Dawn

The ponder sets in on this morning after the election, with a cup of coffee in me and the sun about to rise: what does it all mean? What does it mean that the House (and possibly the Senate) have gone Democratic? What does it mean that California doesn’t limit Kelo? What do the myriad conflicting-but-leaning liberal results around the country mean?

I can boil it down to just three thoughts:

— The majority of Americans are unserious about the war on terror. By that, I meant that they do not recognize fundamentalist Islamics as an existential threat. Many overtly anti-war Democrats were elected, some in opposition to equally overtly pro-war Republicans. A choice was made. Of all the election results, I believe this one will have the most profound and long-lasting consequences. I fear those consequences.

— We can expect Congressional gridlock. The Democrats picked up a very thin margin in the House; if they do pick up the Senate, it will be by an even thinner margin. This means that Republicans and Democrats can both block anything and everything. There’s a perspective (and I have some sympathy with this!) that a gridlocked Congress is the best possible case for the people and for business, because in such a Congress the multitude of scoundrels and scalliwags on the Hill can’t pass bills that hurt us. That’s the good news. For the bad news, see the preceding bullet — you can bet that pursuing the War on Terror is about to get much more difficult.

— Pelosi. I’m not quite sure how to complete that sentence. It is going to be very interesting to observe how the American people react when they see Nancy Pelosi in action. I thought the Republican ads asking folks if they really wanted to put Pelosi in charge were quite effective — scared the crap outta me! But apparently either (a) most Americans are Pelosi’s kind of moonbat, or (b) most Americans don’t really understand her political positions. I’m an optimist — I think it’s (b). In which case the shock and dismay when Ms. Pelosi starts foaming at the mouth are going to be a lot of fun to watch. One could even hope that in two years, during the 2008 elections, the electorate will look at the beast they have unleashed — and do something to put it back into its cage. Or out of its misery. Or something.

So far as I’m concerned, everything else decided in the elections are details…

Lamestream Lament

A piece of free advice: whenever you see an article with the byline James Q. Wilson, read it.

In yesterday’s OpinionJournal, Mr. Wilson has a piece analyzing the effects of the press on the Global War on Terror. It is simply excellent. Go read the whole thing! The conclusion:

Most of what I have said here is common knowledge. But it is common knowledge about a new period in American journalistic history. Once, powerful press owners dictated what their papers would print, sometimes irresponsibly. But that era of partisan and circulation-building distortions was not replaced by a commitment to objective journalism; it was replaced by a deep suspicion of the American government. That suspicion, fueled in part by the Vietnam and Watergate controversies, means that the government, especially if it is a conservative one, is surrounded by journalists who doubt almost all it says. One obvious result is that since World War II there have been few reports of military heroes; indeed, there have been scarcely any reports of military victories.

This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone’s interests.

The mainstream media’s adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.

Mr. Wilson doesn’t propose any solutions. Personally, I think the marketplace is in the process of supplying them right now: on the whole, the lamestream media is failing as a business — with the notable exceptions of the “fair and balanced” Fox news, right-leaning DrudgeReport, and a number of specific centrist-to-conservative shows (think Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Tammy Bruce, Roger Hedgecock, etc.). Lamestream left-leaning leaders the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are either going to change their content or die; they are publicly and visibly in trouble right now. In my local San Diego, just this week the Copley management announced they were selling off all their newspapers except the flagship Union-Tribune (so far left that they have called Nancy Pelosi “too conservative"!) — because they want to concentrate on saving it. This is the sort of corporate behavior that precedes large change.

But if you’d like more immediate change, try my solution: just don’t listen to, or read, the lamestream media. Go cold turkey. Get your news and commentary from well-chosen blogs, second-tier news sources, alternative news sources, etc. Start with the blogs (you won’t go wrong with the list at right); they will point you to new and interesting sources of information and perspective every day…

Global Warming Takedown

From an unlikely source — the London Telegraph — comes a well-researched, well-written article that is skeptical of global warming. It even includes (as a separately downloadable PDF file) the author’s research notes and references.

If you’d like to understand why some people — myself included — are very skeptical of global warming “science", read this article (actually, this is the first of two parts). And read the research notes file. Both of them are excellent primers on what’s wrong with what you’re hearing in the lamestream media (and from most politicians) about global warming.

Quote of the Day

Reported by James Taranto in Best of the Web Today:

Last Friday we attended a dinner, sponsored by the Soldiers', Sailors', Marines' and Airmen’s Club, for wounded veterans planning to participate in yesterday’s New York City Marathon. …

At our table was a young man who in 2003 lost a leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq. Talking to this guy was an inspiration: He evinced not the slightest bit of bitterness, and he went on at some length about the good work he and his buddies had done in Iraq, making clear that he still believes in the mission.

At the end of the evening, we thanked him for his sacrifice. He replied, “It was just a bad day at work."

When I read this (and it’s not the first such thing I’ve read), what flashed through my mind was the contrast between this young man’s admirable attitude and service, and the campaign cut-and-run rhetoric from (primarily) the Democrats. And, not for the first time, I wished we’d see more political candidates cut from the same cloth as this young man.

But then…what such person would want to join the swamps of our federal political process?

Send in the Clowns

Jules Crittenden, writing in the Boston Herald:

It’s that time of the election cycle when we get ready to take one for the team. I’m talking about conservatives. Here in Taxachusetts.

Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank and Mike Dukakis. Gay marriage and Willie Horton. The strictest gun controls in the nation, and gun violence is skyrocketing. John Kerry, still reporting for duty.

We all know the jokes, we’ve heard them all before. People are always amazed to learn that conservatives live here in Massachusetts. They wonder what that can be like. It can be galling to think that, in presidential elections, your vote doesn’t count.

It is nothing more than a symbolic gesture, to let the world know, for example, that more than a third of John Kerry’s voting constituents prefered a Republican from Texas.

But to view the national stage from Massachusetts is to know the bitter truth that our state plays an important role in America’s political theater. Every two years, bluest blue Massachusetts sends in the clowns. We show America what could be and America generally sees it and acts accordingly: runs in the other direction.

From Kerry’s insulting jibes at our troops, to the efforts by Kennedy and others in our delegation to undermine a wartime presidency and give Euro-style socialism a foot-hold in the New World, Massachusetts gives America its bogeymen.

An unexpectedly interesting piece of commentary from this source — do go read the whole thing.

Rope. Tree. Saddam.

Saddam Hussein, convicted of crimes against humanity (along with two co-defendents). All three sentenced to death by hanging.

I cannot think of a single better use for a coil of rope.

There’s an automatic appeal to a nine-judge panel. The outcome of the appeal is not in doubt; they will sustain the conviction. The timing, however, is a bit up in the air. Once the panel sustains the conviction, Iraqi law says he must be executed within 30 days. This is an issue for the Kurds, who (quite understandably) would like to see Hussein convicted and sentenced for his genocidal actions against them (the Kurds). So the conventional wisdom is that the appeals panel will find a way to make their deliberations last just long enough for the next trial to finish.

Out of Control

This morning I was installing a new outlet strip I just purchased, and I noticed the largish “warning label” attached to its cord. It’s made from some rugged plastic material, and prominently on it is “DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG”. Of course I removed it immediately!

But then the ponder set in. Does anyone actually read these tags? More to the point, does anyone who does read these tags learn anything useful? Is there anyone who can read that doesn’t already know everything on the tag?

This particular tag contains 22 separate directives or warnings, plus the lovely headline: “DANGER! ELECTRICAL CORDS CAN BE HAZARDOUS”. Some of them actually make sense (e.g., “DO NOT USE WHEN WET") — but really, is there even a single person out there who (a) would read this profundity, and (b) who didn’t already know that electricity and water are a bad combination? It doesn’t seem very likely to me. Some of them are just nuts (e.g., “Keep Children and Pets Away From Cord"). We have three dogs and eight cats — we’re supposed keep them away from all the electrical cords?

