimes. Looky here:'Only nuclear power can now halt global warming':

Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.

His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but it has always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected his call.

Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.

We've learned a lot since the last generation of nuclear power plants was built. They've performed well in terms of safety and reliability, and the next generation will be even better. And whether you buy Lovelock's beliefs about global warning or not, you have to recognize the correlation between the availability of energy and economic capacity.

So under the circumstances, I'll give Lovelock full credit for getting the right answer.

Dedication

In recognition of a recent travesty at Cannes, I present "The Man without a Country".

News cycles

That journalistic paragon Matt Drudge's front page currently contains this: "President fell off bike Saturday.. Kerry told reporters in front of cameras, 'Did the training wheels fall off?'... Reporters are debating whether to treat it is as on or off the record... Developing... " Yep, that's our diplomat - Indymedia or DU couldn't have said it any better.

Yep, President Bush had a spill:

President Bush suffered cuts and bruises early Saturday afternoon when he fell while mountain biking on his ranch, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

Bush was on the 16th mile of a 17-mile ride when he fell, Duffy said. He was riding with a military aide, members of the Secret Service and his personal physician, Dr. Richard Tubb.

"He had minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees," Duffy said. "Dr. Tubb, who was with him, cleaned his scratches, said he was fine. The Secret Service offered to drive him back to the house. He declined and finished his ride."

Bush was wearing his bike helmet and a mouth guard when the mishap occurred. Duffy said he didn't know exactly how the accident happened.

"It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," the spokesman said. "You know this president. He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."

Of course Kerry had his own little spill a while back. No mountain biker, he fell when he hit a patch of sand. He wasn't riding a mountain bike, but all the same it's that much less reason to be speaking of someone else's "training wheels".

Heads and tails

: "It has been reported that when the remains of Japanese soldiers were repatriated from the Mariana Islands in 1984, sixty percent were missing their skulls.'" Follow that link to get an idea of what kind of pictures were published in Life magazine during WWII.

Link stolen from Colby Cosh. The link that follows includes one of those prison pictures that looks like a Massachusetts bachelor party, so it may be NSFW, but he has much to say about the Abu Ghraib prison affair here. (Arse gratia artis? - oh stop it!).

Politics? What politics?

This morning CNN gave a platform to a woman named Monica Gabrielle who was criticizing the Bush Administration's dealings with 9/11.

Fair enough - she's a citizen. But so am I, and I'm not on CNN, so why should she be? Does she have any particular expertise to add?

No, she's just a 9/11 widow. I wouldn't trade places with her, but then I don't think that her loss in itself confers any relevant expertise in solving associated security or other problems. In fact, the type of questions she was asking were counterproductive inasmuch as they were phrased as attacks on the Bush Administration.

So I looked her up. Ah, here she is:9/11 widows Seek Apology from Limbaugh Over Slanderous Claims.

Slanderous? According to their post, Rush said (emphases added):

Here, listen to this montage in case you missed it on Friday, and understand that these family members are actually part of the Democratic Party machine, as they do this.

VOICE I: I think for someone like President Bush who has not cooperated with this commission, who has stonewalled this commission.

VOICE II: This president and his administration blocked the creation of the commission, have stonewalled the commission.

VOICE I: If this was realistic from the morning of September 11th, it would show President Bush before a group of school children listening to them read, while the twin towers were burning.

VOICE II: If he wants to show a picture of 9-11 depicting what he was doing, it should be a picture of him sitting and reading in a classroom to school children. That's where he was on 9-11.

VOICE I: And we need to find out why 3,000 people were murdered on his watch.

VOICE II: Well, you know, this happened on his watch.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to hear some original thoughts from any of these people, but I don't think that the Democrats trust them to speak originally.

END TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: The two unnamed voices are those of Monica Gabrielle and Kristen Brietweiser.

Now I'll grant that if someone accused me of sounding like a Democrat I'd feel slandered. But look at the above and notice the similarities - I have a hard time believing that two people who hadn't rehearsed or compared notes would have come up with statements that were so close.

Especially the school children bit - now all of a sudden a President interested in education and meeting school children on their turf, and these women would present it as a bad thing. That's too far-fetched not to be contrived. It makes about as much sense to blame her for her husband's death - if she would have jumped his bones that morning for a nice long session he wouldn't have been at work yet when the plane hit.

I didn't record her statements, but you can find some examples of questions she wanted to ask here on Randi Rhodes' website (remember Randi Rhodes? She's the one on Air America who wanted President Bush's family to take him for a ride).

The questions are doozies, on par with "do you still beat your wife?". #1 was "Why was our nation so utterly unprepared for an attack on our own soil?" I'll answer that one when you tell me why people were bitching so much about the additional restrictions on airline passengers *after* 9/11.

