I pulled this from a Reuters piece on international support of the Iraqi vote:

Paris, Berlin and Moscow were dubbed the "non-nein-nyet coalition" for opposing the U.S.-led war in the U.N. Security Council. The subsequent diplomatic chill has been described as the worst crisis in transatlantic ties since World War II.

And I wondered if any of us would a) ever get away with something like that or b) even try to.

But this is commonplace in journalism: stating hearsay as fact without any indication of the source. Who dubbed them the "non-nein-nyet coalition?" Who has described the diplomatic chill as "the worst crisis ... since World War II?"

And in either case were the statements valid? Justified? Partisan? Does it matter? Does the lack of transparency lend an air of authority to the statements., What does the lack of attribution imply about the judgment, the judges, and the judged?

We would find ourselves fisked in the comments or linked by critics on other blogs, and rightly so.

Which is not to equate blogging with journalism, and I hate to dwell on this ubiquitous subject, but it strikes me that these kinds of statements at once fail to serve the avowed ends of journalism and violate the standards of its supposed bastard cousin, the lowly blog.

Again, it's not the claims themselves but the shadows that surround them, their role in the piece, the implied narrative.

I've been really busy, but Justin directed my attention to this picture:

Yeeeaaagh! The above man goes by the "colonial name" of "Ward Churchill" -- and he's recently the subject of a great deal of attention in the blogosphere, reflected in Glenn Reynolds' large roundup of posts and thoughts.

Among other things, Churchill claims that the 9/11 victims -- those who worked in various offices in the Twin Towers or the Pentagon -- were not ordinary Americans at all, but "little Eichmanns."

They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire--the 'mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved--and they did so both willingly and knowingly. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

Churchill is a piece of work, no matter how you look at him. He has solid leftist credentials, is a tenured professor, but not too many leftists are racing to his defense. Some are saying he's really "not the authentic face of the Left."

I probably shouldn't waste too much of my scarce time with such crackpots (and this one has a distinct aroma of being an agent provocateur), but even a cursory glimpse convinces me that Ward Churchill is a pathological liar. Example:

Rusty Calley ultimately was convicted; served about three days per victim for what was listed as murdering something on the order of 200 Oriental human beings (and that was a low count), before being pardoned by Richard Nixon.

And that's just for starters. Here's Churchill on Wall Street:

Earlier we mentioned de facto slavery. We might as well talk about slavery de jure. Because that’s the next queue in the line, the proportion of the roughly 30 million people who never survived the Middle Passage. Signified perhaps by those who were perishing in the slave market enclosed by a wall in New York City. You think slavery is a southern phenomena. No. That’s where Wall Street got its name.

The name of the street derives from the fact that during the 17th century, it formed the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement where the Dutch had constructed a crude wall of timber and earthwork in 1652. The wall was obstensibly meant as a defense against attack from Lenape Indians, New England colonists, and the British, but it was never tested in battle. The wall was dismantled by the British in 1699.

19 third-world individuals ostensibly armed with box cutters converted three airliners (set out to convert a fourth) into what was almost immediately referred to as 300,000 pound cruise missiles, in effect utilizing them as smart munitions, to take out -- what is it they call it when it’s Norman Schwarzkopf talking on TV? -- command and control infrastructure? They took out the command and control infrastructure symbolized and embodied in the Pentagon and Washington DC and the nerve center of the global trade apparatus whose stimulus impulses out into that funny ozone that we’re talking about, and wags that tail of the Pentagon. Understand that the Pentagon does nothing without instruction and dictation from the Twin Towers. And there are probably a few other places.

Might it be because people like Churchill are primarily preaching to way-out, far-left choirs and aren't part of the "respectable" left? If that is true, then why is it that critics of Churchill are subjected to merciless ad hominem attacks by the "respectable" left? Glenn Reynolds is being savaged for criticizing this nut (even as he points out that the left benefits from being rid of such liabilities).

What amazed me the most was to learn that even Churchill's central claim to "moral authority" -- that he is an Indian -- is hotly disputed:

We see self-hating white men like Ward Churchill, Jordan Dill, and others who are seemingly infatuated romantically and mystically with being Indian to the point that they are willing to fraudulently take on the identity of being Cherokee. Both of these individuals have white grandfathers and grandmothers, and consequently, white mothers and fathers. Our investigations have shown that these misinformation specialists have much more sinister motives.

The last web site is very pro-Churchill, but even they note the man's rather inconsistent background with Soldier of Fortune magazine. Is Churchill the white man -- and wannabe Indian -- that his critics say he is? How do we even know he served in the military as he claims?

But let's give Churchill the benefit of the doubt. Even assuming his claim of Indian status is technically accurate, if his parents and grandparents were themselves white and he grew up considering himself white, it strikes me as more than a little disingenuous for him to loudly claim to be an oppressed minority.

Doesn't Cherokee-descended Glenn Reynolds have just as much right to claim Indian status as Churchill? Indeed, why shouldn't Glenn sport the flowing hair, the rad sunglasses, the Che Guevara beret or the angry AK-47 pose? (And no! Don't expect me to do another PhotoShop with the precious few minutes I have for blogging today!) Hell, my father (who spent part of his childhood on South Dakota's Berthold Indian Reservation) once told me there was Indian blood somewhere in his background, but I never investigated because I don't care. Such race-based nonsense doesn't matter to me. I grew up white and I accept it as my reality.

There's just something unseemly in strained claims of oppression.

Especially when they're so unstrained, and unrestrained.

UPDATE: In a flap over his "little Eichmann" remarks, Ward Churchill has resigned as Chairman of the University of Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department. Complaining of "grossly inaccurate media coverage" he now says he was misunderstood:

What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself.

What do you suppose he means? Have little Eichmanns have been turned into Big Eichmanns?

UPDATE (02/04/05): Glenn Reynolds has much more -- here and here -- on Ward Churchill, and it appears very likely that he is in fact making a false claim of Indian ancestry.

The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

(For what it's worth, I never once heard of "Ward Churchill" during that period.)

As fate has it, I happen to be a lawyer by training. This ruined whatever potential I might have had as a writer, for many lawyers are ruined writers. I say "ruined" because when you are forced to think and write like a lawyer, your thought processes end up being captive to a different language -- a stultifying thought police that forces you to qualify, quantify, justify almost everything in a mercilessly redundant manner -- as if in anticipation of litigation of your very thought processes. That sort of mental corruption leads to a very different sort of writing style than whatever style would have evolved had the writer's brain not been subjected to the numbing torments of legalese.

But hell, my legal career was interrupted by a decade of death and reactive self-degeneration, so it's easier for me to be at war with my legal self than for many of my brethren.

The stuff in which I've been steeped the past few days reminds me of the yawning abyss from which I escaped by falling into a much worse abyss.

And what an abyss it is! Listening in contemplation of the terrible fates which can befall any business owner unlucky enough to become an "employer" in California almost made me sit down and cry. Except alas, I paid for the damned course, and there was no time for tears! My purpose was to sit and listen so that I could obtain the qualifying MCLE hours. But it was just awful to hear that nearly everything -- including a hangnail (which prompted a serious "Don't laugh!" from the lawyer/lecturer!) -- can be considered a "disability" under California law, and employers are liable for "discrimination" if they fail to make accommodations. If a sexual comment is made in the workplace, anyone can be aggrieved, not just the party to whom it was directed. This went on and on, and I felt the way I felt years ago when Berkeley instituted rent control and some smartass lawyer asked me why anyone in his right mind would want to be a landlord in Berkeley. (I wasn't in my right mind, so did I mind?)

