A post by Ward Farnsworth at Volokh on "rent seeking behavior" reminded me of one of my objections to lawyering:

....there are two general ways to increase your wealth: by creating things people want, or by fighting over prizes that already exist -- things other people have created or found. Either strategy might be more successful than the other, and perfectly rational to pursue; it depends on the circumstances. Which do you prefer as your own method of choice? Which do you spend more time doing? Why does it matter?

The difference between these methods of gaining wealth -- between, say, competing to build a better restaurant and competing to get to the treasure first (rent seeking) -- is that the first one creates wealth, or better-offness, for the world. Customers are made happy, and restaurants gradually get better. Fighting over who gets the treasure isn't like that. The treasure doesn't get bigger as a result. In a sense it gets smaller because wealth is eaten up in the effort to lay hold of it.

"Attorneys fees are there by statute!" I was told.

Great. Now that I was out of business, I could be born again as a despicable parasite and help ensure that other business owners would be put out of business. It struck me that if I became a homeless derelict, I'd be doing more for the world than if I helped ruin other people's businesses. (It didn't help much that one of the many reasons my business failed was that the building was cited by the fire marshall for inadequate handicapped access, and there was no way to remedy this without major alterations to the building, which I did not own, for patrons in wheelchairs who never came.)

Think of this on a larger scale and you can see that the more a society spends on rent seeking -- on quarrels over who gets what -- the poorer it becomes. If that's all that anyone did, everyone would starve in due course.

Farnsworth concludes with a question:

But probably the most interesting question for my current audience is this: to what extent are lawyers professional rent seekers, and to what extent are they something more worthy of admiration and encouragement?

This piece by Stephen Bainbridge made me realize that lots of parasitic lawyers will soon be waking up to the fact that Global Warming looms large as another rent seeking scheme:

trial lawyers are gearing up to turn global warming into their next pot of gold. A coalition of environmental groups and cities are suing the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank of the United States for making loans to finance oil pipelines, oil drilling, and similar projects that supposedly result in a net emission of billions of tons of carbon dioxide. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans trial lawyers Gerald Mapes and Timothy Porter sued dozens of energy companies, claiming they had contributed to global warming.

Last year, Business Week reported that there were 16 pending global warming cases of these sorts pending around the country. More are surely in the pipeline, so to speak.

Indeed, the prospect of a boom in global warming litigation is prompting law firms to begin setting up units specializing in climate change issues. According to the Dallas Morning News, for example, Dallas law firms Vinson & Elkins and Thompson & Knight have set up global warming units with 41 and 26 lawyers, respectively.

This is a classic example of why tort reform is a pressing need. The Institute for Legal Reform offers some chilling statistics: "America's civil justice system is the world's most expensive, with a direct cost in 2005 of $261 billion, or 2.09 percent of GDP.

"Tort costs were $880 per U.S. citizen in 2005, meaning the average American family of four paid a 'litigation tax' of more than $3,500 due to increased costs from lawsuits and other liability expenses that force businesses to raise the price of products and services. That cost is equivalent to nearly an 8 percent tax on wages."

These costs are having a dramatic impact on the US economy. A nonpartisan report prepared for New York Senator Charles Schumer and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, found that the "propensity toward litigation" in the United States is "driving growing international concerns about participating in US financial markets."

Along with regulatory excesses like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the litigation industry in this country is making our capital markets and our economy as a whole less competitive.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links an interesting post about the campaign donations of large law firms. I hadn't know that Ken Starr's firm gave "more to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign than to all of the top Republican candidates combined," but I'm not surprised.

Go seek the rent, and ye shall find!

UPDATE (08/01/07): Thank you, Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome all!

(Now that I think about it, had I listened to the lawyers advising me to go into ADA litigation back in 1994, I might be wealthy and unwise today!

Who needs satire when all you have to do is read news from Berkeley?

By law, elected members of the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board (the rent control commissars) are supposed to live in Berkeley. However, according to a report in the SF Chronicle, that legal technicality has not prevented one elected commissioner from living in Oakland (apparently for a long time). This has come to light now that he's fighting eviction -- allegedly with help from a community law center that has a contract with the Rent Board:

Over in Berkeley, Rent Stabilization Board member Chris Kavanagh, who by law should be living in Berkeley, is fighting eviction from a cottage he rents in Oakland.

And here's a twist: Kavanagh is fighting his eviction with the help of a former vice chair of the Berkeley rent board, now an attorney for a nonprofit law firm that has a contract with the panel to represent tenants.

A contract, we might add, that Kavanagh voted for.

"It's complete news to me," rent board Executive Director Jay Kelekian said when we asked about Kavanagh's eviction fight and the help he's getting from the East Bay Community Law Center.

The eviction battle -- and the fact that Kavanagh doesn't appear to live in Berkeley -- are laid out in an exchange of letters between Kavanagh's attorney (and former board member) Marc Janowitz and H. Wayne Goodroe, a lawyer representing a couple who recently bought the cottage and a main house on 63rd Street in Oakland's Rockridge neighborhood.

In a letter last month, Janowitz said Kavanagh, who has rented the cottage since 2001, wanted to stay another year, "after which he will move."

(Janowitz is also representing a second tenant living in the main house who's also fighting the toss -- former Black Panther Party member Johnny Spain.)

As recently as two years ago, Kavanagh -- a Green Party member first elected to the rent board in 2002 -- signed a campaign disclosure form, under penalty of perjury, stating that he lived in an apartment on Dwight Way in Berkeley.

Voting rolls also list him as living at the Dwight Way address, though sometime last year he notified the rent board that he was living at 2705 Webster St. in Berkeley, Kelekian said.

When we caught up with Kavanagh this past week at his Oakland digs, he was having dinner on his patio. He said he'd call us later to explain how he's managed to live in two places at once.

He hasn't.

As for Janowitz, he let out a long laugh when we told him what we were calling about -- but said he couldn't really say where Kavanagh lived.

"I'm just defending the eviction," Janowitz said.

He said he didn't see it as a problem that he's representing a rent board member when his firm has a contract with the board. He wouldn't say how much Kavanagh is paying him, calling that "the subject of private attorney-client communication."

Janowitz said the real issue was that the Oakland landlords and their attorney hadn't succeeded in evicting Kavanagh or Spain and now are "attempting to influence the litigation by resorting to extrajudicial gossip -- you being the monger."

It would appear to be a very newsworthy story. Newsworthy enough for Judith Scherr of the Berkeley Daily Planet to investigate further:

Glen Kohler, manager of the apartment building at 2709 Dwight Way, responded to the Planet's inquiry, saying: "No, he doesn't" live at that address.

Questioned about how long the elected official had been "gone," Kohler answered: "I don't know if 'gone' is the correct word," explaining he meant that during the two and one-half years that he had been managing the apartment, Kavanagh had, to his knowledge, never lived there.

A postal worker delivering mail while the Daily Planet was at the Dwight Way apartment house said Kavanagh had previously received mail there, but hadn't for more than a year and a half.

The mailbox at apartment No. 16, where Kavanagh has said he lives, bears no name.

Asked if he knows where Kavanagh lives, Rent Board Executive Director Jay Kelekian told the Daily Planet on Monday, "To my knowledge he resides in Berkeley."

Kelekian said that Kavanagh had informed the rent board of a change of address to 2705 Webster one time, but had informed Kelekian that address is actually a box at the Elmwood Post Office and that he continued to live at the Dwight Way apartment.

Kelekian said Kavanagh picks up his rent board materials at the rent board office.

If it is determined that Kavanagh doesn't meet the residency requirements of the City Charter, Kelekian said he thinks the rent board would agree that he should step down.

Determining residency is not the rent board's call, he said, explaining it is up to the city clerk's office to investigate.

Rent Board Chair Jesse Arreguin said he is aware that this is not the first time the question has been raised. Reporting a conversation with Kavanagh on the topic, Arreguin said, "He assured us that he rents an apartment in Berkeley and stays with his girlfriend in Oakland."

Apparently the question of Kavanagh's residence has not come before the city's Fair Campaign Practices Commission. "It's never been drawn to our attention," said Eric Weaver, FCPC chair.

"We looked at the fact that he is the most chronic late filer," Weaver added.

I don't know anything about the merits of this litigation, and I'm only speculating that the new owners want to move in. If their goal is to live in their own house, I'd support their right to do that.

So, while that would appear to place me on the side of the property owner, I really wouldn't want to "attempting to influence the litigation by resorting to extrajudicial gossip," nor do I think I could. This is only a blog post, and while I don't reach as many Bay Area people as the local press there, I think the legal system can and should run its course regardless of what is said in any report or blog post, whether involving "extrajudicial gossip" or newsworthy facts.

So says "Dan Nender, a 1634 supporter who filed suit in Sacramento Federal Court" to have a "marble monument to service dogs, originally set to be displayed in Sacramento, California" altered.

According to the full story at the "Official News Agency" they want the statue's nuts sawed off:

[Sacramento, CA] A marble monument to service dogs, originally set to be displayed in Sacramento, California, may be on its way out of the golden state. The reason? The statue's "manhood" is still intact.

Proponents of the recently-tabled state assembly bill AB-1634, the so-called "California Healthy Pets Act", which would require that most of the state's dogs and cats over the age of 6 months be sterilized, claim that placing the image of an intact male dog on public property is harmful and sends the wrong message to California pet owners.

"Its not an appropriate display, in a state that carries out three million euthanasias a year." said Dan Nender, a 1634 supporter who filed suit in Sacramento Federal Court to have the monument altered.

Pressed about the number, since most reputable sources set that number at 400,000, Nender replied, "One is too many. Concentrate on the point I'm making, not the numbers."

The sculptor who created the piece, Fidel Marquez of Hemingford, Nebraska, has already refused to alter it. "This is ridiculous. I'll put the damn thing on my lawn before I 'neuter' it."

"Frankly, it doesn't matter what the artist wants, or for that matter whether the lawsuit succeeds." responded Nender. "This is the will of the people... and don't ask me which people, and we're going to carry it out. If this guy doesn't want to do the work himself, we'll sneak in there at night and use a Saws-All on it."

"We cannot have intact testicles on government property. As California government officials, at least the ones on our side, will attest to, Sacramento is a testicle-free zone."

Assembly Bill AB-1634 may come before the California legislature some time again in 2008, according to supporters, but in the meantime, they say they will fight the battle their way. "The ends justify the means," said Nender. Even if the means includes vandalism.

California Department of Parks, who oversee this sort of project, did not return our calls immediately, and the Governor could not be reached for comment. However, plans to erect the monument are on hold until the lawsuit is settled or dismissed.

But I regret to say that much as I love the narrative, I'm afraid the report isn't true.

Not only can I find no confirmation of it anywhere, but Googling the artist's name and hometown leads only back to the same story and the various discussion boards that have mentioned it.

Even the Canada Free Press seems to have been conned, for their earlier link to the story is now dead, although I did very much enjoy the Google cache version which adds a bit of commentary to the story.

Attention all non-Hollywood type sheriffs and law officials: They're going to tote the Kool-Aid, don the tinfoil hats and pull the heist off under cover of darkness.

"We cannot have intact testicles on government property. As California government officials, at least the one's on our side will attest to, Sacramento is a testicle-free zone," said Dean A. Ayers, of Animals C.L.U.B. Freedom. "Animal rights activist "perverts" in my book."

Meanwhile can ACLU check in to let us all know whether is it against Fido's rights to be forced to be in the same state as latter day politicians: Neutered?

Anyway, I hate it when stories that support what I think turn out to be wrong -- especially when they have all the right elements!

There is a serious side to this, and that is the growing emergence of news hoaxes and bogus news sites. Regular readers may remember "Capitol Hill Blue" and the fictitious "George Harleigh." (He didn't exist, and he was debunked, but he's still considered quotable!)

More recently, the Bussard fusion project was falsely reported by a hoax site to be funded by Governor Schwarzenegger.

Of course, the "Official News Agency" does not even pretend to be anything other than a satire site, so it would be laughable to maintain that this rises to the level of a real hoax.

It's a fake hoax, folks!

And what a pity! Because, I really enjoyed another report -- that Harry Reid kicks dogs!

[Washington, DC] Animal rights activists were up in arms Friday, as reports came in that U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, savagely kicked a retired ranch dog lying in his path as he toured a property near Reno. Witnesses say that Senator Reid had to be forceably restrained by his staff so that caretakers could attend to the injured animal.

The dog, a mixed-breed working dog named "Pace", was taken to a local veterinary hospital where x-rays showed no broken bones but physical examination revealed substantial bruising.

"Pace is a tough dog," Mark Hassler, a ranch hand who was present at the incident, said. "He's been around the block a few times. He'll be just fine."

"On the other hand, though, that doesn't make this alright. My boss is really pissed... I have to say I'm not happy either. Pace is a member of the family here, and there was just no reason for this."

The ranch owner, and Pace's master, Phillip Dischete (pronounced dish-SHAY), would not speak to the press except to say that Senator Reid is no longer welcome on his property.

Which means that our superficial concerns over the technical truth can end up obscuring the larger truth -- which is whether the dog Harry Reid might as well have kicked might as well have had balls.

In a long update to my "I should care?" post, I got a little hot and bothered by the idea that disagreeing with gun control means not caring that people are being killed.

This touches on a fundamental disagreement which tends to be lost in the gun control debate, and that disagreement is over CRIME AND PUNISHMENT:

April Saul, who has been chronicling Philadelphia's many teen shooting deaths in a piece called Kids, Guns, and a Deadly Toll [...] explains "why she decided to tell these stories" and at no point does she express even the slightest desire to see the killers caught and punished.

I don't think this means she does not care. Obviously, she cares very much, but in a different way than the way I care. If I had a teenager who had been murdered, I'd want the perpetrators caught and punished, not just for personal reasons, but because I think putting away murderous people is in the ultimate best interest of civilization. April Saul, by saying she would "not try to distinguish between the 'guilty' and the 'innocent,'" in my view is subordinating the distinction between murderer and victim to a narrative which blames the tools used by murderers.

Obviously, I disagree. But what really galls me is this notion that because I disagree over how to address a problem, I don't care about it.

Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson says, "You have a family that's been devastated not only lost one to death but probably going to lose one to life in prison for killing the other family member,"

It flows from the proposition that criminals do not deserve to be punished. In fairness to both sides, though, I think it has to be recognized that the debate over crime and punishment is becoming ever more clouded by the war on drugs.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the clamor to eliminate the distinction between criminal and victim has accompanied the growth of an immense criminal, economic, and law enforcement nexus which drives a large portion of the economy in this country and around the world, and which is predicated on the idea that self abuse is a crime against society. I can think of no better way to blur the distinction between criminal and victim than by creating an immense system of law in which criminal and victim are synonymous, and that harming oneself deserves a lengthy prison term. This has consequences, and they're now being seen in the form of ever-wider acceptance of the terrible idea that we should not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.

Drug dealers are economic offenders, who sell to willing buyers, and who would not exist without a market. That this market is a crime makes it more profitable, and more violent. Drug dealers are seen as people who are trying to make a living in difficult circumstances, and the crimes they commit against each other are being blamed not on the illegal market, but on certain tools of their trade. They are seen as victims, and the gun is seen as the culprit. It would make about as much sense to say that they are victims of the drugs they sell, but no one would listen to that argument, because the drugs are universally illegal, whereas the guns are not. However, making guns illegal is about as likely to solve the gun problem as making drugs illegal has solved the drug problem.

What the drug laws have done is to distort the traditional perception of crime from one of criminal-who-harms-victim to one of criminal-who-harms-self. This in turn has clouded society's normal desire to punish the criminal. Now, there has always been a tendency in some circles to see criminals as victims, but when crime is defined as including self victimization, and when this category of crime becomes as large as it is now, much greater mischief results. The war on drugs has created a large and constantly growing class of angry dissenters who see all criminals as victims.

As for me, I think they're terribly mistaken in their logic. Just because the drug laws have criminalized victimhood does not mean that all criminals are victims.

Murder remains murder, assault remains assault. The motive is secondary; whether someone was murdered for selling drugs on a competing dealer's corner or for refusing to pay a drug debt, that no more justifies murder than jealousy over a girlfriend. The problem is that drug war has vastly enlarged the criminal class and caused people to lose sight of simple reality.

But when on top of that they accuse me of not caring, I must protest!

MORE: A remark by M. Simon in an earlier post bears repeating:

The War On Some Drugs was always a prototype for the War On Guns. If American gun owners really took this to heart the Drug War would be over in America in short order.

Instapundit has brought up a topic near and dear to my heart. Nerds. He gives a few links.

I clicked on this one and got Tom Maguire's view on the subject. Very nice. There was a long discussion in the comments about gangsta culture and its aversion to numbers and all things technical (white).

Some one in the comments was trying to define humanus nerdus and came up with a list which included the following:

unusual conversation skills/topics

There is nothing unusual about wanting to talk about neutron scattering cross sections vs absorption cross sections. Or heat transfer and fluid flow.

Well, I was a Nuclear Reactor Operator in the Navy. About as geeky as you can get and still be a member of the fighting forces. Lotsa numbaz. LOL.

BTW I had some trouble with dating until I put on a Navy uniform. That is when I went from rags to riches. Even better was looking like a hippie (after I got out of the service), ah the 60s.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The Home Gunsmith.com Has some very neat plans for a home shop built SMG (submachine gun). Here is what the site owner has to say about gun control:

My own view is that the gun not only belongs in the hands of the agents of the state (they can never be disarmed) but in the hands of the people as a whole. This is the surest way of maintaining the correct balance of power between state and citizen. The mad rush of government to create a 'gun free' Utopia will not, of course, have any effect on the crime rate. The criminal, by definition, does not obey the law and is therefore unaffected by any anti firearms legislation. Gun control will, however, create more and more victims of violent crime as long as we allow ourselves to be disarmed behind the smokescreen of 'Crime control'. This is the unpalatable truth you will never read in the media or hear from any politically correct politician.

Unfortunately, while we continue to allow the media anti gun propaganda mills to churn out their lies, myths and misinformation we will continue to see the destruction of the ancient liberties and freedoms once securely enshrined under the "Common laws of England".

When any government deprives a citizen of his freedom or property, the individual must take action to publicise his grievances. To this end, I hope to illustrate in the following pages, the futility of gun control, and that no amount of arbitrary legislation can ever prevent those wanting firearms from owning them. The individual who has the ability to construct his own homemade gun can never be permanently disarmed by any level of gun control legislation.

So as to allow you to get a 'feel' for the subject of homemade guns, the following pages illustrate how a reasonably light weight and portable homemade Machine gun was assembled from readily available 'Off the shelf' materials and components. No lathe or milling machine was required or used.

The firearm that can truthfully be described as "a homemade gun" should be one built using the type of hand tools and materials that the average individual could easily acquire.

H/T Commenter PRCalDude at Hot Air

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

I usually don't start a post by quoting someone's comment to another post in another blog, but I did so here, because this is just too damned typical, and there are just too many damned typical examples of this too-damned-typical complete lack of common sense which now seems to have modern America in a deathlock.

No, seriously. Via Pajamas Media I just learned that when 13-year-old boys are caught engaging in horseplay (they slapped butts of junior high girls as they raced down the hall), that is now to be treated as a felony meriting ten years in prison with mandatory Megan's Law lifetime sex offender registration.

As I keep saying, there is no longer common sense, and that unfortunate fact is being drummed into children at an earlier and earlier age.

The only good I see in any of this is that the Protein Wisdom post (which I found at Pajamas Media) was written by Darleen Click, and I'm delighted to see her talent being recognized by another long-favorite blog.

Darleen addressed this latest bureaucratic horror with some of the inimitable wisdom to which I've grown fond over the years:

Reasonable people don't excuse obnoxious behavior. Reasonable people would expect the school not only to discipline Cory and Ryan, maybe a few after-school hours, or Saturdays, scrubbing graffiti off the walls, or scrubbing down the restrooms, but to exercise the judgment of alleged educational professionals who work with children on a daily basis. And such judgment would not be to involve the police.

But hey, public school admins are filled with people who substitute written rules for judgment, law for morality. And why should we be surprised that they would want to palm off two immature 13 year olds to the criminal system when some of the purported "adults" involved act as unreasonable as the prosecutor?

Naturally, the leftiesphere is chiming in about how these are evil white boys and deserve punishment a la the Duke "rapists." Darleen answers:

The abject stupidity of this writer is jaw-dropping. Only in the most fevered-imaginings of rape is however I define it of radical feminists is adolescent prankish, albeit obnoxious, behavior criminal and akin to rape.

But hey, even Jeffy's spearcarrying for VW's sounds reasonable when compared to one of his co-bloggers, Kathy, who not only picks up Jeff Feckes "prank = little rape" meme, but expands on it by comparing to a brutal gang-rape because...well...because Cory and Ryan are White Boys

The systematic destruction of common sense in this country has gotten scary. I worry that the phenomenon truly has become the dominant paradigm I complained about earlier, because it's escalating, and taking on a life of its own. Avoiding the public schools, as Darleen advises parents, might work for now, but the bureaucratic tentacles are metastatic in nature. They grow and grow, and that is because we must pay and pay for them as they inexorably poke, probe, prod and expand, here and there, whether openly or by stealth, finding endless new ways to justifying themselves as they reach out and touch everyone, everywhere, in every last nook and cranny of this once free country, enforcing and reinforcing as they work towards the Orwellian, "democratically totalitarian" goal of zero tolerance for simple common sense.

No, it doesn't much matter who is elected president, or who is elected to the various state or national legislatures, because it is they -- the truly awful they -- who are really in charge and who seek to totally run our daily lives without so much as being elected. (What's really crazy is I don't even know who they are.... Alas! I liked them better when they were just a few kooks in Berkeley. Yes, I know it's an old rant.)

Nice work Darleen!

MORE: Via Dr. Helen (who points out that the girls were slapping butts too) here's Mark Steyn:

A world that requires handcuffs and judges and district attorneys for what took place that Friday in February is not just a failed education system but an entire society that's losing any sense of proportion. Without which, civilized life becomes impossible. So we legalize more and more aspects of life and demand that district attorneys prosecute ever more aggressively what were once routine areas of social interaction.

A society that looses the state to criminalize schoolroom horseplay is guilty not only of punishing children as grown-ups but of the infantilization of the entire citizenry.

Who was Jason Brewer and why was he shot?

Not to pick a murder victim at random, but the Philly.com web site provides few details about the murders, and I get the impression that the overall tally is more important:

Philadelphia tallied six murders over the weekend, police said, bringing the total for the year to 242.

In addition, two police officers allegedly fatally shot two gun-wielding men in separate incidents under investigation by the Internal Affairs Bureau.

Back to Philly.com:

This weekend's six murders:

* 2 a.m. Saturday - 15-year-old Raheem Grant was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head on Callowhill Street near 63rd, in the Overbrook section.

* 4:46 a.m. Saturday - Jason Brewer, 25, was shot multiple times near 18th Street and Girard Avenue, in North Philadelphia. He was pronounced dead at the scene at 5 a.m.

But should that disincline me to look any further?

Remember, my access to information is solely based on what I am able to glean from the hard copy of my daily Inquirer and online, and my opinions are a result of my textual analysis. (I do not have access to the police blotter, which I'm sure is off limits to lowly bloggers.)

Today's Inquirer has more:

It was a violent weekend in the city, with at least six homicides reported apart from the police shooting, bringing this year's total to 242. They included:

[...]

Jason Brewer, 25, of Albanus Street was found shot to death in an apparent robbery in the 1700 block of Harper Street Saturday. Police found Brewer after a companion showed up at St. Joseph's Hospital with a gunshot wound to his ankle and told hospital staff that his friend had also been shot.

Raheem Grant, 15, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in the 6300 block of Callowhill Street after reports of a fight Saturday.

But what about the more puzzling case of Jason Brewer? Was he murdered? If he did not live in the 1700 block of Harper, what was he doing there? Was someone trying to rob him? Or was he trying to rob someone else? Was he found lying on the street?

Or are these details meaningless? I think they might matter in determining whether he was a murder victim, or something else.

In an yesterday's version of the story, it was reported that Brewer was found "at a residence."

Police were still investigating the three slayings that occurred yesterday.

At 2:18 a.m., they received a call about a shooting in the 6300 block of Callowhill Street in West Philadelphia, and found Raheem Grant, 15, who lived nearby, dead of a gunshot to the head.

Just after 5 a.m., St. Joseph's Hospital notified police that a patient had walked in with a gunshot wound to an ankle. The patient told police that another victim was at a residence in the 1700 block of Harper Street in North Philadelphia. When police arrived, they found a 25-year-old man dead of multiple gunshots.

Jason Brewer was murdered;

in a robbery;

at a residence;

where he did not live;

where his companion was also wounded during the same robbery;

I'm tempted to say inquiring minds want to know, but that would sound sarcastic and I'm trying to be serious. What I'd really like to know is who are the victims, and who are the perpetrators. For some reason, these things just don't seem to matter in a world divided into good and bad based solely on guns.

The details don't seem to matter, and I'm left looking at a map of the 1700 block of Harper wondering whose residence might have been involved. Who lived there? Was anyone home? Why no arrests for what is being called a murder? Who might have been robbing whom? As I think about these things which I will probably never know, I'm ever mindful of the numerous admonitions in the Inquirer about how people like me who live in the suburbs just don't care about what goes on in the city. Here's Monica Yant Kinney:

Whenever I write about Philadelphia's homicide crisis, I hear from suburban readers who think it's a waste of space.

Poor black people killing poor black people, thugs shooting thugs - why should we cry?

With alarming regularity, folks living outside the city suggest they'd rather ignore the horrors inside it.

And the way these things are reported makes me wonder how much the Inquirer cares beyond the tally and the narrative of the evil gun.

UPDATE (07/31/07): Today's Daily News has more on Raheem Grant's shooting. Police say they believe it was "retaliatory" -- and neighbors are afraid to talk to reporters:

In Overbrook yesterday, the news that Raheem Grant may have been killed as retaliation caused little shock in a busy neighborhood where many people work during the day.

"It's really crazy," said a woman, who called herself a lifelong resident of the neighborhood.

"There was an explosion a week ago, and there's shootings all the time," she said.

The woman, who did not want to be identified, paused near the multicolored makeshift memorial at 63rd and Callowhill bearing Raheem's picture, candles and teddy bears.

Other neighbors agreed that the neighborhood had gone from bad to worse.

They blamed groups of youths for much of the trouble.

"What was he doing out so late?" pondered Jason Miller, a resident of nearby Felton Street.

"I don't know the situation, but why would a 15-year-old be out past midnight?"

Hanging out late at night shouldn't be a thing for young folks, agreed neighbor Roberta Jenkins.

"The neighborhood is pretty bad . . . ," she said.

"Someone I know just got shot two weeks ago. I'm trying to move."

