Steady Earl

Another Cool Think about Bicycling

2007-04-21T14:49:00.000-04:00

When you're a fit middle-aged cyclist, sometimes very nice things happen. See, you're hidden behind all the idiotic-looking bike-geek-wear, so nobody can tell how old you are.

Sometimes it's just the whistles and cheers and catcalls from attractive young ladies who have no idea they're ogling their fathers' contemporary. Those times are pretty nice.

Sometimes it's something even better. Like today, toward the end of the first serious ride of another glorious season, when I was charging through a busy and sometimes dangerous crossroads. There was an SUV waiting to pull out from the right-hand side street, and as is my usual practice to try not to die, I made eye contact with the driver. She was a breathtakingly pretty young thing, and everything else around the intersection was clear, so I kept her eye as I rode by. She started to smile, keeping my eye too. And the more I stared, the bigger her smile got, until it could have done just as good a job melting away our way-too-long-and-cold winter as today's glorious sunshine and spring temperatures.

I finally had to look away, and the whole thing didn't last more than a few seconds. But what a magical way to spend those few seconds.

It's So Very Nice that Brain-Dead Morons Have a Place on SCOTUS

2006-06-29T21:07:00.000-04:00

Regarding the Kennedy/Breyer opinions about the Guantanomo scum (to be referred to henceforth as "The Guano"):

The President doesn't have to go to Congress for war powers. That power is his by virtue of something I like to call "the US Constitution," you f***ing "intellectual giants!" Did you ever bother to read it?

And, Nancy Pelosi -- the Guano don't have Constitutional rights. Those are for citizens of the US -- that's in there too. But I know you're just a girl, so it's not as bad that you don't know that.

Update: They're not just stupid, they're arrogant; Kennedy lectures our President on needing to go to Congress to get the authority he was granted by the Constitution. But he ignores the clear language, pointed out by Scalia in his dissent, that Congress had forbidden any court to here this very case. Breathtaking.

Rides

2006-06-05T20:50:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I did 47 miles once the oppressive 36 hour rain finally took its leave. It was too chilly for June -- I wore arm warmers for all but the last ten miles, when the sun finally came out in force and warmed things up (in concert with the beastly mile-and-a-half long, brutally steep climb at that point). The north wind was a Saddam Hussein affair -- it was my ally for the front half of the ride, almost a direct tailwind as I headed to hills down south. But I knew even then that I might one day have to go head-to-head with its evil, and my Desert Storm came all too soon as I headed back north. My battle, however, was no cakewalk -- more of a Somme-style trench warfare quagmire.

Today I towed the chunky young spud for ten or twelve miles. He makes the smaller hills a real workout too. I'm counting on the strength training from hauling his princely (m)ass up the nearby climbs to make my ride up Hogpen Gap a breeze this fall.

If They Don't Want to be Americans, Send 'Em Packing!

2006-05-26T06:47:00.000-04:00

Little Green Footballs has the latest updates on the idiotic (and now, apparently, DOA) ukase from the Michigan DOE regarding the use of the words America and American.

In other news, Michigan DOE "social studies consultant" Karen Todorov has directed that only Kleenex brand facial tissues be called Kleenex. All other brand should be called by their proper brand names, or simply facial tissue.

Additionally, she has sent word to WW Norton & Company, publishers of The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, (required reading in all grades and all classes in Michigan schools) that the book must be renamed The Ugly People of the United States or it will be removed from Michigan classrooms.

That Bicycle Chick was Right About Another Thing

2006-05-24T21:30:00.000-04:00

I was overly harsh about the residents of New Orleans.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I still think we should nuke the place and consider ourselves ahead of the game. Let's not forget, after all, the grievous injuries I've suffered there. Those alone oughta be worth a Minuteman.

But I made the mistake of believing the news reports on the MSM about what was going on in New Orleans after Katrina. Unfortunately, the MSM got the stuff completely, utterly, incompetently, criminally, murderously wrong, as Jonah Goldberg spells out here.

Funny. Those pompous bastards sit in judgment of everything everyone who makes an honest living does, constantly criticizing actual productive members of society. Yet they obviously can't be trusted to do their own damn jobs with even the most minimal competence. So why the hell do we listen to a word they say or write? (Well, I don't anymore -- why the hell do the rest of you?)

Promised Bike Stuff

2006-05-24T21:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I experienced agony like a dog in a couple ways: I was suffering the final effects of some dread allergy crap that felt like flu, and just to shake things up, I rode the breathtaking Eddy Merckx over the ridiculously steep hills south of my hometown that are like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact -- positively not good for a Polish man like me. (They're not good for any man, really, but I had to work in my learned reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.)

Today I rushed home and hooked up the exquisite Burley D'Lite and towed my fat-ass little fifteen-month-old son behind my gorgeous K2 mountain bike for ten miles. Did I ever mention how much I despise people who spend $500 for a bike trailer and only go around the neighborhood? I towed that little bugger until he fell asleep from exhaustion; I imagine it's awfully hard work sitting in screened, plush comfort with toys while I slave away pulling his girth about.

And did I ever mention that that chick from that cycling website was right -- the way I afford the multi-thousand clam bicycles I ride (and the trailer my son rides, the cost of which could feed Burkina Faso for a week) is that I have a trust fund that could feed Burkina Faso for a millennium?

Wow, Someone Once Read What I Wrote (and Wasn't Too Happy!)

2006-05-24T21:09:00.000-04:00

Check it out here. I just posted a comment, which I assume nobody will read since the post is ancient. But it's a damn good comment.

What Absolute Living Pieces of Crap These People Are

2006-02-09T20:36:00.000-05:00

Here. They're beneath any further comment.

You All Said I Was Crazy...

2006-01-21T21:45:00.000-05:00

Remember those hundreds of angry comments appended to my post about Iraq hostage Susanne Osthoff being in league with the terrorists, part of my general commentary about the worthlessness of Germany? Y'know, about my being a stooge for the Bush administration, or perhaps hopped up on goofballs? Well, check this out.

From a Pompous, Bloated, Arrogant Gasbag

2006-01-07T15:13:00.000-05:00

Senator Ted Kennedy is lecturing the rest of us about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's credibility.

This is the same Ted Kennedy who killed Mary Jo Kopechne, lied for years about it to protect his political future, and has now lapsed into a decades-long silence.

Activate Dr. Evil voice: Riiight...

In the Steady Earl Region, Anti-German Feelings Run High

2005-12-30T15:34:00.000-05:00

Why?

Their new Fuhrer, Angela Merkel, in her first real act of office, released Mohammad Ali Hammadi, a terrorist hijacker/murderer who killed our Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem back in '85. Read the whole story here.
Merckel assures us Hammadi's unexplained release was certainly not to effect the subsequent release of their own Susanne Osthoff, who was being held hostage in Iraq. We can therefore assume he was indeed released in a quid pro quo for Osthoff.
Osthoff herself assured us all, in a bizarro interview where she wore a hijab that looked like a black ski mask, that she was not complicit in being taken hostage in the first place. So it's also safe to assume that she was part of a conspiracy with the terrorists in Iraq.
Back in '72, the Germans not only bungled, with a uniquely German combination of cowardice and ineptitude, their attempt to rescue the PLO-held Israeli Olympic athlete hostages, who were then mowed down by their captors. The Germans also conspired with the PLO to have a Lufthansa flight hijacked so they could release the surviving terrorist butchers.

And now Merckel has the audacity to lecture us about Guantanamo. I could do without this disgusting excuse for a country.

And Another Sharp Stick

2005-12-18T17:07:00.000-05:00

This time it's a good thorough bitch-slapping (I guess that's different than a sharp stick, but I have plenty of metaphors to go around) for that destructive and moronic notion known as multicultural education.

Since this one comes from Australia, which has lately been reaping the just desserts of its pursuit of this stupid, self-immolating education policy, it's especially informative.

Here's a Sharp Stick in the Eye of our "Intellectual" Elite

2005-12-18T16:38:00.000-05:00

It's a marvelous column by Michael Barone in US News & World Report. Here's the juiciest bit:

These lessons have been widely learned and widely applied by George W. Bush and also to a large extent by Bill Clinton. But not, curiously enough, by those who see themselves as the best and the brightest, our university and media elites. They would still like to see America's power reined in, as it was in the 1970s. They are insouciant about the costs that larger and more intrusive government and higher taxes impose on the economy. They think that leniency and subsidy are the appropriate responses to deviant and self-destructive behavior. They think our most important right is a right to kill our unborn children. You have to be awfully smart, someone once said, to believe something so stupid. And to be so blind to the clear lessons of the past quarter century of history.

It's well worth reading the whole thing.

So Our Mexico Border is Like the Berlin Wall?

2005-12-17T07:25:00.000-05:00

Here's the Mexicans' take on the border fence that's part of the new immigration bill:

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission described the U.S. measure as "part of a tendency to criminalize migration with a wall that calls to mind the Berlin Wall."

Um. Yeah, okay, fellas, here's a bit of a history lesson for you. The Berlin Wall was built to keep people in. See, East Germany was such a craphole, the only way they were gonna have anyone but their Soviet puppet government nomenklatura left was to fence them in, and shoot anyone who tried to climb a fence.

Here's the difference. You have the craphole here. Our fence is to keep your people from coming here, not because we're mean, but because we really can't afford to host your whole country's population. Which is who we'll have here if we don't get a bit of control of our own border.

I have an original idea! How 'bout you guys actually get to work fixing your damned craphole so your people actually want to live in their own country, instead of spending your time bloviating about historical references you obviously don't understand?

What Do We Do About Pigs Like These?

2005-12-16T22:57:00.000-05:00

Read this gem about a bar owner in Ohio whose sign in his window asking customers to speak English has him facing fines and endless hearings in front of an unaccountable "Ohio Civil Rights Commission."

Interesting that in these days of championing diversity, they couldn't manage to find a single, solitary Caucasian to be a member of this Orwellian tribunal. Or maybe they just couldn't find one so lacking in fundamental scruples.

Message to the nearly-diverse members of the Ohio Civil Rights Commission: in the USA, we have a Constitutional right to freedom of speech, you bloated, self-important, immoral, swaggering, corrupt, puny-minded, puerile, cowardly, preening, pestilent, bilious, venomous, crapulent, ignominious, rank, grotesque, supercilious, haughty quislings.

Gosh, I Never Noticed What Geniuses Democrats Are

2005-12-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a comment by one of them at a Howard Dean speech:

"If you go in and attack like a bully, you won't win," Valerie Guenther of Charlotte County said before Dean spoke.

Ah. Now I understand why we sent one man at a time in his own rowboat, unarmed and carrying flowers, across the channel during the so-called Normandy "invasion." That's why we won!

One of the tragedies of man's existence is that a completely brain-dead moron like Valerie Guenther without a doubt considers herself an intellectual giant. And her likeminded friends agree.

You Read it Here First: Wal-Mart's Imminent Decline will be Self-Inflicted

2005-12-03T11:17:00.000-05:00

I despise the current left-wing attacks on Wal-Mart. They're purely ideologically-motivated and come from very stupid people. To the extent that they detract from Wal-Mart's business, we are all the worse off for it.

