As I have repeatedly been unable to ignore the following quote from Glenn Reynolds, I'm going to fail to restrain myself once again:

If Gore were less moralistic in his approach -- as he gains weight, he's even starting to look a bit like a younger Jerry Falwell -- the charges of hypocrisy would have less bite.

That's because of the hypocrisy factor.

In most day-to-day situations where we are supposed to be responsible but fall short of what we should do, a little "hypocrisy" doesn't matter. For example, as I discussed yesterday, my dog Coco is in heat, and it is my responsibility to control her genitalia in such a manner that nothing untoward happens. But if I didn't live up to my responsibility, and Coco got knocked up by the fox who's after her, would that mean that I shouldn't then be able to urge other people to control their animals and their animals' genitalia?

This would seem like an easy question, but it's clouded by public perceptions about what we call "hypocrisy."

I don't see why it would be hypocritical for a drug user to advise people not to use drugs. Frankly, I think he would have more, not less, credibility than someone who had never used drugs.

I can remember when William Talman (who played Hamilton Burger, the DA in Perry Mason) was dying of cancer he made a public service ad warning people not to smoke as he had. The idea that this would constitute "hypocrisy" is absurd on its face.

Even today, if a well-known anti-cigarette crusader were discovered to be hooked on cigarettes, I don't think it would hurt his credibility, nor would he be accused of hypocrisy. But on the other hand, if the head of an "Ex-Gay" ministry were busted in a mens room for soliciting an undercover officer or photographed doing something compromising in a gay bar, he'd be laughed out of the "Ex Gay" business.

What's the difference? Is it that there aren't any militant smokers who run around "outing" furtive closeted cigarette puffers? Or is it that cigarette smoking does not generate moral indignation, but gayness does? No, that can't be it, because being gay is good, and smoking cigarettes is bad. Maybe neither one is a moral issue. No, that can't be right either, because lots of people on both sides believe very passionately that morality is involved.

While I've complained about the conflation of morality with health, there's a lot of it going on anyway. The anti-gay activists like to compare homosexuality to smoking, but I've examined the comparison carefully, and it just doesn't withstand logical analysis. Whether anti-gay activists like it or not, cigarettes are still seen almost solely as a health issue and the only morality involved has to do with where people should be allowed to smoke.

Like it or not, the moral issues draw the hypocrisy charge, not the health issues.

That's why the preachy-scoldy Al Gore, caught in his wildly gluttonous energy use, has set himself up for the charge of hypocrisy. He's like an anti-gay fundamentalist minister caught in bed with a young male prostitute. The thing is, neither Gore nor the minister are prohibited from continuing to preach against the respective ills they condemn. The problem is that they have damaged their credibility, because let's face it, if you don't practice what you preach, people who find that out are just not going to take your preaching as seriously as they would if you did -- unless you admit that you fell short, and (preferably after admission into some sort of program) you solemnly promise not to do it again. Obviously, it is not in the interest of preachers to make such damning admissions.

Not so fast.

I just realized that I have made yet another unfair comparison. Al Gore is really not like the anti-gay preacher caught with the young man; he's worse. That's because those who preach against sins of the flesh recognize that human weakness is involved, and they concede that to those who have such a sinful attraction, it can be irresistible.

While some (including President Bush) have referred to our oil use as an "addiction," I don't think most reasonable people believe that oil consumption is an addiction in the ordinary sense of the word, and that he used the term as political hyperbole. If you doubt me, imagine what would happen if Al Gore tried to claim that he used too much energy because he was "addicted" to it. Stand-up comedians would be making jokes about admitting him into treatment centers run by Greenpeace, and he'd never live it down. He's therefore stuck holding the hypocrisy bag. And worse yet, if his own rhetoric is to be believed, he's guilty of heating up the planet. The closeted gay minister has heated up nothing except his angry congregation, and hell, unlike Gorewell's "carbon offsets," there's simply no such such thing as a homo offset that you can buy -- and I doubt there ever will be. (Not to complicate things unduly, but there actually is such a thing as a homo offset. But they're very technical things, and not intended for misbehaving preachers.)

Meanwhile, of course, the fact of Bush's eco-friendlier home gets almost no media play. If the roles were reversed, imagine the outcry. Actually, Don Surber (via Glenn Reynolds) imagines it pretty well:

If Al Gore were a Republican, the story of his consuming 20 times the national average while lecturing the rest of us on cutting back on our energy use would be front page news from coast-to-coast. Late-nite comedians would have a field day. The editorial pages would puff up about Republican hypocrisy.

Those policy preferences - limit carbon, mandate the use of certain technologies, restrict land use, etc. - all seem to entail increasing governmental control over the economy. Mr. Gore's actual motivation would appear to a fair-minded observer to be a desire to increase government power in the economic sphere - and environmental concern over global climate change is simply the convenient rhetorical tool to flog in the service of that agenda.

Mr. Gore is of course free to advocate for whatever policies he wishes. However, those of us who would bear the burden of his policies are also entitled - in our mindlessly swarming way - to think that his rhetorical flourishes are so much organically-composted, locally-grown, carbon-neutral BS.

Sorry, there, but "pet Gore peeves" slowed me down for a second, because it just Doesn't. Look. Right. It's more than a pet Gore peeve actually, because it's a pet peeve I have with the whole global warming mindset and I don't think it's getting enough attention in the MSM.

The issue, simply, is human meat consumption -- said by the official data to be the biggest greenhouse gas culprit of them all. That this is being downplayed makes me think Creative Destruction is right that "the desire is to increase government power in the economic sphere," and that they're using whatever rhetorical tools are most convenient. As I said, if this were really the emergency it is claimed to be, it would be easier (and less damaging to the overall economy) to curtail meat production than to prevent people from consuming oil. The former is not a necessity, but the latter is. I think that the reason meat is downplayed as an issue is because oil is a more convenient scapegoat. People just love to hate big oil. But Americans simply aren't ashamed to eat meat; the morality against meat-eating is too new, and few Americans buy into it. The environmental movement, IMO, lives in deadly fear of looking ridiculous. And if they demanded that Americans stop eating meat, Americans would think they were ridiculous. The irony is that curtailing meat production is a sensible demand, if their thesis is valid, which I don't think it is.

Once again, the failure to scold Americans properly about their meat consumption makes me think (to quote Creative Destruction again) that they're just seeking a "convenient rhetorical tool," and that the real goal is control over the economy. And if you want to control the economy, curtailing meat production is not the way to do it -- even if it would save the planet according to your precious theory.

I keep complaining that this stuff is newly manufactured morality, because it is.

It's always a little tough to feel sorry for people who fail to live up to the morality they claim to uphold. In the case of someone who has fails to live up to the morality he has manufactured, it's even tougher.

UPDATE: For trangressors of manufactured eco-morality, IowaHawk offers manufactured (if costly) eco-repentance! (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

A real eco offset, not an eco homo offset!

MORE: Ann Coulter weighs in on Global Warming's food aspects with "Let Them Eat Tofu." (I have to say, for a Deadhead, she writes pretty well.)

UPDATE: Thank you Glenn Reynolds, for the link, and welcome all. New readers, please feel free to comment whether you agree or disagree. (No sign-in necessary here.)

UPDATE (03/04/07): Donald Sensing (my thanks for the link!) comes to Al Gore's defense (at least partially), noting that Gore lives in a older area where the houses are inherently not energy efficient:

Belle Meade is the "old money" section of Nashville, dating back to at least the 1920s and quite likely to the turn of the 20th century. Gore's house, at 10K sq. ft., is no tiny thing, but it's not exceptional in Belle Meade by any means. See the satellite photo of his house. These houses are not energy efficient as first designed and built, though I assume that they have been upgraded since. But geothermal heating and cooling, like President Bush uses in Crawford, is out of the question in Nashville. The whole region sits on limestone that goes down miles. More here.

I'm not sure what Al Gore could do to become greener in his home than he says he is - although it's fair to ask what's taking him so long. I'm willing to bet that his electrical usage is not far out of line with his neighbors. It also should be pointed out that Gore runs his business - and it's a big business, obviously - out of his house (or so his spokeperson claims), and that should be factored in.

So I think we all should take a chill pill here. There's less than meets the eye about all this. The only item that Gore's defense offers that bothers me is the carbon offsetting claim, since it forms a crutch to prop up the profligacy of energy the Gore house uses. Even so, another correspondent to Bruce Thompson thinks it is valid, and explains why. Sure, Gore could use a big dollop of humility, but couldn't we all . . .

I wouldn't have a problem with Gore if he wasn't being such a damn scold. While I'm sure Sensing is right that there's not much to do to improve energy efficiency in older luxury homes in Belle Mead, if Gore wants to talk the way he does (about how this is "the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced"), then why dosn't he set an example for the rest of us peons he wants to scold, and simply move? (I think he could afford it.)

I understand and appreciate Donald Sensing's argument, but I still think this is pretty basic stuff. If you're going to take issue with me for burning gas in my Toyota, and I see that you're driving an Oldsmobile Toronado or a Hummer, don't expect me to take you seriously. (And, I guess, depending on the volume of your scolding, it might also be a good idea to think about letting go of the Rolls Royce too. Oh the pain!)

If you're against waste, don't waste. And if you do waste, don't waste my time scolding me.

(HT, M. Simon.)

Reader Paul has sent me a couple of links on what Microsoft's Vista will mean to computer users.

This link is for non technical folks. Let me excerpt a bit:

...reviews have focused chiefly on Vista's new functionality, for the past few months the legal and technical communities have dug into Vista's "fine print." Those communities have raised red flags about Vista's legal terms and conditions as well as the technical limitations that have been incorporated into the software at the insistence of the motion picture industry.

The net effect of these concerns may constitute the real Vista revolution as they point to an unprecedented loss of consumer control over their own personal computers. In the name of shielding consumers from computer viruses and protecting copyright owners from potential infringement, Vista seemingly wrestles control of the "user experience" from the user.

Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge. During the installation process, users "activate" Vista by associating it with a particular computer or device and transmitting certain hardware information directly to Microsoft.

Even after installation, the legal agreement grants Microsoft the right to revalidate the software or to require users to reactivate it should they make changes to their computer components. In addition, it sets significant limits on the ability to copy or transfer the software, prohibiting anything more than a single backup copy and setting strict limits on transferring the software to different devices or users.

Here is a really neat geeky explanation of what Microsoft is trying to accomplish. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, which is another way of saying copy protection:

Note C: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get weird or very weird. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I haven't been in too much of a hurry to install Windows Vista, because everything I have works in all four computers (including the upstairs computer, the downstairs computer, the newer laptop, and the recently resurrected old laptop). There have been so many horror stories about Windows Vista incompatibilities that I just think, why would I want to make my computers not work?

On the other hand, there's a computer wiz over at Pajamas Media who finally figured it out! He's got a great, easy-to-follow, instruction-packed video titled "How to Install Windows Vista in 2 Minutes," and I have a machine very similar to the one he's using! I could probably get it to accept Windows Vista...

Not so fast.

I just remembered another problem: that particular machine has a way of always upsetting Coco.

Damn. There's always a glitch somewhere.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

-- Oscar Wilde

Taking into account that Wilde may have been ahead of his times, here's a video of the Grateful Dead (a personal favorite of Ann Coulter), attempting in 1967 to explain their lifestyle in a documentary by CBS's Harry Reasoner:

While there wasn't any such thing as a formal, officially declared "Culture War" in those days, that was only because people hadn't had time to fully catch up with and process the power of the new medium of television, and all its implications. The Baby Boomers were the first generation to really grow up with something in common -- and that something was a gigantic roving eyeball which enabled the phenomenon of monkey-see/monkey-do as nothing ever before in American history. To a large extent, America has no readily definable or identifiable "culture" before television. There were regional cultures, various class structures complete with particular ways of dressing and even accents which could enable a skilled listener under certain circumstances to discern which part of town someone came from, but no one culture. Well there was American individualism, but that had to go. For how do you wreck a "culture" of individualism?

In order to wage war against a culture, a culture first must be created. TV Culture supplied the stage. As a play (a regular "feature," really), the Culture War was thus inevitable.

Culture War is the nexus where the personal becomes political. Where the details of your life become someone else's business, and where someone else's business becomes your personal life.

It is both a war for and against shame which arose as a result of the television, and it was enabled by the people who thought they could control others through it (and who were of course themselves enabled and fueled by the money and power it brought them).

I blog because I often imagine that the Internet offers an escape.

All I ever asked for was the right to be left alone to live my life as I saw fit without being bothered by anyone as long as I never bothered anyone else.

But as the above television program demonstrated way back when, that's a very elusive "right." Because people are bothered -- and then they bother those they deemed to be bothering them, who then bothered back.

At its heart, the Culture War is personal.

"I have nothing against you personally, I just think you people belong in prison."

Nothing personal, but it's just personal.

I've been a Deadhead since 1970, and one of the things they taught me was that avoiding politics offered no escape from the Culture War. That's because everything is political. Your money, your property, your tastes, your body, and even your genes.

It's been hard, but I've tried to learn (and I'm still trying to learn) not to take any of it personally.

How I envy the sociopaths.

MORE: Not to completely disagree with Wilde's smartass Victorian observation, but I should probably add that I think it would be nice not to try so hard to destroy that in between period of civilization before we've really been able to appreciate it. (Thus, I've tried to warn about the dangers of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)

UPDATE: My thanks to regular commenter Loren Heal for linking this post, and for reminding me that in my zeal for oversimplification, that I ignored some of America's cultural attributes, which she lists:

While it's hard to distinguish our myths about the culture of our forebears from their actual culture, there is little doubt about the commonality of:

* Freedoms of speech, press, firearms, and religion
* "Manifest destiny" and westward expansion: gold rushes, cowboys, indians, cavalry
* Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Bill Hickok, et al
* The town square containing the courthouse
* Public schools (first small, then bigger)
* Tent revivals
* The Civil War
* Social mobility
* Baseball
* The automobile
* Prohibition and the Great Depression

But I'm not sure that these various attributes (known to most Americans only through the filtering lens of television, btw) can be all said to be culture in the traditional sense of the word -- when means cultivation of the mind as one would till land. My etymological dictionary refers to "intellectual training and refinement."

Wiki accurately states the anthropological view:

Anthropologists most commonly use the term "culture" to refer to the universal human capacity to classify, codify and communicate their experiences symbolically. This capacity has long been taken as a defining feature of the humans.

It is my opinion that America's culture of rugged individualism was replaced by a culture of oneness the likes of which had never been seen before. A cultural stranglehold, if you will.

I think what we now call "the culture" happened before people realized what was happening.

One of the problems with this analysis is that "culture" is not readily defined. When I was a kid, culture meant education, refinement, the arts. I'd like it to mean that again. I'd also like "American culture" to mean individualism again, as opposed to programs which destroy by defining. (The best way to end the culture war I'm talking about here might be to simply turn it off.)

MORE: I didn't mean to write an extended essay about television, but I think I should add that it's more complicated than those-who-watched-it versus those-who-didn't. The early Boomers are the Howdy Doody generation, often control freaks who grew up watching ABC, NBC, and CBS with the "fairness doctrine" and common sets of values and ideals shaped by the early tube. As more and more choices in programming appeared, television persisted, but the number of choices led to a loosening of control, and right now, we are on the verge of anyone being able to be his own TV program, which makes the old medium increasingly moot. To that extent at least, "the culture" is pretty close to being back in the hands of individuals.

Which is good. Unless the Howdy Doody control freaks fight back!

MORE: Proving you don't have to be a first generation boomer to be a Howdy Doody control freak, Eric Alterman sounds off in favor of gatekeepers:

Ever since the beginning of blogging-time, I have worried -- in public and on blogging panels -- about the loss of the media's gatekeeper function. Now, I believe I literally wrote the book on this topic -- and it's about to go out of print for the second time, so if you don't own it, hassle Cornell University Press -- and I am as aware as anyone on earth, I believe, of the dangers of the misuse of that function. Almost all of my books deal with this tension in one way or another. But the fact is, the function is absolutely necessary.

Tourists who come to Philadelphia to see the birthplace of freedom will soon be in for a rude awakening.

Access to the Liberty Bell (which is the heart of Independence Mall) will require passing through what's been dubbed "Slavery Mall":

When completed, probably next year, the memorial will constitute the first national commemoration of slaves.

Kelly/Maiello was chosen from a group of five finalists for the project. The firm, over the years, has been involved with aspects of several big-ticket projects in the region, including the expansion of the central branch of the Free Library, expansion of the Convention Center, construction of the Criminal Justice Center, and restoration of City Hall and Family Court.

Their design, which outlines the house at the southeast corner of Sixth and Market Streets where slave owner Washington and anti-slavery John Adams lived and conducted their presidencies in the 1790s, utilizes audiovisual elements to tell the stories and re-create the environment of those who lived there, including the enslaved Africans and other servants.

The house outlines will be punctuated with allusions to architectural elements, such as chimneys and cornices, rising from a low wall defining the site, and the site of the slave quarters is demarcated by a transparent glass cube - at the entrance to the Liberty Bell Center.

"We didn't get here in the usual kind of way - this wasn't exactly a tea party," Mayor Street said at a news conference yesterday at the Independence Visitor Center. "To say that people have a very strong emotional feeling about this would be the understatement of the decade." (Emphasis added.)

In this context, "we" is little more than code language for blood feud. But never mind. Some of the more activist "we's" designed this hall of founding shame to teach the less activist inclined "you's" a lesson in freedom slavery.

Here are Street's "we's" -- long dead people you never heard of (none of them related to Mayor Street so far as I know -- although they may be related to Strom Thurmond), but their names have been resurrected from obscurity in order to eternally scold those of us with evil blood:

The controversy broke out at the beginning of 2002 when The Inquirer reported that the entrance to the proposed Liberty Bell Center, then unbuilt, would compel visitors to walk directly over the unmarked spot where Washington's human chattel labored and slept.

There were no park service plans at the time to acknowledge the presence of Washington's slaves, now thought to number nine: Oney Judge, Moll, Austin, Hercules, Richmond, Giles, Paris, Christopher Sheels and Joe. All spent some time in the house. Hercules, Washington's fabled chef, and Oney Judge, Martha's personal maid, both were able to escape bondage.

In the summer of 2002, as the controversy boiled, the appropriations committee of the U.S. House of Representatives directed the park service "to appropriately commemorate" the slaves and the house they lived in, known as the President's House.

Guess who's paying for it.

About $1.5 million of the project cost will be provided by the city; the federal government is kicking in $3.6 million, according to U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah (D., Phila.), a key member of the appropriations committee, and U.S. Rep. Bob Brady (D., Phila.), both of whom attended yesterday's announcement.

Fattah said the memorial would end silence over one of the nation's inherent contradictions: the presence of slavery at the very birthplace of the free democratic republic.

"You can't have reconciliation without truth," Fattah said. "Now that will be illustrated in an important way."

Michael Coard, an attorney and organizer of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, a grassroots community group that has pushed the park service to acknowledge Washington's slaves and their stories, said yesterday that past acrimony represented "water under the bridge."

"If I designed it myself, I couldn't have done it better," Coard said. "But we are still going to be watching them until the final brick is laid."

The Kelly/Maiello design marks out rooms of the President's House - the dining room, the state dining room, the servants' hall, for example - and uses each room to suggest the life of the house and its residents.

The principal vehicles for recounting stories will be audio and LED video screen dramatizations. Professional historians, writers and actors will be employed in the project.

"The stories and the dialogues are really the unifying principle," Emanuel Kelly said. "You will begin to imagine you are standing in the room inhabited by Washington, Hercules, Oney Judge. The experience will be what you hear and see and it will be left to the visitor to put it all together in his or her own mind."

And, I suppose, tourists who want to hear about the founding of American slavery.

Well, at least "we" don't have to reenact anything.

I hope.

I couldn't blog this myself. Too horrible.

Carl in Jerusalem

Coco is in heat. Yes, it happens twice a year, and it requires me to pay a bit more attention to potential, um, situations, than I normally do. It certainly isn't like the old days, when male dogs roamed about, and having a bitch in heat would cause untold commotion, stalking, and desperate howling late at night. These days, it's almost as if nothing is happening. Even though the scent can be detected for miles, people don't let their dogs roam, and there are almost no male dogs who still have their nuts. Of course, almost is not 100%. There's always that chance, so I remain vigilant.

Thanks to the fresh snow on Sunday night, I learned that there is a late-night frequenter to the property who has left tracks demonstrating a keen interest in Coco. Odd, because as I said, there aren't any dogs that wander, or else they'd be waiting for her in the yard. But this is no dog.

Coco's nocturnal admirer is (I am sure) a fox. A red fox (Vulpes vulpes to be exact).

It looks like this one:

I've seen the fox in the yard before, and Coco has a disturbing habit of rummaging around in the bushes where he lives, and I suspect she's eating something I'd rather not think about, and where I'd rather not "go" in this nice clean blog post. But she's familiar with him, and after looking at the tracks carefully, I'm sure they're from the fox. They're longer and skinnier than normal dog footprints, and...

Hell, here's a picture showing the difference:

It's a match with the tracks in the snow. Furthermore, the fox tracks went right through the hedge without any hesitation, and then looped around and through the yard, then through the neighbor's yard, as if this was an extended detour from its normal nighttime prowling route. There were a lot of tracks circling this house, and around Coco's little spots of yellow snow.

Naturally, a "what if" scenario crossed my mind. While it certainly isn't my goal to play mad scientist with my dog, it did occur to me that mating with the fox would not be a physical impossibility, and that if I left her in the yard in the wee hours of the morning, that little guy might just take a shot at it. Foxes are wily creatures, though, and thousands of years of experience in avoiding man would naturally make them hesitant to get caught in a tie-up (from which escape is impossible for twenty minutes or so).

But lets say that for whatever reason, the deed took place. According to virtually every source I have consulted, the odds are overwhelmingly against a successful pregnancy, because there is said to be a chromosomal incompatibility. Foxes and dogs are in the Family Canidae, but foxes are in the subgenus Vulpes, and cannot interbreed with dogs the way wolves and coyotes can.

If pregnancy did occur, the theoretical result would be a "Dox":

Contrary to popular myth, dogs cannot successfully interbreed with red foxes. Dogs have 78 chromosomes, but red foxes have only 38 chromosomes.* This severe mismatch is a barrier to hybridisation. In spite of anecdotal evidence of hybrids and claims that hybrids are superior to ordinary dogs, there have been no genetically verified "doxes".

An unconfirmed female terrier/fox hybrid was reported, and later euthanized (put to sleep), in the UK. British gamekeeper folklore claims that Terrier bitches can produce offspring with dog Foxes. The supposed hybrids (known as a dox) are natural variation in the domestic dog. There has been a reported cross between a domestic dog and a South American fox, but the latter was a fox-like wolf, known as the maned wolf, and not a true fox.

In Saskatchewan, Canada there was another supposed dox, this time a female miniature sheltie with a wild fox. There was a litter of three, but only one survived. The surviving (a female) was sterile, and looked like an almost pure fox, with slight variations. However, the variability of dogs in appearance makes it impossible to determine whether an animal is hybrid based on looks alone.

I'm not about to try, but that doesn't mean I trust Coco.

Right now, she's wearing a very stylish diaper to keep her discharge from staining up the whole house:

I don't know, but if I were a fox, I might think she looked foxy!

But I'm in no mood to make genetic history right now. Besides, Coco couldn't take the publicity.

* Chromosome differences alone are not an absolute bar. Wiki's discussion of "humanzees" states that "having different numbers of chromosomes is not an absolute barrier to hybridization." (There are tions, ligers, and the beefalos.... Oh my!)

Darren at Right on the Left Coast has what I think is a sensible energy conservation policy:

Most of the light bulbs in my house are compact fluorescent bulbs. I own an electric weedeater and, at a cost approaching $200, just purchased an electric lawn mower. I'm looking into a solar system on my roof, although the cost may be prohibitive. In November, when I was looking at new cars, I gave serious consideration to a hybrid Ford Escape.

I'm all about reasonable conservation measures. I'm all about renewable energy, specifically solar and nuclear. I believe these things not because of any fear of so-called global warming, but because there's no reason to pollute the environment if we can reasonably avoid doing so.

What I would like to know, though, is why so many of the loudest scolds who call for government crackdowns on gluttony are gluttons themselves.

So would Darren, who links to this report about Al Gore's very anti-global gluttony.

Yeah, I know. Gore is buying "offsets."

And the church used to sell indulgences.

Perhaps that's an unfair comparison.

It's not as if Al's Gore's gluttony is a sin, is it? And it's not as if the man is some sort of corrupt medieval priest.

Tell you what. I'd be glad to spare Al the moral lecture. All he needs to do is spare me.

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that Gerard Van der Leun had (unbeknownst to me) raised the indulgence issue before I did. Which means that the comparison I failed to make was neither original nor plagiarized.

AND ANOTHER UPDATE: I tried to ignore the following quote from Glenn, but I can't restrain myself. I just can't.

If Gore were less moralistic in his approach -- as he gains weight, he's even starting to look a bit like a younger Jerry Falwell -- the charges of hypocrisy would have less bite.

But even if he lost weight, he might look, um, Haggard!

(Forgive me. I am sorry.)

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

I'm trying to make sense of the [allegedly] murderous Nashville cab driver who ran over his passenger, because it's been coming out in bits and pieces.

A lot of people are objecting to what seem clear attempts to hide the driver's status as a Muslim from Somalia. Nothing new there; hiding such details goes on a lot, another example being the Salt Lake City shooter.

