While I'm very tired of reading about it, I'm nonetheless having a lot of trouble trying to sort out the bitter and protracted alimony battle between former Governor Jim McGreevey and his wife Dina Matos.

Matos has calculated the value of taxpayer-funded perks that are no longer there, and seeks a "cost of replicating her gubernatorial lifestyle" award:

ELIZABETH, N.J. - The estranged wife of former Gov. Jim McGreevey tried to convince a divorce judge yesterday that she is entitled to alimony, saying her mortgage, legal bills and a $100,000 loan from a friend have left her deeply in debt.

Dina Matos said she had no savings despite having received $110,000 in tax-free support from McGreevey.

The couple wed in 2000. In 2004 he proclaimed himself "a gay American," claimed he had had an affair with a male staffer, and resigned as governor. The employee denies the affair.

Matos wrapped up her testimony yesterday as the final witness in the money phase of her divorce. A judge will rule on alimony and support after lawyers make their final arguments next week.

A final issue in the bitter breakup - her claim that she was duped into marrying a gay man - has not been scheduled to be heard. That phase could include testimony from an ex-aide who claims he had sexual trysts with the couple.

Matos, 41, has asked the judge to base alimony payments on the lifestyle she enjoyed as wife of the governor.

She paid an expert $20,000 to compile a lifestyle report for the judge estimating the cost of replicating her gubernatorial lifestyle at $51,000 a month. McGreevey's expert put the gubernatorial lifestyle around $16,000 a month.

However, a New Jersey Family Law firm provides this summary of relevant principles:

Alimony, as opposed to child support calculated pursuant to the Guidelines, is not as definitive and is based on a number of statutory factors.

In N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23(b), New Jersey's alimony Statute provides:

In all actions brought far divorce, divorce from bed and board, or nullity the, court may award one or more of the following types of alimony: permanent alimony; rehabilitative alimony; limited duration alimony or reimbursement alimony to either party. In doing so, the court shall consider, but not be limited to, the following factors:

1. The actual need and ability of the parties to pay.
2. The duration of the marriage.
3. The age and physical and emotional health of the parties.
4. The standard of living established in the marriage and the likelihood that each party can maintain a reasonably comparable standard of living.
5. The earning capacities, educational levels, vocational skills, and employability of the parties.
6. The length of absence from the job market of the party seeking maintenance.
7. The parental responsibilities for the children.
8. The time and expense necessary to acquire sufficient education or training to enable the party seeking maintenance to find appropriate employment, the availability of the training and employment, and the opportunity for future acquisition of capital assets and income.
9. The history of the financial or non-financial contributions to the marriage by each party including contributions to the care and education of the children and interruption of personal careers or educational opportunities.
10. The equitable distribution of property ordered and any pay-outs on equitable distribution, directly or indirectly, out of current income, to the extent this consideration is reasonable, just and fair.
11. The income available to either party through investment of any assets held by that party.
12. The tax treatment and consequences to both parties of any alimony award including the designation of all or a portion of the payment as a non-taxable payment.
13. Any other factors which the Court may deem relevant.

The New Jersey Supreme Court in Crews v. Crews, 164 N.J. 11, 26 (2000), held that "[a]n alimony award that lacks consideration of the factors set forth in N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23(b) is inadequate, and one finding that must be made, is the standard of living established in the marriage." The Court found that "[i]n all divorce proceedings, trial courts must "consider and make specific findings' under N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23(b)" Id. at 25.

The Appellate Division in Boardman v. Boardman, 314 N.J. Super. 340 (1998) reiterated the application of the principles for determining alimony as set forth in N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23, noting that the principles apply whether the spouse seeking alimony is the husband or wife.

While I have zero sympathy for McGreevey (whose aides went to jail in the corruption scandal that engulfed him), I'm having a conceptual problem with the idea that incidental taxpayer-provided perks are income for alimony purposes. A politician's career can rise or fall depending on a lot of factors, and typically depends on the whims of the voters. The theory is that these people are "public servants," and that the perks which flow to them are supposed to be tools that go with the job, not financial benefits.

Try as I might, I'm having trouble seeing McGreevey's wife as a victim of anything more than the change in political fate brought on by her husband's corruption. But others see her as a victim of more than that:

The press has had a field day with Matos, painting a very one-sided picture of her as an unintelligent money-grubbing gold-digger who hasn't yet realized that she is no longer first lady of New Jersey. But I think the media has distorted her claims and I don't think she is claiming that she is entitled to continue to live the lifestyle to which she became accustomed, as if she is "to the manner born."

She was born in Portugal and came to this country with her parents. According to her testimony, she did not finish college because she had to help her family when her younger brother became ill. She speaks Spanish and Portuguese because her parents were not fluent in English. Matos even lived at home and worked until she met Jim McGreevey, a handsome, ambitious, Ivy League educated lawyer, who was mayor running for governor. She paid for their wedding and worked to support them.

Matos is rightfully upset. When McGreevey wanted a first lady, he got one. Now that he no longer needs one, he laughs at her because she prides herself on being a former first lady.

When McGreevey left his post as governor prematurely after he disclosed his affair with a male state employee, his choices erased her chances, not his. He now lives in a $1.4 million mansion with his wealthy partner, who supports him. He is not working, but is attending seminary school full time to become an Episcopal priest. While he made her a princess, he has also made her a pauper, yet he still lives like a king.

Is she is entitled to McGreevey's lover's money? I don't know any legal theory which would go quite that far. Barring the possibility of same sex marriage or a legal partnership agreement, McGreevey is legally a tenant at will, and his lover can kick him out any time he feels like it. That's much too shaky of an arrangement to be called "income" for alimony purposes

Few articles point out that when Matos met McGreevey in 1996, he was still married to another woman with whom he'd had a child, and divorced in 1997.

I think the claim that McGreevey "left his post as governor prematurely after he disclosed his affair with a male state employee" is disingenuous and tends to mislead readers. I keep seeing it in print, though, and it's as if the goal is to conflate corruption and homosexuality. Why more gay activists don't object to this, I have no idea. Career-wise, McGreevey is best be described as a career politician, whose eventual fall was occasioned not by his homosexuality, but by one of the worst corruption scandals in New Jersey history. I addressed this in two posts, quoting Inquirer columnist Monica Yant Kinney (a New Jerseyan), who said that McGreevey "forever shall be one of the worst governors in modern Jersey history."

But the public wants to think he resigned for being gay, and the press seems to enjoy stoking popular mythology.

And Matos, of course, is painting herself as an innocent victim -- not of her husband's corruption, but of his homosexuality.

Matos testified yesterday that her lifestyle plummeted when she left the governor's mansion four years ago.

"I don't have a state police vehicle, no driver, no security, no housekeeping manager or other staff, chefs and groundskeepers, that were available. I also pay the mortgage, all the utilities and other expenses," she testified.

McGreevey contends that the governor's office perks are not a marital asset.

Matos said she can no longer shop for her daughter's clothes at high-end boutiques, has taken only one vacation and borrowed $100,000 from a friend to make a down payment on her $430,000 Union County house. She said she has $250,000 in outstanding legal bills, excluding the costs of the divorce trial.

She also said she cannot offer her daughter the things the child enjoys when she stays with her father at his boyfriend's house in Plainfield. There, she has her own bathroom and playroom and plays on grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park.

A final issue in the bitter breakup - her claim that she was duped into marrying a gay man - has not been scheduled to be heard. That phase could include testimony from an ex-aide who claims he had sexual trysts with the couple.

While a lot of people have written about the case, overall I think James Kirchick's analysis is the best I've seen:

No doubt the world is unfair to gay people and the higher rates of suicide, depression and personally destructive behavior amongst gay men finds some proximate cause in societal homophobia. But Jim McGreevey was forced to resign for no other reason than that he was a corrupt politician. He's more Mark Foley than Harvey Milk. That he was sleeping with a male aide is incidental to his downfall. By conflating his political demise and his struggle to cope with homosexuality, McGreevey inadvertently hurt the cause of gay civil rights as much as any crusading, socially conservative political activist could have hoped to do. He fed the stereotype that gays are untrustworthy and self-absorbed, and that homosexuality is a personal weakness.

One gets the sense that the McGreeveys' long, drawn-out divorce proceedings (which have now lasted longer than their marriage) is the couple's sick attempt to keep their names in the papers (Matos, remember, published her own memoir, Silent Partner, last year, and told ABC News that McGreevey "enlisted" Pedersone, one his "cronies," to make the threesome accusations because McGreevey "cannot stand it when I am receiving attention in the media rather than him.") In a poll released by Monmouth University just a few weeks before The Confession hit bookstores, 77% of New Jersey residents said that they believed McGreevey resigned due to "his personal sexuality." It seemed that McGreevey's mission had been accomplished: he convinced the voters that it was his homosexuality, not corrupt behavior, which led to his ouster. The prurient disclosures of Theodore Pederson only fortify this harmful, and mistaken, impression.

I can't help notice that McGreevey is studying to become an Episcopal priest. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that's what the scandal, plagued, schism-ridden church needs.

But hey, maybe they can conflate McGreevey's newfound Episcopalianism into the scandal, and say that he resigned as governor because he wanted to become a gay priest....

I mean, why should corrupt sexual hypocrisy be limited to the Republican Party and religious conservatives?

UPDATE: Incorrect link removed. (I thought this was another post, and I'm probably getting senile....)

Yesterday I wrote a post titled "How do I tell Coco they want to kill her?"

I am writing this one lest anyone think I was engaged in hyperbole. While I admitted that I was being emotional, the fact is that people who love their dogs do consider them members of their families, and when the government proposes taking them away and killing them, the effect on the emotions really isn't that different than if the government literally proposed killing human family members.

Losing a dog is a very traumatic event. I grieved as much for Puff as I have for a number of people, and by saying this, I in no way diminish the people I loved or the love I felt for them. Animals are animals, and they are not human, but grief is still grief.

Anyway, I did not exaggerate when I said that they want to kill Coco.

When I wrote yesterday's post, I was unaware of a proposed law in Ohio which would do just that:

"Pit bulls seem to be the dog of choice on the streets," said state Representative Tyrone Yates, D-53rd district, explaining his motive for House Bill 568, a proposal to ban pit bulls in Ohio.

Yates' bill would give pit bull owners 90 days to get the dogs out of Ohio before ordering county dog wardens to seize and destroy the dogs.

"I think eliminating vicious dogs is as important to reclaiming our cities as controlling gun violence and making sure our young people are going to school," says Yates.

While numerous local governments have adopted pit bull bans -- like the two towns in the Dakotas we referred to earlier this week -- this is the first proposed statewide ban with which I'm familiar. It's a highly revolting development, and one that -- though, granted, it pertains to exterminating breeds of dogs instead of races of people -- is reminiscent of some shameful times in world history.

I'm hoping this can't happen in 21st Century America, but then again, on a local level, it already has.

Even the American Kennel Club -- normally focused on purebred breeds, of which the pit bull is not one -- is urging citizens to voice their opposition to it, as you can see here.

(C)(1) Beginning ninety days after the effective date of this section, if an officer has probable cause to believe that a dog is a pit bull dog, the officer may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction for a search warrant. The court shall issue a search warrant for the purposes requested if there is probable cause to believe that a dog is a pit bull dog.

(2) After obtaining a search warrant, an officer shall seize the pit bull dog and surrender the dog to the dog warden. Not later than ten days after receiving the dog, the dog warden shall euthanize the dog.

Yes, I know Coco is just a dog.

But I also thought I was living in the land of the free.

No, that is not a joke about heteronormativism. Or even homonormativism.

I just didn't know what else to call a post linking B. Daniel Blatt's "McCain's Straight Talk Express Stops in Beverly Hills." And while the subject of gay marriage did come up, that's not the point; I just got a kick out of the title.

If you've heard the claims that McCain is arrogant, aloof and won't listen to people, be sure to read Blatt's account:

Yesterday, while in Los Angeles, his campaign also reached out to bloggers, inviting a number -- including yours truly -- to attend a "press availability" in Beverly Hills. Along with the local media there, we felt a bit out of place, given the camaraderie of the press corps which travels with the campaign. But the candidate treated us no differently.

Indeed, the Arizona senator seemed to relish the exchange. At one point when a staffer said they had time for just one more question, he overruled her, saying he'd take a few more. He responded quickly and deftly to all but one question, only occasionally failing to provide a direct answer. He stammered a bit when replying to a question about cluster bombs, stating that he hadn't looked into the issue, but his decision on whether or not to ban them would "depend on the circumstances."

The Republican candidate wanted to focus on the Iraq war and national security, distinguishing his positions and record from those of his likely Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama. The press, however, seemed more interested in the revelations from former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and the Arizona senator's relationship to the incumbent president.

As a blogger who, unlike the reporters there, acknowledges his bias, I guess it's fair for me to say that I came away impressed with the senator's performance. He was quick on his feet and responded to all but one question promptly, confidently, and very often with good humor. However, the press seems reluctant to give him credit for making himself so readily available, even as he took far more questions than his staff thought he had time to address.

I know he continues to get it from both sides, and I don't agree with him on a lot of things. But John McCain just keeps looking better.

To second what M. Simon said earlier,

You know, I could get to like McCain.

2. And when will you finally decide to meet one-on-one, unconditionally, with General Petraeus?

OK. You are fed up with McCain and the Republican Party and don't want them to have a dime of your money. They are not the only game in town. If you think Civilization Is Worth Saving why not donate to help get these ads on the air? You can visit the Vets For Freedom home page to learn more. Or go directly to make a donation.

Via Instapundit - HILLARY GETS A DIG IN: "I have the highest respect and regard for Sen. McCain, he and I have actually gone to Iraq and Afghanistan together."

Welcome Instapundit readers.

Today's WSJ Science Journal has a piece by Robert Lee Hotz called "Revenge of the Freeloaders -- Study Finds Culture Influences Reaction To Reward, Rebuke." Naturally, I was fascinated, and I was even more fascinated by some of the unexamined premises raised in both the study and the piece.

We all bristle at people who put themselves ahead of the common good, whether it is by evading taxes, shirking military service, cheating on bus fares or littering. Many of us will go out of our way to shame, shun or otherwise punish them, researchers have shown. That's how we foster a community that benefits everyone, even at some cost to ourselves.

As to shirking military service, what about so many of the Vietnam generation draft evaders who spent years in college avoid military service by way of student deferments and the like? We elected one president, and Bill Clinton was followed by George W. Bush, who did reserve duty. It strikes me that while there are many people who bristle at those who avoided service in Vietnam, their reasons differ. For those on the left, draft evasion in the form of deferments was the right and moral thing to do only if you were opposed to the war; if you supported the war, you became a hypocrite for not serving. If we apply this standard to taxation, "principled" tax evasion by those who oppose taxation would be justified, while those who believe in the system but evade for selfish reasons would be immoral.

But how is anyone supposed to ascertain whether both claims of principle might not be driven by selfishness? It is not just as selfish to not want to risk dying in a war as it is to not want to hand over your money to the government? I honestly don't know, but I don't think we all feel the same way about these things.

As to cheating on bus fares and littering (assuming the fare cheater can afford the fare), it's very tough to come up with any moral justification at all for such sleazy behaviors, so the vast majority of us would properly bristle at such behavior, and for the same reasons. To my mind, littering is especially animalistic behavior, and I suspect most litterers would benefit from being imprisoned in dumpsters for a weekend or forced to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes, except that would violate the 8th Amendment. I saw a guy throw a coffee cup on the ground over the weekend, and as he glanced glaringly at the people around him it occurred to me that he might consider putting the cup in a nearby trashcan to be beneath his "dignity" -- or even "sissy" behavior. (An unfortunate truth is that society once had the whipping post precisely to deal with miscreants like that.)

But I'm afraid I've strayed dramatically from the scientific study of freeloaders, retaliation, and cooperation. Not surprisingly, results varied by countries.

To explore cooperation across cultures, Dr. Herrmann and his colleagues recruited 1,120 college students in 16 cities around the globe for a public-good game. The exercise is one of several devised by economists in recent years to distill the complex variables of human behavior into transactions simple enough to be studied under controlled laboratory conditions.

The volunteers played in anonymous groups of four. Each player started with 20 tokens that could be redeemed for cash after 10 rounds. Players could contribute tokens to a common account or keep them all to themselves.

After each round, the pooled funds paid a dividend shared equally by all, even those who didn't contribute. Previous research shows that a single selfish individual riding on the generosity of others can so irritate other players that contributions soon drop to nothing.

That changes when players can identify and punish those who don't contribute (in this case, by deducting points that can quickly add up to serious money). Once such peer pressure comes into play, everyone -- including the shamed freeloader -- starts to chip in.

"Freeloaders are disliked everywhere," said study co-author Simon Gachter, who studies economic decision-making at Nottingham. "Cooperation always breaks down if people can't punish."

The students behaved the same way in all 16 cities until given the chance to punish those taking a free ride on the shared investment. Punishment was done anonymously, and it cost one token to discipline another player.

Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by deducting points from other players -- and to give up a token themselves to do it.

"They didn't believe they did anything wrong," said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame.

Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.

"The question is why?" said Harvard political economist Richard Zeckhauser.

No one is sure. The freeloaders might be angry at being trumped by strangers, or be unwilling to share with people they don't know. They also might believe they are being treated unfairly.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Naturally, this distorts a very primal question: whose money is whose? It's a lot easier to consider unearned money to be other than your own, and thus, to give an extreme example, a lottery winner is less likely to feel resentful about forking over his winnings than the owner of a store who has built it from scratch.

And an independent contractor who builds fences for a living is likely to be far more resentful about writing the government a check out of his earnings than the same man would if he worked as an hourly employees for a large fence company and had the taxes deducted -- even if the work was identical, and even if the net after-tax income was the same. The question of whose money is it? so strikes at the core of what motivates people that if the tax withholding laws were abolished, the income tax system would become unsustainable.

Several years ago, I looked at a work situation a left-wing writer saw as an experiment in socialism -- by waiters at a New York restaurant who shared their tips. Like the experiment Hotz describes in today's journal, there was also a common pot. Unlike that experiment, the money that went into the common pot was not exactly "free" but was earned. Waiters who worked harder earned larger tips, and, as the author admitted, these harder workers tended to resent the waiters who didn't:

....which means that tips--no matter how much an individual brings in individually--were split equally. On nights that I sold our most expensive wines and entrees to the best Big Apple tippers, I divided what I've earned with the rest of the house.

Needless to say, this is an experiment in the successes and pitfalls of a socialist society. The good parts are plentiful; when a server gets weeded (waitspeak for "too busy to function"), it is the responsibility of the entire house to pick up the slack. The house does this out of respect for the concept of teamwork and, more importantly, out of a selfish desire to protect the common monetary interest.

Conceptually, this inspires in my coworkers different reactions. One particularly obnoxious workmate of mine constantly complained that some servers didn't hold up their end of the bargain. They're lazy, he says, or they don't sell the same amount of food as he does. (Emphasis added.)

And it needs to be resolved by getting rid of that typically American mindset of ownership -- and above all, of responsibility.

.... that's an American mindset. We are possessionists, obsessed with belongings and ownership. We are a nation of deeds and titles, a nation mired in proving what we have. In the end, if we have shelter and freedom and family, that should be enough to sate any of us.

The fact that the fulfillment of these needs isn't enough is disconcerting, because if a pooled house is a microcosm of that elusive Communist society that has never entirely worked, the one truth is that success is a (distant?) possibility. But we need to divorce ourselves from the idea that each of us is directly responsible for certain things and take a more proactive role in living life. As the environment, economy, and government continue to suffer varying degrees of trauma, it feels increasingly important that we leave our individual bubbles and join a community. Call it a manifesto, or call it a practical approach to changing the world, but it seems to me that we could all be better people if we learned what our teachers tried to impart in kindergarten: sharing is good.

The bottom line is that it's not only a lot easier to share free money, it's a lot easier to become morally indignant with those who don't. But those who didn't earn their fair share are much more likely to be "generous" with what they didn't earn, and less tolerant of the reluctance of those who earned their money to share it.

Carried to an extreme, this leads the freeloading classes to paradoxically accuse those on whose hard work they depend -- their benefactors -- of being greedy. Of being "freeloaders" for not wanting to pay "their fair share."

Which makes about as much sense as parasites accusing their host of parasitism.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I'm thinking that there may be a direct relationship between resentment and greed. Think about it this way: if the more productive classes are resented for having more, and if they are also resented even if they pay more, it begs the question of whether the resentment of them stems from a poorly understood aspect of human nature which touches on the Twain distinction between man and dog. Suppose for the sake of argument that there is some natural, biologically based resentment of the "helping" classes by the classes who are "helped." (Hence the quotes.) The result is that the productive are in a no-win situation; they are resented for having earned more, and also resented for helping the non-productive classes. OK, it being a given that humans dislike being resented, if they're going to be resented either way, what's in it for them by being helpers? Other than not wanting to go to prison, I don't know.

But I strongly suspect that the more the productive classes are resented for being "greedy," the greedier they'll actually become.

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

Comments appreciated.

A very interesting blog by some one who purports to be a Chicago police officer.

The comments are especially good.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I don't know what it is about me and emails I don't agree with, but earlier today I received an impassioned plea from the "Lighted Candle Society" informing me that my tax dollars are "subsidizing pornography."

Naturally, that got my attention, for the word "subsidize" means "finance, support, promote, sponsor, underwrite, put up the money for," and I honestly didn't know the government was paying for porn with my dollars.

But that's what the email said:

My tax dollars are
paying for what?!

With scientific research demonstrating the serious social and psychological harm that pornography causes, can you stand still while your tax dollars subsidize the most explicit sexual material?

This last week, the Lighted Candle Society met with Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia's 10th district. Dr. Broun has introduced a bill in Congress that would prohibit military PX stores from selling pornographic films and magazines. The families of our military, the honor of our servicemen and the dignity of their service to our country deserve more than this.

Currently, PX stores (military base convenient stores) sell explicit materials such as Penthouse, Hustler and Playboy. Representative Broun's bill (the Military Honor and Decency Act) would remove this material from the shelves.

Please contact your representative and ask them to co-sponsor HR 5821. Click on the box below to get started! It only takes 2 minutes.

And it came as quite a shock to me that anyone in this day and age would consider Playboy to be pornography.

Apparently the problem is that under existing law, it isn't pornography. Thus, the goal of the bill is to have the government declare it to be pornography. I read the bill (HR 5821), and it broadens the existing definition of "sexually explicit material" to include nudity.

I guess that means not only no more Playboy, but no more art magazines featuring Renoir!

It's easy to be flippant and say something like "I wish these people would get a life!" The problem is, I'm afraid they have a life, and this is it.

Sigh.

Without getting into the pros and cons of either real pornography or Playboy, I do have a philosophical question.

Shouldn't it be up to the military to decide what is and what is and what is not allowed to be sold to soldiers without congressional meddling? It's not as if we're talking about children here. They are soldiers, and they are risking their lives in the defense of their country.

Where do people get off trying to censor their reading material? Isn't there still a war on?

(Well, if the bill passes, I guess concerned citizens could always start a compaign along the lines of "Send a copy of Playboy to a soldier!" Yeah, I know that would be a subsidy, but at least it would be private. Hey, whatever it takes to help win the war!)

MORE: Dean Esmay must be on the same mailing list I'm on, for he got the email too. He doesn't think this stunt will help the congressman much:

Congressman Broun, if he is successful, will soon become the most hated man in Congress among those serving.

...when pit bulls are criminalized, only criminals will own pit bulls.

-- Radley Balko

State Rep. John Galloway (D., Bucks) will announce legislation today that would allow municipalities to pass ordinances restricting dangerous dogs.

ADBA's position and analysis continues below.

Galloway, who will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. at the Bristol Borough Hall, said he was inspired to draft the bill after a large dog attacked a beagle being walked by a little girl in his district.

Luna, the beagle, was being walked by a 5-year-old girl and her uncle in Bristol when it was attacked by a pit bull that had wandered out of its yard. Luna and the little girl, along with local officials, will attend the event.

What is not justified is the attempt by grandstanding politicians to make me into a criminal, simply because Coco (whose best friend is a little Shih Tzu named Tristan and who is also in love with a beagle named Bailey) happens to share the same collective breed name which is being applied to the dog which attacked Luna the beagle.

