Merry Christmas!

Chiefs 31, Raiders 30.

That's what the obituaries are for

It seems that "insurgents want their stories told". Yeah, and they also want to kill people for attempting to have elections. Does the Associated Press support that too?

Via Belmont Club.

To a 12 year old girl about her future

She's a hormone-addled adolescent just like her mother was not so long ago. I don't see much of her because I'm on the road so much, and it's not clear that it would make much difference if I were around. But what I want her to do is take life seriously long enough to make some plans for her life.

Say what? - she's 12, for crying out loud! Yep, and in 5 years she'll be getting out of high school, and in 10 she might well be out of college. And anywhere along the line she could even have kids of her own. And it wouldn't surprise me to find that none of this had ever crossed her mind.

Well, que sera, sera my eye. She can start influencing her future deliberately right now. It's not too early, and in some extreme cases it's actually too late.

So how do I get her started? Beats me. For lack of anything better I'm thinking of starting with a letter or speech like what follows:

Merry Christmas, kiddo. This may look like the lamest gift you've ever received, but give it a chance. Pay attention and maybe it can help you get something a lot better for yourself - a well-lived life.

Yes, you're only 12. And in 5 years you'll be 17 and ready to get out of HS. In 10 you might be graduating from college. In 15 you'll be older than your mother was when she had you. This may seem like an eternity to you now, but ask any adult and they can tell you that it seems that the older you get the faster the time seems to go.

You've had a chance to observe your mother's life up close. It hasn't always been easy. You might have decided that you want to live your life differently. And you can.

How? The first step is to have some goals. When in doubt, aim high.

Let's start with some examples to come up in the next 5 years. Would you like to be valedictorian? Date the school hunk? Start on the basketball team? Be head cheerleader? Be homecoming queen? Get admitted to your favorite college with scholarships? Get a car? Get a good after-school/summer job? Learn to play guitar? More ideas of your own? All of the above? Fine - for most of those, if you can dream it you can do it. If you get started.

Now let's look 10 years down the road. By then you could be starting on a good career, going to graduate school to be a doctor/lawyer/professor/whatever, raising a family with a good guy you met in college.... Or you could be stranded in a small town with two kids to raise and a husband who makes a lousy living, drinks and abuses you. All of that builds on what happens in the next 5 years.

Now say you have some goals. But they seem big - where do you start? The same way you eat an elephant - one bite at a time. Break them down. Here's an example.

I hear you were cut from the basketball team. OK, so was Michael Jordan in his freshman year in HS. Do you want to go out again next year and show them they were wrong? What can you do to make sure you make it then?

Well, I don't know how to help you get taller. But you can get stronger and get more stamina by exercising and eating right, and that will help you with a lot more than basketball. You can build skills by playing a lot, shooting hoops, practicing dribbling, going to camps, etc. It's up to you.

One goal you might have picked is "to be the most popular girl". Please think again. If it happens that's fine, but ask me or any of your older relatives how much time they've spent with their HS or college friends in the last few years. And ask anyone who's been to a HS reunion what has happened to the "standings". Peer pressure can seem overwhelming, but there's nothing cool about being busted for underage possession or drugs, or sleeping around, or staying out all night when you have responsibilities, etc.

Alright, enough for now. The idea is that the future is coming whether you're ready or not. So why not be ready?

Suggestions?

Are they sure it's a mistake?

Duty, honor, yeah, yeah. Far be it from me to be a faithless elector if I had the opportunity.

But really, having to vote for John F. Kerry? Who even archpartisans like Kos are dumping on nowadays?

I'd think of something.

When is a Contract Not a Contract?

Ask XRLQ, who holds forth here about contract law and US Cellular's attempt to screw Spoons.

Would you like a dose of french fries with that?

French fries! Heavens, between the carbs and the grease they'll kill you! Pass the fish and those good ol' omega-3s.

Not so fast. I haven't heard much about it lately, but back in the late 60's/early 70's we heard incessantly about mercury pollution in our fish. Whether related or not, a trip down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago might well suggest that something was wrong - dead fish were always washing up on the beaches by the millions. Yecch.

