Justice against spammers

You know that scene in "When Harry Met Sally"? The "I'll have what she's having" scene? Well, that's what I thought of when I read this:

"Haarlem (pts) - The Internet portal Lycos http://www.lycos-europe.com has developed a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. As the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, the company is hoping to make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers rocket by keeping their servers running flat out. According to the Internet firm, if enough people sign up and download the new tool, spammers could end up having to pay to send out terabytes of data. By getting thousands of people to download and use the screensaver, Lycos hopes to get spamming websites constantly running at almost full capacity."

Thanks Bitter - you made my day.

Walk a mile in his moccasins. Then shoot him.

This is the kind of story that ticks me off. Reading it, you'd almost forget that the boy killed was trying to kill American and other soldiers liberating Iraq in Fallujah, and that his father had learned nothing from it.

We hear that the boy, Ahmed, insisted on serving on the front line in a black tracksuit an "insurgent" leader had just given him.

The boy's mother was angry, but too bad. Apparently she doesn't even know he's dead yet. Allah will help the father against the Americans, but apparently he cowers before his wife. (Wait until you get your martyrdom, pal, and you have 72 of them to answer to...)

Well, you know how kids are. They get these ideas and... Yeah, right. The father, Abu Muhammed, the guy our correspondent would have us pity, tells us he's not just an "insurgent", but a sniper. That's not enough - he says "When I shoot a target with a rocket-propelled grenade, it's like celebrating a feast".

So we know where the 13 year old kid got his ideas. Either father or son would have killed your or your kids in a flash and would have enjoyed every minute of it. But we're supposed to feel for them?

IMO this quote was interesting:

While atrocities unleashed by the insurgents -- beheadings and bombings that have killed scores of civilians -- have at least anecdotally seemed to unleash popular revulsion, there remains a constituency in Iraq that celebrates the guerrilla war. Myths have grown up around it, all infused with religious imagery and notions of divine intervention. Residents trade stories: that the knights of the prophet Muhammad were seen riding through Fallujah's streets on horseback with their swords drawn; that birds guided by God cast stones at Apache helicopters; that a scented breeze descends on the fighters as they battle U.S. troops.

Abu Mohammed had his tale.

At a checkpoint this summer, he was stopped by U.S. and Iraqi troops with a rocket-propelled grenade and three hand grenades in his trunk. He said he beseeched God: "I am fighting for you." The troops opened the trunk, he said, and found nothing.

Yeah, and other sources have told us about the big supplies of drugs the "insurgents" have.(There's no word yet on whether they've started ghost dancing).

It's just not fair!

The Americans, Abu Mohammed said, are "strong in their technology, but I've never seen cowards like them."

A hint of anger flashed across his usually calm demeanor. "Fifteen thousand Americans against 2,000 mujaheddin, with their technology and their firepower? They say they were victorious, but what kind of victory was that?"

Well hey, you have Allah on your side, not to mention the knights of Mohammed, the birds, the scented breezes...

And Allah isn't through with them yet:

"Until the day of judgment, there will be jihad," Abu Mohammed said, his words slow. "If something happened in Lebanon, I would find a bridge to cross and go there to fight." In a calm voice, he described his obligation as a matter of fact, a self-evident truth, and he quoted the Koran to illustrate his point: "And slay them wherever you catch them."

He clutched a pillow in his lap as he sat cross-legged. A tattered white curtain hung over the window, its pane broken.

"Jihad is not only against the Americans, it's also waged against the people who support them," he said. "They say the government is Iraqi, but it's really American. It's an Iraqi on the throne, but the throne itself is American."

For people who believe that, only one end is possible. I say we expedite it.

IMO the most irritating thing about this article is that what is most damning of our "insurgent" is toward the end. If you don't finish the article, all you see is some poor SOB who lost his son to the Americans.

I guess that's what you can expect from a blue state paper like the Washington Post. They work so hard to understand those who would kill them, and even present them sympathetically. Isn't it a shame that they don't put more effort into understanding red staters?

For Alexander buffs

Check out Livius, which is self-described as "a non-commercial website on ancient history".

In your face, infidels!

Mail and Guardian Online: Iran boasts nuclear victory over US: "Iran boasted on Tuesday that it had humiliated the United States at a board meeting of the UN atomic watchdog by agreeing to what it reiterated was only a temporary freeze of its suspect nuclear programme."

And we fought for this?

I've written several times before about that hellhole that is North Korea. But now I'm starting to question the South too.

In the late 80's an engineer I knew took an assignment in Korea. When he went he was, um, corpulent. When he got back he was svelte. Had he been working out? No, he just couldn't handle the food or the sanitation. The latter consisted mostly of dumping buckets of water on the floor and letting it run into the big holes which served as toilets.

Around the same period the Olympics were held in Seoul and I was working with a 20-something Korean engineer. She was outraged because it seemed to her the no one ever mentioned South Korea in the Olympic coverage without noting the canine cuisine. She didn't deny it, she just thought they could drop it once in a while.

Now today I read this, in which the author and his commenters decry what one of them called the utter lack of common courtesy in South Korea.

I won't be booking a flight over there any time soon.

Over the top rhetoric awards

Right here, according to columnist John Leo.

I might have divided them into classes like "Self-Awareness Award". It would have gone to Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks for "I realize that I’m just supposed to sing and look cute so our fans won’t have anything to upset them while they’re cheating on their wives or driving around in their pickup trucks shooting small animals.”

Read the whole thing

Thomas Sowell channels Ambrose Bierce:

" If someone were to produce a political dictionary, 'crisis' would be defined as a desire to pass a law and 'national debt' would be defined as a desire to raise taxes. And the two in combination would mean a desire to discredit the existing administration."

Most unlikely remake?

CNN just assured me that Dolly Parton has just recorded a version of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven".

Yeah, I know Tom Jones did "Kiss" by Prince, Judas Priest remade Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust", and there's no telling what you'll hear on Muzak or the like.

Anyway, I'm looking for nominations for the most unlikely remakes. Can you top my examples?

Poor Mo

I wish liberals could make up their minds. One minute John Ashcroft is the guy who covers up breasts on statues, and the next he's having his Transportation security folks checking out Maureen Dowd's rack.

The fact is that MoDo is going to bitch as long as there is a Republican in the White House. And if there is another successful terror attack she'll blame it on the Republican administration's policies no matter what.

In particular, she may choose to ridicule "breast bombs", but in fact drug smugglers have used implants for drug smuggling.

Maybe our enemies ought to work on becoming journalists. Then they can try to ridicule us out of our security measures until we let down our guard.

Brand Democrats

Oliver Willis once was a reasonably respectable blogger. But he sold out to become a Democrat shill. Now he has created "Brand Democrat".

(Why is he working so hard at this? Could he be trying to live something down? For instance, could he have been named after Oliver North?)

(Then there's Oliver Hardy.)

Hubris applies the artwork appropriately here

Nice work, but IMO the original is still the best. Big image here, buy the shirt here.

Are these drugs safe?

Derek Lowe discusses drug safety here.

I guess you could say he's conservative:

I don't think that I'm alone in the drug industry as someone who never takes even OTC medication unless I feel that the benefits outweigh the risks, and the risks are never zero. I know too much biochemistry to mess around with mine lightly.

Booblicity

For ballroom dance professionals the Ohio Star Ball serves several purposes. Of course they can compete, with professional or amateur partners. But it's also a big convention where pros, amateurs and vendors can network and do business.

Of course it helps to be noticed, and one young professional I know had just the idea. She's very attractive to begin with, and then she showed up in some strapless bustier thing that was just enough for precarious containment of what I assume are 34B's. If she sat still everything was OK, but then someone asked her to dance a cha-cha.

It was fun to watch. A good cha-cha is fairly fast, and the women spend a lot of time turning with their hands over their heads. That doesn't work well if you're trying to stay decent in what she was wearing. Our heroine was all too aware of the problem, reaching down to stuff everything back in every chance she got. She would have lost the battle but for some adhesive pastie-like cups she had worn underneath.

Well, there's always next year.

The Betty Van Patter award goes to...

...whoever it was who killed Margaret Hassan.

