Friday, July 6, 2007

Jimmy's Killer Rabbit

For no particular reason that I can think of, the story of Jimmy Carter and the Killer Rabbit popped into my head this morning. It seems, somehow, like a condensed version of this most incompetent President – and downright dangerous ex-President.

A quick search on the Internet turned up both the photo I remembered and a nice write-up of the incident and a Wikipedia entry. Here's the gist:

Dubbed the "killer rabbit" attack by the media, the Jimmy Carter rabbit incident involved a swamp rabbit that caught press imagination after trying furiously to board then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter's fishing boat on April 20, 1979.

Carter had gone on a solo fishing expedition in his hometown of Plains, Georgia when the rabbit approached his boat, "hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared and making straight for the president"[1], trying desperately to enter the boat, causing Carter to flail at the swimming creature with the oars from his boat.

I was paying very little attention to politics at the time, being busy starting a business – but this incident was just too funny to ignore!

Photo is courtesy the Jimmy Carter Library.

Quite Elevated Indeed

IowaHawk is one of my favorite places to go for a good laugh – his parodies are consistently good. His most recent piece is titled UK Warning: Look Out For People Doing Things, and it is a spot-on ribbing of the U.K.'s obsession with multi-culti political correctness. There's no way to excerpt this work of art; you'll just have to read the whole darned thing. Don't miss it!

Quote of the Day

Senator Joseph Lieberman:
The threat posed by Iran to our soldiers' lives, our security as a nation and our allies in the Middle East is a truth that cannot be wished or waved away. It must be confronted head-on. The regime in Iran is betting that our political disunity in Washington will constrain us in responding to its attacks. For the sake of our nation's security, we must unite and prove them wrong.
He may be the only sane Democrat, unfortunately.

This quote is the conclusion of a great piece about the dangers posed by Iran and what our response should be. Read the whole thing here.

Again, Good News and Horrors...

Michael Yon has filed yet another extraordinary dispatch from Iraq. He's still in Baqubah, and has considerable good news to report:

The big news on the streets today is that the people of Baqubah are generally ecstatic, although many hold in reserve a serious concern that we will abandon them again. For many Iraqis, we have morphed from being invaders to occupiers to members of a tribe. I call it the “al Ameriki tribe,” or “tribe America.”

I’ve seen this kind of progression in Mosul, out in Anbar and other places, and when I ask our military leaders if they have sensed any shift, many have said, yes, they too sense that Iraqis view us differently. In the context of sectarian and tribal strife, we are the tribe that people can—more or less and with giant caveats—rely on.

Most Iraqis I talk with acknowledge that if it was ever about the oil, it’s not now. Not mostly anyway. It clearly would have been cheaper just to buy the oil or invade somewhere easier that has more. Similarly, most Iraqis seem now to realize that we really don’t want to stay here, and that many of us can’t wait to get back home. They realize that we are not resolved to stay, but are impatient to drive down to Kuwait and sail away. And when they consider the Americans who actually deal with Iraqis every day, the Iraqis can no longer deny that we really do want them to succeed. But we want them to succeed without us. We want to see their streets are clean and safe, their grass is green, and their birds are singing. We want to see that on television. Not in person. We don’t want to be here. We tell them that every day. It finally has settled in that we are telling the truth.

And also some fresh horrors:
At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11-years-old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.
As always, you just don't want to miss his reports (or photography). Read the whole thing here. Please consider hitting his tip jar while you're there – he depends on contributions to finance his work there, and we can't afford to lose his efforts...

One Breath

In as little as a single inhalation, humans can become addicted:
A new study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine shows that 10 percent of youth who become hooked on cigarettes are addicted within two days of first inhaling from a cigarette, and 25 percent are addicted within a month.
To tobacco.

This jibes with the results of several studies over the years. The plain fact is that nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man – more addictive than heroin or crack cocaine.

It seems to me that the entirely arbitrary way that our society has legalized (and failed to stigmatize the use of) alcohol and tobacco, as opposed to the way it treats drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, is entirely indefensible on any logical basis. We've simply declared, as a society, that alcohol and tobacco are ok, and marijuana (for example) is not – with no rational basis at all. There are two scenarios that one could lay a rational foundation for: make all such addictive and psychoactive drugs illegal, or make none of them illegal.

The former approach suffers badly from a slippery-slope problem Рsurely caffeine (which is both addictive and psychoactive) wouldn't be far behind, then chocolate, and eventually ... basic foods like sugar. If you think I"M being ridiculous, consider the recent nanny-state actions in New York (trans-fats, pat̩, etc.).

The latter approach (legalize all such substances) has my vote, consistent with my libertarian leanings. So long as one doesn't harm anyone else, I think people should be free to ingest whatever they want – whether it harms them or not. If their choice sends them to their reward sooner, I'll call that evolution at work...

Oh, My...

We have a house guest with us at the moment, and she (who shall remain unnamed) has a favorite television show: Fox's Are You Smarter Than A 5th-Grader? Our guest asked me to watch this show with her, and because I love her dearly, I agreed to subject myself to 60 minutes of commercial television – something I haven't done for about 10 or 12 years.

The premise of this show is that an adult contestant is asked a series of up to 11 questions that are at (or below!) a fifth grade educational level. Each time they answer a question correctly, they win the next level of prize – up to one million dollars if they get all the questions right. There are some additional rules, all of which serve to help the contestant – basically, all ways to cheat with the help of a fifth grade “helper” kid. In addition, the contestant can bail out at any time and keep whatever prize they've won so far. In other words, the whole thing is rigged in favor of the contestant.

In the show that I watched, there were two contestants. Both of them bailed out at some point – the money that they'd won apparently wasn't worth risking on these terribly difficult questions:
How many months have 31 days in them?

If y=3x and 3x=12, then what is y equal to?

What U.S. President's face appears on the nickel?

What was President Taylor's first name?

If the diameter of a circle is 4 inches, what is its radius?

True or false: the U.S. is in the Eastern Hemisphere?

What continent is the only one that is also a country?
The above are just a representative sample of the questions asked on the show; I didn't try to transcribe them all. The contestants appeared to find these questions challenging, and on several occasions they relied on the rules to allow their helper kid to answer for them (correctly , in each case). The last question above caused one contestant to bail out – after she correctly enumerated all the continents out loud, but then said that each one of them was a country!

Oh, my.

Part of me is unsurprised by this. Over the years I have seen many examples of profound ignorance of nearly everything, mainly in co-workers at places I worked. Let me hasten to add that certainly not everybody I worked with fell into that category – just that there were more than a few of them.

But part of me is surprised – I have trouble believing that apparently functioning adults can't answer certain questions easily (like that simple algebra question), and I'm especially surprised that people who find such questions challenging themselves (like my house guest) are entertained by watching other challenged people. I'd be slinking around in shame, and doing some immediate remedial studying...

And then the ponder: I wonder what would happen if the adult contestants for this show were taken from other countries – China, India, England, or even Estonia? The pattern of results would be most interesting. Based on my personal knowledge of their educational systems, my guess would be that the countries of the former Soviet Union and most of Asia (including India) would produce contestants that would make the U.S. contestants look like chumps...