It so happens that the mercury is still out there in high enough concentrations to get you under the right circumstances. People porking out on certain fish, usually in the name of health, are coming down with symptoms of mercury poisoning, and there are govt advisories on consumption of certain types of fish.

Here Glenn Reynolds notes Ukrainian candidate Yushchenko's dioxin poisoning and links to this, which suggests that use of "fake fat" (olestra), can help him clean the dioxins from his body and thus recover. Incidentally, the same thing might work for other bugbears such as DDT and PCBs.

Biochemical processes are very complicated, but in essence the above works because the substances are fat-soluble. They accumulate in your fat, and in turn they can be absorbed in other fats like olestra. Olestra does not remain in the body, any fat-soluble substances like the above it absorbs in its passage will leave the body with it.

And it so happens that the form of mercury that you get from the fish is fat-soluble. So maybe olestra could help clean out excess mercury too.

Now if only it made good french fries...

Thank heaven for little girls

Right here

The Answer?

Is something missing from your life. Perhaps what you need may be found in the Matriarchal Church.

It's not too well publicized IMO - I found it while looking for current information about the woman who turns out to be its founder, the one and only Kellie Everts.

That name might be vaguely familiar to late thirtysomethings. In her words, "I strip for God". Obviously we are dealing with a woman with a unique perspective.

Her website claims accomplishments many and significant. For those of you who'd prefer not to find yourself on a website entitled kinky-kellie.com, she also claims to be the "foundress of female bodybuilding" and to have taken part in ending the Cold War.

What could be wrong with an organization with such a charismatic leader? Do you feel the call?

Nearly 8 years in prison without a trial

Should I be hearing about stuff like this from a conservative like Phyllis Schlafly? Where are the lefties?

Or do you have to shoot and kill policemen before you get their blessing?

Annoy the MSM...

...and read the stuff they don't seem to want to cover in Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News from Afghanistan.

Who was Mary Alice Meza?

Unless you're a crime buff, you're not likely to know. She was just a 17 year old girl who was raped back in 1948. Shortly thereafter she was institutionalized and remained so to the end of her days.

Who raped her? An innocent man of course - Caryl Chessman. That name might not be well remembered nowadays, but in his time he was an international cause celebre in part because at the time no one had spent more time on Death Row than he. Here's the short version of his story, here's the long version.

In all that time in prison Chessman had time to write and smuggle out three different books. One became a bestseller which is still listed on Amazon.com. He used the proceeds in part to pay for legal and investigative help for his innumerable motions and appeals. The accounts linked above do not mention any restitution to his victims.

Not that he could have made it up to Mary Alice Meza.

Slow news day

What's wrong with this post?

Now let's have a talk about that natalism thing...

I'm only about 6 weeks late to congratulate Sasha and Hanah Metchis Volokh.

Thieves!

I rip off Betsy's Page all the time, but I link back. Others don't.

What's to fear?

Censorship is bad, unless it's your side doing it:

Some people are very upset that a bookstore in Arizona is selling a book called Grand Canyon: A Different View.

The bookstore is operated by the National Park Service, you see, and the different view presented in the book is that the mighty gorge came about as the result of the flood. You know, The Flood. The one starring Noah.

Many people would dismiss that as unmitigated BS, or a legend at best.

Fine, suppose you're right. If we let people's opinions about this determine what we could sell where, the bookstores wouldn't have much to sell. Leave it alone and let the market sort it out.

From Jay Bryant: Your right to say it

A Skeptical View of the Perricone Prescription

It's shakedown fundraising time for PBS, and one perennial star is Dr. Nicholas Perricone. He offers all sorts of prescriptions to help your skin and general health.

His MO is to give a talk to a small room full of people. His air is as one who would bring medical science down to earth for a sophisticated audience. And of course the audience, thinking itself sophisticated, takes the bait.

I'm not qualified to address his claims, but before you pledge your money you might want to read this from Quackwatch.

