And this is whose fault exactly?

David Ignatius's editor must have taken the day off, or else surely this column would have been rejected.

He says "don't politicize terrorism". Fine. And then he proceeds to politicize it for the rest of the column. Ignatius writes:

The dangers of politicizing terrorism were clear in this month's announcement about potential attacks on financial centers in the New York area and in Washington. When Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge disclosed the threats on Aug. 1, he faced immediate skepticism about whether the intelligence was valid. Sadly, the Bush administration had helped create this climate of public suspicion by overusing its elaborate, color-coded system of terrorism warnings.

IIRC after the initial setting the color code has changed 3 times - once up, once down, and now back up again. This, over a couple of years or so since the color system was created. This is overusing? I wonder how often they have fire drills in his building.

Elaborate? There are 5 whole colors. I'd expect a kindergartener to know that many - is this too much of a challenge for Ignatius to keep them straight?

After a terrorism advisory by Attorney General John Ashcroft last spring was pooh-poohed the same day by Ridge, some people wondered whether these warnings were being used for political effect.

Good grief, this past week we've had people talking about the use of hurricanes for political effect - there is nothing Bush could ever do to keep some opponents from projecting their own underhanded motivations onto him.

Bush isn't Bill Clinton. He doesn't conduct polls to see where he should go on vacation. He's willing to take heat for convictions, such as limiting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. He doesn't have a principle-free creep like Dick Morris making suggestions. When his DUI years ago well before his well-known reform was hyped just before the 2000 election, he didn't send his minions out to convince the world that "everybody gets DUIs". He's trustworthy, and the Dems can't stand it - what if the public starts expecting trustworthiness from them too?

Further asininities:

By linking its reelection campaign so closely to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration has eroded its credibility -- to the point that some members of the public are beginning to wonder whether terrorism warnings are all just politics.

Bush's campaign's linkage to the war on terror is entirely appropriate inasmuch as he has no more important task than that, and because it identifies significant differences between him and opponent John Kerry. And Kerry could neutralize it all tomorrow by stating that he approved of Bush's war on terror and if elected, he would give Bush a high position in his govt so Bush could keep running the show.

The administration risks compounding that climate of politicization by nominating a sitting Republican member of Congress, Porter Goss, to be the next CIA director.

What's wrong with having a sitting Republican member of Congress in this role? Shouldn't CIA directors have some knowledge of how Congress runs? And if Bush were a Democrat, does Ignatius doubt for a minute that the nominee would be a Democrat?

If Ignatius has a problem with Porter Goss, he should state it. Better yet, leave all mention out of the column because it's irrelevant. We know what side you're on, Mr. Ignatius - you can quit padding your word count.

And the finale:

Public cynicism about terrorism is dangerous -- and so is the politicization of intelligence that breeds it. The danger is that when the administration warns for real about the next Sept. 11, it won't be believed.

It took some brass-balled effrontery to write that given what preceded it. If Ignatius really believes this, then why would he write a column like the above full of innuendoes that encourage public cynicism?

Power piping

I really know how to write those titles, eh? What can I say, I'm an engineer, not a marketer. And this item is about piping in power plants, as inspired by Sean Kinsell's post here.

It seems that some steam piping failed and killed some workers in a Japanese nuclear power plant recently. Of course anything that happens at a nuclear power plant attracts media attention, and since they can't be troubled to learn anything the coverage usually is shrill. In my naivete I'll attempt to address some of this.

The plant in question was pressurized water reactor, often abbreviated as PWR. Such a reactor operates by heating water in a nuclear reactor core and then pumping it through a number of steam generators (common designs have 2, 3, or 4). These steam generators are built something like vertically oriented boilers, with tubes running vertically through them containing reactor water. The system also has a "pressurizer", which contains a bubble of steam at the top - this device serves to make sure that no steam forms within the reactor itself.

