Not that I care

Glenn Reynolds is having some fun with the Alabama dildo sales ban again today. Of course no such blog item would be complete without references to junior-high taunts at judges and legislators who support such bills, suggesting that their position resulted from their personal inadequacies.

Oh, so it's acceptable to argue that way now? OK, no more unemployment insurance - whatsamatter, you're not man enough to earn a living? No more health insurance, Medicare or Medicaid, ya wimps, or if we do keep them we certainly won't be covering Viagra. Yeah yeah, it was tongue in cheek, but still...

And there's a flip side to the argument. Maybe the men of AL have enough ideas and energy already and it's their partners who are lobbying for relief. Maybe they simply doesn't need these things, while those from other states need all the help they can get.

Personally I couldn't care less about it. I'd insist on a fairly compelling reason for banning the sale of a product, and I can't think of one for banning dildos and vibrators. Maybe I'd see things differently if I raised cucumbers, or manufactured candles or arthritis products.

How did this ban come about? I don't know, but AL politics can be bizarre. I lived there for a while in a dry county, which also happened to have one of the highest alcoholism rates in the state. The largest town in the county had long sought to become wet, but the county always outvoted it to keep it dry thanks to an unholy alliance of bootleggers and Baptists.

Then by some miracle, a bill passed to permit towns above a certain size to become wet independently of their counties, and IIRC this bill somehow passed without any votes from legislators in the dry counties. How the dry county delegation managed to pull that one off without leaving any fingerprints has to be a terrific story, but I've never heard the details. Anyway, my town was eligible and the locals were excited at the prospect.

Well, others were less thrilled - you should have heard the outcry. For instance, the town had one of those picturesque town squares where they still held markets every First Monday of the month (your lost baggage may be there too). But the drys circulated an illustration of the square after legalizing liquor sales, complete with strip joints and gay bars, and...well, you can't fully appreciate just how absurd that was unless you'd lived in the area at the time. Anyway, the town went wet, and although I left no more than a year later I don't recall any particular ill effects.

But I'm not living in AL nowadays, so (assuming that they don't vote for gay marriage...) their laws are none of my business. As for Glenn Reynolds, who lives in neighboring TN, I'd think he'd be for the ban. Now Tennesseeans can build a bunch of sex toy stores on the TN/AL border alongside all the fireworks places (and liquor stores, in case there are still some dry counties nearby). Border towns like South Pittsburg will make out like bandits, and the state will suck down tax dollars from Alabamians.

And let's not forget the service industries - haven't we all heard that old song "Tennessee Stud"? Isn't Tennessee the Volunteer State? (Even Alabamians will vouch for them - they told me nothing sucks like a Big Orange. To which the Tennesseeans would respond by telling you what AL women put behind their ears to attract men - their ankles.)

So if I were GR I'd encourage such bans in AL and in all the other bordering states too.

I'll close by noting that IMO this excessive interest in the sexual options of Alabamians is at least as weird as the sex toy ban. Sheesh, don't these people have anything better to worry about?

Psst - Susanna's birthday is coming

Yep, another couple of days (8/2) and she'll be, uh, well, I don't exactly know. I'm too much of a gentleman to say anyway even if I knew. But it's for sure that if she were a horse they'd have shot her by now.

Keep going down the lower right side of her page and you'll see the Amazon wish list and tip jars. Give till it hurts so she can continue to spread enlightenment in rural Alabama, post gratuitous niece photos and finish up that Ph. D.

Incidentally, I have no financial ties to our Ms. Susanna and she lives several hundred miles away. But if she wants to pass on some of the spoils that's OK with me.

Osama Bin Laden was my brother-in-law

Read Carmen Bn Ladn's story here.

Should be seen and not heard

Did you know that abortions never happened before Roe v. Wade? Why all, they were illegal!

Ashley even confided that she disagrees with her mother, country star Naomi Judd, about the issue and tells Marie Claire readers, "My mother always talks about how she chose not to have an abortion when she was pregnant with Wynonna. But I'm like: Mom, it was illegal at the time."

Sure, honey. Women never had abortions before then - those guys on the Supreme Court invented it just as sure as some Italian guy discovered the clitoris in the 1600's. Actually women went for visits with relatives, or to attend to a sick aunt, or something else, and when they came back that little problem had gone away.

Ashley sweetie, you are one fine specimen. Don't ruin it with stupid lines like this. If you want to talk about women's rights, learn some of the history first.

And support the man who's freed women by the millions in Afghanistan and Iraq - certainly more than the likes of Gloria Steinem and Betty Fredan have ever done. In case you don't know, I'm talking about George Bush.

By popular demand

The Daily Dirt Chess Blog.

Wimps

Being a Cub fan by the grace of God, I have some natural sympathy for the Red Sox. And I'm with those who say that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors.

But I'm not at all impressed with the Red Sox after the skirmish with the Yankees last night. First we have Jason Varitek in full catcher's gear taking on an unprotected A-Rod after he's just been hit by a pitch. Varitek didn't even take his mask off. Was that enough protection, Varitek? Or should we have given you a gun just to make it fair?

Then we have three Red Sox taking one Yankee off to the side without doing enough damage to him to get him out of the game. I would have expected three Boston sports writers to do better than that. In my old neighborhood we'd have made those three wear skirts, except the girls were tougher than that.

Well, maybe that last part was exaggerated a little. But the Red Sox sure don't have anything to be proud of.

Curtain call

In case you haven't seen JibJab, here's another link.

Thanks to Punch the Bag from the great state of Indiana for reminding me.

Yawn

George W. Bush is Jewish. A Syrian wouldn't lie about something like this, would he?

Gay Marriage: What's It For?