How to make a suicide bomber

I can't remember where I found the link to Reasons Terrorists Haven't Hit Us Again. But the part I found most interesting was this:

But if exposure to American life won’t prevent suicide bombings, exposure to Americans might. “The more a person develops normal relations, the more comfortable he is in an environment, the less likely he is to commit an act of violence,” Johnson says. “The social literature on this goes back more than a hundred years, whether it be crime, gang violence, or political violence.” The September 11 hijackers, in a way, were the exceptions that prove the rule: Because they were able to move freely about the country without attracting suspicion, they could isolate themselves.


So if a sleeper cell had been planted here for years, it would have had to integrate into American life and would probably be less inclined to extreme acts of violence. For terrorists who’ve managed to slip in since 9/11, it will be hard for them to remain a self-insulating unit without attracting suspicion. And if a potential bomber arrives on his own, he’ll have daily social contacts that will lower the chance of his carrying out a suicide mission.


Complete isolation and a radically short time lapse between the moment a bomber is tapped and when he carries out the attack are essential to successful suicide attacks. “Studies of Hamas suicide bombers indicate there’s only a 24-hour window between finding the candidate and carrying out the mission,” says Swetnam. “It sounds incredible, but Hamas does the entire process within one day.” Hamas recruiters don’t select suicide bombers from within their own cadres; instead, they pull in a dogmatic and disillusioned young male outside their operation. It takes a deep pool of disaffected males to find the one willing to carry out a suicide mission.


Throughout the night, they’ll keep the candidate in a closed room and bombard him with dogma about his mission as a soldier of Allah and “rev him up about being a hero,” as Swetnam puts it. “They tell him, ‘Allah only asks once, and he’s asking you now.’ ” Only in extremely rare cases has a suicide bomber been known to back out of a mission, Swetnam says; one of the few that is known about occurred when his isolation buffer broke down. “He is said to have run into his brother on the way to his assignment, and that was enough to cause second thoughts.”

IMO that passage was both comforting and scary. Comforting in that it reinforces what I already believed, that there's nothing uniquely evil about Islam or Arabs that turns them into killers - it's just that that's who they have to work with.

The scary side? Never mind.

What's in a name?

Re this post:

If you like it, call it "federalism" and use it to argue against the Federal Marriage Amendment.

If you don't like it, call it "state's rights", which is decried because Southern states tried to use it to avoid outside intervention wrt slavery.

Let's cut the crap. IMO the institution of marriage is orders of magnitude more important than abstractions like "federalism", so if I'm forced to choose between them, the sanctity of marriage as our society has known it for centuries wins every time. I'm still waiting for someone to explain how the door you open to permit gay marriage can be closed again to keep out all manner of other associations.

We have contracts for stuff like this, and we can even standardize them into "civil unions".

But marriage? No way.

If you support gay marriage, say so and argue the merits. Don't hide behind federalism/state's rights with the slaveholders.

What's the matter with Thomas Frank?

Ripping off Betsy's Page again, I find a response to a silly book called What's the Matter with Kansas?

The only thing "wrong" with Kansas is that the author's world view can't explain it. So, being the liberal that he is, he finds that it is reality that is wrong, not his theory.

Quoting one of Betsy's quotes:

Things are especially bad in his old hometown of Shawnee, where, during his visits, he no longer sees anyone in the streets. Instead, "heaps of rusting junk and snarling rottweilers" blight the landscape.

Nice try pal, but some of us have been to Shawnee. Yeah, there are parts the Chamaber of Commerce probably won't show you. Those would be the parts near Wyandotte County/Kansas City, KS, a Democrat stronghold forever which they've turned into the crime and poverty hellhole of the metro area. Or to the west, where it transitions into rural Kansas.

Finally Betsy derives a syllogism from the author's logic. I think I have a better alternative, which annoys certain yellow-dog Democrats I know:

1) Every party seeks to enlarge its constituency.
2) The Republicans are the party of the rich and the Democrats are the party of the poor.
3) Therefore the Republicans want to make everyone rich, and the Democrats want everyone poor.

And I cuss the Beltway traffic

Care to go for a spin in Iraq?

Although I must say, they may be on to something with the cell phones.