I never get any trick-or-treaters, but I always carve a jack-o-lantern anyway. Here's this year's:

I can't help notice that there have been a lot of complaints about girls wearing slutty outfits like these, but because no one ever comes to the house, I have no way of evaluating slutty costume statistics.

For some background, Glenn Reynolds links James Lileks who quotes from Newsweek:

Witches are "wayward" and grammar-school pirates are "wenches." A girl isn't an Army cadet, she's a "Major Flirt," and who knew female firefighters wore fishnet stockings? Even Little Bo Peep comes with a corset, short skirt and lacy petticoat.

I kvetched about this a few years ago in my print incarnation, but for some odd reason one lone column did not stop the marketing juggernaut. I'll have to look into that.

I'm wondering, is such a thing possible?

As to what they would look like, I don't know. Earlier Glenn said he was "OK on slutty," although not for nine year olds, but would anyone say they're "OK on prudish"? Do today's kids even know what the word "prude" means?

What would a prude wear, anyway? Does anyone know?

First, let's settle the nagging question of what is a prude -- at least, from the standpoint of a clueless girl:

Dear Alice,

Hey! I am a thirteen-year-old clueless girl. I was just wondering what prude means. I mean, I am very curious about it, all my friends talk about it, and I have no clue what it means. If you could help me out, I would be very grateful. Thanks again.

-Curious and Clueless

Dear Curious and Clueless,

A prude is someone who is concerned about whether what s/he says, what s/he does, how s/he dresses, etc. is proper according to what a particular group of people thinks is "normal" or appropriate.

But there's more:

The term is often used to judge someone as sexually conservative and no fun.

Being a prude could also describe a person who doesn't know very much about sex because of a lack of experience, or who doesn't do something sexually that someone else wants her/him to do.

So what exactly would a girl who wanted to go out as a prude for Halloween wear, anyway?

I found a goofy online "Are you a prude?" test which had a couple of images:

Well, that looks downright Victorian to me. And while the Victorians were known for being prudish, today that look is considered "Gothic" -- and therefore cool and trendy!

At least as trendy as the "elegant Gothic Lolita" look:

And that's perverted right?

So it wouldn't do for a youngster who's trying for the prude look.

The test site also has this schoolgirl uniform:

I guess that's prudish, but I see a problem right away with the prudishly strict school uniform thing. While the schoolgirl uniforms might be intended to be prudish, it's a well known fact that perverts in Japan (and probably here) get turned on by them.

Which leads this sort of thing to be marketed:

It's so slutty and disgusting that it ought to be illegal, right?

Which is obviously why it's being marketed as a Halloween costume. But the problem is, it derives from prude wear!

If yesterday's prude look becomes today's slutty look, I see no way for parents to win.

I truly apologize for the fact that this became waaaay perverted.

To think that I imagined I could write a modest proposal for prudish Halloween uniforms!

I should probably stay the hell away from fashion and stick to pumpkins.

Dennis Perrin is one of those guys who isn't content merely to disagree with what people say. He has to make things up and put words in their mouth.

Accordingly, in his latest attack on Little Green Footballs, Perrin wasn't content with disagreeing or even name calling; he had to smear LGF (by putting anonymous words in his mouth by way of commenters' remarks):

The commenters never addressed my actual arguments; they simply went after me personally, telling me that I was insane, anti-American, pro-Saddam, probably a fag, or better yet, transsexual. Once they read certain key words, their brains clicked into auto-assault mode, and nothing, n-o-t-h-i-n-g, could stem or alter their spewing. At Little Green Footballs, several commenters bluntly advised me to leave the site, or they would track me down via my IP address and kill me. Probably hot air, but there are plenty of crazy people in the world, and arguing at an anti-Arab racist site wasn't worth taking the risk, however slight.

Asked to produce evidence of a death threat, Perrin stated that he wasn't threatened in his own name, but that of an alias:

What that tag was I have no idea, since I posted there maybe five years ago, two computers and three hard drives in the past.

I knew very little about that site's politics at the time, as I was relatively new to the Web, so I thought I could argue from a different perspective in good faith. Umm, right. My biggest mistake was insisting that the Palestinians are human, which is science fiction to Chazzy's tribe. Several commenters told me to leave, and one said that if I didn't, he'd track my IP address and "hunt" me down, encouraged by a few others. Now, whether this was possible or not, I don't know, but as I said in my earlier post, I figured, f*ck it, and moved on.

With a standard that sloppy, I could leave a comment in one name, then threaten it in another name, and then claim that I received an anonymous death threat, but that I can't remember who I was or who made it.

Glenn Greenwald, call in your angry vengeful Brazilian boys!

As it happens, I have been threatened with death. Right here on my own blog! And if I'm responsible for comments left at my own blog, doesn't that mean I am responsible for death threats made against me? And considering the fact that the commenters were also threatening each other, perhaps all the threats are my fault.

This is just sheer nonsense. (And that's even if you believe that Mr. Perrin really was threatened and really can't remember what his pseudonym was nor the pseudonym of whoever allegedly threatened him.)

Considering what Perrin has written in the past, I am inclined not to believe him now. Years ago (in response to Perrin's rather unhinged attack on James Lileks) I wrote a post analyzing his attacks on Christopher Hitchens, and there was something disingenuous about the way he smeared Hitchens with ad hominem invective -- all the while calling him an old friend -- that made me distrustful. I also found the way he injected race into sports not only distasteful, but largely the product of his own hyperactive imagination:

"many white men...are transfixed by black flesh in motion. Dizziness occurs....Perhaps this is why, equilibrium returned, they despise black jocks in celebration."

elements like racism, religion, patriotism, and blood lust intertwine with the love of sport to produce phenomena like Texas high school football fanatics, Hoosier hysteria, and the Yankees' Bleacher Creatures

I knew it! Sports fans are bloodthirsty, racist religious bigots! Not only that, they're (gulp) patriotic!

I see no reason to believe his latest allegations about five year old anonymous death threats to a pseudonym he can't remember.

You may call it "nonsense" if you like,' she said, ` but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary.

-- The Red Queen

Michelle Dallacroce was hopping mad when she received a letter from Mothers Against Drunk Driving demanding she change the name of her organization, Mothers Against Illegal Aliens.

"I couldn't believe it," Mrs. Dallacroce said. "I don't know who would be confused by this. We don't even have the same acronym."

Mrs. Dallacroce, president of the Phoenix-based advocacy group, received a certified letter Oct. 10 stating that MADD owns the rights to the name "Mothers Against" and giving her 10 days to stop using it.

There's Mothers Against Brain Injury, Mothers Against War, Mothers Against Guns (who don't get a link), Mothers Against Sex Predators, Mothers Against Sexual Abuse, Mothers Against Predators, Mothers Against Pornography Addiction, Mothers Against Peeing Standing Up, Mothers Against Video Game Addiction amd Violence, and last but not least on my list, Mothers Against Blogging. ("It's sucking the life out of my kids," proclaims the site! My mom would probably join it were she alive.)

In fact, there are so many "Mothers Against" organizations that I feel like starting the "Mothers Against Mothers Against Invention." But the fact is, I'm not a mother. Not that a detail like that has stopped the president of MADD, who's a man.

Anyway, MADD has not taken legal action against the Other Mothers. Only against MAIA.

All Mothers should be aghast.

MADD's sleazy, heavyhanded tactics remind me of what MoveOn.org tried to do to it's critics. Robert Cox (via Glenn Reynolds has a report, and Michele Malkin details how the organization with all its vast Soros resources decided to bully a small independent t-shirt seller:

I heard from one of the independent T-shirt sellers targeted by MoveOn.org last week. The seller is a lifelong Democrat and member of the military. Incensed by the attack on Gen. Petraeus, the retailer opened up a shop at online store CafePress. The homemade designs at the PoliStew Cafe (www.cafepress.com/polistew) were stark and simple: "Move Away from Move On!" "MoveOn.org NoFriend to Dems." "General Petraeus has done more for this country than MoveOn.org."

For daring to raise a voice and raise some money for the troops (all proceeds from the sale of his items go to the National Military Family Association charity), this T-shirt seller earned the wrath of MoveOn.org's lawyers. MoveOn.org chief operating officer Carrie Olson brought down the sledgehammer. She sent a cease-and-desist letter to CafePress demanding that PoliStew Cafe's items and other anti-MoveOn.org merchandise be removed from the store.

Olson warned: "We have been alerted to an entire page of items on your website that infringes on our registered trademark, and we request that you remove all items immediately, and ask the poster to refrain from shipping any items purchased on this webpage. We also request that you give us contact information for the company / person who posted the items. This content has certainly NOT been authorized by anyone at MoveOn.org, nor anyone affiliated with MoveOn."

It's worth noting that this obnoxious form of censorship has been attempted for years across the political spectrum. From Michael Savage to Al Franken to the New York Times, the idea is to use copyright and trademark laws to thwart free speech and especially silence critics.

The theory of protecting names from misappropriation for personal gain is being perverted into the the banning of ordinary words, and into the outrageous idea that critics should not be allowed to name what they're criticizing.

The ultimate idea is "You cannnot criticize me, or I'll sue you for using my name!"

It's like something from Alice in Wonderland.

I better stop, because if the Red Queen© reads this post, she might sue me for mentioning her! ("NOT IN MY NAME you don't!")

Last night, I stayed up till all hours writing my first ever Pajamas Media column.

I have to say, I didn't expect sparks to fly in the Democratic presidential debate, but fly they did -- with Obama and Edwards and Dodds really zeroing in, and Hillary looking every bit the waffling, finger-to-the-wind political hack that she is. In my view, her greatest "strength" is that many people would love to see her husband as president again. Last night, this wishful nostalgia just wasn't cutting it. Nor were the numerous attacks on Bush. My fix was that she had a bad night -- beginning with her lousy Halloween-style makeup, and ending with a disastrous waffle on the alien issue:

Hillary certainly did not win tonight's debate. (I think Obama did, although Dodd's articulate and solid performance was quite a surprise.) While I wouldn't say Hillary is in trouble, tonight I saw a few small cracks beginning to appear in her facade of invulnerability. She lacks her husband's legendary teflon, she lacks his common sense ability call a spade a spade, and she lacks his sense of humor.

If this keeps up, the race will actually start to get interesting, and appear to be less of an inauguration.

And for comic value, nothing can beat Dennis Kucinich, who pops up and squeaked "IMPEACH BUSH" like a malevolent Jack in the Box at every opportunity, and finally stated on national television that he had seen a UFO. (If only they'd had some 1950s science fiction music at that point, the night would have been perfect.) It may sound surreal, but last night really was the Night of the Aliens. Hillary waffled on the "alien" issue, while Kucinich held firm as a true believer. (But if they can pilot flying saucers, maybe they are qualified to drive.... After all, last night was almost Halloween.)

So please go check out my post.

My thanks to Pajamas Media for allowing me what turned out to be an exciting opportunity.

UPDATE: Clinton feels the heat.

MORE: Former Clinton strategist Dick Morris thinks Hillary was finally "on display and visible to all":

Hillary Clinton finally got too cute by half in her explanation of her convoluted position on giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. The American people saw her tying herself into a knot over the issue, trying to have it both ways.

AND MORE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking the Pajamas Media post!

I am going to be on the radio. Blog Radio. Always On Watch has invited me and Karridine to discuss I Wanna Go Home and to talk about our give away of 1,000 Free Copies on blog radio. You can tune in here and listen live and call in at 19:00 GMT (12:00 Pacific Std. Time) or listen later at your convenience.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

A sex scandal being deliberately kept under wraps by the news media?

Involving a Democratic candidate?

Anyway, it appears that something is brewing. Glenn linked both of the above, but I can't find any news reports with real dirt or names. Here's what Ron Rosenbaum said:

So I was down in DC this past weekend and happened to run into a well-connected media person, who told me flatly, unequivocally that "everyone knows" The LA Times was sitting on a story, all wrapped up and ready to go about what is a potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate. "Everyone knows" meaning everyone in the DC mainstream media political reporting world. "Sitting on it" because the paper couldn't decide the complex ethics of whether and when to run it. The way I heard it they'd had it for a while but don't know what to do. The person who told me )not an LAT person) knows I write and didn't say "don't write about this".

If it's true, I don't envy the LAT. I respect their hesitation, their dilemma, deciding to run or not to run it raises a lot of difficult journalism ethics questions and they're likely to be attacked, when it comes out--the story or their suppression of the story--whatever they do.

Hmmm...

Am I allowed to at least ask whether it's a male candidate?

A story in today's Inquirer illustrates a strange and disturbing irony, and it's the second one of it's kind to make the local news. I speculated about the line between animal hoarding and animal rescue in an earlier post about a Philadelphia school teacher/author/animal "rescuer" whose house had been rendered uninhabitable by a huge number of cats.

This time, Pennsylvania's animal control bureaucracy stands accused of ignoring a much larger, ongoing problem at a professional animal rescue outfit called "Faithful but Forgotten Friends":

HARRISBURG - Several members of the state dog law advisory board are calling for an investigation into why it took so long for the state to raid a kennel in southwestern Pennsylvania and seize 215 dogs, many of which were emaciated and diseased.

Board members say the Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement, charged with inspecting the state's 2,700 licensed kennels, ignored poor conditions in the kennel and pleas from rescue groups that began almost a year before the raid was ordered on Faithful but Forgotten Friends and Best Buddies kennel.

By the time animal cruelty officers arrived at the Fayette County kennel late last week, it was too late for 50 dogs that had to be destroyed because of severe mange - an irritating skin disease that if caught early is treatable.

Board member Doug Newbold of Malvern, who saw dozens of the surviving dogs - and several that had to be destroyed - at the Pennsylvania SPCA in Philadelphia said she found it hard to believe that the wardens could have missed the signs of a progressive disease and did not take action after earlier inspections.

Others said the bureau's delay was evidence that the welfare of dogs in kennels was still at risk a year after Gov. Rendell began overhauling bureau operations.

Rendell, a dog-lover, has sought to improve conditions for thousands of dogs in large commercial kennels in Pennsylvania, which has been called the "puppy mill" capital of the East.

"This was a major enforcement action" against someone who has filed lawsuits against the bureau and tied it up in court for years, said Smith. "It doesn't mean there's a major breakdown here."

But Howard Nelson, director of the Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania SPCA, which conducted the raid and took in 35 of the seized dogs, believed a review of the bureau's inspection procedures was in order.

"It sounds healthy to have a review to make sure it doesn't happen again," said Nelson, whose shelter had to euthanize nine of the sickest dogs.

Rendell's spokesman, Chuck Ardo, said the governor was "distressed" to hear that animals were being kept under bad conditions, but had yet to determine what steps he would take.

"We'll review the facts of the case and make a decision on how best to proceed," said Ardo.

Faithful but Forgotten Friends kennel, located 300 miles west of Philadelphia, billed itself as a "rescue," picking up dogs from overcrowded shelters, including 76 dogs from Philadelphia Animal Care and Control Association (PACCA).

The kennel license for operator Paula Lappe Barber had been refused in April 2006, after a failing inspection, but a new license was issued to her daughter, Rachel Lappe Biler, at the same location four months later.

The kennel got unsatisfactory inspections twice this fall before the raid was ordered.

"On a cruelty scale of 1 to 10, this is a 10," said PSPCA humane officer Reba McDonald, who led the raid. "The kennels were in poor condition. In some cases, there were 10 to 12 dogs in one pen. The dogs were very thin, and some were suffering from mange or dermatitis."

Interestingly, the Faithful but Forgotten Friends operation has been in the news before

Normal people looking for a dog would have to go to a considerable amount of trouble to "adopt" a dog from this outfit. From the group's website:

....We have an adoption contract for you to complete. If you want to adopt one of our friends, the adoption fee will generally be $150.00 to $300.00 for a spayed/neutered adult dog and $250.00 to $400.00 for a puppy. At times we do charge a higher adoption fee and such pet is labled as a fundraiser pet. Fundraiser pets are trypically chosen as fundraiser pets because they are in high demand and their adoption can generate revenue needed to care for other animals in the rescue's network.

Cohabitating couples who have not married or joined to each other via a civil union need not apply to adopt our pets. Please do not argue with us; there are many other rescues who will adopt to unmarried couples so we suggest that you contact them.

We do not knowingly abort pregnant dogs or cats. Some rescues do abort pregnancies in their animals. We do not abort for two reasons: first, the babies are living creatures and the abortion is virtually the same things as simply killing them after birth and we do not involve ourselves in the killing of good tempered pets. The second reason that we do not abort is the risk that the abortion will harm or kill the mother. We are always interested in hearing from people who are willing and able to foster pregnant pets and their babies. We provide food and medical care for all moms and their babies in our network.

It's not as if the dogs know that they are being "saved" -- much less from what.

There are a lot of articles about this organization's ongoing struggle. They have previously complained about harrassment by the authorities, and in 2005 it appeared that they were almost closed, but they engaged in a lengthy dispute. Now that they're closed, the neighbors are relieved.

The whole thing is quite sad. I don't like seeing animals mistreated, whether by unscrupulous breeders or animal hoarders who imagine they're doing unwanted animals a favor when their conditions are as bad or worse than puppy mills.

I suspect there will be more of these stories, because there is a war between dog breeders and self styled animal rescuers. It's a war over two competing views of morality -- one which considers animals property, and another which considers them like death row inmates, or like slaves.

It's an emergent form of morality, and it strikes me as analogous to the culture war (although I think the distinction between man and animal involves more than just a culture or lifestyle clash).

In any event, feminist blogger Jessica Valenti ran smack into it recently, because she committed an immoral act. What did she do that was so immoral?

Jessica Valenti bought a dog.

No big deal. Certainly it's nothing that I consider immoral in the least. (Far from it; it's something I support, and I have repeatedly warned people about the consequences of non ownership of animals, most recently in the Ellen DeGeneres context.)

I think the Salon article exposes a dirty little secret which is not receiving the discussion it should. There are a growing number of people who consider Jessica Valenti's act of buying a dog (a normal and legal act repeated by millions of Americans) to be inherently evil, as literally akin to human slavery. There is a huge and growing cultural disconnect. By admitting to a dog purchase, Valenti generated an uncomfortable moral debate. As Salon puts it,

people were confronting a difference at the very core of their morals and the great lengths people went to show how deeply irrational the other side was being.

BEGIN EXTENDED QUOTE HEREI can’t believe I just read this. From a thread on Feministing responding to a cute video of Jessica’s puppy Monty, in which several people excoriated Jessica for getting Monty from a breeder, and demanded she justify her decision because she’s a feminist and dog breeding is somehow a core feminist issue:

There is absolutely no need to breed animals for profit, be them for pets or meat. It’s slavery and it’s wrong.

I just — that’s offensive to me on so many levels; I simply can’t imagine how that feels to someone whose ancestors survived the Middle Passage only to be sold at auction and kept in bondage for the rest of their lives; someone whose relatives in living memory were denied civil rights, equal access to education, and subject to lynching for nothing more than looking at a white person funny.

That's just so willfully blindly privileged, and tin-eared, and utterly cruel, and racist all at the same time. But I suppose, given PETA’s history of racist and anti-Semitic ads, where images of black slaves and Jewish inmates at extermination camps were set alongside images of cattle going down a chute or chickens in battery cages, that this is not so uncommon an attitude among the animal-rights set. From Steve's* post about Ingrid Newkirk's dismissive response to the objection of James Cameron, the director of America's Black Holocaust Museum to PETA’s “Slavery” campaign: (my emphasis)

Remember, [Dr.] Cameron almost died at the hands of a lynch mob. They were screaming “get the nigger” and had yanked him out of his cell. Only the lone voice of a woman saying “leave that boy alone” saved his life. But this harrowing experience means nothing to Newkirk, his pain is irrelevant to her. I thought I had seen cruel responses to Mrs. Sheehan. But this tops them. By a mile.It's the same kind of ignorant cruelty Cindy Sheehan is facing. Newkirk is simply incapable, like most fanatics, of seeing any side but her own. And she is blind to the outrage this will cause. She has no idea of how her response is not going to go over with black people. Even her explaination is as tone deaf as George Bush. That may go over well with her donors and allies when she makes a mistake, but it will fall on deaf ears with black people. I dare her to defend this on any black radio show, or even Air America.

Now, not only is PETA refusing to apologize, as they did with the Holocaust ad, they intend to continue the tour, well until they're denounced on Tom Joyner and from church pulpits. To compare black people to animals is the gravest insult a white person can do, and no matter how “liberal” PETA says it is, this will dog it until their tour is cancelled. Because she is fucking with something she does not understand in any way, shape or form. Angry isn't the word. I'd be surprised if Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton aren't outside PETA HQ at the end of the week.

So, given that this is the mentality of PETA's leadership, do you think it's fair to call them racist, now?

Somehow, it's even crueler when the animal in question is not a steer being led to the slaughterhouse, but a well-loved puppy from a responsible breeder.

I'm just gobsmacked.

And after I originally wrote this, the commenter explained herself:

Regarding Zuzu's comments about slavery: Only people who think their lives are more important than non-human animals' lives can be offended by the comparison of human slavery to animal slavery. The definition of slavery is to treat another as property. Property is the essential concept of slavery. Property. The only way you can be offended is if you think it's OK to treat non-human animals as property. I've had this discussion on my blog before: http://www.elainevigneault.com/politics-of-power-and-peta.html

so you can read more if you're truly interested in understanding my perspective. Or you can just ignore my criticisms and right me off as a loon, like you normally do.

I just really don't know how to respond to that.

You?

(cross-posted here)

* God, I miss Steve.

END EXTENDED QUOTE.

This blogger quoted it, and the issue was interesting enough for Salon.

But it's an issue with which few are comfortable (and I suspect that's why the post was pulled.)

I'm fascinated by the slavery analogy though. Wrong as it is, I think it raises some fascinating points about the morality of reproduction. If animals and people are equal, what gives humans the right to possess intact genitalia, but not animals? If dogs are like slaves, but should not be allowed to breed, does that mean slaves should not have been allowed to breed? Or does it mean that the dogs should be freed from captivity entirely and only then allowed to breed?

Or should humans not be allowed to breed? I mean, aren't there too many unwanted humans?

Frankly, I think the animal rights people are out of touch with reality. If humans are like animals are like humans, then why should there be different standards?

It is not immoral to buy a dog, because dogs are property. What is immoral (IMO) is to create a new morality based on the premise that dogs are like humans and should have the same rights.

This new morality degrades humanity, because ultimately it means that there's no reason that humans shouldn't be treated like dogs. (Licensed, controlled, impounded, sterilized....)

So why isn't it being condemned more resolutely?

UPDATE: Zuzu, the author of the post I quoted above, left a helpful comment below:

The post wasn't pulled from Feministe, but the link in that post isn't working now because Feministe migrated to a new host briefly, then back when it didn't work out as planned; as a consequence, links from that period aren't working. Here's the post: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/09/05/holy-crap/

I'm glad to see that I was in error in making that assumption.

The major news story involving the presidential race today seems to be which candidate would make the scariest choice for a Halloween costume. Hillary Clinton is winning:

Once again, Hillary Rodham Clinton leads in a poll. This time, she was top choice when people were asked which major 2008 presidential candidate would make the scariest Halloween costume.

Asked about costume choices, 37 percent in an Associated Press-Ipsos survey this month chose New York Sen. Clinton, the front-runner among Democratic presidential contenders. Fourteen percent selected former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who leads Republicans in national polls.

No other candidate exceeded 6 percent.

Clinton was the choice of four in 10 men and one-third of women. While a predictable two-thirds of Republicans picked her, she also was the choice of 18 percent of Democrats. Among members of her own party, that made her second only to Giuliani as the scariest costume.

I did find Hillary masks apparently still for sale at these two online stores, but I didn't confirm it by trying to actually ordering one. They might be out of stock, and it might be too late to get one in time for Halloween.

Ebay has two Hillarys for sale; this one costs more but if you buy now, they claim you can get it in time.

But I don't think it's a waste if it arrives late, because masks of political figures are by no means strictly Halloween-only items. For example, I've seen a lot of Bush masks worn by protesters at demonstrations. And like it or not, Hillary seems unlikely to go away as a cultural icon any time soon. These masks are therefore probably good investments, and can be used for special occasions all year round!

As to Rudy, I found a mask for sale here, but I think it needs updating.

(Sorry, none on ebay.)

The New York Daily News says that Obama masks were the most popular in stores there, but they've completely sold out.

What I'm curious about is the gender crossover issue. While it's been some time since I was a boy, I never dressed up as a woman character until I was an adult, * and I don't remember other little boys doing so. Sure, there were witches, but the witch costumes were worn by girls.

How does Hillary fit? Not only don't I have kids, but I never get trick-or-treaters so I'm probably too out of touch with the pulse of today's Halloween issues. Still, I'm wondering.

What's scarier?

A boy who wants to be Hillary? Or a girl who wants to be Giuliani?

* And, please, let's not confuse the issue by talking about what Rudy might wear, OK?

Defence News has a story up on the death of Dr. Robert Bussard in which they state that the US Navy has put up nearly $2 million to continue the research on the Bussard Reactor.

Robert Bussard, inventor of a promising method for producing energy from nuclear fusion, died Oct. 6. He was 79.

Bussard received nearly $2 million under a U.S. Navy contract in August to continue work on an inertial electrostatic confinement reactor he had developed. The reactor uses magnetic fields to confine electrons, whose negative charge causes protons and Boron 11 atoms to fuse. The fusion sets off a chain of reactions that produces electricity.

You can find out more about the Bussard reactor at the following urls.

Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
Bussard Reactor Funded
Dr. Bussard's Final Interview
IEC Fusion Newsgroup
IEC Fusion Technology blog

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The linchpin of a republic under civilian rule -- as well as faith in the armed services by a cross-section of Americans -- is an apolitical military.

Greenwald has an earlier post here in which he makes the same argument.

In the traditional, World War II sense, "apolitical" meant staying out of ordinary domestic partisan politics. Military leaders tend to shy away from making political endorsements, and thus Eisenhower would have been unlikely to tell the troops which party to vote for, notwithstanding his personal beliefs.

However, because it is the job of the military to fight and win wars, matters that go to the heart of the war -- such as wartime propaganda -- are not ordinary partisan politics. For example, in World War II, the United States had to contend with enemy propaganda, and enemy propagandists. Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw are two examples. It is always the job of the military to oppose and counter enemy propaganda by any means possible. This is all the more true in a propaganda war, which the current war is.

Factor in the maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and Greenwald's sanctimonious moral posture becomes questionable, if not disingenuous.

What bothers me the most about Greenwald's argument is that he goes out of his way to take the side of an accused enemy propagandist, Bilal Hussein, who has been detained in Iraq for being a suspected terrorist agent.