How about this one? "2. On the morning of 9/11, who was in charge while you were away from the National Military Command Center? Were you informed or consulted about all decisions made in your absence? " Yeah, as if it would have made any difference. But suppose he had been there, he had information in time, and he had scrambled fighters to divert or shoot down 4 civilian airliners so the buildings would be spared. It would have been the right decision - the plane passengers were goners anyway, and but for the last plane, anyplace where they crashed would probably have had a lower population density than what they did hit. Would she have applauded such a decision?

Or this: "5. Please explain why no one in our government has yet been held accountable for the failures leading up to and on 9/11." Well, Clinton, Gore and Jamie Gorelick were already out of the govt by then. I wonder if she's equally curious about why Gorelick is on the 9/11 commission?

I could go on, but I'll close with this one, which says more about where she's coming from than any other: "For Vice President Cheney....5. Please describe any discussions/negotiations between the Taliban and either public or private agents before Sept. 11 regarding Bin Laden and/or rights to pass a pipeline through Afghanistan, or any other subject pertaining to Afghanistan. " That one ought to be a guaranteed conversation stopper for anyone with the IQ of a lobotomized pissant. Nope, no Democrats here.

Enough of this crap. It's depressing enough to know that partisan idiots like this exist, much less that CNN would give them a platform to distribute their militant ignorance.

Mona Charen: Are children of gay parents worse off?

She writes of studies of kids raised by gays, noting that the gay partners studied tended to be highly nonrepresentative.

Then came this:

As Biblarz and Stacey observe, the majority of children raised in gay families turn out to be heterosexual in adulthood (bearing in mind the limitations of the research)."

I would certainly hope so, considering that they're a *huge* majority the rest of the time. The intent of the statement seems to be to reassure, but in fact it leaves room to mask a strong preference for becoming gay compared to kids raised in traditional families.

There's still much more to be done. And in a saner society this research would be done before anything so revolutionary as "gay marriage" was introduced.

Could it be a fake?

It *must* be - Michael Moore has larger breasts than that.

Stolen from Glenn Reynolds.

"You want us to do WHAT?"

I heard a story about a guy who prayed every day to win the lottery. Then one day a deep unearthly voice said "How about meeting me halfway and buying a ticket?"

These two had a similar problem. I would like to have seen their faces when the doctor told them what the problem was.

UPDATE: Those spoilsports at Snopes are at it again...

Chutzpah

I suppose this has something to do with the nonsense at Abu Ghraib - it seems that certain foreign forces operating in Afghanistan avoid taking prisoners so they won't have to turn them over to the US.

What's galling is that it's those wonderful guys who gave us Auschwitz et al - the Germans. Pictures were taken inside their prisons/concentration camps too - I wonder which ones the Iraqis would have preferred to be in?

Does a germ make you gay?

It's an interesting theory from this article, which was referenced in a Corner post by unrepentant homophobe John Derbyshire.

That Sarin IED

Blaster has some terrific background starting here and on down the page.

I liked this part:"The Iraqis had a small number of bastardized binary munitions in which some unfortunate individual was to pour one ingredient into the other from a Jerry can prior to use – an action few soldiers were willing to perform."

Flagrant link theft from Glenn Reynolds.

Neener neener

Extension of unemployment benefits lost by one vote.

John Kerry was away from the Senate, no doubt defending the little guy.

Or maybe he was claiming that during his Air National Guard days (a distinction he shares with potential Kerry running mate Dick Gephardt) President George W. Bush was AWOL?

Of course Karl Rove engineering the whole thing...

Rolling over?

IMO Glenn Reynolds makes too much of this, as if resignation and apathy were the same as positive support for "gay marriage".

And there's the incredibly insightful analysis, such as "it doesn't affect me". One might have said the same about slavery and countless other things. That's not reasoning, that's apathy, and IMO that's not to be encouraged in an electorate by anyone who would call himself a democrat.

As for resignation, that's what "gay marriage" supporters are counting on. They don't want us to ask questions about what will happen to children brought up in an environment when you marry boys or girls equally. (maybe nothing, but shouldn't we have a better idea before we try something so radical?)There hasn't been such a marketing coup since the tobacco companies got the military to include cigarettes in rations.

I remember an issue that reminds me a lot of this one. I was a kid, and it seemed outrageous that there were limits on how a lawyer could advertise. That seemed unfair to me - why not?

Well, now we see. Dante wisely put the sowers of discord near the bottom of the eighth circle of hell, but we put them on our phone books and TVs. With countless lawyers egging them on is it any surprise that we're buried in litigation? But hey, it sounded unfair and "it didn't affect me".

And if anyone thinks this will be the end of gay demands, they're crazy. This isn't about marriage, this is about getting 100% parity with heterosexuality, to the point where eventually anything that favors or encourages heterosexuality will be considered a civil rights issue.

Just wait...

What do liposuctionists do with the stuff they suck out? They could be missing an opportunity.