Of course what’s really driving these dumb labels are lawsuits. I’m sure that’s not news to any of you. Nor am I the first to observe the general uselessness of the warning labels, or even that their ubiquity is undermining whatever trivial benefit they ever had. If we actually read all the warning labels and signs on the way into the grocery store, we’d never have time to do any shopping — not that we could buy anything if we paid attention to the warnings!

But these warning labels… They seem to me to be warning us of something completely different than their intent — they’re warning us that our society’s headlong rush away from any notion of personal responsibility or accountability is just plain out of control. This warning label tells me not to drive over the cord. By implication, if they hadn’t told me that, and I was stupid enough to drive over the cord and start a fire, then it’s not my responsibility for having been an idiot. The implication is that it’s the manufacturer’s responsbility for not having warned me. That’s the same general pattern — refusing to take personal responsbility; finding others to blame — as Mark Foley blaming his outrageous behavior on an old priest and alcohol, or John Kerry finding 55 ways to not apologize to the troops he insulted.

In my 50-odd years on the planet, this is one of the more profound changes visible to me in our society. I can’t help but wonder (and worry about) where this takes us. It seems but a small step to a society where a traffic accident caused by speeding and reckless driving gets blamed on the car manufacturer for not having prevented it. Follow that chain of thoughts for a moment… Do you like the result? I don’t.

Anybody have any brilliant ideas how we could possibly reverse course on this phenomenon?

Just Die, Will You?

This could be the quote of the day:

IRONY SO THICK YOU CAN BATHE IN IT

Rick Moran of the Right Wing Nuthouse coined that phrase to headline his post about the New York Times' almost unbelievable article positing that the Bush administration is endangering us by allowing the publication of translated Iraqi papers about WMD.

Michelle Malkin was almost as good:

The NYTimes blabbermouths are accusing the Bush administration of being careless with national security data?

Ouch. Stop. Sides. Splitting.

Rick’s lead:

The levels of irony on display with the “revelation” by the New York Times that some of the Saddam documents dealing with Hussein’s drive for nuclear weapons may constitute a dangerous release of classified info on how to build them is so perfect, so exquisitely delightful that it’s at times like these I wish I was a poet.

Only The Bard himself could do justice to the smorgasbord of delectable incongruities, tasty paradoxes, and bitterly sardonic idiocies that the New York Times, the left, our intelligence agencies, and yes – even those of us who pined for the release of this historic treasure trove of data have ultimately fallen into.

The New York Times, a news organ that has on many occasions revealed the existence of some of the most classified intelligence programs the government uses to protect American citizens, in violation of the law, of common sense, and (my own opinion) of their patriotic duty during a time of war, now implicitly criticizes the Bush Administration for (wait for it)…releasing classified information!

Read Rick’s entire post here, please.

Ed Morrissey, at Captain’s Quarters, notes how the NYT article also implicitly agrees that Saddam was close to having a nuclear weapon — something they have adamatly denied was possible up to now. Says the Captain:

That appears to indicate that by invading in 2003, we followed the best intelligence of the UN inspectors to head off the development of an Iraqi nuke. This intelligence put Saddam far ahead of Iran in the nuclear pursuit, and made it much more urgent to take some definitive action against Saddam before he could build and deploy it. And bear in mind that this intelligence came from the UN, and not from the United States. The inspectors themselves developed it, and they meant to keep it secret.

Michelle Malkin (called a “firebrand” by the NYT) says:

Just another rich and ripe example of how the Times' problem is, you know, that it’s too “evenhanded."

And the Anchoress manages to make some humor out of this pathetic story, by imagining what a conversation inside the Gray Lady’s headquarters this morning might have been like:

So, the NY Times twirls its mustache and writes:

Stupid Evil Bush Reveals Saddam’s Nuke Plans, and He was Only a Year Away from Having Nukes and…and…

Times Peon #1: HOLY CRAP, Mr. Keller, did we just validate everything Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and stupid evil George Bush said to the UN? When we’re spilling secrets, we’re not supposed to do that!

Keller: OMG, WE DID! We DID validate these scheming nazi theocon bastards!!!

Times Peon #2: And…and…and what about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and those sixteen words Bush said…you know, the impeachable 16 words about the Brit intelligence and the Yellowcake! Jim Geraghty at TKS says we might have freaking validated that story, too!

Keller: Ohhhhhh crap! And freaking bloggers! Okay, let’s spin this, baby, spin it! All hands on deck! Turn this ship around! Call Chris Matthews! Call MoDo - no, wait, don’t call her, she’ll make it worse by pretending to be Emma Peel, or something - call Bob Herbert! He’s a wiz at shifting the rudder! Spin, spin! Call Olbermann!

ROFL! There’s much more from the Anchoress, who’s obviously feeling much better today than she has for the past couple of weeks. You’ll be really sorry if you don’t go read the whole thing.

Update: It just gets better. James Taranto weighed in on the same story with this:

What’s even more astounding about this is that the Times is encouraging the removal from public view of material that might threaten American national security. How uncharacteristically responsible. Usually the paper itself publishes such material, heedless of the consequences. Is someone at the Times on vacation or something?

Heh. (as Glenn would say)

Poll the Terrorists

WorldNetDaily wondered whether Islamic terrorists are following the U.S. elections, and if so, who were they rooting for. Aaron Klein is their man on the ground in the Middle East, and he decided to take the simple route of just going out and asking some terrorists directly. Amongst other things, he heard this:

Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said the Democrats' talk of withdrawal from Iraq makes him feel “proud."

"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk,” he told WND. “Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."

Read the whole thing.

The summary version: yes, the Islamic terrorists are following our election — avidly. And they’re rooting for the Democrats (no surprise there!), because they believe that will ensure their victory.

And they may just be right.

Interesting Idea

My post yesterday about (not often) voting brought me quite a few emails, and those emails pointed me to some interesting reading. In a couple of different places, I read about an idea that I find quite appealing — an idea that would slightly modify how we vote for candidates.

The basic notion is to add one extra choice on the ballot for every race: “none of the above”. In most national races, that would mean you get three choices: a Democrat, a Republican, or neither. If “none of the above” gets a plurality of the vote, then the race is re-run, and all the losing candidates are automatically disqualified.

I’d vote a lot more often if I had this option!

This is Democracy?

Edward (Ted) Kennedy is (unfortunately) a living, breathing reminder of how democracy in the U.S. isn’t working. A rational electorate would vote for their dog — or any dog — before they’d vote for Ted.

You would think Ted’s outrageous and sometimes depraved behavior would make it impossible to get elected even once, even at the local level. After all, this is the man who (a) was thrown out of Harvard twice for cheating, (b) has numerous tickets for reckless and drunk driving, (c) notoriously drove his car off the Chappaquiddick bridge and left poor Mary Jo Kopechne to suffocate over the course of two hours, (d) is a well-known and oft-observed drunk-about-town, (e) was caught in flagrante delicto on a restaurant floor, screwing a woman who was not his wife, and (f) single-handedly nixed the most scientifically and technologically sound alternative energy project ever proposed for the East Coast (the Nantucket wind farm) because it would interfere with the view from his home. And these are just the more interesting behaviors; the entire list is much longer.

In any functioning democracy, this man (I hesitated before using that term to describe him) would never have been elected in the first place, much less re-elected six times. Senator Ted Kennedy is the clearest evidence presently available to support my case that American democracy is badly broken, in the sense that “the people” no longer independently elect their representatives. I don’t mean to imply that there’s some grand conspiracy going on, or that votes are being thrown away. What I do mean is that the voting public is being manipulated — sometimes in quite sophisticated ways — into voting for undeserving, unqualified candidates. And Ted Kennedy is exhibit one for my contention.