After right-wing blogs loudly complained for months about the supposedly Terrorist-sympathizing journalism of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein in Iraq, the U.S. military in Iraq detained him with no charges (and, just by the way, continues to detain him for a year-and-a-half now with no charges). While the military refused to talk to A.P. or any other press outlets about its photojournalist, they leaked the story of his detention to Michelle Malkin -- one of the principal agitators who had spent months calling Hussein a Terrorist-lover and calling for his arrest -- and then, with her military-delivered scoop, she excitedly announced his detention.

Hmm...

I guess that means I should at least disabuse readers of the idea that Hussein was arrested pursuant to some order issued by General Malkin. According to the Wiki entry, Michele Malkin was not even present at the scene of his capture, but only blogged about it later (presumably from the United States). Moreover, the military claims to have found Hussein with an al-Qaida leader:

The military said that Hussein was found with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida forces in Iraq.[1] According to a May 7, 2006 e-mail from U.S. Army Major General Jack Gardner, "He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces."[1] Gardner continued, "The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities."[1]

"right wing bloggers" complained; and

the military detained this guy.

OK, let's look at the "sides" in this political partisanship equation. On one "side" are the supporters of Bilal Hussein, and on the other are those who think that he should be released because the military has no right to hold him.

Sorry, but I don't think these two "sides" constitute political partisanship -- certainly not in the traditional context. Let's compare Bilal Hussein to Tokyo Rose. While she was arrested -- and "detained for a year by the U.S. military" -- this was after World War II had ended. But let's suppose that she'd been grabbed earlier, and detained. Without charges. Suppose some anti-war group had formed a "Tokyo Rose Freedom Committee." While that could have been considered "politics," I submit that to call it the sort of politics implicated in the "apolitical" tradition Greenwald invokes is to torture the primary role of the military in war, which is to win.

I realize that the debate over the war is inherently political, but I don't think the debate over how the military fights war propaganda (or propaganda which helps the enemy) is quite the same thing. Yet Greenwald claims that support for an enemy propagandist constitutes "politics," and that by taking action against a suspected enemy propagandist (and by refusing to cooperate with his sympathizers), the military is being partisan.

Would it have been "partisan politics" for the military to refuse to cooperate with, say, reporters for the German American Bund during World War II, or Communist reporters (say, the People's Daily) during the Korean or Vietnam wars? I don't see how.

An additional problem is the reduction of this issue to "right wing" and "left wing."

How, pray tell, is Greenwald defining right wing blogs? Pro-military blogs that wants the United States to succeed in the war? Greenwald gives a clear hint that he defines right wing as pro-war when he complains that "the military had even been providing conference calls and other briefing sessions seemingly reserved exclusively for right-wing, pro-war bloggers."

Does this mean that if the military does not want to deal with anti-military, anti-war blogs that wants the United States to fail in the war, that they are behaving in a political manner?

I have a question about right wing versus left wing.

How is support for this war any more "right wing" than support for the war against Nazi Germany or imperial Japan?

Are Democrats who support this war to be considered right wing also? This is no exercise in sophistry or rhetorical hair-splitting, and not only because there are still a number of pro-war Democrats.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the right wing anti-war movement, which is growing. There are the Buchananites, the MSU-YAF people, the Ron Paul people, the libertarian Antiwar.com people, and there are a number of right wing 9/11 Truther types. All of these groups (and I'm sure there are more) are right wing, and anti-war.

On top of that, look at the inherent nature of the enemy. People who want to impose a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship which oppresses women, executes gays, forbids theater, film, and music and all sorts of personal freedom can be called a lot of things. I call them "Islamofascists," and while I realize not everyone uses that word, they are certainly far right in the conventional sense of the word, and I see no way that any reasonable person could consider them left wing. Thus, it is fully legitimate to say that the U.S. military is to the left of the enemy it is fighting.

For all these reasons, I think the claim that "pro-war" is synonymous with "right wing" is bogus and misleading.

However, if the goal is to accuse the military of being politicized, then by all means it is necessary to insinuate right versus left into these things.

Considering the totality of the circumstances, is it entirely fair to consider Glenn Greenwald a left wing shill?

Seriously, can't he also be seen as a right wing shill?

I really think he can. (Although it's getting tougher and tougher to know the difference between reality and sarcasm.)

On the other hand, I hate to further politicize what Greenwald is already doing his best to politicize.

But then, I'm not the one who declared that supporting the war is "right wing."

UPDATE: Anyone who thinks being pro-war or anti-war comes down to a neat little question of Republican versus Democrat should read this:

White was one of about 300 people who attended the anti-war rally in downtown Orlando. Many at the rally said Democrats need to do more to bring the troops home.

"I'm at a loss," said Nancy O'Byrne, a Democrat from St. Augustine who attended the United for Peace and Justice rally. "Democrats aren't any better on the war issue than the Republicans. Very few would get our troops out and home and not leave any behind. A lot of candidates are backpedaling on their stance on the war and I'm not sure why. Seventy percent of Americans want this war to end."

The question is under what circumstances. Most Democrats supported this war when it started.....

UPDATE: Thanks to Lance at A Second Hand Conjecture for the link!

Suppose you have a machine that depends for its proper operation on wooden pegs in wooden holes. Say that it has been traditional, if wooden pegs were not available, that brass pegs were an accepted substitute. Now suppose the government outlawed the use of brass pegs and decreed that if you didn't have wooden pegs only gold pegs were acceptable. Would that be right?

What am I getting at? Brain chemistry.

The holes are receptors. The wooden pegs are the body's naturally made receptor fillers. The brass pegs are substances you imbibe (in one way or another) to make up for a lack in the bodies' natural chemistry. What would the gold pegs be? Dr. prescribed medicines.

Let us take the case of marijuana. Mice have been developed which do not naturally produce enough CB1 receptor fillers. They are genetically different. They have long term memories of fear situations. They live in fear and that fear is easily excited. Not a pleasant way to live. Modern medicine has developed substances that can relieve that constant fear. Doctors are allowed to prescribe such substances. However, marijuana can also fill those receptors and relieve constant fear and anxiety. We have made marijuana illegal even though there is no objective difference between the doctor prescribed medicine and marijuana (with respect to brain chemistry). Is that right?

This line of thought came to me in an e-mail discussion of Treatment Vs Recreation and Class War.

You can read more on this line of thought - I have been at it for six years - at the following articles:

PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System
Addiction or Self Medication?
Genetic Discrimination
The War On Unpatented Drugs.
The Pain In The Brain
Addiction Is A Genetic Disease

and way more articles at:
The Nature Of Addiction

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Does opposing Islamofascism mean being anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and racist?

Yesterday I was reading Pat Buchanan's latest WND tirade against Giuliani:

Pro-abortion, anti-gun, again and again he strutted up Fifth Avenue in the June Gay Pride parade and turned the Big Apple into a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. While Ward Connerly goes state to state to end reverse discrimination, Rudy is an affirmative-action man.

Gravitating now to Rudy's camp are those inveterate opportunists, the neocons, who see in Giuliani their last hope of redemption for their cakewalk war and their best hope for a "Long War" against "Islamo-fascism."

I will, Rudy promises, nominate Scalias. Only one more may be needed to overturn Roe. And I will keep Hillary out of the White House.

A Giuliani presidency would represent the return and final triumph of the Republicanism that conservatives went into politics to purge from power. A Giuliani presidency would represent repudiation by the party of the moral, social and cultural content that, with anti-communism, once separated it from liberal Democrats and defined it as an institution.

Rudy offers the right the ultimate Faustian bargain: retention of power at the price of one's soul.

It's not that there's any one thing standing alone that especially bothers me. I mean, normally, I would have overlooked the Buchanan piece, just as I ignored Ann Coulter's recent winking at anti-Semitism, because, I figured, she's an entertainer. (Yeah, she also winked at the use of the word "faggot" and she was fired by the NRO for winking at converting all Muslims to Christianity. Winking at something means never having to really come out and be the thing, I suppose.)

I'll say this for Ann Coulter. At least she didn't wink at Holocaust Denial. The MSU YAF Buchananite crackpots who mounted the latest attack on LGF have done more than wink at Holocaust Denial; they've sponsored a lecture by a Holocaust Denier.

In the aggregate, there's now too much to ignore.

Anyway, when LGF complained, the YAF group responded responded by calling LGF "pro-Muslim," "left-wing," and more:

The Little Green Footballs blog decided to condemn MSU-YAF for hosting Nick Griffin. In case you do not read Little Green Footballs, the blog is pro-Muslim, left-wing, politically correct, and basically a front for neoconservative foreign policy (instead of defending their culture, they want to build schools in the Anbar province). They are basically a puppet of the multiculturalists and believe that Islam is not the enemy of Western civilization and Christendom. Only Bush-bots read the Little Green Footballs blog.

Instead of writing about threats to Western civilization, the LGF blog has recently attacked organizations who are fighting the culture war by doing more than just posting stuff on a blog that only like-minded people read.

The YAF blog links Pat Buchanan's blog as number one, lists four of his books, and I think it's fair to characterize them as Buchananite and solidly within the Paleoconservative camp. More on the group here.

The LGF post also links the group's leader Kyle Bristow, who has managed to get himself photographed with nearly every prominent conservative in America. Anyone can get a picture taken with a politician, though, and it does not mean that they all endorse Bristow's views or tactics. Not only do the latter include the display of signs saying things like "Straight Power" and "End Faggotry," but Bristow claims he wants to "protect" the public:

Bristow goes on to say, "YAF members find homosexuality and other forms of sexual deviancy to be disgusting. The Boy Scouts, military and the American public need to be protected from these degenerates."

But there is a sort of "let the buyer beware" principle here. And there are also political realities. For whatever reason, this group is giving the left (which already believes anti-Islamofascism is anti-Muslim bigotry) a lot of ammo to argue that "a critic of Islamofascism is an anti-Muslim bigot is a neocon." And meanwhile, the isolationist, xenophobic Paleocons promote the argument that "a war supporter is a neocon is a trilateral commission-supporting, One-World-Order, homolovin' bilderbuggerin' Bush-lovin' Jew."

They may be right wing fringe, but by assisting in an ideological war against those who oppose Islamofascism, they're providing an incalculable service to the left.

They're also providing an invaluable service to the Islamofascists, who'd probably love to see a resurgence of American right wing isolationism and xenophobia. (To say nothing of anti-Semitism.)

Strange bedfellows all.

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds -- especially for quoting this post.

Welcome all!

That's a scary thought. And it's a narrative I try to keep in the closet, because I never agreed to become a journalist, and I have maintained -- often vehemently -- that I am not one. However, blogger Michael Costello (linked by Glenn Reynolds yesterday for saying "If The Fu Hsits") discovered that as a blogger he used the same process that conventional journalists do:

I had my narrative in anticipation of facts that I could mold to fit it.. Fortunately for me, I didn't have to make them up. They were just buried in history. I only needed to dig them up. Or, more accurately, find someone else who had dug them up.

Even if bloggers and journalists are doing the same thing, both have a problem with The Other.

In general, while bloggers don't want to be The Other, journalists don't want to seem to be The Other. This is why bloggers stubbornly, constantly admit their biases, while journalists stubbornly and constantly do not.

While my dark side often suspects that bloggers are honest journalists, while journalists are dishonest bloggers, you can't say things like that without being misunderstood, so I should probably keep such thoughts safely locked away in the narrative closet where they belong. Besides, I tend to misunderstand myself, and it occurs to me that there's no way to call a blogger an "honest journalist" if he won't admit to being a journalist at all.

(Unless there's such a thing as honest dishonesty.

But there can't be. For that would mean that bloggers are closeted journalists. (And journalists are closeted bloggers.)

I don't see why people are having such a hard time over the connection between global warming and arson, but they are, along the usual predictable political fault lines. While the California fires were still raging, the Democrats were quick to spot the cause as global warming. But then, when it turned out that the proximate cause was arson, the global warming claim died down, a new finger was pointed at Blackwater while Republican commentators brayed about the fire's human origin.

Many sarcastic claims were made that "global warming causes arson." (Which, if you think about it, isn't all that different from saying that global warming causes terrorism, violence or even nightmares in children.)

Both sides are IMO, overlooking a common area of potential agreement. If you rearrange the words, and use a little logic, isn't it obvious that arson causes global warming? Arson equals fire which equals not only the release of heat, but the release of more C02, right? So all who believe in AGW theory ought to be able to agree on arson as a contributory cause, and even the skeptics ought to be able to allow that arson does at least heat up the area where the arson is committed.

In fact if the entire world were set on fire, few would argue that it wouldn't be hotter.

The more I thought about this (and I tried to be very careful and scientific), the more I was drawn to a remarkable conclusion, on which we can all agree. FIRE IS HOT.

The rest is a simple step.

Can we all get along now?

More red light camera news (involving prohibitorily expensive but "mistaken" filing fees to contest the tickets) via a link from Glenn Reynolds, who provided plenty of evidence last year as to why these things do not work.

The red light cameras, while they have increased revenue, have not stopped carnage in Philadelphia. (Probably because people drive like hell to avoid the yellow lights, then slam to a stop if they turn.) Nevertheless, the Philadelphia Inquirer supports extending them, and in a recent editorial, is now calling for the much more intrusive speed cameras:

The red-light cameras, though, have not stopped the carnage along the 12-lane highway through Northeast Philadelphia. In the last year or so, a dozen pedestrians have been killed along the road. So it makes sense for city officials to look at further measures to make the Boulevard safer, as well as other traffic trouble spots.

Earlier this year, Council entertained a range of costly safety strategies - from adding more pedestrian bridges, to closing traffic lanes, to boosting patrols and safety programs.

All good ideas, but the first one to be tried could provide another "cameo" for reckless drivers: State Rep. George T. Kenney Jr. (R., Phila.) proposes legalizing speed-detection cameras.

As with red-light cameras, the speed cameras would snap vehicle tag numbers of speeders, with appropriately hefty fines to follow.

People need to stand up to this tyranny, and exercise their constitutional right to see and confront their so-called "accusers" in court.

I'm sick of living in a world in which legal trouble can be generated by robots.

UPDATE: In case anyone was wondering where the red light camera revenue money goes, today's Inquirer has a front page story titled "'Running amok' at the PPA" (Philadelphia Parking AUthority, which runs the cameras). The PPA uses the money to fuel a gigantic political "patronage machine, pinching drivers for $192 million a year while giving only a pittance to the city's general fund":

All told, the authority now squeezes $192 million a year out of Philadelphia drivers.

That's tough enough for many to take, even assuming that the cash is being used for a clear public good: hiring teachers, say, or paving city streets.

But as an Inquirer analysis shows, the Parking Authority has become a self-replicating patronage machine that has used its new revenue principally to double the size of its staff and to inflate the salaries of its myriad managers.

Despite revenue growth of 54.5 percent since fiscal 2001, the authority has delivered only a pittance of extra help for the city's general fund: an average of $740,000 a year, or 4 percent, when adjusted for inflation.

"The city is sucking air in a lot of areas, and we look and see a Parking Authority that's twice as big, that's seen a wild running-up in staffing numbers," said Joyce Wilkerson, Mayor Street's chief of staff. "I'm not sure the Parking Authority should have first dibs on that revenue when we have trouble keeping libraries open."

Others share that view. Parent organizations are calling on the agency to write a $20 million check to the public schools. City Controller Alan Butkovitz is poring over the organization's books. Gov. Rendell plans to grill the authority's board of directors, and lawmakers in Harrisburg may call for hearings.

"It appears that it's running amok," said State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.), who has been a longtime supporter of the authority.

(No wonder they're clamoring for speed cameras...)

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking and for quoting this post! A warm welcome to all.

I'm especially honored to be linked in the same post that links an important article by Glenn ("Stop, in the Name of 'Bots") which discusses the use of robots in a much more sinister context.

Don't miss it.

I especially liked the conclusion:

When the power to enforce the law is delegated to software employed by people who don't -- or can't be bothered to -- understand it, no one is safe. When you hear that people are using machines to enforce the law, remember the old computer-geek saying: "Garbage In, Garbage Out."

According to today's Inquirer report, Dillon Cossey (the overweight bullied kid I posted about before) has confessed to plotting a Columbine style attack:

A troubled 14-year-old admitted yesterday to plotting a detailed, Columbine-style assault on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School.

Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor said Dillon Cossey confessed he planned to use chains to secure the high school doors so occupants could not escape, fire a rocket launcher - which he did not own - and use a car as an "ammo dump," an idea gleaned from a Columbine video on YouTube.

Cossey, who named his rifle "Reb" to honor Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, admitted in Montgomery County juvenile court yesterday to criminal solicitation to commit murder, risking a catastrophe, and possessing instruments of crime.

Although police did not find ammunition for the firearms Cossey possessed, his "severe social maladjustment" resulted in a frightening plan that could have ultimately been implemented, Castor said.

Castor said Cossey, who will now get the help he needs, admitted telling friends that he wanted to "kill bullies" at the Plymouth Meeting high school, but the teen told authorities he could remember only three times that he was victimized.

Farrell said his interviews revealed that Cossey was subjected to "protracted peer abuse," something most victims are reluctant to admit.

"Klebold and Harris are heroes to kids who are bullied," Farrell said, adding that such thinking is fueled by violent Internet postings. Dylan Klebold joined Harris in the Columbine massacre that left 13 people dead. Cossey created "a fantasy that was beginning to cross the line," Farrell said.

"He's very remorseful," Farrell added.

Cossey waived the 20-day period for his disposition hearing to allow time for mental and physical evaluations that will assist the judge in selecting an appropriate rehabilitative program.

Tressler explained that the length of treatment will depend on Cossey's progress.

That's because, if you think about it, on what basis is this Columbine hero cult to be condemned? Because they were murderers? And murder is bad?

Well, what about the Cult of Che Guevara? Klebold and Harris killed twelve people, while Guevara killed nearly 2000, including the witnessed killing of a 14 year old boy. And how about the Cult of Mumia?

I'm having trouble understanding how Che and Mumia can be heroes, but not Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.

Not that everybody considers Che and Mumia to be heroes. Far from it. Fortunately, these are fringe cults.

But don't they have a certain legitimacy? Put yourself in the position of a school principal, and suppose some admirer of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (yes there are groups like these) decided to wear a t-shirt with one of their pictures. Everyone would be horrified, right? The school would ban the t-shirts, right? But would they ban the Che t-shirts and the Cult of Che?

This is not a new problem. Oleg Atbashian wrote a great Pajamas Media piece about it, and included this:

Considering Che a hero while blaming the NRA for kids who go bad?

In a twisted way, there's a certain logic to it.

MORE: It's probably worth adding that young people are not being taught that Che Guevara is a murderer. Far from it. They are being taught that he was a victim. Who only "wanted to help people":

Annoying as the Che adulation is, a recent comment by a 14-year-old on an online movie message board was truly disturbing: "I just saw The Motorcycle Diaries, which further made me question: Why is communism bad? . . . Young people are told how bad communism is, but we are not told why. . . . The Motorcycle Diaries showed me how Ernesto Guevara wanted to help people. . . . But this did not explain why he was such a 'bad' person and apparently deserved to be murdered by the U.S."

MORE: In a different context, Clayton Cramer argues that "hero" is "a devalued word in the news media."

It's a pity. But when villains are turned into heroes, when anti-heroes become heroes, heroes and heroism are annihilated.

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

UPDATE (10/29/07): President Bush visited the Philadelphia area today for a fund raiser, and while here he also honored the 14 year old who blew the whistle on Dillon Cossey's Columbine plan:

Lew Bennett III was credited by Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor with helping to avert a potential tragedy after he told police on Oct. 10 that Dillon Cossey, 14, had acquired a semiautomatic rifle from his mother to use in a planned attacked on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School.

Bennett was in a line receiving Bush at the airport. They shook hands and Bush was seen putting his arm around the youth.

Castor said he gave Bennett's name to Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), who apparently made the arrangements with the White House for Bennett and his parents, Lew Bennett Jr. and Terry Bennett, to meet the President.

"I told Sen. Specter that it would be a good idea if the president could recognize the young man, as a way to send a message throughout the country that it is a good thing to come forward to avert a tragedy," said Castor. "I would hope others would step forward."

I had a post up at Classical Values called So Insensitive. Nothing unusual. I do lots of posts at Classical Values. What was special was a commenter who signed himself Muslims Against Sharia. He provided a link to (what else?) Muslims Against Sharia. So let us see what they have to say about Islamo Fascism Awareness Week which has just passed.

Muslims Against Sharia congratulate David Horowitz FREEDOM CENTER and Mike Adams, Tammy Bruce, Phyllis Chesler, Ann Coulter, Nonie Darwish, Greg Davis, Stephen Gale, David Horowitz, Joe Kaufman, Michael Ledeen, Michael Medved, Alan Nathan, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Daphne Patai, Daniel Pipes, Dennis Prager, Luana Saghieh, Rick Santorum, Jonathan Schanzer, Christina Sommers, Robert Spencer, Brian Sussman, Ed Turzanski, Ibn Warraq and other speakers on the success of the Islamofascism Awareness Week.

Islamofascism (or Islamism) is the main threat facing modern civilization and ignorance about this threat is astounding. We hope that this event becomes regular and reaches every campus.

A great many Westerners do not see the clear distinction between Islam and Islamism (Islamofascism). They need to understand that the difference between Islam and Islamism (Islamofascism) is the same as the difference between Christianity and Christian Identity Movement (White Supremacy Movement).

You should visit them and find out more. Good people.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Glenn Reynolds links a very thoughtful piece by Melanie Scarborough which brought back old memories for me. Apparently, Washington DC police are blocking off streets when they feel like it and then demanding ID from people who simply want to walk from place to place. Ms. Scarborough asks some good questions:

Which statute requires law-abiding citizens to produce ID to walk down a sidewalk? What law says that citizens must explain to police where they are going and why?

A call to the police departments general counsel asking that question was not returned. Unfortunately, there likely is some badly written statute that the Metropolitan police can contort into affording them sweeping powers -- similar to the Secret Service's ability to operate virtually unchecked by claiming it is protecting someone or something.

In Brown vs. Texas 443 U.S. 47 (1979), the Burger court reversed the conviction of a man for:

refusing to comply with a policeman's demand that he identify himself pursuant to a provision of the Texas Penal Code which makes it a crime to refuse such identification on request.

The statute, as drafted and as construed by the state court, is unconstitutionally vague on its face within the meaning of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by failing to clarify what is contemplated by the requirement that a suspect provide a "credible and reliable" identification. As such, the statute vests virtually complete discretion in the hands of the police to determine whether the suspect has satisfied the statute and must be permitted to go on his way in the absence of probable cause to arrest.

Melanie Scarborough argues that citizens should refuse to comply with such "laws" and claims of authority:

Such laws are more dangerous than any group of protesters.

Keep in mind that the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of impediments to police. The Founding Fathers understood that a free society can exist only when there are strict checks on police powers. It is not supposed to be easy for cops to corral citizens as they do -- and too few Americans object.

Instead of submissively behaving as if a policeman's word is law, Americans should demand to know why their movements are being restricted. When a police officer capriciously demands to see identification, the proper response is "no." That is not defiance toward authority; it is an obligatory defense of freedom.

Well, this is exactly what Ms. Scarborough is describing, and I think it's appalling.

I helped work with Edward Lawson (who was arrested 15 times under 647(e) during the time I knew him) when I was a pre-law student, and I'm proud that I played a small part, as he handled the Kolender vs. Lawson case in propria persona before the ACLU finally got involved. Edward was the furthest possible thing from being a criminal; the problem was that the cops just plain didn't like his attitude, his race, or his dreadlocks (which frightened cops in those days). If asked for ID, he would pull out his notebook and start writing down badge numbers -- something which did not go over very well with people accustomed to having their authority go unquestioned. The thing was, he didn't drink or do drugs or anything, so he was always clean, and it drove the cops crazy, because they are so accustomed to everyone being afraid and having something to hide. He also had a great, booming, deep voice which sounded like a Harvard professor from the 1930s on steroids, with perfect enunciation and a very erudite manner of speaking (which many police officers interpreted as making them look like ignorant louts). Basically, he defied the stereotypes, would politely and patiently refuse to cooperate, and never budged on his rights, no matter how long it took.

It takes a real dedicated kook to do stuff like that, and it took him many years of dedication to get the law struck down.

We need more such kooks.

MORE: As seen on YouTube!

As recently as May 18, 2007, Edward Lawson still attracts undue police attention. The encounter Edward describes with a police tactical anti-gang unit in El Segundo is so typical of the sort of thing that used to happen to him when I knew him, and it will give readers an idea of what I was talking about.

I was surprised to find it on YouTube, maybe I shouldn't have been.

According to Edward, the police began the encounter by saying, "how many probation violations do you have?"

Says Edward, "It's a cartoon. You're trapped in this Saturday morning cartoon."

Be sure to watch Part 2, in which they decide he's a "gang member," refuse to take a urine sample without explanation, take away his rented car, and finally tell him he "was" arrested for "being under the influence of a controlled substance." (Edward's "the last thing I am is a gang member" is a vintage classic.)

As for drugs, I knew and lived with Edward for years, and I can tell every reader that he did not take drugs. It's a matter of principle with him -- which Edward explains in Part 3. In part 3, Edward characterizes this as "racial profiling gone bad." and I agree. It began as ordinary racial profiling, and was then aggravated by Edward's refusal to fit the "profile."

And finally, there's Part 4.

"It has happened to me over and over and over."

(Yes, it has. I remember it back in the 70s.)

"Does this bother me? I've become used to it. That's worse than bothering me."

"Any cop who wants to can make up any story he wants and any jury would believe it."

Finally, he signed a form under duress in order to be released.

"These four deputies fabricated a crime against me because I was not the gang member they were looking for. How many more times are they going to do this on a daily basis?"

It's all so ridiculous, and all so typical of the encounters I remember. I guess not much has changed in all these years. (I have long suspected that the primary problem in most of these incidents is that Edward is smarter than the cops.)

What gives cops the right to arrest people for being under the influence when they are not, and refusing to give them a blood test? Can the police just accuse sober people of being "under the influence" because they don't like them? (Obviously they can.)

I remember walking down the street with Edward in Berkeley back in the 70s, when a police car drove by. In an ominous tone, the loudspeaker suddenly blared out (for no particular reason) "You're not a student, Lawson!"

Trust me, cops just don't like this guy. Not everybody does.

But what has that to do with law enforcement?

Apparently, everything.

I have never thought of myself as a "conservative," although a lot of people who know me think I am conservative.

I realize that's not much of an insight. In fact, it looks like an outright waffle. So, in the hope of further self analysis (and in the hope of making this discussion as entertaining as possible), I just took the first online "liberal versus conservative" online test I could find.