I posted about stem cells just a bit ago, but there's something else from Smith's article I wanted to note: "Cells from human fat have proven to be true adult stem cells that look to be useful in regenerative medicine. Indeed, it appears that 62 percent of human fat cells "could be reprogrammed into turning into at least two other different cell types," according to Duke University researchers."

If this is true, I'm guessing that we'll never have a problem coming up with enough stem cells.

Stem cells - more of the same

Wesley J. Smith on Stem-Cell Research on National Review Online:

"'We have to use our limited resources efficiently. Money spent on embryonic-stem-cell research and human cloning is money that cannot be spent on [investigating] adult stem cells.' If Kelly is right, increasing funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, especially if it comes at the expense of adult experiments, could actually delay the cures that so many suffering patients hope desperately to receive from developing cellular therapies."

That's right - it's the embryonic stem cell backers who are causing problems with research. They would have us believe that their way is the only way, as in this reference which does not acknowledge the existence of adult (non-embryonic) stem cells.

Yet as noted in the link, it's the adult stem cells that are showing all the successes:

Adult-stem-cell and related therapeutic approaches are in current clinical trials or use for the treatment of cancers, autoimmune diseases, anemias, bone and cartilage deformities, corneal scarring, stroke, and skin grafts. Researchers have successfully restored some eye functions by extracting stem cells from human eyes, growing them in culture, and transplanting them into mice. Human trials are showing similar successes. Optimistic researchers hope that the technique could provide a cure for blindness within five years. Cells from human fat have proven to be true adult stem cells that look to be useful in regenerative medicine. Indeed, it appears that 62 percent of human fat cells "could be reprogrammed into turning into at least two other different cell types," according to Duke University researchers.

The thrust of the research now seems indisputable: While certainly not yet a sure thing, and noting that much work remains to be done in animal and controlled human studies, barring unforeseen problems adult-stem-cell and related therapies may be potent sources of new and efficacious medical treatments in the years to come. Just as significantly, these therapies are likely to be available far sooner than embryonic-stem-cell treatments, since adult and related therapies do not appear to cause tumors, would not be rejected, and do not have to be maintained indefinitely in vitro, because they would come from patients' own bodies.

Now look at this:here:

The doctors thought that this woman might benefit from receiving stem cells from her daughter. The idea was that the mother's body would tolerate or accept the daughter's stem cells and the daughter's stem cells would see the mother's tumor as "foreign" and fight it.

Within three days after stem cells from the daughter’s blood were transfused into the mother, the mother’s symptoms started to get better. Within one month, her activities improved and her tumors “showed striking decreases,” according to the report.

Within seven months she had regained all of her lost weight and had a normal lifestyle. Her cancer has remained in regression for over one year, according to the authors. There is also evidence that the daughter’s cells are still present in her mother’s body.

The stem cells in question are adult stem cells inasmuch as the woman's daughter is not an embryo. But the article doesn't say so, and IMO embryonic stem cell backers do what they can to blur this very important distinction.

Well, maybe the embryonic research might offer still more opportunities. Really? The record is mostly one of failures, and scary ones at that. From Smith:

In animal studies, embryonic-stem-cell treatments have been found to cause tumors. In one mouse study involving an attempt to treat Parkinson's-type symptoms, more than 20 percent of the mice died from brain tumors — this despite researchers reducing the number of cells administered from the usual 100,000 to 1,000.

Just read it all.

Why can't the press acknowledge that 1) there are other forms of stem cells, and 2) the kind they're pushing has a record of failure?

Genital Warts/HPV

I don't know how many times I've been a scold about condom failures or inadequacies, but apparently the word isn't getting around. So let's try this again, focusing on human papilloma virus (HPV), aka condyloma acuminata or "genital warts". Here are a few bullets:

• In the United States, HPV is considered to be the most common sexually transmitted disease (STD). Some studies estimate that the majority of the sexually active population is exposed to at least one or more types of HPV - although most do not develop symptoms. Because HPV is so common and prevalent, a person does not need have to have a lot of sexual partners to come into contact with this virus.
• This type of wart is sexually transmitted. It is highly contagious. The incubation period - the amount of time between contact with a person who has condyloma and the time you notice condyloma - typically ranges from three weeks to eight months, with an average of three months. Condyloma may, however, appear years after a person has been exposed.
• Some people apparently can have the virus, not show any signs of condyloma and still transmit the virus to a partner, who may develop condyloma. Since HPV can have such a long incubation period, it is often not possible to determine how you contracted it.
• Some strains of HPV seem to be related to the occurrence of genital cancer, especially cancer of the cervix. Therefore, if you have condyloma, it should be thoroughly evaluated and treated.
• Although condyloma can be treated and cured, the causative virus, HPV cannot. It is possible to transmit HPV even after all the condyloma are gone.
• Limiting the number of sexual partners you have will help prevent transmission of HPV and other sexually transmitted infections. It is controversial whether condom use can prevent HPV transmission. Condoms cover only the penis; HPV may be found elsewhere on the sexual organs (i.e. scrotal sac, anus). The female condom may be more helpful.