Darnell Washington, who also lives in the area, said it was hard to believe that Raheem could have been shot over a misunderstanding or an argument.

"He was real cool . . . ," said Washington. "Shot in the head? That's crazy. Who deserves that?"

Many passers-by stopped to check out the memorial to Raheem. But in a city gripped by a "don't snitch" mantra, not many would say anything about the shooting.

One woman said she knew Raheem, but hurriedly walked away when approached by a reporter.

"I'm sorry," she said, as she walked down 63rd Street.

"I'm sorry, I'm not going to say anything."

Who was "retaliating" against this teenager at 2:00 a.m. -- and why -- these are things that we who "do not care" will probably never be told.

(That's because we'd "rather ignore the horrors," of course.)

Is there any way to get these people to at least stop scolding me for ignoring what they're not providing?

Seriously, this "you don't care" meme really rankles me, because I suspect that the people who say that are more opposed to seeing the actual perpetrators of these awful crimes punished than I am.

It's as if "you don't care" means "you don't agree with my position on gun control!"

MORE: Not only I do care about Raheem Grant enough to want his killers caught and punished, but I cared enough to photograph the Inquirer's photo of the Grant vigil for the readers of this blog.

Why it appears in the hard copy but not on online, I don't know. The photos are by April Saul, who has been chronicling Philadelphia's many teen shooting deaths in a piece called Kids, Guns, and a Deadly Toll. Ms. Saul explains "why she decided to tell these stories" and at no point does she express even the slightest desire to see the killers caught and punished.

I don't think this means she does not care. Obviously, she cares very much, but in a different way than the way I care. If I had a teenager who had been murdered, I'd want the perpetrators caught and punished, not just for personal reasons, but because I think putting away murderous people is in the ultimate best interest of civilization. April Saul, by saying she would "not try to distinguish between the 'guilty' and the 'innocent,'" in my view is subordinating the distinction between murderer and victim to a narrative which blames the tools used by murderers.

Obviously, I disagree. But what really galls me is this notion that because I disagree over how to address a problem, I don't care about it.

I just found a new site (via Instapundit) called Minding the Campus that concerns how the Race, Class, Gender (RCG aka Angry Studies) people are undermining liberal education.

A good place to start is this piece on the Ward Churchill case, recently in the news, by KC Johnson of Durham in Wonderland/Duke Lacrosse case fame.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

From Slide Rule, the autobiography of Nevil Shute

In the autumn of 1915 my father took advantage of a break clause in the lease to give up South Hill, the house at Blackrock. I think he was concerned at the rising cost of everything due to the war and the mounting income tax, which was to rise to the unprecedented figure of six shillings in the pound.

I think, too, he felt that the house held so many memories of Fred for my mother and myself that it would be better to get rid of it and start again. What he did seems curious now in these days of total war, because for the Christmas holidays he took my mother and myself on a trip to Rome and Naples.

Wars were localized in those days, when the range of aircraft was small and bombing far behind the lines was not a serious menace. The Western Front was ablaze with war from Switzerland to the sea but this war was completely static; there was nothing to prevent the normal express trains full of tourists from running as usual fifty miles behind the lines, and no currency restrictions then impeded foreign travel.

One might have thought that the turmoil of war would have prevented my father from leaving his work to take his annual allowance of six weeks' leave, but it didn't. He was a very conscientious man who would never have put his personal interests above the job...

Rome was full of officers in magnificent uniforms frequently with sky-blue flowing cloaks; the Italians in those days believed in getting some fun out of a war. Naples and Capri followed. My parents prolonged their leisurely holiday so that I had to travel back to Shrewsbury alone from Naples, an interesting and stimulating experience for a sixteen-year-old boy who spoke virtually no Italian and only schoolroom French.

I think this journey did me a lot of good; although I had to change trains unexpectedly two or three times i had no real difficulties; when I got back to school I found that very few boys had made a journey of that length through wartime Europe. I think my parents showed a good deal of insight and wisdom in pushing me off on it.

In a very thoughtful Pajamas Media piece, Rick Moran looks at the desire of many Americans for a "return to normalcy" (meaning a return to pre-9/11 world):

Torn as they are between the desire for a different kind of politics that Obama is offering and the sure handedness that Hillary Clinton is trying to sell, the Democrats (and the nation at large) seem to prefer the familiar and experienced candidate. But might there be something else at work on the voters' minds? Could it be that the change they yearn for is a desire to go back--back to 9/10/2001 when the outside world rarely intruded on our somnolence and where the big debates in Congress were over education and prescription drugs?

Back in 2004, Mickey Kaus wondered if we hadn't experienced "too much history" in the 3 plus years since 9/11. Peggy Noonan echoed those thoughts, asking if what the American people wanted was a Harding-like "Return to Normalcy."

While the Republican candidates all seem eager to continue making history in the War on Terror, the American people may want to take a break from the harsh realities and hard future offered up by the GOP and choose instead a more settled hand on the tiller.

If there are harsh realities (and I think there are), then they are not imaginary realities. This is why I have criticized the people who think that once you get tired of a war, voting it out of existence is as easy as changing the channel on a TV remote.

Of course, the people who do this will naturally vote for Hillary, because she's marketing herself as Clinton nostalgia. Vote for your old favorite Peace and Prosperity Channel, and we'll bring back the program of your choice!

This might even appeal to Republicans who suffer from short memories or wishful thinking. But I can't help notice the way Barack Obama keeps forcing Republicans to defend Hillary. Must be handy for Hillary to have someone like that to run against.

If I were Hillary and I didn't have him, I'd invent him.

From Slide Rule, the autobiography of Nevil Shute

We had a motor bicycle between us by that time, a new Rudge Multi. My parents must have been very wise to launch out on this extravagance at a time when my father must have foreseen rising taxation, for the Rudge cost almost sixty pounds, a lot of money in those days.

Although completely unmechanical himself, my father saw good sense in Fred's contention that every officer ought to know something about motors, revolutionary though that doctrine seemed. My mother had another angle on it; she foresaw that in the holidays my life would be empty without Fred since we had been so much together, and she thought that if I had a motor bicycle while Fred was away at the war it would ease the loneliness.

So in September 1914 when I was fifteen years old I took delivery of the Rudge from the depot in Stephens Green, Fred being in hospital. I had never ridden a motor bicycle before though I had a very comprehensive theoretical knowledge, and I was too shy to admit my inexperience.

The Rudge mechanic gave me a shove off in amongst the trams and for a moment I was out of control while my body accustomed itself to the unfamiliar weight of the machine and the great surge of power that small movements of the throttle produced, for the Rudge was no lightweight but a man-sized, powerful machine. Then I got the hang of it and rode round Stephens Green a couple of times gingerly manipulating the infinitely variable gear, and finally rode it home in triumph.

From time to time in life one gets a moment of sheer ecstasty; I had one of them that day.

Fred had the Rudge at Sandhurst through the winter, and I went back to school where military training was now to take up much of our free time. In the spring he was commissioned and posted to the depot of the regiment at Falmouth, and in the Easter holidays my father and mother took me there to stay for a fortnight so that we could see something of Fred before he went to France.

I think war was still romantic in those days, early in 1915; certainly nobody yet had any conception of what casualties could do to a nation. Fred was very smart in his new uniform, his Sam Browne belt beautifully polished, his sword impressive, his revolver massive, new, and fragrant with clean gun oil...

Fred went to Flanders with a draft, and I rode the Rudge Multi home. It was the first big journey I had made alone in my life, and it took me four days to get from Falmouth to Holyhead. Nearly forty years later it is difficult to see why it should have taken me so long, for I did nothing else but travel. I can remember a vague impression that a hundred miles was an enormous distance and a good day's riding, and I think the fact of the matter must be that roads were generally bad in those days, and motor bicycles much slower than we now recollect...

In adventure and fatigue the journey was probably comparable in these days to a drive from London to Rome or from Boston to Chicago, and that I accomplished it without mishap gave my self-confidence a boost which was rather needed, for I still stammered very badly.

In the middle of the summer term Fred was badly wounded, at a place called l'Epinette near Armentières...In these days of sulfa drugs, blood plasma, and penicillin nobody would die of the wounds Fred got, extensive though they were. He was evacuated down to the base hospital at at Wimereux and for ten days or so he made good progress. Then gangrene set in and became uncontrollable, in itself an indication of the march of medical science, because the medical attention that he got was very good.

My father and mother crossed to France to be with him, as was common in those days of gentler war, and he died about three weeks after he was wounded, with my mother by his side.

If Fred had lived we might have had some real books one day, not the sort of stuff that I turn out, for he had more literature in his little finger than I have in my whole body. He was only nineteen when he died, and after nearly forty years it still seems strange to me to that I should be older than Fred.

For nearly a week, a triple murder in a sleazy Philadelphia bar has been much in the news, with the local press has been reporting that the shooting was triggered by an argument over a bet. This story, headlined "Six killed in weekend violence -- Dispute over bet turns deadly" is typical:

The gunman inside Abay's Wheeler Bar on South 62d Street had won the bet, and flew into a rage when the loser didn't produce any money, said the cousin, Henry Atkins, 18, of the 6200 block of Reedland Street, a block from the small corner tavern.

Atkins, who was sitting on his steps, staring blankly ahead with moist eyes, said his cousin and next-door neighbor, Arthur Jennings, 20, was one of the dead men. "It was all over a bet," Atkins said, shaking his head.

He said another victim, Claude "Netty" Snelling, 30, had wagered on Ronald "Winky" Wright, a challenger to light-heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins of Philadelphia.

Hopkins won a unanimous decision. "Netty bet on Winky, and when the guy wanted his money, he didn't have it," Atkins muttered. Then he stood and abruptly went inside, leaving unanswered the question of how much was owed.

A neighbor who knows the family said that Snelling was the boyfriend of Jennings' mother and that the two victims lived together. The third homicide victim was Jamar Thompson, 31, of the 3500 block of North Masher Street.

one of seven people killed last weekend in Philadelphia, his case lost in the attention focused on the shooting at Abay's Wheeler Bar in Southwest Philadelphia that left three men dead and a fourth critically wounded after an argument over a boxing bet

Monday, Street dragged himself to Abay Wheeler's Bar in Southwest Philadelphia, where a weekend shoot-out - over a boxing bet - left three people dead and one barely breathing.

Philadelphia police announced the arrest of a West Philadelphia man in the triple murder at a bar shooting last week even as three more people were killed in the city yesterday.

Vonzell "Pooh" Roundtree, 27, of the 5800 block of Rodman Street, was charged with three counts of homicide and attempted murder in the rampage last Sunday at Abay's Wheeler Bar in Southwest Philadelphia.

Arthur Jennings, 20, Claude "Netty" Snelling, 30, and Jamar Thompson, 31, were killed after a "very minor argument," police said.

It was originally reported that a fight had escalated after a wager over the Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright boxing match was not paid. Yesterday, police said that story was not the case. (Emphasis added.)

Can we be sure?

Once again, it strikes me that the most important detail is not what may have gone through the criminal's mind at the time of the shooting, but the fact that he was an armed ex-con, whose possession of the gun was in total violation of strong, existing gun laws. Readers have to turn to the inside pages of today's Section B (to page B-6 to be exact), to find the following recital:

Roundtree had three previous arrests for firearms and drug charges, court records show. In 2002, he pleaded guilty to carrying firearms without a license and was sentenced to three years of probation.

Nor do criminal backgrounds of shooters fit the narrative of Philadelphia as a city at war:

A CITY OF VIOLENCE

The CBS report - which noted that the number of homicides has been increasing in many large American cities - focused on North Philadelphia, where reporter Byron Pitts said that "life is often short and illegal handguns are cheap." To prove his point, a 19-year-old - whose face was obscured and who was said to have been just released from jail - pulled a pistol from his front pocket and said, "Everybody's got a gun everywhere."

Perhaps I should be thankful that the reporter didn't dutifully tag along and help the criminal out with a straw purchase as they did in Boston.

Yeah, I know that MSM journalists think the First Amendment gives them a special "no snitching" privilege unavailable to anyone else, but they also feel somehow entitled to break the gun laws in order to advance their narrative that because it's easy to break existing gun laws, we need more.

Yes, it is easy to break gun laws, just as it's easy commit crime. You'd be surprised. Why, I don't see why some "journalist" doesn't just get in his car and prove his point by doing a driveby shooting, then declaring how easy it is to break the laws against driveby shootings! (Why, it's almost as easy as breaking the laws against child molesting or rape!)

An additional point of the "CITY OF VIOLENCE" narrative here is that Philadelphia is Baghdad. Whether that means Bush is responsible and that we should pull out, I'm not sure. But it's a war, complete with law abiding citizens -- who are... Are what? I can't be sure, so I'll let readers decide:

The newscast could have come down even harder on Philadelphia. Earlier in the day, reporter Pitts had written on the CBS Web site that Philadelphia is like "a war zone."

"Just like Baghdad, there are law-abiding citizens whom we met that keep a gun close by when they take their children to school, go to the grocery store and when they close their eyes at night in their own bed," he wrote. "In Philadelphia they're not called 'insurgents'; they're drug dealers and thugs."

But if you keep reading, it seems someone edited that important detail out!

The televised report, however, did not mention Baghdad. And experts have cautioned that comparisons between Philadelphia and Iraq's war-ravaged capital are a slippery slope, since the death rate is far higher in Baghdad, and the root causes of violence so radically different.

But one thing is the same 11,000 miles apart, and that is the senselessness of violent death.

But unless I am reading him wrong, Philadelphia's Police Commissioner appears not to think that locking up a triple murderer would be a devastating result:

Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson says, "You have a family that's been devastated not only lost one to death but probably going to lose one to life in prison for killing the other family member,"

Does he actually think that it was the gun drove this ex-con to possess it illegally, take it to a bar, murder three patrons, and wound others?

I can't be sure, but what he said about concealed carry permit holders last year makes me worry not only about the man's priorities, but whether the anti-gun narrative has blinded him to reality:

"At this point, right now, we have over 32,000 people in Philly who have permits to carry (and) actually walk the streets of Philly with a gun. We only have 6,400 police officers. We're outnumbered nearly 5-to-1 with people who are on the streets with guns," Johnson said.

I think guns in the hands of criminals are the problem, and guns in the hands of law abiding people are part of the solution.

Unfortunately, disagreeing with a narrative often seems like a waste of time, because disagreeing with it doesn't make it go away.

(Might as well disagree with the lyrics to John Lennon's "Imagine.")

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome all!

In a post I wrote this morning, I tried to analyze the facts of another Philadelphia shooting -- and wondered whether the narrative is rendering facts almost superfluous.

I guess the rule is that it's OK to drug children with benadryl for takeoff if you're an airline, but a criminal offense to use the same drug on them at naptime if you're running a day care center. (Actually, there is a certain logic to this, because it is undeniable that flight attendants have a more compelling interest in quiet children than do day care workers.)

Then there's Ritalin. It's OK for schools to drug children to make them pay attention in class, so that they'll perform better in school. But it's not OK to drug athletes to enhance their performance in sports. And God forbid that musicians might try improving their musical performance with drugs.

Somewhere in all of this, there's an exception for drugging under a "performance enhancement theory" -- but it is not being applied consistently.

Then there's medication for pain. For physical pain, it's OK to drug people -- even at the risk of making them feel good. For mental pain, though, while there might be certain allowable drugs, if a drug used to treat emotional pain makes people feel good, its bad.

I'm thinking about the manufacture of morality again. It's always tough to keep abreast of these constantly changing standards.

MORE: The bottom line seems to be that where it comes to drugs, all adults are children.

Except the authorities (and the "experts")!

Bill Hobbs says the war is not lost, but that the Democrats are determined to lose it:

The war has not been lost. American forces on the ground are in the process of winning it. The American military has never lost a war that the American people and its politicians have vowed to win.

It's a shame that the Democratic-controlled Congress can't manage to do anything about illegal immigration, earmarks, sleazy congressional ethics or energy, but it would be better if they buckled down and worked harder at those issues than focusing so intently on legislating American defeat in Iraq.

Do they really want to run in '08 as the party that caused us to lose in Iraq?

I agree with Bill Hobbs, and I think the strategy is to do everything possible to lose the war in such a way that the Republicans will be blamed. One of the ways this is being done is by discounting the documented military brilliance of experts like General Petraeus, whom the Democrats themselves voted to appoint!

Obviously, this is a tricky business, requiring cunning, duplicity, and deception.

Comedian Jackie Mason (while a bit blunt) shows that he understands the dynamics of this elastic inconsistency quite well in this YouTube video:

I have not fact-checked (and cannot vouch for) everything Mason says, but what I find delightful about the video is that he manages to nail the Democrats on their strategy by applying simple common sense. (No wonder the latter is under attack everywhere.)

Mason is absolutely right about one thing: the Democrats did vote unanimously to confirm General Petraeus. (And most of them supported entering Iraq.)

A question I asked myself yesterday about the new "Conservatives for Hillary" phenomenon only seemed to reopen a Pandora's box of endlessly undefinable definitions. (But words fail, because the "box" has been irreparably burst open for a long time.)

Anyway, Socrates left this comment:

Sullivan is not a conservative. I don't know what he is.

For example, I once tried to maintain that Michael Savage is not a conservative:

I think I can fairly state that conservatism does not mean sympathizing with radical Islam, or attributing to God the worst attack on the United States since World War II.

By claiming to be a conservative when he is not, Savage is behaving as a classic agent provocateur.

That he has many fans who call themselves conservatives is more worrisome to me than whether he calls himself a conservative.

I'm not sure whether I should consider Savage's fans to be conservatives or not. (Certainly if he pronounced himself a "libertarian," that would not mean he or his fans were libertarians.) But again, I think the extent to which people who call themselves conservatives agree with Savage begs the question of why some (not all) people think conservatives are idiots.

For the record, I don't think conservatives are idiots (far from it), and I'm going to try not to think of Michael Savage or his fans as conservatives.

(I'm hoping this is an exercise in fairness and not denial.)

This makes me crazy, because some of my liberal friends call me a conservative and some of my conservative friends call me a liberal, and I am not middle of the road, and yet "libertarian" is problematic, because I disagree with many of them and many of them would say I'm not libertarian.

Then there's the political party stuff: as long as I remain a Republican, the "conservative wing" will call me a RINO. Yet if I switch to the Democratic Party, my views will be even more anathema, and I'll be a DINO. (I've had the same views I have now for many years, and had them when I was a Democrat.)

Yeah, I love rejecting labels. But it's getting tired, and seems a tad overwrought at times.

Just for today, I'll stick my neck out and say that I am not a Savage/Sullivan conservative.

If that makes me a liberal, I'll take my lumps.

MORE: It also occurs to me that there are four possibilities:

A. Savage is a conservative and Sullivan is not.

B. Sullivan is a conservative and Savage is not.

C. Savage and Sullivan are both conservatives.

D. Neither Savage nor Sullivan are conservatives.

And if the word has no meaning, then it is very foolish to worry about whether one can "be" such a thing.

So why care?

Well, I didn't start the "Conservatives for Hillary" movement.

Nor did Sullivan.

Sheesh.

I have to say, the "Conservatives for Hillary" movement strikes me as beyond dishonest or contrived -- to the point of being downright tacky.

(But I guess if I can get used to "Goldwater Marxism," I can get used to anything.)

MORE: Regular readers know that I have long doubted the sincerity of Michael Savage. So, apparently, does NRO's David Klinghoffer. Among many other things he cites Savage's contribution of thousands of dollars to ultra-liberal Jerry Brown's campaign for California Attorney General.

Reason?

"Why bet on a horse that isn't going to win? Why throw your money into the garbage?''

Leave it to Michael Savage to think up a catchy fund-raising slogan for Hillary!

I have a friend who reports on the defense industry. Nice Jewish boy.

He says via e-mail that it is no use wasting your time trying to convince idiots of the obvious (morally it is sound though).

He says a big war is coming. BIG war. Like Pearl Harbor it will unite us. He says it is a waste of time trying to talk to the idiots. He used to blog a lot on the subject. Now he doesn't bother. He says events are the best convincers. Why does it feel like October 1939 all over again? The period of the "Phony War".

Which reminded me of this piece by Herbert E. Meyer at the American Thinker.

For better or worse, it's part of the American character to wait until the last possible moment - even to wait a bit beyond the last possible moment - before kicking into high gear and getting the job done. It's in our genes; just think of how many times you've ground enamel off your teeth watching your own kid waste an entire weekend, only to start writing a book report at 10:30 Sunday night that, when you find it on the breakfast table Monday morning is by some miracle a minor masterpiece.

However horrific it may be, the knockout punch won't knock us out. Instead, it will shift us from playing defense back to offense - and this time we won't hold back. The president will ask Congress for a declaration of war and he, or she, will get it. We'll bring back the draft, send our troops into battle without one hand tied behind their backs by lawyers, and we won't waste time and energy pussyfooting with the United Nations. And if we've closed GITMO by this time - we'll reopen it and even double its size because we're going to pack it. All of this will take longer to organize, and cost more, than if we'd done it right in the aftermath of 9-11. That's unfortunate, but that's the way we Americans tend to do things. And when we do finally start fighting for real -- we'll win.

H/T Reliapundit who got me to thinking about this subject with his reports of recent terror alerts.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

As it's YouTube night and as M. Simon started the tradition of "Not Fade Away" nostalgia here, so I thought I'd supply a few variations on the theme:

First, here's the Rolling Stones, from a 1964 appearance on the Mike Douglas Show:

Originally a Buddy Holly song, "Not Fade Away" was the Stones' first hit in the UK.

And it was a staple for the Grateful Dead, performing it here in1970:

Much as I'd love to find the original Buddy Holly version of "Not Fade Away" on YouTube, some things aren't on video and probably never will be. (Well, there is a video showing the original record spinning, but that doesn't count.)

I think the closest video is this. It's not quite "Not" -- but it is a video of Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy":

The year is 1958 and the crowd is pretty excited.

Yes, it is a question I feel forced to ask from time to time.

Reading about horrors like this make me wonder whether the United States government has become almost as dysfunctional as the Saudi government. The latter has a well-known penchant for paying their dysfunctional children go and make trouble all over the world, while our government (if Stanley Kurtz is right) helps ensure that the Saudis indoctrinate young Americans with their hateful Wahhabist bile:

Unless we counteract the influence of Saudi money on the education of the young, we're going to find it very difficult to win the war on terror. I only wish I was referring to Saudi-funded madrassas in Pakistan. Unfortunately, I'm talking about K-12 education in the United States. Believe it or not, the Saudis have figured out how to make an end-run around America's K-12 curriculum safeguards, thereby gaining control over much of what children in the United States learn about the Middle East. While we've had only limited success paring back education for Islamist fundamentalism abroad, the Saudis have taken a surprising degree of control over America's Middle-East studies curriculum at home.

Game, Set, Match
How did they do it? Very carefully...and very cleverly. It turns out that the system of federal subsidies to university programs of Middle East Studies (under Title VI of the Higher Education Act) has been serving as a kind of Trojan horse for Saudi influence over American K-12 education. Federally subsidized Middle East Studies centers are required to pursue public outreach. That entails designing lesson plans and seminars on the Middle East for America's K-12 teachers. These university-distributed teaching aids slip into the K-12 curriculum without being subject to the normal public vetting processes. Meanwhile, the federal government, which both subsidizes and lends its stamp of approval to these special K-12 course materials on the Middle East, has effectively abandoned oversight of the program that purveys them (Title VI).

Read it all and weep. I'd like to ignore the whole thing (and I'm sure a lot of people would label Kurtz an Islamophobe), but there's a real Saudi madrassa in my neighborhood, and there's just something about seeing that the majority of Iraqi suicide bombers still remain Saudi Salafists (as were the 9/11 gang) that I find more than a little unsettling.

What kind of war are we fighting if young people are being systematically taught that the Wahhabist/Salafist enemy is good, but that we are bad?

I know there are many truly moderate Muslims, including patriotic Americans, but there is nothing moderate about Wahhabism. Why spend tax dollars promoting the philosophy of the enemy in American schools?

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just not fight the war, and give them everything they want?

Maybe we already are, but we're still pursuing the war because we imagine the enemies don't realize we've largely defeated ourselves at home. In an interesting piece Glenn Reynolds links, Michael Burleigh asks a good question of England, which might as well be asked of the United States:

Why is foreign aid not contingent upon warning recipient states that they will forfeit it if clerics they subsidise preach hatred of the West?

In a Reason Magazine piece titled "Gut Feelings and Real Threats: Why civil libertarians shouldn't be cavalier about terrorism," Cathy Young has some common sense advice for libertarians:

In the past, wars and other national security threats led to far worse assaults on American liberties than anything being contemplated now. Already, the majority of Americans seem willing to accept at least some curtailment of civil liberties in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. Even one more major attack, let alone three a year, could usher in some very dark days for freedom. If champions of civil liberties want to prevent that, they need to take a different approach: to show that the compromises we are being asked to accept will not make us safer, or that there are ways to make us more secure without sacrificing our bedrock principles. If they want to be heard when they warn about loss of liberty, they cannot afford to sound cavalier when they talk about loss of life.

Right.

Denial is always very appealing, but in real life, there's no TV remote.

This post by Ann Althouse woke me up to the new reality (and a series of posts by Andrew Sullivan supposedly document this new phenomenon.)

Did I really need another reason why I'm not a conservative?

A Yahoo News item I saw earlier focuses on the growing problem of deer-related traffic accidents:

....there are 1.5 million deer-related traffic accidents in the U.S. each year, resulting in $1.1 billion in vehicle damages.

State Farm Insurance Co., the nation's largest car insurer, began tracking deer-crash data in 2002 and also estimates 1.5 million vehicles collide with deer annually.

Pennsylvania, with its heavily wooded areas and dense population, has one of the highest numbers of deer-related crashes, with about 35,000 deer carcasses removed from state roads annually, according to a state transportation official. Other states with large numbers of deer-related crashes are Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, Virginia, Indiana, Texas and Wisconsin.

Most occur in either the spring, when deer are most likely to be on the move at dusk and dawn, and during the fall mating season.

Some of the collisions can be quite messy. A California friend who worked in an ER near Eureka told me about a buck that went through a windshield -- embedding its antlers in a passenger's head. Paramedics had to kill the still-kicking deer, then sever the antler portion from its head, and a neurosurgeon spent the rest of the day carefully removing the antlers from the skull.

These days, man seems to be the only natural enemy of deer. I counted thirteen deer in a neighborhood herd, and in nearby Valley Forge National Park, the overpopulation problem is so bad that huge herds roam at will, at times seeming to actually darken parts of the landscape. In the winter, they starve, because hunting is not allowed. Meetings are held, but the default position often ends up being dominated by Bambi sentimentalists.

The National Park Service is holding the usual public input meetings about the Valley Forge deer problem. Ho hum.