So what happens outside the steam generator tubes? This volume is filled with water at a bit lower pressure and temperature. Water comes into it at the bottom from the feedwater system. Steam forms around the hot tubes and rises to the top, where it goes through separators and driers and ultimately flows through the turbine to drive it. After passing through the turbine the steam is exhausted into the condenser, where it is cooled enough to recondense it into the condensate system.

At this point the water is at very low pressure and lukewarm. The first step is to clean it in "condensate polishers" to catch any corrosion products or other impurities in the water (initial fill is with "demineralized" water - not quite distilled, but highly purified with ion exchange resins).

After the polishers the water is slowly reheated and repressurized in stages until it is ready to return to the steam generators. By the time it returns it is at a high pressure and several hundred degrees F - if it leaks it will immediately form steam. It was piping in these stages which failed at the Japanese plant.

You might think you know a little about steam. Not under those conditions you don't. The amount of concentrated power is unlike anything you see elsewhere, and if it hits you directly it doesn't just scald you, it more or less eats you. If you inhale it live, bye-bye lungs.

Anyway, this feedwater piping is insulated heavily both to minimize personnel hazards and save the heat. In my experience this insulation usually consists of several inches of chalky calcium silicate covered with sheet metal such that none of the pipe's exterior is visible. Power plants turn heat into electric power they can sell after all - wasted heat is expensive.

(Incidentally, piping is used the same way for the same reasons with the same kind of very clean water in it at coal-burning plants. Actually the pressures and temperatures are even higher because there's no nuclear reactor to protect, which means that the personnel hazard onsite from the steam is even greater.)

You might think that if the steam is so dangerous that personnel are kept out of the area wherever pipe that might leak steam runs. In fact the area will be inhabited regularly by plant operators in their rounds checking pressures and temperatures, inspecting steam traps, and sundry other duties needed to keep the plant running. Likewise fire watch or security people or engineers like me might be around from time to time. In practice failures of such piping are uncommon, and their failure would be expensive even if the human factors were discounted, so they are designed carefully and water chemistry is maintained strictly to avoid problems.

As noted in the original article, no radiation was released. If you've been paying attention, you know why - the pipe didn't have anything radioactive in it, so it couldn't release anything. Minor steam generator leaks' results would be captured in condensate polishers further upstream, and if they can't handle it management will be taking the plant down pronto to keep the crud from spreading throughout the plant and sending maintenance costs through the roof, above and beyond any extra regulatory scrutiny and paperwork they'll suffer.

OK, but what happens to the reactor when such pipes fail? Small failures like what killed the workers are hard to pick up on instrumentation right away because nothing is really looking for them - my guess is that, depending on the design of the plant, some fire protection instrumentation might pick up on the extraordinarily high local temperature. It's possible that an HVAC (heating/ventilating/air conditioning) system would pick it up, but such a failure in the turbine building isn't the kind of thing that would alarm on an operator's console necessarily.

Should it? Definitely, if it were likely to indicate that the reactor would need attention. But small leaks are not threats to the reactor and thus are not worthy of highlighting - the risk of distracting operators can be higher than the value of the information.

Larger breaks OTOH would be unmistakeable. Temperatures would get out of hand, sumps would fill, pressures would drop and the noise would be incredible (turbine buildings are noisy but you ain't heard nothin' yet). Life in the control room would get exciting fast. They'd send operators to investigate if needed, or else they'd conclude that for safety's sake they'd have to shut down the reactor and isolate some valves.

What about the steam generators - will they overheat if their feedwater supply is cut off by a big leak or failure? Not once the reactor has been shut down, and there are numerous automatic sensors that can cause this to happen in case the control room is slow on the trigger (and if they are, they'll hear about it, from management, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry's own Institute of Nuclear Power Operations). If feedwater is cut off entirely, there is a backup system designed to much higher QA standards to provide water to the steam generators, and similar high-QA valves would close automatically to isolate the leak from the steam generators so this auxiliary water doesn't just run back out the leak.

