Mickey Mouse competition

"Dancing with the Stars" just ended with a touch of justice - we're finally free of this year's winner of the Master P award, Billy Ray Cyrus. I can't see how anyone besides a Howard Stern fan could have ever voted for him based on his dancing skills. Heather Mills outperformed him for sure, but she was voted off two weeks ago. After Billy Ray who can they follow up with - Larry Flynt?

Oh no, not on ABC. We couldn't have a smut peddler on Disney's network.

Yes, Disney owns ABC. Disney also happens to purvey "Hannah Montana", a show starring....Billy Ray Cyrus! Who also records music on the Disney label. Somehow no one saw fit to acknowledge that, and this week host Tom Bergeron even prompted Billy Ray to mention his album.

Hmm, am I suggesting anything? Not yet. But I wouldn't be shocked in the slightest to find that the show had a production meeting every Tuesday morning with the producers, suits and the judges. There, like the producers of professional wrestling, they would decide what is to happen next in order to get and sustain high ratings. If they can work what amounts to a big commercial into what is nominally the entertainment part of the broadcast so much the better. How else to explain Billy Ray's scores from the *judges*?

Not convinced? How about that huge sloppy wet kiss they gave in the form of a retrospective of his time on the show? Yeah, he's "entertaining" to some, but then so is professional wrestling.

Of course the voters haven't distinguished themselves either, and I shudder at the thought that they might be using similar criteria to vote in *political* elections. Good grief, Joey Fatone finished next to last behind Ian Ziering?

Oh sure, it's cool to some to rip on Joey's former band, NSync, and Joey has probably rubbed some fans the wrong way. But if you want to watch Ian Ziering, I'm sure his old show is in reruns somewhere (and Billy Ray's show is in production still). If you don't like good dancing, fine - don't watch the show. Or at least don't vote, so the rest of us can see the better dancers.

Yeah, I'll keep watching. Likewise, sometimes I don't turn the channel when pro wrestling comes on. It doesn't have to be a competently judged contest or even honest competition to be entertaining.

Weaving gold into straw

Sometimes people don't appreciate how management can foul things up. Being here in Chicago, I use the 1990s Bulls as an example. Suppose Phil Jackson had benched Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and played BJ Armstrong at center and Ed Nealy at point guard. Would the Bulls have won 6 championships in 8 years that way?

Or perhaps Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense ought to be pulling a plow?

Now I have a journalism example too. It appears that incredibly gifted columnist/blogger/father James Lileks will now be a reporter.

Associated partisans

Greensburg, KS was obliterated by a super strong tornado a few days ago. And what did the Associated Press want to write about?

In Kansas, the governor said the state's response was limited by the shifting of emergency equipment, such as tents, trucks and semitrailers, to the war in Iraq.

"Not having the National Guard equipment, which used to be positioned in various parts of the state, to bring in immediately is really going to handicap this effort to rebuild," she said.

Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the adjutant general's office, which manages state resources during emergencies, said the state has a shortage of heavy equipment transport trailers, pallet-sized loading systems, Humvees, dump trucks and other large equipment that would be help move massive amount of debris.

"We are never at 100 percent because we are allocated a certain amount from the National Guard Bureau. With the war, we are much shorter than we would be. We have about 40 percent of what is allocated," Watson said.

And they say that *blogs* don't have editors. Is it news when a Democrat administration (funny how that detail was omitted) taking a cheap shot at the war in Iraq? If this is what passes for news reporting, why not add something like "Democrat leaders lost no time in politicizing yet another natural disaster in hopes of wringing advantage from the blood of the victims."

If the Red Cross or other private groups had programs for relief they went unmentioned. But we did read this:

City Administrator Steve Hewitt said his job Monday would be to get city government working again. He said he needed to find employees, get purchase orders out, pay employees and bills _ in short, create commerce again in Greensburg.

"Get government going _ that is our No. 1 priority," Hewitt said.

I would expect that someone who made a living from the govt would say that. But "create commerce again"? Sheesh, is the govt the only thing going in Greensburg? And does it belong in the article?

"Bring the convicts home!"

Rosie O'Donnell is a disgrace. Yet again.

Pro choice

The sex educators had some fun a couple of weeks ago at Jane Galt's. They decided that kids have to have it in our public schools, and that's all there is to it. The comments have been closed and this is too longwinded anyway, so here is my no doubt long-awaited take.