With unhurried deliberation, National Park Service kicked off a lengthy legal process this month that will ultimately determine the fate of Valley Forge's deer by 2008. A Notice of Intent published Sept. 7 in the Federal Register marked the start of the "public scoping period."
At a press conference on a rainy Thursday morning in the woods bordering Pawlings Road, park officials and state legislators attributed the denuded park woodlands, prevalence of Lyme disease and deer-vehicle collisions to deer overpopulation in Valley Forge.
"This is a serious public health issue," said state Sen. Andrew Dinniman, a Democrat representing Chester County's 19th Dist.
Throughout the past two decades, the deer population has risen substantially, according to the park service. When the animals were counted by park staff between 1997 and 2006, they determined the density rose from 154 to 244 deer per square mile.
The current density is about 14 times that recommended by the state to sustain forest regeneration in the 3,500-acre park.
As the park service develops a general management plan, which will include a deer-management strategy, the federal agency must follow the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The process mandates public meetings.

And activists are sui generis -- a highly specialized, tiny and noisy subspecies in no way typifying that large mass of ordinary people we think of when we use the misleading expression "the public." "Irrational" and "emotional" don't begin to describe people who seem incapable of understanding the simple word "No" -- and who will resort to violence or threats of violence to get their way.

In the case of deer activists, here's a typical example (of an angry "BambiNo"):

Today, I am not asking you to stop killing the deer, I am TELLING you to stop killing deer. There will be no more deer-killings at our metro-parks. It is off limits to you and your hunting buddies. If the HCMA continues on its bloody path, then I will execute justice the way I see fit ... and that means constructing a rogue, independent, deer-police unit to protect them from you. KAPISH!

After the rest of the speeches ended, one HCMA member talked about the importance of civility in discussions. The HCMA commissioner then stood up and claimed - once again - that something had to be done about the deer because they were eating the plants.

I started waving my hands in a gesture of disgust that signified he was lying. He responded by saying, "Young man don't wave your hands at me."

I interrupted loudly, took over the floor and said the following:

"I am waving my hands because you have no idea what you are talking about. And don't give me that nonsense about civility. You don't care about civility and you don't care about the truth. I could tell you Gandhi said, 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.' Is that civil enough for you? Is that truthful enough!

How about Œ'The life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. The more helpless the creature is, the more it is entitled to protection from humans, from the cruelty of humans.' That's Gandhi too. Is that truthful enough! Is that civil enough! Does that mean anything to you or anyone up there? You don't care about the truth.

I told you before these deer are off limits. No more killing. No more! For 80 years there have been organized deer kills throughout Michigan. And after 80 years, the deer are still over-populated. When is it going to get under control? When? Another 80 years? I'll be damned if you're going to spend 80 years killing deer in these metro-parks. I am livid and I am fed up with this nonsense. No more killing. There will be hell to pay if you decide to kill these deer."

Then, I walked over to the row of hunters. There were six of them.

I pointed to each one and loudly said, ŒSissy, sissy, sissy, sissy, sissy ... PUNK.'

You think you're tough guys. Put your hands on me and show me how tough animal killers are. Come on!"

Four officers then approached me and asked me to sit down. Since my point was made, I obliged.

And while the egalitarian bureaucrats tremble over words like that (worrying, no doubt, over whether their children will be safe from activists if they vote the wrong way), the overpopulated deer are going through windshields, destroying the vital understory on which birds and other animals depend, and infecting dogs and citizens with Lyme Disease.

The latter is a serious public health problem which, because it is relatively new, often goes unrecognized, and does not get as much attention as it should. Not to sound hysterical, but the neurological symptoms are pretty scary to contemplate:

Up to 40% of patients with Lyme disease develop neurologic involvement of either the peripheral or central nervous system. Dissemination to the CNS can occur within the first few weeks after skin infection. Like syphilis, Lyme disease may have a latency period of months to years before symptoms of late infection emerge. Early signs include meningitis, encephalitis, cranial neuritis, and radiculoneuropathies. Later, encephalomyelitis and encephalopathy may occur. A broad range of psychiatric reactions have been associated with Lyme disease, including paranoia, dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, panic attacks, major depression, anorexia nervosa, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Depressive states among patients with late Lyme disease are fairly common, ranging across studies from 26% to 66%. The microbiology of Borrelia burgdorferi sheds light on why Lyme disease can be relapsing and remitting and why it can be refractory to normal immune surveillance and standard antibiotic regimens.

The disease is very common here in the Northeast, and it is spreading rapidly:

Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne disease in North America and Europe, and one of the fastest-growing infectious diseases in the United States. Of cases reported to the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC), the ratio of Lyme disease infection is 7.9 cases for every 100,000 persons. In the ten states where Lyme disease is most common, the average was 31.6 cases for every 100,000 persons for the year 2005.[41]

Although Lyme disease has now been reported in 49 of 50 states in the U.S, about 99% of all reported cases are confined to just five geographic areas (New England, Mid-Atlantic, East-North Central, South Atlantic, and West North-Central). Charts and tables for Lyme disease statistics in the U.S. can be found at the CDC website.

The number of reported cases of the disease have been increasing, as are endemic regions in North America.

Why today's Yahoo news article had not a single word about Lyme Disease, I do not know. The insurance companies are reported to be complaining about the high cost of auto accident claims, but you'd think Lyme Disease would be getting expensive too.

There seems to be a causal relationship between deer overpopulation and Lyme Disease:

The presence of Lyme disease and deer ticks indicates significant numbers of deer. The deer ticks cannot spread Lyme to humans without at least 8 deer per square mile. This has been found to be a consistent number in studies across New England.

Why aren't there as many Lyme activists as there are Bambi activists?

MORE: While I did not want this post to end up sounding like a public service message, the more I thought about the tragic possibility of Lyme Disease being misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's, the more my thoughts turned to a famous public official whose recent outbursts about dogs were so bizarrely incomprehensible that they triggered speculation about his mental condition.

I have to say, when I watched the YouTube video that Ann Althouse linked recently, I was a bit taken aback.

Stunned, really.

It is clear that the man (Senator Robert Byrd) is suffering from dementia of some sort. He lets his emotions completely overwhelm him, he stammers, pauses for inappropriate lengths of time, turns pages without reading them, and in general makes so little sense that at first I had a great deal of trouble figuring out what he was talking about.

Before writing this off as Alzheimer's Disease or "senility," I think it should be borne in mind that Senator Byrd is:

a) a dog owner, who

b) lives in an area where Lyme Disease is known to be present, and who

c) shows signs consistent with neurological symptoms of Lyme Disease infection.

Is it too much to ask that he be tested?

I mean, doesn't the guy vote for and against all kinds of important stuff? If a mere course of treatment with antibiotics could clear this up, why, there might even be positive implications for national security!

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds, for the link! A very warm welcome to all.

UPDATE (07/30/07): A post linked by Glenn Reynolds this morning provides a reminder that the above video of Senator Byrd (along with my comments) would be illegal in New Zealand:

New Zealand's Parliament has voted itself far-reaching powers to control satire and ridicule of MPs in Parliament, attracting a storm of media and academic criticism.

The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for "satire, ridicule or denigration".

The rules apply any to broadcasts or rebroadcasts in any medium.

And you too, YouTube!

In a way, such antics are funny, but the threat to freedom isn't. I keep saying that we take our freedom for granted, and our Western allies keep reminding us why we shouldn't.

If you're tired of the endless campaign, relax.

Howard Kurtz (link via Pajamas Media) thinks that the longer it drags on, the more it will help Hillary Clinton:

The endless campaign, in my view, could wind up helping Hillary Clinton.

Put aside all the other questions about her record, her divisive image, Bill's role, the alternating Bush-Clinton dynasties. There remains one immutable fact, the reason why John Edwards (lamely) made fun of her coral jacket: she is a woman. (Or what Post columnist Ruth Marcus calls a "person of cleavage.") And in that capacity, she would break the ultimate glass ceiling.

That's where the length of the campaign comes in. With most people thinking Hillary is the inevitable Democratic nominee--and believing as well that the Dems are more likely to capture the White House this time around--we have plenty of time to get used to the idea of HRC as commander-in-chief. After awhile, it no longer seems so foreign. If she stays ahead in the polls, she almost starts to feel like an incumbent. So by the time the actual voting starts, the notion of a female president is practically old news, factored into the stock price, as Wall Street would say.

With sex out of the way, the focus may shift.

Climate Audit alerted me to the the Detroit Lakes, MN USHCN climate station of record.

I was reading this article about the revival of the Wankel engine for use in aircraft. However, this is not just any Wankel. It can burn kerosene.

There's nothing wrong in sticking with what works but those motors require 70 to 80 moving parts and still use 100-octane low-leaded (100 LL) fuel that has long been displaced by kerosene for commercial aircraft. There are some new advances in combustion chamber design and electronic management systems that are making it possible to develop a reliable rotary engine for small planes running on standard kerosene jet fuel.

The effort is called EUREKA project E! 2743 KERO and it came into being because Mistral Engines saw the demand for a safer, more reliable motor that could be easily adapted to any model of light aircraft and able to run on industry standard fuel.

Safety and reliability most important in aviation. Advantages of the design include excellent reliability as there are few moving parts, a high power-to-weight ratio, compactness and smooth running compared with conventional piston-engine designs. Moreover, the engine will run on widely available standard commercial aviation fuels.

The Wankel engine has a rotor instead of reciprocating pistons, doing away with any need for crankshafts, pistons and springs and reducing the number of moving parts to only two or three. Modern electronics has now made it possible to overcome timing and injection control complications, resulting also in similar fuel consumption figures to piston engines.

==

Copyright 2007. This article may be copied and used freely to promote Inertial Electrodynamic Fusion. Please attribute the source.

Introduction

The internet is all abuzz about the fusion experiments of the Energy Matter Conversion Corporation, conducted in the fall of 2005, which Dr. Robert W. Bussard claims demonstrate "proof of concept" of a new way to produce fusion, which he believes will lead to workable powerplants.

A few critics of this approach have used various arguments to either claim that the method won't work, or that the experiment itself did not produce meaningful results. This article will attempt to show, by analogies to an earlier and well-known technology, just where I believe Inertial Electrodynamic Fusion (IEF) now stands, and what some of the misunderstandings are that limit the critics appreciation of IEF.

At least some of the technical criticisms of the approach are the result of misunderstandings of how the device works. The IEF approach, while it is a "hot fusion" method, is a vast departure from mainstream "thermonuclear" (Maxwellian heat-based) methods. The closest relative to IEF is Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion, typified by the Hirsch-Farnsworth fusor. The physics of IEC and IEF devices are so different from the heat-based approaches that the critics often simply make the mistake of applying the same assumptions and analysis to IEF machines that they would to a tokamak.

Four test runs of a device called WB6 were run in November of 2005. Each of these produced short but intense bursts of deuterium-deuterium fusion. Each test produced only a few neutron counts. The final test attempt burned out one of the magnets that control electron confinement, ending the experiments. So one of the main questions is, are test results, each well less than a millisecond in duration, and producing only a few counts, truly significant?

The WB6 experiments were conducted as the last of the available funds were running out. EMC2 was forced to close its doors. At present, a non-profit organization, EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation, is attempting to gather funds to re-start the research.

Very early in my involvement with IEF research, I recognized a parallel with internal combustion engines, and could imagine that the earliest developers of that technology might have faced similar criticism from critics who misunderstood their engines. This little parable uses the internal combustion engine to illustrate where IEF is, and what needs to happen to overcome the objections.

The following account is pure fiction, but one can imagine that it could have happened that way.

I'm not quite sure how to respond to this, but because a section links this blog in general terms I thought it deserved a fairly serious link:

Has a civilization ever gone from business casual to morning coats? Not without being rebuilt from the ground up in ways too painful to contemplate. We're so far from that today that the concept of hearkening back to Victorian anything is pretty comical. We may as well speak of bringing back the Great Awakening or the good old days of Antiquity. It's not just because of the distance in time: Our culture of slovenliness, gracelessness and, well, just about everything, er, blogging is about is so antithetical to the starched-collar and class-conscious ethos of Victorianism that it is simply impossible to imagine our civilization looking or feeling so civilized -- or, of course, so stratified.

Except the curious part of the above link to this blog is that I found it in the context of a discussion with which I very much agree, and which Glenn Reynolds had linked. To back up, some cretinous slob walked onto the Senate floor wearing bedroom slippers and a Hawaiian shirt, and Ron Coleman was offended:

How far we have fallen (hat tip for that link to this fascinating blog; check out this, too). It is the Victorian in me, I know, but I am comfortable with that.

Not with this, though. It is contemptible, but entirely appropriate considering the contempt they have not only for each other, but the people they represent.

Don't read me wrong. I don't believe in telling other people what to do; only trying to remind them that personal appearance is an important aspect of Western civilization. Personally, there is no question that I'm often much more of a slob than a "dandy" around the house, although out of respect for others I try (and yes, sometimes fail) not to go out looking like a slob. I consider traditional business attire to be the modern Western equivalent of, say, the Roman toga -- something not lightly to be discarded. I say this even though I know I am a child of the 1960s, when what had long been considered civilized attire was thrown out like many other things that shouldn't have been thrown out. I'm not talking about styles changing with the times, either. Looking like a slob really does display contempt for other people. It's one thing for people who don't know any better, but those who do know better ought to realize that dumbing down appearances by looking like slobs only helps dumb down everything, and ultimately works against civilization.

Whether this makes me a Victorian, I don't know. Considering their neoclassicism, maybe. However, I'm not about to put on a toga and Roman sandals, or start wearing a Victorian frock coat and high-button shoes. Such details are styles, fashions and facets of the constantly changing face of civilization.

There is a difference between changing styles of civilized attire, though, and degrading attire itself to the point where it is barely attire, and no longer civilized. I'm not a fashionist, a dandy, or a fashionista, and I can't spell out the standard, but it's a "know it when you see it" sort of thing. Something about seeing an intelligent and well-educated looking man wearing a t-shirt exposing his armpits and flipflops exposing his smelly feet on an airplane is more than unpleasant. It is uncivilized, and there's a lot of it going around. I can't tell people what to do, but some of them clearly know better.

I'd hate to see it all lead to no one knowing any better.

UPDATE (07/27/07): A piece in today's Wall Street Journal focuses on the phenomenon of guests in fine hotels wandering about in bathroom attire: "After years of pushing spa mania, hotels are trying to prevent terry-cloth clad guests from wandering into lobbies, bars and weddings. Hannah Karp on the effort to get robes back into the backrooms".

Hotels that aren't vigilant risk alienating businesspeople and outside guests who come for power breakfasts or ladies' lunches, or anyone else who would prefer not to see glimpses of hairy bellies and cellulite. Gerry Hempel Davis was having afternoon tea with her grandson earlier this year at the Homestead, a luxury resort in Hot Springs, Va., when she spotted an "oversized male" traipsing through in flip-flops and a robe, revealing "two inches too many" of his bare legs. "Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but to me that is totally unacceptable -- it's atrocious," she says.

"It's extremely tacky," says Ms. Spencer, 46, of Pennington N.J. "I don't know you; I don't want to see you in your bathrobe."

What kind of person would want strangers to see him in a bathrobe?

What bothers me about this is that it really comes down to common sense. There shouldn't be any need for hotels to have or enforce rules. But some people are truly clueless -- as if it never occurred to them that they are tacky. As clueless as some of the lamebrains who hold regular conversations during movies in theaters, or cruise down the highway in the left passing lane going 55 MPH. I've seen them, and I swear, some of them do not even realize they are rude. To me, that's the scariest aspect of this.

And, because one wants to tell people they're being rude, and employees are afraid to be confrontive (as well as fearful of lawsuits by the "aggrieved"), it is conceivable that hotels and theaters might eventually call for totally insane laws. I doubt this would take the form of the state making it a crime to wear a bathrobe in a bar or talk in the theater, but it would not surprise me to see a clamor for immunity for lawsuits filed by the socially clueless.

It's tragically preventable.

UPDATE: My thanks to Ron Coleman for the link and the compliment!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse writes about a young associate so clueless that he or she sent a text message to a senior associate asking him or her "Are bras required as part of the dress code?" I didn't mean to be facetious about the sex, but the article does not provide a clue. (I suppose if a male associate asked that question it might have been thought of as sexist, though.)

There's such a complete lack of common sense that I suppose it would be sexist to require women to wear bras and not men. How about pants? Can they be required for men, forbidden for women? And can skirts be required for women, forbidden for men? Or can one sex be allowed to wear what the other is not? There are serious people running around who think such rules involve matters of "fairness" -- with distinct legal implications!

Seriously, I often worry that the absence of common sense is becoming the dominant paradigm.

I just saw a news report that Mike Nifong has apologized:

DURHAM, N.C. - Disgraced former prosecutor Mike Nifong acknowledged Thursday there is "no credible evidence" that three Duke lacrosse players committed any of the crimes he accused them of more than a year ago, offering for the first time a complete and unqualified apology.

"We all need to heal," Nifong said. "It is my hope we can start this process today."

Nifong's apology came as a judge began considering whether to hold the former Durham County district attorney in criminal contempt of court for his handling of the case.

Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III has already concluded there is probable cause to believe Nifong "willfully and intentionally made false statements of material fact" to the court during a hearing in the case last fall. If he finds Nifong in contempt, the now-disbarred former prosecutor could face up to 30 days in jail.

I write about Second Amendment issues a lot (especially when I feel inundated by and overdosed on Philadelphia anti-gun bias), but I'm not what you'd call a gunblogger.

However, this seems like a good time to remind readers who come here that my blogfather -- the guy who originally gave me my start in the blogosphere -- is Jeff Soyer, one of the very first gunbloggers. If you're not familiar with his blog Alphecca, you should be. And if you are familiar with Jeff, and you read InstaPundit, you might have learned that Jeff could use a little financial help right now.

I can't think of a more steady and articulate Second Amendment advocate than Jeff. I've never seen anything quite like the research and documentation he puts into his blog with stuff like the long-running Weekly Check on the Bias. His regular radio segments on NRA News were always fantastic too. Seriously, Jeff's hard work rivals the stuff that think tanks pay people salaries to do. If you own a gun and believe in the Second Amendment, please go over there and hit Jeff's tip jar, as he has more than earned it. (Plus, right now he more than needs it!)

Remember, there's no tip jar here, nor would it constitute "begging" if there was. I'm fortunate enough that I don't need money right now, but that doesn't mean I can't make a reasonable request of my regular readers.

Please go hit Jeff's tip jar. I did, and I hope you will too!

Today I attended the American Legislative Exchange Council (A.L.E.C.) conference in Philadelphia, where I visited the gang at NRA News. Much to my surprise and delight, host Cam Edwards put me on the air on his Cam & Company Show, and I talked about blogging, and Second Amendment issues.

I've long been convinced that I have a voice made for blogging (meaning my voice doesn't sound that great on the air), but I did the best I could. Have to say, I was nervous, but they made it fun!

My thanks to NRA News, to Cam Edwards, Ginny Simone and my old friend John Popp for putting me on the air, and for their kind hospitality.

It turns out California To Fund Bussard Fusion is a false alarm:

Here is Joe Strout's comment at Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:09 pm at Talk Polywell.

UPDATE: I got a call back from Bill Maile in the Governor's office. He spoke with the Governor's policy advisors, and in brief, the story is false. This is the first anyone in the Governor's office has even heard of the idea.

He is going to do some research to try and find out the source of the story. Hopefully he'll have better luck reaching somebody at nextenergynews than I have; the site lists no name or phone number, and is registered through domainsbyproxy.com. But maybe a Governor's office carries enough weight to shake loose some real contact information from them. We'll see... He promised to call me again within two hours, and when he does, I'll let you know what he found.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

There's huge front page story in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, with the issue of the shooter's race suddenly becoming relevant:

Nearly a dozen police officers could be seen posted outside the church as mourners arrived, more than funeral home staff remembered seeing at previous funerals resulting from homicides. The Police Department did not return a call for comment late yesterday.

Some mourners speculated that the police presence may have been due to concern of possible racial overtones. The 18-year-old charged with Tykeem's July 14 murder - Charles Meyers - is white. He had been free without bail awaiting trial on drug-possession and drunken-driving charges.

And the issue of race came up during the funeral.

State Rep. W. Curtis Thomas (D., Phila.) said a state legislator from outside Philadelphia had called the city's homicide problem "cultural genocide," blacks killing blacks. State Rep. Steve Cappelli (R., Lycoming) did so during a nationally televised ABC news broadcast July 8.

But Tykeem's case, Thomas said, "represents a burst in the bubble. It represents the roof coming off."

The mourners applauded and yelled in agreement.

"It's not about just blacks killing blacks. It's about too many guns and violence dominating life in the city of Philadelphia."

Thomas said he had asked Cappelli: "Was Columbine a case of cultural genocide?"

I don't know whether it's fair to say that the case is taking on a life of its own, but in the earlier reports, I'd read about it as being a case of "road rage":

Law, who was described as a "model kid" by those who knew him, was riding with a group of friends in the 900 block of Federal Street around 4 p.m. Saturday when a burgundy Mazda sedan pulled up behind them.

The 18-year-old driver of the car, Charles Meyers, of Darien Street near Ritner, in South Philadelphia, felt the boys weren't moving fast enough and he honked his horn and yelled at the bicyclists to get out of the way, said Homicide Sgt. Tim Cooney.

"Some words were exchanged," Cooney said. "We don't know exactly what was said, but it wasn't a heated or extended argument."

Law's four friends moved over, but Law stopped in front of the vehicle, got off his bike and moved to the passenger side of the car, according to police.

"With that, witnesses state the burgundy Mazda inched up, the driver pulled out a handgun, reached across the passenger and fired one shot through the passenger window, striking Tykeem in the chest," Cooney said. "Tykeem staggered onto the sidewalk and fell in front of 921 Federal Street."

The officer, Joseph Acavino, radioed in the locations of the alleged crimes, Cooney said. He ordered Meyers and his two passengers to stay in the car until backup arrived. All three were taken into custody; Meyers was charged with murder, possession of an instrument of a crime, and firearms violations.

Cooney said police are classifying the case as a "road-rage incident."

There are numerous references to the firearms violations, and I'd like to see exactly what the charges are. if the initial stories are any indication, the man's previous arrest record makes him appear to be a drug dealer (same story here):

Charles T. Meyers, the man held in the road-rage slaying of a 14-year-old boy in South Philadelphia, had been arrested twice on drug-possession charges since his 18th birthday in December, court records show.
Meyers is being held without bail on murder and weapons charges in the fatal shooting Saturday of Tykeem Law.

Acquaintances said Meyers, whose last address was on South Darien Street near Ritner Street in South Philadelphia, had been thrown out of his house by his mother and that his life appeared to be in a downward spiral.
Court records show that on March 28, Meyers was arrested at Seventh and Ritner Streets after a road stop and was charged with possession of 30 Percocet pills with a street value of $150.

On June 15, the same day he had a court date in the March case, Meyers was arrested at Ninth Street and Oregon Avenue and charged with possession of marijuana and Vicodin and driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Meyers had been free without bail and was awaiting trial in both cases when he was arrested in the killing of Law, described by friends and family as a good kid who loved sports and playing basketball.

Why isn't it being made plain that the man was violating existing gun laws, and that had these laws been obeyed, young Tykeem Law would be alive today?Instead, it's all about road rage, and cultural genocide -- caused by a lack of gun laws.

Then there's this detail:

Police said it appeared to be "road rage." Two other men in Meyers' car, ages 21 and 33, were questioned and released.

Oh, and now it's genocide.

Or would that be "road rage genocide"?

I don't know the facts, and I strongly suspect we're not getting all of them.

UPDATE: When I said "arrested" above, I should have said "under indictment" -- as I meant to refer to this man's pending charges, not his arrest. I do not know what (if any) juvenile record he had, nor do I know whether he was under probation at the time. Again, I would like to know precisely what the firearms charges are.

UPDATE: Meyers was assaulted and beaten (apparently by other prisoners) in his courthouse cell this afternoon:

PHILADELPHIA - A suspect in the apparent road-rage death of a 14-year-old bicyclist _ a crime that has shaken even this violence-weary city _ was beaten up in a courthouse holding cell and taken to a hospital Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the suspect's lawyer said there is no dispute that his client, Charles Meyers, fired the shot that killed Tykeem Law.

"It's uncontradicted that Mr. Meyers did in fact shoot the gun," lawyer Jeremy-Evan Alva said Wednesday. "It's a tragedy. Two families are absolutely destroyed over this."

Meyers, 18, was in protective custody when he was assaulted in the Criminal Justice Center holding cell, which held other inmates in protective custody, Alva said. Meyers was due in court Wednesday for a preliminary hearing on the homicide charge.

Alva had not yet seen his client and did not know his condition or the name of the hospital treating him.

UPDATE: Not only is the shooter's race being called relevant, but so is that of the companion passengers:

Some at the funeral said they believe that race was the aggravating factor in the shooting.

"As I told the police commissioner to his face, and as I told the family to their face, we will not let this die," declared Black Panther minister King Samir Shabazz.

"Three of them are in the car, two are let go, and a black man is laying dead behind me now.

"So we are out here fighting for justice and pushing and promoting that [the shooter] and the other two really need the death penalty. That's the only way I'd feel justified for Tykeem Law and his mother."

But now that everyone's race is said to matter, I guess we need to know the race of the passengers. Will it be reported, or are we just suppose to assume they were white?

UPDATE (07/26/07): More (but not much) on the origin of the gun:

Police said yesterday that they had not yet learned how Meyers obtained the weapon allegedly used in the slaying.

Homicide Sgt. Tim Cooney said the .22 caliber gun used to kill Tykeem was not registered to Meyers, but he declined to say whether it was registered to someone else.

"An investigation as to the origin of that weapon is ongoing," he said.

What is not known is when or how he got the gun, or the gun's status.

If he obtained the weapon with felonies pending, there's an illegal transfer right there. Of course, had he obtained the weapon before turning 18, that would have required commission of a separate felony. Additionally, it is a Pennsylvania felony to possess a loaded firearm in an automobile without having a concealed carry license.

I am not an expert on firearms laws, but just what I've been able to find on the Internet convinces me that there were plenty of gun laws making it illegal for Meyers to possess of the gun allegedly used to shoot Tykeem Law.

The problem is that the laws were simply not obeyed, and I am unable to understand how this case can possibly be seen as an argument for more gun laws. Criminals do not obey gun laws, they never have, and they never will. In a murder case like this the firearms violations are lesser offenses anyway, and tend to be sidelined.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link! Welcome all.

Please bear in mind that I am relying on news accounts, and I am not in a position to have all the facts, which are being reported erratically, from different sources. I am suspicious about the direction of the spin, but my suspicions are not facts.

I am left wondering, why this is being made into a national story?

Why is it seen as an argument for gun control?

