Yep. No doubt about it. Your President is lying to you. At least according to the Japanese during WW2.

June 29, 2007: U.S. troops have been mystified at how differently the war they fight in Iraq is portrayed by the U.S. media back home. Most just shrug it off as "politics," and yet another reason to not trust what the mass media presents as reliable reporting. But recently, the troops have been passing around an interesting discovery. Namely, that the Japanese psychological warfare effort during World War II included radio broadcasts that could be picked up by American troops. Popular music was played, but the commentary (by one of several English speaking Japanese women) always hammered away on the same points;

1 Your President (Franklin D Roosevelt) is lying to you.

2 This war is illegal.

3 You cannot win the war.

The troops are perplexed and somewhat amused that their own media is now sending out this message. Fighting the enemy in Iraq is simple, compared to figuring out what news editors are thinking back home.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

This is the first chance I've had to check in at all, and I don't have time for much of a post, but I thought I'd try to share a picture.

In Ketchikan, Alaska yesterday I was lucky enough to see a bald eagle sitting on top of an abandoned ramshackle house. Whipping out my camera, I started shooting pictures as quickly as I could, because I thought it would be frightened away. As my luck had it, not only was it not frightened away, but it was soon joined by a mate -- and they didn't seem to mind my attention.

(I suspect they knew I had a blog, and the Fourth is just around the corner.)

From A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes

A settled income has its attractions possibly, but it can never be the fun of an unsettled one. My father was on the Stock Exchange, and wavered between great affluence and extreme poverty. Neither he nor mother had a saving or economical disposition, but lived happily always, neither elated by wealth nor depressed by the lack of it.

We children were never aware of any money troubles, if such they could be called, for they made little difference to us. At no time were we allowed to spread our butter too thick. If things were going well, my father had no thought of enlarging his establishment or otherwise incurring bothers. His idea was that we should all enjoy ourselves a bit more along the old lines. When a shrinkage came we didn't notice much deprivation, or if we did it was put down to the weather...

I suppose it must have been during a lean year, when we were devoid even of servants, that my father would inaugurate some lark. One afternoon he came home and suggested that it was just the sort of day for making toffee...

Barnholt was sent to the grocer close by for 'a pound of his worst butter'. All grins, Barnholt flew forth on his errand. The grocer was annoyed at such a request, but, as Barnholt pointed out to him, if he had a best butter he must have a worst...

Another time it was a Welsh rabbit that my father had a mind for...Mother hovered around, shaking her head, prophesying indigestion and the doctor. But she ate her share and wished it had been bigger.

The best of these impromptu feasts was a positive shoal of sprats that my father came home with one evening.

'They're practically alive,' said he, 'and they were almost giving them away in Farringdon Market. Now, Mary, bring out your biggest frying-pan and some dripping, make up the fire, and you boys put the plates to warm. You shall have some fish on them before you know where you are.'

And lo, it was so. There was a sizzling and a tossing, and soon the crisp little fish were tumbling on to our outstretched plates, while mother was cutting bread and butter as fast as she could. I have had elegantly dressed sole at a grand dinner, salmon straight from the Dart, trout fresh from a Welsh stream, and perch that I caught myself in a Canadian river, but no fish has ever had the magic quality of those sprats 'given away' in London and cooked by my father.

From A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes

Londoners have no neighbors. During our fifteen years in the one house we never had the slightest acqaintance with our 'semi-detached', nor with the people round, although we knew several by sight and gave them nicknames. A very few became known to us through the vicar, the school-master, and the doctor...

Among the frequenters of the house was a young man named Arthur Collins. Where he came from, or by whom introduced, nobody seemed to know. He cannot have been a friend of the boys. He would look in at all hours and stay endlessly--too shy to go. He had a shock of black hair, a perpetual smile, and nothing whatever to say.

Invariably during his visit he held on his knees a paper parcel, which we all knew to be a present for one of us. Never summoning up courage to give it, he would throw it on the front-door mat as he left. You may think how pleasant this must have been. But we all knew that the present would be a cardboard tidy, or bookmark, or box, ornamented with green ribbon--all his own work.

The house was already littered with these gifts, so that we loathed the sight of them, and his mode of delivery involved a letter of thanks from the unlucky recipient.

He liked to join in any game that was afoot, so long as it was simple, such as dominoes or draughts, but was so good natured that he always let his opponent win. Not that he said so, but we were all aware of it, and could see him making mistakes on purpose.

To poor Arthur we owed our disgust with obtrusively unselfish prople, and our understanding of mother's oft-repeated maxim: 'Please yourself, your friends will like you the better.'

Earlier this month, I posted an excerpt from A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes.
Since then, I've been re-reading it and enjoying it greatly. It's a brief, rambling, and episodic little volume, sedately endearing and unpretentious.

Having enjoyed it, my plan for the next few days is to share that enjoyment with the rest of you. The excerpts I'll present have no particular rhyme or reason to them. They're just conveniently bite-sized anecdotes that I found amusing, or touching, or merely drenched in a pleasant surrogate nostalgia for "Merrie England".

Who knows? Perhaps you'll enjoy them enough that you'll hunt down your own copy. At any rate, best we begin at the beginning...

None of the characters in this book are fictitious. The incidents, if not dramatic, are at least genuine memories. Expressions of jollity and enjoyment of life are understatements rather than overstatements. We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people. It occurred to me to record our doings only because, on looking back, and comparing our lot with that of the children of to-day, we seemed to have been so lucky. In writing them down, however, I have come to realize that luck is at one's own disposal, that 'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so'. Bring up children in the conviction that they are lucky, and behold they are. But in our case high spirits were perhaps inherited, as my story will show.

Roni has more fine art at Underground Studios. He lives in Rockford, Illinois and is a friend of mine.

About the artist.

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

I have made one of my periodic visits to the Netscape blog where today's topic is Anger At the Gas Pump. A topic already covered here. So the topic drifts to Nixon's wage and price freeze.

We have an economic genius who says the policy was really nice but didn't last long enough. farmerman has an answer; a good one too.