That being said, Wal-Mart will inevitably decline. First, people will tire of visiting overcrowded, filthy stores staffed by rude, ugly troglodytes, just as they have with McDonald's. Their culture of shaving every penny at the expense of both appeal to consumers and relationships with suppliers will catch up with them.

But Wal-Mart itself will hasten its own decline still further. Its recent calls for an increase in the US minimum wage was not only stupid economics, but smacked of hypocrisy.

Now there's this. That Wal-Mart wants to force its business partners to be racists and sexists is odious. I'll cheer when this company, with the smug and disgusting Thomas Mars setting the course, begins its Titanic-like trip to the bottom of the retailing sea.

Where are the Dogs in Whoville?

2005-11-27T12:26:00.000-05:00

The most wonderful time of the year has begun. Last night my wife and baby and I began the annual ritual of the watching of the Christmas videos -- all the old cartoons and Claymation specials, along with Christmas movies galore.

"How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is a particular favorite, and is almost always our first pick. I've seen it dozens of times. Yet last night I noticed something new. In scene where the Grinch is cleaning out the first Who family's house, he's shown taking the roast beast out of the fridge. Now, I may be mistaken, but what's on the platter looks conspicuously like a dog.

That would explain why no barking Who-dogs raised the alarm over the Grinch's shenanigans, wouldn't it?

Let's Nuke New Orleans

2005-09-03T22:29:00.000-04:00

Okay, so let me get this straight. The whole Hurricane Katrina thing was the federal government's fault?

Y'know, if I'm living a few miles in from the Gulf Coast in a spot BELOW SEA LEVEL, and I've been paying attention to anything at all, I'd know that I damn well better have a plan for WHEN I get swamped -- not if, for gawd's sake.

Instead, we have to suffer a bunch of freakin' lower-than-the-apes idiots whose response to hurricane warnings was to sit tight in a spot BELOW SEA LEVEL and hope for the best -- and now that they've gottten washed out, they want to whine incessantly about how they weren't whisked away to air-conditioned, well-fed comfort in a quick hour or two!

Mon dew, what a bunch of freakin' pussies Americans are now. This is not the nation that fought WWI or WWII anymore. This is not even the nation that wussed out of Vietnam anymore. This is a nation of millions and millions of overfed, underthinking, fat, lazy, ugly, brutish swine, riding on the backs of a very few productive, thoughtful citizens. It's like Atlas Shrugged, except the villains are more villainous and not nearly as smart, and everyone knows who the hell John Galt is -- he's the guy the rest of us are taking a free ride off of!!! What the hell kind of nation is this that we don't even take the pleasure of shooting down looters like the rabid dogs they are anymore, like Gary Cooper did in that scene in To Kill a Mockingbird? Jesus tap-dancing Christ.

The only thing we have going for us is that the rest of the nations are even bigger pansies than us. That it's so unbelievable, given what unfathomable wusses we've become, doesn't make it any less true.

A side note: New Orleans was a cesspool with an unbearable stench BEFORE all this happened, so why don't we just let it rot into the un-reclaimable swamp it should be? And I don't say that only because I was seriously injured in a bike race there back in April '89. I say it because, the very next weekend, I went back, got drunk, fell down backwards, and was injured a second time, splitting my head open and bleeding like a stuck pig for hours. As if the immediate effect weren't enough, now I'm damaged such that if baldness should ever o'ertake me, and I want to go for the cool white-boy shaved look like Andre Agasse, I can't 'cause I have this giant scar right in the middle of the back of my head. God, how I hate New Orleans.

UPDATE 9/4/05 10:36 am: Of course, I meant Gregory Peck, not Gary Cooper. Oops.

I'm Back! So Let's Fire Lawrence Summers

2005-06-04T13:17:00.000-04:00

Harvard President Lawrence Summers has shown himself to be a most vile creature, for whom no lie is too big to tell, no quailing or bootlicking too low to stoop to, and no principle too personally valuable to jettison, to ensure his continuance in his highly-compensated sinecure.

The details are here, in Heather Mac Donald's marvelous indictment of both Summers and the sickeningly stupid and poisonously ruinous politics of group identity that he now worships and throws others' money at -- 50 million smackeroos, at that -- to save his own job.

Summers should be fired for many reasons: his de facto demolition of academic freedom, his kowtowing to a moronic and rabid element that threatens both his institution and our society as a whole, and his squandering of university funds for his own benefit. But mostly because he has shown his true colors as a liar, fraud, mountebank, and lickspittle. His kind ought to have no place in an institution that ostensibly would like to regain its former prestige, rather than hastening its descent into a laughable parady of a place of learning and culture.

A George Bailey Moment

2005-03-31T20:11:00.000-05:00

The attempt to hear both sides in the Schiavo atrocity ought to be one long George Bailey moment -- that moment in It's a Wonderful Life when he comes to his senses about the job offer from the putrid Mr. Potter. No, dammit -- there is only one "right" here!

If you don't have a sick feeling in your stomach over this one, I pity you.

Terri Schiavo was killed horrendously, in a manner that would land you in jail if you did it to your pet. Not only was the tube providing her food and water removed, but -- by court order -- her poor parents, and anybody else who cared, were barred from attempting to feed her or give her water normally, BECAUSE SHE MIGHT CHOKE!

The long and short of this case is that you have no right to life. If Michael Schiavo -- who had "moved on," fathering children with another woman despite his continuing marriage -- had, with a mere allusion to a supposed comment by his wife some twenty years ago, the full weight of the Florida and US judiciaries behind his quest to murder his wife because she had become inconvenient to him, nobody is safe.

What's more, the left that shrilly and ceaselessly cried "Constitutional crisis" over efforts to hold President Clinton to any legal accountability is utterly silent about the court trampling of legislative mandate in this case, a trampling boasted of by the judges themselves! From the original judge who never saw fit even to visit Mrs. Shiavo for himself, to the federal courts that openly defied the law passed requiring them to review the case anew, we have a full-blown crisis of authority underway. Unelected judges have now placed themselves as final arbiters over everything, your life included, and the clear letter of the law be damned. This is chilling.

We failed Terri Schiavo. What a sad day for our nation.

Will we also fail to reclaim the liberty we've lost to these lawless, arrogant, totalitarian monsters of the courts?

Read Nat Hentoff for more.

UPDATE 3/31: Also read this by William Anderson.

The Schiavo Lesson

2005-03-26T12:06:00.000-05:00

The tragic tale of Terri Schiavo will soon end with her death. We will never know whether this outcome was the one she wanted or not, and I won't dwell on the debate, which can never be settled, over which side of her family was in the right.

What we can take away from this sad saga is yet another lesson in how our unelected judges have freed themselves from any adherence to law. Congress convened in extraordinary circumstances to pass a law requiring the federal courts to look at the Schiavo case afresh. They did not; indeed, they made a point of ignoring the law and sticking their judicial finger in the eye of the US Congress.

All this comes at the same instant as the unbelievable opinion of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the case of the juvenile death penalty. The "justice" clearly structured his thinking to ignore our laws and the US Constitution, and to substitute in their stead international opinion and treaties of which the US is not part, all to come to a conclusion that supports chiefly the personal opinion of one Anthony Kennedy.

It is past high time we begin the long road of addressing this growing problem of illegal judicial activism. Judges who acknowledge no higher authority than their own enlightened opinions are in violation of their oaths, and should go.

UPDATE 3/26: Here's an excellent article by Thomas Sowell on the matter.

Harvard Deserves the Ridicule -- Now for Banishment!

2005-03-26T11:48:00.000-05:00

Our most brilliant and enlightened citizens, the faculty and students of Harvard University, have hit rock bottom and begun digging.

This crew is obviously not content with the pummeling the university has received since its womenfolk, and their equally effeminate "male" colleagues, threw their hissy-fit over the politically incorrect ruminations of their president, Lawrence Summers, some weeks ago. Now each group has weighed in with its own individual fainting spell over Summers's pointing out the obvious fact that there are innate differences between men and women -- at least between those men and women who aren't coddled and idiotic Harvard professors and students.

Summers hasn't helped matters with his odious repeated self-flagellations. A real man in the real world would have had the guts to stand by his statements, but at Harvard such things aren't allowed. And Summers surely doesn't want to relinquish his comfy sinecure for anything as passe' as intellectual rigor or principal.

The most valuable outcome of all this would be that the rest of us out here in Hickville see this appalling display by these coddled "superior intellects" who nonetheless display a stupidity beyond belief, and vow never to cast a vote for anyone who has ever had a thing to do with Harvard -- indeed, it would be best if none of our politicians from here on out had ever come near our elite "institutions of higher learning."

I Should be Able to Win the Tour de France

2005-03-22T21:57:00.000-05:00

I'd really like to win the Tour de France.

After all, I've been cycling pretty seriously for most of the last quarter-century. Oh, sure, I like beer and fast food more than I like serious suffering. Oh, and I dislike riding in the rain and snow and cold so much, I generally put on ten pounds every winter; even though I take them off again, the cycle certainly does put me well below the international elite in the cycling world.

But what kind of society do we live in when a man has to sacrifice everything even to race internationally, much less ever to win a thing, and much, much less ever to even finish the grandest Tour of them all? And don't even talk to me about genetics; sure, I'm heavily muscled and sweat too much to be an efficient cyclist even when I'm in superb shape. But you're nothing but a Nazi if you dare say that nature has anything to do with my not being on the top of the podium in Paris. Such things ought never be uttered, and anyone who would dare utter them should lose their livelihoods.

Silly arguments? Surely. And the exact things our "intellectuals" have been heralded for shrieking about in the wake of Harvard president Lawrence Summers's comments about the dearth women in top university science positions.

If our intellectuals are blathering morons, where does that leave the country as a whole?

Why Does Breastfeeding Make People into Raving Jihadist Lunatics?

2005-03-16T23:14:00.000-05:00

My wife has been breastfeeding our baby boy.

It's not going well. He's a lazy eater and falls asleep while nursing. In his first two weeks, he gained almost no weight at all. So first she followed the advice of her "lactation consultant" and tried very minimal formula supplementation with a system that basically ensured he'd get next to nothing extra.

After that got us nowhere, she did her own thing and is now combining nursing with supplemental bottle feedings of both pumped breast milk and formula. Our little guy is doing great. My wife will probably switch to all formula in the near future.

To many of the "experts," though, this brands my wife as a child-abusing Nazi.

What the hell is wrong with these people who will hear the cries of countless women who have similar problems -- women who are literally getting no real sleep at all and who are in constant pain -- and insist they continue with the "natural" breastfeeding program or be considered forever as failures beneath contempt?

Someone needs to smack these people. All the La Leche zealots who think they're saints for imposing their misguided ideology on millions of women who don't have my wife's intestinal fortitude to stand up to these bullies and point out the incontrovertible fact that they don't have a clue what the hell they're talking about -- those folks really, really need a smack-down. Now.

