Even the collectivists ...
Even the collectivist-leaning newspapers seem to be questioning the value of AIDS treatments as they are administered by the mainstream medical "community"(via Dean Esmay). This article is about the new drug Nevirapine, which most collectivists are screaming at the government about, insisting that the drug companies be made to supply it at little or no cost to any Third-Worlder who has any disease at all that may be said to be AIDS, by whatever definition is politically convenient. But there may be a problem:

This is the drug that countless campaigners—spanning the political spectrum from George Bush to Bono—wish to give all Africans "free access" to. South African President Thabo Mbeki has been savagely pilloried for attempting to stop the drug's distribution to black South Africans. South African lawyer and journalist Anthony Brink's scathing report "The Trouble With Nevirapine" documented the long-known "problems" with the drug. The report was widely read by South Africa's leadership, and is the source of furious debate between black South Africans and the mostly white-run media, which still ridicules all criticism of U.S.-imported AIDS drugs and protocols as being a symptom of not caring about AIDS victims...
"Of all the AIDS drugs, Nevirapine is the most acutely toxic," explained Dr. Dave Rasnick, a fierce critic of the government's AIDS research agenda, and a former drug developer. "It shows its toxic effects quickly. It has been documented in the medical literature for years that a single dose of Nevirapine can kill a person. People don't normally drop dead from taking a protease inhibitor, but that is what happens with Nevirapine. The rationale for this stuff is just as bizarre as it could be."

But not so bizarre for those who've been following the threads on Dean's blog or have read Duesberg's and Mullis's books. Again, I would like to know whether mortality rates in Africa, for all causes, have actually been rising when you leave out the thousands murdered by collectivist AIDS "activists". A little less activity, please.

Americanism - the religion of the future?
David Gelernter has a stimulating thought-piece in Commentary about the origins of "Americanism" in biblical Puritanism. It's not like we didn't all know everything he's saying, but we are rarely reminded of the importance of these thoughts so frankly and powerfully:

The idea of an “American creed” has been around for a long time. Huntington lists its elements as “liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.” I prefer a different formulation: a conceptual triangle in which one fundamental fact creates two premises that create three conclusions.

The fundamental fact: the Bible is God’s word. Two premises: first, every member of the American community has his own individual dignity, insofar as he deals individually with God; second, the community has a divine mission to all mankind. Three conclusions: every human being everywhere is entitled to freedom, equality, and democracy.

My only quibble with this thinking is that the basis of what Gelernter calls "Americanism" could have and, I feel, would have emerged without America, even without Christianity. Individual freedom, equality of opportunity and especially optimism form an irresistible creed that could have become attached to Russia, China, Brazil or even Africa, had history been different. I count myself lucky that I live in the country which turned out to be the vessel for the triumph of reason. But I don't fool myself that there is anything inevitable or sacred about the way history unfolded. Certainly, though, looking at it the other way, I don't refuse to recognize the wonderful and hopeful reality of modern capitalism because it emerged in its most bountiful blessedness in the country I call home.

Kudlow breaks the story
Larry Kudlow's excellent new blog lays out the reasons to be optimistic about the economy. The bad news is the government is not shrinking:

However, with the flood of new revenues, this year's federal budget is still overspending.Domestic non-entitlement program spending excluding homeland defense is rising at a 4.1 rate, more than twice the pace of core inflation. But this may be changing. According to this morning's Washington Post, the first really tough Bush budget planned for FY 2006 (due out next month) may be essentially unchanged from this year's expected totals outside of defense and homeland security.According to reporter Jonathan Weisman, the administration's budget request "... would freeze most spending on agriculture, veterans and science,slash or eliminate dozens of federal programs,and force more costs, from Medicaid to housing, onto state and local governments...". The rapid growth of federal health care and other entitlements would also be slowed markedly.

OK, I'm not really expecting government to shrink much. But I'll always remember what Jeb Bush said at his 2002 inauguration as Governor of Florida, right across the street here in Tallahassee. He pointed to all the state office buildings surrounding the Capitol and said he hoped that in the next four years he could empty out half the buildings. Ah, sweet dreams. Now if his brother could make a similar gesture in Washington next Thursday, then we'd be getting somewhere.

Help others, help ourselves
Michelle Malkin, via Cap'n's Quarters, makes the point that disaster-stricken Indonesians may be glad that the US and Aussie military is out there with huge resources just as ready to come to their aid as they are ready to overthrow bloody dictators. Maybe the larger point is that if you're going to be poor and downtrodden it may be a good idea not to be too insulting and contemptuous to the free and prosperous countries that can save your butt when Mother Nature gets all nasty on you. Then you may want to think, why are they free and prosperous and we're all poor and downtrodden? Then you may want to read this book.

The essential political conundrum
Anyone who's read much of my blog knows how little respect I have for the electoral process. Unfortunately, I don't have a really good idea how to replace it, under the present circumstances. Voting, like it or not, is at the heart of the political system that has kept this country the free-est and most prosperous country on the face of the earth, although I can agree with the sentiment that that's damning with faint praise. Yet, sometimes a faulty process is all that stands between liberty and socialistic tyranny. That's why this November I voted for the first time in 28 years.
That's also why this post at Powerline is so important. For the electoral process to be shattered from the left would be a disaster. It would guarantee the dominance of the party that's better at fraud and demagoguery. And there's no doubt in my mind that's the Democrats. Hindrocket has got the point down:

It seems to me that we have two choices: upgrade our electoral system and guard its integrity with at least the fervor that we bring to preventing, say, underage drinking, or face the inevitable crisis when it comes.

And if we can't be any more successful at shoring up the electoral system than we've been at preventing underage drinking, there's not going to be much left of the system in a very short time. The only real solution to the inadequacies of the electoral system is to restrict the growth of government, restricting the importance of voting and therefore of voting fraud. With government growth controlled, the economy will be free enough to expand to the point where it overwhelms the power of the politicians to do harm. When government controls only a fifth or a tenth of this country's productive resources, instead of the present half, fraud and demagoguery will not be so much of a threat to the world's only real hope for freedom and prosperity.

Foreguess?
SO here we are on Wednesday and the forecast low temperature for Friday has changed from 37F to 42F! Five degrees' difference in two days. Let's see, so that gives, over ten years, leeway, at two and a half degrees a day, of approximately ten thousand degrees, one way or the other. And since we can't go lower than absolute zero, most of this is on the upside. So look for, in the next ten years, a forecast that the temperature in Tallahassee will approximate that of the surface of the sun.

Update Wednesday night. The forecast low for Friday is now 47F! Ten degrees since Monday. I'm looking forward to Tallahassee's temperature rising to that of the INTERIOR of the sun! Seriously, what do they use for computer models to get these numbers? And how can they claim that the computer models of "global warming" are so much better than those used to predict Tallahassee's temperature that they couldn't possibly be off by a factor of just a few degrees over the next century or so? My opinion of the scientific literacy of any country that's accepted the Kyoto Protocol has descended to new lows. I forecast further disillusionment.

Omissions and distortions
this is a good summary of the state of the reaction in the blogosphere to the CBS report on Rathergate. Even this lengthy and thorough review, however, doesn't zero in on the essential omission from the report:
Who actually created the offending documents? When? Where? And, most important, Why? What were they thinking? Were the forgeries stimulated by CBS, by the DNC, by the Kerry campaign, by a combination? How likely is it that they just appeared out of nowhere just in time to be used at the height of W's reelection campaign?
I don't think enough has been made about the lack of information supplied by CBS as to the whereabouts and nature of the original documents, although the above analysis comes close in this section:

Where Were the Pristine Documents?

The Report uncovers the poor decision making taking place within CBS News September 9-10, but misses one failure of CBS News in its CBS Evening News broadcast Friday evening. From the transcript:

Rather: Document and handwriting examiner, Marcel Matley, analyzed the documents for CBS News. He says he believes they are real but he is concerned about what exactly is being examined by some of the people now questioning the documents because deterioration occurs each time a document is reproduced and the documents being analyzed outside CBS have been photocopied, faxed, scanned, and downloaded, and are far removed from the documents CBS started with which were also photocopies.
Here is CBS News "attacking" its critics because they don't have the quality of copies that CBS News had available. This is absolutely shameless. The only reason that other experts were not analyzing pristine copies is because CBS News had refused to make them available, even though CBS News claimed to have pristine copies, according to the Chicago Tribune (annoying reg. req.) on Sept. 14 (Laura Bush says papers likely forged):
CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said Monday that the network possesses what it believes to be so-called "first generation" copies, duplicated directly from the original documents.

But the copies posted on its Web site are somewhat blurred and speckled, suggesting repeated copying.

Perhaps you think I'm making too big a deal about this, but CBS News thought it important enough to site [sic - RS] in their major statement on September 15 (Exhibit 3H, page 2 of 3 [PDF]):
Again, the documents used for the 60 MINUTES Wednesday report were copies, and most of the analysis fueling the current controversy is based on scanned, downloaded, faxed or re-copied copies.

