Long drive to New Jersey today, so there probably won't be much blogging.

However, I'll try to keep my eye on the signs. Like these:

Coco's thinking about suing over that last sign, as she was using shredders long before the dogs in that picture, and she suspects they've committed an infringement of her shredding.

Naturally she wants to shred their infringement.

So I'm leaving her something to chew on.

(As you can see, Coco doesn't have much light to shred on the subject right now....)

I don't know how many readers know it, but Connie du Toit -- a longtime favorite reader and commenter -- has returned to her own blog. Hmmm... I don't know what to call her return from anonymous blogging -- "coming out of the closet" or a "resurrection"? -- but seeing her back is an absolute delight.

What I love most about Connie du Toit is that she has a rare combination of wisdom and humor that I find so inspiring. I don't know how many of my blog posts have been generated by her thoughts, but there are a lot.

Sometimes when I read her thoughts, I see them as commonsensical tidbits of wisdom at the same time I see them as inviting satire. Her latest post -- "Who you are" -- flips both of these switches.

I'll start with the common sense:

Most folks (appear) to prefer to think that their meat doesn't come from animals and are shocked that I don't have a problem discussing the fact that my meat actually comes from dead animals. And I, like some prison camp official, actually order my animal's deaths! "I couldn't do that" is a common response. "Couldn't do what?"

Just because you don't know the date and time of your animal's execution does not mean you are not personally responsible for the death of an animal that you've bought parts of in the grocery store. Passivity in the process as a way of keeping your hands clean is delusional. If you didn't buy meat then the producers would cut production, but if you continue to buy it, an animal is going to be killed on your behalf.

Connie follows animal deaths with a complaint about people who talk about personal stuff like exercise. As an exercise nut, this made me immediately feel, well, exercised:

Another common safe subject is exercise routines. Oh, gawd. I am as interested in someone's exercise routine as I am their bowel movements or how often they floss, shower, or the speed of their toenail growth. That is extremely personal, and banal. When did grooming habits and routine become an acceptable topic of conversation?

Plus, I have written several blog posts about my teeth, which are an extreme environmental hazard making even the cremation of my corpse a very inflammatory topic. Doesn't the public have a right to know about my dangerous mouth?

And since when are my toenails not at least as interesting as my teeth? I mean, I've never had a pedicure or anything, and I haven't uploaded pictures of them, but I'm sure there has to be at least as much reader interest in these vital topics as there is bureaucratic interest. Who knows what vile bacterial, viral, mercury levels they might contain? Should I be allowed to simply throw them in the trash when that might cause them to spread filth, disease, and infection?

The personal has become political, and we are all either part of the solution or part of the problem! The mercury in your teeth, the sewage you generate when you relieve yourself, how long you run the water while brushing your teeth, how much water you use to wash your hair, all of these things have a direct environmental impact on the entire planet. Did you know that if your child loses a tooth, it is a biohazard? The heat we use, the calories we burn, even the air we exhale -- all of this contributes to Global Warming and Greenhouse gas!

What Connie du Toit does not seem to realize (probably because of her admitted refusal to attend political self-criticism sessions) is that not only are these so-called "grooming habits" acceptable topics of conversation, they should be required topics of inquiry.

Considering the highly political nature of these so-called "personal habits," it can only be concluded that any reluctance to discuss such important issues might be evidence of that reactionary racist belief known as individualism.

Be warned. The wisdom of Connie du Toit is infectious, hazardous, and probably addictive.

Anyone seen the clever little stickers like these that activists place on stop signs?

True confession: I'm feeling too lazy to run down to a nearby corner, so I borrowed the sign and photoshopped it to suit the needs of this blog post. No, I didn't add the "EATING ANIMALS" sticker. What the sign actually looked like was this:

A little busy, no?

Regular readers know how I feel about animal rights, but I'm not sure that a stop sign is the right place to be debating that issue one way or the other. A stop sign is not a public debating forum at all, but a safety measure. When people start putting political messages on them, they're distracting drivers from the signs' primary purpose -- which is to make sure drivers stop so that people don't get killed in the intersection.

The problem is, there are too many of these annoying messages, and they invite more "contra" messages. (Which I admit, are a lot more entertaining, and more artsy.)

Like these:

* Collaborate And Listen
* Defacing Stop Signs
* Drop And Roll
* Hammer Time!
* Is The New Go
* It
* Me If You've Heard This Before
* Stickers
* Walking
* With All The Patchouli

* Leftist Drivel
* Socialism
* Nanny Statism
* Animal Rights
* Hillary Clinton
* Intestinal blockage

If you feel so strongly about eating animals, you why not just buy one of the "EATING ANIMALS" stickers and put it where it belongs -- on your car bumper!

Hmmmm.... Maybe that's not a bad idea. You could buy them by the gross and hand them out at beef industry conventions.

I realize that complaining about the stickers does not solve the problem, but I think there is a simple (and probably quite legal) solution. Just take a razor blade and remove the defacing sticker from the stop sign. If you get stopped, tell them that the sticker is not only defacing taxpayers' property, but as an unwanted and inflammatory message, it constitutes a dangerous distraction, and a public hazard, and that you were just doing your part to clean up your community.

I don't think anyone would be arrested for that.

UPDATE: My thanks to M. Simon for linking this post, and for his insightful comments:

Some need heroin, some don't.

Forgive this exercise in the surreal, but that's how I'm feeling about the apparently phony Iraqi police official called "Jamil Hussein," who is now claimed to be real after all.

I know it sounds nutty, but this whole thing had been reminding me of an old friend named "George Harleigh" until Jamil Hussein's apparent resurrection from the phony to the realm of real life.

Might it be time to bring back George Harleigh?

I don't know how many readers remember him, but George Harleigh was a famous Political Science professor who had worked in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and who was always heard to sound off against Bush at a "news" site called "Capitol Hill Blue."

At the time, it didn't make sense to me that any news site could do this consistently and get away with it. But the guy who ran the site was once a regular reporter. How, I wondered, could a formerly "good" reporter could "go bad"? I assumed that he had once learned how to do proper reporting, but that somehow he had become corrupt or lazy.

In light of the Jamil Hussein allegations (which came on the heels of things like the phony ambulance attack, photoshopped smoke, the Green Helmet man, and more), I was beginning to think that George Harleigh might not have resulted from the imagination of a reporter who became corrupted, but that using fictitious sources is just the way things are done.