More Evidence that "South Park" is the Most Intellectual Show on TV

2005-03-16T23:03:00.000-05:00

Tonight's South Park took on the hippies and anti-capitalist, anti-corporate dope-smoking morons. A paraphrased excerpt:

Hippie #1: "We're gonna build a world where there's one guy who makes bread, and another guy who takes care of public safety..."
South Park kid: "You mean like a baker and a policeman?"
Hippie #2: "No, man, can't you imagine a world where people offer services in exchange for the services of others?"
South Park kid: "Yeah, it's called a 'town.'"

Sure, reading Smith's The Wealth of Nations or Hayek's The Road to Serfdom or Bastiat's The Law may give you better bragging rights -- but they won't teach you the realities of economics any better than this episode could.

Idiot Watch

2005-03-14T22:27:00.000-05:00

One of my greatest misgivings about having a child is the constant parade of complete morons I'll now have to have contact with. It started with some of the nurses I wrote about a couple posts back, and will continue through teachers, coaches, and so on for rest of my life.

But of course, the motherlode of idiots will be fellow parents, as evidenced by this article about "parenting coaches." This beggars belief. Here's one gem of a passage (but just one among many, sadly):

Another time, when their daughter resisted going to diving team practice, Ms. Vandon said: "I was so torn, I didn't know what to do. I called Jennifer and she was like 'bam.' In 10 seconds she had the right answer. My daughter had to go."

Do you suppose "Ms. Vandon" also calls Jennifer to see whether she should wipe her ass or not? Holy crap, I hate people.

I'm Overweight... Yeah, Right

2005-03-08T22:46:00.000-05:00

Not that it will quiet the braying ninnies who want the feds to step in to force people to stop being fat pigs, but the Body Mass Index (BMI) is a sick joke.

Do we have too many fat people? Oh yeah. We also have too many people who drink too much (I think I really do fit here), eat too much junk food (here, too, probably), watch too much TV (nope, not here), and know too much about baseball (and definitely not here). So what? That's an inevitable outcome of something I like to call "freedom." Not that that word means anything to nutjobs like Kelly Brownell or Marion Nestle or all those turds from the Center for Science in the Interest of Making Us Feel Smart and Important by Forcing Our Uneducated Opinions Down Your Throat, or any of the pinheads who are on this "obesity epidemic" bandwagon. Speaking of which, we also have too damned many people who have so little to do, they can be on a goddamned "obesity epidemic" bandwagon.

Anyway, here's an actual media report about how stupid the BMI is.

But they didn't need to tell me. Y'know, I hike about twenty miles a week, just to keep some snap in the ol' legs during the snowy months. During the spring, summer, and fall I bike four to six days a week, and for the past six years I've finished the Six Gap Century, a 100 mile extravaganza of pain in the mountains of North Georgia, over the same roads Lance and his fellow pros race on in the Tour de Georgia.

But I have a BMI of 26 or 27, depending on whether it's winter or not. Anything over 25 is overweight. Oh, yeah, and I wear size 32 pants -- just like I have since I was a senior in high school. (That was in '82/'83.)

By the BMI, a third of American adults are overweight. I'm one of them. And all the while, the nice woman who sits next to me at work harangues me for being too skinny. I'm neither, really, but I'm closer to too skinny than to too fat. The braying ninnies need to shut their stinkin' yaps.

Read This George Will Column...

2005-03-06T11:29:00.000-05:00

...which neatly encapsulates all that's wrong with last week's Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment.

Any reasonable reading of Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion leads inexorably to the conclusion that he is thoroughly inept. That he had four other justices concur with his appalling mishmash of personal opinion and references to wholly inappropriate treaties, laws, and international notions indicates the sheer awfulness of the court with which our country is currently saddled.

The coming Bush appointments will be vital. Sadly, it seems not many of the incompetent five in this case will go anytime soon.

Baby Stuff

2005-03-05T20:10:00.000-05:00

My first son was born a week ago today.

Now, I could launch into one of those treacly perorations about the miracle of life and how you never know how much you can love another being and blah blah blah. Hey, I think it's really cool to be a dad, and quite frankly my boy is the most beautiful baby ever born, but folks who go on and on like that have issues.

Instead, I will first point out how amazing it is to see real pros in action. My boy was breech, so in we went for a C-section (and by that I mean, in my wife went to have her belly slit open like a grouper, and in I went to watch). The anesthesiologist was not only great at what he did, but he actually explained things and made us feel better during what was a very tense situation. And man, the surgeons and OR nurses -- they sliced and diced and never once let on that this was anything but a quiet day in the office for them! And so everyone is healthy -- thanks to all of them for that!

But I will also point out that medicine is one area where you should be able to expect consistent answers and advice. But after the birth, we had a steady string of nurses taking care of my wife, and it seems every one had a different story. No sooner had one told us to do this for the baby and that for my wife's incision, than the next one on shift would tell us the exact opposite! Whazzupwitdat?

And plus, you'd think medical professionals would actually want to hear a patient's complaints before rendering judgment. The other day we went for a first checkup at the pediatrician's office. The surly nurse who checked the baby out "listened" to my wife's question about his wanting to feed constantly, and said, "It could be gas. You know about what you shouldn't eat when you're nursing, right -- chocolate, coffee, and broccoli." Uh... A) How did that even apply to my wife's question? And, 2) Why is this nurse telling us this pantload like she has any clue what she's talking about? In this case, the very non-medicine-practicing hottie buxom British chef-ess Nigella Lawson is right: a nursing woman should eat everything, so the baby will learn to tolerate everything! (I'm no doctor, but you don't suppose "allergies" are skyrocketing because nursing moms only eat noodles, and then their kids only eat noodles till they're thirty, do you? Huh?)

Ah, well, thank goodness for the Internet. Nowadays it's best to ignore most advice and research stuff for yourself. You still probably shouldn't attempt a home C-section, but you can certainly ignore the less-able "help."

Rees-Mogg Ain't All Bad

2005-02-28T12:21:00.000-05:00

One of my earliest posts was a thrashing for William Rees-Mogg. But in this piece he is spot-on regarding the European Constitution.

Larry Summers Should Be Fired

2005-02-22T18:57:00.000-05:00

No, I don't agree with the idiot critics of Larry Summers's comments that ignited the recent firestorm. They are intellectual Soviets who wish to air-brush any fact that puts their absurd worldview to lie. And the way they do that on campuses is by intimidating those with opposing viewpoints, so that those viewpoints are silenced, which is what is happening to Summers now.

Had Summers simply responded that his conjectures were out in public for refutation by science and research, and that anyone who didn't want to address the subject in that way should find another place to work or matriculate, I would have defended him wholeheartedly.

Instead, he caved. He threw the whole notion of the university being a place where ideas are spoken and debated openly and civilly right out the window in an effort to save his cushy job by pandering to the shrill censors attacking him.

This statement, from one of his many apologies, is particularly galling:

As I said at our Tuesday meeting, if I could turn back the clock, I would have spoken differently on matters so complex. Though my NBER remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that "I may be all wrong," I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields. I especially regret the backlash directed against individuals who have taken issue with aspects of what I said. In this University, people who disagree with me - or with anyone else - should and must feel free to say so. I know of no community as committed to free inquiry as this one, and no institution with a greater responsibility to uphold it.

This is sheer stupidity. His critics are not attacking his statements or the evidence that supports them. They are attacking his right to say such things. To "regret the backlash directed against" them is to regret the very concept of the university itself. Dr. Summers has shown what's most important to him: a nice, easy seven-figure salary, and open debate and respect for the view of others be damned. Your community is committed to free inquiry? Give me a break, Summers.

Meanwhile, his critics say things such as this:

"What bothers me is the consistent assumption that innate differences rather than socialization is responsible for some of the issues he talks about," said Howard Georgi, a physics professor who has been part of a successful effort in Harvard's physics department to recruit more women for tenured positions.
"It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference," Professor Georgi added. "It's socialization. We've trained young women to be average. We've trained young men to be adventurous."

Hey, y'know what, Professor Georgi? Gather the scientific evidence for your view over Summers's, and publish it! Have it out in an open debate of ideas! It's not "crazy to think that it's an innate difference" -- it's conjecture and study to think that -- something we call "SCIENCE" -- which is your freakin' job, you twit!!

Fire the lot of 'em, I say. What absolute appalling incompetence. The inmates are running the asylum.

The Larry Summers Thing: Leftist Stupidity and Intolerance

2005-02-20T17:15:00.000-05:00

Here is the complete text of Harvard president Larry Summers's comments that have led to a firestorm, which may well result in his dismissal.

Summers spoke a mix of theory, truth, and scientific fact. There was much that was debatable in his comments, and there was much more that was not. But this episode has become a high-profile example of what happens on our campuses every single day. The left-wing takeover of higher education has stifled free thought and censored any idea that challenges its absurd but dangerous ideological worldview.

The people who were upset that this discussion took place have no understanding of what the university is for. The women who left in a huff because Summers would say such things are intolerant, ridiculous children who have no place in the adult world at all.

That these people are being taken seriously is a serious indictment of our culture.

That Summers has cowered before and grovelled before these odious monsters says much about the "men" in the academy today.

More Lessons

2005-02-20T08:41:00.000-05:00

Here's another marvelous story from Iwo Jima.

This is the most significant passage:

In the days that followed the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi in 1945, Wood wrote his mother about the part he had played in providing the now famous flag. Mrs. Wood, in turn, wrote to the War Department, explaining her son’s involvement. Alan Wood later heard from Brig. Gen. Robert L. Denig, director of the U.S. Marine Corps Division of Public Information in Washington, who requested details.
Wood once again told his story, heaping praise on the Marine combat troops. He wrote on July 7, 1945: “Because we were the first LST to beach at Iwo, and because we experienced a little of the deadliness of the Jap fire there, the crew of the 779 is, naturally, proud that our flag was flown from Suribachi. However, speaking for myself—and yet I am sure there are many others aboard who feel the same—the part we played in the invasion of Iwo Jima was pretty small compared to the willing and simple heroism with which the Marines did their bloody job. The fact that there were men among us who were able to face a situation like Iwo where human life is so cheap, is something to make humble those of us who were so very fortunate not to be called upon to endure any such hell.”

This goes straight to the heart of the incomprehension and disgust I feel with the rich and idle anti-Americans who get so much attention these days. How can these people, who've gained so very much from this nation and given so very little, miss the fact that their success is built on the sacrifices of millions before them? What sickness of their spirit makes them so obsessed with our imperfections, yet so blind to the wonder of the wealth and freedom America has to offer?

The Lessons of Iwo Jima

2005-02-19T13:22:00.000-05:00

Sixty years ago the assault on the tiny island of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific began. Few of us alive today can imagine the hell the troops went through.

Bravo to The Wall Street Journal for this excellent editorial on the subject by historian Arthur Herman. Read the whole thing.