But there's something that perplexes me even more than hiding the driver's religion. At first, I grew suspicious about the fact that this was called a "religious dispute." But now that I've read the details of the dispute, I'm more than suspicious; I'm appalled. If this report is correct, the cab driver was an out-and-out Nazi supporter:

A Nashville cabbie made anti-Semitic statements and praised Adolph Hitler's campaign against Jews during a religious argument that culminated when he ran over one of the passengers as he left the taxi, witnesses said during a hearing today.

The cab driver, Ibrahim Ahmed, said Hitler was "trying to rid the world of Jews," the alleged victim, Jeremie Imbus, told the court.

"I just remember ...(being)... I guess the word is 'shocked,'" Imbus said of the Feb. 18 incident.

Let's assume that the same driver had been a non-Muslim. Would this have been called a "religious dispute"?

I may be wrong, but I don't think so.

But because the guy's a Muslim, Nazism is deemed "religious."

If I were a Muslim (whether of the moderate variety or the less moderate CAIR variety) I'd be outraged -- and I mean seriously outraged -- by this.

And do you even have to be a Muslim to be outraged? Why aren't more people outraged that in the mainstream media, support for Hitler voiced by a Muslim is characterized as "religious"?

Or am I missing something? Is support for Hitler's genocide against the Jews now part of mainstream Islam?

I don't think it is.

However, I realize that most of the reporters who conflated Islam with Nazism by calling this a "religious dispute" probably weren't consciously aware of what they were doing, because they thought they were doing something else.

How excusable it is, I don't know. I suppose foolishness (and maybe a little elitist condescension) is better than evil.

Or do details about stuff like this really matter anymore?

Huge front page headline in today's Inquirer: "Homicides surge past 2006 rate." Hmmm.... "Surge" is becoming a popular word; it's used repeatedly in the article:

For the moment, police administrators say they can't be sure what is driving the latest surge.

"At this point we characterize '07 as out of character" compared to last year because a larger number of homicides have occurred indoors - twice as many, year-to-date - police spokesman Capt. Benjamin Naish said.

Asked to explain the import of that finding, Naish said it showed "many violent confrontations are taking place outside the normal patrol areas where police are able to impact and prevent those incidents."

"We follow up, and hopefully, we are able to solve these crimes," he said. "The highway patrol and narcotics strike force are zoning in on areas where we have historical data to indicate high levels of gun violence," and a special tactical unit - SITE - has stepped up its work, he said.

He also cited a list of social ills - "poverty, unemployment, educational challenges" - as contributing to the surge.

Not to pick nits with Captain Naish, but four of the deaths involved an "angry investor [who] opened fire at the Navy Yard, killing three business partners before killing himself." The killer and the victims were all white collar types and the investment involved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Considering that the 22 percent "surge" over last year's January and February numbers consists of an additional eleven people, I think it's a bit of a stretch to attribute the entire "surge" to poverty, unemployment, and education.

Couple the front page with this editorial letter with the oversize headline of "Different rules on gun ownership":

The solution to gun violence ultimately will be political. It will involve educating rural and urban gun owners on the reasons why they need different sets of rules for gun ownership.

Rural residents can be more than an hour away from law-enforcement help and may need to protect themselves with force before law enforcement arrives.

Urban residents are threatened by concealed automatic and assault-style weapons favored by street gangs. The urban violence is aggravated by automobile drive-bys for escape in seconds - even with the availability of law enforcement in minutes.

We need to establish a legal framework that enables protection in rural areas without enabling the gun epidemic in poor urban areas.

This compromise may be facilitated by further research - to convince suburban and rural citizens of the realities. But nobody wants this research to take decades to convince know-nothing politicians and gun bigots the way it took decades to get global warming past foot-draggers such as former Senators John Ashcroft and Jesse Helms.

I've been writing 3 letters to the editor almost every day since 2003. RapidResponse_PA is a wonderful group of active letter writers. Between us, we have been published an average of twice a week -- setting the record straight against wrong-wing editorials, insipid newspaper endorsements, and wildly misleading Republican astroturf.

There's clearly a movement afoot to allow local gun control in cities, and I think the idea might be to count on suburban and rural voters to simply write off the large cities as irrelevant to their lives. They're hoping that the complacent suburbanites and country folk will roll their eves over urban crime and say, "if they want gun control in the cities, let them have it!"

Besides, the cities are more civilized. Urban. Sophisticated. Country people are primitive, violent. Into things like hunting. NASCAR.

In Pennsylvania, gun control is undeniably a red-versus-blue issue. In urban areas, there are racial overtones to the debate, and even though the clear intent is to disarm black urban citizens, gun control opponents are being called racist.

Racial overtones drive so many of these things that I'd be willing to bet that the gun control strategists are counting on what they think is racism from rural and suburban voters to mesh with the urban push to disarm the city people. Calling opposition to selective gun control racist is a brilliant way to reassure the "red" inclined people that they're really not racist at all when they look the other way as the Second Amendment rights of urban dwellers are jettisoned.

While I hope it backfires, I think it's an excellent strategy. At least, the math seems to work.

Certainly, no one can say that the gun grabbers aren't doing their homework.

Who knows? With any luck, the selective gun control meme might even stand a chance of dividing Republicans.

I mean, who wants to be a "gun bigot"?

My favorite Egyptian blogger The Sandmonkey has been blogging about jailed blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman.

CAIRO -- An Egyptian court's imprisonment of a blogger last week is another official blow to free speech, according to fellow bloggers and human-rights activists.

"It affects the only space of free speech left in Egypt, which is the Internet and the blogs, and it could possibly hinder what you can write in the future," said a prominent Egyptian who posts in Web logs, or blogs, anonymously under the name Sandmonkey.

An Alexandria court convicted Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, 22, of insulting Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, sentencing him Thursday to four years in prison.

Suleiman, a former student of Al-Azhar University, the Middle East's most respected Sunni religious institution, attacked the university, Muslims and the Egyptian government in his blog.

His parents denounced him, demanding that he recant or be executed, one Egyptian newspaper reported.

The court's sentence has shocked the growing Egyptian blogosphere. Its more than 3,000 writers, from all levels of Egyptian society, increasingly have exposed police torture and other government excesses through Web articles and videos. Some post in English, although most -- like Suleiman -- write in Arabic.

"These charges are indefinable -- you can't define insulting the president, you can't define the space for religion," said Sandmonkey. "There are no fixed parameters for that."

"What really upsets me is ... that he has no sympathy coming from the Egyptian street, mainly for what he said about Islam and religion," said another blogger who posts under the name Big Pharaoh. "This is really scary. It could start with Abdel Kareem and it could go to other areas. In the future, maybe anyone who writes about politics will get arrested."

Here are a few Sandmonkey posts on the subject.
Abdel Karim family disowns him
Abdel Karim gets sentenced
My PJM piece on Abdel Karim is up
Proxy Blogging
Leave Egypt, to where exactly?
Follow Up

H/T Israpundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I don't know how I manage to get dragged into these things, and I don't know who is to blame. (It's not as if anyone makes me click these links.)

But anyway, there I was, minding my own business and trying to read this piece about Muqtada al Sadr which Glenn Reynolds had linked. What Glenn says is true; Muqtada al Sadr does not like the surge (good!) and he is holed up in an undisclosed location (good in a way, but it's bad that they can't find him and take him out!)

Anyway, as I was mulling all this over, I reached the bottom of the piece and then over on the right I saw some Huffington Post links. I probably should have just left this well enough alone, but when I saw the words "Jerry Falwell on Global Warming: It's a Myth," I couldn't stop myself.

Hell, it's just a little click, right?

Wrong. It was a click on the road to hell! For, I soon discovered to my horror that not only were gays implicated in the Falwellian assessment of Global Warming, but they were partnered with some strange new force I had not seen before -- the force of Teh!

According to David Roberts, Falwell believes that the "nefarious secret agenda of the global warming crowd" is meant to thwart "Teh Gay" hatred:

...to redirect the church's focus, distracting it from its core mission of hating Teh Gay.

Determined to find out, I went directly to Google, and found out that indeed there is a phenomenon called "Teh Gay" -- with a viable presence well known for years. According to the Urban Dictionary, there are two meanings:

1. The non-existant malady that one cathces by being around homosexuals (males especially).

2. Term used mostly by those denegrating anti-homosexual positions of religious leaders and far-right wing politicians.

Lots of bloggers have written about Teh Gay, in posts such as "Where Teh Gay Originates," and it's in wide enough circulation that Kevin Drum used it to title a post (although his more clueless commenters kept asking repeatedly what "teh gay" meant).

It means a lot of things, and some of them are worse than you can imagine. For example, Satan is teh gay, and the GOP are the Defenders of teh Gay. (Does that mean teh GOP defends Satan? Or just teh concept of teh Gay satan?)

If you're really into the nuances, Snopes has a long discussion. Basically it's an imputation of stupidity and bigotry via a gratuitously imputed spelling error.

I was so fascinated by all of this that I just had to watch Falwell's anti-global warming rant. (See how out of hand things can get when you dare click on a link?) Anyway, it was disappointing, and there was Not One Mention of Gay. Or Teh. Or Teh Gay. No Teh Homos either. Just a few words about how the church would be distracted from its focus on morality. While doubtless that morality would include his typical pulpit condemnations of homosexuality, I watched the video closely and saw no signs of gay -- "teh" or otherwise. This screenshot accurately sums up what he said:

It goes without saying that I'm far from happy with Falwell. By expressing skepticism, he's probably doing more to win over the skeptics to Al Gore's side than Al ever could (especially considering the latter's conspicuous consumption and carnivorous gluttony). Why can't he get with the program like Pat Robertson? That way, we few remaining genocidal libertarian skeptics could at least point to the "religious right" in the hope of swaying maybe a few members of the emotionally hysterical left. (I hope I didn't commit a triple redundancy there.)

The worst part of this is that because I clicked on a couple of links I should never have clicked on, I now find myself in the embarrassing position of defending Jerry Falwell. The fact is, he said nothing about gays in the global warming remarks.

So the Teh Gay business in this case has turned out to be an imputation of bigotry via a nonexistent spelling error involving a topic that wasn't there.

This Teh meme is obviously very powerful stuff. It's not only blowing up the meaning of words, it's blowing up the meaning of language that isn't there.

I'm wondering though, why the haste to have Falwell blame Teh Gay? Couldn't the problem just as easily be "teh Global Warming"?

I should have stuck with Muqtada al Sadr. Or maybe his allies from Teh ran.

MORE: Wikipedia has an entry on the teh phenomenon. It's a leet thing. (u wunt undrtsd.)

KesherTalk's Judith Weiss has a great post about the screening of the film "Obsession" at NYU -- and cowardly reactions like this:

"The question about radical Islam and how do we fight it is unproductive," said Yehuda Sarna, the New York University rabbi on the panel. "The question is how to break down the stereotypes facing the two religions."

Check out the post. There's a ten minute trailer video from the film, plus a classic interview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Bill Maher (which Judith thinks "Rabbi Kumbaya" should watch!)

I moan and groan about Global Warming, and I'm a double skeptic, in the following two ways:

1) I'm not convinced that the CO2 produced by man is capable of warming the planet to any appreciable degree. I don't think that has been shown.

2) Even if I were convinced that anthopogenic gases were heating the planet, I still think that the type of massive interventions and regulations being proposed would have more disastrous consequences than the carbon itself.

So, for the purpose of this blog post only, let me assume not only that the planet is heating up, but that our carbon is doing it, and that it is absolutely imperative that we put the brakes on those human activities which are most responsible for producing the carbon.

I have read repeatedly that the biggest single cause of carbon production is not the use of fossil fuels, but the human production of animals to be used as food.

In other words, our meat eating. Dr. Joseph W. Fox is a man whose general philosophy I disagree with, but he states the case rather eloquently:

The natural world is being turned into what some call a biological desert or industrialized wasteland by various human activities. Our singularly most damaging environmental footprint upon this planet, now recognized and documented by the FAO (1) is caused by our collectively costly and damaging appetite for animal produce. Some 3.2 billion cattle, sheep and goats are now being raised for human consumption, along with billions more pigs and poultry. These extensively and intensively farmed animals produce less food for us than they consume, and compete with us for water; they result in an increasing loss wildlife and habitat, and of good farmlands and grazing lands. Linked with deforestation, loss of wetlands, over-fishing and ocean pollution, our appetite for meat is the number one cause of global warming and loss of biodiversity.

Well, I am being serious now. Let's assume there is anthropogenic global warming. I have a legitimate, lingering question that has not been answered to my satisfaction.

Why is all the focus on the number two cause of Global Warming?

Isn't it easier to ask Americans to switch to beans and tofu than to give up their cars and switch to bicycles? Aren't high taxes meat easier to swallow than high taxes on oil?

As a skeptic, I'm not about to give up either one of my noxious addictions. But as addictions go, I think it would be easier to give up meat than to give up heat, and give up driving. I think most people, if they really thought about it, would find it far easier to give up meat than to give up oil, because we can live without the former, but not without the latter.

So why am I being told I'm addicted to oil, but not that I'm addicted to meat?

What am I missing?

AFTERTHOUGHT: To play my devil's advocacy game fairly, I probably should factor the usual political hyperbole into the argument that meat is the number one cause of global warming. OK, let's say it's only the number two cause. That it's not the number one cause, but it's a major cause. There's still a problem -- because I hear and read about global warming constantly, and at least in the conventional mainstream media, the culprit is, simply (in a very steady drumbeat) oil, oil, oil.

Where's the meat?

Can it be that we have an addiction that dare not speak its name?

UPDATE: I am not forgetting about methane -- CH4 -- which not only contains carbon, but which I mentioned in the last post about global warming. Again, my question is, if meat is a major cause of what the global warming proponents allege is happening, why is this being downplayed?

I was reading Michael Totten's blog and came across this interview of him by the Jerusalem Post. One part of the interview caught my eye. (Question by the Post in bold)

Are Syria and Iran still supplying Hizbullah? Have they recovered from the war last summer?

Absolutely. Hizbullah is as strong, or at least nearly as strong, as they were last July. Iran and Syria will continue supplying Hizbullah until they fear the consequences of continuing their support or until no one in Lebanon is willing to receive their support. Right now everyone who dies because of Syrian and Iranian support for Hizbullah is Lebanese or Israeli. They have no reason to stop until that equation is altered.

Now it looks like, although Israel thinks a war with Syria is not likely this year, it is preparing for a war with Syria. Perhaps the Israelis are wizing up.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

the NRA has trained members to attack their perceived enemies without mercy.

Unless the sporting community can become unified behind an organization that fights for safe and responsible hunting and shooting practices and sensible gun ownership, future generations may be unable to participate in and enjoy the shooting sports.

What the hell has hunting to do with the Second Amendment? It's peripheral, and I think this repeated "sporting" meme belies a divide and conquer mentality -- as if hunting is the only legitimate reason for owning firearms. I don't hunt, and I resent the constant (even relentless) implication fueled by organizations like AHSA that hunting is the only legitimate reason why anyone would own a gun.

Pat Wray and others complain about the fact that a hunting columnist infuriated gun owners (like me) when he suggested that because ARs and AKs were "terrorist weapons" they should not be used for hunting. Never mind that they are used for hunting; here's what he said:

I call them "assault" rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I'll go so far as to call them "terrorist" rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are "tackdrivers."

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern.

[...]

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don't need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let's divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the praries and woods.

I see the same sort of tripe in the daily newspapers, and I complain about it ad nauseam, but I can certainly understand why gun owners would find themselves especially infuriated to see it in Outdoor Life. I think this is part of a well-orchestrated movement to divide hunters and people who own guns for self defense.

But I'll say this: the NRA isn't issuing death threats against gun "apostates." There's a right for anyone to do a 180 on the gun issue, a right to infuriate gun owners like me with bad logic, and of course, a right to leave the NRA. And there's of course a right to disagree with and criticize people for doing any of those things.

Without receiving death threats.

That does not seem to be the case with some things:

COLOGNE, Germany, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- The founder of a group in Germany for former Muslims has sought police protection after receiving death threats.

Mina Ahadi, a native of Iran living in Cologne, said about three dozen people have joined the Central Council of Ex-Muslims.

"I happened to be born in a Muslim family, and I have decided not to be a Muslim," she told the magazine Focus.

Ahadi said she and other members of the group have been "terrorized" and have received death threats, most of them sent via e-mail.

In many Muslim countries, people who abandon the faith face the death sentence under Sharia law.

Ahadi said she hoped to represent the interests of former Muslims who do not practice the religion. She chose the name as a play on the Central Council of Muslims, which has about 800,000 members and is the largest Islamic group in Germany.

There are ex-NRA members, ex-Muslims, ex-gays, ex-straights, ex-Christians, ex-Pagans, ex-Republicans, and ex-Democrats. (And I'm sure there are lots of ex-bloggers by now.) So what? I think we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing, especially between now and the election. What separates civilized people from uncivilized people is that civilized people recognize that the right to do something includes the right not to do it, and the right to join something includes the right to leave it.

That does not mean that the people who justifiably feel betrayed by the exodus of fellow members cannot or in some cases should not sound off.

Say Uncle has a great discussion of the Zumbo affair, and there's more here and here.

It was Dr. Helen's blog which alerted me to the Zumbo situation, and I am fascinated by her discussion of a media double standard. (On the one hand Zumbo's a hero for standing up to NRA tyranny, while on the other hand "homophobes" need to be treated for mental illness.)

Here's Dr. Helen:

Take a foul mouthed shot at a minority and one is sent to rehab. Trash a gun owner and liken him or her to a terrorist and you are a sympathetic character who is being attacked by the fringe members of the NRA. I certainly do not condone what Washington said when he called a castmate a sexist slur, yet is it really okay for the The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to request an apology (probably yes), try to get him fired and ABC to send Washington to "rehab," all with no one in the MSM saying this might be wrong or at least giving an opposing view as they did with the gun slur? Why is one type of speech seen by the media as okay and worth defending and the other politically incorrect type seen as not worthy of anything but disdain and punishment?

I wonder when guys like Zumbo will be asked to go to rehab to treat their Hoplophobia?

(Parenthetically, I have long thought that the Washington affair touches on race, but I'm not allowed to say that, nor am I allowed to say that the Washington affair is now being driven by the ongoing flap over Tim Hardaway's remarks -- said to have "led" to a savage and fatal Detroit attack on an elderly gay man, and of course it therefore "follows" that Tim Hardaway's remarks are actually the fault of Peter LaBarbera, which means LaBarbera is the ultimate villain, while Washington is a victim in need of treatment.)

But I'm not allowed to say any of that, OK? Some things simply cannot be discussed. Not even in this blog. That's why I did the right thing and crossed out every word.

I should censor myself more often. It feels good.

I suspect the world will get crazier and we'll see more bad logic and stuff I'm not allowed to discuss between now and the election.

Maybe someone can threaten me into treatment for my merciless self-censorship, which is obviously grounded in self hating hillaryphobia.

(Actually, I blame my internalized blogophobia.)

Yes, I'm afraid it's now an annual tradition. I just turned on the Oscars in time to see Al Gore with a sycophantic young admirer (a future cabinet member who starred in "Titanic"), and Gore then made what sounded like a tantalizing major announcement, is if he was going to say he was gay or run for president or something, but then he ran off stage with the sycophant so I turned it off and reminded myself that the thing to do in cases like this is to watch the Grateful Dead like I did last year.

Only this year, I thought I'd share a Grateful Dead video.

It's "Easy Wind," sung by Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, 1970.

Hey, it beats watching Gore play casting director with future cabinet members.

Things were cooler in those days.

This Global Warming stuff is giving my inner child nightmares.

UPDATE (11:11): Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth."

Don't expect me to PhotoShop anything, OK? I'm too damned tired for inconvenient trophy placement.

UPDATE (02/26/07): Via Glenn Reynolds, Pajamas Media describes Gore's rather peculiar "announcement":

The Goracle is anointed by Leo DiCaprio... and then pretends to, kind of, almost, announce he's running. (Why would he? Nobody says such nice things about you when you actually are a candidate. It's worse if you're president.)

UPDATE (02/28/07): After reading about Hollywood's attempt to censor the Oscars on YouTube, I decided after much agonizing to link the video of Al Gore's "announcement":

(I guess Al owns enough stock in Google that he won't let himself be censored.)

But Pigpen is still cooler!

While it wasn't my intention, it must look like baby day at Classical Values, because first there was fetal alcohol syndrome.... And then, before that had had time to clear my system, I stumbled onto a favorite song from Jan and Dean.

Second only to the Beach Boys as a surfer group (and probably best known for "Dead Man's Curve"), in the old days they did doowop, and my favorite Jan and Dean song -- "Baby Talk." It reached the Top Ten in 1959*, but I had no idea that a video had been made of it.

I've watched it twice now, and I think it's just unbelievably fantastic.

Seriously. It's from another world. I cannot imagine anyone making a video like this today.

While the lryics might be considered a bit much for modern standards, in those days, there was no Culture War.

Thank God.

* In the interest of complete accuracy, I should probably point out that in 1959, to quote the lyrics, "I was only five years old..."

Well I was!

I stumbled onto a fascinating paper about "fetal alcohol syndrome" ("FAS") which raises some good questions about whether what we call "social science" deserves to be called "science" at all.

The essential criterion for any social problem is its universalization (Wagner, 1997Go). As long as a problem is orphaned, especially if it is identified as a problem only within a minority race or social class, it has limited impact on society as a whole. Liberal-minded social scientists are especially wary of associating a stigmatized behaviour with race or class, because such associations perpetuate discrimination (Wagner, 1997Go). By disassociating race or class from a stigmatized behaviour, the problem is more likely to gain public attention, because everyone now feels a vested interest in its elimination. The language of democratization therefore characterizes most social problems, e.g. child abuse, alcoholism, cocaine addiction, teenage pregnancy or domestic violence. Despite the fact that these are not 'equal opportunity' disorders (Abel, 1995Go; Wagner, 1997Go), they are typically scaled up into the middle and affluent classes to draw greater attention to the problem at hand and to overcome any charges of racism, classism, elitism, or any other accusation of discrimination (Wagner, 1997Go).

FAS has not been immune to democratization. When the disorder was first described in 1973, Jones and Smith and their co-workers took pains to emphasize its universalism by reporting that the eight unrelated children they had observed belonged to 'three different ethnic groups ...' (Jones and Smith, 1973Go). However, FAS has never been an 'equal opportunity birth defect' (Abel, 1995Go); its inseparable handmaidens are poverty and smoking (Bingol et al., 1987Go; Abel, 1995Go). What Jones and Smith and their colleagues did not emphasize was that the eight children, and virtually all the other children they and others subsequently examined, were seen in hospitals serving a predominantly lower socio-economic status population. Groups whose members suffer disproportionate poverty, such as Native Americans and African Americans, are especially prone to this disorder. In the Yukon and Northwestern areas of Canada, the rate for FAS and partial FAS has been estimated at 46/1000 for Native children compared to 0.4/1000 for non-Native children, a 1000-fold difference (Asante and Nelms-Matzke, 1985Go). In the USA, the rate of FAS among low income populations is 2.29/1000 compared to 0.26/1000, for middle- and high-income populations (Abel, 1995Go). Despite the empirical evidence, grass roots organizations, such as the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (NOFAS) continue to espouse the view that FAS is a threat to all pregnancies. When NOFAS was founded, for instance, its executive director stated: 'I think a lot of middle-class and upper-class women don't know that occasional use of alcohol during pregnancy is dangerous' (Information Access Company, 1991Go).

While it is true that drinking occurs across all social categories in the USA, FAS is undeniably concentrated among disadvantaged groups. The very large socio-economic differences in FAS rates (Able, 1995) are not due to differences in the number of alcoholic women among the poor compared to the middle classes. In fact, drinking is much more common among the middle and upper classes than among the poor (Abma and Mott, 1990Go; Caetano, 1994Go; Abel, 1998aGo). Instead, the reason FAS occurs predominantly among poverty stricken women is that they experience, or are characterized by, many more 'permissive' factors, such as smoking and poor diet, that exacerbate the effects of alcohol (Abel and Hannigan, 1995Go). Since FAS cannot be divorced from poverty, insisting that FAS 'crosses all lines' perpetuates the problem by situating it solely within an alcohol context instead of the wider context of poverty.

Democratization disguises the extent to which moral panic about FAS may in fact spring from much deeper social unease about changing gender roles and about class and particularly race differences (Armstrong, 1998aGo). Many legal commentators in the USA have noted that the recent rash of prosecutions of pregnant women for substance use and purported fetal harm are concentrated among poor and most often minority women (Roberts, 1991Go; Gomez, 1997Go). The moral panic over FAS likewise may reflect social divisions typically invisible in American society, particularly rifts over what constitutes a 'good mother'.

Because I've known many high-IQ individuals whose mothers drank like fish, I've always been suspicious of the claim that drinking during pregnancy decreases a child's potential IQ. Not that I'm advocating drinking during pregnancy, or even drinking. But sexing up statistics and creating false scares simply in order to call attention to a problem is not only dishonest, it can backfire. Fetal alcohol syndrome isn't even the point, really. The more this sort of thing goes on, the less people are likely to believe what they are told, and the less credibility "science" has.

Hmmm....

Might that be good?