That's what happens if the piping *feeding* the steam generator fails (simplistically - the possible accidents are examined in much greater detail in regulatory documentation filed with the USNRC for each commercial US nuclear power plant in existence). What if the pipes coming *out* of the steam generators - the main steam pipes - fail?

That's a bit uglier, because the water escaping has even more energy in it. But this piping is even more physically remote and heavily insulated than the feedwater piping. Failures of this piping in the turbine building will immediately be isolated from the steam generators and the reactor building by the main steam isolation valves (MSIVs), of which there are two per main steam pipe, and each of those has two independent signals to actuate it. (this is for a boiling water reactor (BWR), in which the main steam system is much more significant to radiological safety than it is in a PWR, but similar controls and safeguards will be in place). That action combined with the auxiliary feedwater system mentioned earlier will keep things under control in the reactor building. Operators who are in the area when the problem occurs had better get going pronto to survive, but in fact I know of no such failures in the history of the US commercial nuclear power industry.

Alright, that's enough of a brain dump for a while. Who knows? - if the world comes to its senses and we start building nuclear power plants again, I may be able to use that background again....

In case you need a picture

How to tell if you served with someone, as presented by the Kerry folks.

Link stolen shamelessly from Dean Esmay.

Free security?

I wonder - has building security improved on average since smokers were exiled outside buildings? It seems that there are always a few hanging around outside for a toke where they still can.

And some of them are nosy. I remember having an interview for a job once when an admin stuck her nose in the closed door to interrupt us. Was it *my* car that had the expired tags? In fact it was, lady, and !@#$ you very much for bringing it up right then and there. (What a day - I didn't get the job and I got a flat tire on the interstate on the way home too. Bill Clinton was President, so it must have been *his* fault, right?)

Hmm - it might be nice to have some witnesses like that around 24-7. How might you make that happen - by passing out free cigarettes? That might work, but I'm guessing it might be cheaper just to hire a guard.

Voila! - geeks are up all night. So if a company that wanted to have some witnesses hanging around decided to put up a free wireless hotspot that was available after normal working hours, could that attract help them with their physical security?

Beats me. But I'd like to see more drive-by wireless hotspots. So I'm looking for selling points wherever they might be found.

Reaching the wrong conclusion

Once upon a time there was a preacher inveighing against the Demon Rum. For a demonstration he took a bottle of moonshine and dropped a live worm into it. The worm quickly quit wriggling and died. He asked the congregation what they should conclude from this. And the drunk in the back (all these joke congregations have one) hollered "If you don't want to get worms, drink moonshine!"

IMO we have a similar situation where Glenn Reynolds cites big reductions in atmospheric SO₂ and other substances during last year's blackout in the Ohio Valley.

So what does this tell us? That power plants are particularly filthy? Or that the atmosphere recovers rapidly from such influxes?

Always be suspicious when numbers are given in percentages. What is important is whether the typical numbers were dangerous. Were they? We can't tell from GR's cite.

At the end we read:

the spectacular overnight improvements in air quality "may result from underestimation of emission from power plants, inaccurate representation of power plant effluent in emission models or unaccounted-for atomospheric chemical reactions." (Marufu et al., Geophysical Research Letters, vol 31, L13106, 2004.)

There could be other issues too, such as weather in the vicinity - if winds came from a different direction or there was a good rain the results could be skewed significantly also.

So perhaps the most appropriate conclusion to reach is that the atmospheric scientists are wrong again. Remember that the next time we hear about anthropogenic global warming.

Having once worked in TVA country not too far from the Widows Creek generating station, I heard the stories. Supposedly things were done differently at night when it was harder to see the smoke, etc. And experienced dirt-burner engineers know better than to drive nice cars to work - get a beater to absorb the abuse from the pollution.