And why would anyone want to be an employer in California? Or own a business in California? Ask the lawyers. Here's a typical example I found yesterday in a local freebie:

JUST A FEW years ago, small retailers in San Francisco began noticing a disturbing trend. Plaintiff attorneys had started using federal and state disabled-access laws to make an easy buck off local merchants. They would go around looking for building-code violations, such as doorways that were too narrow or shopping aisles that were too close together. Then they would file suit and push for a quick settlement. For hundreds of small businesses that weren't prepared for all this, the consequences cost them thousands of dollars.

But it costs lots of money, and it doesn't generate much good writing.

Justin, however, is not a lawyer, and his writing doesn't suffer from the legalistic clutter that plagues mine.

(Self ridicule via legalistic parody of language is often my only resort, as the best defense is a good offense! Justin doesn't suffer from this self-imposed neurotic need to be so defensively analytical and superfluously redundant.)

I've been so busy that I failed to see until today that Glenn Reynolds linked Justin's excellent post on aging and life extension. I'm so glad, because his writing is great, and like most writers he needs encouragement. (And a computer.) And I'll remind my readers of what I've said before: that were it not for Justin I would never have started blogging! I can't praise him highly enough. Thanks again Glenn, and congratulations, Justin.

I worked all day and haven't had time to check in until now, but I did take a photo of the sunset today:

That's the view from my bedroom. Something of which I never tire, and which eludes me on the East Coast. (Even if I do have faster Internet there.)

Justin seems to be on quite a roll, which suits me just fine, because I am swamped. There isn't enough time in the day.

Roll on Justin!

UPDATE: As most of you know, the sun also rises:

Now, if I could I just figure out how to get it to rise in the same place it sets....

Eric has tactfully requested that I remind people of the notorious Kass "Ice Cream Quote", which was featured here at Classical Values on July 25, 2003. While it had appeared in numerous other venues in its truncated form, we here at Classical Values took rightful pride in presenting the great man's thoughts, unexpurgated, on July 29th. We think we may have been the first internet resource to do so.

We fondly hope that the Chairman's words will follow him, "doglike", to the end of his days. Hence, this memory lane excursion, not short but plenty sweet.

"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive"

"I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many readers, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It betokens enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait."

"Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior."

But wait, there's more! It's Kassfest 2005, a veritable dog's breakfast of Kassical Values, culled from a variety of sources. We have social criticism...

"...young people need to acquire the sensibilities, tastes, and skills in reading character that can help them find and judge prospective mates—something they once gained from the study of fine literature and which they can never hope to learn from watching Seinfeld or Ally McBeal."

"The question, admittedly complex, is whether in opting for abortion a woman is doing injustice to herself as a woman, contradicting her generative nature."

"Whether or not we know it, the severing of procreation from sex, love and intimacy is inherently dehumanizing, no matter how good the product....It is not at all clear to what extent a clone will truly be a moral agent...."

We have bioethical musings...

"...mortal danger is contained in the now popular notion that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do what ever he wants to it or with it. Civil libertarians may applaud such a notion, as an arguably logical expansion of the right of privacy, of the right to be free from unwanted or offensive touchings. But for a physician, the idea must be unacceptable."

"even the perfectly voluntary use of powers to prolong life ... carries dangers of degradation, depersonalization and general enfeeblement of soul."

"Paradoxically, even the young and vigorous may be suffering because of medicines success in removing death from their personal experience. Those born since the discovery of penicillin represent the first generation ever to grow up without experience or fear of probable death at an early age. They look around and see that virtually all their friends are alive."

That last is a particular favorite of mine. We wouldn't want the kids growing up without some dead friends, eh? It builds character.

We have sage maxims...

"If our children are to flower, we need to sow them well and nurture them…But if they are truly to flower, we must go to seed; we must wither and give ground."

"Withering is nature's preparation for death, for the one who dies and for the ones who look upon him."

Sociological alarums...

"Our society is dangerously close to losing its grip on the meaning of some fundamental aspects of human existence."

Medical predilections...

"....if one could do something about Alzheimer's, if one could do something about chronic arthritis, if one could do something about general muscular weakness and not, somehow, increase the life expectancy to 150 years, I would be delighted."

And political nostrums...

"What we should do is work to prevent human cloning by making it illegal. We should aim for a global legal ban, if possible, and for a unilateral national ban at a minimum.... renegade scientists may secretly undertake to violate such a law, but we can deter them by both criminal sanctions and monetary penalties..."

We've even got shining cities on a hill...

"Michigan, for example, has made it a felony, punishable by imprisonment for not more than ten years or a fine of not more than $10 million, or both, to “intentionally engage in or attempt to engage in human cloning,” where human cloning means “the use of human somatic cell nuclear transfer technology to produce a human embryo”."

What joy, to stride the earth in the same cosmic eyeblink as such a Titan.

UPDATE: This "Wolcotting" nonsense is quite addictive. I must have an innate predisposition for it, perhaps going back to the old "epigenetic primordium".

But seriously folks, one of these days I hope to best Eric's triple violation of "Wolcott's Rule®" and practice makes perfect. I was re-reading "Leon and Me" and these words looked like they could stand a re-airing...

Perhaps my first mistake was in thinking of him as a Medical Doctor. He is a Medical Doctor who doesn't practice medicine. He didn’t care for it, much.

"Even in my medical days, well before I acquired philosophical interests in these matters, I found the disappearance of a human life from a human body to be a simply incomprehensible occurrence. For this reason, I always disliked the autopsy room, where confident pathologists gave anatomical or physiological explanations, adequate to their limited purpose, that only increased my bewilderment regarding the questions that most troubled me: what happened to my patient? What was responsible for his extinction?"

Umm, death? The limited purposes of the confident pathologists might help narrow the field a bit. And would one really prefer timorous pathologists? Arrogant doctors.... well, who would have thought?

He retreated from clinical medicine and tried his hand as a Research Biologist…but he didn’t care for that, either. What he ended up becoming, is a Classics Professor. And, of course, a Bioethicist.

"In more than fifteen years of discussing questions of medical ethics with physicians, I have been impressed by their reluctance to generalize the principals of their conduct. They counter philosophical argument of principals with anecdotal accounts of cases." Every case is altogether unique" they frequently insist. For several years, I must confess, I was impatient with this approach. It seemed to me then that my physician interlocutors were either too lazy or thoughtless to articulate the tacit premises of their conduct. Premises that seemed to me at least, readily accessible through analysis of their cases....I have come in large measure to appreciate the practitioners point of view...."

So, after "several years" of pestering working doctors, doctors who actually had, um, patients, he finally worked his way round to thinking that they might (however inarticulately) know what they're talking about...

I was starting to wonder what had happened to Leon. He's been so quiet lately.

One could be forgiven for imagining that he had finally been graced with a piercing insight, an insight which elucidated for him the fact that, PR wise, he's his own worst enemy.

Fortunately for my bile ducts, just the other day I found some of his wise commentary over at "The New Atlantis" (Their new motto, "Bringing Home The Bacon!").

And do you know, at first I thought he might be running up the white flag. Seriously. Sheesh, where was my head?

As it happens, he pulls a quick 180 in paragraph 28. The gee forces made my head swim...

For myself, I don’t know whether the earliest embryo is or is not my equal. I simply don’t know. I see the power of the argument from continuity, and yet my moral intuitions cut in a somewhat different direction, even if the existential choice were between preserving my embryo or rescuing someone else’s child. And yet, I stand in awe and reverence before this very human beginning, because I know that if we ran the process backward, all of us came from that.