Yesterday, I inadvertently touched on one of my own raw nerves when I said this about blogging:

....no one pays me to do this, right? And if they did pay me to do it, I would quit, right? My oh-so-sacrosanct artistic integrity would be compromised if I took money, unless there were truly no strings attached. But money is a string, and so are readers, which means that whether I'm paid or not, what I say is influenced by the public nature of this blog, and the identifiable nature of my persona, which is not anonymous. Thus there's no escaping the fact of inherently compromised integrity.

There are millions and millions of people doing exactly what I am doing, which is self publishing for little or no money, in a highly competitive environment. Normally, when we think of "bias," we think in terms of politics, especially particular opinions and positions on issues. With bloggers, this is usually transparent. What you see is what you get. I'm biased in favor of my opinions, and while I like to explain them, there's no denying that I have them. The type of bias that rises to the blog scandal level is bias which is undisclosed, hidden, or denied -- and which, if known, would materially affect the blogger's credibility. A classic example would be a blogger secretly taking money from Wal-Mart who spends most of his time defending Wal-Mart, or a blogger in the employ of a candidate who defends that candidate or attacks his opponent.

But what about all the bloggers, and all the purveyors of online opinion who just want to be noticed? Before we even get to their positions on issues, isn't the fact that they're desperate to be noticed relevant?

The reason I say this is because of a phenomenon I've run into more times than I could hope to estimate. Typically, I'll read someone's online column, and before I realize what is happening, I'll find myself getting worked into a lather over things like whether he's gotten the facts right and whether I agree or disagree with his thoughts and opinions. But then I'll get down to the bottom of the column and I'll see what amounts to a resumé -- usually a boastful description about positions and accomplishments followed by information on how to arrange radio and television interviews.

Regardless of whether his position might be biased, doesn't that indicate another type of bias? The opinion purveyor is, simply, on the hustle! He is doing more than offering opinions, even more than trying to influence public policy; he wants to be a celebrity.

In a word, an entertainer.

I discussed this in several posts about Ann Coulter, because I think she's done it so well that she can be considered a master of Opinion Entertainment.

But I'm wondering -- just wondering -- does the desire to be an entertainer affect objectivity? It's a different question than ordinary bias. Sure, someone like Ann Coulter is biased, but the more I see scholars -- even stodgy think-tankers previously regarded as thoughtful people -- promoting downright nutty ideas, the more I wonder, are they just plain getting hungrier? And is it getting harder and harder to be heard through the din?

I'm sure I'm as guilty as anyone, but I think this is becoming so endemic that if you're in the online opinion business it's almost de rigueur. So much so, that last year when I stumbled upon the fictitious nature of "George Harleigh," the guy who quoted "Harleigh" (at least, one of his sockpuppets) went on the offensive against me -- and he seemed to think I was hiding something:

I decided to do a little background checking of my own on Eric Scheie, the blogger who claims he "outed" this situation. I find it odd that someone who demands so much disclosue from others doesn't include a link to any information about himself on his own blog. Make me wonder what he has to hide.

The fact is, so many people do that nowadays that not doing it can be seen as abnormal.

Again, is the purpose of all of this entertainment?

Can entertainment-based opinion be called truly objective? Or is that the right word? Can Ann Coulter be described as more "objective" than, say, Andy Warhol?

If the desire to entertain people is in fact a form of bias that can affect objectivity (albeit in a different manner than ordinary bias) then why is it so often overlooked?

Because everybody else is doing it, so we're on the same playing field?

Does objectivity suffer the more the field grows? Or am I in too much of a conflict of interest to even care simply because I do this?

I need not worry for long, though. Because this post -- like all posts -- will simply be placed in line and it's entertainment value will diminish quite rapidly.

Somehow I find that comforting. There's something incredibly cool about being able to share a dirty little secret with the entire world. What's incredibly comforting is knowing that even if it matters now, it doesn't really matter for very long. Writing a post like this is, in a certain way, like taking advantage of a hidden loophole. It's almost as if I never told a soul.

(That may represent a hidden and undisclosed form of entertainment, but I won't go there.)

Since I have a post up on cognitive ability and how it seems fixed, I thought it would be a good idea to post this bit of advice.

There is now considerable evidence that breast-fed children have higher intelligence. For a long time it was impossible to be certain this was not merely because the more intelligent mothers (whose children received good genetic and environmental backgrounds) were those who could breast feed, or chose to do so. However, research by Lucas et al. (1992) with premature babies fed through a tube and the type of milk randomly selected has shown that those given human milk do indeed have a higher intelligence when tested as children. The effect was an amazing 10 IQ points.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

There is an absolutely fascinating religious debate going on in this comment thread, prompted by Titanic Director James Cameron's claim that the body of Jesus Christ has been found and identified:

It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.

Israel's prominent archeologist Professor Amos Kloner didn't associate the crypt with the New Testament Jesus. His father, after all, was a humble carpenter who couldn't afford a luxury crypt for his family. And all were common Jewish names.

There was also this little inconvenience that a few miles away, in the old city of Jerusalem, Christians for centuries had been worshipping the empty tomb of Christ at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Christ's resurrection, after all, is the main foundation of the faith, proof that a boy born to a carpenter's wife in a manger is the Son of God.

But film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family.

I'm about as far from being a fundamentalist as it is possible to get without being an atheist. But I think Cameron's claim is grandstanding nonsense.

For starters, DNA tests?

On what DNA? Jesus? Mary? Joseph? Mary Magdalene? Did any of them leave a sample somewhere unbeknownst to anyone until now? There has to be some known relative of the people found in that burial group for comparison purposes; otherwise all that can be shown IF any DNA material remains in the bones is that maybe the people in the burial group were all related to each other. (Hardly surprising in a family tomb.) The names were all common names, and according to the Bible the family was poor. Stone ossuaries characterized the moneyed classes.

I suppose Cameron might be claiming that his experts exhumed some members of the Merovingian dynasty (rumored to have been descended from Jesus) and found a 99% match, but I doubt it. Besides, the Merovingian DNA that was already tested "showed no traces of Semitic DNA at all, making it doubtful they descended from someone from the Middle East."

Interestingly, the film is being called blasphemous, although I'm not sure that any serious examination (even a flawed one) of historical facts would be blasphemous in and of itself. Perhaps the resultant claim that Jesus was never the son of God and was never crucified would be -- but only in the Christian religious sense of Biblical accounts of the resurrection, and possibly the crucifixion.

To a Muslim, discussing this find would not be blasphemy. But asserting that the crucifixion and the resurrection happened is blasphemy, because this denies the Koran, which clearly and emphatically states that Jesus, while a prophet, was neither crucified nor resurrected. Muslims believe he simply died like the other prophets. Many Westerners fail to understand that the reason Christian crosses are forbidden in countries with Islamic law is that they are seen as blasphemous -- i.e. they deny the Koran.

Fortunately, we don't have to worry about blasphemy laws, and James Cameron is as free to make stuff up (or deny the central tenets of Christianity) as anyone else.

While I can't prove it, I have a feeling that he'd be less likely to make a similar film claiming to debunk the central tenets of Islam, but that's because he'd be afraid -- legitimately afraid -- of fatwas and of getting killed.

Sure, some Christians will denounce Cameron as a blasphemer. But the days of Torquemada are long gone.

I think it speaks rather well of Christianity as a whole that it's as "blasphemy tolerant" as it is.

MORE: I can't think of a better example of intolerance for blasphemy than what is being done to Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman, who received a four year sentence for "contempt for religion" and "insulting the president". As Roger L. Simon (via Glenn Reynolds) reminds us,

He could easily be killed in jail by a religious fanatic, according to the Sandmonkey, if he doesn't go crazy in solitary first.

It's frustrating to read stories like this. You want to do something, but you don't know how.

I am reminded of another Egyptian blogger, Alaa Abd El-Fatah. I wrote a blog post and a couple of letters, and I didn't think I was doing much.

In the overall context, I wasn't. But eventually (last June) Alaa was freed in response to public pressure, so I don't think it is unreasonable to say that every little bit helps.

I think those of us who are free to commit "blasphemy" from our armchairs and laptops might have an occasional moral duty to those who are imprisoned for doing exactly the same thing.

What really galls me is that Egypt is supposed to be moderate. What's happening is a disgrace. Shame on Egypt!

And free Kareem!

Read more about it here. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Anyone who watches James Cameron's silly film and imagines that he's being cool ought to stop and think about the freedom we take for granted.

(Hell, you don't even have to be an armchair blasphemer to appreciate such freedom.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: While this post was about armchair blasphemy and not "insulting the president," aren't there Americans who also engage in the latter pastime? I certainly hope they're getting behind this cause 100%.

Tag: abdel kareem soliman

UPDATE (02/25/07): According to at least two knowledgeable scholars, Kareem's imprisonment is illegal even by Egypt's standards:

We find it shocking that a university [Al-Azhar] would turn a student over to the authorities to be prosecuted for voicing his views. The future of learning and science is at risk when dissenting views are punished rather than debated. Jointly, we have contacted Egyptian authorities to ask that they correct a clear mistake and release Soliman.

Egypt is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media." The exceptions allowed are narrowly drawn and require proof of "necessity" before restrictions can be imposed. The posting of opinions on a student's personal blog hardly qualifies as a threat to national security, to the reputation of the president or to public order.

Soliman is not a threat to Egypt, but this prosecution is.

Whether or not we agree with the opinions that Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman expressed is not the issue. What matters is a principle: People should be free to express their opinions without fear of being imprisoned or killed. Blogging should not be a crime.

UPDATE (02/27/07): Regarding the buried remains, it now seems that there is no cellular DNA:

....the panel was asked if there was enough DNA remaining in the ossuary to clone Jesus. "Some experiments shouldn't be done," one of the film team responded.

Then Tabor said conclusively that there was "no intact cellular DNA" and so no possibility of cloning.

OK, now that my feelings are out of the way (at least under control for the time being), I can get back to the business of the post at hand. Or would that be the business at hand of the post?

I had been meaning to write about feral children, because earlier this week Dr. Helen linked one of Kim du Toit's masterpieces on the subject. The whole thing is a must-read (and I also can't wait to see the book) but I'll stick with this excerpt:

When we talk to people about homeschooling our kids, and are asked what we did about "socialization", our answer is dismissive. Here's the gist of it.

1. We were never interested in having our kids learning to socialize from a group of peers who were as clueless about the process as they themselves were. High school kids, unsupervised, are the most feral little beasts on the planet, and we saw no reason why we should subject our kids to that ordeal. The most common response to that statement was usually, "It makes them tougher" or "They learn how to cope with a hostile environment, like they may encounter in the adult world".

Specious nonsense. In the outside world, when you are immersed in a "hostile environment" (work, university, whatever), you have the means to leave it. That's not the case in high school, where you are coerced into staying together with no options to separate yourself from your tormentors.

Another response is that the kids "miss out on so much". Yeah, Daughter really misses that experience of perpetual teasing about her weight, and the physical bullying that went along with it, coupled with sadistic gym teachers who forced her to run a mile during PE class, in the hot sun.

And therein lies the paradox. A mentality quite similar to that which calls children innocent also tends to worship the "innocence" of animals. This ties in quite nicely with Rousseau's condescending "Noble Savage" pap. Nature is said to be "innocent," and civilization is said to be "guilty." That this is highly judgmental, even religious, thinking does not seem to occur to its proponents. Indeed, they often deride religion, which makes absolutely no sense because they are substituting their own bad logic for the "superstition" they claim to abhor.

Yet, as I condemn this mentality, I am willing to concede that the inability to distinguish right from wrong can be called a form of innocence. The children who attacked me were, in the legal sense, incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, although they did run away when an adult finally appeared wielding a broom -- in much the same way a vicious dog might. Why a vicious dog is seen as more worthy of euthanasia than a vicious child is another Rousseauvian paradox, I guess.

I suppose it's worth asking whether this sort of innocence matters, and why it should. If a feral dog attacks me, even though I love dogs, I might have to shoot it. Not so fast in the case of attacking feral children.

But what are feral children?

Do they look like this?

Like this?

Or maybe like this?

Via Jonah Goldberg, who "thought the appropriate response would be to slap the kid."

What is the appropriate response? (The thing is, by today's standards, an angry, fulminating kid like that would not be considered particularly feral, but worthy of receiving an "A" -- if not admission to a top Ivy League school.)

While a stern lecture, a slap in the face, or a better education might be all that's needed for the angry kid in the video, what is the appropriate response in dealing with a dangerously innocent feral kid?

I don't know, but when local I saw a Philadelphia news item linked at Drudge, and realized that the same item touched on Dr. Helen's and Kim du Toit's posts, I realized that the issue was before me, whether I felt like blogging or not.

There's nothing new about feral children in the Philadelphia public school system (daytime holding facilities, really) and I've posted about them before, but here's today's item:

Two Germantown High School students nearly killed a beloved math teacher during a trivial argument yesterday morning over an iPod, police said.

Frank Burd, 60, suffered three spinal fractures in the attack, a police source said, and was taken to Albert Einstein Medical Center, where he underwent surgery last night. A hospital spokeswoman said that following surgery, a stabilizing device called a "halo" was placed on his shoulders to support his neck. She said Burd was in critical but stable condition condition in intensive care.

The students - one in 11th grade, the other in 9th - last night were charged with aggravated assault, simple assault and reckless endangerment of another person, police said. They sat inside a holding cell last night in the 35th District, headquartered at Broad and Champlost streets, cops said.

The reaction of others is that the feral children are innocent, and should be loved and nurtured, that nothing be done which might harm their "self-esteem," and that maybe it's the iPod that's at fault.

I love cheetahs, but find it hard to love feral innocence in children.

It's even tougher to love feral children who remain children -- and feral -- into adulthood.

I hate it when I have nothing to write about. What's even worse is when the things I don't have to write about (I mean "have" in the sense of possession not obligation) are staring me in the face. That's because "not having anything to write about" does not mean not having anything to write about; it's a euphemism for not having anything worth writing about, which, if I look closely, translates into "not wanting to write about anything."

The thing is, no one pays me to do this, right? And if they did pay me to do it, I would quit, right? My oh-so-sacrosanct artistic integrity would be compromised if I took money, unless there were truly no strings attached. But money is a string, and so are readers, which means that whether I'm paid or not, what I say is influenced by the public nature of this blog, and the identifiable nature of my persona, which is not anonymous. Thus there's no escaping the fact of inherently compromised integrity. This is not a personal diary that no one can see. There are plenty of things I feel wholly unable to write about. Major things. Things which preoccupy me which I cannot discuss with anyone. And even opinions on certain subjects I dare not share lest people, um, misunderstand. (But I'd better be careful using the word "misunderstand" lest it too become a euphemism for disagreement or simple dislike.)

The above is pretty much the way I feel about blogging most of the time, except I normally spare my feelings. Who the hell wants to know how a blogger feels, for God's sake? That's why I try (not always successfully) to spare readers the personal details and stick to logic, and when I offer my opinions, I try to distinguish them from facts. The problem with over-reliance on feelings is that this leads to an obliteration of the distinction between opinions and facts. That's because a feeling is, by its nature, neither an opinion nor a fact. It's a fact that you have the feeling, if you are sure that you have it. But how can you ever be sure how you feel? Isn't the assertion of a feeling also an opinion? If I "feel" bad about something, what does that mean? It might mean a million things, and it might reveal a lot about me to a psychiatrist or something, but does it really shed light on news, current events, or ideas? How I feel about Bush or Cheney or Obama or Hillary is only of passing interest. What matters (at least what I hope would matter for the purposes of blogging) is what I think, and whether it makes sense logically. I'm not saying feelings should not be disclosed when they are relevant, and I've spent a lot of time lately on the feeling of hate. But it just isn't controlling on anything. I've spent countless hours decrying gun control, the communitarian philosophy of treating adults as children, etc., but of what value would it be for me to just scream "GUN CONTROL HURTS MY FEELINGS"? While it is always relevant to disclose these feelings (because I think it is fair to acknowledge one's biases), it is far better to explain that gun control would threaten my lifestyle, by leaving me defenseless or (worse) by putting me in prison, and that this is why people who want me to leave me defenseless and lock me up make me feel bad.

What happened?

I thought I was going to write a blog post, and I got all distracted with the touchy-feely stuff. Where was I?

I don't think I was anywhere. In fact, I don't even think I ever touched on what was supposed to be the subject this blog post!

See how awful feelings are? Why, they get in the way of reality!

According to the American founders all men are created equal.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,...

What I'm going to look at here is inequality. Let us start with sports.It seems some people run faster than others. I guess we have races to find out who is fastest of the fast.

Running offers the best prima facie case for the potential impact of body type differences. Athletes of West African descent dominate sports requiring speed and jumping, such as basketball and football. They hold the fastest two hundred 100-meter times, all under 10 seconds, and 494 of the top 500 times. In last weekend's NFL draft, of the 69 players who ran the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds or less, only one is white.

Humans are different, the consequence of thousands of years of evolution in varying terrains. This is not an issue of black and white. East African blacks, from Kenya and Ethiopia, for example, have traveled a different evolutionary path and are genetically distinct in many aspects of their body type and physiology from West Africans. The best East African time in the 100 meters, 10.28 seconds, ranks near 5,000 on the all time list.

While relatively poor sprinters, East Africans win more than 50 percent of top endurance races. Almost all trace their ancestry to the 6,000-8,000 foot highlands that snake along the western edge of the Great Rift Valley. This region of roughly 1.5 million wins 40 percent of international distance events. The Nandi district in Kenya, 500,000 people - one-twelve-thousandth of Earth's population - sweeps an unfathomable 20 percent, marking it as the greatest concentration of raw athletic talent in the history of sports. They win in large measure because elite runners have a near perfect biomechanical package for endurance: lean, ectomorphic physiques and huge natural lung capacity.

"Kenyans are born with a high number of slow twitch fibers," states Bengt Saltin, director of the Institute of Sports Science in Copenhagen. "They have 70 to 75 percent of their muscle fibers being slow. Very many in sports physiology would like to believe that it is training, the environment, what you eat that plays the most important role. But based on the data it is 'in your genes' whether or not you are talented or whether you will become talented."

Genetically linked, highly heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, the distribution of muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency, lung capacity and the ability to use energy more efficiently are not evenly distributed among populations and cannot be explained. For example, whites of Eurasian ancestry, who have, on average, more natural upper-body strength, predictably dominate weightlifting, field events such as the shot-put and hammer (whites hold 47 of the top 50 throws), and the offensive line in football. Where flexibility is key, East Asians shine, such as in diving and some skating and gymnastic events (hence the term "Chinese splits").

So what is all this race stuff any way? It is not like the different races can't interbreed. Isn't race just a social construct? Well no.

Several analyses have confirmed the genetic reality of group identities going under the label of race or ethnicity. In the most recent, published this year, all but five of the 3,636 subjects fell into the cluster of genetic markers corresponding to their self-identified ethnic group. When a statistical procedure, blind to physical characteristics and working exclusively with genetic information, classifies 99.9 percent of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves, it is hard to argue that race is imaginary.

Let us look into a real world example, Ashkenazi Jews, to see how this works.

Ashkenazi levels of real world accomplishment are impressive and thus support the IQ studies. Jewish Americans make up no more than three percent of the U.S. adult population. But in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out

"During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series." [pp 26-27]

Interestingly, the Ashkenazi cognitive advantage seems to be mostly in verbal and numeric, rather than visual, skills. For example, in Hollywood, fewer top cinematographers are Jewish compared to screenwriters or agents.

So are Ashkenazis a race? Maybe. What they are for sure is an identifiable sub group based on DNA (their DNA is most like Arabic DNA, not too surprisingly) and genetic diseases that cluster in the Ashkenazis like Tay Sachs.

What about variation on the low end? Here comes the really hard part.

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve--the role of intelligence in reshaping America's class structure--a chance to surface.

The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard's faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected.

It was depressingly familiar. In the autumn of 1994, I had watched with dismay as The Bell Curve's scientifically unremarkable statements about black IQ were successfully labeled as racist pseudoscience. At the opening of 2005, I watched as some scientifically unremarkable statements about male-female differences were successfully labeled as sexist pseudoscience.

The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media's fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public's misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.

Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders' assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.

One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.

There is no technical dispute on some of the core issues. In the aftermath of The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association established a task force on intelligence whose report was published in early 1996. The task force reached the same conclusions as The Bell Curve on the size and meaningfulness of the black-white difference. Historically, it has been about one standard deviation in magnitude among subjects who have reached adolescence; cultural bias in IQ tests does not explain the difference; and the tests are about equally predictive of educational, social, and economic outcomes for blacks and whites. However controversial such assertions may still be in the eyes of the mainstream media, they are not controversial within the scientific community.

The most important change in the state of knowledge since the mid-1990's lies in our increased understanding of what has happened to the size of the black-white difference over time. Both the task force and The Bell Curve concluded that some narrowing had occurred since the early 1970's. With the advantage of an additional decade of data, we are now able to be more precise:

(1) The black-white difference in scores on educational achievement tests has narrowed significantly.

(2) The black-white convergence in scores on the most highly "g-loaded" tests--the tests that are the best measures of cognitive ability--has been smaller, and may be unchanged, since the first tests were administered 90 years ago.

Let us start with some simple statistical assumptions that are aproximately correct and see if we can figure out what the implications are. First IQ. Ashkenazi Jew IQ is 115. White IQ is 100. American black IQ is 85. These are averages. They tell you NOTHING about individuals. Let us also assume a standard deviation (a measure of variation) is 15 for all groups. I'm going to use this handy bell curve calculator to get my results.

What percentage of white Americans are going to be top college material with an IQ above 125? About 5%. How many Ashkenazi Jews will be found in that range? About 25%. How many American blacks (African blacks are significantly different)? About .4%. Which means if we follow merit alone, there ought to be about 10 times as many whites per capita as blacks capable of work in our top institutions. This is a depressing fact of life, just as the Ashkenazi Jews are a bright spot.

It gets worse at the very high end. For scores above 160, the brightest of the bright, among the Ashkenazi Jews the proportion will be about one in a thousand. For whites the number is zero (actually that really means less than one in 10,000 because the calculator does not do really small fractions) and for blacks the number will be a much smaller percentage than whites. Given that Ashkenazi Jews are at least 100 times as likely to be in that range relative to whites and Ashkenazi Jews represent about .1% of the world's population, the results we see above are not unexpected.

We see all this born out in the top science and math prizes.

So the question as Lenin put it is: "What is to be done?" First off treat people as individuals not statistics. Every one has their own group of talents that should be develped as fully as possible.

Second off we are turning into a society whose rewards are based on cognitive ability. Something the Bell Curve guys discuss at length. What is their answer, besides giving every one a fair shot to develop their talents? They suggest socialism light. The top perfomers should be able to reap top rewards for top performance. Not every one gets first prize in the race. However, because of the work of these top performers, labor doesn't have the value it once did. "John Henry, the Steel Driving Man" was a harbinger of that. It is hard to compete, labor wise, with a motor controlled by a microprocessor. So the top performers are going to have to help those on the bottom, if for no other reason than to keep the peace. Socialism lite.

Milton Friedman and a number of others (including The Bell Curve authors) think that the negative income tax (instituted by Nixon) is the way to go because the bureaucracy required is minimal.

I think we also have to accept that there is a limit to what our public schools can accomplish. Each added increment of resources is going to produce a diminishing return.

There are lots more policy implications in all this. More than I can deal with here. The main point for me is that even in a race blind society not all races will do equally well at all tasks.

A couple of books that might be of interest:

Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It

The Bell Curve

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Jeff Soyer often does a better job with Philadelphia news than I do, and earlier today he criticized a Philadelphia Daily News editorial calling for new gun control measures.

While it might be a bit foolish of me to expect fairness in a piece titled "THE GUN-VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC" what disturbs me the most was the attempt to introduce a racial argument where it does not belong:

NOW IS THE time to take steps to fix the laws that are allowing far too many guns to end up on our streets.

[...]

In 2004, Pennsylvania led the nation in the homicide rate among black victims: 29.5 per 100,000. Handguns were used in 81 percent of the killings.

My concern is heightened by the lamentable fact that the Daily News saw fit to deliberately inject race into its call for gun control. Why? Can statistical correlations based on race ever be considered an excuse to take away a basic human right? While I didn't check the Daily News facts, one of Jeff's commenters pointed out that it seems to find confirmation in a Wikipedia entry. Jeff then pointed out his prior post on the subject, in which (after noting the national black homicide rate of 18.71 per 100,000 as opposed to a national overall homicide rate of 4.86 per 100,000) he asked a very logical question:

If the cause was the availability of guns, wouldn't the statistics be equal?

But we all know that correlation is not causation. Race does not cause crime any more than guns cause crime (or for that matter, penises cause rape).

I think the Daily News behaved irresponsibly by injecting race where it does not belong. The Second Amendment is truly color blind, but it is apparently the position of some people that black people need gun control more than white people. Saying gun control should be tougher in black communities (which is what the Daily News says) is like saying that black people are less entitled to their constitutional rights than white people.

I think it's racism.

Of course, the people on the other side say it's racism to oppose gun control. It's as if the two sides are not arguing over the same thing. What I see as a cherished form of freedom (the Second Amendment), others see as racism.

If there's no agreement on terms, what's to debate?

No really:

(CBS 5) SANTA ROSA The school district's battle against a phrase many teenagers use without giving much thought -- "that's so gay" -- has sparked a legal fight.

Uttered on high school and junior high campuses is slang not many may understand or appreciate.

To say, "that's so gay," according to high school sophomore Jared Young, is to say, "That's dumb. That's lame. That's just stupid."