UPDATE (07/27/07): I really appreciate the useful comments, which demonstrate that there were many more gun laws than the ones I found. Which were not obeyed, of course. (Therefore, we need more laws which will not be obeyed by criminals!)

Despite my best attempts to utilize the Ellis approach to tackle unwanted thoughts, the latter sometimes have a way of surfacing and resurfacing (no matter how many times I might try repaving and regrading).

The other night I saw "Queen Bee" -- a 1955 film starring Joan Crawford as Eva Phillips, grande dame from Hell. A more nightmarishly dysfunctional person would be tough to conjure up, and watching the film was painful. Here's an excerpt from a pretty thorough review:

Those close to Eva know she's utterly evil and corrupt, but young Jennifer Stewart (Lucy Marlow), a cousin who comes to live in the manor, is not so sure -- at first. As the picture makes quite clear (from a character's speech about bees, to another character actually reading a book about bees...bees...bees...so many bees), Eva is, yep, the Queen Bee and those buzzing around are her drones. She will sting anyone who crosses or interrupts her ambitions to get what she wants -- which is, apparently, everything. World domination would not be surprising.

So painful, in fact, that I'm now wondering whether it might have been a factor in why I was too worn out and preoccupied (and perhaps overly concerned with my mental health) to make myself watch the Democratic debate on television the next night.

It would be too easy (as well as a bit of a cheap shot) to compare Hillary Clinton to Eva Phillips. (For starters, there are too many dissimilarities.) Seriously, I had not been planning to do that at all, for I try to stick to facts, and I didn't watch the debate. So maybe I should blame Hollywood post traumatic stress for the fact that I'm even daring to think these unwanted thoughts about a debate I did not watch, and a comparison I never would have thought to make.

Then again, maybe it's my interest in nostalgia, aggravated by a hypersensitive imagination with a penchant for making associations. The fact is, I was unable to avoid wincing when I read about Hillary's jacket:

Wow! She's wearing an orange jacket textured with curving, scalloped lines. It reminds me of a chair we had in the 1950s, but it actually looks rather pretty and definitely sets her apart from the guys who absolutely are not free to wear orange suits. She speaks in a solid, stern voice that has nothing to do with wavy orange patterns. She speaks in a straight, navy blue line.

Most of them won't say anything bad, but Edwards snarks about Hillary's jacket: "I'm not sure about that coat." Which might seem cute, but might piss women off. Hillary comes back with: "Yes, John, it's a good thing we're ending soon." Which sounds like a wife telling her husband he's had too much to drink. But she's supposed to talk about Obama, so she says: "I admire and like very much Barack." I find it hard to believe a sentence that sounds like it was translated from a foreign language. But then, why should she like very much Barack? She'd like very much less Barack. Then Obama one-ups Edwards with "I actually like Hillary's jacket. I don't know what's wrong with it." Which could be read as a double insult. First, it puts down Edwards for knocking the lady's clothes. And second, it subtly implies that Edwards is feminine: Obama can't tell what is wrong with the jacket, because he's a man and doesn't know about fashion, not like some other men, who aren't manly enough.

FWIW, I think all the men were being had. By a pro.

Again, I am not saying that Hillary Clinton is Eva Phillips, but the post traumatic stress from the "Queen Bee" film just won't leave me alone.

Obviously the problem is with me. I must be a total neurotic, and once again, I need to work on my REBT.

Like it or not, the fact is, I can't even look at a totally normal picture from the debate without feeling stung by that post traumatic Queen Bee stress. I ate dinner in Philadelphia last night, and I happened to pick up a copy of a local throwaway, only to see that picture of the woman in the blazing outfit surrounded symetrically by gray men on each side, as two cadet-soldiers stand grimly and solemnly at attention (as if to add symmetry to the picture) in the background.

(Isn't it obvious who's in charge?)

Speaking of cadets, why was the debate held at The Citadel? Is it any coincidence that the DNC would pick a place that lost a famous battle after feminist icon Shannon Faulkner sued to be admitted? There's altogether too much symbolism staring me in the face. You'd almost think someone was sending a reminder about which "side" won.

But wouldn't it have been a better reminder been to make sure that one of the cadets was female?

Ah, but that would have not only interrupted the symmetry, but it might have been a distraction. Again, Hillary Clinton is not Eva Phillips, and vice versa.

Only one Queen Bee at a time.

(It's probably "nature's way," if you believe in that stuff....)

MORE: Once again, Ann Althouse shows gets it right.

"I do love Givhan's idea that the most advanced woman would be so confident about her image as a competent professional that she'd forthrightly use clothing to express her sexuality. If she does this in a profession setting though, she will be surrounded by men in suits who have no way to present themselves more sexily. What's the male equivalent of the Jacqui Smith style? Can Joe Biden wear a codpiece?"

Geez, isn't Biden in enough trouble for his hairpiece? Or is that a hair transplant? Sexed up hair, sexed up, um, codpieces. The difference is that men cannot say, "Honey I'm having a bad codpiece day!"

Advantage, Hillary.

I'm sorry to see that the great Albert Ellis has died:

NEW YORK - He came to psychology almost by happenstance, after friends began turning to him for guidance. But Albert Ellis would become one of the most important figures in modern psychology, once ranked by his peers as more influential than Sigmund Freud.

Ellis, who helped establish cognitive behavior therapy, died Tuesday from kidney and heart failure after a long illness, said his wife, Debbie Joffe Ellis. He was 93.

"He helped countless people, and a large number of people he helped now help other people," his wife said. "And in that, there's no question that he has influenced the world in an intensely positive way. In this crazy, violent world, he was a compass for truth."

In the 1950s, Ellis invented what he called rational emotive behavior therapy, or R.E.B.T., which stresses that patients can improve their lives by taking control of self-defeating thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

learn to not only accept rejection, but to welcome it, it seems that it is the only way to overcome the irrational belief that the world owes you. It doesn't. Of course, one should fight injustice, but the irrational belief that the world should be nice to you just because you are you is a sure way to end up disappointed about life.

If you would like to try some of Ellis's techniques to reduce anxiety and gain a sense of mastery over your social reactions, try reading How to Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable. At 93, his advice is still ahead of its time.

Ellis's REBT cuts through the usual crap, and I say this as someone who is familiar with conventional psychotherapy. It's based on simply looking at your behavior logically. A sort of "Exactly why I am I feeling this way?" approach, which usually results in the realization that I am making myself feel this way.

Back to today's obituary:

After receiving a doctorate in clinical psychology from Columbia University, Ellis started a private practice specializing in sex and marriage therapy. R.E.B.T. grew out of his own experiences and the teachings of Greek, Roman and modern philosophers.

While Freud's school focused intensely on childhood and the unconscious to explain the source of neuroses, Ellis' brand of talk therapy asked patients to take immediate action to confront irrational thoughts.

This is an easy process to understand, but as in most things, the devil is in the details. If you've been doing something irrational all your life, and it's become pervasive, there's no single switch to flip that will transform yourself into perfection. REBT is a constant process, a bit like exercise. Just having the knowledge that it's there -- and as available as my ability to remember it and exercise it -- is a wonderful tool, and I'll always be grateful to Dr. Ellis for having the balls to defy his profession and make something like this available to the general public.

The obit describes him as "salty" and "irreverent." Music to my ears!

His work, along with that of others including Dr. Aaron Beck, is considered the foundation of cognitive behavior therapy. Ellis was also known for his irreverent lecture style and salty language.

Early in his career, Ellis drew criticism from some in the psychological and psychiatric establishment for his critical views about Freud and psychoanalysis.

"There is virtually nothing in which I delight more," he said, "than throwing myself into a good and difficult problem."

Ellis initially tried writing fiction, and when he couldn't get anything published he turned exclusively to nonfiction, promoting what he called the "sex revolution."

In the late 1930s, as he collected material to make a case for "sexual liberty," his friends began regarding him as an expert on the subject. They often asked for advice, and Ellis discovered that he liked counseling.

And I'm sure some of the religious communitarian scolds would enjoy calling him an atheist, too -- for he admitted to being a "probabilistic atheist." Hey, so what? I'm a probabilistic deist! What he thought about the unknown is not the point, and really no one's business but his own. The point is, he helped a lot of people, including me.

REST IN PEACE.

UPDATE: Dr. Helen has lots more, and Glenn Reynolds (observing that we could use more of the "Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable" approach in the blogosphere) links Ann Althouse's further thoughts which prompted Ann Althouse to link her even further thoughts here. Thinking further back, I linked the same further thoughts by Ann Althouse post in an earlier post in which I attempted to tackle the ticklish "sociopath" issue which Ann Althouse had raised. I'm not a psychologist, but I had to weigh in, as I'd recently been called a "sociopath" by Amanda Marcotte, and I was intrigued by the debate:

The Marcotte diagnosis is here. Should I care more? Or should I care less? Am I supposed to care about whether I should care, or am I a sociopath for posing these questions?

I'm wondering about the "Althouse principle" (I'm using the term loosely) that the more you're insulted, the more sociopathic you become. Might we be confusing a personality that has developed hardened calluses with a personality that was uncaring to begin with?

I'm not a psychologist. All I can do is look at Wikipedia. I'm not qualified to psychoanalyze myself, but I don't think I have enough of the traits to fit the diagnosis. (For starters, I'm too much of a damned bleeding heart, and I really can't stand to hurt people. I hope that doesn't mean I should develop a thicker skin so I can run for president or something....)

I think Dr. Ellis might even agree.

Seriously, REBT is good stuff (even if I'm a beginner and need lots of practice).

Wonderful News!!!! Governor Schwarzenegger of California is planning to fund Dr Bussards IEC Fusion project.

In a move sure to impress environmentalists and further cement his Earth friendly image, Governor Schwarzenegger is set to launch a multimillion dollar research effort into a revolutionary new source of clean non-polluting power.

The project is focused on the Inertial Electrostatic Fusion reactor invented by the award winning American physicist Dr. Robert W. Bussard. The Radiation Free Fusion Reactor has the potential to change the whole landscape of energy generation, which is usually a choice between bad and worse options that include Nuclear, Coal and Natural Gas systems.

The State of California peak energy usage is about 40,000 Megawatts and is only expected to grow steadily over the coming years . Fusion opens a whole new avenue of cheap clean energy that could not on

ly satisfy growing energy needs but also fuel massive water desalination plants that could help solve California's acute water shortages.

Fusion is the energy that powers everything in the universe. The sun's energy comes from fusion. Alternatively, fission is the process whereby heavy atoms, which are nearly unstable, are split into two radioactive atoms. Fusion, on the other hand, is when two light atoms merge.

The fusion process invented by Dr. Bussard takes boron-11 and fuses a proton to it, producing, in its excited state, a carbon-12 atom. This excited carbon-12 atom decays to beryllium-8 and helium-4. Beryllium-8 very quickly (in 10-13 s) decays into two more helium-4 atoms. This is the only nuclear-energy releasing process in the whole world that releases fusion energy and three helium atoms -- and no neutrons. This reaction is completely radiation free.

This is the break though in funding I have been looking for for the last nine months.

Better than sex.

Here are a couple of links explaining what the excitement is all about:
Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

I have been trying to avoid the election as much as possible, and while I was doing other things, it's probably just as well that I spared myself the agony of watching the Democratic debate last night.

Seriously, why should I watch? Did I have any duty? I'm no good at "live blogging" things, so it's just as well to leave that to those who are really good at it, like Stephen Green and Ann Althouse. They did a better job of watching the debate than I could. So much better, in fact, that reading their reactions gives me a better idea of what was going on than writing my reactions would have. Seeing them confirm two of my primary suspicions made me feel that I really didn't miss anything.

Here's Stephen Green:

Sometimes I really hate all these guys. Even more than the Republicans. And that's saying something.

And Ann Althouse:

this is the precise point in the debate where I conclude -- I'd been toying with the conclusion -- that Clinton is the superior candidate.

Notwithstanding my problems with the Republican Party, there is no way I could vote for Hillary Clinton. Nor could I vote for any candidate who believes in the following:

That this has become the mainstream position of the Democratic Party is too obvious to require extended discussion. I think pulling out in such a way that it emboldens powerful enemies who are poised to take over Iraq is dangerous and irresponsible. The idea that the US should pull out of Iraq because it was wrong to go in is not only illogical, but in light of the Democrats' former statements, it is supremely hypocritical.

A simple and recent illustration of how utterly destructive and insane this has become, look no further than the Democrats' deliberate killing of legislation which might have protected people from being sued for reporting suspicious behavior by possible terrorists. (Fausta Wertz has a good post on the subject.)

If what had happened to me in September of 2001 happened now, I think I'd be sued. What the Democrats did was beyond scummy; it was truly despicable. Identity politics always is. (I believe it is an evil, loathsome virus of the human mind.)

Look no further than today's WSJ editorial:

Rationing via price controls and, as costs rise, waiting periods and coverage restrictions. This is Michael Moore's medical dream state.

Um, anthropogenic global warming alarmism? (Ugh, not that again!) Nothing like putting environmentalists in charge of the ecomony. What I think Hillary would do is let Al Gore continue to catch the flak for her, then create a new Cabinet level "climate change" position for him. (While the GOP isn't much better, they are nice enough to at least tolerate dissenters.)

No, the Democrats will never, ever, ever, stop with that -- even if they have to break the gun laws in order to pimp for more. That's because gun control has long been one of their crown jewels. (Hillary has long worn hers publicly and proudly.)

Like it or not, the above things are all bread-and-butter issues of the Democratic Party. I disagree on every damned one of them, and I think they are all major issues of vital importance which dwarf the rest. True, many Republicans suck on pork, many suck on individual liberty and lifestyle politics, and many are only half opposed to socialism. Many people get hung up on lifestyle issues and religion, but the GOP is not monolithic about lifestyle politics. Besides, such personal issues are not within the scope and power of the federal government. Much as I disagree with them, I'd hold my nose and vote for a sexual moralist who lacks real power to impose his morality over an environmentalist socialist gun grabber with the power to impose his.

In short, the things I most hate about a minority of Republicans, they can't do.

The things I most hate about the majority of Democrats, they can and will do.

This situation is unlikely to change, and the election is still more than a year away.

(Probably a good reason not to watch the debates, and instead have my fear and loathing done for me vicariously. Nothing wrong with a little emotional outsourcing!)

With apologies to all concerned for my tagging them, I thought I'd return to the scene of the crime and let readers know that so far, at least four of bloggers I tagged have responded!

While Alan Kellogg had been tagged before, he did reply in a comment that he'll soon have teeth, and opined that "instead of being mutant mushrooms, we might be mutant slime molds."

(And Immodest Proposal's comment made me wish I'd tagged him.)

Socrates does a far better job of supplying random facts than I did. (I don't believe I can do things at random, so I used my blog's search engine for random facts, but Socrates' stuff really does seem random. An interesting look at an interesting blogger.)

I had not known that Sean Kinsell says people think he "looks French" (I don't think he does, and I'm with those who think he looks like Matthew Fox), he hates food made with mediocre ingredients, but nonetheless has a major weakness for Burger King. (Sean, if only you'd told me, we could have held our annual Philly summit there!)

And Connie du Toit responded with "things I did not mind anyone knowing." These things include a intense dislike for and a desire to destroy all cars blasting people with loud bass (I agree, and the awful noise is inescapable if you live near any cities or college campuses), and an admission that her favorite fast food restaurant is Taco Bell. (So is mine, and I always order their seven layer burrito.)

I'm not the world's most gregarious blogger, but I have to admit, I'm having more fun with the responses to my tagging than I did being tagged or writing my response.

Has Wonkette become a sort of unofficial anti-Giuliani headquarters of the leftosphere?

Just take a look at some of the titles of some of their recent posts:

* Boy-Molesting Priest Also Giuliani Consultant
* GOP Update: Forgotten Soft-Porn Actress Endorses Divorced Abortionist Fascist
* Rudy Reveals Secret War!
* Costumed Fascists: Rudy Giuliani Finds His Political Base

Why the high-volume, obsessive viciousness right now?

I can't be sure, but earlier I saw Glenn Reynolds' link to the latest Gallup polll results:

In a newly released set of 2008 Gallup general election matchups, Rudy Giuliani has edged in front of Hillary Rodham Clinton among registered voters, 49-46, while Clinton has an equally thin margin over Fred Thompson, 48-45. Giuliani comes in ahead of Barack Obama, 49-45, while Obama leads Thompson 51-40.

When I woke up this morning, I was all set to write a long-winded philosophical post about what I think the Democrats would do if given unbridled power when I saw M. Simon's post asking questions about anti-Semitism at Wonkette.

Regardless of whether anyone at Wonkette actually is anti-Semitic (something I have no way of knowing), echoing the "Jew-liani" and "Jew York Times" stuff strikes me as very sleazy.

But that is not what distracted me this morning. Things that don't compute always tend to catch my attention, and what I found especially interesting is the way leftist blogs are trying to allege that the "Jew-liani" video came from the right -- the evil "Swift Boat Right" to be exact.

In a number of posts (see Democratic Underground, the BRAD BLOG, and techPresident) it has been speculated that the youtube user abrad2345 is also MySpace user Public Persuasion, and that this person might be working for the "Swift Boat Right." The story is big enough to have reached ABC News.

Stevens, Reed, Curcio & Potholm (SRCP), the firm said to be employing "abrad2345" denies that this user was their employee Amy Bradford (as had been speculated), and maintains the personalities were manufactured.

Arlen Parsa, who writes for the Daily Background has been all over this story from the start (simply scroll through his blog for numerous posts), has been told to stop asserting that there is any connection between the YouTube user "abrad2345" and SRCP. Parsa elaborates here:

Despite being personally damn-near convinced that Ms Bradford (if not her employer) was behind the videos, I knew that it would be irresponsible to report what I thought to be true- as straight fact. As such, I tried to write the post in such a manner as to leave the possibility that I could be wrong about all of these things I believed to be facts, and that they could be all coincidences (the lede of my post read: "An employee of the Republican ad firm responsible for 2004's controversial "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" advertisements has apparently been producing viral videos which ridicule Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson.") Obviously I could have done a better job at this.

After I published that item, which contained both information I knew to be true, and also information I merely believed to be true, it got some attention. Today, I got an email from the DC law firm Dickstein Shapiro LLP, which represents SRCP. They were worried that I had published inaccurate information, and wanted me to remedy the situation.

"The thing is complete BS," David All of Tech Republican reported an SRCP source as saying earlier today. "That person and the account is not my firm's employee (it's a fake). We're trying to figure out who created the account and myspace page. Lawyers are involved. It's disgusting."

I want to stress that I have and will in the future try to be as transparent as possible, as I consider openness to be a pillar of good blogging.

I made some mistakes- perhaps most importantly not being more skeptical of a source who in hindsight seemed to have all the right information at all the right times. If indeed it turns out that I've been taken for a ride by the person who was helping me with the research, then it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a reporter- or even a lowly blogger- was taken advantage of.

So, do I think that SRCP was involved with the YouTube ads? I honestly don't know what to believe anymore, but I am taking what SRCP says in good faith. Is there more to this story? Absolutely. And you better believe I'll be looking into it and covering it, though in a very careful manner. Let's just say that I have no desire to become famous for being "the blogger who the Swift Boat ad firm sued."

But I think the idea being parroted -- that he or the video maker is working for the right wing attack machine -- is absurd on its face.

If this video virus spreads, sooner or later someone will figure out who the actor is, which I think would go a long way towards solving the puzzle.

If you watch this one -- "Rudy Giuliani - Because we can't all be firefighters" -- it's just incredibly obvious that the actor thinks Republicans and conservatives are all a bunch of polluting, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, SUV driving cretins who want to carry their guns within 500 feet of schools. And of course, Rudy is their boy -- because he's one of them!

The video is subcaptioned "Rudy Giuliani Campaign Ad that raises doubts about Al Gore, global warming and why we should be at war with Venezuela."

I noticed a few details that might be helpful in figuring this out:

License plates

While most of them are blurred, this one showed pretty clearly:

If you check out the pictures of all 50 license plates, only California and Lousiana fit the layout and color scheme of the above. My initial reaction was that it was a California plate, though, and this was confirmed by --

PALM TREES

They're all over the place, and they are not the Palmetto variety found in Lousiana, but typical of Los Angeles area, which is home to --

THE LAPD

While I can't swear to it, that sure looks like an LAPD car to me. Maybe someone can help out here, but watching the video, I just had the feeling of driving around somewhere in Southern California. Who this man is, I don't know.

But he's sure as hell not driving around anywhere near Alexandria, Virginia.

MORE: In another video from "abrad2345" titled "Real Balls" not only are numerous palm trees visible, but so are a number of older Craftsman-style bungalow houses -- typical of Los Angeles and the older suburbs in that area.

Anyone recognize the hood?

I was reading Althouse about the latest Dem debates and got reminded of some of my favorite music by Ann.

For those who want to see some concert footage of the Doors and Morrison's ironic comments about American Democracy the third video (right most) is it. The middle one in my opinion is musically better. Manzarek is manic on the organ. He did his best work with Morrison. After Jim died he just wasn't the same.

Wonkette is threatening legal action against My Right Word for asking is "Wonkette Antisemitic?"

If I understand you and Wonkette correctly, you thought it was cute/clever or whatever, to borrow a term, "Jew--liani", from that clip and, without any comment about its specific ethnic frame of reference, slap it up on a new post the following day. And someone at Wonkette thought that it was so cute/clever or whatever, that they added "Jew York Times" for increased effect, if I am following the thinking over at Wonkette.

Well, I don't think the way you think. I think it was the grossest of manners on Wonkette's part to repeat the "Jew-liani" bit. Even you, now, seem to admit that it was, at the very least, a slur. But where does the "Jew York Times" come in? Are we now in a Jesse Jackson redux of that 1984 "Hymietown" remark? I'm sure you know what I am referring to but since proper blog manners are to send links, try this one: washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/jackson
You'll note that Jackson made an emotional apology in the end of the affair.

I reviewed my blog post. I am pretty sure I did not malign, defame, libel or otherwise use any deprecatory term and phrase that is any worse that anything that appears on your site.

In any case given the a f routine I can't imagine how such musings might defame Ms. W. As is usual, threatening law suits against bloggers only brings more attention to matters that the sewers would prefer hidden (and no, that is not a misspelling).

H/T LGF

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Commenting on the Republican candidates, Newt Gingrich seems to think it will be the country's problem if he doesn't become president:

Asked by the Examiner if he was prepared to commit to a run, Gingrich said, "I'm perfectly happy to do what I do," he said. "Whether that leads to the presidency is the country's problem, not mine."

Meanwhile, I see that Stephen Green and others live-blogged tonight's Democratic debate.

I missed watching it and thus can't opine, but that's the country's problem, not mine.

UPDATE: Best line from Stephen Green:

Sometimes I really hate all these guys. Even more than the Republicans. And that's saying something.

I'm a Salvador Dali fan as well as a Grateful Dead fan, but it never crossed my mind to inquire whether these two forces of overstimulation of the cosmic imagination ever met up.

Until today, when, as my cosmic luck would have it, Rock Scully's "Living with the Dead" arrived in the mail. While flipping through it, I quite happened upon page 293, which relates the details of the meeting -- beginning with "Jerry Garcia fondling an ostentatiously embossed invitation...."

I couldn't find a transcription of the passage online, and I'm too lazy to transcribe portions of the book. But fortunately, a cartoonist has obliged, and here's the text of the invitation as cut from the cartoon (a cut and paste I hope Dali would approve):

According to Scully (who was the Dead's manager for years), Dali and the Dead did meet up, and it was surreal for all concerned.

While I hate transcribing, I figured one little detail wouldn't hurt -- especially when that detail involves art. While of course he's much better known as a guitarist, Jerry Garcia was also an artist (whose paintings have turned out to be quite a good investment over time), and it thus would have been natural to expect him to ask a question along artist-to-artist lines.

Jerry asks what kind of brushes he uses to get such microscopic detail.

"Tiny brushes. Tiny baby hair, soft as Gala's bottom, made from the pubic hair of capuchin monkeys."

It's exhausting being geniuses together, and Jerry goes to the bar to get himself a Bloody Mary.

But as a serious fan of Dali and the Dead, I thought this seemingly microscopic detail was worth examining.

Fortunately for the Capuchin monkeys, there don't seem to be any Capuchin pubic hair paintbrushes under discussion online. Or Capuchin hair paintbrushes. Hardly a thing about Capuchin monkey hair.

However, my failure to find Google references does not rule out the possibility that some artists might have used Capuchin or other monkey hair to make paintbrushes. Monkey hair has been used to make fishing flies, and according to this account, an artist named Elizabeth Andrews was willing to pay quite a lot of money for monkey hair for paintbrushes:

She offered me quite a bit of money if I could get pink-speckled monkey hair for her. Apparently, the monkey's hair makes the best paintbrushes in the world."

In a way, my research into this illustrates how silly blogging can be. Let's face it, very, very few people want to know whether Capuchin public hair was ever used to make Dali's paintbrushes, or whether Dali was having a little fun at Jerry's expense.

There are, I am sure, more pressing issues facing the world today.

Hmmm...

Like what? Like whether Rudy Giuliani screamed "bull5hit" years ago? Glenn also mentions the floating of rumors that Fred Thompson might be gay. (I was so disgusted after spending time with that non-issue that Capuchin pubic hair now looks refreshing.)

I don't mean any disrespect, but I think Capuchin pubic hair in paintbrushes is more important than whether Giuliani screamed "bull5hit," and I'll really stick my neck out here and venture that it's of greater cosmic significance than even the false gay rumor-mongering about Fred Thompson.

Can't we get a little more surreal?

MORE: I don't know why, but perhaps in a moment of weakness I succumbed to reality, and I watched (albeit grudgingly) the video Ann Althouse links of the supposedly "unhinged" Giuliani saying "bull5hit." Unhinged, my ass! He looks like a New York politician running for office in 1992.

Surely, they're not serious.

But I am serious about the need to get more surreal! As an example of how this might work, Glenn Reynolds linked a suggestion by The Economist that Fred Thompson get a toupee. With all due respect for The Economist, I think a toupee on Thompson would be downright tacky -- as well as deadly dull.

But a pink-speckled monkey hair toupee -- now, that would liven up the race.

No bull5hit!

AND MORE: As the subject came up, I thought brief word on toupee surrealism in politics would be in order. While it's been tough to figure them out, here are the rules on toupees as a political issue as best as I can determine them:

1. If you have a toupee, you will be ridiculed for it if you are a Republican.

2. If, like Fred Thompson, you "need" but do not have a toupee, you will be ridiculed for needing one.

3. If you do not need and do not have a toupee, you will accused of wearing one anyway (and ridiculed).

A pink-speckled monkey hair toupee right now would be superfluous.

Because I was in a hurry and late on Saturday I did not have time to finish the thoughts I started here about being late and being made late.