I deeply and bitterly resent this profound abuse of logic. Dog A is not controlled by his owner and attacks Dog B, so they want to punish owners of Dog C, because Dog C allegedly resembles Dog A. By definition, this is bigotry. Every dog is different, just as every person is different. There are good dogs with good owners and there are bad dogs with bad owners. People should be making up their minds about individual dogs and individual owners based on the conduct of the individual dogs and individual owners. There are leash laws, and laws against allowing dogs to run loose. If violators of these laws own ill-behaved pit bulls which are allowed to run around and wreak havoc, they're like criminal gun owners who engage in drive-by shootings. Show me a bad pit bull that attacks innocent dogs or people, and I'll show you a bad dog owner. (IMO, the popularity of strong dogs with criminals is a result of the drug war, which is another topic.....)

But Breed Specific Legislation disregards the fact that just as not all dogs are the same, not all humans are the same.

This is another example of nanny state social engineering at its worst. Anyone who thinks it will stop at "pit bulls," think again. Like so-called "assault weapons" they're another foot in the door -- based more on an appearance than anything else. (And if you think a pit bull is easy to spot by its appearance, just take this test.)

But dogs looking like pit bulls are only a first step. All large and powerful dogs will ultimately be on the "dog control" list. Nanny statists simply do not want citizens owning dogs which are capable of defending themselves and their familes.

Parenthetically, Clayton Cramer has documented that dog control laws share a racist history along with gun control laws:

In Maryland, these prohibitions went so far as to prohibit free blacks from owning dogs without a license, and authorizing any white to kill an unlicensed dog owned by a free black, for fear that blacks would use dogs as weapons. Mississippi went further, and prohibited any ownership of a dog by a black person.[5]

Sponsor Galloway is a Democrat, which doesn't surprise me, but I see there are Republicans listed among the bill's sponsors. (GALLOWAY, MELIO, RAMALEY, JAMES, SAYLOR, MAHONEY, PARKER, GOODMAN, PASHINSKI, SIPTROTH, MOYER, BISHOP, REICHLEY, SWANGER, MURT AND GERBER -- of whom Saylor, Moyer, Reichley, Swanger, and Murt are Republicans.)

This stuff really fries me, and I don't know what to say, other than I hope that this law is defeated.

I might as well repeat myself:

I don't know if there is any way to put this more simply, but Coco is my dog, and that's all there is to it. I am loyal to her, and in being loyal to her, I am being loyal to myself. The people who want to make me cut out her ovaries and the people who want to kill her I must oppose resolutely, lest I cease to be a free citizen.

I find it depressing to live in a country which would invade my home and kill my dog, and despite my use of satire, ridicule and sarcasm as weapons, I don't think their movement is funny at all. It is sinister. I do not think it is hyperbole to call it Orwellian, and yes, even totalitarian.

I know I am repeating myself, but stuff like this calls for repetition. So I'll also repeat what I said when I repeated myself in a post titled "As the noose tightens, the hangman becomes respectable":

....here I am, minding my own business and not so much as inconveniencing anyone, while an ever-growing number of people want to make me into a criminal. As it is, I'm forced to live as an exile from California, where my dog and my guns would be criminal activities.

So, should I just sit around in Pennsylvania and imagine it could never happen here? Or should I move South and hope it doesn't happen there?

Wherever I go, it seems that it's easier and easier to become a criminal by doing nothing.

My dog Coco is not a gun.

She is a member of my family. Fortunately, she is a dog, so she cannot realize that there are well-organized people in the government who want to kill her. But how am I supposed to feel about people who propose killing a member of my family?

Like I say, this is a more emotional issue than the gun issue. It's hard to look at a member of your family and not feel.

MORE: A friend just emailed me what I think is a perfect example of a killer pit bull in action:

Notice that not only are all of these dogs extremely dangerous, they're diabolically clever at luring their victims into a false sense of security.

MORE: Commenter Oregon Guy asks,

Where is the Kennel Club? Are there no advocates for dogs?

And here's a statement from the ADBA:

The ADBA, AKC and UKC believes that strong enforcement of leash laws, as well as clear guidelines for identifying and managing dangerous dogs, will promote responsible dog ownership and prevent tragedies from occurring. Simply placing restrictions on certain breeds will not improve public safety - it will only punish responsible dog owners.

We strongly support sound, enforceable, non-discriminatory legislation to govern dog ownership, and we appreciate legislators' desire to keep communities safe for both people and dogs. However, BSL will not address the root cause of dangerous dogs - irresponsible ownership!

Click here to continue reading.

UPDATE: Here's more from the ADBA:

If you believe that it does not affect you because you don't own a "pit bull," it may shock you to know that ALL of the following breeds have been targeted; Akita, Alaskan Malamute, American Bull Dog, American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, Belgian Malinois, Boerboel, Bull Terrier, Cane Corso, Chow Chow, Doberman Pincher, Dogo Argentino, English Mastiff, Fila Brasileiro, German Shepard, Great Dane, Irish Wolf Hound, Mastiff, Presa Mallorquin, Presa Canario, Rottweiler, Scottish Deerhound, Shar Pei, Siberian Husky, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and the Tosa Inu.

Thorley Winston at The Volokh Conspiracy has this to say about Obama vs McCain on economic policy:

On Health Care - Obama favors creating a new federal entitlement and a new federal bureaucracy to force every private health plan to conform to the "genero[sity]" of the new entitlement. McCain opposes both mandates and entitlements and favors letting consumers buy their own health insurance policies across State lines and restoring market competition to the health insurance market.

On entitlements - Obama favors raising Social Security taxes (again), thinks that Medicare Part D wasn't generous enough, and thinks that comparatively poorer young people were put on this Earth to pay for the benefits promised to the comparatively wealthier retirees who voted them into existence in the first place. McCain opposes expanding existing entitlements, wants to means-test Medicare, and has consistently supported letting younger workers opt at least partially out of Social Security.

On farm subsidies - Obama favors farm subsidies including ethanol. McCain has consistently opposed farm subsidies even to the point of going into Iowa to denouncer ethanol subsidies.

On free trade - Obama favors backing out of our existing trade treaties unless they include more trade restrictions to benefit various special interest groups that support his campaign (read: unions). McCain has been one of the most ardent supporters of free trade to the point of talking to voters among whom it might be unpopular to convince them that they should support it.

On taxes, spending and earmarks - Obama favors not only repealing the Bush tax cuts but higher levels of taxation on top of that, favors even higher levels of spending, and supports earmarks (ask his wife's employer). McCain has never voted for a tax increase and generally favors lower taxes, has bucked his own party on spending (particularly for popular programs) and doesn't do earmarks.

==

You know, I could get to like McCain.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

"The only news is that somebody within the administration has confirmed what a lot of us have thought for some time."

Having not read the book and being without plans to do so, I'd be shooting in the dark if I reviewed it, but I find myself wondering what juicy scandals it contains, since it's occupying a huge amount of print, talk show, and blog space. I mean, after all, since Bush is the target of McClellan's wrath, and Bush is a lame duck whose only political relevance is the extent to which John McCain can be tied to him, the book would have to be a real eye-opener to merit all this attention.

So what happened? Did McCain throw a tantrum in the White House and punch Bush in the face? Is McCain rumored to have had late night romantic meetings with sexy lobbyists in the White House while Bush snorted coke?

Being a complete ignoramus about these things, I figured I'd start from scratch, so, I Googled Scott McClellan. Quite predictably, the Wiki entry came right up.

The guy seems to have been a natural born and bred politician:

Born in Austin, Texas, McClellan is the youngest son of Carole Keeton Strayhorn, former Texas State Comptroller and former 2006 independent Texas gubernatorial candidate, and attorney Barr McClellan. McClellan's brother Mark McClellan headed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and formerly was Commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration. McClellan is the grandson of the late W. Page Keeton, longtime Dean of the University of Texas School of Law and renowned expert in tort law.

Career

After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, where he was president of the Sigma Phi Epsilon Texas Alpha Chapter, McClellan was the three-time campaign manager for his mother. In addition, he worked on political grassroots efforts and was the Chief of Staff to a Texas State Senator.

The Wiki review of "What Happened" does not point out what's making leading leftists like the gleefully gloating Gleen Grenwald find most damning -- the "deferential" remark:

"[T]he national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq," he writes.

McClellan also writes that "the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

On this point, White House reporters bristle. "When people say White House reporters weren't asking the tough questions, that's false," said Mason, who contended that White House aides such as McClellan kept reiterating talking points and that reporters "weren't getting any usable responses." When asked about McClellan's criticism, NBC's David Gregory responded in an e-mail to Politico: "I think my work speaks for itself and is the clearest refutation of Scott's claim."

McClellan wasn't press secretary during the invasion but took over as the case for war began crumbling.... (Emphasis added.)

During the critical time period in which he claims reporters were said to be too deferential -- when "the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq" was under debate -- McClellan was not Press Secretary, but Ari Fleischer was. However, McClellan nonetheless appeared (as Deputy Press Secretary) at some White House press conferences before he took over from Fleischer. (Full list of White House briefings here.)

I don't know what he was doing in 2002 (he has a long history of working for his mother), but perhaps McClellan missed the "deferential" behavior of most Democrats and nearly everyone else during that period. (See my compilation of "Quotes from war-mongering Democrats.")

There's talk of McClellan's alleged Soros connections, as well as possible Obama connections, but what most fascinates me is McClellans conspiracy theory connection by way of his father, Barr McClellan.

Seriously, I'd rather read his father's book than his son's. His theory is that LBJ killed JFK:

Disallowed from practicing law, McClellan published Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK*[3], in 2003 which became a best-seller in November of that year. In the book McClellan presents a theory that Lyndon B. Johnson and Edward Clark were involved in the planning and cover-up of the Kennedy assassination. McClellan also named Malcolm Wallace as one of the assassins. The killing of Kennedy, he alleged, was paid for by oil millionaires such as Clint Murchison, Sr. and Haroldson L. Hunt. McClellan purports that Clark got $6 million for this work. French journalist William Reymond published a book the same year in which he claims that Cliff Carter and Malcolm "Mac" Wallace were key to helping plot the murder of JFK. McClellan's book has been translated into Japanese. He is presently completing a sequel to his book.

McClellan states, the assassination of Kennedy allowed the oil depletion allowance to be kept at 27.5 percent. It remained unchanged during the Johnson presidency. According to McClellan this resulted in a saving of over 100 million dollars to the American oil industry. During President Richard M. Nixon term, in 1970, it dropped to 15 percent.

McClellan and his wife Cecile live in Gulfport, Mississippi. He is rewriting a novel on the death penalty that was recognized in international competition in 1982 and is producing a play first presented in Houston in 1992.

And hey, "Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK" is available at Amazon! I'll bet the son's new book ought to help dad's sales. As one reviewer said, "McClellan sacrificed a brilliant legal career for this case." Maybe such self-sacrificing behavior runs in the family.

But alas! There's so little time. I don't think I'll be able to read either book.

MORE: Don't miss Rick Moran's "White House Backstabbing for Fun and Profit," which looks at a long history of such "tell-all" books. Most of them, notes Moran, were written by prominent big shots "fairly substantial men who built solid reputations outside of government" -- like Regan, Haig, and Stephanopoulos:

Not so Mr. McClellan. He was far from being an administration big shot. He had no reputation to rescue nor did he necessarily have a political axe to grind. He wrote his vicious little pamphlet and nailed it to the wall because his publisher recognized a market for his scribblings, nothing more. There is doubtless some historical value in what we are told is a book all of 321 pages, although I doubt whether it would be anything much beyond footnote worthy. In essence, Mr. McClellan sold his memories -- faulty or otherwise -- for no other reason than he could.

MORE: Via Glenn Reynolds, Clayton Cramer asks:

if [..] he could see that Bush was intentionally misleading the nation into war back then, why didn't McClellan say anything? Why didn't he quit his job and blow the whistle? . . . It makes me wonder how much of this is that McClellan is trying to sell a book."

And Ann Althouse expressed wonder over the discovery of McClellan's sudden wisdom:

"It's not the disloyalty that bothers me. It's the press suddenly finding wisdom in a guy they previously disregarded as stupid and unreliable. It's inevitable that critical Bush-era memoirs will come out, but written by smarter people. I'll read those."

MORE: It appears that McClellan is a likely Obama supporter:

Scott McClellan, making the media rounds to promote his book and push back against the ferocious counter-attack by Bush loyalists, declined to come out tonight for John McCain and said he liked what he had heard from Barack Obama.

"I haven't made a decision," McClellan told Katie Couric on CBS's "Evening News," when asked if he was backing the Arizona senator. McClellan paid homage to McCain, saying that the Republican nominee had "governed from the center, and that's where I am."

But without prompting, he said he was "intrigued by Sen. Obama's message."

"It's a message that is very similar to the one that Gov. Bush ran on in 2000," McClellan said.

He offered similar comments about Obama on ABC's "World News Tonight."

If McClellan says Obama is very similar to Bush, then shouldn't McCain say he's running to prevent Bush from having a third term?

Back in late March Clayton sent me an e-mail saying that he was running for the Idaho State Senate. He and I have had our agreements and disagreements. He has always been respectful of my arguments and discussed them with wit and intelligence. The people of Idaho would be well served by electing him to office. He is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and he is vitally interested in science and technology. He practices the manual arts (machine shop work) as well. He is my ideal of the citizen politician.

He has my endorsement.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

This was prompted by his blog comment to my post Civilization Comes First. It reminded me I had promised to support him and had fallen down on the job.

I should have looked more closely at his www site. He lost. A shame. We could use more like him in government. Clayton: don't give up. Try again until you succeed.

Watch and believe!

(Link here.)

(HT Justin, who told me that naturalists used to tell people that the above could never happen.)

Not long ago, Eric Wilson discussed something I've often wondered about:

I do wonder, however, if normal sadness -- typical melancholy -- is increasingly being viewed as a sickness, a state to be treated with medication. Of course, there is a fine line between normal melancholy and clinical depression. What separates the two, as far as I can tell, is degree of activity. Both are forms of sadness that lead to ongoing unease with how things are -- persistent feelings that the world as it is, is not quite right. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything, one way or another. In contrast, melancholia (in my eyes) generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.

Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treat melancholia as an aberrant state. This could be terribly dangerous. To treat normal sadness as a disease is to degrade an essential part of the human experience.

That does not mean depression should not be treated, any more than it means pain shouldn't be treated.

But just as there is no moral opprobrium attached to pain from a broken leg, nor should there be to pain from a broken "heart." They can't do things like ruin your career and take away your Second Amendment rights because you're in normal physical pain, so by what standard should they be able to do these things because of mental pain?

Little wonder that people medicate themselves rather than seek help.

Of course, according to the prevailing logic of the world, that's immoral too...

"What I'd really like is something with the price of the Asus, the keyboard of the HP, and Windows XP for speed and broad software compatibility."

So says Glenn Reynolds, in his review of the Asus 900 mini notebook (which he generally likes).

When I'm on the road or when the power's out, I use a Dell 700M (a machine Glenn recommended, BTW) which is a lot smaller than most laptops. I still use it and love it .However, these new mini laptops are even smaller; the size and weight of a slim book. The biggest problem I'd have using one is that I can't stand having to use the tiny keyboards that seem an inextricable part of these machines.

How might they get around the keyboard problem? There are several portable keyboards which fold in half:

Or even into "fourths":

I don't think it would be an impossible engineering feat to design a mini laptop with a keyboard that folds out, perhaps on each side. That way, the thing would still be as small and as convenient to carry as a book, yet capable of delivering the type of performance we've come to expect of "real" laptops.

I guess that doesn't mean yours truly, because not only do I not make a living from blogging, but I never read, linked to, or knew who the complainant ("ex blogger" Emily Gould) was. At least, not until I saw the link from Ann Althouse, and read more:

"They want me to be punished for having left that world, and for having criticized it," Gould wrote to me in an e-mail. "It's important to them that it be understood that my article, which on the surface might seem like an accomplishment, is actually a fluke, a mistake on the Times' part, attributable to pretty much anything besides relevance or skill."

That may sound a little defensive (and even a touch paranoid?), but it's not far off to say that the demographic that cared about this story most was the New York new media crowd. That group's open access to megaphones and soapboxes belies its exceedingly small and unrepresentative nature -- so much so that with a collective eye blink it can light up the blogosphere with vituperative chatter about what's, after all, just a story about the by now unsurprising pitfalls of playing with the Web's peephole-filled boundaries between public and private.

Gould's shocking "expose" of "their" world of blogging is here, and it's a classic example of someone who wanted attention, got it, and now complains about the attention she got.

More out of idle curiosity than anything else, I forced myself to slog through through her incredibly long and tedious screed, and while I'm at a loss to understand why she deserved the attention she got, that's just me. Perhaps if I were young and sexy and of the opposite sex I'd understand better. But I'm not and I don't.

Still, I recognize that under the First Amendment, people are entitled to say anything or express themselves in any legal manner they want in order to get attention. If she makes money doing what constitutes entertainment, she has just as much right as Ann Coulter or Amanda Marcotte.

Being paid lots of money for public assholeism is the American way.

I don't mean to complain, though, because it appears that by complaining I might stand accused of "scrutinizing" Ms. Gould, who is apparently someone who wants unwanted attention so much she'll do anything to get it in order to complain.

So I'm writing this post to say simply that I paid just enough attention to ascertain that this whole "flap" (if that's what it is) wasn't worthy of the attention I gave it.

I just got an interesting report on a technical conference that is to be held by moving electrons not people.

CISSE 2008 provides a virtual forum for presentation and discussion of the state-of the-art research on computers, information and systems sciences and engineering. CISSE 2008 is the fourth conference of the CISSE series of e-conferences. CISSE is the World's first Engineering/Computing and Systems Research E-Conference. CISSE 2005 was the first high-caliber Research Conference in the world to be completely conducted online in real-time via the internet.

Eric's post The little firehouse that couldn't beat the convention racket prompted me to cross post this from Power and Control.

How to get more taxes out of high earners:

May I suggest lowering the rate on top earners to a rate below that of other civilized countries and attracting them to the USA?

I call my plan: Steal The Rich.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

A "little thing" pissed me off earlier. The City of Philadelphia is demolishing an architectural gem known as the Race Street Firehouse. Constructed in 1926, it's one of those whimsically functional buildings no one would design today, and it was adorned with what are probably the world's only "firemen gargoyles" -- an architectural detail I've blogged about before with pictures.

Here's a front view of the building:

And a side view -- showing what a charming and dignified little castle it is -- defying its executioners to the last.

I know I'm being anthropogenic, but it's as if the castle is saying,"Modern barbarians may be able to tear me down, but their vandal culture will never be able to build another one like me!"

It's true. The type of masons capable of such intricate brickwork, and kind of craftsmen capable of carving stone gargoyles, are beyond the practical capabilities of today. I think it's a tragedy, and I'm sure Mayor Nutter cares about as much about the Race Street Firehouse as he does the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

What makes this post especially hard to write is that I'm being emotional about a building, which may seem trivial, because it is not a living, breathing, suffering human being. Well, nor were the Bamyan statues in Afghanistan, but people still cared about their demise, even though they did not suffer as the Afghan people suffered. Of course, the Race Street Firehouse does not compare to ancient statues, so the comparison is inapt in that regard. However, they make the point that culturally significant things do not have to be living to merit at least a modicum of respect. All I can do here is speak up for them on their passing, and reflect on the whys.

Had the firehouse been purchased by a private developer who wanted to tear it down, I would be willing to bet that there'd have been a lot more trouble. The building is on the list of the National Register, and many people love it. As it is a valiant and enlightened campaign was mounted to save it, but to no avail. That's because there was no private developer to be pressured, no way to launch an effort to raise money to buy it.

It is being torn by the state to make way for a vastly expanded Pennsylvania Convention Center. Governor Rendell bulldozed aside the preservationists' concerns, because this is said to mean progress, and money for Philadelphia. Governor Rendell and future Mayor Nutter (who chaired the Pennsylvania Convention Center) positively gloated over the demolitions, which they said would bring jobs and development:

"This demolition is one of the most exciting events in this city's history," said Michael Nutter, former chairman of the PCC and democratic nominee for Mayor of Philadelphia. "The expansion of the Pennsylvania Convention Center will provide jobs, economic development, and cultural enrichment for the entire region. But most importantly, this expansion will catapult Philadelphia into the highest leadership ranks of convention centers in the world. I am very proud of our collective accomplishment."

As a libertarian and a realist, I recognize that old buildings often do stand in the way of progress, and have to come down. In real estate, there's the principle of the "highest and best use" of land, and let's face it, a charming 1920s firehouse in the middle of downtown Philadelphia is not what most reasonable people would believe to be the highest and best use.

But the highest and best use principle assumes a normal operation of the free market system. What is happening here is that the state has decided to go into the convention center business, and it has made the decision to raze an entire area and radically change its character based on the notion that a bigger convention center will necessarily bring more conventions.

So, while my regret over the loss of the charming firehouse is a "little thing," it's one of those little things that has heightened my awareness of a much bigger thing -- government going into huge business ventures with taxpayer money.

A link from Glenn Reynolds to Nick Gillespie's video at reason.tv touched on a question which is very closely related to the convention center business:

Are publicly financed stadiums and other sports subsidies really worth the cost to taxpayers?

"They don't make any money; they just generate new spending in one location by taking it from another. That's no benefit to the society; that's just a benefit to people who got the money given to them at a cost of the money taken from someone else."

And if government involvement in the stadium business is bad, government involvement in the convention center business appears to be worse. Until the doomed firehouse forced me to take a look, I had no idea what an massive boondoggle it is. Far from being limited to Philadelphia, it's become a city government bandwagon, with virtually every large city locked into an imaginary game of "competition" with every other large city. I placed competition in quotes to stress the artificiality.

Steven Malanga looked at the phenomenon in detail in The Convention Center Shell Game.

What is happening in Boston and Baltimore is not an anomaly but merely the latest chapter in what is turning out to be one of America's biggest civic boondoggles. For more than a decade now, cities and counties have been rushing, at enormous public cost, to build new convention centers or add space to old ones, including a $191 million expansion of San Francisco's Moscone Center, a $291 million new facility in Omaha, and a $354 million center in Pittsburgh. The increase in space has vastly outpaced the growth of the convention industry and often failed to generate the kind of economic activity predicted by boosters. Rather than energizing local economies, in fact, some convention centers are emerging as a drag on civic finances, requiring taxpayer operating subsidies on top of their huge, publicly financed construction costs. What's more, the situation is only likely to get worse. Another eight to ten million square feet of exhibition space is scheduled to come on line within five years, an increase of about 15 percent in an industry where demand is barely growing.

Although those numbers should be sobering to any city contemplating building yet more space, in New York officials are plunging ahead with plans for the most costly convention project to date--proposing to spend a staggering $1.5 billion nearly to double the size of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The proposal comes despite the chronic fiscal problems of both the state and the city and the absolute lack of any credible evidence that the expanded center would pay back such a colossal public investment.

Indeed, to finance the expansion, the state and the city, both already heavily indebted, will likely have to float huge debt offerings and may even increase some taxes.

New York's headlong plunge into this new project is evidence that local officials rarely let the facts get in the way of their love of big projects....

Like Baltimore.

Despite a publicly financed Hilton convention hotel set to open next year, Baltimore's major convention business appears to be declining, prompting concern among officials for the city's investment.

Critics say inflated costs and the failure to produce more shows drawing more patrons make the $373 million complex overlooking the Allegheny River a bad investment. A $150 million state subsidy and bonds financed by Allegheny County's hotel/motel room tax paid for the center..

Don't feed downtown L.A.'s white elephant

Convention Center giveaways line developers' pockets at the expense of the rest of the city.

Nearly four years ago, city officials opened the $850 million Washington Convention Center with a string of superlatives. The largest publicly financed project ever built in the city, they said, would attract more than a million visitors a year, fill hotels and set off an economic boom.

Instead, convention attendance is dropping, the surrounding neighborhood is yet to be transformed by the promised new development, and conventioneers are filling fewer hotel rooms than expected.

The number of large conventions and trade shows booked at the Washington Convention Center has declined since its first full year of operations, 2004, and, on average, those events have been smaller. Hotel bookings, a key measure of a convention center's performance, have failed to meet projections in all but one year.

The number of hotel rooms booked is especially significant because it is the most accurate measure of performance, and last year hotel convention bookings missed projections by 13 percent. Bookings are likely to fall short of projections by 24 percent this year and 29 percent next year.

To pay for the center, the city raised its tax rate for all hotel rooms and restaurant meals.