CBS either knew or didn't know the original source of the documents. And by original I mean who sat down at a computer and typed them out? Or, if they were authentic, who stored them somewhere for thirty years and made copies for CBS? If they knew and aren't telling, there are still several more shoes to drop in this story. If they didn't know, they had no business going ahead with this story. Either way, they are still stonewalling. Where are E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North when you need them? Because sooner or later someone's going to find out exactly where the documents came from, who knew and why they never told anyone. And then CBS is going to find out what the term "cleaning house" really means.

Compressed ideas

I left the following comment on Jane Galt's site:

No matter how many laws you make against cannibalism, no matter how many "ethicists" say it's never right, when they get hungry enough some people will eat others. Does that make cannibalism "right"? Don't know. But it sure makes it a feature of life as we know it, one that, however, is at the very edges of normality. To use the extreme possibility of cannibalism to enforce vegetarianism at all times makes no sense. These controversies remind me of Ayn Rand's condemnation of the use of "emergency ethics", where people treat every day life as an extreme circumstance, in order to bend others to their will.

Like in many comments, I felt a bit claustrophobic, and that the comment as written didn't go all that well with the topic, which was torture. I knew that the thoughts were connected, but I may have left a bit much up to the reader. So here goes with the expanded version:
Torture, like cannibalism, is a Bad Thing. No sane man wants to think he would ever torture anyone, even in the most extreme circumstances, any more than any sane man wants to think he would ever eat human flesh, and especially not kill another man in order to eat him. Cannibalism has always existed, though, even in supposedly civilized circles, when circumstances push a man to the edge of survival. From becalmed sailors to Andes plane-crash survivors to snowbound wagon-train parties in the Rockies, cannibalism hovers at the edge of our consciousness as one of those things that you just hope you never have to think about. But you know you might. And you wonder, just as young men wonder how they will respond in combat, how you would respond. I don't suppose anyone's ever done a data analysis to determine how many men, when faced with the stark choice of eating human flesh or dying, have chosen to die. I suspect the proportion would be somewhat higher than most people would think, especially when the man has only himself to worry about.
Similarly with torture, one can blather and speculate endlessly, but when terrorists do have a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in Manhattan - or Dallas, if you'd rather! - and you have captured one of the terrorists and you have good reason to think he knows how to find and disarm the bomb, the impulse to do anything to him to get the information is liable to be overwhelming. To say that the lives of millions of good men is not worth the suffering, even the great suffering, of one profoundly evil man just doesn't make sense. Such thinking can be seen as evil in itself.
Right now an obscene equivalence is being drawn between harsh questioning, psychological pressure and cultural leverage on one hand and physical torture on the other. It is as though vegetarians were pressing the view of the absolute evil of eating the meat of slaughtered animals by alleging that eating animal meat leads inexorably to cannibalism. The slippery slope is a classic fallacy. Just because men eat the meat of cows does not make it more likely they will eat other men. In fact, just the opposite may be postulated. Men who have cows and pigs to kill and eat are less likely to kill and eat each other.
Similarly, a commonsense attitude to effective interrogation techniques is not likely to lead to physical torture in extreme situations. Emergency ethics do not give much guidance to the ethics applicable to everyday life.

EEeek!
What's up with Dean Esmay? He's letting a liberal into the sacred precincts. And 26 years old! I've got shoes older than that, as Lenny Briscoe, who will live forever, unlike Jerry O!rbach, often says. Well perhaps this twig can be bent into a more acceptable shape. He's got to be courageous to jump into this frying pan. But then I find the posters and commenters over there at Dean's World are all pretty feisty. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Tidal wave of commentary
The CBS "Rathergate" report has spawned an overwhelming tsunami of analysis like this on the blogosphere. There's too much in too many places to even read, much less digest. But I love it all. Maybe in a couple of days it will die down a bit and I'll be able to tell what may come of all this. Nothing yet, though, has appeared about who actually typed out the offending documents, how that happened and who may have connived at the slanders. W should sue for defamation of character. Now THAT would be a story!

Lead and sugar
Don't say I never did anything for you. I finished the commodities book I plugged a few posts back. His basic advice: lead and sugar. The Red Chinese are building many cars, each of which needs a lead-acid battery. The whole world is becoming even more addicted to and able to afford more sugar. In both cases production is difficult to ramp up. Don't blame me if aliens come down and give us a brand new power source and we don't need lead-acid batteries any more. Or if the same, or a related bunch of aliens bring along a new taste sensation, easily produced from ordinary rocks, that totally displaces sugar.

Too darn hot
As you can see here Tallahassee is just too warm for January. Oh, I know you Minnesotans are jealous, but I could use some of that 30-degree weather coming later in the week. It is instructive how much the forecasts change as the days go by. Friday's low is supposed to be 37F now (on Monday). How much you wanna bet it'll be three to four degrees different, one way or the other, by the time it actually becomes Friday? And these people say they can tell the whole Earth will be 3.5 degrees warmer in a hundred years! Right!

World's greatest mass murderer
As now reported by the New York Times (via Instapundit - you didn't think I'd go to the NYT of my own volition, did you?), DDT is an effective agent against malaria. The use of DDT has been opposed for four decades now by "environmentalists" who care more about rumors of thinning egg shells than they do about tens of millions of proven dead children and Third World residents. But then Third Worlders don't contribute to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, do they? And the impetus for this insane genocide came from one book: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, who thereby qualifies, beating out Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Genghis Khan, Attila and the Pope(s) for the most prolific killer of human beings in the history of the planet. How do you like your blue-eyed, oh-so-sincere ruthless lying hypocrite, Mr. Death?

A hobo is a hobo
What these Hawaiians don't understand is that "homelessness" has little to do with mental illness or alcoholism or even being a veteran. People wander the streets of a nice warm place like Hawaii because it's easier than getting a job. When you've got legions of social workers and a permissive bureaucracy showering you with temporary shelter when it rains, food, even money in the case of SSI-grifters, "disabled" veterans and even the retired, why should you take on the cares and woes of regular bill-paying? When the cops won't arrest you for vagrancy and you have no self-respect and regard yourself as a victim of an "unfair" society, and you've given up on yourself, what could possibly keep you off the public beaches and streets and parks? Wait a minute, I'm almost convincing myself to go bumming in Hawaii. But no. I still have dreams.

Commodities - again
I've been reading about commodities since the Sixties, but have never done any investing, for the simple yet powerful reason that I've never had any money to invest! But I just got this guy's book and am all cranked up again about the possibilities. I've always liked commodities because they're easy to understand. People eat more meat and less corn and the price of corn goes down. Simple. Wait a minute. People eat more meat, say because of the Atkins diet, and so the price of feed corn for hogs goes up, putting pressure on farmers to plant more feed corn and less man-corn and raising its price. Hmm. Maybe it isn't quite so simple after all. But it's a heck of a lot more transparent, at least in theory, than corporate IPO skullduggery and whether housewives will keep buying Martha Stewart tablecloths at K-mart even though she's in prison. Or will the extra publicity make the housewives even more eager to buy Martha Stewart stuff? That calculation makes the corn/meat formula look like child's play. So if I ever do get any money to invest, commodities will get a long hard look. Besides, money invested in commodities would provide perfect blogmeat. Every day something happens to the price of corn.

Tuning
Having the most difficult time tuning my violin. Makes me think perhaps my hearing's gone, but then I "click in" and everything sounds right. I'm sure this is just one of those skills that one improves by constant practice. It would be nice to have a violin that you could just pick up and push a button and presto! it's all properly tuned. But then one would complain about the loss of the hands-on organic process of tuning up. The point, though, is to be able to play the thing. I just did a fairly creditable job of "Ode to Joy" so I must be doing something right. Last night it was "Gaudeamus Igitur" which brought me back to my prep school days which look so happy in retrospect but which in truth were nasty and confusing and depressing. But then what isn't when you're fourteen?

Robots, not immigrants
The Japanese have solved their labor shortage(via Slashdot). What, you say, a labor shortage in Asia? Why not just allow immigration? I can tell by that comment you're not Japanese. Wouldn't want to dilute the master race. But robots will do fine. They work hard, don't complain, don't burden the schools and prisons. Heck, we could use the idea here. Just imagine what a great job robots would do patrolling the Mexican border and then scuttling off to a factory, field or mine to do the jobs the illegal immigrants they've just captured would have done. They could be referees at NBA games, too. And a robot could sit in a chair and play Freecell just as well as any other government bureaucrat could. It could even be programmed to make positive comments about the latest management improvement plan.

The Motley Fool goes even farther (via Slashdot):

So, now we have machines that are pretty much capable of taking over the business of making other machines. It seems that all we have to do now is get them each an American Express (NYSE: AXP) card and teach them how to max it out, and we can take humans completely out of the loop. It shouldn't be too hard. In fact, I'll bet the cards are already in the mail -- preapproved.

We'd better not let these credit-card-carrying law-abiding buckets of bolts have the number of the ACLU, though. Why do I have a feeling the future holds funerals for rusty old robots, fake marriages between robots, robots smuggling in illegal immigrants to be their servants, and, NO! NOT THAT! but yes. Robobloggers!