Things have changed since then so perhaps I'm too harsh. And I have something of a conflict of interest in that I worked in the nuclear power industry for 10 years before I was starved out in the early 1990's. I was one of those guys who'd remind people that in normal operation a coal plant released more radioactive substances into the environment than a nuclear power plant does.

But I'm also one of those guys who knows our alternatives and has worked in the utility industry. I stand to profit from energy technologies regardless of the source of the power or whether demand goes up or down. So while I won't claim I'm a savant on energy issues, I'm more aware of them than the average citizen.

Later GR writes "I've always felt -- as many people who live in TVA country do -- that burning coal to generate power is an absolutely filthy and destructive habit." This is the guy who raves about nanotech and other cutting-edge technologies. Who's to say that we won't someday find technologies for extracting the energy from coal economically without throwing away potentially useful constituents like the sulfur that currently gets dumped into the atmosphere as SO₂?

In fact, the cure might involve nanotech....

Democracy Inaction

Ya gotta check this out - MoveOnPlease.org, by National Lampoon.

Link stolen from Dean Esmay.

Ill-suited

Some lefty put together this set of playing cards bearing images of Republicans. How original!

John Ashcroft only rates the king of diamonds? Ann Coulter, at deuce of clubs, is outranked by Andrew Sullivan?

Frankly I'd like to see what the Dems' own deck would look like. There'd have to be a lot more colors to be inclusive. Throw in yellow and brown colors and get rid of the idea of "suits" as too Republican. Clubs and Diamonds would have to go as connoting privilege, violence and wealth, and surely we couldn't have Spades...

And what games would they play with them? Not poker for sure, for as Laurence Simon has written somewhere recently, they couldn't stand a game in which it took 4 queens to beat a straight.

Original link stolen from Betsy's Page, which has lots of other good stuff too.

That's what happiness is...

More serendipity - this anecdote at the expense of Charles De Gaulle.

Anthologies of obituaries

The stuff I find while looking for something else...

Riddle me this

How would Bill Clinton run against a guy who's positioned himself like John Kerry has since the convention?

The CW vs. the truth

John Kerry sought to fight in Vietnam, while George W. Bush sought to avoid it, right? That's what John Kerry would have you believe. And it's more or less the opposite of the truth.

Rev. Sensing notes a few things that aren't getting much coverage here.

Want the short(er) version?

• Kerry went to Vietnam and asked to be assigned to a swift-boat unit in the hope he wouldn't see combat. His unit's mission was changed and he did see combat.
  
• G. W. Bush, OTOH, became an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air Guard and was assigned to a fighter wing that was sending pilots to fly in Vietnam.
  
• Furthermore, Bush asked to be sent to Vietnam
  

If you want the details follow the link above.

Deep question

NoSuchBlog asks "what good is surviving if all you do with your life is sit around writing blog entries about how to survive?"

I can't answer that question, but I can point to his survival tips

Nichols Seeks Forgiveness for Okla. City Bombing

Right here.

I have no problem with the death penalty, especially for people like Nichols' partner Timothy McVeigh. But IMO he was executed awfully quickly by a Clinton Administration more concerned with closing the issue than for extracting just what he knew.

Let's not repeat that with Terry Nichols.

How John Kerry would have handled 9/11

The first few minutes, anyway. Don't miss this terrific cartoon on PowerLine

At least there aren't any loopholes

Bitter points out an example of legislation at its finest: here.

Why?

Foreign strippers planning to table dance in clubs must now provide photos of themselves with no clothes on to qualify for a visa for Canada, said immigration officials.

When did you know you were an adult?

That was the question on a local radio station's morning drive last week. Answers varied widely. Coming home with a first paycheck, paying a first rent check, signing off on a house, bringing a baby home, were examples. Some set the sights lower, such as remembering to pick up napkins with the food at the fast food joint like their mother always had (if that's what it takes, I'm still waiting...).