Did you like the shortages and gas lines? If we don't want to buy the oil, the Chinese and others will gladly buy it. You libs can try to rewrite history, but you sure can't rewrite the rules of supply and demand.

The price freeze in Venezuela is working out nicely. You cannot by food that cost more than is allowed now. There is a reason for that. All the price controlled food has disappeared from the market shelves.

Price controlled oil in America had the same effect.

It is terrible the way the price of gasoline rises and falls. Except for the fact that you can buy it when you need it. Price stability by government fiat comes at the price of availability.

Economics in one easy lesson:

A woman comes into a butcher shop. She tells the butcher she wants some chickens. But she wants to pay the same price as the butcher across the street advertises in his window. "Your prices are too high", she says. The butcher asks, "Why don't you go across the street for your chickens?" "They haven't got any", she replies.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

My friend Sgt. Mom, from the Daily Brief has an idea and some chapters of a book she wants to get published. She needs your help. I'll let her explain:

So here's the story, of a blogger (me, of course) who wrote a long multi-part essay a couple of years ago about an incident in history which had always intrigued her, and after posting it, some readers were also intrigued, since they had never heard of it before. And one the readers thought it might make an interesting movie proposal, so I did one, which didn't go anywhere except to a friend of that reader about a year later. The friend thought it would be better to write a novel, because movies based on published novels were an easier sell. So, when I got let go from a corporate admin job a year ago, I sat down and wrote a ripping good historical read, based on all the stuff I had written before.

I was obsessed by the original story of the 1844 wagon-train party who were the first to take their wagons over the Sierra Nevada ., two years ahead of the Donner Party, yet who did not loose a member of the party, even though they also were caught in the snow. Since they were the first to discover the Truckee Pass over the mountains, they also met an incredible challenge of establishing a new trail. How did they manage to work together? Who were they, and what sort of experience did they bring to this great venture? And what did they experience, this handful of men, women and children, once they stepped off into the trackless wilderness a hundred and sixty years ago,?

I had come to believe that their story was the sort of story that we needed to rediscover. We need to be reassured that our forbearers were brave, competent people, capable of working together, of looking out for each other, of daring the wilderness, or any other challenge with grace and courage. We need to get back to our stories, and I felt very strongly that this is one of them.

So I went gamboling playfully in the literary trenches for much of the last year trying to interest an agent and/or a publisher. I have now gone through all the Book of Agents and the Book of Publishers Who Deign To Consider Un-Agented Submissions (all both of them) and been rejected. Hey, and it isn't because I suck as a writer, either. Everyone who has read the manuscript over the last year has said "God, what a riveting story... and why have I never heard of these people!?"

The problem seems to be, as I gather from lurking meaningfully in neighborhood of a lot of book and literary-industrial blogs, is there is a hell of a lot of dreck along with the merely OK to Pretty Damned Good Stuff. The traditional publishing world seems to be swamped up to it's gorgeously nipped and tucked neck, which kind of seriously affects how they can handle the not-inconsiderable quantity of fairly OK to Pretty Damned Good stuff which winds up on the shelves of your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

And that stuff which makes it past the gatekeepers is still in absolutely unmanageable quantities. All the competent and ethical agents seem to have about all they can do to look at hundreds of similar OK to Pretty Damned Good submissions clamoring for their attention and time and make a snap decision on accepting and managing the tiny percentage of those that will pay off with the least amount of effort on their part.

They kept sending me these letters admitting that they just didn't feel the passion for my book that they felt was necessary to represent me adequately. No one feels sufficiently passionate about "To Truckee's Trail" except for me, and those dozen people who have read the entire thing and loved it passionately too. Unfortunately, all those people were just readers and other writers.

And being a military retiree with a mortgage and trying to make it as a freelance writer, I am perennially broke so, here goes Plan B.; a fund drive to do a POD version, to buy advertising, and put review copies where they will do the most good. I've set up a Paypal link at The Daily Brief, for anyone who wants a good old-fashioned ripping yard about the Frontier, about the people who built America, or maybe even just have the fun of seeing an unknown writer make an end-run around the literary-industrial complex.

I think I can promise an autographed copy of "To Truckee's Trail" to anyone who contributes over a certain amount, too.

Hey, it works for Public Radio, doesn't it?

Sample Chapter

Cross Posted at Power and Control

From The Next 200 Years, by Herman Kahn

It is often suggested that adequate technology assessment (TA) studies should be required for any technical innovation before proceeding with commercial applications--that the burden of proof be placed on the people who want the innovation. It sounds reasonable to say that it is up to the innovator to prove that his innovation is safe, but there are some difficulties in this position.

If as a general matter high standards of justification were set and enforced, many important projects would not get off the ground. Full and definitive TA studies of complex projects and phenomena are often simply not feasible.

We have never seen an a priori analysis that would justify the conclusion: "Let's go ahead with the project; we understand the innovation and all of its first-, second-, and third-order effects quite well. There can be no excessive danger or dfficulties."

Indeed, many times the people looking for second-, third-, and even fourth-order effects have often seriously erred about the first; in any case, they usually cannot establish the others with any certainty...

None of the above is meant as an argument against doing TA studies.On the contrary, in many cases much will be learned from such studies. But one cannot expect them to be complete and reliable, and placing too great a requirement on innovators doing such studies can simply be an expensive way of doing less; it entails all the problems and disutilities of excessive caution and of slowing down innovation in a poorly designed--and often capricious--manner.

Which is all too often the real point.

From The Sydney Morning Herald, June 22, 2007

More than 100 studies have found that experts are often poor forecasters. In one survey Professor Philip Tetlock, of the University of California at Berkeley, obtained 82,361 forecasts from 284 academics, other commentators and professional advisers in the areas of politics and economics. The experts had to select one of three answers (that a situation would not change or would get better or get worse).

The experts performed more poorly than they would have done had they allocated forecasts at random. As an article on Tetlock by Louis Menand in The New Yorker put it: "Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices." Tetlock found that the more famous the commentators or forecasters, the more unreliable their forecasts.

Major Eaton: We have top men working on it now.

Indiana Jones: Who?

Major Eaton: Top... men...

