When did human beings start wearing clothes?

That's not so simple to answer because clothes generally don't fossilize. But evolutionary biologists wouldn't let something like that deter them - to estimate an answer they turned to lice.

I'm glad to say that I don't have much firsthand experience with lice, whether they be head lice, body lice or crab lice ("the crabs"). They all live on human beings, with preferences for the head, body, or genitalia respectively. (There are other kinds, but they live on other critters).

One major differentiator between head and body lice is that head lice lay eggs in your hair. Body lice attack hairless parts and lay eggs in clothing. So if you assume that at some point head lice and body lice were the same critter, it makes sense that they would have started differentiating about the same time humans started wearing clothes.

Voila - clothing must be about 40,000 to 72,000 years old.

Evolution of a climber

Tori Allen is the 15 year old daughter of some missionaries who happens to be one of the best female rock climbers in the world.

So where's she from? There's probably a mountain in her back yard, right? No, actually she lives in Indianapolis, where anything tall is manmade. So how'd she get to be so good at such a young age?

She was featured on a Discovery Channel "More than Human" show this past weekend where they revealed some of her secrets. Not surprisingly, she is very flexible and agile. At 5' 3" and about 120 lbs if I recall, she's no stick, but she has only about 16% body fat. And her grip is very strong - she can chin up using just one finger from each hand and can fall deliberately from one grip to another for a couple of feet and still catch herself using only her hands.

So was she just born gifted? No doubt that was part of it. But then when she was a toddler she lived with her parents in Benin, and they had a pet monkey. And she'd follow the monkey around in trees regularly and, apparently, fearlessly. This of course encouraged some unusual development in terms of strength and might account for her long fingers, long arms (her armspan is a couple of inches greater than her height), very strong tendons and many other characteristics that make her an exceptional climber.

I'm sure we ought to give the monkey some of the credit. (I don't know what kind of monkey her friend was, but it definitely wasn't a bonobo.)

The principle-agent problem

Liberals hate to see the little guy crushed under the jackboots of capitalists. They prefer this function to be performed by labor unions instead, because labor unions give them more money. Megan McArdle explains here on TCS.

And don't miss her blog, Asymmetrical Information.

Web Fire Escape!

Remember those old-time PC games with a TBIC (The Boss Is Coming) key? I'm thinking it came out with "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" or soon thereafter. Anyway, just punch that key and suddenly the screen would show a display that looked like something you were being paid to do.

Of course that's not necessary with Windows if you know what you're doing - a productive screen is just an alt-tab away, or you can kill the whole app with an alt-F4.

But now we have the Web Fire Escape! Punch the icon and get switched instantly to Google or whatever you configured it to point to. Obviously everyone needs this - get it here.

"It's a form of money laundering, plain and simple"

Here's a chance for the Democrats to 1) fight the deficit by raking in more tax dollars, 2) fight white-collar crime, 3) fight a multinational corporation with a history of crimes around the world. All they have to do is bust Greenpeace.

Joel Mowbray highlights how Greenpeace collects money under a tax-free entity, then transfers the funds to a taxable entity.

Hmmm. The Clinton administration had so many organizations audited by the IRS and somehow missed this?

Go away Mikey

Drudge points us to this article with former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

The former governor was not shy about sharing why he thinks he lost the election. He said he had not developed a strategy to deal with attacks from the Bush campaign.

I ran into a bit of a buzz saw," Dukakis said.

No Mike, you were already that short.

Oh, he thinks the campaign was dirty. Yeah right, that's the one in which the Dems were scared to death of Dan Quayle, who was young, conservative, and polled well with women. So they smeared him every chance they got, accusing him of being stupid, and then responded one election cycle with a liberal just like him - Al Gore. As for Bush himself, there were claims that he had strafed lifeboats in the South Pacific.

He said he dropped eight points in one week after Bush allegedly had President Reagan refer to Dukakis as an "invalid."

Yep, Reagan made a joke in which he made reference to Mr. Dukakis's mental health. This was during the Cold War after all. I suppose Dukakis would have preferred that the voters remain ignorant of that.

"This is the worst national administration I’ve ever lived under, bar none. I want this guy out of there."

Sure Mike - have you had your meds today? That takes some cojones after witnessing what you did to Mass. The expatriates I talked to in that period were unanimous in their disgust with you and your policies. So it made sense that you would go looking for a job in which you'd get to hell out of town under Secret Service protection.

But Dukakis believes all this crap. Well, as he said in his election bid, a fish rots from the head first.

Fun with the Law of Unintended Consequences

No less an authority than Andrew Sullivan favorite John Derbyshire has some questions on The Corner:

1. If "gay marriage" is legalized, will prisoners be able to marry their cell mates? If not, why not?

2. In many jurisdictions, a marriage can be annulled if it has not been consummated. What, exactly, constitutes "consummation" of a gay marriage?

The latter is important in light of the decision in NH (Opposed by gay groups in the name of "gay parity") that a married woman who had had a lesbian affair had not committed adultery.

Meanwhile another reader sent Derb this:

"Your comment about cell-mates marrying got me thinking. Under the traditional restrictions, a man cannot marry his daughter, or, a fortiori, his son, and so if he leaves them a very large inheritance, it is taxed, although what he leaves his wife is not taxed. But under a general license to 'marry' another man, a man could marry his son, and thus pass his property to the son tax-free.

"This is a loophole that would have to be closed, if estate taxes are going to continue, and the obvious way to close it would be to eliminate the special consideration given to inheritance by a spouse. This would be an unwelcome surprise to some propents of 'gay marriage.'

"On another front, what if two men who are partners in crime take the precaution of marrying, so that they can each be sure that the other one won't turn state's evidence at trial, should they be caught?

"Marriage, with the special privileges that have grown up around it, is a potential source of advantages to the unscrupulous. The remedy is going to be, I suppose, to reduce or eliminate the privileges. Having achieved marriage, the homosexuals may find that it isn't worth having any more..."

Schwing

From Rod Dreher in The Corner:

Anyway, the "Cat in the Hat" commercial showed the Cat, played by Mike Myers, looking at a photograph of a woman, and suddenly acquiring a tumescent tail. Then one of the children says the woman in the photo is "Mom," which causes the excitable kitty to lose his erection. Is this a great culture, or what?

Green onions and hepatitis-A - would irradiation help?

Health authorities believe that the hepatitis-A cases recently traced to Chi-Chi's restaurants are due to Mexican green onions. Reuters reports that they are being held up at the border.

I wonder if food irradiation has been tried with green onions. It can kill off pathogens deep beneath the surface of foods without adding a lot of processing time. It doesn't work well with everything though - as I understand it each individual product to be irradiated must be studied to find the appropriate doses and particulars about feed rates, orientation, packaging, etc. In some cases taste and texture can be affected.

Somebody had better do something quickly though. This is the kind of thing that could impact green onion sales for years.

Michigan madness

What is in the water up that way lately?

Last I knew Dr. Mark Byron was living up there or at least had business there. Anyway, he wrote a scenario in which Democrat Senators in states with Republican Governors were killed by Christian commandos. He did so in the form of a news item, and of course a news item would list the specific Senators by name.

That turned out to be a mistake to say the least. In Dr. Byron's words:

With 58 hours of 20-20 hindsight, the scenario below was too detailed and shouldn't have included names of particular senators....My regulars here generally understood the message I was trying to convey here, that the rhetoric of peaceful civil disobedience can lead to people resorting to violent civil disobedience. However, readers that just read this piece and don't know me as well could wonder whether I'm the next Paul Hill or Tim McVeigh. You would especially wonder that if you read the first half of the piece alone, as many sites did when excerpting it, leaving out the rejection of that straw man.

I agree that nobody who has read Dr. Byron's blog very regularly could have reached the conclusion that he was advocating anything of the kind. But lefties have to have their right-wing bogeymen, and this was the best they could do. Dr. Byron goofed, but IMO the reaction was all out of proportion.

And now we have Dean Esmay objecting to certain Christian fundamentalists and their God.

Fine, that's his prerogative - I can do without some of them too, and if they're right I don't like it one bit.

But then he went too far with gratuitous offensiveness. I won't cite it here, but you can figure it out if you look through the comments to this post far enough. You don't have to be Christian to call that out of line.