Okay, let me unpack that a little. Sentences one and two are self-explanatory.

The "argument from continuity" is basically outlined in the final sentence, and it causes him to stand in awe and reverence of blastocysts. And yet, in sentence three he admits that he doesn't QUITE buy into that argument, for reasons of moral intuition.

"...my moral intuitions cut in a somewhat different direction, even if the existential choice were between preserving MY embryo or rescuing SOMEONE ELSE'S child."

If I am reading the above sentence correctly, Leon is admitting that he would probably save a walking, talking child before he tried to rescue a petri dish waif, even if said petri dish held his own child, and the toddler was some no-account peasant urchin from the lower decks.

I thought we'd made a real breakthrough. But he promptly threw it away.

"And since I don’t know whether the early embryo is or is not one of us, and since the choice before us now is not this child versus this embryo but whether to engage in a speculative project of embryo research..."

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, that's EXACTLY the choice before us now! That's why we're having this argument! You can't just huff it away with a hurried conclusion.

" I am inclined not to treat human embryos less well than they might deserve. In order to do so, I don’t have to insist that the human embryo is the moral equivalent of my child."

Can you?

"I can call instead for a certain kind of expansiveness, a certain kind of generosity, a certain insistence that we should not wish to live in a society that uses the seeds of the next generation for the sake of its own."

I guess you can.

The above sentence reminds me of parental scoldings about cleaning your plate. "Eat your beets, there're people starving in China." How do my beets affect the kids in Beijing? Likewise, how do my medical procedures affect how many kids the Carter family up the street are going to have? To speak of "the" seeds of "the" next generation is a tenuously poetical notion at best.

"This argument appeals to the dignity with which we conduct ourselves, not the indisputable equality of the early embryo."

And here we descend once again into blithering blatherskitery.

"It is an argument grounded in prudence and restraint, not in equality or justice. It is an argument that remembers that we must not sacrifice the opportunities to live well simply in order to try to live longer."

He really had me going for a minute. But I've been hurt before...

If you're thinking of building a deck or repairing outdoor structures, bear in mind that the EPA has recently banned wood treated with chromated copper arsenate -- long the industry's standard -- in residential construction.

Why? Apparently, the usual concern about children:

The EPA conducted risk assessment, and evaluation of public comments and input from an external scientific review panel on methodologies to perform a risk assessment for residential settings and potential exposure to children from CCA.

On February 12, 2002, the EPA announced a voluntary decision by the lumber industry to move consumer use of treated lumber products away CCA-treated wood by Dec. 31, 2003, in favor of new alternative wood preservatives. This transition affects virtually all residential uses of wood treated with CCA, including wood used in play-structures, decks, picnic tables, landscaping timbers, residential fencing, patios and walkways/boardwalks. According to this announcement, by January 2004, EPA will not allow CCA products for any of these residential uses.

Large businesses -- and (of course) government -- may continue to use CCA:

The use of CCA-treated wood will be limited to certain industrial and commercial applications. Residential applications affected by the change include play structures, decks, picnic tables, landscaping timbers, residential fencing, patios, and walkways/boardwalks. Some applications not affected by the settlement include highway construction, marine (saltwater) applications, utility poles, pilings, and selected engineered wood products.

Despite this shift away from CCA, the EPA asserts that no reason exists to remove or replace CCA-treated structures, including decks or playground equipment.

But if there's no reason to remove it from existing structures, why ban it? And why would anyone care? Because, as I just learned, CCA's replacement, (ACQ) wreaks havoc with construction materials:

With environmental and health concerns growing over the use of arsenic, the wood-preservative industry surrendered the right to use arsenic in wood for residential uses at the beginning of 2004.

The most common replacement preservatives are ammoniacal copper quat, or ACQ, followed by copper azole and borate. Borate is sometimes used in home foundation sill plates, but experts say borate-treated wood isn't appropriate for outdoor uses.

The higher metal corrosion rates associated with ACQ-treated wood have raised concerns with the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission and a San Francisco Bay Area district attorney who recently issued a consumer alert.

"CPSC is recommending consumers use stainless-steel brackets and fasteners in conjunction with ACQ-treated lumber," said commission spokesman Scott Wolfson. The CPSC is considering whether it needs to study the corrosion issue further, based on information from the connector industry and Contra Costa County.

That county's district attorney, Bob Kochly, warned in a recent consumer alert that wood treated with ACQ and copper azole "may result in serious and premature corrosion . . . especially in wet or moist conditions" unless stainless-steel connectors are used.

Are environmentalists and big business working in collusion?

And is the concern really about children eating arsenic-treated wood?

What happens if they eat ammoniacal copper quat, followed by copper azole and borate?

(I'm not an expert, but I suspect there might be another corrosive effect.)

Speaking of good writing, I found the following essay on an old floppy disk, and I thought it was worth sharing. The author, an ex of mine, died in 1995. So I guess you could call this a guest post from the long dead.

It's Chapter II from an autobiographical essay called "California."

While I ought to let Mark speak for himself, this has a distinctly haunted feel to it, although my objectivity is open to question, as I found this disk where it had been gathering dust for a decade. I hope he doesn't mind, and I really don't see why he would. I honestly think Mark's thoughts are culturally of enough interest to merit some immortal flavoring, and I see no rule against copying and pasting them into my blog.

I hope readers will appreciate what follows.

- Eric

CALIFORNIA, Chapter II

To no one's surprise, my arrival at my parent's household was duly recorded on many rolls of instamatic film. Whenever I visit my father in San Diego, I try to at least glimpse at the standard-issue drugstore photo album, swollen with the family archives. The pictures my parents took of each other before they adopted children, during the first ten years of their marriage, seem somehow incomplete, critical elements missing from their composition. My parents themselves seem perfectly alien, incomprehensible. The pictures reveal the careful frugality of my parents' lives; each photo solemnly records occasion and setting, self-consciously acknowledging its specific niche in their history together. Here is the efficiency apartment they lived in on Grape Street; here is the new car, Christmas, the trip to Catalina. Then, a series with my shirtless father, smiling as he builds a house with his own hands. When at last my sister was adopted, all photographic restraint was abandoned, and it is at this precise station of our family album that something vital comes alive, transforming these strangers into my parents.

The impact is remarkable, as the forcible entry of bunnies and high chairs, playpens and bassinets, intrudes upon the bachelor austerity of their Danish teak; then the sudden herd of relatives, beaming in now perpetual attendance; above all, the inexplicable mystery of my parents turned suddenly recognizable, smiling wide against the reveille of shutters and flashbulbs.

The casual viewer of my first photographs might well conclude I was Christ himself reborn, so evident and touching was my parents' joy, having bargained for me and won. It was not an easy adoption; my mother was 50 years old at the time of my birth, an unusually advanced age for a parent of either sex to adopt an infant. I was four days old. The pictures show her cradling me in her arms, her striking face glowing with love and fierce pride. Here, she is so undeniably beautiful, but I know this was the last time in her life she would enjoy her beauty or womanhood, and these pictures are painful beyond description. She would undergo radical surgery in my 18th month, removing two-thirds of her stomach in an effort to isolate and subdue a massively perforated ulcer. I never knew the still-young woman who triumphantly holds me up for the camera and all the world to see, her eyes flashing, glittering, alive. She left in her place a dying old woman, crazed by fear and pain, ravaged by drugs, annihilated by medicine. This is the last time we shall have together. For now, not so much as a whisper of doubt. For now, my father, greatest of shadows, loves me still. There is nothing yet for him to fear. I am still a miracle. Here is a picture of my father, holding me as if I were made of glass; he wears an expression of quiet wonder on his face; he does not seem to be aware of the camera's gaze. The visual perspective of the photograph suggests that the photographer took quiet aim from a doorway or hall, keeping secretive distance from the subjects, who held each other tightly, undisturbed.