From The Next 200 Years, by Herman Kahn

Man's intellectual and physical resources must also be devoted to the task of monitoring and overcoming potentially catastrophic long-term environmental problems...

To help in this effort, we would recommend the world-wide creation of a number of public and private institutions with various specific purposes, but all with an overall mission of the systematic and intense study of far-fetched and improbable phenomena...

In effect, these institutions would together constitute an articulate lobby and an "early warning system" for long-term environmental problems.

It is only fair to warn the public that anyone who studies such phenomena full time is almost certain to exaggerate their likelihood, impact and dangers. To do so is simply human nature.

We do want the people making these studies to conduct them with an almost fanatic intensity, since such fanaticism can be very useful in sustaining drive and even creativity. But we do not want this fanaticism to be carried over into judgments on public policy. Our "fanatics" can alert us to the problems and perhaps eventually to their solutions, and they can put enormous effort into the study of both, but we also recognize that this kind of fanaticism, while useful in research and study, can be a disservice if it dominates public discourse.

The boldings, as ever, are mine.

In America a "gas war" is a price war. Fuel stations compete for customers by lowering prices. In Iran the "gas war" is caused by a government mandated sudden jump in fuel prices.

The Spirit of Man blog has a round up of the gas wars in Iran with pictures. It appears Iran is burning.

I am getting some first hand reports from inside of Iran about the situation resulted from fuel ration policy which will go into effect as of tonight midnight (local time) through out the country.

Angry people have blocked the main highway in Tehran and several serious clashes have occurred in gas stations across the capital. The amount of anger among the people is such that police forces have refused to intervene in some parts of the city where roads are blocked and people have shattered the buildings' windows. And some reports indicate that 50 petrol stations were set ablaze in Tehran alone and at least 3 people died in the clashes.

The Middle East Times reports:

TEHRAN -- Angry Iranian youths torched petrol stations in Tehran and long queues formed at fuel pumps after the government announced the start of fuel rationing, triggering nationwide protests Wednesday.

Youths set a car and petrol pumps ablaze at a service station in the residential Pounak area of northwestern Tehran, throwing stones and shouting angry slogans denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

After the announcement of the rationing plan in the energy-rich nation, which affects both private cars and taxis, long queues started appearing at fuel pumps in Tehran and in the countryside.

Ahmadinejad has already come under fire over his economic policies, which a group of economists complained earlier this month were fuelling inflation and hurting the poor.

Iran, OPEC's number two oil producer, announced Tuesday that its long-awaited plan to ration petrol was coming into force at midnight, a move the government says is aimed at reducing colossal state petrol subsidies.

"From midnight tonight (2030 GMT) petrol for all vehicles and motorcycles will be rationed," state television said, quoting an oil ministry statement.

It said private cars using just petrol would be rationed to 100 liters of petrol a month while those using petrol and compressed natural gas (CNG) would only be allowed 30 liters.

Basically Iran is hobbled economically by two things. A theocracy based on 7th century ideas on how to organize society and an economic policy discredited with the fall of the USSR. Ahmadinejad is an economic illiterate. He doesn't get it. He has pumped the economy full of cash. With no productive capacity to absorb the cash it has led to runaway inflation. Even though the cash is mostly imported at market prices. He should have studied what happened to Spain when they found gold in the Americas. Spain did get richer. It also got a heavy dose of inflation. Despite the fact that gold is "real" money. As with all things he may not be getting what he wants, but he is getting an education. I'm hoping he gets educated to death. Or if he is lucky, absorbs his lessons in exile.

Gateway Pundit has a round up with more pictures.

A. Jacksonian has reminded me of a bit he did on the state of Iran's Oil Sector. Very complimentary to the above.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Did you know there were principles of forecasting? I don't mean like the positions of the planets. Which for time spans of tens of thousands of years is fairly mechanical. The kind of forecasting I'm talking about involves events that are less deterministic than the motions of the planets. And yet there are principles.

The first is to classify the methodology. Are you starting with numbers or guesses? Which is to say how good is your data base? If you have numbers, what kind of precision is attached? Do you use the numbers directly? Or do you use statistical methods to tease out "useful" information?

OK. You have some data. Now you have to select a method of analysis that is both suitable to the data and the purpose for which it will be used. Is this an investment decision? Or just a report on something to keep an eye on? Do you have a business plan in hand or just a casual "this seems like a good idea"?

The above pages are full of annotated charts with little pop-up explanation boxes to help you understand the charts.

And if that isn't enough the authors of these pages and the accompanying book will give you free help if you describe your problem(s) to them.

We have come a ways and surely it can't be just to talk about forecasting methods. Well yes and no. I want to talk about climate. Climate forecasting.

J. Scott Armstrong, of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and Kesten C. Green, of the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit, Monash University have done a short audit of IPCC climate science [pdf] based on the forecasting principles outlined above.

I think it would be good to start with the title which really gets to the heart of the matter.

Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts

In 2007, a panel of experts established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme issued its updated, Fourth Assessment Report, forecasts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group One Report predicts dramatic and harmful increases in average world temperatures over the next 92 years. We asked, are these forecasts a good basis for developing public policy? Our answer is "no".

Much research on forecasting has shown that experts' predictions are not useful. Rather, policies should be based on forecasts from scientific forecasting methods. We assessed the extent to which long-term forecasts of global average temperatures have been derived using evidence-based forecasting methods. We asked scientists and others involved in forecasting climate change to tell us which scientific articles presented the most credible forecasts. Most of the responses we received (30 out of 51) listed the IPCC Report as the best source. Given that the Report was commissioned at an enormous cost in order to provide policy recommendations to governments, the response should be reassuring. It is not. The forecasts in the Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they present the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. We found no references to the primary sources of information on forecasting despite the fact these are easily available in books, articles, and websites. We conducted an audit of Chapter 8 of the IPCC's WG1 Report. We found enough information to make judgments on 89 out of the total of 140 principles. We found that the forecasting procedures that were used violated 72 principles. Many of the violations were, by themselves, critical. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts to support global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.