Bloggers have seen this so many times that the natural reaction of many is to believe CENTCOM's assertion that there was no Jamil Hussein in the Iraqi police. Gateway Pundit (via Glenn Reynolds) had a remarkable post about the Jamil Hussein "Iraqi police captain" affair. Flopping Aces seems to have uncovered the hoax, and NewsBusters had more.

I liked Jeff Goldstein's explanation of the dynamics:

Whether this narrative is the product of willful distortion or merely the laziness that comes with being fed stories that match your preconceptions is, in effect, beside the point--though the former is clearly more despicable, and, should it prove to be the case, has the practical effect of undermining a representative democracy that can only work properly if citizens are being given accurate accountings of events by those purporting to do so.

And of course, if it turns out that he did exist after all, those who claimed he didn't will be more than wrong. They'll be morally evil -- to the core. And their moral wrongness is the most damning argument possible in favor of absolute and unconditional withdrawal from this absolutely immoral war!

Real or not, Hussein is of course as replaceable as "George Harleigh." The important thing is what Americans must remember (especially in November):

Leaving aside the elitist and racist underpinnings informing such a subtext, what is important to note here is that the majority of Americans who don't follow politics closely will remember nothing but the ghastly imagery and the message it is intended to further: that we are dealing with a society of savages who, given the opportunity for freedom, will reject it in favor of bloodsport and retribution.

Why? Because they simply are not ready for freedom, partly because the guiding hand of a caring, ruling elite is not available to bring them into the light....

As to those who still manage to support the war, they're mentally ill:

The dwindling few who still, for reasons known only to God or their psychiatrist, support President George W. Bush's failed invasion if Iraq, continue to claim the situation is not as bad as portrayed by the media.

Isn't there an assumption that a war which is apparently being lost should be lost?

And now that the fake Jamil Hussein story is claimed to have been true and accurate after all, apologies are being demanded. From bloggers of course! (Did they not believe the evil lying lies from the evil lying military?)

here we have so many conservative bloggers, after days of castigating the Associated Press for running what the wingnuts claimed was a fictitious story about six Sunnis being burned alive in sectarian violence in Iraq on Friday, having to once again face what a bunch of putzes they really are.

The AP reported last night on eyewitnesses to the immolations, that occurred when Sunni worshippers were leaving a Mosque on Friday and have also substantiated the identity of Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein, who the AP cited as the primary source for its story that the Sunnis were killed while the Iraqi military stood by and did nothing.

[...]

Newsbusters took it a step further by also concluding that NBC's decision to begin calling what's going on in Iraq a "civil war" was based in part on the "bogus" nature of that story.

Flopping Aces, which seems to have started this embarrassing affair, has been running a lengthy series ominously called "Getting The News From The Enemy" while The Jawa Report really stands proud and proclaims that "It's unlikely that the Associated Press and other news agencies will issue corrections approaching the sensationalism with which they originally pushed the false stories."

Ouch. That kind of strident crap's got to make their red-state faces pretty damned crimson about right now.

But then, to grotesquely paraphrase Sir Charles Barkley, they would feel the shame that's coming to them, but then they realized that they have no shame.

Have we forgotten the maxim going back to Aeschylus?

In war, truth is the first casualty.

Whether this story turns out to be true or not, why should it be an argument in favor of defeat?

Is the goal to win this war, or is wanting to win the war a symptom of my mental illness?

Anyway, the AP is sticking by the story, and they're now claiming that a reporter went to visit Jamil Hussein after bloggers raised a fuss, and that he definitely exists:

...[T]he U.S. military said in a letter to the AP late Monday, three days after the incident, that it had checked with the Iraqi Interior Ministry and was told that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein works for the ministry or as a Baghdad police officer. Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer of the
U.S. Navy Multi-National Corps-Iraq Joint Operations Center, signed the letter, a text of which was published subsequently on several Internet blogs. The letter also reiterated an earlier statement from the U.S. military that it had been unable to confirm the report of immolation.

The AP received no comment Friday when it first asked the U.S. military for information. It then carried portions of a U.S. military statement Saturday that said the U.S. had been unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. The U.S. military said that neither police nor coalition forces had reports of such an incident.

The Iraqi Defense Ministry later said that al-Hashimi, the Sunni elder in Hurriyah, had recanted his account of the attack after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.

The dispute comes at a time when the military is taking a more active role in dealing with the media.

For its part, the AP makes it quite clear which side it's on:

The AP reported on Sept. 26 that a Washington-based firm, the Lincoln Group, had won a two-year contract to monitor reporting on the Iraq conflict in English-language and Arabic media outlets.

That contract succeeded one held by another Washington firm, The Rendon Group. Controversy had arisen around the Lincoln Group in 2005 when it was disclosed that it was part of a U.S. military operation to pay Iraqi newspapers to run positive stories about U.S. military activities.

Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.

On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack. Others in the neighborhood said they were afraid to talk about what happened.

Who was this reporter? How do we know he exists?

I thought I should attempt to contact George Harleigh again, and I found him apparently alive and well. While he wasn't reported as predicting defeat in Iraq, I have to give him credit for predicting defeat in November:

The rapidly-multiplying scandals ripping through Washington like a category five hurricane has Republicans reassessing their political futures while Democrats rub their hands with glee amid dreams of massive gains in the 2006 midterm elections.

"It's the kind of upheaval we see every so often," says political scientist George Harleigh. "It happened after Watergate and during the midterms of Bill Clinton's first term (the 1994 elections when Republicans seize control of Congress."

George Washington was right to tell his father the truth about cutting down the cherry tree, even if he didn't.

MORE: Austin Bay looks at the Jamil Hussein affair, and concludes that there are many questions:

MNCI could be wrong, but the distinct possibility exists that the AP has been misled by its own stringers or duped by an enemy propaganda operation. The AP insists it reported the basic story accurately. However, if Jamil is another Jimmy," the APs story as a weapon in a war of perception-- is far more damaging than Janet Cookes Washington fiction.

Jamil and his various stories require investigation and substantiation; an AP self-investigation will strike many as inadequate. 25 years ago the NY Times dismissed the National News Council as unnecessary. Jimmys World proved the Times wrong. We need to revive the National News Council and have it investigate Jamils World muy pronto.

MORE: CBS News reports that AP is "hitting back" and speculates that the fight is just beginning:

The message between the lines in all this is that the AP believes the government is going to be more aggressive in challenging the press - even when they don't have the goods to back it up, as the AP believes is the case here. "I have infinitely more faith in the U.S. military than in the Associated Press, but that doesn't mean the military is always right or the AP always wrong," writes Powerline. "It seems that the AP believes it is in a strong position. I'm tempted to say that one institution or the other must emerge from this affair with its credibility damaged." This could be one fight that's just beginning.