Gere makes my point
That's the nice thing about Hollywood "activists". You can always rely on them to prove how utterly stupid and self-absorbed they are whenever you make a comment, such as my last post, about their stupidity and inability to deal with the world as it is. Can you imagine someone casting a movie and saying "who can we get to play the young naval officer? I know, how about Richard Gere. He played one in An Officer and a Gentleman." This is how actors get typecast. They aren't able to imagine how a wide variety of real people view the world because they see only their little part of it. Perhaps it's because they're so insecure that they cling desperately to one character. That's what makes William Shatner so good, perhaps the best of the lot. When he's Captain Kirk, you see Captain Kirk, not William Shatner. Yet when he becomes T. J. Hooker (was that the cop he played?) there's no Kirk there. Remember his portrayal of a Rush-Limbaughesque radio talk show host on a Columbo in the Eighties? The character was cartoonish and didn't do justice to Limbaugh's complex style. But within the limitations of the writing Shatner made the personality come alive. And I'm sure if I met Shatner, he would have a distinct and probably pleasant and interesting private personality.

Regular Whittle-ing

Looks like we'll have a regular dose of Bill Whittle for this year, if his resolutions hold up. His essays have the admirable quality of producing more energy than they absorb, proving that punditalicious pontificating is not a zero-sum game. I like his comments about actors and politics. I have noticed that some of the most acclaimed actors don't seem to be very good at projecting a distinct personality. I differ, though, in that I think the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Diane Keaton, Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, among others, don't do a very good job of absorbing different characters and portraying them on the screen. They adopt a particular character style early in their careers and then portray that same character over and over again. That's what they think acting is. Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier can play almost any character and make you forget they have an off-screen persona. Yet, their off-screen characters are distinct and interesting. The first group are the same, on-screen and off. If I were Whittle, I'd develop these thoughts into a 25,000 word essay.

First tune
I played my first tune on my reconstructed, resurrected violin. And it was: Land of Hope and Glory, music by Elgar, words by Arthur C. Benson. I figure this is some kind of commencement so I chose music which made me feel like I was graduating all over again. Here's a link. Googling "Land of Hope and Glory" brought up some snarky "Imperialistic Anthems" pages and a disgraceful BBC contemptuous dismissal of anyone who would want to sing "God Save The Queen" or "Britannia Rules the Waves", one of the all-time best. Now if you ask me that's the problem with the Land of H and G, they've had a queen for too long. They need a real non-poufter King, and not that Charles fellow neither. Andrew might do it, he's got the Henry V model to look to, not to mention Richard III!

Got it!
That darn "Monty Hall problem" has resurfaced, thanks again to the demonic Dean Esmay. But this time, after perusal of this site and this US Naval Academy site, I think I've figured out an explanation that satisfies me. It's an odd situation, because you know what the right answer is, you just can't convince yourself why it should be so.

As everyone knows, the problem goes like this:

Monty Hall offers you the choice of three doors, A, B, and C. Behind one of them is a pile of cash, behind the other two are booby prizes. No tricks or hidden facts. You choose Door A. Then, before you see what's behind A, Monty says "Wait! I'm going to help you out!" and opens Door B. There's a booby prize behind it. Then Monty says, "Now, do you want to stay with your original choice or choose Door C?" What should you do?

Well, to cut to the chase, you should switch. All the experiments agree. But why? It's simple, really. When you were initially presented with three doors, the chance that the pile of cash was behind A was 1/3. Now, when presented with the choice of Door A or door C, if you maintain that the chance of the cash being behind A is now 1/2, you are saying that, when you first chose A, you somehow, magically, were able to choose a door that had a 1/2 chance of being the right one! Now how could you possibly choose a door with a 1/2 chance of being the right one when you had three to choose from? With no information, you couldn't. And, as Sherlock says, when you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable it seems, must be true.

Update
OK, so maybe it's "Monte Hall". One consideration bothers me about the above analysis. So there you are sitting in front of three doors. What if, before you choose, Monte(y) says, "Hey, you know what? I'm feeling great today! I'm going to really help you out!" And he opens door B, which he knows does not have the cash behind it. You've got two doors left to choose from, just like in the above. But in this case your chances are obviously 50/50. So how is this choice different from the choice above, where all you've done that you haven't done here is commit to one particular door and Monte(y) has opened one of the other two doors? How can a choice inside your head influence probabilities in the real world? Does this have anything to do with the Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen gedankenexperiment!? Bell's Theorem? Something to work on.

cancer, in the first instance, is not a disease of cell multiplication

Read this and tell me if your ideas don't change just a little bit? Not a teensy smidge? If not, then go meta.

Dean Esmay on the job
The bloggers are on the hunt after this AIDS nonsense. I stumbled across this post by Dean Esmay, who I have seen in many a comments section laying about him to good effect. The controversy I've been following for years now seems to be heating up for real. I bought and read Duesberg's book, and then Kary Mullis's, thinking there had to be some simple explanation for the apparent inconsistencies in AIDS logic (or lack thereof). Having never gone anywhere near a test tube since high school, I may seem to be at a disadvantage. But as a lawyer I know something about proof. And as a bureaucrat I know something about governments. And this looks like the story of the century. So far. Remember, you didn't hear it here first. People have been saying HIV doesn't really cause "AIDS" for years. And yet the band played on.

Atheists in love

The New York Times had, for a wonder, an interesting article, found via Arts and Letters Daily, asking what appear to be mostly irreligious people what they believe to be true that they can't prove. Some talk about life on other planets, rat "consciousness", even that there is no God. Of course one can't and shouldn't have to prove a negative, so that one's a bit weird. I like the last one best, because it reflects my belief (unproven!) that people believe what they want to believe:

David Buss
Psychologist, University of Texas; author, "The Evolution of Desire"

True love.

I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.

Doubtful Zarqawi capture (hey, that would be a great name for a band!)

Drudge is reporting that Zarqawi has been captured in Baghdad. But since even Debka isn't going along with it, I'm inclined not to believe it. And I'm pretty gullible about believing things I want to be true.

Take gout. I went to the doctor and he told me I need a full physical and should start on allopurinol after the present attack subsides. No duh. Now I believe if I get on allopurinol I'll never have another gout attack and will be able to gambol about like a young lamb. Anyone who knows me is now shuddering and trying to erase a thoroughly horrifying mental image.

By the way, my father always used to say never go to the doctor unless you absolutely have to if you want to survive. Think about it. Who's almost always present when someone dies? A doctor. The correlation between time spent in the presence of a doctor in the last, say, month, and death must be close to 100%. So doctors cause people to die. Right? And people who are alive and healthy rarely come into contact with doctors. The correlation there is almost nonexistent. Hey, if we abolished all the doctors, no one would ever die again!

The slow extinction of the Russian male
Worried about overpopulation? Read this.

And, you gay marriage advocates, don't forget this part:

The rapid decline of the two-parent family in contemporary Russia undercuts prospects for substantial increases in national fertility levels.

Don't tell me two parents can be two guys named Bruce and Irving. You'll just make me mad.

Gout today
So the old gout is acting up aplenty today, with naproxen sodium - you know, that nice stuff that gives one heart attacks - as the only palliative. Can't bend my right knee beyond 90 degrees, but, hey, who needs all that extra flexibility, anyway? Never really use it, or only in my dreams. I have no idea how those in the old days kept from suicide when there was no real help at all for the pain and stiffness of gout. Looking forward to not having to hobble too much after my doctor's appointment this PM. I was thinking, this ailment-blogging could be big. Think of all the old - and not so old - whiners and cranks who sit around all day complaining about how their body is disappointing and betraying them. Some of them might be so old and weird that they would devote whole blog posts to their medical condition - oops. If they blogged, though, they might feel better. And a massive amount of quasi-medical information would be available to researchers. Ah, 'tis a brave new world.

Two in a row
Hey, that wasn't so hard! Blogging every day can be fun. Especially when one is groaning under the impact of a massive gout attack because one's doctor insisted on one coming in to see him before he prescribes any more medication. Yes, that's right, the medication that has been at least somewhat successful in dealing with massive gout attacks in the past EIGHT YEARS that the doctor hasn't seen fit to see one and actually do some modern doctoring. My appointment is tomorrow, but until then I'm somewhat "grognon" as Maigret might say. We'll see what new treatment il dottore comes up with to assure that this ancient demon doesn't wreck my once-beautiful corpus completely.

Steve Sailer has some interesting speculation about why Germ troops outfought the Brits and Yanks after D-Day. He rambles on about group cohesion. Say, Steve, you don't think it could be because they (the Germs) were defending their "heimat", do you? Or because they still had a good number of troops left alive who had been fighting since at least 1939 and some who had fought in the Spanish Civil War? Sure the Brits weren't all raw recruits, but few of the Yanks had much in the way of combat experience. Knowing just how to use your weapons in actual combat is a big advantage. It took the Soviets several years of losing millions to the Reichswehr to amass a significant force of battle-hardened veterans who could push the Germs back. And they still made a complete hash of the capture of Berlin, losing hundreds of thousands of tovarishes unnecessarily.

That's another good aspect of the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan. If we handle the troop rotation properly, we'll end up with a veteran corps of guerrilla-killers who could make the next campaign (Syria, are you listening?) much quicker and less subject to embarrassingly deadly mistakes.