So Michael Williams asks here. IMO he's basically on target - it's about "we're just as good as you" and wanting to suck up some bennies.

Oh, but they're in Love! Fine - you don't have to be a cynic to ask what that has to do with marriage. Are we now to be permitted to marry anything we love?

If we're going to do it and extend it to same-sex couples, what justification do we have to stop there? If the definition of marriage is just some arbitrary social construct, then why can't it group people more than two at a time? If it needn't be restricted by sex, then why should it respect age, genetic distance or even be limited to pairs? And what about the narcissists - why even require two)? Can gays provide any intellectual or moral justification for limiting marriage only to pairs?

Oh yeah, there's this crap about it being a "civil right". I've never heard any legal justification for that assertion. If the intentions of the legislators or justices is to be given any weight, does anyone really believe that any anti-discrimination legal decisions, laws or amendments were made with the intent of permitting gay marriage?

Enough - this has been addressed here many times. Somehow the fact that I have weighed in on this topic doesn't settle it - imagine that....

Public service announcement

Attention you single men: Fred Reed doesn't think you should get married.

But if you won't be dissuaded, at least listen to Ben Franklin.

Above all, don't believe everything you read.

Security Clinton style

I'm guessing that I would have seen this photo long ago if the models were Republicans.

Stolen from Clayton Cramer.

Challenge your visual acuity

Right here.

From Lileks, of all places.

Your number has come up...

Because in Nigeria rumors are spreading that taking calls from certain numbers can kill you.

It must be true - it came from Fark.

Essential information

Yes, fish get constipated too, and no one knows it betta than our Big Arm Woman.

Land rights under attack

From Beaker's Corner we have this account of asinine land use rules.

What's for the common good should be at the common expense. Is that too hard to understand?

Creepy

If you think abortion is bad, check out "reduction".

Tell me another one

If you read the news long enough you'll see everything.  One that I saw on the news in FL once told of a man who got too affectionate with the filter suction inlet on a swimming pool at a motel.  Others have tried to explain intimate encounters with vacuum cleaners that way ("I was nude, and I tripped over the vacuum, turning it on, and....) , and the list of items found in colons is long ("I accidentally sat on that light bulb.  Honest!").

But to date no one has tried to tell us that he "inadvertantly" stuck classified documents in his pants.  See Glenn Reynolds from about here on up for all the links you can stand on this farce.  Sheesh, how stupid do they think we are?

NWA Worldwide Exclusive!

That's right - where else could you read where I've been the last few days?

Yep, I went to Chicago for a long weekend and got to see some people I've wanted to see for a long time. This was the first time I had flown since 9/11 so I was wondering what to expect. Of course I had seen the Syrian musician story just before I left...

It wasn't too ridiculous. I had already frisked myself and put stuff that would flunk a metal detector into ziplock bags, and if I hadn't bumped my shoulders on the sides of the metal detector I would have made it through without incident. I did forget to take this laptop out of my carry-on bag at O'Hare, which got a bit of a rise out of the security people, but it wasn't a catastrophe.

There was one small snafu with the luggage. It seems that the airline has two flights from O'Hare to BWI on Monday nights, and although I was on the later flight the bag was placed on the earlier one. That's a good idea as long as the planes land in the order they're scheduled, but somehow the earlier flight had a crew scheduling problem and wound up leaving after mine did. I got my stuff, but it probably added an hour to my time at the airport.

If you go to Chicago, be aware that several of the big attractions such as the Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum are only open until about 5, even in the summer. My friend and I did manage to spend an hour in the Field Museum, then it was off to nearby Chinatown for dinner and shopping.

Then it was off to suburban Brookfield for "Brookfest", featuring a carnival and local oldies legends the Cryan' Shames and the Ides of March. Both had national hits in the 60's and early 70's - you must have heard the horn riff from "Vehicle".

Most of the rest of the time was with relatives. Yep, same people, same bull sessions, same stories, same arguments. And I can't wait for the next time.

One of my relatives brought her boyfriend. They were new graduates from a small expensive liberal arts school - she had studied English and history, and he was a philosophy major. They were raving about that abomination "Fahrenheit 9/11", but somehow hadn't heard of "Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man". The best part was when she said that the two of them were "realists", which almost made me gag. The philosophy major's denial of the existence of objective reality was a hoot. He gave the stock lefty spiel that Communism had never been properly implemented, and I inquired what was "scientific" about "scientific socialism" - how could we know what would happen if it were implemented if in fact it never had been? No answer, of course.

Alas, it's back to the salt mines.  But at least the world knows what was happening while I was gone so everyone can finally get a good night's rest. 

Good news from Iraq

Arthur Chrenkoff has been compiling good news from Iraq for some time now, and he's done a very good job. His latest compilation has even been featured on the OpinionJournal's site.

Worm sleeps to avoid detection, may attack "rival" worms

Right here.

Check it out

I'd never been to Bifurcated Rivets before, and I wonder why. I could rip it off for days - what could be wrong with a blog that points us to the Slide Rule Universe?

Wanna argue forever? Of course you do - you're reading blogs. So I propose a couple more links I found there - the 50 greatest rock intros and top 100 albums of the 70's.

But there's lots more.

Elements of blogging

Right here.

Alas, there's at least one glaring omission.

"Look Ma, No Hands!"

Derek Lowe presents How Not To Do It, a compendium of ways to shorten your career or life via chemistry. I've never met the gentleman, but I wonder if he still has all of his fingers.

His tongue is probably OK though. He discourages tasting chemicals in the lab, but there is at least one prominent dissenter as noted here.

After all, the tongue and olfactory apparatus are sensitive chemical sensors - it's a shame not to be able to use them. And in days before better technologies became available, they were. For instance, one of the tests for diabetes was sugar in the urine....yeah, that's one way they tested.

