The voyeur's guide to ballroom dance competition

They probably wouldn't let me in the ladies' dressing rooms at the dancesport events. No, I haven't tried - not even in the name of that most self-sanctified of all callings - Journalism! But I have a pretty good idea about what I would see anyway (not that that's ever kept me from taking a good look before...).

There'd be women of all ages for pro-am events, but the competitive pros are between about 18 on the low end to about 40 or so on the high end. Latin in particular is very physically demanding, so the women retire fairly young. Then they typically go on to get their own studios and teach, or take students to pro-am competitions, or they become judges or other officials for dance events. They don't have anywhere near the coaching opportunities men do, because the amateur competitors in my experience number around two women for every man.

If you're looking for "diversity" this isn't the place. If you were expecting to see a lot of Latins in the Latin dancing, sorry. Competing is expensive for amateurs, especially on the road. (Even top pros can't make much money consistently - the purses just aren't there.) So if you look into the backgrounds of top amateur dancers you'll find that they are often well compensated professional women and all that that implies demographically. In particular, it seems lily-white - I recall two black male pros from Miami and a woman amateur from DC, but that's about it, and the audience isn't much different in my experience.

Physically the amateurs would be all over the map, with some downright hefty girls competing. Heights ranging from tiny 6 year olds to 6' plus. The pros all seem to be in a range of about 5'2" to 5'10", roughly estimated, and they're buff - the years of training and practice trim and shape them as few other things can. But they still look like women.

Well, some of them want to look more like women. There's falsies, particularly in the standard/smooth where the girls are more covered. For the rest there's Wonderbras, but there's only so much that upholstery can do. The meatier amateurs are often willing to let it all hang out, but I don't recall seeing many pros over a B cup or so. My goddess Charlotte Jorgensen from "Dancing with the Stars" is typical, and that's fine with me.

There would be lots of instant tanning compound. A lot of those dancers are naturally very fair-skinned, and bright lights on the floor make them all but disappear. So you'll see many "tanned" palms and soles, and no doubt some strange looking effects once you get to what the costumes cover. I hear that the stuff is expensive too.

Likewise the makeup is overdone for cameras and lights. They wear enough so that close up they're almost clownlike, but somehow they keep it from running during long energetic dance events. Like in theater and on TV, some of the men wear it too. I can only imagine how hot that must be.

The hair! Good grief, they way most of them do it you'd think it would never move again. It's usually longer than what you see, anyway. It's true that you don't want anyone stepping on it or to have it dragging on the ground (these girls are flexible), nor do you want it used as a weapon, but I think I'd rather have them all wearing helmets than what they do wear. Even the women with short hair plaster it down. Many of them dye it bright colors.

Psst, wanna talk underwear? Well, experience has shown that it's necessary to have some rules what with the short skirts and very flexible women out on the floor. A certain minimum amount of coverage is required in the rules to avoid this. Stockings are found, regular or fishnet, but they don't last long.

As for dresses, the ones for smooth or standard dances(waltz, etc.) are long and snug in the body. They'll come nearly to the floor. There might be a lot of skin showing, or long slits in the skirt, but the dances are more about grace than glamour so there's a practical limit.

The Latin outfits are another thing. Even the men usually wear something open all the way down the front, and the women...well, there's not much there, They use strategically placed transparent straps to hold things together, and I wouldn't be surprised if some used glue in places.

("Wardrobe malfunctions"? You betcha - I've seen a few. Usually it's a heel caught in the hem of a dress, and in an energetic dance like jive they can do this with a very short skirt. I've been told that a top competitor once had a top split right down the front in the middle of a number, but she managed to keep it together long enough to finish and get off the floor. There's no stage, and nowhere to hide - the only way out is through the audience)

Now really, what other blog could offer you such inside dope with a twisted angle? Or would resort to such a lame device to end a post?

Double standard

The Baltimore City Paper has a big article on solar photovoltaic power. It notes that the stuff is expensive, so only affluent people are installing it.

It also pushes for programs to subsidize installation and operation of solar PV.

IOW they want programs to make it cheaper for affluent people to buy something they'd buy anyway.

Isn't this what lefties like to call "welfare for the rich?"

Armadillos breeding

I'm not kidding. Publishing this probably says something about my own breeding.

The video itself is from a Letterman show, so it's tame enough for TV. But lots of other stuff on the site is NSFW.

Money talks, and vice versa

The cat's out of the bag. Michelle Malkin tells us how the state of Washington is trying to use campaign finance laws to clamp down on conservative talk radio.

Complain about it to your congressman, while you still can.

Lit Lileks-lookalike launcher

Kim DuToit calls this guy the moron of the year, and it's hard to argue.

Some commenters offered alternate candidates, such as the guys who let fireworks explode in their mouths. The guy with the M-80 lived, the one with the M-100 did not. The pictures are nasty.

I don't know if the commenter's story about the .22 bullet used as a fuse is for real or not, but who cares? - it deserves to be true.

Who should be on the next "Dancing with the Stars"?

Hmm. I have a few suggestions, not all of which are serious. Chelsea Clinton. Monica Lewinsky. Gary Coleman. Kathy Lee Gifford. Al Gore. Keith Olbermann. Ruben Studdard. Ken Jennings. Jenna Jameson. Terrell Owens. The guy who does the "6 Flags" ads. Michael Richards. Tara Reid. Kelly Ripa.

Come on, let's have some suggestions....

Close call

After the final dances by the finalists on DWTS, MC Tom Bergeron was introducing the judging segment with his usual patter.

The final dance for the finalists in DWTS was unique in that it was not restricted to a particular style. I don't know for sure who did the choreography, but presumably it was the professional half of each team. That would have been Charlotte Jorgensen for John O'Hurley and Alec Mazo for Kelly Monaco. As it happened, both dances had included segments where the woman grabbed the man's shoulders, jumped into the air and wrapped her legs tightly around his waist while leaning backwards.

I suppose the true aesthete sees such a positioning as pure Art. As for me, well, there's this thing called a "kneetrembler"...

Tom Bergeron, the co-MC, must have been thinking along similar lines. After the performers had finished and standing before the judges he went into his patter mumbling something about the parts of the show that would be on Pay per View. And just behind him you could see Charlotte Jorgensen swinging her hand at him as if to pop him upside the head.

These women are feisty, I'm telling you. Last week Ashly DelGrosso, Joey MacIntyre's partner, looked like she was about ready to go rounds with the judges when she and Joey were told that what they had done was "not foxtrot". But you don't insult the alligators until after you've crossed the river, and that week they were eliminated.

And the winner is...

Alright, you have two women competing for a job. One of them is fresh from a good college but has no experience. The other is a bit older and has been doing a very similar job for several years but doesn't have the degree. Which one gets hired?

The one with the biggest boobs, of course. (Gimme a break - what do you expect from a feminist joke?)

Justly or not, that's also what happened on "Dancing with the Stars". Kelly Monaco, once picked to be one of the first to go, wound up winning over John O'Hurley and his incredible professional partner Charlotte Jorgensen. Ms. Jorgensen could make anyone look good, including O'Hurley, but in the end he was just too much of a load.

Should O'Hurley have won? Well, I won't call myself a good enough judge for that. The consensus of the pros I've asked who saw it was that O'Hurley should have won. I'll assume that the fact that the input included no straight males had nothing to do with that decision. Anyway, I'd like to see how well he would do in a social setting without a world-class partner to backlead him.

IMO O'Hurley overdid it much of the time though. And his strengths were in the standard rather than the Latin dances - the latter are more telegenic IMO, and Kelly Monaco had the figure for it (oh, did she...there had to be a lust factor here).

Ah, Kelly Monaco. Her strengths weren't technical. She could stretch and spin and could survive some of the more elaborate footwork, but if she winds up dancing professionally it'll be about her presence, not her chops.

Both O'Hurley and Monaco had made tremendous progress in a short time. But men have more to learn to reach a given level of dancing in any case, so O'Hurley started out in the hole. In the minor leagues where I labor, men and women ordinarily don't compete directly for that reason.

Injustice or no, I hear another season will be coming soon.

Nonlethal weapons are lethal

After the recent show of barbarism in the UK I'm not so sure I like this idea. Good grief, after all the silliness about Gitmo, next thing you know our troops in the field won't be permitted to kill anyone either. That might be a great concept for a movie like Terminator 2, but combine that with opposition to the death penalty and we won't be able to eliminate anyone no matter how much of a threat to society they are.

"But we can imprison and rehabilitate these people!" Yeah, right - don't even get me started. We can't execute people, in practice we can't keep them locked up (it's been alleged that the bombers in the UK had recently been released from Gitmo) - the minute technology permits, we won't even be able to kill people who are actively trying to kill us on a battlefield. If the aliens come a la "War of the Worlds", ten minutes later we'll have a lobby crying out for their rights.