Easily kept resolutions
Well, my first New Year's resolution is going to be to make at least one New Year's resolution. Hang on, I've already done it! What a good boy am I! And to get more intellectual, play the violin more, learn enough French to really enjoy France (if that's possible!) and cure my gout.

So I've still got something to do this year after all. What a relief.

I'd like to be able to paint like this guy. Maybe I already can but I just don't know it yet. But no, I don't want to learn and study and achieve a skill, I just want it handed to me, with the full package of ambition and energy and wit and humility. Like Michelangelo was handed his talent. Or Cellini. So that's not so much a resolution as a daft fantasy.

And I would like to blog once a day, at least. There, I said it though I didn't want to. I don't like people like Lileks and Instapundit who are always apologizing for not blogging. Make me feel like I want to be handed something for nothing. Ungrateful talented sillies.

Duesberg was right (?)

Does this article mean Duesberg was right to think that the only thing killing Africans other than the usual diseases that have been killing them for millennia is the medication they are given for the non-existent "AIDS" syndrome? What a kick in the head if he is finally vindicated after all these years! This is bigger than oil-for-food-scam or global warming-gate or any of the other frauds perpetrated by the new collectivists. Scary to think that just when I had about given up on the theory, after buying Duesberg's book, and Kary Mullis's, it may surface once again. This time, though, the blogosphere is ready to take it on big time and examine it from every possible point of view. Why do I feel the NIH and WHO are in big trouble? Couldn't happen to two nicer tyrannical slugocracies.

New America - it is I

Ok, so there's old Europe and New Europe, according to the God Rumsfeld. But more than that, there's Old America and New America. Gee, I wonder which is more important? Odd thing is, when you say Old America, one thinks of traditional, conservative, Bushist America. But like so many things these days, that's completely, 180 degrees wrong. Old America is the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Atlantic, Harper's, the "blue" states and all the cultural tyrants who attempt to impose Old Europe mores on America. Have we ever allowed Europe to do this to us? Will we ever? One hopes not, no matter how many third-world lackeys line up behind Chirac and Dan Rather.

Mistuh Chimpy frat-boy moron Bushitler - he dead!
Well, well, well. The Halliburton AWOL WMD shriekers didn't get the job done. What a surprise! This is the best gloat-meat since the impeachment. How burning with shame must the Kerryites - or, no, I guess I'd better call them the anti-Bushies - be. As Kerry said earlier in the campaign, they just can't believe they got beat by this idiot! That's the way to survive and thrive, underestimate an opponent who got a Harvard MBA, comes from one of the most powerful families in America, has all the right contacts and has Karl Rove on his side! Nice move! I actually voted, for the first time since 1976. Jimmeh C.'s term in office disgusted me so much that he turned me into an Objectivist, but even us Randianistas came out for this one. What a coincidence that it was in Carter's term that the Iranian thug-youth took our embassy personnel hostage. And then their colleagues - yes, I'm tarring all those idiot Islamists with the same brush, because it's got our blood on it - bombed Marines in Beirut, air passengers in Scotland, servicemen at Khobar Towers, sailors in Yemen, and oh let's not forget the several thousand in New York, the Pentagon et al. Payback's a bitch, you Muslim slime! But for those who survive, we've got freedom and democracy and property rights and a real non-totalitarian future for your children. All you have to do is not kill us. Is that too much to ask? If so, and you'd rather die than extend rights to your women and allow freedom of thought, we now have a President who will accommodate you.

Mistuh Know-it-all, he dead

I killed him. It just got too annoying, it was more of a nuisance than those irritating Al Qaedas, having this comprends-tous (sait-tout?) in my head. See, that's proof. I don't even have a clue if the French really have an expression corresponding to "know-it-all" in their silly language, which has now almost completely surrendered to me, {Only Compiegne and the Haute-Savoie are holding out, along with a few mountain villages in the Pyrenees} or if "comprends-tous" is used, how it should be spelt (wait a minute. Shouldn't that be "spelled"? Doesn't "spelt" have something to do with fish and their utterly irresponsible and Clintonian mating processes? Or is that smelt?) But I went ahead and put it down anyway, because darn it "comprends-tous" sounds better than "know-it-all" and I don't even care if some mindless truffle-snorters use or don't use a particular expression, or how they spell it. It serves my needs and so there you feckless foie-gras fanciers.

This is so liberating you just don't know. For 56 years now old monsieur (actually, far more likely to be mamselle!) comprends-tous has been beating me about the head and shoulders when I write or say anything that doesn't correspond to what dimwit wrote in some book around the time of the Flood, which may or may not have happened and I don't know and even care. More later, if I care to and if the Scotch doesn't do for me entirely and disenfranchise me by rendering me unable to vote for Bush on Tuesday, the result, obviously of a conspiracy between McEdwards and MacKerry. If I look really hard and drink a real lot I'm sure I can find those names somewhere on the bottle. Like it matters.

This fever will break

Saturday before the election, dear Diary, and here I am in a sweat, because this darn weather hasn't broken and I bought a half-gallon (no, I WON'T call it a "1.75-Liter" even though that's what it is) of Scotch (Duggan's Dew, 86.8 proof) to get me through the election. And by the way, couldn't they have just evened it out to two liters? If Bush wins, I celebrate, if he loses I drown my sorrows as I watch Kerry turn the keys of the country over to Osama. Either way the rapacious international Scotch merchants win and I turn up for work with a hangover.

And I know it doesn't really matter. I've been through this so many times before and it has never actually changed my way of living, except for that idiot Carter. The more I think about it I don't think I did vote for Carter in 1980, so 1976 was the last time I voted. Carter had broken his promise to run the govt. on "zero-based budgeting", which was the only reason I voted for him in '76. There was also that little matter of the hostages and the idiotic Olympic boycott. That's what Kerry would have done if he had been Prez in 1990. "Now, Saddam, you pull out of Kuwait or else the US will pull out of any Olympics that Iraq participates in and by the way the UN - and the entire Olympic Committee - except for you and probably Kuwait - is going to really, really punish you for killing your Olympians who don't perform properly. Oh, you're going to be so sorry!"

Naked spin
It was cool to see all the spinmeisters on TV utterly naked, without any clothes at all, not even clothed in plausibility. The spin-meter has gone off the scale and bears no relation to reality. I watched part of the debate and read liveblogging on the rest of it. I thought Bush clearly did better, calling out Kerry-bot 2004 on his opposition to the First Gulf War (what, not enough allies?) and his plans which contain no details except spending even more than the supposedly conservative Bush administration.

The Main Stream Media has abandoned any pretense of objectivity. Kerry-bot's weird mannerisms, his botching of the Bible and blathering about "Native American" (don't get me started) religions and his answering a question about his wife by talking about his mother and his ridiculously obvious "wink, wink" reference to Mary Cheney's lesbianism make this by far his worst performance. And yet the MSM call it a "draw" or even a win for Kerry. Absurd. Disgraceful. Inexplicable except by bias. I'm glad they're being so obvious. This is going to come back to haunt them big time, even if Bush loses. Which I have a feeling - heck, let's make it a prediction - that Bush is not going to do. I predict 52% for Bush, with 290-300 electoral votes. See, it's in print now, on the Web. It's at least as accurate as anything Taegan Goddard's ever said.

Much substance will come out of this debate to haunt Kerry, too. It's just the beginning of the most intense and interesting part of the campaign. Bush should be loaded for bear now. And, after last night, Kerry-bot's got nothing left.

Quote of the day - er - month

From Graham Greene's The Comedians:
"I get scared sometimes, too. I lose the way. It's frightening to be lost, isn't it, in a strange city, but when you get lost inside yourself ... Have another lager."

Easy forgetting

I've been finding it very easy to forget things lately, which is a great blessing. I forget my limitations, my grievances, my sins. I also forget about this little blog. But then when I remember, it's a good smiling memory and I find my way here easily.

Last night's debate was by all accounts a Bush "win". I didn't listen to it, having been ennui-ed out of my mind by the last one. I wonder if anyone else has ever verbified "ennui". I wonder if anyone else has ever used the word "verbified". Ah, enough innovation. And wondering. Kerry's positions do seem to be coming apart, unfolding and drooping like his face would if he stopped with the Botox. He seems to be out of ammunition. He's used "Halliburton, AWOL, WMD" (repeated ad libitum endlessly whether any of it makes any sense or not) and the other slogans until they're all used up. He really needs another one to get him to election day.
I didn't listen to or watch the debate, but I read it, on Hugh Hewitt and Ann Althouse. Even the puppy blender was liveblogging. It reminded me of "watching" the Fischer-Spassky championship in 1972 on PBS from Iceland when the moves would come in on a teletype and be recreated by an "expert" on a big board with slots and cardboard pieces. It's much more calming than having to look at the protagonists and wonder whether the odd drop of sweat or nervous tic was going to keep one of them out of the White House. From now on I'll read all the debates - oops, there's only one left. Maybe I'll read all real-time live events instead of relying on talking heads and deceptive video. Anything for equanimity.