Leftism as mental illness

From a comment over at Gene Expression:

The Left is nothing but the reservoir of all unresolved dissatisfaction of any sort, of all unresolved feelings of inferiority

There's more here.

No, we needn't treat "deviationism" with drugs. But IMO there are plenty of leftists who need some serious medication nowadays.

The CPA from the inside

Once-respectable economist Paul Krugman smeared the CPA, and Simone Ledeen replies here.

Watermelon Jewels

Right here.

This is serious

The Black Hills Pioneer, Newspapers, South Dakota, SD:

Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said Thursday that he was very concerned about homeland security issues in the face of what he called the most sobering terror report he had heard recently....Asked if the timing of the terror concerns might be aimed at stealing political thunder from the announcement of John Edwards as the democratic vice presidential candidate, Daschle replied, 'The report is so sobering and so serious that I cannot bring myself to believe anyone in this administration would use this for political purposes.'

Now that's scary. Lately there haven't been many things so heinous that the Dems wouldn't accuse the Republicans of it. Then again, we haven't heard from Michael Moore yet.

But the real question is, is this interesting enough to merit the attention of John Kerry? Or is he too busy talking to bother learning what he's talking about?

Whatever happened to Phil Katz?

I broke down and paid for Textpad today. It's a shareware text editor for Windows and it's pretty handy. It's not as fully featured as, say, MultiEdit, but then it's a lot cheaper too.

The whole shareware thing made me think of Phil Katz. If you've been working on the Windows platform for very long, you're familiar with his work - he created PKArc and the later PKZip. The latter was the de facto standard for compression for much of the pre-Windows PC era and is still around. I used it constantly for years, but I don't recall ever paying him a license fee.

I suppose it's not too late - the company he founded, PKware, is still around. Their compression product is one of the few that works well across multiple platforms.

But Mr. Katz has been gone since April 2000 when he was all of 37 years old. Here's the story.

Chocolate myths and facts

From St. Louis's Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company.

They also offer molded chocolate products such as screws or a horse's behind. Ain't capitalism grand?

John Edwards: Dan Quayle without the experience

Okay, so John Edwards with a hangover is about ten times smoother than Dan Quayle on his best day. But it's worth noting that before he started putting his foot in his mouth, the knock on Quayle was that he wasn't experienced enough to step into the presidency if needed. Well, Quayle represented Indiana in the Senate from 1981 to January 1989, and he previously had served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

That's six more years in the federal government than Edwards.

Also

Hugh Hewitt summarizes John Edwards' legislative career: "He spent four years in the Senate positioning himself to run for president and two years running."

Tidbits like this and much more can be found on NRO's KerrySpot

It'll be Evan Bayh

DRUDGE REPORT 2004?: "Kerry's aides reported placards had been printed with three versions of the Democratic ticket: Kerry-Edwards, Kerry-Gephardt and Kerry-Vilsack, though they acknowledged that Kerry could still surprise even them with a different selection...
Kerry will appear at a big morning rally in Market Square in downtown Pittsburgh and announce choice at 9 a.m. Tuesday, before flying to Indianapolis.
The running mate's political director would be Linda Moore, who was President Bill Clinton's deputy political director and then Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh's deputy chief of staff... "

UPDATE: Yeah, yeah, he picked Edwards (somebody did, anyway). But I bet he changed his mind at the last minute...

Talking center, but aiming left

I'm nobody's marksman, but shouldn't he be looking in the same direction he's pointing the gun?

So what? - it's all an act anyway. Good grief, he's even saying life begins at conception! That might actually impress someone who hadn't seen Kerry assume all positions on all issues. As for me, well, I'd like to see him work that into a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Does she or doesn't she?

This is what I get for skulking around the Knockturn Alleys of the web this past weekend. And now you get it too!

Once upon a time people would hang their clothes out in the sun to take advantage of natural bleaching action.

Today we have people bleaching where the sun don't shine.

Personally if I found this worthy of esthetic intervention I'd probably start with dogs. Mix the stuff with some "Sphincterine" and then they'd have better breath too.

Beaver scouts

"Young Norwegians can earn a merit badge in sex this summer. The pin, modeled on a popular summer swimming merit badge, is an offer from Swedish-Norwegian sex education group RFSU, also the main producer and importer of condoms to Norway, newspaper VG reports.
The badge, which displays sperm cells swimming in waves, can be won by correctly answering 10 out of 13 questions about sex."

A realistic path to failure

John Kerry was doing so well there for a while, keeping his lip zipped and watching President Bush get flak about Iraq. But as if we needed further proof that Kerry's not really smart, he opened his mouth again.

His latest can be found in the WaPo here.

We know that a chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, was right when he argued that more troops would be needed to establish security and win the peace in the weeks and months after Saddam Hussein's fall.

Of course Shinseki's right and the rest of the Army is wrong, irrespective of what is actually happening in Iraq. I'm glad to see that the military has some dissenters because that shows that they have more ideas to consider. But then decisions have to be made and people have to get with the program, and if Shinseki won't get with the program he doesn't belong in the service. (Gosh, why couldn't he just get along with the rest of the generals, like Kerry would have the US kowtow to the UN?)

If Shinseki is right, then how did we manage to turn over Iraq to the Iraqis? We're not out of town yet, but surely if Shinseki were correct we'd be incurring more casualties than we are.

But if we are to reduce the overwhelming military and financial burden America is bearing and maximize the chances of success, we will need help from others.

Overwhelming? What tasks remain that will require any more troops there than what we already have? And if in the meantime our economy is coming back from the blows of Clinton's presidency, the 9/11 massacre and the war in Afghanistan, how can one meaningfully call the burden "overwhelming"?