MORE: Michelle Malkin is keeping track of the story with numerous updates.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post, and a warm welcome to all new readers.

(And welcome back, George Harleigh! I missed him so much that maybe I should write some new quotes just for him.)

I don't know how many people there are who play Tetris, but I have the classic version of it on my cell phone, and as most people who play it know, it's a game in which there really is no such thing as "winning," because if you play, eventually you will lose. Skill at Tetris relates to the ability to postpone losing by destroying as many rows as possible until at last the ever-increasing speed of the falling objects makes it impossible to move them fast enough. No matter how fast one's hand-eye coordination, all players are doomed to lose.

While it's nice to break your own record (right now my cell phone record is 46,900), there's something that happens much less frequently, and which has only happened to me four times. That is when all shapes disappear completely, leaving a black screen.

It happened yesterday!

Here's what it looked like just after I flipped the "L" upside down -- and just before I dropped it into its waiting niche (had to pause and restart to get the camera, of course):

And, just for that most-savored moment after the drop, the screen was blank, and black.

In Tetris, that's the closest I can get to victory.

(In real life, you'd need heroin. And no, that's not a moral equivalency argument!)

I find it interesting that the recent (and still very unresolved) case of a police shooting in New York has caused a mini-barrage of editorials against, well, Mayor Giuliani.

Here's El Diario:

...[O]ur city is scarred by the legacy of a former mayor, now running for president. In a series of ugly police incidents that resulted in the abuse or deaths of young African-American, Latino and Asian men, the rash statements of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani needlessly added insult to injury.

Normally, I wouldn't devote a blog post to editorializing by New York leftists, but it's not limited to local papers. This morning I was greeted by an attack on Giuliani by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Claude Lewis:

Many say the Bloomberg/Kelly administration is a dramatic improvement over the Rudy Giuliani days, when the former mayor often seemed to defend police shootings reflexively and waged a personal vendetta against crime in New York. Crime did decrease under Giuliani, but at the cost of some lives and liberty, as citizens complained of less freedom.

Who are the "many" who are said to complain about this vindictive man with a personal vendetta? I don't know, but according to the New York Post's Bob McManus, they include the "high decibel" activists Giuliani once dismissed:

While the [Amadou Diallo] shooting clearly had struck a chord in New York City, the fact is that the most vocal of the critics were demagogues whose high-decibel demands had once shaped city policy - but whom Giuliani had dismissed out of hand when he took office.

They never forgave him for that, Sharpton and Barron and the rest, nor will they ever. So just imagine their joy Monday when Bloomberg invited them back into the public dialogue.

In an editorial about "lessons learned," the Christian Science Monitor throws in references to Giuliani's marital difficulties -- and his "meltdown":

Most political analysts are applauding the city's response so far, but some say it's unfair to compare the way Mr. Giuliani and Bloomberg handled the two shootings. Giuliani, who defeated the city's first African-American mayor, had strained relations with the minority community from the start. In reforming the city's finances, he also took on its various interest groups, including those in the black community, according to political analyst Fred Siegel, author of "The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life." Finally, the Diallo incident occurred at a time when the mayor's personal and marital problems had become regular public fodder.

"The Diallo affair comes at the beginning of Giuliani's personal meltdown," says Mr. Siegel. "This isn't a criticism of Bloomberg. I just don't think it's a fair comparison."

Ah, but might the jury have been motivated by a "personal vendetta" against crime?

One of the reasons I find this all so fascinating, is that the last couple of times I wrote about Giuliani, he was under attack from the right.

Oh the irony!

The Red Queen shook her head, `You may call it "nonsense" if you like,' she said, ` but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'

-- From Alice in Wonderland

I'm no etymologist, so I always have trouble defining words, especially when they've been so misused as to be unrecognizable. (Besides, via Glenn Reynolds, I see that Ann Althouse has already done a better job.)

Sometimes I like to look at the dictionary, and often an invaluable resource is C.T. Onions' Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. But in the case of recently made up or wholly manufactured words, forget about the regular dictionary, much less C.T. Onions.

Not that I like made-up words, but I guess Andrew Sullivan has as much right to make up a word as anyone else. In this case, the word is "Christianist," and his goal is admittedly political. At least I think it is, but it's hard to tell. I agree with Glenn that the "term draws an unfair equivalence between Islamist terror, and mere Christian social conservatism, which are hardly comparable," but as to the definition, I'll try to stick with Sullivan's "Original Intent" in the hope of divining the meaning.

Via Wikipedia, here's Sullivan's textual definition:

...[L]et me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

For starters, there's the argument that "we" should "take back" the word "Christian." Has the word been hijacked? While I don't like the fact that some Christians try to speak for all Christians, unless some people (those he calls "the quiet majority") are more entitled to be called Christian than others, then who is thse "we" who are to be entrusted with the word once they "take it back"? Does this line between Christianists and Christians imply that the former are not the latter or should not be? How can Sullivan declare such a thing unless he has been put in charge of defining Christianity?

What I also find confusing is that the political aspect of Christianism is limited to right wing politics. Thus, only those Republican Christians whose right wing views Sullivan doesn't like are to be called Christianists. Evangelical Christians who vote Democrat are not Christianists -- not even if their "religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda,"-- which means that non-Republican Christian activists like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Catholic liberation theologists, or even Jim Jones and the People's Temple would not be Christianists. Never mind that they all share "the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike" -- only Republican Christians are to be called Christianists.

I think this is both overinclusive and underinclusive, and it's hard to take the definition seriously.

Then there's the statement that "I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor." Sullivan is a Catholic; is that his faith? Isn't the Catholic Church hierarchical, and isn't the Pope in charge?

Consider this statement from Sullivan:

There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is.

Why invent words that can only be divined by the inventor of the word? The way Sullivan is going, I half expect him to expand the definition of "Christianism" to include people who aren't even Christians. (Say, atheists who might support an alliance with Christians who agree with them on certain political issues.)

This post is very confusing. When I started this yesterday I hoped I'd be closer to a definition, but I'm feeling about as clueless now as I was then.

