The Run

This past weekend, Miki (our one year old male field spaniel) entered his very first competition of any kind: an all-breed conformation show being held at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. This post covers the first “run” on Saturday afternoon, which was also the first time that Debbie had ever run her own dog in a conformation show. Before the show, Debbie relaxed and prepared a bit with her friend Tammy O., who owned the only other field spaniel entered in the show. One of the things they practiced was “stacking up” the dog (posing him), as you see here with Miki…

There is a schedule for the show that gives the approximate time that a particular breed and class of dogs will run. From what I can observe, in practice these times are the unreasonably optimistic best-possible-case. What actually happens is that there are lots of delays, unexpected events, etc., and when you arrive at the designated show ring on time, you’ll be waiting for a while before you actually get to make your run. This was the case on Saturday, in spades: Miki was originally scheduled for 8 am, but the judge he was supposed to have was delayed back East somewhere by snow, and another judge had to be found. The new schedule was for 12:30, and Debbie and Miki were there in plenty of time — but they didn’t actually get to run until nearly 1 pm. So they waited, and pondered, and practiced, and paced, until it was time.

But finally it was time to go into the ring! I couldn’t hear what the judge was saying, but she directed Debbie and Miki to make a first run around the ring, then to stop right where they had started and stack the dog up. Then the judge carefully observed Miki, including a lot of hands-on checking (to make sure all his parts were present, for one thing — and I’m not sure what else). Miki played the part of the puppy during this inspection very well — he was very curious about the judge, and wiggled around something fierce. Luckily for Miki, the judge took all this with great good humor. Debbie — an expert at agility, but a complete novice at conformation — got both advice and encouragement from this very nice judge.

After this hands-on inspection, Debbie and Miki made another run around the show ring, and then posed for one last inspection by the judge. During this phase, Debbie and Miki (who were in a class all by themselves) were joined by the only other field spaniel in the entire show: Onyx, owned and showed by Tammy O. I can only guess what was going on there — I suspect it was a “best of breed” exhibition, showing the winners amongst field spaniels for each of the classes. In our case, this was a bit ridiculous, as Miki was the only dog in his class, and Onyx was the only dog in his class! After this little ceremony, both Miki and Onyx made one more run around the show ring, and then the judge handed out the prizes: Miki won first prize in his class! If I understand the rules correctly, since he was the only entry in his class, and since the judge pronounced him “qualified” (as a breed-standard field spaniel), the first prize was more-or-less automatic. He could have been disqualified by the judge, however — but he wasn’t. Onyx also took first prize in his one-dog class. But despite having won first prize, the contest today didn’t help either Miki or Onyx advance in the rankings — as they didn’t beat any other dogs. Really we have to chalk this one up as fun and practice. And pretty ribbons!

Below are all the photos I took of this run, in chronological order…

Light Blogging

Blogging is even lighter than usual this weekend, because I’m spending most of each day at a dog show - a “foo foo” dog show, no less!

Miki, our one year old field spaniel, is in his very first dog show. He’s too young for agility (where he is destined, we hope, to be the very best field spaniel ever seen on an agility course!), but he’s just old enough to be entered into a traditional dog show. Allegedly these dog shows are all about the dog’s conformation to breed standard. When you walk through one of these shows, it looks like a gigantic beauty salon, with all the accompanying chemicals, brushes, hair dryers, etc. All around you, dozens and dozens of dogs are being groomed, bathed, powdered, and dried. Some of them, I think, are also being dyed, lacquered, or painted.

Given all the effort that goes into this “prettifying", I think it’s fair to say it’s really a beauty show more than a conformation show. So we’ve nicknamed them a “foo foo” show. And we never thought we’d be entering a dog in one!

But…Miki came from our favorite breeder (Sheila Miller) with a condition: we could have him, but only if we agreed to show him in these foo foo shows. So there we were yesterday, entering Miki in his very first foo foo show.

And he won first place! First place, that is, amongst 12 to 18 month old field spaniels in the show. He had lots of competition — himself. I’m told that the first place ribbon isn’t an inevitability in a one-dog show; the dog has to meet breed standard, behave in some acceptable way, and apparently the handler (which was Debbie, of course) also has to meet the handler appearance standard. But she and Miki met all the applicable requirements, so they took a first place ribbon home!