This passage, though, is key:

Yet even this valor and sacrifice is not the full story of what Iwo Jima means, or what Rosenthal's immortal photograph truly symbolizes. The lesson of Iwo Jima is in fact an ancient one, going back to Machiavelli: that sometimes free societies must be as tough and unrelenting as their enemies. Totalitarians test their opponents by generating extreme conditions of brutality and violence; in those conditions--in the streets and beheadings of Fallujah or on the beach and in the bunkers of Iwo Jima--they believe weak democratic nerves will crack. This in turn demonstrates their moral superiority: that by giving up their own decency and humanity they have become stronger than those who have not.
Free societies can afford only one response. There were no complicated legal issues or questions of "moral equivalence" on Iwo Jima: It was kill or be killed. That remains the nature of war even for democratic societies. The real question is, who outlasts whom. In 1945 on Iwo Jima, it was the Americans, as the monument at Arlington Cemetery, based on Rosenthal's photograph, proudly attests. In the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, it was the totalitarians--with terrible consequences.

Would that we understood this lesson of history today. Indeed, the women during WWII were tougher and more resilient than the men of today. Today, while our enemy hangs the bodies of murdered civilians from bridges and hacks off the heads of kidnapped innocents, our "intellectuals" wail and gnash their teeth over the "torture" at Abu Ghraib and the horrendous fiction that our military men targeting journalists.

We will have to learn the lessons of Iwo Jima. Or we, like the many invincible powers that came before us -- the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, or the Romans -- will see all we've built fall to ruin.

So Why Help Pay Their Bills?

2005-02-19T07:45:00.000-05:00

I don't go to movies much. It's hard to find one nowadays that doesn't just completely suck, I think.

But there's the reason I don't go to pro sports events, too -- prices are far too high for what you get, and the performers are paid ridiculously just for fooling around! Sorry, my cash is for more important things, like beer and bicycle stuff.

Just as with my point months ago about universities, if people don't like the politics of an institution, why do they give it money? The lockstep-left-wing "institutions of higher learning" survive on alumni donations. Why fork over the cash to support the self-important and childish worldview of the typical socialist college prof?

Same with Hollywood. As this Fox News report says, the politics of movies is equally one-sided as in our universities. So surely your money can go to more worthwhile causes, like purchasing firearms.

And why provide a paycheck for the shrieking anti-American actors of today? If the actor Sean Penn, or the actress Leo DiCaprio, want to belittle the US, that's their right as Americans -- more power to 'em. But you're the one responsible for the fact that they're doing it from hillside mansions in Malibu, with an endless string of hotties on their arms. Those two should be delivering pizza and dating heifers.

Go here to read about the real heroes of Hollywood -- people who could not only act, but could also put their wealth-accumulating aside and take up arms to defend freedom. Their kind, like the elves at the end of Lord of the Rings, have passed from this land.

America's Fading Glory, Part 157,917...

2005-02-06T08:12:00.000-05:00

They seem to come in waves, these assertions of the ongoing demise of the West (by which the writers always mean the US -- funny how Europe is still going to be a star player despite its already moribund economies, its coddled, idle populations, and its complete lack of military anything).

Here's yet another, by Martin Jacques from The Guardian. This one is particularly idiotic on at least two points. The first is in his comparison of America with Europe:

This was something that Europe learned the hard way: two world wars, the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union, and the anti-colonial struggle have taught our continent the limitations of its own power. That is why Europe today, with the partial exception of Britain and France, and exemplified by Germany, is so reluctant to use military force. The United States, of course, is the opposite. It measures its power not by its relative economic and technological prowess, which would suggest restraint, but its military unassailability, which implies the opposite.
Nor is this attitude simply a product of the neoconservatives. It also draws on something deeper within the American psyche. The birth of the United States and its expansion across the American continent - the frontier mentality - was an imperial enterprise, involving, most importantly, the subjugation and destruction of the Amerindians. This is lodged in the national genes, it is part of the American story, and it helps to inform and shape its global strategy and aspirations.

What a sick joke. No, Martin, it is not some deep wisdom gained by Europe that leads to its refusal to use force. It is the fact that Europe has no force, and no backbone. This is not a recent phenomenon. In the World Wars, Europe had the backbone but not the military might to throw off its potential conquerors, and it was left to the Americans alone in the First, and America and the Soviets in the Second, to come to Europe's rescue (though in the case of the Soviets, they were also a third set of potential conquerors.)

During the Cold War, most of Europe's remaining military might dissolved, and its backbone disappeared entirely. The waning years of the Cold War saw Europeans cozying up with the Soviet conquerors of its Eastern reaches, and protesting against the American military power that preserved its freedom. The Soviets lost nonetheless, but the hangover of that long conflict (perhaps unavoidable) is an entire continent that continues to rely on the US for its defense, while explaining its weakness away as a superior understanding of the world. How absolutely pathetic.

Finally, for a European to assail America for its imperial ambition is jaw-droppingly bold. It's also incorrect, insofar as Jacques explains it. The conquering of what is today the contiguous 48 states was not imperial; Manifest Destiny, for all the apt criticisms it might attract, was a program of creating a political continuity on the continent. This is not empire. Indeed, Jacques's critique here smacks of a sad projection.

The second is in his discussion of the rise of Asia, particularly India and China. This passage comparing China with the US is telling:

The contrast between China and the United States could hardly be more striking. The former dates back thousands of years, the latter not much more than 200; the former is a product of an ancient civilisation, the latter an invented nation whose citizens bear allegiance to a political document, the constitution. It is little wonder that Americans constantly need to reinvent themselves: the Chinese, unsurprisingly, have no such problem, they know exactly who they are. The profound cultural differences are already being played out in a cinema near you: Hollywood versus the new breed of popular Chinese films. This is just a taster for the future, the beginning of what will later come to dominate the 21st century. American - and western values - will find themselves contested like never before.

Jacques's assertion that somehow China, because it's an "ancient civilization," has been firmly unchanging in its culture and its politics while the immature America has blown in the wind is inconceivably daft, and betrays a profound lack of understanding of what makes a country tick. China's recent history in particular has been a comedy of political and cultural cluelessness, with its Communist Party grasping feverishly at one program after another to keep its grip on political power and keep the masses from revolt. America, meanwhile, has certainly rolled with the changes -- but its fundamental politics have remained amazingly constant, Jacques's sneering at us as "an invented nation whose citizens bear allegiance to a political document, the constitution" notwithstanding. (By the way, Mr. Jacques, it's Constitution. But then to expect any respect from you is a tad silly.)

India and China are succeeding today primarily to the extent they adopt those values that the US will continue to instill wherever she can: free speech, free enterprise, and the rule of law. China in particular, its ancient civilization notwithstanding, has radical changes yet to make if it's not to suffer the same ignominies as Japan. But Martin Jacques certainly will never understand any of this.

Childbearing Smarminess

2005-02-05T17:12:00.000-05:00

I used to despise everything about childbearing, sneering at those with or expecting children as the "babymakers" (not meant in any way positive, let me tell you!)

Okay, I got over it, and now I'm one of the previously vilified "babymakers" myself, with my first son due in a month.

Still, even if I can now admit the positives to the whole thing,I also know there's a lot of idiocy around the process. For example, what the hell is it with the penchant for laboring mothers to be bare-ass naked? First, I'd like to point out that this is Seinfeldian "bad naked," and don't make me count the ways. But second, there's more than a whiff of '60s hippyishness about it, and I'd so hoped we'd finally gotten past that. But go to any childbearing class (most of which are themselves given over to a lot of the idiocy around the whole thing), and there in most of the videos are grunting, pallid, fleshy, NAKED women, with hairy heads poking out of you-know-where! AAARRRRGH!

As an aside, I find myself to be wholly un-squeamish about the blood and goo and such. So don't even lay that on me as a defense; no, it is just the barenaked ladies themselves who are so off-putting, and that should be the case for any discerning human.

But even more odious and idiotic is what is fast becoming an ironclad rule of referring to the unborn baby as "she." This seems to arise from that branch of feminism that dreams of manless world, and I shudder to think of those dopes taking control of the whole birthing process -- what with that meaning the end of mankind and such. For now, though, they seem only to control the childbearing-industrial complex, especially the publishing end. I've vowed that any information about childbearing or children that hews to this moronic language standard will be immediately discarded, unread past that first encounter with the feminine third person pronoun.

Sadly, of course, that means that I've learned next to nothing about this "magical moment" for which I'm inexorably headed. Ah well, sheer ignorance worked for our ancestors, so it'll just have to work for me.

The Anniversary of the Tet Offensive, but Not Much Has Changed

2005-01-30T16:44:00.000-05:00

I asked my dad, a post-WWII Air Force photographer, and his cousin, a WWII B-29 crewman, whether the media today, as contrasted with pre-Vietnam days, are truly as appallingly negative and anti-American as they seem to me. Their responses indicate to me that I was naive -- today's media are far, far more negative and anti-American than I thought.

I don't know where it all went wrong, but by Vietnam, journalists had begun to believe that their job was not to report mere facts, but to present a case for their own worldview. The Tet Offensive in 1968 showed how powerful their jettisoning of any ethical standards could be: an American military victory was successfully portrayed as a defeat to the folks on the home front.

Today, that can't happen, thanks to the blogosphere. But it sure isn't changing the behavior of the MSM -- their news out of Iraq is essentially entirely negative, regardless what is actually happening on the ground. Just one more thing to think about before you re-up for your local paper, or switch the channel to that network news show.

We Need More Guys Like This, Too

2005-01-30T16:41:00.000-05:00

Bull Moose and I probably disagree on almost everything, but not on his main point here.

Sadly, now that initial reactions are out in the MSM and from lefty bloggers, his wish has obviously not come true.

Bush Wins Another National Election!

2005-01-30T09:08:00.000-05:00

CNN reports 72% turnout after polls close in Iraq, with no major attacks. How will the critics spin this one? They can't ignore the good news, like they did in Afghanistan.

It'll be interesting to see, but don't look for them to wise up any. The same people who droned about a "quagmire" in Afghanistan a few days after fighting began, who predicted months of battle and 10,000 American dead before Baghdad would fall, and who are generally stupid and wrong every time they open their shrieking mouths, will move on to some other topic to predict doom over -- and nobody will call them on their countless past errors.

This Guy Must Want to be the Next Bjorn Lomborg

2005-01-30T09:05:00.000-05:00

Some reason from a former Greenpeace activist.

Mark Steyn is Brilliant Again

2005-01-30T08:59:00.000-05:00

Here's his latest. My favorite line:

''Stability'' is a fancy term to dignify laziness and complacency as sophistication.

We Need More Like Him

2005-01-30T08:56:00.000-05:00

Not all Europeans are blinkered fools.

America's Decline?

2005-01-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

Here's an excellent article by Jonathan Rauch on something I've previously commented about, the perennial predictions of America's preemption by another superpower.

Rauch's comparison of today's predictions of European preeminence with those about Japan less than two decades ago is illuminating. But he skirts or even misses some important points. One is the lack of military power in any challenger right now; there exists nowhere an army with the numbers and technology to rival America's. Except for Great Britain, no European state can field a force that can even really assist the US in battle, owing to the enormous disparity in technology. And as I've pointed out before, all of Europe has gotten a free ride on the defense front since WWII, and when those countries are forced to shoulder the true burden of their own defense, their vaunted "superior economic models" will be revealed for the hollow shells they really are.