Someone suggested, perhaps to give him an out, that he wrote such a thing simply to rattle cages toward the end of increasing traffic. Dean's integrity was affronted - said commenter was asked to leave the blog without letting the door hit them in the ass on the way out. He meant it all right.

The frustrating thing about religious discussion is the faith - you can't prove anything without it. But Dean refuses to acknowledge that for all he knows the fundamentalists are right about God, and he himself might be the one with the flawed morality. (Maybe he'll see it differently in a few weeks - currently he and Rosemary are both quitting smoking, so in the meantime Hell probably doesn't intimidate him).

After all this, it would serve Michigan right if they lost to Ohio State.

Gay marriage

Gay marriage has to be the BS issue of all time. Does anybody really believe that significant numbers of gays want to get married? Or do they really believe that this will somehow strengthen marriage?

It's nonsense. This isn't about gay marriage, or even gay rights. It's about gay parity.

What do I mean? It means that being gay would be considered to have equal moral status with being straight. That's what GLBTs really want, and gay marriage is a huge step in that direction.

It's like the ERA all over again. Did most or even a significant percentage of women really want to do all of the things they would have forced their way into? And did they anticipate all of the side effects of such "simple" legislation? No to both counts, of course not, and insightful women like Phyllis Schlafly fought ERA for that reason.

But gays have been preparing the ground for this battle for some time. By now you can't even oppose them without being called names - you must be "homophobic". IMO claiming homophobia is an admission of ignorance and inability to contribute usefully to further discussion.

For my part, I just like to know that before we change our society that we have a good idea of what the consequences will be. Here are a few questions I have:
1) Will gay parity result in a greater or lesser number of gays?
2) Does the number or proportion of gays in a society impact it in a way that is not compatible with our polity?
3) What happens to children brought up in a world in which being gay or straight are simply "choices" of equal moral standing?

I'm sure I could come up with more if I thought about it some more. My point is that this is an experiment with our society which is unprecedented, and thus we cannot predict all of the outcomes. I'm not claiming to know the answers, and for all I know there could be vast improvements. And kindly note that my questions are not based on any religion or tradition, and I did not disparage gays.

But I happen to believe that in the absence of well-researched scientific answers to the questions I have posed, to proceed any farther with gay parity is foolhardy. Thus I oppose gay marriage on those grounds.

Traditionally the burden of proof would lie on those who are proposing the changes to our society. Lines like "what can it hurt?" are simply an attempt to shift that burden of proof. Can those who push gay marriage show that there will be no intolerable ill effects?

Real culture wars

Glenn Reynolds points to this excellent Austin Bay article which notes the similarities between today and 1983 when leftists were braying about Pershing missiles. The Soviets and their useful idiots were at full cry on that one. And there were some interesting developments on the cultural front that year too.

Remember 99 Luftballons by Nena? It was probably the last song here in the US that was available in two languages but was more popular in its original German. In English:

99 Red Balloons

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'till one by one they were gone
Back at base, sparks in the software
Flash the message "something's out there"
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
And focusing it on the sky
The ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine decisions treat
Ninety nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The President is on the line
As Ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine knights of the air
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a super hero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
Ninety nine red balloons go by

As ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine dreams I have had
In every one a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If i could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you and let it go

In the same year we also had WarGames

In director John Badham's WARGAMES, Matthew Broderick stars as David Lightman, a young hacker who accidentally logs on to the Department of Defense's network. Thinking that he's found a cool new computer game manufacturer, David plays checkers, chess, and other more intriguing games like Global Thermonuclear War. Realizing that their system has been tampered with, military operatives arrest him. However, the computer continues to play the "game" of thermonuclear warfare without David and generates the very real threat of World War III. In an attempt to prevent global disaster, David and his girlfriend, Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), search desperately for the scientist who designed the system before the goverment computer initates a full-scale nuclear war.

Are we picking up a message yet? And why didn't we ever see protests about the Soviet missiles?

One line, two meanings

PBS is running a special on the Kennedys.

One of the scenes showed RFK campaigning at the Fulton Fish Market for his NY Senate run. Someone asked RFK what he thought of the market and he said something like "there's a lot of fish". Everyone laughed. This had come from a Kennedy after all, therefore it must represent wit.

IMO if George W. Bush had said the same, the press would have jeered. "See what I mean? What did the stupid SOB expect, anyway?"

Strangest comedian

No doubt there's plenty of competition and I'm probably way behind the times. But it's hard to go wrong with nominees like Emo Phillips and Steven Wright.

Never heard of EP?

Emo Phillips was pulled over in Massachusetts for reckless driving. When brought before the judge, Emo was asked if he knew what the punishment for drunk driving in that state was. His reply: "I don't know, re-election to the Senate?"

I love to go down to the schoolyard and watch all the little children jump up and down and run around yelling and screaming...They don't know I'm only using blanks.

I discovered my wife in bed with another man, and I was crushed. So I said, "Get off me, you two!"

I went into Gus's artificial organ and taco stand. I said "Give me a bladder por favor." The guy said "Is that to go?" I said, "Well what else would I want it for?"

People come up to me and say, "Emo, do people really come up to you?"

How about Steven Wright?

All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand.

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavoring, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?

Yeah, they're a pair all right. But the Official Comedian for NWA is still...

...oh come on, it's obvious...

...Gallagher!

Hepatitis-A from green onions?

By now most of us probably have heard about the hepatitis-A outbreak that has been traced to a Chi-Chi's restaurant in western PA. Wonderful - I haven't been there recently, but when I'm near them I eat at Chi-Chi's.

Well, one of the guys who died from hepatitis-A ate there on October 6 and was dead of liver failure by November 7. Interesting - I was passing through PA that very day, but a good ways south of that restaurant and after they were closed. I guess they would have got me by now.

So now I'm in DC, eating fairly regularly in the company cafeteria. And since I'm on something of a health kick I'm grazing at salad bars a lot lately. One day a week or so ago they had green onions and I piled them on.

Now I read that the problem at Chi-Chi's is believed to have been caused by green onions. Terrific.

No, I'm not paranoid. But I think I'll pass on the green onions next time.

And I've never felt safer

Mayor of London says Bush is "greatest threat to life on this planet".

Is your garbageman a litterbug?

Apparently so, whether due to poor technology or poor packaging of garbage. Look for more here.

So who's going to get into trouble about this, the haulers or the residents? Hint - the residents can vote.

Human stem cells protect against acute strokes in rats

Here's the story. Excerpt:

The researchers demonstrated that cells obtained from circulating human blood -- known as human peripheral blood (HPB) cells -- survived without immunosuppression, migrated to the site of stroke injury and significantly improved motor and cognitive performance in transplanted animals....The researchers conclude the preliminary findings support the investigation of HPB cells for neurotransplantation therapy in stroke patients.

Now if they can make this go the other way we're in business.

I'd pay to see that

For details, see Brent.

Wisdom for the ages

Here are 22 capsules of pith and vinegar from Rodger Schultz.

Example: The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
--Mark Twain

Local Accountability

Steve Verdon has already taken a rip at this Kevin Drum post, but I have a few things to add.

Drum cited an LA Times article which contained this:

"Today's passage of my job protection amendment is a victory for the thousands of families in Missouri, and across the nation, whose jobs were threatened by California's attempt to force-feed the nation dangerous new regulations without concern for job loss or safety," Bond said.

That's exactly right. If the rest of the country doesn't have the pollution problems CA does, then why should they be forced to adopt the same solution?

The amendment, approved on a voice vote, represents a major setback for the state's strategy for fighting the smog that continues to plague Southern California despite half a century of pollution-control efforts, state officials say.

And that strategy is clear. CA wants to keep their natural advantages with climate and surroundings without suffering the downside. If they can make sure that all of the rest of us suffer the same way then they can cancel out the economic impacts. So instead of looking for local solutions (remember "think globally, act locally"?), they try this self-serving nonsense and then claim that the rest of us are bad guys for not being pushovers.

So what's a local solution? Ban transit unions from going on strike, so they keep more cars off the road. Tax the crap out of gasoline to see if that has any impacts on the margin. Locate the heavily polluting cars and get them off the road - they might be amazed at how much difference this would make. Or just ban the small gas-powered devices that they would otherwise regulate.

What, we can't do that! Then politicians would be offending people who can vote them out of office instead of dumping problems on voteless corporations in other jurisdictions far away. Transit worker unions would throw a fit. And residents would be bearing the true costs of living in the area - faced with those finally, they might decide that a bit more smog isn't so bad after all, or that they'd really rather live somewhere else.