It's not as if they weren't warned.

A major Brookings Institute study by Heywood Sanders pointed out that the convention business has been in decline:

* The overall convention marketplace is declining in a manner that suggests that a recovery or turnaround is unlikely to yield much increased business for any given community, contrary to repeated industry projections. Moreover this decline began prior to the disruptions of 9-11 and is exacerbated by advances in communications technology. Currently, overall attendance at the 200 largest tradeshow events languishes at 1993 levels.

* Nonetheless, localities, sometimes with state assistance, have continued a type of arms race with competing cities to host these events, investing massive amounts of capital in new convention center construction and expansion of existing facilities. Over the past decade alone, public capital spending on convention centers has doubled to $2.4 billion annually, increasing convention space by over 50 percent since 1990. Nationwide, 44 new or expanded convention centers are now in planning or construction.

* Faced with increased competition, many cities spend more money on additional convention amenities, like publicly-financed hotels to serve as convention "headquarters." Another competitive response has been to offer deep discounts to tradeshow groups. Despite dedicated taxes to pay off the public bonds issued to build convention centers, many--including Washington, D.C and St. Louis--operate at a loss.

Needless to say, Philadelphia's convention industry is also declining, and while you might not read that in the Philadelphia Inquirer, some brave souls were at least concerned enough to allow that the enormous expansion just might entail risk.

Still, the convention advocates advance the view that Philadelphia has not kept pace with other cities, and "needs" a larger convention center, and I guess they're content to ignore evidence to the contrary.

While it wasn't easy to find hard statistics for Philadelphia, Professor Sanders supplied some during House testimony last March:

Philadelphia presents a similar case of overly optimistic consultant forecasts and lagging convention center performance. The new Pennsylvania Convention Center opened in July 1993, supplanting the Civic Center as the city's prime convention venue. The penultimate market and feasibility analysis for the center was completed in May 1988. That analysis stressed the capacity of the planned center to bring new convention and tradeshow events and attendees to Philadelphia. It projected that the center would be an economic boon to the city, generating a total of 4,252 new jobs and yielding 664,800 hotel room nights to the city by 2001.

The new jobs are difficult to find, but the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority has reported on the hotel room nights associated with center events. They hit a peak of 519,793 in fiscal year 2001, boosted by the Republican National Convention. By fiscal 2004 the room night total had fallen to 363,954. For fiscal 2005 it hit 297,180. The center is thus currently generating less than half the forecast hotel demand. At the same time, the 1998 consultant study predicted that the center would incur an annual operating loss of about $2.2 million. The center's actual operating loss for fiscal 2005 came to $14.8 million,

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Philadephia are now undertaking a $700 million expansion of the center that will add 260,000 square feet of exhibit space. Consultant studies project that the expansion will add more than $140 million in spending impact, by filling a total of 650,000 hotel room nights each year. That figure, post-expansion, is less than the 664,000 room nights promised in 1988 and never achieved.

That's the whole problem, and it's why I don't like government going into the convention business. Like any business owner, the government can fail. However, when a private business entity fails, the consequences take the form of investors and stockholders losing money or becoming bankrupt.

But what happens when government business ventures fail?

MORE: While Nikolai Ceausescu didn't call them "convention centers" he razed huge portions of Bucharest in order to build gigantic government buildings:

Beginning in 1972, Ceausescu instituted a program of systematisation. Promoted as a way to build a "multilaterally developed socialist society", the program of demolition, resettlement, and construction began in the countryside, but culminated with an attempt to reshape the country's capital completely. Over one fifth of central Bucharest, including churches and historic buildings, was demolished in the 1980s, in order to rebuild the city in his own style. The People's House ("Casa Poporului") in Bucharest, now the Palace of the Parliament, is the world's second largest administrative building, after The Pentagon. Ceausescu also planned to bulldoze many villages in order to move the peasants into blocks of flats in the cities, as part of his "urbanisation" and "industrialisation" programs. An NGO project called "Sister Villages" that created bonds between European and Romanian communities may have played a role in thwarting these plans.

Ceausescu considered it necessary to his program of systematization to demolish vast portions of the historic and central parts of Bucharest and replace them with giant representation buildings and high-density standardized apartment blocks. The latter rooted in the ideology of "edifying the multilaterally developed socialist society" and it was considered an epitome of the Leninist formula of the "fight between old and new" (see Historical materialism).

Started in 1974, but implemented some six years later, the program implied a comprehensive nationwide campaign of demolitions, resettlements and reconstruction.

Still, I find myself wondering...

These ever-more-gigantic and ugly convention centers have all the charm of airports, and this one is destroying much of downtown Philadelphia's charm.

From where came the rule that all cities must have them?

UPDATE: My thanks to Clayton Cramer for the link. Notes Cramer,

Special interests in the area of the proposed development make out like bandits on these projects, while taxpayers as a whole get looted--and business in other parts of the city are the usual losers.

Conservatives are pining for a candidate they can vote for. What they really need is an electorate that will vote for their candidates.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

It seems everyone wants to essentially surrender and put a RINO (or in Jonah Goldberg's case, an actual Democrat) on the ticket with McCain.

Wouldn't it be better to have a VP who actually brings people to the ticket, instead of pushing away the voters we actually have?

Here's a brazen idea: let's put a real conservative on the ticket with McCain (someone who could be a great President in 2012) and start a GOP renewal by refocusing the party on conservative prinicples.

And I'm a Real Conservative™. Tobacco and pot are none of the governments damn business.

I've studied the global warming science very carefully and from this engineer's perspective it is a total crock.

None the less I'm a strong supporter of MCain. Despite my very Libertarianish tendencies.

Make it harder for you to vote for McCain? You have no idea how hard it is for me to vote for the crap the GOP serves up to me. But you know there is a fookin' war on and my pet issues can wait until our civilization is properly secured.

In any case the VP has absolutely nothing to do with making or signing abortion laws. If it can give us a win in any of the states I mentioned I'm for her.

The election is going to be a dog fight and the MSM is white hot for Obama in a way they were not for Kerry (he did have their wind at his back). I want every stinking advantage I can get in the coming election. Even if it means giving up many of my most cherished positions and principles.

Civilization depends on it.

Rachel Lucas has it right:

===

Why?

Because Civilization Comes First

BTW Click on the Bumper Sticker to find out how to order some.

H/T Instapundit

Clayton E. Cramer has linked. Clayton is running for the Idaho Senate. If you are from Idaho give him your support.

Welcome Instapundit readers. You might like to also read Vets For Freedom.

Take a look at this video of John McCain being heckled by anti-war protesters.

As I've discussed before, McCain has this calm, unflappable quality, and when he's under pressure, all that seems to happen is that he looks mildly amused. I'd be willing to bet that if his blood pressure were monitored during these incidents, it wouldn't rise at all; it might even go down.

So what's with the accusation that he can't control his temper?

My guess would be that it's probably projection.

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

May I suggest Linda Lingle a two term Republican Governor of Hawaii. She won her last election in a Democrat state by 62.5% to 35.4%. She is Jewish, which might help peel NY-31, NJ-15, and FL-27 from the Democrat column. That is 73 Electoral College votes. I think the help in those states would be especially strong if Obama knocks Hillary out of the race.

Linda Lingle On The Issues. Be sure to scroll all the way down to see how she rates on the World's Smallest Political Quiz.

Note: I decided to cross post this here (from Power and Control) in response to Eric's recent post suggesting (as an aside) a McCain/Lieberman ticket. At least Lingle is a Republican (by Party affiliation if not by positions).

Welcome Instapundit readers.

No, I don't mean the Republicans In Name Only. I mean real rhinoceroses. According to Michael Miersch (one of Germany's most prominent writers on ecological matters), efforts to stop "Global Warming" are endangering not only Rhinos, but many other forms of wildlife living in rain forest areas being burned down and replanted for biodiesel production:

In order to meet the European demand for biofuels, companies in Indonesia and Malaysia are burning down rain forests and planting oil palms in the enormous spaces thus cleared for cultivation. As a consequence, hundreds of rare species -- among them, the Sumatran tiger, the orangutan, and the Sumatran rhino -- are losing their habitats. European hysteria about the climate is having the paradoxical effect of destroying a treasure trove of biodiversity.

Time and time again I have seen environmentalists demand that society implement "solutions" only to later discover they are worse than the problem. Remember the inane 1970s "Split wood, not atoms" slogan? It's becoming a crime to burn wood, because of the emissions.

Windmills, anyone? Not only do they chop up endangered raptors, but -- get this --

more climate-warming carbon dioxide is produced in the manufacture, installation and maintenance of the turbines than they save by generating "green" power over their expected lifetime.

I'm sure there are many other examples of environmentalist "cures" which turned out to be worse than the disease.

Wasn't it bad enough when we had to save the endangered rhinos from the Asian aphrodisiac industry and Yemeni dagger merchants?

Well, now it's time to save the rhinos from the environmental wackos!

It's just a small part of their master plan to destroy the planet in order to save it.

In a comment to the last post, longtime commenter Rhodium Heart argues very convincingly for a McCain/Hillary Unity Ticket:

Please please please be the first one in the blog-o-sphere to suggest that John McCain form what other presidents have done in times of war: a national unity ticket. Just like Abraham Lincoln (R) chose Andrew Johnson (D) as his vice president, McCain should pick bring the divided nation together in time of war. McCain must bring us together:

McCain / Hillary '08.

She's earned the vice president slot. No one said it had to be on the D-ticket.

Please please please be the first to suggest this. You'll be Insta-lanched. You'll be the bane of the Kos Kids. You might even be Olbermann's Worst Person Ever. Please. For America.

I'm wondering. When someone dangles before me the prospect of being Insta-lanched while simultaneously being the bane of the Kos Kids, and Olbermann's Worst Person Ever, how could I resist the temptation? I'm only human, and even Jesus was tempted by the devil's offer of power and riches.

However, I don't think I can get away with being the first to suggest a McCain Hillary Unity Ticket, because Kathryn Jean Lopez suggested the idea months ago, as did others. Red State's Moe Lane emphatically stated, "You heard it here first," and while it's not easy to verify such firstness, it's quite clear that I would not be the first if I suggested the idea today.

Considering the number of blogs out there, I'd be maybe the 127th or something! [Um, sorry, but I'd be more like the 751st!]

I think it's worth noting that the idea is not limited to Republicans; over on the left, Buzzflash's Mark Karlin did more than float the idea; he designed a button to go with it:

The button indicates that such a move would provoke immense anger on the left, and I'm sure the same could be said about many on the right.

But the bottom line is that it's hardly an original idea, so I can't be the first to suggest it.

Moreover, regular readers know that I don't like Hillary Clinton, and I have been issuing warnings against a Hillary Clinton presidency since the earliest days of this blog. While it's true that I never inveighed against her being Vice President, I'd be a bit lacking in credibility if I suddenly advocated her being McCain's running mate.

I will say this:

A McCain-Clinton Unity ticket would win.

That's a simple statement of fact.

Not an original idea, and certainly not an endorsement.

UPDATE: According to Dick Morris, Hillary is not likely to be Obama's vice presidential pick, nor does Morris think he would help her.

All the more reason for her to offer to switch parties -- or at least become an Independent like Joe Lieberman.

(This all begs the question of a McCain Lieberman ticket, of course. Not a new issue here.....)

I wish I could prevent the Democrats from seeing these numbers, but I can't. So I might as well speak my mind. As I had expected would happen eventually, McCain is pulling ahead of Obama, yet Hillary still beats McCain:

Tracking Polls (General)

* Gallup: McCain 47, Obama 45
* Gallup: Clinton 49, McCain 44
* Rasmussen: McCain 45, Obama 45
* Rasmussen: Clinton 47, McCain 45

Damn. I hate it when people I want kept in the dark see the light!

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and while I'm glad he agrees that "it's harder to keep people in the dark."

But wait! Isn't Glenn making it harder to keep people in the dark by linking this post?

The complexities are overwhelming.....

(And that's without even factoring in passive aggressive linking.)

Jefferson to Adams in a July 11, 1786, letter: "I acknolege I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro' the medium of war."

Jefferson was speaking about the jihadis of his day.

A sobering thought for this Memorial Day.

It's Memorial Day and most people are out and about, as I will be too. (I'm planning to attend a Memorial Day event at Laurel Hill Cemetery.)

While it doesn't apply to the kind of people capable of reading blogs, I was taken aback to read that according to a recent Gallup poll, 28% of the American public do not even know what Memorial Day is:

a recent Gallup poll found that only 28 percent of Americans know the reason for Memorial Day. Many youngsters know it only as the day their local swimming pools open.

Memorial Day originated in 1868 as a day of remembrance for Union soldiers. Today, it honors all uniformed armed-forces personnel killed during war.

Well informed as I try to be, even I was startled to read that there is only one World War I veteran still alive:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last known living American-born veteran of World War I, was honored Sunday at the Liberty Memorial during Memorial Day weekend celebrations.

"I had a feeling of longevity and that I might be among those who survived, but I didn't know I'd be the No. 1," the 107-year-old veteran said at a ceremony to unveil his portrait.

His photograph was hung in the main hallway of the National World War I Museum, which he toured for the first time, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States presented him with a gold medal of merit.

On Monday, he will be presented the American flag flying outside the memorial.

Buckles, who now lives in Charles Town, W.Va., has been an invited guest at the Pentagon, met with President Bush in Washington, D.C., and rode in the annual Armed Forces Day Parade in his home state since his status as one of the last living from the "Great War" was discovered nearly two years ago.

Federal officials have also arranged for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Born in Missouri in 1901 and raised in Oklahoma, Buckles visited a string of military recruiters after the United States entered the "war to end all wars" in April 1917.

He was rejected by the Marines and the Navy, but eventually persuaded an Army captain he was 18 and enlisted, convincing him Missouri didn't keep public records of birth.

Buckles sailed for England in 1917 on the Carpathia, which is known for its rescue of Titanic survivors, and spent his tour of duty working mainly as a driver and a warehouse clerk in Germany and France. He rose to the rank of corporal and after Armistice Day he helped return prisoners of war to Germany.

Buckles later traveled the world working for the shipping company White Star Line and was in the Philippines in 1940 when the Japanese invaded. He became a prisoner of war for nearly three years.

It's a nice piece, but I'm afraid that in discussing his attendance at the grave of General Pershing, the AP used the wrong word:

Buckles gained notoriety when he attended a Veteran's Day ceremony at the Arlington grave of Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing, who led U.S. forces in World War I, said his daughter, Susannah Flanagan.

He ended up on the podium and became a featured guest at the event, and the VIP invites and media interview requests came rolling in shortly afterward.

Things change, of course, and what was once honored can find itself being shunned, even prohibited.

Back to World War I's only surviving veteran:

"This has been such a great surprise," Flanagan said. "You wouldn't think there would be this much interest in World War I. But the timing in history has been such and it's been unreal."

Buckles spent much of his museum tour Sunday looking at mementos of Pershing, whom he admired. He posed for pictures in front of a flag that used to be in Pershing's office and retold stories about meeting the famous general.

While Pershing claims most of the fame, Buckles now has a featured place at the museum.

Because the purpose of Memorial Day is to remember casualties of all American wars, there's no better way to remember than by hearing from those who were there. World War II veterans are fading away, and by 2020 they're nearly all expected to be gone. A local VFW post says that today may be its "final Memorial Day commemoration."

"There are only three or four of us in the area," said Christy, a retired hospital food-service director who worked at Aramark for 38 years and who now lives in Clifton Heights. "It's a shame, but it's the way life goes. You can't stick around forever."

The club's demise reflects the shrinking population of World War II veterans nationwide. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has estimated that of the 16 million men and women who served in the war, 2.8 million were alive in September, including 160,953 in Pennsylvania and 82,566 in New Jersey.

By this September, the department projects the number of veterans will have dropped to 141,265 in Pennsylvania and 72,065 in New Jersey.

It's a holiday, but it's more than a holiday; it's a time to remember.

And while I'm remembering, my special thanks to co-blogger M. Simon, who is a Vietnam veteran.

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!

UPDATE: Commenter Jay points out I had my math backwards -- which means 72% don't know the meaning of Memorial Day.

I stand corrected. But ugh! That is a very unpleasant statistic, and when I misread it in a hurry this morning I thought it was bad that 28% did not know.

That it's 72% is horrible.

MORE: For those wanting to understand the real meaning of Memorial Day, don't miss this post by Donald Sensing. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

This pair of discarded television sets in SoHo looked so forlorn that I felt obligated to take a picture of them:

Not sure whether the graffiti beautifies them or makes them uglier, but it seemed to add to their pathos.

Near the TV sets, a colonial soldier looked almost as forlorn, especially because he had been plastered over with female stooges:

And right around the corner from that was a mailbox on which someone had placed an uneaten ice-cream cone upside down:

Coco, of course, sits around waiting.

I'm sure she'd rather have had me bring the yummy ice cream home than take pictures of it.

While I've long been an advocate of a conservative/libertarian political alliance, electing someone like Barack Obama was not exactly what I had in mind:

The only thing Senator McCain and his consultants can say to conservatives and libertarians is

* The Democrat boogieman is going to get you if you don't vote Republican

or

* I'm the lesser of two evils

or

* I may not be what you want, but the other fellow is worse

Fear of the other guy is not a governing philosophy, Senator McCain.

The lesser of two evils.... is evil, Senator McCain.

Which leads me to a nagging question I've had lately. There's been a lot of talk on the right about how Hillary Clinton (long a favorite demon among conservatives) would be a much better president than Barack Obama. I agree. However, I still think that McCain has a better chance of beating Obama, for the very reason that conservatives favor Hillary -- not only because Obama is simply less experienced and less qualified than Hillary, but because Hillary is better on foreign policy issues.

None of this ought to erase any of Hillary's well-known baggage, though. And the mere fact Obama is worse than Hillary does not transform Hillary into a good, much less wonderful candidate. She is only "good" in contrast to Obama. It is not logical to say that because Obama is bad (or Hillary is better), Hillary is therefore good. While few conservatives who favor Hillary argue that she has actually become good, they tend not to talk much about her negatives.

John McCain also has known negatives, and I have discussed them repeatedly. There is no question that conservatives and libertarians can find much to dislike about McCain.

But right now I want to stick to logic to the extent I can. From a conservative standpoint, let's assume that Hillary Clinton, because she is more experienced, and her positions are more to the liking of conservatives, is better than Obama.

Doesn't it necessarily follow (in logic, at least) that McCain is better than both Hillary and Obama, because he is more conservative than either? And if McCain is more experienced and more conservative than Hillary, then logic dictates that he is far more experienced and far more conservative than Obama.

So my question is a simple one:

How is it that anyone who thinks Hillary would be better than Obama can maintain that Obama would be better than McCain?

Try as I might, I cannot make sense of this.

Since so many conservatives and a growing number of libertarians clearly want the Democrats elected, I'm thinking the only way for McCain to get their support would be to switch parties and just declare himself a Democrat.

Then maybe Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could become Republicans, to make sure they lose the loyal conservative vote.

In the primaries the Republican base did what has fractured the Democrat base. They voted for a candidate "who looks like me" (socialist Huckabee) instead of voting for the Reagan Republican (Thompson). With the conservative vote split we wind up with McCain.

The liberal wing of the party has to be satisfied (we need their votes) just as the conservative wing must be satisfied. No way in heck would Huckabee have satisfied the liberal wing. We need to give a thought to the libertarian wing as well. RR ran on a libertarian platform - lower taxes smaller government. It is something all the party can agree on. You will remember RR was a pro-abortion Governor of California.

So the "just like me" litmus tests have to be abandoned.

It is OK. Once we get totally socialized medicine and a general war in the ME Republicans will come together to save what is left. It won't be much.

Way to go guys.

The key is: every faction was looking out for itself. None was looking out for the coalition (Party). Republicans can't do coalition warfare any more. Sad.

Prompted by: Republicans: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I love thinking about the psychiatric underpinnings of the "Wi-Fi allergy" meme that's been floating around like an Internet virus:

A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings.

Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.

"I get chest pain and it doesn't go away right away," he said.

Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The city attorney is now checking to see if putting up Wi-Fi could be considered discrimination.

What's interesting is that such mental states are known to be able to bring on actual physical symptoms. I do not doubt for a moment that Mr. Firstenberg (an activist with a Wiki entry, BTW) does in fact get chest pains, and that they are real. But a lot of pain and a lot of disease symptoms have strong mind body connections. Books like this have been written on the subject. That the mind can cause or aggravate physical symptoms of disease does not diminish their reality to the patient, nor does it in any way diminish their suffering.

That emotional distress can make you sick is not a terribly profound nor terribly new idea. Why, even this blog post might upset people -- especially those who believe the Wi-Fi signals are the direct cause of their symptoms, rather than a trigger of a mental process which causes them. It is not unreasonable to assume that in such cases, mere disagreement with the diagnosis of such a suggestible person might cause more symptoms to erupt.

Even political disagreements can cause physical symptoms of illness. At the height of the Bush Derangement Hysteria era, I heard about a woman who fulminations against Bush caused her to literally erupt in hives -- something that shocked my friend whose disagreement with her had set it off.

This all raises an interesting point, though, because if we assume for the sake of argument that certain suggestible people like this will get chest pains in the presence of Wi-Fi, and that these symptoms can be documented, under the law it really doesn't matter how they originate, because it is the Wi-Fi signal (or, at least the awareness of the WiFi signal) that triggered them. Whether the signals cause the disease symptoms directly or indirectly via a psychogenic component, they still could be considered a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

All symptoms and diseases are created equal.

And after all, isn't that what lawyers are for?

If racism can cause symptoms, why not Wi-Fi?

And while we're at it, why not a lot of other things? (Global Warming, for starters....)

Hey, I'm not being judgmental here. I'm just as sick as anyone else.

Isn't my neurosis just as valid as anyone else's?

MORE: Despite my satirical tone, this is no joke to activists like Mr. Firstenberg, whose group advocates getting rid of a lot of things many people take for granted:

Electric floor or ceiling heaters, fluorescent lights, dimmer switches, and electronic security systems can all produce problematic electromagnetic fields. Finding all the sources and eliminating or avoiding them requires patience and may be time-consuming but is not necessarily difficult or expensive.

Your basic measuring tools are a $40 magnetic field meter, or "gaussmeter," and a cheap (poorer quality is better for this purpose) battery-operated AM radio. When the gaussmeter reads 0.2 milligauss or less, and the radio, when tuned between stations, remains silent (does not buzz or give loud static), you have a relatively calm environment--especially important in the sleeping area. These two measuring devices will not detect the very high frequency radiation produced by cordless phones, wireless computers, baby monitors, remote controls for appliances, radio-controlled toys, and other wireless equipment. We recommend eliminating wireless technology from the environment altogether.

However (and perhaps this comes from living for decades in Berkeley), the worry wart inside me causes me to wonder whether this could lead to a busybody movement against "second hand electronic emissions" -- in a manner similar to the movement against smoking.

Back in the early 70s, I laughed at Berkeley's GASPers. No one laughs at them now.

But suppose someone said this:

"Please turn off your laptop. You're emissions are hurting my health!"

But how long will it be funny? I'd appreciate having some sort of time frame, because after all, satire can be ruined by too much reality.

Some one should start asking the leftys what they really want.

It is my opinion that if America started drilling for oil now as the price starts going through the roof we could bring the Middle East to its knees by bringing a lot of oil on line in the next few years.

Where would be a good place to start? Look at this map that shows where Cuba and China are drilling:





The Cubans have already found oil near our economic zone. We should get some of it too. To start. Then we could start looking at the no zones for oil:




Building a few more refineries wouldn't hurt either.

You might want to contact your government and give them an ear full:

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

HT Gateway Pundit for the maps.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Welcome Instapundit readers.

Roger L. Simon is wondering whether his own Lakers fandom (and perhaps fandom generally) is a form of mental illness:

Sometimes fandom almost feels like a mental illness. During the playoffs, I can spend more time thinking about my team than my work, family, or anything else. Part of the reason I am writing this article is that it, at least, combines thinking about the team with work. And I have checked LakersGround and ESPN twice while writing it, even though the article, no magnum opus, is at this point barely seven short paragraphs long. Surely there is something wrong with me.

But what is it? Am I just some aging white guy anxious to identify with six-seven black dudes who can slam-dunk backwards? I hope it's not that pathetic. But even so, I worshiped Mickey Mantle when I was a kid and he was shorter, white, a bit pudgy and, apparently, something of a drunk. (Parenthetically, I am much more willing to excuse athletes their personal foibles than any other public figures -- as in the Mr. Bryant mentioned above.)