Today I bear upon my cheek a tiny scar, reminder of my reluctant passage from a now-forgotten womb into the bright steel jaws of a doctor's impatient forceps, implacably drawing me forth into the alien landscape as remorselessly as one might extract a tooth. Only the scar remains as proof of my birth.

There was never a birth, there was only a child. We were the family who married each other.

My life as an infant was one of purest bliss, spent contentedly in loving arms, pressed against these dim warm shapes, meadow-sweet and soft as old flannel. It was here that first I must have dreamed of all I had forgotten, in the ancient laps of grandparents, the proud arms of aunts and uncles, in the tenderly bemused arms of young cousins and friends. It was here that first I felt my flesh touch yours, or his, or anyone's, and somehow, I can almost remember knowing something ... big. Then nothing, nothing at all. Only flesh, singing lullabies and riddles in the language of hands. At the conjunction of flesh and sleep, the lessons of hunger are taught. Such is the function of memory.

Not awake, I pressed even closer in response, snuggling deeper in sleepy reply. Tender and blind, in my father's strong arms I first learned of hunger. In his arms, and in my dreams, I still could fly like a dagger of light, a naked wicked beauty, not quite human, not yet mortal.

I remember only darkness, darkness and flesh.

I awoke to find myself a toddler, as if hurled, full-grown and squealing, into delighted consciousness, where I landed dazed but unharmed. I proceeded to amaze the world by reading aloud before the age of three, a skill I had not been taught. I only remember knowing how. With similar aplomb, I mounted the Wurlitzer chord organ, filling the air with song. I was alarmingly bright, very pretty indeed, a precious golden child. I went to Sunday School, drew pictures, read books, and watched TV with native excellence. I was yet a gift from God.

A splendid child. No wonder they came to me in dreams, those mysterious, handsome young men who loved me ferociously and pressed me against their hairy naked chests. Why should they not make love to me? As I was regularly assured, I was truly the best little boy in the whole wide world, and everybody Loved Me, Loved Me, Loved me.

In sleep I was delighted heir to a kingdom of delicious secret wickedness, a toddler's empire of license and permission. In sleep, sorcery was as common as flight. In sleep, anything is possible. Cartoon characters, man and beast alike, were my regular visitors. I was especially fond of Johnny Quest; I recently watched several old episodes after some twenty-odd years had elapsed.

I noted with great amusement the powerful homoerotic elements at work. Nowhere is a female to be found, save the occasional maharini or scientist's daughter rescued by the determinedly squeamish Johnny, who knew only too well how her gratitude included the obligatory embarrassment of kisses, which he seemed to resent rather fiercely. The eternally invincible Johnny and his retinue of beloved male comrades won my lonesome heart. Even the dog was a fag.

How I longed to conquer Namor the Submariner, arrogant and bitter Atlantean who cannot love or trust a human; I dreamed of the day when I, too, would become the beloved ward of a handsome, eccentric millionaire, who would give to me strange powers and a new name; he would lead me to his underground cavern, where together we would celebrate our secrets. Once I dreamed I lay in a storybook barn's tiny hayloft, next to Major West of Lost in Space, who fondled me affectionately and submitted as eagerly to my own caress. Incidentally, a neighborhood acquaintance kept the Monkees tucked naked inside her radio, who waited only to be brought out to dance under flashlight and blankets, performing hilarious obscenities for a carefully selected audience. At last, I found myself afloat, high above an enchanted Disneyland glittering magically beneath my feet. I landed on tiptoe, greeted by a host of Disney characters. From the highest turret of Sleeping Beauty's castle, we waved to the enormous crowd celebrating below, returning their wild cheers as thousands of multi-colored balloons were released, filling the sky. We had triumphed at last. A handsome youth with shaggy brown hair, naked beneath his ridiculously bulky dog costume, had taken the mask off his beautiful face, and motioned to me. He led me away from the castle balustrade, to the cool gray shadows beneath a plaster arch. We embraced. My child's hand slipped knowingly under the heavy plush of his costume, deliberately caressing the smooth warm skin of his naked buttocks. As he held me in his strong arms, murmuring and drawing me closer, I awoke, rolling frantically upon my belly, squirming circles into the mattress, my body grinding with unbelievable pleasure. After the eruption ceased, I lay quite still, awestruck and quite naturally incredulous upon experiencing my first orgasm at the approximate age of four years.

I knew myself to be royalty, a miraculous child of heavenly brilliance, more angel than human. I felt as if I were an enchanted princess, spellbound with sleep, awaiting the embrace of a handsome prince. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella had their obvious and devastating effects. To a startled world, I announced my desire to become a girl. These demands were first ignored, but as I became embarrassingly vocal in my insistence, I was first mocked, then punished, at last imprisoned in the horrid shackles of tiny cowboy outfits, complete with gunbelt and badge, forcibly inflicted upon me in their grim determination to rid me of my passion. Yes, there are pictures of this spectacle as well, and I am pleased to recall the expression of absolute loathing I wore whenever photographed in such hideous attire. I only wanted to be as beautiful as I knew girls alone could be. I recall another dream from this period in my childhood, in which I have been miraculously transformed into a dazzling fairy princess, resplendent in a silvery gown, my hateful crewcut now an elaborate blonde bouffant, billowing skywards and crowned with a diamond tiara, my face as eerily perfect as a porcelain doll's, with hugely exaggerated eyes and a perfect rosebud mouth, set in a delicate heart-shaped face. So great was my joy upon discovering myself thusly transformed that I began to urinate, awash in an ocean of contented warmth. I awoke not to the embrace of a handsome prince, but to a cold and soggy mattress and an unsympathetic world.

As becomes a princess, I was a difficult child, forever at odds with the vulgar prison of my earthly station, thwarted at every attempt to realize my true destiny. I came to find my parents' plodding embrace of middle-class values to be shabby and crude, not to mention incomprehensible in a world which serves vintage champagnes and stylish canapés to its preferred guests.

I once lovingly prepared a set of recipe cards for my mother's benefit, inventing elaborate and costly hors d'oeuvres calling for liberal portions of caviar. Perplexed and exasperated, she tried to explain that "we were not that kind of people." Bruised yet again by the infernal pea beneath my many mattresses, I haughtily informed her that it was she who was "not that kind of people," not I, earning for myself an invigorating gargle with Ivory liquid, preferred by my mother for such tasks, its ease of application further improved by the disappearance of tiny toothmarks from our bars of soap.

They tried to bring me back to earth, too late, too late. Chores were assigned, then enforced. I resisted bitterly, weeping with shame: Sleeping Beauty never collected dog shit with a garden spade from her back yard.

They would have their victory. They would speak to me of death.

They explained to me that my grandmother had died, and that we would go and see her before she was buried. We drove to a small mortuary a few blocks away from the convalescent hospital she had ended her life in. She lay in state, the coffin open, seemingly asleep. My mother whispered to me, "Touch her." I did. She was cold as ice.