Some people will suffer health impacts. I propose that they relocate, just as they might from Denver's altitude, Buffalo's snow, Arizona's heat, Louisiana's humidity or Montana's emptiness. IMO proposing that we change LA to suit their problems is just as asinine as trying to change the other situations I mentioned. It might even make sense to relocate the vulnerable with public funds if the net cost will be cheaper than alternatives.

LA has been bullying the Southwest for a long time about water issues and the like. Now they're going national, acting like a bunch of spoiled children and trying to make this into a partisan issue. Let's put them back in their place.

On pacifism

I saw a quote in Bigwig's comments and looked it up on the web. I found this page. Enjoy.

Joel Mowbray on NYC's new gay high school

Right here.

Take another look...

...at this post by Glenn Reynolds. It has kept growing in response to lefty braying about fairness - it seems that some of them don't want to be associated with their associates, and they come up with false analogies. Reynolds sets them straight and offers more links.

This all reminds me of my nuclear power career. The antinukers would try to represent themselves as against problems with the technology when in fact they were out to eliminate the technology itself. And today their intellectual heirs on the left pretend to be antiwar when in fact they are anti-US.

What is Zell Miller up to?

Believe it or not, Doug Turnbull has blogged recently and he has a theory.

He could be right. But I'd like to believe that Zell finally just got sick of the Dems and now that he's beyond retribution he can tell them off.

Ted Rall = Tokyo Rose?

If you must, read this. But really, you're better off taking my word for what follows. For that item was written by Ted Rall, who is offensive even by hard-left standards.

Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices.

Let's assume he's right. So does that mean it wasn't ever about the OOOOIIIIILLLL? And does that make Ted Rall a "chickenhawk" for failing to go over there to fight alongside his heroes?

He's not through yet - after all, the item was posted on Veterans' Day:

It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney (news - web sites)'s cynical oil war.

This is more wrong and offensive than mere words can tell. I'll content myself by noting that somehow it has become about the OOOOIIIIILLLL again. I guess Cheney isn't so good with numbers, huh?

If we ever lose First Amendment protections, it will be because of the likes of Ted Rall.

What's in it for George Soros?

Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.

From here:

Soros has become as rich as he has, the aide said, because he has a preternatural instinct for a good deal.

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which promotes changes in campaign finance , has benefited from Soros's grants over the years. Soros has backed altering campaign finance, an aide said, donating close to $18 million over the past seven years.

Conspiracy buffs can have some fun with that.

But really, what does George Soros want with the Democrats? Oh yeah:

In past election cycles, Soros contributed relatively modest sums. In 2000, his aide said, he gave $122,000, mostly to Democratic causes and candidates. But recently, Soros has grown alarmed at the influence of neoconservatives, whom he calls "a bunch of extremists guided by a crude form of social Darwinism."

Neoconservatives, Soros said, are exploiting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a preexisting agenda of preemptive war and world dominion. "Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God," Soros said. "He's leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence."

Good grief.

Psst, all you al-Qaeda types - George Soros is Jewish. I certainly don't wish the man any harm besides perhaps a bop upside the head hard enough to pound some sense in. But in opposing Bush irrespective of his challenger, he certainly gives aid and comfort to a worldwide cabal of creeps that would cut his head off on videotape for no better reason than his Jewishness.

Maybe that's OK with Soros. After all, he's partly to blame for anti-Semitism:

When asked about anti-Semitism in Europe, Soros, who is Jewish, said European anti-Semitism is the result of the policies of Israel and the United States.

"There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that," Soros said. "It´s not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti- Semitism as well. I´m critical of those policies."

"If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish," he said. "I can´t see how one could confront it directly."

That is a point made by Israel´s most vociferous critics, whom some Jewish activists charge with using anti-Zionism as a guise for anti-Semitism.

The billionaire financier said he, too, bears some responsibility for the new anti-Semitism, citing last month´s speech by Malaysia´s outgoing prime minister, Mahathir Mohammad, who said, "Jews rule the world by proxy."

"I´m also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world," said Soros, whose projects and funding have influenced governments and promoted various political causes around the world.

"As an unintended consequence of my actions," he said, "I also contribute to that image."

How is that? If you weren't Jewish the idiots would just claim that you were the proxy for one.

What Soros doesn't contribute to is Jews:

Though he´s ranked as the 28th richest person in the United States by Forbes magazine — with a fortune valued at $7 billion — Soros has given relatively little money to Jewish causes.

Soros´ first known funding of a Jewish group came in 1997, when his Open Society Institute´s Emma Lazarus Fund gave $1.3 million to the Council of Jewish Federations, and when Soros gave another $1.3 million to the Jewish Fund for Justice, an anti-poverty group.

As much as Jews may not like what Soros has to say — at the Nov. 5 meeting, he called for "regime change" in the United States and talked of funding projects in "Palestine" — they are eager to get Soros involved in giving to Jewish causes.

"In many ways, this was an introduction for Soros," Charendoff said. "He remarked to me how impressed he was with the quality of the people he met. We can only hope that this was a beginning of an engagement with the Jewish funding world."

Soros said he has not given much to Jewish or Israel-related causes because Jews take care of their own, so that his financial clout is better directed elsewhere.

Steinhardt tried to correct him on that point, saying the field of Jewish giving is not as crowded as Soros thinks.

"Even if we were a crowded field," Steinhardt told Soros, "I´m sure we could make room for you."

Certainly Soros can do what he wants with his money. But if he can't come up with something better than this I have to wonder about his competence.

WTO abuse

IMO one of the more underrated scandals of the Clinton administration involved the illegal campaign contributions from China and elsewhere. It was clear that 1) the donors gave significant sums, 2) they expected something for their money, 3) there are US policies they would like to control (access to technology, readiness to defend Taiwan, etc.).

So now we have this little disagreement with the WTO about steel tariffs. These tariffs were widely questioned for good reason, and the WTO has ruled that they are unacceptable. In response,

American jeans, Florida orange juice and dozens of other US products could double in price from next month because of a growing transatlantic trade war.

OK, fair is fair. Until I read this:

In drawing up its list of sanctions, the EU has deliberately selected products from states which are crucial to President Bush's electoral hopes.

That is beyond the pale. This is supposed to be about fair trade, not politics. Foreign powers' attempts to influence Presidential or other elections in the US are not acceptable, by this means or any other.

UPDATE: Now the WSJ weighs in against the tariffs - no surprise there. They have other, better reasons to oppose the tariffs, but this was worth noting:

Meanwhile, the strategy of using the tariffs to score political points has backfired. The tariffs have done nothing to win over protectionists, as evidenced by the growing number of blue-collar union endorsements of Democrat Presidential contender (and anti-free-trader) Dick Gephardt. Karl Rove might also note that a disproportionate number of the steel-consuming jobs that have been lost are in key battleground states like Florida and Pennsylvania, which Mr. Bush needs if he is to win re-election.

Gay gods?

As in, are there any? I understand that Zeus had an eye for boys once in a while but he was predominantly straight. What about other mythologies?

Sex and the Single Worm

Yep, I ripped off the title too, from Richard Gayle. It's about a worm with two sexes, but one of them occurs only 0.1% of the time. You'd think that that would make it pretty frustrating for the 99.9%, but they are actually hermaphroditic and can do themselves - it's the 0.1% that have to find a mate.

Actually it's weirder yet, but you'll just have to follow the link and read it for yourself.

Terri Schiavo website

www.terrysfight.org

Richard Sorge

Steven Den Beste is discussing the various alliances of WWII and how they influenced the war here.

He notes that Germany and Japan were trying to exploit each other in various ways, claiming that Hitler declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor because he thought he had a deal that the Japanese would attack the Russians in the East. That would tie up Russian troops in Asia, lightening the load on the Wehrmacht.

The Japanese never came through, but the Russians couldn't be sure of that at first, so they kept forces in Asia in case the Japanese attacked.

Then, through the work of a German Communist spy named Richard Sorge, they discovered that the Japanese had no plans to attack in the East. As a result the Russians would redeploy troops stationed in Asia to fight the Germans.

Sorge operated out of the German embassy in Japan, so he had access to incredibly valuable information, and he proved his value to the Russians again and again. Through him the Russians had warning of many significant events, including the German invasion of Russia.