(What words do we have for these people? Insurgents? Minutemen? No, let's call them "jihadis". Then maybe some day we can get people to associate jihad not with holy war, but with the wanton feral slaughter of defenseless, harmless older women.)

No, I never met Margaret Hassan, and if I had we probably would have disagreed passionately about many things. In particular, she opposed UN sanctions in the misbegotten belief that they, rather than Saddam Hussein's spending priorities, were causing problems for Iraqis. No doubt Christopher Hitchens could come up with much more, like he did with the late Mother Teresa.

But I can't help but respect someone doing what Margarat Hassan has done for Iraqis for the last years. She didn't bug out with the expats - she considered herself Iraqi. Unlike the many other expats (and who knows how many Iraqis) who have been murdered by "jihadis", she had been there all along and in no way could have been considered some sort of profiteer or even a collaborator.

So she stayed around in Baghdad to be kidnapped and to die degraded on videotape.

Not there too

Several of us from the same studio were eating dinner at the Ohio Star Ball when someone mentioned something I had already noticed - a number of the better male dancers were wearing fairly large labels on their jackets. I hadn't been close enough to read them, but it turned out that the labels were deliberate advertising by sponsors.

About that time the devil whispered in my ear. So I proposed that the ads go the whole NASCAR route, and invited them all to picture the dancers with big Skoal or Red Man ads on their backs.

You never heard a conversation stop so fast in your life. The looks of horror were priceless.

The fact is that competing at dancesport is expensive, and the prizes aren't exactly huge even for the top pros. The competitions aren't exactly money machines either from what I can tell, so any added money from sponsors or patrons is a huge help. A couple of common sponsors are Capezio and Chrisanne.

But really, there's something about an ad which clashes with formal wear. It makes the dancers look like they're part of the hotel staff. Surely we can do better than this.

Barbarians!

I just got back from spending the past week at the 2004 Ohio Star Ball. It's like nothing else.

One of the odder things I saw was on the last day of competition and many of us were leaving. I was riding in an elevator at the Hyatt Regency Columbus when some others got on. One volunteered something about going home to a "blue state", in a tone suggesting he'd been playing Jane Goodall for the past week in red Ohio. Someone else seconded the concept as the elevator opened to the lobby.

I couldn't let that pass, but wasn't particularly inspired - I just said something like "I'm a red stater, I'm proud of it, and I'd vote for Bush again" as the others left. I didn't chase them down to argue with them, but I'm sure I left them shaking their heads.

I know I shook mine. What is it about these people that makes it so important to let people know where they stand? Apparently they think they're superior and demand recognition of this, but why?

Thinking about it later, I wanted to say something like "we red staters are the ones who feed, clothe, shelter, power, and defend the rest of you. We are the sources of physical and moral capital that make this country what it is and can be. Kill off the blue staters and that would be a setback. But without the red staters the blues would starve in weeks". (apologies to William Jennings Bryan).

Anyway, I'm guessing that the blue stater expected solidarity because of the nature of the event - surely there wouldn't be any NASCAR-loving red-staters there!

If so, he sure wasn't paying attention. The winners of the professional American Smooth were Ben and Shalene Archer Ermis from red Tennessee, and they'd won the year before too. The event has been held in red Ohio from its beginning almost 30 years ago because that's the home of organizer and former Blackpool competitor Sam Sodano. And on Saturday night during a break in the finals they announced the retirement of one of the best American Rhythm couples ever, Dan Rutherford and Nicole Carroll from red Indiana.

The rest of the story

"I recall during a recent trip to Israel, a checkpoint guard told the story of a woman who recently detonated herself and four others at the border checkpoint. What went unreported was that the woman had been found to be having an adulterous affair. She was given a choice: be stoned to death or go on a suicide bombing mission. She chose the latter. That is to say, she chose to die not for a noble cause, but as a result of the oppressive social forces within the Palestinian society. "

Read it again

...because I'm assuming that dozens of bloggers who've been busy this week have pointed you to this from Marine Corps Moms.

But that would have been a War Crime!

I'm betting that you haven't heard of Henry Tandey. But I'll bet you could name the German corporal he could have finished off in 1918.

Dichotomies

To revive an old line, there are two kinds of people - those who divide people into two types, and those who do not.

Well, you can't argue with it for sure, but it's not too useful either. But some dichotomies are useful - it just wouldn't be right if there weren't two kinds.

Glenn Reynolds links to this, which divides the world into the kind of people who might have written or swallowed this crap from Jane Smiley and the rest of us. She has concluded that there are people who think like her, and the "unteachably ignorant" who voted for George W. Bush.

C. P. Snow had his own theory 45 years ago with his "The Two Cultures". See it reviewed by the incomparable Orrin Judd here.

For my money the best entry is "A Conflict of Visions:Ideological Origins of Political Struggles" by Thomas Sowell. His "constrained" vs. "unconstrained" visions correspond fairly well with our conservative/liberal divide today.

Alas, some of us have more time to blog today, and I don't. See ya!

The deep end

By now you've probably heard about how hard some Dems have taken Kerry's loss. Like this one, who decided to take his life with a shotgun at the WTC site.

I've decided to take up a collection for his family. Please send more shotgun shells to....

No, that's way beyond the pale. In defense I'll merely note that I have read too many lefty blogs lately, and the rhetorical style just kinda crept in. Consider me self-flagellated.

But really now people, this was a Presidential election. Any suicides should have been confined to the likes of Bin Laden, Zarkawi et al for knowing that the best they can hope for for the next four years is living in holes on the run.

Would I have been happy if Bush lost? Certainly not. I know that a lot of my countrymen are under- or misinformed by the MSM, but to find that a majority were so would have been disheartening at best.

Am I thrilled with Bush? Compared to "JFK", yes. But I'd like better. And that has nothing to do with his extemporaneous language skills or alleged resemblance to lower primates.

Maybe we'll get better this time, with some of the riffraff like Daschle out of the Senate. If these hardcore lefties really believe "worse is better", then let's see them go along with the Republican agenda, let some judges be seated, et al.

Given some bigger margins in both houses, maybe we'll see a more fiscally responsible Bush come forward. I sure hope so.

But if he doesn't, well...we survived Jimmy Carter.

UPDATE: It appears that something else inspired the suicide reported by CNN and cited above. What made CNN conclude that the suicide was related to the election?

Nasty hit

Sunday is Football Day, doggone it. And this past Sunday I saw one of the nastiest hits ever, and I never saw the victim twitch a muscle afterward. Yeah, you expect that from football, but at the time I was watching figure skating.

The girl was up in the air for some sort of lift and her partner had both of her hands. So when she fell from about shoulder height she hit more or less head first.

As it turns out she's recovering and is planning to come back very soon.

There was another potentially nasty fall too, but the girl managed to flip over in the air and land on her skates in a position only a chiropractor could love. But they kept going.

Huge dancesport event in Columbus next week

If you want to see ballroom dancing as done by the best pros anywhere, you need to go to the 2004 Ohio Star Ball Championships in Columbus, Ohio.

You'll see all ages and skill levels and about any reasonably common dance you can think of climaxing on Friday and Saturday nights. If you're not a dance junkie you'll miss a lot, and if you use constructions like "the dance" I suppose you'll sniff a lot, but I enjoyed watching it even before I knew what was going on.

And things go wrong once in a while. You have to wonder how a woman could catch her heel on a skirt that barely covers her bum, but I've seen it happen - she almost tore it off getting loose, and for the rest of the event she dropped her hand down to pull it back up whenever she could while staying in synch with a professional routine.

Anyway, it's something different, it's big, and it's right out there in God's own RED STATES...

Mystery

I keep asking Kerry voters what they thought he would have done in Iraq. It seems that none of them have a clue.

Fair enough - I didn't either. But then I didn't vote for him.

Slow

It's been slow around here lately and that'll probably continue for a while. This week is a frenzy while I prepare for a long road trip, and I'll be out of town all next week. Sheesh, I barely even got in any gloating about the election.

Must be seen to be believed...

This unsigned screed was actually published in the Mirror.

Stolen from The Corner.

Protesters in Portland

I suppose that these protesters fancy themselves as heroes. Yeah, they're supporting democracy!

One of them proclaimed that the "religious right" won the election. It's true that they were more likely to support Bush, not that there's anything wrong with that.... Sorry pal, but a minute ago you said you were supporting democracy, and these people get to vote too.