Do any of you have an alternative explanation for the Ted Kennedy phenomenon?

Stern

If you pay attention to the news at all, you’ve probably heard about the “Stern Report” on global warming. It’s a very cleverly packaged AlGore-esque treatise that makes a startling claim: that we (the whole world, they mean) should immediately start investing 1% of GDP annually in carbon reduction technology. Oh, and if we don’t, Mr. Stern says we’ll be in big trouble.

It’s just talk.

It’s not supported by science, or by economics.

Bjorn Lomborg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist does a detailed takedown in today’s OpinionJournal (free), concluding:

Why does all this matter? It matters because, with clever marketing and sensationalist headlines, the Stern review is about to edge its way into our collective consciousness. The suggestion that flooding will overwhelm us has already been picked up by commentators, yet going back to the background reports properly shows declining costs from flooding and fewer people at risk. The media is now quoting Mr. Stern’s suggestion that climate change will wreak financial devastation that will wipe 20% off GDP, explicitly evoking memories of past financial catastrophes such as the Great Depression or World War II; yet the review clearly tells us that costs will be 0% now and just 3% in 2100.

It matters because Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Nicholas Stern all profess that one of the major reasons that they want to do something about climate change is because it will hit the world’s poor the hardest. Using a worse-than-worst-case scenario, Mr. Stern warns that the wealth of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will be reduced by 10% to 13% in 2100 and suggests that effect would lead to 145 million more poor people.

Faced with such alarmist suggestions, spending just 1% of GDP or $450 billion each year to cut carbon emissions seems on the surface like a sound investment. In fact, it is one of the least attractive options. Spending just a fraction of this figure — $75 billion — the U.N. estimates that we could solve all the world’s major basic problems. We could give everyone clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education right now. Is that not better?

We know from economic models that dealing just with malaria could provide economic boosts to the order of 1% extra GDP growth per capita per year. Even making a very conservative estimate that solving all the major basic issues would induce just 2% extra growth, 100 years from now each individual in the developing world would be more than 700% richer. That truly trivializes Mr. Stern’s 10% to 13% estimates for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Last weekend in New York, I asked 24 U.N. ambassadors — from nations including China, India and the U.S. — to prioritize the best solutions for the world’s greatest challenges, in a project known as Copenhagen Consensus. They looked at what spending money to combat climate change and other major problems could achieve. They found that the world should prioritize the need for better health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education, long before we turn our attention to the costly mitigation of global warning.

We all want a better world. But we must not let ourselves be swept up in making a bad investment, simply because we have been scared by sensationalist headlines.

Do read the whole thing. It’s a breath of fresh air…

Bjorn says, in effect, take a deep breath, everybody. First of all, there are reasons to be skeptical of the underlying science (both of the very existence of global warming, and of any purported mitigations). Secondly, even if all the science claims were true, global warming isn’t the worst problem we have — if we were going to spend that kind of money addressing a problem, there are a bunch of other candidates that might be more important.

Global warming is an interesting example of what happens when a complex issue enters the political arena. Politicians look at issues like this differently than most would wish them to — they examine it from multiple perspectives, looking for a way for them to gain some political advantage over their rivals. For one politician, it might be the money he could raise from his district by supporting ethanol — it doesn’t matter to that politician that ethanol doesn’t actually help anything (and quite possibly is worse than using oil-in-the-ground). For another politician, it may be political cover for a large increase in gasoline taxes — and again, it doesn’t matter to that politician that the impact of those taxes is negative for his constituents, as that tax money means more ways for him to control the spending of it, and thereby increase his power.

I could go on and on along these lines, but the real point is this: decision-making in the political arena isn’t the same thing as rational problem-solving. Far from it! It’s not even reasonable to expect it, given the context. Nevertheless, I can’t help but be bitterly disappointed at the direction this particular political debate is going (watch what happens in California next Tuesday), and at the utter lack of sober reasoning it appears to contain.

My prediction: our taxes are about to be raised significantly, and the net carbon added to the atmosphere annually will not decline in my lifetime. In other words, the politicians will raise our taxes under the political cover of “global warming", and they will spend the resulting money on everything under the sun except global warming mitigation. Just as they have spent California’s lottery revenue on anything but…

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Anyone who knows me even slightly knows that I have strong views on many political issues, and that I avidly follow political events. But unless you know me well, you may not know something else about me that may surprise you: I rarely vote.

What?

That’s right. I rarely vote. I don’t believe the conventional wisdom that voting is a duty of every citizen of a democracy — it isn’t; our Constitution grants me the right to vote, but it does not make voting a duty. Even more emphatically I reject the “logic” that every vote counts, and my vote might make the difference — for in nearly every election, the outcome is perfectly predictable.

It is in those exception elections, the ones where the outcome is in some doubt, that I vote. For example, I voted to recall Governor Gray Davis, for I was quite unsure of that election’s outcome and I had an informed opinion (Gray Davis really badly needed to be dumped!).

In most national-level elections, there really isn’t any doubt at all about the outcome. For over 20 years now, between 95% and 99% of all incumbents are re-elected. There’s a good discussion of why this is so here. Depending on whose tally you choose to agree with, in this election cycle there are only 10 or 15 House or Senate elections with any significant doubt about the outcome. All but one or two of these are electing a new Senator or Representative to a seat that’s been vacated. This fact — easily verified by any skeptics out there — belies the notion that candidates win on merit. For how could it be that in 95%+ of the cases, the incumbent is the better candidate?

A while back I read a very interesting study (which unfortunately I can’t locate a link to) that looked at the effect of campaign spending only in Congressional elections without an incumbent. These are nearly the only truly contested Congressional elections, so I was quite interested in this. The most damning result: in those cases where campaign spending differed by more than 20%, the top spender won more than 90% of the time. Do you really believe that the better candidate is so overwhelmingly more likely to spend more money campaigning? Again, the evidence argues that candidates are not elected on their merit.

Here’s a very well-known fact that I suspect few people ever think about: for well over fifty years, 99%+ of all Congressional winners belong to either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Our two-party system is so ingrained in us that I’ll bet a lot of people believe it is actually a Constitutionally-mandated situation. But it is not, and many fine candidates agree with neither party’s platform and run either as an independent or with one of the smaller parties. Rarely does one of these candidates win. Does it really make sense that such a tiny fraction of those candidates deserve to win on their merits, when compared to their Republican and Democratic opponents? Of course it doesn’t. Oh, and I know there are all sorts of arguments to be made about how membership in one of the major parties has substantial benefits (to the candidate) — but I don’t give a hoot about any of that. What I’m observing here is a simple fact: a superior candidate running as (say) an independent has a greater chance of getting struck by lightning while winning the lottery than he does of winnning the election.

Merit has little (and perhaps nothing at all) do to with winning Congressional elections. Congressional elections are won by incumbency, party affiliation, and money.

So I don’t bother voting in elections where there’s an incumbent — that incumbent is going to win no matter how I vote. I don’t bother voting in elections where there is no incumbent, but the spending is lopsided — again, my vote isn’t going to make any difference. But if we ever get an national election for my district without an incumbent and with relatively equal spending, I’ll vote.

I’ll also vote when there’s a local or state election of interest. California’s Assembly and Senate seats have a very similar rate of winning for incumbents as the Congress; all the same issues apply. Ditto on the spending. One characteristic of California’s political scene is a bit unusual in the U.S., and may be unfamiliar to many from outside the state: our proposition process. It’s relatively easy for citizens to put a proposition on the ballot — and the results of these propositions are binding. Much of California’s property tax cutting was accomplished this way, via the citizenry bashing their politicians over the head with Proposition 13. Politicians, by and large, hate the proposition process. I love it, of course — and I watch those propositions very carefully. In election cycles with propositions I care about whose outcome is at all uncertain, I’ll vote.