Sorge was caught by the Japanese and hanged in 1944.

Scum sucking bottom feeders

Or, an encounter with the comment spammers. Thanks to Jeff Jarvis

Are the Saudis on board yet?

Or will they just chalk this bombing up to Ramadan?

LA transit workers' strike

Arthur Silber is having transportation problems in LA because of the transit workers' strike.

A question for liberals - how can you promise people that they can depend on public transportation, then permit the workers to go on strike?

A challenge to libertarians - how do you solve problems like these?

An opportunity for new governor Arnold Schwartzenegger - do you have the power to make the strikers go back to work, and if you do, will you use it?

As for me, There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time. - Calvin Coolidge

Remember PATCO?

Make your own church sign

Right here. I stole it from Michele and have since seen applications at Acidman's and Radley Balko's sites.

It looks like my firewall settings are in my way, so I didn't make one. My suggestion was "Welcome Episcopals! We are into fundamentals, not fundaments".

Ban the Ban

A week ago I was stuck in traffic in NW DC with my windows rolled up when I smelled smoke. I looked around and saw that someone in a car on my passenger side was smoking with his window down. I noticed him that far away with my windows rolled up.

I'm not particularly sensitive - I don't have asthma and I grew up around cigarettes. But over the last decade or so my smoke exposure has been cut so much that I notice stuff like this now. And if I go to a bar and hang out with smokers I'll be able to pick out the clothes I wore there up to the day I get them washed.

And smokers have amazed me sometimes. I used to catch a guy in the main hallway of my apartment building smoking all the time. He hadn't been banished - he just didn't want the smoke in his apartment. All I could do was shake my head.

Even so, I don't like the way the antismoking goons do business. And in DC they're on the march again, trying to ban smoking in more places in DC. (it's a PDF). Hence we have a new blog called Ban the Ban.

One of the things that gripes me about it is that all of the penalties I saw were on the proprietor, not the smoker. The last time I saw logic like that was when the Nigerians were going to stone a woman for adultery after she'd been raped.

Let the sneaks who support this measure take on the smokers directly instead of setting proprietors against their customers. If it's more expensive to enforce that way, too bad - that should give them a clue that they shouldn't pass it.

But it was worth it

This (heh heh) is unprofessional (ha).

Whatever grounds there were for refusing to grant the motion, they did not involve adultery.

Blame Eugene Volokh for both.

Drug free association

You meet such wonderful people in college. Among my more memorable ones was an engineering student/ROTC candidate/drug dealer I'll call Floyd.

Floyd was into pot and the whole drug culture thing. And all it took was this cat story to remind me of the heroes of some of his favorite literature, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers!

Here's Freewheelin' Franklin Freak and the rest with a classic quote.

I'm not sure where Floyd wound up. It's been 20 years at least since I've heard anything about him: he'd been busted and was in prison. I suppose he's been out for a while now. What with his technical background and criminal record, I'm guessing he's running a meth lab somewhere.

The conspiracy theorists were right

Someone spills the beans here about that and forbidden secrets of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

Oh come on, we all already knew that they controlled everything, right?

Unless they didn't want us to...

Howard Dean, meet Earl Butz

"All them Southerners worry about is race, guns, God and gays!"

Yeah, but as anyone with the brains of James Watt can tell you, they're more diverse than that - they've got at least 2 Jews, lots of women and blacks, and any number of people crippled fighting to defend your sorry lefty behind.

Mr. Dean, go home and learn something about this country before you even fantasize about running it.

Happy third birthday, Little Missy

Actually she's a bit older than that - you might even need a zero after that three. But Melissa Schwartz, your guide to culture in DC, has been blogging for 3 years now.

White boys can't drink

Erin O'Connor shows us how diversity is even good for our health. Now it's being plugged as an answer to binge drinking:

...the findings show that greater diversity on campuses may serve as a risk-protective factor, even for those who were binge drinkers in high school. The study found that incoming white freshmen who did not binge drink in high school were less likely to start binge drinking as college students if their universities had higher proportions of African-American, Latino, Asian or older students. Incoming white freshmen who were binge drinking in high school were less likely to continue drinking in this way when attending schools with higher percentages of minority or older students.

But can you teach them how to dance?

Quick hits

Medpundit always has good stuff. I'm ripping her off for two things today, which don't really have much in common except that they might be ripe for political exploitation.

1. Does sitting with grandchildren cause heart disease? Hmm, can you think of any service industry that might plug this one?

2. Hazards of outsourcing medical records

A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients' confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients' records attached.

....She wrote: "Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed, so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet."

You can pass US laws until doomsday and not have a chance of controlling this. It's not as if US citizens can't do it too, but they're easier to track and catch at least.

Who needs doctors when you have lawyers?

Really now. Why go to med school and suffer all the residency and other nonsense when all you need is a law degree? Then you can question doctors all you want or even tell them how to do their jobs.

And now judges want to get into the act:

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a federal ban on certain late-term abortions from applying to four doctors in a ruling issued less than an hour after President Bush signed the ban into law...."While it is also true that Congress found that a health exception is not needed, it is, at the very least, problematic whether I should defer to such a conclusion when the Supreme Court has found otherwise," Kopf said.

So now the Supreme Court is a medical authority also. (No wonder it's hard to get cert.) Last time I looked none of the Supremes were doctors. At least Congress has a few, such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Here's something from testimony before the House of Representatives that I found via Google but couldn't pull up, so I'm pointing to the cached version:

I must begin my statement by defining partial birth abortion as the feet first delivery of a living infant up to the level of its after coming head, before puncturing the base of its skull with a sharp instrument and sucking out the brain contents, thereby killing it and allowing the collapse of its skull and subsequent delivery. This description is based upon the technique of Dr. Haskell of Ohio, who has subsequently identified It as accurate. He has referred to his technique as "D & X" (Dilatation and Extraction), while Dr. McMahon of California refers to it as an "intact D & E." An ACOG ad hoc committee came up with the hybrid term "intact D & X". As you can see, many terms are used and are not clear in their description.

Partial birth abortion is mostly performed in the fifth and sixth months of pregnancy. However, these procedures have been performed up to the ninth month of pregnancy. The majority of patients undergoing this procedure do not have significant medical problems. In Dr. McMahon's series, less then ten percent were performed for maternal indications, and these included some ill-defined reasons such as depression, hyperemesis, drug exposed spouse, and youth. Many of the patients undergoing partial birth abortion are not even carrying babies with abnormalities. In Dr. McMahon's series, only about half of the babies were considered "flawed", and these included some easily correctable conditions like cleft lip and ventricular septal defect. Dr. Haskell claimed that eighty percent of his procedures were purely elective, and a group of New Jersey physicians claimed that only a minuscule amount of their procedures were done for genetic abnormalities or other defects. Most were performed on women of lower age, education, or socioeconomic status who either delayed or discovered late their unwanted pregnancies. It is also clear that this procedure occurs thousands of times a year, rather than a few hundred times a year, as claimed by pro-abortion advocates. This has been independently confirmed by the investigative work of The Washington Post, The New Jersey Bergen Record and the American Medical Association News.

One of the often ignored aspects of this procedure is that it requires three days to accomplish. Before performing the actual delivery, there is a two day period of cervical dilation that involves forcing up to twenty five dilators into the cervix at one time. This can cause great cramping and nausea for the women, who are then sent to their home or to a hotel room overnight while their cervix dilates. After returning to the clinic, their bag of water is broken, the baby is forced into a feet first position by grasping the legs and pulling it down through the cervix and into the vagina. This form of internal rotation, or version. is a technique largely abandoned in modern obstetrics because of the unacceptable risk associated with it. These techniques place the women at greater risk for both immediate (bleeding) and delayed (infection) complications. In fact, there may also be longer repercussions of cervical manipulation leading to an inherent weakness of the cervix and the inability to carry pregnancies to term. We have already seen women who have had trouble maintaining pregnancies after undergoing a partial birth abortion.

There is no record of these procedures in any medical text, journals, or on-line medical service. There is no known quality assurance, credentialling, or other standard assessment usually associated with newly-described surgical techniques. Neither the CDC nor the Alan Gultmacher Institute have any data on partial birth abortion, and certainly no basis upon which to state the claim that it is a safer or even a preferred procedure.