In an honest and amusing piece, Burt Prelutsky explained why he is irate when people are late:

As a rule, I'm an easy-going guy. Hardly anything gets my goat, ruffles my feathers or raises even a single hackle. I always try to put myself in the other fellow's shoes, and am always prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt. There is only one area in which I give no quarter. If it were up to me, lack of punctuality would be a felony. And while I might not make it a capital crime, I wouldn't think twice about tossing the terminally late in the cooler for 10 or 20 years; preferably in solitary confinement, so that they wouldn't be distracted while mulling over their anti-social behavior.

Where punctuality is concerned, my motto is: Better half an hour early than 10 minutes late. They're words I live by, and so should the rest of you.

I have a dirty little secret which probably shouldn't be disclosed on this blog, but which I'll disclose anyway because it's a rainy Monday morning (and I'm being told my blog is being read by people who do not like it but who for whatever reason will never let me know about it). I really don't mind it when people are late, as unless they are totally insensitive assholes who offer no apology (itself very revealing), it takes the "edge" off things. Probably involves my low self esteem and adolescent passive aggressive rebellion, but that's just the way it is. If the person is a relative stranger, it's a way to break the ice and evaluate him, and if it's an old friend, they usually have good excuses if they're late (in which case it's no big deal) or else they call into the "chronically late" variety, in which case it's something to plan for (and if you really don't like it, well, you can always discontinue the friendship). I tend to be amused by chronic lateness types, but then, I've spent enough time in cultures where everyone arrives late that I don't get as bothered as some do. My biggest problem in dealing with late strangers is that it makes me wonder whether there was confusion over where to meet -- which means that if I'm wrong, they have more of a right to be indignant over my lateness than I do about theirs!

Because there are no rules other than "NEVER BE LATE!" a contradictory, seemingly hypocritical attitude towards lateness prevails. If being late and being made to wait is rudeness, then we are all (at least, most modern people are) subjected to a relentless, systematized campaign of chronic rudeness over which we have no control. This, I believe, triggers conscious resentment which is quickly stuffed away as unconscious resentment, because we see ourselves as "not allowed" to feel it.

Who must wait for others -- and who gets to make others wait with impunity -- involves a classic struggle over personal power dynamics. This touches on respect, disrespect, who has authority, and who should have authority.

We are all made to wait, put on hold, rescheduled, and literally abused -- all without any input from ourselves -- by total strangers to whom we give near total power over our valuable time. I believe this takes its toll, and because the resentment has nowhere to go, we take it out on those who are "smaller" in much the same way the victim of a bully will often turn around and bully an even smaller victim.

Abusive airline personnel are a perfect example, which is why I wrote about them, but nearly any petty tyrant will serve as an example. Like it or not, there are people who like to boss people around and use their arbitrary authority, and they are everywhere -- from the most mundane all the way to those who have real power over our lives.

"Good Morning XYZ Associates would you hold please?"

Nothing like a command posed as a question, for it is nearly always followed by being on hold. It's rude, but it's so routine that only a crank blogger would even take notice of it. But how many people would answer their home phone that way -- even if they were extremely busy?

As part of their jobs, airline employees must become accustomed to ruining people's schedules, days, and even entire purposes of trips that if they didn't grow calluses, they'd probably not last long in the job.

"I'm sorry that you missed your mother's funeral, but we can get you on the same flight tomorrow."

Only they're not sorry at all. No one is. Never mind that the customer paid three times the usual rate for a last minute emergency flight. If you didn't get what you bought, tough luck!

The problem is compounded by a lack of clarity over who holds the power in these interactions between "customers" and "providers" of "services." Where is the authority? If you go into a store or a restaurant, the employees are expected to serve you, because you are the customer, and that is the nature of service. You take a cab, and you can usually expect that the driver will take you where you want to go with as little delay as possible, and that he'll be forthcoming and generally polite in explaining delays encountered along the way. But with airlines (and increasingly, on trains and even buses), the idea of "service" or "politeness" is such a joke that complaining to anyone in charge seems so beside the point as to be almost ridiculous. I complained once to New Jersey Transit over the failure of the company to indicate from which track a train was leaving, and how it didn't make the company (a state run monopoly of some sort) look good. From her incredulous expression, it was probably the only complaint like that she'd heard in a long time, if ever, and that I was the one who must be crazy, not New Jersey Transit (which was, after all, only behaving in a completely natural manner).

Yet just because it is natural does not mean it is natural. That's the contradiction. Customers are increasingly not customers, and service is increasingly not service.

What are government employees who work in the innumerable bureaucracies? Is the anachronistic expression "public servant" really helpful in describing them? The term would imply that because we the taxpayers pay their salaries, they are working for us. But isn't that a bit silly? A guy comes to inspect your business, with the power to shut you down if he thinks you've got a bad attitude, and he's working for you? Come on. Might as well lecture an officer who's giving you a ticket on why he should be more polite to the guy who's his "boss."

Anyway, these people -- an endless variety of petty tyrants -- routinely make us wait and mess with our lives, while conducting themselves in a manner more associated with rude bosses than people we are paying for a "service." Attitudes we would find appalling in a bartender or a waiter are simply accepted as a given.

But the waiter or bartender analogy fails, for the simple reason that there's no competition. You don't like the service of Joe's Bar and Grill, you can refuse to leave a tip, and you can go elsewhere. But if you don't like USAir, it's not so easy, as there may be only one or two other choices, as it's a government-sponsored oligopoly, and if you're not pleased with the quality of your electrical service, or the quality of the passport or drivers license services, forget it. To illustrate further, imagine if these various petty tyrants had their salaries reduced and were made to work for tips. In a government monopoly setting, a massive bribery system would result.

And of course some hard core socialists advocate pooling of waiters tips in order to eliminate incentives and competition. (They probably imagine that socializing health care would make it better. If you like New Jersey Transit, get ready for their health care system.)

This is only an attempt to explain unconscious forces that may be at work, and I am in no way trying to say that rudeness justifies rudeness or lateness justifies lateness. It wouldn't be an excuse anyway, and in a case like this, even offering an honest excuse like this --

"Sorry I'm late, but because I am tired of being put on hold, tired of long delays at the airport, and abused by authority figures masquerading as servants, I'm afraid my unconscious mind may have made you my punching bag!

Hey, I don't like being late or making excuses for it, so the above is not my excuse. But we're living in a world in which brutal honesty, rudeness, and insanity, are not always options. Sometimes I get a kick out of the idea of a covertly polite world where bloggers can say what they really think, and run around pretending they didn't say what they thought in front of people who pretend not to have read it.

Where else can you go to complain and explain at the same time?

A few more flowers from yesterday's visit to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden:

Coco stayed home yesterday, but I made it up to her today by taking her on a nature walk. Here she stops to admire a large and picturesque fungus:

While the fungus is more subdued in color than the flowers, I think it more than makes up for it in size and unpredictable attitude.

UPDATE (07/23/07): Commenter ThomasD thinks the fungus Coco is smelling may be edible, and the link he provides clearly illustrates that it is indeed the "Chicken of the Woods" fungus (Laetiporus sulphureus).

Intrigued, I found a recipe here:

Also known as Sulfur mushroom, the Chicken of the Woods should be harvested when they are young and tender. Since it is a variety that may cause discomfort or reactions for some due to the toxins in this mushroom, caution is advised when eating this mushroom. Specimens that are found attached and growing on eucalyptus are considered inedible.

To prepare, clean the leafy sections thoroughly and cut away the woody core, using only the leafy sections of young tender specimens. If the mushroom is to be stored, keep it refrigerated and use within several days for the best flavor or cut into pieces, blanche or sauté and then freeze. The flavor which represents the name, tastes somewhat like chicken. Meaty in texture, it has a noticeable aroma and desired flavor that provides an excellent enhancement to rice, risotto, curry, and various chicken or poultry dishes, such as chicken and turkey casseroles. The mushroom can also be sautéed in butter, flavored with garlic, onions or shallots, and served as a side dish or an ingredient in egg dishes.

I'm tempted to give it a try. I don't know how long these things live, though, and for all I know a greedy gourmand (if I may use the word that way) has already beaten me to it.

Not much to report from New York. The subway system proved to be so dysfunctional that I wasted hours trying to get around. As my luck would have it, yesterday they shut down several major lines for maintenance, and shifted trains to tracks belonging to other lines, while putting up incomprehensible signs like these:

I don't know who wrote or designed ("created" is a better word) these absolutely fiendish signs, but what they do not tell you is that not only is there no 3 Train, but that the 2 train which replaces it might or might not run on the 2 Track (depending on the whim of the operator -- and unbeknownst to passengers, who would have to run up and down flights of stairs in the hope of locating the right track). Yesterday the 2 sometimes did run on the 2 Track, but mostly seemed to run on the Number 1 Track. Then, I learned that the 4 Train was sometimes running on the 2 route, but sometimes not and when the 2 train did run it was running on a route no one could figure out, and its movement and stations did not correspond to the electronic displays inside the train. Trying to figure any of this out logically was simply impossible. People were irate and one furious man told me that he rides the subway every day, and that this had never happened before. (I calmly asked whether he thought I should write a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, and this only seemed to make the man angrier.) The MTA employees were unable to predict or explain anything, and eventually it became clear to me that the trains were just being run in an opportunistic, make-up-the-route-as-you-go-along manner, and that in all probability, there was no system at all, and nothing was anyone's fault. I saw foreign tourists who were hopelessly confused, and I wouldn't blame them if they concluded that the evil empire was on its last legs.

Speaking of signs, I had a great time at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, although I guess it's just as well that I missed the exhibit illustrated by this sign:

Really and truly, I didn't know there was a plural of "feminism," and now I'm worried, because what are the implications for the other isms? Are we approaching a permanent state of priapistic pluralisms? (Or would that be pluralistic priapisms?) Are there now to be sexisms and racisms? Liberalisms and Conservatisms? Libertarianisms? Catholicisms, Episcopalianisms, Baptisms, Presbyterianisms? Where does it end?

I just can't keep up with the pace of dysfunctionality, and I tended to identify with the turtle I photographed in the pond at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden next to the museum.

I also enjoyed the Sacred Lotuses blooming in the water lilly pond:

They have an interesting history:

This is a symbol of the sun, of creation and rebirth. Because at night the flower closes and sinks underwater, at dawn it rises and opens again. According to one creation myth it was a giant lotus which first rose out of the watery chaos at the beginning of time. From this giant lotus the sun itself rose on the first day.

It's certainly better than any creation myth I could come up with for the New York subway signs!

Lubos Motl is complaining about the invasion of personal gossip into physics.

David Goss has sent me a flawless article from the July 19th issue of Nature, pages 297-301. Everyone who prefers articles about physics itself over fourth-class porn about physicists sleeping with other physicists - the kind of junk that numerous Woits and Smolins offer to their highly undemanding readers - will enjoy it.

After a thrill like that male and female mating connectors just don't have the same level of excitement.

More of that sort of porn is available at IEC Fusion Technology blog. Or you can try: Mr. Fusion.

Commenter Larry R. at Motl's place thinks I have explained gay physics. It is quite possible. However, not being an expert, I defer to others for the definitive explanation . I do know quite a bit about male and female mating connectors.

Burt Prelutsky has a very amusing piece about people who are chronically late:

When you live in Los Angeles, as I do, people are constantly arriving late and then using traffic as their excuse, as if they had no reason on earth to expect there might actually be other cars on the road. So, first they insult you by keeping you waiting, and then they follow up by insulting your intelligence. Do they imagine that I, who somehow managed to arrive on time, came by helicopter?

How true. I say this as someone who constantly struggles to arrive on time. Like right now, I'm supposed to be driving to New York, and I'm already running late. Why? Because I hate driving, and I hate traffic, so I put it off until I absolutely have to. But that is as irrational as it is irrelevant and unfair.

You'd think in the more than half a century I've been on this planet, I could learn to tolerate traffic. But what is tolerance? I seem to get less tolerant of banal annoyances as I get older, and the timeworn wisdom of "do the thing you fear and the fear will go away" does not apply to traffic. Or patience.

I say this as I'm making myself late by avoiding traffic by impatiently writing an impossibly impatient post about the impossibility of patience.

Air travel is even worse, because it doesn't matter how "on time" you are, as you'll be made late, and there's no revenge. I found myself sympathizing with the woman who got ejected from the plane because her baby kept saying "Bye bye plane!"

As an attendant reviewed the flight safety instructions, Garren began to bid Houston adieu.

"There was a plane next to us, and I pointed it out to Garren, and he started saying 'Bye, bye plane,' over and over," Penland said.

Distracted and upset by the boy's words, the flight attendant went over to Penland after completing her safety demonstration.

"She leaned over the gentleman who was sitting next to me, and she said, 'OK, it's not funny anymore. You need to shut your baby up," Penland said.

Penland said she told the flight attendant that she expected her child to fall asleep momentarily.

"'It doesn't matter. Regardless, I don't want to hear it,'" Penland said the flight attendant told her.

"'It's called Baby Benadryl,'" Penland said the attendant told her, suggesting she give her child allergy medication to help him fall asleep fast.

"I said, 'Well, I'm not going to drug my child so you have a pleasant flight,'" Penland said.

The discussion continued and very quickly what started as an unpleasant flight for Penland and Garren became no flight at all.

The flight attendant told the captain that Penland had threatened her, and the captain agreed to taxi the plane back to the gate, where mother and child were told to disembark.

Other passengers who witnessed the argument were stunned, and came to Penland's defense.

Fellow passenger Sandy Taylor said the flight attendant came back and "in a real arrogant way she says, 'We're going back to the gate.'"

There's more and more of this stuff, and a recent WSJ piece has a gruesome collection.

If this Times piece is any indication, passengers are starting to help each other out against their uniformed oppressors (a bad sign for the airlines -- as the usual pattern was more like savage competion):

Like her, I've noticed that passengers comport themselves remarkably well on stranded planes, even amid appalling conditions like backed-up toilets and a lack of food.

"Because things are so bad right now with the delays and missed connections, I really feel it's become an 'us against them' attitude." Ms. Ogintz said. "I think people actually tend to be nicer to each other than they used to be."

Like many passengers on stranded planes, she saw how people looked out for one another. "Five hours was a long time to be sitting there, and I noticed people tried to help each other. If somebody had an extra snack, they would give it to somebody with a kid," she said.

In another incident, a pair of unaccompanied children were abandoned by Delta Airlines after missing a connecting flight:

The family of two children traveling alone from Alabama to Alaska says Delta Air Lines abandoned the unescorted minors for more than 20 hours after they missed their connecting flight in Salt Lake City.

Fifteen-year-old Blake Sims and 10-year-old sister Briana locked themselves in a downtown hotel room until an aunt in Do- than, Ala., arranged for an off-duty Salt Lake City police officer and his wife to pick up the children, feed them and return them to the airport to resume their cross-country trip the next day, said their mother, Adriana Ables.

"They are doing good. The older one, he was a trooper. The little one, she was fine until she saw me, and then she was real upset," Ables said from her home in Fairbanks.

The July 1-2 ordeal is the latest in a chain of incidents this year that have stained the public's view of U.S. airlines and stoked enthusiasm for a passenger bill of rights. With jets jammed, fares rising and the on-time arrivals and departures at record lows, frustration levels among passengers - and the parents of two minor travelers - are rising.

Makes me never want to leave the house. Do I have to?

Yes! And right now. I hate to be late but it will always be a lurking possibility until the day I'm officially declared "late."

A video Ann Althouse mentioned last night made my unconscious mind look for and find this video -- "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondells.

(In 1968, it was a lot easier to fly.)

Through some inexplicable process, this led me to search out and find Tom Petty's original "Learning to fly" video.

(Hmmm... Decades later, seems we'd forgotten how to fly.)

Might be too late to learn.

I complain about bureaucrats a lot, and one of the reasons is that I was a small business owner for years and I know what it's like to deal with bureaucratic inflexibility and ineptitude, when all you're trying to do is run a business or be a small landlord. Inspectors can be a real pain in the ass.

A Philadelphia health inspector, though, recently proved to be more than just a pain in the ass for a small business. He was -- literally -- a pain in the foot, allegedly running over the foot of a neighbor who tried to prevent him from fleeing with cash stolen from the business:

A city health inspector has been arrested and charged with stealing $1,200 from a Chinese restaurant in North Philadelphia during an inspection, police said yesterday.

Clarence Morris, 33, also was charged with assaulting the restaurant owner's wife and a female witness who tried to prevent him from fleeing, officials said.

Police gave the following account:

At 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Morris was inspecting the Erie Express restaurant on the 3600 block of North Broad Street when the owner's wife discovered $1,200 missing from an area not accessible to customers.

The woman told her husband, and when they confronted Morris, a tussle ensued.

Morris made it to his white Health Department-issued Jeep, and while the woman tried to pull him out of the vehicle, another woman who saw what was happening held the door open to prevent the inspector from driving off.

Still, he pulled the door shut, and when he drove away, he ran over the foot of the woman who had come to the wife's aid.

I hope this isn't an indication of the kind of people who work for the City of Brotherly Love. They're already having a problem keeping businesses from fleeing the city because of extortionately high payroll taxes, but when the bureaucrats commit strongarm robberies, you have to wonder.

It appears the city didn't do the greatest job of screening, although the inspector is being fired for having lied about a previous record:

Police radio soon broadcast an alert for the Jeep used in the robbery. Detectives later tracked down Morris, and he surrendered to Northwest Detectives late Wednesday afternoon.

Both women were treated at Temple University Hospital and released.

Morris was charged with robbery, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment.

Morris was a probationary employee hired in April, said Health Department spokesman Jeff Moran. He was fired yesterday for lying about past criminal acts.

People around here love to blame "gun availability" for the huge increase in the Philadelphia murder rate, but if guns were the reason, you'd expect similar murder rate increases in cities with similar laws. In an Inquirer op-ed titled "Guns don't kill people, Phila. does, John R. Lott compared Philadelphia to other cities (like Pittsburgh) where guns are just as available as in Philadelphia, and concluded that Philadelphia's problems have something to do with Philadelphia:

In the five years from 2001 to 2006, Philadelphia's murder rate soared more than 36 percent while nationally, the murder rate increased only 2 percent. Indeed, only two other cities in the top 40 experienced a sharper rise in murder rates, according to FBI crime statistics.

But if the cause of more murders in Philadelphia is the lack of yet more gun control, why isn't murder increasing in the rest of Pennsylvania? Pittsburgh saw just a 7 percent increase.

Why haven't murder rates gone up in the rest of the country? Should Phoenix, the city closest in size to Philadelphia, claim that its murder rate remained virtually unchanged for the last five years because of the supposed lack of new gun control? How should Dallas explain its 24 percent drop in murder?

It is not that guns are more likely to be used in Philadelphia murders, either. The proportion of murders involving guns is similar to that of other cities.

It would appear that Philadelphia's problems have something to do with Philadelphia, not the lack of more gun control coming out of Washington or Harrisburg.

Could it be that Philadelphia simply isn't doing such a great job at law enforcement?

Randy Barnett has been doing some writing on Libertarians and War. Most recently this Wall Street Journal piece. Which has spawned a lot of discussion with Randy at the Volokh Conspiracy.

A number of commenters have noted that the Iraq War started without a declaration of war, but instead Congress gave the President an authorization to use military force (AUMF) and gave him the money to back up that authorization. Not good enough for some Libertarians.

What ever resources (including judgment) Congress put in the President's hands with respect to our jihadi (a term from the American Colonial period) enemies can be rescinded if the Congress sees fit. In fact some Dems are trying to do just that.

This is not a usurpation of power. It is delegating to the executive the implementation of the wishes of Congress. Just as the executive enforces laws Congress passes. That is the traditional role of the executive. Don't Libertarians have any respect for tradition?

Sometimes, I think reality makes Libertarians crazy.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

As Jose Guardia makes clear, political satire (like the picture of Bush and Blair in the last post) above could be censored in Spain -- at least, if it involved the Spanish royal family.

According to the court, slandering the royals is a crime:

A spokeswoman for the National Court, who could not be identified because of court rules, said slandering the head of state could carry a two year prison sentence.

Americans take the robust free speech we enjoy here for granted. So much so, that we tend to assume that our European allies must have the same First Amendment that we do. It's a major error, and it must always be remembered that there are plenty of people who'd love to take it away from Americans.

Fortunately, for now they're stuck with the First Amendment, so they're using various workaround methods.

UPDATE (07/24/07): Jose Guardia has a new post and says that "El Jueves has published a retraction in the issue to hit the newsstands tomorrow."

They've cleaned up the cartoon, which is now work-friendly and even kid-friendly!

No word on the implications for the "bee shortage" (although that might be only an American problem).

A guy named "Gary" came up with a couple of real classics today.

The comment he left to Dr. Helen's post on gay marriage is too rich to ignore:

Gary :
Dr. Helen states in part: "First, let me start by saying that I am for gay marriage. As a right-leaning libertarian, I believe that people should be able to enter into whatever relationship they wish with other competent adults without state intervention. If men want to marry other men and women want to marry other women, have at it."

"Right leaning Libertarian" that just another label for just another Bed-wetting, bleeding-heart socialist with a difference you spending your tax dollars. What she is saying is "have at it"-a "competent" adult father could marry a competent adult daughter or daughter"s" or a competent adult mother could marry a competent adult son or son"s" or a woman could marry 10 men or 10 women, or you choose the senario. This woman is just another elitist from some Socialist Indoctrinated University. Take advise from this person at your own risk. Conservatives beware.

Commenter "Elitist Bedwetter" called it "a good illustration of the dangers of inbreeding."

"Gary" replied:

Sorry I didn't proofread for the highbrow.

I feel good knowing I hit the bullseye. Try 'Liberal'tarian-the swap wives and husbands highbrow society.

It puts a whole new face on socialism, although I have to wonder how Dr. Helen is going to square it with what she said in her Norm Geras interview:

What would you do with the UN? > Dismantle it.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

I'm inclined to think that "Gary" might have a bit of 'splainin to do, although I'd still like to know more about the "swap wives and husbands highbrow society" -- especially Dr. Helen's involvement in it. If there's anything to this, a lot of people might suddenly be very interested in joining the right leaning libertarian socialist movement.

However, I've been reading Dr. Helen's blog since she started it, and while I can't say I've read every single word and noticed every last detail, I think I'd have noticed something like that.

But I'll try to follow this argument out. Maybe there's a concern that heterosexual marriage will be dragged down some sort of slippery, "sexual socialist" slope. Does advocating homosexual marriage lead to heterosexual husband and wife swapping?

Has a study been done?

If it turns out that Gary is right, then it's not the emerging Nanny State we should be worried about, but the coming Orgy State!

MORE: It occured to me that terms like "right leaning libertarian socialism" and "swap wives and husbands highbrow society" are a little busy, and I thought I would try to simplify things by using the word "Orgytarian." But Google thinks the word "Orgytarian" should be "vegetarian." What's up with that? "Nannytarian" is a word.

So why not "Orgytarian"?

I haven't asked Gary or his people (whoever they may be), but you'd think both sides could agree that "Orgytarian" beats having to say "the right leaning libertarian socialist/swap wives and husbands highbrow society."

Anything to promote better dialogue, I say!

MORE: While I hesitate to depart from the topic of libertarian socialist orgy-mongering, Randy Barnett's post about radical libertarian war supporters (which Glenn linked earlier) has left me grasping for words!

I probably need to do some serious soul searching, because like Randy Barnett (and along with Glenn and Helen), I would have to consider myself solidly in the libertarian war supporters' camp.

But for terminology purposes, how are we supposed to fit "war" into the "right leaning libertarian socialist/swap wives and husbands highbrow society"?

The "right-leaning libertarian-socialist war-supporting wife-and-husband swapping highbrow society"?

Nah, I don't like that, because then I'd have to change the title of this post to "Right Leaning Libertarian Socialist War Orgy" and I don't like changing post titles.

I do see a clear conflict, though, between the Right Leaning Libertarian Socialist War Orgy Machine and a certain 1960s idea based on a false dichotomy, and recently resurrected in France:

I thought instead of changing the whole title of this post, I'd just change the valentine to suit the orgy warriors:

Or would that be war orgiers?

Either way, they're not a new idea, although in some places orgy warriors (at least their torsos) are to be "endured with sullen solemnity."

What, you think I'm smiling or something?

UPDATE: My thanks to Dr. Helen for the link!

I like to say that I hate statistics, which of course I do.

But that doesn't mean I don't find statistics like these an endless source of entertainment:

2.2lb of beef is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions which have the same effect as the carbon dioxide released by an ordinary car travelling at 50 miles per hour for 155 miles, a journey lasting three hours. The amount of energy consumed would light a 100-watt bulb for 20 days.

My reaction is to not care.

MORE: I realize that not caring about statistics does not solve the problem, but I have noticed a recurrent phenomenon. It often happens that statistics are proferred about persons, events, and things which are ultimately unknowable, and never subject to accurate determination. If reasonable estimates by people acting in good faith are offered and they involve noncontroversial topics, fine. But contentious and political issues are another matter. Simply try to discern the following:

How many illegal aliens are there?

How many Muslims are there?

How many homosexuals are there?

How many abortions were performed before Roe v. Wade?

How many crimes were deterred by guns?

This is not to say that there are not actual numbers in each case; only that there is no way to absolutely know them.

Of course, it's easy for me to disregard data, because most of the opinions I hold do not depend on data. Whether there are 7 or 30 million illegals, or whether gays are only two percent of the population, or how many guns deterred crime -- these numbers do not affect my opinions in the least. Why would they? If there were more Hispanics than blacks (or more Muslims than Jews) should that change anyone's opinion about any of these group of people? I would tend to distrust anyone whose opinion about the nature or character of any group of people was based on their percentage of the population -- and that's yet another reason I distrust statistics, because they are wielded to influence the very people whose thinking I most distrust.

I picked up a new vacuum cleaner the other day.

Well, it wasn't exactly new. And I'm not sure calling it a vacuum cleaner is completely accurate, because, while it looked like one of those tiny old classic vacuum cleaners, it turned out to be missing the entire motor.

What I picked up was a shell. Rather like two clam shell halves that had to be screwed back together; the whole thing had been left by a neighbor in a pile for the trash collector, and clueless me (I'm always a sucker for nostalgia) picked it up and brought it home.

Here it is, being examined by Coco, who wasn't terribly impressed (mainly because it didn't contain food).

Fortunately, the two little wheels had been left inside, along with the rubber gasket and the long screws which hold the case together, otherwise I'd have put it out in front of my place for the trash collector.

During the assembly, I began to see a REVELATION. Literally, the word seemed to appear, as if struggling to break through the blue paint and tell me something important.

I just saw the movie 1408 the other night. It's a great but scary film, and it crossed my mind that I might be suffering from hallucinations induced by Post Scary Film Stress Syndrome on the heels of excessive Grateful Dead nostalgia. When a wacky word like "REVELATION" (well, wacky for a vacuum cleaner) appears like that, struggling to be seen despite a coverup, I've got to remain skeptical.