It has nothing to do with being gay, he said.

The public schools think the slang use of "gay" is highly inappropriate, and the school district is being sued in court for its stance.

In my darker moments, I'd almost swear the word police are behaving in a niggardly manner.

But that wouldn't be very white of me.

Sigh. This is not new. Hell, I can even remember when Norton Utilities was gay.

I think that whether it's logical or not, if you don't like something, you should have the right call it whatever you don't like. Take, for example (via Glenn Reynolds), these scowling models, for example. No please take them:

Judging from their cold glares on the runway, it seems something has gone terribly wrong in the lives of fashion models. It doesn't matter where they are - the fashion shows earlier this month in New York, last week's in London, this week's in Milan. No place is up to their standards. They look perpetually peeved, as if there's nothing so hellish as wearing new clothes in exchange for thousands of dollars. What do they want-more money? Better clothes? More admiring glances?

Or as they just disgusted at the audience? Are they pained to be surrounded by shorter, pudgier, uglier people? When they pose for magazine ads, are they pouting at the thought of the grubby-fingered masses pawing their photo? Are we not worthy to gaze upon their cheekbones?

Social psychologists at New Mexico State University have studied glaring models, as well as glaring football players, and come up with a unified theory to explain the lack of smiles.

Well, isn't it?

If you don't think so, have a nice day.

In court.

UPDATE (02/25/07): Thanks to Clayton Cramer for link. In another post, Cramer explores the issue of possible selective (religious based) bias in the decision to single out this girl.

Regular readers might remember my recent post about Matt Barber's suggestions for Bush's State of the Union speech. I'm on the guy's mailing list (I don't know why), and I have attempted to address some of his concerns in this blog.

His latest couple of mailings concern a death threat incident at Pam Spaulding's House Blend. The story has been considered newsworthy enough to have been written up at WorldNetDaily, and the Dakota Voice.

Because there's nothing about the threat at the cited Pam's House Blend post to indicate what happened, I thought I should attempt to address this in chronological order.

Here's how the Concerned Women for America first reported the threat:

In what was, at the very least, an apparent attempt to intimidate and frighten LaBarbera, who is married with children, "House Blend" published his home address in a January 13, 2007, thread titled, "Saturday this and that." Shortly thereafter, someone identified as "Barry G. Wick" posted the following comments: "It's across from a park in an area with cul de sacs. I'd bet it's a residence ... and across from a park. Snipers take note." (emphasis ours)

As it turned out, she never did publish the home address; a commenter did. In a later column, Matt Barber -- who is CWFA's Policy Director for Cultural Issues -- noted that it was "someone" named "Barry G. Wick":

In what was, at the very least, an apparent attempt to intimidate and frighten Americans for Truth president Peter LaBarbera, who is married with children, someone on House Blend published his home address in a January 13, 2007, thread. Shortly thereafter, someone identified as "Barry G. Wick" suggested that "snipers take note" of LaBarbera's address. Wick also suggested that shooting LaBarbera would amount to an act of self defense and stated that, "[LaBarbera] and others like him ought to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what future awaits them from a cadre of selected defenders willing to give up everything in order to protect the lives of gay and lesbian citizens."

Spaulding and other members of her blog so frequently foment hatred toward Christians that it's no real surprise that one of her posts culminated in this chilling and ostensibly illegal threat to LaBarbera's life.

You shouldn't blame Spaulding for this since one of her commenters, who was later banned, was responsible, but it is worth noting that this isn't the first time liberals have posted addresses of their political enemies online and have encouraged violence towards them.

This isn't really all that different from what happened to Michelle Malkin back in April of last year. The death threats towards Malkin's family back then got so bad that she had to remove one of her kids from school and move.

Again, I'm not blaming Spaulding for this, but I will say this about the whole left side of the blogosphere: when liberals constantly tell their audiences that conservatives are evil Nazis, who want to form a theocracy and may have been behind 9/11, is it a big surprise that you have someone posting a conservative's address and suggesting that, "Snipers take note?"

Any reputable blogger making such accusations against another blogger would have preserved a screen shot as evidence so that readers could distinguish between comments and posts, and draw their own conclusions. Instead, a clear attempt was made to insinuate that Pam Spaulding posted the address, which she simply did not.

As I keep saying, anyone can leave a comment. Anyone means anyone. Names mean nothing, and claims about political leanings (or, in "Wick's" case, sexual leanings) are completely unverifiable. Comments thus provide a golden opportunity for sock puppets or agents provocateur to pretend they're from the other "side" in the hope of discrediting whoever they might want to discredit.

What I find especially fascinating about this is that the alleged commenter, "Barry G. Wick" (routinely taken at his word as being a "homosexual activist"), has issued an apology which has not been independently verified, in which he goes out of his way to blame the Spaulding blog for his threatening comments:

There had been some good-natured joking about a very hurtful song posted on that website...and thinking my words would also be taken as so much hyperbole...well, they were not. As a new member of Ms. Spaulding\'s blog community, I got carried away with the atmosphere. I shall not return there.

We live in America. A land governed by law. We have differences about what the civil law ought to provide it's citizens....but we are in agreement....that violence in any form is not the answer. I, too, have been threatened in my activist work of past years. I knew there was no serious substance to them and did not report them. You have used your vast power to swat a fly...and as that fly I feel swatted. I apologize to your wife and family for any fears they may have had. There was never any danger and I stand apologetic and humbled by my misadventurous writing style that has made a wrong turn. Please accept this as a sincere apology on all levels and that I hope this letter will put an end to who is responsible.

I heard your thoughts that perhaps the person writing the words was not a real person. Sadly, I am real...the words were wrong and were not taken in a hyperbolic, humorous context. Such "manifestos" are of a period that no longer exists in American social action. Further, I apologize to CWA for having to use its airtime and resources to tell this story to its audience. Nobody in the "gay" community would ever take what I said seriously. Trust me, any friends I may have made by my writing have now deserted me. I hope CWA will report this letter and its true sincerity to the same audience. I have truly supported non-violence in the gay community and continue to do so to this day.

I found another comment by the alleged-alleged "perp" which couldn't possibly sound more contrite, and even refers to the "New Tower of Babel":

Barry G. Wick says:

I can genuinely see that some of my comments on Pam's Blog could have seemed as a threat...and I didn't really want that. I never meant to threaten Mr. LaBarbera. I've sent him an apology...a deep honest apology. And he's made some hay from my hyperbolic language. Fine. One has to admit that gay folk have used the hyperbolic and threatening language of the "homo-haters" to make their points. We all live in the day and age of the New Tower of Babel....we're all yelling at each other....we're all talking at each other...demanding to be heard...demanding to have our side of the argument accepted. We're not trying to find common ground, common things to discuss...we're all trying to find the things we disagree on immediately. I don't have the answer, sorry, but if I get the chance to apologize to Mr. LaBarbera with my own voice, I shall. If he understood some of my language to be a threat...I want to put his mind, the minds of his family and friends at ease. I know we're going to disagree on a whole range of issues. But I will listen. And I hope we'll find something to talk about besides our differences.
And if he should choose to blast me for the perceived threat...I'll listen and acknowledge that.

I'm certain there are a number of people who think I'm a wacko. Fair. There are sometimes I wonder about myself. I live a bit of an isolated life except for my internet connection. If all I had to judge the world of humans by was the internet, and that's about what's happening in my life, after a while one would have to think the whole world mad. So many voices, so much confusion. Yes, some people don't want to listen. There are times I haven't listened. The older I get...the more I want to listen because there may be a time I won't be able to listen any longer. I would love to bring the voices back to me of my friends of dieds of AIDS complications.

I'd love to have my good friends, gay and straight, those who've gone...I'd love to listen again. It's not possible.

So maybe I'll listen to Mr. LaBarbera...and I'll read more of his websites...and try to hear what he's saying. I know we'll disagree. But just perhaps we can find some things to talk about. The militant gay part of me says:
"you're nuts Wick. " The 55 year old bearded man in mirror says: "listen and try to understand."

For those of you who are angry at my words and for "taking-on" Mr. LaBarbera or for even apologizing to Mr. LaBarbera...I apologize to you as well.
I have some kind of path to follow here. I don't know where it's leading me. Give an old queer this rocky path to stumble on, wish me well...and let's hope I'll find some answers.

February 10, 2007 3:29 AM

Whatever happened to "trust but verify"?

I realize that in the normal course of blogging there's no way to verify anyone's identity, but once there's been a death threat, and once that crime has been reported to the FBI, doesn't there come a point where we ought to be able to verify the facts?

Why couldn't the Dakota Voice get hold of Mr. Wick or Mr. LaBarbera? Has the FBI been contacted about the results of their investigation? Is there any such person? Or has the "homosexual activist movement" found it's own "George Harleigh"?

All things considered, I have to say that this time I agree with Matt Barber. At least on this:

LaBarbera indicated that he has been in touch with both the FBI and the North Carolina Attorney General's Office. He's anticipating a full criminal investigation. "I'm a big boy. It's not so much that I'm worried about myself," said LaBarbera, "but the effect this could have on my wife and children ... that has me extremely upset."

Concerned Women for America is deeply disturbed by this apparent threat to Peter LaBarbera's life. Matt Barber, CWA's Policy Director for Cultural Issues said, "This is nothing short of cyber-terrorism. There should be a thorough criminal investigation, and if it's determined that a crime has occurred, the perpetrators should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."

The bottom line here is that while I'm not in the habit of defending leftie or gay activist blogs, unless Pam Spaulding wrote the post, she is not to blame for her commenters -- any more than I am here. But beyond that, the idea that Pam's "homosexual activist" commenter would first issue death threats, then later blame her "atmosphere" cannot but raise common-sense suspicions.

This person either exists or he does not. He is either a "homosexual activist" or he is not.

(I mean, sock puppets can't play games with the FBI, can they?)

MORE: According to Peter LaBarbera, a police investigator in Rapid City, South Dakota has refused to prosecute "Barry Wick":

Update on the "sniper" story: an investigator with the Rapid City, S.D., police department has contacted Americans For Truth and told us that South Dakota "gay" activist Barry Wick will not be prosecuted for his "Snipers, take note" comment against this writer, posted on lesbian Pam Spaulding's blog, because the threat was "too vague." We have received and accepted a heartfelt apology from Mr. Wick.

It's tough to know what or whom to believe. Determining the facts online is not easy.

MORE: Here's more evidence confirming the genuine nature of Barry G. Wick, in the form of a comment purporting to be ffrom him:

Sad to say...you're the first to get this news...the Rapid City South Dakota Police Department wants to talk to me tomorrow 2/12/07 though I've been told I won't be arrested. As for facts, I decided to resign from Pam's House Blend on my own. She gave me the sense that her rules were violated. I took myself off the blog permanently so as not to add confusion. My apologies have been accepted by Mr. LaBarbera, but that doesn't mean the police agencies or other conservative bloggers involved will leave me alone. I'm hoping for the best. Thanks for the mention. I'd just as soon go back to a quiet life without downing anyone for any reason. At 55 years of age, I'd just as soon live a little quieter.
I thought my comments on Pam's blog would have been taken as outrageous, but the outrage was of a different kind. I'm looking forward to this being Over Over Over.
B. G. Wick

AND MORE: Reading this, I conclude that Barry G. Wick exists, and lives in Rapid City, SD.

My suspicions and doubts about his existence therefore appear to have been quite groundless. As to what his motivations might have been or are now, I have no idea.

There is no excuse for what he said, and I think commenters who cross that line should be held accountable.

R rated - language

Selling drugs in the inner cities is the worst job in America. The pay is low and the death rate is much higher than the death rate in Iraq. Drug prohibition has literally created a war zone in American inner cities.

A University of Chicago economist who lived with a gang for ten years looks at the details from an economic and sociological perspective. The talk lasts about 22 minutes and is given by one of the researchers on the project, economist Steven Levitt.

Eric tells me that the video does not show up on some browsers. If you are having trouble here is a alternate Youtube version.

Some commenters are wondering about drug addiction. Glad you asked:

Addiction Is A Genetic Disease

Fear memories, the amygdala, and the CB1 receptor

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

There isn't much I can add to the beclowning of Professor Paul Campos (about whom I've complained before). I guess it wasn't enough to have called Glenn a "Bush dead-ender" and "jingoistic right-wing ideologue" so it has to be ratcheted up to Glenn Reynolds, Fascist Murderer.

Considering all the beclowning that's been going on (even begloating over beclowning) I don't know how I'm supposed to take this guy seriously. Perhaps I could sue Campos for plagiarism, for I called Glenn Reynolds a fascist -- long before he did. But Campos is a law professor, and he probably has a million and one sneaky loopholes to hide his fascist plagiarism behind. (Yeah, I know I should have said "behind which to hide" but I'm too tired for prepositionally correct behind placement.)

But be aware, Campos, I am not fooled! In my heart I know you take orgiastic delight in copycat fascism!

Anyway, I think the man has been already been taken seriously enough (in particular Eugene Volokh did a fair and thorough job of explaining why Campos is wrong in the legal sense), that there really isn't anything serious I could add to the discussion at this point.

However, because of my tendency to get all fussy about these definitional things, I am a bit concerned about the word "beclown." Campos is said to have beclowned himself, and while I think he has certainly done that, I am not entirely certain that being beclowned is the same as being enclowned.

It occurred to me that maybe there ought to be some kind of official enclownment ceremony, so I came up with this:

Personally, I think he looks kinda cute that way.

No, not him!

(The one with the accessories!)

There's nothing more challenging than agreeing with a central thesis that is mostly right, but which suddenly veers off on an irritating, seemingly minor tangent which ends up contradicting the central thesis. What's worse is when the thesis involves complex unresolved philosophical questions that have plagued the West's greatest thinkers for centuries, but are simplified and squeezed to fit into a column for public consumption.

For me to imagine that a problem like that could be resolved in a blog post would be the height of arrogance.

So why even write about it? Because it stared me in the face when I made the mistake of opening the newspaper, and the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that this oversimplified pablum might not just be meant for public consumption or as entertainment for the little guy in the street. That the author might actually be trying to influence public policy. I like to think that those charged with setting public policy are at least informed. Asking them to be enlightened is a bit much, but the people who founded this country were enlightened, and I don't think it's asking too much that those who stand in their shoes at least be informed.

David Brooks paints a view of America as roughly divided into two camps -- that of Rousseau and that of Hobbes. I've read both, and I think both are flawed. But it doesn't matter what I think; the founders of this country were well aware of the dark side of human nature, and while they took into account the Hobbesian philosophy, they rejected it. Brooks, on the other hand, breathes new life into Hobbesian thinking by setting up what I think is a classically false dichotomy:

....As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau.

Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We're tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups.

This darker, if more realistic, view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision, and what E.O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don't understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting one another's throats are valuable and are altered at great peril.

Today, parents don't seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach, and instruct every element of their lives. Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture - even the artists and rock stars are bourgeois strivers. Today, communes and utopian schemes are out of favor. People are mostly skeptical of social-engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn. Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong, order-imposing state.

But Hobbes? Getting from Rousseau to Hobbes requires a quantum leap, and it also requires discounting centuries of what this country has always stood for: the dignity of the individual, and his right to freedom.

American adults are not children. At least they're not supposed to be. The unfortunate reality is that some are. What galls me more than just about anything is to see a growing consensus between left and right that because some adults are children, that the rest of us (that awful "we") need a big strong government to micromanage our lives.

Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong, order-imposing state.

Read that carefully. There are no qualifiers. Unless I am reading Brooks wrong, the clear implication is that we Americans are all like Iraqis. Iraq showed that Hobbes was right, and therefore we (the clear implication of "human beings") need a "strong, order-imposing state."

If I didn't know Brooks was a good man who cannot mean what he appears to be implying, I'd be inclined to characterize this as an attack on the idea of the American founding.

I'd like to think that it wouldn't be necessary to point out to David Brooks that the United States Constitution was not intended to create a "strong, order-imposing state." Precisely the opposite. Or has Iraq "revealed" that the founders of this country was wrong, and Hobbes was right?

Brooks continues, with the apparent assertion that James Madison and Friedrich Hayek would now agree on the need for a "strong, order-imposing state." Oh, and in conclusion (by the way) conservatives dislike evolution:

This is a big pivot in intellectual history. The thinkers most associated with the Tragic Vision are Isaiah Berlin, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek and Hobbes. Many of them are conservative.

And here's another perversity of human nature. Many conservatives resist the theory of evolution even though it confirms many of conservatism's deepest truths.

Who cares?

Iraq has shown us how evil we are.

Sorry I can't solve all these vexing philosophical questions in a single blog post, folks, but over the years I've been trying to defend Western Civilization a little bit at a time. (In that context, I can even remember agreeing with David Brooks.)

And hell, I'm human, and I can at least partially understand Brooks' frustrations. Over the weekend someone I greatly respect told me that we should have left Saddam Hussein in power. I disagree, but I don't think that makes me a follower of Rousseau.

What brings out my Hobbesian side is little things. Things like seeing people deliberately throwing their garbage (not litter, but garbage) in the middle of a public parking lot when there are trash cans nearby. Such clear evidence that there are people on whom the social compact is hopelessly lost tends to bring out my inner Saddam Hussein -- but that's an essay I'd rather avoid lest I be misunderstood by the kind and gentle Rousseauvians.

You can see a high definition version of the trailer and buy the movie at Outside the Wire the DVD.

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

Pajamas Media has a fantastic piece by Buzz Aldrin and Taylor Dinerman about man's return to the moon. Aldrin begins:

On my last trip to the moon I didn't get to stay the whole day and had to share my accommodations with another man. If I could go back, I would expect not only a larger room, but a longer moment to gaze at the stars and the cloudy blue ball that should only be mankind's starter home.

An American moon base would insure that traditional American ideas such as private property and homesteading would influence the future legal regime. Otherwise the Europeans and others might try and push their model of tight government control and high taxes onto the off-Earth economy of the late 21st century. Such an environment would stifle the creative endeavors not only of American entrepreneurs such as space ship one financed by Paul Allen, built by Burt Rutan, that forms the basis for Virgin Galactic's suborbital space tourism project.

It's a crying shame this wasn't done before now, but I'm glad to see that it will happen. True, I might not live to see it, but that does not mean I can't support it anyway.

While I hope it's not another indication of a coming showdown over What We Eat, Pajamas Media features a humorous piece by Nancy Rommelmann -- a mother trying to cope with her daughter's boyfriend's veganism:

My daughter insists he's a vegan for political reasons; that Aidan--a tall, rangy high school senior who thrashes guitar in a band called Wolfgang Williams and the Punk Rock Faggots--doesn't believe in cruelty to animals, and wants to "support the environment." Mm, okay. And aside from the dietary constrictions, I truly like the kid; he's polite and funny and genuinely cares about my daughter. Because he's constantly riding his (non-polluting) bike or skateboard and thus burning what must be 5,000 calories a day, I also have a mother's concern that he eats.

"Is there any dairy in it?" my daughter asked, eyeing a dish of freshly mashed potatoes, as Aidan lingered in the doorframe, looking leaner than the last time I saw him. And I really wrestled; I thought, is he even going to know there's milk and butter in there? I sighed, and said, yes, there was, and watched them trudge upstairs, unfed.

To go with the piece, there's this very funny video:

I have no problem with "nice vegans" like the writer's boyfriend. What bothers me are the vegans who want to make me be a vegan, and I worry that the "Global Warming" scare is going to make them ever louder, and ever more insistent that Only They Are Saving The Planet.

There's something annoying about messianic people who want to convert others, and I don't care what the cause is. Gay activists can be extremely annoying, but despite the complaints I have heard about attempts to convert other people to homosexuality, they are nowhere near as annoying in that regard as are some of the vegans. (The radical vegan activists don't simply want to be left alone to eat their tofurkey; they are abolitionists who ultimately would throw me in prison for eating meat.)

Commenter John Blake has an interesting take on veganism as a passive virtue:

In his Autobiography (c. 1750?), Ben Franklin states that, yes, he flirted with vegetarianism in his twenties. Self-immolation of this nature goes back aways... two factors sobered him.

First, humans have three kinds of teeth: Canines, incisors, and molars. Nature designed us to rip, tear, bite off great chunks and masticate them into pulp. It is literally unnatural to pretend otherwise. And since Nature knows no dietary constraints, preferring omnivorous nourishment, who are we to disagree?

Second, on his first transatlantic voyage back to Blighty, the one on which he noted the Gulf Stream, Franklin observed schools of flying fish hunted by "shoals" of predators. Well, said Ben, if they can eat each other, then I can eat them.

So much for vegetarians' practical premises-- as for moral ones, there aren't any. As Churchill later wrote, "There are no passive virtues." The fact that one is not a serial child molester does not render you thereby more "moral" than otherwise.

In fact, if you consider mere absence of anything a virtue, then lack of virtue becomes virtuous. Contradictory propositions such as "zero equals one" (nothing is something) can assert anything: Zero virtue equals Thomas Aquinas. Given that so-called Vegans assert contradicory propositions, they profess mere attitudes rather than informed opinions.

But if veganism constitutes refraining, and it is not a virtue to refrain from doing something, then would it be more virtuous to refrain from refraining?

I'd hate to think that double passivity would be a virtue, so maybe it's eating meat that is a virtue.

After all, if virtue requires doing something, and if eating meat is good for you, maybe carnivores are more virtuous.

This whole thing reminds me of refraining from golf, which I once analyzed thusly:

Well after my adolescent crisis had passed (but before my midlife crisis had been fully developed), a well-meaning relative honestly believed that I should play golf even though I hated it. He thought that it was socially the right thing to do, that it would advance one's career, and all that morally righteous stuff. But the bottom line for him was that he loved golf! So, he could carry on all he wanted about how golf was good and even virtuous, but the fact remained that it was fun for him, and torture for me. The odd thing is, when I was a kid I noticed that many of the harder working men used to criticize men who enjoyed playing golf as shirkers of their responsibilities. (Like the doctor out whacking a golfball while his patient dies from complications.)

Where does that leave someone like me who, if I played golf, would absolutely hate it? Shouldn't I get some moral "credit" if I force myself to do something that I hate? Is it fair that others would have a good time doing it? How do we know that many of the people who lecture us about what we "should" do aren't secretly enjoying themselves while doing what they want and scolding the rest of us for not wanting what they want?

But if virtue is being active, then wouldn't people who hated smoking but who forced themselves to smoke anyway be more virtuous than non-smokers?

If this "logic" is correct, I must conclude that the only way for vegans to be virtuous would be for them to eat meat while hating it.

If virtue requires more than being passive, perhaps I should go shopping for a hair shirt.

On second thought, I think I'll refrain.

But shouldn't I say that I'm refraining from something that would give me pleasure? I mean, otherwise, what's the fun in refraining?

I was commenting at Durham in Wonderland about the Duke Lacrosse case. I was explaining what the faculty Group of 88 are really up to and explaining their motivation.

==

Cultural Marxism explains what the Gang 88 is up to.

The subversion of America. i.e. turning America into the USSR.

an excerpt from the above Cultural Marxism link:

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

an excerpt from a link at the above link:

Gramsci posited that because Christianity had been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, not only was it fused with Western civilization, but it had corrupted the workers class. The West would have to be de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a "long march through the culture." Additionally, a new proletariat must be created. In his "Prison Notebooks," he suggested that the new proletariat be comprised of many criminals, women, and racial minorities.

Thus thugniggaintellectual.

Communists have always used the criminal element to advance their cause. They represent the muscle of the movement. Thus the New Black Panther Party (NBPP).

The NBPP is not an abberation. It is part of the plan. Where argument and persuasion do not work intimidation will be used.

BTW this was all worked out in the 1920s.

About 5% of the American population creates the wealth we all enjoy. That 5% are our top intellectual performers.

In any Communist regime they will be the first up against the wall.

This is what the thugniggas of the world are up to. Which is why this is the "perfect" case for them.

The sex stuff is all about destroying coherent families because such families are naturally in the way.

I have been pretty much a libertine in my youth. However, nature changes all that when children start to arrive. It surprised me. Children naturally seem to change most people's point of view on the subject. Conservatism is nature's political program for families.

The USSR was a bastion of free sex in the beginning. That went away after the first few years because it is not natural for families. Families are naturally conservative. It has nothing to do with politics. It is nature.

To reduce the power of natural conservatism, sexaul libertinism is promoted for all, not just the unmarried, because it breaks family bonds and family bonds as Gramasci saw were an impediment to "revolution".

Cross Posted at Power and Control

John Fund has an interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal, titled "George Washington, Whiskey Entrepreneur":

....[H]ow many people know [George Washington] was also a leading businessman, probably the No. 1 whiskey producer in all of colonial America?

Indeed, Washington was a prosperous farmer and entrepreneur throughout his life. "He thought like an American businessman," says Jim Rees, the executive director of Washington's Mount Vernon estate. "He was a true disciple of the free enterprise system, and he sensed that our new system of government would encourage people to think creatively, take chances and invest."

Mr. Rees is proud that Mount Vernon is helping showcase our Founding Father's business career by opening a complete reconstruction of his 75-by-30-foot distillery, which at its peak turned out 11,000 gallons a year of corn and rye whiskey along with fruit brandy. (The distillery and accompanying museum open to the public on March 31.) James Anderson, a Scot who was convinced making whiskey was a growth industry, pitched the idea to Washington just weeks before he retired from office. Import taxes had reduced the consumption of molasses-based rum and made home-grown hooch popular. At the time, the average American consumed five gallons of distilled spirits every year, compared with only 1.8 gallons today.

