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.

Free pot for everyone!

No, not yet. Just a proposal for a Cabinet level "Department of Peace". Won't someone get a butterfly net and take Kucinich and his cosponsors away?

It's been referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Let's hope that they overlook it.

From The Corner and Tigerhawk.

Justice at last?

You've heard of David Duke, right? The ex-con who used to run the Ku Klux Klan? Not only that, he's a Holocaust denier, and if that's enough for you, he's a Southerner and a Democrat turned *REPUBLICAN*!

Anyway, did you know that Duke University was named after him?

No?

That's good, because it isn't true. The school existed long before David Duke was born, and was renamed for a major donor who got his money from tobacco. There, *that's* better. What would be better yet would be if the donor's name had been Lynch.

It's also not true that all the Duke staff members who were so quick to condemn the lacrosse players at Duke are in fact acting out of guilt for their own histories of raping black women. I can't prove it, but surely *some* of them are innocent.

(They may have been quick to condemn, but they have their limits. The lacrosse players might have been called rapists, but at least no one called them anything like "nappy-headed hos". Now *that* would be offensive.)

Even so, I'll bet that *this* is true - someone who donated money to Duke has also given money to the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth". Eww, talk about an indelible stain.

No, we must make sure that any such allegations are nipped in the bud before they become immortal on Google.

Hey, maybe we need a new verb: to duke. Meaning something like "to condemn without justification and then not to apologize afterwards". Or maybe we could start saying "Dukism" instead of "McCarthyism".

IMO until Duke University management and faculty Imus themselves before the lacrosse team men for piling on after the vicious slanders by Crystal Gail Mangum, they deserve as much disgrace as we can heap on them. And they can start by running about 88 people out of town.

Calling a spade a spade

I don't listen to Don Imus and I don't know his history. And you won't ever win any charm or class points by referring to a bunch of young women as "nappy-headed hos". But where are all the free speech people about now that Imus is under attack?

Yeah, everybody knows you'd better not say, um, well, you know, the *N-WORD*! For crying out loud, you can't even say a perfectly innocent word like "niggardly" nowadays.

Whatever the virtues of such extralegal prohibition, at least the news has gotten around. It would be nice if the same rules applied to alleged "hip hop artists", who ought to be credited for spreading the word to a bunch of white suburban kids who otherwise wouldn't hear it at home, and they repeat what they hear.

What's is it about "nappy-headed hos" that earns so much time in the media? It isn't exactly race specific - blacks (can I say that?) aren't the only ones with kinky hair. It's gender-specific, but it's not the feminists who are fussing, and what credibility do they have after years of sucking up to Democrats anyway?

No, this is about publicity for opportunists like Al Sharpton. Yes, the "reverend" who has yet to apologize for his role in the Tawana Brawley affair.

Am I being obtuse in suggesting that this is overblown? Whatever the answer, IMO if we're must raise such a fuss over certain words, how about identifying them once and for all?

I suppose we can make some pretty good guesses. I hadn't even heard "pickaninny" when someone was busted for using and defending it. Other candidates would be "Jungle bunny" or "jigaboo", which in my experience are so uncommon that you can't expect younger people to know them. I suppose references to watermelons, spear-chuckin', fried chicken and chitlins will have to go too.

But it's no use, because this isn't about grievances, this is about kowtowing. The ladies of the Rutgers basketball team have a grievance. The rest of the world should butt out.

Incidentally, congratulations to the Rutgers ladies' basketball team for a fine season. It's heartbreaking to work so hard and then finish second.

But nothing that happens to Don Imus will bring that title to New Jersey.

Postscript: the Rutgers ladies just appeared on the tube. (I can't resist noting that the black girls I saw had straightened their hair - now we know the *real* reason why they're ticked...)

Anyway, those quoted on TV spoke up more about the "ho" part. One, when asked about the popularization of "ho" in hip-hop, said it was no different and also ought to be discouraged. Good for her.