Then again, we may not need murder anymore. Just incapacitate someone with one of these weapons while they're doing something dangerous and then let nature take its course. No marks, no other evidence left behind, no way to trace the shooter... And the opportunities for use in terrorism are unbounded.

Our only hope will be if our invaders are fetuses. Then we'll be permitted to dismember them, suck their brains out or otherwise destroy them in any way possible.

{edited for closer resemblance to literate English)

I'm in the wrong business

A few days ago I watched a dance DVD. A couple was teaching to the lamest, cheesiest $50 Casio organ music I had ever heard. Alright, I know it costs money to license music, but I had no idea just how much of a racket it was.

"Mad Hot Ballroom" is a documentary about a ballroom dance program in NY elementary schools. Of course that means that they used a lot of music, and much of it was expensive. This article tells about it. Consider this:

Stay Free!: There's a scene where a woman's cell phone rings and she has the "Rocky" theme ring tone. I noticed that you even cleared that! I would have thought that could be an example of fair use.

Sewell: I thought so too. It's only six seconds! But our lawyer said we needed to clear it. So I called Sprint, which owns the ring tone master rights, and they gave it to me for free because they saw it as product placement. But then I called EMI, which owns the publishing rights and they asked for $10,000. I said no way--even the classics weren't getting that much. Luckily, we were able to get it for less.

Stay Free!: How much did it cost for the average song?

Sewell: It depends on how many entities are attached to it. Our typical total cost for a classic was about $15,000-20,000, split between publisher and master rights. With the Rocky theme, the publishers didn't want to overexpose the song. That was the issue with Ray Charles' "Hit the Road Jack" as well.

and this

Stay Free!: Were there any scenes you had to cut out of the film because of copyright?

Sewell: When we were down shooting the boys playing foosball, Ronnie yelled out, "Everybody dance now!" Just when I think we've finished the film, someone points out that we have to clear that because it's a "visual vocal cue." So I went back to the publishers, and the first publisher, Spirit, says they'll throw it in with the other things we've cleared if Warner Chappell throws it in. But Warner Chappell said, "Look, we've cut you some nice deals, we can't give this to you." They said this three-second bit would cost $5,000. And since they had Most Favored Nation status it would have raised the cost on similar uses, like the Rocky ring-tone. So I went back to lawyer and said we should keep it in because this should be a poster child for fair use. But he didn't recommend taking on the music industry. Those corporations have too much money for us to play Norma Rae our first time out.

Good grief.

Army recruiting problems

Lately we've been hearing a lot about difficulties in recruiting for the Army. It's nothing new. Check out this, describing how things were in WWII.

Upcoming Dancesport events near you

This weekend there are several good events.

The Desert Dancesport Classic is at the Marriott Resort and Spa in Palm Desert, CA.

The Imperial Star Dancesport competition will be at the Clarion Hotel & Conference Center, 1450 Route 70 East, Cherry Hill, NJ 08034.

The Twin Cities Open is being held at the Sheraton Bloomington outside Minneapolis.

There are still more events for other types of dancing. The list I'm working from is here.

So get up and go!

Questions for Ingrid Newkirk

Who? Maybe this quote will remind you

“A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals. Ingrid Newkirk, PETA

Yes, she's into animal rights.

Look around on the page I linked for similar thoughts from other animal rights types:

“If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
Chris DeRose, Last Chance for Animals

“The life of an ant and that of my child should be granted equal consideration.”
Michael W. Fox, Humane Society of the United States

Of course we shouldn't burden Ms. Newkirk with defending things she didn't say, but what she said is plenty. And in a couple of days (7/9) she'll be at a newly opened Borders bookstore in Timonium, MD. Hmm, I wonder if she'll be answering any questions from the public?

And if she will, what would you like to ask her? Because I'm just brash enough to go there, just a few miles from where I'm camped north of Baltimore, and ask her a few. Any suggestions?

Busted

A Russian youth wearing a drag outfit which gave him improbably large breasts has been caught trying to sit an entrance exam for a female friend.
Moscow University security guards first thought the applicant had an oversized bust because "she" was trying to take crib sheets into the exam.

A search unmasked the false bosom, the university told the BBC News website.

Stolen from Dave Barry.

My way or the highway

So now we've had Live 8, a huge series of performances by some of the top performers ever with the stated purpose of helping Africa. Yeah, right.

It's true that it would do little good for all those millionaire musicians to raise money for Africa. The place has been an aid sinkhole for generations. But Bob Geldof et al have the answer

"This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the eight world leaders at G8 an end to poverty"

Yeah, you read that right - they'll hold the G8 nations responsible!

Um, how about holding the African nations responsible?

A 2004 World Bank report on corruption noted that bribery is a trillion-dollar industry, causing far more wealth to flow from poor countries to rich countries than the poor countries receive in foreign aid. Whereas an estimated trillion dollars of foreign aid was given to poor countries between 1950 and 2000, at least five percent of the world's domestic product (amounting to $1.5 trillion in 2001) goes into the financial markets of wealthy countries in the form of money laundering. Focusing on Africa, The Economist reported that 80 percent of the funds lent between 1970 and 1996 "flowed out as capital flight in the same year." Robert Guest, the magazine's Africa editor, estimates that this amounts to about 40 percent of Africa's privately held wealth. In his book The Shackled Continent, Guest goes on to note that although a "Marshall Plan for Africa" (as advocated by many supporters of foreign aid) might be a good idea, "Africa has already received aid equivalent to six Marshall Plans."

And Herb London asks

What happened to the $2 billion raised with Live Aid? Moreover, over the last decade government and private charities have poured over $25 billion into Africa for seemingly little effect? In fact, Africa has had an aggregate g.d.p. reduction of about 25 percent since the Live Aid concerts two decades ago.

If the morally trendy types who support initiatives like this had any grasp of reality, they'd realize that there's exactly one organization in the US that's capable of correcting the real problems that lead to the symptoms they want to address. And that organization is booked heavily in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere right now.

My bet is that the Geldofs would reject that idea out of hand. Far better than the impoverished should remain so until a solution acceptable to the the Geldofs is found, right?

More by Ed Driscoll here and Don Surber here.

Whatever happened to the Ozark Mountain Daredevils?

Well, they have this website, for one.

And while we're in the general neighborhood, it seems that some of the members of Black Oak Arkansas have survived. Go Jim Dandy!

Popup Blocker? What Popup Blocker?

Are some popups getting past your popup blockers? See a discussion about why it might be happening here.

From Mark's Sysinternals Blog - part of a site full of terrific Windows ubergeek info and code.

"Pacemaker for the tummy"

Right here. Inserted laparoscopically, it makes you think you're full.

Insensitive!

Radley Balko flaunts his insensitivity here. Heavens, any half-wit should realize that use of terms like "Brainstorming" would be offensive to those with brain disorders.

There seems to be one brain disorder that is universal nowadays - Trivial Complaint Syndrome. Having so few *real* problems, we come up with nonsense like the above. You know it's really bad when you start blogging.

Coming soon to a game near you

Interesting animation which might not be work-safe in some places. It's not smutty, it's just....check it out.

From that St. Louis based Pabst-lover who goes through websites faster than Liz Taylor did with husbands. Hurry up and you might catch him yet at With Cheese!

We're from the govt and we're here to help...

...and we think you'll be safer if we charge you close to $100 just to put in a few permanent electrical features in your home. Thus spake Lynne Kiesling here.

This is about the revenue of course, because it's contrary to safety. Why? Because people will avoid this outrageous fee. They'll do it by using inferior contractors such as themselves, or will instead rely on nonpermanent measures like dropcords and power strips.

Requiescat in pacem, Ipse Dixit

Senator Christopher Dodd is still around and as obstructive as ever. But The Dodd - Dodd Harris - is shutting down his blog.

This is a true loss to the blog world. Come on back anytime, Dodd. And if you need a place to vent sometime, you're welcome to do that here or probably at dozens of other sites as well.

You missed it...

The Maryland Dancesport event happened this past weekend, and what a show it was. It's not the biggest, and it doesn't host any "world championships", but there was plenty of talent. If you like "Dancing with the Stars", a competition like this will blow you away.

After the competition Saturday night there was a show by Andrei Gavriline and Katya Kryuchkova. Mr. Gavrilene makes Jim Carrey look downright arthritic, and both he and his partner know how to put on a show. It was based on Latin dances, but on the high end it becomes all but indistinguishable from show dancing.

Some of it is hard to appreciate unless you've tried it yourself, but everyone ought to be able to notice athleticism. They could move very quickly, and very precisely, totally in sync with one another while covering the floor from one end to the other. The sheer energy alone was about enough to make your eyes sweat just watching. And that's from some old t-square and compass left-brained engineer - most of the crowd was "artier", and they were at least as impressed.