I'm not sure where to draw the line for me. Getting up by myself in the morning without nagging? Buying my own clothes/doing my own laundry? Shutting off lightbulbs? Doing my own housecleaning? Buying furniture that you don't intend to sleep on? Refraining from spending money when I had it?

Of course being an adult isn't the same as being recognized as one. Little things like being treated as a houseguest rather than as a kid when you visit your parents. Getting addressed with honorifics like "Mr". Not getting carded when buying cigarettes or alcohol. Getting your own credit card solicitations.

Having survived twoscore and more years, I figure I must have made it to adulthood at some point, sense of humor and taste notwithstanding. I'm not in quite the same hurry to reach the next milestone (millstone?), when I start getting senior citizen discounts.

Markets Protecting the Environment

...is the subheading for The Commons, a blog dedicated to Free-Market Environmentalism. It's excellent.

Corporophobia

Some of the biggest corporations in this country are in the media. And who are some of their favorite whipping boys? Large corporations.

The WaPo published this today, speaking of fear of corporations. We see this:

Think of the first global corporation -- the Catholic church -- with its offices in many countries (monasteries and churches), language peculiar to the institution (Latin), aggressive takeover methods (the Crusades), vigorous marketing campaign (missionaries) and competition-killing strategy (the Inquisition). It took 1,500 years and Martin Luther's entrepreneurial spirit to create a viable alternative for consumers.

Right - there were no alternatives to Roman Catholicism anywhere on the planet at the time, right? And in this age of Islamists, who have spread their faith by the sword since Mohammad himself, he chooses the Catholic church as an example. And more silliness:

From the Catholic church sprang the Knights Templar, the Crusades' elite soldiers and the world's first international banking system, as the knights transmitted money along the pilgrims' path from Europe to the Holy Land. As such, they had the power that went with wealth, and were viewed with such suspicion and envy as to be eradicated by France's Philip IV, something of a medieval trust-buster.

Trust-buster my eye - he saw a rival and dealt with it. Likewise for Teddy Roosevelt - he wanted to be the biggest BSD around and certainly wouldn't tolerate corporations powerful enough to tell him off.

Omnipotent organizations form in power vacuums. For those who think Rupert Murdoch is too powerful, look back to the end of the 19th century, when the federal government's regulatory authority was so small it would be unrecognizable to us. In those times, sprawling, self-interested corporations filled the void. And they weren't just depicted in the media -- they often were the media.

Oh yeah, we get the example of Rupert Murdoch for excessive power. This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that he's not a flaming liberal, would it? Why don't we ever hear anyone complaining about lefties like the obscenely rich head of Viacom, Sumner Redstone? Or Ted Turner?

On the other hand, Michael Moore's 1989 "Roger & Me" details the devastating consequences of General Motors' decision to pull a manufacturing plant out of Flint, Mich. No one accuses former GM chief executive Roger Smith of intending to turn Flint into an urban ruin where people eat rabbits to survive, yet it happened when the GM plant, and its 30,000 jobs, left.

He's hit bottom. Ye gads, the writer is treating Michael Moore as someone with intelligent responsible commentary!

GM did not adopt the workers when it hired them. If Flint had too many eggs in one basket economically, then that's a local problem. If they had insisted upfront that GM take extraordinary responsibility for their workers before the plant had been built, certainly GM would have gone elsewhere. Would Flint have been better off if the jobs had never been there?

United Fruit, for instance, with its close ties to the Eisenhower administration and the CIA, was Guatemala's largest landowner and employer and its de facto government, writes David Halberstam in "The Fifties."

Does Halberstam, a liberal, have a problem with this? Surely he's not suggesting that the biggest "corporation" of them all, the US government, would ever do anything sinister? Oh, I forgot - Eisenhower was a Republican, and the opposition in Central America typically was Marxist.

Just last week, reports surfaced that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether four major U.S. oil companies bribed the dictator of Equatorial Guinea.