My kind of tonw

There's nothing like solidarity, but how far do you go?

It happened in Chicago. Someone came in for a tattoo that in part read "Chi-town". What he got instead said "Chi-tonw". He's suing the tattoo artist.

But the tattoo artist has friends. How do you know? They're all getting the same tattoo, including the "Chi-tonw".

It turns out that the plaintiff approved the tattoo before it was applied. Unfortunately, it appears that he did it with a mirror. Whoops.

Anyway, I hope he loses. But then he'll probably be back to sue the friends for using his design without his permission.

DWTS year 4, week 4

The fourth season of "Dancing with the Stars" is well underway with the biggest bunch of "stars" ever. Unfortunately more people doesn't mean more total talent. The best clue is that a woman with one leg (Heather Mills) is one of the more successful competitors.

The judges aren't happy, and before anyone had danced one of the judges, Len Goodman, reamed all the survivors for slacking. He claimed that the celebs had been putting in only 13 hours of practice on average between shows vs. 19 in past comps, and the scores on average seem to be lower. The feedback was what I'll call "frank"

The one who really got reamed was Clyde Drexler. He'll always have problems because of his 6' 7" height, but the judges actually suggested that he wasn't putting in enough effort. Clyde didn't take that lying down and offered to meet one of the judges outside. He was kidding, I hope. But the judges are right - he basically just followed his partner around the floor on flat feet, and but for the time of the music it was hard to tell he was doing a paso doble instead of a waltz.

Billy Ray Cyrus is coming along but has a long way to go. One clip showed his partner entering the ladies room and then we heard sobbing. The best thing he has going for him is his humility. IMO the judges have been generous to him and Heather Mills if only for their effort.

That's not to say that Heather Mills isn't doing as well as can be expected and more besides. You can't exactly fault her for, say, not pointing her prosthetic left foot when her entire lower leg is a prosthetic, and DWTS certainly isn't a formal dance competition, but at some point we deteriorate from supportiveness to political correctness. She should still be on the show, but not until the last month.

John Ratzenberger wasn't much better than Drexler. But that probably won't be enough to send him out the door with Paulina Porizkova and Shandi Finnessey, because the men either don't vote or, more likely, they don't even watch.

That's bad news for Leeza Gibbons and her partner, the best male pro out there, Tony Dovolani. You wouldn't guess that Ms. Gibbons is 50, but then at times you might not guess she's a dancer either. That's harsh, but she didn't have a good night. My bet is that she's gone after tomorrow.

The young guys are doing OK. So far it looks like Joey Fatone (with Kym Johnson), Apolo Anton Ohno (with Julianne Hough), and Ian Ziering (with two-time winner Cheryl Burke) will be the last to go. Of the women, Laila Ali (with Maksim Chmerkovskiy) will be around for a while too.

In all fairness, we were told from the beginning that this bunch started training later than their predecessors, so expectations had to be lower. Like with most beginners with no dance experience (myself included, in spades), they're very stiff, and that doesn't make for good routines.

But it still makes for a good show altogether. If you've never seen it, give it a try.

Meet Julianne Hough

Yeah, you wish. Julianne Hough isn't mere eye candy from head to toe, she's also an incredibly gifted ballroom dancer who's only 18 years old. You can see her on a video on her website here or you can watch "Dancing with the Stars".

But if you miss her, stay tuned. She wants to be an actress, and if she works as hard as she must have to achieve what she has at her age, you'll be seeing a lot more of her.

Hiss story

Adolf Hitler has some kin in the US. Not surprisingly, they don't use the Hitler name. But we could yet see the day that they not only embrace it but stand up in public claiming he was framed.

Why not? The Hiss family hasn't given up on convicted Cold War spy Alger Hiss yet. And I wouldn't be surprised if relatives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were still politicking too. Anyway, Powerline has much more on Hiss here.