Want to see stamina? There was Slava Sergiev, from here in Baltimore. He danced with enough students well enough and often enough to come in second as Top Teacher, then competed himself with his wife as a professional and finished second. In between did at least one show dance number, and that's just what I saw.

A few nights back I was dancing with a couple of the local professionals (dancers, wise guy). On Sunday I got to watch them compete for the first time. Ya know, they've been holding out on me. I seem to recall them dressing more conservatively then too.

Anyway, you'd think they'd have to be bored out of their skulls with someone at my level. Then again, they have some idea what a professional partner might do, and they know he'll do it well - with me they really have to be on their toes. And it can even risk injury - there are elbows flying around, I'm a lot bigger, and duffers have poor balance and don't know when or how hard to hold or let go.

So don't just sit there - go to your local competitions! There's one at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge this weekend, the Manhattan DanceSport Championships, and if I get a wild enough hair I might even show up there myself.

Harkin vs. Harkin

Certainly a long-serving US Senator like Tom Harkin wouldn't change his opinion on an issue based purely on which party held the Senate?

Or would he?

Hawspipe settles the issue.

Attention personnel professionals

Hey, I've been through personnel processing many times. And being the public spirited sweetheart of a guy that I am, occasionally I offer wisdom like this.

Now today while on the wrong side of the tracks I found this. NSFW, or at least if it is you need to go get a better job.

Girl, 14, Accused Of Robbing Pizza Delivery Driver At Gunpoint

Right here

What struck me was "According to the bureau of labor statistics, driver-sales type work, such as pizza delivery, is the fifth most deadly occupation when you combine traffic fatalities and homicides.

The bureau says it's a job more deadly than roofing, electrical power installation, farm work, and construction work."

It's not too late...

...to come to the finals at the Maryland Dancesport competition being held at the BWI Marriott just outside Baltimore. You've already missed some good stuff, but there's still more tonight and again tomorrow up until about 4PM.

Yes, I was there too competing in the pro-am division. I racked up win after win in smooth, Latin and rhythm. Of course I probably ought to give credit where credit is due and note that no competition for me ever showed up. So if you're a half-empty sort of person you can say that I finished last in every event too. I definitely should have lost in the American samba, where I must have looked like a man with a bum leg trying to mime a bout of Tourette's.

Two more events occur in the DC area later this summer. The Virginia State Championships event will be in Reston in mid July, and the Capital Dancesport event is in Alexandria, VA in late August.

Newsflash!

In an effort to correct budget shortfalls, the District of Columbia has just seized the Supreme Court building and sold it to WalMart.

A DC spokesperson said "We've had problems with money because we have so many Federal buildings here that are exempt from property taxation. Now, thanks to the Kelo decision, we can generate some serious tax dollars to help pay for the next time the chief of police's car is stolen".

A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood was disappointed that their bid to turn the facility into the Blackmun Abortion Museum failed.

Meanwhile Wal-Mart spokespeople were exuberant. "Once we kick those nine old folks out, what you'll have here is just us".

If you believe the above you really have no business being on the Internet. Near as I can tell the only part that's true is the bit about taxation in DC and the car heist. Meanwhile I'm sure Scrappleface or Iowahawk have done a better job with this.

The way to a better Supreme Court

Let's see who can guess who voted for the Kelo decision:

Kennedy? Souter? O'Connor? Thomas? Scalia? Rehnquist? Ginsberg? Stephens? Breyer?

Oh come on, this one is easy.

Here's a hint - if they get good press, they voted for it. If they've been the subjects of repeated smear campaigns (Thomas, Scalia), they voted against it. If they were submitted immediately after someone was sodomized by a vicious smear campaign (Kennedy, after the first "borking"), they voted for it. If they were appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton (Ginsberg, Breyer), they voted for it.

How to account for Stephens and Souter? Both were appointed by Republicans, as were all four dissenters (Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor and Rehnquist). But Stephens and Souter were appointed by moderate Republicans facing hostile Dems controlling both houses of Congress. Stephens was appointed by Gerald Ford after the Dems finally succeeded in screwing their old nemesis Richard Nixon - there's no way anyone but a liberal was getting past a Senate loaded with Dems. Souter was appointed by George Bush 41, not so long after the unconscionable nastiness of the Dems' attacks on Robert Bork.

Can we draw any conclusions? (Try and stop me....) How about this?...If you want defensible decisions from the Supreme Court, wrt property rights at least, let a Republican President do the appointing, with a Republican Congress to approve.

And let them come up for a vote.

The real Klan

You know, I can't stand Robert Byrd, the insufferable Senator from West Virginia. If reminding people that he once belonged to the KKK will help get his sorry butt out of office, I say fire at will. But let's show some respect for historical accuracy here.

I followed a link to Wizbang and saw commenter after commenter making ritual denunciations of the Klan. Terrific - we certainly don't need any of what they've come to represent. But when was the last time anyone took a look at how they came to represent it?

The simple fact is that the Klan was popular nationwide until well into the last century. They were even represented as the heroes of one of the world's best known early movies, "Birth of a Nation".

And it wasn't just a Southern thing either. It was found throughout the North too, including central IL where I grew up. I had at least one older relative (deceased for half a century now) who was a member, and his quote was that he couldn't see anything wrong with an organization that required its members to be free, white and 21. Enlightened he wasn't, but he was typical of his generation.

As for the ambient racism, a town not far away (LaSalle-Peru, IL) was known to have signs on each end of town saying "Nigger - don't let the sun set on you". There were few blacks or Jews in the area, and there were enough Catholics to take care of themselves, so it must have been kind of frustrating if everyone was seeking violence and destruction.

Incidentally, we've had entire political parties dedicated to intolerance, such as the Know-Nothings and the Anti-Masonic party.

The Klan is associated with terrorizing minorities, particularly blacks. But have you seen pictures of lynched blacks? Look in the crowds - how many of them are wearing Klan outfits? The fact is that lynching was approved by much of the population once upon a time. It didn't take the Klan to start or even accelerate lynching, and in fact the term predates the Klan.

And it so happens that I have a very distant cousin, who was at least half white for sure, who allegedly was lynched out in western Iowa somewhere. Nowadays no one is quite sure how it happened, but the theory is that he was accused of stealing a horse. Here is an account of a white guy named Bowen who was lynched in Texas.

The recent book "Freakonomics" studies some of the most offbeat things, and among them is the KKK. The book tells of one Stetson Kennedy who infiltrated the Klan - here's a passage:

But if the Ku Klux Klan of the 1940s wasn't uniformly violent, what was it? The Klan that Stetson Kennedy found was in fact a storry fraternity of men, most of them poorly educated and with poor prospects, who needed a place to vent-and an excuse for occasionally staying out all night. That their fraternity engaged in quasi-religious chanting and oath taking and hosanna hailing, all of it top secret, made it that much more appealing.

Kennedy also found the Klan to be a slick money-making operation, at least for those near the top of the organization. Klan leaders had any number of revenue sources: thousands of dues-paying rank-and-file members; business owners who hired the Klan to scare off the unions or who paid the Klan protection money; Klan rallies that generated huge cash donations; even the occasional gunrunning or moonshine operation. Then there were rackets such as the Klan's Death Benefit Association, which sold insurance policies to Klan members and accepted only cash or personal checks made out to the Grand Dragon himself.

Yep, it was a big boys' club for losers. Setting up a local branch of such an organization was a way for Robert Byrd to promote himself and and live off poor people. It's little wonder he became a Democrat Senator - it's the same thing on a larger scale.

(Want to know the ingenious way in which Stetson Kennedy turned the Klan into a laughingstock? Read "Freakanomics".)

How busy was the Klan? In terms of lynchings at least there were some 4000-odd lynchings between around 1880 and 1950, but not all were black and not all of those were by the Klan for sure (not that the Klan wouldn't lynch or terrorize whites too - I'm just trying to come up with some sort of ballpark estimate). In contrast, over less than 5 years 1063 people have been killed by Palestinian violence and terror, yet some people think they're the good guys.

But hey, let's hang 4000 lynchings on the Klan. Literally millions of men had had something to do with the Klan at one time or another over that period. Lynchings by the Klan at least appears to have been fairly uncommon, and chapters who did do it might well have been the exception rather than the rule. When Klan membership is common as it was, it can be difficult to determine whether people were acting as Klansmen or just as people who happened to be Klan members. I don't know - I don't have the data.

Now suppose that every last trace of the Klan disappeared from the earth this instant. IMO something comparable would arise in its place. Dung by any other name would smell as bad, and if we don't want the Klan back then we must avoid creating the conditions that incubated it in the first place.

Is the above a defense of the Klan? Hardly. But let's not make out as if any past association with the Klan is some sort of indelible stain or original sin. Unless someone can dig up some actual terrorism conducted by Byrd's little scam, his past association probably says more about his age and where he grew up than anything else.

Flag burning...

...is a hate crime against veterans and patriots.