Interesting. It takes two parties to a bribe, and both are unethical, yet somehow it's only the corporation which is seen as wrong. At least the briber from the corporation is working to advance the interests of his stockholders - the one who takes the bribe is putting his personal interests ahead of those he nominally serves.

In many ways, today's corporations are more powerful than nations and much more modern. Corporations are borderless nation-states, many of which have higher economic output than most sovereign countries. Ethnic infighting and border hatreds rarely affect their ability to form alliances. They are not shackled by the history of the regions in which they operate.

What a shame that governments can't be run more like corporations...

How is it that people who fear corporate power can believe that government power is better? Which one has the guns and the prisons? And if corporations manage to get control of those via control of the govt, that's only because of the powers given to the govt, so if you would limit the power of corporations, maybe you ought to take a look at limiting govt power.

But in the final analysis the article can be dismissed out of hand. After all, the author works for a corporation...

The Third Terrorist

(Whoops, an earlier version of this somehow got published before I was through with it. Let's try this again.)

It's a shame that blogs weren't as popular back in the early 90's as they are now. There are tons of stories from Clinton's day that IMO got bum's rush coverage. And probably the worst case was the Middle Eastern ties to the OKC bombings.

I recall the early coverage, in which we suspected Middle Eastern involvement and we were looking for a John Doe who looked suspiciously Middle Eastern. Then that stopped abruptly and we wound up with a couple of white guys supposedly with right-wing ties.

Wasn't that convenient for Bill Clinton? He was in trouble. He didn't want to have to deal with foreign affairs, yet he might be forced into it if this were associated with Muslims. Far better that the perps should be "right-wingers" - he'd attempt to associate these with his political opponents. Next thing we know he's accusing Rush Limbaugh et al of inspiring the event.

Of course he had no evidence of this. But what evidence *did* he have?

Now I'm reading "The Third Terrorist", by Jayna Davis. I haven't read too much of it yet. But from what I've seen, Bill Clinton knew very well that he was lying when he was blaming "hate radio" for the terrorism.

Alabama Executes 74-Year-Old Man (washingtonpost.com)

So reads the headline, anyway. Down in the body we see this:

J.B. Hubbard's failing body kept him lying in bed -- a bunk on Alabama's death row -- most of the last days of his life. Other inmates say they walked his wobbly frame to the showers and listened to him complain about the pain: the cancer in his colon and prostate, the hypertension, the aching back. They combed his hair because he couldn't. They washed him.

When spasms of dementia made him forget who he was -- what he was -- they told him: a 74-year-old, small-town Alabama man gone bad, a twice-convicted murderer, the oldest inmate on "the row." He left them behind, these most unlikely of caretakers, one month ago and was transported south to a drab, gray prison set back in the cotton fields of lower Alabama. As the sun was tipping toward the horizon, Hubbard was put to death there Thursday, becoming the oldest inmate executed in the United States in more than six decades.

So how did it come to this?

Hubbard first killed in 1957, teaming with his uncle to rob and murder a Tuscaloosa man. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison but was released in October 1976, in part because a widow agreed to give him a job and help ease him back into society.

So someone sponsored him. How could you ever repay someone for that? Here's how:

on a winter evening in 1977, police say Hubbard shot his benefactor three times in the face.

Poor guy - losing his benefactor like that must have been devastating.

All told, I'm thinking that this one might have been a good one for the anti-execution types to sit out. Yet the usual suspects, having arbitrarily decided that "a civilized society" does not execute even slimeballs like that, had to show up and get their ration of free uncritical publicity.

And of course the WaPo gave it to them.

Oh Veronica!

Not you too! Yep, even the Archies are loosening up according to this.

Further down the page you are invited to vote for the sexiest cartoon babes of all time. I correctly picked the winner of the last contest, but competition is heating up. Kim Possible won't be jailbait forever, and then a few years behind her there's the PowerPuff Girls.

I need to get out more often.

Alternate History

The French would love a veto over our military activity, as noted again in this.