Sheesh.

Next they'll be discovering that Americans used to have more sex.

No! Say it's not true!

I doubt very many readers will remember that post more than two years ago, I complained about an employer who prohibited his employees from eating pork or having pork products on company premises. What I didn't like was the bizarre notion that eating pork was discrimination against anyone:

This is an interesting test case, and I predict that if it goes anywhere, a few misguided American religious zealots will follow the usual left wing ideologues and side with the Muslim employer. One reason is that (apart from the fact that homosexuality is more charged emotionally than eating pork) there is no logical difference between discriminating against someone for tastes in food and tastes in sex partners (something I have pointed out before), but there is a shrill movement seeking the right to do the latter. And they're always looking for new opportunities.

It never ceases to amaze me how thoroughly confused people can be over the concept of discrimination. Failing to follow the religious dictates of other people is not discrimination, nor is it persecution.

Anyway, in today's interesting coincidence, the brother of the pork-banning employee has been indicted for funding terrorist groups, but (apparently in mitigation) gave money to the GOP:

Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari gave $15,250 to the NRCC since 2002, according to FEC records published on the Web site opensecrets.org.

On Friday, Alishtari pled not guilty to funding terrorism and other crimes, including financial fraud.

The NRCC is the main political group dedicated to helping the Republican party win seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Reached Monday morning for comment, an NRCC spokeswoman declined to discuss the matter on the record.

The indictment against Alishtari unsealed in Manhattan federal court Friday charges him with providing material support to terrorists by transferring $152,000 between banks to allegedly be used to purchase night-vision goggles and other equipment needed for a terrorist training camp.

As Glenn Reynolds points out, Alishtari's GOP donations might be an exercise in CYA:

This is an embarrassment -- though if I were a terrorist I'd be a big GOP donor, too. It might help, and at the very least would ensure that prosecution would be an embarrassment.

Anyway, the reason I know Alishtari is the brother of the employer I blogged about in '04 is that in another article on the same case, it was reported that,

Kweli [the employer] introduced the policy because Rising Star shared a building with its main client, GlobalProtector.net, owned by A.T. Alishtari, Kweli's brother. Kweli voluntarily instituted the no-pork policy in 2000 or 2001 after he found out some of Alishtari's employees, who were devout Muslims, felt they could not eat in the shared lunchroom because of the presence of pork.

I guess money probably buys a lot of forgiveness -- especially from pork lovers.

There's so much corruption in high places that it's hard to know what to think about these things, or in what directions I am supposed to care. Starting with my local Saudi madrassa -- which probably funds both parties.

For years (decades, even) I've derided radical vegetarians and animal rights activists. By way argument ad absurdum, many times I have sarcastically opined that, given a chance, they would mandate a vegetarian diet.

Well, thanks to the Global Warming hype, it looks like they may be getting the chance:

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation.

The latter two gases are particularly troubling - even though they represent far smaller concentrations in atmosphere than CO2, which remains the main global warming culprit. But methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Animal-rights activists and those advocating vegetarianism have been quick to pick up on the implications of the FAO report.

"Arguably the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products," writes Noam Mohr in a report for EarthSave International.

Changing one's diet can lower greenhouse gas emissions quicker than shifts away from fossil fuel burning technologies, Mr. Mohr writes, because the turnover rate for farm animals is shorter than that for cars and power plants.

"Even if cheap, zero-emission fuel sources were available today, they would take many years to build and slowly replace the massive infrastructure our economy depends upon today," he writes. "Similarly, unlike carbon dioxide which can remain in the air for more than a century, methane cycles out of the atmosphere in just eight years, so that lower methane emissions quickly translate to cooling of the earth."

Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the global warming impact of meat eaters with that of vegetarians and found that the average American diet - including all food processing steps - results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent (in the form of all greenhouse gases) compared to a no-meat diet. Researchers Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin concluded that dietary changes could make more difference than trading in a standard sedan for a more efficient hybrid car, which reduces annual CO2 emissions by roughly one ton a year.

It occurs to me that making us all stop eating animals might not end methane emissions, though. I realize that animals emit methane, but aren't humans also part of the methane equation? Considering that there are 6.5 billion humans and no euthanasia plan in place to reduce their numbers, what would be the consequences of forcing them all to be vegetarians?

Why, more methane gas, of course:

Suffice it to say that flatulence is a common complaint among and about vegans, and for that matter vegetarians generally. (For those of you who don't know many vegetarians, they come in various flavors; vegans are the most hard-core, eschewing not only meat but animal products of any kind, including milk and eggs.) The problem is the body's inability to fully digest the complex carbohydrates so abundant in the vegetarian diet and the consequent excessive production of gases such as hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane.

Vegetarian nutritionists claim this phenomenon abates once the intestinal flora adapt to the new menu; perhaps your friend is an intransigent case. However, I suspect high gas production is inherent in any diet consisting predominantly of plant products. Cows and sheep, for example, are marvelously adapted to all-veggie fare, yet they generate such prodigious quantities of methane-laden flatulence that some authorities regard them as major contributors to the greenhouse effect and thus to global warming.

Isn't it time someone asked Al Gore about his diet?

According to Kathy Freston (a vegan who writes for the HuffPo), "Vegetarian is the new Prius." But as a commenter to one of her later posts observed,

Al Gore eats meat, and lots of it.

UPDATE: Commenter XWL has a great blog post on how to stem Global Warming, plus usher in a winter we've all been waiting for. As Final Solutions go, it's not bad.

Which means I was mistaken when I said there was "no euthanasia plan in place."

My bad.

This week's RINO Sightings Carnival is hosted by JimK at Right Thoughts. Taking the form of a hard-boiled detective drama, it's one of the most creative carnivals I've seen:

The night was black as ink and cold, the kind of cold that makes a man wish he had a bottle of applejack and someone to drink it with. I was waiting. Just waiting. Stakeouts are about the most boring thing you can do when you're a gumshoe, but that's the job, so we do it. I knew that tomorrow I was hosting the RINO Sightings, but tonight - tonight it was just me, the night air and the job.

Be sure to check it out.

Lest anyone think the genital sex culture war is limited to arguments involving homosexuality or the use of words like "scrotum" in children's books, the mud flap flap demonstrates that adults are the targets too. And not urban sophisticates, but plain old non-metro, hetero, truck-driving, adults at that.

I kid you not. The great issue of the day for the forces on each side of the Culture War looks like this:

And the argument against them looks like this:

"I personally am tired of explaining to my 11-year-old son why they (women) are depicted on mudflaps , but not all women are 36Ds. He's very confused by that," Ulmer said. "But seriously, this is about family values -- what are we going to send out as a message to our children."

Sigh.

I never really thought about what message I was sending out by allowing a truckdriver to have mud flaps like that. But since "we" means me, maybe we should start requiring size 36D mud flaps on all trucks. That way, the nasty Islamists will have a tougher time driving fuel tankers into bridges and stuff, because their refusal to display the mud flaps will stand out in advance of their attacks. Just a thought.

And if we really wanted to freak out the Islamist enemies, we could go further yet by returning to the days before the culture war, and bring back the "bomber girls" like these:

If you think that's bad, check out this bestially suggestive image:

Here's one designed for flying over the hump:

I think the above are more impressive than the mudflaps they want to ban. Of course, the latter are only about trucker morale, while the former are about war morale, but hell, we're in a war, aren't we? That's why I suggested making them mandatory.

Supposedly, bomber nose art was banned in recent years, but I can't verify this.

But at least in the old days, they really knew how to fight a culture war. Why, they even had girls on the hood!

I'm telling you, the Culture War is Hell!

MORE: Laura W. at Ace of Spades has more on the claim by Rep. Ableser that he had seen mud flaps with a derogatory term for black children -- "pickaninny" -- and there is some discussion in the comments as to whether any such mud flaps exist. I've never seen one, and a diligent search failed to find one.

Is it possible that Ableser just made it up, and that the real goal was to ban the girl silhouettes?

AND MORE: Believe it or not "mud flap" is listed here as a racial slur.

Madam Speaker, I am privileged to be a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Our chairman, Mr. Lantos, has scheduled for March a hearing to discuss the different proposals relating to the handling of the war in Iraq. He has promised a lot of time for debate on all the different bills introduced in the House of Representatives, ranging from those that call for us to pull out of Iraq immediately, to those that demonstrate our presence there as part of a larger war, not against a nation, but against a movement, Islamic jihadis. They are everywhere and are responsible for attacks in India, Jordan, Israel, England, Egypt, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the Gaza, Morocco, Pakistan and in the United States and Iraq.

==

You can read the rest at
Congressman Manzullo Against Cut And Run .

Maybe we have some intelligent Congressmen after all.

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna is reporting on aerial survelance of the Jamaat ul-Fuqra compound in Georgia. Some photo analysis is provided. The Baron is asking for help from any one who could assist in further analysis.

The Christian Action Network [CAN -ed] recently made another aerial run over a Jamaat ul-Fuqra compound, this time the one near Commerce, Georgia. Martin Mawyer, the president of CAN, has kindly made the resulting photos available to Gates of Vienna.

The compound on Madinah Road actually has a Royston address, and is about halfway between Commerce and Royston, to the northeast of Atlanta.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra -- the terrorist organization whose cover group is known as the Muslims of America -- means "community of the impoverished" in Arabic.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

I don't know whether this children's book (containing the word "scrotum") is what Antonio Gramsci and WorldNetDaily would call "cultural Marxism," as I haven't asked the author whether that was her intent.* But Glenn Reynolds' link to the discussion reminded me of M. Simon's post from yesterday as well as some earlier ones on the subject.

Whether it's to be called "Cultural Marxism" or not, increasingly, the culture war seems to be a sex war.

A war over genitalia.

It does occur to me that we all have these things, and that we all have varying issues -- should I say "levels of excitation" or would that go too far? -- about them.

I'm reminded of the medical school nursery rhyme.....

"Although we hardly ever see 'em, we all have a perineum!"

I'm trying to take this stuff seriously.

What? I should try harder?

*Intent is relevant, isn't it? Or is cultural Marxism to be discerned without regard to intent? (i.e., by a similar process to that which discerns racism.)

MORE: Ann Althouse has mixed feelings, and says:

I can see feeling hostile to a children's author who uses this technique to get attention.

And a drooling news media which loves to, um, quote'em.

I'd like to think this should be up to the parents, but there are a lot of things I'd like to think.

Should I be glad I don't have kids?

Lest anyone think I was condemning everyone who received a draft deferment during the Vietnam war in my prior post, I was not. In fact, it wasn't my goal even to condemn draft dodgers.

My complaint is not with people who saved their own skin. All of us have done things that were less than brave at one time or another. My problem is with those who have spent decades convincing themselves that their simple (and forgivable) acts of cowardice were of a high moral caliber. For many of them, this process started when they were in college, when they began to feel a bit guilty about the fact that because of their middle class backgrounds, it was they who got to go to college and receive a student deferment while their less-well-off (or not as bright) counterparts had to go and serve, often being blown to bits. Fairly or unfairly, the deferment system put the former in a serious moral quandary. All too often there was only one way to resolve this in a manner consistent with -- what's the word? manhood! (Yeah, I'm afraid that's it. Many of their dads served in WWII, and such issues -- laughable as they are in academia today -- loomed large in those days.)

So, if you grew up in one of those typical middle class baby boom households and you avoided service, whether by deferment or by draft dodging, you were less than a man. Not an easy thing. Probably not as bad as being a homo, but maybe something approaching it.

How to solve the manhood problem? Why, by radical opposition to the immoral war, of course! The more ferocious the opposition, the more manly the draft dodger became. I cannot tell you how many aging radicals I've known who related countless "war stories" about how "I was there in Chicago in 68" when "heads were bloodied" and the rest of it. They sound much like old veterans carrying on about military service, and no doubt they were schooled in sounding that way by dads who related their WWII service to them when they were boys.

The problem is that avoiding service is still avoiding service. It is less than admirable, and less than manly. And again, while I think it is eminently forgivable, in order to be forgiven and in order to move on, it is necessary to acknowledge what you did.

I have more respect -- a lot more respect -- for the guys who just avoided service and aren't proud of it than for those who imagine it's a badge of honor. Yet the latter never stop lording it over the former that they are morally superior.

Since when is it morally superior to spend much of a lifetime in denial? To disguise cowardice as virtue? I think that's what the anti-war draft dodgers have done, and I think it is what those who will not acknowledge their mistakes are continuing to do. Believe me, I realize it's a tough acknowledgement to make -- for it's an admission to something less than manhood.

But it takes a man to admit to a mistake -- especially such a longstanding one, and it's why I think those who are proud of their draft avoidance and antiwar stance are less manly than those who aren't. The former are stuck -- because their manhood is permanently disabled by dishonesty -- while the latter can move on.

This is, of course, counterintuitive according to the popular wisdom that prevails. (But that's why I felt the need for another post.)

MORE: The irony is compounded by the fact that the draft-deferment kids were steeped in the then-prevailing middle class morality, which accounts (IMO) for their original desire to be seen as morally righteous. What occured was a classic case of rationalization often aggravated by social pressures and even mass hysteria.

Not that I'd expect the massive societal damage this caused (and continues to cause) to be solved with a blog post.

American Thinker looks at Cultural Marxism

There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. "The Sixties are dead," wrote columnist George Will ("Slamming the Doors," Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991)

Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war 'peace' activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and 'gay' rights groups. All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network (GSLEN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Code Pink for Peace.

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Christopher Hitchens has a fine piece on the trajectory of our war with Iraq.

...it was on the initiative of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, both of whom delivered extremely tough speeches warning of another round of confrontation with Saddam Hussein, that the Senate passed the Iraq Liberation Act that year, making it U.S. policy to remove the Baathists from power. It was the Clinton administration that bombed Sudan, claiming that a factory outside Khartoum represented a chemical-weapons link between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. And, as Sen. Clinton reminded us in the very same speech, it was "President Clinton, with the British and others, [who] ordered an intensive four-day air assault, Operation Desert Fox, on known and suspected weapons of mass destruction sites and other military targets" in Iraq. On its own, this is enough to make childish nonsense of her insinuation that an "obsession" with Saddam took root only after the Bush-Cheney victory in 2000.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has called for a 90-day deadline to start pulling American troops from Iraq.

Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, has been criticized by some Democrats for supporting authorization of the war in 2002 and for not renouncing her vote as she seeks the U.S. presidency in next year's election.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The Victory Caucus is a new blog devoted to Victory in the war against Islamic fascism.

What is their mission?

This will be a long and serious effort, but it starts now. We have established a team within the site that will focus on identifying strong candidates -- veterans, ideally --- as well as teams devoted to identifying White Flag Republicans and their antimatter opposites, the Blue Dog Democrats. These three groups will be at the forefront of our efforts to identify the districts where we can do the most good: whether that is to replace a defeatist Democrat with a new Republican victory candidate --- or to help a Blue Dog Democrat who is strong on the war take down a White Flag Republican. Here, party comes second: victory --- and country --- come first.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Austute Blogger

I agree with Glenn Reynolds and J.D. Johannes:

"Support the troops. Let them win."

I can't find a more perfect example than Senator Charles "just-like-in-the-days-of-Vietnam" Schumer who is bound and determined to plunge the country into another glorious defeat.

Of course, he'll say the war was "unwinnable," but this is often turns out to be code language for "wrong and immoral," and the people who talk this way want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, they try to undo whatever victories are acheived by U.S. troops on the ground, so they can turn around and say their lives were "wasted" -- all in the name of "supporting the troops."

Sorry, but I've already seen it one time too many during the Vietnam era, and it makes me sick that the anti-war generation -- the ones who came to age under student deferments and have been rationalizing their cowardice ever since -- still have so damned much power. This makes them feel it's their God-given moral duty to decide that their country deserves to lose another war. It's not an entire generation, mind you. But this psychology represents a substantial portion of the pre-1953 boomers -- the ones who stayed in college to avoid the draft, rationalized it into pride, and now consider themselves America's moral conscience instead of America's moral cowards (which is what I think they are). Schumer epitomizes them, and I don't want them to return to power in the White House. For starters, I can't stand to hear them whine about what "heroes" they were, when all they did was saved their own skin from the draft.

Perhaps I lived in Berkeley too long, but I just find that kind of sanctimony unbearable, and I don't think it will mellow with age.

For the life of me, I don't see why they can't admit for once that they just wanted to save their asses from the draft, and the rest is just rationalized claptrap. Hey. I'm not perfect; I say this as a former Marxist who once hated the U.S. military.

Sigh.

Perhaps I should be more understanding. I was born in 1954 so I didn't have to deal with the draft.

It looks like the Palestinian Civil War has resumed.

The Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) condemned Thursday an attack by unknown gunmen at the house of MP Yousef Alsherafi in northern Gaza Strip.

In a released statement, the PLC condemned the attack, reminding all Palestinian factions of abiding by the recent agreement on ending all forms of internal violence, reached in the Saudi Arabian city of Makkah two weeks ago.

The press release emphasized the need to swiftly form a national unity government in line with what has been agreed upon over the weekend between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Prime Minister, Ismaily Haniya.

Meanwhile, various parts of the Palestinian territories saw over the past couple of days a number of incidents such as shootouts at the house of Palestinian planning minister in Nablus city, at some Fatah members in the Gaza Strip town of Bani Sohaila and a small-scale shootout between gunmen on the Salaheldin main road in central Gaza Strip.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I'm writing a test post on a Dell laptop motherboard I just hooked up to see how well it works. My older laptop (a Latitude c600) has a motherboard problem which isn't worth the money it would cost to fix, so I bought a new board on Ebay. Basically, it's the bottom of a laptop, minus the keyboard and everything else, and it looks like this:

The reason they sell them like this is it's not worth the time and trouble to remove the board. Too many little screws (many of which are bears to remove), endless tiny plugs, wires, miniboards and doodads, each of which has to go back in exactly or else nothing will work.

Wanting to be sure this worked before dissecting my laptop, I stuck in the hard drive, the RAM and the mini PCI board, then plugged in a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and VOILA! It booted right up. No stupid XP activation problems either.

Not that I really needed to write a blog post using it, but I'm trying to determine whether it overheats and whether the charging system cycles properly, and the monitor, keyboard and mouse are disconnected from the other computer, so I'm "on" my new laptop motherboard.

Used this way, it doesn't feel like a laptop at all.

UPDATE: Done. I'm using the laptop now with its new motherboard, and everything works fine.

Taking these things apart is almost as much fun as blogging.

A very funny video by a black man who gets the Duke Lacrosse case.

(which possibly ought to be called the "perilously white classically bendable values agenda" or something) was held in Philadelphia yesterday.

Visiting dignitaries Sean Kinsell of White Peril (who traveled all the way from Japan) and yours truly of Classical Values arrived at Philly AIDS Thrift (514 Bainbridge Street) -- a charitable thrift store which doubled as unofficial conference rendezvous center:

NOTE: Please ignore the fact that the mannequin on the far left has had its underwear pulled down to its ankles. I am assured the problem will be corrected.

Presiding over the meet-and-greet festivities was proprietor Tom Brennan of Agenda Bender, who issued each attendeee with an official T-Shirt. By unanimous intuititive consensus, the decision at the time seemed to be that the arctic temperatures did not constitute T-shirt weather, and it was not until today that Eric decided to take a unilateral and risky decision to model his T-shirt over regular clothing outside in the cold:

After some browsing at the store, the next stop was a late working luncheon at the PhilaDeli, at 410-412 South Street, in Philadelphia. (Review here, picture here, menu here.)

Because of the highly confidential and sensitive nature of the meeting, no official minutes were requested or taken, and while I think I can fairly state that not all of the world's problems were solved, nevertheless a fair and frank exchange of views occurred, with globlist as well as local perspectives being exchanged and discussed.

After a volunteer photographer was drafted into service, an official picture was taken:

The meeting then adjourned, and we went back to the store, where Sean went on a bit of a buying spree.

(If you're in Philadelphia, definitely check out "PAT." Huge inventory and great prices, for a good cause.)

For someone who bills himself as a humorist, Garrison Keillor doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humor. First there was his threat to sue a blogger for parodying the Prairie Homo Home Companion with a t-shirt. And now there's his latest pissy hissy over Giuliani's Marilyn Monroe parody in drag:

Say what you will about the Current Occupant [President Bush], there is no video out there of him waltzing around in a long lavender gown and a brassiere, and blond wig, while an aging tycoon nuzzles his chest. He may have sunk low back in his drinking days, but he managed to keep his adventures private. . . .

This is not a major issue. . . . But the video has a creepy fascination to it. . . .

Mr. Giuliani should put the issue behind him by answering a few questions: (1) How much did he have to drink that night, and what was he drinking? (2) Whose idea was it--his own or an aide's? If the latter, was there wagering involved and how much was bet? (3) Were the garments new or used, and who picked them out? And was he wearing male or female underthings? (4) On a scale of 1 to 10, how good did he feel in that dress?

I couldn't agree more.

As I said before, it took balls for Guiliani to do his drag routine, and his "It's okay, they aren't real" shows that he has a great sense of humor. (HT Glenn Reynolds.)

Concluded Taranto,

Whether Keillor is expressing his own prejudices or cynically trying to appeal to the prejudices of others, his effort to smear Giuliani by playing on fears of homosexuality is invidious and unseemly.

Here we go again.... First they came for the gay conservatives. And now, if you're a Republican, you don't even have to be gay to be targeted. You only have to do something that might look gay, or hang around with gay friends.

If I didn't know any better, I'd swear the left wants all Republicans to be homo-hatin' "Christianist" stereotypes. (Perhaps they should bear in mind that Fred Phelps is a Democrat.)

And what's with the "Were the garments new or used" question?

Is there a right answer to a question like that?

Hmmm....

I guess if I were advising Guiliani, I'd tell him to answer "Yes!"

(OK, I'm trying to take politics seriously, but this is getting a bit ridiculous.)

Coco has a visitor, Sean Kinsell, and she's convinced that he traveled all the way from Japan just to see her.

As you can see, Sean has mastered a rare Japanese massage technique which never fails to put pit bulls to sleep:

(If only the Humane Society put pit bulls to sleep that way instead of the other way.)

Sean's blogging certainly won't put anyone to sleep -- especially human pit bulls. Here's a sample from yesterday (about a lesbian Muslim activist Irshad Manji, who's being snubbed by the left):

Plenty of gay men and women who "don't care what people think" when they're having a noisy good time at brunch or giving conservative relatives a heart attack with their views about social policy will turn into the most craven protocol-followers alive when it's time to venture, even gingerly, the opinion that maybe there are strains of thinking in non-Western cultures that are incompatible with human rights and are not the fault of Western imperialism. Or that gay advocacy groups often choose cheap partisan expediency over gay interests.

As for Coco, she's steeped in double standards, and I can barely get her to read this blog, much less help me with editing and proof reading.

Wish I had more time for blogging today, but I'll be running around.

Meanwhile, Coco plans to petition the Humane Society to put Sean in charge of all pit bull policy.

Murtha has a plan for American defeat in Iraq. MoveCongress.Org says John Murtha will speak to them about removing support for our troops and thus ending the War in Iraq. Evidently they would prefer genocide followed by a full scale Middle East War. MoveCongress has spoken and here are their words.

The Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense has begun consideration of the president's $93 billion supplemental appropriations request for Iraq. Action on the request will be the first opportunity for the new Congress to exercise its "power-of-the-purse" over the Iraq war.

Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president's foreign and national security policy. Chairman Murtha discusses these steps in a videotaped conversation with former Congressman Tom Andrews (D-ME), the National Director of the Win Without War coalition, sponsor of MoveCongress.org.

Join us here tomorrow for this exclusive interview.

Why do I feel this is 1936 all over again?

And now, on March 7, 1936, while France had only a caretaker government, Hitler, not fearing the League being used against him, sent troops into the Rhineland. According to the Versailles and Locarno treaties the Rhineland was to remain demilitarized. The move defied these agreements but was popular in Germany - an issue of national sovereignty - the Rhineland being a part of Germany. But Hitler's generals were concerned. Germany's army was still not ready for combat. Hitler had assured his generals that they could withdraw at the first sign of a counter move by France's army, but he had taken measure of the pacifism in France and Britain and was confident that France and Britain would do nothing. His move into the Rhineland caused a sensation and the world waited to see what France and Britain would do.

The UN is corrupt and will do nothing. The enemies of liberty advance with the help of our anti-war folks. Did some one say 1936?

Churchill, in the House of Commons, declared the remilitarization of the Rhineland to be a triumph for Hitler. He spoke of the danger to parliamentary nations from heavily armed dictatorships. He complained that Britain was confronting dictators "without weapons or military force" and that the spirit of British people was being tamed and cowed "with peace films, anti-recruiting propaganda and resistance to defense measures."
Fear of the Left in France

In May, 1936, elections in France brought to power a new coalition government, called the "Popular Front" - a coalition that included Communists - who were responding to the Soviet Union's new policy of allowing alliances with anti-fascists. After only a few days in office, France's new government announced its intentions to improve working conditions - which, along with wages in France, lagged behind other advanced industrialized nations. Labor leaders were emboldened by the Popular Front's victory. They were impatient and wanted to demonstrate their power, so they sent their workers out on strike, aggravating everyone but labor and the Left.