Debate thoughts

Kerry held his own, but came up with nothing new that I could detect. The "global test" meme could be his worst moment. He really let it be known that there's one thing he does believe in and that's the necessity for getting international permission before the US does anything to safeguard itself. That's the only time he showed any passion, when he was talking about getting the UN involved in all the conflicts of the world, as if they've ever done anything positive about any conflict they ever got into. He even had the nerve to mention "global warming" but didn't dare bring up the ICC, which Bush used to some effect. That could come back to haunt him and should be showing up in an RNC commercial - soon!

Bush hit all the right themes, but could have been more forceful about the connection between 9/11 and Iraq and the War on Terror. There was too much about Iraq. I thought Lehrer would have a little more imagination. Does he really think Iraq deserves ninety percent of a foreign policy debate? Unless - you don't think! - he was purposely trying to hammer home what a terrible job he thought Bush was doing. There really isn't that much to say about Iraq any more. And Kerry never did say in any detail what his "secret plan" was.

Overall, it was the War of the Stump Speeches. On North Korea, I thought Kerry stumbled badly by appearing to come out against the multilateral talks. Bush said, "That's just what Kim Jong-Il wants to happen" and of course he's right but I don't delude myself that anyone's really going to notice. On Iran and the sanctions Bush caught Kerry out with the comeback that they hadn't started on his watch and Kerry never replied to that.

Bush now knows that Kerry's a worthwhile opponent and with any luck can boost his preparation a bit and hit back harder next time. Time for the gloves to come off.

Pre-debate frenzy


So O'Reilly is doing his best to keep me from watching the debates on Fox. I just don't like the fake neutrality he espouses. Before too long that attitude is going to look so pre-blog! Maybe it will be a good thing when all commentators declare their allegiance before they start to pontificate. I find it very handy to have someone declared as a liberal. Then I can stop listening to him. I no longer delude myself that any liberal has anything interesting to say. I saw Instapundit on Kudlow and Cramer earlier. Thought he did pretty well, although the blogger segment was awfully short. Now Instapundit is regarded as neutral by most anti-collectivist bloggers like me, but he seems to have come to that position honestly, from his gut, not just to get people to read him, but to get to the truth. My only problem with that attitude is that he has not yet realized that liberals really do have nothing real to say. But he's young yet. He'll learn.

I'll be looking for Bush to stay steady and on course. He knows exactly what he has to say and how he needs to say it. Kerry, if experience is any guide, will essentially go in winging it, hoping to score points like a boxer who knows he's behind in the judges' scoring and can only hope for a knockout. I just hope they aren't allowed to recycle their stump speeches.

Cars - again?!

Doesn't it burn you up when you see the ads this time of year from new car dealerships? They all say, "Hey, we've got 2005 models coming in and no room to put them anywhere! We've got to move out the 2004's pronto! Come in and get your best deal now!"

Wait a minute. How dumb do they think we are? Well, considering these ads play every year, they must work, so they must think we're plenty dumb, and I guess we are! But really, who believes that new car salesmen are sitting around in the summer with a lot full of cars, saying to each other, "Wow, it's a good thing we've got all this room for all these 2004 cars. Sure hope the manufacturers don't send us a whole passel of new 2005 models. Nah, that's not gonna happen."? Then October approaches, when new cars have been sent out from the factories for, what a HUNDRED YEARS NOW?? And trucks start showing up full of cars and the dealers expect us to believe they're SURPRISED???!!! So the best they can come up with is to put ads in the paper complaining that something that happens every year has happened again, darn it? Nope, no way they could have, for instance, only ordered the number of new cars they actually had room for! No way. Then the ads wouldn't work and they wouldn't be able to create in the prospective buyer's mind the image of car dealers stacking up cars three deep and desperately slashing prices in half to get rid of the old ones. The most amazing thing is that some buyers actually fall for this nonsense. The older I get, the dumber people get. And the sleazier car salesmen get.

Metaphors

The long-overdue Day of the Blogosphere may finally be dawning. How predictable was this? But, then, who predicted the rise of Protestantism out of the new technology of printing? Hmm. Everybody can read and comment on the original text and therefore see how stupid and vicious the hierarchy's reading of it is. And perhaps how irrelevant the "authentic" text itself is to everyday life. And then there's Open Source, the god of some lefty-types, but now serving as a model for the self-correcting blogosphere, inexorably crushing the idols of left and right. It IS a good thing for thousands of bloggers of every conceivable political and cultural orientation to see and comment on news events, isn't it? And for such comment to be instantly available to everyone with an internet connection? Or, at least, it has to be an improvement on a few rich white male Democrat "journalists" putting out the only "authoritative" texts of such events. We do all believe in diversity, don't we?

Becalmed in a hurricane
Here at ground zero it's barely raining, blowing a bit. I had a power outage last night, annoying only because the AC and fan went off. Storms make for cool days but warm nights, for some reason. I keep seeing pictures on TV of trailers blown to pieces and think "Gulp!" The rain and wind I've had so far, though, is barely sufficient to move the surrounding trees around. I'm looking more carefully at those trees. They seem to be tall and thin and far away from the trailer. Good. A large decrepit tree right over the bedroom would be worrisome. At least no one's ordered me to evacuate. I'd rather stay right here and read about Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

Stormblogging

Frances has finally showed up, or at least her far outskirts. The eye's still over Tampa and we're feeling strong winds and rain here in Tallahassee, so I guess for once the weather Cassandras were right. It IS a large storm. But I'm in my snug little trailer here, not worrying about anything. It would just be inconvenient if the lights went out just as I was bloggin

Ha.. Just my little joke. I've got plenty of time to evacuate if it should become necessary. Haven't I? Looking on the bright side, if this rain and wind keeps up maybe I'll get a day off work on Tuesday.

OK, back to reading about Buckingham's rebellion against Richard III. That's what I like about the Wars of the Roses. One surprise after the other.

The Wounds of Time

All I'm going to say about this is what a good thing it is that no one really has to worry about what happens to Bill Clinton any more. It doesn't matter, as it did in the days when he had his wandering finger on the nuclear button and his backup was Al-Gor. I certainly won't mention the rumors that his weak heart may be a result of cocaine ingestion, not Big Macs, or wonder why he didn't release his medical records while he was president (no capitalization deserved in his case).

Nuance

John Kerry says he can’t be blamed for voting to give authority to George Bush to wage war to liberate Iraq because how was he to know that Bush would take that authority and “use it in the wrong way”? He seems to think he can be absolved of the consequences of any action he takes if he didn’t predict those consequences in detail. In other words, he claims to have intended that Bush would not have used Congressional authority to go to war but would have, for example, NOT gone to war!

Isn’t Kerry responsible for the consequences of his votes in Congress? Isn’t he responsible for making the judgment that Bush would properly and responsibly (in Kerry's view) use authority granted him? How stupid does Kerry think people are? Or, perhaps more to the point, how stupid is Kerry?

Here at the end of August, the Kerry campaign doesn't seem to have any traction at all. I will be very surprised if he manages to gain any voters out of the Republican convention. If form holds, Bush will gain. He may gain big. And if by the middle of September Bush is ahead by five points or more in most polls, Kerry is an ex-politician. He has gone to join the choir invisible of politicians who never quite made it onto the big stage, like his former boss Dukakis, Mondale, Gore, Dole and his special buddy, Captain Oldsmobile. ( I just saw somewhere that nickname for Teddy Kennedy, and I love it!)

--

Gambella Massacre

It's amazing what you find just by ambling around the blogosphere. Actually, I found this site while I was looking at Africapundit. The Anuak blog tells a detailed story of the Ethiopian government's ethnic cleansing of an area of western Ethiopia called Gambella state. Here is a
map.
I have never heard about this. I followed the Ethiopia-Tigre-Eritrea story for years, mostly, I guess, because it corroborated my idea that collectivism always leads to violence. The stories on Anuak Genocide Watch are as bad as what came out of Rwanda, much worse than Bosnia and Kosovo. Because Gambella has no oil (that I know of) or uranium and doesn't fit any pet victim profile that would galvanize the UN into action (hah!), it has been totally ignored. It makes one wonder how many of these stories exist around the world, holocausts that fade unnoticed into history. Their motto is not "Never again". It's "That never happened". People care more about the elephant or the mountain gorilla than they do about Anuaks. The tragedy can be best appreciated by seeing where the survivors headed for refuge: Sudan!

Update: there is, apparently, an oil angle, though this article is irrationally biased against oil extraction. I understand the mistrust of government, but there's no reason why oil can't be produced to the profit of the Anuak. It will only be the fault of the left-leaning government if it isn't. To call the use of valuable resources "socially and environmentally destructive" tells you everything you need to know about the real agenda of "Genocide Watch" and their "Cultural Survival" project to keep people as pets, protected from the nasty twenty-first century so they can stay poor on their farms and never get it together to defend themselves from the Ethiopian government. I'm only linking to these collectivist fools because there's some interesting history in their article.