So if we must permit it in the name of free speech, let's get all the other hate crime legislation off the books too.

Denzel Washington, great American

Greg Hlatky tells us about it.

Energy policy

The Ergosphere writes here. I wrote comment #4, and maybe there will be more.

Dick Durbin: phony

That was an apology?

Sorry Dick, but you don't wait a week. You don't wait until your whoremasters in Chicago come down on you for it. You don't continue to deplore Guantanamo even as you try to distance yourself from your grossly inappropriate Nazi parallels. You don't make continued references to others' "misunderstandings", and in any case what you said was plain as day - you are the one straining to come up with an alternate interpretation. And if you
want to look more sincere than you did, you'd be taking a step in the right direction by studying Jimmy Swaggart ("I have sinned!").

Video here, via Glenn Reynolds.

I'll confess that I couldn't stand the man before, and I've voted against him every chance I've had. Looking at him was probably what convinced Alan Keyes to run for Senate in IL. Durbin is a party hack all the way regardless of what is good for IL, and the sooner he is gone from Congress the better.

UPDATE: From C-Log. They didn't see an apology either.

Belated recognition

Medpundit points to this item about a man who played a key role in one of the most publicized events in medical history, yet I'm betting that you've never heard of him. I sure hadn't.

What you've been missing

The Daily Dancer.

Wind power follies

...via Kate

CNN and lynching

CNN is showing a feature about a black man who barely escaped lynching and subsequently started the "Black Holocaust Museum" in Milwaukee.

One can quarrel with this idea on several bases. For one, last I knew the Jews weren't selling "Holocaust" franchises. Godwin's Law is due for an extension.

In fact, for all we hear about lynching, we're only talking a few thousand over decades. As bad as that is, it's not in the ballpark with the Holocaust, which killed off around 6 million Jews over a much shorter period. It works out to roughly a 1,000,000% difference. No hair-splitting here.

And not only blacks were lynched. Who made up the rest? Many, including Jews. The Leo Frank case in Atlanta was an example of the latter. I'm not going to jack around with the numbers, but it might be interesting to see which groups were lynched more often as a proportion of their populations.

But what led to this post was the repeated mention of efforts to make lynching a Federal crime. Good grief, why get the feds involved, especially nowadays when it appears that things are under control?

Note to CNN - if more govt is the answer, it's probably a stupid question.

Go big or go home

Rathergate, the Downing Street memos...what's with these people? Doesn't anybody want to do any real work nowadays?

Consider "Baron" James Reavis. He went to churches and archives across the southwestern US, Mexico and Spain examining, altering and forging documents until he convinced a lot of people that he owned a huge tract of land which encompassed much of Arizona and part of New Mexico.

Eventually he was busted and spent a couple of years in the federal pen, but he had a heck of a run in the late 1800's before he was exposed.

Recycled links

This website needs some housekeeping. Some things are hardly changed since day 1 three years ago. OK, so I have respect for tradition. If you want change, there's this guy, with half a dozen names for his blog on about 3 sites that I recall.

Nope, this site reveres the past. In that spirit I'll revive some classics that don't seem to get much buzz nowadays. Such as OddTodd.

Things My Girlfriend and I have Argued About probably ought to be made into a movie with Hugh Grant. For a costar, after her performance in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days", I vote for Kate Hudson. Anyway, it appears that he's been revising and updating this page.

Then there's JoeCartoon, home of the Frog Blender and Gerbil Microwave.

But no matter what, I refuse to link to HampsterDance.

Forgetting anyone?

Normally I'd leave the LA Times beat to Patterico, but I can't let this one pass.

Drudge posted this about a PI threatening a reporter. Could it be?...yes, it's the Pelican, Anthony Pellicano.

He's up to his old tricks again, intimidating women. You might recall that he was also involved with trying to intimidate witnesses against Bill Clinton, such as Kathleen Willey.

Yet somehow Bill Clinton's name was not mentioned in the article. Golly, do you suppose it's an innocent oversight? Or is it not news when a President's known associates does things like this?

An Emily Litella moment

I read about something described as an "oral impotence drug". Say what? Then it dawned on me that it was the dose that was oral, not the condition.

Never mind.

A thread on nuclear power safety issues

I stumbled across this post a couple of days ago. Someone in Australia was concerned about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to attack, and we had some exchanges in the comments.

While reading it I couldn't help but remember a post a couple of weeks ago in which I questioned the manners and productivity of evolutionary biologists, who have so few actual speciation events to claim while responding to critics with bluster, insults and other things unworthy of professionals. I was amused at the strange combination of rudeness and touchiness, and the unfounded accusations about my beliefs coming from those who supposedly revered logic and research.

I can see getting frustrated with some arguments, which can make you wonder just how !@#$@ stupid someone thinks you must be, and I've certainly run into partisans against whom reason contends in vain.

But hey, I don't work at nuke plants any more. I don't even own any stock in companies who own them, and it's been awhile since I've seen anyone I used to work with. I really don't care where my power comes from - as a mechanical engineer I can make money off it no matter what its source.

So by now I speak as one with a decade's worth of relevant firsthand engineering experience without any economic or other conflicts of interest besides a desire to keep the lights on at a price I can afford.

Legal guide for bloggers from EFF

Right here

Misunderstanding

I hate to think of how many job interviews I've had. Doing contract work has often meant that I don't meet my interviewer face to face until I show up for work. In fact, I've participated in a number of successful interviews while flat on my back in bed.

Interviewers have been a mixed lot too. Usually it's one-on-one, but occasionally there are multiple interviewers, and on a speakerphone to boot.

I'm used to these things by now, but some people have a hard time relaxing under such conditions. In terms of stress, it ranks up there with speechmaking.

If you've looked at books about making speeches, they have a number of hints for helping you to relax. One famous book suggested visualizing your audience naked.

And then there's this one: Dancing Naked: Breaking Through the Emotional Limits That Keep You from the Job You Want.

So maybe this guy was only trying to help.

From Drudge.

Greens: - Put your money where your mouth is

Check out AltEnergyStocks.com: The Investor Resource for Alternative Energy Stocks.

40 reasons for gun control

Right here. Snort.

Via Sharp as a Marble"

We're whistleblowers, they're rats

How to tell them apart

Jay Bryant seems to have closed up shop on his blog. But while looking for it, I found this.

Power blogging

Since I started this blog over 3 years ago a number of people have started writing about energy issues. Here are a few:

Alternative Energy Blog - solar, wind, nuclear...
NEI Nuclear News - where Eric McErlain et al keep us abreast of nuclear power issues.
The Ergosphere - the home of Engineer-Poet and a lot of informed talk about energy.
The Knowledge Problem - economics with much discussion of energy issues.
Late entries that I'm less familiar with:
Energy Outlook
Peak Oil Optimist

And I have to tip my hat to Steven Den Beste, one of the best bloggers ever, who has shut down his flagship USS Clueless. Look through his archives for some really good stuff, and wish him well.

Of course none of this is to be confused with Powerblogs. Experienced high-volume high-traffic bloggers like Dean Esmay and the Volokh Conspiracy swear by it.

Jersey justice

I have to wonder if judges don't wake up on some days and ask themselves "who can I screw today?" Try to make sure you're not in the courthouse on those days.

Oh, just read it.

I wonder what it would be like being raised by someone who's on record as saying she might have killed you if she had known that there was a chance you'd turn out like you did? "You changed your mind, right Mom?"

Made in America?

Somewhere in a cave a few weeks ago there might have been a discussion like this:

"I hear some Korans are being torn up and such in Gitmo"

"So? How do you think we start our fires?"

"But they're flushing them down the toilets"

"That is indeed a crime - they should be dried off and used again to start the fires, or perhaps washed and used again"

"But those citizens of the world who make up American journalism think this is a really big deal to us - shouldn't we play along?"

I was under the impression that Islam didn't have much use for idolatry and such. For sure the Wahhabis, who in essence are the bad guys we're fighting in the Middle East, go so far as to redecorate mosques whenever they have taken over. Other, more common strains of Islam are more tolerant.

So what is this about desecrating Korans? Is it a bogus issue from the start, created by Western journalists with no knowledge of Islam? Or is there actually something in Muslim tradition that exempts mere objects like copies of the Koran from concerns about idolatry?

Dancing with the Stars

I managed to catch it this week, and it was a trip. 6 celebrities of the kind that participate in reality shows were paired with 6 top pro dance instructor/performers, and they're competing for marks from the judges and the audience. Each couple must dance one dance a week, with the whole floor to themselves. Of course we have an "execution" at the end of each show starting this week until we have a final winner.