Since I saw the links Glenn provided yesterday, I've been trying to follow out the twists and turns of the confusing campaign against those who object to the "Christianist" label, which seems to have culminated in a new phase of the Andrew Sullivan anti-Christianist crusade. Sullivan now endorses Glenn Greenwald's embellishment of the "Christianist" meme (originally written in a post linked here), so that with this revision, those who object to the word become supporters of the "Christianists" themselves:

What seems to be guiding Althouse and Reynolds' hatred of the term "Christianist" is that it highlights a fact which they both are eager to ignore -- namely, that the political party to which they are so devoted is dominated by individuals who believe that their religious/Christian beliefs ought to dictate the American political process, shape secular law, and exploit coercive state power to constrain the choices of their fellow citizens.

I'm sorry, but this is getting really wacky.

Who's in charge? Should wackiness be met with further wackiness?

While I don't know exactly what she had in mind, Ann Althouse thought about taunting the taunters:

I feel I would be doing my regular readers a disservice if I posted what I just composed in my head, which is a response to a couple of very conspicuous taunts that are out there today.

But you taunters -- you know who you are! -- be advised: I could taunt you right back so hard it wouldn't even be funny.

Considering Althouse's restraint, perhaps I was a bit harsh in likening Andrew Sullivan to the Red Queen. Perhaps it's actually Glenn Greenwald who should be likened to the Red Queen. Or perhaps a contest should be held.

I don't know how to settle this, and I'd rather not taunt the taunters, lest they accuse me of "Pantheistic Pagan-Christianism" or something.

Is there any way to make the taunters point their fingers at each other?

Each might be as sensible as the other.

Which compared with which would be as sensible as a dictionary?

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link and the compliment!

I also see that I am not alone in thinking about Alice in Wonderland; Professor Bainbridge was reminded of Humpty Dumpty:

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

Agnosticist anyone?

And what about the "Althouse-Reynolds Axis" of which Sullivan now complains? Is there such a thing? Or is it just an axis of minions? Such lines of attack are about as logical as the WorldNetDaily approach of accusing someone of having a "gay agenda."

Hmmm....

Somehow, I'm now reminded of the "happily married gay couples with closets full of assault weapons."

Be phobist. Be very phobist!

In light of the new information that has come to light in the police shooting of an elderly woman, I'd like to repeat my earlier concerns about the public perceptions of this case.

Why is this being spun more as a civil rights issue than as a human rights issue?

Might that be because black people are seen as chess pieces in a game of identity politics, while white people are seen as neutral, and therefore simply human?

Forgive my cynicism; I don't write these rules.

The confidential informant on whose word Atlanta police raided the house of an 88-year-old woman is now saying he never purchased drugs from her house and was told by police to lie and say he did.

Chief Richard Pennington, in a press conference Monday evening, said his department learned two days ago that the informant -- who has been used reliably in the past by the narcotics unit -- denied providing information to officers about a drug deal at 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta.

"The informant said he had no knowledge of going into that house and purchasing drugs," Pennington said. "We don't know if he's telling the truth."

The search warrant used by Atlanta police to raid the house says that a confidential informant had bought crack cocaine at the residence, using $50 in city funds, several hours before the raid.

In the document, officers said that the informant told them the house had surveillance cameras that the suspected drug dealer, called "Sam," monitored.

Pennington on Monday evening said the informant told the Internal Affairs Unit hat he did not tell officers that the house had surveillance equipment, and that he was asked to lie.

What about the judge who signed the warrant? Is there no duty of care to conduct himself as more than would some Soviet apparatchik? Again, I think that had the same allegations been made against an elderly white woman, the entire case would have been looked at differently, and subjected to a completely different level of scrutiny. It's as if lowered standards of enforcement and review are expected in cases like this. It begins with child protection and schools, and a lowering of standards tends to be overlooked, excused, or even advocated. (In an educational setting, this has been called the "soft bigotry of low expectations.") When minority police, bureaucrats, and social workers are in charge, these lower standards can become further institutionalized, and a conspiracy of second class treatment is allowed to masquerade as compassion, even "self help."

I've written more than one long blog post about the conspiracy of silence which takes the form of the anti "snitching" movement, and what disturbed me the most about the phenomenon was the realization that there is a different definition of what constitutes snitching in lower income communities. It's as if the entire community considers itself in an institutionalized setting, and any contact with the authorities is analogous to (and is regarded as) a prisoner talking to a guard.

In a prison setting, "snitches" (aka "informants") are of course the lowest of the low, and they are candidates for death. I don't doubt that the informant who fabricated the story about a drug buy in the elderly woman's house was either facing drug charges himself, or being paid. He may have made a drug buy somewhere, but for whatever reason (maybe to preserve his life) he might not have wanted to inform the cops of the true location. The marvelous thing about snitching out a wholly innocent party is that it acts as a general deterrent in communities dominated by criminals out to stop snitching.

The whole thing stinks, and I think efforts to focus on the race of the victim by treating this as a civil rights matter play right into the problem. The fact that this took place in "the neighborhood where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family once lived" should be as irrelevant as the victim's race. But because we live in a country where such things are highly relevant, the concerns with race have a sneaky way of defining down what should be a human rights inquiry into a civil rights inquiry.

Paradoxically, this is why I wish Ms. Johnston had been white.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution asks some good questions:

Before narcotics agents went to Johnston's home last week, did they ascertain who lived there? Considering it was two days before Thanksgiving, did they establish whether visiting children or other family members were in the home? Did they lean on an informant to lie on their behalf?

If the informant never fingered Johnston's house as a drug source, how did police end up there? What evidence did police have that the drug quantities involved were significant enough to call for forced entry?

Based on what is known so far, it's hard to argue that Johnston was at fault. She was not the professional trained to investigate a situation before taking any action that could endanger innocent people. She had no information to alert her to what was really happening in her home that night.

Unfortunately, it appears that the APD didn't either.

Again, much as I hate to say this, if everyone involved had been white, there might be more of a debate on the real issue -- human rights and the war on drugs.

Just to disclose my bias, I think the war on drugs ends up being a war against human rights, and cases like Ms. Johnston's are a classic example of why. Interjecting civil rights into the analysis causes people to overlook the inherent nature of the war on drugs, and ultimately gives it a pass.

While visiting Rockford, Illinois over Thanksgiving, I was invited to attend the Rockford Dance Company's production of the Nutcracker Suite at the Coronado Theater. Little did I know what a treat was in store. Not only was the performance fantastic, and the theater was unlike anything I've experienced, but I got to meet a longtime favorite blogger -- M. Simon of Power and Control -- who lives in Rockford and whose very talented daughter Camille Simon had two roles in the production.