But that leads to the other important point. Even with the freebies on defense, Europe's main economies today are in no position even to be compared with Japan's in the late '80s. They are growing scarcely at all, have high rates of unemployment, and a desperate need for structural reforms that a coddled populace won't countenance. Add in a native population in decline, and a burgeoning but unaddressed unassimilated immigrant problem, and European countries leave much to be desired. They are not a threat to America -- they are mainly a threat to themselves.

Morons "Don't Get" Free Speech

2005-01-29T09:10:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting contrast in stories.

The first one is about a college student expelled for writing a paper promoting corporal punishment in schools. Scott McConnell was studying for his Master's of Education and wrote the paper for a course on classroom management.

Colleges were once places of free inquiry, where conflicting opinions were discussed and debated. But the same shrill "defenders" of such rights as the one to pull a near-term baby from the womb and kill it with scissors to the back of the head think that even mentioning spanking an unruly grade-school student warrants expulsion. What a world we've made for ourselves.

But in the meantime, expect those same shrill demons to launch demonstrations if the good folk in this story succeed in preventing a murdered from speaking in City Hall. Imari Obadele was the leader of a black terrorist organization that killed Jackson, Miss., police officer William Louis Skinner, who was part of a force serving an arrest warrant at a house the group was holed up in.

Mr. Obadele has served his far-too-short sentence, and should have the right to speak his mind. But the numbskulls on the left believe the right to freedom of speech means the right to a forum, which is absolutely not the case. Jackson Councilman Kenneth Stokes no doubt believes he's doing right by inviting the murderer to speak in Jackson's City Hall, but that just means Stokes's mother didn't bring him up right. Proper manners would dictate deference to a murdered police officer's survivors, not to the man who murdered him. But then, proper manners aren't exactly a high priority for those who see spanking as evil, but murdering police officers as noble.

Where are the Adults??

2005-01-23T11:34:00.000-05:00

My recent reading of I am Charlotte Simmons, and the memories it raised of my own college experience, have had me wondering what ever happened to the notion of mature adults setting limits and expectations for children and young adults.

It seems the world now is awash in parents and "adults" in positions of authority who believe it's more important to be seen as "cool" by their charges than actually to protect them. The concept of in loco parentis was long ago jettisoned by the adolescents of all ages who run our universities. And we read stories such as this week's news about the mother who held booze, drug, and sex parties for her teenage son and his friends.

Sadder still is this story. A young woman died a year ago on a cheerleading trip to Hawaii when she broke her 2 am curfew to spend the night with a young man she'd met upon arriving at her resort hotel the day before. We'll never know why Laura Crossan fell from the ninth-floor balcony of her new "boyfriend's" room, but this is a far cry from "Leave it to Beaver," isn't it?

Accidents happen, and some young people will die for seemingly unfathomable reasons. But the whole idea of adult authority is to substitute what should be a more mature judgment for that of youthful indiscretion and inexperience, therefore to reduce the chances for avoidable tragedy. Our culture's worship of youth as not only physically beautiful, which it often is, but also intellectually advanced (note the tautological storyline of seemingly every TV show that adults are ignorant and stupid boobs and youngsters are brilliant savants), which it almost always is not, is a recipe for disaster -- especially when combined with the effete "adults" that our abandonment of real adulthood back in the '60s has now created.

Cynics Without a Cause

2005-01-23T08:18:00.000-05:00

A very smart friend of mine told me recently I was a cynic, but that "cynicism is fine, as long as you have a passion to make things better."

The Democrats are cynics -- but their passion today appears to be twofold: find any scheme that will regain them the power of their glory years, while heaping vitriol and bile upon those they find so appallingly stupid (i.e., anyone who disagrees with them).

These self-appointed geniuses, though, can't grasp the obvious point that the two steps in their program are like matter and antimatter -- put 'em together, and POW -- annihilation!

The always-brilliant Mark Steyn makes the point here.

Santayana Said it Best

2005-01-22T13:45:00.000-05:00

How many times have you read or heard that fat, stupid Americans are ignorant of history, and therefore on a bumbling path to ruin? This is a good example of such tripe.

Meanwhile, the talking heads largely ignore, when they're not openly praising, those who really are on a path to doom well-trod by history. So when I opened my latest issue of The Economist today and read the latest about the evil despot Hugo Chavez in Venezuala, I thought of George Santayana's excellent admonition about those not knowing history being doomed to repeat it. Chavez's murderous thugs have now launched their effort to make land ownership "fair," by stealing it from those who own it now and giving it to others -- which is bad enough, but that they're giving it to hand-selected "peasant co-operatives" really makes the ol' alarms go off in the history department.

Okay, I could see how a poor country's peasants may not have heard of the collective farms of the Soviet Ukraine, or the Great Leap Forward in China, or even Pol Pot's magnificent repopulation of rural Cambodia (that is, with the Cambodians he didn't kill immediately). So maybe they don't know that the peasants in those co-operatives mainly ended up starving to death, in their uncountable and unimaginable millions. But for Pete's sake, Zimbabwe is pretty recent history, and the collapse of its previously productive farming capacity thanks to dictator Robert Mugabe's racism should be fairly well-known.

Ah, well. Santayana will again be proved right, and the peasants cheering for Chavez now will rue the day later -- at least the ones who survive. Here's more (and thanks to McQ at Q and O Blog, who shared my thoughts and did even better research.)

This is Why My Boy will be Home-Schooled

2005-01-22T09:01:00.000-05:00

Educators today can't find time to teach things like history, science, English, and math -- but they can surely make time to indocrinate your child! What a load of crap.

Forget Oil-for-Food! What About the Minority-Owned Business Scam?

2005-01-16T16:54:00.000-05:00

Read these three stories about the corruption that's rampant in the City of Chicago's program to use minority-owned businesses.

Such programs are an absolute crock. As with these cases, it's easy enough for anyone to run a business that qualifies for "minority-owned" status. Indeed, it seems that, like Oil-for-Food, they often become a conduit for enriching the well-connected.

But even if we assume all the businesses that are certified as such truly are owned by minorities, exactly what purposes do such programs serve? Are they eliminating present racism? I'd say the willingness of buyers to set up such programs puts any allegation of rampant racist "freezing out" of minorities from the marketplace to lie. Are they making up for past bigotry? Well, unless you believe this is accomplished by steering more cash into the hands of present-day well-heeled people who by accident of birth share the sex or skin color of someone who was at some time discriminated against, no (see my "Corporate Thoughts #1" for more about this concept).

And there's this complication: such programs aren't free. Oh, I'm sure some of them on paper are about merely identifying, and sourcing bids from, relevant businesses owned by minorities. But the programs never, ever stop there. Whether they say so explicitly or not, they come with goals -- goals for money spent, or for the number of businesses employed, or for the number of transactions completed. And the only way to meet these goals is to pay more for the services of minority-owned businesses than you otherwise would. This is simple economics; too many dollars are chasing too few minority-owned businesses, so prices must rise. (Plus, since such businesses are usually sourced without bidding, there is no competition at all to make them "sharpen their pencils.")

So what we have are government and corporate entities paying more than market price for goods and services, to serve no other ends than to satisfy liberal white guilt, and to keep corrupt race-baiting "activists" off their backs. And the sole identifiable outcome is the kind of corruption revealed in the articles at the link. But at least all it costs is that we, the taxpayers and shareholders, are left holding the proverbial bag.

And Speaking of the Murdering Swine...

2005-01-16T08:30:00.000-05:00

It seems they're not that far away.

A Coptic Christian family of four in New Jersey were found dead in their home Friday morning -- murdered, each bound with his throat slit. Frighteningly, early speculation is that Islamic nut-jobs targeted them because of exchanges on a religious chat website. (See the whole story at Free Republic.)

The most ironic passage of the story is this:

"We are not a bloody people," said Ahmed Shedeed, director of the Islamic Center of Jersey City. "This is not from the Quran. This is not from Islam at all."
Asked about passages in the Quran that may suggest murdering non-believers in a manner that resembles the family's deaths, he replied, "The Quran talks about people fighting in the battle of war. It's not talking about people who live next to you. ...This has nothing to do with our community at all."

I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Sheheed is a fine man, and speaks what he believes is the truth of his religion. But until people like him come to to terms with what Islam is becoming across the world -- a cult of death, power, and backwardness the world hasn't seen for centuries -- and begin helping the isolate and weed out the rabid nutcases that tar Islam as a whole, such stories will only become more and more commonplace. Remember Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands? Well, such things are not so far away now. September 11 should have been our wake-up call here in America. Unfortunately, it seems many of us just hit the "snooze."

Favoring the Palestinians

2005-01-16T08:11:00.000-05:00

I am continually amazed at the bias in so many quarters that gives the Palestinians a pass on their frequent animal behavior, while castigating Israelis if they even raise a hand to defend themselves against attack.

The whole security fence fiasco is an excellent example. But even more basic is the utter silence we hear from our media when the Palestinians execute "collaborators." That's probably the saddest thing of all: the media regale us with the tales of the innocent Israelis killed by the monsters of Hamas, Fatah, and the PLO, since blowing up buses is, to our international journalists, a suitable means of "expression" -- but we never hear of the innocent Palestinians murdered by those bold "freedom fighters," because that information might just be enough to show the world what swine the Palestinian "armed resistance" is made up of.

Power Line details the latest such episode; unfortunately, while this one may get a bit more attention, it's hardly unique.

CJR -- Now a Farce?

2005-01-15T08:41:00.000-05:00

The standard-bearer in journalistic balance, The Columbia Journalism Review, greatly diminished its reputation with its recent article on the Rathergate fiasco. Corey Pein's article, "Blog-Gate," was a poorly researched hit-piece that tried to smear the bloggers who exposed CBS's forgeries and lies.

Now CJR Executive Editor Michael Hoyt has jumped in the fray, and taken the partisan, journalistically-challenged line as well, not only backing the ridiculous Pein article in a recent letter to The New York Post, but going so far as to continue to assert that CBS's discredited documents might be genuine! Little Green Footballs has the story here.

Abject Apologies: A Fresh Update to "Latino Heritage?"

2005-01-15T08:28:00.000-05:00

In my post "Latino Heritage?" I took a young lady named Delia to task for appearing on TLC's "What Not to Wear" in what I took to be the standard, always-fashionable Che Guevara T-shirt.

But how mistaken I was. Her shirt wasn't pro-Che, but stridently anti-Che, with a red circle and slash across his picture, and the slogan "Cuba Libre Hoy" ("Free Cuba Today") across the back. (Thanks to NRO's "The Corner" for setting me straight!)

So my deepest apologies to Delia. Perhaps she should be the one telling people what to wear.

Another Jewel From Stein

2005-01-09T17:21:00.000-05:00

Required reading.

Another One From the Gun-Controllers' Playbook: Science Doesn't Back Us? Ignore It or Lie about It!

2005-01-08T10:51:00.000-05:00

Here's an article about the recently-released study of gun control laws and their effects from the National Academy of Sciences, which generated countless headlines about right-to-carry laws not reducing crime.

There's only two problems: the headlines covered a lie in the report, and the report was about a whole lot more that shoots the gun-banners down (pun intended).