The dances themselves are the so-called standard and Latin dances - the international style. Standard includes foxtrot, waltz, quickstep, Viennese waltz and tango, and Latin includes rumba, cha cha, jive, samba and paso doble. The series is six weeks long, so presumably they'll be doing six of the above. We've seen 4 - the ladies have done waltz and rumba, and the men have done cha cha and quickstep. It would be a crime if the other two weren't tango and jive (think swing/Charleston/Lindy). Standard Viennese waltz is boring (as opposed to American style smooth Viennese waltz), foxtrot is too much like quickstep and waltz, paso doble isn't so accessible and samba just has a little too much personality.

Each dance is rigorously defined for judging purposes by various organizations. Ordinarily the actual choreography is limited to using figures which are "part of the dance", but they're probably a bit relaxed here. There are three judges for each dance in a token attempt to maintain discipline and to give some useful feedback, but the results tell us that the audience rules the roost. Otherwise Kelly Monaco would be gone instead of Trista, with Evander not far behind.

(Evander Who? Yep, that's Evander Holyfield, past heavyweight boxing champion who has "danced" with Mike Tyson et al. One judge had just finished criticizing Evander's quickstep when another proposed that the first be given 5 weeks of training and then put in the ring with Evander).

Watching this could be intimidating to potential dancers. They have to understand that those routines, at least what I've seen so far, would take the average person many many lessons and much practice to learn. We're talking years at typical rates of study and progress. If you see showy moves, it's because they've had several intensive weeks to prepare with the full attention of top pros, and they know that much of their audience won't bust them on technical stuff like the judges will. (Also, the dancers have the floor to themselves, so "floorcraft" isn't an issue - they don't have to work around the other dancers like at real competitions or social gatherings. That makes life a lot simpler for everyone, especially inexperienced men doing standard dances)

A cynic might say that of course it takes time to learn - dance instructors typically get paid by the hour. To that I can only say "try it", and consider that somebody like Joey MacIntyre, who was the youngest man competing, has been dancing for a long time, and presumably wants to look good, had plenty of trouble working with his quickstep routine.

They don't call it quickstep for nothing - you could call it a faster foxtrot that at times looks like calisthenics for two. The tempo wasn't really brutal, but it was plenty for men who weren't professionals, and many of those beats were split into two steps. Anyway, it's harder than it looks, especially when the pros do it. Anyway, I can't wait to see Evander Holyfield attempt it - he'll literally need to be on his toes.

Meanwhile the ladies are doing rumba, which is the slowest Latin dance. It's supposed to be the most erotic, and it definitely doesn't look right if you look like you're dancing with your sister. That seemed to bother Trista, who basically wanted to clear some of it with her husband first (don't worry, honey, you're not your partner's type).

Stacy's Mom has got it goin' on - Rachel Hunter did well, even with some challenging moves. Trista just wasn't into it enough or maybe she just couldn't relax. Kelly Monaco, an ex Playboy Playmate, had no trouble with heat but needed work on her movement.

Joey MacIntyre was OK. John O'Hurley looked the part and got the highest marks. Evander? Well, he was a fan favorite, but he wasn't exactly lightfooted. Just don't tell him I said that.

If you liked the show you might consider going to a dance competition. I'll write about that in another post.

A trip to Mars

It's Tuesday night on the north side of Baltimore and I'm bored. This, from an engineer/IT guy who's studied a fair amount of statistics, accounting and economics. I know bored - this is the real thing.

I don't react well to boredom. Bored engineers are especially dangerous, and the results often include property damage. Bored neighborhood kids used to make pipe bombs out of old lawn furniture, match heads and homemade gunpower, and I marvel to this day that we all escaped with all of our eyeballs and fingers. The worst I ever did on my own was a respectable fire that only caused a little smoke damage and a slightly cracked commode before I put it out.

Well, I did have a dance lesson tonight. Some might prefer boredom - welcome to my life. But hey, my Latin dancing is getting more recognizable.
< rant>!@#$@ metric dancing! - of course those contrary furriners don't do it the same way. You might think that Latin (international style) rumba or cha cha cha (sic) would be the same as rhythm (American style) rumba and cha cha, but no, and they morphed east coast swing into something called "jive". And who came up with that leg-crossing limping-looking thing called samba? They start their rumba on the 2nd beat, which is contrary (although rhythm dances like mambo and salsa do it too). Somehow underarm turns became "alemanas", crossovers are "New Yorks", and what amounts to a right side pass becomes a "hockey stick". And there's exactly one standard "syllabus" of steps for each dance for teaching and competitive judging purpose, instead of the multiplicity we have in the US, so as usual when innovation is needed it comes from the Americans.< /rant>

Natasha was my instructor tonight. She's a young (<20?) girl with the kind of figure you can only get from dancing. Like about all the staff at the studio (website here), she is from Minsk, Belarus or thereabouts. And they're all good - the owners, Igor and Polina Pilipenchuk, have been 10-Dance champions. (Sheesh, how'd they wind up in Towson? Don't tell me - they got bored.)

Then it's off to the Guitar Center almost next door. Oh, the toys! Now if only I had some talent. Or at least a repertoire. But I'm not going to buy anything, so once again I'm bored.

Alright, better head for the motel. But I can't go the same way every time, or straight back - let's go up York Road. Yeah, let's check out the famous Best Buy where they had a guy busted for passing $2 bills. The guy at the door assured me that they accept $2 bills now. He asked me if I had any and I said no, I was just looking for trouble. I would have bought some stuff, but the line was so long that I wasn't going to wait even though there was some spectacular eye candy just a couple of places ahead of me in the line. I guess I should have expected the long line - obviously they'd had trouble hiring good help.

Then at last, my trip to Mars. No, nothing in Rand Simberg's turf - if you're familiar with Baltimore you know Mars is a local grocery chain. I had to ask the deli clerk and the checkout lady the worst lines they'd ever heard playing on the store's name, but they didn't have any ideas. Boring. I guess I'd better leave the JayWalking to the professionals.

Across the street was a Bertucci's, which makes terrific but pricy pizzas. While I was waiting for one the other day I told the kid at the counter that they were going to open a strip joint next door and call it "Bare Tushies". He liked the idea, or at least humored me until I left with my pizza.

Actually boredom itself is kind of boring. What I have must be something special, like ennui. I'm ennuied. Or something like that - Dr. Weevil would know.

That's what I need - a blogger get-together like when I was in St. Louis. We even managed to get a couple of us together on a weeknight when Tim Blair stopped in town on his transAmerican tour a couple of years ago. Around here of course there's Dr. W, intrepid investigator Bryan Preston, curmudgeonly and skeptical Rodger Schultz, and probably a few others I don't know about. And we're not too far from DC, where they have people like Michelle Malkin, "Deacon" Mirengoff of PowerLine, La Shawn Barber and the Galley Slaves. Maybe we can arrange something before I'm out of here around mid July.

Alright, this post is long enough. I may still be bored, but at least now I know you are too.

The EMP Threat

I've been waiting for someone to do a good writeup on this. Read it and weep:

If Osama bin Laden - or the dictators of North Korea or Iran - could destroy America as a twenty-first century society and superpower, would they be tempted to try? Given their track records and stated hostility to the United States, we have to operate on the assumption that they would. That assumption would be especially frightening if this destruction could be accomplished with a single attack involving just one relatively small-yield nuclear weapon - and if the nature of the attack would mean that its perpetrator might not be immediately or easily identified.

Unfortunately, such a scenario is not far-fetched. According to a report issued last summer by a blue-ribbon, Congressionally-mandated commission, a single specialized nuclear weapon delivered to an altitude of a few hundred miles over the United States by a ballistic missile would be "capable of causing catastrophe for the nation." The source of such a cataclysm might be considered the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction" (WMD) - yet it is hardly ever mentioned in the litany of dangerous WMDs we face today. It is known as electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

Read the rest here
Incidentally, in case anyone has forgotten, it's the Democrats who oppose missile defense. Remember that if you ever find yourself sitting in the dark, with a heap of ruined electronics equipment (including your computer), and no idea what happened or when it will be fixed.

Queer behavior

I was talking to a young mother the other day who was disturbed that her children were calling each other "faggot". We traced it back to a 10 year old boy who apparently uses it regularly as a general purpose pejorative.

I know the kid's family, and I've never ever heard them use that word, whether describing sausages, embers or gays. It's not as if it's common on TV or pop music (I don't think I've heard it on the radio at all except for an occasional uncensored version of "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits). So where did he get that from?

Apparently he got it from his school buddies. I'll grant that things were tamer when I was his age, but I didn't run across that word until I was about 12 or so. Even then I had to look it up in the dictionary - it hadn't occurred to me that there was such a thing as homosexuality.

A few years earlier I had heard a family friend use a certain compound word in a context where he clearly disapproved of someone's behavior, but he didn't say it as if it were profane. Cool - now I had a new name for the kids I couldn't catch if we were playing tag. So I hollered it at the top of my lungs one summer's day before AC was popular, so the people who weren't cooling off outside could hear it through their windows for blocks around.