The theater took my breath away, and it has to be seen to be believed. They just don't make 'em like that any more, and my photos (taken at night, with difficulty) don't do the place justice. This was an extravagantly, decadently opulent theater when it was built, and unlike it's counterparts in many larger cities (long since demolished) the Coronado has been restored to perfection. It provides real evidence of another American era -- a whimsically esthetic time of cultural revival. Whether it took the form of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Neo Babylonian or Egyptian revival, such frivolous and lovable decadence just couldn't quite survive the serious times that followed in which modern America "grew up." Now that we are mature, Americans look back with wonder and awe at days largely gone and forgotten.

Wikipedia accurately describes the Coronado's design as "breathtaking":

The elaborate auditorium of the theater is designed according to the atmospheric style which was popular in movie houses built in the 1920's. This style simulates an outdoor theater-going experience. The Coronado's auditorium walls are decorated with the facades of gilded Spanish-style buildings, and the ceiling looks like a deep blue sky filled with twinkling stars and floating clouds. The auditorium is full of gilded detail. Green stained-glass lamps with fluted bulbs adorn the walls. Japanese dragons and glowing lanterns cover the organ screens on either side of the stage. The seats are covered with plush red velvet.

The lobby is as elaborately designed as the auditorium. One of the lobby's focal points is a statue of Venus standing in front of a golden seashell. Because of its breathtaking interior design, the Coronado is sentimentally referred to as "Rockford's Wonder Theater."

Here's the outside at night:

Immediately after you enter, the lobby ceiling looks like this:

Some random interior details give a general idea of the opulence of the place:

(I preserved the anonymity of the patrons on the staircase, as they weren't engaged in a public demonstration or anything, and I have no way of knowing whether they would want their faces appearing in a blog.)

The performance was fantastic. The dancers couldn't have been more talented and professional, and my only criticism does not involve them, but only the apparent shortage of male ballet dancers -- which I'm told is a problem in many cities. (Back in the days of Shakespearean theater, men used to play women, so the new role reversal is ironic.)

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to photograph the performance, so readers won't be able to appreciate the costumes, scenery, or performers.

However, there was no rule against photographing the power behind the scenes, or a guy who in fairness should be considered the man behind the controls -- M. Simon of Power and Control. I already mentioned that his daughter Camille was in the performance, but what I only found out later is that the theater still has the original control levers, with which he is obviously familiar.

As it turned out, I was allowed to pose at the controls with Mr. Power and Control himself!

(Talk about leverage!)

Simon is justifiably proud of his daughter as well as the theater, and he has two posts about the evening here, and here.

A great weekend. I only wish there'd been more time.

My thanks to Justin for posting while I was away. (A minor administrative blog hassle seems to have temporarily messed up comments, but it's being fixed thanks to Host Matters, and comments will probably work by the time this post goes up.)

As if I needed any reminder while I was away, I see that it's an increasingly ugly world out there.

I certainly hope the Democratic majority is up to the task, as the lame duck president couldn't be any lamer if he tried. (No need to shoot lame ducks, of course, so I suspect they'll lay off the impeachment and "war crimes" tribunals in the near future.)

As to whether the multiculturalist Democrat identity politicians are up to the task, reading Victor Davis Hanson's post on war hardly reassures me:

....[T]he West is encountering something novel, as it fights its first politically-correct war, in which all the postmodern chickens of the 1980s and 1990s have come home to roost. Thus multiculturalism makes it hard to fight non-Europeans from the former third world, inasmuch as it argued there was not just little distinctively good about the West, but rather the once recognized universal sins of mankind--racism, sexism, class oppression, inequality, patriarchy--were to be seen as exclusively Western.

If you have taught youth for generations that the story of World War II is Hiroshima and the Japanese internment, not Normandy, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, then how can you expect a nation to fight an enemy without making a mistake? And if dropping the bomb on Japan to stop its daily murdering of thousands in its collapsing empire, and to avoid something that would have made the horrific Battle for Berlin look like a cakewalk is equated with the Holocaust, how can the United States marshal the moral authority to press ahead, secure that its killing of jihadists is a different sort from jihadists killing the innocent or each other?

Add into this dangerous modernist soup moral equivalence, or what we know as "conflict resolution theory." It postulates that any use of force de facto is equivalent to any other....

All it will take is subjecting a few more ordinary voters to chants of "Allahuakbar" on airplanes, and the enablers of the chanters will lose.

As Hanson implies in his suprisingly optimistic conclusion, the Democratic leaders are smart enough to understand this:

....A progressive can call the ACLU all day long, but after 9/11 if he stands in line at an airport gate listening to an imam chanting Allah Akbar as he and his friends board, our liberal friend will begin to worry. And second, our enemies have no intention of relenting. They smell blood and want our carcass, so eventually even the progressive mind will give up the pieties of peace and face the inevitable....

Of course, this has to be tempered with Ted Koppel's definition of a liberal as a "conservative who just got arrested." (Or who's maybe been a mistaken victim of a SWAT team.)

I guess if you don't like being mugged or arrested, you can always be a libertarian -- but that doesn't mean you won't get both!

The problem with using this analogy is that terrorism is on a much grander scale than mugging (regardless of the politics of the victims), and not too many conservatives (or liberals, for that matter) have been getting arrested as terrorists.

The guys at Focus Fusion have provided their take on that Robert Bussard video that's been making the rounds. Their impression is that his approach looks promising.

Their own approach is somewhat different technically, but either one, if successful, would enable the same sort of technological revolution.

Boron fusion. Clean, inexpensive, inexhaustible power.

UPDATE (11/27/06 by Eric): Thanks to M. Simon at Power and Control for linking this post (and the earlier post about the teenage experimenter who produced cold fusion). Nice discussion too! Don't miss it.

James "I am not Elmer Gantry!" Kunstler is forever going on about those easy motoring, cheese doodle crunching Americans and the doom that is even now bearing down upon them. Wishing, we are told, will not change the facts of life, and Jiminy Cricket notwithstanding, we simply cannot invent our way out of the "Long Emergency".

Monkeyballs. The man is a broken record, stuck on peevish. Allow me to point out a few hopeful developments that illustrate the paucity of his historical perspective.

Composite core aluminum power cables...

CTC's Aluminum Conductor Composite Core cables incorporate a light-weight advanced composite core around which aluminum conductor wires are wrapped in a manner identical to traditional energy cable.