• Agreement among experts is weakly related to accuracy. This is especially true when the experts communicate with one another and when they work together to solve problems. (As is the case with the IPCC process).

• Complex models (those involving nonlinearities and interactions) harm accuracy because their errors multiply. That is, they tend to magnify one another. Ascher (1978), refers to the Club of Rome's 1972 forecasts where, unaware of the research on forecasting, the developers proudly proclaimed, "in our model about 100,000 relationships are stored in the computer." (The first author was aghast not only at the poor methodology in that study, but also at how easy it was to mislead both politicians and the public.) Complex models are also less accurate because they tend to fit randomness, thereby also providing misleading conclusions about prediction intervals. Finally, there are more opportunities for errors to creep into complex models and the errors are difficult to find. Craig, Gadgil, and Koomey (2002) came to similar conclusions in their review of long-term energy forecasts for the US made between 1950 and 1980.

• Given even modest uncertainty, prediction intervals are enormous. For example, prediction intervals expand rapidly as time horizons increase so that one is faced with enormous intervals even when trying to forecast a straightforward thing such as automobile sales for General Motors over the next five years.

In electronics we can work with very complex systems because the interactions are strictly limited. How is this done? A marvelous Bell Labs invention called the transistor. It isolates as well as performing other useful functions.

The electronics guys, with lots of knowledge and isolation plus simple models, are real happy when their predictions of what will happen next in a circuit comes within 5%. The climate guys say they can tell within better that 1%. What are the odds?

When you have lots of things or some very complex things interacting, prediction gets hard. As a very great Yogi is reputed to have said: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Some of the conspiracists over at Volokh were discussing the Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case that the Supreme Court decided. Basically they said that if you intentionally skip school and show up at a public event with a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" sign a 10 day suspension for the sign is not unreasonable because school kids were expected to be at the public event as part of a field trip.

Trouble is people have no idea how bad drugs are.

Calling attention to them by public ridicule of the Drug War will not be tolerated in America.

In Canada telling the truth about drugs will get you thrown out of school.

Do you see what these drugs are doing? By their very nature they destroy free speech. All is not lost. I have a fix. We declare all discussion of the Drug War and why people take drugs illegal except for professionals licensed or authorized by the state. Fortunately the state has access to enforcers for just such problems.

When only the truth is allowed everyone will be able to speak freely.

Keep that thought in mind when you listen to the incidental music brought to you by the morning maniacs to the left.

Ann Althouse is looking at what makes Mike Nifong or as I expect, the soon to be JailFong, different from other prosecutors? Was it the elements of the case: sex, athletes, strippers, and a hooker? Or was it his behavior?

Which got me to thinking. The whole Drug War is prosecutorial misconduct.

We now know from the NIDA no less that Addiction Is A Genetic Disease.

So why does the Drug War continue? For the major reason that you have prosecutorial misconduct. It is popular. Nifong did what he did because he thought it would be popular where he lived. He was right.

Commenter at Ann's place Bruce Hayden had this to say at 11:54 AM:

Realistically though, I don't see most prosecutors crossing the line. I personally have a much better experience with them than I do with cops, in the area of abusing the power of their offices. More than once, I have seen prosecutors dismiss overreaching charges filed by the cops, sui sponte.

That is not to say that they don't work with the cops to overcharge in order to plea bargain into what they consider a reasonable sentence. You see this all the time - where they have charged a dozen felonies, and plea bargain to one or two. Many times, the added charges are not all that strong, but the chance that the prosecution might win on one or two of them is all it takes to rationalize a plea bargain, even if you know yourself to be innocent.

That is exactly how I see it. Prosecutors have the tools to railroad any one they want and they prefer to use the tools only on the guilty.

No one cares as long as it is done to "them". It is when it is done to "us" that people rise up. Who ever the "us" is that gets catered to.

We have in fact condoned the railroading of the guilty. No surprise if the innocent get caught up in that little machine every now and then.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

I'm working with a bunch of folks at NASA Space Flight blog trying to turn the concept invented by Dr. Robert Bussard, the Bussard Fusion Reactor, into a practical research reactor to test the concepts involved.

What is striking about the people working on the project is that we have every one - from a diarist at Daily Kos to an American style Republican leaning libertarian. All of us have buried the political hatchet in order to co-operate on designing a research reactor that may lead to a production reactor if the research is favorable.

Which got me to thinking about Bucky Fuller and his concept of Energy Slave.

Early energy slaves replaced draft animals - the early age of steam. Then they replaced humans for simple repetitive tasks - like sealing cans of peaches at a peach canning factory. Now our energy slaves are smarter and can think for themselves to a certain extent and will follow orders without complaint. Like the thermostat that will make sure in the winter that during the day the house is warm but at night it is cooler except on Saturday night when it is kept warmer for the traditional Saturday night party. 24/7/365 for decades. Change the timing when you like. Down to the minute.

These energy slaves are getting smarter every day. They are precision machinists that can work at a speed and keep tolerances no manual machine could dream of. Some of them have hands. As many hands as needed.

One of the reasons slavery not to mention work is going out of style. Machines (energy slaves) can do it better, faster, and cheaper. John Henry couldn't defeat steam. He has no chance what so ever against electricity. Design - understanding what humans want and how to make it will still be a human job for another decade or two. Selling is always human.

What is now universally understood is that for more people to have energy slaves we are going to need cheaper energy. We need to Enslave the Machines and Free the Humans. The sooner the better.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

It seems that in Canada telling the truth in school can get you suspended.

Kieran King got in trouble with his school for doing research on marijuania (on line, not personal) and telling the truth about what he found.

On May 30, Kieran, who is described as "research-obsessed" by his mother, was chatting with friends around the school lunch table and telling them about what he'd discovered, largely from scholarly and government sources. He argued that marijuana carries a near-zero risk of overdose, that it has been approved by Health Canada for medical use and that it kills an infinitesimal fraction of the people that alcohol and tobacco do every week -- claims so uncontroversial you'd have to be high on something much stronger than pot to dispute them.