I was summoned and grilled about this. No, I didn't know what it meant, but it really didn't take much thinking to figure it out. People did that? Well, I guess that's what the girls were doing in those pictures I found, but I thought they were gross.

I learned more as time went on. About the time I learned "faggot" I remember learning a word for a certain sexual practice which kind of revolted and amused me, and I immediately embraced the word as a nickname for a kid named Cornell. But even then it was in a heterosexual context. I could figure out that it could be done to either sex, but that was just in principle - it never occurred to me that men actually did it to each other. (and later I learned that it wasn't even reciprocal. Not that way, ya perv - I mean that there are two roles, and typically the "tops" didn't trade places with the "bottoms". If I'm wrong, well, ignorance has its place.)

Would my education have been better served with information like this? (Nasty Material Alert!) It seems that it's something of a priority to present such, um, educational material in the hands of kids.

Would it have harmed me? I guess it would depend on how much influence my teachers had on me, and whether my parents had found out. I hadn't had any counter-education, so my reactions were my own, and I don't know that I was different from other local kids in that regard.

So I have to wonder if this type of education won't backfire on the proponents.

"Anti-gay hate screechers outwitted, outmaneuvered"

In the Lord of the Rings someone proposed killing Gollum just because. Gandalf replied that he might yet have a role to play. What do you know, he did.

Now we have Fred Phelps's "god hates fags" crowd again, getting ink in MA. These creeps thrive on publicity - why give it to them?

Because the schools are trying to change the subject. They want the media to help them outshout the parents who are outraged that this was available at a gay/lesbian promotion at a MA high school. And of course they're trying to establish equivalence between their opponents and Fred Phelps - if you disagree with them, you must "hate fags".

Hey, don't go thinking that administrators don't attempt to protect kids from stuff they "shouldn't see":

Clever maneuvering by educators in Lexington and Dracut yesterday spared school children from protesters visiting from a gay-hating Midwestern church.

Buses to Joseph Estabrook Elementary School in Lexington pulled up to the back entrance, bypassing the groupwaving ``God hates fags'' signs.

In Dracut, students attended schoolwide assemblies in the Englesby Intermediate School gym and cafeteria - thus emptying classrooms, some of which have a view of the street.

``I came to make sure they couldn't see what's going on out here,'' said outraged Dracut parent Sheri Ritchie, who has two children in the school.

She joined a couple hundred counter-protesters who turned out to oppose anti-gay activists from Topeka, Kan., Westboro Baptist Church. Nine members of the church, including two young children, also took their rolling demonstration to John Glenn Middle School in Bedford.

``There's no voice here speaking for God. These children, these people, are entitled for once in their life to hear the unapologetic, unvarnished truth about what the Lord their God requires of them,'' church member Shirley Phelps-Roper said outside the Lexington school.

Why were they there?

Dracut attracted the hate group's attention after a student wrote an essay about gay talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Bedford flew a rainbow flag at John Glenn Middle School, and Lexington grabbed headlines when a parent demanded to be notified when his child was taught about gay lifestyles.

Got that? A parent dares to demand notification about what his kid is being taught, and the school system has a problem with it. If that same kid had objected to a cross in the classroom, or acknowledgement of the scientific truth that evolution is properly described as a theory you can bet the coverage would have a different tone.

Oh yeah, some from the sinister side of the blogosphere have been trying the usual stunt of denying that distribution of that black book linked above had actually occurred. Nice try, creeps - check this out. In what is otherwise a rant against groups they don't like, including a reference to Matthew Shepard even, they manage to acknowledge that "a local AIDS Action group brought, and made available, explicit sexual materials that are totally inappropriate for high school students". Yeah, right - his only objection is probably that the books didn't have anything explicit for the lesbians.

Anyway, despite his intentions, Fred Phelps might actually have done some good. Without his groups' presence, there might not have been any publicity at all about this nonsense.

Charade

Let's quit pretending that this medicinal mariijuana legalization business is about anything but legalizing pot across the board.

Is it about providing a better product for consumers? I'll believe that when the medicinal marijuana users give up administering pot in a "wild" form and instead submit it to a process to assure consistent dosage consistent with requirements for pharmaceuticals.

Is it about state's rights? Yeah, right - where are you guys when people are talking about Roe v. Wade? There are always plenty of fair-weather federalists. Maybe the Court found a right to be free of pot smokers in some "penumbra" or "emanation" from the Constitution, and were just too stoned to write it down.

I can't get too wound up about pot, or much of anything else in the War on Drugs (especially civil forfeiture laws). I don't know any long-term potheads who are worth a hoot, but then I wouldn't like them any better as drunks either. If someone wants to foul up their life, they'll find a way.

But those who want federalism to be taken seriously didn't have to wait for this decision to start complaining.

Information from Guantanamo Detainees

A discussion of detainees, their skills, training and other things.

Stolen from Ace, who has lots of other good stuff on that post too.

Raising the dead

Or at least the next best thing - resurrecting 80's performers. See it yourself on Thursdays on NBC. Take it away, Ace.

Riding Sun: What is being done in our name

Many people linked to this post, but I want to point out this comment on it in particular.

From Star bellied Sneeches to "Brights" and now this

I tried, but I can't improve on this:

"'Reality-Based'
OK. I'm officially sick of it. The very moment folks started calling themselves 'members of the reality-based community,' it made me want to wretch on my Pumas. Why not be honest and call yourself a proud member of the 'you're either stupid or evil if you don't agree with me community?' I understand the supposed contrast with 'faith-based' and the ironic embrace of its derisively intended non-opposite. But come on, really. I think we all understand and appreciate what a hard-headed empiricist you are by not attending Sunday school. Your epistemic virtue bowls us over. But just maybe it's time for new blog slogans, people. Why not try something along 'my scat smells like honey-based' or 'self-congatulation-based' lines? "

It might sound a bit better from one with a tagline other than "the sweet release of reason". You know, as if he ejaculates the stuff.

Via Andrew Hofer, blogger extraordinaire who knows a true liberal when he sees one.

Dancing with the Stars

At last, a reality show I might watch. It's on ABC on Wednesdays 9/8c - check it out here.

You knew it would happen...

Yep - someone is proposing a ban on kitchen knives.

Via Drudge.

Arab success in the US

Glenn Reynolds points to an interesting article here about how successful Arabs are in the US. In fact, according to the article the average Arab in the US has an average income and education higher than the average American. It would be interesting to see them compared to the average Jew in the US, but I'm just not motivated enough to look it up right now.

It's interesting on its face, but I have to wonder if this isn't skewed by some huge outliers. After all, an Arab who can make it to the US was probably doing really well at home already.

The good old days - they were terrible!

It's hard to go wrong heading over to Dean Esmay's place, but this post in particular will be memorable.

Nowadays there's no excuse for letting this living history leave us without documentation. I just lost a WWII veteran a week ago, and one of these days I'll have to debrief a woman who was born in pre-Nazi Germany who *wasn't* Jewish (however unsympathetic they may be, if you think the average German citizen had it easy you're mistaken).

For a taste of a still earlier time there's always the Otto Bettmann classic "The Good Old Days - They were Terrible!", or a number of books by that old lefty Studs Terkel.

Unevolved

If you should ever see a jackass wearing a mortarboard exiting a biology department, it might well answer to the name "Hoppe". From a post attacking someone who dares to dissent from evolutionary dogma, quoth Richard Hoppe:

What it means is that Rubinstein is pig-ignorant of biology, is what it means. He has not the slightest clue, and passes off his clueless “best inference”, grounded on false premises, as a statement about evolutionary theory when in fact it’s a statement about his ignorance of the theory he egregiously misrepresents.

I am less interested in the specific errors, misrepresentations, and plain dumb crap in Rubinstein’s piece than I am in the question of how a presumably intelligent person could bring himself to publicly display such breathtaking ignorance, when the resources necessary to rectify that ignorance are as readily available to his readers as to himself. I am frankly puzzled. Does he really think his readers are as ignorant as he is and that they can’t (or won’t) do a tiny bit of reading on their own? (Don’t answer that!)

Is this how evolutionary biologists discuss their field? Venting my eye - the rest isn't much better, and it's unworthy of anyone claiming the appellation "scientist" or "gentleman".

About every discussion of evolution on the Web, including the one cited above, winds up with someone pointing to talk.origins. This is an interesting website which gathers a lot of useful information about evolutionary biology in one place with the alleged intent of contributing toward discussions of evolution vs. creation.

One hopes that Professor Hoppe approves of the following, inasmuch as he linked to the page:

The literature on observed speciations events is not well organized. I found only a few papers that had an observation of a speciation event as the author's main point (e.g. Weinberg, et al. 1992). In addition, I found only one review that was specifically on this topic (Callaghan 1987). This review cited only four examples of speciation events. Why is there such a seeming lack of interest in reporting observations of speciation events?