The composite cores lighter-weight, smaller size, and enhanced strength and other performance advantages over traditional steel core allows ACCC to double the current carrying capacity over existing transmission and distribution cable and virtually eliminate high-temperature sag.

Warm superconductors...

Superconducting cables can offer the advantages of lower loss, lighter weight, and more compact dimensions, as compared to conventional cables. In addition to the improvement of the energy efficiency of the utility grid, this can lead to easier and faster installation of the cable system, fewer joints, and reduced use of land.

The high performance of the superconducting materials leads to reduced materials use and lighter and more compact cable technology. In this way, energy and cost is saved in the whole chain of manufacturing, transport and installation.

A merger of optimists...

Open Energy Corporation... today announced that it has signed a joint development agreement with Infinia Corporation to integrate its products into a revolutionary power generation system.

Infinia's free piston Stirling engines are currently used for aerospace and national security applications...Operating without internal combustion, a Stirling engine utilizes high temperature differentials to drive a piston and produce electricity.

The engineering teams at Infinia and Open Energy believe that the Suncone CSP solar concentrating power system can be modified to deliver over 700 degrees centigrade of solar thermal energy to Infinia's engine, thus generating electricity on a cost effective basis...

"Infinia is already commercializing a 1 kW engine for residential heating and electricity in Asia and Europe. We will begin our product development utilizing a modified version of this engine to prove out the feasibility of the Suncone/Stirling system, before developing a larger version for distributed generation applications."

Algae on the march...

Nov. 13, 2006 -- Green Star Products, Inc. today announced that it has signed an agreement with De Beers Fuel Limited of South Africa to build 90 biodiesel reactors.

Each of the biodiesel reactors will be capable of producing 10 million gallons of biodiesel each year for a total production capacity of 900,000,000 gallons per year when operating at full capacity, which is 4 times greater than the entire U.S. output in 2006...

Presently, the De Beers plant is now operating at 10,000,000 gallons per year on sunflower seed oil as feedstock and has contracted for additional feedstock for additional plants.

However, the final answer for biodiesel feedstock will not be oil crops - it will be algae. For example, soybean produces only 48 gallons of oil per acre per year, canola produces 140 gallons per acre and algae can produce well over 10,000 gallons per acre.

This figure has been verified in actual algae field production tests by the US Department of Energy in an 18 year Algae Study Program from 1978 - 1996. This makes algae the only worldwide feedstock capable of replacing crude oil. Making use of algae also means not competing with crops for food sources...

Mr. de Beer has entered into an agreement with Greenfuel Technologies Corporation, and has purchased and removed the MIT bioreactor from Cambridge, Massachusetts and transported it to South Africa. It has been reassembled on the biodiesel plant site in Naboomspruit, South Africa and is now awaiting the arrival of the algae to be inoculated to start production...

Most of the 90 franchised biodiesel plants are located close to electric power plants as well as other CO2 emitters, to utilize their stack emissions (CO2) to feed the algae farms when they switch over feedstock from oil seed crops to algae...

GSPI is proud to be part of this De Beers Fuel Limited Team in South Africa and has already set up operations at its 90,000 sq. ft. Idaho Facility to fabricate as many as 150 reactors per year to accommodate anticipated expansion of De Beers plant facilities into other countries...

Solid Oxide Fuel Cells for the lomg haul...

A prototype 5 kW-class complete system using the SECA technology has operated for 2,800 hours and continues to operate at the Siemens facility near Pittsburgh, PA. It has met or exceeded all of the DOE technical and economic objectives for Phase 1 of the SECA program.

The successful operation of the SECA system is especially noteworthy in that there has been absolutely no degradation of cell or system performance during the period of operation.

Lead Acid Batteries anticipate a quantum leap...

The approach used by Firefly Energy, a spin-out of Caterpillar, is radical but simple. The company's new battery removes past obstacles such as heavy weight, extensive corrosion and sulfating positive and negative lead metal grids by substituting them with carbon-graphite foam, increasing the surface area, to enhance the chemistry taking place.

The result is a battery that can rival the advanced chemistries in performance, take advantage of an existing manufacturing base and address environmental concerns through the removal of one-half to two-thirds of the lead content...

Additionally, by replacing most of the lead with a much lighter material, Firefly has drastically lowered the specific weight of the battery, which can help by either increasing output from the same weight or in creating a smaller package but with normal power output.

There's plenty more where that came from. More than I imagine you would ever want to know about, but I do hope that the basic point has been made. In the interests of good sportsmanship I'll give Kunstler the last word...

November 13, 2006

Get this: the day is not far off when, for one reason or another, the flow of imported oil to the US will cease. But when that day comes, we will not be running our shit the way we have been running it. That day will be the end of the interstate highways, Walt Disney World, and WalMart -- in short, the way of life we are fond of calling "non-negotiable."

We are not going to run that shit on coal liquids or tar sand byproducts or oil shale distillates or ethanol or biodiesel, or second-hand french-fry oil. Nor on solar, wind, nuclear, or hydrogen. You can run things on that stuff, but not the biggies we run at their current scale.

A new United Nations children's book promoting fears of catastrophic manmade global warming is being promoted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Kenya..."Tore and the Town on Thin Ice" is published by the United Nations Environment Programme and blames "rich countries" for creating a climate catastrophe. The book is about a young kid named Tore who lives in an Arctic village. Tore loses a dog sled race because he crashes through the thinning ice... After the boy loses the dog sled race, he is visited by "Sedna, the Mother of the Sea" in a dream. The "Sea Mother" informs the boy in blunt terms that the thinning ice that caused his loss in the dog sled race was due to manmade global warming. "I'm the one who created and cares for the sea creatures - whales and walruses, seals and fish," the "Sea Mother" explained to the boy. The "Sea Mother" then tells the boy she will educate him about the reason the ice is thinning.

The morning after his dream, Tore sets out on a quest for knowledge about the dangers of catastrophic manmade global warming. A "snowy owl" informs Tore that "the planet's heating up" and that both the Arctic and Antarctica "are warming almost twice as fast as elsewhere."

,The "snowy owl" tells Tore that winning dog sledding races "might not be your top worry" and the owl instead tells the boy that "lots of things are changing fast. Some people who hunt for a living are already going hungry because a lot of seals and walruses are heading north." The "snowy owl" also asserts that "the great ice cap here in Greenland-mountains of snow and ice up to about four kilometers thick-is thawing."