Oh, those fascinating Olympic sports! I tuned in to the coverage this morning and saw two teams of women playing something that looked like a cross between field hockey and water polo on land. I remembered before too long that there was something called "team handball" and this must be it. I'd never seen it before. It was the Hungarians, who all seemed to have their hair frosted in unison, and the Chinese, who seem to be able to come up with skilled athletes in any sport in a month or two after the sport is adopted in the Olympics. The US is definitely at a disadvantage in women's team handball, since hardly any Americans are even aware such a sport exists. All our athletes are out playing "beach" volleyball, which is now an Olympic sport distinct from regular volleyball. Maybe this is a trend. Why not have "beach" soccer or "beach" tennis or "beach" cycling, where athletes try to ride a bike through deep sand? No doubt they'd develop new bikes with big tires. Didn't the Romans set their gladiatorial combats on sand? I think "arena" comes from a word for sand. So once again the Romans were there first. But there's little blood in women's beach team handball, just a lot of screeching and hair pulling.

As for men's basketball, starring two NBA stars against the rest of the world, the US lost to Puerto Rico yesterday. Which is very odd, considering that PR is PART of the US! Does no one else find this disturbing? Why not the US vs. Florida in football? Florida would win. I've been puzzling over the autonomy of PR in basketball since I've been watching Olympic sports. I suppose it's an outgrowth of the move for independence, which has been soundly rejected by the Puerto Riqueno populace every time it's been voted on. And for good reason, considering that half or more of the PR populace receives US government Food Stamps funded by the taxpayers of the rest of the US. But still. In the Soviet era, Belarus and the Ukraine were not allowed to have separate Olympic teams. All their athletes had to play for the Soviet team, even when in the United Nations they had separate votes as part of the Soviet bloc. And you know who's responsible for all this nonsense? Yep. You guessed it. SHEMP!!

On the Lighter Side
Measurement. It's such an annoyance. The Metric Maniacs insist that a system invented during the French Revolution is clearly superior to the English system, based, as far as I can determine, on the size of various parts of the human body. Let's see, which is more universal, easier to understand? One ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along the Greenwich meridian or the size of my thumb?
I was watching this documentary about the feasibility (see http://denbeste.nu/) of a manned Mars mission, when I started thinking, OK, so this is it. We're going to the stars. For thirty years it's been really hard to actually believe it was going to happen.

But when we're out on Aldebaran a thousand years from now why should we be using a system of measurement based on a more or less random distance on a third-rate planet in a mediocre solar system in an average galaxy? OK, I've been reading Stephen Hawking, too. So English would be better. If we still have thumbs and feet. But maybe we won't.

So why not adopt a measurement system based on something that won't vary no matter where in the universe we go? I'm talking about light. The speed of light, that is. The light year is used extensively right now. It's neither metric nor English. Its only not universal because of that "year" thing. Why the time it takes for a somewhat average planet - etc. - to go around a mediocre star is relevant will not be apparent to our descendants on Aldebaran. A light year is of course a bit lengthy to be useful for cutting cloth or constructing football fields. But that's where exponents can come in handy. We can use an appropriate fraction of a light year to represent a convenient unit of length. Cloth, lumber or licorice can be measured as a fraction that is universal, at least for observers in a similar frame of reference.

Mountain of lies
I'm awed by the mountain of lies the political campaign has thrown up, almost all on the Democratic side, although if the Republicans started talking about the War on Some Drugs, they would add to the heap. But no one talks about the WOSD these days. Does that mean the war's lost or everyone's given up or the war's won and no one cares?

Michael Moore and Leni Riefenstahl. Both won awards from the French:
see Triumph des Willens

Moore lies intentionally and continuously, by implication and outright. Riefenstahl was just going along with the Nazis because she wanted to make films.

The lies will form an avalanche and bury their sponsors eventually. But will it collapse before the election or after? I've come to the conclusion that a Kerry presidency would be a great opportunity for the Republicans to consolidate their control of the Congress and would be a disaster for Hillary Clinton's hopes for 2008. So not so bad. But Bush's speech yesterday makes me think he's going to turn up the heat. Also, Theresa appears to be cratering. So maybe now it gets to be fun.

Got a truck. Got a W04 sticker for the back window of the truck. Funny not having a back seat. At least I have a cool silver tool box and a plastic bedliner.

Reagan and stupidity
I never liked Reagan. Mostly because he just had to be a stupid actor but he turned out to be right about most everything. That's really annoying. Lileks has a good summary of the situation in today's Bleat. I voted for Carter in 1976. In 1980, because Carter never came through on his promise of zero-based budgeting, I didn't vote. That was the beginning of my Harry Browne-inspired "there's no point in voting" period. As Lileks remembers:

We didn’t hate Reagan; we viewed him with indulgent contempt, since he was so obviously out of his depth. I mean, please: an actor? As president?

Then when the wall fell in 1989 and it obviously had something to do with the stances Reagan took, I was so ashamed of myself. I mean, the Berlin Wall. I remember when it went up in 1961, I was twelve. The wall became a permanent part of the world. It was the concretization (!) of the Iron Curtain. Which would never go away. And then all of a sudden there it was, gone. Something was going on which I couldn't understand. What blows my mind today is that anyone could live through all that and not realize that they didn't understand anything. And reexamine their political assumptions. Then the Gulf War and twelve years of ineffective Cartering around. Then 9-11. Then Bush actually does something about it. How can anyone not love it? Or at least give it a chance? The point is that freedom is something tangible, as real as a good meal. Something everyone can learn how to enjoy.

Sounds familiar
A news story about Jose Padilla, a traitor who worked on bombing US apartment buildings, reminded me of stories during the Russians' little problems with Chechnya. Weren't something like 500 or more Russians killed by Chechnyan (Muslim) terrorists blowing up buildings around Russia? And didn't these terrorists use exactly the same technique Padilla is accused of contemplating? That is, renting an apartment and filling the apartment with gas by opening the pipes and then lighting the whole building off with a timed bomb.

And if my memory serves, wasn't it mostly because of this horrific bombing campaign that the Russian military went into Chechnya, killing thousands and losing hundreds in Grozny alone? Why haven't I seen any reference to this similarity?

It's obvious
The suicide rate in New Jersey is twice the homicide rate, according to a new study. This isn't surprising, since anyone who has seen any part of the rest of the world and finds himself trapped in New Jersey has no other realistic option than to commit suicide. The small number of murders is no doubt accounted for by the few native New Jerseyites who realize the nature of the hellhole they inhabit. The few who do will do anything, even murder, to get out.

The only boooks in the world
Thought I'd come up with a list of the only real books out there. It's odd to go into a bookstore and not see any great number of books, just a few here and there, separated by meaningless jumbles of typography on wasted paper. So I'll just give you authors' names. Not all the authors listed actually wrote a book every time they put words on paper but most of their production is real:

Rand
Hugo
Balzac
Adam Smith
Orwell
Carlyle
Stendhal
Asimov
Gogol
Dostoevsky
Voltaire
Simenon
Bernard Lewis
Raffaello Pumpelly
Benvenuto Cellini
Hayek
Vernon Howard
Bunyan
Lysander Spooner
Thomas Paine

I'll add more as I think of them and perhaps someday figure out how to move the list into a permanent section of the site. Odd how few wrote after 1900, eh?

More Fish War
To be even-handed, I must present the Pakistani view of the piscine pugilistics off the coast of the subcontinent. But who will speak for the fish?

Indo-Pak fish war
Yes, only on Conundrum will you hear about the Indo-Pakistani fish war:

An Indian Navy patrol boat fired at a fishing trawler that strayed into Indian waters in the Arabian Sea , killing three Pakistani fishermen, officials said on Tuesday.

One just hopes it doesn't scale up.

Bye-bye Briscoe
I've said a lot about the racism and leftism (but I repeat myself) that characterizes the "Law and Order" TV show. But still I must admit to a little rueful pang when Jerry Orbach retired his Lenny Briscoe character last night. I managed to catch the last few minutes of the show in a timeout of the Kings-Timberwolves fiasco. I always liked Briscoe's attitude toward the bad guys and his skepticism about the weenie DA's and their technicalities. His battle with alcoholism gave him a dimension not shown by anyone else on the show. His daughter was a drug addict killed by a dealer. This character had depth, pathos. His every action and word was colored by the pain he'd been through. His anger at a kid who was throwing away his life, or had taken someone else's, appeared more understandable and real than that of some of the other characters. Good on yer, Lenny.

Good Cocktail
God Bless Google! I found a Dubonnet Cocktail on some site:

Equal parts (red)Dubonnet and gin (I used Beefeaters - mmm!)
over ice in a rocks glass
with twist - I used lemon wedge.

Delicious and powerful and smooth. And the formula is simple to remember after you've had a few. After all, Dubonnet, as I understand, is a vermouth or vermouth-related. So it should go well with gin. And it does. I may try it with some soda or seltzer as a long drink.

I have no idea if it goes well with my Cortislim non-diet. But I don't care. I'm still taking four a day and eating and drinking pretty much what I want. And have yet to see the looser-clothes phenomenon.

Nailed
Lileks nails Hunter Thompson, after scaring all of us former fathers of formerly small children by losing Gnat momentarily. The only mystery is why someone else has not nailed Thompson so definitively before this. I can only feel glad I am not Thompson.

The plan
OK, four weeks have gone by since I started using Cortislim and I have hardly lost any weight or inches, but I do feel better. Big deal. I'm spending a hundred dollars just to feel better?! No!! I want weight loss and svelteness. So I'm switching from two capsules a day to four, starting today, two at breakfast, one at lunch, one at supper. And I'm continuing my regular diet, but no eating between meals or after about eight at night. We'll see what the next four weeks brings. On the bright side, my Peugeot cinq-cent-cinq should be back a la route by Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest. A small oil leak apparently caused all the trouble.