The bigger question then remains: Why ever do a partial birth abortion? There are and always have been safer techniques for partial birth abortion since it was first described by Dr. McMahon in 1989 and Dr. Haskell in 1992. The usual and customary (and previously studied) method of delivery at this gestation is the medical induction of labor using either intravaginal or intramuscular medications to cause contractions and expulsion of the baby. This takes about twelve hours on average, and may also include possible cervical preparation with the use of one to three cervical dilators (as opposed to the three-day partial birth abortion procedure, with up to 25 dilators in the cervix at one time). This also results in an intact baby for pathologic evaluation, without involving the other risk of internally turning the baby or forcing a large number of dilators into the cervix. The only possible "advantage" of partial birth abortion, if you can call it that, is that it guarantees a dead baby at time of delivery.

The less common situation of partial birth abortion involves, an abnormal baby. These conditions do not threaten a woman over and above a normal pregnancy, and do not require the killing of the baby to preserve her health or future fertility. I have taken care of many such women with the some diagnoses as the women who provided testimony on this issue in the past. Each of these women stated that they needed to have a partial birth abortion performed in order to protect their health or future fertility. In these cases of trisomy (extra chromosomal material), hydrocephaly (water on the brain), polyhydramnios (too much amniotic fluid) and arthrogryposis (stiffened baby), there are alternatives to partial birth abortion that do not threaten a woman's ability to bear children in the future. I have personally cared for many cases of all of these disorders, and have never required any technique like partial birth abortion in order to accomplish delivery. Additionally, I have never had a colleague that I have known to have used the technique of partial birth abortion in order to accomplish delivery in this same group of patients. Moreover, there are high profile providers of third trimester abortions who likewise do not use the technique of partial birth abortion.

In the even rarer case of a severe maternal medical condition requiring early delivery, partial birth abortion is not preferred, and medical induction suffices without threatening future fertility. Again, the killing of the fetus is not required, only separation from the mother.

There is much more. The short answer is that it's never necessary or even desirable, despite the claims of the opponents of the ban. This goes beyond a mere difference of opinion.

And this medical authority can tell you what happens to people who lie.

This judge needs a recall, for legal malpractice. And he should be sentenced to use only lawyers for his health care needs for the rest of his days.

Rush to return November 17

John Hogan, chief executive officer of Clear Channel Radio, said there hasn't been much of a financial fallout since Limbaugh has been away. No stations have left the fold and no advertisers have dropped either, Hogan said.

"During his absence, we have maintained 100 percent of our affiliate base, and we have maintained our advertiser base," Hogan said. "This is an unfortunate turn of events for Rush, but our advertisers and our affiliate base have remained firmly behind him and we look forward to his return in the near future."

Stolen from The Corner.

Ichthypundit

Mac Thomason's politics are a little fishy, and now I know why. Look here and learn more about our piscine pals than you might have wanted to.

Perhaps this doesn't call for so much thought, but I'm guessing that this is why fish go belly-up when they die - their gut is below their center of gravity, so if they don't cut loose once in a while they won't be able to keep themselves righted. Likewise the gas might be fore or aft of center, causing the fish to pitch upward or downward if in distress.

I have no word on whether fish can burp or vomit, or what would happen if you fed them an Alka-Seltzer or put them in a tank full of carbonated water. But if the govt wants to cut me a check for a couple hundred thousand bucks I'll be happy to research it all.

Did "Atrios" win?

Much was blogged about Donald Luskin's attorney's letter to "Atrios". Now let's see what everyone writes about the "joint statement" here. Yes, "Atrios" posted it too - Glenn Reynolds linked to it.

The posts I saw presented Donald Luskin as the bad guy, for dragging lawyers in. And at the Atrios site commenters presented the joint statement as a unilateral capitulation by Luskin, gracefully handled by "Atrios".

Sorry, but that one doesn't pass the giggle test. It doesn't even pass the ROTFLMAO test.

I don't have any inside information - I don't know either of the two. But IMO "Atrios" was faced with being outed and thus associated with what he posts, and he didn't like it, so he ran like a scalded dog.

Why no missing links?

From the time of its creation by Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution has been about more than mere science. Nonbelievers have always seized upon it as a weapon against the religious and their creation explanations. And because they needed it for nonscientific reasons, they didn't much care if science could defend their claims.

Whether you're religious or not, if you believe in the scientific method, you insist that your theories should be supported by evidence. That no one else has come up with a theory that you think is "better" does not serve to prove your own. Yet the abusers of evolution science insist on stretching a thin layer of knowledge to cover a vast area of ignorance to this day.

This article gives a good example:

Matt Ridley, the science writer, kindly explained the lack of fossils before the Cambrian explosion: ‘Easy. There were no hard body parts before then. Why? Probably because there were few mobile predators, and so few jaws and few eyes. There are in fact lots of Precambrian fossils, but they are mostly microbial fossils, which are microscopic and boring.’

Tough luck pal. No evidence, no theory, no excuses. You may be 100% correct, but the theory must forever contain holes if you are. And this should be acknowledged openly by anyone practicing honest science.

The writer of the piece bemoans that "71 percent of adult Americans think that the evidence against Darwin should be taught in schools". Well, if we insist on teaching Darwinism in schools, why not? What's so special about Darwinism that it cannot be permitted to be challenged in schools? Why do high-school science classes have to address origins at all? - would the lack of it somehow reduce graduates' ability to be responsible citizens?

I'm guessing Richard Dawkins would say it does:

‘Imagine,’ he wrote, ‘that there is a well-organised and well-financed group of nutters, implacably convinced that the Roman Empire never existed. Hadrian’s Wall, Verulamium, Pompeii — Rome itself — are all planted fakes. The Latin language, for all its rich literature and its Romance language grandchildren, is a Victorian fabrication. The Rome deniers are, no doubt, harmless wingnuts, more harmless than the Holocaust deniers whom they resemble. Smile and be tolerant, just as we smile at the Flat Earth Society. But your tolerance might wear thin if you happen to be a lifelong scholar and teacher of Roman history, language or literature. You suddenly find yourself obliged to interrupt your magnum opus on the Odes of Horace in order to devote time and effort to rebutting a well-financed propaganda campaign claiming that the entire classical world that you love never existed.’

That's one whopper of a straw man - you can question Darwinism without claiming anything analogous what Dawkins suggests above. Either he's not too bright or he thinks we aren't.

And at least we can visit those ruins and read those texts. We can't see Dawkins' missing links. We insist on physical evidence for any other theory, why should we accept it for Darwinism?

You don't have to be religious to insist that science not be corrupted by ideology.

Maggot therapy

If you read the book Susanna cited on Halloween you've probably heard enough about maggots for a while. But if you haven't, read this and see how much good they can do for the living.

Slowing evaporation in reservoirs

Experiments have shown that adding a very thin layer of certain compounds to reservoirs slows evaporation significantly, thus conserving water for consumption and power. It would be terrific if it also suppressed mosquitoes too - the article made no claims, but covering the water with a thin layer of certain compounds can suffocate mosquitoes in their larval ("wiggler") stage.

Downside? Evaporation cools the reservoirs so they'll run a bit hotter. No doubt other phenomena remain to be discovered. But it will be interesting to see where this goes.

Where you stand depends on where you sleep

More genius from our ex-President:

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said Tuesday AIDS should be considered a security issue, with the disease affecting more people in the world than terrorism.
"We should continue to fight terror, but we have to realize that the AIDS issue is also a security issue," Clinton told reporters after talks with Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik in Oslo. "It's a humanitarian issue, but it's a security issue," he said, warning AIDS fueled poverty and desperation.

AIDS is a security issue? The people who get it nowadays (if they're kids or heterosexuals, anyway) typically get it because they can't get clean hypodermic needles - the health professionals are forced to reuse them over there, so people with AIDS, Ebola, hepatatis and other blood-borne illnesses can share their blood with others without any other contact.

But no, we can't send needles. Liberal doctrine is that AIDS is spread by non-anal sex just as easily as by other means, lest we single out gays. So they insist that we send short-shelf-life condoms, which have high failure rates when used as intended, to be used by unsophisticated people - this offers limited effectiveness in fighting an uncommon means of spreading AIDS while diverting attention from the easiest way for kids and straights to get it. I guess libs figure it's better to kill some of those colored furriners than their deeply held beliefs.