It was too quiet. "Can I go outside?" I asked. I was allowed to exit, and I climbed into the front seat of the station wagon, taking advantage of their absence by helping myself to several candy bars I found in the glove compartment. Driving home, I asked if I, too, would die. They said yes, but I refused to believe them. The confirmation of my eventual death had a familiar hollow ring, like other pronouncements they regularly made, supposedly designed with my best interests in mind. I was immortal. I would live forever. I would never die.

Now comes memory with lessons of fear.

I had strayed too far out. I had gone too far. The night held monsters, hungry and unspeakable.

One night I found the world turned cold, its face against me, love turned to hate as it so often does. I said the first of many prayers. Ghosts howled in the distance, zombies marched closer in militant formation, searching everywhere; they will not rest. The jungle of darkness pressed hard against my window, seeking entry, billowing into sinister shapes looming over my bed, where, trembling beneath the covers, I pray the dark will pass me by, too late, too late. The darkness wants me too. I screw my eyes as tightly shut as possible, for if those yellow orbs should meet my own, it will see my fear, and tear me to pieces. Helpless, I see its hideous gaze, burning through my eyelids as if lasers, and around those demon eyes congeals the darkness into terrifying shape, an idiot Frankenstein's monster angrily rises far above me in murderous silhouette. I have been found out. He reaches out his arms for me as a calm, inhuman voice explains inside my head that, while sounds alone cannot hurt you, shadows kill, and now the monster strangles the final scream from my little throat, a useless echo in the indifferent night.

I had been rendered mortal, after all. I have been inconsolable ever since.

I just watched the International Space Station slide by overhead, like a little amber bead on an invisible abacus wire.

If you don't know what it is, you might mistake it for an airliner. If you do know what it is, it's too cool for words.

As it is, I have a hard time balancing flippancy and venom. The more sincerely I feel about something, the more I'm drawn towards shrill peevishness and bilious ranting.

Except, of course, when I talk about Leon Kass...

I realize that past a certain point, confident self-assurance sounds like arrogant dogmatism. This is counterproductive, but sometimes I just can't help myself.
When I come across a writer who expresses my own thoughts in a more civilized and articulate manner, it makes me realize how far I have yet to go.

Jay Fox makes some arguments that I have made in the past, but makes them in such a pleasant, heartfelt way, that I just had to share them with you.

His primary argument is that we should be thinking about longevity first. Literally. Well, maybe I don't agree entirely with that, but it should certainly be in the top ten.

Some of you may wonder why I feel that way. For starters, helping people to stay healthier longer is so self-evidently virtuous as to require no excuses. It angers me that such excuses are even thought necessary in "certain quarters". To live a good life requires, first and foremost, that you have a life to be good WITH. The dead have had done with being good.

But the life extension angle, isn't that just a little kooky? We have no proof at all that it's even possible, right? Aren't I just grasping at straws here? Well now, that's the funny thing. We actually DO have evidence that it's possible, at least in lab animals. Heck, it's not just possible, it's a done deal.

Worms have had their natural spans trebled, and quintupled. Rats have gained fifty percent. If the rat comes from a truly screwed up strain, prone to a short lifespan, caloric restriction can triple their life expectancy.

And we've known how to do this since the 1930's. It's only now that we have the tools to begin exploring the why of it.

Given these FACTS, when I hear someone denigrate this type of research as hopeless, or immoral, or doomed to failure, I ask myself where THEIR evidence is...but perhaps I'd better quit while I'm ahead.

Here are some things Jay has written that I (mostly) agreed with.

Imagine aging has been cured. People no longer grow old. Old people can be restored to youthfulness.

The first thing to understand is that death has not been cured. People will still die. Accidents will still happen, as will murder, war, suicide, pneumonia, fatal flu viruses, etc. Even heart attacks, strokes, and cancer will still happen, though far less frequently. It is important to understand this, because we need to be clear about the philosophical and religious aspects of curing aging. People will still die; mortality will still define existence. People will not live forever simply because they no longer have an expiration date.

So what's the difference, then? Without aging, people will live a lot longer. 500 years, perhaps 1,000. There wouldn't actually be a hard limit, as there is today. Today, you might have a 50% chance of living to 80, but a 0% chance of living to 130. On the other hand, with aging cured, you might have a 50% chance of living to 500, but a 6% chance of living to 2,000, and a 1% chance of living past 3,000.

Why did I ask us to consider the world from this perspective? Well, think back to today's world. We currently live in a world that openly rejects the mere concept of curing aging. We live in a world where it's okay to talk about curing heart disease, or cancer, or Alzheimer's, as long as we don't make people “live forever.” It's okay to let people live 10 years longer, or 20, but 50 years is too much—it's unnatural. As such, we live in a world where it's okay to spend tens of billions of dollars a year to cure cancer, but it would be considered a waste of time and money—indeed, it would be morally wrong—to spend half that much money to cure aging itself

If we have a chance to save hundreds of millions of lives, and cure cancer and heart disease at the same time, for less than we currently spend on either cancer or heart research, aren't we obligated morally to carry out that research?

Put another way, if aging researchers announced that aging would be cured in 30 years, would we actively try to stop them? Would we actively try to prevent hundreds of millions of people from living longer lives? Would we in fact condemn hundreds of millions of people to die? It's easy sometimes to remove personal responsibility for the misery and suffering of others, by saying that we did not cause that misery.

Once aging was cured, and people were living hundreds of years, would we want to go back? Think of antibiotics. They are “unnatural,” just as curing aging would be. Would we want to go back to the days before antibiotics? If not, then why does today's world not want to go forward, into a world where people don't have to die by the tens of millions?

...Knowing that a cure for aging is possible, we must cure aging as fast possible. Looking back at 2004, from the year 2104, we will be ashamed that we did not act faster to save the millions of lives that will be lost by our collective inaction. Let us not allow 2005 or 2006 to be remembered so shamefully.

You can read the whole thing here. Where I part company with Mr. Fox, is the notion of moral culpability. Also, though I am convinced that people will eventually live longer, I am not confident as to the actual numbers. Given those minor caveats, there is one thing he says of which I am dead certain. Let me say it again.

Looking back at 2004, from the year 2104, we will be ashamed that we did not act faster...

SECOND THOUGHTS: From second parties, namely Phil Bowermaster at "The Speculist". He read the essay by Jay Fox and had some observations of his own to make...

Our ancestors engaged in a war against death that we're still fighting today. They threw everything they had and everything they could think up at the enemy, and as a result we now have science and medicine and religion and, really, the whole of human culture. They were relentless and tenacious fighters, but (being rational creatures) they understood the limitations of the war they were able to wage. As a group, the clan/tribe/people would fight on until the end of time, making what progress they could against death. But as individuals, it had to be acknowledged that each and every soldier would one day fall to the enemy.

That was a terrible thing. An unacceptable thing. But it had to be accepted anyway. Refusing to acknowledge the inevitability of death would have made as much sense as refusing to acknowledge the inevitability of gravity. It was pointless, and you would go crazy if you thought too much about that kind of thing.

It's only within the past couple of centuries that human beings have had our first real victories in the war with gravity. Getting to the first hot air balloons, much less to Kitty Hawk, required an enormous paradigm shift on the part of a few visionaries. Only after these heroes showed the rest of the world that gravity could be beaten did the mass of humanity come around to shifting paradigms.

That's encouraging, but the "inevitability of death" paradigm is far more entrenched than the "inevitability of gravity" paradigm. There's so much more at stake. To acknowledge that life might go on for decades or centuries longer than we've ever known it to is to kindle a hope that lies hidden in the heart of every human being.

You can read the whole thing here.