Sex education? Sure, there are plenty of things every human being ought to know about it. But perhaps the main one is simply discipline, whether you're talking keeping your hands off the interns , having sex in church, masturbating in a theater, soliciting gay sex in a public bathroom, a quickie in a car parked on the street or plenty of other things that can be and have been done with people who presumably know more than enough to avoid disease and unwanted pregnancy. Teaching restraint and manners is a lifetime job, and liberals throw a fit any time a public school tries to teach anything that smacks of an ideology other than their own secular religion that dares not speak its name. Yet even the liberals worship condoms, the use of which (or alternatives) requires discipline in itself and fails regularly enough even when used as directed.

And what of consequences of their actions? About the severest consequences modern kids ever suffer in daily life are perhaps losses at video games. Not everything can be reset and restarted, yet we have people trying to eliminate winning and losing from kids' lives lest they suffer a blow to their self-esteem. Yeah, far better than they should learn of consequences from maternity wards, abortion mills, public health clinics or cops. If we want kids to be responsible about sex, maybe we should teach them to be responsible, period. You can't expect it to be taught in schools, especially to kids who don't even have to do chores or earn money.

You also can't teach anybody much of anything practical in sex education. Well, besides unrolling condoms on bananas. That's not very practical unless they're holding the banana below the waist while they're hornier than goats with three testicles and the banana is subject to going bad any instant. And with young guys that might even be enough to end the show (for a couple of minutes, anyway).

When I was a kid there was no sex education in the public schools I attended, but there wasn't a force in the universe that could have stopped me from finding out everything I could on the subject. But knowing how and why sperm are discharged into a vagina didn't help me achieve same, or to get further opportunities if I ever succeeded.

Now what are schools for, anyway? They're publicly funded because we're interested in producing good citizens. Social engineering for sure, but it's intended to complement the parents, not displace them. They don't and shouldn't have the kids 24/7, so they can't teach the kinds of things that require 24/7 teaching (they can only counter them). And the things that require 24/7 teaching would be pretty much anything but the 3 Rs, history, science, vocational education and maybe PE.

What's more, why have the schools teach kids things that they're sure to pick up on their own if they're interested? IMO sex education falls in that category. Likewise with art and music - let the kids stay after school for that if they want it, or leave it as an elective for kids with acceptable achievement in the core subjects.

One of the best things people should be taught is to get the fundamentals right. Apparently liberal school reformers didn't get the news - like all liberals, they'd rather have govt institutions do dozens of things poorly than a few things right. So we clutter schools with irrelevant nonsense at the expense of fundamentals, like a would-be basketball player who can't dribble, pass or shoot but spends his time practicing slam-dunks.

Hey, if you want your kids to get sex education, teach them yourself. If you're not qualified, just how did you have kids, anyway? If you didn't know what caused them then, surely you've learned something since, right?

(Well alright, maybe you adopted the kid(s). Fine. Remind them that even though their mother didn't keep them, she didn't kill them, and maybe they ought to think about that if they ever contemplate an abortion.)

Face it, there simply aren't any good defensible reasons for requiring sex education in schools. There are some bad ones though. Like this. Even if we must require sex ed in the schools, there's no place for that - it's about promoting particular lifestyles, not any sort of essential knowledge.

Hey, I'm just being "pro-choice"...

Short memories

Read something like this and it's easy to imagine the fall of civilization. Well, yeah, this was worse, but how anyone can vote for Democrats after what we've seen so far is amazing. Stay home, vote 3rd party, *something*, but don't vote for those creeps.

And has everyone forgotten how miserable everything got when the Dems ran the show with numbers that could defeat filibusters and we had that insufferable sanctimonious wuss Jimmy Carter in the White House? They fouled things up so badly that we elected Ronald Reagan. We hear plenty of moaning about current circumstances, but the numbers from the Carter years show that this is nothing but partisan yammering. If you want it back, all you have to do is vote Dem.

Voting for and even declaring failure in the Middle East? Nothing the Republicans have done even compares to this Dem disgrace. And here in IL Gov. Blagojevich is grasping for huge programs like a madman while he can - the last couple of Dem governors of IL have wound up in prison upon leaving office, and he's under serious investigation.

Yet lack of enthusiasm for voting for Republicans is understandable. They never had large margins of control, they had the press fighting back tooth and nail, and many of their numbers were RINOS anyway, but still they didn't deliver what people wanted from them. So if govt is to be about nothing but wealth transfers and impotent posturing after all, we might as well vote for the Dems.

But when people like some of my relatives, who have a history of voting Democrat, start cussing the Dems, something's going on.

Did we learn nothing from Bill Clinton?

More examples of armed citizens resisting mass killers

Right here.

Membership of the Congresses of the United States

Greg Hlatky has done a lot of dogged work putting together this page - check it out.