Chaparral Chuckle

Sent along by SimiL:

The German air controllers at Frankfurt Airport are renowned as a short-tempered lot. They not only expect one to know one’s gate parking location, but how to get there without any assistance from them.

So it was with some amusement that we (a Pan Am 747) listened to the following exchange between Frankfurt ground control and a British Airways 747, call sign Speedbird 206.

Speedbird 206: “Frankfurt, Speedbird 206 clear of active runway."

Ground: “Speedbird 206. Taxi to gate Alpha One-Seven.” The BA 747 pulled onto the main taxiway and slowed to a stop.

Ground: “Speedbird, do you not know where you are going?"

Speedbird 206: “Stand by, Ground, I’m looking up our gate location now."

Ground (with quite arrogant impatience): “Speedbird 206, have you not been to Frankfurt before?"

Speedbird 206 (coolly): “Yes, twice in 1944, but it was dark — and I didn’t land."

Chaparral Chuckle

GeorgeK sends along this story:

In some foreign country a priest, a lawyer and an engineer are about to be guillotined. The priest puts his head on the block, they pull the rope and nothing happens — he declares that he’s been saved by divine intervention — so he’s let go. The lawyer is put on the block, and again the rope doesn’t release the blade, he claims he can’t be executed twice for the same crime and he is set free too. They grab the engineer and shove his head into the guillotine, he looks up at the release mechanism and says, “Wait a minute, I see your problem…"

If you don’t see what’s funny, then you’re not an engineer or the spouse of an engineer…

T-Shirt

While I was in our local Post Office yesterday, picking up my mail, I spotted this T-Shirt sported by a winsome young lass:

I just neutered my dog.

Now he’s French…

Something tells me she didn’t vote for John Kerry!

Chaparral Chuckle

Submitted by SimiL:

While taxiing at London 's Gatwick Airport , the crew of a US Air flight departing for Ft. Lauderdale made a wrong turn and came nose to nose with a United 727.

An irate female ground controller lashed out at the US Air crew, screaming: “US Air 2771, where the hell are you going?! I told you to turn right onto Charlie taxiway! You turned right on Delta! Stop right there. I know it’s difficult for you to tell the difference between C and D, but get it right!"

Continuing her rage to the embarrassed crew, she was now shouting hysterically: “God! Now you’ve screwed everything up! It’ll take forever to sort this out! You stay right there and don’t move till I tell you to! You can expect progressive taxi instructions in about half an hour, and I want you to go exactly where I tell you, when I tell you, and how I tell you! You got that, US Air 2771?"

"Yes, ma’am,” the humbled crew responded.

Naturally, the ground control communications frequency fell terribly silent after the verbal bashing of US Air 2771. Nobody wanted to chance engaging the irate ground controller in her current state of mind. Tension in every cockpit out around Gatwick was definitely running high.

Just then an unknown pilot broke the silence and keyed his microphone, asking: “Wasn’t I married to you once?"

Disaster in Jamul

With permission, I am reprinting this email sent by a Jamul resident to the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Voice of San Diego:

Disaster in Jamul

I found it very interesting while I was doing some research on Southern California Intertribal Court Judge Anthony Brandenburg that on the web page for the Intertribal Court of San Diego it lists under Member Tribes only Pala, Pauma, Rincon, San Pasqual, La Jolla, Mesa Grande and Santa Ysabel. I do not see the Jamul Indian Village any where on the site so why would the Sheriff’s office support an eviction notice from this “Court” when it appears they do not even have jurisdiction? This is information Sheriff Deputies or Captain Chambers could check just like any other citizen. I certainly can understand why Walter Rosales and Karen Toggery, their attorney plus concerned friends would expect Sheriff Deputies to protect them from unlawful home invasion that led to violent, illegal evictions and their homes being unjustly demolished.

Shame on the Sheriff’s Department for supporting the “Mafia” like tactics of the Jamul Indian Village and Lakes Gaming.

Linda Ivy

Jamul, CA

This is yet another example of how the country-within-a-country nature of America’s relationship with the American Indians complicates seemingly ordinary events, and leads to results that look crazy. Who would have believed that the sheriffs and police would just look on as Americans were clubbed and pepper-sprayed by hired thugs?