I can't help but think of 1940, when the Wehrmacht went through the French like Ex-Lax through a skeleton. Quickly the French formed their Vichy government to get along with Hitler.

What would the French govt have said if we had asked them if we could get involved to beat Hitler?

Bunny suits?

Tasteless joke time!

A couple of guys were swapping stories about embarrassing moments. One said he had been caught while hiding in the closet watching his parents have sex. The other one said "kids do the craziest things, don't they?" The other said, "Yeah, but this was just last week".

John Kerry isn't happy about his "bunny suit" costume picture, which makes him look like one of the sperm from Woody Allen's classic "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But were Afraid to Ask)". Of course his thoroughly professional campaign team is calling its release a dirty trick by the Republicans. Aww -

Now we hear that there's a similar picture of W. But his dates back to 1981, long predating his political career. OK, so there is. But why would anyone bother to keep it that long? Has J. Edgar Hoover been reincarnated and hired by NASA?

IMO it's no big deal for Bush or Kerry. Kerry doesn't exactly look like the massively phony image he'd like to project, but he could hardly rank lower in my eyes anyway.

Words fail me

In a move that pro-life activists say is clearly "anti-child," an Australian abortion center has objected to the opening of a child care center in its neighborhood.

Dark Light

Here is an interesting review of a book about people's reactions to electricity. "Dark Light - Electricity and Anxiety From the Telegraph to the X-ray", by Linda Simon, is "fact an utterly idiosyncratic romp, a poetical humanist's inquiry, a chronicle not so much of gizmos and inventors but of their effects on the public imagination."

I had heard of Luigi Galvani's experiments applying electricity to frogs' legs to make them twitch, but the book speaks of another Italian's work with freshly guillotined human heads - by electrifying them, he could make them blink or grind their teeth. Ewwww. It made an impression on Mary Shelley too - she later wrote "Frankenstein".

In the early days people didn't know what to make of electricity, and even those like Edison had their moments - '"When Edison first heard his own phonograph talk back to him, he told a reporter he was 'actually frightened and for a moment dropped the crank he was turning,'" Simon writes'.

I think I'll have to have a look at this one. Maybe it'll provide some insight into contemporary reactions to the Internet.

What people with lower standards might post

Or in this case, forward through email. Yes, the picture to the left is unacceptable for a respectable blog, and is posted only so you might know how this blog's careful and discriminating editing process protects you from lower forms of political discourse while edifying you on countless other subjects.

If you checked out this blog on Sunday before noon, you no doubt noticed that the gods of irony deliberately fouled up this post - I've corrected it since then.

Incidentally, I am told that the sign in question is to be found somewhere near Green Bay, Wisconsin. And notice the lower right hand corner - apparently the guy even sprung for a spotlight so you could see it at night. Not bad for a state whose best known citizens are Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer...

Explain this one to me

I grew up with the legend of JFK and PT 109. Or the movie, anyway. It was long, but I liked it when I was little.

I don't recall seeing it playing on TV for a while now, so I suppose it's possible that twenty- and possibly thirty-somethings don't know the story. It seems that JFK's craft was rammed broadside by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri, which cut it in two.

What happened later was tough on JFK and the crew, but all but two of them survived. But how did they wind up in that situation in the first place?

In particular, how did a small craft that could go at 45 knots get hit broadside by a comparatively monstrous destroyer? They were operating in Blackett Strait, which is narrow by ocean standards but still left plenty of room to maneuver. It's as if a human being were hit by a semi traveling at walking pace - it wouldn't be too hard to stay out of the way. It's hard to see how PT 109 could have suffered such a fate without gross failure by the commanding officer - IMO they would have done better with Joseph Hazelwood.

But I know jack squat about issues nautical and thought maybe some of you naval types might have comments.

Happy Birthday Milton Friedman!

He's 92 today. And he's one of the best arguments for cloning I can think of.

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.