He also suggested that it doesn't make much sense for marijuana to be illegal in a world where booze and smokes are freely available in shops.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Last week I bought a sheet of the new "Forever" stamps:

I like things that can be used forever, and I toyed with the idea of buying a lifetime supply. Too much hassle, I thought. Besides, what's a lifetime? Suppose I die. Can I take them with me?

I was reminded of the Forever stamps again just today while driving around earlier, when I saw one of these omnipresent bumperstickers:

The one I saw was white with red letters, but never mind. The point is, just like the "Forever" postage stamps, the "IMPEACH" bumperstickers are applicable forever, because the "IMPEACH" mindset is now forever a part of the American culture. This means the bumperstickers are true American classics, and their vendors will be able to go right on selling them no matter who is elected president.

While I might be tempted to feel sorry for the guys who have warehouses full of stickers reading "IMPEACH BUSH," they'd be well advised to save them, because with American Dynasty politics you never know. (For all I know, there may still be a warehouse full of "IMPEACH CLINTON" bumperstickers gathering dust somewhere. If you were in the business, would you throw them away? I wouldn't. Classics never go out of style.)

With that, I'm leaving for a trip (returning July 2), which means that for at least eleven full days you won't have me to kick around anymore. (Oh hell, you can still kick me around; I just won't be able to feel my pain.)

But that doesn't mean M. Simon won't be here to be kicked around, and unlike me he kicks back. With any luck, Justin will make some unpredicable reappearances too.

Have fun everyone, and don't anything I would do!

Via Pajamas Media, I read about a scary new trend in Australia -- selective race-based legislation which would prohibit alcohol and pornography, but only to Aborigines:

Australia's prime minister announced plans Thursday to ban pornography and alcohol for Aborigines in northern areas and tighten control over their welfare benefits to fight child sex abuse among them.

Some Aboriginal leaders rejected the plan as paternalistic and said the measures were discriminatory and would violate the civil rights of the country's original inhabitants. But others applauded the initiative and recommended extending the welfare restrictions to Aborigines in other parts of the country.

Prime Minister John Howard was responding to a report last week that found sexual abuse of children to be rampant in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. The report said the abuse was fueled by endemic alcohol abuse, unemployment, poverty and other factors causing a breakdown in traditional society.

"This is a national emergency," Howard told Parliament. "We're dealing with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present."

Howard announced the measures for the Northern Territory, an Outback region where the federal government retains powers it doesn't have over Australia's six states. He urged state leaders to apply similar tough rules in their jurisdictions.

The plan angered some Aboriginal leaders, who said it was the kind of government behavior that has disenfranchised Aborigines and created the problems in the first place. They also complained they had not been consulted; the government had not previously indicated it was considering such action.

"I'm absolutely disgusted by this patronizing government control," said Mitch, a member of a government board helping Aborigines who were taken from their parents under past assimilation laws who uses one name. "And tying drinking with welfare payments is just disgusting."

"If they're going to do that, they're going to have to do that with every single person in Australia, not just black people," she said.

Howard said the sale, possession and transportation of alcohol would be banned for six months on the Aboriginal-owned land, after which the policy would be reviewed. The child abuse report found drinking was a key factor in the collapse of Aboriginal culture, contributing to neglect of children and creating opportunities for pedophiles.

Hardcore pornography also would be banned, and publicly funded computers would be audited to ensure that they had not downloaded such images. The report said pornography was rife in Aboriginal communities and that children often were exposed to it.

Under Howard's plan, new restrictions would be placed on welfare payments for Aborigines living on the land to prevent the money from being spent on alcohol and gambling. Parents would be required to spend at least half their welfare on essentials such as food, and payments also would be linked to a child's school attendance.

I certainly hope nothing of the sort ever happens here, but I worry about the people who want to do things like impose selective gun control on urban areas -- especially those who see opposition to gun control as "racist."

If we applied similar logic to alcohol, liquor stores would only be allowed in affluent suburbs. In Seattle, they're moving in that direction:

Sales of "fortified" beer and wine will be banned in certain Seattle neighborhoods as part of a plan to cut homelessness and chronic alcoholism, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reported Aug. 31.

The ban applies to 29 specific brands, including Thunderbird, Richard's Wild Irish Rose, and Night Train Express wines, and Colt 45 Ice, Olde English 800, and Red Dog beers.

I realize some people think discrimination intended to "help" people is fine. I think it's incredibly condescending (as well as unconstitutional) and deserves to be called "nanny racism."

Summer's beginning: Six dead in one day

Five died in two triple shootings 15 hours apart in which gunmen opened fire on people on city streets.

That scary headline makes it look as if Philadelphia is being plagued by random gunfire, which just happens all by itself. And as usual, none of the victims or neighbors are talking. However, when I read the details, the shootings didn't strike me as random "gun violence" which just happened to occur on a street corner at 2:30 a.m.:

Police said the three victims had "been through the system" before - including narcotics arrests. Although two of the men had survived previous shootings, neighbors and relatives insisted that they were not thugs.

"They were not dummies, and they had families that loved and supported them," said Marcia Green, who described herself as Burman's godmother and Lundy's cousin. She was aroused from sleep by the gunfire and rushed out to the street to find her relatives dead. "None of them had been involved in crime," she said.

According to family members, Burman was a graduate of Kensington High School, Lundy had a GED, and White was planning to attend Opportunities Industrial Center in the fall.

Lynette White, the mother of the youngest victim, said her son was shot in his left side three months ago, and he still ha a bullet lodged in his chest.

Lundy's relatives said he had survived a shooting last summer.

Scott P. Charles, trauma outreach coordinator at Temple University Hospital, said it was not unusual to see a gunshot victim who had been shot before. Often, gunshot victims return to the street intent on settling scores.

"We're patching them up, and they're sending us back a couple more, if they don't come back dead themselves," Charles said.

The problem with urban crime is that many criminals live in urban areas. This leads well meaning people to advocate selective gun control -- in urban areas only, such as the oft-sponsored legislation allowing Philadelphia to enact its own gun control laws. What is being forgotten is that for the huge majority of shooters (85% according to Philly's Chief of Detectives), there already is gun control -- the strongest gun control possible. For any convicted felon, merely being found in possession of a gun is a serious crime involving mandatory prison.