My digital camera is working great - I bought a Nikon Coolpix 3200. With my older son's help it's hooked up to my Linux computer, without using any of that software that comes with the camera. Linux rules again! Now I can bring photos into the Gimp and warp them beyond recognition. Went to a little air display out at the Tallahassee Airport today. Saw two F-16s and the inside of a Fedex 727. Oh, yes, and two old AT-6s took off in front of us. Actually they were in Marine garb, so I guess they were really SNJ's or some such designation. I felt the History Channel was coming to life. I'm inspired. Maybe one of these years I'll make it to Oshkosh. I've always wanted a Bensen Gyrocopter. But I want someone else to build it for me. Now to find another place to live. True independence beckons.

Metric blindness
Via Slashdot, I found this interesting article about so-called "Metric" paper sizes (A4 and so on) that implies that those 0h-so-smartypants Euro types are way ahead of us North American Babbitt frontiersman warmongers. Oh, yeah, if they're so smart how come golf courses all over the world are still measured in yards? Even the new ones? I especially love the way the article slips in a "yet" whenever it says that not everybody uses the devilspawn Metric system. I'd be willing to bet in fifty years the good old English pound-inch-gallon system will still be alive and well.

And as to those paper sizes fitting so well with each other because the sides have the ratio of one to the square root of two: Am I missing something or couldn't that work in any measurement system, not just the Metric system? What's that got to do with the soulless, unnatural millimeter?

Disappointed
OK, I did it, I admit it. I got on a darn scale yesterday at lunch before my big new job interview. And I had GAINED weight. Now I know why the Cortislim people tell you not to weigh yourself for the first month. I could be wrong. I've noticed before that I weigh different amounts at lunchtime, dinner, and in the morning. Usually I'm lightest in the morning, before the cares of the day have burdened me. Who knows how much the anxiety of going to a job interview weighed me down? But my clothes aren't any looser. And the guy in the Cortislim radio ads seems to have changed his spiel to say that he's taking four pills a day instead of two. What does THAT mean? I'll stay the course, though, and do my two-pill a day routine for another few days, which will be one month. Then maybe I'll switch to four a day for a month. Of course then the 60-day money back guarantee will be expiring. HAH! JUST LIKE THEY PLANNED!! Or maybe not. Hope not. Is this just the 200 pound plateau? Why does my war against weight seem to parallel the War against Terror and to Liberate Iraq? Maybe by June 30 I can declare victory and buy new pants with a thirty-inch waist. Not that I really want to be that skinny again. Perhaps the shedded weight will take with it all the wisdom I've accumulated over the last thirty years. But wait a minute. If the foolishness sloughs off as well, I can start over with a clean slate. And a full plate. Sorry. I love to eat.

Americans are prisoners in our own Abu Ghraib

The obscene pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison have been compared by "conservative" commentators to the images popular culture on cable TV and in NEA-funded "art" expose Americans to every day. The obvious difference that compulsion is involved in the prison doesn't refute the basis of the comparison. If it is horrendous and unacceptable for prisoners to be exposed to sexual images, why is it any less horrendous for American taxpayers and TV watchers to be exposed to images like Janet Jackson at the Superbowl, "Piss Christ" and profane and obscene "performance art", simulated sex and constant foul language in hip-hop videos and booming rap filth streaming from loud cars at stoplights? Is it any wonder some of us feel like prisoners in our own country?

Can I be (Gasp!) Wrong??
Paul Campos of the Guardian has an interesting article about weight loss whys and wherefores. Of course, being a Guardianista, he blows it at the end by relating America's "obsession" with weight loss to SUV's and "Imperialism". Fool. And isn't it the svelte, sophisticated Europeans who are always complaining about what fat, low-class pigs Americans are? Then American liberals breathlessly and shamelessly copy their attitudes, just like Mencken noticed a century ago.

Nevertheless, he makes some good points about the lack of real evidence that being fat hurts anyone. I am losing weight, though, so I can get strong and feel attractive and energetic. It probably is a class thing, to some degree. But it also feels good to be thin. Now I'm going to worry about why thin feels better, why I obsess about losing weight. But I shouldn't.

Just in time!

Whew! Looks like I decided to get rid of my toxic fat just as more evidence came out that fat is incredibly bad for you. So why are fat people so jolly, anyway? I know! Because they can eat anything they want! Seriously, the article could be an ad for Cortislim:

The first real inkling that fat is more than just inert blubber was the discovery 10 years ago of the substance leptin. Scientists were amazed to find that this static-looking flesh helps maintain itself by producing a chemical that regulates appetite.

One of the main ingredients of Cortislim is something called "Leptiplex" (TM) which underwhelms when you see it's just extracts of green tea leaf and bitter orange peel. But it could be just what you need to combat the chemical signals being sent to the rest of your body from the fat, according to the AP. And they never deceive. Do they?
Once again, it seems that I have taken to something just as it becomes wildly popular. Atkins was like that. Is it perhaps the other way around? Does a particular ideology or lifestyle become wildly popular because I adopt it? Hmm. (or "heh"))

Literary losers
It would be hard to parody this account of a literary prize gathering on Mauritius. It self-parodies so well one is suspicious if such a prize even exists. The animadversions against "modern" literature in The Fountainhead pale by comparison. So I sent the following letter to the editors of the Independent:

Dear Editors:

I just wanted to make sure you knew how much I enjoyed Tracy Macleod's satire on literary prize competitions. I laughed till I cried. Books which have "love at their spine"!! Please, stop!! "A Glaswegian painter-decorator"! "Lesbian love in a shabby-genteel Oxford"!! "love between an ageing gay composer, his dog and a brutal Bosnian interloper."!!! That last one, if I may criticize, is where Macleod went a little over the top. I mean, come on. Bosnians are always victims. Oh, wait a minute, maybe he was a Bosnian Serb. Then that would be OK. But Macleod overdoes it again with "it's smart to be intelligent". I needed my heart pills after that one. The Aberdonian Travelodge was also a bit much, but all in all I haven't enjoyed such a brutal yet humorous savaging of literary pretensions since The Fountainhead. Thanks again.

Robert Speirs

Tallahassee, Florida

The Full Story - Shot Live!

RealClearPolitics.com does a good job in this piece explaining exactly what must have been going through John Feckless's mind when he went to Vietnam. I'd always been puzzled why he was so aggressive and warlike as a soldier, when even before he joined the service:

By that time Kerry had also expressed grave doubts about the war in Vietnam, most notably on June 12, 1966 when he said in an oration to his fellow students, "We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving."

For someone that much opposed to the war to go to Vietnam is understandable only if he had coldly calculated the whole thing in advance. He was about to be drafted. So his plan was to join the Navy and sit safely on a ship offshore and set up a nice juicy political career. Then his hitch on the Swift boats got dicey. But there he was with a movie camera getting himself on film, Liveshot shot live! It must have been near-hallucinogenic. All the medals he grubbed, the action he got into, the praise and, probably, somewhere deep inside, the awful guilt for even having gone, much less having killed enemy soldiers. I suppose it's hardly surprising that he had to come back and apologize, publicly and repeatedly. In his mind the whole war was an atrocity and he was part of it. The fact that his ravings and even his apologies and his medal-throwing garnered him more publicity than he could have dreamed must have seemed hugely laughable. And he must have known it was all wrong. Because here he is thirty years later, pluming himself on the medals whose ribbons he threw away, acting as though his actions in Vietnam "defended America" when he never thought they did any such thing. And he's having to defend what he must always have thought was his most admirable action, his criticism of and apologies for his country's trying sincerely to defend a small vulnerable country from Communism.

What a mixed-up man.


update Pernod and bitter lemon is not my favorite drink. Bitter licorice needs something else. Sugar? Maybe I need to put a little lemoncello in it. I'm trying to conceive how a Hemingway would taste. That's one part Pernod to five parts champagne. Maybe I'll try it on Mother's Day. Found the perfect present for Mom. A music box with an airplane that goes round and round while "Here we go into the wild blue yonder" plays. You see, Dad was an Air Force guy.

Peugeot Panne-ic

Little Anglo-French pun there for ya. The 505STX is in the shop after pooping out on the side of the road. Since my daughter's car is also in traction, mending, it's been an interesting couple of days. I would swear the Cortislim has had something to do with keeping me calm and focused. It almost got me through the neighbor's brass band rehearsal for Cinco de Mayo last night, but he pushed things a bit too far and I yelled at him anyway. Moron. Tonight seems quiet, so maybe I'll be able to get some distance into the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini before I pick up the kids at work at nine. And then there's the Lakers-Spurs game. Busy busy. And I finally got the Pernod drink menus. Tonight I'm going to try it with Bitter Lemon. After I finish driving.

Looser clothes?