The head of the new government was Leon Blum, the leader of France's Socialist Party. Rightists in France wondered whether Hitler conquering France would be any worse than the Left in power in France, Rightists knowing that Hitler would suppress the Left. The expressions "better Hitler than Blum" and "better Hitler than Stalin" were heard.

Churchill did have one nice thing to say about America. "Americans can always be depended upon to do the right thing --- after they have tried everything else."

He was right, but it is going to cost us. Dearly.

You can hear what John Murtha has to say at Google Video.

Mark Levin has an excellent rant on Murtha [audio].

Murtha has me frosted. So I'm adding a bit more on this crook.

The Washington Times calls the Murtha plan a plan for defeat.

In the wake of September 11, McGovernism -- that is, the reflexive opposition to the use of force by the United States against foreign enemies that has dogged the Democratic Party since Richard Nixon's time -- became more of a liability than ever. At least, it appeared that way judging from the 2002 and 2004 election results. But in last year's congressional elections, the Democrats came up with a shrewd, cynical new P.R. strategy that has until now served them well: saying lots of nice things about American soldiers fighting in Iraq while simultaneously advancing resolutions that denigrate their mission. But the decision to effectively cut off funds by micromanaging their use -- rather than by doing so directly -- may also be unconstitutional.

When the House votes today on the resolution denouncing Mr. Bush's plans for additional troops to combat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq, members should be under no illusions about what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership are trying to do: to make it impossible for American troops to properly do their job in Iraq.

Sweetness and Ligght has some good quotes:

By Richard Cowan and David Alexander

WASHINGTON, Feb 15 (Reuters) - U.S. Rep. John Murtha, a leading congressional opponent of the war in Iraq, on Thursday said his plans for placing conditions on how President George W. Bush can spend $93.4 billion in new combat funds would effectively stop an American troop buildup.

"They won't be able to continue. They won't be able to do the deployment. They won't have the equipment, they don't have the training and they won't be able to do the work. There's no question in my mind," the Pennsylvania Democrat said.

Murtha says he was once a Marine. I'll agree with that. He is a Marine no longer.

"We're trying to force a redeployment not by taking money away, by redirecting money," Murtha said, adding he wants U.S. funds to be slanted more toward diplomacy and Iraq reconstruction...

Further reasearch shows Murtha's Military Medals may have been unearned.

"Of course Congressman Saylor wanted to help if he could, but there was nothing in the service record to indicate the wounds were of any severity and the documents specifically indicated that next of kin was not notified in either instance," Fox told the Herald-Standard in 1996. "We were amazed that Mr. Murtha was asking for Purple Hearts for superficial lacerations," he added.

The Captain's Quarters has some thoughts on Murtha's slow bleed of American troops..

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I just ordered Clayton Cramer's new book, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie -- the thesis of which I thoroughly agree. (Among other things, he debunks the notorious Michael Bellesiles.)

It's reviewed here, and despite the insane weather (and a series of travel glitches from hell) the author made it to the East Coast, where he's right now is in the middle of his book tour.

I only yesterday got my driveway shoveled out, and in addition to other commitments this weekend, right now I'm entertaining Sean Kinsell who's visiting from Japan. (Although Sean is blogging on the road -- check out this post about lesbian Muslim activist Irshad Manji, who said "Society needs people who offend, otherwise there will be no progress.")

Anyway, I won't be able to attend the book signing festivities. But in case there are any readers in the DC area, this is Cramer's schedule for today:

February 16, 2007

10:45 - 11:30 G. Gordon Liddy's radio show

1:30 lunch with several Maryland legislators and gun rights activists

5:00 Books-A-Million, DuPont Circle, Washington, DC, for book signing

If you're in the area, don't miss it.

It looks like the American government is jumping off the Abbas ship.

The United States has informed Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas that it will shun a future Hamas-Fatah coalition government because it will not explicitly recognize Israel, Abbas aides said Thursday.

That position would be a severe blow to Abbas, who is trying to reach a power-sharing deal to end Palestinian infighting and to get crippling international sanctions on the government lifted.

Last week, the two political rivals reached a coalition agreement in principle, and the Hamas-led government was to resign later Thursday to pave the way for a coalition government.

Until now, Washington had withheld judgment on the power-sharing deal.

Abbas received word of the new US position in a phone call from a senior US State Department official late Wednesday, the aides said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue. A US diplomat then delivered the same message to Abbas in person Thursday, the aides said.

If Hamas does this they will get killed by their own people. If they don't do this they get strangled economically. Tough choice.

What the US is saying is that for the Palestinians "National Unity" is pointless.

I'm ticking off the hours until the civil war starts up again.

I just read an interesting bit that may explain why the US reserved comment on the deal until now. It looks like they waited until the "National Unity" government was formed.

By MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH, Associated Press Writer

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas announced the resignation of his Cabinet on Thursday, a formality that paved the way for the formation of a national unity government with Fatah . Haniyeh said a unity government would usher in a new era for the Palestinians. He stood next to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during the ceremony. Abbas then authorized Haniyeh to form a new coalition government.

Meanwhile aides to Abbas said Thursday that U.S. diplomats told them Washington plans to shun a future Hamas-Fatah coalition government because it will not explicitly recognize Israel.

If the U.S. decides to shun a new Hamas-Fatah government, it would be a severe blow to Abbas. The Fatah moderate leader has been trying to implement a power-sharing deal with Hamas to end Palestinian infighting and lift crippling international sanctions against the government.

Washington had previously withheld judgment on the power-sharing deal.

There is a picture of Abbas at the first link in this piece. It looks like he is having a very bad case of acid reflux and forgot to bring his Tums. He is now in a fight for his life.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I don't keep up with professional basketball as I should, but according to CBS there's apparently been "a groundbreaking revelation made by former player John Amaechi, who became the first professional basketball player to openly identify himself as gay." (Of course, he waited till he retired to jump through that hoop.)

Another player, Tim Hardaway, is none too happy about it. Pressed for his views, he decided to come out with them -- quite vociferously:

"Well, you know, I hate gay people," Hardaway said in response to Le Batard. "I let it be known I don't like gay people. I don't like to be around gay people. I'm homophobic. It shouldn't be in the world, in the United States, I don't like it."

Everybody needs to hate somebody. However, these days, it is not easy to hate. Usually, it's easier to say you hate a particular person than a group. If you say you hate a group, people will come down on you for it. Especially people who are conditioned to think that you have no "right" to hate them. But of course we have a right to hate people -- whether individuals or groups. We have a right to say so, too. What I think is going on here is that people resent being told they can't hate people, and it helps to have a convenient group which other people hate, and if a religious justification can be thrown in, so much the better.

I don't know how scientific the CBS poll is, but it indicates that 29% of the voters either agree with Hardaway or think his comments accurately reflect what most people think.

Nothing surprising about it. People have a right to hate whoever they want. (As well as what I've called a right to be sick -- logically a two way street.) Hell, God might even agree with them. How anyone would know what God might think, I don't know, but I can't say what God does or does not think. A lot of people think God is a bigot who hates all kinds of people, and they're willing to die to prove it. (Fortunately, in the West this is a minority view.)

In Russia, there seems to be a religious movement to conflate religion and epidemiology. Somewhat analogous to the American "homosexuality is like smoking" meme, in the case of Russia the argument is that homosexuality is like alcoholism:

In an attack on what he said was criticism from the Swedish ambassador, Muradov equated homosexuality with alcoholism and drew a comparison meant to suggest the ban was intended to protect the heath and well-being of society.

''As you know, the sale of alcohol is restricted in many Scandinavian countries. Why not pose the question of removing the limits on alcohol in these countries, of holding a 'parade of alcoholics' in Sweden? They would answer, No, it's bad for one's health, it affects society's morals,'' RIA-Novosti quoted him as saying.

You can find plenty of religious authority against either, but I don't think that changes the nature of advocacy, which is simply a form of free speech. Or the nature of hate, which is as natural as snowfall in winter.

I guess it's OK to hate free speech too. But the right to hate does not include the right to censor.

MORE: I realize that people don't understand the point of this post, but the point is I am having a bit of trouble understanding, and I am trying to write satire without being judgmental. Thus, I never speculated about whether alcoholism might be considered morally superior to homosexuality. (Especially in Russia.)

UPDATE: My thanks to The Blog Report for linking this post!

UPDATE (02/19/07): Hardaway has apologized:

"I don't hate gay people," Hardaway said. "I'm a goodhearted person. I interact with people all the time. ... I respect people. For me to say 'hate' was a bad word, and I didn't mean to use it."

Yes they are. And as M. Simon reminded me this morning, they -- the Democrats -- are pushing for a renewal of the (so-called) assault weapons ban.

Les Jones has the scoop:

"Well, all you folks who voted for anyone but a republican now know what the next 2-10 years are going to be like. Maybe longer."

Which was countered by:

"Plus, even if it does pass, all you good Republicans have nothing to worry about because your President will veto it, right? Remember, you guys all said Bush was just playing politics when he said he would sign a new AWB. You guys don't think you are wrong now, do you? Do you?"

Yep. Bush said in the 2004 election that he would sign the AWB renewal if it came across his desk. At the time, he was confident of a Republican Congress keeping that from happening. What could possiblie go wrong? The 2006 elections went wrong, Democrats now control both houses of Congress, and Bush's words are coming back to haunt gunowners.

Lately, of course, I'm continuing to complain repeatedly in a similar vein -- about the movement to put Hillary in the White House. Why, I'm feeling so repetitive today that I'll even repeat my repetition:

If you don't believe me about this, read the immortal words of Tom DeLay:

Hillary Clinton as president may be the best thing that ever happened to the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

At the risk of repeating myself for the umpteenth time, when enough people want something to happen, it will happen.

I keep opining that collusion is not always an intentional process. Voting means choosing the better of two bad alternatives, and people get so blinded by their emotions that they forget.

The bright side of this is that the gun issue was once supposed to be a losing issue for the Dems, so they dropped it.

But now that they're back, maybe they'll make it a losing issue again!

Evidently Fatah is having trouble keeping the troops in line.

The Palestinian Authority has fired hundreds of security officers who refused to participate in the recent fighting against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas announced that it was "premature" to talk about the resignation of his government. Haniyeh was expected to submit his resignation on Tuesday to pave the way for the formation of a Palestinian unity government. Haniyeh did not offer any reason for his decision to delay the resignation, sparking speculation of renewed tensions with Fatah.

Fatah officials admitted on Tuesday that they were facing "certain difficulties" in persuading the US and EU to accept the agreement that was reached with Hamas in Mecca last week.

OK. That is the current political situation. We will get back to that later. Sometimes the Jerusalem Post writes as choppily as I do.

So what happened with the troops?

PA security officials told The Jerusalem Post that the officers were dismissed for "failing to fulfill their duties" during the armed clashes with Hamas militiamen. The officials described the behavior of the security officers as a "form of mutiny." They said most of the officers were fired after they refused to defend senior PA and Fatah officials who came under attack from Hamas.

In one incident, scores of officers refused to confront Hamas gunmen who besieged the home of Gen. Muhammad Ghraib of the Preventative Security Service in the northern Gaza Strip for eight hours before killing him.

The fired officers belonged to the Preventative Security Service, Military Intelligence and Force 17.

According to the officials, the officers are suspected of sympathizing with Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees, an alliance of various armed groups in the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian President Abbas has put off giving a "National Unity" speech. That is funny. I thought they had that all sewn up in Mecca a few days ago. Sewn up with a billion dollars of Saudi thread. It appears the sewing was not that great and the thread is unraveling. Remember what your mother told you. Don't pull on that thread. The whole garment will unravel.

By Wafa Amr

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas abruptly put off an address he was due to give on Thursday about a new unity government and an official said on Wednesday the delay was due to a dispute with Hamas.

Abbas had been expected to promote the deal in a speech to Palestinians before heading to the Gaza Strip to accept the resignation of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader who is supposed to lead the new unity government agreed in Mecca.

Abbas adviser Nabil Abu Rdainah told Palestinian television the president would give his speech after the Gaza talks.

Some Hamas lawmakers said Haniyeh would not step down until he and Abbas, the moderate Fatah leader, had finalised several unresolved issues in the Saudi-brokered deal including naming an interior minister and deputy prime minister.

"Hamas has made several unacceptable conditions which cannot be implemented. The Mecca agreement cannot be re-interpreted and must be implemented immediately without any conditions," a Palestinian official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

So what do the ordinary folks in Gaza think?

After countless broken cease-fires, skepticism in the Palestinians territories remains strong.

"There is a lot of mistrust," said Bakr, the local Fatah chief. "If it (the Mecca deal) lasts for six months, it is a good agreement."

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The Democrats have a strategy for defeat in Iraq.

Top House Democrats, working in concert with anti-war groups, have decided against using congressional power to force a quick end to U.S. involvement in Iraq, and instead will pursue a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration's options.

Led by Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., and supported by several well-funded anti-war groups, the coalition's goal is to limit or sharply reduce the number of U.S. troops available for the Iraq conflict, rather than to openly cut off funding for the war itself.

The legislative strategy will be supplemented by a multimillion-dollar TV ad campaign designed to pressure vulnerable GOP incumbents into breaking with President Bush and forcing the administration to admit that the war is politically unsustainable.

No doubt Democrats have the courage of their convictions.

"What we have staked out is a campaign to stop the war without cutting off funding" for the troops, said Tom Mazzie of Americans Against Escalation of the War in Iraq. "We call it the 'readiness strategy.'"

Certainly not readiness to defeat our jihadi enemies. It is 1936 all over again.

This move by the Democrats will not shorten the war against the jihadis. It will make it at least ten times bloodier for them and us.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I put off blogging about the Salt Lake massacre until there was more information. We have it now.

Ajka Omerovic, who said she was Talovic's aunt, visited the home Tuesday afternoon. She told the Deseret Morning News that Talovic had been "a good boy." She said the family are Muslims from Bosnia who had lived in the vicinity of Sarajevo.

Unfortunately unlike the Mr Taheri-azar of North Carolina the jihadi in this case will not be available for questioning. Ever.

If this gets more frequent it will make Muslims unwelcome in America.

Eric at Classical Values has an early take on events. He believes if there had been more folks with weapons (concealed carry) the killer would have been brought to heel sooner.

H/T LGF

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Six people were killed in a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, but the mass shooting incident doesn't seem to be getting much attention as national news. Normally, such shopping mall shooting sprees do.

As to the motive, according to a local news report, it might be related to the man's "upbringing":

A family friend, who didn't want to be identified, told us Talovic's upbringing may have played a role. He was a Muslim-Bosnian, born in war-torn Bosnia. Talovic has lived in Utah for the past several years. He dropped out of high school in 2004.

The family friend said Talovic had a tough time interacting with people and dealing with traumatic episodes. That may be why neighbors who lived near the Talovics for years don't know the first thing about him.

John Buddensick, Neighbor: "Me or my family, or pretty much anybody on my side of the street never came in contact with Sulejmen or any of his friends or anything like that. So to hear that this happened is somewhat shocking because you really didn't know who he was."

Whether there were indicators or not, police say Talovic planned on killing as many people as possible at Trolley Square. Talovic carried with him a .38 caliber pistol, a shotgun, a backpack full of ammunition and a bandoleer of shotgun shells into the mall.

So, all we have to go on is that this is a local shooting that may have been caused by an "upbringing."

I'd like to know more.

At this point, all I can conclude is that it's another good argument for carrying concealed.

UPDATE: Flashback to 1929, in which the infamous "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" captivated the nation's imagination. The mass shooting has never been forgotten, even though the victims were not innocent bystanders, but rival gang members.

I guess what made that different was that seven people were killed, but Sulejmen Talovic killed only six?

Via Michelle Malkin, I see that Charles Johnson is wondering whether this might be Sudden Jihad Syndrome.

If it is, we'll never know. I mean, if it's hurtful to call people crazy, "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" would probably be a disease that dare not speak its name.

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, Mary Katherine Ham has pointed out that the race of criminal suspects may not be mentioned unless they are white.

In the case of the Salt Lake City suspect, it's his religion that may not be mentioned (at least, not by the AP).

I have a feeling that if a family friend had said that the shooter's fundamentalist Christian upbringing may have played a role, that this pertinent fact might have made it into the AP story.

Gerard Van der Leun offers some words of wisdom over the John Edwards campaign blogger controversy:

Without referencing the Edwards bloggers, I would note that over time people change and at certain moments people online write things they later regret out of passion or ignorance. Over time, people's situations change as do their needs and views.

It seems to me that we use past opinions to dump on future aspirations in our political squabbles at our peril. Getting people sacked in real life by using online life as a club is always a bad idea.

If you think it isn't, you're next.

(Emphasis added.)

This was by no means the first time.

Does anyone remember the frenzied attempts to get Glenn Reynolds fired for wearing the diversity gun t-shirt in a humorous manner? Readers were urged to contact his employer, and I was so outraged that I immediately ordered one of the shirts and posed for my blog wearing it.

In "retaliation" for the attempts to get him fired, Glenn made some comments about his "second career as a male model." (His modeling career did result in an unexpected consequence, though.)

Despite the fact that Amanda Marcotte was not fired, her blog Pandagon is supplying her supporters with an official IRS "Information Referral" form all filled out with the name of the people who urged Edwards to fire her along with IRS contact information, and (with a clever wink-wink) making a suggestion:

One thing I would certainly NOT expect is that anyone would go here[PDF], using the above as a template (or not), and stick that fucker in the mail. I certainly would be shocked if anyone were to alert all their friends and loved ones to behave similarly.

Yeah, I know free speech has consequences, and I have a perfect right to criticize anyone for anything, and say just about anything in disagreement. This includes the right to hurl insults and vituperative language as long as it doesn't cross the line to libel or slander. And I suppose it even includes the right to contact the employer of someone I disagree with, try to get them fired, try to sic the IRS or other authorities on them, (and vice versa), but I'd never do that to anyone -- no matter how much I might disagree. I think using online life as a club in real life is about low as you can go.

Unfortunately, I think there's going to be a lot more of it.

Man, for two days the snow has been coming down fast around here. First snow, then liquid ice; I parked my car in the front of the driveway and could barely get out this morning.

I'm glad I'm not in the flower delivery business. It would drive anyone crazy.

Or am I not allowed to use the word "crazy" anymore? Considering that Amanda Marcotte called me a sociopath yesterday and I didn't especially mind, I think it should be perfectly OK to use the word "crazy" -- especially in a humorous manner.

But it isn't -- at least, not if you're in the teddy bear business and don't want to offend certain activist groups. The Vermont Teddy Bear company got in trouble for selling teddy bears in cute little strait jackets, and they had to pull them. So now, they're selling on ebay as collector's items for as much as $315.00. This one's a steal at $75.00 and it ends in a few hours. Might be just the thing for people who are going crazy at the last minute. (If I really were a sociopath, I'd send one to Amanda, my new love! But alas, I'm afraid I may not be gay enough for her. Or do I mean lesbian enough?)

The interesting thing about the teddy bear is that because of its self deprecating nature, it doesn't make fun of other people, but only the gift giver. How this can hurt the "feelings" of an identity group is beyond me. Even if you're not crazy, how does saying you are crazy as an expression of love hurt those who are crazy? Suppose a heterosexual man tells another heterosexual man he likes him so much that he feels gay even though he isn't; does that insult gays? If I call myself a sociopath in response to my dear new girlfriend Amanda, am I hurting the feelings of sociopaths?

Is everybody crazy or is it just me?

MORE: Michelle Malkin has a reminder that angry Islamists are burning Valentines in protest. They're offensive! And blasphemous!

Oh baby! Set my blasphemous heart on fire!

Amanda Marcotte had the temerity to call me a "sociopath" earlier today.

And as of now her website is down with this explanation:

Whenever the site is up, we get slammed and it goes down. I have to suspend the site until the fervor dies down. At this point, I think it might be a few hours before the Lookie Lous give up refreshing the site.

We sociopaths really know how to slam a site when our feelings are hurt.

UPDATE (02/15/07): If I think it's unfair being called a "sociopath," I should count my blessings. Cathy Young was accused (by Amanda Marcotte) of being an "apologist for abusers, as long as they are male." (Via Dr. Helen.) Young's crime was to have stated the obvious fact that women can be abusers too, and the whole post is a must-read for "PandaGate" fans.

(At least I can comfort myself knowing that Amanda thinks I'm sick and in need of help.)

The "reality based" movement has morphed into the Net Roots.

Obviously they have decided that reality is too much of a burden and now references to reality are no longer required. All that is required now is belief. No pesky facts can in any way intrude.

Breath of the Beast has an interesting look at the origins of this kind of attitude in human mass psychology. He starts out with a quote from Louis Menand.

The mysterious part of totalitarianism's appeal--and here we return to the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen--is that its official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it. This is because the mob is made up of cynics; for them, everything is a lie anyway. And the masses' hostility is free-floating. It has no concrete object: the masses are hostile to life as it is. The more extreme and outrageous the totalitarian ideology, therefore, and the more devoid of practical political sense, the more ineluctable its appeal. Totalitarian rule, Arendt argued, is predicated on the assumption that proving that a thing is true is less effective than acting as though it were true. The Nazis did not invite a discussion of the merits of anti-Semitism; they simply acted out its consequences. This is why documents like the memorandums for which Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" continued to be believed even after they had been exposed as forgeries, and why the Moscow Trials were defended even by people who knew that the "confessions" were fraudulent. It's why some of the defendants in those trials went uncomplainingly to be executed for crimes they had not committed.

The idea that the anger and disenfranchisement of the "Arab street" is in some way a comprehensible rationale for the callous barbarity of the attack on innocent civilians is an offense to humanity. Ironically, the very enormity of the crimes they commit and the wildness of the pretext they do it under, are taken by those who do not understand the game they are playing as proof of the authenticity (even righteousness) of what they do.

The rage, when looked at honestly, is nothing more than that same invincible, fervent stupidity that filled the air at the nazi rallies in Munich or that propelled the Bolshevik protesters into the streets of Moscow. This wild arousal state crowds out reason and hope. It pumps up its own excitation and then demands revenge on the world for the distress it has caused itself. Daniel Pearl's death tape is the perfect illustration of the end result. It is actually mostly propaganda and screed. It is an obscene blend of lies, fabrications and outrageous distortions. It intimidates by showing Daniel Pearl being forced to "admit" to being a Jew and making him dwell on his Jewishness. Then at the end, after his head is hacked off and held up as a trophy, a threat scrolls onto the screen. This will be repeated "again and again" it promises. That phrase, "again and again" forms a mocking echo to the Israeli Slogan "never again".

In much the same way that Hitler told the world what he had planned in Mein Kampf the Islamofascists are being very honest with us.

In direct opposition to the Catholic Church's current position that faith and reason are not in opposition. Their little to do with Galileo seems to have cured them (mostly) of their opposition to science.

This conflict has been going on for a very long time. In fact we use Greek names for the opposing philosophies. Dionysian and Apollonian. Ecstasy vs. Reason.

My position in all this? I get my ecstasy from reason. Much more difficult than ecstasy alone. So much more worthwhile. It also avoids embarrasment when reality does not match faith. Since there can be no contradiction in my philosophy, then I simply modify my faith. The faith based people have no such luxury and thus are bound to smash into the wall of reason. Me? I prefer to brush lightly against it and change my course.

American Thinker weighs in on the subject of Islam's embrace of faith over rationality.

Muslim reformers of the past century - such as Mohammed Abdu, Refaa Al-Tahtawi, Taha Hussein, Ali Abdel-Razik and others - sought and unfortunately failed to modernize Islam. The militants, led by Hassan Al-Banna and his partisans, won this battle, and forced their vision to "Islamize" modernity on the people. They created a certain pattern - a mindset and a lifestyle - and promoted it as "The Valid Islam," Al Islam al-Sahih.

They resorted to seduction and fear to impose this pattern on their societies, and made sure to attach an "Islamic" label to each and every aspect, with the clear implication that other patterns were deemed non-Muslim and illegitimate. An increasingly wide array of things fall under this valid pattern: the Islamic dress, the Islamic banks, the Islamic economy, the Islamic education, the islamization of science, media and the judiciary system, the application and enforcement of Islamic laws, the widespread dissemination of the fundamentalist culture, the promotion of Islamic medicine and the Prophet's medicine, the expansion of Islamic organizations, the marginalization of the national identity of the state in favor of Islamic nationalism, and the islamization of daily vocabulary and political terms (mobayaa, welaya, shura, thawabet al-oma, etc..).

As a result, the Muslim countries wasted their chance to embrace modernity, opting instead to import a shallow veneer of modernity from the West; and they became idle consumers of the products of civilization, with no contributions to offer.

The two main political parties in America mirror this age old conflict. The left aligning (mostly) with the Dionysian and the right aligning (mostly) with the Apollonian. Which is why these days I side mostly with the right where reason has more sway, despite the frequent lapses.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Recent but reliable reports that Al Gore's speeches may be triggering snowstorms and record low temperatures (a still unfolding natural phenomenon known as "Global Coldening") have reminded me of an inconvenient truth about Al Gore -- the criticisms over the years that he's stiff and cold. I understand he's been working at making himself warmer, but if this recent picture is any indication, he still has a long way to go:

OK, there's at least an attempt at humor there. The globe floating above him in the evergreen trees is a wonderful prop. But instead of rising to an occasion which cried out for some fun, he just stands there like the same old stiff and wooden Al Gore. Regardless of whether the goal was to depict him as the world's steward, or just to show him having fun with a globe, either way it fails, because if you look carefully, you'll see that he's allowing the world to fall into someone else's hands! (If you really think about it, that's neither funny or reassuring.)