So tell me Slick - of AIDS and terrorism, which can all but fetuses defend themselves against solely by their own efforts? Well, maybe he has a scintilla of a smithereen of a clue:

Asked whether AIDS was a bigger threat to the world than terrorism, Clinton said: "Right now (AIDS) affects more people, but I wouldn't say that. What I think is that we can't think about one to the exclusion of the other."

Was anyone doing that?

The Shellie Awards!

John Leo presents this year's Sheldon Awards to the most spineless college administrators here.

"Don't attack during Ramadan!"

Remember that? Heavens, we had to respect the Iraqi's holidays, or else....well, something!

There might have been something to it:

His face half-scabbed by a recent burn - the result of a mishap with some TNT - Adnan al-Doleme suggested: "Stay with us, and we'll show you another attack. Ramadan has been Allah's gift to us. The streets are empty then, so we can attack the Americans without the possibility of killing our people."

If true, that could cut both ways though. Then nobody ought to complain about a curfew during Ramadan, and thus anybody about is a "fly".

Online dating

Two views - Gene Expression looks at it sociobiologically, and TJ's Weblog looks at it as a business.

A modest proposal

What would you say to an immediate military takeover of the US govt by our military? There might be some complications, but then maybe we can get a flat tax of 15% like the Iraqis.

Bremer's new economic policy for Iraq will slash Saddam Hussein's top tax rate for individuals and businesses from 45 to 15 percent. Of course, since Hussein's government, like others in the Middle East, almost never enforced tax collection, there is no real history of paying taxes in the country.

So they'll need their own IRS. At least now we know what to do with all the former Ba'ath party officials...

Nothing to get political about

Drudge links to this report about a girl from the West Coast who died after an abortion induced by the hastily-approved abortion pill RU-486.

The 18-year-old was given the abortion pill a week earlier by a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Hayward, where she sought it without the knowledge of her father.

Nope, can't let daddy know. Make sure that the only counsel she gets is from an organization that profits from abortion and, like any other organization, will strive to cover its ass. No, it's worse - they have an entire worldview to protect which to them is worth infinitely more than the safety of any drug or the life of any girl.

When she fell ill Sept. 14, her boyfriend rushed her to Valley Care Medical Center, where she reportedly was told that her pain and bleeding were normal, and she was sent home with painkillers.

She returned to the hospital three days later, on Sept. 17, and died.

Does this prove that RU-486 is dangerous to more than just who it's intended to kill? No, of course not. And any pregnancy that does not result in a birth will affect the health of the mother.

But if the drug is not safe, and does not meet ordinary FDA standards for safety, then someone ought to be accountable.

Wouldn't it be ironic if one of these days women figure out that to the pro-abortionists, their lives are expendable for The Greater Cause. And thus learned not to listen to them.

The Man Who Ate Central Park

Right here. Search for the string "Wildman Steve Brill" unless you want to wade through some ecobabble.

Between football games today I stumbled upon a PBS program about NYC that included an eating tour of Central Park, starring some middle-aged man and the young woman who was hosting the show. He reached down and grabbed a plant that looked like a dandelion to me - he called it "poor man's pepper". They shared a bite of it and said it tasted spicy, like arugula.

Then it was off to the cattails. The man picked one, stripped off some of the fibrous outside until he got to a white core which he shared with the woman. This part allegedly tasted like cucumbers.

I think I'll pass.

Does Paul Krugman want the economy to go bad?

Yes. Godless explains.

Misspent youth

It looks like I've been to some of the same dives as Velociman. If he's new to you, well, I'd file him somewhere between Lileks, Acidman and the Possum. Not that that does him justice - take a look around.

Aside to KC - it was*6* weeks ago.

Send a jihadi to Iraq today

Drudge points to this in the NY Times about jihadis leaving Europe to fight in the Middle East.

Of course I don't want to endanger our troops, Iraqis or for that matter the sane Muslims. But Iraq is where we're best prepared to deal with them, and the sooner these creeps get stuck on the "flypaper" the better.

Howard Dean had a clue

Dean said "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," the former Vermont governor was quoted as saying in Saturday's Des Moines Register. "We can't beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats."

Finally someone used the Confederate flag as a symbol of what it represents better than anything else - poor Southern whites.

Who provided most of the manpower for the South? Poor southern whites. Whose bodies covered the battlefields? Poor southern whites. It's little wonder that they found the Confederate flag a symbol of pride and solidarity.

Now let some years pass. What group was the most threatened *economically* by civil rights? Poor southern whites. A group that was already struggling to get by suddenly had a whole new class of people to compete with them for jobs, often at lower rates.

What followed was only to be expected. Just as labor interests in South Africa pushed for and got apartheid, poor southern whites voted for the Democrats and their Jim Crow policies. Just as we see today with union violence (hmm - more Democrat supporters), we saw intimidation of new labor sources. It's not just, but history shows it's 100% human.

It sounds like poor southern whites are a natural Dem constituency. But race hustlers can't permit that. So poor southern whites are the only group left that you can insult with impunity, despite their very well known poverty and other social problems. They can't even keep their symbol, the Confederate flag.

(and before some jackass says that hoods and burning crosses were their symbols too, I recommend a look at US history, which will show that the KKK was nationwide and politically potent in large numbers as late as the 1920's. The Yankees, lacking blacks in most places, mostly chose to pick on Catholics, Jews and recent immigrants instead.)

His opponents immediately chose the low road, with even nominally sane Lieberman getting his licks in. Kerry informed us that he'd rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA, showing that's he's definitely the candidate of the non-sequitur (how does he think blacks defended themselves against the KKK, or Schindler's Jews defended themselves against the Nazis?).

Even though he said something defensible and did bug some of the right people, Dean couldn't keep it up for long:

In response to the criticism, Dean released a statement saying: "I want people with Confederate flags on their trucks to put down those flags and vote Democratic - because the need for quality health care, jobs and a good education knows no racial boundaries.

I guess a guy whose supporters supposedly are lily-white has to run from this undeservedly demonized symbol. But I hope his supporters remember that when he had a chance to show some stones and stand for something, he ran.

Plot twists

I heard this little story on the radio commuting into DC on Friday. I have no reason to doubt it, and I was amused, so here it comes.

Some kids got in trouble on a school bus for abuse of one of the other riders with a foreign object. Boo!

The foreign object? A chicken leg. Oh, what a wimp!

They HIT him with it, right? No? Then what did - you don't mean - Ewww!

Yep you're right, they did. Well, those little perverts!

Not so fast. The victim was mooning them at the time.

IMO justice was served. (I don't know if the chicken leg was or not).

And now you know The Rest Of The Story. Good day!

"When is this bitch going to die?"

I don't have a link handy and I'm too lazy to hunt for one right now, but I've read about some tragic errors in anesthesiology. It seems that often drugs must be used in tandem, with one to paralyze the patient and another to knock them out.

And some times the knock out drug wears off first. Then the patient is treated the exquisite hell of being cut, sutured or otherwise painfully manipulated without any way to communicate it or avoid it. But they can hear, and they've been known to recite operation-time conversations back to physicians.

Unfortunately this isn't the only way a patient can be rendered helpless but aware. Consider this story of a patient who wasn't dying as expected, and whose attempts to get attention were treated as if they were seizures to be countered with sedatives. In a situation right out of Edgar Allan Poe, she got to listen to the doctors discussing pulling her life support:

I then started spelling the same word in the air, "Don't! Don't! Don't!...."

The doctors decided that the letters I was spelling in the air were repetitive seizure activity and just happened to occur most often when they were in my room discussing killing me...I even took to writing them backwards to make it easy for them to read...

And their response was to sedate me even more....

But, the nursing staff began to believe I was really and truly with them.

One, in particular, starting bringing in a clip board and a broken pen when she talked to me. She would put ink on my fingers, the clip board under my right hand and then ask me yes and no questions in the beginning.

With her I secretly progressed to answering in sentence fragments. However, by doctor's orders she was not allowed to document in my file what she was doing and that I was giving meaningful responses.

But...she did save my inky answer sheets and recorded the questions she asked. She got into a lot of trouble for that.

Look, I understand that this isn't easy. You can cite cases of hundreds of thousands or more being spent on patient with essentially zero quality of life or life expectancy, or even cases where huge sums are spent keeping convicts alive until their execution dates. It doesn't make sense to burden the living with someone who is dead in all but the most technical sense of the term.