Did you get that last one? If condoms were 100% effective they wouldn't necessarily help, and the more adventurous you get the more ways you can get it.

So let's boil this down - it's common, once you have it you can transmit it forever, there's more than one strain so you can always get it again, you can't always tell if you have it (much less if your partner does), if condoms were 100% effective they couldn't stop it, and it can cause cancer. That's right, sweetie - you might be more likely to get cancer from those smelly hippies you hooked up with at the protest than from the nuke plant or waste dump you were protesting.

(I'm not a physician, but you guys out there shouldn't be too cocky. Women might have to deal with cervical cancer, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find a connection between HPV and prostate cancers. I'm guessing that that isn't really high-priority research - there aren't many men's health pressure groups out there that I know of.)

Want a source for the above information and more? OK, but be aware that it contains pictures of the condition at the bottom of the page, which I'm guessing are NSFW. Thus warned, look here. Also, there's the American Social Health Association's site here, which covers many other topics besides.

The Commons: Immobilizing the Poor

Iain Murray has done it again. With several coconspirators he has put together "The Commons" - I'll let him describe it here. The tagline is "Promoting environmental quality and human dignity and prosperity through markets and property rights".

The blog is so new that you can read it all in a short time, and I'd recommend that - just hit the archives for May 2004.

Or maybe check out The Commons: Immobilizing the Poor. Would you buy a car for every poor person in town if you could do it in place of and for lesser cost than building a local transit system? Odds are you'd at least marvel at how expensive this would be as a minimum, but you'd have to admit that it addressed the transit needs of those most in need of it.

But Denver rail proponents objected for other reasons. Just read it....

Sic 'em!

"Israel is apparently preparing to conduct a long range bombing mission to destroy Iranian nuclear weapons development facilities."

Via VodkaPundit

Bad News From the Front: 1942 and Today

Right here.

Link via Lead and Gold.

Artists AWOL?

Can we get rid of these smiling pictures and videos of Osama Bin Laden? Even the WSJ does it in the article cited below. Godwin be damned - did our newspapers ever publish flattering pictures of Adolf Hitler?

Too bad Doctor Seuss is gone. He did a great job with Hitler - too bad we'll never see his take on OBL.

And where's our Charlie Chaplin as in "The Great Dictator"?

Sounds good, but...

I dislike Jimmy Carter. I like Victor Davis Hanson. So it pains me to suggest that JC might have come up with a better solution than VDH proposes here.

VDH says JC should have declared war on Iran back in 1979. At the time the Cold War was alive and such a thing would not have been so straightforward - Hanson himself acknowledges that the Soviets were behind Arab terrorists. We also did not have the sophisticated logistics and weapons we have today. So it would have been extremely difficult to carry out the threat at best even under competent leadership in the White House. (Then again, it's amazing how fast the hostages were released once Ronald Reagan got to the White House).

And that's leaving aside the fact that our economy was weaker at the time. People complain about the costs now - imagine taking it out of a much smaller economy.

And we now know how things turned out. Back then it wasn't clear that Khomeini's gang would having staying power.

OTOH sometime in the same year the Russians launched their invasion of Afghanistan. We lived to see it bleed the Russians white militarily and economically, and the jihadis may be correct in saying they brought the USSR down. They certainly contributed to it.

So I'm thinking that Jimmy Carter actually did something that worked out right. But being JC, it could only have happened because he screwed up at screwing up.

What have they done to my Blogger?

I woke up this morning to do a quick post and what do I see? They've finagled with Blogger. It even does its own comments now. More here.

The difference a mother makes

You've probably never heard of Fulton, IL. It's right where US 30, (aka the Lincoln Highway) crosses the Mississippi River, across from Clinton, IA and 20-odd miles upriver from the Quad Cities.

Fulton is small, but it has character. Leave something in one place long enough and it'll wind up with a tulip on it, because Fulton is about as Dutch as it gets on this side of the Atlantic. Since 1974 they've been celebrating Dutch Days in early May.

But arguably the most famous "Dutch" from Fulton wasn't Dutch at all. It was Jack "Dutch" Reagan and his wife Nelle, the parents of Ronald Reagan.

Jack Reagan had problems with alcohol and moved the family many times as he attempted to make a living. As noted here, it was mother Nelle who made Ronald Reagan the man he would become, even down to the elocution lessons which served him well later as a broadcaster, actor and public speaker.

Nelle Reagan died senile in 1962. What a shame - she may never have known that her son had become governor of California, much less popular successful two-term President of the US.

The article about her closes with "Mothers, take heart. Yours is a tough business; the deck is stacked against you. Nelle Reagan, too, faced trials. Yet, she persevered—and left a mark on history."

My mother faced some trials of her own. Thanks Mom. I'll never be President, but I'll always be a better man than I would have been without you.