Given the readily observable statistics about voting, the average voter must vote like this: Is there an incumbent? If yes, vote for him. Otherwise, vote for the major party candidate who spent the most money, or for the major party that I vote for no matter what. In the rare cases where the preceding doesn’t tell me how to vote, roll the dice.

With that simple algorithm, I can predict — accurately — the outcome of nearly every Congressional election. Note that the candidate’s merit does not figure in the algorithm at all.

And this tells me that unless an election includes one of those rare no-incumbent, equal-spending races, my vote isn’t going to make any difference at all. There’s a good term for this from the electrical engineering world: the “signal-to-noise ratio”. This is simply a way of describing how the signal strength (for example, of a radio station) compares to the inevitable background noise. In Congressional elections, the “background noise” is the incumbency/spending/party affiliation situation, and the “signal” is my vote. If the signal-to-noise ratio is very low, my vote will not be “heard", and I don’t bother casting it.

What should really concern you, though, isn’t that I don’t usually vote. That’s not the sad story here. The sad story here is that voting algorithm I described above. For how can a democracy flourish when its government is no longer elected on its merits?

Quote of the Day

From John Kass, in the Chicago Tribune:

So Kerry’s ridiculous elitism, burbling out of him as if he lives, as I suspect, entirely on a diet of lentils and club soda, is what the Republicans needed. It’s a big chunk of wood floating just above Republican hands in deep water.

This is from a liberal columnist in a liberal newspaper in a liberal city. Go read the whole thing.

Something I’d really like to know: is the mindset of John Kerry (D-Ketchup) as revealed by his recent copy actually news to most Americans? Because if it is … if it really takes a colossal put-your-foot-in-it comment like this to inform people … then what hope is there for a democracy to every elect someone on merit?

The Wall Street Journal chimed in with this:

Congratulations, Senator Clinton. Another competitor bites the dust.

Oh, that’s comforting.

Perverted Science

The dead-tree publication Science News is one of the few that I still subscribe to. They do have a web site, but it’s quite awful and obviously designed to promote (through the tired old “teaser” mechanism) subscriptions to the paper journal. Because of that, I can’t link to the story I’m about to discuss.

That story is titled “Fit to be Tied", and it describes a branch of science that some — most recently including a couple of knowledgeable practitioners — believe is pursuing a fairy tale. They describe this branch of science as being mired in groupthink, perverted by the quest for grant money (wherein saleability matters more than genuine advance), and the telltale hostility to any naysayers. The latter is particularly “unscientific", in that it suppresses the interplay of theories and ideas — instead putting great pressure on scientists to conform to the “consensus” view.

The pattern I just described is exactly what I believe is happening with global warming right now. Bjorn Lomborg, in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, first got me thinking about the global warming “movement”. But the article in Science News wasn’t about global warming — it was about “big physics", and string theory.

For quite a few years now, string theory has been the primary focus of physics research. Physists hold string theory up as the one great hope of a genuine “Grand Unified Theory” — a “theory of everything” that could successfully describe the how and why of everything we can observe in the physical world. I have only the vaguest clue about string theory; it’s very confusing to even a reasonably well-informed lay person. It also has been rapidly changing, and there are a large number of seriously considered variations of it.

The Science News article paints a picture of string theory as having been perverted into something that’s not really science, in exactly the same way as global warming (the parallel is mine, not the article’s). Dissenting scientists are shunned and can’t get funding. Groupthink prevails. No testable hypotheses — not one, after decades of work — have ever been formulated (these are a hallmark of physics theories — at least, they were until the advent of string theory). The all-out pursuit of the funding dollar.

This all gives rise to the ponder… Is this pattern the inevitable result of major public funding of science? If we removed the billions of dollars in annual funding from global warming and string theory, would the fields revert to a more normal scientific endeavour? Can we predict which fields will be come moribund simply by looking to see which ones are getting the most money?

I suspect it’s not that simple. To evolve into the pattern of global warming science and big physics requires one more element, I think: the primary objective must be theoretical, as opposed to practical. For example, the primary objective of cancer research is…curing cancer. Avenues of research that weren’t genuinely promising probably aren’t going to become consensus thinking, especially when there’s so much competition from avenues of research that are providing verifiable results. I don’t think that what’s happened with global warming and string theory could happen to cancer research. Are there other fields where this could happen? Of course there are. But what I don’t know, and would like to, is which of those fields is getting the majority of its funding from public sources?

Quote of the Day

John Kerry, speaking yesterday at a rally for Phil Angelides (the hapless Democratic challenger to Arnold Schwatzenegger):

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

In other words, losers become soldiers and go to Iraq. Implied subtext: winners get to be like me!

I’ve long thought that it must be true — given their positions and their rhetoric — that the moonbat wing of the Democratic party holds our troops in utter contempt. They’re just (usually) too smart to put that contempt on display.

But not John Kerry, moonbat extraordinaire. No sir, he just lets it all hang out. And proves my suspicion in the process.

Rope. Tree. Raving un-American moonbat. Some assembly required.

Ah, Autumn...

We went for a nice walk up the slope behind our house this morning, Debbie and I, and all three dogs (Mo’i, Miki, and Lea). It’s the first morning we’ve had this season that “felt” like an autumn morning: 42 degrees when we left, 100% relative humidity, clear skies with patches of fog and mist spotted here and there. By the time we got back (an hour or so later), it was 52 degrees, but otherwise the same.

This is the season when all the plants are covered with dew in the morning. We still have some plants in bloom, and they were quite beautiful, all glistening with fine dew drops. Naturally, I forgot to bring my camera! The spider’s webs were prominent again — they’re always there, but you really don’t notice them much if they’re not dew-covered. The east end of Lawson Valley, which is pasture spotted with large live oaks, was particularly pretty. The sun had first struck it just minutes before we sighted it, and the sun’s warmth was raising tendrils of fine mist in the still morning air; they twisted and wove around the oaks in my idea of good performance art. And of course, the humid air made all the desert odors pop out. The dogs all lost their minds as we walked, following who-knows-what scent with enormous enthusiasm. Happy dogs…

Yesterday I had a bit of excitement. I was in my office, working; Debbie was off with all three dogs to an agility meet. Suddenly I heard all five house cats yowling — something that I’ve never heard before, in over 25 years of living with cats. I ran out to our livingroom to find all five cats prowling along our glass patio door, looking every which way and yowling up a storm. Anybody who knows cats knows that this is very odd behavior.

Well, when I got to the patio door and started looking around myself, I soon saw the cause of the commotion: a huge rattlesnake, easily the biggest I’ve ever seen on our property — about 6' 4” long, and very fat. I got my snake stick and a covered plastic bucket, and captured him easily enough — he didn’t act frightened or alarmed at all, as rattlesnakes usually do when I capture them. It was a bit of work to get him coiled up in the bucket, but I did it, and got the lid safely snapped on. I take the rattlesnakes I capture to a part of the National Forest that’s about five miles from where I live. I don’t want rattlesnakes in my yard, where they threaten us and our animals, but I also don’t want to kill them — they do a great deal of good in our ecosystem. So I do the catch and release thing…

Usually when I release the snakes, I have the bucket upright, snap off the lid, and then tip the bucket over, away from me. The snakes always immediately slither out and away. This fellow was a little different. When I pried off one corner of the lid, suddently the rest popped off all by itself — the snake pushed it off, and very quickly slithered out of the bucket while it was still upright. When that lid popped off, you can probably imagine how quickly I did the backwards walk! I watched from about 15 feet away; he got himself entirely out of the bucket in just a few seconds. He looked my way once, and then set off kind of sideways to me, into some nearby brush. This was a very confident snake, very different than my usual experience…

Boykin RotaRule 560

The slide rule at right (click the thumbnails for a larger view) was made by the Boykin Products Company. I don’t know much about it other than a brief discussion (featuring the manufacturer’s nephew!) on the ISRG (a news group on Yahoo!). The example that I have is a different, and presumably more modern model (since the model number is higher). It’s quite nicely made, with an ingenious braking mechanism to help keep the cursor in one place. I rather like the scale labels on the cursor; it greatly eases the work of figuring out “where you are” when you’re using the rule. If anyone can help fill in the blanks on this slide rule, I’d sure appreciate it.