I've lived in parts of the country within a few miles of where they handle snakes as part of the services. You can't go much farther off the deep end than that. But I've never had a lick of trouble with "the religious right", and typically I didn't hear a peep unless they were provoked. And it wasn't because they were a minority. IMO the most obvious difference between them and the protesters, besides dress and hygiene, is that the evangelicals would rather keep to themselves and not do something so worldly as to pose for a camera, or even vote.

And, if anything, what do you suppose provoked them this time? Might it have had something to do with an arbitrary decision by some to overturn a few thousand years of social experience to mock marriage?

Oh yeah, the protesters are against the war too. I have a proposal for them - I'll bet Fallujah could use some human shields about now...

Giving his due

After months of dog-cussing John Kerry, the least I can do is acknowledge that he outclassed Al Gore in conceding defeat in the election.

Now let's see if the rest of his supporters do.

Common sense breaks out

Look here and scroll upward for deadly retorts to the latest press attacks on Bush from US and foreign sources. The linked article discusses the big deal the press would make of al-Qaqaa, and the next two up discuss the Lancet article about supposedly outrageously high Iraqi fatalities in the war.

And then just keep reading in both directions, because Chicago Boyz is a terrific blog.

Meanwhile Chicago Girl Megan McArdle overcomes her NY influences to embrace the right man for President here.

If you still don't get the al-Qaqaa thing, John Cole has pictures for you here.

Faulty decision process?

Daniel Drezner has a child and wants tenure. To get it, he probably has to rattle off left wing catechism for the grantors of tenure. That's the only way I can explain this.

Mr. Drezner is distressed by the number of "Mongolian clusterf**ks" found in the Bush administration's planning. Well what do you know - not everyone in his administration had the same ideas about how to do things! Some people have expressed differences of opinion, and that can only mean that the decisions actually implemented were incorrect, right?

I for one would be far more disturbed if everyone in the administration had exactly the same ideas - apparently President Bush has assembled a diverse group to provide counsel, and that's to be respected. But once the decision has been made, it's time to put your head down, shut up and start implementing instead of hogging cameras. And has anyone ever considered that maybe planning could be better if the Bush Administration didn't have to watch its back against a hostile media echoing opposition spin all the time?

I'm a blogger too, so I too reserve the right to question decisions made by the govt, media, other bloggers or anyone else after the fact. The thought that Mr. Drezner would question the Bush administration's conduct of the war certainly wasn't offensive in itself.

But the jaw-dropper was when he wrote "I prefer a leader who has a good decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I don't like, over a leader who has a bad decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I do like."

And this led him to support John Kerry? Can Kerry be said to even *have* a decision-making process? Or is it just so prolific that it generates all alternatives? Pick Kerry if you must (he's going to win IL anyway despite my absentee vote), but please come up with something better than this.

Mr. Drezner goes on to say "But in the end, I can't vote for a president who doesn't believe that what he believes might, just might, be wrong." Here he must be mindreading. Making a decision does not indicate that there never was any doubt, it just means that somebody had to have the cojones to act under conditions of uncertainty - you'll never know all the relevant facts and much of what you do know has a short shelf-life.

(And making a decision is the opposite of letting your allies dictate your policy. Kerry's "global test" nonsense is simply a way for Kerry to avoid responsibility. That's OK with me, but I'd prefer that he avoid responsibility by losing the election by a truly embarrassing margin)

So how does Mr. Drezner conclude that President Bush has no doubts about his decisions? It appears that he is making some truly stupendous assumptions that just could be wrong. Is he willing to reexamine that?

Or maybe Mr. Drezner swallowing the Dem story concocted to counteract Kerry's flipflopping, namely, that in fact George W. Bush is bullheaded.

Well, President Bush in fact has some identifiable consistent principles, which certainly narrows the scope of the decisions he's likely to reach. And I, the stock market and most of sane society prefer that predictability to a loose cannon who scores once in a while but is likely to shift with any political zephyr.

And if bull-headedness is to be feared, what can you say about a man who still won't come clean about Vietnam, or apologize for the monstrous and unsupported accusations he made about his "band of brothers"? Had he done so, we might never have hears about the Swift boat vets. Even Jane Fonda has apologized - why can't Kerry? His positions on Viet Nam might well be the only ones he's ever stuck with.

Anyway, I hope Mr. Drezner gets his tenure. But only if he can come up with a better decision making process than what we've seen.

UN seals?

Everybody seems to be so impressed by these UN seals on ammo dumps in Iraq. I'm not.

It so happens that I was raised around truckers who went to some really iffy places. Seals? Ha? Thieves could just take the entire back doors off the trailers, rob them blind, then reinstall the doors without breaking seals. If you wanted to secure your load, you'd back your trailer up against a wall or another trailer so close that no one could get into the gap.

I dare to suggest that one so highly motivated as Saddam could defeat any seal the UN could place on a site, especially after disabling all the other surveillance equipment placed on the sites.

What if we caught Osama bin Laden?

I've heard that a cockroach can live for two weeks without its head. But what about real low life forms, like al Qaeda? What would happen if we caught Osama bin Laden tomorrow?

It all depends on how well he set up his organization. To a certain extent it's a cult of personality in that he himself is a potent symbol. But IMO there's no sign that his organization couldn't go on without him.

If that's true, then catching OBL might be meaningless at best. After all, we've been locking up gangsters for the better part of century, from Al Capone to John Gotti, and I don't hear anyone claiming that organized crime is gone. Al Qaeda would just have to come up with another leader just as the mob always has.

Do we know that bin Laden is a particularly effective leader? Someone had to set up his worldwide organization for sure. And although they've certainly had their successes, I have to wonder what another leader might have been able to do with the years of preparation and millions of dollars he's had available. How do we know that there's not a much more able successor waiting for the legend to pass so he can get his chance?

If there is, it would be positively counterproductive to catch bin Laden openly. Al Qaeda would still have him as a symbol even as they strengthened their management. Is it likely that anyone would make a move to take over while OBL is alive and at large?

Well, wouldn't he make a good scalp for GWB just before the election? I don't know why. People might get the idea that that meant that there was nothing more to be done in the Middle East, leading to a breakup of the "coalition of the bribed" and possibly even the election of that failure-in-waiting called John Kerry.

Catching and keeping him covertly, however, sounds good. I'm not sure that anyone needs to know besides the US govt and his followers. His followers IMO would not want anyone to know that he had been caught for PR reasons, and would have to wonder what information bin Laden had given to authorities.

Imagine this scenario - we already have OBL in custody, the Dems find out, and they release that info before the election as an October Surprise. Then what?

World Series prediction

Now that the Red Sox have made it to the World Series, by winning 4 straight after being 3 down, there's only one way for this to turn out.

The Red Sox will win the first three, and then they'll lose 4 straight.

Game 2 just ended, and the Red Sox are 2-0. So far so good...

October surprise?

Against Bush 41 there was that stunt by Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. And in 2000 the Dems had dug up a DUI charge against Bush 43. So what do the Dems plan to spring on the electorate just before the election *this* time?

How about this? Yes, Laura Welch Bush was involved in a fatal car accident back in 1963. What on earth this would have anything to do with today is byeyond me, but then I never figured out why anyone would care about George W. Bush's ancient DUI charge either.

I'm guessing that the Dems won't do it, but not because they aren't mean enough. I just think it would backfire on any party with Ted Kennedy as a member.

"Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts...."

That's the first line as I always heard it, but much of the rest is in dispute. I doubt that there's a canonical version, but if there were this guy would probably know. I don't know if there's a Latin version or not, but I know where I'd look.

Although the meter could be made to fit, I must confess I've never heard a version that included "disembodied rat neurons". That's because we have better things to do with them.

What's eating him?

Just take my word for it that this is one nasty set of pictures.

Three Dog Night

A comment to another post made me wonder if Three Dog Night was still around. Silly me - there's more money to be made, isn't there?

Near as I can tell there are only two original members out there - Danny Hutton and Cory Wells. Chuck Negron is still around and touring too. I think those were the three main singers with the band. Oh yeah, the webside says the original keyboardist is there too.