So what is it? Arrested development? Testosterone poisoning? So far I have no full explanation for this insanity...

The way people reacted, you'd have thought this was an act of treason. No seriously. My memory of what happened was vivid enough that I blogged about this near-fatal act of would-be Lakers fandom a couple of years ago:

In the Philadelphia area, there are sports fans who do not take kindly to criticism of their opinions or teams. I remember that not long after I moved back to Philadelphia from California, there was huge local hysteria over a showdown between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Los Angeles Lakers. While riding through Philly in a friend's car and thinking it was funny to hear people cheering in the streets for the Lakers, I thought it would be equally funny to evoke (in an imitative if insincere manner) a little pro-California cheering. I opened the window and yelled "GO LAKERS!"

According to my friend who was driving, this was not a good idea at all! He yelled at me to shut up, and said he was worried for our safety, and about his car getting damaged...

Whether any of this is mental illness, who knows? At the time I was merely exercising my First Amendment right to self-expression, brought on by being homesick for California. The question of mental illness could be argued both ways. Who was crazier? The fanatic 76ers fans in their own city streets, or a displaced Californian who dared to defy them?

Not being a sports psychiatrist, I won't hazard a guess. Besides, even if I were a sports psychiatrist, wouldn't I be in a conflict of interest?

Of course, now that I've been in the Philadelphia area for eight years, I take a broader view of these things. So even though I am a loyal person I have to say that if the incident repeated itself today, I'm not sure I'd feel the emotional need to yell "GO LAKERS!" (It is possible that living in Philadelphia has caused my testosterone levels to change and I've become more submissive to alien fandom influences, but I haven't had that confirmed medically.)

But what if I move back to California? Is fandom permanent condition? Is it portable? Or is it changeable? Not to get heavy or political, but doesn't this beg the question of whether fandom is chosen? So, if I move back would I then become an ex-Sixers fan? What is a former-Lakers fan returning from Philly to the old fold? An ex-ex-Sixers fan?

Right now I'm feeling like a lapsed Lakers fan.

Maybe I'd be ex-lapsed.

Who knew?

In today's Wall Street Journal, Donald J. Boudreaux figured it out, simply by applying logic to Hillary Clinton's contention that she is a victim of sexism:

This fact (if it be a fact) reveals a hitherto unknown, ugly truth about the Democratic Party. The alleged bastion of modern liberalism, toleration and diversity is full of (to use Mrs. Clinton's own phrase) "people who are nothing but misogynists." Large numbers of Democratic voters are sexists. Who knew?

But here's another revelation. If Mrs. Clinton is correct that she is more likely than Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, that implies Republicans and independents are less sexist than Democrats.

It must be so. If American voters of all parties are as sexist as the Democrats, Mr. Obama would have a better chance than Mrs. Clinton of defeating Mr. McCain. The same misogyny that thwarted her in the Democratic primaries would thwart her in the general election.

And it's nice to see that the truth is finally coming out about far left elitists who conceal their sexism while accusing others of being bitter religious gun-clingers!

Barack Obama can be such a wimp.

I mean, he had a perfect opportunity earlier when Hillary made what this unintentional assassination insinuation:

"We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

"We all remember Vincent Foster was found dead in July in Fort Marcy Park."

"Sen. Clinton's statement before the Argus Leader editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign."

Nor is Hillary's campaign. First they defended the unintentional insinuation:

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson defended the comments to The Post, "She was talking about the length of the race and using the '68 election as an example of how long the races in the past have gone -- she used her husband's race in the same vein."

"The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive," she said.

"Vincent Foster has been much on my mind the last days because of Camille Paglia's recent column and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Foster family was in any way offensive."

"He was talking about conspiracy theories in the context of the politics of the past and using the '93 Foster death as a random example of how how once these conspiracy theories get started, they just never seem to end -- the Robert Kennedy assassination (which he didn't raise but which his opponent did) being a perfect example."

Or for those want to drag in the old vast right wing conspiracy, there's this vintage Vincent Foster theorizing from Fox News:

Hey don't look at me! It's all just litigation.

UPDATE: On a more serious note, don't miss Rick Moran's PJM analysis of what he calls the gaffe of gaffes:

This is the gaffe of gaffes, the Mother of all campaign faux pas. There's no taking it back at this point. The statement is out there, hanging like a rapidly decomposing side of beef in the hot sun. To suggest that you should hang around and stay in the campaign "just in case" the unthinkable occurs is beyond anything yet seen in this campaign. And considering all the race and gender cards that have been flying around, the assassination card tops them all.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of other reactions, although he doesn't think she meant to do any more than point out that the race was alive when Kennedy was shot:

I think she was just pointing out that when Bobby Kennedy was shot the race was still alive, and that was June. Still, it's a pretty impressive gaffe.

I think it was just another in a long line of Hillary gaffes. Were she really thinking along sinister lines, she'd have kept her trap shut.

A gaffe like this, though, makes humor irresistible:

...even Senator Obama must know at this point that, even if he somehow pulls off a miracle by sweeping the remaining primaries and locking up all the contested superdelegates, he simply cannot escape the inevitable mysterious accident that will clear the Democratic nomination for Yours Truly.

MORE: "There is something deeply wrong with the Clintons," says NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez.

If my memory serves me right, there was a time when lots of conservatives would have agreed.....

AND MORE: You think any of this was bad, check out Michael Goodwin at the New York Daily News:

Her shocking comment to a South Dakota newspaper might qualify as the dumbest thing ever said in American politics.

Her lame explanation that she brought up the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy because his brother Ted's illness was on her mind doesn't cut it. Not even close.

We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul. One consumed by raw ambition to where the possible assassination of an opponent is something to ponder in a strategic way. Otherwise, why is murder on her mind?

It's like Tanya Harding's kneecapping has come to politics. Only the senator from New York has more lethal fantasies than that nutty skater.

We could have seen it coming, if only we had realized Clinton's thinking could be so cold.

MORE: Ann Althouse's analysis of Hillary's gaffe led her to apologize for criticizing an earlier outburst from Andrew Sullivan:

....I would like to apologize to Andrew Sullivan. On Thursday, I took him to task for calling Hillary Clinton a sociopath.

ONE WOULD EXPECT ANDREW SULLIVAN, OF ALL PEOPLE, to have a less-stringent attitude toward political inconsistency . . . .

ANN ALTHOUSE on the difference between sociopathy and litigation: "It's litigation. Quite normal. If the rules help you, you insist on the importance of rules. If the rules hurt you, they are mere guidelines that must bend flexibly for the sake of justice." It's a distinction that non-lawyers sometimes miss!

If so, then isn't it even more passive-aggressive to hurl an accusation by name without supplying a link?

So what is this? A game of retaliatory passive-aggressiveness? Links alleged to be passive-aggressive are to be countered by even harsher passive-aggressive reprisals with linkless allegations of passive-aggressiveness?

No, that can't be right, because such retaliatory passive-aggressive reprisals would have to be called litigation-style behavior -- of the sort we're not supposed to confuse with sociopathy.

Now I'm really confused. One of these days I'll get all this passive-aggressive stuff figured out.

Who will John McCain pick as his running mate?

In the last post, I suggested Lieberman (for the second time, BTW...) but good arguments can be made against him -- just as good arguments can be made for or against most of the possible choices.

Writing for Pajamas Media, John Hawkins takes a look at the leading contenders (including Lieberman), and asks,

Will he choose a vice president who can help him patch things up with conservatives or will he go the other way and choose someone who would broaden his appeal to independents? Will McCain pick a veep who will add strength to the ticket as a whole or will he narrow his focus and take someone who can help in a particular state or demographic group?

And it might not be a bad trait to have in a wartime leader.

MORE: Jonah Goldberg is taking heat from Rush Limbaugh for daring to suggest Lieberman as a running mate, and I'm sure countless other conservatives would agree with Limbaugh.

(Only because they want nothing more than for McCain to win, of course....)

We all agree that rules are not fair, right?

So, when the rules don't apply because they are not fair, what rules apply?

Because of the close race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, this is the hottest question in politics right now, and it is generating fierce debates, like the one between Andrew Sullivan and No Quarter USA.

Obama is the one that violated the rules Andrew. I realize he is your Great Black Hope. And I get that he gives you wood. More power to ya bucko. But he is the one that violated the rules he agreed to abide by. Not Hillary. Get a frickin grip.

Now that's what I call passion. While I'm not sure who violated the rules more (and I haven't checked to see whether Sullivan accuses his accuser of wanting to have sex with Hillary Clinton; as it is I can barely keep track of the sexual interests of the candidates, much less their supporters), according to what I've generally read, Edwards, Obama, Richardson Biden withdrew their names from the ballot, while Hillary, Kucinich, Dodd, and Gravel didn't. This was because of a decision by the DNC Rules Committee to punish Michigan for an early primary. Bear in mind that Rules Committee members include:

"a dozen [who] endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton, [and] eight [who] endorsed Sen. Barack Obama. Two members work for the Clinton campaign, including strategist Harold Ickes. The two chairmen--Alexis Herman and James Roosevelt Jr.-are neutral, but Herman served in the Clinton White House.

One thing is clear. The closer the race, the more ferocious the debate gets, and the louder people scream about fairness, the wider the range of answers. The idea surrounding most of these popular vote count debates is that because the Democratic Party is supposed to be as inclusive and democratic as possible, it isn't fair to simply count the delegates as the rules require. Rather it is the popular vote which should "count." In "moral" terms of course. (Echoes of Al Gore in 2000 not being coincidental....)

The problem with this moral analysis is that it is not crystal clear who wins the popular vote count, because there are so many counting methods available. Veteran Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Larry Eichel identifies four methods and concludes that Clinton only wins in one of them. It all boils down to whether Hillary should be given all of her votes in the disqualified Michigan election, and whether Obama should be given zero:

So the question is whether Obama should get credit in the popular-vote calculation for the 238,168 uncommitted votes cast in Michigan.

If you give those votes to Obama - and the DNC appears likely to use them as a basis for awarding him some delegates when it considers the Michigan/Florida mess on May 31 - then you have Method No. 3, in which Obama leads by 64,121.

But if you credit him with no votes at all in Michigan, then Clinton leads by 174,047. This is Method No. 4, which, understandably, is the one favored by the Clinton campaign. It is the source of her oft-repeated claim that she is outpolling Obama.

In today's Inquirer, Jonathan Last argues that there are six counting methods, and Hillary wins in two of them:

Real Clear Politics keeps track of six versions of the popular-vote total. They are, in ascending order of inclusivity: (1) the popular vote of sanctioned contests; (2) the total of sanctioned contests, plus estimated votes from the Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington caucuses; (3) the popular vote plus Florida; (4) popular vote plus Florida and the caucuses; (5) the popular vote plus Florida and Michigan; (6) popular vote plus Florida, Michigan, and the caucus estimates. After Tuesday, Clinton now leads in two of these six counts.

It is this looming prospect which explains the tremendous pressure Obama partisans and the media are putting on Clinton to drop out of the race. They want her gone now because they understand that she has an excellent chance of finishing as the undisputed people's choice.

Would it matter if Clinton were the undisputed (or even disputed) popular-vote winner? That's hard to say. The question is, matter to whom? The superdelegates will determine the nominee and there's no telling what will sway them. They have no objective criteria from which to make their decisions. But if they were to deny the popular-vote champ the nomination, there is a real question of whether Democratic voters would reconcile themselves to the decision. As it is, much of the talk about Democratic defections in November has been overstated.

That question is more important than "fairness." Why, at times like this, the very concept of "fairness" becomes an excuse for genuine underlying rage. Like this gem:

We won't vote for her. The reality on the ground for us is that we do pretty well for ourselves under a Republican administration and I would be willing to take my chances with a solidly Democratic congress, but without her. Sorry folks, but there are a lot of people like us. I know that we're all supposed to join hands and pull together for a greater more progressive tomorrow and yadda yadda yadda.... but when it comes to Hillary Clinton, fuck that noise. My contempt for her has reached the Lieberman line.

Anyway, left right or center, nearly every political junkie under the sun is sounding off about fairness. Rules are fair to those who win by the rules, and unfair to those who don't.

One of the things that tends to be forgotten is that people want to win, and politics is like litigation. I enjoyed Ann Althouse's take yesterday:

This isn't insanity. It's litigation. Quite normal. If the rules help you, you insist on the importance of rules. If the rules hurt you, they are mere guidelines that must bend flexibly for the sake of justice.

Yet as I say that, I must recognize that there is something about politics that I despise more than its similarity to litigation. Litigation is like a chess game, and it is inherently Machiavellian. (How litigators fit into the Guardian Class/Commercial Class spectrum discussed by M. Simon earlier is a question for the experts, and beyond this topic, but I'm very curious...) Anyway, while I didn't get much emotional satisfaction from litigation, I recognize that it is a necessary evil, and while it may be the nuts and bolts of how justice (or a theoretical chance of justice) is sometimes obtained, I have no more illusion than Oliver Wendell Holmes that "justice" is a thing to be expected.

Ugh. Justice in the same sentence as litigation? Drat! Fairness raises its ugly Machiavellian head again, as if litigators care about fairness any more than reptiles care about the feelings of their food.

In the context of politics, it isn't litigation that bothers me, or even litigiousness. Nor is it the pretense of principle, because litigators always claim to be principled. And fair. No, what bothers me about politics is when people expect me to go along with their claim that a particular argument involves great questions of morality and fairness, when in truth they're just litigators, for whom winning takes the form of getting elected.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are involved in lengthy, drawn-out litigation, and I think they know it, even if they can't acknowledge it. Unfortunately, many of their followers don't know it, so they not only think that great matters of ultimate fairness and truth are involved, but they're encouraged to do just that.

In the context of the endless debate over the Michigan primary, I find this to be incredibly tedious, but I really can't complain that it's unfair, lest I buy into the fairness game.

Politics is about winning and fairness is a tactic, as well as an appearance.

If we keep in mind the fact that the country is still at war, and the maxim that nothing is fair in war, I'd say fairness is going to be a secondary consideration for quite some time. But that doesn't mean it won't still be masquerading as a primary consideration.....

No wonder people turn to sex issues. There's nothing fair there either.

But then, at least there isn't supposed to be!

BOTTOM LINE: Whether things are fair depend on what people want.

It strikes me as common sense that if you need nothing more than a magnifying glass to start a fire, there's free solar power anywhere. Yet concentrating solar power in such a manner is not what ordinary solar collectors do. Until recently, that is. IBM seems to have figured out how to use the magnifying glass principle to dramatically shrink the amount of space and number of components needed to build a solar farm:

By mimicking the antics of a child using a magnifying glass to burn a leaf or a camper to start a fire, IBM scientists are using a large lens to concentrate the Sun's power, capturing a record 230 watts onto a centimeter square solar cell, in a technology known as concentrator photovoltaics, or CPV. That energy is then converted into 70 watts of usable electrical power, about five times the electrical power density generated by typical cells using CPV technology in solar farms.

If it can overcome additional challenges to move this project from the lab to the fab, IBM believes it can significantly reduce the cost of a typical CPV based system. By using a much lower number of photovoltaic cells in a solar farm and concentrating more light onto each cell using larger lenses, IBM's system enables a significant cost advantage in terms of a lesser number of total components.

For instance, by moving from a 200 sun system ("one sun" is a measurement equal to the solar power incident at noon on a clear summer day), where about 20 watts per square centimeter of power is concentrated onto the cell, to the IBM Lab results of a 2300 sun system, where approximately 230 watts per square centimeter are concentrated onto the cell system, the IBM system cuts the number of photovoltaic cells and other components by a factor of 10.

The trick lies in IBM's ability to cool the tiny solar cell. Concentrating the equivalent of 2000 suns on such a small area generates enough heat to melt stainless steel, something the researchers experienced first hand in their experiments. But by borrowing innovations from its own R&D in cooling computer chips, the team was able to cool the solar cell from greater than 1600 degrees Celsius to just 85 degrees Celsius.

The initial results of this project will be presented at the 33rd IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists conference today, where the IBM researchers will detail how their liquid metal cooling interface is able to transfer heat from the solar cell to a copper cooling plate much more efficiently than anything else available today.

While using this techology to build solar farms is commendable, I wonder how soon it will be before they start selling home units.

(And speaking of energy, with the price of gasoline continuing to escalate, I wonder how long it will be before people resort to home distillation or ethanol. Sugar is still cheap, and this unit will produce 35 gallons of car fuel per week, at $1.00 a gallon. More here, and remember, "home ethanol production was advocated and used by Henry Ford when he created the Model T.")

In today's Inquirer, Rick Santorum characterizes the California Supreme Court's legalization of same sex marriage as a "wake up call":

The latest distressing news came last week in California. The state Supreme Court there ruled, 4-3, that same-sex couples can marry.

In doing so, four judges rejected a statute that passed in a referendum with 61 percent of the vote that defined marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

It's merely the latest in a string of court decisions that have overturned the overwhelming will of the people.

OK, if you're not inclined to hurl epithets, you might ask: Don't we have more to worry about than some court redefining marriage? After all, gas prices are soaring, health-care costs are rising, and our nation is at war. Why should we care what a few activist judges in California say?

I can't help wonder how many of the conservatives who are so upset by the Supreme Court's legislating from the bench would feel the same way had this been a conservative court with an opposite result. Suppose Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed the same sex marriage bill the legislature passed instead of vetoing it, and suppose the court had intervened and thrown it out. Wouldn't that also be legislating from the bench? Isn't it legislating from the bench if a court throws out gun laws as unconstitutional? The reason I'm posing these questions is not to be argumentative, but simply to remind conservatives that not only are the courts a two-edged sword, but that people who are happy with court decisions throwing out or reinterpreting laws tend not to complain about legislating from the bench.

If what I hear on talk radio is any indication, Santorum is not alone in characterizing opposition to gay marriage as the "overwhelming will of the people." That was the case in California when voters approved Proposition 22 (which defined marriage as between a man and a woman) by a margin of 61.4% to 38.6%. (Map here.)

Considering that this matter will again be before the voters in the fall, this time in the form of a constitutional amendment, it will be interesting to see how people vote.

What is the overwhelming will of the people on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage? If the most recent Gallup polls are any indication, there is no overwhelming majority either way.

The Massachusetts gay marriage law was met by a call for a constitutional amendment in that state to define marriage as between a man and woman -- something President Bush has advocated at the national level as well. There is already an initiative underway in California to put such an amendment to the state constitution on the ballot this fall.

The effort to constitutionally limit marriage to heterosexual couples failed in the Massachusetts legislature last June, but on a national basis, Gallup finds Americans evenly divided. About half (49%) favor a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriage, while 48% are opposed.

By region, though, opposition to a gay marriage ban now appears to be in a clear minority position in the West:

I don't know what accounts for the apparent shift in California demographics since 2000, but if the polls are correct, this is a loser for the GOP in California -- and not a clear winner of an issue for either side in a national election. In some states, it might help the Republicans, while in others it might hurt them. It's unpredictable.

As is the case with most issues, the people who feel strongly yell the loudest, and there has been a lot of yelling about gay marriage since 2000. Naturally, as a longtime advocate of compromise in the Culture War, I find myself wondering just how that yelling influences ordinary people. By ordinary, I mean the non-activists who don't yell, 98% of whom will never marry a person of the same sex, and many of whom don't know anyone who will. Do they get tired of these debates? Do they worry more about things like crime, taxes, or the price of gasoline? Do they get tired of being yelled at?

Which side is yelling at them more? The reason I think this is relevant involves the principle of backlash. Have gay activists and their supporters on the left learned to shut up, and let the other side do the yelling? Who is more likely to confront an ordinary voter trying to wheel a shopping cart into a supermarket? An angry gay marriage activist, or an angry anti-gay marriage activist? Who is going to be perceived as more shrill? It should not be forgotten that Anita Bryant did more to promote acceptance of gays by yelling about them than the tiny gay movement at the time ever could have done. She put the modern gay movement on the map, and I remember it vividly. Ordinary people -- the kind of people who had avoided the subject -- now found themselves now talking about gays at the dinner table, and few agreed with Bryant. People react to scolds that way.

Is it possible that the California Supreme Court -- by seeming to scold the voters -- may have helped the constitutional amendment's chances in the fall? Normally I'd say yes, but in light of the poll numbers, I think the answer will depend on who yells the loudest.

If the level of agitation against gay marriage becomes too loud and too angry, people might get so sick of hearing about an issue peripheral to them that they might decide to vote the issue away. Similarly, if gay marriage advocates are seen as yelling at voters, they might decide to vote the issue away in another manner.

This is not to say that voting makes issues go away. Voting will not make war go away, for example, despite the best efforts of the anti-war left to convince people that it will. But to the extent that the war over same sex marriage is a war, it's limited to the "combatants" who feel strongly about it, and its application will be limited to gay couples. Whether the voters can be convinced that they are "invaders" is doubtful.

Considering the onerous obligations that attach to marriage, they might even see them as silly people who ought to be careful what they ask for. ("You want your silly right to marry? Here! And good luck!") To the extent voters see it that way, then the opponents (with the battle cry of "DON'T LET THESE PEOPLE MARRY!") might look even sillier. Their demand that voters amend the Constitution to stop silly people from marrying each other might very well be seen as more silly than the silly marriages themselves.

Louder and sillier is not a winning strategy.

What Presidential candidate is most up on fusion and specifically the Bussard Fusion Reactor Program. Interesting question. Which candidate was interested enough to have his staffers look deeper into it in August of 2007? The answer? John McCain.

A week ago I attended a lecture given by Sen John McCain given to the Economic Club of South West Michigan.

In the question and answer session following the lecture I asked about resuming funding for Robert Bussard's project. Sen McCain said that he was unaware of the project but would like to talk to me about it.

Afterwards a aid of his spoke with me and I emailed a summary to them.

The packet I forwarded to the aid had most of what is on the Mr. Strout's web site, except the youtube vids.

I tried to insert some summaries, such as excerpts from the "Fighting for fusion"[pdf] article, rather than simply links.

Just another reason I'm going to vote for John McCain in November.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Welcome Instapundit readers.

H/T Instapundit

I'll be gone most of the day, but I highly recommend reading Kathy Shaidle's excellent PJM post, "Mark Steyn vs. the 'Sock Puppets'."

In Canada, where there's no First Amendment, writers can be hauled before kangaroo courts and so-called "human rights commissions," (Newspeak for what are censorship boards, and abused by activists who claim to have been "offended."

What is going on in Canada is an outrage, and I've blogged about it before. I like to think that it can't happen here, but I worry. Because a local college president assisted in a Canadian "hate speech" prosecution, and already there are "human rights commissions" springing up. So far, they're only investigating things like skinhead posters. (And, of course, "discriminatory" cheesesteak signs.)

So when I read about events in Canada, I worry that we're headed in that direction.

While I have nothing but sympathy for blind people, I think the recent decision by the D.C. Court of Appeal that U.S. currency discriminates against the blind sets common sense on its head. Jonathan Adler quotes from the opinion:

The current design of paper money springs from the world of the sighted. Upon casual inspection, anyone with good vision can readily discern the value of U.S. currency; yet even the most searching tactile examination will reveal no difference between a $100 bill and a $1 bill.

Unfortunately, today's ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit likewise discriminates against the blind, who must depend on others to learn what it says. And the online version of the ruling discriminates against those without internet access.

WIthout electronic readers, blind people cannot read currency. But neither can they read anything that isn't in Braille. This includes daily newspapers, most books, packages of food in stores (as well as shelf labels, scales used to weigh produce) and even prices at the fuel pump. Nor can they read speedometers or odometers, taxi fare meters, and highway signs. Virtually everything related to shopping and driving (including all stores and highways) discriminate against the blind. For that matter, so do cars. And so do blogs, theaters, television sets, video games, and art museums. On Saturday I went to the Philadelphia Art Museum to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit, and I can assure readers (at least those of them who can read or audially scan these words), that no blind person could have seen it.

And what about pornography? To the blind, it's even more useless than currency, because unlike currency, there are no electronic readers to read it. And in view of the recent Supreme Court decision, I'm also wondering what's to put the blind on notice that they might be downloading kiddie porn (much less imaginary or virtual kiddie porn)?

How blind can naked power be?