But the main reason for this post isn’t to answer questions about the RotaRule 560 — it’s to get opinions and ideas about high-resolution photography of slide rules vs. the more conventional scanning.

What got me started on this was the artificial looking “flatness” of a scan. This is the inevitable result of the fact that a scanner just plain doesn’t work like your eyeball. Scanners by their very nature look at the object being scanned from a perspective that varies as the scanning head moves across the object. This creates an image where every element appears to be directly in front of you — something that could never happen in real life. The human vision system sees such an image as lacking all perspective. A camera, on the other hand, emulates your eye much more closely — especially in terms of recording the perspective in an image. Furthermore, a modern digital camera’s optical system (I’m generalizing here; there are exceptions) is likely to render the object’s colors and contrasts more faithfully than a typical scanner would.

So I built a shadow box (that’s why the background in the photos is completely black) and tried taking photos of the RotaRule. Clearly I have some refinements to make, particularly with respect to glare. I took these photos outdoors, in natural indirect light. The glare visible on the cursors is most likely from the bright white T-shirt I was wearing, which was directly lit by the sun. I used a 160mm (effective) macro lens on a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 10D camera, at 100 ASA, f32, and 1/15 second. I used the pinhole f-stop to maximize the depth of field.

Several things are evident at a glance. First, the overall resolution is somewhat less than what a 300 dpi scan would produce. This makes sense, as the photos work out to about 200 dpi. The photo is less “crisp” than a 300 dpi scan. Second, the “scanner flatness” is definitely gone; this looks like a normal, natural image to my eye. Third, the colors and textures are substantially more sensitively (and accurately) rendered on the photo, as compared with the scan. For a concrete example of this, look at the top of the front photo — the white background of the stator has a distinctly different tone than the background of the rotor. This difference is visible in an identical way on to an eyeball, and completely invisible on any scan I made (I made dozens of them in the course of this experiment).

I can’t say that either photos or scans are so superior to the other that I should drop one approach and take the other. I’m leaning, slightly, toward the photo — mostly on aesthetic grounds. I like the natural-looking images, and I like the fact that I can use the same method to image inherently three-dimensional objects, such as a cylindrical slide rule, where scanning simply will not work.

Thoughts, anyone?

America Alone

I just love Mark Steyn; he’s a breath of fresh air and rationality in any political conversation, and is one of the wittiest commentators around. I’m reading his latest book (America Alone), and found this bit last night:

For example, I hadn’t really followed Sudanese current events closely since, oh, General Kitchener’s victory at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, but in 2003 a story from that benighted land happened to catch my eye. In the fall of that year mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi: a man from West Africa came into the shop and “shook the store owner’s hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body."

I know the feeling. The same thing happened to me after shaking hands with Senator Clinton.

Just seconds before reading that passage, I was taking a sip of a nice Cabernet. I’m sure glad I had swallowed my wine before reading any further!

To be quite serious for a moment, Mark’s new book is a prediction for America’s future — when it stands nearly alone as the only major non-Muslim country, and all of Europe is under sharia law. His case starts with demographics — very alarming all by themselves — and is buttressed by some cogent observations about weaknesses in our own civilization. It’s a real wake-up call, and well worth reading. The wit is just a side-benefit.

By the way, the above-quoted story carries on for quite a while. I hurt myself laughing at this section; it’s worth the price of admission all by itself…

French Steel

These two slide rules are made from polished heavy sheet steel; possibly plated, but I don’t think so. The scales and other writing are engraved into the steel. The rules are similar, but not identical.

From the writing on them one can see that they are advertising French companies. I believe some of the other language indicates they are of French manufacture, but I’m not sure about that. Perhaps someone out there knows enough French, and France, to tell me that for certain?

The “Paul Torche” rule seems to be advertising old electronic components (in English, static transformers and mercury vapor rectifiers). That would date it to about the 1950s or earlier. The other rule seems to be advertising abrasives; something I know next to nothing about. Other than those two flimsy clues, the only other thing that might help date them is that one of them (the abrasives rule) was coated with a substance that I believe was very old “cosmoline”. I’m quite familiar with that stuff from my days in the U.S. Navy; lots of stuff came packed in it. Cosmoline was a petroleum-based product with the consistency of heavy grease, and often it was green in color from the cuprous oxide in it that discouraged any life form from attacking whatever it was protecting. This was very important in places like the tropics, where they have bacteria and fungus that can eat just about anything. Anyhow, this rule was coated with what looked like hardened Cosmoline. I’m sure it was petroleum-based, because soap and water barely touched it, but Nevr-Dull sluiced it right off. I’m thinking that the cosmoline dates it to no more recent than about the late 1950s, consistent with the electronics components. But…both the electronics components and cosmoline were in use as early as the 1930s (and possibly the 1920s), so that’s still a broad range.

Any ideas, anyone? Please leave your thoughts in the comments…

Mystery Hemmi

I really love the Hemmi bamboo slide rules (they have my vote for the best overall construction and “feel"), and I’ve collected a number of them. Many of them have a model number prominently displayed somewhere, and are therefore very easy to identify. For the rest of them, the main resource I have is Paul Ross' magnificent Hemmi catalog — with which I’ve been able to positively identify almost all of my Hemmis.

This is one of the exceptions (click on the thumbnail at right to get a large 300 dpi scan). The scales are identical to a Model 1 and Model 47, but it has some of the characteristics of each. For instance, it has pins at the ends of the stators and the slide, like the Model 1. It has a cursor of the same general style as the Model 47, except it’s considerably wider. Like them, it has 250mm scales.

It’s entirely possible that the slide rule originally had the model number on the paper glued to the back. Unfortunately, that paper has been rather completely destroyed. So I’m left mystified, a state that my wife would tell you I’m all too familiar with.

One strange note: the former owner of this slide rule decided to add a few gauge points of his own. Look closely at the C scale and you’ll see 'em…

If anyone can identify this, please leave me a comment here…

Aussie Poster Girl

Where is the American equivalent?

Just listen.

This video is topping the charts in Australia.

She can be my poster girl anytime at all...

Sartorius-Werke

The aluminum slide rule at right has me completely baffled. It’s not, strictly speaking, a slide rule at all — there’s a stator and a cursor, but no slide. It resembles the simple measurment conversion rules one sometimes sees. However, while some the scales are linear, a few are not — and the labels on the scales (Nm, Td, Neb, Nel) don’t ring any bells with me at all. The company still exists, manufacturing a wide range of equipment, especially biology instruments and scales.

Click on the thumbnails at right to get a 300 dpi scan.

If you have any knowledge of this slide rule, or can make a good guess, please leave a comment here.