Here are the results:

Your Political Profile:

Overall: 80% Conservative, 20% Liberal Social Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal Personal Responsibility: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal Fiscal Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal Ethics: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal Defense and Crime: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

Regardless of how true the label is, does it give me any duty? To anyone? If so, under what theory? And what does it give me a duty to do? Police myself? The thoughts I have which might cause people to label me are mine, are they not? Does the mere fact that some test (or some person) might cause a label to be bestowed on me give me a duty to uphold it, as if I've sworn an oath of allegiance to a term I never selected?

Similarly, I have never thought of myself as a doctrinaire libertarian -- not even when I was registered Libertarian. Nor am I "middle of the road." And I am certainly not a "liberal," unless that is defined in the classical sense.

I really don't care about the definitions, because I don't seek them. The problem is, they seem to seek me, and they have a way of becoming what other people think are Their Business. It's one of the reasons I started this blog, and one of the things that has kept me going for over four years is that people keep either trying to reduce me to a definition (which is insidiously similar to identity politics), or else threaten to withold a definition from me. Like I'm supposed to care.

I'll never forget being scolded for not being a good enough libertarian. A "pseudolibertarian" is what a self-appointed libertarian blog scold named "Hesiod" called me. (Another libertarian I won't name said much more insulting, much more unrepeatable things.)

All of this old stuff was on my mind as I read Stephen Green's and Bill Quick's posts that Glenn Reynolds linked yesterday.

They served as a reminder of a doctrinaire Big L Libertarian mentality that's still there. Say the wrong thing (voice support for the war, or utter a qualified opinion that maybe it's OK to spy on al Qaeda operatives), and the Big L ideologues will jump all over you.

Yet I never signed any piece of paper saying that I was a LIBERTARIAN and therefore bound to kowtow to every Rand-spouting ideologue looking for latent altruistic deviationist tendencies. Where do people get off acting like this?

Stephen Green's (more here) and Bill Quick's posts were unpleasant reminders of this phenomenon, but I didn't think it merited another post on a subject I've written about more times than I can recall.

But now I'm seeing the same problem in another context.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that there's a newly emergent group looking for signs of deviation from Big C Conservatism, and they're reminding me of the Big L Libertarians. The idea is that if you don't agree with them, you might not be a "real" conservative.

Well sorrrrrry!

Where's the piece of paper I signed agreeing to be a "Conservative"? For the umpteenth time, am I ever going to be allowed to just think what I think?

It seems that the Big C Conservatives (at least, people claiming to be that), have decided to promote the meme that anyone right of center who does not agree with them is not a "real" conservative. Glenn Reynolds, in their mind, is somehow to blame for the problem, because.... Well, because (I'll try to follow this argument out) bloggers who are right of center want to get linked by him, and this corrupts conservatism because Glenn is a "radical libertarian":

The fact that many center-right bloggers care more about getting linked by a radical libertarian than they do in discussing the concerns of their fellow conservatives is one of the primary reasons the Right blogosphere is a failing to have the same impact as the Left.

That Glenn is linking "center-right bloggers" because they care about getting linked; and

The "center-right bloggers" are not saying what they think, but only saying what Glenn Reynolds wants to hear in the hope of currying favor with him.

The above analysis makes the major error (in my view) of seeing political correlation as political causation. What happens in the blogosphere is that people are able to hook up with others who feel shut out of the normal political process, precisely because they don't fit neatly within the liberal-versus-conservative spectrum. I'm a good example of this, and the reason I like Glenn Reynolds is not because I've been seduced by what are called his "seductive radical libertarian ways," but because I already thought the way I think, and I was delighted to read a blogger who thinks along similar lines. It just so happens that I agree with Glenn Reynolds most of the time, and I suspect a lot of people do. Those who agree with Glenn would also tend to agree with each other. Is anything surprising about that? So why does Glenn get the blame as if he's this radical libertarian Svengali?

I have to say, much as I'm honored by every link I've gotten from Glenn, I see blogging as an art form, and I try to put a little but of my heart into every post. Sometimes I'm more successful than other times, but if I judged success by whether or not Glenn linked the post, I'd be a 99% failure and I'd have to quit blogging. Let's face it; many, many thousands of my posts were never linked by Glenn Reynolds.

What I find especially insulting is the idea that my thoughts are not mine, but actually Glenn's. I've been thinking outside of the box ever since I voted for Libertarian Roger McBride in 1976. As it happens, I learned about Glenn Reynolds in 2002 from Justin, my best friend, who knew me well enough to know what I think and who nagged me to start reading him. He'd call on the phone and say, "Hey Eric, go to instapundit dot blogspot dot com right now!" And I would. And I liked what I saw. So I kept reading, and I still am. The idea that my "conservatism" has been "suppressed" because I have been "seduced" laughable. So rather than be insulted, I guess I should try to laugh it off.

But, putting aside the issue of whether I think what I think, the idea that conservative discussion in general is inhibited by Glenn Reynolds is so absurd that it reminds me of the complaint that Glenn Reynolds is so "loud" that he shouts everyone else down.

What I think is really going on here is that there are conservatives who disagree with Glenn Reynolds, and who don't like contemplating that there are a whole lot of people out there who share Glenn's general perspective on things. Um, isn't Glenn's huge traffic a clue that millions of people think along similar lines, and read him because they like him, and not because they're repressing their conservatism while avoiding the concerns of their fellow conservatives?

The link Glenn provided cites a post by Joe Carter for the following proposition:

'Right-Leaning Bloggers Are Out of Touch With a Large Portion--If Not the Majority--of Conservatives in America.'

I don't like arguments, so I don't want to start one with Joe Carter, because I'm sure he means what he says, and I will never change his mind. He's with the Family Research Council and I don't know how many conservatives they represent, but this is where definitions come in handy. If you define "conservative" as agreeing with the Family Research Council, then probably a lot of right-leaning bloggers are out of touch with conservatism.

And that's the problem. Without getting into a detailed definition of conservatism, the fact is that Carter's post revolves around the Family Research Council "Action's Values Voter Summit":

I talked to the bloggers on the panel, many of whom are the same bloggers I read daily and interact with here in DC. Then I talked to the people from the audience, most of whom are not political junkies. The differences in the discussions was eye-opening. The top four issues that voters said were important to them are "life" (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, embryo destructive research, etc.), marriage, tax cuts, and permanent tax relief for families. Aside from tax cuts, these issues are rarely talked about by the bloggers on the Right. Three out of four issues are ignored--and this is just the top of the list.

And where does this leave me? I know a lot of people who vote Republican and consider themselves conservative, but they're not obsessed with homos and abortion the way the Family Research Council seems to think they should be.

Are they all RINOS?

If so, I have a question: is not agreeing with the Family Research Council the new definition of RINO?

And precisely why am I supposed to care? I've already admitted to being a "Goldwater liberal," because I think a lot of the people aligned with groups like Family Research Council would consider him a liberal. I guess it's also possible that a Libertarian could come along and say,

'Right-Leaning Bloggers Are Out of Touch With a Large Portion--If Not the Majority--of Libertarians in America.'

What troubles me is if I am not a liberal, not a Libertarian, not a Conservative, not a Family Research Council supporter, then what am I?

And for God's sake, from where derives this rule that people who think like me are to blame for some "failure" to have "the same impact as the Left"?

The fact that many center-right bloggers care more about getting linked by a radical libertarian than they do in discussing the concerns of their fellow conservatives is one of the primary reasons the Right blogosphere is a failing to have the same impact as the Left.

Here's a sample of what activists have wrought from today's Wall Street Journal:

The continuing expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction has given federal law enforcement officials unprecedented power over each of us. As Gene Healy of the Cato Institute has observed, the federal criminal code is so vast and comprehensive that it enables prosecutors to "pick targets they think they should get rather than offenses that need to be prosecuted." Mr. Healy estimates that about 4,000 crimes are "scattered throughout the tens of thousands of pages of the United States code," stressing that the exact increase in federal crimes has been difficult to track. One frequently cited 1999 study by the American Bar Association noted that 40% of all federal criminal laws enacted after the Civil War dated back only to 1970.

While libertarians have mounted consistent, principled resistance to this expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction (and Cato offered thoughtful testimony against the federal hate-crime bill), generally both liberals and conservatives have adopted result-oriented approaches to federalizing crime: Liberals who favor decriminalizing marijuana possession oppose federal laws prohibiting it, which conservative anti-drug warriors support. Liberal gay rights advocates support the federalization of bias crimes against gay people, which conservatives wary of expanding gay rights oppose.

This may look like pragmatism, but it's more like shortsightedness. Expansions of federal criminal jurisdiction are often responses to concerns of the moment -- from carjacking and cockfighting to child abuse and juvenile crime -- that can be addressed adequately by the states (especially with federal incentives). The necessity of many federal penal laws is more often presumed than demonstrated, and outweighed by the cumulative threat that this growing body of law poses to liberty.

Is that what is meant by having an impact? Sorry, but I'd rather do my best to try to dampen the impact.

As to the "radical libertarian" label, while it's not a major point, I do remember Joe Carter calling Glenn Reynolds that years ago during an argument over the immorality of eating ice cream in public. He also said this:

I can't say who should be more embarrassed: Reynolds for being so dismissive of religious-based reasoning or those of us who value a Judeo-Christian heritage for allowing this culture of disdain to flourish.

Darn!

If only Glenn would quit stifling me from discussing my concerns!

The author of I Wanna Go Home, Karridine, has authorized me to give away 1,000 free copies of the song to our men and women in the military for personal use only. However, recipients of a free copy can let anybody listen to it if they want. Members of the military can put it on their i-pod, use it on their computer, or make one CD.

To get your free copy just send me an e-mail. The address is on the sidebar. Your free copy will be delivered by e-mail - about 2.1 Megs.

I can send out about 100 to 200 copies a day. So if yours doesn't arrive right away be patient.

If you are in a hurry and can't wait to Get a copy then Click here - I Wanna Go Home. The author has given permission to those currently serving in the military who buy the song to share it with nine of their best buddies, wives, husbands, parents, or children.

You can find out more about the song and watch a video of the first minute and thirty seconds at I Wanna Go Home. There is also a link to the lyrics so you can sing along.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Megan McArdle is blogging about an air travel disaster she recently had. So I thought I'd have a few words about my favorite air travel experience:

I remember Knoxville, TN, fondly.

I got to sleep with over 50 women in one night. On the floor of the airport terminal.

I did have the presence of mind to ask one of the airline personnel to retrieve some sleeping gear from one of the grounded aircraft before they went off duty. At least I was only uncomfortable, not cold and uncomfortable. Others were not so wise.

Sadly none of the grounded ladies asked to share my accommodations.

Ah, the joys of air travel.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

To tell the truth, I never gave much thought to the notion of whether Che Guevara met God. Even when I saw Glenn Reynolds' link to Samizdata, I thought the whole thing must be someone's idea of a sick joke.

The title of the Times Article that Brian Micklethwait linked -- "Where do you stand in the new culture wars?" Followed by a "Culture War quiz"?

I mean, Come on! Che meets God? Surely that's gotta be humor.

So I read on:

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father's death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union".

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God. "The Soviet Union is gone," he affirmed. "The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words."

So even if this were serious, the question would more properly be whether Che met Allah, right? You know, the guy in the sky with the 72 virgins?

Someone already seems to have thought about this, as I found a cartoon of Che dressed for the occasion:

But are we really serious yet with this unholy alliance between blasphemous commies and religious crackpots? Come on.

And hey, what's with that "Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom"? Are they one of those legitimate "religious" charities? Sounds more like a sick joke to me, especially the acronym.

AVSM?

Um, sorry, but I've been around the block a few times, and I know a raunchy ad category catering to San Francisco's Folsom Street set when I see one.

So let's just cut the phony religious crap, OK?

There are plenty of ways for the blasphemous Che to play games with his religious friends.

CHE: "72 virgins my ass!"

(After translating this from Spanish into Arabic, Osama dutifullly follows Che's religious instructions....)

Adds Brian Micklethwait to the Times discussion:

LOL indeed.

I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what.

UPDATE: My deepest thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post! Welcome all!

(I hope that I have not offended anyone except those in need of a good offense...)

This test says I'm "Platoon."

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

I'm hoping this says more about the people who wrote the test than it does about me, because I didn't like "Platoon" and I can't stand Oliver Stone. Who wants to be a film you can't stand?

I found this test via Sean Kinsell, who is also a Vietnam war film, but his is "Apocalypse Now."

Sean links another test called "What Famous Leader Are You?" According to the test, he's Ghandi -- an "emaciated do-gooder." To which Sean replies "WTF?"

My results are not publicly disclosable, as I don't want this blog to be banned in France.

The following photo is so good that I thought that rather than update yesterday's post on "imageism," I'd put it in a new category by itself.

It shows Desiree Farooz of Code Pink, having at it in her uniquely unhinged way.

Who finds these people anyway?

(And they said that Karl Rove retired!)

MORE: Check this out.

Desiree Does Disrupts the Heritage Foundation -- and boy is she pissed!

Yow!

I'm glad to see that at least someone is doing the heavy lifting for the Republicans.

AND MORE: Hillary Clinton seems to do a better job than the Republicans of keeping Desiree at a desirable distance.

In the following video, Desiree tries (and fails) to disrupt Hillary Clinton. If you watch it, you'll notice that they never let her get close to the action.

PLEASE NOTE: To see the attempted disruption of Hillary's speech you need to watch through to the end of the video, as I can't edit out the clip.

However, I don't think you'll be disappointed by the first part of the video. (Especially those who enjoy gender confusion.)

MORE: More on Desiree Farooz. She's from Texas, where she "quit her teaching job in Grand Prairie and left her family behind in Arlington to become den mother to the women of Code Pink."

UPDATE: From Glenn Reynolds, a good question:

....would anti-abortion protesters in "Operation Rescue" t-shirts be allowed up-close to wave bloody hands at Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Somehow, I doubt it.

UPDATE: It seems there may be some problems with the embedded links above.

So....

Just in case they don't work for you, here's the Heritage heckling link.

And the Hillary heckling link.

This is a video done by my friend Karridine. It made me cry when I first heard it. Hope you like it.

Here is a little about him and why he did the video.

Karridine enlisted at age 17 to follow his father's example and serve in Korea. After a year's study at the DLI in Monterey, CA, learning Korean language, Karridine served in the Army Security Agency, working atop a mountain on an island on the Korean DMZ. When the USS Pueblo was captured, Karridine was one of three people handpicked by NSA to fly back to Korea and guide the follow-up there. He got his Honorable Discharge after 4 years service in late1968.

Karridine wrote "Wanna Go Home" as his supportive contribution during the Battle of Baghdad, long after he was refused further service. Knowing how lonely it can get on the front lines, or just far from home, Karridine wove this story of the normal American GI's desire to go home, AFTER completing the mission, AFTER making a positive difference in the field.

I just learned about Jeff Soyer's 53rd birthday -- as well as Alphecca's 5th Blogiversary!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFF!

And congratulations on five years of awesome Second Amendment blogging.

Jeff helped give me a much needed start when Classical Values began in earnest, as he honored me when I was a complete unknown by agreeing to be my blogfather. (I was his first blogson too.) Anyway, five years is an important milestone in blogging, and it represents more than ten percent of Jeff's life.

The only thing that troubles me is that I turned 53 in July, which makes me three months older than Jeff. How many people are older than their fathers?

Why, I'm so old, I even remembered that Jeff had cake back in 2004, so I updated (literally) the icing!

So go wish Jeff a happy birthday.

MORE: While you're partying, Jeff's got a great post about Hillary Clinton's amazing claim that she "supports the Second Amendment." (And if you believe that, Jeff has a bridge for sale in Brooklyn too.)

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds!

Most people are familiar with this picture:

And this famous picture of the napalmed girl in Vietnam:

A burning child is certainly not a pleasant thing to contemplate (neither is a romanticized murderer), and I remember that the picture caused great distress when it first appeared in print.

But was it an indictment of the Vietnam War any more than a photograph of Che validated his actions and beliefs? The near-religious frenzy that both photographs inspired and continue to inspire is remarkable, and as a logical person I've never quite been able to understand it.

Certainly, the napalm girl photo depicts an awful scene. But does it make America an evil country? To many people, the picture is not only conclusive proof that the Vietnam War was wrong, it's conclusive proof of the Ugly America (discussed in this essay by Norman Podhoretz). And beyond that, it's conclusive proof that all war is evil.

But why stop there? Isn't it also proof that flammable substances are evil? Forest fires? How many children have burned to death because of human use of fire, and flammable substances?

I submit that logic has nothing to do with it. Pictures reach people on an emotional level, and because the emotions tend to override logic, they are thus seen as "persuasive" by those I might as well call the persuader classes. Instead of presenting arguments, they like to resort to arguments which are not arguments at all, but pictures. I don't know what to call this, but "imageism" seems about right.

Michael Moore is one of the masters of imageism. He and the people who think like him know that if you show Bush swinging a golf club and then a truckload of dead Iraqi children, there are people who will make the "connection." That there is no connection at all means nothing, because these people are not thinking; they are emoting and then they are imagining themselves to be thinking. Not only that, they'll make permanent irrational "associations" which they will always remember. The next time they see a well-dressed man swing a golf club, the thoughts of "murdered Iraqi children" will leap into their mammalian brains, and a series of negative and irrational thoughts will follow. I remember that when I sat as a Berkeley Police Review Commissioner, the people who hated the cops were clearly dominated by 1960s images of the Birmingham police turning dogs and hoses on demonstrators, and the Chicago Police Department beating on "peaceful" McCarthy protesters in 1968.

I'm sure that a picture of Condoleeza Rice shopping for shoes juxtaposed with a picture of Katrina flood victims would be similarly "persuasive."

I do not mean to suggest that this phenomenon is limited to the left wing. As we're all familiar with the tactic of waving giant images of aborted fetuses, I'll offer another example.

Here's a recent example from the right, maintaining that the following image of the globe which is being placed on North Carolina drivers licenses --

Is so similar to this image --

That it constitutes proof (at least, so says WorldNetDaily) of a conspiracy to dissolve the United States into the "American Union" and thus, eliminate United States sovereignty.

Without getting into whether certain people would favor such a plan to dissolve the U.S. (clearly some would), I think the idea that the use of a globe on a drivers license proves its implementation is a bit of a stretch. But it's an example of the power images have over people -- as well as the power that people inclined towards magical thinking imagine they have.

FWIW, an image of the globe has appeared on a United States coin at least once -- on the reverse side of the Columbian half dollar -- and the nation managed to survive.

One of the reasons I love the Internet is that by making so many images available, it reduces the traditional hold they've had over human thinking. The irrational ability of images to influence thought is one of my pet peeves, and I suspect that it was behind the Biblical prohibition on graven images. In my view, the more images are restricted, the more power they have over people -- the huge uproar over the Muhammad cartoons being a good example. The people who freaked out and engaged in rioting proved that they are prisoners of imageism, and their extreme intolerance resulted from the prohibition on images, in much the same way their extreme intolerance of sexuality and alcohol (and even pigs) results from similar prohibitions.

Unfortunately, the copyright people are unwittingly assisting the power of the cult of imageism by attempting to control and limit the distribution, proliferation -- and even parody -- of images.

Back to the juxtaposition of Condoleeza Rice shopping for shoes with a picture of Katrina flood victims. Funny that I'd mention that, but I started this essay a few weeks ago and then today's news served up another reminder that Condoleeza Rice is especially hated by the believers in imageism. That's because they are so preoccupied with appearances that they elevate them above substance, and they hate her with a special passion for the unforgiveable crime of being conservative while black. This is considered an affront to all that is holy in leftist imageism because it violates the central tenet that black people cannot be conservative.

Accordingly, she must be "exposed" as evil -- by the use of imageism! I saw a perfect example as a thumbnail on today's Drudge Report, and then found the photo here -- titled "CODE PINK - Putting Reality in Condi Rice's Face":

That this "reality" is seen as a damning indictment of Rice is shown in the explanatory comment:

This is my favorite photo of the last 7 years.

My reaction to the photograph is that it shows a logical and reasonable woman doing her best to remain calm in the face of an illogical, irrational, and highly emotional attack. On a sociological level, there's a contrast between a black woman who worked incredibly hard to achieve success and her shabby looking tormentor with the manic expression on her face. I wasn't there, but it inclines me to empathize with Condi Rice, as I put up with a lot of abuse when I was on the Berkeley Police Review Commission, and I'm not fond of leftist intimidation tactics. (So, to the extent that the picture endears Secretary Rice to me, I'd say it has backfired. Hmmm.... Should I send a check to Code Pink?)

Condi's a real pro, and I don't think she's any more likely to be persuaded by Code Pink activists with "bloody" hands than Operation Rescue activists with pictures of dead fetuses. Or pictures of dead Iraqi children..... Clubbed demonstrators in Chicago..... Clubbed baby seals in Canada.

Or even.... golf balls clubbed by Bush.

I wish I could same for everyone else.

UPDATE: Rave reviews from the left to the picture of the protestor with the bloody hands, one "Desiree Farooz."

To me, Desiree Farooz's expression is beautiful/pure righteous confrontation.

I say it's a TIME COVER !!!

Wow, what a photo!!! Think she's pissed? C'mon Condi, tell us how you really feel, you crazed loonie!!
Ya'll just know she wanted to throw down on that lady!!!

I guess it's time for lunch. Hmm, I wonder how your blood would taste, lady.

What a cold hearted mean bitch! Did you hear her greet someone in the background sound with her fake irritating voice? these people have no soul.

What a great picture. "Every Picture Tells a Story" and this one certainly does.

Welcome to the real world, Miss Mushroom Cloud!

May you dwell in a parched land, endlessly ponder your own wickeness and choke on your tears of regret.

I've added it to my collection. It's a picture that will come in handy for '08.

UPDATE: From Glenn Reynolds, a good question:

....would anti-abortion protesters in "Operation Rescue" t-shirts be allowed up-close to wave bloody hands at Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Somehow, I doubt it.

After nearly zero sleep (I was awakened at least a dozen times, and I've yet to master the art of incremental sleeping), I'm not feeling terribly original, nor are my fingers cooperating by creating what my brain cannot. It would be nice if they could, though...

But I found something worth quoting. In a discussion of the realities and the myths of millionaires, Dr. Helen concludes with some great advice for the jealous left, and the government.

...rather than a bunch of "fat cats," most millionaires are just the opposite: people who worked, lived below their means and saved a lot of money. Or as one politician put it, people who "worked hard and played by the rules." All of us could learn from them. Jealous that they have not achieved this level of wealth, now many controlling types of people are scheming to take money from others through high tax rates that penalize the "shy millionaire" as much as the real "fat cats," whatever that means. Instead of scheming like a bunch of thugs, perhaps the government and those that approve of their thuggery should learn to be more like the shy millionaires by spending below their means, saving, and showing some class.

The result is "class war" and other diseases of what's called the "collective mind."

I've stopped engaging in wishful thinking along the lines of "if only they realized that socialism does not work," because I don't think they care whether socialism works.

The core issue is resentment. Resentment clouds minds. People whose resentment stems from jealously not only resent those who contribute to the economic life and growth of a society, they defend and promote those who are doing the opposite. They fail to resent those who are actually the most deserving of resentment in any healthy society -- criminals. The latter are defended, excused, and their criminal actions are actually blamed on the people who are helping the economy.

So it's not just a question of resenting people who should not be resented. It is also tied closely to not resenting the people who should be resented.

It is one thing to be irrationally resentful in this way, but the problem comes when the people driven by irrational resentment seek to be in charge. In an earlier post titled "But who are they?," I lamented my inability to come up with a definition, but posed a few questions:

I complain a lot about assorted government bureaucrats, social workers, educrats, the Imagine people, the government people, academicians and self appointed activists who work hand in hand with those who manipulate public opinion, highly educated people who believe that their credentials qualify them to run people's lives, but there is an enormous class out there. I don't know whether to call them a "ruling class," because Americans are not supposed to be ruled but are self-governing, and "ruling class" is simply not an accurate description of an unelected and undefinable elite that would deny its own existence. But this all begs the question: who are these people who want to rule, and why do they have so much power without ever having to run for office?

the Excuse-Making Industry....consists primarily of intellectuals in the social science establishment: the philosophers, psychological theorists, political scientists, legal scholars, sociologists, criminologists, economists and historians whose theories have shaped our modern legal system. It also consists of an activist wing of fellow-travelers: social workers, counselors, therapists, legal-aid and civilliberties lawyers, "inmate rights" advocates, "progressive" politicians and activists, and so on...

It's a sprawling intellectual consensus...united in a single premise: that the criminal isn't responsible for his behavior... Forces and circumstances outside his control "cause" him to behave as he does. He should be forgiven, or treated therapeutically, or placed in a better environment, or counseled to "cope" with his uncontrollable inner demons. But he must not be held accountable for his actions-- and, under no circumstances, punished for what he "couldn't help."

Is it possible that the self-insufficient resent the self-sufficient?

I'm complaining that it is emotional and illogical.

But what if it's natural?

Isn't it a bit of a paradox to argue against natural resentments? Maybe it is, but I still think identifying problems is a good idea.

Gateway Pundit has pictures up that show the protests against Islamic Fascism Awareness Week in Bezerkeley, California. As per usual there is a guy dressed up as a Gitmo prisoner.

Gitmo guy talked about his fascist government here in the United States. He believes we should take care of the fascist government here at home first.

Evidently the Stalinists have overpowered the Trots.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Late last night (when I probably should have been in bed), I wrote a post about Hillary Clinton's cat, and as I tried to explain, cats are not my area of expertise. Nor am I into catfighting.

However, I do think it's interesting that the term "cat fight" is usually used for as code language for certain types of human combat, while "dog fight" generally means canine combat. Well in World War II it meant aerial combat, but that use seems to be fading. Anyway, when was the last time you heard about urban cat fight problems or police raids on catfighting rings?

This is just another reason why cats and dogs should be treated separately. And this post is about dogs, especially the case of Buddy, the ill-fated chocolate lab who never made it out of the Clinton administration alive.

Yes, it's true. This sad tale has all the telltale signs of another conspiracy, and another coverup.

Ann Althouse linked a 2001 Mickey Kaus piece titled Who Killed Buddy? which meticulously examines the many strange and suspicious (and unaccounted-for) circumstances surrounding what ought to be called "The Strange Death of Buddy." People who want to read the ultimate spine-tingling political chiller should take the time to go read "THE NINE SUSPICIOUS FACTS ABOUT BUDDY'S DEATH."