We have to move our allies beyond the resentment they feel about the Bush administration's failed diplomacy so they can focus on their interest in fighting terrorism and promoting peace.

Our allies were beside us in the Iraq war. The snippy noncombatants who tried to keep us out to protect their investments in a dictator must learn that we will not tolerate free riders. France in particular has a huge Muslim population and will benefit disproportionately if radical Islam is eradicated.

We would do well to establish the principle that dictators are poor credit risks. Then enablers will think twice about selling them arms, chemical warfare equipment, reactors and other instruments for aggression internally and abroad.

The best way to do that is to vest friends and allies in Iraq's future.

From whose point of view? Certainly not that of the US. And the President of the US is expected to look out for US interests - if John Kerry can't suppress his internationalism and guard US sovereignty he's unfit for the job of President.

On the economic front, that means giving them fair access to the multibillion-dollar reconstruction contracts. It also means letting them be a part of putting Iraq's profitable oil industry back together. In return, they must forgive Hussein's multibillion-dollar debts to their countries and pay their fair share of the reconstruction bill.

No way. It's up to the Iraqis who rebuilds their country of course - they can snub us if they want but they ought to seize the opportunity to steer contracts to American firms as some sort of feeble payback for something they never could have achieved alone.

But the forgiveness of debt is non-negotiable. Most of it was for trade that was illegal, and we don't reward or indemnify criminal behavior. The backstabbers in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere got far more in intangible benefits from the cleaning of the snake pit in Iraq - that they didn't participate in the cleanup is a disgrace, and that they would dare suggest recovery of their losses is chutzpah beyond parallel. Have them negotiate with Dick Cheney - he'll know what to tell them.

Of course things could deteriorate in Iraq, especially if we aren't ready to kick the crap out of Iranian meddlers. No one, surely not John Kerry, knows how things will turn out, if they will turn out well, how long it will take to end our involvement, or if in the final analysis the entire affair will have turned out in the best interests of the US. IMO Bush did the right thing, as well as anyone else would have and a damned sight better than Al Gore would have. And for that and other reasons I'll swallow my dislike of some of his other policies to return him to the White House.

As for John Kerry, I hope he learns to put US interests first. If his self-esteem demands he run the US to meet the approval of Europeans or other outsiders, he's unfit to serve as President.

Musical livers

Susanna digresses into a story about a three-way liver transplant here:

Speaking of organ donations, I watched one of those "amazing medical stories!" types of shows last night. In one segment, a young man learned in his late 20s that he had a liver condition that caused a buildup of proteins in his body and it had reached a life-threatening stage. He had to have a liver transplant or die. However, he was thousands down the list to get one. As it turns out (and I didn't know this until last night), you can actually lose half your liver and it will regenerate, at least to a degree. So they sought a voluntary living donor, and they found one. That's a whole story in itself. Then a third person came into the equation - a woman in her late 30s whose liver was nearly useless because of cancer. It hadn't metastisized, but it wouldn't be long, so she needed a liver transplant right away too. Same situation - way down on the list. However, the liver disease the young man had was a slow one, a condition that takes years to cause a life-threatening condition. His liver was essential okay except for that one malfunction, it was just that the accummulated result of that malfunction had caught up with him. The doctors said it had taken "decades" to get to that point. So, they thought, why not give his liver to this woman, because it would give her at least 15-20 years before causing serious problems, and maybe by then there'd be treatments or greater possibility of another donation?

So they did. In one day, they took half the healthy liver of the donor, transplanted it into the sick young man, then took his liver and put it in the woman with cancer. At the end of the segment, they said that within a month of the surgery, the donor's remaining liver had regenerated to 75% of its previous capacity, the other half had regenerated to the same degree in the formerly sick young man, and the woman with cancer was now cancer free and living a life with a future.

I'd like to see follow-ups on this one.

I'd also like to see what health insurors have to say about this. Would they cover it?

If they wouldn't, then of course the usual suspects would howl about this being some sort of injustice. Possibly. But they'd be more convincing if they put up their own money first to make sure what needed doing got done before they called in the lawyers and lobbyists.

Getting the last word

Here's how to respond the next time some liberal or lefty wants to start a flame war....

Lefty taxonomy

By Arthur Koestler via OxBlog.

Watermelons busted

John Ray enjoyed posting this

Wow! It looks like there has now been a major backdown by the authors of the original "Greenhouse" article. The crooked scientists behind the Greenhouse scare (Mann, Bradley and Hughes) have at last been forced to own up to fudging their data. The very foundation of the "greenhouse" scare has been kicked away....a clear admission that the disclosure of data and methods behind MBH98 was materially inaccurate. The text acknowledges extensive errors in the description of the data set. Even more important is the new online Supplementary Information (SI) site, which concedes for the first time that key steps in the computations behind MBH98 were left out of (and indeed conflict with) the description of methods in the original paper.

But the scientists behind the original study are still fighting, of course

The Corrigendum and the SI contain the gratuitous claim that the errors, omissions and misrepresentations in MBH98 do not affect their results. If this were true, then a simple constructive proof could have been provided, showing before and after calculations. This is conspicuously missing from the Corrigendum and the new SI. We have done the calculations and can assert categorically that the claim is false.

But even if these guys rolled over and admitted that at best they'd goofed, don't expect greens to shut up. They'll try honesty, but if that doesn't work they'll try something else.

The Virginia State Ballroom Championships July 15-18 in Reston, VA near Dulles

Right here:

We are hosting the Virginia State Championships at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia. This resort-like hotel offers superior accommodations with the comfort and satisfaction of guests in mind. Located in Reston Town Center, the Hyatt provides easy access to shops, restaurants, golf course, biking and jogging trails, as well as its own fitness club, and a magnificent 12,300 square foot Grand Ballroom. Whether you are an avid Dance Sport competitor or ballroom dancing enthusiast, you will not be disappointed, and will leave the event wanting to attend for many years to come.