Hmm. Does my abdomen actually have muscles in it, under all that fat? My usual way of judging whether I'm losing weight or not is whether my belt still fits. It's in the last hole - OK, so I bought a 44, hoping for this result. The problem is that I'm still wearing 40 pants and I could swear they're getting all bunched up around the waist, so the belt is still working even though just maybe there's less fat for it to circumscribe, but all the bunched-up fabric makes it seem just as tight. The real test will be to buy some 38 pants and see if I can breathe in them and if I'll have to put another hole in the belt.

I've been reading all the pieces about the prison "atrocities" in Iraq. What atrocities? Sounds like all the things they tell teenagers about prison in Florida to get them not to smoke dope. And that leads me to wonder about all the pundits solemnly opining that the pictures of mistreatment - that's the proper word - will convince millions of Arabs to rise up and become terrorists. Maybe this is cynical and mean, but isn't it more likely that millions of young Arab men will look at the news stories and become markedly LESS eager to earn a place in an American-run prison? Of course a few may think it looks like fun.

Andalusia is lost - again!

What would El Cid say? Did he worry about upsetting the Moors? No, he was too busy slicing them into little bits and crushing their heads and stringing them up three or four at a time on his lance. To be historically accurate, I've heard he did actually use Moors in his army, when the time was right. But now BBC alleges that people say idiot things like this:

The Baroque image of a sword-wielding St James cutting the heads off Moors is not a very sensitive or evangelical image that fits the teachings of Christ, he added.

Nah, nobody else ever cut people's heads off in the name of Christ (or Muhammad!) so why should St. James be the only one!? How about those of the six million tourists who visit Santiago de Compostela just to see the image of St. James cutting off Moorish heads? That must be right up to five million, nine hundred and ninety thousand or so. Including all the real live boys.

This explains it

I always wondered why I could never understand Chomsky's linguistics when I studied linguistics in the early Seventies. I even went to a summer seminar and sat - literally - at the feet of the great master. I just figured I was too dense or lazy to penetrate the mysteries. Now Pejman has opened my eyes to the nature of Chomsky's evil ineptitude. I think I'll steal bits and pieces and just call Chomsky an "intellectually stunted microbe" and forget him. Be sure to check out the comments. And Amritas on the subject. "Like Lenin and Lysenko rolled into one." Yup. That's Chomsky.

Two Weeks

The literature says not to look at a scale for the first thirty days of the Cortislim regime. Of course, I couldn't resist, looked again yesterday morning, which marked two weeks since I started taking the stuff, and realized why the Cortislim folks say that. You get frustrated by seeing you only lost five pounds in two weeks. The scale shows me at 200, where I was a couple of days after I started. Will I be able to avoid scale obsession for the next two weeks? No. Can looking at a scale make you gain weight or lose it slower? Of course not - or - hmm. Depends on the psychological component. I'm still waiting for the dramatic looser-clothes effect to hit, too. On the bright side, I'm off Atkins and not gaining weight. I walk quite a lot, sometimes not by choice, as when my car broke down yesterday. I seem to have mastered the art of stopping the snacks early in the evening. And I feel better. On balance, I have hope. I'm not yet at the point where I can recommend to others to spend a hundred bucks on three bottles of these pills, though. I'll know about that after six months when I've lost as much weight as I want and kept it off.

As much as I want and no more

Trying to pay attention to my body today, stopping eating even if my plate isn't clean. That could save money, too. I keep expecting my pants to start falling off, but that hasn't quite happened yet. It's a bit disorienting because, the propaganda is correct, my body does seem to have changed shape somehow so I'm not quite sure whether it's fatter or leaner or what. That should change.

Not Wyatt Earp

Hate to disagree with Ralph Peters, but Iraq doesn't need a Wyatt Earp or a Rudy Giuliani. Peters thinks order on the streets is the basic medicine that will purge Iraq of its chaos:

In addition to the military reduction of the last breath of resistance in Fallujah and the arrest or killing of the renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf, we need to change the rules on Iraq's streets.

If any adult touches a damaged or destroyed U.S. military vehicle, he must be shot. Start with a one-week warning period to get out the new rules. Then execute. The Iraqis playing trampoline on the hoods of our charred vehicles aren't the ones who will build a better future.

As for the juvies, send them to reformatory camps. No exceptions, even if daddy's the Sheik of Araby.

If we can't or won't bring order to that festering country's streets, we'll never see a lawful state emerge. I still believe that most Iraqis want democracy - in some adjusted form that gives them a voice in their country's affairs. But they want and need security even more. You can't build a legal economy or hold honest elections if you can't control the neighborhoods in broad daylight.

Law first, then democracy. Sorry, but it doesn't work the other way around.

He seems to forget that Saddam used the "all force all the time" method for years, although concededly in a less than judicious manner. But even Wyatt Earp could not get the Iraqis to feel like Iraqis who need to subordinate their factional interests to democratic methods for the good of the nation.

Iraq needs an Ataturk. I'm not saying Turkey's perfect. But most Turks do think of themselves as Turks these days. An Iraqi leader who can get Kurds and Sunnis and Shi'as to think of themselves as citizens of a modern, respectable nation state would take the country far beyond simple civic order to true nationhood. The Ataturk reforms:

Between 1926 and 1930, the Turkish Republic achieved a legal transformation which might have required decades in most other countries. Religious laws were abolished, and a secular system of jurisprudence introduced. The concepts, the texts and contexts of the laws were made harmonious with the progressive thrust of Atatürk's Turkey. " The nation", Atatürk said, " has placed its faith in the precept that all laws should be inspired by actual needs here on earth as a basic fact of national life."

Among the far-reaching changes were the new Civil Code, Penal Code, and Business Law, based on the Swiss, Italian and German models respectively.

The new legal system made all citizens - men and women, rich and poor - equal before the law. It gave Turkey a firm foundation for a society of justice and equal rights.

are not that different from what the new constitution is trying to introduce to Iraq. The problem is the lack of a charismatic leader who can personalize the reforms and offer an Iraqi vision of the new democratic man. Is there no survivor of the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf wars with military and political leadership credentials and not too many atrocity rumors attached to him who could be Iraq's Ataturk?

Signals

The Cortislim website says that a Cortislimmed body will send you signals as to when to stop eating. They're right, but I am really finding it difficult to obey the signals. For instance, yesterday we had a lunch for the secretaries at work. I had a chicken sandwich with fries. Halfway through I can remember thinking, "Gee, I don't know if I want this whole thing." But I have a strong impulse to "clean my plate" even though I can't actually remember my mother using that "Think of all the children starving in China" line on me when I was a kid. Maybe I just hate to pay for a meal and then leave half of it. Then it happened again at supper, when I insisted on eating a whole box of breaded scallops because I'd cooked them all, even though I practically had to force the last of them down. Sigh. Maybe I'll train myself by making smaller portions. Also, I'm back to a usual carbohydrate ratio, after being on a modified Atkins for years. So maybe that's confusing things. I really want to see if Cortislim will work with a "regular" diet, though, to clarify whether it's my Atkins efforts or the Cortislim that's working. Oh, yeah. Day 11. Haven't dared weigh myself the last two days because I feel fat. That may be the carbs talking.

Kerry implosion

Even hard core Dems seem to be getting really worried about Kerry's campaigning competence. I can't believe this. Who did they think they were voting for in all those priimaries, anyway? John Feckless is a pretty known quantity, or lack thereof. I know, Bushies shouldn't be too quick to carp and caper with glee. The last thing we want is to have to deal with Hillary or even John Edwards instead of Liveshot. But it is delicious to watch the Dem-mobile driving over a cliff with Craggy X. Blowhard pontificating at the wheel, not even aware of the spectacle he's presenting.

Day Nine
Pretty frustrated at my scale, for refusing to show the weight loss that my body tells me I've experienced. Ah, well, according to the testimonials on the Cortislim website, I should lose ten or fifteen pounds this month. That's all I care about. If I had already lost ten, I would be a bit scared. Still feel good and am sleeping better, no doubt about it. I must say I'm not exercising much, either, on the theory that I need to be thinner before I can do enough of the Combat Conditioning exercises to make a difference. I did do a whole sixty second "Wall Chair" yesterday, though, which felt good. Is it my imagination or does my gout feel better since I started taking Cortislim? Hmm. I bet the Cortislim folks would be interested to know that, although they probably couldn't use any testimonial I might make to claim a cure for gout without going through sixteen years of FDA paperwork.

Oil for Anti-Americanism

Claudia Rosett has really put it all together about the U.N.-scam known as the Oil-for-Food program. I'm glad to see the Kurds are still demanding their four billion dollars that - surprise, suprise! - Satan, I mean Saddam, never gave them. Hard to believe the UN's auditing never discovered that fact. Does anybody seriously maintain any more that the UN - or any agency of the "international community" - is good for anything? Wait, there is one thing. That big building in New York would make fantastic condos. And think of the parking revenue the city would pick up. Mayor Bloomberg? I hear they're smoking in there. Can't you condemn and confiscate the building on that basis?

Billy Joel

Is anyone really wondering why Billy Joel has all those car accidents? Has anyone actually looked at his CAR?? I thought Citroen Deux Chevaux couldn't be imported to the US because they were so lame. That one looks just like the one my landlady had in Paris in 1964. (Scroll down, on the right, until it goes away). And this is spoken by the proud but frustrated owner of a 1987 Peugeot 505.