Normally, I don't like to tell politicians how to entertain, or entertainers how to politick. However, this situation cries out for some sort of treatment. Maybe the phrase is "product placement." Whatever. Al clearly needs help of some kind here, and if I can't offer help where help is needed, what kind of public service am I providing?

Because I don't like to complain about a problem without offering a solution, I thought I would contrast Al Gore's globe-handling with that of the great Charlie Chaplin. Here was a guy who knew how to behave around a globe. He didn't let it sit there while he stared at the camera with a slight Mona Lisa-type smile. On the contrary, he interacted with it.

Please bear in mind that what follows was Chaplin's comedy, and I do not mean to suggest or imply that Gore (whether he means to be a comedian or not) is in any way comparable to either Charlie Chaplin or the fictitious character the latter was portraying. The goal here is simply to offer a few acting tips to Al Gore, and he can take them or leave them.

My point is that if you're trying to show the world you save it, you have to show the world you mean business -- even if you're trying to be funny and light about it. Standing there stiffly while the world falls into the hands of a stranger is neither meaning business by taking control nor is it funny and light.

Contrast that with the Chaplin approach. Right away, he zeroes in and transfixes the globe with a serious stare -- as if to let it know he means business!

In today's parlance, the above is called "thinking globally." (But I'm sure Gore understands that, so I'll skip the pedantic lecture.)

However, as Chaplin made clear, it's not enough to just think globally. The goal is also to change the world! Which means you have to show the world that you know how to handle it!

That you can stand up to the task of taking the world in your hands:

That you're willing to sit down in order to work the world's problems out:

That no matter what it takes, you'll really get down!

And if the business of the world requires it, you won't hesitate to butt in:

Personally, I prefer a more hands-off approach where it comes to building a better world, but I heard that Hillary pays conservative bloggers not to run her ads, so I'm hoping that Gore will pay me not to help him anymore.

(Seriously, isn't being paid not to do stuff part of the American way?)

MORE: Lest I be accused of unaccountability (or worse, hypocrisy) by attempting to hold Al Gore to a standard higher than that which I impose on myself, I went out into the freezing weather and tried to hold the whole world in my hands.

As you can see, it is not an easy task:

In this weather, it's more than inconvenient.

It's downright unsustainable!

A. Jacksonian left an interesting comment on my piece "Clouds" posted at Classical Values. It is a fascinating look at magnetism, war, global climate, and impending doom from natural causes. I'm posting it here in full. And, thanks A.J. for your always interesting posts and comments.

====

Actually, there have been numerous magnetic field reversals in Earth's history. The fact that this was so was discovered due to WWII subsurface magnetic readings taken to try and find U-Boats. Once all the data got put together, identical stripes of different magnetic polarity could be seen on either side of the mid-Atlantic. This was one of the great insights that led to the first International Geophysical Year and the culmination of data from core samples on magnetism and radioactivity that led to the discovery that these stripes were coincident at the same time in history indicating they were placed at the same time. The mid-Atlantic ridge was analyzed and folks realized that new material was being forced out there and it contained the same magnetic orientation and strength as the surroundings as the rock cooled. The very first tape recorder had been discovered, save the 'tape' was oceanic basalt. Global studies of similar rocks pointed to the exact same magnetic orientation at the same time and the same changes over time. This has proven to be a long term key for analyzing rock strata, and measuring the orientation and radioactivity not only places it in time but in position.

From all of that continents now were seen as in motion... well, all geological plates were seen as in relative motion to each other based on sub-plate movement. All from trying to find U-Boats in WWII. That information required that we change how we look at the planet and ask it different questions and we found different answers, and so our view of the planet changed and changed again so we could understand what the rock
was telling us.

Some magnetic flip-flops have been coincident with extinctions (large and small) but not all of them. Changes in background cosmic ray incidents is an indicator from the solar system's relative position within the galaxy and who its neighbors have been. That has also varied over time some changes, up and down, coincident with extinctions, some not. Continents coming together to form supercontinents and their break-ups have been a high, nearly 1:1 indicator of extinction events as habitats suddenly disappear or appear both having long-term impacts on life in those ecozones.

Volcanic activity can play a part, especially those large caldera events at Yellowstone, Toba and elsewhere, as they release large amounts of particulates into the upper atmosphere. The idea for for the amounts was put forward in a good way by a movie on the History Channel. Consider the ejecta to Mt. St. Helens to be a sugar cube. Tambora was a box of sugar cubes (the volcano responsible for the 'year without a summer'). Yellowstone is a 1m x 1m x 1m packing crate of sugar cubes. That gets pretty close to the scale differences involved for relative particulate output, save the actual crate is a bit bigger than the 1 meter cube. Yellowstone, itself, goes through different cyclic events, where it will rest for hundreds of thousands of years and then erupt and continue with smaller-scale, continuous eruptions for a long period and then go quiet. Considering that this same hotspot laid down the meters thick basaltic rock seen in Oregon and Washington States, that is nothing to be sneezed at.

We haven't even started in on the real disasters that can hit North America and will, sooner or later. Cyclicity and periodicity tell us that these things will return, sooner or later, as the geophysics behind them has not changed for them. Global Warming? Heh. Yellowstone! Because once it hits, it continues on for thousands if not tens of thousands of years... did it before and will do it again. And that will assuredly change climates on the planet... I wouldn't suggest trying to 'laser lance' it either. That would be like taking a can of soda, putting it in a paint shaking machine for half an hour, heating it up to couple of hundred degrees and *then* trying to put a small hole in the container. Not a good idea, at all, really. Just like trying to build flood protection on land that is sinking...

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Commenter linearthinker reminds me in an e-mail that I have not covered the CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) aspect of the Guilford College fight. Let me rectify the oversight.

Here is a bit of what CAIR had to say on 26 Jan. '007

"At approximately 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 20, 2007, an altercation took place in Bryan Hall on the Guilford College campus involving physical violence and alleged verbal abuse. Such behaviors have no place at Guilford and will not be tolerated in a community that values the peaceful resolution of conflict."

"It is important that political and religious leaders in North Carolina speak out against the kind of hate that apparently motivated this attack," said CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. "The alleged bias motive of the assailants clearly warrants the intervention of the FBI in this case."

CAIR, America's largest Islamic civil liberties group, has 32 offices and chapters nationwide and in Canada. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

You don't hear much fron the Anti-Defamation League (a Jewish organization) about it since they first came out with their statement supporting the Palestinians.

I think the silence is because they have figured out the Palestinians probably initiated the attack.

The low down on CAIR is that it looks like a terrorist supporting organization.

On December 18, 2002, Ghassan Elashi, founding board member of CAIR-Texas, a founder of the Holy Land Foundation, and a brother-in-law of Musa Abu Marzook , was arrested by the United States and charged with, among other things, making false statements on export declarations, dealing in the property of a designated terrorist organization, conspiracy and money laundering. Ghassan Elashi committed his crimes while working at CAIR, and was found Guilty.

CAIR Board Member Imam Siraj Wahaj, an un-indicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing, has called for replacing the American government with an Islamic caliphate, and warned that America will crumble unless it accepts Islam.

So what is CAIR's goal for America? Here is their advice to Muslims who stay in America.

"Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting, keeping Mosques open so anyone can come and learn about Islam. If you choose to live here, you have a responsibility to deliver the message of Islam ... Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."

General Patton of WW2 fame had a few things to say about the Muslim world.

"To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Muhammad and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing" -- General George S. Patton: The War as I Knew It

For more on the history of the case: Guilford College

Cross Posted at Power and Control

In an article I found in the back pages of today's Inquirer, Jesse Jackson spoke at an AIDS conference in Philadelphia yesterday where he criticized pharmaceutical companies for their emphasis on AIDS treatment instead of a cure:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking at an AIDS conference in Philadelphia, yesterday called for more funding for research to find "a cure" for AIDS.

The civil rights activist was particularly critical of pharmaceutical companies that make drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. He urged the hundreds of medical professionals and AIDS activists in his audience at the National Conference on African-Americans and AIDS to buy stock in drug companies and attend stockholders' meetings to push for "a cure," instead of the cocktail of drugs used to treat the AIDS virus.

"They may have an interest in more medicine and less cure," Jackson told the conference at the Sheraton Philadelphia City Center Hotel, which is next door to GlaxoSmithKline's U.S. headquarters. "Ultimately we don't want the medicine. We want the cure."

Since 1987, when the first HIV treatment was approved, the medical arsenal has grown to more than 26 drugs. Although the drugs can have serious side effects, combinations of therapies have turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic illness.

Jackson did not mention that the conference, now in its ninth year, is partly underwritten by some pharmaceutical companies. GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer are among the major sponsors of Minority Healthcare Communications Inc. in Fogelsville, Pa., the nonprofit health-education organization that produces the conference.

I'm not sure exactly who Jackson means by "we," but I think almost anyone infected with AIDS would prefer a cure to an extended treatment regimen consisting of a daily "cocktail" of half a dozen or more drugs of unknown long-term efficacy.

I don't think a cure is as likely as a vaccine, and I think one of the most interesting areas of research ought to involve mapping out the exact mechanism which allows some Northern Europeans to be immune to AIDS. For what I think is a combination of reasons, this selective natural immunity is not getting the attention it should.

High on the list of reasons is, I believe, the moral disruption which might be caused by a public perception that a deadly venereal disease might be racially selective.

A shame, really, because through genetic engineering, the mutation which causes selective European immunity could be mapped out and marketed as a vaccine. If this theory pans out, the rest doesn't take much imagination:

...some people have a mutation where we are missing the CCR5 protein is missing on some, or all, of macrophages. If you don't have the CCR5 protein, then the AIDS virus can't enter your cells. This mutation is most common among the people in Northern Europe. 14% of Swedish people have the mutation, and so are missing the CCR5 docking protein in some, or all, of their white blood cells - and have some degree of immunity to the virus that causes AIDS. But as you head geographically south and east, the mutation becomes less common. It's present in about 4.5% of Greeks, about 2% of Central Asians, and it's totally absent in people from East Asia, from Africa, and from Native Americans. These people are genetically very susceptible to the AIDS virus.

What do I mean by moral disruption? It is my theory that sexual morality only masquerades as right and wrong. Concepts like "absolute truth" (tough to apply to genital functions regardless of how hard "we" try) are the window dressing. From a social engineering perspective, what counts is that people don't do things like get pregnant without having families to support the kids, acquire fatal communicable diseases, or even freak out because they cannot go about their business without being distracted by high-profile public displays of sexuality. Whether these displays are disgusting, appalling, titillating or irresistibly attractive isn't the point. It's the old "don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses" rule.

This is why people from the "old school" of morality once considered the idea two men walking down the street holding hands infinitely more threatening than thousands of closeted gay men screwing discreetly in their bedrooms. Women being able to avoid pregnancy by simply taking a daily pill was infinitely more threatening than unwanted pregnancy, because it gave birth to new social meme that pregnancy resulted not from immoral behavior, but by neglecting to take a pill.

It's not morality, but order. The two often get confused. I think that right now America is so steeped in cultural morality of the identity politics variety that the idea of a sexually transmitted but racially discriminatory disease is just too much.

For starters, how might a leader like Jesse Jackson speak to such a disease?

There was a bit more to his remarks than the Inquirer reported, and a local ABC news affiliate provided a closer look:

Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke in Center City with more than 5 hundred health care providers who work with people who have HIV and AIDS. They're at a national conference on African Americans and AIDS.

African Americans make up 13-percent of the U.S. population.

But according to a Kaiser Foundation study they represent 50-percent of the countries newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases. The rate of new AIDS cases among African Americans is 10 times higher than among whites.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson said, "There's a certain sadness because expanding HIV is preventable."

Conference organizers blame misinformation, drug abuse and cultural inhibitions that lead to "down low" or hidden male-to-male sexual activity by men who also have sex with women. Some of that behavior can reportedly be traced to overcrowded jails.

Another factor is simply risky sexual behavior.

"Clearly more loose behavior leads to more loose results. And what we're being fed through mass media is that sex without love is alright," said Jackson.

I think it might be more accurate to say that over the past few decades it has become possible to decouple sex from love, that many people have done that, and that the media reflects it. To what extent it "fuels" it, I do not know. Individual people may be fueling it themselves.

I for one hate rap music. Even more do I hate gangster rap. But when I ran a nightclub in the early 90s, I was under relentless pressure to have rap shows. I resisted the pressure to the extent I could, not out of any genuine sense of moral outrage, but because I didn't want violence or rioting in the club, and because I just plain didn't like the music.

But suppose I had been running a record and CD store. Not selling rap music would have been economic suicide. Who's fault is that? The media? Somehow, I don't think so. The media simply reflect what's there, and if some idiot wants to drive around emitting gangster rap from a $1500 car stereo, no one is making him do it. Yet at the same time there are countless entrepreneurs competing with each other to sell the idiot the equipment which will annoy the general public and probably damage his hearing for life. (I'm just waiting for someone to sue the recording/electronics industry for hearing loss!)

Comments like Jackson's remind me of why Islam is spreading in the black community.

How this will be affected once the demagogues realize that AIDS is a racist disease, I don't know.

But morality always seems to lag behind scientific knowledge.

Science couldn't care less about the morally disruptive news that white immunity to AIDS has roots in the Black Death:

According to the researchers the mutation is absent in Africa and throughout East Asian populations and evident in varying amounts across Europe. O'Brien explains:

'It was present as high as 15% in Scandinavia; it was less in Europe, about 10% in France, Germany and England. Further south it was 5% and in Saudi Arabia and Sub-Saharan Africa it was 0%.'

Believing that this 'genetic drift' was probably not random, the scientists looked to their history books to find out when this mutation was last prevalent in human history and what conditions may have favoured it.

Interestingly, the Black Death hit the Islamic world a lot harder than it did Christendom

Although the devastation the Plague brought to Europe in terms of lives lost was immense, the Islamic world arguably suffered more, because plague epidemics kept returning to the Islamic world up to the 19th century. Muslim populations thus never recovered from the losses suffered because of the Plague, a demographic shift that arguably helped Europe to surpass the Islamic world's previous superiority in scholarship.

In Christian Europe, people believed that the plague was punishment from God for the sins of all Christians. The Christian doctrine of original sin also factored into the European view of the plague, because they believed that the disease was God's punishment to humans for having been born in sin. Also, death was always treated as punishment in Christian Europe, and the idea that the widespread death caused by the plague might be due to something other than God's wrath was not considered.

Islamic theology held different views about the plague. Muslims agreed with Christians that the disease was the work of God, but they did not necessarily view it as a punishment. Muslims preserved their belief in a compassionate and merciful God, and thus they believed that death from the plague was an offer of martyrdom from God.

I want to return to Jackson's complaint about the message that "sex without love is alright."

Why should the evil media stop there? How about sex without passion? Sex without people? Cyber sex? What if pornography is taking the people out of the sex? What if sex bots and droids became so real you might just prefer them to the real thing?

Or is it immoral to remark that you can't get AIDS from a robot?

I don't think there's anything written in any religious text about it, so the moral arguments will have to be found elsewhere.

(No, I will not ask Leon Kass!)

NOTE: My thanks to Clayton Cramer for his earlier comment he left about AIDS immunity.

Giuliani is by far the most formidable, and most dangerous, Republican candidate...

So says Glenn Greenwald, who seems not to like Rudy Giuliani very much:

As this excellent and comprehensive article documents, Giuliani is an "authoritarian narcissist" -- plagued by an unrestrained prosecutor's mentality -- who loves coercive government power (especially when vested in his hands) and hates dissent above all else. He would make George Bush look like an ardent lover of constitutional liberties. He is probably the absolute worst and most dangerous successor to George Bush under the circumstances, but his political talents and prospects for winning are being severely underestimated.

Reading through the above carefully, I get the impression Greenwald thinks he has found his new calling. While he sounds especially irate about Giuliani dressing in drag (discussed infra), I think the real problem is that he thinks Rudy can beat Hillary.

I have a feeling this may be why Greenwald has moved onward and upward to join the Hillary forces at Salon.com!

Sheesh.

No one's even been nominated, but it already feels like an election.

And it's not too early to diagnose a clear case of Giuliani Derangement Syndrome!

That's what Newsmax.com says:

....the Secret Service was notified when a blogger posted a rant on one of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign Web sites calling for Clinton's death.

I'd like to know how we know that whoever posted this was a blogger? Does he have a blog?

Or are we supposed to take Newsmax.com at its word?

Perhaps we're supposed to take the New York Post at its word, for they have echoed the same charge against a "blogger."

February 12, 2007 -- A blogger's rant calling for Hillary Rodham Clinton's death - and posted on one of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign Web sites yesterday - came as her security has been being dramatically beefed up, The Post has learned.

[...]

The sick note, which misspelled Obama's first name as "Barrack," also blasted the Illinois senator, saying he's a "politician who hasn't had experience wrestling in filth with the great whores in Washington."

The anonymous note came as new details emerged about the former first lady's U.S. Secret Service detail - which has received a major boost since the New York senator declared her bid for the White House on Jan. 20.

The increase - from three or four federal agents to as many as a dozen - took place in recent weeks, before the Web posting.

Asked about the posting, Clinton aides said it was forwarded to the Secret Service, but they wouldn't comment further.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said, "This is obviously a horrible abuse of the openness of our Web site. We took it down because the content was deplorable and has no place in the discussion."

Unless someone has some evidence that it was posted by a blogger, I think it borders on being a smear against blogging.

Ignorance by Newsmax I can see, but the Post ought to know better than to confuse commenters (much less anonymous commenters) with bloggers.

Coupled with the news of Amanda Marcotte's resignation, this makes me wonder whether I might have been onto something when I speculated about whether there's a movement to discredit bloggers.

(I'll have to think about Franklin's hang together or hang separately stuff.)

UPDATE: ABC knows better than to call an anonymous commenter a "blogger," but they still title the threat a "Blog Rant."

Is it necessary to even point out that anyone -- anyone -- could have posted that comment? I think it's disingenous to call it a "blog rant." If someone posted a comment like that here I'd delete it as soon as I saw it, but to call it a comment "blog rant" would be laughable if people weren't taking it so seriously.

MORE: Chris Bowers (with whom I nearly always disagree) says something I think may be relevant here:

By speaking directly to the members of the electorate who are the most politically active and intense consumers of news, we can wield a lot of influence while simultaneously not playing the idiotic games of "gotcha" and faux outrage that have been used to try and sway low-information voters for the past several decades (no wonder low-information voters are dismissive of politics, considering how stupid people often assume they are). In essence, we focus on the middle tier of influence in American politics--the several million political activists--rather than just focusing on how the few thousand elites in the top tier are portrayed to the tens of millions of low information voters in the bottom tier. It is a type of triangle that explains the reach of blog power just as Peter Daou's triangle explained its limits. I can see how established consultants who are used to bypassing the middle tier altogether would want to fire junior staffers out of fear that it will result in backlash from the bottom tier. I can also see how many long time residents of the elite tier would view something as influential as the netroots as potentially vulnerable to attacks in the same way that actual members of the elite tier are vulnerable. After all, if you ignore the middle tier for so long, you might forget how it operates. The truth is that we are a different entity entirely, as our numbers and our activism allow us to boast influence without the baggage of name recognition.

How sweet it is. Being both powerful and anonymous is a beautiful thing.

If the rightie bloggers can be counted on to go after the leftie bloggers (and vice-versa), it makes the job easier.

"Bill and I have beaten them before and we will again."

As I said, I think Hillary is more Lurleen Wallace than Margaret Thatcher.

Of course, if she wants to polish up her queen act, she could start using the royal "we" -- as in not amused.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the above might be disrespectful.

(For starters, the queen has no power.)

So Cal Lawyer of The Southern California Law Blog is hosting this week's RINO Sightings Carnival. Topics include the futile nature of Israel's nuclear arsenal, Yemen (a god-awful place if ever there was one), McCain, Giuliani, Hillary, and even the Daylight Savings bug. Yes, the last post by BloodSpite involves some good advice about the 3/11 bug and your computer. (Damn! Until now I never realized that time change is analogous to climate change, and it's increasingly obvious that time itself is now being all screwed up because of human activity!)

They're all good posts, and So Cal Law Blog is a great blog, so go check it out!

I question the timing!

Of what?

Of Global Warming, for starters. The main reason I'm a skeptic is because I was in college at UC Berkeley in 1972 -- back when they still had global cooling. Professor Clemens of the UC Berkeley Department of Paleontology had it all laid out in graphs and charts, and he maintained that not only were we still in the Ice Age (which consisted of lots of up and down periods of glaciation), but that we were headed into another cooling blip -- meaning the glaciers would return. Back in those days, only geologists and paleontologists really cared, because it wouldn't have occurred to anyone that we humans had control over the climate.

Average temperatures go up and they go down, like stock prices. Periods of glaciation -- traditionally referred to by the European names of Gunz, Mindel, Riss, Wurm -- came and went along with the sheets of glacial ice they brought.

Anyone can draw a graph of what has gone on during any period of time, but over what period? Do we chart the Dow average for an hour, a day, a week, a year, or over the life of the stock market? Is it going up, or is it going down?

And the stock market is easy -- because we know exactly when it started, and there are detailed records. Climate has existed on this planet for billions of years, so to declare that the planet is "warming" is misleading without some reference point.

What I want to know is, Global Warming in relation to what? The reference point seems to be the beginning of the "Industrial Era" -- a period I tend to associate with Charles Dickens and Victorian soot. Considering geologic time, what makes that tiny little blip in human history so damned special? Man has been around for thousands of years before Dickens, and hundreds of thousands of years before that in uncivilized form, and so what? Man is so insignificant in terms of geologic time as to be of no consequence at all. Global Warming is based on an unproven assumption that recent human measurements which mean nothing in the context of geologic time are meaningful when seen in the context of couple of centuries. The only reason centuries seem important is because of the human lifespan. We live less than a century, so the century is seen as a measuring stick. If we lived for 500 years, I suspect a fifty year trend wouldn't be seen the same way.

Equally unproven is the assumption that humans are responsible for a geologically infinitesimal trend. I think that picking the Industrial Era is a classic case of post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, and I have long suspected that carbon dioxide was selected as the cause with the specific goal in mind of asserting an anthropogenic cause. Because there's no quantitative proof of precisely how much CO2 it would take to actually warm the planet by increasing the Greenhouse effect, the proof takes the form of simply coupling higher C02 levels with a slight rise in temperature, and asserting that because man caused the former, he therefore caused the latter.

The chart I'd really like to see is the development of Global Warming hysteria in relation to the development of anti-Bush hysteria. I suspect there's a direct relationship.

I'm not alone in questioning the timing. Via Pajamas Media, Pieter Dorsman wonders "how global warming made it to the center of the political agenda and why it has become such an incredible success story, despite the real questions being raised about the science underpinning it all." And like me, he suspects that climate hysteria may be linked more to politics -- in particular the 2000 election results -- than to climate.

And while many on the right still rejoice over Al Gore's defeat in 2000, one has to wonder where climate change would be on the agenda today had the former veep captured the White House that year.

At the risk of sounding like a hopless relativist, I have to wonder why relativism has all of a sudden become such a profound evil.

I can remember when lots of things were relative, and relativism was a useful tool in science. We're all familiar with absolutism (normally associated with politics or religious fundamentalism), but I can't remember ever seeing as much absolutist thinking in science as I am now seeing in the case of global warming and greenhouse gases.

Or has scientific relativism become relative to the absolutism of the day?

I propose we call the past seven years the Bush Warming Period.

UPDATE (02/13/07): Tim Blair has documented a new scientific truth -- to wit, "the terrible connection between Al Gore and global coldening"

Days after Al Gore went to New York City last month to deliver a speech blasting the Bush administration's environmental policy and touting the dangers of global warming, the National Weather Service reported record low temperatures across the region.

As a matter of fact, it's snowing in Philadelphia right now.

Coincidence?

You were hoping for an erudite discussion of one of the works of Aristophanes? Not today. Instead we are going to look at how clouds and cosmic rays influence our weather and more importantly, climate.

Every one who has looked into the subject knows that climate science is no longer much about science. It is about politics.

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months' time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

Well we have a new candidate. Cosmic rays. Or the lack of them actually.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun's brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun's magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark's idea -- apart from its being politically incorrect -- was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

In Global Cooling I looked into how the sun powers our short term climate cycles. Longer term climate cycles appear to be driven by orbital mechanics such as the roundness of Earth's orbit around the sun and global wobble which changes the angle the Earth presents to the sun. Those are well known and are called Milankovitch Cycles.

There is another factor which needs attention. The Earth's magnetic field waxes and wanes. Currently we are in a waning phase. It has declined about 10% in the last 160 years.

I suppose that will give "the sky is falling" folks something new to be scared to death about and some new reason for them to declare that we have to raise taxes to have the money to fix the problem.

Some things never change.

You can read more about clouds, cosmic rays, and climate change at The U.K. Telegraph

Update: 13 Feb '007 1053z

Donalds Sensing discusses the issue with lots of charts, graphs, and pretty pictures of the sun.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Is Giuliani an excessively macho man? And if so, do his GOP supporters have a "girlish infatuation" with him? Glenn Reynolds raises the question, with a link to Ann Althouse's discussion of how the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman frames this apparently serious issue:

"The GOP has morphed from a party that reveres limited government to a party that is girlishly infatuated with executive authority."