The schedule is here.

Better yet, get off your butt and dance yourself! It's low impact for sure, and you needn't be in shape to start - I recently saw some women I would have thought barely capable of walking turn in respectable waltzes. You can relive your misspent youth with hustle. Or you cut loose with jive, swing, cha-cha or salsa and get a respectable aerobic workout without even realizing it.

Here around DC check out DC DanceNet, or shoot me an email for suggestions on starting.

Browser Helper Objects et al - yeah, I'm talking to YOU!

Pardon me this fit of geekery to suggest something that might earn a place on your PC if you use MS Internet Explorer. It's only a couple of paragraphs and it's for your own good...

First, there's CLSIDs. It's something of a globally unique identifier for certain types of Windows program objects, created by a special program from Microsoft: To a very high degree of certainty, this function returns a unique value – no other invocation, on the same or any other system (networked or not), should return the same value. Program components that run in Windows as COM or DCOM objects (which applies to about everything having to do with MS Internet Explorer) have to have them. The relevant information is stashed in your registry. Among other things, Windows can "blacklist" or otherwise alter its treatment of objects based on their CLSIDs.

There exists this critter called a Browser Helper Object (BHO). For übergeeks you can look at this for more info. For the rest of us, you need to know that a BHO adds functionality to your browser. For instance, the Google Tool Bar, which I'd hate to live without, is such a critter.

But like any other neato feature of IE, some dirtbags are using them malignantly -from the above:

...there is no restriction on what a BHO can do your system; it can do anything any other program can do: read or write (or delete) anything on your system. Usually, software is installed on your system explicitly by you; when you do so, you are, in effect, saying that you trust the vendor. BHOs, however, have a history of being installed without the users knowledge (fine print notwithstanding)

Given that (a) BHOs can do absolutely anything to your system, and (b) they are often installed without your knowledge, there is a distinct potential for abuse by vendors. The problem is, until now you had no way of knowing which BHOs are on your machine, who put them there, and what they do.

. So you do care about them, and it would be nice to know more about when you have them and what they're doing for - or to - your PC.

Voila - we have BHODemon

Think of BHODemon as a guardian for your Internet browser: it protects you from unknown Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), by letting you enable/disable them individually. BHODemon is free, runs in the tray area, and works on Windows 95 or later operating systems.

. So download it already!

If you're like some I know, you're already infested with adware or worse. One answer for this is Ad-aware, from Lavasoft. Available in free or a paying version, it knows spyware and makes it easy to get rid of. Just be aware that some software you have might quit working if you disable adware willy-nilly (ya tightwad!).

Ad-aware is like treating a disease, and then there are vaccinations. SpywareBlaster takes that approach - it can prevent running known spyware from running on your PC before you even encounter it. You'll find it here.

All of the above require updates periodically, because new programs with new CLSIDs are forever coming out. It's not much trouble and doesn't take long, even on a scuzzy dialup line like I'm using right now.

Of course it goes without saying that anyone intelligent and discriminating enough to read this blog already is running a firewall like ZoneAlarm and some sort of virus/malware/Trojan checker like Norton AntiVirus. Especially if you have broadband. Right? Don't make all of us come over there and kick your butt....

Petition and demonstration against Iranian mullahs

Roger L. Simon points to this petition:

A Plea For Support & Demonstration Attendance from all Freedom-Loving Activists around the world in our united fight against Terrorists, Islamofascists, and Fanaticism!

This is an invitation to join us in a worldwide demonstration against the Mafia Mullahs, Terrorists, Islamofascists, and Fanatics who intend to stop and kill the spread of FREEDOM, SECULARISM & DEMOCRACY around the World! Our unified presence in a worldwide demonstration will be the biggest blow to the Mafia Mullahs.

Ordinarily I'm not a big fan of lots of UPPER CASE EXCLAMATIONS!, but the cause is right.

I might even make it to the Washington demonstration (Thursday Jul 8 on the western side of the Capitol building starting at 11 am) to see what happens.

If you're from out of town and dreading driving or parking in DC, there's always the Metro. You can park in the sticks and still make it downtown with a few blocks' walking. Several lines have stops near the Capitol. Snoop around the site for details.

For you train lovers Union Station isn't far away. And if you want to fly in, the Reagan airport is right on the Metro (BWI and Dulles are out in the sticks).

But whether you think the US or the UN ought to be involved or not, surely there aren't many who would wish the current mullahcracy on anyone, Iranian or no. Let's give the mad mullahs something to think about besides how many infidels they or a proxy can kill with their nuclear weapons program.

Moore lies

I have a family reunion coming up soon. It's the first one that didn't involve a death in some time, and I'm really looking forward to it. It won't be huge - mostly descendants of my late paternal grandmother and their families. I'll be startled if there's as many as 50 of us there. But I'll probably get to see some people I haven't seen in 30 years plus.

Now suppose I'd recruited a bunch of goons and they'd just succeeded in flying airplanes into buildings killing thousands of innocent people. The FBI springs into action, rounding up those relatives and inlaws, and puts the screws to them. How much information would they get?

Hmm. There's no point in asking for my family tree, because it can be constructed from public records. Since I'm on the road almost constantly, only about half a dozen of them would be able to say anything about my associations at all, I have plenty of associations which no one in the family knows about for totally innocent reasons (the staff where I live, people I know socially, etc.), and if it suited me to hide associations actively it wouldn't be difficult.