To me, this is conclusive evidence that the mere passage of laws does not affect criminals. To others, it's an argument for more laws which not only won't be obeyed by criminals, but which will only enlarge the criminal class, by transforming previously law abiding gun owners into criminals.

Aren't there enough criminals without passing laws creating more? What I've never been able to understand is why people don't understand that the more laws there are, the more crime there is. What's going on? Does it take a Ph.D. in economics to lay it out on a graph? Just as lawyers generate litigation, legislators generate laws (which in turn generate crime). It is what they do because it's what they need to do to survive. Similarly, bureaucrats need regulations and social workers need social problems, or else there'd be no need for them.

I realize that it isn't nice to question people's idealism, but why is it OK to question the idealism of lawyers and politicians, but not bureaucrats and social workers? Shouldn't the standard be the same? And what is idealism? Should a restaurant owner get a gold star for calling himself a "food provider"? Is a cab owner a "transportation services provider" who risks his life daily engaged in "public service"? It strikes me that the moral authority of many of the people who are being paid to do things (and who make a living at it) is directly related to whether they're being paid by the taxpayers. Does this mean that earning government money is worthier than earning private money? Can anyone tell me why? Couldn't it be argued that receiving money which is extracted from the citizenry under threat of legal force is actually less worthy? Why is it that so few people pose these questions?

I've long been worried about a growing division between tax payers and tax eaters (the latter are now poised to become the voting majority). Common sense suggests that in general, the former tend to be more productive than the latter. In economic terms, this would make them more valuable (although private school teachers make considerably less than public school teachers, despite the fact that the former do a better job.)

But can such value be measured in moral terms? While it isn't my job here to make a moral pronouncement, in my half a century on the planet I have detected a significant moral shift. I can remember when living off government money without working was considered less than morally optimal, and being on the government payroll carried with it no special moral authority. Nor should it. Yet I have seen a growing tendency in some circles to see tax eaters (of all varieties) as morally better than the people whose taxes pay them. This makes no sense. It's not as if working for the government is like working for a religious order.

Hmmm...

Maybe it is. I mean, if there is to be such a thing as moral authority, then someone has to have it, right?

MORE: Speaking of two Americas, I enjoyed Glenn Reynolds' comment this morning:

I think there are two Americas: Those who manage to enrich themselves by exploiting legal technicalities, and those who do not.

UPDATE: My thanks (from Alaska where I'm on vacation) to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

Roger Pielke Sr. has a few complaints about the comprehensiveness of the research papers used to prepare various IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports have the following stated goals:

"A comprehensive and rigourous picture of the global present state of knowledge of climate change"

and

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."

However, the IPCC WG 1 Chapter 3 report failed in this goal.

This weblog illustrates this defect using the example of their assessment of the multi-decadal land near-surface temperature trend data, where peer reviewed papers that conflicted with the robustness of the surface air temperature trends are ignored. Later Climate Science weblogs will document this issue with other climate issues.

To evaluate the IPCC's claim to be comprehensive, we cross-compared IPCC WG1 references on near-surface air temperature trends with the peer-reviewed citations that have been given in Climate Science. We selected only papers that appeared before about May 2006 so they were readily available to the IPCC Lead authors.

If the papers were neglected because they were redundant, this would be no problem. However, they are ignored specifically because they conflict with the assessment that is presented in the IPCC WG1 Report, and the Lead Authors do not agree with that perspective!

"The process for completing the CCSP Report excluded valid scientific perspectives under the charge of the Committee. The Editor of the Report systematically excluded a range of views on the issue of understanding and reconciling lower atmospheric temperature trends. The Executive Summary of the CCSP Report ignores critical scientific issues and makes unbalanced conclusions concerning our current understanding of temperature trends".

"Future assessment Committees need to appoint members with a diversity of views and who do not have a significant conflict of interest with respect to their own work. Such Committees should be chaired by individuals committed to the presentation of a diversity of perspectives and unwilling to engage in strong-arm tactics to enforce a narrow perspective. Any such committee should be charged with summarizing all relevant literature, even if inconvenient, or which presents a view not held by certain members of the Committee."

How might we narrow them down? Well Roger thinks he knows how the IPCC arrived at its concensus.

The IPCC WG1 Chapter 3 Report process made the same mistakes and failed to provide an objective assessment. Indeed the selection of papers to present in the IPCC (as well as how the work of others that was cited was dismissed) had a clear conflict of interest as the following individuals cited their research prominently yet were also a Review Editor (Tom Karl), works for the Review Editor (Tom Peterson, Russ Vose, David Easterling), were Coordinating Lead Authors (Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones), were Lead Authors (Dave Easterling and David Parker), or a Contributing Author (Russ Vose).

In fact, as stated above, the CCSP Report "Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences", with its documented bias, was chaired by the same person as the Review Editor of the IPCC WG1 Chapter 3 Report (Tom Karl)! Regardless of his professional expertise, he is still overseeing an assessment which is evaluating his own research. There cannot be a clearer conflict of interest.

The IPCC WG1 Chapter 3 Report clearly cherrypicked information on the robustness of the land near-surface air temperature to bolster their advocacy of a particular perspective on the role of humans within the climate system. As a result, policymakers and the public have been given a false (or at best an incomplete) assessment of the multi-decadal global average near-surface air temperature trends.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

We're all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function...

While she hasn't been talking much about the Internet lately, via Glenn Reynolds I see that time doesn't seem to have changed Hillary's view of the First Amendment. She and Barbara Boxer are quoted as wanting a "legislative fix" for talk radio.

I'll say this for Hillary; at least she's consistent.

Of course, Hillary's "legislative fix" comments may have been deliberately intended as a campaign tactic -- to provoke talk radio hosts into a vitriolic rage in the hope of generating blowback in her favor. Years ago, Jeff Jarvis noticed the phenomenon:

The more the talk-show hosts scream about her, the more Democrats will be inspired to come out to support her.

With any luck, she'll try harder.

Jeez, there I go...