Cage rattling

I think I've published something like this before, but it wasn't an election year then. Anyway...

1) All political parties seek to enlarge their constituencies.
2) The Democrats are the party of the poor.
3) Ergo, the Democrats want to make more of us poor. John Kerry's wife and Ted Kennedy's family have theirs, Jack, and they need servants like you.

4) The Republicans are the party of the rich
5) Ergo, the Republicans want to make more of us rich. How else can you afford to buy Bush's buddies' baseball tickets and oil?

Now really - what more do you need to know?

Just because...

George Washington's Rules of Civility

Broken eggs

A short history by war crimes by Stephen Green.

Another take

There has been a lot of hyperventilation about Abu Ghraib. Politicians here and abroad have sought to capitalize on some illegal and unacceptable mistreatment which nevertheless in many cases sounds a lot more like fraternity hazing or a clip from "Jackass" than torture IMO. Interrogation is about getting people to say things that they would rather not disclose - before long we'll have people claiming that that alone is unacceptable because of the effect on the self-esteem and sensibilities of those subjected to it.

Now Charles Krauthammer has written this:

We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe -- and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an "I told you so" played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film. ....the abuse at Abu Ghraib is so inflammatory and, for us and our cause, so damaging. It reenacted the most deeply psychologically charged -- and most deeply buried -- aspect of the entire war on terrorism, exactly as Osama bin Laden would have scripted it.

(link via VodkaPundit)

Masked mischief

Madpony got me thinking about raccoons as pets. A Google later and we find all sorts of neat references on the subject, starting with this and its many links.

When I was younger a neighbor caught an old male alive, and he was about as mean as they come - getting within about 10 feet of the cage was good for snarls and claws extended through the bars. Apparently raccoons aren't fit company unless they're held a lot when they're little. Or even then -see about domestication issues here. In some jurisdictions having one is against the law.

Maybe a pet raccoon is the last thing you have in mind, and you just want the little varmints to go away. This has some suggestions.

Move over 007

The James Bond character may live dangerously, but he's got nothing on Terry Schiavo. Bond has the bad guys after him, but I don't recall anyone ever attempting to dehydrate him to death.

Ms. Schiavo is unable to communicate clearly at this time. Her husband has been doing what he can to get her to die, despite the wishes and beliefs of her parents.

She had been left to slowly dehydrate, a penalty we couldn't impose on the world's most heinous criminal. Thanks to legislation by the state of Florida and Gov. Jeb Bush, she had her feeding tube restored.

But the Florida judiciary, previously distinguished by their attempt to throw the last presidential election to Al Gore, has intervened. She can't communicate, you see. So she can't express the wish to stay alive. So according to Pinellas County Circuit Judge W. Douglas Baird, Gov. Bush violated her rights by ordering her feeding tube restored.

Now check out the news coverage. The WaPo covered this as Brain-Damaged Woman's Rights Were Violated, Fla. Judge Rules (washingtonpost.com).

Yep, that's it. Her rights were violated by an order that saved her from slow dehydration.

Justice must be served, you know. Perhaps some day the judge who came up with logic will be found unconscious and needing help somewhere and the onlookers will apply the same logic. "Well, why didn't he say something!"

It's possible that Ms. Schiavo would wish to die under such circumstances. That has been her husband's position all along, but he can't document it. And there are reasons to be suspicious of his motives. Her supporters' website is here.

I've had a relative die slowly. I can see why people might want to die under certain circumstances. But I can't see anyone wanting to do it this way.

If euthanasia über alles types think she wants to die, fine - let them kill her outright and have a test case. But the ones who would hide behind an Orwellian legal decision that would kill her to "defend her rights" can drop dead.

You don't have to admit your score

Rob the Acidman has a multiple-guess test full of questions about everyday life back when. Yeah, they had a pop culture back then too.

He also knows how to deal with Georgia's gift to agriculture, the Vidalia onion.

Thinking negatively?

Suppose your spouse proposes that you take out a life insurance naming them as beneficiary. Is this responsible behavior? Or is it "thinking negatively"? Or could it mean that your spouse is planning your demise?

I'm hoping that most of us would think it was about financial responsibility, but after this morning I can't be so sure. Chilli Amar, the traffic babe on a morning show, told of her friend's relationship which had progressed through an engagement. Then just before they set a wedding date, the man matter-of-factly proposed a prenuptial agreement, not suspecting that it would be an issue. It was - the friend was outraged and things haven't been quite the same.

If any specifics were discussed, Chilli didn't mention them. Certainly there's some potential for abuse there, especially if it pops up the morning of the wedding. But apparently her friend was mortally offended by the idea alone - there was nothing specific to complain about and no wedding date had been set yet anyway.

I don't see the problem here. We were told that both had some significant assets such as houses and savings - why be at the mercy of judges' whims?