Rather than succumb to cosmic fretting, I reached for the steel wool!

Sure enough, the word "REVELATION" was not only there, it appeared to be a commercial logo of some sort. Googling the term in the vacuum cleaner context, I soon found what I was looking for:

The Compact vacuums were originally made by the Interstate Engineering Corporation to clean Howard Hughes Corporation aircraft in the 1940's. The first Compact had two rear wheels and two front skids. It had a hose with several attachments so they could easily clean under the seats and the overhead compartments. It was very likely women employees who cleaned the aircraft because Howard Hughes' Corporation employed many of the "Rosie The Riveters" that you've probably heard about working to support WW2.

The vacuum worked so well that they decided to sell it to the public. The transition was easy because they already had all of the cast and die equipment necessary to manufacture the metal parts for the machines. The first Compact was sold to the public in 1946.

The salesmen were doing so well selling the Compact door to door that the company made a spin off called the Revelation. The Revelations were only sold in retail stores from 1949-1954. The Compacts were only sold by salesmen. Interstate invented and owned patents on both of the machines.

I'm glad I found the truth about my "revelation" though, because there's another "Vacuum Cleaner Revelation," and I'm afraid I don't have time for it. More than one Vacuum Cleaner Revelation in a day, and there'd be a sucking sound from within my cranial cavity.

I'm left wondering why someone would have gone to the trouble of painting over the word "REVELATION."

They probably used lead paint too, so I've shortened my life and lowered my IQ.

Just to make a planter.

Well, you can't say I'm not helping the environment. No seriously. If every vacuum cleaner in the world could be turned into a planter, the number of carbon footprints which would never be made would exceed the number the vacuum cleaner would have ever vacuumed up!

(No, I haven't checked the math, but give me a break; it's a REVELATION I'm dealing with!)

Via Pajamas Media, Sissy Willis has some excellent macro photographs of spiders, along with some keen observations like this:

the night stalker had moved its silken bundle across the room to a more secluded wall near the sink. We tried to get a closer look using one of those bar-magnifier rulers. When it inadvertently touched the web, the spider went into a spinning frenzy worthy of a Clinton spokesperson, even as what was left of the silk-encased lacewing hung motionless attached to the wall close by.

The thing is, I hadn't considered the political ramifications of spiders when I wrote that post, but Sissy has, and it occurred to me that the religious aspects (Pagan though they may well be) might be worth another look. The word "Arachne" is of traditional Pagan origin, and involves a sort of mythological guilt trip:

Minerva could not stand the insult that Arachne had weaved, so she took her shuffle and tore the weaving to peices. Then she touched Arachne's forehead to make her feel her guilt. Arachne could not stand the guilt any more so she hung herself. Minerva took pity for her and turned her into a spider to let her live.

Guilt is a powerful motivator.

So get spinning!

M. Simon has just informed me of some wonderful news!

Oregon Guy has "tagged" Classical Values!

Ugh!

But thanks!

Whether this creates any obligation for me to comply with the rules, I do not know. I did not -- and do not -- make the rules, and I don't think they're legally or morally enforceable. However, as this seems to be an established game of some sort, I'll try to play along to the extent I can.

I think it's at least fair for me to provide a written response to each rule, so here they are:

1. Let others know who tagged you.

2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.

I don't have a book about myself, but I do have a blog, so here are random facts about me -- gleaned by using the the disembodied poetic method in conjunction with this blog's search engine:

In college, I received an A+ grade in a Criminology course called "Sex and Crime."

I am a double-transplanted East and West Coaster who moved to California at 18, and grudgingly moved back to the East Coast where I have attempted to be bicoastal ever since.

I do not like activists, although I am often overcome by the contradiction of not wanting to fall into the trap of being an anti-activist activist.

I love pigs, and I love to eat pork.

In college at UC Berkeley, I was told that I should be a writer, and warned that law school would destroy my writing skills. In keeping with my usual pattern, I defied the warnings.

AIDS killed the majority of my friends. (My response was to engage in self destructive behavior.)

Statistics annoy me.

I have faith that there is a God, but that faith extends to no organized or written religion.

Phew!

3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.

4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

Sigh.

The following are selected at random, and they are not obligated in any way:

Loren Heal

Sean Kinsell

Connie du Toit

Agenda Bender

Alan Kellogg

A Jacksonian

Nick Packwood

Fausta Wertz

Otherwise, I guess that ends this exercise.

Are we having fun yet?

I just read a bit touting Bill Richardson as a strong Democratic contender for President. Here is a bit of what the stands for:

...he advocates complete and total withdrawal of troops from Iraq within six months...

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

One of my pet peeves is the inability of so many gun control advocates to recognize that the militia clause in the Second Amendment is not a limitation on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, but explanatory language. An explanation is not a limitation, and had the founders wanted such a limitation, they'd have referred to the "right of the militia to keep and bear arms," and not "right of the people to keep and bear arms."

Yet "right of the militia to keep and bear arms" is what (under the "collective right" theory) the anti-gun people like to claim that "right of the people to keep and bear arms" actually means. This is absurd.

Googling "right of the militia to keep and bear arms," I got nearly 9,000 hits, but none of them are saying that the Second Amendment says that. Just the opposite.

If only more of the gun control people would admit that the "right of the militia to keep and bear arms" is their interpretation of the Second Amendment, the debate would be clearer.

Eric at Classical Values is discussing Clayton Cramers's piece on the prevalence of abortion before Roe. His conclusion about abortion is that it may actually be happening at a lower rate since Roe.

Clayton's most important point is his conclusion.

If you have to arrest and try your own citizens for a crime on a massive scale (as would be necessary to enforce a general ban on abortion), it is usually a bad indicator for the moral health of your society.

Update:

David Hecht made this comment at Classical values:

"If we can't stop abortion when it's legal, we'll never stop it when it's illegal."

Words of wisdom.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Attempts to censor the blogosphere seem never to stop.

Via Pajamas Media, I read that Gates of Vienna, Atlas Shrugs, and Jihad Watch are all having problems. The latter two report being banned in a number of places. In addition, Atlas Shrugs' Pamela reports a sudden and dramatic Google traffic loss, while Baron Bodissey reports being unable to post anything at his Gates of Vienna, which is being treated as a "spam blog." According to a comment he had to leave in one of yesterday's posts, whenever he tries to publish a post, he gets the following message:

"This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts."

When a person visiting a blog clicks the "Flag?" button in the Blogger Navbar, it means they believe the content of the blog may be potentially offensive or illegal. We track the number of times a blog has been flagged as objectionable and use this information to determine what action is needed. This feature allows the blogging community as a whole to identify content they deem objectionable. Have you read The Wisdom of Crowds? It's sort of like that.

I'm glad I'm with HostMatters and on MovableType, because this Blogger stuff looks ominous. M. Simon left a comment to the Gates of Vienna post advising that this URL is the only way to contact Blogger. Using his instructions I left the following message:

Gates of Vienna is not a spam blog, and yet it is being treated that way, and the author is complaining that he is still unable to write posts. I am worried that blogspot blogs are being falsely flagged as spam blogs and that this could happen to my blogs.

Are my concerns misplaced?

UPDATE (2:32 p.m.): Gates of Vienna is working now, with Baron Bodissey saying this:

Dymphna and I were cut off from posting for about eighteen hours, having been designated a "spam blog" by the Powers That Be.

We were unable to consult the Oracles, but someone else must have done so on our behalf, because we have just been released.

This may have been the result of a deliberate malicious action. A disgruntled reader or troll probably notified Blogger that we were a spam site.

I'd love to hear an explanation from someone at Blogger/Google.

Regular readers know that I write a lot about the issue which the media calls "gun violence." The argument is that guns kill people (often reformulated in an endless loop as "guns make people kill people"). I tend towards the belief that guns are inanimate objects which will not kill anyone unless someone picks them up and fires them. But there is no bridging the gap, as most of the people on both sides made their minds up long ago.

Occasionally, though, a new idea will appear and, finally, via Frank J. at IMAO, I stumbled onto something that appears to be a genuine technological breakthrough which could stop all gun violence once and for all.

How it works I don't know, but the video speaks for itself. Apparently, some people have manufactured what appears to be an ordinary sign, but which has magical power to stop gun criminals cold. Unlike using a taser, a dog, or another gun, it works by itself.

Just watch the video!

If I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I'd have never believed it possible.

And now that I think about it, I'm reminded of the "Nuclear Free Zone" signs which went up on all streets entering the city of Berkeley back in the 1980s:

Much as I like to consider myself a skeptic, I feel forced to ask myself a searching and fearless question.

Has there ever been a nuclear attack on the city of Berkeley?

Obviously, these signs work. What I'd like to know is how.

I'm stumped.

Michael Totten has a fascinating interview up with historian Michael Oren.

PORTLAND, OREGON - Renowned American-Israeli historian and best-selling author Michael Oren is touring the United States promoting his new book Power, Faith, and Fantasy a sweeping history of America's involvement in the Middle East from 1776 to the present. It's the first and only book on the subject ever written, and it's currently inching toward the top of the New York Times best-seller list for non-fiction.

I first met Michael Oren under Katyusha rocket fire when he worked as a Spokesman for the IDF Northern Command in Israel during last summer's war against Hezbollah, and I met him again when he came to my home town of Portland, Oregon, last week on his book tour.

"You cannot withdraw from Iraq and be confident that the enemy is not going to follow you. Because the enemy is going to follow you. America can't detach from the Middle East because the Middle East is not going to detach from America. And America's going to have to learn to fight this fight to win in a much more prudent and effective way. And there are ways America can fight it more effectively." -- Michael Oren

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Ridiculous as it may sound, that seems to what angry Pagans are saying about the image of a gigantic Homer Simpson painted on a field adjoining the famous Cerne Abbas giant:

PAGANS have pledged to perform "rain magic" to wash away cartoon character Homer Simpson who was painted next to their famous fertility symbol - the Cerne Abbas giant.

The 17th century chalk outline of the naked, sexually aroused, club-wielding giant is believed by many to be a symbol of ancient spirituality.

Many couples also believe the 180ft giant, which is carved in the hillside above Cerne Abbas, Dorset, is an aid to fertility.

A giant 180ft Homer Simpson brandishing a doughnut was painted next to the well-endowed figure today in a publicity stunt to promote The Simpsons Movie released later this month.

It has been painted with water-based biodegradable paint which will wash away as soon as it rains.

Ann Bryn-Evans, joint Wessex district manager for The Pagan Federation, said: "It's very disrespectful and not at all aesthetically pleasing.

Let's take a look at the picture the BBC has kindly provided.

Hopefully, there's no BBC photoshopping involved, but these days it's hard to tell.

The Pagan Federation seems to think Homer and his donut are not only disrespectul to Pagan religious beliefs, but also to "science":

Ann Bryn-Evans, joint District Manager for the Pagan Federation in Wessex, in whose area the figure resides, said: "It's very disrespectful and not at all aesthetically pleasing. We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind. We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away."

She added: "I'm amazed they got permission to do something so ridiculous. It's an area of special scientific interest."

According to the Wiki entry, it is considered unlikely that the Cerne Abbas giant (no relation to Mahmoud) is an Iron Age fertility symbol as believed:

The giant, owned by the National Trust, is thought by many to be an Iron Age fertility symbol but, as it is unlikely that the monks of Cerne Abby would have tolerated such a figure and with no records before the 17th century, this cannot be confirmed.

Isn't it more likely that the Homer Simpson image has offended someone more powerful than an obscure group of British Pagans? I think what is being missed becomes obvious if we only look at the subtext. To do that requires taking a Freudian view of donuts, as well as the colloquy between Bill and Hillary Clinton in the famous Clinton "Sopranos" video -- as interpreted by Ann Althouse:

....the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves.

Bear in mind that Homer Simpson is an intellectually challenged American father, symbolic of the moronic American patriarchy that Hillary wants to kill off. (It just so happens that the intelligent, self-aggrandizing, Hillary Clinton has been favorably compared by Mother Jones to Lisa Simpson, Homer's daughter.*)

Taking this a step further, might the father's offer of the donut to the (patriarchal) fertility god be seen as a final plea for help before the male camaraderie that Hillary abhors is literally rubbed out?

And how can we really know for sure it's not an onion ring that Homer is holding? For the purposes of this analysis, it might not really matter whether the object is an onion ring or a donut (or hell, even a life preserver!), for as Ann Althouse explains, the narrative reduces itself to the timeless struggle over a very simple element:

The man wants the hole-shaped item, and the woman forbids it.

The nonsensical claim that Pagan beliefs are being disrespected does not fool me, as I suspect a very clever strategy coming straight from the Clinton campaign!

The Pagans (and other unwitting dupes on the left) are being tricked into thinking that they are helping to preserve fertility when in actuality they are helping to undermine it.

As to the social conservatives on the right, why, there's no way they're going to be caught defending Pagans. Or Pagan images. Or Homer Simpson.

Sheesh.

The Clinton triangulation strategy is so diabolical that it even works when it's full of holes!

* FULL QUOTE

THE LISA SIMPSON HILLARY: We're seeing of lot of this conscientious Hillary lately. When she ran for Senate, her critics said she was just running on name recognition. "But she was able to give milk prices to upstate New Yorkers," says Helen Thomas, the former upi reporter who has covered the White House since John Kennedy. "Then, in the Senate, she acted like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, asking experienced Republican senators to 'teach me' how it all works." This is the Hillary who got straight A's; the law school graduate who in 1974 wowed the old D.C. pols on the Watergate Committee; the one who attempted to master health care in 1993; and who in 2000 visited Buffalo 26 times and earned its citizens' votes. This Hillary first appeared at age four when, according to her mom, the future senator confronted the neighborhood's meanest girl bully, knocked her down, and then exclaimed, "I can play with the boys now!"

UPDATE: Commenter Cut N. Paste has shed light on this mystery by discovering this animated gif.

Still no word from the Clinton election staff.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome all.

I can't help noticing that Glenn has characterized the Simpson drawing as a "sacrilege." Does this mean Glenn sympathizes with the Wiccan position? Or the scientific position? Or might Glenn's objection be to graven images in general? (Strictly speaking, I think the latter would be the missionary position.)
Absent further explanation, I don't know whether to interpret the remark.

But hey, regardless of what he meant, at least Glenn has weighed in on this urgent issue.

I'm still waiting for the Clinton position!

UPDATE: Thanks to Ann Althouse for linking this -- especially for the charming Quoits picture that says it all!

AND MORE: Forgive the appearance of patriarchal sexism, but I just thought this picture belonged here:

Well, Hillary did say "I can play with the boys now!"

Clayton Cramer notes that there were plenty of abortions before Roe v. Wade -- and that there may have been more than there are now.

....even before Roe v. Wade (1973), Oregon theoretically made abortion unlawful except to save the life or health of the mother--and yet still had 199 abortions per 1000 live births in 1970. Does anyone really believe that 1/6th of all pregnancies in Oregon required an abortion for the life or health of the mother? You can pass laws, but if a large fraction of the population strongly disagrees, that law will be disobeyed unless you have a very powerful police presence trying to enforce it. Think back to the national 55 mph speed limit, or most restrictive gun control laws.

The key operative word here is "health" -- which doctors were free to interpret in any way they wanted. Most "therapeutic abortions" were done for MENTAL health reasons. A psychiatrist's opinion would be obtained through a referral (fee splitting of course occurred in those days), and all he needed to do was state that the abortion would prevent damage to the woman's mental health. (Emotional distress would result from pregnancy, arguably more than would result now because of the stigma and resultant family pressures.)

Cramer also links his earlier post on the same topic, in which he concluded that the pre-Roe statistics were "disturbing to the conventional wisdom":

If you believe that Roe v. Wade started a deluge of murdering babies, then why was the abortion rate so high in states that pro-lifers would consider civilized? Does anyone seriously believe that 16% of Oregon pregnancies required an abortion for the life or health of the mother? It should be obvious that a lot of those were elective abortions, disguised as being for "the life or health of the mother."

If you believe that before Roe, America was a barbarous place where women had to get backstreet abortions (except for the five "enlightened" states of Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington), then you need to explain why the abortion rates in some of the states with severe abortion restrictions were higher than the abortion rates in the states that allowed abortion on demand.

I find this data fascinating, and disturbing to the conventional wisdom.

The pro-abortion people like to paint the pre-Roe world as a patriarchal hell in which oppressed women were either forced to bear unwanted children or else resort to "coat hanger abortions." The anti-abortion people paint the pre-Roe world as governed by the type of values often portrayed in 1930s movies (aka "traditional values" -- but never mind the less traditional 1920s), in which those few women who might get pregnant out of wedlock would never have had abortions because a Godly America would not allow it.

The truth is unpalatable to both of these "conventional wisdoms."

Conventional narratives is what they are.

More accurately, they're activist narratives. Over time, such narratives come to dominate all discussion and debate, because it's risky for non-activists to contradict activists. Once the narratives have taken over, they become the conventional wisdom. (The more conventional the wisdom, the less wise it is to dispute it.)

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer stresses in the comments below that he did not say that there were more abortions before Roe than there are now. What he said was "there were more abortions per 1000 live births than in the five states that had made abortion available on demand."

Last year, Megan McArdle discussed the statistics -- which are surprisingly difficult to come by.

UPDATE (07/19/07): Instapunk has done a huge amount of research into the actual numbers, concluding that this post was seriously in error to state that "there may have been more than there are now." Correction noted.

My main point in writing this was to state what I remember personally about therapeutic abortions being easy to obtain in Pennsylvania. They were. As to the statistics, how accurate they are or were, and how well they were kept, I simply don't know. (In those days, doctors were able to do a lot of things off the record in ways that would be impossible now.)

The ever-reliable Clayton Cramer cleared up what I had misunderstood yesterday, and I updated my post last night to reflect that. The Instapunk post (while critical of Clayton Cramer, M. Simon, and me) is huge, and worth a detailed examination, which I do not have time for right now. Last night, though, I noticed that there are statistics all over the place in this debate.

Right now, I retract my statement that "there may have been more than there are now," because unless Instapunk's data are way off, he has showed that the rate and number of abortions increased -- and substantially -- after Roe v. Wade.

All who are interested in the data, be sure to read Instapunk's post. Anyone with anything to add, feel free to chime in.

(BTW, I have no particular axe to grind in this debate, as I am a states' rights type who is morally opposed to abortion, but uncomfortable with the idea of imprisoning women. I just enjoyed Cramer's post and added my mistaken thoughts.)

UPDATE: In a later post, Clayton Cramer notes correctly that I misread his earlier post, which is true. However, I did not read it as a "defense of Roe v. Wade (1973)." Not only do I know very well that Cramer is against Roe, but as a federalist, I'm against it too! What I did read into Cramer's thoughts were my own very hurried speculations (triggered by my memories of the "therapeutic abortion" phenomenon in Pennsylvania). I do not think it is possible to obtain accurate data on pre-Roe abortions, though, (which has nothing to do with the advisability of Roe v. Wade).

I have already noted my mistake, and I can only offer my sincere apology to Clayton Cramer, whose excellent research should not be in any way besmirched by my hurried misreading of it!

Dr. Helen links a fascinating psychological study which found that high school age girls who "co-ruminate" (defined as "talk[ing] very excessively about their problems") are "greater risk of developing anxiety and depression":

The research was conducted by Amanda Rose, associate professor of psychological sciences in the College of Arts and Science. The six-month study, which included boys and girls, examined the effects of co-rumination - excessively talking with friends about problems and concerns. Rose discovered that girls co-ruminate more than boys, especially in adolescence, and that girls who co-ruminated the most in the fall of the school year were most likely to be more depressed and anxious by the spring.

"When girls co-ruminate, they're spending such a high percentage of their time dwelling on problems and concerns that it probably makes them feel sad and more hopeless about the problems because those problems are in the forefront of their minds. Those are symptoms of depression," Rose said. "In terms of anxiety, co-ruminating likely makes them feel more worried about the problems, including about their consequences. Co-rumination also may lead to depression and anxiety because it takes so much time - time that could be used to engage in other, more positive activities that could help distract youth from their problems. This is especially true for problems that girls can't control, such as whether a particular boy likes them, or whether they get invited to a party that all of the popular kids are attending."

It would not surprise me if these same girls turned out to be more likely to resort to self-medication with street drugs, alcohol, or even cigarettes. However, because of the way adults tend to look at these things, if a girl takes drugs and is later diagnosed as depressed the external factor of drugs is likely to be seen as a cause. (It's less likely that cigarettes would be blamed, although self medication is self medication, regardless of the choice of medication.)

OTOH, it is also possible that excessive talk about personal problems can magnify them, via the hysteria factor. In an earlier post about mass psychogenic illness, I discussed a girl's boarding school in Mexico in which the girls convinced themselves they were sick, and actually developed symptoms -- which of course disappeared when they were sent home:

Mass psychogenic disorder is a phenomenon that can be understood as resulting, in part, from the nocebo effect. Think of the nocebo effect as the opposite of the placebo effect. Instead of good thoughts or associations producing a positive outcome, bad thoughts and associations produce bad results.

Is it too politically incorrect of me to wonder whether home-schooled girls are less neurotic?

What's also probably politically incorrect (but nonetheless fascinating) is the study's additional finding that co-rumination between boys did not correlate with depression:

Ironically, although co-rumination was related to increased depression and anxiety, Rose also found that co-rumination was associated with positive friendship quality, including feelings of closeness between friends. Boys who co-ruminated also developed closer friendships across the school year but did not develop greater depressive and anxiety symptoms over time.

But might this lead to problems in dealing with depression later in life? Men are more reluctant than women to seek treatment for depression, or even admit they suffer from it. A lot of men simply tough it out through the bad stuff, and would rather self-medicate than see a shrink, much less check into a hospital.

(While this can lead to the loss of an important constitutional right, my speculations about depression in men is off-topic, and best left to other posts.)

Back to the study at hand, and co-ruminating girls:

"For years, we have encouraged kids to find friends who they can talk to about their problems, and with whom they can give and receive social support," Rose said. "In general, talking about problems and getting social support is linked with being healthy. What's intriguing about theses findings is that co-rumination likely represents too much of a good thing. Some kids, especially girls, are taking talking about problems to an extreme. When that happens, the balance tips, and talking about problems with friends can become emotionally unhealthy."

Rose said adolescents should be encouraged to talk about their problems, but only in moderation and without co-ruminating.

"They also should engage in other activities, like sports, which can help them take their minds off their problems, especially problems that they can't control," she said.

And what about blogging? Are My Space and Live Journal entries considered a form of "co-rumination"? If so, does that mean blogging can lead to (or be symptomatic of) depression?

I hope not. But fortunately, I'm a 53-year-old man and blogging actually tends to cheer me up.

(As long as I avoid blogging about topics like our hopelessly dysfunctional "ally," Saudi Arabia, I'm fine.)

This post by Glenn Reynolds discusses two of the most whiny-looking books I've seen. Apparently, the "choice" presented in Daniel Brook's The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America is between "selling out" (meaning working for evil corporations which make the world a worse place), and starving as an unpaid or underpaid activist. The argument, apparently, is that society should subsidize activism. We don't already? (I think we do; see these posts.)

I may be getting old, but I think these whining books are leaving out an important career choice -- to wit, the "working class hero." Considering the well-documented shortage of handyman skills (and presumably, handywoman skills), I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that many a young person could, by learning the basics, earn a good income. True, they might have to work with their hands, but isn't that part of the whole working class hero ethos?

The marvelous thing is that by being willing to get your hands dirty, you can do all of the following:

improve self esteem by becoming a real part of the working class!

Live up to the Maoist goal of being in touch with "the people"!

Have something to show for your work at the end of each day!

Actually earn a real living!

(Most importantly) have something to whine about!

On the other hand, you can join the working class and not whine at all.

Molly Hartmann Ahrens graduated from a very prestigious, public service-oriented college with a degree in sociology, and eventually went on to become a professional bartender. She wrote about her experience not long ago for the Philadelphia Inquirer in a piece titled "Bryn Mawr grad's big career? Call it public service". As Ahrens points out, Bryn Mawr is known for producing leaders:

Among many, it produced Katharine Hepburn (Class of 1928), Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore (1909), Nobel Peace Prize recipient Emily Greene Balch (1889) and Drew Gilpin Faust (1968), who will become the first female president of Harvard University in July. To be a student at Bryn Mawr is to be constantly reminded of the legacy of the great women who went before you.

Bartending was something a friend of mine mentioned after I quit my second job. I did not like the suggestion. "I got a college degree to become a bartender?" I asked her. But like it or not, I needed the money. So with no other immediate prospects ahead of me, I signed up for a week-long licensing course. At the time I felt like a failure. Going to bartending school felt like a punishment for not being able to withstand a job with a more impressive title.

I got mixed reactions from people when I told them I was "pursuing a degree in mixology." Most of my friends thought it was hilarious. "But you don't even drink!" they exclaimed. An old college professor I ran into asked me when I was planning to get a real job. My mom tried to sound upbeat, but I knew I was putting an end to 21/2 decades of her bragging about me to her friends. Spending your nights mixing up Purple Hooters isn't exactly the same thing as writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

After receiving my bartending license last fall, I began to work with a small catering company. We mainly did private parties in large suburban mansions. At first it really depressed me to be "the hired help" (as I have been referred to), but I was soon cheered up by the fact that I made more money bartending than at my previous jobs. Plus, I found the work pretty interesting.

At Bryn Mawr, I majored in sociology. Standing behind the bar provided me with a perfect vantage point from which to study people. Dressed in my black uniform, I could easily disappear into the shadows, becoming noticeable only when someone needed a fresh drink. But this invisibility felt very different from the kind I had experienced previously. I used to feel invisible in a bad way; it was not only about not being seen, but about not being able to feel my own spirit inside myself.

San Francisco used to be the kind of over-educated place where you could get into a taxi and discover that the driver had a Ph.D. in history or something. And what's wrong with that? Lots of people have advanced degrees in fields they never enter, and end up doing something else. (My A.B. was in Rhetoric, so I went to law school, realizing all the while that I might not enjoy practicing law. I tired of litigation and ended up selling real estate, running a (failed) nightclub business, and other things. While I have never felt entitled to complain that I wasn't made partner in a large law firm, I suppose what I'm doing now does constitute a form of rhetorical analysis, but it would never occur to me in my wildest dreams that the taxpayers should fund it.)

What it is that drives this apparent sense of entitlement that seems to characterize so many people?

There used to be a concept known as the "day job." Artists, musicians, and other creative types have traditionally worked in offices, or as waiters, cooks, messengers, or even blue collar workers while hoping for a big break. But there never was any sense of entitlement to the big break.

I can't help wonder whether a two-headed monster has been created.