I haven't seen them, so for all I know they're as good as they ever were. Even so, once it would have been hard to imagine them releasing a title like "Three Dog Night: Live With The Tennessee Symphony Orchestra".

Susanna's loins

Now that's something I haven't blogged about before. Anyway, lately she's been girding them and stepping into the arena attempting to spread enlightment among the unwashed via the Detroit News. Check it out.

It's not just for amoebas anymore

So says a Tshirt disseminated by the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.

You see, 1 in 100 of us are asexual.

We may never know why people kill others or themselves, or why they overeat or otherwise behave destructively. But if it has to do with sex, you can bet we'll research it to death.

Well, maybe not in this case. Celibacy has been called the most unnatural of all perversions, and they have to draw the line somewhere.

Give me demagoguery and give me death!

I still think Kerry is worse than Edwards, but maybe no longer if I keep hearing nonsense like this:

"If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again," Edwards said.

I suppose that after a career making millions second-guessing doctors for a living one would be tempted to believe that he knew more about medicine than they did. Medical professionals don't seem as positive about the possibilities of embryonic stem cell research as Edwards is.

But Edwards must spread the belief that all we need for scientific progress is more money.

Hmm, maybe I like that idea after all. Gimme the money, Uncle Sugar, and I'll get right to work on that perpetual motion machine.

OK, no one will question that some money is necessary. But money is available from sources other than the govt. Really. And George W. Bush, the first president to release *any* federal money for stem cell research, did not bar funding of stem cell research - he merely stated that such funding would not be coming from the govt.

If Kerry and Edwards are so concerned for Michael J. Fox, the late Christopher Reeve or other big names, why would he make them wait on an act of Congress before seeing their research funded? The govt doesn't have to do a thing - donate the money and we can get started right away! Get famous musicians to hold benefits. Make movies. Recruit billionaires to set up big organizations to influence public opinion worldwide to raise money.

No, that's not the Edwards' way. We can see that where he has a choice between getting the research done sooner to save the lives he claims to care about, and having an issue to misrepresent against the Republicans, he'd rather be demagoguing. In the name of accelerating research, he misses a golden opportunity to advance it. The man is a disgrace.

And while we're at it, what about Michael J. Fox? Why isn't he leading efforts to raise money for embryonic stem cell research himself? Is it possible that he's not aware of the truth - that there's nothing about federal money that affects the outcome of research? Or is it just alien to his Canadian mind that individuals can spend their own money directly on health care?

Who knew Democrats had scruples?

1974 was quite a year. What I remember most was CB radios, Richard Nixon's resignation, and streaking.

Ah streaking, another pop culture highlight that the twentysomethings might not have heard of. I don't know what inspired it originally, but for about a year or so it was everywhere. Ray Stevens even immortalized it with a song, "The Streak".

Yep, almost everybody was doing it that year, including one Pete Sessions. And his Democrat opponent for Congress has pictures to prove it .

IMO the worst Sessions is guilty of is of being 18 at a strange time - I lived in a small town in the South at the time and *I* knew people who had done it, so believe me when I say it was pervasive. To say as his opponent's campaign does that he "exposed himself to children and strangers", especially from the party that defended Bill Clinton to the bitter end, is a little much to take.

I wonder - if they've had pictures of Pete Sessions like this for all this time, and they knew who it was, why didn't they prosecute? Lack of evidence? Insanity?

I'm guessing that this one will backfire.

Crime vs. war

These guys can't tell the difference either:

"'Disappearances' were a trademark abuse of Latin American military dictatorships in their 'dirty war' on alleged subversion," said Human Rights Watch special counsel Reed Brody.

"Now they have become a United States tactic in its conflict with Al-Qaeda," Brody said.

And I could say with equal accuracy that babbling is associated with idiots and now we're getting it from Human Rights Watch.

Imagine these jackasses fighting a war. "Excuse me, all of you gentlemen in the fatigues will have to line up over here for processing. No weapons are permitted in the office. All of those trucks will be needing license plates, tax stamps and pollution and safety inspections, and the drivers will need chauffeur's licenses and current log books. You'll need a permit for a parade for us to let those tanks and howitzers in...."

They're not through:

"Those guilty of serious crimes must be brought to justice before fair trials," said Brody. "If the United States embraces the torture and 'disappearance' of its opponents, it abandons its ideals and international obligations and becomes a lesser nation."

Yes, if we did, (and the article offers no proof ofc ourse)

Now tell me - what do we become if we let these bastards come and go as they please?

Idiots.

Victimless terrorism, or mass murder as nuisance

John Kerry said something you'll be hearing again and again this weekend:

''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' the article states as the Massachusetts senator's reply.

''As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''

As the Volokhs note, he either picked one lousy analogy or he has a strange view of terrorism.

Why is it that gambling and prostitution are low legal priorities? The Volokhs address that here. IMO the essence is that they're victimless. The govt doesn't like for any economic activity to occur without being taxed, and prostitution in particular can become a significant public health threat if not kept within bounds, but for the most part they're simply personal problems. If we were having our kin killed by gamblers and hookers on a regular, random basis you can bet your sweet patootie the hookers and gamblers would be swinging from lampposts until the problem went away.

But that's altogether too dispassionate. Your murder is Kerry's nuisance?

Well, that's not what he meant, right? He's speaking in the legal sense, not the popular sense. He meant that the demonstrated existence and virulence of a cabal of lunatics, dedicated to killing Americans and others by any means necessary so we can live under sharia, is in principle no more serious than your neighbor playing his stereo a little too loud?

No, not that either! He just wants people to accept it, like the weather. (And maybe we ought to get rid of that nasty name "terrorists" too - how about "insurgents"?)

Yes, it's true that we can't eliminate *all* terrorism any more than we can eliminate mental illness. But these creeps aren't mentally ill - they know damned well what they are doing and they're loving it. They love death? Hey, I have a win-win proposition for them....

Sorry, but there's no talking around this one. Doesn't this man have handlers? Or is he just too arrogant to listen to them? Sheesh, I would have expected better from his wife

But it could have been worse - Kerry could have mentioned the real reason why he wants people to forget about terrorism. Democrats don't run well on foreign affairs issues. They can't see spending all that money on activities that won't buy them more votes back home. What's more important - your physical well-being, or their careers?

Horse balls

They may be bigger than you think. Yes, this is safe for work.

Memories...

It seems like only yesterday...a couple was filmed to make what they were told would be an innocent commercial. It turned out to be a commercial about herpes. The couple, failing to see the advantage in being immortalized in association with a social disease, sued the producer.

(you want a link? Tough. I'm sure I read it in some paragon of respectability like National Lampoon's True Facts section.)

Now we have the "it's a brand new day" Valtrex commercials. There's the babe talking to the camera about her herpes, and she and her squeeze are frolicking about - just think, if you had herpes your life could be like that too!

It's hard to believe what a big deal herpes was in its short vogue before AIDS showed up. Unlike true love, herpes lasts forever - even now there is no cure. Supposedly the outbreaks become less severe and less common over time, but I still won't be having any, thank you.

Vaughn Bodé, RIP

Good grief, Vaughn Bodé has been dead for almost 30 years. So if you're a twentysomething and didn't have a degenerate older relative like me with a stack of old National Lampoons you might not have heard of the man, or "Cheech Wizard".

Well, it's not like you've missed *that* much. But he's a taste of the late 60's and early 70's, like Peter Max, R. Crumb, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

Nobel peace laureate claims HIV deliberately created

Good grief, where do they find these people?

Debate notes

I saw a bit of the debate on Friday. I've been avoiding it deliberately - as I expected, I spent about half the time gnashing my teeth thinking "you let that pass, you should have said this....", etc. I'll just have to trust that the all-knowing Karl Rove tested the answers and knows best. If Rove is half as good as the Dems say, everything is well under control.

Kerry claimed to have voted to "balance the budget" back in 1985. I couldn't recall the particulars, but I was about 95% sure that that was code for "raise taxes". And of course that was 20 years ago in any case.

Bush got an environmental question and I'm surprised that Kerry didn't bring up the old BS about arsenic and other rules that Bill Clinton had sat upon until about the time he pardoned Marc Rich.