In which I too mock Sheryl Crow

Sheryl Crow has definitely soaked up too much sun. If you read the news or any blogs yesterday you've heard of her policy prescription for saving the planet. Yep, just one square of TP per trip, folks. What with her hippie predilections we should be happy she uses any at all. And I can't wait to hear her address feminine hygiene.

I wonder if Rosie O'Donnell will be following along? Eww, that one square ain't gonna do it. She'll need to use the roofer's definition of a square - 100 square feet. Whether that will be sufficient remains to be seen - paparazzi, do your stuff!

Now just to show how classy and restrained this blog is, not that *I* didn't write anything like some of the blog comments I saw in various places. For instance, it's been suggested that the departure of Lance Armstrong was related to, um, paperwork. Stuff like that has no place on this blog so I'd never write it here. And certain words don't appear in this blog either, so I didn't title this post "saving the planet the asshole way". Nosirree, we have standards here.

And then there was the account of her and Laurie David running into Karl Rove. Sheryl Crow seems to have battered him with her finger. He took action to avoid this, and Laurie "I'm not perfect" David marveled that anyone would refuse to be jabbed in the chest by Sheryl Crow. Now we know.

(And again, this blog has standards - I would never propose that we challenge blindfolded people to poke Karl Rove and Sheryl Crow in the chest and try to tell them apart. That's *class*.)

I agree with Freedom Eden. We all have our own particular needs of course, so we can make offsetting sacrifices in other areas. Like, say, forgoing the use of private jets.

Seriously, I shudder to think of people like this running the govt.

More overreaction to VT massacre

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, it's a bit overstated IMO. At least, I'll trade a little liberty for a lot of safety, but even then only temporarily. Examples might be, say, quarantines.

But with quarantines we have a disease we can diagnose. If only we were so good at diagnosing mental illness. (At least the press isn't very good, anyway) Yet we're hearing rumblings about simplifying involuntary institutionalization in response to the Virginia Tech slaughter, and that's potentially very scary.

For instance, it's often very tempting to attribute disagreement to mental defects, especially in politics. In some countries it has been policy, and dissidents would wind up in mental hospitals or "reeducation" facilities.

But it can't happen here, right? In fact, it has, and the mere threat of institutionalization has been used for intimidation, Here's an example.

Now that we've seen Congress change hands twice in the last 15 years, you'd hope that both major parties would have learned something important: you don't ever let the govt have a power that you wouldn't trust your opponents with. No more political theater of Congressional investigators and special prosecutors - the Dems could just declare President Bush, VP Cheney, Tom Delay and countless others mentally ill instead harassing them, and the rest of us would cage Dennis Kucinich, Michael Moore, Al Gore and other spigots of senselessness.

IMO any safeguards against political or other misuse that were strong enough to be worthwhile would render the whole project useless. But I suppose I could compromise a little. So I propose the Brazen Bull Act of 2007 - Let's find the people who are in favor of simplified institutionalization and lock them up.

Who is Sick?

Who is Sick? has incredible potential. Just check it out.

Then try to imagine how much this free product would have cost if the govt had tried to implement it.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds (who I only credit about 10% of the time, as if he'd notice the difference on his hit counter) and Boing-Boing for the links.

Just watch it

I got a lot of hits for mentioning Julianne Hough last week, but that's not why I'm mentioning her and celebrity partner Apolo Anton Ohno again. Just watch the video. It's the best performance I can remember from the show after 4 seasons.

Watermelon Day

Ha, another global warming rally impacted by cold weather. And now we must suffer "Earth Day", where greens prostrate themselves before the great goddess Gaea and pledge to badger their betters another year.

This repeated collective silliness annoys me. Why? Because it's ineffective - it's nothing but a big party for likeminded poseurs. (Yeah, they need love too, but in their case all it does is spread more disease and cause abortions). Then they ride home in their SUVs and leave their trash behind.

And because they're dominated by lefties, all of their prescriptions have to involve the govt - heaven forbid that lefties would actually do or pay for anything themselves.

Who says govts can do anything? All any of them can do is take your money, spend it on what they want, pick favorites and deprive you of life, liberty and property if you don't cooperate. This doesn't work with CO2 or the sun. Increases in solar activity may well account for most of the claimed changes in our global average temperature anyway, rendering anthropogenic contributions as significant as spitting in the ocean is to the tides.

But let's suppose we puny humans are causing the change, and that we really know the consequences, that they don't result in net improvement, and that dealing with the results isn't better or cheaper than changing our ways. Then what?