I won't go through them all, but here's one of the most damning facts, plus Kaus's exhortation to the cowardly GOP-run Congress:

....Buddy would "pad on down to the basement of the West Wing, poking his nose into the wastebaskets outside Sidney Blumenthal's office." Yes, that Sidney Blumenthal, the partisan conspiratorialist who is so often at the center of Clintonian machinations--the same Sidney Blumenthal who had seemingly eerily anticipated last week's deadly event by writing a play about a scandal involving the president's dog. Why Blumenthal's trash, and no one else's? What did the doomed Labrador find there? Had Buddy smelled too much?

Connect the dots. It doesn't add up. No other conclusion seems even possible. Perhaps some subpoenas would help shake loose the real story. But who in Congress will step forward to do what is necessary?

While the Internet is alive with conspiracy theories about the death of Vincent Foster, there's almost nothing about Buddy. Clearly, America is a speciesist culture which cares more about lawyers than man's best friend.

Witness the double standard where it comes to sex. While Buddy's master was free to play, Buddy found himself castrated -- on the orders of Doris Day! At the time the BBC commented on this strange irony:

The United States First Pet looks likely to avoid the sexual allegations which have dogged his owner President Bill Clinton.

Buddy, the President's seven-month-old chocolate brown Labrador Retriever, is to be neutered.

Mr Clinton made the decision after consulting his vet and hearing an appeal from actress Doris Day, expressing concern that the dog would suffer health problems if he were left intact.

EVERY DOG has his day. And for Buddy the First Pooch it's Doris. Last week, Doris Day wrote to President Clinton demanding that he be neutered - the dog, that is. Of all the potential perils the modern world has to offer, the possibility that Doris Day will publicly call for your castration must rank as pretty remote. Nonetheless, Buddy's perky blonde nemesis is insistent. If the President's chocolate labrador were to be left intact, she says, he would be liable to prostate problems which might cause embarrassing urinary accidents on grand White House occasions.

[...]

The poor mutt is clearly labouring under a great deal of strain. Buddy really is this man's best friend - the last remaining FOB (Friend of Bill), the only one who can't be subpoenaed. And, like so many others, he's now being called on to take the bullet or, in this case, the knife - for his pal. Bill Clinton wasn't forced from office, but Web Hubbell, his Assistant Attorney-General was; Bill Clinton didn't go to jail, but James McDougal, his Whitewater partner, did; Bill Clinton won't be castrated, but Buddy's distinguishing characteristics are headed for the same shredder as Hillary's law firm billing records.

If this first couple is returned to the throne, we can expect more eunuchs and more disarmament!

Much as I should have left the hell alone my last post about Ellen DeGeneres's dog rescue issues, I didn't. Instead, I reiterated my point in an update by making a Hillary Clinton/Ellen DeGeneres comparison:

Via Glenn Reynolds, I read that when she got Socks, the White House cat, Hillary Clinton "lectured readers" that pets are an "adoption instead of an acquisition." Later, she dumped the cat on her secretary, who now has it.

It sounds as if Hillary thinks adopting an animal is less of a commitment than buying an animal.

I never really thought about it before, but I guess if it's not really yours, where's the commitment?

Yeah, OK, I was originally talking about dogs, not cats (and definitely not cats owned by Hillary Clinton). I am a dog person and I'm probably now treading on thin ice. (There's that old saying that you should stick to what you know.) I generally try to avoid cats because I'm allergic to them and I don't own them. Plus cat owners get really weird and emotional about them, and if you say anything that can be seen as in any way wrong, cat people will often go ballistic. I'm sure if I said that it was better to buy a cat than rent one via the "rescue" service, I'd get flak from one cat faction, and if I said it was better to rescue or adopt than buy, flak would fly from another. Cat people can be catty, and cat fights result, so I just try to stay the hell out of it.

And this isn't just any cat. It was Hillary's cat!

I did think that Ann Althouse raised a good point in her earlier post, though, in which she rather cattily ventured that Hillary should go on TV and talk to Ellen. When I read it, I thought I'd said enough about the virtues of privately owned dogs (which wasn't Ann Althouse's point), and I just didn't want to start a new post getting into a detailed moral comparison of Ellen's dog and Hillary's cat.

I do think that in general if you own something, you'll tend to take better care of it than if you rent it, and in my callused opinion, adopting an animal (especially when you don't have title) is more like a rental, while purchasing it is more like real parenting or home ownership. I realize people will disagree with me, and these things are emotional, so I thought I'd let the Ellen post die its natural death.

So perhaps adding the Hillary cat update was asking for trouble. That's because I have this weird inability to ignore unfinished things, and now the Ellen/Hillary thing has escalated into a catfight, with Andrew Sullivan weighing in by misunderstanding Ann Althouse.

What the former objected to was this:

So, Hillary, just go on the Ellen show -- if Ellen ever manages to stop the tears and broadcast again -- and cry about how terribly much you loved Socks and have Ellen help you explain why love is what makes you get rid of the pet. Then you can get back to telling us how you're going to bring the womanosity to the presidency.

In a recent interview, Hillary Clinton disclosed that Socks has been declawed in December 1996. The First Family's decision to declaw Socks was in part at the insistence of the Secret Service, after Bill was seen wearing a bandage on his cheek. At first, he said he had cut himself shaving, but later he revealed Socks had scratched him. Perhaps the declawing was postponed until until after the presidential electlion to avoid it becoming a campaign issue.

the Buchanans did not have their cat declawed, which is more than you can say for our current president. Mrs. Clinton recently told the world on TV, and without a hint of remorse, that Socks was declawed years ago - probably to save the White House furniture.

Again, I think Ann Althouse was being too kind. The overwhelming evidence is that as a cat parent, Hillary Clinton stinks. (I guess that would be stank.)

Thus, sense of humor or not, there is no practical need for any catfight.

Malibu burning?

Maybe the little people will get access to the beaches for a while.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Gateway Pundit posted the below picture of raging grannies protesting IslamoFascism Awareness Week. Shouldn't they be in burkas or something? How can they be so insensitive?

Michelle Malkin also has a round-up.

In a post titled "Resistance is futile: You will be (mis)informed," Michael Yon laments the awful cognitive disconnect "between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq":

...it wasn't until I spent that week back in the States that I realized how bad things have gotten. I believe we are witnessing a conspiracy of coincidences conflating to exert an incomprehensibly destructive force on the free press system that we largely take for granted. The fact that the week in question also happened to be when General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker were delivering their reports to Congress makes me wonder if things are actually worse than I've assessed, and I returned to Iraq sadly convinced that General Petraeus now has to deal from a deck clearly stacked against him in both America and Iraq.

A good friend recently told me that he supports the war in silence, and he absolutely refuses to talk about it any more.

Bloggers, I am sorry to say, cannot fix this problem. Most people do not get their information from blogs, and those who do are usually on one side or the other, so their minds are not likely to change.

Take me, for example. I can write this blog post, but I am not in Iraq, and I am relying on what I have read in Michael Yon's blog and a few others. However, I do watch mainstream media reports pretty closely, and what I have noticed is that at the same time the situation in Iraq improved, mainstream news reports seemed to dwindle in a direct relationship to the improvement. To me, that's a clue. But to others (especially the more "normal" people who rely on news accounts) no news is not seen as evidence of good news, but just a relief from news. Unfortunately, all they remember is the steady drip drip drip of bad news from Iraq. Without any news, they're probably just hoping that the channel has been changed.

As I've argued before, this behavior reminds me of changing the channel on the remote. And if you're blogging about the war, what you're doing is basically like trying to get people to go back to what they've been tired of watching for a long time. Add this to the fact that the overwhelming majority of blog readers already know what they think, and my remark that bloggers cannot fix the problem becomes understatement.

It makes me very angry, and it's one of the reasons I don't write about the war very much despite my strong support for it. And let's face it, anger is generally non-productive -- especially anger over being unable to do anything productive.

I mean, really, what the hell can I add? Should I repeat for the umpteenth time that I am sick and tired of seeing all these seemingly irrelevant bloggers doing what's supposed to be part of President Bush's job?

But even there, there's a problem. If bloggers who are doing President Bush's job by defending the war are being ignored as irrelevant, then what good does it do to get mad at Bush?

Especially if President Bush is irrelevant.

Glenn Reynolds discussed the relevance issue yesterday (after a Google "Bush" search turned up nothing) and after the Washington Post reported -- barely -- a recent claim by Bush that he was in fact "relevant":

Bush said his veto pen was "one way to ensure that I am relevant; that's one way to ensure that I am in the process. And I intend to use the veto."

Bush said Congress, under Democratic control for nine months, has not "managed to pass many important bills. Now the clock is winding down and in some key areas Congress is just getting started." Congress should act on mortgage relief for homeowners hit by the housing crisis, trade deals that would strengthen allies, legislation expanding U.S. markets and aid to military veterans, Bush said.

"I'm looking forward to getting some things done for the American people," Bush said. "And if it doesn't get done, I'm looking forward to reminding people as to why it's not getting done."

Has the president become content to support the war in silence like my friend?

While Bush's rather plaintive cry of relevance seems to have made it into the Inquirer, it didn't quite stand out at me the way another story did, which pictured Bush with a screech owl:

First came some bird-watching at the Patuxent Research Refuge outside Washington, where he peered through a scope at waterfowl and had a closer encounter with a brown-and-white screech owl.

"Cute little fellow," the president said, looking slightly askance at the jittery bird perched on his hand.

Bush, noting that migrating bird populations were threatened by increasing development along their routes, said his administration would award private landowners "credits" they could sell, mainly to federal agencies, to encourage them to set aside "stopover habitats" for more than 800 species of migratory birds.

He said his administration also would give extra tax breaks, if Congress consented, to landowners who donated conservation easements to help migratory birds.

But if he thought that, he'd be wrong, because the name "Screech Owl" is a bit of a misnomer. The Screech Owl does not screech, but makes an unforgettably haunting sound like the whinny of a horse. And more:

The screech owls produce a number of different noises. The call that gives them their name is less a screech and more a spooky horse whinny. Another call they make is a quick melodic puttering that is very hard to locate. When angered, mildly threatened or otherwise offended they growl, like a miniature bulldog. Annoyed or quite upset, they will snap their bill making a little clapping noise. Some argue this clapping is actually tongue-clicking.

Not that I'd tell him how to run the war, of course, but I wish he could do a better job of defending the war instead of worrying about whether he's "relevant" while war bloggers like Michael Yon do his job for him.

Hey, it's not as if I'm asking Bush to point out that owls are associated with Athena, and that Athena is the goddess of war and technology or anything like that....

Just defend the war!

UPDATE: Thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link, especially for the quote!

A warm welcome to all.

The neural circuits of most people tend to get gradually dimmer over time, and as they dim, the memories tend to fade along with them. Some people's dim more than others; I noticed that Senator Bob Kerrey stated recently that an important conversation he had with the president of the United States was now "lost from [his] memory bank":

Moynihan wrote that former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey confided that he called Bill Clinton after the release of the 1998 Starr Report on the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky, and told the president he should resign. "Wow," Mr. Kerrey emailed after learning of the account. "This is lost from my memory bank. Whatever conversation I had (and I won't second guess the content of the Moynihan memo) it had to be more of a discussion of options than a recommendation. I would remember if I recommended he do this."

Anyway, where was I? This was not supposed to be about Bob Kerrey's memories, or who forgets what about the Clintons. Rather, a piece in today's Inquirer made certain dim memory circuits light up.

Flashback to the early 1970s, and the beginnings of the anti-smoking movement. There is no way that I can prove that this movement started in Berkeley, but I moved there in 1972, and I will never forget my astonishment over what would today be called "political correctness" but which at the time I thought was the most whiny group of the whiniest whiners I had ever seen whining in my life -- angry anti-smoking "activists" who had found each other and organized themselves into what was called GASP -- the Group Against Smoking Pollution:

In the early 1970's, people around the United States began to talk about the annoyance and potential health hazards of secondhand smoke. The smoke gave some people headaches, made some cough and gag, and in the worst case scenario kept those with respiratory illnesses from entering smoke-filled establishments. These concerned citizens banded together to form local organizations called Group Against Smoking Pollution (GASP) that initially engaged in educational work and eventually began to seek legislation to limit smoking in public places. Several GASP organizations sprung up in California and in 1976 they combined their resources to create California Group Against Smoking Pollution.

I remember ridiculing them and laughing at the way they would go up to smokers and whine "You're polluting my air!" Of course, I didn't smoke, nor did smoke bother me, so I had no axe to grind. It's wonderful when you can watch such highly emotional things from a neutral and detached perspective, especially at the tender age of eighteen. On the one "side" were the activists -- messianically whiny and in your face, and on the other were the smokers, none of whom had yet become accustomed to being considered evil, and who only seemed to want to be left alone.

While this experience did not cause me to break with Marxism, or leftism, it was about that time that the earliest cracks in my revolutionary veneer began to appear. It struck me that the "GASPers" (this was what we called them) had gravitated to their cause more for psychological than rational reasons, and I started to wonder (indeed, I worried!) whether a similar mechanism might be behind a lot of people who were attracted to "movements." My worries were not alleviated when I heard an angry black revolutionary shout down an angry white revolutionary along the lines of "I'm fighting because I'm oppressed and my people are oppressed! You're just fighting because you hate your father!" This might not have struck at the merits of Marxism, but it did make me wonder early on about the very different motivations. So did the fact that no sooner was the draft ended than anti-war demonstrations which had once drawn 500,000 were down to a trickle of 10,000 or so. The same war was on, right? What happened to the idealists who were against it? (Like, the 10,000 or so might have been in the "I hate my father!" group, but it occurred to me that the other 490,000 might have had a much more universal motivation of "I don't wanna die!")

Well, I've strayed so far from my point that I'm nearly in the dark as to what it was.

It was the light!

The article that triggered my memory synapses and made me think of the GASPers was about "light pollution."

It is titled Let there be (less) light:

Light pollution - the glare of civilization that makes it hard to see the full blanket of stars at night - has long been an environmental issue, but mostly among stargazers, who contend the dark sky is one of the world's fastest-disappearing natural resources.

Try as they might to enlist support, they were often dismissed - except in places such as Arizona, home to a major observatory.

Now, however, a confluence of concerns is ratcheting awareness up. And getting lights turned down.

I don't know what to think. But there's an organization called the International Dark-Sky Association which is pushing for less light. With new help from the forces of Global Warming alarmism:

Lately, dark-sky advocates may have found their best ally yet: energy conservation.

Saying that about 30 percent of lighting is wasted - it is "ill-conceived, ineffective or inefficient," they say - the International Dark-Sky Association, based in Tucson, Ariz., estimates the annual toll is as high as $10 billion.

Not to mention increased air pollution and global warming from burning fossil fuels.

"People are starting to realize everything is connected to everything else," says Dennis Ward, of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. He recently coordinated a citizen science effort, the Great World Wide Star Count, to chart light pollution.

In two weeks, he got more than 4,000 observations from 61 countries. He hopes the results will raise awareness and eventually illuminate trends.

Unlike most environmental ills, light pollution is easy to fix - turn it off, turn it down, or shield it from your neighbors. And the heavens.

"You're polluting my natural darkness!"

"You're warming the planet!"

Can anti-light complaints (lodged by neighbors against neighbors, naturally) be far away?

Am I still allowed to laugh while I can? No, I really shouldn't because my laughter is grounded in cynicism and denial, and this is an issue which touches on the human spirit, on poetry, love, and even God!

In the darkest spots - such as Cherry Springs Park in Potter County, Pennsylvania's first "dark sky park" - as many as 14,000 stars are visible. In most cities, you can hardly pick out 150.

Ultimately, our new world of day and partial day may be as much a loss for humanity as for science.

The bejeweled sky has inspired humans to create myths, write poems, compose sonatas, ponder the existence of God, and fall in love.

Lest you think this is just an example of the light-headed kidding I enjoy in this blog, remember something: these people are activists.

And activists always want laws!

In response to increased inquiries from municipalities, the Dark-Sky Association and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America are drafting a model ordinance.

Ratcheting this issue up will take time, because there will be much resistance, not only from trial lawyers, but from ordinary citizens who want to feel safe. And people who really don't want to be thought of as polluters simply because they like to read in bed. And considering that soccer moms always worry about their own safety and that of their kids, I don't expect Hillary to to be leading the way in the progressive fight against the light.

However, by offering the satellite picture, the Inquirer article did shed some light (if I may still say that) on something else.

We have been seeing the world in the wrong way. When we gaze at the satellite pictures, we tend to regard the darker spaces and the less illuminated countries with pity, because we see them as "backward." And as "undeveloped." What we need to remember is that they are the ones leading the way to a better, darker future!

Anyone remember the map showing the two Koreas?

Remember how we used to laugh?

Shame on me for laughing at the most progressive country in the world, and at the most progressive leader, the dimmest of the dimmers, the enlightened endarkened Kim Jong Il -- shown here while his benevolent stargazing "inspires humans to create myths, write poems, compose sonatas, ponder the existence of God, and fall in love."

That was in 1979, before his further, um, elevation.

More recently, he met with Madeline Albright, who seems to have done little more than present him with a letter from President Clinton:

"The secretary and Kim Jong Il met for three hours. The conversations were substantial; we found them useful," U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters in Pyongyang.

Boucher said that during the meeting, Albright gave Kim a letter from President Bill Clinton dealing with Clinton's expectations of how to further develop relations between the two countries.

He said Kim and Albright were expected to meet again on Tuesday because "they have more to talk about."

During their meeting Monday afternoon, Kim and Albright focused their discussions on issues of how to improve ties between the two countries and Clinton's possible visit to Pyongyang in the near future.

There's the famous photo of the two of them drinking a toast, but what I'm more intrigued with is this one, showing them in front of the ocean:

I think the above picture has a decidedly environmental flavor. Still, not a word seems to have been uttered by Albright in praise of Kim's world leadership in saving energy in general, or his country's amazing absence of light pollution in particular. However, later Albright did seem to go out of her way to state that Kim was not a nut.

Far from it. He's leading the way to a darker future!

Dimming the lights may be a long way off, but we have to start somewhere.

The misuse of copyright law to defeat free speech is getting out of hand. I made a wisecrack about it in an earlier post, as my attempt to produce an obvious political parody of Che Guevara's widely disseminated image has now been rebuffed by two different t-shirt designers claiming that even making fun of the image constitutes infringement -- notwithstanding fair use and parody.

Before the company realized its mistake and flagged the design, I had ordered one of the t-shirts, and yesterday it arrived in the mail. I thought the least I could do was put it on and pose for a picture of me, attempting to duel with commie fascism:

"Tou che!"

Hmmm....

Maybe I should call it the commie-fascist uniTee. (Well there are such hybrids....)

If you look carefully, you'll see that I am holding a Model 1898 Argentine cavalry saber:

That sword would have been in use in the Argentine cavalry when Ernesto was born. Parenthetically, when I lived in Argentina in 1968, the president was a former cavalry commander, General Juan Carlos Ongania, who had helped identify Che Guevara's severed Argentinian hands. (As a matter of fact, as recently as 2004, Argentina and Castro were fighting over the rights to Guevara's corpse.)

Much as I'd hate this to turn into a "more than you needed to know about Guevara" trivia post, I'm afraid it is becoming that. So while I'm on the subject of Che, let me pause to consider the Cult of Che.

There is nothing new about this well-established cult. Its originated in the development of mythology shrewdly built around a failed revolutionary whose death was in the interest of the very people who built and encouraged the growth of the cult. The reason for this is obvious; Che was a handsome, charismatic leader, but wildly impractical, and his ideology was at odds with that of Fidel Castro and the Cuban government. Worse yet (from their standpoint), his travels to the Soviet Union had convinced him that the Soviet Communist model was not working. Probably because his emotional fanaticism was fueled by personal pride (you know, "real men" can't stand to admit they are wrong), instead of questioning the premise of Communism, he decided that the more fanatic variety -- Chinese Maoism -- was the way to go.

Bad career move. Castro couldn't wait to get rid of him. But (if you can stomach the thought for a moment), put yourself in Castro's position. What do you do when a highly popular and charismatic figure is poised to make major trouble with your only major underwriter, without whose support your regime will almost certainly fail? Obviously, you can't just kill someone like that. And Castro was too smart to do something crass and stupid, like staging an "accident."

What Castro probably did know was that as a military tactician, Che, a failed doctor, was a bit of a dud. During the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion (a perfect opportunity for Cuba's heroes -- both existing and newly minted), Che was relegated to a place far from the action in what has been called "one of the worst conceived, planned, and executed military-intelligence operations in modern history." It would not have been possible to give the Cubans -- especially Che -- a better propaganda opportunity, and in retrospect I think Fidel knew it, and would not have wanted Che to have a central role in any way. Whether by design or sheer incompetence, Guevara was nowhere near the botched invasion, and all he managed to do was shoot himself in the head:

Che's role in "Imperialism's First Defeat!" as Castro refers to the Bay of Pigs invasion merits mention. The American invasion plan included a ruse in which a CIA squad dispatched three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba in Pinar Del Rio (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors and a tape recording of battle.

The wily Guerrilla Che immediately deciphered the imperialist scheme. That little feint 300 miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse, he determined. The real invasion was coming in Pinar Del Rio. Che stormed over to the site with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded and waited for the "Yankee/mercenary" attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs and mirrors did their stuff offshore.

Three days later the (literal) smoke and mirror show expended itself and Che's men marched back to Havana. Somehow Che had managed to wound himself in the heated battle against the tape recorder. The bullet pierced Che's chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post April '61 pictures of Che (the picture we see on posters and T shirts was taken a year earlier.)

Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Fidelista at the time, speculates the wound may have come from a botched suicide attempt. Che hagiographers John Lee Anderson, Carlos Castaneda and Paco Taibo insist it was an accident, Che's own pistol going off just under his face.

At any event, Guevara did manage to thank the United States for the invasion.

This egomaniac was a major headache for Fidel, and I am sure he breathed a huge sigh of relief when Che finally met his doom, and the building of the real, controlled, personality cult could begin in earnest.

The Korda picture is the quintessence of what I call "imageism." Without it, I'm not sure the cult of Che would have ever been quite what it was -- and is. For whatever reason, no other picture of Guevara captures that romantic essence of the rich Western kid who overcame his roots and became a champion of armed revolution. It is supposed to be an inspiration to others.

As such, it is not so much a picture as it is pure, passionate propaganda -- for Communists it is every bit as much a religious symbol as a famous religious image like Da Vinci's Last Supper. From a constitutional perspective, the Korda image is the essence of political expression. For it to have gained "copyright" protection (which I do not think it has) is a sham and an outrage. It was deliberately, systematically placed in the public domain, circulated worldwide, and only in 2000 did the photographer manage to wangle what is called a "judgment" (a court-approved settlement is what it is) from a British court.

Those who promote the Cult of Che believe that this "judgment" gives them the exclusive right to the image -- even against parody or ridicule of it. Ridicule, parody, or any use the cult owners dislike, so they claim, constitutes infringement.

(Which probably means that if I printed up this post and titled it "Che for Dummies" I'd face a lawsuit for double infringement!)

The resultant attacks on the free speech have of course been directed at critics of totalitarianism like Reporters Without Borders, who face bankruptcy simply because they "grafted the face of Korda's "Che" on to a picture of a French riot squad officer" -- something which is still (IMO) allowed in the United States even if the cowardly American T-Shirt companies are afraid to touch it.

I think there's an important and fundamental principle here. Whether it is moral or legal, it is certainly of constitutional dimension, because the essence of censorship is government-enforced prohibitions on free speech -- especially when such restrictions are based on political content.

While there is a longstanding constitutional "exception" for commercial speech, the assumption was that commercial speech was not political and thus not deserving of First Amendment protection which is there to protect political speech. What worries me here is that copyright law is increasingly allowing this commercial speech exception to engulf and devour the broad protection afforded political speech.

Thus, I believe rather passionately that not only do I have the legal right to politically attack the Cult of Che by desecrating the Korda image, but I have a broader moral and legal right to do so in order to defend an important constitutional principle.

Aside from its inherently political nature, the Korda image is (I think) squarely in the public domain. In a Church of Scientology involving the public domain question, the court held that if Hubbard's works "had fallen into the public domain before 1983" (which Guevara image had) "then any registration of copyright over such works would be invalid." Not only did Korda fail utterly to object to the fact that the posterized version of the Che image had been circulated worldwide, but with no objection from Korda, its Irish author declared it a free image:

I made all the Guevara images copyright free. That's how it spread everywhere so quickly.

The People's Cube has a thorough discussion with many links, and I especially enjoyed their Hillary Horse's Ass Che.

It even inspired me to come up with another pain in the ass infringement

Which in turn led to a totally psychotic one -- the "Munch Scream" Screaming Che!

Munch Che Sí!

Munch Che Do!

As you can see, things got a bit out of hand. And only because I didn't want to encourage the Minutemen did I refrain from putting an eagle devouring a snake above Che's head in the middle. (Um, that would be intentional international disrespect towards the copyrighted logo of a country, which would have to constitute copyright infringement, wouldn't it? )

These arguments are not new to Wiki; their old Che stuff is here, and their deletion discussions are here and here.

Odd that I would mention my moral rights under the United States Constitution, as there is such a thing as moral rights theory in the context of copyright law. But "moral rights" in the European sense mean the right to censor. American legal commentators have warned of the clear conflict between moral rights theory and parody:

Other commentators have expressed concern that traditional, continental moral rights, if adopted in the United States, might endanger the creation of socially desirable derivative works, including parodic uses. For this reason, some of these commentators have called for the application of fair use in order to permit such beneficial uses. See PATTERSON & LINDBERG, supra note 93, at 176 ("The [traditional] moral-rights doctrine should not, for example, be used . . . to inhibit the genres of burlesque, parody and satire."); Kwall, supra note 21, at 71 (noting that fair-use doctrine "represents a particularly significant limitation on [traditional] moral rights" and that such limitation is "justifiable as a 'necessary concomitant' of living in a democratic society"); Lacey, supra note 111, at 1595 n.267 (stating that artists should be prevented "from asserting [their] right of integrity to prevent genuine parodies of [their] work"). These commentators' concerns are warranted in the context of continental, personality-based moral rights, which can prevent alterations of even reproductions of art works. If such broad moral rights were recognized in the United States, fair use should permit the unauthorized creation of desirable derivative works. However, the rights recognized by VARA are significantly less expansive than traditional moral rights, protecting only original .works of visual art."

Obviously, my moral rights theory is inconsistent with their moral rights theory. But we live in the country where I have the right not only to thumb my nose at their view of moral rights, but to parody the very concept of copyright as an interference with free speech.