Fall Color (Updated)

A few minutes ago I was sipping a cup of tea, and looking out my office window at a “Liquid Amber” tree, whose leaves have turned a deep red. And I was reminded of something that happened to me in Lake Forest, California, a couple of years ago…

I was working for FutureTrade, which is based in Lake Forest. My normal routine there was to drive 120 miles or so to Lake Forest, work for two days (staying overnight in a local motel), and then driving back home. On those mornings when I woke up in Lake Forest, my habit was to stop for coffee at a local Starbucks. Most mornings I was there, a particular young lady was on shift; I don’t remember her name, but I called her “Metal Woman” because of the amazing number of metal things she had sticking into and out of her body. Her ears, cheeks, tongue, nose, arms, legs, fingers, and forehead were all festooned with metallic protuberances. More alarmingly, she was not at all shy about discussing and/or showing off her more…private…protuberances to anyone who acted interested. When I first saw her, I noted several bumps under her T-shirt — she saw my glance, and promptly lifted her T-shirt so I could get a good view (yes, she was wearing a bra — and there were bumps under it as well!).

Anyway, one fall morning as I stopped in for my morning coffee, I made a comment to Metal Woman about how pretty the color was on the Liquid Amber trees planted along the sidewalk in front of her Starbucks. She gave me a funny look, and said (I’m not joking!):

"Every year about this time, those trees get sick and their leaves die — and every year, people tell me how it looks nice. I don’t get it!"

A little questioning and I quickly figured out that the entire notion of deciduous trees was a new one to her. When I asked her if she had heard of “fall color” before, she said yes, but she had no idea what it referred to. When I told her that the Liquid Amber trees were a good example of it, she thought it was really kind of creepy that people got all goo-goo about sick trees. When I told her that the trees weren’t sick, but rather adapting to the seasons in order to survive, she gave me the kind of look you might give someone who started raving about the little green men from Alpha Betelguese who were living in the garage.

She didn’t believe me.

I’m told you have to be a high school graduate to work in Starbucks.

Every time I’ve seen fall color since that experience, I think of Metal Woman. Disturbing metallic protuberances on an otherwise attractive woman (albeit with shock exhibitionist tendencies) don’t really go all that well with the simple beauty of fall color, unfortunately. I need a way to purge my mind of Metal Woman…

Updated:

A reader wrote me to ask if I had a problem with exhibitionist women. Absolutely not! I am 100% in favor of women showing me their bodies. I just prefer them without metallic parts…

A. F. Metal Rietz

This is my week for mystery slide rules! This one arrived today, and in the materials used for its construction it is unlike any other slide rule I have ever seen…

Click on the thumbnails at right to get full-size (300 dpi) scans. They are JPGs this time, so they’re not quite as huge as the PNGs I subjected you to yesterday…

The main mystery is this: who is the maker? A. F.? This rings no bells with me…

The bottom photo shows the slide set up on edge to be scanned. This shows you the bizarre construction of this rule. What you’re seeing is the ends of metal bars, roughly rectangular in cross-section, arranged so that if you’re holding the slide rule for normal use they run vertically! How odd! The metal bars appear to be embedded in a vinyl (or something similar) extruded matrix. Both the stators and the slide are comprised of two layers of the material I just described sandwiching an inner layer of a transparent plastic with a yellowish tint. You can’t see it very well in that scan, but that transparent layer is a little wider than the other layers on the slide (forming runners) and a little narrower on the stators (forming a well for the runners to run in).

Does anyone have a clue who the maker is? What the alleged benefits of this construction technique were? Any references to information about it on the web (I googled, but found nothing)?

I’d appreciate comments on this post if you have information…

Quote of the Day

The crazy folks in California (where I live) have a voter initiative (Proposition 87) on the ballot this election that would raise taxes on oil from California, and use the money raised to fund a slew of unspecified, politically-controlled energy initiatives. If there was ever a recipe for wasting billions of dollars, this would be it.

The Wall Street Journal’s commentary page chimed in on this subject today, in their inimitable fashion. Some excerpts:

...

The jewel in this liberal crown is Proposition 87, which would raise taxes on oil extracted from California by 1.5% to 6%, depending on the price per barrel — all in the name of reducing energy consumption and dependency on foreign oil. Let us run that by you again: The idea here is to tax California oil in order to get Californians to use less Saudi oil. Brilliant.

If approved, the law would raise costs on California’s oil producers by as much as $4 billion over the next 10 years. California would overnight become the state with the highest tax on oil producers in the U.S. — which makes as much sense as Vermont levying the highest tax on maple syrup. Not one penny, by the way, would go to close Sacramento’s enormous government debt burden — which may rise by another $40 billion if the multitude of bond initiatives for new public spending are also approved by voters this November.

...

Former President Bill Clinton is starring in a pro-87 TV ad that began running last week. Al Gore is raising money for the initiative, alongside Hollywood economists Geena Davis and Julia Roberts. Its main financial supporter is Hollywood producer Stephen Bing, who is also rich enough not to care about any increase in energy prices; his $40 million contribution is believed to be the largest individual donation to a ballot initiative in history. One co-chairman of the initiative, Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist, has contributed $1 million to the campaign. Mr. Khosla happens to own an ethanol plant outside of Fresno — just the operation that, who knows, might be eligible for funding from this new energy welfare fund.

...

Love that bit about the Hollywood economists…

The latest polls have likely voters supporting Proposition 87, 48% to 38%, with 14% undecided.

If Julia Roberts supported a proposition to require all California residents to whack themselves in the head with a sledgehammer every morning, I’ll bet it would pass…

Mystery Dietzgen

Yesterday I received a package with two slide rules in it. They were from an auction I’d won on eBay. One of the slide rules was a Keuffel & Esser model that I wanted to add to my collection; the other was one that the seller could not identify (not even the maker), and from the lousy photo in the listing didn’t look very interesting.

So I was very surprised when I opened the package to find that the unidentified rule was actually the more interesting of the pair. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the Keuffel & Esser, mind you — it’s just that the other one was a real prize. It was extremely grubby, and I wish now that I had taken a “before” picture so I could show you what a good cleaning can do. But even when it was dirty I could see that it was something special: a very old Dietzgen, almost certainly from the first decade of the 20th century.

The first thing I did was to search through all my reference books, and on the web, to try to positively identify the model. I failed; the closest thing was a Dietzgen slide rule scan I found at Mike Konshak’s wonderful online slide rule museum. Mike has this identified through the “3746A” that is stamped into the bottom of the rule. If that identification is correct, then the rule I have is most likely a “259A", as my rule has that number stamped in the same place as the rule Mike shows with the “3746A”. However, I’m suspicious that those stamps are actually serial numbers, and not model numbers — as I could find no references anywhere to a model 259A (or 3746A, for that matter).

So, I’m left wondering just what I’ve got. And I’d appreciate any help, or even wild speculations, that anyone might have (please use the comments here). At right are thumbnails of 300 dpi scans of the slide rule (after cleaning!); click on any of them to view them (warning: they’re big!). Worth noting is that the wood this Dietzgen is made from isn’t the usual mahogany; it is distinctly lighter in color, a sort of honey colored wood. I have a couple of other slide rules made from pearwood, and this looks exactly like them. The scan on Mike’s site looks like mahogany — but looking at my scans, the color didn’t come across very well, and perhaps it didn’t on Mike’s scan, either.

Boring notes on cleaning:

Most of the cleaning I did in a very low-tech fashion — I used very a dilute dishsoap solution, lint-free Kimwipes, and lots of elbow grease. A century’s worth of crud (whose components I really don’t want to know) had accumulated in every nook and cranny on the rule, even in the engravings. The slide’s motion was very difficult before cleaning, and I was worried it was in need of sanding; afterwards it was smooth as silk. Crud, and lots of it, was the only culprit.

I used a soft-bristled toothbrush to clean the engravings — tedious, but the result was crisp, black markings instead of the slightly vaguely defined, grayish markings it started out with. The biggest crud-removal challenge turned out to be the cursor — the inside of the slides had a millimeter or so built up. I soaked it for an hour in the soap solution, and then the toothbrush did the trick.