Hiss was busted thanks to the late Whittaker Chambers, who earlier had spied for the Russians himself. But he broke with the Evil Empire after seeing it in action enough times, documenting his journey in his bestselling book "Witness". It's still worth a read over half a century after publication.

(Now Thomas Sowell has written another book, which in part documents his recovery from leftism. Mona Charen writes of it here.)

Yes, I'll kowtow to Godwin's law and acknowledge the obvious - Hiss was no Hitler. Or perhaps more appropriately, he was no Stalin. But he and his ilk were enablers, without whom such beasts could not attain power. And with tens of millions of deaths attributable to Communism, there's plenty of guilt to go around.

Secular Sharia

Some of the dumbest people I know are atheists. If you really want to waste some time, try convincing one that their atheism is just as much an article of faith as anything a deist ever came up with. If you doubt that this is true of atheism, try proving that gods *don't* exist.

Of course deists have the same problem proving that gods *do* exist. But at least they admit that they have faith.

And at least religious people are usually humble. Not so the atheists. And few are quite as aggressive at trying to impose their views by law, all while denying that they have any faith at all.

Captain Ed has more to say here.

In closing, this agnostic wishes one and all a happy Easter. While the law still permits it...

She learned from the master

Don Surber catches Hillary Clinton with a real whopper:

“What has historically happened is that there has to be some negotiation and compromise. We may not get it, but I’m not ready to concede that. I saw a lot of what happened when my husband had a Republican Congress. We would stake out one position, they would stake out one position. And then people would begin to try to figure out how to narrow the difference. That’s what should be happening here.”

Then again, we have to consider that to the Dems, compromise means "do it my way".
True compromise might be what should be happening, but it wasn't exactly the Clinton modus operandi. Mr. Surber offers what may be the best example - the budget showdown in 1995:

WASHINGTON - President Clinton and his Republican antagonists are blaming each other for a pre-holiday federal shutdown, forced by yet another deadlock over the two sides’ budget-balancing priorities.Nine Cabinet departments and scores of other agencies technically ran out of money at midnight yesterday, hours after budget talks between the White House and congressional Republicans broke off in bitterness.

This quote is fairly evenhanded, but the coverage in general wasn't. Never mind the fact that the order to shut down Federal functions came from Clinton's staff, reflecting Clinton's explicit choice and initiative - the whole thing was presented by the press as if the govt shutdown were a calamity and Republicans were solely responsible for it.

So maybe the Republicans shouldn't have done things as they did? Well, a few years earlier a budget deadlock occurred between a Democratic Congress and then-President Ronald Reagan. Reagan could have shut down the govt but he didn't. I don't know what the Republicans were thinking, but in retrospect it sounds crazy to expect Bill Clinton to behave like his superior.

Sometime in that period Rush Limbaugh had a TV show. He had no end of fun showing montages of video clips of Bill Clinton speaking of balancing the budget in N years, where N was usually in the range of 5 to 11 years. Too bad we didn't have YouTube or Tivo back then.

Anyway, it's not as if balancing the budget had never been on Clinton's publicly stated agenda. But being the lying sack that he was and is, when time came to deliver he not only wouldn't but he shut down the govt over it. And being the infinitely brassy SOB that he was and is, he claimed credit for budget surpluses when they occurred a few years later under the Republican Congress despite his best efforts.

And all of this was done in front of and perhaps even per the advice or even the direction of Hillary Rodham Clinton. So excuse me if I doubt her integrity, truthfulness and general worthiness to serve in any political capacity whatsoever.

Instant credibility

Yes, you too can have it. How? Malign conservatives.

Neal Boortz says

Sadly ... many conservatives seem to have dedicated their lives to lending credence to the left's "conservatives are idiots" claim.

From his citations apparently the reasoning goes something like this:

"They say that men lived alongside dinosaurs? They're crazy to believe that!"

"They say the earth is flat? They're crazy to believe that!"

"They call themselves conservatives? Why would you question that?"