This Harvard Law School site has an invaluable collection of helpful links, such as this parody and fair use -- defined as "a humorous form of social commentary and literary criticism in which one work imitates another."
I also enjoyed this, and there's a lot more at the Harvard site.

Guevara with headphones, anyone?

Or how about Guevara with a necktie, shown here around the time of his Departure For The World (the famous Motorcycle Diarrhea run).

Sorry about the staples that have pierced our hero's head and chest! But these foul acts of desecration were committed not by me but by the Colombian government.

Obviously, if you're a handsome and rich young egomaniac, it's not enough to just sit around. (No time to lament the loss of Evita -- the fake future hopes of Hollywood and Andrew Lloyd Weber notwithstanding.)

Anyway, while the PINO CHE T design was simmering, I read about the Fox News reporter named Rebecca Aguilar who bullied an elderly Texas man who had defended himself against burglars. By now that news is old, and it has been commented upon by others such as Glenn Reynolds and Ed Morrissey,

What outraged me more than the conduct of the reporter was the way the station reflexively availed itself of copyright laws by pulling the video! Yet it was the video which showed the very bullying by the reporter that generated all the discussion. That is the conduct which is precisely at issue, and I think it's a classic example of how copyright law is being abused. Glenn Reynolds linked the Fox affiliate's legal threats against Dan Riehl (who pulled the video) and this Breitbart video discussion incorporating it. (There's also another link here.)

But it's YouTube with which everyone is familiar these days, so Fox wasted no time in complaining about "copyright infringement" -- and the video disappeared, with this message appearing in its place:

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by KDFW FOX 4 TV.

This was Glenn Reynolds' comment on the matter:

KDFW has gotten the video -- previously embedded here -- pulled from YouTube, which suggests that they feel they have something to hide. But you can see the relevant segments as part of this commentary on Aguilar's journalistic ethics, at Breitbart.tv.

I was struck by reporter Rebecca Aguilar's body-language, literally standing over him in judgment with tailored suit and umbrella. The way she looked down, literally and figuratively, on an old man who had defended his life, entirely legally, and reduced him to tears seems to me to be representative of the worst stereotypes of Old Media. Then, when she belatedly realizes that she's coming across like a bully -- because, you know, she is -- she retreats into faux-sympathy and the laughable claim that she's just helping him get his side of the story out. It's like something out of a local-tv parody on The Simpsons. Yet her webpage suggests that she's on the side of the "little guy."

What happens when a "little guy" strikes back? The anti-Hugo Chavez "don't buy gas from this ass" billboard (in this video) strikes me as a good example of something to watch. (The fallout and the video, of course.)

I would expect a lawsuit or a demand that the Citgo parody be taken down too. After all, the billboard shows Citgo's corporate logo, does it not? I'm sure the name "Citgo" is protected too, and I don't doubt that some clever lawyers could figure out a way to claim that anyone who criticized "Citgo" was guilty of infringement by using the name "Citgo."

I mean, just look at the this flagrant example of the disrespect shown to a leading company and its fearless leader!

And on top of that, there's the destruction of the glass monument to Che Guevara© in Venezuela! Not only was the image copyrighted, but it was a protected religious shrine! Why, almighty Che had actually stopped right there during his copyrighted Motorcycle Diaries© trip!

How dare these heretics vandalize a sacred image at a place for religious pilgrimages! What's next? Images of Che photoshopped into the sacred corporate logo?

Death to the copyright infringers!

Death to the parodistas!

Parodistas al Paredón!©

(Probably what MoveOn© would love to do the parodizers in their disinfrinchisement campaign too. It can't happen here!)

MORE: Reason's Michael C. Moynihan has a good post on the BBC and the Cult of Che, especially what the BBC leaves out. (Like the murder of nearly 2000 Cubans, and possibly more.)

Yes, but he was young! He was handsome! And he was idealistic!

UPDATE: I am muy honored by Compañero Glenn Reynolds, who cared enough about the dead Che© to link this post.

¡Y hasta la victoria siempre!©

Economist Paul Krugman gets it.

The ascendancy of modern conservatism is "an almost embarrassingly simple story," he says, and race is the key.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

It looks like the voters in Louisiana know who caused the Katrina mess in that state even if the left in the rest of America still blames Bush. The Associated Press reports:

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- In his second bid for governor, Republican U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal strongly led a field of 12 candidates in the Louisiana gubernatorial race late Saturday night as he attempted to avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.

Jindal, 36, the Oxford-educated son of Indian immigrants, needed more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary to win outright without a runoff. Victory would make him Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction and the nation's youngest governor in office upon taking the oath in January.

And what do you know, it seems like the Republicans are friendly to people of color. Despite what Democrats say about the party being a den of racists. In addition, this should improve our relations with India which have hit a snag over the atomic trade deal.

Here is more from the AP.

Virtually no one questions that Jindal, who lost to Democrat Kathleen Blanco four years ago, will be atop the field of a dozen candidates when the votes are tallied. But Democrats Walter Boasso and Foster Campbell and independent John Georges hope they can keep Jindal's support under 50 percent, sending him into a Nov. 17 runoff election.

But analysts also said Jindal built up support as a sort of "buyer's remorse" from people who voted for Blanco last time and had second thoughts about that decision amid widespread public dissatisfaction with the Democratic governor after Hurricane Katrina.

"I think the Jindal camp, almost explicitly, (wanted) to cast it this way: If you were able to revote, who would you vote for?" said Pearson Cross, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette political scientist.

ABC News makes an interesting point.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants, won the Louisiana governor's race Saturday, carrying more than half the vote against 11 opponents to become the state's first non-white governor since Reconstruction.

During the Civil War, Pinchback traveled to Louisiana and became the only African American captain in the Union-controlled 1st Louisiana Native Guards.

After the war, he became active in the Republican Party and participated in Reconstruction state conventions. In 1868, Pinchback organized the Fourth Ward Republican Club in New Orleans. That same year, he was elected as a Louisiana state senator, where he became the state Senate president pro tempore. In 1871 he became acting lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar Dunn, the first elected African American lieutenant governor of a U.S. state.

Pinchback was elevated to the Louisiana governorship on December 9, 1872 after impeachment charges were brought against his predecessor, Republican governor Henry Clay Warmoth.

I do not think the Democrats are going to have the easy ride in 2008 that they expected. This is a harbinger. I think we are going to have another swing election. Corrupt incompetents are going to get tossed just as they were in 2006. Just look at how Congress stands with the American people. From September 19th.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress registered record-low approval ratings in a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday, and a new monthly index measuring the mood of Americans dipped slightly on deepening worries about the economy.

Only 29 percent of Americans gave Bush a positive grade for his job performance, below his worst Zogby poll mark of 30 percent in March. A paltry 11 percent rated Congress positively, beating the previous low of 14 percent in July.

It might be a real good idea to keep matches out of the hands of Democrat Congress critters. We wouldn't want them setting fire to the place to cover up their incompetence.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

When I read that Sam Brownback had dropped out of the race, my immediate reaction was that this would be good news for Mitt Romney.

In light of Brownback's comments yesterday, I'm wondering whether he dropped out specifically to help Romney:

The Kansas senator did acknowledge, however, that he is convinced the Republican Party will nominate a "pro-life candidate," and he feels that Giuliani does not fit the bill. "Governor Romney's certainly taken a pro-life position now," Brownback said to reporters after his speech. "We'll see if that's something that can persuade the American public. My criticism of [Romney] has been that you need someone that believes in the cause to persuade the American public, and if it's seen as switching on a lot of topics it's tough to persuade the American public. Mayor Giuliani has said he's pro-choice."

But it makes me wonder about something else.

Since when is abortion the number one issue for the president of the United States?

I realize people have strong feelings all the way around. I have mixed feelings and I have discussed them. But what exactly is the president going to do about it one way or the other? He's charged with faithfully executing the laws of the United States, and his powers are limited. True, he could sign or veto abortion legislation (and that could possibly be sustained or thrown out by the Supreme Court), but he'd be charged with enforcing the laws on the books, and little more. There's no magic wand for the president to wave which could either "save the unborn" or further "doom" them. And even if we suppose that the Supreme Court were to do something so dramatic as to reverse Roe v. Wade, then abortion would become even less of a presidential concern as it would revert completely to the states.

My intent here is not to debate the merits of the abortion issue, but to express concern that the GOP is plagued with a lack of imagination, and possibly hamstrung by single-issue contingencies.

Meanwhile, Hillary is becoming a walking encyclopedia of moderation, and while she barely mentions abortion these days, she has done her damnedest to make herself appear as abortion-unfriendly as possible. Unless she's caught waving a coathanger at a NOW convention, the Republicans will be painted as shrill and obsessed.

And Hillary will fall back on her previous statements that abortion is "a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women," and:

There is no reason why government cannot do more to educate and inform and provide assistance so that the choice guaranteed under our constitution either does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances.

Neither will Hillary.

MORE: And here's another important issue -- headlined "Republican Candidates Unite In Disgust Of Harry Potter."

That was before today's announcement that Dumbledore is gay.

Hey, these are serious issues. Get with the program!

Israel gets what?

Israel gets it. Since the 1970s, on school campuses in Israel, policy requires teachers and parent aides to arm themselves with semi-automatic weapons. The result? School shootings have plummeted to zero.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

About Iraq:

Our generals up 'til now didn't win. That was bad. Our generals up 'til now didn't lose. That was good.

In addition too little force allowed the insurgents free play. That was bad. Too little force allowed the Iraqis to get to know the insurgents on an intimate basis. That was good.

Out of bad strategy and bad tactics victory may yet come.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

HT Gateway Pundit

Note: the first video link has been pulled from YouTube. Listen to this while you still can.

I have just received an anonymous e-mail with a link to a site, I Call BS, that purports to have a secret recording of Harry Reid's Secretary from this morning. You can listen to the mp3 and judge for yourself. It seems authentic to me.

Some one should tell Rush.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The Tony Auth cartoon in today's Philadelphia Inquirer resorts to some of the Inquirer's usual kneejerk assumptions about the NRA.

As a member of the NRA and other often-stereotyped groups, I don't enjoy stereotypes, and I'm no more enamored with the idea that because I belong to the NRA I dream about arming infants, nuns, and cats any more than I enjoy stereotypes about gays being immoral, Jews being greedy, or blacks being stupid.

(However, I have to admit that I find myself tempted to ask why Mr. Auth didn't include any "happily married gay couples with closets full of assault weapons" in his cartoon.)

In addition to invoking the usual stereotypes about gun owners, the cartoon's caption quotes the famous words of Martin Luther King Jr. This invokes the conventional wisdom that King was a Ghandian pacifist who would never have had guns.

That King never owned guns is considered so beyond dispute that we all just take it as a given, right?

Not so fast.

Well before his decision (apparently in 1955) to embrace Ghandian non-violence as the best tactic in the national showdown over civil rights, King had been a committed civil rights activist, but also a man who believed in protecting himself and his family against constant threats of racist violence (which included the bombing of his home).

Accordingly, the pre-Ghandian King had been armed to protect himself and his family -- to the point where his home was described by one activist as "an arsenal":

King would later admit that at the start of the boycott be was not firmly committed to Gandhian principles. He had initially advocated nonviolence not as a way of life but as a practical necessity for a racial minority. When his home was bombed at the end of January, he had cited Jesus-- "He who lives by the sword whill perish by the sword"-- rather than Gandhi in urging angry black neighbors to remain nonviolent. At the time of the bombing, King was seeking a gun permit, and he was protected by armed bodyguards. Only after the bombing did King alter his views on the use of weapons for protection. His reconsideration was encouraged by the arrival in Montgomery of two pacifists who were far more aware than he of Gandhian principles.

Competing with each other for the influence over King, Bayard Rustin, a black activist affiliated with the War Resisters League, and Glenn E. Smiley, a white staff member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, saw themselves as King's tutors on Gandhian precepts. Rustin was shocked to discover a gun in King's house, while Smiley informed fellow pacifists that King's home was "an arsenal."

Martin King was not committed to nonviolence at the beginning of the bus protest. As white violence became increasingly focused on King personally through police harassment, the bombing of his home, volumes of hate mail, and frequent telephone threats of harm, King, seeking to protect himself and his family from white violence, applied for a gun permit, which, of course, was rejected. The threat of violence was so real that armed blacks took turns guarding King's home. King also kept a loaded gun in his house, which Bayard Rustin of the War Resistance League nearly sat on during a visit.

For starters, why was the application rejected? The use of the language "of course" makes clear the unmistakable reason -- white racism by a bigoted Southern police department (King lived in Montgomery, Alabama at the time), and brings to mind the specter of the racist history of gun control -- all amply documented by Clayton Cramer in his ground-breaking work. The racist gun legislation was not merely intended to disarm former slaves after the Civil War. It also directly targeted those involved in the emergence of the 20th Century Civil Rights movement:

Most of the American handgun ownership restrictions adopted between 1901 and 1934 followed on the heels of highly publicized incidents involving the incipient black civil rights movement, foreign-born radicals or labor agitators. In 1934, Hawaii, and in 1930 Oregon, passed gun control statutes in response to labor organizing efforts in the Port of Honolulu and the Oregon lumber mills. Michigan's version of the Sullivan law was enacted in the aftermath of the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black civil rights leader. Dr. Sweet, had moved into an all white neighborhood and had been indicted for murder for shooting one of a white mob that had attacked his house while Detroit police looked on. A Missouri permit law was enacted in the aftermath of a highly publicized St. Louis race riot.[47]

After World War I, a generation of young blacks, often led by veterans familiar with firearms and willing to fight for the equal treatment that they had received in other lands, began to assert their civil rights. In reaction, the Klan again became a major force in the South in the 1910's and 1920's. Often public authorities stood by while murders, beatings and lynchings were openly perpetrated upon helpless black citizens. And once again, firearms legislation in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas made sure that the victims of the Klan's violence were unarmed and did not possess the ability to defend themselves, while at the same time cloaking the specially deputized Klansmen in the safety of their monopoly of arms.

Needless to say, the denial of King's gun permit application did not make it into the Wiki entry on King. (Should someone add a sentence with the appropriate links?)

Personally, I think King missed an opportunity to strike a blow for civil rights. So did his supporters, and so did the Second Amendment-shirking ACLU. Bearing in mind that King's house had been bombed, and he had received numerous death threats, I think it is beyond debate to any fair-minded person that the denial of his gun permit application was grounded in racial discrimination, which was illegal even at the time. He would have had a good case. But it was one of those "missed" opportunities -- and I place the word "missed" in quotes because of the strategic nature of King's decision to ditch his guns, and embrace Ghandianism.

What I'd like to know (both as an NRA member and history buff) is whatever happened to his gun? The man was monitored and bugged; is it possible that somewhere along the line one of the various surveillance operatives might have noted and recorded the serial numbers of his gun? In those days, gun ownership was pretty much uncontrolled everywhere, and guns could be purchased by mail order and even sent to minors (so purchase records of the sort kept today would be nonexistent). I don't know whether in 1955 Alabama still had any laws barring black citizens from merely owning guns, but I'm assuming that King's ownership of the gun must have been legal. Otherwise he'd have doubtless been arrested on gun possession charges by the racist cops who already hated and watched him. (Indeed, the bigots at the time would have probably savored such an opportunity.)

So, King's gun permit application must have been for a permit to carry the gun. What I don't know is whether the permit process was governed by state law or municipal (Montgomery) law, and whether or not applications would have been gun-specific and included serial numbers. If so, the serial number(s) might be matters of public record somewhere, and maybe the gun or guns could be found and placed in a museum where they "of course" belong.

If I were feeling up to the task, I'd almost be inclined to do a retaliatory photoshop of the Auth cartoon, with an alternate history image of King celebrating his newly won victory for the Second Amendment rights of black people in the South, captioned along the lines of

"I HAVE A GUN!"

But alas! If I did that I'd probably be accused of "copyright infringement."

It appears that the Time Magazine issue with the Marine Corps Osprey on the cover was spraying bunk. Lubbock Marine Parents whose motto is: "Freedom is not free, but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your share." -Ned Dolan, has the story.

I am so glad to see this article. I am not a Time Magazine reader, but happened to see this particular issue in the library. I saw the Osprey on the cover and because one of my sons is in an Osprey squadron, I was curious about it and read it. It was extremely negative. I came home and started searching on the internet and found lots of blogs talking about the Osprey in a very negative way too. When I next talked to my son I asked him about the points that the article made. He said most of them were either outright wrong or dated. One of the blog posts I read even stated that the prop wash from the Osprey would rip a Marine's clothes right off of him and that the Osprey wasn't equipped to fly into clouds. My son has been in the Osprey while it was flying through clouds, so I knew right off that that part wasn't true. He also works with Ospreys every day and has NEVER heard of any one's clothes being ripped off. Where did that even come from? Just made up on the spot by the blog author? I didn't know enough to put together a whole blog post about it and answer all the accusations, so I was thrilled to find this article. Be sure and read that last paragraph.

There's also the issue of defensive weaponry. The Ospreys that press reports say are now operating in Iraq, all with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263, are equipped with M240G medium machine guns pointed out the back ramp, ready to spray hundreds of 7.62mm bullets into a hot landing zone.

Retired Gen. James Jones, former commandant of the Marine Corps, told Time he'd always wanted the Osprey to have a forward-mounted gun, a .50-caliber under the nose -- something he never pulled off as the Corps' top Marine.

Jones thinks all assault support aircraft should have forward-facing weaponry, according to the article. He described it to Time as a fundamental belief stemming from his Vietnam War experience: Biggest and baddest is best. A spokesman from Jones' office said the retired general was unavailable to comment for this article.

The Time article quoted Jones as saying, "A rear-mounted gun is better than no gun at all, but I don't know how much better."

But Walters said the Osprey's rear machine gun is the same weapon system the Corps has in every assault support aircraft, none of which has guns facing forward.

Over the past five years, side gunners firing from CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan "found that most of the threat was on the ramp," Walters said.

He said Jones wasn't the only Marine to stand by a forward gun on principle.

"It's an emotional issue for a lot of people," Walters said. "I can come up with a scenario where it would be valuable, but we haven't seen it in five years of combat."

Update: I think this quote about accuracy in the Drive By Media is particularly apt:

"Thompson left out the part where I indicated my support and hopes for VMM-263's success and resultantly I am presented as a 'critic,' " he wrote. "That's what I get for attempting a complete thought with a reporter who's reverse-engineering a story."

Yesterday I was discussing in Dingy Harry Gets The Bum's Rush how Rush Limbaugh turned the "phony soldier" controversy into cash for the Marine Corps -- Law Enforcement Foundation. When I posted last night (local time) the bidding was up to $850,000+. Today the bidding is closed and the total is, as the headline shows, over two million dollars. On top of that Rush plans to contribute an equal amount to the foundation. Over four million dollars folks. No doubt the moonbats at DU are howling. Howling moonbats. Got to be a new sensation.

You can go to rushlimbaugh.com to find your local station. Today ought to be a lot of fun.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Anyone who knows me from this blog (it's been awhile) or just about anywhere else would probably be surprised to recognize an Ani DiFranco reference in the title, but they'd be even more surprised to learn that I belong to *gasp* a union.

I am in fact a public school teacher working in a closed shop, which means that they'd take my money one way or another, and as one put it to me, paying the full dues would protect me if I ran a kid over on the way to school one morning. Not that I have any plans to do that, or think that I shouldn't be held liable if I did, even by accident. But there's a lot of added security in not standing out as a non-tenured teacher in a very powerful crowd of unionistas.

I have a very strong financial motive for surrendering my ideals and a portion of my paycheck.

What I will not surrender, however, is my good taste, and I could not stomach this bit of doggerel that made its way to my inbox:

The Jersey Jive

An Election Time Rhyme--For a Good Reason!

Hickory, Dickory Dock
It's time to check your clock
An election is coming
(Ah, the excitement is numbing...)
And to the polls all good citizens flock.

We're not talking about that White House race
This election's about a whole different place
The State House in Trenton
Has candidates here bent on
Calling the Assembly or Senate "home base."

Nov. 6th is the day we will vote
And you can't afford to miss this boat
'Cause the stakes are sky high
It's about the state funding "pie"
And there are plenty of issues to note.

Local property taxes are key
And your pensions and benefits, see
Plus with school vouchers scams
And members' rights slams
The situation's as bad as could be.

So, see your PAC-endorsed candidates here
And let's make one thing quite perfectly clear
To vote absentee
Click this form and do it quickly
For Election Day's really quite near.

And speaking of forms, there's one more
And this one cuts right to the core
Join the Committee of 1000
To show 'em school workers aren't drowzin'
And Election Week watch NJEA ROAR!!!

The form of the limerick, though inappropriate to the message, is not that hard to master.

There once was a silly old message
that was filled with a queer sort of presage:
It made little sense,
packed with numbers quite dense,
like the fools what had sent that old message.

(Mine strikes me as a bit Goreyesque.)

Earlier this morning, I was emailed a link to what appeared to be a typical scare story about a python which came out of a woman's toilet.

There was no Halloween bogeyman in the closet for one Brooklyn woman just a 7-foot-long python in her toilet. Nadege Brunacci was washing her hands in her bathroom before dawn Monday when she glanced back and saw the slithering serpent peeking out from her toilet, most of its body hidden in the pipes.

"I turned on the light and screamed," Brunacci, 38, told the New York Daily News. "It still makes my heart race."

It's unclear how the snake made its way into the pipes.

Brunacci, a restaurateur, says she gave the snake to a friend who keeps it as a pet and named it after her.

Brunacci says she started using her daughter's training toilet after the scare in her third-floor apartment. And when she brushes her teeth, she said, "I'm looking over my shoulder."

I think there's more to the story than is being reported!

This story (which only received media attention because it involved Ellen DeGeneres) should serve as a remember that if you "adopt" what is called a "rescue" dog, it is not your dog:

The twisted dog tale began last month when DeGeneres and de Rossi adopted a cute, black Brussels Griffon mix terrier named Iggy. When Iggy wasn't able to get along with DeGeneres' cats, the couple gave the dog to DeGeneres' hairdresser.

That, Batkis pointed out, violated a written agreement de Rossi signed in which she agreed to return the dog to Mutts and Moms if the adoption didn't work out.

DeGeneres acknowledged she erred but said her hairdresser and her family shouldn't be punished.

"This is so insane," a calmer DeGeneres said on her talk show Wednesday. "It's just the dog needs to go to the family."

Batkis has refused to back down.

"If Ellen wants to place dogs and decide what's a good home, then she should start her own rescue group," she told "Inside Edition.""But I'm the one doing this and I know what I'm doing."

Meanwhile, the dispute has become a hot topic on news and talk shows.

"There's got to be some sort of rational compromise," ABC's Diane Sawyer said on "Good Morning America."

People who don't like the consequences should simply buy a dog. I bought Coco, and she is mine. I would not part with her for any reason I can think of, but if something awful happened (say, I was dying or in some kind of dire straits) and I couldn't keep her, I could give her away or sell her, and then she would be owned by someone else.

Nothing wrong with that. Or is there? According to a new system of recently manufactured morality, the ownership of animals is immoral, and instead of owning them, humans should henceforth only be allowed to become "guardians." This is a radical view of animals, and I have criticized it many times. However, there is a growing "guardian" movement, working largely under the radar to get various governments to change legal language in the hope that eventually, animal ownership will be abolished. (Yes, they even call themselves "abolitionists.")

Laugh all you want, but these people are activists devoted to their cause -- which means that their tireless efforts never cease.

I am not saying that all animal rescue organizations subscribe to this radical abolitionist ideology, but unfortunately many of them do. Whether it's merely a coincidence (or part of a two-pronged attack), the legal push for guardianship is accompanied by the constant (albeit indirect) promotion of the new morality. At this point, most animal shelters and rescue workers don't directly declare themselves to be against pet ownership. But they are determined to stop the breeding of dogs (AB 1634 is clear evidence that this idea alone has become mainstream thinking), and additionally they are rapidly reaching the point of unanimous opposition to the sale of dogs.

From a typical animal rescue web site:

"The number one resolution next to spay neutering is to abolish pet stores."

As the new "morality" becomes ascendant, that song will become little more than what it is in this link I found -- embarrassing evidence of an immoral system which allows the buying and selling of animals. Right now, pet stores that dare to sell dogs in this area are being treated like abortion clinics, and subjected to angry, emotional demonstrations like these.

And it's not just that dogs should not be sold in pet stores. They should not be sold anywhere -- nor should pet stores be allowed to sell pets (which are called "companion animals").

The opposition to pet store dogs is said to be based on the fact that pet store dogs come from "puppy mills" where dogs are abused and bred like cattle. Now, most caring and compassionate people would oppose puppy mill cruelty. (I certainly do.) But animal cruelty is already illegal, and the term "puppy mill" has become a foot in the door for condeming nearly all sales of dogs. Here's the HSUS:

You gaze into the sad eyes of the puppy in the pet store window, and you want to "rescue" the lonely pooch...

You read the ad in the newspaper, and the couple seems so trustworthy, with their decades of experience breeding dogs...

You find a website with photos of green hills and beautiful puppies that insists the "little darlings" and "bundles of joy" will only be sold to "loving families"...

Beware! A cruel, mass dog-breeding facility could hide behind each of these scenarios. Most likely, you've heard about them. The Humane Society of the United States calls them puppy mills, and for good reason.

Puppy mills will continue to operate until people stop buying their dogs. We urge you to visit your local shelter, where you are likely to find dozens of healthy, well-socialized puppies and adult dogs--including purebreds--just waiting for that special home--yours.

It must drive such people crazy that it is still legal in many areas to breed and sell dogs, because not only are they convinced it's immoral, they want to be in charge of all dogs.

Except that in the case of Ellen DeGeneres, they went a little too far, and it managed to get into the news. The initial outburst generated much sympathy for Ellen:

The calls got so bad that Marina Batkis said she had to close her business and stay home Wednesday, a day after DeGeneres broadcast a tearful, televised plea for the dog to be returned to her hairdresser and the woman's daughters.

"My life is being threatened. This is horrible," a tearful Batkis said outside her home.

Batkis and Vanessa Chekroun co-own Mutts and Moms, the nonprofit dog-rescue organization that gave DeGeneres and her partner, actress Portia de Rossi, the dog.

any sympathy Mutts and Moms owners Marina Batkis and Vanessa Chekroun had for DeGeneres has evaporated. The pair have reportedly received death threats since the show screened and are now taking a stand, insisting through their lawyer, that will not be bullied and Iggy will not be returned.

The American media, whipped into a frenzy by DeGeneres's tears, are now beginning to swing in behind Batkis and Chekroun, reporting on their distress, DeGeneres's clear breach of a contract, and clear Mutts and Moms rules that say small dogs can not go to families with young children.