We didn't hear from the friend, but a number of callers weighed in. Most were for the prenup, and insisted that there were benefits that weren't obvious. At least one was against it, talking about "negativity" et al, as if someone were betting that their marriage would fail going in, and he felt that the uncertainty provided an incentive to work on saving the marriage.

IMO if you can't think of a better reason for making a marriage work besides what might happen to your personal assets, maybe you shouldn't get married at all. But in a world full of willful judges, vicious family law attorneys and jealous family members, putting things down in writing sounds like plain common sense to me.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting. Trust is good, but not having to trust is better.

The inflection point

A is flying an airplane. He is flying higher and higher until he manages to disable the jet engines. The plane's altitude continues to increase for a bit because of its momentum. Then A turns over the controls to B.

Shortly after B takes over the plane reaches a maximum altitude and then starts to fall. He manages to restart the engines, but it takes a while to recover and the plane loses a lot of altitude before it starts to climb back up again.

And he's still climbing, but hasn't reached the heights A reached because B is flying by more responsible rules and has some nasty storms that A didn't have to deal with in the meantime. Now we're considering a new pilot, who has never flown a plane and thinks A was a better pilot than B because A reached higher altitudes.

Now tell me - when did the problems start? When A killed the engines? Or when the plane reached a maximum height and started falling?

And when did things start improving? When the plane started pulling out of the dive? Or when the minimum altitude was reached and it started climbing?

David Brock wants to use the peak as the starting point of a recession. That this peak occurred during 2 months into Bush's administration pleases him because he doesn't like Bush (in more ways than one) and wants to blame the recession on him. He goes so far as to say that the Republican claim that the recession started under Bill Clinton is a lie.

Believe me, David Brock knows about lying. But as his post cites, he has some support from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which uses the peaks as bounds for measuring recessions and expansions.

That they would do so is not surprising, because peaks and valleys are easy to measure. It's far more difficult to tell exactly when things "started to get better/worse".

But for deciding who'll make a better President we don't need precision. We just need a definition that can be used to tie economic performance to economic policies of a particular administration. Anything that can keep the accuracy within a 4 year window is good enough.

And we know for sure that George W. Bush had only been in office for two months when this peak was reached. His staff was probably still replacing the W's on keyboards when this peak happened - he certainly hadn't had time to effect any economic policy changes. We are forced to conclude that if we can hang this economic performance on the President whose policies were in effect, Bill Clinton is the guy responsible. So Brock's story fails even on its own terms.

But even if the recession had come later that wouldn't have let Bill Clinton off the hook. Things had to have been fouled up well before the peak was reached. If business activity were a smooth function, this would be sometime around the "inflection point" before the peak, when the graph started curving downward instead of upward (it's the point at which the the second derivative became zero - did that help?). That puts the start of the recession well within Clinton's 8 year watch.

Suppose you think I'm all wet and you like Brock's reasoning. Fine, run with it. Note that it shows the beginning of the expansion that Bill Clinton enjoyed was before Bill Clinton entered office. So it appears that the guy who ran for President claiming that we had "the worst economy in 50 years" not only was lying, but was not responsible for the upturn in the economy - it started before his policies came into effect. (Of course using my reasoning the result is the same, only that the expansion started even earlier in Bush 41's term). We have no evidence that John Kerry's economic policies will be better than Bill Clinton's, and by now we know that Clinton's led us to a recession after Bush 41's recovery.

Anyway, despite my trademark digressions, the general idea of this post is that thanks to the tremendous momentum of and lags in our economy, things can be hosed well before we reach the peaks and things can be on the mend before we hit bottom.

And we can conclude that the last two expansions were started by guys named Bush and the last recession was caused by the policies of Bill Clinton.

Donald Luskin takes another approach here, but the conclusion is the same.

The 'cost' of medical care

Thomas Sowell offers this anecdote:

" I saw a vivid example of what bureaucratic medical care meant back in 1959, when I had a summer job at the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. Around 5 o'clock one afternoon, a man had a heart attack on the street near our office.
He was taken to the nurse's room and asked if he was a federal employee. If he was, he could be sent to the large, modern medical facility there in the Public Health Service headquarters. But he was not a government employee, so an ambulance was summoned from a local hospital.
By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of downtown Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. That is what bureaucracy means."

And some people want more of this.

Separation of church and state

Look around among blogs or elsewhere and you'll have no problem finding brayings about separation of church and state. Yeah, yeah, we've got to have it to prevent theocracy, blah blah, as if we've ever come close. It's as if feminists in the US claimed that unless we backed them we'd soon be seeing this and this next door.

But somehow the flipside never gets considered. We must protect the Leviathan we call from the multitude of churches, but how about protecting the churches from the govt?

For instance, what's this about politicians ragging religious officials who would deny Communion to politicians who refuse to uphold the policies of their churches? That's an internal matter - what business does the govt have in interfering?

No one can stop John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi from calling themselves Catholic. But if the Catholic Church can no longer determine what it takes to receive Communion, then the govt has overstepped its bounds, and this should be recognized as unConstitutional political bullying.