Do they know if I go to church, or where? You're back to the core. Do they know how I make a living? - maybe a couple dozen know I'm an engineer, but don't know where I am now or that I'm doing IT work nowadays. About a dozen of them might know something about my politics, and it typically takes only about 5 minutes of exposure for that to come out.

They want to see how my mind works? Out of that 50, you're back down to the core again. But although they could probably tell you I have multiple web sites, they probably couldn't help you find them any better than Google can. If they know I have a blog, I'll bet they don't know the name or have never read it. (It's not a secret, it's just not something most of them are interested in and I don't promote it.) So interrogate them all you want - they either don't know anything or can't give you anything you don't already know.

Michael Moore's crockumentary has revived the old nonsense about Osama Bin Laden's family. It seems that a lot of them were flown out of the country after September 13, with the blessing of the US govt. I suppose that sounds sinister if you can't think of any good reasons why Arabs, particularly Osama Bin Laden's family, might have wanted to leave the US about right then.

The implication was that they were given special favors, and that some crucial information is now beyond investigators' reach. Well, the planes were flying again by 9/13, and the blessing for OBL's people to leave came from none other than Richard Clarke, who became a hero to the left for spreading so many innuendoes about the Bush Administration's handling of 9/11. Aw, shucks, it's not so interesting anymore.

But every last one of the relatives should have been getting the third degree, right? Why? The FBI did grill about 30 of them, which is substantially more than would have been useful in my case as noted above. And that's of the relatives that lived abroad. OBL was from a very large family - he might well have had brothers and sisters who couldn't tell you jack about him beyond his being a black sheep, and it's not as if he had never been investigated prior to 9/11.

I'm not a professional investigator and I'm in no position to evaluate the adequacy of the FBI's investigation.

But neither is Michael Moore, who nevertheless doesn't let his profound ignorance deter his spreading of anti-Bush nonsense.

Just lucky, I guess?

Thomas Sowell asks:

When you have seen scenes of poverty and squalor in many Third World countries, either in person or in pictures, have you ever wondered why we in America have been spared such a fate?

When you have learned of the bitter oppressions that so many people have suffered under, in despotic countries around the world, have you ever wondered why Americans have been spared?

Have scenes of government-sponsored carnage and lethal mob violence in countries like Rwanda or in the Balkans ever made you wonder why such horrifying scenes are not found on the streets of America?

We hear so much utterly hysterical bitching from the left nowadays that it makes me wonder just what they'd say if we had *real* problems.

But I got over it

You know, I almost felt sorry for John Kerry when I read this.

You too, and the horse you rode in on

After years of being a jackass in Congress, Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont finally got an answer with all the charm and intellectual content he deserves. Dick Cheney isn't the only one who felt better afterward, and I only wish I could have been there to do it myself.

Harold Meyerson, normally confined to the intellectually barren pages of The American Prospect, thinks this wasbad:

But we have it from Cheney himself that after he encountered Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy on the Senate floor and told him what to do, he "felt better afterwards."

If that justification came from the mouth of a Democrat, of course, it would be a sign of moral laxity and lack of seriousness.

No, it would just mean that they had boiled their approach to politics to its essentials. The Dems are the party of coercion, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton's recent gaffe - "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good". And if you don't like it...

Don't make us prove it

From the Federalist Patriot - to subscribe click here.

From a Marine officer on the Iraqi warfront with Jihadistan...

(This is an open letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, "Islamic Response," and the rest of the so-called al-Qa'ida "insurgents" in Iraq and elsewhere. We don't have an e-mail address for these swine -- though we are closing in on their snail-mail address, but we are forwarding this letter to Federalist Patriots around the world in the hope you good people will forward it to as many other Patriots as possible to rally prayer and support for our fellow Marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. Should these al-Qa'ida pigs spill his blood, we want them to rest assured that the contents of this letter will eventually be nailed to their foreheads. Thank you for your assistance.)

To al-Qa'ida terrorists in Iraq:

I see that you have captured a U.S. Marine, and that you plan to cut off his head if your demands are not met. Big mistake. Before you carry out your threat I suggest you read up on Marine Corps history. The Japanese tried the same thing on Makin Island and in a few other places during World War Two, and came to regret it. Go ahead and read about what then happened to the mighty Imperial Army on Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They paid full price for what they did, and you will too.

You look at America and you see a soft target, and to a large extent you are right. Our country is filled with a lot of spoiled children who drive BMWs, sip decaf lattes and watch ridiculous reality TV shows. They are for the most part decent, hard working citizens, but they are soft. When you cut off Nick Berg's head those people gasped, and you got the media coverage you sought, and then those people went back to their lives. This time it is different. We also have a warrior culture in this country, and they are called Marines. It is a brotherhood forged in the fire of many wars, and the bond between us is stronger than blood. While it is true that this country has produced nitwits like John Kerry, Michael Moore, Howard Dean and Jane Fonda who can be easily manipulated by your gruesome tactics, we have also produced men like Jason Dunham, Brian Chontosh and Joseph Perez. If you don't recognize those names you should. They are all Marines who distinguished themselves fighting to liberate Iraq, and there will be many more just like them coming for you.

Before the current politically correct climate enveloped our culture one of the recruiting slogans of our band of brothers was "The Marine Corps Builds Men." You will soon find out just how true that is. You, on the other hand, are nothing but a bunch of women. If you were men you would show your faces, and take us on in a fair fight. Instead, you are cowards who hide behind masks and decapitate helpless victims. If you truly represented the interest of the Iraqi people you would not be ambushing those who come to your country to repair your power plants, or sabotage the oil pipelines which fuel the Iraqi economy. Your agenda is hate, plain and simple.