Next, a polar bear informs Tore that it is hungry because the ice is too thin to stand on and hunt and the bear says that other bears have "starved" because the sea ice went out to sea. The polar bear adds, "We may not have much of a future." The polar bear concludes by telling Tore, "It looks like many animals and fish and birds will go extinct-die out-during your lifetime, partly because of changes in climate."

The child is described "at a loss for words" after hearing this grim news and just "stare[s] at the polar bear."

After a whale appears to present more climate fear, the boy finally screams, "Listen, I've had all the bad news I can stand. Our world is melting. Polar bears are starving and all sorts of animals won't survive. I don't want to hear anymore!"

The whale responds, "That's the spirit! Get good and angry. You'll need all that energy to make a difference." The whale then goes on to describe computer model projections of massive coastal flooding in the future and the potential destruction of human life in coastal areas because of the projected sea level rise.

The whale continues, telling the child that more hurricanes and "other things you call `natural disasters' are on their way, too - and they're getting harsher."

Finally Tore has had enough and asks, "Is there anything at all a kid like me can do?" The "Sea Mother" tells him of the dangerous effects that an oil and gas based energy system has on the climate and the "Sea Mother" singles out the industrialized world as the cause of her predicted climate catastrophe. "Rich countries use-and waste-an awful lot of energy. Huge cars. Too many cars instead of efficient trains and buses," the "Sea Mother explains to Tore... Finally the "Sea Mother" tells Tore that the solution to the climate crisis can begin in his Arctic village by "setting up solar panels to get electricity from the sun, and modern windmills to capture the energy of the wind." The book ends with a section answering the question "What can you do?" The books answer includes such suggestions as "Join or create an environmental club," "only drive cars if you must," and "write to your political leaders."

My niece and nephew saw Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" the other week, and it actually managed to get to them. It seems that the science teacher had their entire class make a field trip to the theater where it was playing. He feels that the issue is far too important to leave to their parents haphazard ministrations.

The indoctrination session was stunningly successful, and my nephew in particular was more than a little freaked out by what he saw.

Later, he gravely informed me that the polar bears are drowning. Further, unless we do something, the oceans will rise and drown our coastal cities. There can be no room for doubt because, get this, " All the scientists are in agreement!".

Much internet research and conversation ensued, on both of our parts. Finally, reluctantly, he accepted that perhaps we aren't going to drown in the next twenty years after all.

Maybe. He's still reserving final judgment.

Since when have middle school teachers and washed-up politicians commanded such powerful moral suasion?

Next time I see him, I'm showing him the following...

Antarctic disaster:

Certain moments stick in your head. Take, for example, the story of the Siberian ponies adrift on an Antarctic ice floe surrounded by killer whales. Something about the scene... lodged in the mind of Sidney Nolan, who painted a version of it when he returned from his own eight-day trip to Antarctica...

What had happened? Nolan explained it in a letter to Hal Missingham, director of the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney.... "Once, five of the ponies, covered in green rugs, were lost on an ice floe which drifted out to sea surrounded by killer whales...Bowers and his party, on the floe with the ponies, managed to save one of the ponies after some awful moments. The episode was witnessed from the shore...through field glasses and tears. Anyway, it is roughly this moment I have tried to paint."

You can see why the scene might have affected Nolan. For starters, it was horrible to contemplate; it would have affected anyone. But it also had a particular quality - surreal, deadly happenings in an extreme, implacable setting - that Nolan seemed to relish...

The only pesky thing is that the above all happened in 1911...

Cute. Hopefully, it won't be too subtle for him.

UPDATE: He wasn't too keen on my polar bear population dynamics presentation. However, he did get a snicker from the following, a collection of
alarmist rhetoric from thirty-five years ago. If it seems familiar, well, it ought to.
I've recycled it from this post seven months ago...

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation," wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

"We have about five more years at the outside to do something," ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970.

Dubbed "ecology's angry lobbyist" by Life magazine, the gloomy Ehrlich was quoted everywhere. "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make," he confidently declared in an interview with then-radical journalist Peter Collier in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."

"By...[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."

Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off."

Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, wrote, "Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions....By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine".

In January 1970, Life reported, "Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support...the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution...by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...."

Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, "At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable."

Barry Commoner cited a National Research Council report that had estimated "that by 1980 the oxygen demand due to municipal wastes will equal the oxygen content of the total flow of all the U.S. river systems in the summer months." Translation: Decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America's rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

In his "Eco-Catastrophe!" scenario, Ehrlich put a finer point on these fears by envisioning a 1973 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare study which would find "that Americans born since 1946...now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out."

Keying off of Rachel Carson's claims about the dangers of synthetic chemicals in Silent Spring (1962), Look claimed that many scientists believed that residual DDT would lead to an increase in liver and other cancers.

"We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones," warned Sierra Club director Martin Litton in Time's February 2, 1970, special "environmental report."

Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

Kenneth Watt was less equivocal in his Swarthmore speech about Earth's temperature. "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years," he declared. "If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."

Funny how humor can get the job done where mere statistics fail, isn't it? Still, I could tell that it wasn't quite enough. Then his mother (who is as unappreciative of this sort of thing as I am) had an inspiration. You see, he's been going through this Extreme Christian phase lately. When she suggested that perhaps the Rapture might take everyone before the ice caps melted, well, he just brightened right up. He's still reserving judgment, but he's much more his old, cheerful self. Go figure.

A mother knows these things.

Forest fires can help to reduce global warming, despite generating tonnes of carbon dioxide, a study has found.

Scientists looking at the effect of fires in boreal forests found that in the long term the loss of trees means that more sunlight is reflected away from the Earth. This is because more snow, which is highly reflective, is able to cover the ground.

There is a similar effect when new trees start growing their light green leaves, which reflect better than dark foliage...

Boreal forests, which account for 14.5 per cent of land surface, are thought to contain 30 per cent of all the CO2 held by plants and soils. It had been feared that dryness caused by global warming would increase the frequency of fires.

The findings, the researchers say, mean that plans to cut CO2 emissions by planting trees and preventing fires need to be reassessed.

Now they tell us? You can't win for losing, can you? However, there's a wonderful mental defense mechanism available, should you decide to accept it. Simply assume that the researchers are in the pay of Big Oil. All the popular kids are doing it.

The diligent rat is forced to earn his keep. Eric is trapped in the wilds of Illinois, sans connectivity. Amusingly, his hotel has nanny software that won't allow him to access his own blog.

He says "Hi everybody!".