In my humble opinion, four things account for this lack of interest. First, it appears that the biological community considers this a settled question. Many researchers feel that there are already ample reports in the literature. Few of these folks have actually looked closely. To test this idea, I asked about two dozen graduate students and faculty members in the department where I'm a student whether there were examples where speciation had been observed in the literature. Everyone said that they were sure that there were. Next I asked them for citings or descriptions. Only eight of the people I talked to could give an example, only three could give more than one. But everyone was sure that there were papers in the literature.

Second, most biologists accept the idea that speciation takes a long time (relative to human life spans). Because of this we would not expect to see many speciation events actually occur. The literature has many more examples where a speciation event has been inferred from evidence than it has examples where the event is seen. This is what we would expect if speciation takes a long time.

Third, the literature contains many instances where a speciation event has been inferred. The number and quality of these cases may be evidence enough to convince most workers that speciation does occur.

Finally, most of the current interest in speciation concerns theoretical issues. Most biologists are convinced that speciation occurs. What they want to know is how it occurs. One recent book on speciation (Otte and Endler 1989) has few example of observed speciation, but a lot of discussion of theory and mechanisms.

I guess you can't help but admire the faith of these biologists in things not actually observed. Sorry, but these inferences of speciation events simply aren't any more scientific than inferences of creation events.

And if the cases cited are in fact true examples of speciation events (whatever they might be - look around on the page), still there were only 4 of them. This, for a theory more than a century old, out of something like 1.7 million described species of an estimated 14 million altogether. I think I'd be scurrying my tochas back into the lab looking for more examples before I got all huffy about anyone daring to question my pet theory. And I'd like to see it apply a few more notches up the alleged evolutionary ladder from Drosophila (fruit flies). (another link on the page points to more alleged examples, but they have their flaws - maybe I'll get around to fleshing that out in a later post).

Let the crying begin: Some of the fossils are gone! We haven't found them all yet! Many of the species have soft bodies and are not adequately preserved in the fossil record! Evolutionary processes take a long time! And so on. The answer to them all is tough luck, kid - the evidence is supposed to be there to support your theory.

And if you don't have it, you have no right to complain when someone points it out and notes that other scientific fields are more demanding of their theories. Spend your time researching instead of defending your faith with content-free invective like Hoppe.

Practice "safe sun"

Scientists are excited about a vitamin again. But unlike fads that sizzled and fizzled, the evidence this time is strong and keeps growing. If it bears out, it will challenge one of medicine's most fundamental beliefs: that people need to coat themselves with sunscreen whenever they're in the sun. Doing that may actually contribute to far more cancer deaths than it prevents, some researchers think.

Next thing you know, they'll find something redemptive about tobacco. Actually I thought I'd read that it helped suppress TB (the TB bug doesn't like the smoke either), but I can't find the cite.

Link via Drudge.

Remember this the next time they talk about "hypocrisy"

If the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were reviewing the Democrats' filibuster choices, it would have grounds for a disparate-impact lawsuit.

Plush Cthulhu

Is a child you know having nightmares? If not, you can always give them this

Shut up and teach

Apparently 1/3 of the faculty at Calvin College is comprised of jackasses. The President is scheduled to be their commencement speaker and they're braying about the war.

Two bodied guitar?

Seeing is believing. The owner, Glenn Branca, plays it with a slide.

I'd call it weird, but then blogging about it from my phone isn't exactly mainstream either.

From Gizmodo.

Treo 650 blogging

If you see this post, it can be done. It isn't the easiest way, but then I really ought to RTFM about this keyboard.

We do too have standards

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I've seen the future, and it's creepy

People with less compassion and taste than I have been known to compile lists of tasks that could be performed by the profoundly disabled. Most of these involved things like buoyancy, body heat or inertia. Others proposed that the person in question leave their tongue hanging out for the moistening of stamps and envelopes.

Technology has rendered that moistening function mostly obsolete nowadays. But as it takes, it also gives in return. Now these people who can't or won't be productive otherwise can be used as a supply for this device which produces electricity from human blood.

Actually there are better things to be done with these devices, which run on glucose in your blood. I wonder if these somehow could be used to help diabetics regulate their blood sugar. Or perhaps it could power, say, little plows to clear away emboli in the bloodstream. Less exotically, perhaps they could power pacemakers.

Kofi Tweed

There's good work here on the renovations planned for the UN. But it's on Power Line, so that goes without saying.

I'm guessing that it's not easy to impress NY commercial real estate people with renovation costs, but as one writes in the post, "the UN could tear down the entire facility and rebuild it brand new with the most state of the art improvements for 40-50% of the proposed renovation." It goes on to say that "incompetence alone does not account for the astronomical cost of the proposed renovation".

Maybe this is good news. After all, inflated construction costs on NYC landmarks led to the end of the incredibly corrupt "Tweed Ring".

Wow, another coincidence. Both the UN and Boss Tweed had support from the Democratic Party.

Political whore

I despise Ron Reagan. The least the pipsqueak could do is change his name.

Inspired by this MSNBC video.

We heard the same sorry line about how Iraq was our ally while the Kurds were being gassed in the late 80's during "my father's" administration. Good thinking, Ronnie boy. Now let's blame Roosevelt for every atrocity committed by the Russians during WWII while they were our allies against what's his name.

You like moral equivalency, Ronnie? How about you and a pus from a chancre on a Nazi's bung?

Ballblogging...

You'll see some of the best ballroom dancers in the country there in the Brunswick Hilton Hotel and Towers at the American Star Ball this weekend. All of youse New Yorkers who have more culture than Charlie the Tuna should be there - East Brunswick isn't that far away, even if it is in NJ. I'll be there watching some of my professional friends compete. Anyway, there's more info here.

Chutzpah

NARAL Pro-Choice America, the abortion lovers, are not content with simply doing their utmost to see that more fetuses (that's "babies" to normal people) are killed. Now they want to kill some judicial nominations.

Yep, they've hired some slimemeisters to request financial disclosure records for various judges who are possibilities for nomination to the Supreme Court. Conservatives, that is.

Of course this is permissible, and the financial disclosures are required. But this is different:

Jones was not alone as a target, and Rice is not just a nosy citizen. He and Craig Varoga, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, are partners in a California political consulting firm. Their May 5 petition requested financial information on 30 appellate judges in all but one of the country's judicial circuits, including nine widely mentioned Supreme Court possibilities. Varoga & Rice's client: NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Nobody can recall any previous mass request for such disclosures by federal judges.

The Dems are nothing if not innovators, especially with sliming their opponents.

But I'm sure that this isn't the end. How much do you want to bet that the day will come that NARAL will insist that the judges in question recuse themselves from NARAL cases on the grounds that they might hold this snooping against NARAL?

Dennis "Cat" Avner

Right here. What can be said?

Travel guitars and amps

I flew into town for the current gig, which is expected to last about a month. Flying and guitars don't mix so well, so I didn't take one with me.

But I suffered withdrawal symptoms and had to go find a cheapie locally that I can ditch later if I can't fit it into the vehicle I'll be driving back. Or maybe give to a young relative. Nah, Goodwill sounds better - it might get destroyed either way, but that way I won't have to watch.

Of course someone else thinks they have the answer for guitarists who travel. Behold, the SoloEtte Travel Guitar. I haven't tried it, but it got a testimonial from Sharon Isbin. If she says it can help her maintain her technique and repertoire it's good enough for me.

More venerable is the Chiquita, which appeared in a Back to the Future movie and was used by the likes of Billy Gibbons. The ad says it's about a foot shorter than a Strat.

What about amplification? Here I show my age by mentioning the still-available Pignose. Or Tom Scholz' Rockman, which was noisy and had no speakers but was terrific for its time. The more modern musician might want this, which as the ad says, "great for running out of your girlfriend's house after a fight".

This gizmo probably doesn't belong here, but then why would I start showing any discipline now? Anyway, plug in your guitar, mic, line in, line out or headphones and you're in business - speed up or slow down music without shifting pitch, or shift pitch, or endlessly repeat something until you get it down - man, what I wouldn't have given for this 20-odd years ago. Throw in some Practice Tracks like these and you can jam 24-7 all by yourself, and the whole works is small enough to travel with.

Now if you'll pardon me, it's jam time...

Convergence

Gimme gimme:

Touch screen, VoIP, IPTV, HDTV, dual boot Linux and Windows, DVD player, 5.1 Dolby Sound, USB 2.0, and starting at $850.00. This device is destined to end up in hotels, hospitals, conference rooms, dormitories, airports, and consumer homes. Combine it all and here you have it: the all-in-one for the budget consumer.

Via
LIVEdigitally

PETA Kills Animals

More here.

Dirty pool? Yep. And who deserves it more than PETA?

Goddess of software....