I always worry that the water in the soap solution will soak into these old wooden rules. My standard procedure with them is to use a very sparing amount of the soap solution, and to wipe it off immediately. This time, however, the crud was so thick — and the wood was clearly not being affected — that I felt safe using much more soapy solution (though still drying if off very quickly). There were no ill effects at all.

After this cleaning, there were still some yellow spots on the face of the rule. Rubbing my finger over them very lightly, I felt (or imagined that I felt) a slight bump, as though there were some substance on the surface. These spots were quite unsightly, and detracted a lot from the appearance of this otherwise very fine old slide rule. I decided to try abrasion, and I chose the finest grit abrasive I have: some 12,000 grit Micro-Mesh. I used some of the soap solution for lubricant, and my finger instead of the foam pad they give you (as I wanted to be able to apply more pressure). In about 10 seconds, those yellow spots were history — and better yet, there was no telltale texture difference on the spots I cleaned. Hooray for Micro-Mesh!

Quote of the Day

Justice Scalia (one of our Supreme Court Justices, for all you public school graduates) gave a very interesting talk yesterday. He commented extensively on the historically very recent intervention by federal judiciary in social questions, via the “discovery” of new, heretofore unsuspected, Constitutional rights — and trampling on democracy in the process. Abortion and suicide rights featured in his talk as social issues that the Supreme Court really didn’t have much business deciding (in other words, he believes these social issues are properly matters for the states to decide).

Near the end of his talk, Justice Scalia let fly with this sweet and succinct verbal dart:

It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional.

That one-liner quite beautifully sums up what’s wrong with judicial activism. The courts have become too powerful compared with the other branches of the federal government. Justice Scalia knows it, and knows the only way to stop it is to appoint more strict constructionist judges.

We need more justices like Mr. Scalia, at every level of the federal judiciary.

Faster, please.

Bumper Sticker

On a car absolutely plastered with “Kerry/Edwards” stickers:

If you want to see hate, disagree with a liberal.

What is this? Did some conservative spot the car, and think it needed a new sticker? Or is this liberal so blinded by his ideology that he actually thought that was a positive statement about liberals?

I don’t know the answer to that.

But I want one of those bumper stickers!

Quote of the Day

From Omar Fadil of the IraqTheModel blog:

"All they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives."

Said in response to the recent propaganda in the guise of a “scientific” study published in the Lancet — and promptly debunked by a host of real scientists. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece ($) that excoriates the Lancet, saying in part:

So read a story in last week’s Washington Post on the new John Hopkins-led study — published in the British medical journal Lancet — purporting to document “excess deaths” in Iraq. “We have no reason to question the findings,” the Post quoted a Human Rights Watch official as saying. The article was fairly typical of reporting on the Lancet study, which has also been all over television and radio, as well as Internet sites such as Google and Yahoo! news.

All of which leaves us wondering if reporters and editors have enough sense anymore to ask basic questions about such enormous numbers, or whether they are simply too biased against the Bush Administration and its Iraq policy to do so. The 655,000 figure is more than 10 times higher than previous estimates of violent deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, and it is larger than the number of Germans killed by allied bombing during all of World War II and larger than the number of Americans who died during our own Civil War.

Others have noted elsewhere that the Lancet’s estimate would require that over 1,000 Iraqis were killed every single day in 2006 — that nobody bothered to report to any police, hospitals, or other authorities. This seems unlikely in the extreme, as many Iraqis on the ground have observed.

Omar has it right: the Lancet has a political agenda in opposition to the war in Iraq. And it seems clear that their report was timed to influence the upcoming American elections. Shame on this “science” journal, both for publishing such a piece of rubbish, and for sullying the once-good reputation of a once-fine scientific journal…

Lovely Morning

Yesterday, as a measure of atonement for our absolutely decadent meal on Saturday (lobster l’americaine, garlic/cheese French bread, Caesar salad, and chocolate Grand Marnier cheesecake, all homemade and washed down with generous quantities of good wine), Debbie made a lovely Mexican chicken soup (tlapeno). Slightly more down-to-earth than Saturday’s meal, but awfully good. Anyone who knows Debbie is aware of her inability to make less than enormous quantities of soup — so now we have (yum!) gallons of leftover tlapeno. You all should envy me!

Now, making tlapeno involves large quantities of chicken processing — you have to roast the chicken, then strip the meat, and boil things down to get the broth. For our three field spaniels, life doesn’t get much better than a kitchen with unwanted chicken parts flying around. We had the full and undivided attention of all three dogs while we were processing the chicken — and we didn’t have to dispose of anything other than the totally stripped skeletons. Happy, happy dogs, they were.

Until 1:30 this morning, that is. Because at that moment, Lea decided (rather abruptly) that vomiting was the appropriate thing to do. On the bed. On Debbie. In large quantities. Full of delightfully greasy, fragrant chicken parts. Lovely.

Not.

So… Up we got. First, Debbie (in her vomit-dripping pajamas) took Lea outside, hoping that any further spewing would occur in the great outdoors. But Lea was terrified by the howling of bazillions of coyotes, some pretty close, so Debbie brought her back in — and got my sorry butt up, so I could take the poor girl out for a walk (on a leash), hoping to encourage whatever foul humors remained to disgorge. But nothing more was forthcoming. Debbie, meanwhile, took a shower and did something to her pajamas. We gave up on sleep; stripped the bed, applied various chemicals, and parked Lea in the office (which has an easily cleaned linoleum floor) in her favorite doggie bed. We had coffee. Then, a couple of hours later, Lea casually stands up in her doggie bed and vomits again, in the same style as previously. Right into her doggie bed, not the easily cleaned floor, naturally. The disaster response team swung into action again, with practiced moves. Large quantities of paper towels were consumed. The doggie bed, washable, fortunately, went into the washer with appropriate chemicals. Now Lea is lying beside me in the office, on naught but an old towel — which is also easily cleaned.

So far she has vomited approximately 30 gallons of partially digested chicken. We’re pretty sure that’s more than went into her. We’re hoping there’s nothing more to come out.

Pray for us.

Update: It gets better. We have one of those Tempurpedic foam matresses, and after stripping all the bedding earlier, it is exposed to the air (awaiting appropriate chemical treatment, once we find out what that is). I just went into the bedroom a moment ago, and discovered a trio of our cats all looking at one part of the mattress (not where the dog vomited, but rather down by where our feet would be). I looked to see what they were all interested in — and discovered that they had eaten a few cubic inches of the foam!

Oh, my. One wonders what memory foam will do to a cat’s innards…

Rain!

Last night, just before we went to bed, we had a light shower. I woke up several times during the night to the delightful sound of raindrops hitting all the dry leaves and grasses — a bit like rain on a distant, muted tin roof. And this morning, I ran in to look at the weather system first thing — and miracle of miracles, we got over a half inch!

You non-desert folks might scoff at this. I can just hear some of my friends now, mocking our half inch as “just barely damp”. But for us, this is an extremely welcome wetting of the tinder we’re surrounded with; it means a significant reduction in the fire danger.

And we like that!

Update:

I took a run into town to do some errands, and once again had the experience of seeing the sudden greening that comes to the desert very quickly after a rain. As always, the most dramatic greening is with our mosses — they’ve been black all summer, tricking our expectations into thinking that flat black is their normal state. But within minutes after a rain, they start turning green — and by this morning they are all bright emerald green, very different than yesterday. Slightly subtler is the greening of the other plants — a combination of happy chlorophyll and the dust getting washed off. I’m not sure which effect is predominant. Another change, not so subtle, is that everything got darker when it got wet — rocks, tree trunks and branches, even the pavement — so the greens are more dramatically contrasted…

Quote of the Day

This is a long quote, I know — the conclusion to her very fine column yesterday:

What is most missing from the left in America is an element of grace — of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together. The Democratic Party hasn’t had enough of this kind of thing since Bobby Kennedy died. What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few. Such as: Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

Go read the whole thing. Now.