Chapman's second assumption is whether the GOP is in fact "girlishly infatuated" with executive authority, and whether that infatuation accurately targets Giuliani. I'm not sure accuracy is the goal so much as insinuation -- for this is a political hit piece in which Chapman does his best to paint a picture of Giuliani as a freedom-hating macho strong man, and the GOP as sycophantic girlish admirers. Explains Althouse (who is amused, but not buying), Chapman's analysis is "sexual imagery in political analysis":

See, their masculinity is really feminine, because when they like a really masculine character like Rudy Giuliani, they're acting like girls (or gay guys) lusting after a macho man. I love sexual imagery in political analysis. There's also a lot of talk about Shakespeare in the linked piece. I love literary crap in political analysis too.

He's also leaving out a key piece of sexual imagery in his political analysis, and he's been around long enough that naturally I wonder whether Chapman is making some sort of insinuation about this notorious picture:

Yes, I'm afraid it's Giuliani, and there's no getting around it, as it's all over the Internet.

I found it at a conspiracy site which describes the "macho fest" that went on:

In his drag persona of 'Rudia', Giuliani went on to dance, to strip behind a screen, and to impersonate Marilyn Monroe's breathy singing to John F. Kennedy of 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President'. He convinced four of his five deputy mayors to attend in drag as well."

--Cindy Friedman, NewsWrap, Queer Resources Directory, "THIS WAY OUT Program #467" March 8th, 1997

Geez! Talk about enabling perversion and degeneracy! And on top of that, ridiculing a dead Kennedy! No wonder that picture has caused him no end of grief with the conservative wing of the GOP, especially the humorless freepers like this commenter:

Liberal Rudy lovers dismiss the dress photos posted in some of these threads as if they were some sort of ad hominem attack. What they fail to accept is that some of the photos were taken at a fundraiser for a radical gay group. In addition, he agreed to appear on the pornographic gay Showtime series "Queer as Folk" in drag to raise money for a project of that same gay group. His repeated public appearance in drag does give one pause before casting a vote for him as it says something of his lack of character and the dignity required in a President. The reasons that he appeared in drag say a great deal about his support for the radical gay agenda.

If it was a front running Democrat candidate who had this record of drag appearances and support for radical gay groups then just about every FReeper would be condemning him. But because he has an (R) after his name, you see many FReepers making the lamest excuses for his shameful behavior and issue position.

I mean, we wouldn't want anyone to think macho man Giuliani might have an irreverent and ballsy sense of humor, would we? So, the insinuation is a wink-wink to those who have seen the picture, as well as an attempt to ridicule Republicans who Chapman believes are clueless dummies. Sorry, but this is the Internet, and that kind of concealment no longer works.

Ironically, I think Giuliani has more balls than Chapman imagines, and I agree with Ann Althouse's characterization of his tone:

Hey, no fair nominating such a strong candidate!

You don't believe me? Try it.

I'm far too much of a coward to ever do something like that in this day and age -- even if Giuliani and his macho henchmen paid me!

But I will say this: in terms of humor and courage, I don't think Hillary's pants are comparable.

Whether she'll ever be the macho man that Guiliani's accused of being is highly debatable.

But it's not as if her party hasn't had an occasional girlish infatuation.

Or sense of humor:

At least, I'm pretty sure that was humor.

(It's all been a long time ago.)

MORE: I should probably add that when I said "humorles Freepers" I didn't mean to imply that all Freepers are humorless. Far from it. Nor did I mean to suggest that Giuliani's henchmen are all macho men. There's definitely humor in both camps (and possibly a few good macho girlie men, even if Google doesn't think so).

I am by trade a designer of aircraft electrical power systems (among other things including laptops). The amount of electrical power on an aircraft is strictly limited. So what does an aircraft system do (formerly there were engineers aboard all aircraft to handle the job, that task is now fully automated) to keep the power flowing? The system switches off expendable loads. First to get dropped are the food preparation loads like refrigerators, ovens, and coffee makers - which may delay food service a little, but otherwise passengers hardly notice. Then comes cabin loads like laptop charger outlets. Entertainment systems would be next. Cabin lighting. And, so forth.

The aircraft electrical system does not need to be designed for the maximum possible load, because loads can be controlled.

Our current terrestrial power systems are not so well controlled. You turn on a switch and you expect the lights to come on. Your refrigerator says it needs a cooling cycle and it turns on without asking permission and stays on until the end of its cycle.

We already have the beginning of a more integrated load management systems with what are called interruptable contracts for electrical delivery. During peak load time those loads are shut off for short intervals in order to match demand with supply. These loads are usually in the megawatt range and often in the multi-megawatts, the transactions are normally handled by phone so the plant engineers involved can make the desired changes in demand.

Sietze van der Sluis, an engineer in the Netherlands, wants to expand that idea.

Refrigerated warehouses might soon be used to store not just food, but gigawatts of electricity. A plan dreamt up in the Netherlands could see the giant fridges acting as massive batteries. They would buffer swings in supply and demand from electricity created from renewable sources.

The idea seems simple. Say you lowered the temperature of all large coldstores in Europe by just 1°C during the night when electricity demand is low, then let it rise 1°C by switching them off during the day when demand is at peak. The net effect would be that the warehouses would act as as batteries -- potentially storing 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy -- and the food wouldn't melt.

That's the calculation of Sietze van derSluis, head of refrigeration and heating technology at The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in Delft.

Such a system would make it possible for smaller discrete loads (such as large cold storage plants) to take advantage of their interruptable nature to balance supply and demand. Also feasible is cooling a few degrees colder at night than normal and letting the system warm up during the day. Thus shifting at least part of the load from daytime when usage is high to night when the utilities would actually prefer a larger load (it makes the system easier to control).

Then add in variable sources like wind and solar voltaic and we have a real winner.

Automated integrated electrical power systems were pioneered on aircraft. That technology is now in the process of being applied to our power grid. It will increase capacity without adding any new wires or generating plants by better matching of supply and demand. Automatically.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Leon Kass has been awe-fully quiet lately, and I've been rather too preoccupied with the demands of mere living to go digging for him. Sometimes I disappoint myself.

But, as a diligent collector of Kassiana, when I unexpectedly stumble across the great man's freshly steaming spoor, well, the whole world seems just a little bit brighter.

A case in point. I found the following profundity (among others), over at Accelerating Futures, Michael Anissimov's transhumanism oriented blog.

"Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, he is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. With adultery almost as American as apple pie, few people appreciate the awe-ful shame of The Scarlet Letter. The sexual abominations of Leviticus - incest, homosexuality, and bestiality - are going the way of all flesh, the second with religious blessings, no less."

Well, those first two sentences are just stupid and wrong. Even if we judge them as mere rhetorical excess. Repeat after me. Stupid. Wrong.

But that last line is the real kicker. Just what is it, exactly, that Dr. Kass thinks we should do about the proliferating sexual abominations of Leviticus? Kill all the queers and furrys? Or, I suppose we could just force them into arranged marriages. Though that seems a tad unfair to their brides-to-be, to say nothing of The Children. Perhaps a life of enforced celibacy in solitary confinement is called for? Because if we lock them all up together, just imagine what mischief they'd get up to. If we're going to do that, we might just as well let them wander around at loose ends. But let me not put words in his mouth. Concentrate rather on those words he's actually said.

Then repeat after me. Stupider. Wronger.

So much for Kass and the Old Testament. Even better, to my mind, is his recent appearance live, on stage, in the heart of our nation's capital. The press of affairs prevented my attending, but Dr. Kass always provides a lively show, and as luck would have it, Julian Sanchez was there, to provide us with a dispassionate and thoughtful analysis...

More or less as I expected, Kass is a master of what (in honor of the late Alan Bloom) I've decided to call Bloombast: The conservative version of that special gift for conjuring a sense that you are in the presence of Profundity--and, indeed, perhaps even asserting as much repeatedly--without actually making a cogent argument or, indeed, pinning down a solitary clear concept...

I was a bit surprised to find that Kass does, however, give the impression of being a serious and, in a sense, intellectually honest fellow who's aware of and troubled by the gaps in his arguments...For various reasons, Kass is at pains to show that our Dignity, whatever it might be, is not reducible to any number of other familiar moral concerns, such as autonomy, experiential well being, equality, and so on...

The key rhetorical trick Kass employs...involves splitting the question into one of our "higher" dignity, which he calls the "dignity of human being" ("being" read as "fully flourishing") and the "lower" dignity of "being human," which is to say, simply existing as a biological member of homo sapiens...

The moralist concerned with coarse culture, say, will be more attuned to the former...Another sort of conservative especially outraged by abortion and stem cell research, on the other hand, may feel a little uneasy about this rather aristocratic conception of dignity (for how much of that does an embryo have?), preferring to insist this is a basic and unalterable property we have just as humans...

Now, watch closely for the sleight of hand. Kass runs through a series of conceptions of the "higher" dignity, beginning with the ancient Greek heroic sort, coming by turns to Kant's ideal, which he critiques (justly enough) as excessively formal...

Let me just interject here that "a series of conceptions" from Leon Kass should probably be taken with a healthy dose of caveat emptor. The totality of his primary source's thought is sometimes, um, lost in translation. Consider his ongoing treatment of Montaigne.

At the same time, though, Kass does say a number of highly plausible things about the higher order mental properties in virtue of which persons might be thought deserving of special moral respect.

On then, to that "lower" dignity. Here...Kass seems acutely aware of how inadequate are any of the accounts one might try to give of a "dignity" rooted just in some kind of biological humanity...

What to do, then? Here, we get a slew of metaphors in service of a spectacular act of Cirque du Soleil isometrics, with biology grounding and supporting the higher mental properties, which in turn reach down to elevate the biology. The circle is squared, the lady made whole: Biological humanity basks in the glow of the higher personhood for which it acts as necessary substrate.

Except, of course, it is just a trick: The lady was never really sawed in half, and no actual miracles occur when she's made whole...the false division he ultimately repudiates was rhetorically necessary to his argument: Whatever semblance of plausibility it picks up along the way depends crucially on the initial posit of a dichotomy. The counterfactual assumption is discharged, but Kass has snuck one of its consequents back into the main derivation. Because only by way of that imagined split between base biology and higher cognition does Kass justify talking about human biology in the abstract, about the physical, genetic species as a natural kind. Then, when they're reunited, he hopes he can skyhook the whole class into the Kingdom of Ends by way of the cognitive capacities we all recognize as morally significant.

Man, oh man. I sure wish I could write like that. But I am a peasant, from a long line of peasants, and such thoughtful criticism is beyond me. I just like to point at Dr. Kass and laugh. Philistinism? Sure. But it's a great big world, with room enough for even the likes of me. As has been pointed out over at Fight Aging!...

Leon Kass may not presently possess the high profile of past years, and these views are not expressed in the mainstream media in quite such volume these days, but the President's Council on Bioethics that was his podium is just as bad now as then - stacked with folk who believe it best to force you to age and die on schedule...These sorts of pro-death viewpoint are rightfully brought out in the sunlight, ridiculed, and squashed.

One does what one can. Kass's vision of human dignity would seem to demand that we wither and die, more or less on schedule. That's a piece of human dignity that would be well worth relinquishing, could we but do it.

H.G. Wells once voiced some thoughts that seem quite appropriate for this topic. He was talking about the human soul, but if you'll just substitute "human dignity" for "soul", you'll find that it still carries the gentleman's meaning quite clearly.

We are constantly being told that the human animal is "degenerating" body and mind, through the malign influences of big towns, that a miasma of "vulgarity" and monotony is spreading over a once refined and rich and beautifully varied world, that something exquisite called the human "soul," which was fomerly quite all right, is now in a very bad way, and that plainly before us, unless we mend our ways and return to medieval dirt and haphazard, the open road, the wind upon the heath, brother, simple piety, an unrestricted birth-rate, spade husbandry, hand-made furniture, honest, homely surgery without anaesthetics, long skirts and hair for women, a ten-hour day for workmen, and more slapping and snubbing for the young, there is nothing before us but nervous wreckage and spiritual darkness.

Man, oh man. I wish I could write like that, too.

In a comment to an earlier post, Darleen Click said something which ought to be read by everyone, and which, if true, ought to chill the bones of every conservative, libertarian, and libertarian conservative, and conservative libertarian:

RE the GOP, IMHO this is why you're seeing the anti-Romney sentiment amongst a lot of Republicans... he IS a solid conservative candidate, but they really don't want to "waste" him against Hill this time around.

Which makes me want to as the unaskable....

Would they prefer a Hillary Clinton presidency to a Giuliani or McCain presidency?

I realize they'll never answer publicly, but if the private answer is "yes," then which side are they "privately" on?

I was over at one of my daily reads Little Green Footballs and came across this Penn and Teller episode of their program Bullshit on Recycling. Very interesting. Very Funny. And laced with profanity. Kind of like Amanda Marcotte only they make you laugh.

So I started noodling around and found a bit they did on the War On Drugs. And how well it is not doing. As you know I rarely post pictures or video clips in order to keep this place low bandwidth friendly. I'm going to make one of my rare exceptions for this one. (about 30 minutes).

These guy are geniuses. And, smart too.

Not Work Safe

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Warning: brutal honesty follows. Reader discretion advised.

A few weeks ago, I wondered whether Barack Obama might be Hillary Clinton's stalking horse. And for the past week, I was so caught up in blogging about the blog scandal in John Edwards's um, campaign, that for a moment I almost forgot that he really isn't a serious candidate.

Even now, I pick up the paper, and it is abuzz with Obama talk. ("Barack the Vote!" blah blah blah.)

I hate to burst the netroots bubble, but I think that if we look at the big picture, this is all silly business. Unless something truly insane and unprecedented happens, Barack Obama has absolutely no chance of winning the nomination for president, nor does John Edwards. My or anyone else's speculations about whether either one is Hillary Clinton's stalking horse are silly.

It does not matter.

What matters is that Hillary Clinton is simply going to be The Candidate.

She doesn't need no stupid stalking horse.

It's been nearly a year since Walter Shapiro opined that for numerous reasons Hillary was an unstoppable juggernaut -- a view that has only become more painfully obvious since then.

Having way more money than anyone else, the best campaign organization headed by the best campaigner in American history, an early start, and name recognition fueled by the immense popularity of a husband who easily could have been elected overwhelmingly to a third term -- these things all not only count, they make her nomination a foregone conclusion.

To me, it's painfully obvious common sense -- and it is of course all borne out by the polls.

Real Clear Politics:

Clinton 37.4
Obama 17.8
Edwards 12.4

American Research Group breaks the race down by state, and in every state Clinton is way ahead of all the rest of the ostensible candidates. Her range is from 35% as high as 41% -- with everyone else in the teens or lower.

Opposition to Hillary amounts to tokenism, puffed up (in my view at least) by a left wing blogosphere out of touch with reality and a very willing media which likes to create the impression that real grassroots democracy is at work.

I would love nothing more than to be proved wrong about this, and if I am, it will be the biggest, longest running error in the history of this blog, as I have predicted a Hillary presidency for years.

In my view, the real clincher for me will prove to be tacit (passive aggressive) support from the Republican right wing, which is divided right now into two pitiful camps. One camp still engages in Hillary Denial, maintaining that she cannot win, that people don't really like her, and thus she will prove easy to beat. (An echo of the Democrats' early Ronald Reagan Denial.)

The other camp is now having the audacity to come out openly in support of Hillary. Not just her campaign, but of a Hillary administration. They think it will revive the right wing.

If you don't believe me about this, read the immortal words of Tom DeLay:

Hillary Clinton as president may be the best thing that ever happened to the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Sure, the right wing think tankers will deny that they want Hillary to win, but I'd say the old fixeroo is in. They don't just want Hillary, they need her.

What really bothers me is what I think is an emerging new development. At the risk of sounding cynical, I think the right wing needs her so badly that they're more and more willing to sit back and forgo mounting a serious conservative challenge to Giuliani and McCain. If a Republican moderate "sellout" loses to Hillary, so much the better. The loss won't be blamed on "the right" (although the truth that will be missed is no right wing Republican could possibly beat her) and the Demonic Red Queen will be on the throne! There's no way that this will be seen as the fault of the "divided and dispirited" conservative GOP wing, and the latter can all happily "regroup" for the inevitable long march "back."

I feel like saying "spare me," but I should spare the clichés.

I think I'm going to need them.

UPDATE: I have to say that despite my darker fears, Giuliani is looking pretty darned good!

But will Tom DeLay and company vote for him?

Not if this interview is any indication.

AND MORE: Giuliani is a Native New Yorker. Normally, this wouldn't count for much. But if he runs against Hillary, he could remind everyone that he's actually from New York. (Where he used to prosecute criminals before his opponent's husband pardoned them....)

While he was at it, I suppose he could also ask whether anyone remembered the FALN terrorist pardons...

Israel says it will break ties with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas if the quartet conditions - the renunciation of violence, recognition of Israel, and adhering to past peace agreements - are not met.

If the new Palestinian unity government is based solely on the agreement reached in Mecca and does not include the three conditions of the Quartet, Israel will cut off its ties with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, officials in Jerusalem warned Sunday morning.

In an interview with Army Radio Sunday morning, Opposition head MK Binyamin Netanyahu agreed with this position.

"Hamas has not moved in the direction of Abbas," Netanyahu said. "Rather, he has moved in the direction of Hamas. If he gives legitimacy to Hamas, then that's bad; if we give legitimacy to Hamas, then that's even worse."

Senior Israeli officials said Abbas's agreement to and appointment of a new government that does not accept the three international benchmarks - recognizing Israel, accepting previous agreements, and renouncing terrorism - made him a partner with Hamas, and called into question future Israeli cooperation with him.

The official said Israel was carefully assessing the situation and waiting to see what the new Palestinian Authority government's guidelines would be before making a final decision. "Maybe we will all be surprised," the official said skeptically.

The agreement, which took the form of a letter written by Abbas, calls upon Hamas to "respect international resolutions and the agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization."

Sources in Jerusalem said that "respecting" agreements is not the same as "accepting them," and that the letter made no mention of recognizing Israel and renouncing terrorism.

The Palestinians cry crocodile tears every time they lose a battle with the Israelis. Yet fighting is their policy. Some people are very hard to educate.

The officials said Israel was "stating very clearly that terror is continuing on a daily basis - the firing of rockets and the smuggling of arms into the Gaza Strip - and has never stopped. And as far as we can tell from the public declarations that were made by Abbas and Hamas after the agreement, the new government does not meet the three international benchmarks."

The only surprise in the offing is when the next war will start. I'm betting on weeks if not days. In fact it may have already started. In the same way that Stupidfada II started. With a riot about the Temple Mount. The Israelis are doing some reconstruction work about 200 feet from the Temple Mount area to fix a collapsed ramp.

....Palestinians have expressed fears that the excavations under way actually are attempts to tunnel under the compound.

Israeli officials reject that accusation and say they are not digging under the compound, or even close to it. They insist that the replacement of a ramp would not harm the holy site about 200 feet away.

"We have nothing to hide, and yet extremist elements with a hateful agenda have cynically provoked violence by deliberately spreading mistruths about what we're doing," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.

You know how it is. Hope springs eternal. This time it will be different. For sure.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The Palestinians have formed a national unity government to avoid a civil war. However, that will not end the internal Palestinian disagreements.

So how does a government wracked with internal disunity create a real national unity?

Start a war with a neighbor.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Arabs in Gaza are holding a memorial service for Saddam.

(IsraelNN.com) Arabs in Gaza on Saturday held a memorial service for Saddam Hussein, marking the 40th day since his hanging, reports in the Arab media said.

"Saddam has won more dignity after his murder, far beyond what his enemies had expected. Poets and writers and the whole Iraqi people have expressed their love and respect for Saddam at all levels and political affiliations," one of the program's organizers was quoted as saying. He revealed that in the last moments of Saddam's life, he was offered an agreement, the terms being recognition of Israel," yet he refused because he had always believed that Palestine is Arab land, " the organizer told reporters.

Many poets read poetry in memory of Saddam at the event, and several speakers delivered speeches praising Saddam and recalling his "good works."

No doubt Saddam will be missed in their communities.

From what I gather since Saddam is gone the going rate is only $2,500. Hardly worth raising a son or daughter for. Times must be tough.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The Palestinians will soon have the long awaited National Unity Government. It will not be renouncing violence, recognizing Israel, or accepting past signed peace agreements. The requirements for restarting aid to the Palestinian Arabs.

Recognition of Israel is one of three conditions set by the "Quartet" of international Middle East negotiators for lifting sanctions on the Hamas-led government. The Quartet also demands Hamas renounce violence and accept existing peace deals.

"The issue of recognition was not addressed at all (in Mecca)," Youssef said.

"In the platform of the new government there will be no sign of recognition (of Israel), regardless of the pressures the United States and the Quartet would exert."

The Quartet -- the United States, Russia, European Union, and the United Nations -- repeated its conditions on Friday for a resumption of aid, but withheld judgment on whether the new government met those conditions.

Youssef said a continuation of the aid boycott imposed after Hamas trounced Fatah in elections last year could lead to more violence in Palestinian Territories.

Well the Palestinians are on the verge of calling off their truce with Israel.

GAZA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- A senior leader of Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) called on Palestinian factions on Saturday to revoke ceasefire with Israel in response to the excavation works near al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

"The Israeli occupation understands nothing but rockets," said Nezzar Rayan, who also urged militant groups to "respond to enemy's violations."

Cross Posted at Power and Control

What was fascinating? An article I read in the Jerusalem Post about prostitution in Israel. The article is about a woman who ran a whorehouse as a police sting operation.

Today, three years after her unpaid eight-month stint as a brothel proprietor, she still recalls not only the social stigma and neighborhood harassment but her family's horror as well. "You can take my picture, but please blur my personal details a little," she says. "I was a pariah in the neighborhood where I lived. Even though the whorehouse itself wasn't nearby, when the news got out, my neighbors were angry. They thought I'd be bringing men home, into my own apartment. That was completely ridiculous, but I don't want to live through all that again."

Her family was disgusted. "My sister is a social worker, so I told her what I was doing," she recounts. "I thought she'd be supportive of my desire to help these women, but when I told her, her face went white. She refused to listen to another word. Even after all the indictments came down, it remains a sore subject."

Sharon - not her real name - is 66 years old and looks more like someone's grandma than a Madam. A graduate of one of the US's most prestigious Ivy League law schools, she served in the US Department of Justice, US Attorney's office, under Robert M. Morgenthau. She also holds a Masters Degree in Tax Law. She made aliya [emigrated to Israel - ed.] in the late 1970s and is now studying for another degree, this one in an offshoot of veterinary medicine.

All jokes about lawyers and whores aside, Sharon apparently excelled in running a house of ill repute in Hadar, the old commercial center of Haifa. "I loved the job," she admits. "I loved taking care of the girls, and enjoyed the business. I'm happy to tell the story because so much misinformation about prostitution exists, especially about the women themselves. I'd like to see some serious reform, and maybe this will help."

Then the opportunity to be a Madam arose. "One of the people I met was a police informant, a really bright guy," she says. "He was trusted by both the criminals and the police. So one day he came to me and said he needed to open and run a whorehouse in an attempt to catch some of the people involved in the infamous 'trafficking in women' trade. Would I consider being the Madam for the sting operation?

"I jumped at the chance. I'd represented a number of prostitutes, and liked the idea of being able to help the women. I agreed."

Most of the women were here illegally from Eastern Europe. "They came from Romania, Kazakhstan and Russia, smuggled in over the Egyptian border, although a few may have had tourist visas. The main point to understand is, these women knew very well why they were coming to Israel. If they didn't exactly relish the work, for them it was a chance to earn pretty good money. On the whole, they'd do a lot better as prostitutes in Israel than they'd do at any job they could get in their home countries. One woman called both her mother and sister in Romania frequently, every time encouraging them both to come to work in prostitution. Compared to life there, they did well in Israel."

There was no compulsion, she notes. "They could leave, get out of the business, anytime they wanted. That wasn't a problem. One woman I really liked had worked in Holland as a prostitute, was imprisoned in Turkey for prostitution, and now was here. Every week, either my partner or I would go with her to the bank where she bought money orders to send to her family in Romania. Both her parents were disabled, and she was their sole support. Another woman had been a literature professor at a university in Russia - she couldn't get a job. Another was very elegant, extremely well dressed. She came because she could make a better living as a prostitute here than there."

In retrospect, how bad is the life of a prostitute? "On the whole, it's probably more pleasant than doing drudge work in a factory, standing on your feet all day. For many, it's better than working in one of the chemical plants. Look at some of the places where people work in Haifa - terrible conditions, fumes, caustic substances, hard work, long hours, low pay. Many women would rather be prostitutes. One thing is for sure: I won't sit in judgment on women who made this choice - their biggest mistake was not being smart enough to choose parents like mine, who saw to it that I had every advantage."

Would you do it again? "You bet," Sharon says with a grin. "In a heartbeat. It was fascinating."

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Here's Coco caught in midair!

Maybe this post should have been titled "Make Love AND War," for that's what the pandemonium resembled earlier today, when Coco was paid a visit by her amorous young suitor Trey.

As soon as the two were let off their leashes, they were moving so fast that it was very difficult to get a picture. It was hot pursuit all the way, although it was tough to tell who was pursuing whom!

Trey had the weight advantage though, as you can tell by the way Coco takes a tumble in this picture:

Coco isn't in heat, but Trey does not seem to realize that.

It took a lot of convincing