Common sense suggests to me that a deal is a deal.

And if you want your own dog, go buy one.

(Better hurry while it's still legal!)

MORE: Via Glenn Reynolds, I read that when she got Socks, the White House cat, Hillary Clinton "lectured readers" that pets are an "adoption instead of an acquisition." Later, she dumped the cat on her secretary, who now has it.

It sounds as if Hillary thinks adopting an animal is less of a commitment than buying an animal.

I never really thought about it before, but I guess if it's not really yours, where's the commitment?

Of course, if I publish this, I'll look like someone who is obsessed with obsessive people who write obsessive laws, so maybe I should let it rot in oblivion like so many other posts. Besides, how can I be expected to solve a centuries-old theological dispute in a blog post?

So may the gods forgive my neglect of my obsession with obsessiveness! (While this is an awful dichotomy, I have decided to sail directly into the Scylla of "neurotic" obsessiveness as opposed to the Charybdis of "healthy" neglect.)

Anyway, regular readers know that I've often scratched my head over how the sin referred to as "sodomy" became more important than all other sins -- to the point where some people see sodomy theology as the overarching be-all of Christianity itself. Why the apparent obsession? And why did the same thing not happen with Judaism, which is after all said to be the source from which the original condemnation of homosexuality derived?

Don't expect to find the answer in the Bible. While a few references to same sex sin are there, they cannot be called obsessive by any rational standard. To find the obsessiveness, you have to go to medieval sources. Not just any old medieval sources, but the obsessed medieval priests and monks -- one of the most noteworthy being an 11th Century religious scholar named Peter Damian.

I stumbled onto Peter Damian while reading The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology by Mark D. Jordan. The author does a good job of explaining how "sodomy" became code language in which the name of a physical place evolved into unique form of condemnatory language of all people in all places and times who practiced certain behaviors (which, I'd add, have no logical connection to attempted angel rape actually described in the Bible). "Sodomy" as a term was a medieval creation -- and Peter Damian was its principal creator.

The more I read, the more it occurred to me that there might be a simple reason behind the development of the extreme animosity against homosexuality which found its way into Christian theology. For starters, guys like Damian were not ordinary people. He and others like him flagellated themselves regularly. This was called "the discipline." In an amazing leap of logic, he also devoted a good deal of time to "proving" that God can actually restore virginity (although Damian maintained it was "wicked" to ask whether God could actually undo the deed which caused the virginity to be lost.)

It occured to me that men drawn to living together in religious orders under vows of poverty and celibacy might tend to think about some sins more than other sins, for the simple reason that only certain sins would have been possible, much less present.

I mean, put yourself in their position: if you are living with people wearing the same primitive sack cloth attire, eating the same dull and uninspired foods, whipping yourself daily, surrounded by nothing worth stealing, no ordinary enemies to kill, no females to date, and no entertainment in the popular sense (like, say, killing Jews, or butting cats to death with your head), while your thoughts might not necessarily turn to having sex with your fellow flagellants, it could certainly be expected to happen in others, and it obviously did. A lot. And not only would those who did it have plenty of guilt to obsess over, but those who didn't could be expected to become even more obsessed with those who did.

Anyway, I never gave much thought to the plight of these medieval clerics before I read the book. Not that the author felt terribly sorry for them; I think he's mad at them over the fact that their theological distortions were written into Christian theology. True, the consequences are with us today in the form of the obsession with homosexuality that an occasional modern blogger like me will complain about, but I hardly think the obsessions of these medieval clerics should surprise anyone.

Even a critic of Jordan's book would seem to partially concede that point:

Why is it, asks Jordan, that so much energy is expended on denunciations of sodomy compared with the more lenient treatment of other sins in the medieval catalogue of vices, say, murder, usury, simony, or adultery?

Why, indeed. Medieval monastic and scholastic authors presumably had less pastoral experience than did the regular clergy with murder, adultery, and usury, or even with standard clerical sins such as simony, nicolaitism (clerical marriage), and concubinage. As members of male religious houses, however, Benedictine monks (like St. Peter Damian) had in common with Dominican friars (like Saints Albert and Thomas) a concern for the moral, spiritual, and psychological health of a same-sex religious community.

To whatever degree priests are actually more inclined to pederasty than anyone else, the association is not new, as the excerpt below indicates. Taken from an eleventh-century book-length invective against homosexuality among priests, the passage demonstrates that not only were homosexuality and pederasty common in the Middle Ages, but so little was being done about it that the author, Peter Damian, an Irishman, felt the need to speak out violently. His verbal assault is sweeping and relentless and, to the modern eye, somewhat comical. But despite his overblown rhetoric, Damian clearly believed that homosexuality and pederasty were the foremost faults with the medieval priesthood. Nine centuries of civilization have done little to erode the stereotype.

From The Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexual Practices by Peter Damian
translated by Pierre J. Payer

A Mournful Lament for the Soul Who Is Given over to the Filth of Impurity

O, I weep for you unfortunate soul, and from the depths of my heart I sigh over the lot of your destruction. I weep for you, I say, miserable soul who are given over to the filth of impurity. You are to be mourned indeed with a whole fountain of tears. What a pity! "Who will give to my head waters and my eyes a fountain of tears?" And this mournful voice is not now less suitably drawn from my sobbing self than was then spoken out of the prophetic mouth. I do not bewail the stone ramparts of a city fortified by towers, not the lower buildings of a temple made by hands; I do not lament the progress of a vile people taken into the captivity of the rule of the Babylonian king. My plaint is for the noble soul made in the image and likeness of God and joined with the most precious blood of Christ. It is brighter than many buildings, certainly to be preferred to all the heights of earthly construction. Therefore I especially lament the lapse of the soul and the destruction of the temple in which Christ had resided. O eyes wear yourselves out in crying aloud, overflow the rivers full of tears, water with continuous tears my sad, mournful face! . . .

Consider, O miserable one, how much darkness weighs on your soul; notice what thick, dark blindness engulfs you. Does the fury of lust impel you to the male sex? Has the madness of lust incited you to your own kind, that is, male to male? Does a [male] goat goaded by lust, ever sometimes leap on a [male] goat? Does a ram leap on a ram, maddened with the heat of sexual union?

In fact a stallion feeds calmly and peacefully with a stallion in one stall and when he sees a mare the sense of lust is immediately unleashed. Never does a bull petulantly desire a bull out of love for sexual union; never does a mule bray under the stimulant for sex with a mule. But ruined men do not fear to commit what the very brutes shrink from in horror. What is committed by the rashness of human depravity is condemned by the judgement of irrational animals.
Unmanned man, speak! Respond, effeminate man! What do you seek in a male which you cannot find in yourself? What sexual difference? What different physical lineaments? What softness? What tender, carnal attraction? What pleasant, smooth face? Let the vigour of the male appearance terrify you, I beseech you; your mind should abhor virile strength. In fact, it is the rule of natural appetite that each seek beyond himself what he cannot find within the cloister of his own faculty. Therefore, if contact with male flesh delights you, turn your hand to yourself. Know that whatever you do not find in yourself, you seek vainly in another [male] body. Woe to you, unfortunate soul, at whose ruin angels are saddened and whom the enemy insults with applause. You are made the prey of demons, the rape of the cruel, the spoils of wicked men. All your enemies open their mouths against you; they hiss and gnash their teeth. They say: "We have devoured her; this at last is the day we hoped for; we found it, we saw it."

The miserable flesh burns with the heat of lust; the cold mind trembles with the rancour of suspicion; and in the heart of the miserable man chaos boils like Tartarus. . . . In fact, after this most poisonous serpent once sinks its fangs into the unhappy soul, sense is snatched away, memory is borne off, the sharpness of the mind is obscured. It becomes unmindful of God and even forgetful of itself. This plague undermines the foundation of faith, weakens the strength of hope, destroys the bond of charity; it takes away justice, subverts fortitude, banishes temperance, blunts the keeness of prudence. And what more should I say since it expels the whole host of the virtues from the chamber of the human heart and introduces every barbarous vice as if the bolts of the doors were pulled out.

For it is this which violates sobriety, kills modesty, strangles chastity, and butchers irreparable virginity with the dagger of unclean contagion. It defiles everything, stains everything, pollutes everything. And as for itself, it permits nothing pure, nothing clean, nothing other than filth.

Not only does sodomitical practice defile everything again note the generality of Damian's word choice but it easily casts out the normative, permitting only things unclean. The threat of sodomy then is not simply a perversion or deviation of the norm but a full-scale displacement of the Same's instability onto the Other. Hence not only is sodomy itself irrational and able to conflate truth and error, but it is also a perversion so powerful that through it the normative social order and the reason subtending it can be overthrown and, ultimately, destroyed. Damian's statement is just as, if not more, revealing of the normative as it is of the deviant. From this perspective, the Liber Gomorrhianus divulges, probably unconsciously, the very state of the normative which its rhetorical, spiritual, and sexual politics attempt to occlude.

Well, there is a candidate for president who called homosexuality "the thermonuclear device--that is aimed at the soul of America," but I think that in general, such views are atypical today. Not merely because they're derived from medieval thinking, but because they're derived from atypical medieval thinking. I think that the people who wrote medieval "sodomy" theology that became Christian theology were truly tormented souls, personally obsessed with and quite possibly too close to the subject to write about it in an objective manner.

It is understandable in one sense that people obsess over things that matter to them personally. (After all, why would I be writing this post if it did not matter to me?) But why is it that obsessed emotional thinking tends to become dominant thinking on any particular subject to the point where logic and reason are crowded out? Are the vast majority of non-obsessed people like a bunch of sheep who are incapable of thinking for themselves?

A similar conflict of interest touches on why laws should not be -- but often are -- written by activists. Animal rights activists work for animal rights organizations and draft animal legislation. Environmentalists go to work for the EPA or Greenpeace and then draft environmental legislation. Members of identity groups write new laws calling for inclusion of their particular group. And so on.

I am getting so tired of writing about these things that I really ought to figure out how to take a break. But ignoring the obsessed does not stop them from obsessing, and ignoring activists does not stop activism. (Which means that every time I try to avoid obsessing over the obsessed activists, they draaag me back in!)

Seriously, if I can't fix gun control obsessions in Philadelphia, how the hell can I fix sodomy control obsessions in the early Middle Ages?

MORE: Not that it would matter much to anyone but a student of medieval theology, but according to Jordan, Damian sees sodomy as unique among sins because it is incapable of being repented (something Jordan sees as violative of Christian teaching):

Peter Damian's construction of sodomy renders it "as a sin that cannot be repented. [Damian's] conception violates the fundamental Christian teaching about sins of the flesh, namely, that they are always repentable. To conceive of a fleshly sin that cannot be repented is to set in motion an interminable dialectic. The dialectic can be stopped only by admitting that what has been categorized as an unrepentable fleshly sin is either not a sin or not fleshly."

If a criminal shoots a law abiding citizen, is that the fault of the NRA?

Coming from me, I know that will sound like a rhetorical question. But what's a rhetorical question for me is a genuine argument for someone else -- in this case a grief-stricken Philadelphia city official.

Among the organizers was city consumer advocate Lance Haver, whose son Daren Dieter, 24, was paralyzed by a gunman in West Oak Lane on Sept. 22 and who remains hospitalized at Albert Einstein Medical Center.

Pausing during the march, a tearful Haver said, "My son is lying in a hospital bed unable to move. He cannot move and cannot breathe, and it's because he was shot with an illegal handgun."

Haver said people should understand that "no young person who is shot and slaughtered has done anything to suggest that that should be their punishment."

Tyree Bohannon, 21, of the 6500 block of North Fairhill Street in East Oak Lane, has been charged in the shooting.

The goal of the rally was to "stop this from happening to anyone else," Haver said. "And to call attention to the fact that Daren was shot by someone he didn't know because our elected officials refused to stand up to the NRA."

(Emphasis added.)

I can only begin to imagine the pain and suffering that Mr. Haver and his son are going through. But still, the father is a city official making a very unfair accusation that simply defies analysis. What I want to know is this: by what logic can the murderous actions of a thug, with a criminal record, carrying an illegal handgun, be blamed on the refusal (by elected officials or anyone else) "to stand up to the NRA"?

As a member of the NRA, I can't but find the implications more than a little insulting. If elected officials are to blame for not standing up to the NRA, then the is NRA ultimately responsible, which means that I and all members share in the blame for this horrible crime.

I know this will sound redundant in light of the many blog posts I have written on the subject, but what gun law or laws could conceivably have prevented a criminal from shooting an unarmed law abiding citizen? Today's article lists the current demands of the gun control advocates:

[Former city managing director Phil Goldsmith] said that in 1995 state lawmakers passed legislation that took away the city's right to regulate handguns.

"And what we've seen since then is an increase in handguns and violent incidents on our streets," Goldsmith said.

Murders peaked at 503 in 1990 for a rate of 31.5 per 100,000, and they averaged around 400 a year for most of the nineties. In 2002 the murder count hit a low of 288, but by 2006 the annual total had surged to 406.

Back to the Inquirer:

He and others called on lawmakers to pass legislation requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen guns.

"This is not a radical suggestion. Connecticut has such a law. The state of New Jersey is about ready to pass such a law," Goldsmith said.

He said the measure had wide support throughout Pennsylvania.

Goldsmith also called for passage of legislation limiting handgun purchases to one a month. He said the majority of Pennsylvanians favored such a measure.

I understand that this is an awful crime, and that the father is grieving. But giving his argument every possible benefit of the doubt, I cannot come up with a logical theory under which his son would not have been shot by Tyree Bohannon had elected officials "stood up to the NRA," and the one-gun-per-month, mandatory reporting laws had been passed.

The argument simply boils down to saying that the NRA is responsible for urban gun crime, and I think it's outrageous. As a matter of fact, I'd be willing to bet that if the NRA had been allowed to appoint the judges, there'd be fewer criminals running around with illegal guns in the first place.

There is no question that criminals use guns. But the focus on guns almost always ignores the fact that criminals aren't allowed to have them, and that there are too many criminals walking around free.

Once again, 80% of the shootings are committed by people with criminal records. Why focus on guns they're already not allowed to have?

Wouldn't it be more productive to focus on the criminals than to blame the NRA?

In my post Treatment vs Recreation I looked at how the pharmaceutical industry has come to the rescue of the middle class by making a whole host of drugs that substitute for the illegal variety. I'd like to take another look at the subject Tim Wu brought up in his Slate article. The Class War aspect. Let me quote from Tim:

...the current program of drug legalization in the United States is closely and explicitly tied to the strange economics of the U.S. health-care industry. The consequence is that how people get their dopamine or other brain chemicals is ever more explicitly, like the rest of medicine, tied to questions of class.

Antidepressants and anxiety treatments aren't cheap: A fancy drug like Wellbutrin can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $2,400 a year. These drugs also require access to a sympathetic doctor who will issue a prescription. That's why, generally speaking, the new legalization program is for better-off Americans. As the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports, rich people tend to abuse prescription drugs, while poorer Americans tend to self-medicate with old-fashioned illegal drugs or just get drunk.

I don't see how in good conscience we can keep doing what we are doing. In fact I pointed it out in a number of articles such as Dr. John Beresford Has Passed where I look at the Nazi connection to the Drug War and How To Put an End to Drug Users where I make that connection even more explicit with a review of Drug Warriors and Their Prey by R.L. Miller. I show exactly how conscience has been buried. We prefer to look the other way and make all kinds of excuses rather than looking at exactly what we are doing. If we faced it, we would have to see ourselves as kinder and gentler Nazis. We don't do mass murder. We do mass incarceration. Not exactly a step up we should be proud of. What exactly is the difference between a war on Jews and a war on the poor? Beats the hell out of me.

HT Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Tim Wu at Slate is taking a look at a subject I have been discussing for years. The idea that illegal drugs do the very same things that legal drugs do. Treat what are called emotional problems.

Over the last two decades, the FDA has become increasingly open to drugs designed for the treatment of depression, pain, and anxiety--drugs that are, by their nature, likely to mimic the banned Schedule I narcotics. Part of this is the product of a well-documented relaxation of FDA practice that began under Clinton and has increased under Bush. But another part is the widespread public acceptance of the idea that the effects drug users have always been seeking in their illicit drugs--calmness, lack of pain, and bliss--are now "treatments" as opposed to recreation. We have reached a point at which it's commonly understood that when people snort cocaine because they're depressed or want to function better at work, that's drug trafficking; but taking antidepressants for similar purposes is practicing medicine.

This other drug legalization movement is an example of what theorists call legal avoision. As described by theorist Leon Katz, the idea is to reach "a forbidden outcome ... as a by-product of a permitted act." In a classic tax shelter, for instance, you do something perfectly legal (like investing in a business guaranteed to lose money) in order to reach a result that would otherwise be illegal (evading taxes). In the drug context, asking Congress to legalize cocaine or repeal the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 is a fool's errand. But it's far easier to invent a new drug, X, with similar effects to cocaine, and ask the FDA to approve it as a new antidepressant or anxiety treatment. That's avoision in practice.

Are the new pharmaceuticals really substitutes for narcotics? The question, of course, is what counts as a substitute, which can depend not just on chemistry but on how the drug in question is being used. But as a chemical matter the question seems simple: In general, pharmaceuticals do the same things to the brain that the illegal drugs do, though sometimes they do so more gently.

As many have pointed out, drugs like Ritalin and cocaine act in nearly the exact same manner: Both are dopamine enhancers that block the ability of neurons to reabsorb dopamine. As a 2001 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded, Ritalin "acts much like cocaine." It may go further than that: Another drug with similar effects is nicotine, leading Malcolm Gladwell to speculate in The New Yorker that both Ritalin and cocaine use are our substitutes for smoking cigarettes.

I think all together they make a pretty good case about why the pharmaceutical companies support the war on drugs. They don't want the competition from substances you can grow in your back yard or in your basement. As I put it in my post Addiction or Self Medication?:

It turns out that anxiety disorders are the most common mental health problem in the United States. They are worth $46 billion a year to the pharmaceutical industry. You don't suppose this fact has any thing to do with the pharmaceutical industries being in the forefront of the Drug Free America campaign do you? Of course not. They are just trying to keep you from being addicted to natural products at the cost of 1/10th of a cent per dose when they are more than willing to sell you an FDA and doctor approved, pharmacy sold product that will do the job for a dollar a dose. They have only your best interests at heart. Just ask their accountants.

And you thought it was because drugs were bad for you. Well they are. If you don't buy from the cartel you can go to jail.

HT Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Well, well, well. What do you know. The marks are starting to wise up. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Kyoto is socialism all the way. As I have been saying for a while, human caused global warming is Socialist Science. Let me let the Prime Minister tell it like it is.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper once called the Kyoto accord a "socialist scheme" designed to suck money out of rich countries, according to a letter leaked Tuesday by the Liberals.

The letter, posted on the federal Liberal party website, was apparently written by Harper in 2002, when he was leader of the now-defunct Canadian Alliance party.

He was writing to party supporters, asking for money as he prepared to fight then-prime minister Jean Chrétien on the proposed Kyoto accord.

"We're gearing up now for the biggest struggle our party has faced since you entrusted me with the leadership," Harper's letter says.

"I'm talking about the 'battle of Kyoto' -- our campaign to block the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto accord."

The Prime Minister goes on:

He writes that it's based on "tentative and contradictory scientific evidence" and it focuses on carbon dioxide, which is "essential to life."

He says Kyoto requires that Canada make significant cuts in emissions, while countries like Russia, India and China face less of a burden.

Under Kyoto, Canada was required to reduce emissions by six per cent by 2012, while economies in transition, like Russia, were allowed to choose different base years. As developing nations, China and India were exempted from binding targets for the first round of reductions.

"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations," Harper's letter reads.

He said the accord would cripple the oil and gas industries, which are essential to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

So much for history. How about some news.

OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government promised Tuesday to get tough with polluters, but it angered opposition parties with a throne speech that reiterated its intent to ignore the country's legally binding targets under the international Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Almost a decade ago I suggested that global warming would become a "gushing" source of political hypocrisy. So it has. Politicians and scientists constantly warn of the grim outlook, and the subject is on the agenda of the upcoming Group of Eight summit of world economic leaders. But all this sound and fury is mainly exhibitionism -- politicians pretending they're saving the planet. The truth is that, barring major technological advances, they can't (and won't) do much about global warming. It would be nice if they admitted that, though this seems unlikely.

Europe is the citadel of hypocrisy. Considering Europeans' contempt for the United States and George Bush for not embracing the Kyoto Protocol, you'd expect that they would have made major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions -- the purpose of Kyoto. Well, not exactly. From 1990 (Kyoto's base year for measuring changes) to 2002, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, increased 16.4 percent, reports the International Energy Agency. The U.S. increase was 16.7 percent, and most of Europe hasn't done much better.

Here are some IEA estimates of the increases: France, 6.9 percent; Italy, 8.3 percent; Greece, 28.2 percent; Ireland, 40.3 percent; the Netherlands, 13.2 percent; Portugal, 59 percent; Spain, 46.9 percent. It's true that Germany (down 13.3 percent) and Britain (a 5.5 percent decline) have made big reductions. But their cuts had nothing to do with Kyoto. After reunification in 1990, Germany closed many inefficient coal-fired plants in eastern Germany; that was a huge one-time saving. In Britain, the government had earlier decided to shift electric utilities from coal (high CO2 emissions) to plentiful natural gas (lower CO2 emissions).

Let me make it official then. Nobel Peace Laureate Al Gore is now officially a has been. He should than the Nobel Commission for the recognition.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Front Page Magazine has a self parody up in which they refer to American Fascism Awareness Day. I was taken in by the parody. So I wrote Ron Paul - Communist Sympathizer? The joke was on me. Why was I taken in? It seemed like so much I have read on lefty and Islamic fascist sites from the usual cast of characters. So I guess it is time to look at the real deal.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week coming to a campus near you starting October 22nd.

Beginning on October 22, student groups across the nation will hold Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on their campuses. These protest weeks will feature a series of events designed to bring a message to these academic communities that challenges most of what students are taught about the so-called War on Terror both in the classroom and on the quad.

The Week's events will include speeches about Islamo-Fascism by prominent figures, including former Senator Rick Santorum (Penn State, Temple and UPenn), Sean Hannity (Columbia), Ann Coulter (Tulane and USC), Dennis Prager (UC Santa Barbara), Robert Spencer (Brown, Dartmouth, University of Rhode Island, and DePaul), Daniel Pipes (Northeastern and UPenn), David Horowitz (Columbia, Emory, Ohio State, Michigan and Wisconsin), Michael Ledeen (Maryland), Nonie Darwish (UCLA and Berkeley), Wafa Sultan (Stanford) and radio talk show hosts Melanie Morgan (San Francisco State), Michael Medved (University of Washington), Martha Zoeller (Georgia Tech), Alan Nathan (George Mason), Mark Larson (to be named) and many others.

A major theme of the Week will be the oppression of women in Islam. The photo accompanying this article, which shows a teenage girl buried before being stoned to death for alleged sexual offenses, will serve as the poster for the protest Week. The stoning took place in Iran.

The plight of Muslim women will be featured at "teach-in" panels and also at sit-ins in Women's Studies Departments, designed to protest the absence of courses that focus on Islamic gynophobia. The silence of Women's Studies departments in the face of this oppression is a national outrage. College students are offered the opportunity to study the "oppression" of women in Boston and Beverly Hills in hundreds of Women's Studies courses across America. But there is not a single course we are aware of that addresses the real oppression of women in Teheran and Riyadh. In Saudi Arabia, to take one horrendous example, Saudi police recently shot to death schoolgirls who were fleeing a burning building without their veils. Better that they should be dead than seen. A pamphlet on the subject of women's oppression in Islam, written by Robert Spencer and Phyllis Chesler will be distributed on campuses (and posted on Frontpage next week), along with a petition protesting the campus blackout of this issue.

There seems to be a backlash against Angry Studies and PC on campus. This should shake up the professoriate. Good. Nothing like a bit of cognitive dissonance on the other side to give one a feeling of schadenfreude.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Front Page Magazine has a bit on Ron Paul's alignment with certain unsavory groups.

The campaign mounted by campus leftists against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which is scheduled to take place on more than 100 campuses during the week of October 22-26 has taken a new turn with the announcement of a counter-protest at the Washington Monument. The protest, which will be called "American Fascism Awareness Day" is being organized by Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Students for Justice In Palestine, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee among others and will feature speakers such as congressman Dennis Kucinich and presidential candidate Ron Paul, anti-war activists Cindy Sheehan and Harry Karry and actor Sean Penn. According to a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party, one of the sponsors of the event, "This is an answer to the Jew Horowitz and the neo-conservative Zionists who dragged us into an imperialist war in Iraq and are spreading hatred against Muslims to support their war plans against the Republic of Iran."

HT Reference Frame commenter Larry R.

Update: It looks like I have been hoaxed. The "flyer" for the event lists Nov. 31st as the date of the event. There is no Nov. 31st on any calendar. I still stand by my point that the Libs have taken the Communist line on Foreign Policy. HT commenter Grant at Power and Control.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

After mentioning the wiretapping, and plans of violence against Iran, Glenn Reynolds states that Hillary Clinton is "like President Cheney, only with hair!"

Well, I am proud to say that this is not a new subject at this blog.

And not a new look (although I guess it is a new one for Hillary):

This makes me feel a bit sorry for President Cheney, though. Because in real life, not only did he never have hair like Hillary, but he never had her matching Hsus.

(Without the hair or the Hsus, little wonder he can't be president.)

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

While I am sorry that Glenn found this disturbing, what I find most disturbing is his reference to "Hillary Milhous Clinton."

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. Some images are too disturbing to contemplate.

When Glenn Reynolds linked my PINO CHE T shirt design post, he commented that it had the potential to "create all sorts of amusing commotion." I assumed Glenn meant political commotion, but the commotion which has happened so far is copyright commotion.

While copyright commotion can be amusing, it can also be annoying. Anyway, when I uploaded the design to a leading T-shirt designer, everything seemed to work, and I was actually given a URL where the T-shirt could be sold. No big deal there. I thought all was well, and I put the link in my post so people could order it.

But last night, I got the following email from the T-shirt company:

We recently learned that your CafePress.com account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, designing, manufacturing, marketing and/or selling products that may infringe the rights of a third party, including, copyrights (e.g., an image of a television cartoon character), trademarks (e.g., the logo of a company), "rights in gross" (e.g., the exclusive right of the U.S. Olympic Committee to use the "Olympic Rings"), and rights of privacy and publicity (e.g., a photo of a celebrity) are prohibited.

Accordingly, we have set the content that we believe to be questionable to "pending status" which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public.

So I wonder what is going on.