He also says that I should crank out a few brief yet edifying posts while he's away. Naturally I protested. We have entirely different styles and interests. You're here to read him, not me. Such sweet reason and logic got me nowhere. He is adamant.

So here we are. Substitute postings will continue till Sunday.

I have to leave at the crack of dawn, and I'll be gone for the holidays, so I may or may not have time for blogging.

With any luck, there might be some posts, though.

Happy thanksgiving!

UPDATE: What the hell. I might as well leave readers with a picture, as I know I wouldn't want to come here and read a post with nothing to see except a "happy thanksgiving" announcement.

So here's the most dramatic turkey picture I could find.

Yes, it's the largest turkey in the United States -- at least it was until a tragic incendiary incident.

Remember, only you can prevent turkey fires!

I enjoyed reading about the "nuclear teen":

In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion -- when atoms are combined to create energy -- is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," he said.

In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion.

It's just another reason why I think "Peak Oil" theory suffers from static analysis.

UPDATE (11/27/06 ): My thanks to M. Simon at Power and Control for linking this post and yesterday's Justin's cold fusion post with plenty of excellent discussion.

What's great news is that this appears to be scalable:

...the idea is to build a fusion device that produces no long lived nuclear radiation and that works with the forces of nature instead of against them. The voltage required to make these devices work is on the order of 10 to 20 thousand volts or less. About the same voltage as you would find in a tube type monitor or TV set. Nothing very exotic. For a full scale power producer it is predicted that you would need about 2 million volts. Well within the range of current technology for small scale devices. Currently the highest voltage used in electrical transmission is 1.15 million volts. Scaling that up to two million volts for production devices should not be too difficult.

One of the reasons people hate the fact that times change is that they have to change with the times, lest they become literally crippled by past perceptions. This is particularly true when it comes to understanding why things happen the way they do. One of the ways I cope with inconveniences and things I don't like is by trying to understand them. Understanding something is not the same thing as liking it, but knowing why and how something happened is a bit like knowing how something works. If there is a huge line of cars stretching on for miles, even if you're trapped and cannot escape, it always feels better once you know what happened, and why. Some explanations are more emotionally satisfying than others, and this varies according to the individual personality.

To stay with the traffic example, there might be a tree blocking the road, a dead cow, a stalled car, or a road crew. Then again, the explanation might be simple "congestion." I can't speak for everyone, but I find the fallen tree or dead cow more satisfying than an asshole who should have known better than to run out of gas and who lacked the simple ability to pull over, and as to the road crew, I find it infinitely more satisfying if I see them doing emergency-related work than if they've closed down two lanes and held up rush hour traffic so that a few juvenile delinquents can pick up trash. "Congestion," of course, is the least satisfying explanation of all.

Then there are bad drivers. What often helps me "cope" (for lack of a better word) is seeing an explanation for the bad driving. I've written about this before, but my anger is always calmed down when I discern the nature of the culprits -- especially if they can be reduced to humorous stereotypes:

2. Elderly drivers who wear hats. I don't know whether hat-wearing causes bad driving, or merely evidences the personality of this driver, but elderly hat wearers tend to hug the middle of the road, and go much too slowly, often gripping the steering wheel with both hands at the top of it, while peering over the dashboard with a blank stare. Scary. Don't get behind them.

3. Drivers with more than twelve stuffed animals arranged on the inside ledge of the rear windshield. This type is also slow and erratic, and often in a bizarre and unpredictable manner. Not sure why; perhaps there are medication issues.

But none of this is rational, and these stereotypes are supposed to be funny, right? If the film "Borat" can stereotype Kazakhs and feminists and frat boys, then what is the great evil in having a little fun with a license plate?

No, I still won't do it. I'm still feeling guilty about stereotyping Subaru drivers, and I want to return to the topic of changing with the times. So New Jersey license plates get a break.

Back to my point. There are few things more irritating than those things which resist easy explanation and stereotyping, especially if the stereotypes are invoked as a mental coping strategy. If you've been driving as long as I have (36 years), you tend to think you've "seen everything" and you've tended to compile a long list of stereotypes to be plugged in as the need arises.

Enter cell phones. These days, the number one bad driving offender is someone who waits too long and drives too slowly for no apparent reason. I hate the fact that I have had to add a new stereotype to my hate list, but the fact is, when all other stereotypes fail (no age issues, stuffed animals, mental illness, intoxication, or type of car), almost always I see that the driver is talking on the damned phone. What that means is that he or she (invariably the former tends to be an "asshole" while the latter something less polite) is doing two things:

This does not mean that I would outlaw using cell phones while driving. But impaired driving or obstructing traffic should always be an offense, so I think the rule should be along the lines of "at your own risk." Some people can handle it; others can't. If you hold people up by not proceeding at a green light because you're on the phone and weren't looking, that should be a citable offense. So should weaving around and crossing into the next lane as you enthusiastically discuss last night's Eagles game.

But it's a new thing. A brand new stereotype. There are many more of what I can only call "those people" driving around than there used to be.

Because times change.

To a lot of people, the answer is to blame the cell phone, and target that as if it is the cause of its own misuse. That makes about as much sense as blaming cars for traffic, or guns for crime. But that's what people do, and it is also a relatively new phenomenon. When I was a kid, people weren't as likely to blame guns for crime, or even for tragedies. Even if irresponsible parents left guns lying around for their four year old, that was the parents' fault and not the guns'.

This blaming of objects reaches absurd heights. Attempts have been made to ban all cell phones in bathrooms because a tiny minority of sickos have misused them, and Ipods have been blamed for the fact that they were stolen. Cell phones "kill" too; ask any "victim" of a cell phone driver or cell-phone-activated terrorist bomb.

Times change, and it sucks because your thinking has to change with it. In order to cope with what might otherwise appear to be insanity, the list of explanations grows and grows.

But still, just as I'll never see cell phones or cars as evil, I'll never see guns as evil. This makes voting for Republicans part of my coping strategy, for most of the insanity about these things emanates from leading Democratic politicians. While it seemed that the conventional wisdom in the Democratic Party had shifted for the better (and gun control was seen as a losing issue), I'm seeing evidence that the pendulum is swinging the other way. A particularly horrendous example is that Tennessee mayor ("Tennessee mayor" doesn't sound quite right, and I'm not sure why) who wants to be governor of one of the reddest state but who has allied himself with the gun grab program of the very "blue" New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Maybe the conventional wisdom of gun control being a losing proposition is fading, because only this morning, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell came out against the use of tiny guns as Christmas tree ornaments, in language