Oh yeah, the Kyoto protocol. Kerry kept a straight face while suggesting that people in other countries would dislike Americans because we didn't ratify it. That Botox stuff must be strong. Anyway, Bush failed to note that Clinton blew it off too and that the Senate voted it down something like 97-zip.

I thought Bush handled the mistakes question thing well. He started off ignoring the question entirely, then came back to it saying that the mistakes were personnel appointments and he didn't want to embarrass the relevant people on TV. Slick.

Now Kerry wants to portray Bush's answer as "pigheaded" and "stubborn". Of course to Mr. Flip-Flop himself, holding a position for more than 20 minutes is "stubborn".

Who won? I didn't see it all. Bush didn't impress me, but I don't see why the best debater would make the best President, either.

The Snake

A guy wearing a John Kerry button walks into a bar just as the late news is showing a man standing on the edge of a building. The Kerry guy bets that bartender $50 that the man on TV won't jump. A moment later the guy does jump, so the bet is settled. But the bartender says "Aw, I can't take your money - I saw that clip on the early news". The Kerry guy says "yeah, so did I - I sure didn't think he'd jump again".

Was that a gratuitous Kerry reference? Of course. But then his noncynical followers (assuming he has any) are being asked to believe that he supports the troops when he didn't even support the guys he nominally fought alongside. They're asked to believe that he's not going to raise their taxes despite the long Senate record he's unusually quiet about. They seem willing to believe that Kerry can simultaneously insult our allies while attracting more of them to the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they think that by electing a Veep that has a history of raising medical costs and driving obstetricians out of business they can offer better and cheaper medical care.

They're sure going to be surprised if they get what they vote for and Kerry turns out to be the same SOB he's been for the last 35 years.

And you thought your life was dull

“I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.”

Training costs

Some years back a man I know says he was leading a crew of bricklayers and laborers building a brick wall several storeys high. They were up a few decks high on the scaffolding when suddenly they felt it give way. Somehow no one was hurt, but you can bet that this was investigated.

Looking through the mess it was discovered that the lowest levels of the scaffolding had had its braces removed. So the laborer who had been responsible for this was questioned, and he told them that the braces were in his way and they weren't working on those levels anymore anyway, so he took them out. Whoops.

So our hero fired that laborer, right? No. As he put it, "Now he knows he needs to keep the braces on all of the levels. I can't afford to teach another one."

And so it is with Presidents. Those suckers are expensive to train. Whatever you might thing GWB and his team have fouled up, he does have that expensive experience. John Kerry and John Edwards certainly do not (and judging by their attendance records they don't have so much Senate experience either).

"Shadow War"

John Kerry annoys me in more ways than I care to count, but his convenient use of intelligence sources is close to the top. Don't prate ever onward about our failure to find WMDs in a short period of time in a big country when you know damned well that Saddam had had them and had used them. Or did Kerry miss too many Senate Intelligence Committee meetings to know anything like that?

And then after that we hear about President Bush supposed ignoring intelligence sources telling us how fouled up things are in Iraq? It's amazing how much smarter those intel guys got in the last few years, eh?

Unlike the infinitely arrogant Kerry, I won't imply that I or anyone I could find would do any better than the current intelligence people do. And after reading this article, I'm surprised that they can do as well as they do.

The article is fairly long, but you know you want to know if there ever was a Tom Clancy-like plot to fly a small plane into the White House and kill the President on the first anniversary of 9/11. It's an excerpt from Richard Miniter's new book "Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror".

The question no one has been asking....

You were expecting something political? Not this time. Admit it, you've been dying to know where I've been for the last week instead of indulging my blogging obsession, even as two debates have happened.

The main problem is my new obsession with video. I finally broke down and got a camcorder, video editing software and other expensive toys for grownups, and now I'm trying to figure out how to do something worth doing with it all. I'll get there, but that'll be many trials and errors from now.

And of course there's dancing still. Yep, this one would make me a world champion on what's my line, as I don't exactly look the part (think Hoss Cartwright). It gets me out of motel rooms and moving instead of retreating to cranky hermithood cursing the TV, and I'm actually getting better at it.

Work has picked up a bit too. That's a good thing. Believe me, Parkinson's Law is 100% correct.

So in short I've been busier than a one-armed paperhanger with the seven-year itch. That's even busier than a peg-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. And I'll bet you don't know anything busier - answer the challenge in the comments.

Divine retribution

I hope voodoo dolls are a lot of hooey. If they worked, some people I've known would be interested in little else.

I'd be satisfied if there were such a thing as a voodoo commode. That is, one that would cause Al Gore to gag every time you have to take a plunger to it.

Taxman and Tortboy!

Via Hawspipe. And there's more besides.

He links to Tex the Pontificator as the source for the cartoon and other stuff. It's worth checking out.

Nice try...

Glenn Reynolds linked to this so maybe you've already seen it. Tough - I want to emphasize this passage:

''The Najaf shrine — HUNDREDS of dead women and children were brought out after Sadr left,'' Rose wrote. ''They (Sadr's supporters) rounded them up during the battle and brought them in to be executed. Why? Because they anticipated the Americans would eventually enter the shrine and walk into a media ambush. We never went in. The people of Najaf love us right now because of that. They hate Sadr and want him dead.

Leave aside the utter fiendishness of it all for a moment - where was Sadr's media ambush?

Here's another passage:

...journalism in America is broken. It has no foundation of values by which many Americans can relate and depend. The moral of this column is not about one side prevailing in news coverage on the war on terror. It's simply about fairness — about Americans getting both sides with the same prominence.

They're not. And media emphasis on Iraq being in chaos has coincided with John Kerry making the same pitch to voters. It makes you wonder, just as we did on the authenticity of Dan Rather's reporting. And now America knows about Rather's ruse.

Interesting to see this possibility raised. Before the assumption would have been that Kerry was reacting to events and not that the press was reacting to Kerry's needs. But the bias has been too flagrant for too long for us to continue to be so charitable about the MSM's motives.

Colorful politicians

Americans like a politician with a colorful past, and they usually don't have to look far. Bill Clinton certainly qualified, and if you just wanted to sit around and have a bull session you'd probably want him around, as long as you're not in the White House.

Jail needn't stop you. Here in DC Marion Barry is back in the local govt again. There are many other examples, my favorite being Boston's former mayor James Michael Curley.

I can't trace this Curley story as I write this, and I don't have time to authenticate it to Big Media standards (you know, typing it up in Word, copying the copies for a few generations, getting rid of the original, and claiming that I got it from some mystery woman...). But hey, this is a blog - I have no credibility anyway!

Anyway, Curley is in the hospital in bad shape, being fed rectally through a tube. But one day he perked up and noticed that he was being serviced by a pretty nurse. So he proposed that the next day she should bring two tubes so they could have lunch together. Now that's the spirit...Strom Thurmond probably went the same way, and I'm expecting similar from Bill Clinton.

Color is great, but it can be overdone. Consider the politician from Montana who took too much silver for its supposed medical benefits. Now his skin has turned blue, and I'm told the condition is permanent.

Now John Kerry has changed color, to orange. His aides claim it happened over the weekend playing football. Good grief. Having been around competitive dancers, I know that color - it's a fake tan from a bottle.

It won't help. They can paint John Kerry orange, but they can't give him appeal.

Get it? A peel? Like an orange? Oh, never mind...

Trojans via image files

I've seen some skanky looking people in my time, and it's nice to know that I can't catch anything just by looking at them. But now it appears that thanks to a flaw in some versions of Windows, viewing the wrong pictures could catch you a Trojan:

"Internet watchers say they've spotted infected images that could implant a back door into a Windows computer if they are viewed.
EasyNews, a provider of Usenet newsgroups, said it has identified two JPEG images that take advantage of a previously identified flaw in the way Microsoft software handles graphics files. Windows users could have their computers infected merely by opening one of those Trojan horse images. "

This may or may not apply to you, and other safeguards might prevent problems in any case. Follow the link for more details.

It's not about us

Michael Ledeen explains.

How it's done

I suppose a teenage breakup isn't so bad as long as your daddy is the legendary Possumblogger.

Time wounds all heels

I don't care if this story is true or not - it's too good not to repeat.