THIRD THOUGHTS: A warm welcome to Instapundit readers... I hope you like what you've read so far, and also hope you'll look around a bit when you're done here. My blog-host Eric and I have very different interests, and though he has been previously instalanched, oh, a few times, this will be my very...first...ever. Have I mentioned how extra-special each and every one of you is to me? Didn't think so. That's why blatant and shameless self-promotion follows. You've been warned...

For peevish bile aimed at Leon Kass click on his name up in paragraph two, or go here.

For cool Israeli tech with a dash of paranoia try "Barking Dogs".

"Bigger Dirigible" looks at the possibility of a government driven lighter-than-air Renaissance. Yeah, I know...

If you prefer your science fiction clearly labeled as such, here's a review of "The Golden Age" by John C. Wright. I think he's as good as Charles Stross.

Retrospectives on Paul Ehrlich and Jeremy Rifkin have (perhaps too often) graced these pages. Both "Estimated Prophet" and "Birth Of A Notion" are sentimental favorites of mine. "Machine Gun For An Idiot Child" asks the rhetorical question "What would it take to make those two happy?". Bjorn Lomborg supplies a plausible answer.

To wrap up our commercial programming, some "Family Values" vignettes,
"Anecdotage", "The Blue And The Grey", and "My Aunt Margie". Now you've got psychological insight, see?

At a conservative estimate, Eric cranks out more than 95% of the bloggage around these parts. Dennis and I sort of lurk in the crannies, firing off an occasional potshot, but if you look for us, we're here. Thanks for dropping by.

Extra thanks to Phil Bowermaster, Reason, and Jay Fox for fighting the good fight.

E at the Dave, responding to one of the single most offensive pieces of post-9-11 relativist drivel I've seen, gives "cultural studies" darling Terry Eagleton a dose of righteous indignation that's worth reading.

Notice that Eagleton starts right in with "insurgents." At my favorite blog the Bleat, James Lileks shows us the term "terrorist" in use in 1937, long before Reuters *ahem* altered the discourse, adding this:

It’s almost jarring to see the word “TERRORIST” in 1937, since we think that belongs to the post 1972-Olympics world, perhaps. And it’s enlightening to read about violence and bloodshed and the usual cycle o’ violence instigated, in this example, by the publication of a commission’s recommendation to partition the area.

No doubt they were reacting to the future occupation of the West Bank.

I have long been a chump for the romance and glamour of airships. A credulous rube, a gullible hayseed, a sucker, a mark, a patsy. I wanted to believe.

Seeing the Goodyear Blimp can still bring a vacant smile to my childlike face. It always has. Cruel the fate, that denies me a sky darkened at noon by majestic leviathans. Events have conspired again and again to raise my hopes, only to dash them pitilessly.

I thought Cargolifter would be off the ground by now.

In June 2002, the company made an application for insolvency. In August 2002, work on Cargolifter's other major programme, the CL 75 lifting balloon was also halted.

Damn.

And whatever happened with Skycat? I loved watching the videos of their drone test flights. Where are they now?

I fear I'm setting myself up for yet another cycle of emotional abuse. The United States Office of Force Transformation (Did you even know we had such a thing? We contain multitudes!) would like to upgrade military logistics and civil cargo hauling with heavy lift airships. Be still my heart. I am in love again.

With a tip o' the hat to Jules Verne, they are currently styling the project "Mobilus in Mobile", "Mobile within the Mobile Element".

Here are a few bullets from their introductory pitch:

• A new form of airlift dramatically increases the overall capacity of the transportation network from origin to destination (strategic and operational distances) and within theaters of operation

• This maneuver capability can overcome area denial and anti-access measures by flying directly to the destination area and offload in austere areas

• Humanitarian relief – massive amounts of food, modular hospitals, water purification equipment – can be delivered directly to the point where it is needed

• The US air transportation system becomes a more robust and agile network capable of absorbing disruptions due to weather or attack

• Military capabilities can rapidly maneuver to critical points across the earth at least three times faster than by ship and be ready to operate immediately – and do so at lower cost than existing airlift

I suppose we can all come up with our own examples, some fairly recent, of just how useful such capabilities would be. What makes me feel all funny inside is that the Pentagon is aiming for dual use from the outset.

The up front capital investment will be tremendous, and the time required for design, construction and certification (the latter often overlooked) is measured in years. To justify this tremendous investment, investors must be confident of significant profits, and this suggests many craft in operation to achieve economies of scale and return on investment. The military also needs hundreds of airships to exist so there would be enough to either operate in an arrangement similar to the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) and/or to lease. This means there must be a large LTA industrial base similar to that of aircraft. LTA operations must demonstrate three things to investors and regulators: consistency of operations, complementary capabilities to existing assets, and commercial viability.

Now I'm really in love. Advancing the art of force projection, at a profit.

Airships for industry! Airships for science! We may yet reach that curious steam-punkish future of slow moving aerial shipping envisioned by Kipling in 1905...

Yellow-bellied ore-flats and Ungava petrol-tanks punt down leisurely out of the north, like strings of unfrightened wild duck. It does not pay to "fly" minerals and oil a mile farther than necessary; but the risks of transhipping to submersibles in the ice pack off Nain or Hebron are so great that these heavy freighters fly down to Halifax direct, and scent the air as they go. They are the biggest tramps aloft except the Athabasca grain-tubs. But these last, now that the wheat is moved, are busy, over the world's shoulder, timber-lifting in Siberia.

Or, we may not. It could all come to naught, yet again. Kipling's airships used clean, light, fictional atomics. Shades of "The World Set Free". We wouldn't have that advantage.

Plus, I heard that the shadowy and enigmatic Tom Swift Sr. had Fleury whacked. We may have to make do with jet lifters.

While it isn't especially related to this blog, it just so happens that I am an attorney licensed to practice in California. And right now I am faced with an inescapable responsibility called "MCLE" (Mandatory Continuing Legal Education). Because of my last name, I fall in the "N-Z" group, which means I must complete 25 hours of MCLE coursework by January 31, 2005.

I started yesterday, so I have a ton of course work still in front of me to complete.

Adding this to the rest of the stuff I'm supposed to be doing doesn't leave much time for blogging.

I'll try to check in as I can, and I appreciate everyone's patience.

(If I'm lucky I can get Justin to fill in!)

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is hosted by The Raving Atheist, who not only does a great job, but was nice enough to allow my late entry. The posts are grouped according to religion (or lack thereof), and mine is in the Pagan category. (I have issues with religious differences, so I "define" myself as an apostate Christian Pagan or an apostate Pagan Christian -- depending on the judgment of the religious judge. This is probably related to my issues over sexual and political "definitions" -- which are too often used not to define, but to induce conformity to the will of others.)

But enough of my definitional ranting. I don't have time to define myself out of existence today.

Go read the Carnival.

And do not be defined!

San Francisco Bay Areans have become much too complacent about a genuine threat to freedom -- in the form of RED LIGHT CAMERAS!

These detestable, unconstitutional devices have sprung up all over the place, and so far they have survived court challenges. A neighbor was recently cited by one of the damned things, and she showed me the summons which was mailed to her. It featured not only pictures of her license plate, but of her face as she drove through the intersection. An accompanying notice recited the so-far fruitless nature of the quest to defeat this noxious idea in the courts, and explained that the citing officer (the one signing the form) was the "witness" who could be expected to appear in court against her. It goes on to explain that the ticket may only be contested "if you are not the person in the picture" and the whole thing made my blood boil. Because, with technology proceeding at its present pace, there'll soon be sensors linked to cameras on the highways, with automatic speed tickets being cranked out by computerized Big Brotherism, with the confrontation clause of the Constitution rendered meaningless.