After conservation, the answer lies where it always has - in science and engineering. You want cleaner power? - we're the guys who make it happen. You want more fuel-efficient cars? Tell us what you want and give us the time and money and we'll do all that the laws of physics permit. And who do you think developed, say, solar PV? An activist? A celebrity? A lawyer? A politician?

Yet when was the last time Greenpox et al ever spent a dime on engineering or basic scientific research? No, their history is about imposing additional costs on clean, reliable power sources like nuclear power. Their obsession with energy threatens our supplies, and if you think some forms of energy are dangerous, think of how dangerous it will be *not* to have the energy we need.

I suppose that the lack of support makes sense to them, because they ignore engineers and scientists if they don't like the answers. Colby Cosh gives a terrific example wrt windpower here. The problem, which ought to be obvious to anyone paying attention, is that wind is not necessarily in sync with power demands.

No problem, we'll just store the juice when it's there and dole it out when it's needed, right? Sure, once we get affordable reasonably efficient and reliable non-site-specific storage mechanisms that can work on utility scale. This will work well with solar, windpower and handling peak loads on the grid without having to keep usually oil-fired "peakers" running. Win, win, win - someone will get richer than Bill Gates if they can make this happen.

Again, where's Greenpox et al? They could be training scientists and engineers or funding research toward such a universally useful technology. But as usual they're spending it on lobbyists, exhibitionists and more fundraisers to defoliate us with their mailings about protecting the rainforests.

Lefties aren't about anything but power and control, and any issue they get involved with will be redirected to serve their political ends. The sooner the true greens kick out the reds the sooner we can make environmentalism the nonpartisan issue it always should have been.

Medical miracle

What would a human being look like if he turned inside out? Take a look over here and stay tuned - you might yet get to see it if the author sticks his head any farther up his backside. (You might think that farfetched, but it *would* explain his outlook).

Again, I don’t know what fantasy world people live in that “more guns on campus” is the solution to the tragedy the other day.

Yeah, pick on a straw man - he can't hurt you. Not even if he has a gun. Of course sentient beings would conclude from that that it's not the guns that are the problem, but then we're talking antigunners here.

I'm not a "gun nut" myself, but perhaps Mr. Cole can help me - I sure can't think of any gun organizations that have suggested that guns should be available to all comers. They all emphasize gun safety, and training can be found by anyone who seeks it. (And if sex education ought to be in schools then by all means let's have gun education there too - you know they're going to experiment, so let's make sure they do it safely, and teaching abstinence can't possibly help).

Of course we'd expect that permitting guns on a campus would lead to more guns being there. But that's not the goal - the goal is to enhance security on campus with trained volunteers. The legislation that would have allowed the guns on campus was restricted to trained users over 21.

Colleges are a very unique cross-section of the population, composed of 18-22 year olds, the most violent members of society

Yeah, I was one once too. But college students are not the subdemographic that runs up the score on crime. Or did the Crips et al get their colors from their alma maters? Perhaps Mr. Cole thinks that parents on Chicago's South Side should warn their kids to avoid the University of Chicago campus lest they should be harmed by all those criminal, violent college students.

As far as I am concerned, only if you want more gun violence would you support heavily armed students on every campus.

Is that even remotely fair as a characterization of the defeated law mentioned above? A gun in the right hands in the right place and time could have reduced the gun violence, and has already done so at past school shootings. One of them was even in Virginia in the same part of the state. See lots of examples of handgun self-defense here

It's not so easy to get a gun, they aren't cheap, they require maintenance, and they're heavy and inconvenient to carry. And if you have one legally registered to you you'd better make sure that it isn't stolen or misused. These qualities don't appeal to college students or a lot of others besides. So it's hard for me to believe that we'll have many takers on loosened gun restrictions.

No doubt the next potential mass killer is picking his target based on local gun laws. The thought process must go something like this: "I may be willing to kill strangers in cold blood, but violate gun restrictions? No way!" Or perhaps "No, I'm too young to have a gun - I'll come back then I'm 21 and have the training." Again, sentient beings realize that a group not known for respecting other laws is not particularly like to respect gun laws either, so all the restrictions can do is restrain the law-abiding and make them more likely to be victims.

But I'll take it all back if Mr. Cole can show me a case of a gun harming anyone of its own volition.

I refuse to let the actions of a crazed mass murderer dictate policy decisions that would have broad and potentially disastrous implications for society. And that is what this is really about- knee-jerk reactions to the actions of a crazy person.