(Really, I shouldn't be so cynical as to attribute political calculation to sincere and long-held beliefs.)

Now that the anthropogenic global freezing has been announced, I find myself enjoying Czech President Vaclav Klaus's remarks about warming:

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

That's because Klaus has seen so much of such stuff before that he knows how to spot it:

I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: "future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age".

The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.

As Arnold Kling pointed out in his review of "An Inconvenient Truth," there are parallels between macroeconomic scientific consensus of the 1970s and the anthropogenic global warming scientific consensus of today:

My concern is with how "scientific consensus" is reached. In economics in the 1960's, there was a "scientific consensus," embedded in sophisticated macro-econometric models, that inflation reflected a competition over income shares, and that government policies to interfere with wage- and price-setting were the solution. Milton Friedman's contrary views were outside the "scientific consensus."

By 1985 or so, the "scientific consensus" had shifted, in part because policies based on that consensus were tried in the 1970's, leading to the worst macroeconomic performance of the post-war period.

By the 1990's, large macro-econometric models had pretty much disappeared from the economics literature. The problem with macro-econometrics is that the models continually broke down out of sample. That is, a model estimated through 1969 would work terribly in predicting the early 1970's. A model estimated through 1975 would work terribly in predicting the late 1970's, and so on.

Unsound theories lend themselves to further "fixing" by their proponents. Creating a problem in order to solve a problem appeals to government lovers, because as they say, the government is there to solve problems. Just ask them!

Thus, the government can always be trusted to do whatever is best for the government.

I have to admit, from a government perspective, putting environmentalists in charge of the economy is the best thing that could happen -- to the government.

UPDATE: My thanks to Darren at Right on the Left Coast for the link.

Yes.

From today's Inquirer:

HARRISBURG - A top aide to State Sen. Lisa M. Boscola will keep his job despite making profanity-laced remarks on a blog about a congressman and his potential Democratic challenger, the senator's office said yesterday.

Bernie Kieklak, chief of staff to the Democratic senator from Northampton County, will remain on her staff if he undergoes counseling and meets "the higher standards that people deserve to expect from individuals in public service," according to a statement.

We all say things we regret, and it is entirely foreseeable that what a blogger working for a state senator says will likely be scrutinized in ways that another blogger's words won't be. What happened here was that the blogger made profane and indecent remarks about a Republican congressman as well as his challenger.

Kieklak was suspended without pay last week for making vulgar comments online about U.S. Rep. Charles W. Dent, a second-term Republican, and Siobhan "Sam" Bennett, who leads an Allentown nonprofit and is running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Dent in the 2008 election. The comments, posted in early June, came in response to blog entries on the merits of the candidates.

Kieklak submitted his resignation last week, but Boscola did not accept it.

He had initially defended his writings as those of a private citizen exercising his First Amendment rights. But he apologized to Dent, Bennett, Boscola and her constituents in a separate statement yesterday, saying his comments were "vicious and obnoxious."

"I know many, many people are angry with me for what I said and their anger is justified," Kieklak said. "It was my mistake [and] I will regret it for the rest of my life."

Counseling implies that he really wasn't responsible for what he said, because implicit in such counseling is the idea that his words are a symptom of disease.

I've used the phrase "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and I now see that people are using the phrase "Clinton Derangement Syndrome." In politics, such things are to be expected. What I would not want is to see someone being ordered into treatment for BDS or CDS. It degrades blogging. (And the nature of political freedom.)

Of course, the comments by the blogger in question could be said to degrade blogging in and of themselves. I won't repeat them because I don't want to upset the net nanny software (which cannot distinguish between what I say and quotes from others). I think this blogger should simply have been fired. Common sense suggests that you not talk that way if you work in a public position like that and expect to keep the job.

However, something about counseling just rubs me the wrong way. If you say something, I think you should live with the fact that you said it -- no matter how right or wrong or obscene it is. Of course, if the guy is really mentally ill, that's something else, but his apology strikes me as quite sane and rational. Fire him or keep him and take the lumps. Sending an adult political blogger into counseling tends to abrogate responsibility, while medicalizing political blogging. At the very least, it creates a public perception that political blogging is a proper subject for "treatment" by mental health professionals.

I'll say this for John Edwards; at least he didn't force Amanda Marcotte into counseling.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and to everyone for coming.

I agree with Glenn about the double effect of counseling (political reducation plus abrogation of responsibility). A win-win.

"How convenient" is right!

UPDATE: Commenter Armed Liberal asked what they really meant by "counseling," and speculates that this could mean simply "sitting with them and making sure they knew what the rules were and what was expected from them."

While I don't know the details of what type of counseling is involve (which would most likely be confidential if they involve licensed mental health professionals), what I've read states that the counseling is more than a meeting with the employee -- it has to be "successfully" completed (whatever that means) -- with termination if he fails to complete it:

Under the terms of what Boscola described as a "Condition of Continued Employment" agreement, her chief of staff, Bernard J. Kieklak, must successfully complete a course of counseling to keep his job.

Boscola said in a statement that if Kieklak fails to complete that counseling, or "[conducts] himself in a way that does not meet the higher standards that people deserve to expect from individuals in public service, he will be terminated immediately."

BTW, unless I am mistaken about the nature of alcohol treatment and rehab appears that Keiklak -- and his boss -- both may have been through counseling before:

Kieklak's comments refreshed old wounds in Boscola's office. Seven years ago, the chief of staff drank with Boscola the day she was arrested for drunken driving, prompting Senate Minority Leader Robert Mellow, D-Lackawanna, to reassign Kieklak away from Boscola's office. Boscola was later admitted to the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program for first-time offenders.

Kieklak returned as Boscola's top aide in October 2001. Five months later, he checked himself into an alcohol treatment program after he was charged with drunken driving for allegedly causing a four-vehicle accident in Harrisburg. His case later was expunged.

Kieklak kept his job then, too. "Everyone deserves a second chance," Boscola said at the time.

Now I'm intrigued.

Is it possible that this involves drunken blogging?

Here's Joe Owens of the Express Times:

....I believe O'Hare should have jumped in for Kieklak as part of the bloggers FDLFBD credo: Friends Don't Let Friends Blog Drunk.