And what about guns? In light of a very clever Op-Ed by Michael Bloomberg in today's Inquirer (attempting to link the "virtue of independence" to gun control), I'm also thinking about whether blind people are being effectively denied their Second Amendment rights by the evil gun industry. Think about it. Suppose you are a blind gun owner, and you want to engage in target practice in furtherance of your right to keep and bear arms in self defense. The way most guns are designed and the way most ranges are set up, how in the hell are you supposed to hit the target? I realize that there are probably electronic pointing and aiming systems which might emit audio signals (like a beep tone when you're on target), but how many guns have them? How many ranges are set up to accommodate them?

Does Mayor Bloomberg know that the blind are being effectively disarmed by the gun industry? And suppose a burglar breaks into your house? Even if your gun were equipped with an audio-signaled siting device, what about the burglar?

And suppose the burglar was also blind. What would put him (or any other blind person) on notice that a gun was being pointed at him? Seen this way, blind people are being discriminated against whether they're pro-gun or anti-gun. They are being effectively deprived of their Second Amendment rights by not being able to use firearms, and from an anti-gun perspective, virtually all guns are unsafe in that they cannot be seen, and give no warning to the blind that they're being pointed at.

Surely, if money discriminates against the blind, so do guns.

So why isn't Bloomberg sounding the alarm? It seems to me that he's overlooking another brilliant tactic which might be used against the firearms industry.

And a lot of activists are overlooking this tactic. If the goal is to shut things down and cripple the economy (whoops, I just said a bad word), the opportunities abound. You'd think the activists have blinders on. (Whoops again.)

Come on, get with the program! Do the blind always have to lead the visually impaired?

I'm reprinting in its entirety a post from Black Box Voting. Because as Joseph Stalin was once reputed to have said:

"It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."

==

In this article you will find tools to help you analyze the numbers as they come in from Kentucky and Oregon's May 20 primary elections. New info: 2008

Tool Kit: Tool Kit.

You can find more Oregon & Kentucky tools, and discuss here:

Oregon & Kentucky tools

Kentucky is a big problem, Oregon is just plain strange. I'll start with Oregon's all mail-in voting system before I tell you the news about Kentucky. In Oregon, 100 percent of votes are absentee, or mail-in, although citizens do have the option to take their mailed ballot to an elections office to drop it off.

OREGON'S SURPRISING ELECTION DATA*

*Source:

xls spreadsheet (Excel spreadsheet, huge mamajama, allow time to download. And see end of this article for tips on how to use.)

1. EVER WONDER ABOUT SIGNATURE VERIFICATION? Here's a little pop quiz: Out of 1.4 million Oregon votes in 2006, and knowing how people's signatures change over the years, how many signatures would you expect to mismatch?

ANSWER: Out of 1.4 million, the state of Oregon claims that 29 counties had ZERO mismatched signatures, and in the 10 remaining counties that reported mismatches, the grand total was (drum roll please)..... 34 ballots.

Yes, out of 1.4 million, just 34 signatures did not match. With those figures, it seems equally plausible that the dog's pawprint that made it through a couple election cycles in Washington State as would have fared just as well in Oregon. Heck, a scribble drawing or a blob of spaghetti might work fine too, we just don't know.

But what we do know is that according to data submitted by the state of Oregon to the EAC, Clackamas County had 146,968 ballots cast and not a single signature was too squiggly, scrawly or tilted to mismatch, and that Oregon has one of the lowest signature mismatch rates in America.

We're not wanting to disenfranchise people, but accepting every signature that floats in the door may not be a good thing. It puts extra pressure on the validity of the voter registration database and the postal delivery system, that's for sure.

2. FALSE: Oregon's claim that forced mail-in voting gives them higher turnout figures is simply not true. Oregon is squarely in the middle of the pack when it comes to voter turnout, when compared to the other 50 states in the same election.

3. MIRACLE POST OFFICE: Oregon also has a remarkably, some would say impossibly effective postal service. Here's what I know: Black Box Voting does periodic mailings, and we consider a mailing of 8,000 pieces to be spectacularly large, for us. Thirty-one of Oregon's counties mail more ballots in every election than we ever do, yet they never seem to have ballots arrive late or flop around battered and bruised, to be returned months later.

That's not our experience. Some of our mailers arrive late, some probably not at all, and a few look like they've taken a bruising trip to Mongolia before they belatedly return to us.

Yet out of 2.5 million ballots mailed out in the 2006 general election, Oregon reports ZERO ballots returned undeliverable, and only 54 reportedly came in after the deadline. Oddly, 44 of those were in one county. (Not Mulnomah, the biggest county, where Portland sits. It was Washington County).

4. VOTING MACHINES: Contrary to many citizens' beliefs, Oregon uses computerized voting machines statewide, almost all ES&S scanners, and if you'd like more information on the hackability of those, check out the EVEREST Report, choose the 334-page Academic Report and look up Election Systems & Software. Every component of the ES&S machines were found to be tamperable.

MOONSHINE MATH IN KENTUCKY

Kentucky never has accounted for its 2006 election math, as can be seen by examining the data reports published by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in the above link.*

There is a wonderful (if it can be called that) discussion of nuclear war going on at Talk Polywell.

I'm not going to reprise the discussion. However, I'd like to give you some educational resources. First Wretchard's Three Conjectures. Which discusses what a rogue attack (terrorist) with a nuclear weapon would mean in terms of response.

Second are three very interesting articles by a gentleman who seems to know the inside of planning for nuclear war and its aftermath.

Nuclear Warfare 101
Nuclear Warfare 102
Nuclear Warfare 103

So actually we have two lessons of threes. Why didn't I just say four or six? I like three.

What is the worst thing I learned? It would take the world 200 years to recover from all out nuclear war. And which society would be best positioned to recover? The USA. Why? The Right To Keep and Bear Arms. I must say that the society that we would have after such a war would be very, very, ugly for at least the first 50 years, and not so pretty for 150 years. And the first year or two after? Look at the triage performed in Nuclear Warfare 103. Old women would be the least valuable members of society and young women (the most valuable) would be dedicated to breeding.

And if the attack was one sided? Kiss Islam good by. As Wretchard says in his Three Conjectures it wouldn't even take an attack on the USA. Here is a discussion of what almost happened after 9/11 and the follow on policy that evolved.

The threshold had almost been crossed. However that may be, we now know from National Security Presidential Directive 17 that a terrorist WMD attack, including biologicals and chemicals, will go over the line:

"terrorist groups are seeking to acquire WMD with the stated purpose of killing large numbers of our people and those of friends and allies -- without compunction and without warning. ... The United States ... reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force -- including through resort to all of our options -- to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies."

Some reports have suggested that the US would preemptively use tactical nuclear weapons -- bunker busters -- to destroy terrorist WMDs. We're no longer in Kansas. In the halcyon days of the Cold War Soviet boomers would cruise the American coast with hundreds of nuclear weapons unmolested by the US Navy. Now a single Al Qaeda tramp freighter bound for New York carrying a uranium fission weapon would be ruthlessly attacked. The taboo which held back generations from mass murder has been mentally crossed by radical Islam and their hand gropes uncertainly for the dagger.

Here are some other good resources that will help in figuring the aftermath:

Makers vs Takers
Decline and Fall
Desolation Row

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I watched Obama's Iowa speech earlier. Nothing new. Crowd chanted "Yes we can." I tried not to fall asleep.

Finally, I see that Obama won Oregon, which isn't any more surprising than the fact that Hillary won Kentucky (although Hillary won by a much higher margin).

I'm not sure, but I guess the speech in Iowa is his way of returning to his roots to celebrate.

And so the election drags on.

While it wasn't much of a surprise to see Hillary Clinton win Kentucky, the fact that she won by more than a 2-1 margin (65%-30%, with 91% of the vote in) ought to send a shiver down whatever spine the Democrats have. It's not a pretty picture for them, because the sharp, deep division means that neither Obama nor Hillary (both of whom have high negatives with certain groups of voters) can really run with any confidence of having the whole party behind them.

For the time being, Republicans ought to be happy that this fighting is keeping McCain in a competitive position.

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

Comments welcome.

An Op-Ed in today's Inquirer really caught my attention today, because the author (David Benkof, of GaysDefendMarriage.com) is a gay man with a contrarian view of same sex marriage.

...the gay community shouldn't be celebrating.

This decision [legalizing same sex marriage] does next to nothing for California gays and lesbians, and causes real harm to people who believe in the "old" definition of marriage.

It's nothing to be proud of.

I call upon my fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender/transsexual people to vote in favor of this November's California Marriage Protection Act, which is the only way to reverse the unfortunate decision.

The June weddings that can now be expected for same-sex couples all over California will actually provide little tangible advantage to anyone.

California already has a domestic-partnership law providing all the state benefits of marriage to same-sex couples, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act prevents all the federal benefits.

Sure, gays and lesbians may get a lift in self-esteem from having their relationships declared "equal" by four jurists, but does an ego boost really outweigh the real harms caused by last week's decision?

Whether you agree with Benkof or not, viewpoints like his rarely make it into major newspapers. The Inquirer should be commended.

I hate race.

No really. I wish such things didn't matter. I've often said that I think the sexuality of other people ought not to matter to anyone (except potential partners of a given individual). So, if the sexual interests of others ought not to matter, then why should race matter?

Unfortunately for me, that's a hollow rhetorical question, because even though these things make no sense to me and I'll never understand the need people have to make them matter, to many people they do matter, and they matter dramatically.

Attempting to come to terms with this argument is like trying to mix tar and water.
My argument that sexuality and race do not matter is grounded in individualism (tar) and the argument that they do matter is grounded in communitarianism (water).

My genitals and my skin color are seen as not my own business, but as the collective business of other people in various identity groups.

As is the case with many communitarian arguments, religion often factors in, and the latest race argument is that "we" need to have a "sacred conversation" about race. To do that, we must turn down the volume:

If America is ever going to have a healthy conversation on race, it must first turn down the volume, a black Philadelphia preacher told a largely white congregation in Wayne yesterday.

The Rev. Derick B. Wilson, pastor of a poor, multiracial Kensington congregation, told several dozen congregants of United Church of Christ at Valley Forge in Wayne that empathy for the struggles of others would help to dismantle distrust.

Far from it. Rev. Wilson is a devotee of Wright who adheres to the same religious philosophy, and he is outspoken in the man's defense.

Wilson, pastor of Healing Stream United Church of Christ in Kensington, staunchly defended Wright in a May 6 Philadelphia Daily News column, and he offered a similar justification with the Wayne congregation during coffee hour yesterday.

But in yesterday's Inquirer, he stays with an apparently safer talking point -- government-sponsored AIDS, which is really about slavery:

He asserted that, like Wright, some African Americans believe the U.S. government is responsible for instigating the AIDS epidemic, even though there is no evidence to support that view. He said many blacks feel that way because of the nation's history of slavery and oppression of minorities.

"For 400 years, we were slaves in this country, we were ripped from our homeland," Wilson said. "So as black people we have lived in situations where you might well say, 'Well, that never happened.'

First of all, the term "we" is inappropriate in the context of long deceased people. But tar and water, there I go. To communitarians "we" means all members of a group at all points in time. Well, at selected points in time. The "we" doesn't include the conquering African tribes who sold their captives, and how could it? No one wants to say that "we" played a role in doing something to our own selves.

And of course, there's an awfully big stretch included within the "400 years" of slavery "in this country." I have to assume that by "this country," Rev. Wilson means the United States of America, for what else could he mean? The United States was founded in 1776, and the Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished all slavery in 1865.

Subtracting 1776 from 1865, I get 89 years. What happened to the other 311 years? I'm not sure, but subtracting 311 from 1776, I got 1465.

[Just corrected my math there; I was off by two years.]

Now that made me feel like a real ignoramus, because even though I consider myself familiar with history, for the life of me, I cannot figure out -- even hypothetically -- what the year 1465 might have to do with the United States. Or England. Or even Spanish colonialism in the New World.

Can someone enlighten me about the 309 year gap in this country's history? I can't figure it out.

Returning to the sacred dialogue, as presented in the Inquirer, Rev. Wilson continues with the AIDS theory:

"Do I believe that the U.S. government put AIDS in our communities? I don't know," Wilson went on. "I wish that I could say no, but I know the government has done other things in the past."

Some members of the congregation gently pushed back.

Phil Clark, a scientist who works in the pharmaceutical industry, said that there was no evidence that the government had anything to do with starting the AIDS epidemic and that it did not have the technology at the onset of AIDS to create the virus.

Another member asked Wilson how whites and blacks could move beyond feelings of distrust if Wright's views held such wide currency.

For Wilson, the best approach is to recognize that each person suffers, and that empathy can bridge wide gaps.

"All of us in this room have been in situations where we have been counted out," he said. "If we can get in touch with that sameness" there would be more of a basis for understanding.

Wilson is known as an eloquent preacher among United Church of Christ leaders in Southeastern Pennsylvania, and it was on that basis that he was invited to give Sunday's sermon, said the Rev. Frank Pennington, pastor of United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

"We are trying to create a safe environment for people to disagree agreeably," Pennington said. "That is the kind of discourse that is lacking in our culture."

Let me start by saying that I disagree agreeably with the idea that the U.S. government spread AIDS in the black community. I suppose "disagreeing agreeably" over such things is a nice thing to do, but I just have a little bit of trouble following why debating a fringe theory like that constitutes having a "sacred conversation about race."

What is sacred about it?

And is it really a "conversation"?

Sigh.

I'd hate to think that by posing such questions I might be seen as a race-hating atheist.

I still agree that we should all try to turn down the volume. I try to be tolerant of the views of others, but if someone opines that 400 years of slavery in this country validates the view that the government spread AIDS in the black community, I don't really know what to say. Is this a conversation, or am I just supposed to shut up and take my scolding from someone's pulpit?

If so, then monologue is being confused with dialogue.

UPDATE: Math error corrected.

I just learned from Duane J. Oldsen about a book by Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politicswhich was published in 1992. It is a fascinating look at the two major systems of morality that we find in the world. Commercial Morality and Guardian (Political) Morality. Or what I like to call Makers vs Takers. The two are complimentary (neither does well without the other) and yet stand in opposition to each other. Things get really nasty when the spheres of influence are mixed without consideration for consequences.

Let me start with a couple of references. First The Wiki which provides a short look at the major points. Second is this pdf which is much more detailed with many excerpts from the book. However, I must caution that it is somewhat hard to read due to the many typos.

I want to start first with a table of contrasting moral precepts. Which I have modified slightly from the wiki to make the contrasts a little clearer.

Moral Precepts for Systems of Survival

I think the commercial class is rather self explanatory but the political/guardian class needs some explanation. In the American system the political class is supposed to provide oversight to the warrior class in order that those in the warrior class are kept within their proper bounds and operate with the maximum of efficiency and the minimum of corruption in their own sphere. This is their prime function. Their motives are most closely aligned with the warrior class since the political class are by definition takers. However, they are also entrusted with seeing that the commercial class is kept honest as well. This explains why we have two systems of courts. The check on the political class is that they are watched by the civilian courts and civilian prosecutors. They are also checked by being elected by the civilian population.

Science and its handmaiden engineering are inherently a commercial endeavors only more so. They depend on a level of honesty not often found in ordinary commerce. They must not be just accommodating of truth but ruthless about it. The check on science and engineering is replication of the work. It is not true science until some one can repeat the experiment and get the same result within the margin of error. Of course there is continuous effort to reduce the margin of error. That leads to economy both in engineering and science.

Well that is a nice short over view. Let's look at how the systems can fail. The number one failure within the warrior class is a failure of loyalty. In the true warrior loyalty is bidirectional. It comprises loyalty to subordinates, equals, and superiors. The reason loyalty is so important is that all warfare is based on deception. Commerce is dependent on honesty above all. Honest measures, truth in advertising, and the fitness of the goods for the purposes contracted. The good working of both systems is most ensured by promoting excellence, in people, in goods, and in services. And to make it all work the two systems must be kept as separate as possible. The peace keepers (soldiers, police) will demand loyalty from the political class and the businessmen will demand honesty from the political class and each must be satisfied in its own sphere.

I have been going on and on and you can probably see for yourself many avenues for corruption and the misuse of one system by the other and most easily the misuse of both systems by the political class who are in charge of keeping both honest. So let me end with a number of quotes from the Jacobs book extracted from the above pdf.

On Agriculture

...agriculture can be operated under either guardian or commercial ways. Wherever in the world a clamor arises for land to be divided and given to its workers, the system being attacked is the guardian type of agriculture. {But}...it's basically a commercial activity.... ...when agriculture is operated in accordance with commercial precepts, placing value on voluntary agreement, thrift, productive investment, efficiency, and openness to innovations, it is much more productive than guardian-run agriculture. worker for worker, it supports its people better. Guardian ways are a drag on agriculture. ...the work's natural demands..for commercial morality. It innately requires thrift: the farmer must deliberately set seeds and breeding stock aside, even if it means going on short rations. It also requires industriousness, much unremitting drudgery day after day after day, especially before machines lightened the work. ...trading or bartering is almost invariably associated with agriculture and animal breeding. Farm households everywhere struggle to get something to market if they possibly can. This is true even when members of the household spin, weave, and practice other crafts. For a household to produce food and fibers for itself and for nobody else, and therefore by definition also supply itself with all its other needs, too -- since it isn't buying or bartering -- is so impractical it's uncommon. So impractical it's a guaranteed recipe for poverty. [Agriculture is]...an economic activity that is functionally and morally commercial [and] has historically been skewed to conform to the contradictory values and morals of guardian landowners. Rulers long ago became preoccupied with agriculture because it meshed with their preoccupations with territory. Tradition has perpetuated the fixation. Any ostensible reason for maintaining the tradition will do. ...once guardian largesse and controls are in place, any attempt to abandon them becomes disruptive.... ...nobody knows what agriculture would be like if it were restored fully and truly to the commercial syndrome and its workings, and everybody is afraid to find out.

...we're qualitatively different from other animals as ecological presences. But why? ... Trade! Trade pays no attention to ecosystem unit boundaries. It skips over them as it pleases, transferring surplus energy from this and that ecosystem unit into other ecosystem units. ...it's logical for guardian-minded people to identify a given territorial unit by the range of its top predator -- its prince. However, in the real ecosystems of the real world, obscure creatures can identify ecological units more tellingly than animals at the top of the food chain. ... If you care about putting scientific learning to constructive use...then you need guardian-minded ecologists.... And you have to take them with their habits -- fixation on territories and territorial princes, bureaucratic ways of bringing order to reality, and all. ... If something is a large, important truth, many entirely different avenues should lead to it.... Education does not guarantee a cast of mind appropriate to the training. [Referring to a team of researchers] At the institute, [they]...no doubt sincerely thought they were engaging in free intellectual inquiry. Yet their guardian assumptions, their guardian cast of mind, governed the root questions they were putting to themselves.

Engineers working in the military-industrial complex are skillful at designing ingenious products but...they fail to combine this skill with thrift of means. ...trained incompetence...it has corrupted the abilities of most of the country's best and brightest engineers over the span of the past forty years. ...lack of cost discipline...has side effects outside the military-industrial complex. ...between 1980 and 1988, our share of machine tool markets dropped from eighteen percent to seven percent. ... American engineers have...remained marvelous at inventing in fields that can afford to support such work. ...the trouble comes from inability to produce the inventions at affordable costs and with competitive efficiency. then, even though invention has given us a head start, we lose out to Italians, Germans, Japanese, and others.... ... Pentagon contracts in the aggregate are enormous. ...engineers laid off from military work will have a 'lethal effect' in civilian production because of their lopsided experience in disregarding costs.

Plato said mingling kinds of work or meddling with other people's tasks was 'the greatest wickedness,' did the ,most harm' to the community, and was the very incarnation of injustice.

Fair and square competition is moral in the commercial syndrome. Not in the guardian syndrome, where largesse and loyalty take priority.

Francis Bacon: The increase of any state must be upon the foreigner (for whatever is somewhere gained is somewhere lost). ... People with guardian casts of mind tend to carry zero-sum thinking with them into their attempts to understand all kinds of gains and losses.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

In a piece with the irresistible title of "What Me Mullah?", Roger L. Simon looks at Barack Obama's wild inconsistencies on Iran, and foreign policy in general.

On Sunday, Obama told the throng at Pendleton, Oregon: "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, 'We're going to wipe you off the planet.'"

On Monday, after the McCain people rushed to distribute the video of Obama's pronouncement, the Illinois Senator quickly revised his statement somewhat:

"Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust," he said. "The reason Iran is so much more powerful than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush-McCain policy of fighting in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran. They're the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely."

Oh, really?

I used to do litigation, and while I hated it, this type of thinking is typical, and it is called arguing in the alternative. Behind the "tiny threat" argument is the idea that Republicans are dishonest in describing the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran as grave. But on the other hand, if the threat is indeed grave, then it is the Republicans who are responsible for having done nothing -- despite the fact that the Democrats have demanded toughness! (Either way, the Republicans are wrong.)

In litigation, it typically is not supposed to matter that positions are legally or logically inconsistent, because they are played like chess moves.

What I like about McCain is that he's not arguing like a litigator (nor is he a lawyer), but as a man with common sense military experience who knows a threat when he sees one and cares more about the country than winning an argument.

Obama, as Roger points out, sees this as a debating game. Yet even according to game theory, he loses the debate:

To accept Obama's (wavering) position, you must assume that Ahmadinejad and the others are lying about their deeply held religious beliefs. That's difficult to do, since they have been so consistent in their statements and their actions for decades now. Time, to them, is on their side. Furthermore, Obama's contention that because the Iranians are not as technically advanced as the Soviets they are not as dangerous would be almost silly were it not so potentially catastrophic. It is more likely the reverse. Nuclear weapons in the hands of religious fanatics with a divine impetus to spread them is terrifying because it is unrestrained by rationality.

Michael Moore, BTW, has been acting out lately, and I think he must be one of those people who can't stand being ignored. His most recent venture has involved the illegal use of Michael Yon's pictures for his own propaganda purposes.

And, joining like-minded luminaries like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Moore has now endorsed Barack Obama for president.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds used the phrase "JAMES EARL OBAMA" in a different context, but for me, it brought to mind Moore's place of honor next to the original James Earl.

The name goes quite well with Moore and Hamas that "James Earl Obama" is not a bad all-around fit.

If I were working for the Hillary campaign, I'd circulate the hell out of this video:

As to McCain, he can always use it later.

(There's more than one way to play "Ayatollah you so.")

Suggested by dre in a comment to Classical Values post Heroes locked under Plexiglas. Picture originally hosted by Power Line. Power Line suggests you look at this image in case the association is not clear.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, on Saturday I went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum.

Now, while I happen to think Frida Kahlo's art is overrated as art and I abhor her and her husband's Stalinist politics, I still find her art interesting. While she is not (despite what anyone says) one of the leading artists of all time, her morbidly personal style and imaginatively warped sense of self-absorbed surrealism intrigue me. There are a couple of reviews here and here and it isn't the purpose of this post to get into detailed discussion of her art.

Besides, there's a well established Frida Kahlo cult, and you're either a Kahlo cultist or you're not. (Excellent reappraisal of Kahlo here.) I can take Kahlo or leave her, so I'm hardly a cultist. However, I do find her work far superior to that of her blowhard abusive husband Diego Rivera, whose crassly political Stalinistic murals I have always found dull and dreary.

Of all the Kahlo paintings, there was one that particularly drew my attention -- not merely because of the subject material but because of the way it was on display.

While the rest of the paintings were simply hanging on the walls with guards watching as you'd expect in a normal museum exhibit, one was encased in a heavy-duty plexiglas box which was bolted around it and firmly affixed to the wall. I don't think the primary concern was theft either. I think the curator feared vandalism.

To this painting:

(If interested, you can click to see a larger version.)

The painting (from 1945) is titled "Moses," and here's a brief description:

In the extraordinarily detailed painting Moses, 1945, the sun is presented as 'the centre of all religions'. The composition is divided into three registers, which consist of images of gods in the upper section and portraits of 'heroes' below, including Alexander the Great, Martin Luther, Napoleon and Hitler, whom she called 'the lost child'. At the bottom are the masses, and scenes relating to the process of evolution. The painting was inspired by an essay by Sigmund Freud that made a link between Ancient Egyptian beliefs, Moses and the origins of monotheistic religion. The infant Moses has been given the third eye of wisdom, a device Kahlo sometimes used in her portraits of Rivera.