And I have relatives who nursed a daughter for 20+ years as she very slowly died from metachromatic leukodystrophy, devolving from a thriving two-year-old to a thin, twisted, helpless, hopeless adult with no sight, hearing, touch or motor control. A 90+ year old relative could die any day now, which might assuage his fear of outliving his money. And at least one slightly younger relative wants the plug pulled if things get to that point. So I know about this stuff firsthand.

And I've concluded that we owe the living the benefit of the doubt, and the burden of proof ought to be on those who would declare them dead.

Yes, this was prompted by the Terry Schiavo situation - the title of the post was spoken by her husband. For much more, see Patterico's Pontifications here and in several other places down the page - this was the source of the blockquote link.

NationMaster

Tyler Cowen points to a tremendous resource, NationMaster. You'll find graphs, stats, maps, flags and all sorts of other information from around the globe.

For instance, consider the map of Kiribati to the left. You may not need it for the next 100 years, but it's an example of what's available.

As for Mr. Cowen, find him at the Marginal Revolution or the Volokh Conspiracy.

Couldn't make it

Although I did think about it and it would have been a pretty drive down along the Appalachians, I wasn't quite crazy enough to drive 600 miles to Dahlonega, GA to see the Acidman.

But I checked out his site, which is in the capable hands of guestbloggers. Velociman gives us a taste of old-time Southern justice (you thought it was just the blacks that got abused?). And Shell knows just what to say to the next jackass who says "let's register guns - we register cars, don't we?"

Meanwhile down at the world's largest outdoor cocktail party the Gators are winning. What's up with that?

Federal ban on Internet taxes ends today

Bloomberg's enemies list?

From Bob Novak here.

But this is scary

Endangered species? That's Darwin for you. But then I read about this.

A Vermont Boy's Halloween

here.

The last responsible Democrat?

Miller's decision was prompted in part by his disgust with the Democratic presidential field. "It makes me ashamed. It's a disgrace for anyone to talk about - talk like that in a time of war," he told Fox News' Sean Hannity. "Using this war for political advantage can only give hope to our enemies. And when you do that, that's going to cost lives."

From Jonah Goldberg's column.

What will it take to wake the Dems up? Some Muslims blowing up a car in front of their headquarters?

No. IMO they'll just blame the Republicans.

Global warming is for real...

...on Pluto.

Eric Raymond is back

...right here. That's because he's finished with his book.

Despotic govt

Before I got to DC I'd heard various things about local govt. What annoyed me most was the automated speedtraps and cameras at intersections. It's not as if they don't have a right to enforce the law, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Then I got a couple of parking tickets. Whoops, I guess that sign said 2 hour parking until 8 PM, not AM. Jerks - that's nothing but a shakedown. It doesn't hurt the residents a bit. I wonder if the owners of the parking garages a couple of blocks away watch the area and call the parking Gestapo down on innocents like me?

Today Roger Simon posts about North Korea, and a commenter mentions the Chosun Journal. There you can read about literally millions of people who live for the day when the worst that happens to them is a parking ticket.

Did I tell you the meter maid was from North Korea? No?

Actually I haven't met that person, but it sounded like a good way to wind up this post.

For Halloween

Celebrate at Blogcritics. I'd keep an eye on the Possum too.

I realize I spend too much time at this or other PCs, but I still remember what "celebrate" means. That was a figure of speech, OK?...

No bull

From VodkaPundit.

Luskin v. "Atrios"

Glenn Reynolds hears that Donald Luskin is threatening to sue Atrios. If true, he pronounces it "just embarrassing".

Not being a law professor I'm sure there are things I don't appreciate here. Being a blogger I'd like to see the lawyers kept far away. So what's unique about this situation?

IMO it's that Atrios is free to hide behind his pseudonym to traffic in stories alleging that Donald Luskin is a stalker. (Spare me the "alternate meanings of stalker" rap - would it have been juicy enough to post if Atrios had meant anything but the worst sense of the word?)

The problem here as I see it is Atrios' pseudonym. He can spew insults forever without ruining his personal reputation. If he wears out his welcome he can come up with a new handle and get back into the game - too bad Joe McCarthy didn't think of that. (Wouldn't it be funny if he decided to use Armed Liberal's real name instead? After all, we already have a lefty blogging as "Roger Ailes".)

Luskin, OTOH, will show up in Google queries alongside "stalker" for a long time. If you want to question the way Luskin has handled this, be my guest - this post is about what should be done about people hiding behind pseudonyms while defaming others' reputations.

So what's a fitting punishment for Atrios? Out him. If he wants the freedom to behave as he does, let his personal reputation be accountable. If he's been publishing things he's ashamed to be associated with, too bad.

Either that, or let him do what Luskin requested. Or let Blogger take down his site.

In conclusion, if someone wants to blog under a pseudonym, fine - there are defensible reasons. But if you want to attack others' reputations, then you should be prepared to be outed, to prevent abuse of the pseudonym privilege. This isn't about free speech, it's about behaving like a decent human being.

Iraq strategy

John Cole points to an interesting NYTimes article on tribalism in Iraq and how the US might take advantage of it.

So they like WMD, eh?

Glenn Reynolds links to Strategy Page info that tells us that Al-Qaeda is setting up bases in the Sahara.

Interesting. I'm no expert on the Sahara, but I know it's vast and there's little to harm there. Just the place to drop a bunch of nuclear weapons...

Or maybe a biological weapon. How about the Sin Nombre virus?

Yeah, yeah, this is getting out of hand. But I'm having a hard time having any compassion for people who put bombs in ambulances so they can get closer to an International Red Cross facility. And there sure can't be much collateral damage.

The War for Muslim Outreach

or: What the Lt. General William Boykin furor is *really* about. By Diana West.

QED

From Meryl Yourish:

So some people have been saying that I see anti-Semitism or an anti-Israel bias in every shadow. I exaggerate, they say. Calm down, they tell me. It's nowhere near as bad as you think.

Of course Meryl and I know that's not true - sometimes it's sexism instead. But hey, she caught the bastards *this* time...

These schmucks not only can't get the date right, but they completely change the tenor of the incident by stating that the it took place months before the Six-Day War. The Six-Day War began on June 5, 1967, and ended on June 10. Does UPI even use copy editors? Do they have fact-checkers? Did the idiot that passed this piece not notice that the lead says it occurred on June 8?

If you read blogs very long you're used to seeing documented examples of media incompetence such as what she's spotted here. She's a bit shrill so far, but she's not done yet...

Did David Duke ghostwrite this piece for UPI, or what?

I rest my case.

It's not as if anti-Semitism doesn't exist. But there are far better examples than that, if it's an example at all. Let's not make a real, significant problem look as if it lies in the eyes of some, uh, "hypersensitive people".

Is that site good or evil?

Find out by using this. It determined that NWA was 71% good, so it couldn't be more than 29% off.

Stolen from Jonah Goldberg and The Corner.

(rimshot)

The item below reminds me of a story I once read that I don't have time to find a link for right now. Anyway, some paparazzo got a picture of Ted Kennedy atop some bimbo du jour on a boat somewhere. Former Alabama Senator Howell Heflin then supposedly asked Kennedy if that meant he had changed his position on offshore drilling.

Pot-ential selling point

New research has shown that millions of years ago rich crops of marijuana grew wild in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. For millenia they grew and evolved, causing their THC deposits to grow ever more concentrated in the muck below. Over the years the waste slowly turned to oil. And nowadays it turns out that burning the oil from ANWR releases the THC in the smoke, and potheads are blissing out snorting car exhaust.

Yes, that's why indigenous people don't want us drilling up there. They don't want us running off with their stash. Why else do you suppose those Eskimos hung around up there all those years?

To my knowledge none of the above is true. But it might make a good news release before the next serious attempt to drill in the ANWR. Plant the story with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, let them jawbone about it, and then all the Democrats will have to support drilling in ANWR just to oppose them.

Pot luck

You do check out Forbes online regularly, right? Today there's a big article on the marijuana business, in which we learn that pot is Canada's most valuable agricultural product.

They must be caught up in the spirit of Halloween. Aren't you dying to know the 10 top-earning dead celebrities? Or the best cemeteries?

They even have a short review of a book I've been meaning to blog about called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. It's a lot better than it probably sounds.

Household hazards

I've looked at most of these worst-case scenario survival books and to my knowledge none of them deal with certain humble household hazards. So as a public service I'll submit the following. Perhaps I should forward them to the authors of the aforementioned books for future inclusion.