Paypal policy

I don't know why PayPal has done what they've done about who they'll do business with. But IMO we're way too quick to jump to conclusions about their motives. And heaven forbid that anything would make it less convenient to pay for porn.

It's well known that some customers turn out to be more trouble than they're worth. For instance, I'm guessing we'll be reading a lot about insurance companies refusing to write more homeowners' policies in FL after all of the hurricanes. Is it because of all the Hispanics down there? Or maybe the Haitians, or blacks, or AIDS cases? Or maybe it's discrimination against old people?

No, it's because they can only afford to have so much risk exposure in one place. If they go broke settling FL claims they can't possibly meet their responsibilities to the rest of their policyholders. So although there are ways to abuse the situation, in fact there is nothing inherently questionable about their conduct and in fact there are reasons to recommend it.

Likewise, when I worked in telecom I found that some companies simply refused to serve certain area codes. They were too expensive to serve because of incredibly high levels of fraud and abuse.

In other cases margins are very narrow, so companies take steps to build in a minimum amount of revenue. For instance, telecom companies like to have a minimum charge for service, and Sam's and Costco want a membership fee before they'll let you buy anything.

Maybe the customers require too much service relative to their revenue. For instance, telecom companies also have been known to avoid business that Jerry Falwell might not approve of simply because of the number of disputes. "Honest Mom - I didn't call Dial-a-Slut!". For good or ill, these take a lot of attention and generate a lot of ill will, so who needs it?

Or maybe it's too dangerous. Try getting a taxi or a delivery pizza in the wrong part of town.

Or maybe we can thank lawyers. Has PayPal been sued for facilitating certain types of illegal business?

In short, there might well be any number of perfectly good reasons for choosing not to do certain business. Surely no one is claiming that PayPal has a duty to serve anyone who wants to use them.

So PayPal might have developed a perfectly defensible policy.

Of course it takes time and training to implement a policy. There will be screwups from time to time, and I suspect that that could be the case here. If this is a recent policy change, the staff has both a learning curve and a huge backlog to deal with. Resolving problems is a PITA for sure, but is not ipso facto evidence of ill will or incompetence.

Incidentally, I have used PayPal only for donations, IANAL and I don't stand to make a nickel on this any way it turns out. And I'll note that PayPal takes a smaller cut of donations than Amazon does.

But I have had enough of people who want to scream "Censorship!" at the first sign that others have standards that differ from their own. Unless there is some more evidence I haven't heard yet (and I'm agnostic on this), the scolds who are all over PayPal for their policy statement and possibly unintentionally flawed implementation are no more tolerant than their bogeymen on the Religious Right.

Stop the presses - Men and Women are Different!

Why is it that the scientists seem to be the last to know? Lots more here. If you need pictures, just talk to Dean and I'm sure he'll post something for you.

Well, yeah, there has been some recognition that men and women have different bodies and thus have different problems. But historically this has been what some have called "bikini medicine", as if all of the differences were localized.

But the linked article mentions a number of other things that differ, including interactions with hormone levels - apparently women's problems with inflamed bowels vary with their menstrual cycles, for instance.

Others I have to wonder about. For instance, it says that women are less likely than men to get oral cancer. Yeah, but they're also less likely to smoke or chew tobacco (thank God). You don't need hormones to explain that one. (And my inner Beavis has an alternate explanation for this one and also that periodic bowel thing. I won't hold my breath waiting for the research into such theories, although this research gives me hope.).

What surprised me the most was that heart attacks in women frequently do not involve chest pains and may involve more vague, flu-like symptoms. It'll be interesting to see how evolutionists and others explain this little asymmetry. I suspect it's because women are more likely to go to the doctor - they don't wait for the traditional crushing chest pain.

But hey, read it yourself (same link).

Chernobyl now

Don't miss this from NRO. Actually the real issue with the article is how much we overrate the impact of radiation exposure on our health.

Heaven forbid our forebears had been the same. "You can't build a fire! It will lead to horrible burns and scalding, forest fires, property damage, respiratory problems, cigarette smoking, cancer from barbecuing.... Food will taste better, so people will become obese. Light will be available at night, so people will stay up all night in bars swilling booze they've distilled using a fire. Then they'll go home and breed children out of wedlock..."

Morphine-free poppies

Right here.

It seems that these poppies produce other substances which turn out to be useful precursors for creation of a new generation of powerful analgesics. The article doesn't say if the new substances are addictive.

Don't forget to write...

John Ellis has been predicting that Mary Mapes would take the fall for Ra^therGate. Surely a guy like Dan Rather couldn't be expected to know intricacies about what typewriter output looked like back in the 1970's, could he? (yeah, right - did he turn in his copy in longhand back then?)

She certainly had earned walking papers for that. But since then more things have come up, and Susanna has the goods on an earlier brush with the law by Mapes. We're not talking DUI here - she was compromising security at federal prisons.

Don't let the door hit you on your way out, sweetie. But don't forget that Dan Rather stays behind smirking at you. Isn't there anything you'd like to tell us?

Labor saver

I may have to switch to Movable Type. Now they have a plugin automatically superscripts the "th" in Ra^thergate and puts sneer quotes around "news" in CBS "News".

Charles cautions citizens considering Kerry

Click

Time for a good old-fashioned horsewhipping

It's not quite up there with the bombs shaped like toys that have been used in some wars. But it's so easy to copy I almost hate to publicize it - we know that sick bastards exist, so why give them ideas like this.

Let the punishment fit the crime. Drag the creeps behind a pickup truck face down over the area a few dozen times to be sure to find them all.

The definitive timeline for RatherGate

At PoliDock.com

From the standard lefty playbook

Hey, so what if Dan Rather got a little overzealous? We all know that George W. Bush must have received special consideration before getting assigned to the Texas Air National Guard. If the purported "proof" happens to be faulty, it's nothing worse than "lying for justice". (the cite is a comment which appears to have been intended for the next post, so read it for context).

Here's another example of this phenomenon. But no more - I don't have all day.

As the old lefty saying goes "truth is whatever serves the revolution." For the full flavor, read Whittaker Chambers' book "Witness".

The anti-food?

Yesterday 60 Minutes had a segment on morbidly obese people (600+ lbs) trying to lose weight in the clinics of Durham, NC. Some were successful in losing, with one guy down around 400 lb. But for the most part they gained it back despite their efforts.

There's plenty to be read about "emotional eating" or other cases where food is a substitute for something else. I don't have the answer, but I know that I miss my old buff wrestling weight.

Certainly we're captives of our physiology to an extent. And my improvements never happen without lots of regular exercise, which can be hard to do on the road. So losing significant amounts of weight is not trivial.

And certainly everyone has heard of the health dangers of obesity. What starts with extra sweating, susceptibility to injury and loss of flexibility and endurance can continue into heart disease, diabetes... It sure isn't a social plus.

So if it is within their power to do anything about it, why is anyone fat?

If I knew I'd be a millionaire of course, but I suspect that we'll find someday that we're dealing with something more like an addiction. Hmm..

Back in the 60's attempts were made to turn heroin junkies into methadone junkies. They were still addicts, only less destructive ones.

Could there be an answer there? Maybe some

UPDATE: that wasn't supposed to end that way. I would have sworn I told Blogger to post this in draft so it wouldn't show up yet. But then I decided I liked the drama of ending in mid-sentence, as if some dastardly food conspiracy's enforcement division had rubbed me out just as I was about to Expose Them. I had made most of my point anyway, and what can you expect from a guy in his pajamas?

"A War Hero or a Phony?"

Many have done a good job of reminding us of the truth about John Kerry's military record. I could have linked to many items many times, but for now let's see what MVB candidate Beldar has to say about Nicholas Kristof's NYT op-ed "A War Hero or a Phony?"

Link via Mr. Blog himself, Glenn Reynolds.

Against the spirit...

Sometimes I wonder why we bother to write laws. No matter how brilliant our legislators might be (and certainly never are), they're hopelessly outnumbered and usually far less motivated than those who would defeat their intent - it's only a matter of time. Lynne Kiesling (doesn't that sound like a wine?) offers an example here.

Send that reporter some pajamas...

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a poll that shows Illinoisans prefer John Kerry. (if past experience is any example, this link will probably rot fast)

What motivates the voters?