John Lott Jr. has an excellent op-ed about it here -- it's worth reading the whole thing. But here's the relevant passage about right-to-carry:

James Q. Wilson, professor of public policy at UCLA, was the one dissenting panelist and the only member whose views were known in advance not to be entirely pro-gun control. His dissent focused on the right-to-carry issue, and the fact that emphasizing results that could not withstand peer-reviewed studies called into question the panel's contention that right-to-carry laws had not for sure had a positive effect.
Wilson also said that conclusion was inaccurate given that ''virtually every reanalysis done by the committee'' confirmed right-to-carry laws reduced crime. He found the committee's only results that didn't confirm the drop in crime ''quite puzzling.'' They accounted for ''no control variables'' -- nothing on any of the social, demographic and public policies that might affect crime -- and he didn't understand how evidence that wouldn't get published in a peer-reviewed journal would be given such weight.

Of course, numerous studies by others have already proven the point: right-to-carry laws reduce crime. Florida led the way with such a law, and a follow-up study showing its effectiveness, some ten years ago.

Of course, all the other errors of omission and commission are bad, too. Read the whole article.

UPDATE 1/9/05 -- Fixed missing links.

Of Course...

2005-01-08T07:11:00.000-05:00

I'm someone with way too much time and money on his hands, too. And you can be sure I'll never, ever shut up.

Ever!

Of Masculine and Feminine

2005-01-08T05:58:00.000-05:00

Neil Cavuto of Fox News reports on a run-in he had with a feminist who got bent out of shape when he held the door for her. Here's the whole sad tale, but I really liked this part:

"Excuse me," I asked — now feeling every bit of my offended macho Italian roots — "but exactly what bug got up your butt?"
"Treating me like I have to be coddled," she said.
"By opening a door?" I asked.
She went onto explain the door thing was part and parcel of a bigger thing: An attempt by men, she said, to make women feel like they're lesser.

This is part of a big problem we have. Oh, not the whole ages-old women vs. men thing. No -- I'm talking about the one where we've gotten so damn wealthy we can now take normal everyday things and make them crises.

This particular one is akin to the argument over the third-person singular pronoun. That's the one where the feminists have ruined good English by insisting that we're all sexist thugs for using male pronouns (he, him, or his) in general cases, such as, "An activist makes a complete ass of himself when he insists we change our language to cater to his idiotic and ignorant opinions." Their argument is that we favor males by defaulting to their pronouns. And the rest of mankind (oh boy, there's another can of worms -- the synecdochic use of "man" to refer to all humans) is supposed to ignore the flipside argument, that we belittle men by making their pronouns multi-purpose, while women have theirs all to themselves.

What it comes down to is that we have whole classes of people now who have too much time and too much money, and spend both by making themselves a thorn in the side of humanity. But what I wonder is why the rest of us even listen to them, much less change our freaking ways to try to make them shut up. Because you can count on this: such pathetic, whining (actually I prefer the British "whinging"), find-something-to-bitch-about-at-all-costs wastes of space and air will never, ever shut up.

Ever.

Washington State Update -- Rossi Files Challenge

2005-01-08T05:43:00.000-05:00

Ever hear of Republican Dino Rossi? He was governor-elect in Washington until the Democratic machine was able to manufacture enough votes in three counts to swing the election to their candidate, Christine Gregoire. And he has now filed a lawsuit challenging the results of that tainted election.

Obviously, the vote itself -- one that featured one heavily Democratic county continually "finding" ballots to help put Gregoire on top, dead people voting, and more votes than voters in many precincts -- was the bad news here. On the plus side, though, the local media in Seattle actually seem to be reporting on the mess, rather than ignoring it as the national MSM has chosen to do. See here and here.

And Sound Politics continues to do an excellent job rooting out the apparent fraud and holding the feet of the elected officials and bureaucrats responsible to the fire.

Latino Heritage?

2005-01-07T21:31:00.000-05:00

My wife likes TLC's "What Not to Wear," the goofy personal re-make show that's essentially "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy" without the "alternative lifestyles."

On the episode she watched tonight was a young lady who insisted she not be changed so much that she lose her authentic Latin American heritage. That heritage consisted, apparently, of wearing really, really awful clothes, not understanding how to improve her far-far-less-than-model-perfect looks with makeup -- and, of course, sporting a Che Guevera T-shirt.

The priceless Jay Nordlinger of National Review has been doing a magnificent job questioning the fascination of America's liberals and Latin Americans with the murderer Che. Quite a fashion statement to wear togs promoting a guy who delighted in administered the coup de grace to the innocents mowed down by the evil revolution's machine guns -- and this is just one example of the horrendous evil perpetrated by this "doctor of the people."

I noticed just the other day one of the Hispanic workers in the manufacturing plant I work in sporting "Che Guevera" as a nickname on the back of his bump cap. As Jay Nordlinger says, this wholesale worship of a butchering thug is an evil that would take massive effort and years to stamp out.

Let's start now.

Home Defense Sense

2005-01-06T20:11:00.000-05:00

Read this article from ABC News in Portland, Oregon -- or just check the meat of it here:

Robbery suspect caught by well-armed homeowner
KELSO, Wash. - Cowlitz County Sheriffs say they have taken a bank robbery suspect who has been on the loose into custody.
Deputies received a call from a resident on Kalama River Road
Wednesday at 5:10 p.m. saying they were holding a person at gunpoint on their property who matched a description of the bank robbery suspect.

This kind of story may be big news to you. Of course, National Rifle Association members read a number of such stories each month in "The Armed Citizen," a column in the monthly members' magazine American Rifleman. The stories usually end with the intruders fleeing, sometimes injured. But sometimes the homeowners shoot and kill.

Even if you aren't a gun owner, ask yourself: If you were faced with an intruder in your home, with seconds to determine if your life is in danger, whether the intruder is armed, and what constitutes "reasonable force," would you want to have some publicity-seeking prosecutor or a comfortable police desk jockey second-guessing what you did to protect your family, home, and life?

Now read this, from the December 9, 2004, issue of The Economist:

SIR JOHN STEVENS, the head of London's police, thinks that Britain's burglary laws are too soft on criminals. A troupe of indignant newspaper columnists agree. Listeners to “Today”, an influential BBC breakfast radio show, voted it their most-wanted new law.
This week, the Tories hoped to catch the mood, tabling a bill that replaces the old idea that householders can use “reasonable force” against intruders with a new one, that all but “grossly disproportionate force” is allowed. Tony Blair, always unwilling to be outflanked by the Tories on crime, responded by saying that the law might need to be changed.
The facts suggest otherwise. Under the existing law, only two people have been imprisoned for using force against burglars within recent memory. The first, Tony Martin, shot a teenager in the back with an unregistered shotgun while the boy was climbing out of a window. The second, Barry-Lee Hastings, stabbed a man 12 times in the back, and kept stabbing even after the burglar had left the house. Neither makes a credible folk hero. Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney-general, who drafted the bill for the Conservatives, concedes that no have-a-go heroes have been convicted.

We can judge the bias of The Economist by the author's failure to mention that Mr. Martin was alone in his isolated rural house, at night, and was confronted by two intruders (he killed one and injured the other with a single shotgun blast). But regardless, the lad he killed had broken into his house. But in Great Britain, all handguns are banned for the general public, and all other firearms, including BB guns and air rifles, are heavily regulated. Mr. Martin's shotgun was unlicensed, and he ran afoul of the "reasonable force" law so favored by The Economist. (Great Britain is also experiencing a horrendous wave of violent crime and home intrusions, dating -- curiously enough -- the the laws that largely disarmed the populace.)

A just law should be very simple: Any force in such a case should be justified. An intruder, armed or not, should be seen as an immediate threat to the lives of all those present in the home. To set up a tribunal to judge after the fact (and usually ignoring or belittling the inevitable panic and uncertainty of a homeowner faced with such a threat) whether force was justified, when fractions of a second in such instances often determine whether the innocent live or die, is ludicrous.

Tony Martin himself, the reclusive farmer who acted properly to save his own life, only to have it ruined by the criminals who preyed on him and a society that made him pay with years of that life lost to an unjust prison sentence, said it best: "We are supposed to live in a civilised society. It's not the way I have been treated... People are not aware of what it's like in the countryside. Criminals prevail. It can't be right."

No, Mr. Martin, it isn't right.

Democrats Hit Rock Bottom and Start Digging

2005-01-05T23:10:00.000-05:00

You can't make this kind of stuff up. For years now I've heard predictions of the ultimate demise of one party or the other, and learned a long time ago to laugh them off. This time, though, the Dems may actually be committing suicide.

I think the two-party system has served us well, and maybe this would clear things out so a group of adults can once again represent the left -- though finding adult leftists nowadays may prove a challenge...

This Woman Has Gall

2005-01-05T20:47:00.000-05:00

Christine Gregoire, whose party machine is well on their way to stealing the election for governor of the state of Washington, had this to say:

"This rhetoric that I hear every day on talk show radio is serving to further divide this state of Washington," she said. "There is something more important than partisanship in the state of Washington.''

This from a woman who insisted on TWO recounts. Of course, Democratic questioning of election results is never divisive, and Democratic vote-inventing is never partisan.

Read the whole disgusting story here.

This Cartoonist is the Greatest

2005-01-05T18:53:00.000-05:00

Not only is Michael Ramirez a fantastic cartoonist, but he's also a very nice guy.

I had the pleasure of meeting him some years ago in Memphis, when he was with the Commercial Appeal. A mutual friend of ours, knowing my "right-wingedness," had told me a number of times I needed to meet him, and several times we were at the same parties or bars, but we just kept missing each other.

Fortunately, right before I moved, I was playing with a band at a local dive and Michael showed up. He entertained my wife and our friends by drawing some funny little doodles while I played, and we had a great chat during the band's break. He was very complimentary of my harmonica playing, so I gave him one of my harps, with a note about how nice it was to meet him on its included instruction sheet. I told him we were moving, but that we'd frame some of his doodles to remember him. He insisted on something better, telling us to get our new address to him through our mutual friend.

Well, he lost our address after our friend had given it to him the first time. But he remembered us, asked for it again, and a few months after we got settled a very nice print of one of his cartoons showed up in our mail. It's now framed over our bar, appropriately enough!

There's been ample commentary about the dearth of conservative editorial cartoonists in the MSM. Say what you will about the Los Angeles Times, but they've had Mr. Ramirez on staff for years now. So because he's so accomplished that he's not just a great conservative cartoonist, but a great cartoonist, period -- and because he's a great guy -- Michael becomes our first non-print link at the right.

Let's Make it a Quick One Today

2005-01-04T21:02:00.000-05:00

It's another jewel from the inimitable Mark Steyn.

There's Plenty of Blame to Go Around, Right?

2005-01-03T20:00:00.000-05:00

I think we can now see the tack the MSM will be taking regarding Rathergate. Beginning now with the publication of rank distortions and character attacks on the bloggers by Corey Pein in the January/February 2005 issue of Columbia Journalism Review, they've launched into a "yeah, our side did bad, but your side did too" kind of "offsetting penalties" defense.