I have yet to meet a woman who 1) I've heard complain about people leaving the toilet seat up AND 2) who had any chance of getting her own behind stuck or wet as a result. But I do know from experience that one can become stuck in the throne. And if this happens, you are fairly helpless because usually you have no leverage and there's nothing to grab. And although you'd probably prefer to deal with the situation yourself, if you want help you're probably not even able to unlock the door to let them in.

If said tragedy should ever occur and I'm not there to rescue you personally, kindly note that there could be a vacuum between you and the commode that will make it much harder to escape (that's why the seat is elevated on those little legs from the rim - it prevents a seal). Break the vacuum by any means necessary - with any luck you'll even make a cool sound. Without perfect timing, flushing the commode will only make things worse because it creates a vacuum as it does its business.

If you should ever find yourself fighting a fire in a commode as I have, said fire is probably because of petroleum distillates floating on top of the water. Pouring water onto the flames will not help. It might cause the throne to flush spontaneously, which under some circumstances might expose the flames to combustible sewer gases. Trust me, you don't want this.

Do not attempt to blow out the flames either. This can result in an intensification of the fire. And there will be severe thermal stresses between the water-cooled part below and the heated part above that can crack the glazing or worse.

The right thing to do is to take a big towel, soak it down with water (although a dry one might work), and smother the commode with it. A few moments later the fire will be out.

The picture to the left may amuse you or even bring back memories. But this really is a household hazard - if you think escaping a toilet is awkward when you're caught butt-first, imagine being a toddler going in headfirst. Small children actually die like this every year, and not just in commodes - a bucket will work.

Yes, I need an editor.

Healing Iraq

...is a newish blog about post-Saddam Iraq. Check it out here.

One black, white, and read all over

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for pointing us to this portrait of the NY Times Editorial Board. She also noted that all but one are white.

And guess which one isn't. Yep, the one for Education, Race and Culture. That's a good place for a token, just as in my experience HR departments are where the minorities are shuttled to help the numbers.

The Foreign Affairs guy is white. Hmm, aren't most of the people of the world "of color". Maybe this would be a good job for Condi Rice 5 years from now.

Ah, a white guy for Environmental and National Affairs. Race is a big issue, isn't it? And I hear there's such a thing as environmental racism. It seems like a nonwhite ought to be here too.

Law, Civil Rights and National Affairs? We'll give them half a point for a woman, but how can some honky understand Civil Rights? Doesn't Al Sharpton have something to say about this?

Alright, enough. Can we ask that the NY Times refrain from lecturing us on race issues and affirmative action until they have a few more minorities on their board?

Blowing smoke about civil liberties

I'm all for civil liberties, but then I read crap like this: "Sounds like Big Brother - '1984.' It's horrible," said Bernard Karmine, an attorney. "It's not necessary to give up your civil liberties to cut down on smog."

The threat in question is a technology for detecting pollution from cars between inspections. If a car that drives past is out of spec, the license is photographed and sent to the perp.

So assuming that we're serious about air pollution, what's wrong with this? Would it be OK if there were cops using it and writing the tickets instead? Or is there something wrong with identifying the individuals who are polluting out of proportion to their fuel consumption?

The fact is that some cars pollute far more than others, and identifying and correcting those will result in more improvements per dollar spent on abatement. And if there's any justice at all, it will catch a bunch of people who like to fuss about pollution from power plants and other corporate sources. (Whether it does or not, there will be plenty of hollering. Because a lot of those cars caught will be old cars. And who owns the old cars? Seniors and the less affluent. Uh oh, disparate impact - it has to be discrimination!)

I predict that this will go nowhere, because it won't catch the right people.

What the world needs now...

Dawn Olsen spotted this item about a bunch of 13 year old British schoolboys taking Viagra at school. The school has a no-drugs policy so the kids will be disciplined.

The Sun newspaper quoted a source at the school as saying: "By the time the afternoon lessons began, there was no hiding what they had done."

Paramedics took the six squirming boys to the nearby Royal Berkshire Hospital, where they were monitored until the effects wore off.

Maybe I'm sadistic, but I would have handcuffed them and had them sit through a geometry lesson. For the rest of their days whenever they got horny they'd think of pentagons or something.

That's settled

"But the overarching fact--that Saddam and al Qaeda had a relationship--can no longer be seriously disputed. "

Disrespect for the military

It seems that James Lileks and Donald Sensing differ on a passage from a Bleat. I have much respect for Rev. Sensing, but IMO he is oversensitive here. This is not about uniformed service, it's about the DoD, and those are two different things.

I've worked for the govt before. I know about the careerists, and the people who while away their hours until retirement running their home businesses using govt assets, or other similar forms of waste. Just show up on time and don't get caught saying "niggardly" and you'll be able to retire at a good salary, and maybe sign up for another govt job for double-dipping on the pension.

And if Rev. Sensing wants me to believe that the DoD is the only govt department of them all that has no such people, he deserves as much credibility as the lefties who talk about DoD waste as if it were the only part of the govt that ever wasted any money. I'll reserve the right to criticize any organization that spends my tax dollars, thank you. And if the military doesn't like the idea of civilian control, which necessarily involves a lot of people who haven't "walked the walk", then it's time for an attitude adjustment.

For real disrespect for the military, I suggest this:

I have an idea. Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad - one of the accused D.C. snipers - both served in the military. I think we need to put all U.S. ex-servicemen on a special watch list, because they obviously could be terrorists. I think we should flag them for "special screening" when they fly and think twice before allowing them to take scuba-diving lessons.

What do you think of my idea? I hope you're appalled, incensed and angry that I question the honesty and integrity of our military personnel based on the actions of just two people. That's exactly the right reaction. It's no different whether I suspect people based on military service, race, ethnicity, reading choices, scuba-diving ability or whether they're flying one way or round trip. It's profiling. It doesn't catch the few bad guys, and it causes undue hardship on the many good guys who are erroneously and repeatedly singled out. Security is always a trade-off, and in this case of "data mining" the trade-off is a lousy one.

Yes, I'm appalled and angry, you ignorant cretin, because out of all of the groups you could have made a case for you picked the ones who make it possible for the likes of you to make statements like that. May you find yourself somewhere where you are profiled for having a bad attitude and get exactly what you deserve.

While you stuff yourself on Thanksgiving Day

...think about these "people of size".

American Idol meets Russian convicts

...and wins some of them their freedom.

I don't know what they sang, but I'm betting that the lyrics didn't come from here.

Both links stolen from Boing Boing.

"Pro-Choice" is a lie

Pro-life and pro-choice. Who could possibly choose between such alternatives? After all, who wouldn't choose to live? But then this is the country where we revere lines like "Give me liberty or give me death!", so it's not quite so simple.

Pro-life may be exaggerated, but at least it's fundamentally accurate. It doesn't apply across the board - many also favor the death penalty. This inspires some to say that it's hypocritical, but that simply shows that some people are incapable of moral distinctions between convicted criminals and unborn children.

But pro-choice? Right. There are three choices - raising the baby, letting it go for adoption, or aborting it. A group that could be called pro-choice in any honest sense would support any of those choices in equal weight, right?

Not so. They fight like hell against a license plate that says "Choose Life" - rather than coming up with their own alternative, they seek to ban that choice. They aren't known for doing anything to help place children for adoption. Their organizations like Planned Parenthood don't make any money if they counsel mothers to let their children live, so there's an incredible financial conflict of interest favoring abortion. (As for founder Margaret Sanger's past, let's see what her legacy has to say about it).

And pro-lifers hear cracks like "if they don't want abortions, then pay to raise the kid". Wait a minute - shouldn't the nominal pro-choicers offer that choice too? Obviously babies need support and care - why wouldn't the pro-choicers want to support that choice too, unless the real goal is to have more abortions?

So a reasonable person can only conclude that they are not pro-choice at all. They are simply pro-abortion, but aren't honest enough to admit it.

OTOH pro-choice might apply more accurately to the pro-life side. They just think that the mother made her choice when she decided to have sex, not when she started barfing in the morning a while later. And since rape by definition means that the woman did not decide to have sex, it makes perfect sense to treat the fetuses differently in this case. Likewise for incest or other cases where a woman might not have capacity for such decisions.

Enough - at least I waited until abortion was in the news this time.