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 exam