Pein's approach to the analysis of the forged documents is so laughable, its publication in what I've heard was once a distinguished publication is its own commentary on the left's desperation. Here's the crushing defense by one of the outfits Pein attacks, Little Green Footballs. Wizbang, another of the blogs attacked, also does a number on this ridiculous travesty here.

But this passage really takes the cake.

As Memogate progressed, certain talking points became conventional wisdom. Among them, that CBS’s producer, Mary Mapes, was a liberal stooge; that her source, Bill Burkett, was a lefty moonbat with an ax to grind. Both surely wanted to nail a story that Bush got preferential treatment in the National Guard. Still, there was a double standard at work. Liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush’s defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined.

Oh, that's right -- the fact that Mary Mapes spent five years trying to find some way of substantiating this story is proof of her evenhandedness! And Dan Rather's own attack, from his nightly news anchor chair, on the bloggers and others questioning his saintliness as "partisans" obviously doesn't count as a questioning of their motives.

What a pathetic joke.

More Good News on the Miracle Rabies Girl

2005-01-02T22:57:00.000-05:00

Well, she didn't make it home for Christmas. But she did go home yesterday, with no brain damage and with miraculous healing still going on.

We're talking about fifteen-year-old Jeanna Giese, the young lady from Wisconsin who contracted full-blown rabies from a bat bite last September. Here's the latest.

America vs. Europe

2005-01-02T13:48:00.000-05:00

There suddenly seems to be increasing interest in comparing the economies of the US and Europe. Powerline has a couple of posts to that effect, including this one discussing the laughable Jeremy Rifkin's new book about how great Europe is. (I'm going to nominate Rifkin for The Economist's ongoing contest for the wisest fool. Despite decades of being wrong about everything of note he has ever said, Rifkin remains a newsmaker and hero of the left. Go figure.) And the always-right and always-funny Mark Steyn has a column about it here.

What's usually missing in any of these discussions, though, is the military angle -- specifically, the fact that the US has one (a really, really, really big one), and the European nations don't. Okay, the UK has a passable force that has been at our right hand in all our recent forays. But France? Germany? Spain? Italy? Give me a break. My personal firearms collection puts me on par militarily with those weaklings.

Folks can tout European GDPs and standards of living all day, but until they then compensate for the fact that the good ol' US of A has been providing the defense of those whiny adolescent citizens' supposedly superior way of life since WWII, the figures themselves mean little. As we roll forward with our troop realignments over the next few years, those coddled populations are in for a big awakening. Maybe they'll even finally have to work for a living.

More on the San Fran Gun Ban

2005-01-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

"When you get guns out of people's homes and off the streets, it means that that gun is not going to be used in a shooting that kills someone, whether a murder or an accidental shooting." -- San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, commenting on the city's proposed handgun ban

"There has been a troubling increase in the use of firearms." -- Chief Inspector of the Constabulary Keith Povey, commenting on Great Britain's continuing and increasing wave of violent crime in the wake of their ban of all handguns in 1997, and the subsequent introduction of draconian regulations for all other guns (BB guns included)

It may become a mantra here: how do you caricature such people?

Campus Clowns

2005-01-01T15:48:00.000-05:00

I just ripped through Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons over the past few days. It's an excellent read (I am rarely able to finish a book of 600+ pages this quickly), and speaks volumes about our campuses. It was a dishearteningly accurate portrait of the small private school I went to twenty years ago ("Catholic," no less!), with the addition of a much more powerful sports team and far more overtly biased professors.

And that last bit gets to the main point of this rant. Here's a passage from Wolfe:

But how could the rest of them sit there and just listen to this PC s**t and not say anything? F**king sheep... they just swallow the sheep s**t he gives them and regurgitate it every time he asks a question. If that's all you do, it doesn't matter whether you believe it yourself or not. It ends up being the only "proper" s**t to say, and so you keep on saying it because why not be proper and not the kind of person you can't invite anywhere because he might introduce a fart into a proper conversation.

The reality of American campus intolerance for any viewpoint but the left-liberal orthodoxy was covered very nicely in the Dec. 4 issue of The Economist. (Isn't it sad, by the way, that it takes a British publication finally to address this sickening reality, which has previously only been heard within conservative opinion circles? The American MSM has been ignoring it for decades.) Here's a letter to the editor responding the the article:

SIR -- Your call for greater political diversity in academia is reasonable and desirable. But it would require conservative intellectuals to dissociate themselves from their brethren who deny evolution, global warming and the value of stem-cell research, while promoting homophobia and the rest of the dreary litany of popular but ludicrous conservative causes. The political imbalance in academia derives not from a leftist cabal but the intellectual indefensibility and moral bankruptcy of so many conservative notions, which taint those that may be worth discussing.

John Payne
Los Angeles

Get it? The liberal establishment admits it's cocooned in an academic world of "free inquiry" that currently allows only left-wing thought. But it welcomes conservative opinion, just so long as it unerringly echoes left-wing opinion, challenges no left-wing assumptions, and creates no discomfort for those on the left! Because, it's obvious, any concept that would make a liberal uncomfortable or might make him actually think about the drivel he's spouting is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt.

How do you caricature an intellectually insecure but nonetheless oh-so-smug "thinker" like Mr. John Payne?

I shouldn't paint the left with such a broad brush, of course. The always thought-provoking Nat Hentoff (who I've now added as our first opposite-side viewpoint link at right) of The Village Voice has been covering the shenanigans of this sort within the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University.

UPDATE 1/2/05 -- Here's an excellent article by John Leo in US News & World Report about Wesleyan University, which sounds as though it may have been the model for Wolfe's fictional Dupont U.

Washington State Election Theft

2005-01-01T14:15:00.000-05:00

What can you say about the blatant theft of the governorship of Washington? It's a prime example (not that there aren't hundreds of examples, every single day) of the left's primary tactic. That is, they shriek to the heavens about their opponents' supposed illegal or immoral behaviors, when those behaviors are in fact the left's own stock in trade. While the MSM prattles on and on about "questions" in Ohio, they seem to find very little to note in the patently obvious invention of additional votes that put Democrat Christine Gregoire over the top in the third vote count.

Just a year ago, none of this would ever have seen the light of day. Now we have the blogs, and there is some excellent work going on tracking this travesty. It may yet all come to naught in this particular race, but it will add to the already overwhelming evidence of the evil to which the increasingly powerless and desperate left has descended. Sound Politics, Pull on Superman's Cape, and Michelle Malkin are but a few following this outrage.

There IS Some Good News

2005-01-01T07:51:00.000-05:00

Here's an amazing story about a little girl who actually paid attention in class, and saved hundreds of lives on one of the beaches in Thailand last week. Wow.

Real Science -- For a Change

2004-12-31T05:01:00.000-05:00

Steven Milloy's stuff at his Junk Science site (now added to my links at right) is always worth reading. Here's his take on some of the numbskulls trying to capitalize on the tsunami suffering -- namely, the always-odious soi-disant environmentalists.

Tsunami Words of Wisdom

2004-12-31T04:51:00.000-05:00

Here's an excellent article from the editor of the London Telegraph, Boris Johnson. His best part:

One can see that this is in the spirit of the hysterical precautionary principle that now bedevils our legislation, but it is mad. It may offend our species' sense of self-importance, but when a thunking great hunk of rock comes hurtling out of space, to splat this planet like an egg, it is time to admit gracefully that our number is up.

And here's the always superb Peggy Noonan from the Wall Street Journal. (When I wrote my "No Class..." post, I thought we'd have perhaps just a few sickening examples of people trying to score political points off this unfathomable tragedy. But people never fail to disappoint, and the few have now become the many. But as Noonan says, "Such people are slyly asserting their own, higher sensitivity and getting credit for it, which is odd because what they're actually doing is using dead people to make cheap points.")

A Way to Help... If You're a Geek

2004-12-29T16:53:00.000-05:00

For most of us, the only thing we can do to help the poor people affected by the unthinkable tragedy of the tsunamis is to donate our cash (and dozens of other blogs have recommended destinations for this money). Sri Lankan blogger Sanjiva Weerawarana, in addition to having some appalling eyewitness commentary on the disaster, also has a way for computer programmers to help (at least those who "can write some PHP stuff and know Mambo.")

No Class...

2004-12-27T17:27:00.000-05:00

It took exactly no time at all for the chattering classes to make political hay out of the enormous suffering in Asia. Lord William Rees-Mogg, whose prediction of a 1990s global depression should recommend his opinion to us all, wrote in today's London Times that the devastation of tsunamis should have us abandoning our conceit of skyscrapers and (of course) getting serious about global warming. I'm left wondering whether, if this unfathomable disaster had occurred thirty years ago, it would have been evidence in support of the drastic steps to prevent the ice age that the likes of Rees-Mogg were predicting back then.

UPDATE 12/28/04: Here's commentary on Powerline about another asshat with this kind of moronic take on this unspeakable tragedy.

Notes on Lori Berenson

2004-12-27T16:36:00.000-05:00

I don't know the truth of the Lori Berenson case. Berenson has languished in Peruvian prisons since late 1995 when she was accused of being a member of a Cuban-style revel movement, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). First convicted by military tribunal in accordance with draconian anti-terrorism laws, Berenson was later given a civilian trial after those laws, and the convictions from the courts they spawned, were overturned by Peru's Supreme Council of Military Justice. Sadly for her, the civilian court (which was clearly no model of fine jurisprudence either) convicted her again. Last month that conviction was upheld by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Berenson will likely remain in jail until 2015.

There can be no doubt that Berenson has been mistreated. But several things are troubling. This website, which documents that mistreatment, completely ignores the fact that part of the house she rented in Lima was sub-let by (according to The Economist) "more than a dozen heavily armed MRTA guerrillas." Indeed, they speak little of the accusations against her, other than to call them "preposterous." The site also claims Berenson was subjected to double jeopardy, a claim that wouldn't be accurate even under US standards of justice.

But therein lies the biggest problem of all. When a well-meaning American moves to another country, even if it's truly to do good, he should go with the full awareness that he is no longer protected by our notion of proper jurisprudence. I truly hope justice is done for Berenson. (Admittedly, though, she's done herself n0 favors with her videotaped outburst defending the MRTA as a "revolutionary movement" in a country that has been riven by terrorism, or with her marriage to an MRTA militant she met in prison.) Perhaps it already has been, and perhaps not; if nothing else, this sad episode should serve as a reminder to those who denigrate American justice that we are truly blessed to have what we have here.

Religion and Reason

2004-12-26T14:58:00.000-05:00

In National Review's current issue, Ramesh Ponnuru's cover article had this gem: "Liberals tend to assume, without reflection, that the rational view of an issue is the one that most non-religious people take. The idea that a religious tradition could strengthen people's reason -- could help them reach rationally sound conclusions they might not otherwise reach -- rarely occurs to them."

Those two sentences speak volumes about the lack of deep thinking on the left. I'd go one step further, though. Few of the liberals I know have ever really thought about their beliefs. Most of their deeply held convictions are based not on reason at all, but on pure emotion.