"I just really hate Bush," said Angela Smothermon, 35, a nurse from Dowell, in Southern Illinois. "My husband is a union member. He used to work a lot, but he hasn't worked since Bush has been in office. I think Kerry can do better."

Cry me a river lady. If I depended on finding work in my chosen career in my home town in IL I'd be in the same boat, but I'd rather work than bitch. And my personal diaspora started under Bill Clinton - should I have blamed him?

Or there's this:

"We've seen (Bush) in action," said Mary Lou Delaney, a homemaker from Carlinville, Ill. "I'll never forget the way he was on 9/11. Kerry scares me - he can't make up his mind about anything."

or

Said William Fleischman, a salesman from Galesburg, Ill.: "(Bush) has had experience in the (Middle East) region, whereas Mr. Kerry has no experience in running anything except a family fortune."

Hot dog! - some evidence that people actually used some reasoning. And they're both for Bush. Although Mr. Fleischman gives Kerry too much credit - Kerry himself has always lived off someone else's family fortune, and I'm guessing that Teresa runs the financial show in the current Kerry household.

But ignorance could not be denied:

"He (Bush) got us into a war for basically no reason," said Dennis Cassidy of Mount Vernon, Ill., an unemployed child social service worker and Kerry supporter.

Sigh. And people like this can vote.

What the reporter never got around to recognizing is that IL is not a "battleground" state. Only the St. Louis vicinity is a battleground media market, and it contains noted hellholes like East St. Louis and other Dem strongholds nearby. With Alan Keyes running as the Republican candidate for Senate, Bush isn't likely to be spending much time or money in IL either. Heaven forbid that Kerry wouldn't be winning in IL when he's essentially unopposed.

Pajamas? Well, I guess you could have missed this.

Kerry's Campaign: Incompetence? Or Conspiracy?

Do you really need to read the rest to figure out the answer? Conspiracy Planet lets the rest of us in on what the cognoscenti already know.

Her again

Once a kid gets to a certain age his parents are a source of acute embarrassment. For most of us that stops at some point, and we notice that the old guy who was so stupid when we were 16 sure has learned a lot in the years since.

I never knew the late Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin. He was killed in Iraq earlier this year trying to disarm a bomb.

My guess is that people who disarm bombs are dedicated individuals. The kind who might be embarrassed if someone made a huge fuss over their chosen occupation, because they were doing what they thought was right. If so, well, at least Mr. Dvorin is beyond embarrassment now, and can't see how his mother has been using his misfortune. Woman wearing 'President Bush You Killed My Son' T-Shirt disrupts first lady's rally

UPDATE: I'll leave the above as is just to remind me to pay attention when I hit the Draft button the next time. But I had to include a link to her latest. Hint - she doesn't like George W. Bush.

Success secrets from Barbara Walters

I'll let Big Arm Woman tell you about it.

There's a CBS News watcher born every minute

P. T. Barnum might say that if he were around today. You might recognize the name from Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circuses. Unlike a more modern corporation I could name, Barnum didn't have to give his product away - he could get people to pay to see BS.

No circus was complete without a collection of oddities to display, and in 1869 a real whopper was found in Cardiff, NY - the Cardiff Giant.

Barnum saw the marketing potential of this huge object and tried to buy it for his circus. No sale. OK, Barnum had a Cardiff Giant of his own created and toured with it instead. There's no word on whether he billed it as "inauthentic but accurate".

Whoops, it turned out that the original was a hoax. No problem - Barnum just started billing his version as the "real fake". See it in this link - it's the one that appears to be made of black rock.

There's also no record of Barnum saying anything like "I think the public understands that powerful and extremely well-financed forces are concentrating on questions about the giants because they can't deny the fundamental truth of the story". Of course the existence of fake giants would not prove that there never had been "real" giants. But it's truly perverse, seeing what it cost to create the fraudulent statues and the gain to be had from displaying them, to suggest that the people who proved them fake were the ones who were unscrupulous. Perhaps Barnum had more respect for the intelligence and sophistication of his audience than Dan Rather does.

But keep trying, CBS. Perhaps one day you'll make it up to Barnum's standards for accuracy.

Is President Bush manipulating terror warnings for his political benefit?

A discussion here.

Silvertongue

It was dark, I was young and I was somewhere secluded and comfortable with a heretofore friendly young lady. The moonlight was very flattering to her skin tones. Romantic that I was, I sought words to capture the scene.

And what came out was "you look better in the dark". With charm like that, who needs contraception?

But we all foul up that way once in a while - even professionals. Woundwort offers examples
here.

Irrational?

I have a lot of Depression-era relative still around. You can always tell these people. Saving the foil, twine, paper bags, margarine tubs, etc. Of course they often have small living spaces, and they never really do ever use the stuff they save. But to throw the stuff out? - that would be irrational. By the standards of their time, anyway.

Now we have Stuart Buck, a very sharp man, reviewing economic behavior in Atlanta in the early part of this century. He concludes that the actors were irrational.

Per his post Atlanta, or at least its Chamber of Commerce, decided to become a haven for "satisfied, intelligent, contented Anglo-Saxon labor". As a marketing strategy that might have been 100% rational at that time. If consumers liked it better, then they were the irrational ones, not the ones who gave them what they wanted.

It's fair to assume that this initiative, driven by the local Chamber of Commerce, was at worst perceived as a long-term investment at the time. We know that the companies in the examples incurred greater costs. What we don't know is if this increased expense resulted in increased profit. If not, I'm guessing those new white guys quietly started disappearing, fast.

Putting delivery boys in uniform isn't so strange by contemporary standards - it provides security bona fides and presents a consistent image to customers. That they should be white, well, people commonly believed strange things about black male sexuality then too. So the delivery boy thing might well have been completely rational.

(I helped deliver furniture for a major Atlanta department store in the late 70's, and most of my coworkers were black. They all wore uniforms. One old black guy had been at it for 30+ years, and he always kept a big empty plastic bottle in the back of his truck. I had to ask...well, that was one bathroom he knew he could use.)

Why did the hospitals demand the blacks back? Blacks were commonly thought of as caretakers and cooks et al. Aged whites likely to be found in the hospitals of the time probably preferred receiving intimate attention from blacks like they probably had in their youth. Being cleaned up by "equals" would have been humbling, but by those perceived as inferior? - well, you don't chase the dog out of the room when you take your clothes off, do you? And the blacks got the same money they had been getting before when they came back - the administrators seem to have gotten their rationality back in a hurry if they ever lost it.

In short, although the behavior certainly isn't acceptable nowadays, I conclude that at best Mr. Buck fails to make his case that the behavior was irrational.

Don't read this

Seriously.

But you did, didn't you? So now you might be interested in this.

Blame it on Radley Balko.

Good grief!

You might recall how badly Zell Miller has been dog-cussed by the Dems for his speech. Sure, I can see how they might feel betrayed. But all the crap about "fascism" et al - what's going on?

IMO it's because he dared associate John Kerry with his votes. Kerry certainly hasn't shown any interest in doing so. Either he isn't proud of his record or he knows damned well that the rest of us (outside that asylum called Massachusetts) won't like it.

So what do the Dems try next? If you've read any blogs over the last several days you know about CBS and the apparently forged documents suggesting misconduct by George W. Bush 31 years ago. IMO even if the documents were authentic they wouldn't have amounted to a hill of beans, but....

Now what? Oh yeah, apparently Bush's campaign literature made an errant claim about his military service.

No, not in the current campaign. Back In 1978.

Oh yeah, it's damning too: "Flyers distributed to Texas voters during Bush's failed Congressional race say 'he served in the U.S. Air Force and the Texas Air National Guard.' But according to Air Force officials, Air National Guardsmen are not counted as members of the active-duty Air Force."

Now there's a major distinction for you. You'd think that if the Air Force had tried to activate him, he could have escaped by saying "No way, I joined the Reserves!"

I'm certainly in favor of accuracy, and if this turns out to be true it's regrettable.

But if the Dems think this kind of chickenshit will harm George W. Bush in the minds of sentient beings, especially 26 years after the fact, desperation simply isn't adequate to describe their position.

Leno, Letterman et al.

Newsmax.com isn't for everybody, except for their collection of one-liners from late-night TV. Follow the link for a bonanza.