I'm not patient enough to wait for a good legal case, and I won't be in California for more than another week or so.

But I had a few thoughts, and the first thing that occurred to me was, hey, if you're a deliberate scofflaw and you know you're running a red light, why sit there and be a victim? You could always do what disgraced respectable businessmen used to do in the 1950s when they were arrested on morals charges; throw a hat in front of your face! Now, I realize that this might interfere with driving, so it might help to punch a couple of holes through it beforehand. (An old baseball cap would serve just as well as the 1950s gentleman's fedora, of course.)

Of course, if the "citing officer" (a whining socialist government clerk, more likely) saw that picture, why, he might not be too happy about it. Bureaucrats don't like being bested at their game, and besides, they'd have your license number. That's enough information to bring a possible charge of interference with a law enforcement officer, as proscribed in Section 148 of the California Penal Code:

Resisting, Delaying, or Obstructing Officer

148. (a) (1) Every person who willfully resists, delays, or obstructs any public officer, peace officer, or an emergency medical technician, as defined in Division 2.5 (commencing with Section 1797) of the Health and Safety Code, in the discharge or attempt to discharge any duty of his or her office or employment, when no other punishment is prescribed, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment.

(2) Except as provided by subdivision (d) of Section 653t, every person who knowingly and maliciously interrupts, disrupts, impedes, or otherwise interferes with the transmission of a communication over a public safety radio frequency shall be punished by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment.

Which brings me to a completely unrelated idea more along the lines of Rube Goldberg than the ACLU.

Remember, I would never advocate violating Section 148, so this is completely unrelated, OK?

Ahem.

Ever lock your keys in the car? What a humiliating, degrading experience that is! Well, you can buy those little metal Hide-A-Key sliding containers to stick under the fender, but thieves might find them and steal your car, and these days, there's not much magnetic metal under cars; the underside of my car consists of plastic "aprons."

So how about hiding the key underneath the license plate? I think it would be pretty easy to make a license plate frame with a mousetrap-style spring hinge so that the plate would flap closed. (Some gas tank filler caps are located under hinged license plates.) But that's way too insecure, as thieves might figure it out......

So I thought, why not have the license plate spring going the other way, so that the plate wants to fly open all the time, but is held down by a small plastic catch? The latter could be solenoid-controlled by a remote hand held unit, so if you were to lock your keys in the car, you'd just press the button, and with an instant SNAP! the plate flies upward, and there's the key in its hiding place.

Naturally, this would render the license plate unreadable, so you'd have to make sure to close it in place afterwards, and you'd never, never want to hit the "unlatch" button while driving, because then the cops (and the red light cameras) would be unable to see (or read) your plate.

This might be a nice gadget for the man or woman who has everything, and it could be sold by the same places that sell radar detection equipment.

But they'd have to include the following warning:

"NOT TO BE USED IN EVADING RED LIGHT CAMERAS!"

That would be illegal!

(Far be it from me to say whether, in the philosophical sense, it would be wrong.)

UPDATE: Wow, I was gone most of the day and then some, and just returned late at night to see that Glenn Reynolds has linked this post. Thanks Glenn, and welcome InstaPundit readers. I appreciate the comments, and if I could add anything it would be that I personally think that anyone who deliberately runs a red light is contemptible and dangerous, and I don't defend them. Two wrongs do not make a right, though, and when smaller freedoms are sacrificed (even for a good cause), that only greases the skids for much larger encroachments.

UPDATE (01/27/05): Glenn Reynolds has more on the problems with traffic cameras: they not only increase the number of accidents, but raise serious problems involving legal process. In Virginia, personal service is required, which does not obtain by certified mail.

In California,

[W]ith red light cameras, there is no arrest, no promise to appear, no signature of the arresting officer to verify the traffic complaint, no personal service of process, no live witness, no right to confront accusers, no due process, no fair hearing and an automatic finding of guilt by the court.

And here's a description of how it works.

According to another web site, several years ago ago, these tickets were being beaten routinely:

If you get a ticket in the mail from San Francisco's red light camera program, think twice about paying up. Eight of every 10 motorists captured are escaping conviction. With a $270 fine for running a red light, many motorists are driving without front license plates and risking the $25 fine. (The cameras take a picture of the front of the car.) Also, since the owner of the car is mailed the ticket, some car owners are able to get the tickets dismissed if they can convince authorities that they were not driving the vehicle at the time. One woman is suing the city because she says the camera is not an appropriate witness in lieu of an officer, who can assess the situation and circumstances. Others argue that motorists who drive the same route past these cameras every day will have no recollection of the supposed infraction when they receive the ticket several weeks later, and are essentially left without a defense. It shifts the burden of proof to the accused.

If they keep this up, they'll be losing more money then they get!

(And now it's back to work for me.....)

MORE: A reader who hasn't tried it yet emailed me about a web site advertising "Phantom Plate" -- which he describes as "a high gloss varnish that makes your license unreadable after the flash of the camera light goes off."

I don't know how well it works, but I checked out the web site and I like the slogan:

"Over 1,000,000 license plates protected."

Perhaps they should add that this product is sold only as a license plate preservative -- and is not intended to be used to evade law enforcement activities!

Friday, October 15, 2004

"Bush talks and thinks like Milosevic. He will lose, but the most disheartening thing is the prospect of his religio-nationalist reality-deniers clinging fiercely to the sacred glory of their Lost Cause for the next hundred years. We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."

--Bruce Sterling, via email to William Gibson

Saturday, October 24, 2004

It never ceases to amaze me, how Josh Marshall can keep this administration's lies sorted, handily enough to cite and refute them, crisply and authoritatively, day after day. This must amount by now to knowing two entirely different versions of history by heart, the one genuine, the other an endlessly (and indeed artlessly) exfoliating "tissue of sheerest horseshit*"

Here, today, he does it again, skewering the sort of shameless (not to say surreal, grotesque) revisionism that no longer even causes our jaws to drop. Myself, were I to daily and directly subject myself to the full blast of ill-crafted lies issuing from the White House, I would quickly grow punchdrunk and confused. I simply wouldn't have the stomach for it. Not so Josh Marshall. Long may he wave.

--William Gibson, blogging

They started to change with "The Difference Engine".

Just the kind of day that makes you feel good to be alive!

Gomez Addams's cartoon precursor used to say that to his family only on the gloomiest of days.

The gloomy days here (wet and foggy, with temperatures in the 50s) actually do make me feel good to be alive, especially compared to the arctic East Coast conditions.

I finally found my camera (which I'd concluded had been stolen out of my car), and thought I'd celebrate by sharing a couple of shots of the blessed, blissful, Bay Area gloom.

Here's the view outside my bedroom window. Straight across and through the fog is San Francisco, with the equally invisible Golden Gate Bridge in the center.

And here's a corner of the living room, looking towards the ceiling.

Lots of room to appreciate gloom!

This may sound crazy, but it's become clear to me that you simply cannot be a decent blogger without a fast (DSL or cable) connection. At this house in Berkeley I am stuck with dialup, and it is driving me crazy. Obviously, if I moved here I could go back to DSL, but for now it is sorely testing my patience. For starters, it takes several minutes just to load many typical blogs. Also, this is a much-neglected Windows 98 machine which I am rebuilding, and in the process of installing Windows 2000 I had to download SP4 (130 megabytes) and the connection failed again and again -- hours into the damned downloads. Utterly maddening. I suppose if you have nothing but time (and a phone line to waste), dialup is OK, but I am going nuts.