From her own description of the painting:

On the same earth, but painting their heads larger, to distinguish them from the "mass," the heroes are pictured (very few of them, but well chosen), the transformers of religions, the inventors and creators of these, the conquerors, the rebels.... To the right, and this figure I should have painted with much more importance than any other, Ahmenhotep IV can be seen, who was later called Akhenaten... Later Moses, who according to Freud's analysis, gave his adopted people the same religion as that of Akhenaten, a little altered according to the interests and circumstances of his time. After Christ, follow Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon and ... "the lost infant", Hitler. To the left, marvelous Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beuatiful, she must have been " a wild one" and a most intelligent collaborator to her husband. Buddha, Marx, Freud, Paracelsus, Epicure [sic]. Genghis Khan, Gandhi, Lenin and Stalin.

(Top row, left to right: Epicurus, Freud, Paracelsus, Marx, Nefertiti; Bottom row, left to right: Stalin, Lenin, Ghandi, Genghis Khan, Buddha).

And the greatest heroes on the right.

(Top row, left to right: Akhenaten, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Zoroaster; Bottom row, left to right: Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon, and Hitler).

Of all the subjects in the painting, which one would so worry the curator that he felt the need to put it behind a protective encasement?

I don't think that takes much imagination. All of these subjects have been painted in many times and places by many artists, but the only one I can think of who would generate such paranoia on the part of a museum curator is Muhammad. Frankly, I don't blame the curator. Nuts do vandalize paintings from time to time, but the kind of people who would want to erase the image of Muhammad are not your garden variety schizophrenics. They're more likely to be serious and determined people who believe they are on the side of God.

Perhaps it isn't accurate to be lumping them in with nuts. Perhaps it is. Some might consider it a form of denial to dismiss violently determined religious people as "crazy." (Certainly the violent and determined people themselves wouldn't want to be called crazy.)

But whatever they are, the problem is not one that's going away. No avant-garde artist today would dare include an image of Muhammad in any painting. No museum would show it, and few galleries would display it. I realize that many, many artists, in both the Western as well as Eastern traditions (including my favorite, Salvador Dali) have portrayed Muhammad, and I know that a bas relief sculpture of him is still on the Supreme Court building (although Muslim activists want it sandblasted off). But would any museum dare to do an exhibition of Muhammad images in the history of art? Would any gallery display a Muhammad collection? I think not, and I don't think calling them "cowards" ends the inquiry.

For starters, they wouldn't be able to get insurance for the event. Police departments would warn them of violence, and would suggest the events not be held. Various bureaucracies would chime in, and demands would be issued by activist organizations.

In this context, exhibiting the Kahlo painting behind plexiglas has to be seen as an act of courage.

UPDATE: I appreciate the comments! Little did the pain-wracked Frida Kahlo know that what she was painting in 1945 would become such a masterpiece of moral equivalency.

"Why don't you care about the mercury?"

So asks Ann Althouse in a post about CFL mercury dangers.

I can't resist why questions. Basically, my answer is the same that it has been to "Why don't you care about the lead?"

Because the dangers are overstated.

But speaking of overstated dangers, I cannot help noticing that when Glenn Reynolds linked the Ann Althouse post, he quipped that he mails his CFLs to Al Gore. I'm wondering about something. Did Glenn know about Al Gore's Carnegie University commencement speech about the "third hero generation" yesterday? It was relegated to page B-11 of today's Philadelphia Inquirer, and I cannot find the story at the Inquirer web site (why such shabby treatment of the Goreacle?), so I'll just use the AP version:

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Former Vice President Al Gore on Sunday told graduates of Carnegie Mellon University they could become part of the next "hero generation" in American history by solving environmental problems.

In a commencement address before a record crowd of about 10,000 people, the Nobel laureate said there had already been two "special generations" of Americans: the one that founded the country and the one that defeated fascism during World War II.

"You, I hope and expect, will be called upon to be part of the third hero generation in American history," by countering the threat of global warming, he said.

"We face a planetary emergency," Gore said. "The concentrations of global warming pollution have been rising at an unprecedented pace and have now given the planet a fever."

Carnegie Mellon had provided "great leadership in confronting what I regard as the most serious crisis our civilization has ever confronted," partly by becoming a major buyer of retail wind power, he said.

Alternative energy sources such as the sun and wind can replace fossil fuels, Gore said, but "we need one ingredient that you represent. We need political will; we need your dedication; we need your hearts."

Because the fact is that CFLs -- and the people who want to save the world with them -- are under increasing assault. And I don't just mean from the right wing anti-environmentalist agenda. In very green-conscious England, there is a serious move to preserve incandescents -- for health reasons:

Conventional or "incandescent" bulbs are being phased out in a voluntary agreement with retailers and will no longer be on sale from December 2011.

Campaigners want people who have light sensitive conditions to be able to continue to buy conventional bulbs for their homes.

They warned that employers must also be able to purchase incandescent lighting as employees have a right to such adjustments under the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Andrew Langford, chief executive officer of the Skin Care Campaign, one of the charities involved, said: "Incandescent light bulbs are the only source of electric light for many thousands of people with light sensitive conditions.

"Add to this the thousands of people whose conditions or treatments may secondarily cause them to be light sensitive, and you have a large number of people potentially being isolated in the dark....

When I was a kid, we used to play with the stuff. I mean both mercury and lead, and not only did no one care, but nothing terrible ever happened. Why am I still alive?

As I've pointed out repeatedly, my mouth is loaded with mercury, and in some places, I'm considered too toxic to be cremated. The anti-mercury activists want mercury amalgam banned, not because it's dangerous, but in order to bolster their credibility (and that of the anti-fishing movement, which which loves to scream about mercury).

I'm not buying into it. This doesn't mean I'm going to break open a thermometer and drink a shot of mercury (or even break one of my CFLs and eat the contents) but there is such a thing as common sense.

The following chart compares "the EPA value to mothers breast milk, bottled water, canned tuna fish and amalgam dental fillings":

As you can see, my mouth is far, far more dangerous than anyone's CFL. Or even the salmon on your plate!

Hmmm.....

I guess that means if you sprinkle the contents of a CFL on your tuna sandwich and eat it, you'd still be getting 10 times the amount of mercury from the fish.

Unless you chew too hard....

UPDATE: From commenter dre, a reminder of the Gore Effect:

The Gore Effect works. Pittsburgh weather yesterday 5/18/08:

Normal (KPIT) 72 ?F / 22 ?C 50 ?F / 10 ?C
Yesterday 64 ?F / 17 ?C 44 ?F / 6 ?C
Yesterday's Heating Degree Days: 11

AFTERTHOUGHT: While it's probably obvious from the tone of this post, I should probably emphasize that I consider the environmentalist double standards to be deliciously laughable -- the disconnect between the zero-tolerance-for-mercury scare campaign and the fanatic embrace of mercury laden CFLs being a perfect example.

Anyway, here's the deliciously laughable rule on mercury:

All mercury is dangerous and evil -- except the mercury that is wonderful and mandatory.

The New Criterion has an article on romaticism in the public schools. It is not about the study of a literary genre but a look at how bad ideas coupled with good intentions are ruining our schools for all children. The children with limited abilities. Those in the middle and those at the top. It is a very long piece (well worth reading in its entirety) so I'm going to pick out some high points that illustrate where we are, why we are where we are, and where we should go from here.

Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers' unions.

In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren't smart enough.

No one disputes the empirical predictiveness of tests of intellectual ability--IQ tests--for large groups. If a classroom of first-graders is given a full-scale IQ test that requires no literacy and no mathematics, the correlation of those scores with scores on reading and math tests at age seventeen is going to be high. Such correlations will be equally high whether the class consists of rich children or poor, black or white, male or female. They will be high no matter how hard the teachers have worked. Scores on tests of reading and math track with intellectual ability, no matter what.

That brings us to an indispensable tenet of educational romanticism: The public schools are so bad that large gains in student performance are possible even within the constraints of intellectual ability. A large and unrefuted body of evidence says that this indispensable tenet is incorrect. Differences among schools do not have much effect on test scores in reading and mathematics.

Excellent schools with excellent teachers will augment their learning, and are a better experience for children in many other ways as well. But an excellent school's effects on mean test scores for the student body as a whole will not be dramatic. Readers who attended normally bad K-12 schools and then went to selective colleges are likely to understand why: Your classmates who had gone to Phillips Exeter had taken much better courses than your school offered, and you may have envied their good luck, but you had read a lot on your own, you weren't that far behind, and you caught up quickly.

To sum up, a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement. To put it another way, we have every reason to think--and already did when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed--that the notion of making all children proficient in math and reading is ridiculous. Such a feat is not possible even for an experimental school with unlimited funding, let alone for public schools operating in the real world. By NAEP's (National Assessment of Educational Progress) definition of proficiency, we probably cannot make even half of the students proficient.

The first strand in explaining educational romanticism is a mythic image of the good old days when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three R's. You have probably run across tokens of it in occasional editorials that quote examination questions once asked of public schools students. Here is an example that The Wall Street Journal gave from the admissions test to Jersey City High School in 1885: "Write a sentence containing a noun as an attribute, a verb in the perfect tense potential mood, and a proper adjective." Or consider the McGuffey Readers that were standard textbooks in the nineteenth century, filled with literary selections far more difficult than the ones given to today's students at equivalent ages. That's the kind of material all children routinely learned, right?

Wrong. American schools have never been able to teach everyone how to read, write, and do arithmetic. The myth that they could has arisen because schools a hundred years ago did not have to educate the least able. When the twentieth century began, about a quarter of all adults had not reached fifth grade and half had not reached eighth grade. The relationship between school dropout and intellectual ability was not perfect, but it was strong. Today's elementary and middle schools are dealing with 99 percent of all children in the eligible age groups. Let today's schools not report the test results for the children that schools in 1900 did not have to teach, and NAEP scores would go through the roof.

The roots of educational romanticism go back to the beginnings of the Progressive Education movement early in the twentieth century. Its flowering in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a zeitgeist that nurtured wishful thinking of all sorts. But I think we need to come to grips with another important historical force that made educational romanticism dominant. The effects of the triumphant Civil Rights Movement gave a special reason for white elites in the 1960s to start ignoring the implications of intellectual limitations.

It is difficult to convey to readers who came of age in the 1970s or thereafter the emotional power of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. The ambiguities associated with affirmative action and the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws were still in the future. The Civil Rights Movement prior to 1964 created a change in the consciousness of white elites that was felt viscerally, and it included an embarrassing awareness of just how unremittingly whites had violated every American ideal when it came to blacks. With that awareness came elite white guilt --honest, deeply felt, and warranted.

Elite white guilt explains much about all kinds of social policy from the last half of the 1960s onward, but especially about education. Until the 1960s, white educators and politicians could look at a class of white children in which a number of students were doing poorly and shrug. The schools try to teach everyone, but some kids can't handle the material. That's just the way the things are; it is not a problem that can be fixed. But when the class consisted of black students who were doing poorly, that reaction was not acceptable. These were children growing up in a society where all the odds had been stacked against them, and their failings couldn't be passed off as "just the way things are." Elite white guilt made it impossible to say that a lot of black children were going to continue to fail in school and there's nothing anybody could do about it. Once it could not be said of black children, neither could it be said of white children. In that context, educational romanticism did not just become fashionable during the 1960s. It became emotionally mandatory.

And so, beginning with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal government embarked on a series of major efforts to improve education for disadvantaged children that culminated in 2002 with the No Child Left Behind Act. Surveying that history, an analogy occurred to me that I offer as a speculative proposition: America's federal education policy as of 2008 is at about the same place that the Soviet Union's economic policy was in 1990.

The parallels between the trajectory of the Soviet Union's attempt to reform its economy and the trajectory of the federal government's attempts to reform the public education system are striking. By the mid-1980s, Soviet leaders knew that they had to introduce supply and demand into the economy, but they couldn't bring themselves to try honest-to-God capitalism, so they tried to decentralize decision-making and permit some elements of a market economy while retaining central price controls and government ownership of the means of production. The reforms were based on premises about human nature that were patently wrong. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the educational romantics--and George W. Bush is the Percy Bysshe Shelley of educational romantics--knew that public school systems everywhere had become bureaucratically top-heavy and that many inner-city schools were no longer functional. They knew that the billions of federal money spent on upgrading education for disadvantaged children had produced no demonstrable improvements. But they thought they could fix the system. Bush's glasnost was to implement accountability through measurement of results by test scores. Bush's perestroika was a mishmash of performance standards and fragments of a market economy in schools, while retaining public funding of the schools and government control over the enforcement of the new standards. The reforms were based on premises about intellectual ability that were patently wrong.

Unlike the Soviet economy, American public schools are still in business, but scholarly analyses of the administration of No Child Left Behind are documenting a monumental mess.

Contemplate these results for a moment. A law is passed that, at least in the first few years, convulses educational practice throughout the nation. It is a law explicitly designed to raise test scores, if only because it produces intense drilling on how to take tests. And it produces trivial increases in NAEP's math scores and no increases in its reading scores. No Child Left Behind has been not just a failure for educational romanticism, but its repudiation.

The good news is that educational romanticism is surely teetering on the edge of collapse. I am optimistic for three reasons. First, the data keep piling up. It takes a while for empiricism to discredit cherished beliefs, but No Child Left Behind may prove to have done us a favor by putting so much emphasis on test scores and thereby focusing attention on how hard it is to budge those scores. Second, we no longer live in a romantic age. Educational romanticism was born of forces that have lost most of their power, and façades collapse when the motives for maintaining those façades weaken. Third, hardly anybody really believes in educational romanticism even now. No one but the most starry-eyed denies in private the reality of differences in intellectual ability that we are powerless to change with K-12 education. People are unwilling to talk about those differences in public, but it is a classic emperor's-clothes scenario waiting for someone to point out the obvious.

For the good of our children, educational romanticism needs to collapse, and quickly. Its effects play out in the lives of young people in devastating ways. The fourth-grader who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading A Tale of Two Cities for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears. The eighth-grader who cannot make sense of algebra but has an almost mystical knack with machines is told to stick with the college prep track, because to be a success in life he must go to college and get a B.A. The senior with terrific SAT scores gets away with turning in rubbish on his term papers because to make special demands on the gifted would be elitist. They are all products of an educational system that cannot make itself talk openly about the implications of diverse educational limits.

There is much more to be said about these harms (and I have said it, in a book that will appear in a few months). For now, it is enough to recognize that educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top. It short-changes all of them.

I have said this often but it bears repeating:

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." -- John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

In other words not every man has equal intelligence. All have equal dignity if they comport themselves in a dignified manner. We owe the maintenance of our civilization (and it takes a lot of maintaining) to our plumbers and garbage men. We owe the advances to our scientists and engineers. What we must never forget is that we are all in this together. The man/woman who is respectful and contributes deserves our respect without qualification. The financial trader or the clerk at the grocery store.

Let me add one final point that the article didn't make that I think is vitally important and not well addressed in many communities. Hard work can make up to a 15 IQ point difference in outcomes (sorry no link). That is one standard deviation. It is not a lot. It is however significant. You can make up for some lack of anything with extra effort. How many times do we hear of the ball player with less than stellar abilities make up for his lack by devoting more time to practice than his team mates? What works in baseball also works in school. You can punch above your weight if you work at it.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I hate the way Sunday has become official morality day.

I say this not in criticism of organized religion or morality in general, but because I don't like trickery, and I don't like the way Sundays have become the official day for media to play preacher and promote morality -- especially the newly manufactured morality which appeals to the non-churchgoers with unacknowledged spiritual needs.

In today's Inquirer, "our" car culture and our cell phone culture are subjected to good sound scoldings. So, after the poor sinful readers spend their weekdays indulging their decadent lifestyles by commuting to work in their greenhouse-gas-emitting cars and facilitating their needless and wasteful lives by using culturally-destructive cell phones, they need to be shamed on Sunday.

If it weren't so predictable and so tired, this would call for a long essay.

But I have to go out and commit sins -- of the automotive and telephonic variety -- so I don't have time for a long essay.

Forget about atonement. As it is, I never had time to atone for my more pleasurable sins.

Atoning for driving and communicating is impossible.

(In a way, I don't envy today's preachers, so maybe I shouldn't be too hard on them. It is easier to induce guilt over pleasurable things like recreational sex and drugs. Scolding people who have to do things like commute and communicate simply to make a living must be an uphill battle, as well as a thankless task.)

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and for the quote. A warm welcome to all.

Comments appreciated, even from anti-media Sabbath-breakers!

UPDATE: My thanks to Sean Kinsell for linking this post. Don't miss Sean's devastating critique of the anti-cell phone culture screed.

In terms of finger-wagging social commentary, it has everything: a crack analogy, an appeal to some think-tank expert whose qualifications aren't at all established, and compulsive genuflection to a supercilious Brit decrying the decline of civilization. Since I've been making the transition from the cell-phone culture in to that here in the States, I've actually been thinking about these things quite a bit....

Gone all day yesterday, but blogging was not forgotten. Far from it. After a trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum where I immersed myself in the morbidly self absorbed art of the unabashedly Stalinist surrealist Frida Kahlo, I got in my car and hightailed it to Baltimore for a very different event, and a more appetizing one -- both in the political and literal sense.

So I spent a very enjoyable afternoon at the Baltimore Blogger Meetup, which was held at Mama's on a Half Shell -- a restaurant I highly recommend, especially for seafood lovers.

Longtime blogfriend Rachel Sawyer of Tinkerty Tonk was there, was were David Foster of Photon Courier, who also posts at Chicago Boyz, and Jonathan of Chicago Boyz. (I guess you could say Chicago invaded Baltimore.)

I never know how pictures are going to turn out, and we were sitting outside in the afternoon sunlight, which makes them even more unpredictable. While it isn't one of the predictable photos of people looking and squinting at the camera, the best photo I have shows Rachel and I looking at Jonathan's camera, instead of my camera (which was in the hands of David). So it's a picture of us looking at someone else's camera.

If there's any truth to the old superstition that cameras capture souls, it shows our souls being captured by Jonathan! (Speaking of "souls," Jonathan also took a photograph of everyone's feet, and I don't have it, or I'd feed it up and readers could make judgments about whether the attendees and their soles were well heeled or something....)

We had a wide-ranging conversation about everything from popular culture to economics to the election and even the highly politicized weather.

And finally there was the check!

As you can see, the generosity and munificence of bloggers who subscribe to the theories of Milton Friedman know no bounds! *

It was a lot of fun, and I wish such events happened more often.

*Should I feel obligated to point out that the $2.00 was not really the tip?

(People have been known to take me too literally, so maybe.)

UPDATE: Saying "if I revealed anymore, I'd have to kill you," Rachel posts a highly classified picture of the footwork that went into the meeting.

"I think the United States should take a step back, see what they do when they form their government, see what their policies are, and see the ways that we can engage with them, and if there aren't any, there may be a hiatus."

"I think the United States should take a step back, see what they do when they form their government, see what their policies are, and see the ways that we can engage with them,

And Obama? Well he is just a liar. Or perhaps I'm being too harsh. Perhaps Barack Hussein Obama is just a failed comedy act. Maybe that is why he isn't getting any laughs. Tell us another joke Barry. Maybe the next one will go over better.

H/T Gateway Pundit via Instapundit

Got 'lanched. Welcome Instapundit readers.

President Bush gave a speech at the Israeli Parliament.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama accused President Bush of "a false political attack" Thursday after Bush warned in Israel against appeasing terrorists -- early salvos in a general election campaign that's already blazing even as the Democratic front-runner tries to sew up his party's nomination.

The White House denied Bush had targeted Obama, who said the Republican commander in chief's intent was obvious.

I think he done slipped in some Shinola.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

McCain made a great point at the NRA convention and he changed my mind about my on again off again support for him. We owe it to those who have fought and died in Iraq.

Senator Obama has said, if elected, he will withdraw Americans from Iraq quickly no matter what the situation on the ground is and no matter what U.S. military commanders advise. But if we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq will survive, proclaim victory and continue to provoke sectarian tensions that, while they have been subdued by the success of the surge, still exist, and are ripe for provocation by al Qaeda. Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. A reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values. Iran will view it as a victory, and the biggest state supporter of terrorists, a country with nuclear ambitions and a stated desire to destroy the Sta te of Israel, will see its influence in the Middle East grow significantly.

The consequences of our defeat would threaten us for years, and those who argue for premature withdrawal, as both Senators Obama and Clinton do, are arguing for a course that would eventually draw us into a wider and more difficult war that would entail far greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date. Thanks to the counterinsurgency instigated by General Petreaus, after four years of terribly costly mistakes, we have a realistic chance to succeed in helping the forces of political reconciliation prevail in Iraq, and the democratically elected Iraqi Government, with a professional and competent Iraqi army, impose its authority throughout the country and defend its borders. We have a realistic chance of denying al Qaeda any sanctuary in Iraq. We have a realistic chance of leaving behind in Iraq a force for stability and peace in the region, and not a cause for a wider and far more dangerous war. I do not argue against withdrawal because I am indifferent to war and the suffering it inflicts on too many American families. I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are. But I know, too, that we must sometimes pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later. I want our soldiers home, too, just as quickly as we can bring them back without risking everything they suffered for, and burdening them with greater sacrifices in the years ahead. That I will not do. I have spent my life in service to my country, and I will never, never, never risk her security for the sake of my own ambitions. I will defend her, and all her freedoms, so help me God. And I ask you to help me in that good cause. Thank you, and God bless you.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Like a lot of people who have been using computers for over a decade, I have performed "upgrades" more times than I care to remember. Among the more mundane of these upgrades have been replacing hard drives -- sometimes because they failed, but mostly because they eventually were filled to capacity. I'm kind of a pack rat, and this leads to problems in real life spaces, because when paper, books, and magazines accumulate, they occupy space which ought to be available for humans -- a situation guaranteed to get worse over time. The only options are either throwing things away, or moving to a larger space. Both options are problematic, for obvious reasons.

However, thanks to the continuous evolution in computer technology, I've never had this pack rat problem with hard drive space. It has been expanding and expanding almost infinitely in a way that reminds me of the movement outward of the Universe since the Big Bang. Hard drives get bigger and cheaper, and by the time I've "outgrown" one, there will be one that holds five times as much on sale for a fraction of the price I paid for the filled-up drive.

Because hard drives are fairly small in terms of physical size, the old ones haven't been a big problem; they just sit around gathering dust. But I am stuck with them, and because they contain passwords, financial data, over a decade of old email, and a daily stream of personal consciousness more detailed than any diary could ever be, they're not things I'm willing to just pitch in the trash.

From an economic standpoint, even if I could scrub and reformat them safely (more on that in a second), I cannot sell or even give them away. Old hard drives of 10 Gigabytes or less are useless and worthless, because they're too small for modern purposes. I actually have a 750 Megabyte hard drive if you can believe they ever made such a thing, but physically, it's identical in size to my latest 320 Gigabyte drive.

A lot of people think you can just reformat these things and throw them away. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If you want to be really paranoid, even using the best DoD approved techniques which involve multiple random overwrites of 0s and 1s do not scrub the data sufficiently.

I was shocked to read that the government does not want you to know that:

The second problem with official data destruction standards is that the information in them may be partially inaccurate in an attempt to fool opposing intelligence agencies (which is probably why a great many guidelines on sanitizing media are classified). By deliberately under-stating the requirements for media sanitization in publicly-available guides, intelligence agencies can preserve their information-gathering capabilities while at the same time protecting their own data using classified techniques.

Sorry, but no one messes with my palimpsestuous images, pal.

The only genuinely secure, safe and foolproof way to delete data is by physical destruction of the drive itself. Not just putting it out of its misery with a sledge hammer, because the plates are still inside and some sneaky bastard could theoretically still come along, put them inside another drive, and scan them with his killer microscope. You have to destroy the platters.

If you go to all the trouble of taking one of the silly drives apart (careful, as they're vacuum-sealed and go POOF!), and dissecting the hell out of it, you'll find these:

(As you can see, I've got too much on my platter.)

I think dissolving them in strong acid or reducing them to powder with a bench grinder ought to satisfactorily take care of the problem. But let's face it, that's a hell of a lot of work. I poked around a little bit, and learned that degaussing is the next best thing, but hard drive degaussers are expensive.

What about powerful magnets? The military has developed a hand-crankable box (the "Guard Dog") containing neodymium iron-boron magnets which is supposed to render any hard drive totally useless in a matter of a few seconds.