Neither conservatives nor liberals can control who's on their side of the barricades. And no amount of dissociation will eliminate the resulting slanders. In particular, liberals will slander opponents no matter what they do.

Chlorine gas vs nuclear power plants

The depravity of our opponents in Iraq et al knows few bounds. They don't seem to be lacking in inspiration for new types of attacks, either. All the same, I'm sure that many of you avoid speculating about what *might* be done just in case some murderous creep is reading and hasn't thought of it already. I know that *I* do.

But long before Hezbollah and their ilk was Murphy, as in Murphy's Law. No one is more creative than he. He saves some of his most ingenious work for nuclear power plants, as we saw almost 30 years ago at Three Mile Island. And it so happens that nuclear power plants need to chlorinate their water too, so there's always some chlorine around. What if...?

First let me note that chlorine, even as bottled gas, isn't exactly exotic. Odds are that it has been used to chlorinate your water at some time in the past at least, and the industrial hygiene concerns and rules are well evolved - many people know how to work with the stuff safely. And your local fire departments/emergency responders ought to know where the stuff is in your community and how to deal with it in the case of an accident.

But what about nuclear power plants? Could it harm the staff or otherwise impair control of the site?

Ah, we're a step ahead of you. I've been out of the commercial nuclear power industry for a while, but I can tell you that something like 15-20 years ago a concern arose with the use of gaseous chlorine on nuclear power plant sites. At that time at least it was the cheapest way to chlorinate water on a large scale. But lest some gas should be released inadvertantly, nuclear power plants were ordered to get the gas cylinders offsite. I expect that by now all sites have implemented this. The plant I am most familiar with now uses a solution of sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) in water, which basically amounts to strong Clorox, to chlorinate their water. My guess is that most others do the same.

But that's not good enough - what if the creeps bring their own chlorine? Good point - the nuclear power industry has been concerned with that for years, and we're covered there too. You see, it's common to transport chlorine by rail in large quantities, and most nuclear power plant sites are close enough to railroad lines to need to be concerned with chlorine or whatever other toxic gases might be released in quantity nearby. So nuclear power plant control room ventilation systems have elaborate systems to detect the presence of gas and can responde automatically to protect the staff. And in case the control room should become uninhabitable even with Scott air packs (like what firemen use, and which are always present under Federal regulations for dealing with emergencies), there is another means for shutting down the plants safely, but I don't see the need for more detail right now.

What's more, US commercial nuclear power plants have communications systems with alarms that can be heard for miles, and other emergency response measures reinforced with federally monitored drills, preassigned duties and chains of command and other features too. You can bet that if the local nuke plant calls the sheriff, they'll answer the phone. If you live nearby, they know about it and have ways to evacuate you. Under non-nuclear emergency conditions, this civil defense apparatus would be available also (assuming there are no regulations against it).

US commercial nuclear power plants make lousy targets in any case. But that's another post.

Better to have loved and lost?

You know the expression. One source traces it back to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who may have cribbed it from St. Augustine.

But today it occurred to me upon hearing of the passing of Cathy Seipp, who left us this afternoon after 5 years of lung cancer. I never had the chance to meet her. But if her friends and their regard for her are in any way her measure then we've truly lost a treasure. Blessings to her daughter and the others who have lost far more than I.

What does it take to turn people into authoritarians?

The most annoying little kid I've ever run into always said "Why?" in response to anything anyone said. Inquisitiveness is fine, and if a kid is really interested in something he'll get as much of my time as I have. But this little pest really needed a chokechain. Mercifully he grew out of it. (I guess he would have had to escape it by the time he was a teen - by then he would have known everything and been telling all the rest of us "why").

Yeah, I suppose I'm getting older and crankier every year, and I'm either noticing things I didn't or reacting differently. Yet the world really has changed. Good grief, what kind of jerks have to sue a school district because they want to wear Tigger socks? Heaven forbid that she couldn't show "who she is" - the schools must be ruled by the whims of 14 year old girls and publicity-seeking attorneys.