A religion of peace...

Rod Dreher on The Corner points us to this:

"Governor Ahmed Sani of Zamfara State, has ordered the demolition of all churches in the state, as he launched the second phase of his Sharia project yesterday.
Speaking at the launch in Gusau, the state capital, Governor Sani disclosed that time was ripe for full implementation of the programme as enshrined in the Holy Quran.
He added that his government would soon embark on demolition of all places of worship of unbelievers in the state, in line with Islamic injunction to fight them wherever they are found. "

Crooked journalists

Unless you're a crime buff or an old Chicagoan you probably haven't heard of Jake Lingle. He was a popular journalist with the Chicago Tribune who was murdered in 1929.

Ha - it turns out that Lingle was crooked:

In the wake of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, the police cracked down on many organized crime activities in Chicago. One of the gambling dens that was closed was the Sheriden Wave Tournament Club. A year later, Zuta and his gambling partners were ready to reopen the plush gambling casino. When the Chicago Tribune's Lingle got word of this he became greedy and let Zuta know that he wanted $15,000 up front, or 50 percent of the net for protection. Zuta balked at Lingle's demands. When Zuta refused to pay, Lingle told him, "If this joint is opened up, you'll see more squad cars in front ready to raid it than you ever saw in your life before."

The murder of the popular Lingle created sensational headlines in Chicago and the Tribune printed daily that a $55,000 reward was available for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his killer. The public's outrage at the killing caused a police crackdown on all of the gangs in Chicago.

For some time now we've heard that Saddam Hussein allegedly liked buying journalists because they were so cheap. Now Instapundit links this, which apparently names some names of corrupt journalists.

So what's the appropriate punishment? Given all the braying we hear at the slightest impact on the First Amendment, and that these people were manipulating public opinion against the public interest, such journalists ought to get penalized as they would have if they had committed treason.

OTOH, I wonder if any of them ever tried pulling Lingle's trick on Saddam Hussein? Gosh, what do you suppose he would have done? Seriously, have there been any mysterious disappearances of journalists in the Middle East?

Are three blades better than two?

The answer is here, from the most credible of sources - a blogger.

Now if they can just figure out how to keep Mom from using the same one Pop is using on his face, they'll really have something.

"'He has spoken to his family and now is ready to get back to work.'

This man shouldn't ever have to pay for his own drink again.

Link via Instapundit.

What's dumber than a suicide bomber?

These guys.

Just asking

The outlets that are making so much of the US and now British abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib - did they raise a ruckus when Saddam Hussein was doing it?

Writer's workshop here in DC

See EveTushnet.com for details.

Get a life!

Seriously. You must have better things to do that to read this. It's all John Derbyshire's fault, but then what can you expect from a guy who writes books about the Riemann hypothesis!

The real investigation

Here I am, a humble blogger, linking to something someone else wrote again. Secondhand, even - I saw Glenn Reynolds' link to it at the bottom of a long updated post. But at least I'm not spinning the truth, and I'm not taking credit for something someone else did.

It's too bad that CBS News doesn't uphold such standards. As Greyhawk notes here, it was US military personnel who identified the problems with the Abu Ghraib prison, and it was an Army legal team that pursued it. And the investigation was conducted before 60 Minutes II showed the pictures.

I'm sure the 60 Minutes II folks would like to present themselves as crusading journalists exposing iniquity to the world to see it corrected. By dumping on the guys who make their beloved First Amendment possible.

Sorry guys, you're late to the party. That US troops break the rules from time to time is not news - just ask John Kerry. That they and other institutions don't choose to air their dirty laundry is not news either - just ask the news networks themselves.

Don't misunderstand me - this is legitimate news and should be covered. It should also be covered when the perps get what they have coming. But in particular, it should be noted that the military itself identified and started disciplinary and corrective actions long before some self-important overgroomed talking head with a teleprompter started mugging for a cameras. Was that acknowledged?

As for the perps, I don't want to hear any of the "didn't know the Geneva Convention" crap - we have any number of military bloggers over there so there must be some way to access the Web. Get on it and find the answer right here. (I gave myself two minutes to find this and I beat it - Google geneva convention prisoner of war and hit "I Feel Lucky".)

And these creeps wonder why their numbers are going down. Hey, if I want al-Jazeera I'll tune it in.

The rubes did it

By now everyone has heard of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. About anything I would say about it has been said quite well by others.

Except possibly for noting this: ": "'The elixir of power, the elixir of believing that you're helping the CIA, for God's sake, when you're from a small town in Virginia, that's intoxicating"Got that? City folks, or maybe rural Vermonters might have handled it just fine, but you'd better keep an eye on those rustics from Virginia...

Astonishing insight

Rosenblog notes the common factor in all terrorism.

More on Oil-for-Food

"Basically, Oil-for-Food was Saddam--just slightly harder to spot, swaddled as he was in that blue U.N. flag."