When you raise that sword over your head I want you to remember one thing. Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun is not alone as he kneels before you. Every Marine who has ever worn the uniform is there with him, and when you strike him you are striking all of us. If you think the Marines were tough on you when they were cleaning out Fallujah a few weeks ago you haven't seen anything yet. If you want to know what it feels like to have the Wrath of God called down upon you then go ahead and do it. We are not Turkish truck drivers, or Pakistani laborers, or independent contractors hoping to find work in your country. We are the United States Marines, and we will be coming for you.

A Microsoft blog

Not all Mac guys are bad. Really. And if you're the type who likes to start MS Word in a debugger, Buggin' My Life Away is the blog for you. It's a bit technical, full of all sorts of under-the-hood details about Word, Macs, and Microsoft then and now.

Word is almost inescapable these days. How many of us even remember the competitors? WordStar? WordPerfect? Ami Pro? I know as a matter of faith that there are plenty of bugs in Word, yet somehow I never seem to run into them.

For all the crap we hear about Microsoft products, consider this. As blogger Schaut tells us, in Word we have:

• More than 850 command functions (e.g. Bold and Italic are the same command function)



• More than 1600 distinct commands (e.g. Bold and Italic are distinct commands)



• At any given time roughly 50% of these commands are enabled (conservative estimate)


With just 3 steps, the possible combinations of code execution paths exceeds 500 million

Whether software ought to be that complex is another question, but there's no denying that making it work for millions of customers for hours a day the world over is a formidable accomplishment.

Anyway, I'll be back there once in a while. It's definitely worth a look.

Refresher for Al Gore

Sorry Al, but people who offer corrections to partisan lies in the press aren't "digital brown shirts". If you don't believe me, ask Lileks or Powerline.

If you want to throw around the "brown shirt" idea, then use it somewhere where it applies. Like with this: Movie Goer Assaulted at Fahrenheit 9/11 Showing. Or when protesters express their opinions and are assaulted by Teamsters. The goons are on your side, Al.

But then I guess we can't expect a man who flunked divinity school during the Vietnam War to know jack about history.

Feminist c**t

Snatched from here

Bill Clinton in a nutshell

From Best of the Web Today:: "I last saw Clinton near my own house in the celebrated Notting Hill district of London in 2002. He decided to do a walkabout, and plunged into the crowd, an activity he enormously and palpably enjoyed, and which delighted everybody. No one ever matched him as a simple campaigner. It was the thing he did best--perhaps the only thing he did well. It might be said, indeed, that he never did anything else. In Notting Hill he was not running for office. The locals were not his voters. But he behaved as if they were and they loved it. The old con master was in his element. He found himself in a pub and ordered drinks all round. All cheered. The news spread to the vast crowd outside, and it cheered too. Adrenaline racing, fists thumping chests, hugging and handshaking, wisecracking and slogan swapping, Clinton worked that crowd for twenty minutes, leaving it hoarse and exhausted, delighted and deeply impressed when he swept off in his limo. The only unhappy man was the bartender, who was never paid for ol' Bill's round."

Trust me...

A lot of people probably have greenhorns working for them for the summer. Many of them are spoiled kids, boss's family or other unworthies good only for hazing. So get them good.

First you prime them. Send them after the prop wash, or the left-handed crescent wrenches, or send them back to the warehouse for screws with heads on the other end ("These go on the other side, stupid!"). After hours, take them on a snipe hunt.

Then when it looks like they start to suspect an inkling of a shadow of a clue, send them to the store to get you a DVD rewinder.

Yep, someone is selling them. Thanks to Gizmodo for telling us, I think.

You be the judge

What is the appropriate penalty for someone who sells 30 million AOL customers to spammers?

I propose that he should stay in prison until he has transcribed each of the spams longhand, then written a separate letter of apology to each recipient for each spam in longhand.

And that's not to mention the trees...

Mt. Rainier violates environmental laws.

Second chance....

Just in case you didn't follow Glenn Reynolds' link to Rand Simberg, you get another chance here. Now read it all, especially if you are a journalist.

Eat Your Fugu and Die of Cancer Like the Rest Of Us

It appears that the famously poisonous puffer fish aren't poisonous themselves - it comes from what they eat.

Title and link stolen from Steven Saporito over at SashaCastel.com: Fugu? Hai!

"Coonass"

Say what? Find out here.

For those of us without older sisters....

...comes a fable from Mostly Cajun.

Just desserts

Bill Clinton couldn't disappear with decency for a few years like Richard Nixon - he has to keep sticking his his head back out. That would be OK if he had learned a few things since then, but no. His book got a review in the NY Times which said in part "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull-the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history". He rages in a BBC interview because the interviewer brought up the most memorable occurrence in his Presidency. And he speaks of his impeachment fight as a "badge of honor"..

Bill Clinton was not just a lawyer, but a former law professor. He lied under oath. The subject of the lie was immaterial - he was legally compelled to answer the questions truthfully and he didn't. He knew he needed to tell the truth, or ought to have, and he didn't. Case closed. That he was also a slut (where are the medical records?), and grossly irresponsible (were there no *discreet* Dem women who'd have him?) is just gravy.

But suppose we did, as the Democrats insisted, assume that this "did not rise to the level of impeachment" (an awkward phrase that became popular through Dem choreography). There's a case for that, but not for his subsequent behavior. That solipsistic jackass had his minions attack the fundamental morality of the US, and it's still going on today (if they didn't do it at his command, then the decent thing would have been for Clinton to call them off. But that would have taken some class). "It's just lying about sex". "It was just a blow job!", ad infinitum, just to save him from well-deserved ignominy. It's as if current charges against a certain celebrity were proven and he started a national campaign with a slogan "Boys - the other white meat".