I have a hint for you and your lawyer, sweetie. You won't be showing "who you are" until you stop wearing bottoms.

You might say that it's at least as silly to act as if permitting the changes would end civilization as we know it. If there were no need for any kind of dress code for schools I might agree, but this just shows that no matter what you might put in one, some jackass might take issue with it. Couldn't the judge who got this case sentence the girl to, say, write a twenty page single spaced report on good citizenship as opposed to being a narcissistic twit, and then to make a longhand copy of it for every one of her fellow students in the district?

Salespeople know that you want customers to say "yes". Crap like the above eventually forces us to start saying "no". And once we get started, the easier it becomes to be more restrictive. If we ever do become authoritarians, IMO it will have started in response to clowns like this who show no perspective or discretion.

Give 'em hell, George!

Which president was told by his father that it was a good thing that he wasn't born a girl, or else he'd have been knocked up all the time?

The answer?

Surprised? After recent events I'd think GWB would be the most popular guess. It might not be good policy to line up all the Dems in the House and Senate (and a few Reps too) and kick them all in the crotch, or to put Ann Coulter in charge of his PR, but he puts up with way too much crap without even a comment.

Another form of stupidity

An anti-smoking group called on the U.S. National Slavery Museum to return a donation from tobacco giant Philip Morris USA, saying the company targets children "for another form of slavery."

Just think - all those slaves ever had to do was break a habit. We had a war over that?

How long before Ann Coulter is prosecuted?

For something.

But don't question their patriotism...

No, you can't stop me, and I'm sure you've heard it: Scientists are starting to use lawyers in medical experiments instead of rats. The lawyers are more numerous, the staff doesn't get attached to them, and there are things that rats won't do.

If the above were true I'd be advocating vivisection about now. If there is no basis in legal ethics for sanctioning lawyers who do stuff like this, than can we even claim that such ethics exist? Sheesh, can't we at least stop giving them a forum at law schools?

This could be it...

It looks like Blogger wants to force me into the new, much-cussed version. Will it work? It looks like we'll find out shortly. In the meantime, it's been a great 5+ years.

Posts have been slowing down for some time. In part it's from being upstaged - my pet issue, nuclear power, is promoted more effectively than I could do it by Instapundit (which is a very good thing - sic 'em, Glenn!).

Incidentally, where did that 'No Watermelons Allowed' name come from?

There I was, impatient to start blogging and I was faced with a prompt for a name. I must have picked a dozen in a row that were taken. Now what?

Well, years ago I was an engineer in the nuclear power industry. I was raised during a time of ascendancy of environmental groups, so I shared their concerns, including those of nuclear power.

Yet my job experiences gave me confidence in the technology and the industry, so I became suspicious of other environmental claims. I found that there was another side, it wasn't malignant, and that it usually made a lot more sense.

Really now, how did environmentalism become a partisan issue? Don't we all want clean air, clean water, a sustainable biosystem, etc.? Never mind "global warming" - who wants to waste power or use up finite resources needlessly? How could an issue with such universal appeal ever become partisan? How screwed up is your approach when you can't sell conservation to conservatives?

Because lefties won't have it any other way. Given a choice between bipartisan progress or doing things their way, these nominal "progressives" oppose progress every time. They seize issues to promote lefty politics to the detriment of the original issue, like a virus turning an innocent cell into a source of further disease. They own the big environmental organizations lock stock and barrel. Accordingly, the late Warren Brookes called these phonies "watermelons" - green on the outside, but red on the inside.

So true environmentalists must take back their institutions from the left, or else create and defend new ones to marginalize the old. No Watermelons Allowed!

Hence the name. It's still weird, but at least it's unique, and without it I might still be sitting at that prompt thinking...

That's Mistress Katharine to you, maggot!

Ever fantasized about an S&M session with a Hello Kitty theme? Look here