You know, if Dick Cheney were as crooked as the Dems say, he would have had Halliburton's hands in this raking in the bucks, and he would have opposed the invasion of Iraq. Instead it's the Dems who were against it. Verrrrrry interesting.....

John Kerry Claims His Penis is Larger than George W. Bush's

Well, no. But a few more days ought to do it.

And if he's wrong, he'll claim that the rest was shot off in Vietnam.

Alright, I'm not Scrappleface. But I'll leave you with this collection of John Kerry jokes.

Cosmo, beware!

Billy G. Cates, 18, was fined $325 last Tuesday for letting loose his dog "with the intent to annoy, worry, maim, injure or kill the squirrel," according to the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil and the Omaha World-Herald.

The black-colored squirrel (search) is Council Bluffs' unofficial mascot, and an ordinance protecting it has been on the books for decades.

They're not the only ones with black squirrels - for more, check here. For white squirrels, go to Olney, IL, or several others.

Incidentally, Cosmo is columnist Jonah Goldberg's dog, well known for his dealings with squirrels.

Awwww

"We take France to be a declared enemy of Islam."

Sophos Spam glossary

A few days ago I got some email from a respectable address but with a subject that looked like spam. After standard precautions, I opened it. It turned out to be spam.

So I went to the company's website to find an address to forward the spam to, so they'd know what was going on. That's when I found this spam glossary

It doesn't have an entry for "irony".

Will same-sex marriage lead to incest and polygamy? Let's hope so!

Title stolen from here.

Septic tanks?

It was during the Cold War, and I was taking an "American History since 1865" class one randy spring quarter. It was late in the term, the prof was discussing NATO et al, and Poland was in ferment.

I'm in the zone, writing notes as the professor said "Did you hear that the Poles were buying 10,000 septic tanks? As soon as they figure out how to start them they're gonna invade Russia". I had about half of that written down before I realized I'd been had by a Polack joke (yeah, we troglodytes actually told them back in those pre-PC times). My kingdom for a rotten tomato!

Hey, this was engineering school - we didn't take our history too awfully seriously, and it wasn't as if you could major in it there. But perhaps this prof was just a bit ahead of his time. Because, via Matt Drudge, we have this - what appears to be a fuel cell designed to run on human waste.

The article states that the device would produce all of 51 scuzzy kW of power from the waste produced by 100,000 people. That's about 70 horsepower for you old-timers. I'm guessing that you couldn't even pump that much waste with that amount of power.

It's better than nothing of course. But with further research, this could come out smelling like a rose.

Hmmm

Jay Bryant: Don't Drink From This Well: "Gorelick (whose last name, I was depressed to learn, consists of three syllables) should remain on the commission for precisely the same reason Ted Kennedy should remain in the Senate: the final product won't be noticeably different, and her having participated in it will help discredit whatever final nonsense it produces. "

Of yellow porn, the fruits of wrath, and obestiality

There's no particular reason to link tothis, other than that it reminds me of some things I have written.

Say what?

Tina Fey is a writer and cast member on Saturday Night Live and wrote the new release "Mean Girls". Here's an anecdote about her:

: "'When she was about 7, she drew this street scene of people walking along, holding hands with huge chunks of Camembert and Cheddar,' her brother recalls.
'At the bottom, she wrote, 'What a friend we have in cheeses!'' "

Pop songs are often misunderstood this way, and of course there's a book and website about it. Both of them are named for a line in Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze".

But you never make mistakes like this, right? Alright, try these examples from the comments on the book at Amazon - what songs supposedly contain these lyrics?:

• the ants are my friends, they're blowin' in the wind (oh come on, it's a gimme)


• The girl with colitis goes by
• Just floss my teeth before you leave me, baby


• I was born...to four cross-eyed lesbians

LaserMonks.com

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According to the story running on CNN, the founder was surfing the Web looking for a replacement toner cartridges and decided that the prices were too high. Read the rest here.

The official explanation

You might have heard this tragic story: a ship full of blue paint collided with a ship full of red paint and both sank. Their crews were marooned.

Or there's an old classic from Snopes about the unfortunate Civil War vet who took a round through the gonads which later lodged in the abdomen of a woman and impregnated her.

And this is how the North Koreans are explaining the big blast at Ryongchon last week:

: "Jang Song Gun, an official in charge of rescue efforts, said that the blasts occurred at noon after an electricity pole was knocked down when an oil wagon collided with two other wagons loaded with ammonium nitrate fertiliser. The fire caused by the short circuit ignited the oil wagon and the chemicals as the trucks were being shunted. "

Yeah, yeah, they've accounted for the ingredients in a OKC or 1993 vintage WTC bomb. What they haven't covered is the effort of mixing the ingredients, or managing to detonate them such that it all goes off at once. Otherwise you don't get much yield for your ingredients.

I'm no expert on ANFO, but I won't be taking that one at face value.