A lot of this (one of the monster's heads) stems from the relentless, all-encompassing self esteem movement (beginning in kindergarten if not day care and running all the way through to college and even grad school) resulting in adults steeped in the entitlement mindset. Even people who might have practical degrees in something useful nonetheless think it is beneath them or degrading to have to work in entry level positions and work their way up. Another head of the monster is the creation of a useless and unemployable caste, by the conferring of meaningless degrees in an unending litany of identity group "studies." The holders of these degrees have their self esteem delusionally bolstered by a false belief that the "system" which sees no value in their valueless degrees is victimizing them. TS at The Sophist calls it "an indictment of our college system that someone could graduate with a double major in film studies and gender studies" and while I agree, I also think it's self-indicting to walk around with a degree like that and imagine that it has real value. (Again, false self-esteem prevents the recognition of simple reality.)

No wonder they feel entitled. If they didn't have the feeling of entitlement, I'm afraid they'd have nothing at all.

Fortunately for them, there are still vocational training centers and adult education courses available in most cities and communities where they can learn things like bartending and automotive repair. I do hope they eventually learn useful skills, for otherwise they might become an angry class of people seeking "revenge."

But I don't mean to come off sounding like Marie Antoinette. I not only ran a bar, I once earned a living as an auto mechanic. But as to the "working class hero" stuff, I really can't identify with the concept. Such things are best left to people like Hillary Clinton. (Perhaps her campaign can provide temporary employment for some of the vengeful entitlement set.)

I see Eric has done a post this morning on scientist making policy prescriptions outside their field of expertise. I have a good example from some physicists. I think it is syncronicity.

==

I was visiting a physics blog (well the Duke case has lost my interest so I have to do something) and came across this astonishing discussion of economics. They are discussing how stupid the Laffer curve is as presented in a recent Wall Street Journal article. It seems like our vaunted physicists believe a linear curve better fits the data than the third or fourth order curve the Wall Street Journal presented. He shows the two curves with some comments and then says:

No, I am not being unfair. I did not draw the "Laffer Curve" on top of those data in order to embarrass the WSJ or AEI. They did it themselves; the second graph is how the plot was actually published by the Journal, while the first one was Mark Thoma's subsequent reality-based-community version of the plot. As Kevin Drum says, it's "like those people who find an outline of the Virgin Mary in a potato chip."

Among other features, we note with amusement that the plotted curve implies that tax revenues hit zero at a corporate tax rate of about 33%, and become dramatically negative thereafter. As of this writing, it is unclear what advanced statistical software package was used to fit the Laffer Curve to the data; the smart money seems to be on MS Paint.

Can you explain why tax revenues in America have been rising at double digit rates despite the tax cuts of 2003? They started going up as soon as the reductions were passed and have been rising ever since.

It seems that the experiment is being done and it proves that the Laffer curve guys may be right.

As a good aerospace engineer I trust the data over theory every time.

There is a very good reason that, for the most part, money decisions are made by engineers and rarely by scientists. Engineers are expected to make things that work.

I would like to see more engineers in Congress. More scientists would be a disaster due to insufficient contact with the real world.

Let me note that the WSJ graph (mistaken in derivation or not) most closely fits the evidence. Lowering tax rates raises government revenue. At least in America.

===================

B said: If the people in country X want more (public transport? social security? health insurance? unemployment insurance?) to be shared responsibility, the thing to do so is to use taxes.

Let me rephrase that:

If the people in country X want to steal other people's money the responsible way to do it is to use taxes.

I agree.

Hey physics guys. The USSR failed. Europe can't support its welfare state. America will be severely strained by its welfare state. And you guys want more of the same? With Big Physics on the government dole I understand your orientation. However, it may not be popular with the run of mill citizen who dislikes having his pocket picked.

====================

I know how you can get back in the good graces of the average citizen. Give them the physics to build a low cost p-B11 (proton - Boron 11) burning fusion reactor which can deliver power to the grid and your esteem in the eyes of the average citizen will go way up. They might be more willing to open their wallets.

Get cracking.

BTW I'm working on an open source test reactor along the Bussard Polywell lines. I'm short a plasma physicist. Any one care to join in?

IEC Fusion Technology blog

If you are not familiar with Dr. Bussard's work here is a good place to start:

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion. Actually it is not no radiation. A 100 MW reactor will produce about 1 Kw of neutrons. Not too hard to shield. Not significant for making plutonium. So I learned a bit since I wrote that.

=======================

You really want to do something for the poor of the world? Forget Socialism. Reduce the cost of energy. That is actually within your means.

Better yet get us off the oil standard.

Yeah. The LHC (Large - they are not kidding - Hadron Collider) is sexy. And the superconducting magnets are thrilling. Well they thrill me, but I've been known to have some strange fetishes. Evidently that is one of them.

Seriously.

You guys need to focus for a few years on providing benefits to society. Don't you know there is a war on? It could be ended with physics and I don't mean bigger bombs.

There are a number of IEC fusion devices out there. From my studies the Bussard Reactor looks to be the most likely to succeed. However, if you don't like that there is a commercial venture Tri Alpha Energy. Or the guys at the University Wisconsin. Or Champaign Urbana.

Here is a look at some of the small fusion projects [pdf] currently going on in America.

Give what you can. An hour a week would be a start.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

While I often complain in long posts about the way political arguments are dressed up as science, Virginia Postrel has articulated it very succinctly:

Scientists have gotten way too fond of invoking their authority to claim that "science" dictates their preferred policy solutions and claiming that any disagreement constitutes an attack on science. But, even assuming that scientists agree on the facts, science can only tell us something about the state of the world. It cannot tell us what policy is the best to adopt. Scientists' preferences are not "science." You cannot go from an "is" (science) to an "ought" (policy). Social science, particularly economics, can tell you something about the likely tradeoffs (hence some of my frustrations at Aspen). But it can't tell you which tradeoffs to make.

Unfortunately, many people who get into these debates tend to lose sight of the "oughts" and get caught up in debating the minutiae of scientific facts (more likely, summaries and pronouncements based on disputable facts). Many of these scientific claims are only beyond their understanding and training, but their access to them is pretty much limited by what is made commonly available in ordinary media sources. So, they're not even debating what "is" -- as they're not competent to decide. I'm not sure scientists are either, as I have seen far too many scientific positions revised and reversed. (Studying Paleontology in the early 1970s, I was taught that we were still in the Ice Age.) Nothing is constant. Debating science is an exercise in futility, and because there is so much theory involved, one might as well debate the unknown.

Injecting science into politics causes a lot of people to become distracted and lose sight of basic principles. Science and politics are both contaminated, resulting in hybridized pseudoscientific nonsense like the "Precautionary Principle" -- which is used to justify the subordination of the economy not to the free market (or even economists or politicians), but to the whims of environmentalists (an ill-defined group of often highly political people who like to call themselves scientists).

Commentary Magazine has an interesting article by Charles Murray discussing the origins of Jewish Genius.

Since its first issue in 1945, COMMENTARY has published hundreds of articles about Jews and Judaism. As one would expect, they cover just about every important aspect of the topic. But there is a lacuna, and not one involving some obscure bit of Judaica. COMMENTARY has never published a systematic discussion of one of the most obvious topics of all: the extravagant overrepresentation of Jews, relative to their numbers, in the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media.

I have personal experience with the reluctance of Jews to talk about Jewish accomplishment--my co-author, the late Richard Herrnstein, gently resisted the paragraphs on Jewish IQ that I insisted on putting in The Bell Curve (1994). Both history and the contemporary revival of anti-Semitism in Europe make it easy to understand the reasons for that reluctance. But Jewish accomplishment constitutes a fascinating and important story. Recent scholarship is expanding our understanding of its origins.

And so this Scots-Irish Gentile from Iowa hereby undertakes to tell the story. I cover three topics: the timing and nature of Jewish accomplishment, focusing on the arts and sciences; elevated Jewish IQ as an explanation for that accomplishment; and current theories about how the Jews acquired their elevated IQ.

In the letters to the editor section of the magazine he gets asked a few questions. Here is one.

To the Editor:

Charles Murray's consideration of the historical sources of higher-than-average Jewish intelligence and cultural achievement is the most informed and intelligent on the subject that I know of. That it is written by a non-Jew is, I believe, instructive for many of us who tend to take pride in Jewish achievements. We must always keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of great cultural creators of mankind have not been Jewish, and that achievement is by no means a Jewish monopoly.

We should also be aware that a number of factors--rising rates of intermarriage, the increasing insularity of some religious Jews--raise considerable questions about whether Jewish cultural and creative achievement will be as disproportionately great in the next 200 years as it has been in the previous 200.

Shalom Freedman
Jerusalem, Israel

Shalom Freedman's first point is of course correct: Jews are disproportionately represented in the ranks of outstanding achievers but, in raw terms, non-Jews are in the great majority. I proudly join Eoghan Harris in noting that among them are Scots and Irish, and even the occasional Scot-Irish. Mr. Freedman's worries about intermarriage are justified if the question is the survival of a robust Jewish culture, but less so with respect to IQ. On average, Jews do not marry randomly selected Gentiles, but ones they meet in college or workplace, which in turn means spouses whose own mean IQ is also considerably above the Gentile mean. Increasing cognitive stratification independent of ethnicity or social origins is the ignored story of today's evolving class structure--the story that the late Richard Herrnstein and I tried to bring to public attention in The Bell Curve (1994).

As my friend Jose Arias used to say: welfare is the price we pay to keep the lower classes from revolting. I think what we have done with welfare in terms of encouraging work is a good idea. If for no other reason that it provides some cultural cohesion. We all have our shoulders to the wheel. My friend Bob used to say that "Liberty is just equality in school". There is no way equality in school can be accomplished without destroying the effectiveness of our schools. I might add that Bob was a lot older when he first said that. He is younger than that now.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Dean is 41 today and he reports that he doesn't feel 41. (In all honesty, I can't remember how 41 felt, but it would be fun to time travel back 12 years and find out whether 41 felt any differently than 53 does now. I'll try to feel 41 today if I can in Dean's honor, but I might have trouble figuring out how.)

Happy Birthday Dean!

Did God put Glenn Greenwald in charge of gender? Or does Glenn Greenwald imagine himself the God/Goddess/Godz of Gender?

It might be James Taranto's fault, because in a total violation of the Karl Rove Rule On Glenn Greenwald, he actually linked Greenwald's thoughts on gender (which I think deserves to be titled "I'm the Gender God").

Not that I blame Taranto for succumbing to temptation. In a manner which couldn't have been calculated to have been more personally insulting, Greenwald displayed the most unflattering pictures he could find of Taranto, apparently because he believes that the pictures are themselves a sort of argument that Taranto is bad. He's an evil, male macho pig. A masculist, perhaps? (Greenwald calls him the "Arbiter of American Masculinity -- the Ridiculer of John Edwards' lack of manliness.")

Here's the picture that Greenwald sees as representing "awe-inspiring toughness and towering masculinity":

How is that to be, um, "answered" or "rebutted"? Is Taranto supposed to apologize for his appearance? As the pictures are supposed to be in retaliation for Rush Limbaugh's display of the Breck girl photoshop of Edwards? (Something Taranto didn't do, but we all know that the macho monolithic Arbeiters of American Masculinity think with one mind, don't we?) Taranto is lucky he's not me, for I'd probably upload this picture....

....and title it "Glennda Genderwald, the Wicked Witch of the Yeast" or something. And then there'd be calls for Taranto to be fired for sexism or something.

But I'm not Taranto, so I can't.

While I haven't met Taranto and don't know whether the ones Greenwald served up are bad pictures or not, the whole thing made me shudder in fear, and made me very hesitant to write this post. Imagine if Greenwald poked around looking for a picture of me. If you Google my name, the very first picture that usually comes up is the one at Frank J.'s "Peace Gallery" -- showing me holding deadly weapons wearing a "NUKE THE MOON" T-shirt!

Or he might find the picture of me holding crossed swords, and wearing the gun diversity T-shirt -- the same shirt that angry leftists believed Glenn Reynolds should have been fired for wearing. (Lefties have no sense of humor.)

Fortunately, I'm a pipsqueak by Greenwald's standards, and he'd never deign to malign my pictures as he did Taranto's.

But the fact is, if Taranto is bad, then I'm really bad!

We come to the question of gender. I think I am of the male gender, although I try not to take these things for granted, because back in the days when my brain's philosophical wiring resembled that of the sound engineer Ann Althouse discussed recently, I used to contemplate the differences between the sexes until I was convinced that there really weren't any of real, ultimate consequence, and that any that might appear to be there were only nature's way of playing sexual head games (which of course lead to the usual mammalian terrestrial politics). I thought that we were all victims of a cosmic joke that most of us failed to get, and I often still feel that way. While I cannot characterize myself as the Arbiter of American Androgyny, when I force myself to slog through the pathetic ditherings of Glenn Greenwald, I am reminded of similar ditherings on the right about the way God made man and God made woman, and I wish Greenwald would look at the bigger picture, stop being another petty gender tyrant, and just get a effing clue.

Instead, the man is obsessed by Taranto's remark about how women had been "won over by John Edwards's womanly charms." That is so unbelievably lame! Of course they were won over by his womanly charms; that's part of his androgyne appeal as a trial lawyer, and it's why he's so irresistibly cute that when I uploaded a cute picture of him in drag, even an unquestionably heterosexual retired-blogger found himself unable to avoid leaving the following comment:

Is it just me, or is that third one kind of cute?

Anyway, what's wrong with the Breck girl business? Are we supposed to gasp in collective horror, and clutch the curtains as we swoon? Since we're on the subject, can anyone explain to me why pictures of Edwards in drag are worse than the pictures of Giuliani in drag?

Or do I have it all wrong? Might it be that the pictures of Giuliani in drag are worse? I suspect that to the gender-virtuous, pictures of John Edwards in drag are some sort of smear, but that the pictures of Giuliani are a worse smear -- for very different reasons. The Greenwald explanation would be that they're far worse -- a sort of "double reverse" Republican smear against the left grounded in the fact that Giuliani is an "authoritarian narcissist."

Or would it be that Giuliani is guilty of hypocrisy for allowing gay men to dress him in drag?

Does that make me a "hypocrite" too?

Anyone who would run around looking like that is probably looking for a real man:

Or do I fall into some hitherto unknown category of treason? When I found amusement and not outrage in these sorts of things, I found myself called a "sociopath" by another champion of gender virtue, Amanda Marcotte. Yet the picture of Edwards was -- and is -- undeniably cute!

Who are these gender virtue people to decide whose gender views are right, and whose are wrong?

I don't know, but I have a broader gender issue for them to consider. The picture of Edwards in drag was emailed to me along with the pictures of all the other candidates in drag.

Forgive my sexism and ageism for saying this, but I have to remark a simple truth:

John Edwards is the only candidate who could have been considered even remotely attractive in drag.

But it is evil and sociopathic of me to say that, isn't it? Why? The only "rule" that I can discern here is that attractive drag on Democrats is bad because it's Republican sexism. But unattractive drag on Democrats (Kerry) is bad because it's Republican sexism. Likewise, unattractive drag is bad on Republicans because it's Republican sexism. (They're making fun of women, or the transgendered, or something.) I'm not sure how attractive drag on Republicans fits into this equation, so I'll think about it.

But it's OK to say that the Republicans have uptight macho sexual issues, and that's because the Democrats don't!

Understand now?

Good, because I don't.

Taranto is lucky he's not me, because if I were Taranto, I'd hire a professional make-up crew to see what they could accomplish. That would really give the witches of Gender Virtue something to stew over.

MORE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome all!

Wish I had more answers to all these "gender issues" than I do, but I just don't. (If you want answers, you'll have to ask the humorless people who have figured it all out for everyone else.)

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds comes a clear sign of hope, in the form of this new campaign pledge by John Edwards:

...to eliminate all unpleasant, disagreeable, or otherwise bad things from all aspects of American life by the end of his second year in office.

It looks like Global Warming Scares have reached their sell by date and are now being discounted. People are starting to fall away from the old time religion.

Here is a video from CNN. Not exactly your most conservative station.

Especially check out Bjorn Lumborg at about 9 1/2 minutes into the program. He says global warming will have dire consequences for Britain. He says 2,000 more people a year will die in Britain if warming trends continue. That is terrible and something must be done. However, 20,000 fewer people a year will die from the cold in Britain. Can we just let it happen? Do the math.

Then Bjorn goes on to list the top five problems in the world where a dollar spent gives many dollars of return. This was worked out by a number of Nobel Laureates and other economic specialists in a document called the Copenhagen Consensus. They are:

• AIDS


• Malnutrition


• Free Trade


• Malaria


• Agricultural Research

Also note that Al Gore comes in for a lot of ribbing. Especially about Kyoto. He was against it before he was for it. Al Gore in his own words. Always good for a laugh. I get it though. When he was Vice President he spoke for the American economy. Now that he is a freelancer all he cares about is his own personal economy.

Cris Horner at about 29 minutes in talks about how the IPCC gets its consensus. They write the summary for policy makers first and then make sure the science used in the report conforms to the policy prescriptions. You can read more about that in Manufacturing Consensus.

The host, Glenn Beck, says at the end of the program:

Just yelling "the debate is over and these people are heretics or Nazis" as loud as you can is not the best way to advance science, however many have discovered it is the best way to secure funding.

Which is why some debates deserve two or more sides. Some do not. They get them any way. If you have a position be prepared to defend it or acknowledge your faith.

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

For this outburst I blame M. Simon, who wrote his post because Ann Althouse wrote a post about Augustus Owsley Stanley, III (aka "Bear"), sound and chemical engineer extraordinaire.

It's the Grateful Dead playing another Pigpen classic, "Easy wind." It's tough to call Pigpen the "leader" of the Grateful Dead, as the band was so anarchic, but in his autobiography "Searching for the Sound," bassist Phil Lesh called Pigpen their "anchor." With good reason; while the rest of the band (and nearly everyone in the audience) were on LSD, Pigpen somehow was able to be cosmic on alcohol. (It took its toll, as he died of cirrhotic liver disease at age 27, in 1973.) There was something about his down-to-earth "cosmic but sensible" grounding that kept the band from getting too far out and spaced out (especially during their experimental days) and it was the Pigpen space that gave the band their ability to always return to earth. I believe that he influenced the sound of their music greatly, and without Pigpen they would not have developed quite the same distinctively adventurous, very American, syncopated style which has been called "chunky psychedelic wit."

I don't know how many people enjoy it, but I do. Psychedelic nostalgia at its finest.

Link here.

Considering that this is 37 years old, the psychedelic light show in black and white seems appropriate.

MORE: Amazingly, Pigpen video keeps turning up at YouTube.

Here's a classic version of "Hard To Handle."

(Have to say, that last one's the best I've seen so far.)

There's a theoretical concept that has become such a hot button issue that it's not a safe subject for public discussion. Not, that is, unless you're among trusted friends. That's the idea of using war for political advantage. Because it is seen as so immoral and so despicable by the people accused of doing it, people become indignant, and reasonable discussion is next to impossible.

Ever since 9/11, Bush has been accused of waging war for the political advantage of his own party. Not only is the mentioning any positive accomplishments in the war seen as political opportunism, but so is any mention of 9/11. (The latter, of course, supplies much of the emotional fuel for the 9/11 Truther movement.)

But because Democrats see Bush as fighting a war for political purposes, this inclines many of them to want (at least in the political sense) the war to become a hopeless quagmire -- something that can be said to have been "lost" by Bush.

Beyond this is where it gets tricky. (And highly emotional.) There is a fine line between wanting Bush to screw up so that the voters will see the truth and throw the damned Republicans out on their ass, and actually wanting America to lose the war because America is evil and just plain deserves to lose the war. Not only is it a fine line, but it's a messy, blurry line, because the Democratic Party is home to genuine America haters like Ward Churchill, Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Code Pink, Not In Our Name, A.N.S.W.E.R., etc. And naturally, those who hate America indignantly claim that they do not hate America, but only hate its evil deeds and the evil men who run the government -- and that it is those who disagree with them who really hate America (and are unpatriotic).

I realize that by even attempting to discuss this, I am resorting to the type of generalizations I normally deplore, which is why I don't like to write essays like this very often. People become emotional whenever anyone generalizes about them, and I don't like it either. When I see any of the groups to which I might be said to belong being smeared, I tend to take it personally. Thus, if someone calls gun generalizations, or pit bull generalizations, or genital generalizations, I cannot help wondering whether they're talking about my guns, my dog, or my genitalia. So I should make it clear that I am not talking about pro-war Democrats here -- especially those of the Joe Lieberman variety. Nor am I talking about people who disagree with the war, but do not want the U.S. to lose it. I'm talking about those who want the country to lose in order to take back the White House -- both the "evil America" haters and the "good America" lovers.

I have to say, I find myself wondering whether it's more honest to want the country to lose because it's evil and because war is evil than to want it to lose in order to win an election. I also find myself wondering what would happen if Bush were cynical enough to play this game along with them.

To play this out hypothetically (as I'm sure many a Washington Machiavellian political junkie has), let's assume that the GOP's top strategists were able to call the shots, and that they had concluded that because the war called for a longtime occupation in Iraq, that it was not capable of ever being translated into a neat and tidy "victory" in time to win the 2008 election. They'd be faced with several choices:

stay in as long as possible and hope the American people would understand

pull out ASAP and hope for the best

make it appear that blame for the pullout was to be laid at the feet of the Democrats, and do everything possible to ensure that any perceived defeat be seen as the fault of the Democrats.

From the viewpoint of longterm political success or defeat, the two major factors are:

whether and when there will be a U.S. pullout; and

whether the Iraqi government can hold after the pullout

The question reduces itself along the following lines:

Will thousands of Americans have died for nothing?

Many people have a vested interest in this being the case, whether they admit it or not (and whether they like it or not) it is in their political interests to want the Iraqi government to fail.

It's become a downright unpleasant subject for discussion.

The battery that is being held by the bronze medieval alchemist is nearly as useless as my knowledge of battery technology. A lithium ion Motorola BT50, it worked great in my cell phone when it was new, but over the past year or so, it deteriorated to the point where it will only hold a charge for a couple of hours (sometimes even less than that). No matter how long I charged it or how many times, it kept declining steadily.

But what a difference a brand-new battery makes! I just got one yesterday, charged it up, and 24 hours later, it hasn't registered the slightest drop in the phone's battery strength meter.

"Battery life sucks!" is an expression I hear bandied around a lot. But what does "battery life" mean? The battery life is fine if we're talking about a new battery. But the battery life is absolutely awful with an old one.

Battery life is relative to age, but what I want to know is why. The Wiki entries (for batteries and lithium ion batteries) really doesn't explain it, and I get the impression that the chemistry is either a trade secret, or else something the industry doesn't want to let the public know about; Wiki says it is not widely publicized:

A unique drawback of the Li-ion battery is that its life span is dependent upon aging from time of manufacturing (shelf life) regardless of whether it was charged, and not just on the number of charge/discharge cycles. So an older battery will not last as long as a new battery due solely to its age, unlike other batteries. This drawback is not widely publicised.

According to Wiki, this is what happens:

It is important to note that lithium ions themselves are not being oxidized; rather, in a lithium-ion battery the lithium ions are transported to and from the cathode or anode, with the transition metal, Co, in LixCoO2 being oxidized from Co3+ to Co4+ during charging, and reduced from Co4+ to Co3+ during discharge.

I'm wondering whether there are any readers with a background in electrical or chemical engineering (or just well-red geeks) who might be able to explain in lay terms precisely what is happening to these batteries as they age, as I'd love to know. Is there a steady chemical change, and is it irreversible? I've seen car batteries go bad from sulfur accumulation, and I know that they can be taken apart, the plates cleaned, and new acid poured in (a process called "rebuilding"). Is something similar at work inside a lithium ion battery?

Whatever the problem is, they better figure it out before the Prius converts to lithium ion, or there will be a lot of pissed off owners in 2009! A $10.00 cell phone battery is one thing, but the batteries in a car that costs $75,000 is quite another. Saving the world might be more expensive than imagined.

I realize my ignorance may be showing, but it seems to me that if today's alchemists can synthesize gold, they ought to be able to prevent lithium aging.

UPDATE (07/18/07): In today's Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes discusses the battery tech bottleneck, and he says that Lithium ion batteries are the best to appear so far:

The famous Moore's Law has computer chips doubling in capacity every two years or so. The progress for batteries is more in the neighborhood of 10% a year, says Lawrence H. Dubois, who heads up physical-sciences research at SRI International, the Menlo Park, Calif., research outfit. Improvements, he said, tend to be incremental, even "mundane," like figuring out a thinner container for batteries and thus saving space.

Not surprising, device manufacturers regard every advance in batteries as something of a gift from heaven. "With even 20% more efficiency, you could make the phone slimmer or the display bigger and brighter," said Muzib Khan, a Samsung vice president working with mobile phones. "It opens up more opportunities."

The problem is that the basic design of batteries hasn't changed -- and really can't. One part gives up electrons for energy, one part accepts them and a third part keeps the two separated. Researchers scout for new materials that will provide the most chemical energy in the least weight and space; lithium-ion batteries, used in consumer electronics for the past 10 years, is the best anyone has come up with.

The biggest problem with Lithium ion technology appears to be lifespan. As the date of manufacture is more important than any other factor, I'm still not completely sure what accounts for the degradation, but I'm not convinced I'd want them in a car.

There's a fascinating discussion of Lithium ion batteries in cars here.

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine takes a look at Timothy Leary.

Never too comfortable with politics (he dismissed student activists as "young men with menopausal minds" and proclaimed that LSD stood for "Let the State Disintegrate"), he nevertheless hosted a Los Angeles fundraiser in 1988 for the very buttoned-down Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul (now a congressman from Texas).

I got reminded of the Gillespie article by this Althouse article.

"Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different." LSD folkhero Owsley speaks. More:

"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."

By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement....

He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library.

Well just to get in the mood I have a Dead version of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away on in the background. (Video above).

Oh yeah. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul.

However, I'm leaning Fred Thompson these days.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Like Roger L. Simon, when I initially saw the story about the Queen of England losing her temper at an American photographer, my sympathies were with the Queen. But as it turns out, the story was falsified by the BBC. Not only had the sequence of events been misrepresented and manipulated, but looking at the video in the link that Roger supplied, it became obvious to me that the Queen not only didn't "storm out" of the photography session, but she wasn't especially bothered by any of it. I think she might have even been slightly amused (although dry British humor can be tricky to read), but either way I agree with Roger's assessment:

I am not surprised the Beeb lied or "misrepresented" or whatever they call it. That's what they do. (They are a self-sustaining propaganda outfit, just as any public broadcasting system must perforce be. As we all know, the BBC is virtually unsupervised with a mammoth budget that taxes television owners in the UK with less representation than the citizens of colonial America.) But I am a little disappointed that the Queen didn't walk out on Annie Liebovitz. I mean who is Liebovitz anyway? A celebrity photographer! (Okay, a good one, but still just someone who goes around taking pictures of famous people.) It was more than a little funny to envision Elizabeth giving her the gate. Like the recent movie, it made me like the Queen.