My favorite was "Did you read this strange story – a woman was caught trying to pass a counterfeit $200 bill that had a picture of George W. Bush on it. Turns out there was also a John Kerry bill. It’s pretty realistic. Kerry’s on both sides."

Expert: Dan Rather Exaggerates Military Record

Heh heh.

Via Glenn Reynolds.

Ouch

CBS News after Dan Rather.

Maybe he'd come clean about his favoritism, anyway.

Sean McCray is back

He disappeared for quite a while, but now he's back at Next Right.

Stem cell progress, no thanks to embryos

"An Italian boy has been cured of a potentially lethal form of anaemia by a new type of stem-cell therapy, using cells from the placenta of both of his recently born twin brothers, the health ministry said on Monday."

I d4c U?

Rebecca Blood, who unfortunately can't be trusted with sharp objects like Occam's Razor, cites this about SMS divorces in Malaysia.

How did you rate?

Attention to all of you Republicans who rented some feminine attentions in NYC during the convention - an alleged NYC escort has a few words for you.

A scurrilous fabrication

Yep, some lefties apparently think Republicans fight dirty in elections, in a tone suggesting that they never did such things. Now that's a whopper.

After ROTFLMAO, I thought it would serve the Dems right if their opponents behaved as claimed. Like me, for instance. What could I come up with? Hypothetically, of course - I'm above such conduct.

Let's start with the fact that John Kerry, who has been treated for cancer and whose true military record is subject to question doesn't want to release his medical records and his full military records. And IIRC Kerry's divorce records are sealed too. Could there be a common thread tying all of this together?

Aha! Kerry's Purple Heart wasn't really for a little bitty wound in his arm. In fact, John Kerry, a man known for his long face, must have accidentally blown off part of his genitalia.

He wouldn't want to flaunt this. At the time there was no Lance Armstrong to inspire him, so I'm guessing that about any red-blooded American male of his age in his time would have done his utmost to hide any such misfortune. "No, it's just this thing on my arm - honest!"

I'm assuming that he didn't lose both testicles, because he does have two daughters who I'm sorry to say do look like him. Then again perhaps he has a relative who helped him out. And it would help to explain some of his Senate votes.

Now perhaps it's time to note a couple of conditions that affect the sex of your children. One is that the further the sperm have to travel, the more likely it is that any resulting offspring will be girls (i.e. he's working with a stump). The other is that orgasms change the chemistry in the vagina in a way that favors male sperm (i.e. he's a lousy lay). Having only girl children is consistent with the above, and again points to a reason why he might want to keep his divorce records sealed. And isn't it interesting that we haven't had any "bimbo eruptions" from a guy whose hero was JFK?

Now I for one would never spread such a nasty rumor - I offer it only as an example of fighting dirty. But you have to admit it's consistent with the record. All John Kerry has to do to stop it in its tracks is to release the rest of his military and medical records and his divorce records.

Why wouldn't he release the records? Doesn't he have the....never mind.

Cry of the moonbat

Yes, we must avoid treating dissent as a pathology to be treated by strong drugs. And then you read stuff like this. Believe it or not, there are those who think the Democrats don't fight dirty enough.

Via, of all places, The Corner.

It takes all kinds...

There's a TV in a break area at work, and normally it's tuned to a partisan news network. If anyone else is there and I happen to be watching, they're in sever danger of hearing my opinions. Because believe it or not, not everyone reads blogs yet.

Today I was watching with another man briefly, and he piped up that he like Kerry's position on outsourcing and trying to stop it.

I started to go into my spiel about how anybody could possibly know what perennial flip-flopper Kerry's position was on anything, in addition to the specific drawbacks of opposing outsourcing, blah blah, when it dawned on me that I was talking to an IT guy from India.

I guess it makes sense - I guess if he had wanted to stay there he would have. It just struck me as amusing that at a time when some US IT jobs are heading to India, here's an Indian who isn't happy with it either.

Alternate history

It's 1941 and the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor. John Kerry is President, and he's holding a press conference.

"When will we go to war, Mr. President?"

"First we have to understand why they hate us. Meanwhile we must create a plan for winning the peace. I'll have Congress review and approve all rules of engagement. We have to hire counselors for all of our POW camps to make sure our prisoners aren't abused. We plan to schedule an exploratory meeting to discuss in principle our most appropriate reactions with our allies - I've already had some input from Petain of France. We'll issue warrants for the arrest of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hirohito as soon as we have enough evidence. We mustn't rush into war."

"Are we well prepared with men and materiel?"

"It will take a while to build up. Past Congresses and people like Dick Cheney voted down many weapons systems I sure wish we had now in my wisdom as a veteran. Fortunately we do appear to have an adequate supply of spitballs"

"And didn't you lead the charge against those weapons programs when you were in Congress?"

"That's ancient history, and we must move on"

One question IQ tests

...as proposed by Mike S. Adams.

I have a few myself:

1. Did George W. Bush win the 2000 election?

2. Did George W. Bush have anything to do with the attacks on 9/11?

3. Did you question whether WMD's had existed in Iraq prior to the most recent war?

4. Have the MSM been favoring John Kerry in this election?

5. Are Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell at least as dangerous as Islamic fundamentalist jihadis?

Suggestions?

Not bad for a girl...

Mary Katharine Ham asks "If women really do offer equal work for 23 cents less on the dollar, why does anyone bother hiring men?"

She also blogs at The Insider. It's a product of the Heritage Foundation.

The New Iraq

Right here, as ripped off from The Corner.

Interview coup

He's done it again - John Hawkins got an interview with John O'Neill of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth right here.

Hat tip to Ed Driscoll.

Subtle propaganda?

A few years ago I ran across a nuclear power plant simulator PC game. What a propaganda opportunity that could be - all they'd have to do is make it impossible to win the game and voila - an insidious message that reactors are unsafe.

Glenn Reynolds approves of his daughter's play with The Sims and The Sims 2. He says he got a column out of this - it'll be interesting to see what he says. For me, I've always meant to take a look at some of the Sims games, which have been out for around 15 years now in one form or another. But then it's not as if I don't spend enough time on the computer already.

GR says "It apparently conveys the message that if you marry a loser, he'll probably stay a loser, and your kids are likely to be losers, too." Sounds realistic to me. But....

Of course the game is just a model, and presumably we adults know that. We can play it as a diversion, and we're in a position to know when real life ain't that way. But for kids I have to wonder if it couldn't lead them in the wrong direction.

(My concerns are similar for kids and porn movies. No one will tell them that's an exceptional size, they looped the tape to make it last longer, things didn't happen in that sequence, a professional was paid a bonus for that, they're only in that position because of lighting and camera angles, they just spent 20 minutes cleaning, stretching and lubing off-camera before that happened, they get tested for diseases every week, they used a stand-in for that, most people don't groom like that, they're not even practicing "safe sex"... Do you want a kid who learned sex from porn going out with your kid?)

If kids run their own scenarios with the Sims and see how they turn out, in the absence of real world experience that *is* their experience. So what if the Sims don't accurately reflect reality, or consciously bias it toward a particular political POV?

The game has been out for some time - presumably some people out there are in a position to say whether it behaves consistent with human nature, or if it is somehow tuned with some "values" so that the good guys usually win, etc. Even so, it would have to be retested with each version.

I guess I'll have to check it out someday.

Bainbridge on Volokh on Hastert on Soros

You might recall House Speaker Dennis Hastert's recent comment on George Soros. Specifically, about where the money he works with comes from. Eugene Volokh rightly notes that if Hastert has evidence that Soros is using drug money, he should present it.

Fair enough. But it's not as if the drug money charge is far-fetched - from Wikipedia we have:

Critics point out that Soros plays the currency markets through Quantum Fund, his privately-owned investment fund registered in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, a Caribbean tax haven which has repeatedly been cited by the International Task Force on Money Laundering of the OECD as one of the world's most important centers for laundering the illegal proceeds of the Latin American drug trade. By operating from Curaçao, Soros not only avoids paying taxes but also hides the nature of his investors and what he does with their money.

In short, anyone with a pile of money and interests contrary to the US can act through Soros to try to influence US policy. You don't have to be paranoid to see potential dangers in that. If Soros is offended, let him disclose the sources of his money.