While they don't sell these things, four inch neodynamium magnets with a 750 lb, pull are available for sale here, and they're described as dangerous:

They are incredibly powerful and should only be purchased by users familiar with the proper handling of large neodymium magnets. Two of these stuck together are virtually impossible to separate by hand. They can pinch and cause physical harm if they are not handled with extreme care and respect. You must read and understand our Neodymium Magnet Safety Page before ordering these magnets. You must also agree to our Terms and Conditions prior to purchasing. THESE ARE DANGEROUS!

But would it work? Might the gummint geeks still be able to get at your palimpsestuous images with their scanning tunneling microscope recovery techniques? I don't know, but I still like the grinder.

I did find another enjoyable method which would appear to be foolproof, and that is called Drive Slagging:

We finally decided that the only sure way to thwart data recovery was to melt down all the aluminum contained in the platters. Slagging the drive would have two effects on the medium. First off it would convert it from a readable disk to any shape we decided to pour it into. Secondly it would nullify the magnetic properties of the coated aluminum.

What's left is guaranteed unrecoverable.

And who said meltdowns can't be enjoyable?

The American Thinker asks: What do the Saudis want?

Slowly but surely it is beginning to dawn on a world mesmerized by the Democratic primary contest that an oil cartel has been picking our pocket with impunity by willfully failing to adjust its output to the additional needs of China and India. More specifically, Americans are beginning to wonder at the logic of continuing to keep Saudis safe. Hence, the US-Saudi oil axis faces a day of truth when president Bush will deliver diplomatically to his Saudi hosts the message NY senator Chuck Schumer delivered most undiplomatically:

We are saying to the Saudis that, if you don't help us, why should we be helping you?

But first what do the Saudis want?

First, they want to see energy demands curtailed rather than supplies increased so that oil will continue to be able to meet that need.

Second, they want oil consumers to continue to promote investment in oil and to promise NOT to invest in or subsidize seriously the development of alternatives to oil.

Third, if alternative energy is to be developed, it should not substitute for oil, merely supplement it.

Fourth, they want "to smooth the recycling of billions of dollars in oil revenues from producers back into consuming countries." In other words, end the growing scrutiny of sovereign wealth funds.

Which fits in pretty well with keeping alcohol tariffs high and preventing the development of flex fuel vehicles, which I discuss at The Girls From Brazil Have A Question. They also have nice asses (and I don't mean donkeys) which you can see in the included video.

Which leads us to the final question which Instapundit asks: is Congress on the Saudi payroll? Rocky Mountain news has the details.

The Senate Appropriations Committee today narrowly defeated Sen. Wayne Allard's attempt to end a moratorium related to oil shale development in Colorado.

It was a big day for Colorado energy issues on Capitol Hill as Gov. Bill Ritter testified before a senate committee asking lawmakers to move cautiously on oil-shale development until more is known about the environmental impact and other issues.

Meanwhile downstairs, the appropriations committee was considering a massive Emergency Supplemental Spending Bill. Allard, a member of the committee, attempted to insert an amendment that would reverse the moratorium that lawmakers approved late last year.

The moratorium prevents the Department of Interior from issuing regulations so that oil companies can move forward on oil-shale projects in Colorado and Utah. Allard said the moratorium has left uncertainties at a time when companies need to move forward and in the long term make the United States more energy independent.

"If we are really serious about reducing pain at the pump, this is a vote that would make a difference in people's lives," Allard argued.

But in a 14-15 vote, the committee spilt strictly on party lines and rejected the amendment.

So do the Saudis own the Democrats? It is as good a hypothesis as any. And what about Bush? I think he is a bad politician. He didn't stay bought. How about the Democrats? It looks like they are getting double crossed. Well crossings and double crossings are always the prelude to war. This one is going to be a real bitch.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Welcome Instapundit readers.

Under the Endangered Species Act the polar bear is now listed as a threatened species.

After 18 years of a law practice devoted to counseling landowners, home builders and commercial interests affected by the long arm and severe penalties of the Endangered Species Act, I am used to incredulous looks and outraged oaths from clients coming to grips with the Act's incredible burdens on impacted private citizens.

"Are you telling me I can't build my Burger King because a Delhi Sands flower-loving fly that has never been seen and is above ground only a few days a year might be near-by?"

"I can't build a connector road because the noise from construction might damage the hearing of the Stephens' kangaroo rat thus impairing its reproduction?"

"All construction in San Diego involving impacts to road ruts which might contain Vernal Pool Fairy Shrimp is enjoined? All construction?"

Yes, yes, and yes. The list of situations in which the ESA has stopped otherwise legal and fully permitted projects from proceeding is extraordinarily long and getting longer. With Wednesday's decision to list the polar bear as "threatened" the burden on the American economy brought about by the ESA grew exponentially.

I have written here and here on the polar bear controversy. Those columns delineated how the advocates of the polar bear listing planned on using the bear to impose vast new controls on the emissions of greenhouse gases across the United States. When Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced the listing, he also made a bold statement that the new status of the polar bear would not lead to such consequences.

To which the environmental activists replied immediately: "Says who?" The law is the law, they correctly noted, and it cannot be cabined by "guidance" issued by the executive branch.

Because the polar bear has been listed as threatened due to alleged deterioration of its ice habitat, and because the alleged loss of the ice habitat has occurred because of global warming caused at least in part by the emission of greenhouse gases, environmental activists will argue that all emissions of greenhouse gases that flow as a consequence of the grant of a federal permit of any sort are now subject to review under the ESA and, crucially, that those permits cannot be issued unless and until the United States Fish & Wildlife Service reviews and approves of the requested permit under Section 7 of the ESA, a process which takes at a minimum months and which can cost millions of dollars even if it is successful.

Because of the generous "citizen standing" provisions of the ESA, expect dozens of "60-day" letters to begin to arrive in the offices of Secretary Kempthorne very soon, announcing that unless the Department and the Service act to invoke Section 7 vis-a-vis this or that federal permit, a lawsuit will be filed to force compliance. Expect most of those suits to be filed in the Ninth Circuit, where the appeals court has been very expansive in applying the ESA.

Swarming the courts has long been a tactic of the left, but private sector firms and sectors threatened by the threatened polar bears need to do more than sit back and wait for bills to come do and projects to be canceled.

Once this gets going if some one will direct me to the requirements for letter filing and standard forms or groups that will help I'll post them. The way to put an end to bad law is to get it strictly enforced. The stricter the better.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

All this will do is send jobs to China and India.

I used to be luke warm for McCain. Now I just don't care any more.

H/T linearthinker

Let me add that Eric covered this in from the Congressional/bureaucracy side at Same sex marriage and condoms on bananas.

Be sure to check out my Pajamas Media post on the subject, and please feel free to leave a comment

The bottom line is that while travel to Burma is generally considered unethical (because tourist money supports the tyrannical regime financially), the situation is so awful there right now that travel could hardly make things any worse. I think that it might be an especially good time for bloggers to go there, and let the world know what's going on.

In any case, I'm not sure the ethical prohibition on travel to Burma before the cyclone still apply.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking the Pjamas Media post!

While I know Mike Huckabee was only kidding, remarks like this just don't don't work out too well in the world of politics.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Republican Mike Huckabee responded to an offstage noise during his speech to the National Rifle Association by suggesting it was Barack Obama diving to the floor because someone had aimed a gun at him.

Hearing a loud noise and interrupting his speech, Huckabee said: "That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he -- he dove for the floor."

Breitbart video here:

I think he may well have blown his chance at the vice presidency. In any case, he demonstrated his cluelessness to the world.

Moral lesson?

If you're going to crack jokes about politicians and guns, be sure the target is Dick Cheney.

MORE: The Breitbart video has been deleted. Here's a YouTube version (with a little Blitzer talk):

"We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibility."

So said Phil Edwards of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, quoted in a report linking obesity to global warming.

"Hands off my steak!" is more like it. That was Andrew Bolt's reaction.

Bolt also supplied graphic evidence of "an enviro-menace who endangers us all":

Like the scientist said, it's a global responsibility.

I do not admire disloyalty, so I was perturbed to read about a supposedly conscience-stricken young man [Matthis Chiroux] who, after years of military service in Afghanistan and elsewhere, suddenly says he "failed to report" "war crimes" and refuses deployment to Iraq. From his statement:

This occupation is unconstitutional and illegal, and I hereby lawfully refuse to participate as I will surely be a party to war crimes. Furthermore, deployment and support of illegal war violates all of my core values as a human being. But in keeping with those values, I choose to remain in the United States to defend myself from charges brought by the Army, if they so wish to pursue them.

I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation."

[Yeah, I know he's being upstaged by that funny haircut on the guy on the right, and I know it's hard to be serious when you're looking at a haircut like that, but let me try to be serious, OK?]

The young man above describes himself as "from a poor, white family from the south," which made him "'filet mignon' for recruiters," and is said to have "graduated from Auburn High School in 2002."

He's shown as having played French Horn in the school band in 1999, so he was there for at least three years.

So why does this poor boy from Alabama not have even the slightest trace of a Southern accent?

It's probably nothing, and there has to be an explanation.

But what is it?

Auburn (Alabama) is a town located more than halfway between Montgomery and Columbus, Georgia. I knew a guy who lived in Phenix City (across the river from Columbus), and he had such a strong accent that I could barely understand him, and I kept having to ask him to repeat himself.

However, that was in the 1980s. I've read that Southern accents are disappearing, but still.... Seeing a "poor white" boy from Alabama talking like this was a bit of a shock.

But I guess it could have been worse.

At least he didn't denounce his fellow soldiers for behaving "in a manner reminiscent of Jenjis Khan" in an accent reminiscent of a Boston Brahmin....

That really would have been too much to bear.

Take a long, hard look at this video:

Barack Obama said that when he gave a speech in Detroit telling automakers that they had to build more energy efficient cars, nobody clapped.

The reaction of most people who look at the above would be to conclude that he's simply lying. Obviously (unless the video is doctored and the applause was pasted in), his recollection of what happened does not square with the facts.

But does this necessarily mean he was consciously lying? In linking the above, Glenn Reynolds compared it to the Hillary Bosnia sniper flap. During that controversy, many people (myself included), thought it was yet another example of Hillary Clinton's longstanding "congenital liar syndrome."

However, while almost no one swallowed Hillary's lame "sleep deprivation" excuse, some analysts noted that there might be another possibility beyond mere pathological lying:

There are two possibilities: Hillary may be a pathological liar. Or, more persuasive to me, Hillary believed what she was saying and her description of her Bosnia trip was a true representation of her psychic reality and not external reality. In her internal world, Hillary may feel as though she's always being shot at by sniper fire and that she's heroically managed to stay alive.

This theory makes sense of Hillary's recklessness. It didn't feel reckless to Hillary to repeat this lie over and over again, and she paid no heed to those who contradicted her, because in her mind, she was telling the truth. Only when confronted with undeniable evidence of external reality -- actual footage from her Bosnia trip - did she admit (possibly to herself as well as the public) that her version of events was not true.

In the course of Hillary's campaign, a number of features have repeatedly emerged that are also elements of her Bosnia tale. 1) Hillary is both hero and victim; 2) facts are of no consequence; 3) And there are no witnesses or observers to the facts. This last point is always startling. For example, Hillary's explanation of her vote on the war made Nora Ephron wonder if Hillary thought we "weren't alive at the time."

On the tarmac in Bosnia, Hillary is the victim for being shot at and the hero for braving a war zone. And she's apparently having a negative hallucination that nobody else was there. The irony, of course, is that when the Bosnia story was discovered, it reinforced Hillary's psychic reality: Once again she felt she was being sniped at (this time by journalists). And that she had to heroically fight on and escape this near-death experience. Which it now seems she has.

But according to the experts, it doesn't much matter what I'd prefer to think about Hillary at this stage of the game, does it?

So, unsettling as it is to contemplate the possibility that Barack Obama might not be lying in his own mind, the simple fact is that either he was consciously lying, or else he was engaged in the same type of hero-or-victim self-delusion explored in the above theory about Hillary.

If this was not a conscious lie, the fact that he said "nobody clapped" when the crowd did in fact clap evinces a simultaneous desire to be both a hero and a victim. More worrisome to me is the possibility that he knew they clapped, but didn't think they clapped long enough or loud enough, because that might -- and I stress might -- indicate paranoid megalomania. Leaders whose egos demand prolonged and sustained applause (of the "better clap or else" variety) tend to have less than stellar historical track records, and I'd rather avoid giving examples.

So I just hope it was an ordinary lie.

MORE: While her analysis relates to the "now you see it now you don't" flag pin controversy, I find Ann Althouse's reaction reassuring:

Come on! He's lying! Don't lie! I mean, I know you've been having an unimaginably powerful experience with millions of people buying the things you say, but don't get cocky. We do still have our lie detectors, and we can reactivate them if we get in the mood to. Don't push us. Keep the magic alive.

If the massive outrage I overheard on talk radio yesterday is any indication, yesterday's California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage is the ultimate affront to democracy, and the final triumph of judicial tyranny run amok.

Daniel Blatt (a supporter of same sex marriage, btw) admits to being "troubled by the decision," as am I, and he explains why in an excellent PJM piece.

Not that I'm advocating rule by judicial fiat (or even same sex marriage), but it seems to me that much of popular reaction arises more from the culturally inflammatory, easily-understood nature of the issue than it is with judicial tyranny in general.

As issues of importance to the average person go, gay marriage strikes me as not terribly likely to reach out and touch most people. Unless you believe in the social contamination theory, which (correct me if I'm wrong) takes the communitarian view that marriage is much more than something for individual couples to contend with, as it is a social institution that can be "destroyed" once it allows itself to become "polluted" by gay couples. I've never been convinced that the average straight couple will be affected much, but I may be wrong.

While any reaction against judicial tyranny is generally a good thing from the perspective of those who fear out-of-control governments, I think this will be more likely to lead to the passage of a constitutional marriage amendment than to a serious drive to end judicial tyranny. In that respect, I am reminded of the way certain parent groups devote huge amounts of time attacking condoms on bananas instead of targeting the larger problem of the overall failure of schools fail to teach (of which the condom demonstrations are a symptom).

Much is said about unaccountable tyrants in judicial robes, and I don't like the idea of arbitrary rule by an unelected few any more than anyone else.

However, I will say this about tyranny by judges. At least the judiciary is in theory part of the constitutional system. (You know, one branch of the government and all that?) Judges have to at least operate publicly, and when they go too far, when their decisions are too notorious, the people who appointed them can ultimately fail to be reelected, and in California the judges themselves can be removed. So they're not completely unaccountable, nor are they completely unconstitutional.

What terrifies me much more than rule by an unaccountable, unelected judiciary is rule by an unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy.

Yes, there's that word again. Bureaucracy. For some reason it looks and sounds numbingly boring. When we think of bureaucracy and bureaucrats, our eyes glaze over. This faceless, largely invisible, almost eunuchoid ruling class just doesn't instill fear and loathing in people's hearts as it should. "Bureaucracy" is not a powerful word associated with tyranny, and it does not bring to mind the sinister men in black robes, even though the latter are in fact more publicly accountable.

Maybe I should have been worrying about gay marriage, but last night I tried to make sense of a bill called S.2191 -- America's Climate Security Act of 2007.

Trust me, it is a nightmare of government regulatory madness. Bipartisan sponsorship, naturally, so neither party has to face the wrath of ordinary little people when their gasoline prices double. Hopefully, they'll still be so busy duking it out over gay marriage that they won't notice the emergence of a new ruling class with far more power over their daily lives.

Even though it's a gruesomely cumbersome piece of legislation designed to regulate "greenhouse gases," S. 2191 does not specify what standards are to be set or what constitutes a violation of the law. This is all left up to "the Administrator."

SEC. 1202. COMPLIANCE OBLIGATION.

(a) In General- Not later than 90 days after the end of a calendar year, the owner or operator of a covered facility shall submit to the Administrator an emission allowance, an offset allowance awarded pursuant to subtitle D of title II, or an international allowance or credit obtained in compliance with regulations promulgated under section 2502, for each carbon dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gas that--

(1) was emitted by that facility during the preceding year;

(2) will, assuming no capture and permanent geological sequestration of that gas, be emitted from the use of any petroleum- or coal-based transportation fuel that was produced or imported at that facility during the preceding year; and

(3) will, assuming no capture and destruction or permanent geological sequestration of that gas, be emitted from any nonfuel chemical that was produced or imported at that facility during the preceding year.

(b) Retirement of Allowances- Immediately upon receipt of an emission allowance under subsection (a), the Administrator shall retire the emission allowance.

(c) Determination of Compliance- Not later than July 1 of each year, the Administrator shall determine whether the owners and operators of all covered facilities are in full compliance with subsection (a) for the preceding year.

Who elects these people? No one. They are nameless, faceless, and as replaceable as pistons. And the legislation empowering them is not only unreadable, it probably won't be read by the legislators who will pass it.

But two men on the altar? Marriage redefined? Anyone can understand that. It's as easy to conceptualize as a condom on a banana.

No wonder ordinary people react.

The cynic in me suspects that's the whole idea.

Where it comes to dating the divorced, I'm afraid I'm a bit out of my league, as well as out of touch with today's world. However, I nonetheless enjoyed Dr. Helen's PJM post on the subject, especially because double standards never fail to intrigue me. And boy, do the double standards ever abound!

...a divorced man has baggage and is a challenge. Dating a divorced woman is a special concern and leads to a fulfilling and wonderful relationship. Even the books mentioned are different. For divorced women, a book is cited with a nice title that is gender neutral; for divorced men, the title is more hostile and is geared towards what women can do to make sure this damaged man is right for her. Everything is about what women want in a relationship. The man just has to play along and conform to what women need.

However, a super bloggerhelper did email me something today which might be helpful; not for people dating the divorced, but to people -- especially male people -- who just want to feel dated, period. (In the nostalgic sense.)

It's from the American Psychological Association and it's called the "Marital Rating Scale--Wife's Chart":

...a test developed in the late 1930s by George W. Crane, MD, PhD, (1901-95) of Northwestern University, who ran a counseling practice, wrote a syndicated national newspaper column called "The Worry Clinic" and started his own matchmaking service.

The test was designed to give couples feedback on their marriages. Either husbands or wives could take the test, which rated wives in a variety of areas. For instance, if your wife "uses slang or profanity," she would get a score of five demerits. On the other hand, if she "reacts with pleasure and delight to marital congress," she would receive 10 merits. The test taker would add up the total number of merits and demerits to receive a raw score, which would categorize the wife on a scale from "very poor" to "very superior."

Hmmm..... Some of these questions are really great! (And how forward-thinking they were to include "jolly and gay" on the "merit" side!)

Contrast the above with the modern rule that "if you're a woman, never give too much and don't try too hard to be understanding." In light of all the progress that's been made, it's hard to imagine that there ever was a time when men might have used such a guide in evaluating their wives.

However, I'm thinking that such a "dated" perspective might offer hope to at least some of the "damaged men" who have gone through divorces. Why, maybe they could even be allowed to get together in support groups, and retroactively evaluate their spouses as they share a warm nostalgic feeling of being dated.

(Don't expect me to say that being dated beats dating, though. As I say, I'm an out-of-my-league babe-in-the-woods....)

Post-Nuclear War Mutant Salt Shakers, anyone?

Clayton Cramer said that a Thai restaurant was handing them to customers, but he found them "disturbing."

It's not the first time this has happened, but once again, I must regretfully disagree with Cramer.

I mean, just look at these!

I think they're incredibly cool and I want a set! In fact, I almost feel like flying to Boise, Idaho, renting a car and then driving to the Sad Wa Dee Restaurant in Meridian, to beg for a set.

BTW, the Sad Wa Dee has been favorably reviewed and rated four stars.

But the salt and pepper shakers are so beautifully disturbing I'd rate them a five!

UPDATE: Things are more disturbing than I thought. After exhaustively searching the Internet for mutant salt and pepper shakers, and "weird" salt and pepper shakers, I finally stumbled onto the mutants. Only they're not intended to be mutants; they're "huggies" -- and they're supposed to be placed together in a syrupy sickly-sweet display of saccharin schmaltziness....

Like this:

Ugh!

Reminds me of the expression "you can't hug your kid with nuclear mutants."

Or was that "nuclear mutants are for hugging"?

Maybe Clayton Cramer was right to find them disturbing....

To contact your government about Brazil and/or fusion try one or all of these:

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

HT Instapundit

Hey, I almost forgot that this blog is five years old today.

Here's what it looked like in the early days on blogspot.

And here it is in July of 2003, right after I moved it to HostMatters with a cool redesign by Little Green Footballs:

And in June of 2004, the blog was redesigned again by Sekimori to its present form.

I'm not much on statistic-keeping, but according to the Site Meter, total hits are 2,839,355, with 3,837,105 page views. I tried to do a word count once last year, and it was difficult, but it appears that there are millions of words in the archives. There have been well over 6000 posts (many of which are essays), and while I've written most of them myself, there have been as many as four co-bloggers over the years:

Beck, who's written 8 posts;

Dennis, who's written 250;

Justin, who's written 322;

M. Simon (of Power and Control) who will probably be writing his 500th post today. (My congratulations!)

Considering that the goal of this blog is admittedly unachievable, I'd say the work is far from over.

While I like to think that I pay attention to so-called "wedge issues," it appears that I missed one. According to WaPo's Harold Meyerson, John McCain is trying to make "America" itself a wedge issue, by means of identity politics:

McCain's first post-primary ad proclaimed him "the American president Americans have been waiting for." Not the "strong" or "experienced" president, though those are contrasts he could seek to draw with Obama. The "American" president -- because that's the only contrast through which McCain has even a chance of prevailing.

Now, I mean to take nothing away from McCain's Americanness by noting that it's Obama's story that represents a triumph of specifically American identity over racial and religious identity. It was the lure of America, the shining city on a hill, that brought his black Kenyan father here, where he met Obama's white Kansan mother. It is because America is uniquely the land of immigrants and has moved beyond a racial caste system that Obama exists, has thrived and stands a good chance of being our next president.

That's not the America, though, that the Republicans refer to in proclaiming their own Americanness. For them, "American" is a term to be used as a wedge issue, a way to distinguish their more racially and religiously homogeneous party from the historically more polyglot Democrats. Such separation has a long pedigree....

I hate to interrupt nostalgic waxing over the "historically more polyglot Democrats," but I must object to the implications of word "historically." Historically, the Democratic Party was home to the Ku Klux Klan, while the Republican Party was home to black voters in the South. In 2000, Condoleezza Rice spoke from experience:

The first Republican that I knew was my father John Rice. And he is still the Republican that I admire most. My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.

Fugitive slave laws? In 1850, Democrats passed the Fugitive Slave Law. If merely accused of being a slave, even if the person enjoyed freedom all of his or her life (as approximately 11 percent of blacks did just before the Civil War), the person lost the right to representation by an attorney, the right to trial by jury, and the right to habeas corpus.

Emancipation? Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. In 1865, the 13th Amendment emancipating the slaves was passed with 100 percent of Republicans (88 of 88 in the House, 30 of 30 in the Senate) voting for it. Only 23 percent of Democrats (16 of 66 in the House, 3 of 8 in the Senate) voted for it.

Civil rights laws? In 1868, the 14th Amendment was passed giving the newly emancipated blacks full civil rights and federal guarantee of those rights, superseding any state laws. Every single voting Republican (128 of 134 -- with 6 not voting -- in the House, and 30 of 32 -- with 2 not voting -- in the Senate) voted for the 14th Amendment. Not a single Democrat (zero of 36 in the House, zero of 6 in the Senate) voted for it.

Right to vote? When Southern states balked at implementing the 14th Amendment, Congress came back and passed the 15th Amendment in 1870, guaranteeing blacks the right to vote. Every single Republican voted for it, with every Democrat voting against it.

Ku Klux Klan? In 1872 congressional investigations, Democrats admitted beginning the Klan as an effort to stop the spread of the Republican Party and to re-establish Democratic control in Southern states. As PBS' "American Experience" notes, "In outright defiance of the Republican-led federal government, Southern Democrats formed organizations that violently intimidated blacks and Republicans who tried to win political power. The most prominent of these, the Ku Klux Klan, was formed in Pulaski, Tenn., in 1865." Blacks, who were all Republican at that time, became the primary targets of violence.