The thing is, I engage in outright fakery all the time, as I find it entertaining. I also enjoy linking to it, and putting it in my blog.

I even enjoy pretending it's true, and because of the nature of this blog, I don't feel under any obligation to spell out in detail everything I really think. Not long ago, I had some fun with a front page exposé in the Globe maintaining that Queen Elizabeth had scolded President Bush in his "divorce war." I pretended to take the Globe seriously (and I dutifully uploaded pictures of the "fight" between Dubya and the Queen as "proof"), but I'm sure no one was fooled.

However, now I see that the BBC is following the Globe standard. What's the world coming to?

Do I have to start pretending to take the BBC as seriously as I pretended to take the Globe?

It's going to be tough.

However, there is still a distinction between the Globe and the BBC, and I think it has to do with the BBC's status as a "self-sustaining propaganda outfit." No matter how comically dishonest it becomes, the BBC must assiduously maintain the pretense of journalistic integrity at all costs, while the Globe has no such burden. Thus, for appearance's sake the BBC must pretend not to be like the Globe, which means that when it is caught, it must pretend to engage in a ritualized "apology" despite the fact that it was caught engaged in deliberate misrepresentation.

To illustrate how the distinction works, had the Globe had run exactly the same story as the BBC, no reasonable person would have ever expected such an apology (from the Globe or any other tabloid).

But as long as it insists on being taken seriously, the BBC is still expected to play "let's pretend."

The downside of pretending to be serious is that it's hard to pull it off if you think you really mean it.

At the risk of sounding like a bleeding heart, I don't envy the BBC. They're obviously having so much trouble with the moral distinction between fake fakery and real fakery that I should probably be pretending to take them seriously as they're pretending to take themselves.

At this rate, we'll all soon be on the Globe standard.

Here is a report from 2005 that may explain recent climate changes or not.

This web page documents the increase in severe weather throughout our entire solar system and relates it to the obvious cause, increased solar activity. The increase in severe weather suddenly appeared in 2002, too suddendly to be caused by greenhouse gasses which have been slowly building for generations.

And Now Cosmic Dust

Cosmic dust might be the reason for the sun's other strange performance. We are currently in a solar minimum which has aspects of a solar maximum. In the last solar max (2001), there were 3 severe geomagnetic storms and 17 X-flares (the largest of solar flares). As of Sept 2005 there have been 4 severe geomagnetic storms and 14 X-flares even though the number of sun spots is low as you would expect in a solar min (see the Updates section for links to articles).

Sunspots have Increased 1825%

From a New Scientist article of 02 Nov 2003, "There have been more sunspots since the 1940s than than any other period (of same duration) in the past 1150 years." This is something like a 1825% increase. Sunspot numbers were derived from levels of a radioactive isotope found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. Sunspots are the precursors of solar flares and coronal mass ejections and reflect the internal state of the sun. It is interesting to note that the number of sun spots during the last (2000 to 2002) solar maximum was fairly low.

Cosmic Dust Causes Intense Weather

The increase in sun activity is related to increases in cosmic dust. In 2000, cosmic dust into our solar system increased threefold. The following years saw exceptionally server weather such as the 2003 hurricane Isabel with wind speeds over 300 MPH (second highest ever recorded). Also in 2003 Arkansas was heavily damaged in one of the most intense outbreaks of tornadoes in 53 years of record-keeping, and a heat wave in Europe killed 12,000. From European Space Agency's online news story of 01 Aug 2003 "we can expect even more interstellar dust from 2005 onwards, once the changes become fully effective." But, that is only the first volley of dust, the second one is three times more intense.

It seems that the more dire a discovery is, the longer NASA will delay its release. Such a delay discourages the media from reporting the discovery. For example, on 10 May 99, the solar wind "stopped" for two days. This is very scary, because no one seems to know what caused it. NASA delayed the release of the information for six months so the media didn't touch it. BUT, NASA sat on the cosmic dust story for THREE YEARS.

Much More is Coming

Between 2005 and 2013 cosmic dust will increase by another factor of 3. Thus making the second increase three times more intense. We are in for a rough ride. Of greatest concern is volcanic activity which has increased 500% over the past 100 years. The timing of this cosmic dust increase is disturbing because the usually dependable (every 600,000 years) Yellowstone super volcano (30 x 50 miles wide) is 40,000 years late.

I do worry about Yellowstone. As A. Jacksonian says:

Much, much, much more worrying is a caldera event in Yellowstone National Park. That sucker will be huge.

And it is overdue.

And the ground is moving there... slowly...

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Zee News reports on a Russian scientist who wants Russia to export fusion power plants.

Tokyo, July 13: Russia is eyeing on designing thermonuclear plants for domestic and international market in the next 20 to 25 years, nuclear physicist Yevgeny Velikhov said.

He expressed confidence that Russia will be able to begin commercial production of thermonuclear reactors in 20-25 years.

"Russia's final goal is clear. We should at least get necessary knowledge to design and build thermonuclear plants for Russia's domestic purposes and for export," Velikhov said.

He believes that it is high time "to prepare Russia's science and industry to the next stage of commercial production."

"Our goal depends on ITER not by 100 percent. We should work ourselves as well. We have to prepare the new generation to this as the stage of commercial production will begin in 20-25 years as a minimum," he said.

There is a shorter path. The direction taken by Tri Alpha Energy is one of those paths. The work by Dr. Robert Bussard is another.

A few of us are so convinced that this work has to go forward that we are working on an open source fusion reactor. You can find out more about it at IEC Fusion Technology blog. If you want to join in the fun you can visit or join the
IEC Fusion Newsgroup. We talk about the science, the technology, and funding the project, among other things.

We need to get a move on. The Russians are coming.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

From the Economist:

Snow fell in Buenos Aires, for the first time in 89 years.

Initially, this struck me as odd, because I hadn't read that Al Gore visited there lately. (A phenomenon known as the Al Gore coldening effect, which has been documented by Tim Blair.)

I don't mean to joke about things like this. The fact is, it's so cold in Argentina that people are dying. And Al Gore has been described as "angry. Very Angry.."

Oh, really? Methinks he doth protest too much!

Because, as it turns out, Al Gore did visit Buenos Aires recently -- in May! His visit was opposed by the Grupo Reflexión Rural, which accused him of staging a "media and propaganda coup in favor of the agrofuels industry."

Of course, the coup that Al Gore staged in May was only the beginning. We all know what followed.

It took me a little time to find the clincher, but this headline says it all:

Live Earth Concerts worked: Al Gore makes it snow in Argentina.

I stumbled onto a fascinating YouTube video of Hillary Clinton being scolded by Code Pink in March of 2003.

Caption:

Hillary Clinton talks about her vote to go to war, Saddam, and WMDs 2 weeks before war in a meeting with Code Pink in March 2003.

Yeah, I know you can't watch the embed here. But it's nice to know you can't, because we're all in this YouTube village thing together, aren't we? Those who disable embedding by request undoubtedly have their special reasons for doing so, and I think it's really cool that people are special and take their specialness seriously. Maybe I, too, should be more special. While I only have one YouTube video (of Coco dancing to Bartok), should I disable embedding? (I'll ask Coco for her thoughts....)

Anyway, for those who don't have the time or the stomach to actually go to YouTube and watch the video, here are a few tidbits:

CP: "We know you say it takes a village. Well, it takes a bomb to destroy a village!"

HRC: "no belief that [Saddam Hussein] will [disarm]"

"[There was] no accounting for the chemical and biological stocks"

"A "tyrannical" "dictatorial" "reign of terror"

"A proven track record" [of having WMDs]

"[I supported the decision] " after carefully reviewing the information and intelligence that I had available."

"We are in a very difficult position right now"

"I would love to agree with you but I can't right now"

[Going into Kosovo] "we did it alone" "we had to do it alone"

After stating that "I see it somewhat differently," Hillary refuses the "pink slip" the activists offer and gets yelled at.

CP: "LIVING IN DENIAL!!!"

[Singing] "Putting our bodies on the line!

Stop this war while there's still time!"

Really? I didn't know they were putting their bodies were on the line. (Anyone know how many Code Pink casualties there were?)

It's easy to laugh at this, but if I were working for Hillary's campaign I would be carefully assembling key footage from confrontations like this (and I am sure there were others), for use later to reassure and shore up the moderate middle American vote.

I think it's quite clear that Hillary knew the cameras were running, and that she would be running for president -- preferably in 2008. In retrospect, it makes for a nice "Sister Souljah" moment. Hillary does in fact stands up to the radical left in the video, but at the same time you can see that she manages to work herself into quite a righteous lather over Bush's economic policies (going to war without raising taxes) -- and draws applause from the group for that.

Despite the anger of the crowd, Hillary knew then (and knows now) that she'll ultimately get the vote of most of the women in that room, along with those who agree with them.

What, does anyone think they'd even consider voting for Giuliani or Thompson? If anything, a strong Republican candidate will only make them less likely to disable their embedding by throwing away their vote on a clown like Ralph Nader.

I really should try to take this more seriously, but when I can't embed Hillary Clinton and Code Pink in my own blog, that hurts!

Former CIA Director James Woolsey has co-authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal that I think ought to be read by everyone. Basically, he says that the British finally get it, but the Americans don't.

On the eve of his departure from office, Mr. Blair gave a television interview taking on those he once courted -- British Islamists who have been quick to level charges of Islamophobia and oppression against Britain and the United States: "The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle [against terror] is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, 'It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified.' . . . Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism."

(Emphasis added to what I think were brilliant remarks.)

....they excluded the truly moderate, who are not Saudi-founded or funded: the Islamic Supreme Council of America, the American Islamic Congress, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the Center for Eurasian Policy, the Center for Islamic Pluralism, the Islam and Democracy Project, the Institute for Gulf Affairs, the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia and many others.

These organizations are frequently shut out of U.S. government events and appointments on the basis that they are considered insignificant or "controversial" by the petro-dollar-funded groups. The administration makes a terrible mistake by making such Wahhabi-influenced institutions as the Washington Islamic Center the gate keepers for all American Muslims.

The actual substance of Mr. Bush's mosque speech -- particularly good on religious freedom -- was overshadowed by the announcement of its single initiative: America is to send an envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference. Based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC was created explicitly to promote hostility to Israel, and its meetings largely consist of ritualistic Israel-bashing. At one last year, Iran's president called for the "elimination of the Zionist regime." It has no mechanism for discussing the human rights of its member states, and thus has never spoken out against Sudan's genocide of Darfuri Muslims. It is advancing an effort to universalize Islamic blasphemy laws, which are applied as often against speech critical of the governments of OIC member states as against profanities. Last month the OIC council of foreign ministers termed Islamophobia "the worst form of terrorism." Currently no Western power holds either member or observer status at the OIC.

The Bush administration is now actively considering whether its public diplomacy should reach out to Muslim Brotherhood groups. While such groups may pay lip service to peace, they do not denounce terror by Hamas, a Brotherhood offshoot. It keeps as its motto: "Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." By choosing those whose definition of terror does not include the murder of Jews, honor killings and lethal fatwas against Muslim dissidents and reformers, the U.S. government makes them look strong -- particularly in the shame-and-honor culture of the Middle East -- and strengthens their hand against the real moderates and reformers.

I can only hope that Bush still has some sort of secret plan to lull the Saudis into a false sense of security, the way he lured the suicidal Saudi Salafists into Iraq. (I can dream, can't I?)

These days, there are plenty of reports and opinion pieces about al Qaeda. Predictably, the left focuses on al Qaeda in Aghanistan and Pakistan (and the "war we should have fought"), while the right focuses on al Qaeda in Iraq (which is, after all, the war we're fighting right now). But few mention the Saudi role in al Qaeda, even though the Saudis and al Qaeda are inextricably intertwined.

Bret Stephens (also writing in the Wall Street Journal) understands that there's an ongoing, institutionalized problem of American cluelessness:

Take the case of career diplomat Francis Riccardione, currently the U.S. ambassador to Egypt. In interviews with the Egyptian media, Mr. Riccardione has said that American officials have "no right to comment" on the case of Ayman Nour, the former opposition leader imprisoned on trumped-up charges; that faith in Egypt's judiciary is "well-placed," and that president Hosni Mubarak -- now in his 26th year in office -- "is loved in the U.S." and "could win elections [in America] as a leader who is a giant on the world stage." Mr. Riccardione also admits he "enjoyed" a recent film by Egyptian artist Shaaban Abdel Rahim, best known for his hit song "I Hate Israel."

Mr. Taylor, a former telecom executive who moved to Jakarta in the 1990s and speaks fluent Indonesian, has engaged influential and genuinely reform-minded Muslims -- as opposed to the faux "moderates" on whom Mr. Bush lavished praise at the Islamic Center -- to articulate and defend a progressive and tolerant version of Islam.

In its brief life, LibForAll has helped turn back an attempted Islamist takeover of the country's second-largest Muslim social organization (with 30 million members), translated anti-Wahhabist books into Indonesian, sponsored a recent multidenominational conference to denounce Holocaust-denial, brought Mr. Dhani to Colorado to speak to U.S. military brass, and launched a well-researched "extremist exposé" in order, Mr. Taylor says, "to get Indonesian society to consciously acknowledge that there is an infiltration occurring of radical ideology, financed by Arab petrodollars, that is intent on destroying Indonesian Islam."

For his efforts, Mr. Taylor has been cold-shouldered by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta -- more proof that when it comes to public diplomacy the U.S. government functions with its usual genius and efficiency. But there's more at work here than a bumbling and insipid bureaucracy. As the scholar Carnes Lord notes in his useful book on public diplomacy, "Losing Hearts and Minds," America's public diplomatists "are today no longer as convinced as they once were that America's story is after all fundamentally a good one, or believe an alternative, negative story is at least equally plausible." Hence someone like Mr. Riccardione can say, when asked about discrimination in Egypt (where a Coptic population amounting to about 10% of the population has one member in the 444-seat parliament) that it "happens everywhere, even in the U.S."

You'd almost think the State Department was being run by Rosie O'Donnell. Or Helen Thomas. Although in fairness (as Glenn also notes) she wasn't elected.

It may be that Bush is no longer in control of the situation. Perhaps a basic history lesson is in order. I wish the president would read what Glenn linked earlier from Don Surber in response to the Byrd/Clinton axis (to which I'd add the Saudis, O'Donnell, and Thomas):

"The American people have waited long enough for progress in Iraq," Byrd and Clinton wrote. "They have waited long enough for the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future."

Really? The war lasted three weeks. The occupation is in its fourth year.

So what? The North occupied the South for 12 years, and had it hung on a few more years, civil rights would have arrived for black Americans about 80 years sooner.

American troops are still in Germany. It took 10 years just to calm West Germany down and begin its "economic miracle," i.e. Americans bought what West Germany produced, no matter how awful it may have been.

American troops are still in South Korea. It took a good 20 years to establish a democracy there. My brother-in-law still recalls the deprivations he faced when he served in Korea.

That was in the 1970s.

American troops are still in Kosovo, helping prevent the very genocide that the editors of the New York Times suggest is OK in Iraq.

American troops are still in Afghanistan.

I won't go into how long we occupied Italy and Japan. My point is made.

(Brilliant remark in emphasis.)

I doubt that would help. Besides, Byrd is 89. Rome will outlast him.

Seriously, I don't think the fall of Rome is upon us yet, but I do think Bush would do better to listen to history than the Saudis. Or Helen Thomas.

"The most hostile in history to the Bill of Rights."

According to Clayton Cramer, that's how the Bush administration is being characterized.

An acquaintance now living in Europe went on one of his rants about how the Bush Administration is "the most hostile in history to the Bill of Rights." This is very typical rhetoric in a lot of circles today, especially by those who are either too ignorant, or too dishonest, to admit the real situation.

Let me respond to just one of your statements below which really captures how severely you have been lied to. To claim that the Bush Administration is the "most hostile in history to the Bill of Rights"--let's compare their actions (not all of which I have agreed with) to those of previous administrations at war--and sometimes in
peace. I'm not saying that I approve of all the previous actions, or of all of Bush's actions below; my point is that your overheated rhetoric is profoundly ignorant.

But there is a question I'd love to ask the people who believe the Bush administration is "the most hostile in history to the Bill of Rights."

How are you defining "Bill of Rights"?

All too often, that term is used as code language concealing a selective cherry- picking of only certain rights from the Bill of Rights. As anyone who has taken basic Civics ought to know, the Bill of Rights consists of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, safeguarding not only free speech and the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, but the right to keep and bear arms.

Are the Bush critics suggesting that his administration has been the most hostile to the right to keep and bear arms? For that matter, are they suggesting Guantanamo is worse than FDR's Japanese internment camps? Cramer makes an excellent point:

During World War II, tens of thousands of non-resident enemy aliens were arrested and held for some months while arrangements were made to exchange them for Americans caught in the Axis powers at the start of the war. About 110,000 U.S. citizens and resident aliens were interned. By comparison, what has the Bush Administration done that is even a pale shadow of this?

What about safeguards against federal encroachment on states rights in the Ninth Amendment?

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

I may sound like a nitpicky and pedantic nerd in my insistence that the Bill of Rights actually contains ten amendments, but I get a little tired of hearing the phrase invoked by people who turn out to be indifferent (if not actually hostile) to some of the other rights in the total package they claim quite sanctimoniously to be defending.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome all.

But this worries me. Will Glenn will be accused of "approval" again? Can I be sure that I won't be accused of "approving" of Clayton Cramer's post?

And what if the accusation involves "approval" of Bush's hostility to the Bill of Rights?

Oh, and I forgot all about the fact that Bush is forcing us to quarter troops in time of war as well as making poor Mary Cholmondeley waste her life.

Surely, Bush's backstabber-approved hostility knows no bounds!

AND MORE: If you haven't read it yet, please do not miss the post by Clayton Cramer which inspired this one.

It's a must read.

I might be mistaken, but I don't think Ace is terribly sympathetic to Andrew Sullivan's plight. (Or, for that matter, that of Gren Gleenwald, whose hatred and vitriolic excesses I think make Sullivan look kind and reasonable.)

I should probably warn readers that Ace is pissed, so if you're easily upset, you might want to do your touchy-feely yoga exercises before clicking the links.

Whether Sullivan is engaged in the type of deliberate rumor-mongering about Fred Thompson that Ace complains of, I do not know. For his part, Sullivan denies it:

Wonkette inferred some gay rumor, and then the blogosphere ran with it. Please. All I meant was that Thompson, as a single man, had had a lot of dates with a lot of women, something that strikes me - and a lot of Republicans as well - as completely fine. I have never heard a single gay rumor about Thompson and never intended to be interpreted as spreading one.

This is such total, utter crap. Honestly, I wish I didn't have to write this post, but the country's obsession with sex does not stop simply because I stomp my feet and demand it.

I do think that to the extent Sullivan encourages any such rumor-mongering, he is engaged in a betrayal of his own principles, and while I don't agree with the characterizations Ace heaps on Sullivan, I think Ace has a good point here:

Let's flash back: Back to the days when Andrew Sullivan was, he claimed, all about sexual privacy. He shrieked about it, in fact. Exposing someone's private sexual behavior was the worst form of Sexual McCarthyism. As one of his post-titles had it.

I hope Andrew Sullivan's views on sexual McCarthyism haven't changed.

What worries me is that he seems to be promoting a mindset that I find anathema, but which I've warned is becoming an

agreement along the following lines:

RESOLVED: Gays do not belong in the Republican Party.

I think that's identity politics, and it is the antithesis of political freedom.

It's also the antithesis of sexual freedom, but I guess that's long been a casualty of America's war on sex.

I hope Fred Thompson doesn't become a casualty of the war on sex, and I don't mean that as gay rumor-mongering. FWIW, I don't think Fred Thompson is gay in the least. I would not care, but the idea strikes me as absurd. However, this good man (who I think has the makings of a great president) is already under attack for the "trophy wife" nonsense, and the campaign hasn't even begun in earnest.

Does it all really have to be about genitalia?

I guess so.

Welcome to the world of premature elections.

(There's no need to worry about issues, for we all have genitals....)

UPDATE: The new (apparently moved) link to Andrew Sullivan's "witch hunt is a witch hunt" post is here.

UPDATE (07/13/07): Writing at Pajamas Media, Rick Moran has a must-read post on the latest battle in the Sex War:

I could go on and on listing issues that have some bearing on the nation's health and well being or are just huge stories of national and international import.

And yet, David Vitter gets caught with his pants unzipped and a media frenzy erupts.

There's so much hypocrisy all around that it's unbelievable, and I agree with Rick.

The ultimate question of who wins the Sex War is probably related to who wins the related Hypocrisy War. Right now, there's a relentless push to show that the Republicans are more hypocritical than the Democrats, but I think what's being forgotten is that merely being a Republican does not make one a sanctimonious moral scold. If the noisier Republicans learned how to tap into their laissez faire roots (all they have to do is shut up a little louder) and let the Democrats go too far with the sexual scolding, the ordinary people (especially those who only want to be left alone) might realize that where it comes to upholding sexual morality, no one has a monopoly.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has a really good post titled "Liberalism, Libertarianism and Gay Rights":

I argued specifically against the liberal recipes for gay equality: against hate crime laws and even against employment discrimination laws. I argued that a conservative position on gay rights would leave private discrimination and prejudice alone and change only the government's stance so that all citizens are treated equally by the state, even if they are subject to discrimination by private entities. Virtually Normal did contribute, I think, to a deeper understand that marriage rights and military service were central to the gay rights movement. In that, it helped revolutionize the gay rights movement - against the wishes of many of its leftist leaders. But I had no luck trying to shift the liberal nannying and tolerance-mongering of the gay establishment.

Still, we're not all liberals. For the record. But it's a quixotic position, I will sadly concede. Freedom is not as popular as it once was. And liberals have helped whittle it away.

Extreme anti-gun bias by Philadelphia politicians and media is attracting national attention lately, with an ABC News special echoing and promoting culture war stereotypes of the sort I've been arguing against for years.

I'll start with the Philadelphia Inquirer. The logic is hard to follow, but the Inquirer recently editorialized that gun control would have helped stop police from firing 85 shots into a man who'd been waving a gun at them:

Make no mistake, there are situations in which police have no choice but to shoot. In Miller's case, police said he pointed a loaded gun at officers and would not drop it when ordered. But the number of shots went far beyond what was necessary to deal with the threat. Something went awry.

Understand that officers staring down a weapon have to make split-second decisions whether to fire. They know that all too often in such situations, it's officers who are hurt.

That's why good training that ingrains smart procedures is so key. Other cities' police departments - New York's, in particular - have done a better job recently of training police in tactics that minimize the need for deadly force in difficult situations.

Harrisburg lawmakers could help city police by providing sound gun control. With city streets awash in illegal guns, it's no wonder officers frequently face potentially lethal situations.

Yes, that's exactly what the argument is. From another Inquirer editorial:

It's likely that the firearms used in these killings were illegally obtained by the shooters.

The odds of that being so are heightened because of the lack of political will in Washington and Harrisburg to displease gun-rights absolutists.

Yes, the people who think this way really believe that laws will stop shootings in Philadelphia.

NRA-beholden legislators stand in the way of actual progress. Instead of passing laws (which are the only solution that can work here), they only promise commissions and more talk. (Emphasis added.)

Monica Yant Kinney expressed a typical sentiment:

Whenever I write about Philadelphia's homicide crisis, I hear from suburban readers who think it's a waste of space.

Poor black people killing poor black people, thugs shooting thugs - why should we cry?

With alarming regularity, folks living outside the city suggest they'd rather ignore the horrors inside it.

"Homicide is a loaded topic. It's not pretty. It's not pleasant."

And whether you're living comfortably in the suburbs or fighting to stay alive in the city, it's too ugly to ignore anymore.

This Tony Auth cartoon (which I previously blogged about) is typical:

It would be bad enough if this bad logic and culture war stereotyping were limited to local politicians and newspapers, but now that I see it's been ramped up on national television, I worry that the fears I've expressed (about a national gun control movement deliberately targeting cities) are confirmed.

This past Sunday (July 8), ABC's World News Sunday ran an extremely biased program about Philadelphia gun control. Invoking all the culture war stereotypes, Philadelphia is portrayed as a "victim" of the rural redneck culture that rules the rest of the state, and will not allow Philadelphia to enact "its own laws."

During a plug for the story before a commercial break, anchor Dan Harris portrayed Philadelphia as a "desperate" city that was "in the cross-hairs" of the gun control debate. Harris: "A city desperate to stop the murders finds itself in the cross-hairs of a national debate on gun control."

Harris introduced the story by relaying the contention of Philadelphia gun control proponents that its city has a higher murder rate because the city must abide by gun laws set by a state government that is "dominated by rural lawmakers." Harris: "Philadelphia has to follow gun laws set by the state government, which is dominated by rural lawmakers. And city officials say that is why they have the highest murder rate of the nation's big cities -- 213 this year and counting."

Kerley began his report by recounting the story of a five-year-old girl who was shot to death while riding in a car. Kerley then suggested that the reason New York City has a lower murder rate than Philadelphia is because it has stricter gun laws than Philadelphia. Kerley: "Philadelphia has more murders than New York, with six times the population. But unlike New York, Philadelphia cannot pass its own gun laws."

The ABC correspondent then turned to one of the "frustrated city officials" who says they will "sue their own state government." City Councilman Darrell Clarke: "I can no longer continue to sit here and allow the level of violence to continue unabated simply because people don't feel it is appropriate to do what I believe is their mandatory duty."

This would almost be comical if it wasn't for the fact that we're talking about the Second Amendment here. (You know, it's part of that Bill of Rights thingie?)

I'm also fascinated by the dichotomy between urban and rural. From the transcript of the ABC docudrama:

Where you stand on this issue may depend on where you live. Urban Americans tend to favor strict gun laws. Rural Americans do not. But in one big city, they don't get to choose. Philadelphia has to follow gun laws set by the state government, which is dominated by rural lawmakers. And city officials say that is why they have the highest murder rate of the nation's big cities -- 213 this year and counting.

I may be a total aberration, but if the truth were told, I'm not urban, nor am I rural. I live in the suburbs. And not only don't I have a handlebar moustache, I don't have pistols with telescopic sights! (I usually associate the latter with competition shooting at ranges, not drive by shootings, but I guess ABC was just trying to be as inclusive as possible.)

What's missing from the chart and from the discussion is that Philadelphia's murder rate, while appallingly high, is nothing new. The chart accurately reflects this year's total so far. Last year's homicide total was 406 -- not much different from what was seen in the 1990s:

Murders peaked at 503