I don't know how much light this sheds on the inquiry, and while I still can't state definitively that I know precisely what type of counseling is involved, my common sense tells me that it contemplates licensed mental health professionals of some sort.

Are today's children being overprotected by their parents? There's been a lot of discussion about this, and I agree that many children are way overprotected.

Many, that is, but not all:

A day after his daughter drowned in the Schuylkill, Octavio Perez was still haunted by how the last time he saw her she was playing in shallow water just 10 feet from him.

Perez said in an interview that he and his brother-in-law had taken their six children to play in the river, where it runs through Valley Forge National Park. Just as the two families were leaving around 5:30 p.m., they noticed 5-year-old Kelly Perez was missing.

Everybody makes mistakes, but something about the circumstances strike me as very odd (especially in the context of our overprotected children):

"She didn't make a sound," Perez said of his daughter's sudden disappearance.

The families searched the area, seeking assistance from fishermen, who Perez said swam underwater in search of Kelly. After 10 minutes, the fishermen called the police, Perez said.

Fire and rescue units found Kelly floating in six feet of water a short distance away, near the Pawlings Road Bridge in Lower Providence Township. She had been spotted by a fireman from the bridge.

The girl was rushed to Phoenixville Hospital, where, after several attempts at resuscitation, she was pronounced dead at 8:23 p.m.

Perez, of the 100 block of Chain Street in Norristown said he and his family had moved to the area from Lakewood, N.J., a month ago, and it was the first time he had taken his children to play in the Schuylkill. He said that neither of them knew how to swim.

"There were no signs saying 'No Swimming,' " Perez said.

Rivers are dangerous, whether there are signs there or not. While I haven't visited River Front Park, I'm willing to bet there are "No Swimming" signs posted there, because it's in a heavily populated area. Personally, I'm against such signs. Rivers are part of nature, and nature -- if it is public property -- should be free to use at your own risk. A tree can fall on you, lightning can strike you, and of course, water can drown you. Signs warning about these things are superfluous. The duty is not that of the state to warn parents.

Ironically, the placement of "No Swimming" signs in one place could be interpreted as meaning that without a "No Swimming" sign, swimming is safe. So, does this mean that the entire 130 miles of the Schuylkill River should be plastered with signs on both sides lest people imagine it is safe to swim? (And what about the many unsigned lakes and coasts?)

What about the fact that this five year old girl didn't know how to swim? Isn't that a more significant factor than the presence or absence of a sign? I may be crazy, but it seems that if you have a child who cannot swim, whether there's a sign is completely superfluous.

I think incidents like this lead to overprotection from the top down, by the nanny state. The overprotective parents buy into it and support it, while at the other end the underprotective parents become victims.

The safety net tightens like a purse being closed. A government purse, of course -- consisting of millions of taxpayer-squeezing "protective" strings. (It really hurts to have to pay for social harm in the name of protection.)

So stay indoors and eat your trans fatty fried onion rings while you're still allowed!

While this probably should have been an update to my previous post, something about Ann Althouse's new Calamari rings post reminded me of a touching tale involving my father's trickery. (Yeah, he got me to eat squid when I was a kid -- by telling me the calamari rings were actually onion rings that had "soaked up the flavor of the fish" and I naively ate them while he stifled a chuckle.)

While it may be cute (and even beneficial) for a father to trick his son into expanding his horizons by lying about what he's eating, something about seeing skilled politicians harness the forces of Hollywood and the music industry to manipulate grown adults to put them back into office strikes me as a little crass.

So do the shrill attacks on Ann Althouse (that she "should have her teaching credentials revoked") for poking fun at what I think is a very unoriginal attempt by the Clintons to hijack popular culture to their advantage. It's not just Bill and Hill as Tony and Carmela, but they needed a theme song, and "Don't Stop Believing" is (they think) catchy, and they wanted to claim it.

Hell, they have claimed it.

Must they?

And must we hear it?

It's all too easy for me to not be impressed, as I put up with them glomming onto Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" for nearly a decade.

I think they're tired, and I wish they would stop.

I'm already more tired than I was in the 90s, and that's pretty tired.

But I won't stop being tired....

Yawn.

I don't know why these things keep happening in Milwaukee, but here we go again:

MILWAUKEE -- Milwaukee's Juneteenth Celebration ended in violence after a man was dragged from his car and beaten.

Milwaukee police said an officer was also hurt while trying to break up a fight during Tuesday's celebration.

Several thousand people attended the festival celebrating the end of slavery.

Things turned violent when the festival came to a close, police said.

Police said a 33-year-old man was hurt when hundreds of teenagers swarmed around traffic in the area of North First and West Chambers streets.

They said people rocked the man's vehicle, smashed the windows, dragged him out of the car, and kicked and hit him.

He was treated at an area hospital for cuts on his face and a broken tooth.

He told police he has no idea why he was targeted.

However, in the pictures and the video here, the crowd is black, and while the driver cannot be seen clearly, in this video the driver also appears to be black.

So unless I'm wrong, there doesn't seem to be even the possibility of a black-on-white racial aspect to this. Just cars being attacked. That previous link details several other incidents at the same event:

In one incident, a crowd surrounded a black car stuck in traffic at 2nd and Burleigh. A couple of teens jumped on top of the car. One smashed out the rear windshield. The driver stayed in the vehicle and escaped unharmed. He smashed into the car ahead of him trying to speed away from the attackers.

Further down the street, a woman in a gold car stopped after a teen jumped onto the back of her car. She got out and yelled at the teen, then she got back in a tried to speed away, also hitting the car ahead of her.

A short time later, at 1st and Burleigh, the crowd surrounded a red car, pounding on the hood and trunk and breaking out the windows. /after a woman reached into his open window, the driver got out, was kicked in the head by a man and fell to the ground. He was taken to the hospital for treatment.

In another incident, police said a young woman hit an officer in the face as the officer was trying to break up a large fight near 1st and Auer. The blow shattered the officer's face shield. The officer was cut by the shattered face shield and needed stitches at the hos