Fetus farming

from MedPundit

Pharm team

In Hollywood or New York I'm told that about all the waiters are really actors. But from this it appears that some wanted to be doctors.

Maybe most of the people who read that post and found it to be a riot were medical professionals of some sort. If not, why did so many know so many different drugs and what they're used for? Is that common knowledge nowadays, and if so, doesn't that say something about us?

Or should I just take a pill?

Link via Medpundit.

One for the lefties

Just about everyone seems to be chewing on President Bush today, so it's as good a time as any to pass on this joke.

Dr. Elmo

You may well have heard of him, believe it or not. He's famous for a Christmas song.

For lots of information even more worthless than this, check this out.

Rules for thee and not for me

Talk to a liberal long enough and you're bound to hear some diatribe about White Collar Crime!

Fine. It's a problem.

It might well be that my experience is unrepresentative. But I can't tell you how many times I've heard gripes about white collar crime from people who wouldn't hesitate to cheat on their taxes and insurance claims. Or from politicians who don't play by the rules on campaign finance.

And I don't ever recall the day that people feared walking down the street because someone, say, looted an S&L.

And how many of us pay lower prices because of illegal aliens? That's right - employing them is white collar crime. Good grief, I never see anyone sweating outside a health club nowadays unless he's Hispanic - who would do the work in this culture if they left?

Bottom line - be careful what you ask for.

Killer alternative

Looking for a candidate who's truly different? How about this guy?

Hat tip to these guys.

Washington v. business

My new employer has a PAC, and recently has been trying to get employes more interested in the political process.

Gosh, what has taken them so long? After all, any good liberal can tell you that businesses are on the offense in Washington, afflicting innocent legislators with their incessant desires for favors.

Shouldn't Wall Street be giving them favorable press? "XCo rose 2 points on knowledge that they'd started a PAC. Amalgamated WTF fell 3% after their chief lobbyist went to work for their chief competitor."

Or could it be that in fact it's the other way around - that businesses have to cover their backs in Washington lest they get their pockets picked or get legislated out of existence?

Jonah Goldberg knows the answer and talks about it here.

Abusable information

My nephew recently had a birthday. It's hard to believe that the varmint is in his 30s now. Or that I'd still call him something like that.

Anyway, I probably taught him most of the obnoxious little tricks every adolescent boy loves to learn. Inadvertantly, of course - I'd always tell him he shouldn't do X, and then explain X in detail. Things like "if you answer the phone and it's a boy asking for your sister, don't tell him 'she's taking a huge dump right now'". Somehow he kept getting the wrong idea.

(It was probably good for him though. I wasn't always around to help him. So, like the boy named Sue, he learned how to fight for his life against older, bigger, dirty fighters, which could serve him well in later life.)

We're both older now, so we wouldn't do things like that any more. We have younger relatives for that.

Anyway, in a few years my nephew might even be in the market for products like Rogaine. So he, and perhaps you, should know that you can't let cats consume Rogaine, because it can cause a fatal drop in blood pressure. And if you get any bright ideas like treating baldness on a cat with Rogaine, you should know that the cat will wind up consuming it as it licks itself.

This and other tidbits on the Hair Loss Blog.

Retailing riddle

Is it fair to say that if a man has a larger waist size, that on average he's taller?

That being so, why do retailers stack the small sizes on top and the larger sizes on the bottom? The short guys are closer to the floor already - why shouldn't they have to bend over or get on their knees to shop instead of the larger ones?

And the fat guys have a harder time bending over - if they weren't so politically incorrect someone would be hollering "Discrimination!"

Credit card security

Among my many past contract jobs was a 2 year stint in the credit card industry. It was interesting to see how the credit card industry really worked.

In particular, I found that according to Federal law, companies such as MasterCard and Visa are not permitted to have information that would permit them to identify the names and addresses of cardholders. Therefore they could not have contacted any customers impacted by security problems.

Banks are the card issuers. They are the ones who could notify cardholders if they chose to, if they knew the numbers of the affected cards. I'm guessing that the banks have that card number information.

Moonbattus rusticus

A relative tells me that her junior high aged daughter learned something interesting in school in downstate IL a while ago. It seems that the hurricanes are God's punishment for our involvement in war in the Gulf.