OK. But a little balance would be in order. Mr. Cole neglected to mention that the antigun ghouls are again seeking to cash in on the blood of victims, while a bill to permit trained people over 21 to carry guns on campus at least had potential to prevent or at least limit the carnage based on past experience. Perhaps that was an oversight, but I don't think so.

Mr. Cole isn't through yet - from the comments:

But you are still dealing with the base aggression and lack of full and complete brain development that comes with 18-22 year olds. I, for one, do not want to add firearms to an already volatile situation that contains immaturity, hormones, stressful and tumultuous times, etc.

Yeah, that's it - given a choice between beer money and buying and maintaining a gun, the college kids will all go for the guns. Do the authorities have any idea how many students already have guns on campus? After all, they do such a terrific job keeping drugs and booze off campus. And then we get this:

At any rate, it is up to those who wish to propose a drastic policy change such as free-fire zones on campus to prove that it would be fine. Not the other way around.

That's funny, I feel the same way about Constitutional rights like the 2nd Amendment. Free-fire zones? - how asinine can a mischaracterization get?

Of course Mr. Cole isn't the only one writing comments:

Handgun control needs to be national. Regardless of the laws on concealed carry, the fact is that a handgun is very concealable. As long as they’re legal anywhere in the country, they can and will be carried and concealed everywhere.

What's the magic power of this word "legal"? I lived in a nominally dry county once and it had some of the worst alcohol abuse problems in the state. Abortions certainly were common enough before Roe v. Wade. Prohibition didn't exactly work, and we do a hellacious job of keeping out illegal drugs and aliens too. To hear some talk, we can't even keep criminals out of the White House. Ban legal gun sales, and it won't take a week for illegal guns to come in by land, sea and air. As if they weren't already.

The VPI killer had already violated a few other laws too - why didn't the "legal" charm protect VPI against him?

Worldwide experience is that you can't keep guns out, and the nations that try still have plenty of spectacular gun crime. If it must be, Congress can always pass a resolution in favor of safe gun use. It too will be an ineffective gesture, but it would thrill the moral masturbators without harming the rest of us through eroded rights and safety.

Antigunners aren't going to shut up of course. But at least they can be recognized for what they are. You know, as if there really are any agnostics left on this issue.

Laughter yoga

No joke - read this. And watch this.

And while you're at it, check out this book.

Think like a mass murderer

Let's get psychopathic for a moment. No specifics, just yes or no.

Let's suppose you intended to kill as many people as you could (and optionally were willing to die in the process). Would you use a gun?

So you can't or won't think that way? Then think about what the most infamous mass killers use. You know, terrorists. When they really want to run up the score like this week's creep did, do they use guns?

Similarly, alternatives were available here (engineering students probably would have known what some of them were - fortunately we were dealing with an English major). If you can't think of any alternatives, well, never mind what they are. Anyway, would anybody be any happier if the victims had died from another cause?

But we all know that the Brady Bunch will be trying to use this tragedy to advance their totalitarian-friendly agenda.

Virginia Tech massacre: blame class warfare!

By now everyone has heard of the mass killings at Virginia Tech. The usual suspects have been heard from claiming that somehow it was the guns that were at fault, as if they'd have been happier if the killer had used bombs.

Those usual suspects are disproportionately liberals. Those same liberals disproportionately fuss about income inequality, CEO compensation, progressive taxation, and other ideas that can be lumped fairly under the heading of "class warfare".

Well, according to the Chicago Tribune the killer left a note railing about, among other things, "rich kids".

Ah, was he inflamed by liberals and their class warfare rhetoric? Is John Edwards inspiring the next wave of remorseless mass killers with his "Two Americas" tripe? (Heaven knows it has nothing to do with $400 haircuts)

I await the editorials from the New York Times.

What I learned from 9-11 Conspiracy Theories

Right here.

Via Colby Cosh.

False start

Mark Twain once said “The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.”

And those cats up in Cheektowaga, NY will remember their failed solar street lights for a long time.

I don't know the technical particulars of this installation, but I would have had plenty of questions about it. But maybe snow didn't collect on the solar collectors. Maybe the battery capacities were appropriate and weren't impaired by the low temperatures you can expect near Buffalo, NY. Maybe the insolation levels were appropriate on average and they just had a 100 year event. Maybe the locations chosen were far enough from power supplies that it made sense for each pole to have its own independent solar power supply with no backup.

If they just had to make some sort of EC (environmentally correct) gesture, why not pick something that would be less spectacularly obvious if it failed?

I bet it'll be a long time before they'll try something like this again. All because some people won't wait for technologies to mature.

From Ecotality, featuring Bill Hobbs.