I'd hate to think that Che or his photographer are trying to censor me from beyond the grave!

MORE: The copyright parody plot thickens. Commenter Meleva suggested I go into cafepress and search for famous images, which I did.

Considering they sell t-shirts featuring the original Korda photograph like this one (from which the rest are derivative), obviously that's not the copyright issue that's causing the commotion.

Furthermore, they also feature t-shirts featuring the same Pinochet image on which I based the design!

So I'm more confused than ever. If neither image alone has copyright problems, then what's behind the commotion?

MORE: As I suspected, the Korda image is the problem. I just received this reply to my request for an explanation:

Thank you for contacting CafePress.com!

Unfortunately we have pended your Korda Che Guevara based image. Please understand that we feel Che is a political figure and that it is appropriate to use original, public domain or licensed images of Che on the CafePress.com Web site, however, the Korda Che Guevara image is a photograph that is protected by copyright laws and use of the actual image, or any derivatives can be viewed as copyright infringement.
We have been in contact with the attorney for the Korda estate, and below please find his contact information. We are more than happy to allow you to use the image if you obtain permission.
Maitre Randy Yolaz
Cabinet D'Avocats - Law Offices
17, Bis Avenue Foch
75116 Paris France
Tel: +33 1.40.67.99.10
Fax: +33 1.45.00.69.66
Sorry for the inconvenience. Once again, we do view Che as a political figure and allow pro or anti Che merchandise, however, your particular image is too similar to the original Korda photograph. Please note that merely altering the image is not sufficient, you need to create your own original work and it cannot resemble the unique features of the Korda photograph.

The Wiki entry for the Korda photo provides some background on the copyright issue. As Cuba was a non-signatory to the Berne convention, the image was widely reproduced for 40 years without any copyright protection. (Castro consider stated that he considered copyright law "imperialist bullshit," but he seemed to change his tune in 1997.) A couple of years later, Korda was upset by a Smirnoff vodka ad and sued in Britain, where he won a $50,000 judgment. Here's a brief summary:

A recent international case dealt with this: a Cuban photographer (Alberto Korda) took many pictures of Ché Guevara (never taking public credit for them), and for years allowed anyone who wanted to use them to do so (because he felt that it immortalized Ché, as well as the Cuban revolution). A few years ago, Smirnoff vodka used some of these images in an ad campaign; the photographer did not like this, and complained about copyright infringement. Seagram's (the company that makes Smirnoff) countered that the photographer had allowed the copyrights to fall into public domain because he had made no attempt to stop the many people who had used the images before without asking permission. By strictest interpretation, they were right (the pictures were made pre-Berne, they were never registered, no notice of copyright had ever been given, and world-wide use had been allowed with no attempt to stop or even notify the infringers), but the government of Cuba put some pressure on the English government to protect the copyrights. In a purely political move, Seagram's backed down, but all this says is that if you don't have the backing of a large governmental agency, you can possibly lose your copyrights to public domain.

I'd be willing to bet that they'll never dare sue ThoseShirts.com, because they'd certainly lose in any United States court. (Those cowardly British courts. Again!)

The more I thought about Cafe Press's attitude, the more annoyed I became.

Next I discovered that I am not alone. Cafe Press also censored The People's Cube for this "infringement":

Not only is it pure parody, it doesn't even resemble the Korda photo. Moreover, The People's Cube documents countless instances of parodies of corporate logos none of which Cafe Press is interested in protecting.

What a priceless double standard.

Parody capitalismo sí!

Parody communismo no!

And in what I think is a priceless act of retaliation, The People's Cube now has their own Cafe Press Parody Site!

UPDATE: The official PINO CHE T is now for sale here!

UPDATE (10/19/07): The Printfection link will no longer work, so (only after great reluctance) I redesigned the T-shirt yet again, minus the Korda design which upset the companies. It is now for sale at Cafe Press.

PLEASE NOTE: The above is not the Korda image, nor is it derived from it.

However, it remains my opinion that the Korda image is in the public domain, and that in any event it may be freely parodied.

Is Classical Liberalism dead in today's Republican Party?

The reason I'm asking is that it often seems that way to me. I'm thinking that the Wikipedia's attempt to call it "conservatism" may therefore be in error.

From the Wiki entry, a brief definition of Classical liberalism:

a doctrine stressing the importance of human rationality, individual property rights, natural rights, the protection of civil liberties, constitutional limitations of government, free markets, and individual freedom from restraint as exemplified in the writings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill,[3], Montesquieu, Voltaire [4] and others. As such, it is seen as the fusion of economic liberalism with political liberalism.[5] The "normative core" of classical liberalism is the idea that laissez-faire economics will bring about a spontaneous order or invisible hand that benefits the society,[6] though it does not necessarily oppose the state's provision of a few basic public goods that the market is seen as being incapable of providing.[7] The qualification classical was applied in retrospect to distinguish early nineteenth-century liberalism from the "new liberalism" associated with Thomas Hill Green, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse,[8] and Franklin D. Roosevelt,[9] which grants a more interventionist role for the state. Classical liberalism is not to be confused with the ideology that is commonly called "liberalism" today in the United States, as classical liberalism is actually closer to being a tendency of "conservativism" in the U.S.[10]

If this poll is correct, times are changing:

The overseas earnings of large US companies may well be shielding the US economy from a recession at a time when the housing market is in a steep slump but voters of the traditionally pro-business Republican Party, by a nearly two-to-one margin, believe free trade is bad for the US economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president.

A new Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll shows a fraying of Republican Party orthodoxy on the economy. While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it's time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.

Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad for the US and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favoured tougher regulations to limit foreign imports. The Journal says that represents a challenge for Republican candidates who generally echo President Bush's calls for continued trade expansion, and reflects a substantial shift in sentiment from eight years ago.

Is Classical liberalism dead?

I hope not. (And after all, you can't kill a theory, so in the technical sense it will never die.) What worries me, though, is that Classical liberalism may be close to dead in the Republican Party. Ironically, its executioner (or at least the guy who's hammering in the coffin nails) would seem to be its staunchest proponent -- Ron Paul. While there is no logical relationship between economic policies and support or opposition to the War in Iraq, human thought tends to become contaminated by juxtapositional associations -- especially when people are in a hurry (or mentally overloaded). Like it or not, Ron Paul's strident opposition to the war is being indelibly associated with his equally strident economic laissez faire advocacy. Few people take the time to sort these things out and ask whether he might be partially right. Instead, they dismiss him as a loon. And with him, they dismiss Classical liberalism.

As a Classical liberal (or small "l" libertarian, "civil societarian," or whatever you might call it), I hate to see this happening.

Parenthetically, this touches on why I think Alan Keyes should be included in the debates. It seems only fair (if not fair, at least symmetrical) that someone should be doing to social conservatism what Ron Paul is doing to libertarianism. Besides, there are people in the party who agree with Keyes, just as there are people in the party who agree with Paul.

And, just as there are plenty of social conservatives who disagree with Keyes, so there are plenty of libertarians who disagree with Paul. Why does the "kook" phenomenon have to be linked in the debates only to libertarianism?

Anyway, I'm sorry to see clear evidence that the Republican party rank and file have become so accepting of statism, because the Democrats offer no alternative at all. Whether it takes the form the welfare state, the nanny state, or the big government conservatism state, I worry that the country is headed for populist totalitarianism with mutual consent of both parties.

No doubt there will be plenty of "triangulation" on both sides.

MORE: Fred Thompson speaks out against triangulation:

"Some think the way to beat the Democrats in November is to be more like them. I could not disagree more," the one-time Tennessee senator says in remarks he is to deliver to the Conservative Party of New York.

"I believe that conservatives beat liberals only when we challenge their outdated positions, not embrace them. This is not a time for philosophical flexibility, it is a time to stand up for what we believe in," Thompson adds.

(Not to confuse an already confused issue, but I should point out that there is also such a thing as neoclassical liberalism.)

UPDATE: Oregon Guy has an interesting post on the submission curve. (This one's good too.)

Can identity politics ever destroy identity politics?

Glenn Reynolds earlier linked a perfect example of the cannibalistic nature of identity politics:

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

But because Massad's crackpot view of sexuality is in the tradition of the "anti-Orientalist" Edward Said, he must be taken seriously:

It becomes clear why Massad views gay-identifying Arab men with such scorn. In his mind, they have become willing victims of colonization. That's why Massad tacitly supports Middle Eastern governments' crackdown on organized gay political activity: He sees this repression as a legitimate expression of anti-colonialism. "It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness that these gay-identified men seek." Thus, Arab gays (or, to use Massad's terminology, "so-called 'gays' ") should not identify as such, because to do so is accepting Western cultural hegemony. Massad even throws in a swipe at the "U.S.-based anti-Arab British Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya," a strong supporter of the Iraq war, for his alleged attempt to include protections in the new Iraqi constitution for homosexuals. How dare these men fight for their dignity as homosexuals!

It is true that the current understanding of "gay identity" is a relatively new concept, formed by Western thinkers over the past century years. This does not mean, however, as Massad contends, that a gay identity is inherently Western. The increasing acceptance of homosexuality as an acceptable way of life is a fruit of Western liberalism, but so is equality for women. Just because these notions originated in the West does not also mean that gays around the world do not also yearn for them or deserve them. But that is the logic of Joseph Massad.

Does this mean the executioners who put the rope around their neck are their cultural "betters"?

I suspect that what drives Massad is not homophobia, but what Dean Esmay calls Americaphobia:

Americaphobia: it's as real as Islamophobia, but too many Muslims are too stupid to recognize this reality.

The crazier these things get, the more people just want to be left alone.

But sometimes, the right to be left alone requires a fight. I don't care whether the people Massad is talking about are "gay," or "homosexual," or "bisexual," or just men who for whatever reason like having occasional sex with men. The fact is, they are not free to do what they want to do. No amount of post-modernist analysis is going to change that ugly fact.

They are therefore going to look to the West, and to America. To argue against that constitutes religious bigotry, as well as Americaphobia.

Far from excusing the former, the latter only makes it worse.

There are some people who relentlessly believe that the opinions at sites like WorldNetDaily constitute facts, and RedState's Bob Frazier seems to be one of them:

Is this country going mad?

""Mom and Dad" as well as "husband and wife" have been banned from California schools under a bill signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who with his signature also ordered public schools to allow boys to use girls restrooms and locker rooms, and vice versa, if they choose."

So reports World Net Daily. Funny, it does not seem to be getting a lot of "airplay" in the Main Street Media. This is a group of state bills signed by Arnold the terminator. For those of you who supported Arnold over McClintock because "he was electable" the chickens are now coming home to roost. (Is there a lesson here?)

The bills include SB777, which bans anything in public schools that could be interpreted as "negative" toward homosexuality, bisexuality and other "alternative lifestyle choices." There are no similar protections for students with traditional or conservative lifestyles and beliefs, however.

These are WorldNetDaily's opinions about how the bill might be interpreted.

Here are the relevant passages which seem to have especially irritated religious conservatives:

SECTION 1. Section 200 of the Education Code is amended to read:
200. It is the policy of the State of California to afford all persons in public schools, regardless of their sex, ethnic group identification, race, national origin, religion, mental or physical disability, or regardless of any actual or perceived disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic that is contained in the definition of hate crimes set forth in Section 422.55 of the Penal Code, equal rights and opportunities in the educational institutions of the state. The purpose of this chapter is to prohibit acts which are contrary to that policy and to provide
remedies therefor.

[...]

51500. No teacher shall give instruction nor shall a school district sponsor any activity which that reflects adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry a characteristic listed in Section 220 .
SEC. 16. Section 51501 of the Education Code is amended to read:
51501. No textbook, or other instructional materials shall be adopted by the state board State Board or by any governing board for use in the public schools which that contains any matter reflecting adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry a
characteristic listed in Section 220 .
SEC. 17. Section 60044 of the Education Code is amended to read:
60044. No instructional materials shall be adopted by any governing board for use in the schools which that , in its determination, contains:

(a) Any matter reflecting adversely upon persons because of their race, color, creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, handicap, or occupation a characteristic listed in Section 220 .
(b) Any sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda
contrary to law.

Sigh.

SB 777 appears to be a rehash of SB 1437 (vetoed by Schwarzenegger last year), which basically adds "sexual orientation" and "gender" to the list of protected categories. The same arguments were made over that incarnation of the bill, and I addressed them then, so rather than recreate them, I'll just repeat myself:

I don't think government should be dictating the content of textbooks, because that opens the door for various identity politics activist crackpots to complain that something "reflects adversely" on their group.

However, notice that religion and sexual orientation are treated equally. That means angry fundamentalist activists would have just as much right to maintain that school activities or statements in the textbooks reflect adversely upon them as would angry gay activists.

[...]

I am not clear on how forbidding the adoption of material that reflects adversely on a sexual lifestyle requires promotion of it -- any more than forbidding the adoption of material reflecting adversely on a religion mandates promotion of that religion.

In logic, possible interpretations of a law are not the same thing as what the text of the law says, and these two things should be distinguished. WorldNetDaily is making a huge stretch in reporting what might happen as what would happen.

Of course, we can argue whether it's important to differentiate between opinion and fact. I think it is important -- even in blogging. But in news reporting, I think it is more important, and WorldNetDaily describes itself as a newssite. As such, I think it is fair to at least try to hold them to the same standard to which I hold the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I can't help notice that in last year's post I was complaining that the whole things was giving me blogger burnout. (Even the title was "An inside look at blogger burnout.")

Well my blogger burnout is back!

And this time, I'm so burned out that I'm just about ready to climb to the top of Brokeback Burnout Mountain and proudly proclaim my perpetual burnout to the world.

(A good thing really, because with an election just around the corner only a year from now, I probably ought to keep the fires of my blogger burnout burning on the back burner.)

There are several million embryos frozen in liquid nitrogen. I propose we thaw them all, right now and let their life continue. It is immoral to keep them frozen. They are being imprisoned without due process. It's unConstitutional. End the prisons for children at once. Thaw the embryos.

Prompted by Jaw-Dropping Demagoguery and Can Rudy Talk The Pro-Life Crowd Into His Corner?

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Is how Ed Morrissey describes Alan Keyes' CLC speech from Saturday night:

....He made an intriguing claim that the preamble of the Constitution forbids abortion in its mandate to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". In this, Keyes claims to have found the language forbidding abortion that Justice Blackmun insisted he sought during Roe, because "posterity" refers to those yet to come -- which would include unborn children necessarily. Websters defines "posterity" as "the offspring of one progenitor to the furthest generation" and "all future generations," and Keyes says the framers understood exactly what they meant when they wrote that passage.

With that understanding, Keyes engaged in some jaw-dropping demagoguery. He claimed that Giuliani's pro-choice standing put him in the "pro-slavery position". That's ridiculous on its face. First, the language of the preamble did not forbid slavery; it took the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to accomplish that. Second, in no way could anyone accuse Giuliani of being "pro-slavery". It's as though Keyes read the Constitution and decided that one has to go all the way to Z as a consequence of moving from A to B. It's absurd.

After that, he talked about Mitt Romney being "the devil with the mask on," and Rudy as "the devil with the mask off." Fred Thompson wears masks, too, because he made a living as an actor. Don't talk about Reagan being an actor, though, because Keyes says that Reagan had "character" while Thompson does not. How he makes this distinction, Keyes didn't elaborate, but it seems somewhat daft considering Reagan was an actor by training, while Fred's acting career was a lark that paid off.

Devils and traitors populate Keyes' world to a degree not known by most rational people....

There's nothing new about Keyes' "slavery" argument. I've addressed it before, and it doesn't just arise in the context of abortion. Homosexuality is often analogized to slavery (in fact a persistent commenter argues that allowing consensual sex is like allowing slavery). Regarding homosexuality, Keyes goes even further than slavery; he calls it "the thermonuclear device--that is aimed at the soul of America," and "a direct repudiation of our most important principles." (Pretty strong stuff, but the man really and truly believes that opposition to homosexuality lies at the foundation not only of America, but of all morality.)

I'll say this for Keyes; by sticking to the slavery analogy, at least he didn't accuse Giuliani and Romney of committing nuclear genocide against our founding principles.

Nor, significantly, did he accuse his fellow Republicans of being like Hitler. Or Himmler....

(Maybe the invocation of slavery is "Godwin Lite....")

AFTERTHOUGHT: Does my advocacy of tolerance for the Keyesians violate the rule against tolerating intolerance? Any thoughts?

(Maybe I should worry over whether the top of the Empire State building should be lit up in green despite the fact that there probably won't be reciprocal Christmas lights in Mecca.)

The Berkeley Daily Planet has a post up from US Marine Corps Captain Richard Lund in response to the Code Pink demonstration in front of the Marine Corps recruiting office in Bezerkeley, California.

First, a little bit about who I am: I am a Marine captain with over eight years of service as a commissioned officer. I flew transport helicopters for most of my time in the Marine Corps before requesting orders to come here. Currently, I am the officer selection officer for the northern Bay Area. My job is to recruit, interview, screen, and evaluate college students and college graduates that show an interest in becoming officers in the Marine Corps. Once they've committed to pursuing this program, I help them apply, and if selected, I help them prepare for the rigors of Officer Candidate School and for the challenges of life as a Marine officer. To be eligible for my programs, you have to be either a full-time college student or a college graduate. I don't pull anyone out of school, and high school students are not eligible.

I moved my office to Berkeley in December of last year. Previously, it was located in an old federal building in Alameda. That building was due to be torn down and I had to find a new location. I choose our new site because of its proximity to UC Berkeley and to the BART station. Most of the candidates in my program either go to Cal or to one of the schools in San Francisco, the East Bay, or the North Bay. Logistically, the Shattuck Square location was the most convenient for them.

Next, you claim that I lie. I have never, and will never, lie to any individual that shows an interest in my programs. I am upfront with everything that is involved at every step of the way and I go out of my way to ensure that they know what to expect when they apply. I tell them that this is not an easy path. I tell them that leading Marines requires a great deal of self-sacrifice. I tell them that, should they succeed in their quest to become a Marine officer, they will almost certainly go to Iraq. In the future, if you plan to attack my integrity, please have the courtesy to explain to me specifically the instances in which you think that I lied.

Semper Fi

H/T Zombie Time from a link at LGF

BTW if some one can direct me to the author and exact form of the "Every country will have a military..." I'd appreciate it.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

A good one, from 8-27-72!

(Grateful Dead, of course.)

Explanation (well, sort of, if you really must):

In Garcia, Charles Reich questions Garcia about "Dark Star.":

REICH: Well then if we wanted to talk about "Dark Star," uh, could you say anything about where it comes from?
[GARCIA]: You gotta remember that you and I are talking about two different "Dark Stars." You're talking about the "Dark Star" which you have heard formalized on a record, and I'm talking about the "Dark Star" which I have heard in each performance as a completely improvised piece over a long period of time. So I have a long continuum of "Dark Star" which range in character from each other to real different extremes. "Dark Star" has meant, while I'm playing it, almost as many things as I can sit here and imagine, so all I can do is talk about "Dark Star" as a playing experience.
REICH: Well, yeah, talk about it a little.
[GARCIA]: I can't. It talks about itself.
(pp. 84, 85.)

"Sometimes I just count the scales of the dragon," said Garcia, in apparent agreement.

Sometimes I could see the dragon breathe. But maybe I was only feeling it move and maybe my senses were crossed.

Glenn Reynolds' link to Samizdata's Quote of the Day reminded me that I had missed the 40th anniversary of the Che Guevara's death:

I belong to a Facebook group called "Che Guevara was a murderer and your T-Shirt is not cool". It has 10,935 members. It's not nearly enough. To celebrate the anniversary of his death, why not join up and get on the right side of history?

Marc Sidwell also supplied a link to this t-shirt, which is a good way to remember the beloved murderer so many foolish people imagine to be "cool."

I was reminded of a t-shirt I designed (but alas never made), which I thought would probably annoy the Commies more than it would any other group.

I called it the PINO-CHE "T" -- and now that they're both dead, it seemed like a good time to resurrect it.

As I said at the time,

I mean no offense to the victims of either of these two men, as it is not my intent to glorify them. Only offer a little perspective.

(And symmetrical ridicule.)

Tou Che!

But if you've gotta go, I can think of worse things to do than laughing at Che Guevara on your way out.

MORE: Don't miss "The BBC's vile infatuation with Che Guevara" -- which begins with this especially vile quote from Che:

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary... These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."
Che Guevara

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, especially his comment that it "could create all sorts of amusing commotion."

Of course, Glenn has a long history of creating t-shirt commotion, and no doubt the t-shirt humor police will note this latest outburst of politically incorrect shamelessness.

Humor on certain subjects is of course verboten!

MORE: I can't help noticing that Glenn is pictured here (at the bottom of the page), wearing the t-shirt that made such a commotion in the politburo of akademia.

I just tried uploading my design there, but "file uploads are temporarily disabled."

AND MORE: Finally figured it out. The PINO CHE T-shirt is for sale here!

It looks like this:

Go ahead. Outrage your commie friends!

UPDATE: The commotion Glenn predicted seems to be starting (although it's not the type of commotion I expected). More here.

Tim Ventura has a 53 minute audio interview of Fusion Pioneer Dr. Robert Bussard at his site American Anti-Gravity. Let me give you a bit of what Tim has to say.

In our exclusive interview, Bussard describes the disenchantment with big-science Tokamak research that led him to return to the roots of Farnsworth-style fusion in the "Polywell" project that he initiated in 1986. Funded for over 20 years by the Department of the Navy, Bussard's EMC2 corporation was tasked with solving 19 fundamental challenges that stood in the way of designing commercially viable Farnsworth fusors - and in an unexpected twist, a race to bring the prototype online after project funding was cut in 2006.

Never straying far from the dream of manned spaceflight, Bussard's Polywell design is exceptional in being not only designed for high-efficiency, but also for portability - making it perfect for not only the Navy's intended use in powering ocean vessels and submarines, but also for providing high output thrust for proposed nuclear space-applications. Bussard's first intended application was an 8-foot diameter naval reactor capable of generating 100-megawatts of output energy, with the ultimate goal of using these reactors in high-velocity transorbital spacecraft capable of reaching the moon in less than 8 hours time.

Let me add that the US Navy funded Dr. Bussard's research this past August, about two months before he died. Two scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratories, one a long time friend of Dr. Bussard's, continue the work.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Remember in the good old days of the Cold War, when political analysts in this country used to play Kremlinologist? The Soviet leadership would line up on the reviewing stand of the Lenin Mausoleum (especially on Mayday) to watch men and missiles on parade, and the slightest details were watched avidly. For "signs." And "clues." Who was now standing closest to Brezhnev? What did that mean when Kosygin was seen looking skyward for an instant when Brezhnev paused for effect? And why did Defense Minister Ustinov slightly raise his eyebrow?

Yes, those were the happy days!

While he was not talking about Kremlinologists, Sean Kinsell made me feel an outburst of nostalgia:

...everything she says or does is examined to death, by friend and foe alike, for what it might indicate about her emergent Hillaryness. Of course, every politician makes tossed-off comments or clothing choices that get overworked in the media, but with Hillary the enterprise reaches a whole new level. Some sources speculate that Clinton's newest shade from Clairol suggests her commitment to the reconstruction of Iraq is less than sincere.... I understand that there are reasons for it--she may lack Bill's charisma, but in her own weird way, she may be just as compelling a figure. A lot of her fans seem to think she's some kind of saint, and a lot of her detractors seem to hate her more than they do Satan.

Mere mortal than I am, even I occasionally can't resist the temptation.

I kept my trap shut during the Media Matters-fueled attacks on Rush Limbaugh because it was obvious to me what he meant by the "phony soldiers" remark, and equally obvious that paid professional Rush watchers can do wonders by taking a few words out of their overall context. By its nature, talk radio cannot withstand textual analysis, because the shows consist of hours of daily spontaneous remarks. Considering the number of mistakes and inadvertent omissions I make when I'm writing, and the voluminous nature of my remarks (many of which are intended as satire), and considering the way new readers misconstrue what I say, I shudder to think what a paid professional antagonist could do if I vented freely on the air for hours each day. I'd probably be left saying, "I didn' t say that! And if I did I meant precisely the opposite!"

On the other hand, I'm not a Limbaugh fan. So the Limbaugh matter failed to excite me. People can yell and scream and misconstrue him, demand that he be taken off the air, and it probably helps his ratings overall.

However, there is one aspect of the Limbaugh matter that cannot be ignored, and it isn't Hillary's Media Matters stuff. When the government -- in the form of a number of members of the United States Senate -- ratified the Media Matters accusations and coupled them with demands on official stationery, they came pretty close to violating their oath of office. (The latter requires them to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" and "bear true faith and allegiance to the same.") I think accusations and demands sent to a radio executive based on no more than the alleged content of protected political speech constitute something less than full truth and allegiance to the First Amendment to the Constitution. Maybe I should grateful that they stopped short of passing a law regulating what Rush Limbaugh is and is not allowed to say, but haven't these Senators heard of a thing called the chilling effect on free speech? (Imagine the outcry if a group of Republican Senators had sent a similar letter to the employer of a left-wing radio commentator who had upset them!) Anyway, whether they like it or not, these people are charged with protecting free speech, not chilling it. I think they've abused their position and damned themselves as enemies of free speech. Any remark made by Rush Limbaugh (who is simply sounding off) pales in comparison to a government letter like the above.

Had the letter only been signed by a few ideologues like Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, or Bernie Sanders it wouldn't be as big a deal.

What makes it a big deal is the signature of Hillary, because this makes it Hillary's letter to Rush. She is running for president, and unless the GOP does the impossible gets its act together, she'll win.

In the letter, Hillary claims that Rush's remarks were "an outrage" and an "affront" which was "beyond the pale":

Although Americans of goodwill debate the merits of this war, we can all agree that those who serve with such great courage deserve our deepest respect and gratitude. That is why Rush Limbaugh's recent characterization of troops who oppose the war as "phony soldiers" is such an outrage.

Our troops are fighting and dying to bring to others the freedoms that many take for granted. It is unconscionable that Mr. Limbaugh would criticize them for exercising the fundamentally American right to free speech. Mr. Limbaugh has made outrageous remarks before, but this affront to our soldiers is beyond the pale.

I remember the uniform ban claim quite well, and I first heard about it during the frenzied debate over gays in the military. Looking back, it would be nice to know what really happened, but all I can see right now is the claim by Patterson (who worked as an Air Force aide in the Clinton White House) on one side, countered by angry denials on the other. The reason I wanted to know then and still want to know now is that it once worried me that so many of the people who were pushing for gays in the military -- a cause I strongly supported at the time as I do now -- were anti-military. (I'm a very cynical person, but the idea that patriotic gays who wanted to serve in the military might be used as political fodder to hurt the military upset me enormously. Perhaps to the depths of my soul, if such things be....)