For all the improvements in technology, bandwidth still has a long way to go.

Well, now I'm really behind the curve. I finally got crosstown and retrieved my copy of " Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard". However, at this late date, the Boxing Day Tsunami is all but off the radar. That's too bad, cause' I wasn't FINISHED yet. Please indulge my slight monomania.

Submitted for your approval...a few snippets from the book. You may remember my fascination with anomalous boulders?

Most boulders found scattered across atolls consist of coral that is more than 1,500 years old; however, the boulders rest on an atoll foundation that is as young as 300 years. This fact suggests that the boulders were deposited by a large tsunami at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Local legends in the South Pacific describe the occurrence of large catastrophic waves at this time concomitant with the abandonment of many islands throughout French Polynesia. Significantly, the legends have the sun shining at the time of the waves…p 113

The Time Detective angle, you gotta love it. Onward to yet more boulders...

Of the world’s entire coastline, the West Coast of South America is one of the most prone to recurrent large tsunami…at Herradura Bay in the Coquimbo region, large tonalite boulders over 2 m in diameter are exposed within nearshore beach sands on a 200,000 year old interglacial terrace that is now situated 35-40 m above sea level. The boulders originated 2 km away, on the Coquimbo Peninsula, which was an island at the time the terraces formed. p 127

I've been fascinated by great inundations for decades. One of my brothers (I can't remember which) told me the story of Lost Atlantis when I was just a little shaver. He also told me that scientists were worried it might happen to North America sometime in the next six months. Mmmm, family values.

I am now about to perform my first "Wolcott"...

"Dr. Bryant has done yeoman service trying to warn people of what he calls “the underrated hazard”. Coastal fortifications would be impossibly expensive and don’t work."

Yup. That's the very first time I've quoted myself. Here's the relevant excerpt from Bryant.

The Hokkaido Nansei-Oki Tsunami of 12 July 1993

The earthquake consisted of at least five intense jolts spaced about 10 seconds apart…two to five minutes later a tsunami with an average run-up height of 5 m spread along the coast of Okushiri Island and killed 239 people-many of whom were still trying to flee the coastal area. On the southwestern corner of the island, run-up reached a maximum elevation of 31.7 m in a narrow gully…Tsunami walls up to 4.5 m high protecting most of the populated areas were overtopped by the tsunami. Similar walls have been constructed in and around Tokyo and other metropolitan areas of Japan to protect urban areas from tsunami. They may be just as ineffective. p 170

By trapping the backwash within city precincts, the tsunami barriers may actually manage to drown a few people who might otherwise escape. It's arguable...

Yet another recent killer wave, Papua New Guinea, 17 July 1998

…Tsunami flow depth averaged 10 m deep along 25 km of coastline reaching a maximum 17.5 m elevation. The wave penetrated 4 km inland in low-lying areas. In places, the inundation of water still 1-3 m deep 500 m inland…over 2,200 people lost their lives.

With pyrotechnics...

The wave was unusual because it was associated with fire, bubbling water, foul-smelling air, and burning of bodies. Eyewitnesses reported that the crest of the tsunami was like a wall of fire with sparkles flying off it…this sparkling was attributed to bioluminescence, while the foul odor was linked to a disturbance of methane-rich sediments in Sissano lagoon. The burnt bodies have been ascribed to friction…These explanations may not be correct. Subduction zones incorporate organic material, which is converted to methane by anaerobic decomposition. The sudden withdrawal of 1-2 m depth of water can cause degassing of these sediments, leading to bubbling water…The atmospheric pressure pulse preceding this wave may have been sufficient to ignite this methane. Certainly, the pulse was strong enough to flatten people to the ground before the wave arrived. Those exposed to this flaming wall of water would have been severely burnt before being carried inland.

Fascinating, horrible stuff. I think part of the horror stems from the sheer scale, the speed and lack of discrimination. Saint, sinner, mother, child, all grist for the wave's maw. If I were still a Christian, it might make me question my sacred teachings. As it is, I actually feel better being snuffed out like an insect by vast impersonal forces. If this sort of thing were done intentionally, I would want better explanations than the ones I've been given.

So, I'm philosophically naive. We already knew that.

If you're not totally fed up with giant waves, check out these...

http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/spacegd7.html

http://www.drgeorgepc.com/

The romance of airships?

Count me in!

In the last post, I discussed a double standard where it comes to discussing the sex differences between humans and animals. (See Why Gender Matters, discussed by Glenn Reynolds.) Anyway, this has all gotten me thinking about the aging brain, dirty old men, sex, and of course dogs.

A consummate con artist with the female sex (despite his age), Puff still has his testicles, and he's glad that Berkeley is not quite as uptight as San Francisco. While it might be true that "there just aren't as many hot bitches in San Francisco as there once were," Puff has found precisely the opposite in Berkeley.

Here's Puff scoring with a beautiful, trim, sleek pit bull named "Nikki."

No matter what your preference, you have to admit that Nikki is a hot Berkeley bitch! (I'm sure she's not the only one.)

I must apologize to my readers for not weighing in sooner on the crisis involving the "gay-tolerant" Spongebob Squarepants. I have been extremely busy out here, and what time I have that hasn't been sucked up by other things has been spent repairing computers. The latter, even when they work, are nowhere near as fast as my DSL connection back East, which has spoiled me.

At any rate, via InstaPundit, I see that James Dobson is most annoyed about Spongebob Squarepants' gay tolerance. Apparently, he thinks that tolerance is synonymous with promotion of homosexuality. I'm not quite sure I follow the logic there, because tolerance is not defined. It would seem to me that tolerance means tolerance not only of homosexuals (who of course practice homosexuality by definition), but it might also mean tolerance of whatever it is that "promotion" means. Religious tolerance means more than tolerating religion; it means tolerating the promotion of religion. Tolerance is of course a two way street, and it always struck me that if promotion is tolerated, then opposition to promotion must also be tolerated. Otherwise, promotion becomes intolerant. But if intolerance is promoted, it can eventually cancel the tolerance which allows it in the first place.

Anyway, it's convoluted as hell, but I'm against intolerance of any sort, and I think James Dobson really ought to choose his targets more carefully. In any event, preaching tolerance is not the same as promoting homosexuality because tolerance -- even tolerance of promotion -- is not promotion.

What strikes me as being worse than James Dobson's intolerance of Spongebob Squarepants is San Francisco's intolerance of dog sex. According to SF Weekly's Matt Smith San Francisco is downright puritanical where it comes to what used to be considered canine nature:

In my day there were parks, riverbeds, alleyways, and railway beds where dogs could meet, hook up, and make love obscured from the embarrassing gaze of human beings.

Sadly, in San Francisco, spaces of this sort are off limits to animal love, thanks to a blue law in the city's Health Code that says it's illegal for animals to "breed on public property," excepting places such as the University of California at San Francisco hospital, where researchers may spawn rats, monkeys, and whatnot.

You can imagine my pleasure, therefore, when I noticed a package of legislation on last week's Board of Supervisors agenda aimed at improving the lives of San Francisco dogs. I was happier still when the package passed Tuesday, a story that was picked up by more than a hundred newspapers around the country, which reported on the seemingly ultrahumane, generous provisions of the new law that require owners to provide doghouses complete with blankets and raised floors for their pets.

And I was ecstatic when I learned the dog-law package was sponsored by Supervisor Bevan Dufty, ordinarily an ope