Jim Crow laws? Between 1870 and 1875, the Republican Congress passed many pro-black civil rights laws. But in 1876, Democrats took control of the House, and no further race-based civil rights laws passed until 1957. In 1892, Democrats gained control of the House, the Senate and the White House, and repealed all the Republican-passed civil rights laws. That enabled the Southern Democrats to pass the Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on, in their individual states.

Civil rights in the '60s? Only 64 percent of Democrats in Congress voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act (153 for, 91 against in the House; and 46 for, 21 against in the Senate). But 80 percent of Republicans (136 for, 35 against in the House; and 27 for, 6 against in the Senate) voted for the 1964 Act.

Anyone who think the Democratic Party's racist history is limited to the distant historical past need look no further than the life story of the much-maligned (by Democrats) Condoleezza Rice:

Condi, as friends call her, was born November 14, 1954, in what his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would call "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States." During the Civil Rights struggle it came also to be called "Bombingham," with racist explosives killing not only Rice's friend and three other girls but also shattering the home of black civil rights lawyer Arthur Shores and terrifying the African-American community.

"Rice's father went to police headquarters to demand an investigation," wrote Dale Russakoff in the Washington Post Magazine. "They didn't investigate," Condoleezza Rice has said. "They never investigated."

The police commissioner in Birmingham who would not investigate was Bull Connor, a Democrat who perfectly embodies everything that political party has always stood for. When civil rights protesters arrived, Connor unleashed his dogs and fire hoses on them.

"John Rice," writes Russakoff, "then did what black fathers all over Birmingham were doing - what Alma Powell remembers her own father doing then, when she happened to be home with her babies during her husband's [Colin Powell's] tour in Vietnam: They got out their shotguns and formed nightly patrols, guarding the streets themselves."

One of the many dirty secrets of the Democratic Party is that its passion for gun control began, and continues to be, from a desire to disarm African-Americans and thereby make them powerless and dependent. Russian expert Michael McFaul, writes Russakoff, "remembers [Condoleezza] Rice telling him she opposed gun control and even gun registration because Bull Connor could have used it to disarm her father and others" in 1963.

Condi Rice remembers many lessons of how her mother and father stood up to segregationists, refusing again and again to accept the inferior place into which the white Democratic bosses of Birmingham tried to push blacks. She remembers learning from her grandfather that "You have control, you're proud, you have integrity, nobody can take those things away from you."

For those who enjoy historical quotes from Democrats, Bruce Bartlett, author of "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past," shared some gems from his book in the Wall Street Journal:

"Slavery among the whites was an improvement over independence in Africa. The very progress that the blacks have made, when--and only when--brought into contact with the whites, ought to be a sufficient argument in support of white supremacy--it ought to be sufficient to convince even the blacks themselves."

--William Jennings Bryan, 1923
Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, 1896, 1900 and 1908
Appointed Secretary of State by Woodrow Wilson in 1913
His statue stands in the U.S. Capitol.

"Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results. . . . The argument works both ways. I know a great many cultivated, highly educated and delightful Japanese. They have all told me that they would feel the same repugnance and objection to have thousands of Americans settle in Japan and intermarry with the Japanese as I would feel in having large numbers of Japanese coming over here and intermarry with the American population. In this question, then, of Japanese exclusion from the United States it is necessary only to advance the true reason--the undesirability of mixing the blood of the two peoples. . . . The Japanese people and the American people are both opposed to intermarriage of the two races--there can be no quarrel there."

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1925
President, 1933-45

However, while I'm at it I can't resist this vintage snippet from a New York Times editorial:

"It has of late become the custom of the men of the South to speak with entire candor of the settled and deliberate policy of suppressing the negro vote. They have been forced to choose between a policy of manifest injustice toward the blacks and the horrors of negro rule. They chose to disfranchise the negroes. That was manifestly the lesser of two evils. . . . The Republican Party committed a great public crime when it gave the right of suffrage to the blacks. . . . So long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the menace of the rule of the blacks will impend, and the safeguards against it must be maintained."

--Editorial, "The Political Future of the South," New York Times, May 10, 1900)

And to his pure way of thinking the word "American" has become ugly code language for white Christian racist bigotry. And callused drowners of cities which probably weren't white enough:

....Their party leader, the incumbent president, let a great American city drown. They are the American party, and McCain the American nominee, that hasn't a clue about how to help America in its (prolonged, I fear) moment of need.

What remains for the GOP is a campaign premised more on issues of national identity, aimed largely at that portion of our population for which "American" is synonymous with "white" and "Christian," than any national campaign has been since the American Party (also known as the Know Nothings) based its 1856 campaign chiefly on Protestant bigotry against Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In Appalachian America (the heart of which went to the polls yesterday in West Virginia), as Mark Schmitt notes in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect (which I edit), a disproportionate number of people write "American" when answering the census question on ethnic origin. For some, "American" is a race -- white -- no less than a nationality, and it's on this equation that Republican prospects depend.

But speaking of "American" as code language for white, I remember Whoopi Goldberg getting in trouble for describing herself as an American.

"Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African. The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American. This is my country. My people helped to build it and we've been here for centuries. Just call me black, if you want to call me anything."

But there's no winning this silly debate.

What's important to remember is that Republicans are bigots, "America" is code language for white racism, and members of minorities who dare call themselves American are "acting white."

In Picture Of WB-7 Bussard Fusion Test Reactor Available I reported that there was a picture of the WB-7 Fusion Test Reactor available. (Well duh). I must sadly report that it is no longer available. Instead EMC2 Fusion has replaced it with a picture of a plasma test of the fusion reactor using Helium gas. Yeah! We are another small step on the way to fusion power. Or to proving you can't get there from here. Depending.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Human Events and WorldNetDaily have teamed up in the form of this editorial from WND editor Joseph Farah:

...John McCain won't get any help from me. He won't get my vote. In fact, to be honest, if the Republican Party is ever going to recover itself and become the party it was under Ronald Reagan, it will happen faster if John McCain is beaten. It will happen faster if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton gets elected and implements the Big Brother, socialist agenda they both endorse.

Bring it on. I'll do my best to expose it. Maybe the American people will wake up and rediscover the meaning of freedom after tasting elitist, top-down, command-and-control, centralized socialism.

We all are going to experience it in the next four years. It's simply a question of who is going to be force-feeding it to us. I'd rather it come from the Democrats so the American people know who is to blame.

Had they been given the chance, they would have gladly reelected Bill Clinton to a third term. As it was Al Gore nearly won in 2000.

I don't know where these people get the idea that Americans will "wise up" if only they are punished enough.

I have no illusions about McCain, but voting involves not merely whom you vote for, but whom you vote against. After reviewing Robert Bidinotto's thoughts on the subject, Kim du Toit concluded,

"I'm voting against Socialism" should be our slogan in November.

Do you want someone is wrong half the time, or someone who is wrong all the time?

This type of thinking is quite old, and it's popular among activists. I remember a similar argument back in the 1970s on the other side. I know I'm repeating myself, but here it is again:

...behind the thinking is the idea that if the country is ruined by intensifying the pace of socialism, open border policies, multiculturalist rot, draconian gun control, terrible schools, etc., that the voters will finally "wake up" and realize that the only answer is to be found in far-right conservatism. Left wing tyranny will bring about a backlash resulting in sudden majority support for far-right politics.

This reminds me of a political debate on the left in the late 1960s -- a time when Weather Underground types and their supporters believed in radicalizing everyone -- and their violent tactics were intended to do just that. More mainstream leftists, while agreeing with the general Marxist philosophy, believed that such tactics might very well cause Richard Nixon to put America under martial law and bring about a fascist state. To this the far left replied that "If it takes fascism, then bring it on!" They believed that if America went fascist, the great middle would suddenly see the light and become Marxist. Now I am not comparing today's conservative right to the 1960s far left; for starters the right wing's tactics are not violent. I mean to highlight the logical fallacy involved in thinking that helping to bring about an abhorrent government will cause ordinary people to "see the light." Ordinary people not being activists, they don't see the light in this way; they hope only that they will be left alone. Thus, assuming the Clintons return to power, this does not mean voters would suddenly be more likely to vote for a far right conservative. To the contrary, they'd be more likely to vote Hillary into a second term. And, while the party purists in the GOP might wring their hands in despair of what has happened to this once wonderful country, they'll be stuck agreeing with each other, and blaming the RINOs for their loss.

This brings to mind another reason for sitting it out and letting Hillary win. McCain -- and the "RINOs" -- can then be blamed for Republican defeat, and the right wing can then have their "turn" at running against Hillary. I'll vote for them, of course. And they'll probably say that the reason they didn't win is because of the RINOs. But winning isn't everything; it's about party principles.

I have principles too, and I don't expect them to prevail.

(I mean really. Stop socialism, legalize drugs, defeat Islamofascism? Come on! What's next? "End the Culture War"?)

In terms of outcome, I don't think this conservative activist strategy of masochistically supporting the Democrats will do anything more than help the Democrats.

Well, I suppose it might generate a little more conservative despair. Is that supposed to be a good thing?

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, an excellent analysis by Andrew Stuttaford, who calls this phenomenon "revolutionary defeatism":

I'm struck by how, to use an old Marxist term, a variant of "revolutionary defeatism" appears to be emerging within some sectors of the right. Under some circumstances, Lenin was indeed correct, the worse was the better. Thus using this logic, an Obama presidency ("the worse") would be "the better" because it would both rally the conservative troops, and by reproducing the errors, say, of Clinton 1992-4 or the whole miserable Carter saga, create an opening for a revived conservatism. Sometimes, however, the worse is just worse. That, I think, is the danger here.That, I think, is the danger here. I would not be at all surprised if the Obama presidency proved to be a policy disaster, but a political success....

Assuming another Reagan comes along, I suppose it might lead to an election victory in a decade or two.

In what may be the silliest post I've written in some time, I'm going to try to make sense of Sean Penn's recent political analysis, delivered at the Cannes Film Festival:

At a press conference beforehand, the actor, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, offered his views on the Democratic nomination race.

Asked if he would be joining other Hollywood A-listers in pledging support for Obama, Penn gave him a less than ringing endorsement and warned that he has an awful lot to live up to.

"I don't have a candidate I'm supporting and I'm certainly interested and excited by the hope that Barack Obama is inspiring," he said, but went on to accuse him of a "phenomenally inhuman and unconstitutional" voting record.

Except I'm having a little trouble with the rest:

"I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn't become a greater man than he will ever be," Penn said. "This is the most important election, certainly in my lifetime, and maybe ever."

Isn't that a logical impossibility?

UPDATE: My thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link!

Crystal Dixon, an associate vice president of human resources at the University of Toledo, has been essentially fired (she refused to accept a demotion with a pay cut) for writing in a newspaper that homosexuality is wrong, and not the equivalent of race:

Dixon was placed on paid administrative leave after a column she wrote that appeared on the newspaper's Web site April 18 created controversy because of her views on homosexuality.

"As a Black woman ... I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are 'civil rights victims.' Here's why," Dixon wrote. "I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a black woman ... Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle ... "

According to a statement from UT spokesman Lawrence J. Burns, the university determined that there was "just cause" to fire Dixon.

"The public position Ms. Dixon took in the Toledo Free Press is in direct contradiction to University policies and procedures, as well as the institutional core values as defined in our strategic plan, and called into question her continued ability to lead a critical function within the administration as personnel actions or decisions taken in her capacity as associate vice president for human resources could be challenged or placed at risk," Burn said in the statement.

Predictably, the case is generating wide debate on the merits, with many social conservatives such as Matt Barber (who emailed me) saying she is right, and others arguing that she has a specially protected religious right to her opinion. It is true that the Bible says certain things about homosexuality, but I don't see how the question of whether sexual orientation is analogous to race constitutes a religious opinion. Nor am I comfortable with the argument that ideas grounded in religion are more constitutionally protected than ideas which are not. (This is not a new issue here.)

The University of Toledo is a public institution, and they're not allowed to engage in viewpoint discrimination.

How far that goes, I don't know. Would a university administrator be allowed to hold racist opinions as long as he didn't discriminate? Ms. Dixon has stated that she does not discriminate against gays:

"I absolutely respect their right to disagree," Dixon told WTVG about people who have spoken out against her statements. "Again: They are citizens. They can voice their opinion. I'm a citizen as well, and I ought to be able to voice my opinion."

"I've practiced human resources for 25+ years," she says when asked about any conflict her moral beliefs would have with her work at UT. "I have provided outstanding service to individuals regardless of of their sexual orientation. I have hired heterosexuals and homosexuals in my 25 years practicing as a human resources person, so I think it speaks for itself."

Of course, having a right to an opinion and a right to state that opinion does not always translate into a right not to be fired for having that opinion.

Should it?

And should an opinion grounded in religion be more worthy of protection than the same opinion not based on religion?

Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't understand why a Christian should have more of a right to criticize gays than an atheist.

MORE: Suppose the situation were reversed, and Ms. Dixon wanted to fire someone who believed in views contrary to her own. Would that make any difference? I don't see why. Yet I suspect some of her supporters would like to have the right to fire those who disagree with them.

If this were a private entity, it would be easy. In Boy Scouts v. Dale, the Supreme Court upheld the right of BSA to bar gays and atheists (and presumably, their supporters).

MORE: More on viewpoint discrimination here and here. It also arises in the cases involving Intelligent Design. But once again, I have a problem that religious objections to evolution are more entitled to constitutional protection than non-religious objections.

There's just something absurd about saying that those who deny that man evolved from Australopithecus can be fired, unless their opinions are based on religion.

Here's a treat for all aging hippies, hippie lovers, hippie haters, culture war buffs, and dog lovers everywhere.

Stephen Gaskin on Cesar Millan (aka the Dog Whisperer).

A tireless regular reader of this blog who will remain nameless has emailed me a link to the Oxford Reference Online's Fact of the Day which was headlined "How is the nine-banded armadillo able to traverse water?" The answer to the question is that it self-inflates, and holds its breath:

The nine-banded armadillo, unlike the other species, is able to traverse water by inflating its stomach and intestine with air for buoyancy. Since it can hold its breath for several minutes, it can cross smaller streams underwater.

For centuries, armadillos have been exploited by humans for their meat, and they continue to be a favored food item in many areas of Latin America. In North America people partake of armadillo meat less frequently; however, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, destitute southern sharecroppers came to rely on armadillos for food, and the animals were nicknamed "Hoover hogs," a wry allusion to US President Herbert Hoover.

I suppose that today it might be called a "Bush hog." ("Bush meat" is taken; it refers to African game animals, which are expensive delicacies.) But by today's standards, that wouldn't do, because its status in America is listed as "threatened" -- despite the fact that its range is increasing:

In the United States, the sole resident armadillo is the Nine-banded Armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus), which is most common in the central southernmost states, particularly Texas. Their range is as far east as Florida and as far north as Kansas, and while cold winters have slowed the expansion of their range (due to a lack of sufficient body fat), they have been consistently expanding their range over the last century due to a lack of natural predators and have been found as far as western Kentucky, and are expected to eventually reach Ohio before the cold winters inhibit their expansion.

I'm thinking that "threatened" is probably code language for having Bush as president. (The category can be flexibly "upgraded" in the event of "change," to demonstrate that we've made "progress.")

But meanwhile, it's Bush's fault no matter what.

Aside from the fact that I'm not a Clinton supporter, two things bother me about the news of Hillary Clinton's 2-1 victory in West Virginia last night.

One is the fact that while the story was reported, it was treated as a non-event, and buried on page A-4 of the Inquirer. This is part of the election, and while we're all sick of the election, it's an ongoing important national event, right? The margin is so close between these candidates that there's definitely still a race. Yet this huge victory by Hillary Clinton (second only to her Arkansas victory) is being treated as a trifling matter of political insignificance. It doesn't seem to matter that as Hillary warns, "no Democrat has won the White House since 1916 without winning West Virginia."

The Inquirer did report this odd little detail:

Obama also broke from his usual practice by wearing a flag pin on his suit jacket. He told several thousand people at the Charleston Civic Center that patriotism means more than saluting flags and holding parades.

Actually, I think I'm wrong with that comparison. Suppose that Huckabee won a state like West Virginia, even after McCain had clinched the nomination. I think it would be getting more ink than this. A lot more.

The other problem I have with this news is that the whole thing gives me the impression that either Obama doesn't care anymore, or else he's been given powerful reassurances that he doesn't need to care. Bad move all around. The man is running for president, and a failure to campaign creates the appearance that he doesn't care. The implication of this is that either he's lazy (which I doubt), or else he just doesn't care about the "hillbilly vote."

The conventional political wisdom right now is that McCain is poised to pick Mike Huckabee as his running mate. Perhaps an Obama deemed "out of touch with hillbilly voters" can be spun that way. I disagree with this approach, as I think McCain needs to reach deeper into that genuinely hurt and despairing group of Democratic voters who are sick of being spun as ignorant white rednecks and racists, and Huckabee is not the guy to do it. Psychologically, Huckabee will simply remind them that they really aren't ignorant rednecks, but still Democrats, and he will help them swallow their pride and vote for Obama after all.

Few GOP loyalists will agree with me, but I think Lieberman ought to be McCain's Veep. He's the leading member of the scorned and rejected class of normal people who are held in contempt by far-left party elitists who see them as defective (or "bitter) for believing in "outmoded paradigms...."

Like, say, the idea that an attack against your country deserves the strongest possible military response.

Hmm...

Do you have to be a hillbilly to think stuff like that?

UPDATE: Broken link fixed. And contrary to what I initially thought, the Inquirer did quote Hillary's statement about the importance of West Virginia:

"Every nominee has carried the state's primary since 1976, and no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916."

UPDATE: I was out of commission last night so I wrote nothing about West Virginia. But for those who want more, Stephen Green drunkblogged the race (the word "race" is becoming a political pun), and Rick Moran analyzes the historical context in "Why Hillary Won't Give Up."

UPDATE: Regarding the flag pin, Byron York notes it's an on-and-off issue. (Via Glenn Reynolds, who's questioning the sincerity of the timing, or maybe the timing of the "sincerity.")

Hey, whatever. Married men have been known to remove their wedding rings under certain circumstances.

MORE: I forgot to mention race, but Ann Althouse covers it:

White. White. White. Race. Race. Race. Oh, you Democrats. You've really made a nice place for yourselves.

One of these days maybe someone can explain why 67% is more racist than 91%, but never mind.... (It's probably racist to pose such questions.)

Here's something Coco is not happy about.

A student teacher in St. Cloud who had a service dog was harrassed by a Muslim student who threatened to kill his dog -- apparently because they thought the animal was "unclean." (According to the article, "the Muslim faith, which is the dominant faith of Somali immigrants, forbids the touching of dogs.")

How being forbidden to touch translates into threatening to kill I'm not sure. At any rate, the school (naturally) failed to back the student teacher:

...They upheld the rights of the side that threatened capitulation or violence. Instead of expelling the student for his threat and making an example of him, they chose to coddle the student and chase the teacher out of his job. Afterwards, they issued the normal multi-culti mewlings of "misunderstanding", "growth process", and emphasizing respect for different cultures.

I've got a suggestion: how about teaching that respect to the people who issue threats, instead of their victims? Which person needed an object lesson in respect more, the Somali student or [teacher] Tyler Hurd?

We have laws in this country, decided on by democratically-elected representatives. If Muslims don't like these access [to service dog] laws, then let them elect representatives that will reverse them, or failing that, go back to Somalia where violence trumps the law and they would be more comfortable. Shame, shame on Technical High School for buckling under to thugs and abandoning their responsibilities in such a cowardly manner.

(The whole thing makes me wonder what will happen when Muslim students threaten to kill gay teachers....)

In my recent post Starting A Fusion Program In Your Home Town I talked about expanding the fusion design and testing environment to increase the rate of progress in the development of a power producing reactor.

The lead Bussard Fusion Reactor (BFR) experimenter, rnebel, has read that article and has chimed in here with his thoughts.

One of the things we have been considering is selling a "turnkey" version of the WB-7. In this case we would design, build, license and deliver an operating Polywell, probably on the scale of the present machine. Operator training and tech support would also be part of the deal. The model is to use a plug and play concept where the user could substitute their own parts (electron sources, for instance) in an open architecture system. This is similar to what IBM did with the PC in the early 80s. It would give people who are interested in Polywells a chance to develop their own new patentable concepts and new companies without having to go through the entire learning curve that we have been on for the past several years. This struck us as a way to jumpstart the industry and get a lot of new ideas and people involved in Polywells. These devices could be funded through government grants (we have found a mechanism) or privately. I think we could do a turnkey machine for a ~ $500k-$1000k depending on how many people are interested. The idea would be for the government to make grants to institutions and then we would be able to competitively bid on providing the hardware. Ideally, I would like to see at least one Polywell in every Congressional district in the US. Since the cost is cheap, this is a tractable. Is this something you might be interested in?

Sign me up.

I think it might also be useful to do a $10K to $100K fusor type device for those on a more limited budget. Jr. Colleges etc. There is a lot that can be learned from such a device that would help with more efficient (Pollywell) devices.

BTW in other places (fusor forum) I have made the evolution of the computer hobby argument.

Great minds etc.

Also a range of devices and power supplies. i.e. 25KV, 50KV and 100KV pulsed supplies. Then the same range of continuous operation supplies. Same for the reactors. Pulsed and continuous operation. The equipment should be standardized as much as possible - at least for the starter kits so we could get the efficiencies of mass production. Also standardized test equipment. Standardized control.

If we had 435 tests going on at once in each district that would cause the Congress critters to all get behind the fusion push. Very astute. That was sort of my idea.

Again - contact me and tell me how I can help. I'm rarin' to go.

Simon

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I've been slow on the uptake lately. I try to follow alternative news sources, and so yesterday when I was at the supermarket I saw a tantalizing article in Globe -- headlined "Obama Caught Up in Gay Murder Scandal."

Excerpt:

So far, the Chicago cops' investigation into the murder of Trinity United Methodist Church's gay choir director has come up empty. But a top Chicago private detective tells GLOBE he believes the shooting death of 47-year-old Donald Young may be connected to Obama, who belonged to the church once headed by the scandal-scarred preacher the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"Donald Young was silenced because of something he know about Obama," says the private investigator, who has connections to the police department's homicide unit.

However, I did enlist the help of the ever-loyal Coco, whose ceaseless evaluations of various media claims has been invaluable over the years.

As you can see, she thought the story was at least worth a sniff:

Overall, on a scale of 1-10 I'd rate Coco's reaction maybe a 2. (She did later walk on the story, though....)

Anyway, Coco and I are a bit behind the learning curve, because John Hawkins has already been all over this story:

...I stepped up to the plate, bought the latest copy of the Globe, and perused the story so I could tell you what it was really all about -- because after all, if this man is going to be our next President and he's going to be getting involved in gay murder scandals, I think the American people have a right to know that.

Now granted, this is the Globe and as such, I wouldn't give Larry Sinclair and their anonymous "private investigator" any more credence than I'd give say, the anonymous sources for a Seymour Hersh story, but still, I thought you should be aware of this story just in case you are ever discussing Barack Obama and the gay murder he isn't -- well probably isn't -- involved with.

But why is Hillary being so uncharacteristically silent? Couldn't she at least do the charitable thing and state her belief that Barack Obama was not involved in the murder?

Barry Rubin has an article out at Gloria Center about the destruction of Lebanon. In it he says:

The goal of Hizballah, and its Syrian and Iranian backers at present is not the full conquest of Lebanon--something beyond their means--but to control the government so it does nothing they dislike: no strong relations with the West, no ability to stop war against Israel, no disarming Hizballah's militias or countering that group's control over large parts of the country, and certainly no investigation of Syrian involvement in terrorism there.

Why, three years after Damascus ordered the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri do investigators dawdle, having edited out the names of top Syrian officials they blamed for the killing in their initial report?

Israel bombed a nuclear reactor being built in Syria. Rice reportedly opposed the action. The world yawned.

Iran drives for nuclear weapons. There is some effort but too little, too slow. Whether or not the war in Iraq was a mistake, when terrorists murdered Iraqi civilians, much of the West blamed America; all too many Americans agreed.

These are the questions Obama isn't even pretending to try to answer: Are you willing to fight on this issue? To defy an "international community" that opposes action? To intimidate and defeat the radicals? Answer: No.

But here's the worst part that few in America but everyone in Lebanon will understand all too well:

"It's time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment."

Here, make no mistake, Obama is endorsing the Hizballah program. It wants a new Lebanese consensus based on