So I'd still like to know. If the First Lady tried to keep uniforms out of the White House, it is at least as relevant now as it was then. Because, you know, it might have significance beyond the Limbaugh letter.

Geez, was I getting serious there? Forgive me. I started out trying to be humorous and nostalgic.

Perhaps I should return to the signature of Hillary. Might there be hidden meanings expressed in the signature itself that haven't been thoroughly explored and dissected?

Here's the Limbaugh letter signature:

The "Clinton" part of her name is distant, and clearly running off to the right, as if written in as an afterthought. The "Hillary Rodham" part looks like a normal signature, while the "Clinton" appears added. Furthermore, "Hillary Rodham" runs along the same line, while "Clinton" is slightly elevated.

Notice particularly the gap between "Rodham" and "Clinton."

Signatures from a few years ago not only align perfectly, but there's no gap between "Rodham" and "Clinton." Here are three typical examples:

What really deepens the mystery is that an autograph dealer states that she no longer signs her name that way:

An Invitation to the White House oversized coffee table book autographed on the inside cover in black marker with a legible FULL NAME Hillary Rodham Clinton signature that she no longer signs. Her current shorthand signature is much less legible.

A psychoanalyst I am not (nor am I a paid professional Hillary watcher). But it does occur to me that there might be an element of passive aggressiveness in the Limbaugh letter "afterthought" signature, especially the Rodham-Clinton gap. Many have long suspected that she'd love to ditch the Clinton, and not in name only. But for political reasons, she can't. So she may be feeling torn, and it would not surprise me if she has mixed feelings about returning to the White House with Bill. Would they actually live together? Again?

Not that it would really matter to anyone except a nostalgic Clintonologist.

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds and Extreme Mortman something to add to the nostalgia mix (and related to competitive victimology) is the question of whether black women should support Obama as a black candidate, or Hillary as a woman with historically significant hair:

Clinton won Bell's undying support in part by playing on her femininity. In addition to the policy pronouncements she gave during the keynote at a black hairdressers' convention this summer, Clinton ran through a slide show of her hairstyles through the years.

A long bob with short bangs.

A short bob with tall 1980s bangs.

A mini-bouffant as a brunette.

A straight slick cut hitting at the chin.

"Go 'head, woman," someone in the audience said. "You've got more power than any woman in this whole world."

Glenn also links Ann Althouse's discussion of fading memory (on which Andrew Sullivan has more). Althouse notes the incredibly condescending nature of the discussion:

I'm vaguely horrified by this discussion of black female political thought. As the NYT article tells it, it seems that black women vote based on whether they feel more like a mother or a sexual partner to the candidate (or the candidate's spouse) -- with a dollop of religious inanity stirred in.

(Oh, I forgot. The media "discussion" is part of the campaign, dummy!)

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link! And welcome fellow Kremlintonologists. (Did I spell that right? I keep making hair-raising mistakes.)

My friend linearthinker liked my post on Practicing Chaos so much he decided to add some thoughts of his own.

"The difficulty in planning against American doctrine is that Americans neither see fit to follow their doctrine nor even read their manuals." KGB Document

The KGB demonstrated incredible perception. The day-to-day activities recollected from roughly 30 years in the Federal bureaucracy bear out the truth in their statement. Must have been hell for the Soviets, until they realized what they were up against, and by then it was probably too late. One could paraphrase Churchill endlessly on the frustrations one encountered almost daily while coping with the bureaucracy, citing for instance, the unwilling led by the uninformed in pursuit of the worthless.

I have my own scars to bear witness to the feckless leadership of our Federal bureaucracy, and yet their situation was one to evoke sympathy from even the most callous observer when it was realized they were forced into institutional schizophrenia by the conflicting demands of their purse masters in Congress. I offer into evidence only the environmental vs timber production direction given to the US Forest Service from the 70s through the turn of the century. But even that conflicting direction cannot begin to explain why the bureaucratic machine insisted on reinventing the wheel at every shift in program direction or new daily work challenges.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Nope. Not Ron Paul. Peter F. Paul.

Paul has his own blog (who doesn't?) documenting his participation in election fraud. Which he calls the biggest election fraud in history.

Then there is good ole boy Bill. Who seems to be doing very well with donations to his library. Oil money seems to be involved. Saudi Oil Money.

LITTLE ROCK, ARK. - President Clinton's new $165 million library here was funded in part by gifts of $1 million or more each from the Saudi royal family and three Saudi businessmen.

The governments of Dubai, Kuwait, and Qatar and the deputy prime minister of Lebanon all also appear to have donated $1 million or more for the archive and museum that opened last week.

Democrats spent much of the presidential campaign this year accusing President Bush of improperly close ties to Saudi Arabia. The case was made in Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11," in a bestselling book by Craig Unger titled "House of Bush, House of Saud," and by the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Kerry."This administration delayed pressuring the Saudis," Mr. Kerry said on October 20. "I will insist that the Saudis crack down on charities that funnel funds to terrorists... and on anti-American and anti-Israel hate speech."The Media Fund, a Democratic group whose president is a former Clinton White House aide, Harold Ickes, spent millions airing television commercials in swing states with scripts such as, "The Saudi royal family...wealthy...powerful...corrupt. And close Bush family friends."

There is a more modest Clinton Library being built in Little Rock The Clinton Counter Library, whose motto is: Supported by Citizens who refuse to allow the Clintons to erase their White House record.

Like any good politicians who a large segment of the population loves to hate, Hill 'n Bill have their very own video parody site. I kind of like the one with Hillary as Cher. Love that plunging neckline. How low can you go? Pretty low. And very pretty at that.

H/T Gateway Pundit

Well, it happens. And in today's competitive victim society, it is sometimes very difficult to determine which victim has superior inferior superior inferior status.

A month or so ago after an incident in a store, I was all primed to write about shopping cart etiquette in the context of who gets there first (the one who sees a spot or the one who's closest?), but it didn't seem all that important, considering the elections and culture wars and stuff, so I forgot all about it. But I was left with the distinct feeling that notwithstanding "equality," we are not all equal. Some people are better at getting spaces, while others are better at seeing them first even though they don't get there first. And "ladies first" be damned.

Or is that ladies be damned first, damn it?

I don't know the answer, but when black men and lesbian women collide, prepare for a victim competition contest:

Liz Spikol says she witnessed a racial incident at a local pet store. As one of the women involved in that incident--which was an attack on two lesbians, not a racial incident--it's hard for me to imagine how Spikol could have gotten it so wrong.

I'm one of four women who run a cat rescue shelter in Germantown. On that evening my friend and I had two carts of cat food and litter, so the manager had a cashier open up a register for our very large purchase, so as to not slow down the customers at the other register. The cashier had just started to ring up our purchases when "Goldfish Man" walked up with a small bag of goldfish and asked if he could go ahead of us. We politely explained that the cashier was already ringing us up, so no, he couldn't.

He continued to press the point, becoming verbally abusive. Both my friend and I asked him to stop talking to us. Instead he walked up right next to my friend and continued his tirade. That was the point at which she told him to back off.

He did indeed step back a foot, and continued his verbal abuse, which culminated in his shoving the back cart against the front cart while my friend's hand was between the carts. This caused a large cut and drastic bleeding.

What I find interesting was that Spikol felt this was all about race, simply because the man, who was African-American, said the words, "It's because I'm black, isn't it?"

This wasn't a racist incident; it was a homophobic, antiwoman incident. I'm shocked that as a woman, she walked away without noticing that the two women involved in the incident were feeling highly threatened.

Liz Spikol says she was, though, and her original column here paints a completely different version of the story, with no mention of violence or bleeding. I'm kind of glad I wasn't there, as I tend to get just as outraged over things I see as anyone else would. Yet I don't necessarily see them the way others might. A lot of these interpretations seem to depends on whose mental "video replay" is the strongest. Do you see an automatic replay of Bull Connor's bigoted police in Birmingham hosing demonstrators and siccing the dogs on them? Or do you think of women being abused, or Matthew Shepard beaten and tied to a fence?

Are we not all capable of being victims depending on how you look at it?

Actually, there is one category of people who do not deserve victim status -- no matter what. I refer to those indefensible people known as "bigots" -- who Liz Spikol's PW colleague Steven Wells thinks deserve to be beaten:

In light of all the cheeseparing piffle written about the Jena Six by liberal journalists apparently attempting to equate resistance to racism with the racism itself, I have to ask: Is it ever morally wrong to hit a racist?

If Jackie Robinson, during his first game with the Dodgers, had reacted to racist abuse by taking his bat and smacking some bigoted scumbag in the face, would that have made him the moral equivalent of the racist? Would it hell.

The legendary music journalist Lester Bangs once wrote about the casual racism of the mid-'70s New York punk scene. You guys have every right to go around spewing racism, he concluded, but no right to whine when some black guy walks up and smacks you in the mouth.

Why, the callow and immature me is tempted to insouciantly say "Thou shalt not suffer a bigot to live!"

But this is a serious game, and there are serious, um, rules. In the event of a dispute or altercation, according to the prevailing theories of identity politics, there are two primary considerations:

1. Who has superior (victim) status?

2. Who has a greater chance of earning a place in the bigot category?

In the instant case, if you scroll down and read the other letters complaining about Liz Spikol's column, they not only support the lesbian allegedly struck by the black man, but go out of their way to make sure that homophobic sexism is the narrative and not racism.

You'd almost think they were trying to avoid getting on the wrong side of Cotton Mather.

UPDATE: My thanks to Sean Kinsell for linking this post in a discussion of the former first lady.

Hmmm...

(Maybe I should have said "first ladies first" above.)

MORE: Racist p0rn -- another collision?

A local 14-year-old named Dillon Cossey and his alleged Columbine-style threats have provided two days worth of front page news, and the incident has become a national story.

What I am unable to determine is precisely what the threat was. (It seems to have been related second-hand by a friend who said Cossey tried to recruit him, but the exact words of the threat have not been quoted.) By all accounts, there was no ammunition and his mother had only recently bought guns, one of which she is said to have given him. What the law says about parental supervision, I'm not sure, but it appears the mom violated it.

There's a lot of talk about how the kid was bullied in school, and that the parents took him out and homeschooled him.

One look at a picture of the kid (at the Inquirer and here, and it's not hard to imagine that he was bullied, at least teased.

The kid is morbidly obese.

I'm not quite sure how they define bullying (pretty broadly, I think), but there's little question he would have been teased quite a bit when I was a kid. But he wouldn't have gone on a school shooting spree -- despite the fact that guns were more available then than they are now. It wouldn't even have occurred to anyone that this would be a normal response to teasing. In those days, bullied kids fought back. I was the smallest kid in my class, and I had to fight back a few times, but it wouldn't have occurred to me in my wildest dreams to shoot anyone, even though there were guns in my home.

Now, the formula seems to be along the lines of bullying plus guns in the home equals Columbine.

What has changed? The left blames guns (Michael Moore's "culture of violence" nonsense comes to mind), while many on the right say it's taking the Bible out of the schools. I don't think the Bible has much to do with it, because the Bible was already out of the public schools when I was a kid, yet there were no shootings. I think two of the biggest changes are:

-- the huge growth of media culture, which encourages everyone with a grudge to seek his fifteen minutes of fame and glory;

-- a bizarre cult of hypersensitivity to all possible threats, real or imaginary, and in which the slightest criticism is seen as provoking a legitimate grievance and engendering a sense of entitlement to victim status.

A perfect example is this:

DENVER - In an effort to combat the problem of childhood obesity, the Denver Public School District is sending home student health reports to keep parents informed. However, one parent says it should not have been sent home in her daughter's backpack because she read it.

"The part that upset her the most as she started reading it, there it stated that she was overweight and she started to cry saying, 'Mom, that school tells me I'm fat.' So, it was very heart wrenching," said Flaurette Martinez.

Her daughter Isabel was sent home from the Centennial K-8 School on Monday with the health notice. It listed her height, weight and body mass index - a measure of body fat. Underneath the listing it had a marking next to the status "overweight."

"My daughter is big boned," said Martinez.

Isabel's mother does not have a problem with what the schools are trying to do. She says that type of sensitive information should be mailed directly home to parents, because kids are prone to reading letters sent home by the schools.

"If she would have dropped this letter, a student may have found it and may have exposed it to other students," said Martinez. "Anything specific to the child should be mailed. It should not be given to the child."

However, DPS Spokesperson Alex Sanchez says schools do that all the time. Report cards, disciplinary notices and letters from the principal are commonly sent home with students. Sanchez says it is cheaper for the district to send these things home with students instead of by mail.

Martinez says that decision is causing her daughter emotional distress.

I think media culture and hypersensitivity tend to fuel each other, and the result is a latent hysteria constantly lurking in the background, and ready to break out upon the slightest provocation.

Take nooses. When I was a kid, they meant little more than the fact that a boy had learned how to tie them. Personally, I thought they were cool. It's only been in the past decade that I've suddenly been told that they are "hurtful images" like displaying a swastika. (Boys used to doodle swastikas all the time, as most of their dads were World War II veterans. Hammer and sickles were also considered "cool" to doodle when I was a child.)

At the rate things are "progressing," pretty soon the mere hanging of a noose would shut down Grand Central Station. Recently, one caused panic in a post office (and it seemed imitative of an earlier one which caused chaos at Columbia):

NEW YORK (CBS) ― There was a disturbing discovery near Ground Zero in Manhattan Thursday. A noose was found hanging from a lamppost at the Church Street Post Office. This is just the latest message of hate striking the city.

Police said it wasn't clear where or at whom the Church Street noose might have been directed.

"At this point, there was no target that was evident or any motive," U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Al Weissman said Friday morning. He said no postal workers had reported any threats or other problems.

Postal workers in a second floor office at Church Street noticed the noose Thursday afternoon

Building managers removed the noose, which was later turned over to the NYPD's hate crimes unit for investigation, police said.

Speaking to reporters following a ceremony at a police memorial, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly suggested that the noose outside the post office could have been an attempt to imitate the discovery at Columbia, which shocked the Ivy League campus and received extensive news coverage.

"We have to be concerned about a copycat being out there," he said, adding that police had no suspects or motives in either incident.

Meanwhile, detectives at the NYPD Hate Crime task force have 56 hours of surveillance tapes to comb through, trying to catch the person who hung a noose on Professor Madonna Constantine's door at Columbia University.

A colleague, who Constantine is suing for defamation, says she had nothing to do placing this vile symbol of racism at her door.

Naturally, the ability to create mass panic and fuel media attention leads to copycat behavior:

Kelly also said a noose found Thursday outside a lower Manhattan post office could have been the work of a copycat.

"When something happens, we do have to be concerned that others might do it," Kelly said.

Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, remains shaken by the discovery of the hand-tied hangman's noose on her office door Tuesday morning. "It was a symbol of violence," said Constantine's lawyer, Paul Giacomo. "By hanging a noose, you're saying, 'I want to hang this around your neck. I want to execute you.'"

Detectives were conducting DNA tests on the noose and have interviewed several of Constantine's colleagues and students.

"I don't know of any specific act within the last few weeks leading up to this that would lead my client to believe that one or more people would be a suspect," Giacomo said.

Meanwhile, Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn) said he will introduce legislation to make displaying a noose a felony akin to showcasing a burning cross or a swastika. "I think it is high time that the law recognizes the racial and historic hatred that a noose symbolizes," Lentol said.

Are rational people really as terrified of nooses, flags, and symbols as they're portrayed as being? Does anyone really and truly believe a piece of rope will hurt anyone? People say they are terrorized, and I think where a noose is left as a threat against a particular individual, it ought to be investigated the way any other threat would be. But I have a problem with the idea that any black person who might see a noose left dangling in a public place is "terrorized." This just makes it way too easy for pranksters to cause huge disruptions over something which basically amounts to nothing.

In another interesting wrinkle on hate crimes, a gay man was recently found guilty of hate crimes against another gay man:

October 12, 2007 -- A Brooklyn jury yesterday found that a gay man who lured another homosexual to his death last year in a plot to steal the victim's pot was guilty of a hate crime, despite their shared sexual orientation.

Anthony Fortunato, 21, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and attempted petit larceny for his role in a scheme that resulted in the death of Michael Sandy.

He was acquitted of murder charges, which would have carried a minimum 25-year sentence.

The jury foreman, who shot Fortunato a regret-filled look when he read the verdict, said outside the courthouse that he felt the hate-crime law was unjustly applied by the district attorney.

"It's absurd," said the foreman, Eric Zaccar, a playwright. "[The hate crime] is a great law when it applies to fat white guys with baseball bats beating up a black man, or gays, or Jews. But when it applies to one gay person seeking out another gay person, it's absurd."

It's too bad they can't make hysteria illegal.

It will raise the value of his speeches by at least 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.






Cross Posted at Power and Control

This will take some time (assuming you are up to the task). But spend some serious time at Climate Audit and tell me the Climate "Scientists" are not cooking the books.

Start here: YTD Hurricane Activity

This is a real Gem: Hugues Goosse and the Unresponsiveness of Juckes

Bad models: Climate Insensitivity and AR(1) Models

Bad data: Titusville

Bad accounting: Should NASA climate accountants adhere to GAAP?

Bad explanations: Mann's New Divergence "Theory": A Smoothing Artifact

Don't just read the entry. Read all the comments. This will take time. Once you have done that roam around. Then come back here and tell me climate science can make pronouncements about anything. Including todays temperature accurate to 1 deg K.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I think it's hard to beat this remark from Ibn Warraq:

I don't want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery.

What many would see as "irreverence" towards Islam I tend to see it as reverence towards freedom.

By the way, the subject of the debate was "We Should Not Be Reluctant to Assert the Superiority of Western Values." According to Dr. Chesler, the vote was against the resolution before the debate, and against it afterwards.

I suspect the vote changers needed a reminder that it isn't always a good idea to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A gloating environmentalist reacts to Al Gore's "peace" prize:

Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize symbolizes more than just a head-nod towards some eco-fad -- it shows that sustainability has finally moved from the outskirts of activism to the most central halls of authority. Concern for the planetary future is now as credible as it is possible to get. The beginning of the struggle to save ourselves from ecological catastrophe has come to an end and we can begin to see the outlines of the next stage of the struggle.

Those of us who've spent our careers advocating a saner approach to the future can be forgiven a few moments of smugness, for these are sweet days. There is no longer any reasonable debate about whether or not we need to move with all possible speed towards a different way of living on this planet. To argue the contrary is now to prove oneself morally bankrupt.

Of course, the morally bankrupt can still be found in some numbers in the corridors of commercial and political power, but we don't need to worry too much about them. They are the leaders of the past: their influence wanes by the moment, as leader after leader steps up to call for big changes.

Didn't we have enough manufactured morality without having to make more?

I'm sorry, but I refuse to have morality written for me by others, especially on such shaky premises.

While I guess it's arguable whether I'm immoral, amoral, or simply morally bankrupt, what is going on constitutes moralistic overload, and I'm getting weary of it all.

Moralistic hyperbole leads to moral bankruptcy.

War is hot! (And "peace" is now "cool"!)

So where do I buy my cool peace offsets?

I've been feeling guilty. Not only did I drag poor Coco into being a "political ring tone laugh analyst," but by having her evaluate only the Hillary Laugh Ring Tone, I may have inadvertently created an appearance of something less than full objectivity.

Regular readers know my biases, which I try to disclose, and I have said repeatedly that I do not intend to vote for Hillary Clinton. But Coco really hasn't taken a position on the candidates or the issues, and it just isn't fair to have people think that she would chose to evaluate the Hillary laugh only.

Furthermore, after Glenn Reynolds opined that the "little chuckle that Mitt Romney deploys when he think he's scored a point" is "more irritating than the Clinton cackle," I consulted Coco, and promised that "I believe in fairness, and I'd be glad to have Coco check out the Romney chuckle ring tone."

In light of my promise, the Mitt Romney ring tone positively cries out for Coco's evaluation. (Otherwise, I'd be guilty of a violation of Fairness Theory.)

So here's Coco evaluating Mitt Romney's laugh as it emanates from my cell phone:

You'll notice that Coco doesn't appear terribly excited. The Hillary laugh seemed to get more of a rise out of her:

But whether she's more irritated is tough to tell. I think she finds the Romney chuckle more boring than the Hillary cackle.

Wanting to leave no stone unturned, I finally decided to cut and paste the cackle and the chuckle together, along with an appropriate sound track.

Again, here's Coco, doing her best to bear with me:

I think she'll be glad when this election is over.

(If the Hillary Mitt Medley Ring Tone isn't audible enough, you can also stream or download it here.)

I was discussing DDT in my post Global Warming Is Socialist Science and while I was doing research came across this comment at Deltoid.

In Argentina, as all other countries in South, Central and North America DDT is strictly prohibited under severe penalties by the law. So you are LYING when claiming "there is no de facto ban". The exception is Ecuador who has never given up spraying DDT and saving human lives, alas, at the cost of valuable mosquito lives.

I have been exploring and traveling the Amazon since 1971 and I know what I am talking about. I am a field scientist not an armchair scientist in air conditioned labs.

At this moment, environmentalists are prosecuting health and agriculture officials in Córdoba, Argentina, because they discovered that a cargo of 12 tons of DDT had been stored for 30 years without telling the people it was stored there and "could" have contaminated the neighbors.

Could, may, might, perhaps, are words always accompanying green and fake alarms. Then, why has not mosquitoes developed resistance in Ecuador after 32 years of Ecuador refusing to give up DDT spraying, and 53 years since they started using it? You should provide a scientific answer.

Our Argentinean Foundation for a Scientific Ecology (FAEC) was consulted by the two federal judges that dealt with the DDT storage case and sent our report to be studied by the scientific team formed with members from our National University at Córdoba, and from the Ministry of Public Health. Then compared the accusations made by the environmentalists and studied their claims and references.

A remark that one of the judges said to me after their ruling was: "These greens are not only crazy, but I would prosecute them for criminal activities if you pressed charges."

Your weblog is perhaps the more "science-killing" and misinforming site I have ever seen. Keep up your work. It gives skeptics plenty food and ammunition to fight green neurosis and paranoia.

Eduardo Ferreyra
President of FAEC
Argentinean Foundation for a Scientific Ecology

Cross Posted at Power and Control

No, I don't mean Al has died of AIDS. Al has won the Nobel peace Prize. Woo Hoo. Another glorious day for Socialist Science and Green Criminals. You may barf when ready.

The Reference Frame tells it like it is.

British Judge says "Inconvenient Truth" is Politics Not Science.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Lubos Motl at The Reference Frame is discussing Al Gore and his movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Left-wing people are rarely right in politics. If they were right, they wouldn't be left. But this audio is a remarkable exception. A self-described mildly left-wing professor criticizes the British conservatives at their CPS Fringe Event and he is quite right.

What the British conservatives are doing in the context of climate change - such as the recently proposed plasma TV ban - is absolutely outrageous and it is very good that Philip Stott told them in his inimitable way.

Nigel Lawson, one of the brightest politicians in the U.K. history, speaks after Philip Stott.

I'd like to discuss one of the more interesting quotes from the audio. Let me note that the speeches are delivered in British House of Commons style which I have always enjoyed.

I am absolutely amazed that the Conservatives above all others have been tempted to fall for the hubristic idea that we can control climate predictably, and I will return to that word "predictably", by big government. By taxes that are injurious to industry and to business. By taxes that are retrogressive on the poor and by attempting to micro-manage every single aspect of people's lives.

Policies which stand 100% agaist those on which the CPS itself was founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher.

It is a serious issue "global warming", but it is politically serious not scientifically serious.

I fear that Conservatives above all, have for the last two or three years, been walking blindly into a socialist elephant trunk.

We are seeing this same push in America to bring in totalitarianism through the back door. By the Global Warming hysteria, with Medical Totalitarianism and of course with the control mechanism that is the grand daddy of them all The Drug War. Two themes are predominant: "for the children" and boy do they love to whip that one. The other of course is "we are trying to do something about a problem so serious that it imperils life on the planet". Take the DDT scare. Cecil Adams of Straight Dope has this to say.

While DDT is highly toxic to insects and fish and can poison other animals in large enough doses, in moderate amounts it's not especially harmful to birds and mammals, including humans. (Ironically, the EPA's own judge agreed, but was overruled by its chief administrator.) No one has conclusively proved that DDT can give you cancer. The cause of eggshell thinning is likewise poorly understood.

On the other hand, DDT is demonstrably effective at controlling the mosquitoes and other insects that transmit malaria and typhus. Thanks principally to DDT, in the years after World War II malaria was eradicated in the U.S. and sharply curtailed in many tropical countries. Venezuela recorded eight million cases of malaria in 1943; by 1958 that number was down to eight hundred. The World Health Organization estimates that DDT saved 50 to 100 million lives during this period, and that's just counting malaria prevention. In recent years, however, the disease has staged a comeback. Globally it quadrupled during the 1990s, and it's even reappeared sporadically in the United States. The resurgence of malaria is due to a variety of factors, including changes in land use and possibly climate, and some experts say the phasing out of DDT is one of them.

I don't mean to suggest that DDT is benign. On the contrary, it's a potent contact toxin, and though it breaks down quickly in sunlight, it's much more persistent in soil and water and accumulates in plants and fatty animal tissues with long-term exposure. But its drawbacks have to be weighed against its benefits. Malaria currently infects 300 to 500 million people annually, mostly in Africa, and causes as many as 2.7 million deaths. Alternative methods of mosquito control cost more and are less effective. Some 400 scientists and doctors have signed a petition opposing the inclusion of DDT among the 12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to be banned under a United Nations treaty now up for ratification, and a few public health experts are campaigning to bring DDT back. DDT isn't a panacea; India, which still uses it, suffered nasty outbreaks of malaria in the 90s, and insects in many parts of that country have become resistant to the chemical. But it remains an important tool, and in a time of rising global pestilence we shun it at our peril.

The end goal of course is to free the world to follow exactly the dictates of government.

My answer is that the best protection for all men is Liberty. Let me quote a few of our founders:

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Archibald Stuart - 1791)

"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson (attributed to Jefferson, by his contemporaries)

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania - 1759)

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison (attributed to Madison, by his contemporaries)

From the list at Action America

Cross Posted at Power and Control

So said Bill Clinton in 1996.

And today, his wife is an echo claiming to be a choice:

Senator Hillary Clinton said yesterday that if she is elected president, she intends to roll back President Bush's expansion of executive authority, including his use of presidential signing statements to put his own interpretation on bills passed by Congress or to claim authority to disobey them entirely.

"I think you have to restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers, which