If there are still worshippers of ancient Greek gods out there, they've probably been busy hanging new responsibilities on the old guys and gals. Aphrodite would get boob jobs and cosmetic surgery, Hephaestus would get robotics and microchip fabrication, Hermes would have the space shuttle and electric power generation, etc. Demeter might get genetically modified foods and sun lamps, and Hades would sponsor the Democratic Party. I'm not touching Uranus.

(Maybe old afflictions would change too - I suspect that Sisyphus would be a programmer. I can't think of good ones for Persephone and Tantalus).

Who would get software? That sounds like Athena turf to me when she wasn't sponsoring the Republicans and fighting Dionysius for the colleges and the libertarians. But then since it runs about everything nowadays Zeus and Hera would want to horn in, and Hera would outsmart Zeus, so Hera it is.

And here apparently someone wants to give a piece of the software action to Demeter

Cloning musical performances

I suppose if you're a good cook and you taste something new made of ingredients you know, you could more or less derive exactly what would have to be done to reproduce it. But it would be quite another accomplishment to, say, pour a martini into a machine and have it determine the recipe and manufacturing process. ("The booze was Bombay Sapphire, the vermouth was brand X in proportion Y/Z to the gin, the olive was from southern Spain, and it was shaken, not stirred")

Musical performances offer similar issues - any idiot can record something, but it's quite another thing to record the *way it was played*. That is, to capture the performance in such a way as to be able to duplicate it on other instruments to the extent applicable, right down to the tiniest nuances in pitch, tempo and dynamics. Or if you're an electronic music geek, to convert a complex performance to MIDI without human intervention. But listen to this:

First, an original recording is digitized at the highest possible quality. Then, their custom-designed software then models the exact combination of pedal, hammer velocity and impact angle, and timing needed to produce each note in the song. They claim their system is so robust that line noise, voices, or singing have no effect. The software records this data in a special MIDI format file which has 7 times the descriptive variables and 10 times the resolution of a standard MIDI file. Then, this file is "performed" by a Yamaha Disklavier PRO Grand piano. Unlike the "roboplayers" you may have heard in Malls and Restaurants, this machine has orders of magnitude more precise movement and sensing, as well as separate CPUs for pedal and keyboard movement.

All this pulls together to deliver the impossible: Zenph claims that their system reproduces the actual performance of the musician, past the level of precision that the human ear can detect.

The reproduction is so perfect that re-performance isn't the only thing the setup is good for. Great pianists travel to Zenph's studio just to record themselves on the piano, and then have it replayed while sitting in various places around the auditorium. Having never heard yourself play like this, it can be a very moving experience. The robotic piano is so precise that artists record pieces into memory and return later with sound engineers to turn that program into sound

More here.

Via Gizmodo.

ID for thee but not for me

Michelle Malkin offers a SPECIAL REPORT: INSIDE AN ILLEGAL ALIEN RALLY.

It's kind of long, so I'll just highlight what IMO is the best part. Of course the illegal aliens were bitching about having to have documentation. But when Michael Graham arrived in an INS T-shirt and showed his ID as a journalist with WMAL/ABC News, the organizers told him he didn't have proper ID to attend.

Road chow the NWA way

Most places I stay have coffeemakers. I don't drink much of the stuff, so mostly I put them away so I don't break the urn.

Then it dawned on me - all it is is a little water heater. It turns out to work pretty well with instant oatmeal. Dump in the right amount of water, empty the little envelope(s) into the bowl, put it under the spout, check your email and there it is. Next up - ramen noodles.

Road follies

I'll agree that motel maids need not know a whole lot of English, but they really ought to know what it means when I put up a "do not disturb" sign. STAY OUT!

There are many reasons why you might put one up. In my case I just had left my laptop and some other stuff out that had some identity theft potential unlocked and in plain view. Being in a hurry and not wanting to deal with it, I just stuck the DND sign in the slot (they can't miss it). I had a big mess of trash to take out, but I figured I could deal with that myself later.

I got back that night and the bed had been made. No catastrophe, but it did mean that the maids had been in there. Likewise something had been unplugged for some reason and other things were not as I had left them. I made a mental note to tell the manager.

Then I remembered I needed to fill out one of those !@#$ rebate things for Best Buy. They all require some sort of relic from the packaging, so I had torn the relevant part loose from the box and pitched the rest. The last time I remember seeing it it was on the floor next to the bed along with the receipt and other crapola they demand before they ransom your money months later. (Just how often do they actually pay out the rebates, anyway?)

Well guess what? Apparently the staff had pitched it. It was a $30 rebate so I looked everywhere for it to no avail. The receipt had been placed next to the bed, and I'd had it all together for safekeeping.

Could it be in the trash? Why? Surely they would have carried it out, right? Hey, it's $30 and it's *my* trash - let's look. Hope swells as I see that in fact they have not carried out the trash as I would have expected them to do, but no - the tokens

Ha! - it wasn't there.

Well, at least I could take out the trash, right? Sure, after I put everything into a new bag after the original one ripped. Grrr. Where is that manager!?

Why the birds quit singing...

Yes, I've been scarce lately. I did a stretch of 6 beds in 7 days, during which I moved from MD to IL and back again. So now I'm in Baltimore instead of DC, my fourth industry, fourth location (soon to be fifth) and fifth job since starting this blog a bit over 3 years ago.

To go where no man has gone before...

Could it be that Trekkies are especially likely to be pedophiles?

Academic recall

If you went to Brown University, keep an eye on your mailbox. Soon you will be getting a recall notice for your education. Those with bachelors' degrees may perform remedial work at select institutions such as Hillsdale College. All those with advanced degrees will be lobomized.

Of course if you're from Brown University you might believe this. Why not? - apparently some of you believe we were carpet-bombing Fallujah.

So let me note that none of the above is true to my knowledge. But then I hear that I'm conservative, so can you really trust me?

Close enough

Years ago I heard a joke that promised good news and bad. The bad news was that aliens had landed. The good news was that they excreted gasoline and ate [members of an unfavored minority group].

Who would have guessed we'd find something almost as good right here on Earth.

Recommended by abortionists

Years ago the "Seinfeld" series introduced us to the concept of "spongeworthiness". A man was "spongeworthy" if Elaine would invest one of her precious few remaining sponges on a date with him.

I didn't watch the show much, so I can't speak for Elaine's intentions. But I propose a new way to determine this. A man is "spongeworthy" if 1) he would make a good father, or 2) he'd be willing and able to pay for an abortion.

The overall 1st year failure rate, for women who have not given birth (nulliparous), is 9% with perfect use, and 20% with typical use. For women who have given birth (parous) the failure rate is 20% with perfect use, and 40% with typical use. [See also specific brand failure rates.]

If your partner uses a condom, the sponge's ability to protect you against an unintended pregnancy is greatly improved.

That last part is depressing, because condoms aren't exactly 100% effective either. Nevertheless, if the little squirt runs the gauntlet successfully you should sign him up for the Navy Seals.

There's more. After a long list of virtues we see that the sponges also introduce a "small risk of toxic shock syndrome" and an increased risk of transmitting HIV. Maybe we should add more criteria to "spongeworthiness".

Are these risks "high"? The article doesn't say. IMO it would be interesting to compare these risks to those of, say, a plane crash, or of getting lung cancer if you're a smoker.

You might think that those comparisons would not be fair because they usually end up in death. Think again - the whole point of an abortion is to kill something (and abortionists don't always do that right either. Did anyone ever go to med school with the intent of becoming an abortionist?).

Oh, that doesn't count - it's just a "bundle of cells". Well, if you think abortions can't cause *your* death or other unpleasant permanent conditions you'd better do a little research, because nobody in the abortion industry is going to tell you. All that stuff that used to happen in pro-abortionists' legendary back alleys still happens today.

Well, they might give you a disclaimer to sign which lists dozens and dozens of things that could happen. Then they'll say "our lawyers make us do this" and keep you waiting until you've signed - of course no one would dare call this "duress".

The list might include things like permanent inability to have children, hemorrhage, endometriosis (in case they don't fish out all the dismembered parts of your little parasite) ... Or perhaps a puncture between the vagina and the rectum or urethra - guess what happens then? You need that like you need another...never mind.

Isn't it funny how so many who otherwise would bristle at risky operations, malpractice, product liability and conflicts of interest turn a blind eye at abortion?

Do I want to make abortion illegal? No. But I want women considering it, or considering doing what could result in the need for it, to realize exactly what they're getting into. And because high-profile pro-abortionists like Planned Parenthood make a lot of money from abortions and thus have a severe conflict of interest, they're not likely to spread the word.

I guess you could say I support a woman's right to *informed* choice. IMO if women are well informed, they'll usually either abstain or keep the child for themselves or an adoptive parent. Of the remaining women who get abortions anyway, well, legality wouldn't matter to them and if they want that kid dead they'll have many more chances...

The cites above are from here, via Glenn Reynolds.