But lying about sex was trivial?. Right. If it's so trivial, then why lie about it? "So I got a BJ, big deal - what's the problem?" Some even tried to get us to believe that in the same act, Ms. Lewinski had had sex but he had not.

The fact is that lying about sex was critical to his election hopes. That's what inspired him and Hillary to appear on "60 Minutes" for their little show of solidarity after the Gennifer Flowers situation. That's why he regularly had his little photo ops in front of left-wing churches with a Bible in his hand, while truly religious men like Ronald Reagan quit going to avoid burdening the churches with the security issues. He knew very well that his pluralities against two of the least charismatic men the Republicans had ever run might not have held had more voters known what kind of man he really was, and thought that Monica's behavior was more than an essential social skill.

Then there was that "sheet-sniffer" Kenneth W. Starr. What were Starr's offenses? He *published* what Clinton *did*, in accordance with his mandate. Now tell me again, who's the perv? By Clinton's standards, we should have let the "In Cold Blood" killers go and locked up Truman Capote instead.

Well, let's try this one - lying about sex was heroic! He did it to save his family! He was Tom Sawyer, lying to save Becky Thatcher's delicate behind from old man Dobbins ("Oh Tom, how could you be so noble!"). Sorry pal, but you don't save your family by lying about being a slut, you save it by not being a slut in the first place.

But hey, maybe he and Hillary had an "understanding", and her reported reactions were for show. There's still something to object to. I'd think that even a cursory look at this woman's background would have screamed "Indiscreet!" But as Gary Aldrich had already informed us in a book the Clintons tried hard to suppress, he had abandoned normal FBI screening practices for his staffers. So he didn't even have access to an FBI file about her.

Saddest of all was watching the Democratic Party play along with it. What a !@#$!@ disgrace to see them lined up defending him, which should have demonstrated to even the most naive of us that the Democratic Party abandoned all pretense that it was about anything but its own propagation.

Look, I'm no Hillary fan. I could feel sorry for her husband whoever he was, and if he had taken his medicine like a man I could have mellowed out on this. But if he made a deal with the devil let him pay the price just like she does.

Likewise I'm no Al Gore fan, dating back well before his haunting of the White House. Since then things have only gotten worse. I could give Clinton and the cynical yet sane Dems who supported him some points for doing what they could to keep Gore out of the White House if they hadn't supported him in the subsequent election.

But the day a President's private affairs get in the way of discharging their duties as President, and he hijacks the mechanisms of govt to defend himself to the detriment of such things as national defense ("Bin Laden? Save it in case we need to push Monica off the front page") is the day the President should resign. Bill Clinton did not do that. He failed to live up to the standards set by Richard Nixon, and thus must be judged as a failure.

Eat like a Filipino

See what you're missing?

BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how gross it is. It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially-formed baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat one
without fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile,pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus... excuse me, I have to go and throw up
now. I'll be back in a minute.

Sorry about that wanton culture-centric editorializing - I'm just quoting the post.

More here.

Another reason to support nuclear power

Because it's our inalienable right, and we must not fall into the hands of the Zionists.

Stolen from Celluloid/Protein/Goldstein Wisdom, which offers another take here.

Thus spake Nietzsche

"Behold the superflous. They are always sick. They vomit their gall and call it a newspaper." - Twilight of the Idols

"Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws." - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, On Those Who Are Sublime

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

As ripped off from Somewhere Over the Rainbough.

Moonbat for a day

Aw, who needs proof? - let's just start making accusations, then keep repeating them until they become true.

For instance, let's try this one. Michael Moore paid the jailers at Abu Ghraib to act up on videotape and then send him the tapes so he could use them against George W. Bush and the war. That's how he came up with the tapes he has and apparently included in his crockumentary "Fahrenheit 9/11".

Then the Pentagon found out about them, reprimanded the bad guys and released the tapes to steal Moore's thunder.

Crazy, eh? Maybe, but not totally unprecedented - the left fights dirty and always has. For instance, when the UFCW was trying to unionize Food Lion a few years ago, they had a man get employed there for the express purpose of setting up unhealthful situations in hopes of catching Food Lion employes mishandling them.

And I seem to recall that back when the Democrats controlled Congress, certain allegations against Republicans were so incredibly serious that they demanded investigation despite a lack of evidence to justify it.

Oh lookie here, from Drudge:

Re: How Moore obtained his footage from the war in Iraq:

LAUER: There's a disturbing sequence in the film that shows-- US soldiers, casualties. It has interviews with US soldiers in battles. How did you get that footage?

MOORE: From a variety of sources...

Lauer: ...Do you think that the soldiers thought they were talking to a film crew that was working with Michael Moore?

Moore: Some of them did and some of them didn't...

Lauer: ...Do you think that's fair?

Moore: Well, I think it's fair that the American people know what's going on. These soldiers are certainly presented in the film with the deepest respect...

Hmm - so he had film crews working over there. Maybe this is less crazy than I thought...

A question for everyone who's making a fuss about Abu Ghraib

If you thought it could have saved you or some of your family, would you have permitted torture of captured suspected terrorists?

Those who say Yes are cordially invited to STFU.

UPDATE: Alright, let's clarify this. As Glenn Reynolds put it, I'm asking the Dukakis Question. And I say that if you'd permit the use of torture in the situation proposed, I don't want to hear any prissiness about Abu Ghraib, especially when we see the stuff they *really* were subjected to.

Let's give Darwin a hand. Everybody who's for "gun control", wants to coddle criminals, or doesn't think he should fight back against criminals or terrorists in a way they'll understand should be required to publish their addresses. Let the crooks pick off the low-hanging fruit at their convenience without disturbing those of us who recognize that, to paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice, morality is not a suicide pact.

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.