Dang, she’s good! What a talent she has for distilling the essence of things…

Title

Neo-neocon is one of my favorite bloggers, always interesting. Today she starts with this:

North Korea is a country formed by a war that never ended.

Pacifists are fond of saying that war never solves anything. I beg to differ — war, for example, solved the problem of Adolf Hitler and German expansionist aggressiveness, although at great cost.

But that war was fought to the bitter end, unlike many subsequent ones. Revulsion at war — which I share, by the way, although my critics won’t credit that — has led to a series of unfinished, prematurely truncated wars. And like most unfinished business, there’s a tendency for these conflicts to come back to bite us.

Read the whole thing.

War can be the least awful of the alternatives available. Looking at the current situation in North Korea, one can’t help but think it would have been better to have finished the job back fifty years ago…

Straw Poll

A GOP straw poll...

...with some interesting results...

Quote of the Day

From today’s Wall Street Journal comment page:

Majority Leader-in-waiting Harry Reid insisted the Administration appoint a “senior official to conduct a full review of [its] failed North Korea policy.” Mr. Reid performed the rare feat of making Nancy Pelosi sound statesmanlike. Ms. Pelosi at least acknowledged that countries such as China might have played a negative role here.

Emphasis mine.

Ha! …and “indeed”.

Washington Politicians: rope, tree, pol; some assembly required.

I’d vote for an iguana if it would keep one of these sorry excuses for an American out of office. Hear that, lizards? Lots of lizard chow down there in D.C…

Seriously

Thomas Sowell is a columnist you should always take seriously. In an excellent column at Townhall, Mr. Sowell accuses our media of the obivous — being unserious:

In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame’s identity as a C.I.A. “agent” — actually a desk job in Virginia — and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.

This is the frivolous media — and the biased media. Republican Congressman Foley was wrong and is out on his ear. But Democrats in both Congress and the White House have gone far beyond words with a page and an intern. Yet the Democrats did not resign and Bill Clinton’s perjury, obstruction of justice, and suborning of perjury by others were treated as if these were irrelevant private matters.

Even when serious issues are addressed, they can be addressed either seriously or frivolously. If you are content to see life and death issues of war and peace addressed with catch phrases like “chicken hawk” or to see a coalition of nations around the world fighting terrorism referred to as “unilateral” U.S. action because France does not go along, then you are content with frivolity.

This is exactly why I don’t rely on the lamestream media, the Wall Street Journal excepted, for my news. What Mr. Sowell doesn’t mention, but what worries me deeply for its implications to the future of America, is why the lamestream media is unserious: because unserious news reporting makes money, and serious news reporting doesn’t. Yes, Virginia, it really is that simple. Most Americans will gladly spend money to read about celebrities, or sports, or left-wing rants — but they won’t spend money for serious reporting that requires one to think. There are niche exceptions, of course — the Wall Street Journal, various specialty journals, and so on — but the sum of their revenues is miniscule compared with the rest of the unserious media. Ponder the long term implications for America of this preference for the unserious. It’s not a happy thought…

Mr. Sowell concludes his piece with this observation about the war in Iraq:

Those who discuss the current war in terms of frivolous talking points make a big deal out of the fact we have been in this war longer than in World War II. But, if we are serious, we would know that it is not the duration of a war that is crucial. It is how many lives it costs. More than twice as many Marines were killed taking one island in the Pacific during World War II than all the Americans killed in the four years of the Iraq war. More Americans were killed in one day during the Civil War. If we are going to discuss war, the least we can do is be serious.

Exactly right. But most Americans don’t seem to understand this, and I’ve been surprised about why at least some of them don’t. During the runup to the Iraq war, and for the first year or two of it, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with quite a few people who were opposed to the war. A few of these people — depressingly few — had fairly well developed positions, based on reality and their own opinions. I disagreed with these folks, but was cheered by their seriousness. However, most of the people I talked with who opposed the war did so for a variety of absurd “reasons", impossible to respect. Some were of the tinfoil hat, Michael Moore school of reflexive Bush-bashing: never mind if he’s right, he said it, so I hate it. But what brought these folks to mind today was another pattern I saw, which Mr. Sowell’s conclusion reminded me of: a significant proportion — perhaps half — possessed a context so warped, so divergent from reality, that it prevented them from analyzing the war in Iraq in anything like a rational manner. One recurring example of this was exactly the point Mr. Sowell raised about relative casualties. I talked with dozens of Americans — almost all of them college graduates, and most considerably younger than I — who really believed that the casualties we experienced in the first year of the war in Iraq were numerically comparable to, or even exceeded, the casualties America suffered in Vietnam, the two world wars, or the American Civil War. In a dozen or so cases, when I shared the actual casualties of those past conflicts with the person I was conversing with, I was frankly disbelieved. In more than a few cases, we repaired to a reference work to ascertain the truth of my assertions — and in one memorable case, even then I was disbelieved!

Some of you may be surprised at this. Myself, I’ve become quite cynical about the general American understanding of history. Mind you, I’m no history expert myself; my small knowledge of history comes mostly from reading I’ve done on my own. But my default assumption about other Americans' knowledge of history — especially those much younger than myself — is now approximately zero. And I’m right far more often than I’m wrong.

What does this portend for America? I don’t pretend to know the answer to that, but it’s very hard to see how the result of such profound ignorance could be good…

Seriously Loony

Isn’t it amazing that someone as overtly insane as Kim Jong-il could be the leader of anything, much less an entire country? Now this maroon has gone and tested a nuclear weapon, or at least claimed that they did — the official North Korean press release:

The field of scientific research in the DPRK successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, 2006, at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation.

It has been confirmed that there was no such danger as radioactive emission in the course of the nuclear test as it was carried out under scientific consideration and careful calculation.

The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent. It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.

It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.

This press release is so bad (as are virtually all of them from North Korea) that it’s hard to take seriously. They need a new PR agency, badly…

Initial reports said that seismic activity consistent with magnitude 3.58 earthquake on the surface was detected. The USGS has an automated earthquake reporting system that publishes to the web (see map at right); they are reporting a 4.2 earthquake, on the surface. These reports indicate that a large explosion took place — the equivalent of between 550 and 4500 tons of TNT. So North Korea either set off an amazingly small nuclear explosion (perhaps a failed weapon), or a very large conventional explosion. The lamestream media is reporting it as if it was a confirmed nuclear explosion, though no evidence other than seismic has been presented, and the seismic evidence is ambiguous. I suspect that stupidity, sensationalism, and political expediency are combining to make this happen — after all, a nutjob with a nuke is far more sensational than a pathetic loser with a fake nuke or a fizzled nuke.

But other sources are much less confident that fearless leader Kim actually pulled off a nuke. The speculation seems pretty evenly divided between a nuke that fizzled and an outright piece of fakery. Supporters of the first notion point to similar fizzles with the Kimster’s ICBM tests; supporters of the second notion point to the careful mention (in the press release) that there was no radiation leak — as atmospheric radiation is normally how nuke tests are confirmed.

Who knows what the truth is? And it may not actually matter, because the test — whether faked, fizzled, or factual — has got everybody in the neighborhood in a tizzy. Japan and China are talking about their mutual security, a circumstance not quite as likely as pigs suddenly starting to fly around. Japan and South Korea are integrating their intelligence and defense efforts — another unlikely pair. About the only unexcited neighbor is Russia, and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe they just like the idea of a destabilizing influence on their border.

As others have noted, it’s really hard to deal with a lunatic — whether you’re talking about people or countries. You can’t negotiate, you can’t make agreements. About the only choices we have are (a) ignore them, or (b) conquer them. The first choice gets less attractive every day…