And therein lies the doom of the left. Meaning well is not the same as doing good. Most of them do mean well, but their religion -- and the doctrine of the left is akin to religion, no less faith-based for most of its practitioners than is any godly creed -- calls for ignoring the actual results of putting that faith into practice. It is here that they fall short on the "doing good" part.

Read This

2004-12-24T07:17:00.000-05:00

Victor David Hanson's latest is not to be missed.

Worth Searching (and Spending) For

2004-12-24T06:53:00.000-05:00

Read this story about one man's quest for toy guns for his boys. As I have a boy on the way, I'm filing it away for reference.

Just one thing is missing here: the beauty of the Internet. A quick Google search, and my first click turned up a site for this stuff.

(Not to wish precious time away, but I'm really looking forward to when my boy's old enough for the real deal...)

Corporate Thoughts #1

2004-12-23T17:49:00.000-05:00

Diversity is crap.

I mean that in so many ways. First, because for most people bandying the term about, it's just PC-speak for racism -- oh, sure, racism that's supposed to help victims of past discrimination, but still racism: favoring and disfavoring based on the accident of birth of skin color.

And that whole helping of victims thing rings a bit hollow nowadays. I had an intern a few summers back, a lovely, sweet, bright, witty young lady who has since joined our company. She was a "two-fer" -- the favored sex, and a favored ethnicity. But when I had to make accomodations for her to take her planned summer trip with her family to Switzerland, it occurred to me that we weren't remediating past discrimination -- we were just creating some new discrimination, favoring this young woman who'd had all the advantages that wealth and health and good looks had to offer, over some poor white trash male who was the "wrong" sex and the "wrong" color.

Recently, our HR manager joked about a young man who we had to fire that it was good he was white and male. That should be chilling, but it isn't for most people. It's the kind of thing that leads to the ghettoes and the camps and the killing. Is that where we're going?

The other thing about diversity that rings hollow is that somehow we "need" it to be successful. But the firms in China and India currently kicking our butts, and those in Japan a few years back that were doing the same before being supplanted by even more economical Asian economies, have no diversity at all. At least not the kind usually discussed in our addled conversations here in America.

But there's hope on the diversity front -- the addled conversations may be becoming less so. My company has recently been referring to real diversity -- of opinion, of background, and so on. Perhaps the accidents of birth of sex and color may one day be relegated to the background, where they belong.

The Baby Morons

2004-12-22T04:27:00.000-05:00

I've long had a theory that, between the conception and birth of each child, both parents lose 95% of their mental capacity.

Since I'm now in that between-conception-and-birth gap, I've been watching myself closely, like Charlie in the latter half of Flowers for Algernon. So far I seem to be faring well, but perhaps it's because my mind is slipping so badly I can't even see my own decline.

But I can still recognize examples of that decline in others. One of the main bits of evidence since my wife and I announced our forthcoming bundle of joy is the sheer number of parents who seem to think it's either the height of wisdom or the very essence of humor to point out to us that our "lives are going to change." Well... yeah. What is it that compels otherwise seemingly normal people to intone this tautology? Would they say it to someone announcing he had cancer? Or to someone announcing he was moving to Kuala Lumpur?

I've been through many life-changing events, including some very jolting moves across this vast country of ours. Nobody has ever said this to me before. And it's not only what they say, but how they say it, as if to imply that billions of much more idiotic people than us hadn't survived this change!

Steady Earl to earth: I KNOW MY LIFE IS GOING TO CHANGE. I KNOW I DON'T EVEN REALIZE HOW MUCH. NOW PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE, YOU SMARMY NUMBSKULLS.

This Guy's Quick Thinking Saved Us All

2004-12-19T08:05:00.000-05:00

Via Powerline and Mark McDonald of Knight-Ridder:

Stanislav Petrov single-handedly prevented a nuclear war in late September 1983. He was in command of the Soviet Union's early-warning radar installation when a new satellite array, called Oko (The Eye), indicated a launch of five American Minuteman II ICBMs. While relations between the Soviets and Americans were especially awful at that time, just a week after a Soviet fighter had shot down a Korean airliner, Petrov knew something wasn't right. Why would the Americans start an attack with only five missiles?

He contacted his superiors and told them confidently (though he himself was less than 100% confident he was right) that it was a false alarm. The failure of any of the Motherland to turn to vapor in the next few hours proved he indeed was right, as did the subsequent investigation that showed the satellites had seen not the launch flash of the missiles leaving their silos, but sunlight reflected off some clouds over those silos. Oops.

Stanislav Petrov has not had an easy life since; he lost his wife, and now lives a meager existence in Moscow. While the Soviets acknowledged the problem with their system in the official follow-up reporting, there was no reward for those who prevented catastrophe. Petrov deserves the respect and gratitude of the world he saved.

All Right, Something Positive...

2004-12-18T12:47:00.000-05:00

My brother checked out my blog, and said it melted his laptop screen. Okay, so the past few entries haven't been in the Christmas spirit. How 'bout this?

My wife and I were visiting my parents in lovely Upper Michigan when the local news ran the tragic story of the fifteen-year-old girl in Wauwautosa, Wis., who had contracted rabies. Bitten by a bat at her church, she had ignored the problem until it was already a full-blown case of hydrophobia. (Honestly, this is a positive post!) We could only shake our heads at what seemed a sure thing that the poor young lady would die. Only five people ever survived rabies, and they had all had the vaccine.

But she beat the odds. With the aid of a new treatment by the folks at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, where she was put into an induced coma and given a combination of anaesthetics and antivirals, Jeanna Giese survived, and may yet make it home for Christmas.

That's a miracle.

Gun Control Dimwits

2004-12-18T08:40:00.000-05:00

Eugene Volokh reports on the gun ban proposed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Following the lead of crime-free cities such as our nation's capital, they aim to make possession of a handgun by anyone but the police or military a crime, and make it illegal to sell or distribute any firearm within their city limits.

For the good people there, who already suffer from the liberal idiocy pervading that place with such things as aggressive bums in their streets, I hope this attempt to deprive them of their constitutional rights falls flat on its smug left-wing thug face. But for those smug left-wing thugs who've been ascendant in that breathtakingly beautiful city, I hope it passes. I've had my visit out there, one I'll always treasure, and I hope my soon-to-be-born son can visit too. But if the numbskulls in charge have their way, they'll soon be assailed by much worse than strident pan-handlers; they'll be terrorized by the wave of crime and murder that always follows these moronic gun bans (just ask England). And my son will just have to visit breathtakingly beautiful north Georgia instead, where the citizens are free to carry a loaded handgun in their vehicles, so long as they keep them in plain view or in the glove compartment. And crime isn't a problem there.

Then and Now

2004-12-16T17:51:00.000-05:00

Sixty years ago today, the Germans launched a long-planned counteroffensive against the Allied army in Belgium. Their 500,000 men, who had been secretly assembling in the lightly defended area of the Ardennes forest for weeks, drove a salient into the Allied line in a desperate attempt to reach Antwerp and split the Allied army in two. The Germans hoped to achieve a forced peace on their western front.

The salient -- or "bulge" -- would give the battle its name. The Battle of the Bulge would last the next forty days and be the costliest of the war.

The men resisting the German action would not have a merry Christmas. They fought in snow and bitter cold against a savage enemy; 86 captured Americans would be machine-gunned in cold blood near Malmédy on December 17.

We have men fighting today with the same determination and courage, and facing conditions and and an enemy every bit as terrible, as in 1944. But if the Battle of the Bulge happened today, we would also have a Congress holding hearings to pin blame on political opponents for allowing half a million of the enemy to assemble unnoticed. Brigadier General Anthony MacAuliffe, whose reply of "Nuts!" to the German commander requesting his surrender of the surrounded town of Bastogne is the stuff of legend, would likely be keelhauled before a media even more hostile to our military than the enemy himself. Or thanks to the same perfidious media, we might win the battle but have it portrayed as a loss, as with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

Yes, it is a different world sixty years on from the start of that momentous battle. Time will tell if we will prevail in the great war of our time, but for now it seems that despite a military whose might makes our WWII forces pale in comparison, and despite an American majority who showed in the recent election that it has the will to see it through to the end, we can still look at our nation today and say that we have met the enemy, and he is us.

UPDATE: Here's an excellent article from Investor's Business Daily along the same lines as my post.

Going Nowhere Fast

2004-12-14T22:21:00.000-05:00

Hell is an eternity on a stationary bike.

To those of us who love cycling, who have ridden insane distances over even more insane terrain, who have known the unspeakable agony of a bicycle race, who have whiled away a sizeable percentage of our lives perched on a leather-covered two-by-four (on end) turning the pedals, riding the trainer shouldn't be a big deal. Same motion, same narrow saddle, same position -- right? Yes -- but with no variation, and no wind, and no scenery, something we find really enjoyable suddenly becomes absolutely appalling.

Is there anything worse this side of authentic torture? (And by "authentic torture," I don't mean the Abu Ghraib driven notion of humiliation as torture; after all, wearing bike clothes is humiliation.)

You, Of Course, Are a Dope

2004-12-13T19:33:00.000-05:00

I have the advantage of having a job where I get to spend a fair amount of time in an office, with an Internet connection at the ready. Given my short attention span, that means that whenever I get bored, I can pop onto my favorite websites and read.

As you'll find, I'm far better informed than you are. (But that's not what makes you a dope.) I get all this information -- what many of my business compatriots call "useless facts" -- from the likes of the sites I have links to over to the right of this post.

National Review Online is always my first stop in the morning after I've quickly checked the news. Their contributors are brilliant, so their blog ("The Corner") is excellent, and their articles always magnificent. (My first click there, if there's a new installment, is Jay Nordlinger's "Impromptus.") Victor David Hanson is always a top choice as well -- even meriting a link to his own website! These guys will truly make you feel intellectually inferior. But hey, you are, so what's the worry?

Steve Vinoski is my sole non-political link thus far. He's a super-geek whose output is usually gibberish to mere mortals, but who also peppers his stuff with cool music and techie toy commentary.

So yes, you are a dope. But check these folks, and my other links out, and maybe you'll pick something up to make you less of one.

University Nonsense

2004-12-12T08:17:00.000-05:00

There's been a bit of attention lately to the left-wing tilt of America's universities, along with all the pap (blatant political pressure from professors, ideological indoctrination passed off as "classes," and the like) accompanying that reality.

My question is this: if you're a sensible person -- that is, you find the wholesale exclusion of conservative thought from campuses as odious as I do -- why do you send your alma mater money? Because your school is almost certainly no less guilty than any other of the leftist intolerance (there are a few, such as Hillsdale, that still welcome a range of opinions, but they're so few that they won't enter into our debate). Yet if you're like so many of my friends, you contribute to the annual fundraising drive, and you support the school further with your (fungible) dollars by being a rabid fan of its sports program.

Here's my advice. Cut 'em off: no more contributions, and no more pouring your precious cash into their money-making "amateur" sports teams. The schools will start to amend their ways when they feel the pain in their wallets, and certainly no sooner. They can get all the bad press National Review and The Economist can send their way, but as long as the coin keeps pouring in, they'll change not at all.