If this were the Clinton Administration the Dems and Europeans would be saying that what the President does with his penis is none of our business.

Chernobyl a generation later

I was working in the nuclear power industry when Chernobyl happened in 1986. It was a very nasty accident, compounded by the fact that the Russian govt was trying to deny it happened even as outsiders could see the fire via satellite pictures. They couldn't very well evacuate people if nothing had happened, could they? What could we expect from a society that couldn't even run a farm?

The predictions were frightful. Fortunately for me, I was working around a bunch of people with the technical knowledge to show me that what had happened at Chernobyl simply couldn't happen at a US commercial power reactor - such a reactor never would have been licensed under US regulations. What's more, most Soviet reactors couldn't fail that way either - it was peculiar to RBMK models as opposed to the more common VVERs.

However flawed the design was, to call Chernobyl a failure is to be unfair to it - it simply wasn't designed to be operated the way it was at the time. The only reason why it was operated so was - are you ready for this? - to demonstrate how *safe* the design was.

Here Michael Fumento writes of a recent report on Chernobyl, produced by the UN with the benefit of almost 2 decades' worth of study of the aftermath of the accident. He writes

Indeed, “the largest public health problem created by the accident” is the “damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information,” the Chernobyl Forum found. “These problems manifest as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.”

Well, now we have some accurate information based on years of observation.

And environmentalists have no excuse for failing to inform the public of the truth about Chernobyl.

Don't hold your breath.

When Nike was a missile

Recently I looked into Nike missile history, and I was surprised to find how many bases were near me. As in just a few miles' drive. This was true around major cities in much of the country during the Cold War. This document describes a bit of the Nike history and some bases in Illinois.

As if it mattered...

I'm not fully settled in Chicago yet, but I'm getting there. Now I finally have a comfortable place for the PC and high speed internet, so the world must once more suffer additions to this blog.

Me too

Ain't it great about how everyone can seize upon a disaster like Hurricane Katrina to advance their own political agendas?

No, I'm not innocent.

I see Glenn Reynolds pointing to the by-now familiar photo of flooded school buses in NO. It seems like one heck of an oversight when these buses could have been used to get people out of town.

Of course, then what do you do? NO at least owned the Superdome, so presumably putting people there would be cheaper in terms of transportation and lodging if people didn't have to stay too long. Maybe someone just made a really bad bet.

But then whenever I see a really questionable decision, I usually find that lawyers were involved. What do you think will take longer - reconstructing NO, or settling the last of the lawsuits?

There's a little good in everyone

See if you can figure out why I linked to this.

Where to stop?

Eugene Volokh posts about same-sex marriage and slippery slopes.

Yeah, yeah, a slippery slope is a metaphor and not an argument. But the previous statement is not an argument either - invocation of the slippery slope metaphor does not invalidate an argument.

In this case IMO everything boils down to one question:

What legal, logical or moral argument(s) would a supporter of gay marriage use to oppose extending marriage beyond permitting same-sex couples? If these are unsound or nonexistent, then in fact we have a slippery slope - if we can't limit marriage to a pair consisting of a man and a woman, can we limit it at all?

Don't expect me to trust people not to push beyond a certain point. They will, if only out of orneriness.

Or for tax benefits.

Re Vioxx

I want to sue the jury. And whoever these idiots are who would justify a lack of caps on jury awards.

Let's suppose that the company was just the absolute incarnation of guilt (as opposed to the reality, in which there was no direct tie between Vioxx and the meal-ticket's victim's head). Suppose that the event warrants liquidation of the corporation down to the very last dime. Does it not make sense to hold a little something back until you know how many people were harmed, so there can be some equity in the recovery?

Or if the first plaintiff is permitted to suck a corporation dry, then let subsequent defendants sue the first to get their fair shares. Whatever its' drawbacks, this at least has the benefit of siccing the jackals on one another, permitting the productive sector of the economy to go back to producing the wealth that pays for these asininities.

Advice for the young businesswoman

Don't do this. Or if you do, don't try to explain it.

It's a video, for you poor benighted dialup users.