I have no expertise on the great, entangled mess that is the body of law and regulation controlling this relationship. My own investigations into the actual status of the Jamul Indian Village are completely inconclusive — authoritative-sounding people on both sides of the issue make contradictory claims, and support them. I have trouble getting excited about who is right or wrong on this issue (and I suspect the answer is somewhat plastic anyhow). What I could get excited about is a movement to remove the distinction, so that it no longer mattered whether the tribe was “certified", whether Walter Rosales had the “right blood” to be a Jamul Indian tribe member, or any of the other crazy questions that arise because we’ve made this artificial distinction between classes of Americans.

But it may well be that the fate of the casino rests on the answers to questions like the one that Linda Ivy raises in her email. For that reason, it behooves us all both to raise the questions (as Linda has done) and to try our best to follow the maze of headache-inducing rules and laws that determine the answers.

I think I’ll order a big bottle of aspirin…

A Chaparral Morning

We’ve been going for a walk most mornings — Debbie, myself, and our three field spaniels. The weather has been just gorgeous; the mornings are cool and crisp. In the photo at right, if you click to look at the large version, you can make out the “cage” that my beautiful wife is wearing around her broken ring finger on her left hand. She’s smiling anyway! The dogs are of course their usual happy selves; there is nothing they like better than a walk. From left to right, it’s Miki (our puppy), Lea (the princess), and Mo’i (at the moment, the number one agility field spaniel). You might have noticed the strap across the muzzle of Miki and Lea — that’s a kind of harness called a “Halti”. They’re wearing that harness because they’re BBDs (bad brown dogs) when we’re walking — every time they spot a quail, hear a rabbit, or smell a coyote, they completely lose their minds (and being spaniel owners, we know very well that there’s not a lot of mind to lose!). The result is that we get towed all over the County, through the chaparral and whatever else was in the way. The Halti stops that, without causing any pain to the dog. It’s a clever device — if the dog tries to pull at the leash while wearing it, it pulls the dogs head back toward you. Mo’i is the only GBD (good brown dog) we have on a walk. He rarely strains at the leash; he just plods happily along with us…

One of our favorite local flowering plants — ceanothus — has just popped into bloom. It’s several weeks earlier than usual this year, most likely due to the combination of a drenching rain a couple of weeks ago, and a week of warm weather afterwards.

We have four species of ceanothus that are common locally; two with blue flowers and two with white. Both blue species and one of the white are in bloom right now. One of the blue species' flowers are highly variable in color, ranging from intense, saturated dark blues to much lighter shades; this species has particularly nice foliage as well, with dark green leaves and dark gray bark that both have an interesting texture to them. The other blue species (seen at right) has a much more consistent color, large, smooth lighter green leaves, and a very light, smooth bark. These are often so full of bloom that there is no foliage visible. The white species that’s in bloom now has flower clusters that lie close to larger branches, making an interesting spiky effect.

I’ll leave you with a selection of photos from our walk this morning…

Word of the Day

Cashtration: The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

Casino Update

This morning, Lakes Entertainment (the company backing the Jamul Indian Village’s attempts to build a casino) released their financial results for fiscal 2006. The press release announcing the results contained this nugget:

Based on recent meetings between the Jamul Indian Village (“Jamul Tribe”) and the State of California, Lakes and the Jamul Tribe are currently re-evaluating the Jamul Tribe’s alternatives for its casino project. Depending on which direction Lakes and the Jamul Tribe decide to take, the proposed gaming facility will be reduced in size and scope. As a result, during the fourth quarter of 2006, Lakes recorded unrealized losses on notes receivable related to the Jamul project of approximately $6.3 million, which reduced the overall 2006 net unrealized gain on notes receivable related to this project to approximately $2.0 million.

I’m no expert on corporate finance, and certainly not on the financial ins-and-outs of gaming companies — but here’s my stab at translating that into plain English:

First, the Jamul Indian Village has borrowed some amount of money from Lakes Entertainment, in one or more loans, which at some point in the future they will have to repay. My presumption would be that this money is to be used to promote, get clearance for, build, and operate the casino. My further presumption would be that the use of this money is essentially controlled by Lakes; I can’t imagine they would simply hand it over to the Jamul Indian Village. But — key point — repayment of this money will depend on the existence and profitability of the casino. The more profitable the casino, the more likely (and the faster) this note would be repaid.

For the purposes of their financial statement (which is the public disclosure of their financial condition), Lakes can’t simply record the loans (the “notes receivable") as if they are certain to be repaid. Obviously there is considerable risk to these loans, and that must somehow be disclosed. The conventional way to do that is for the firm’s financial officer (and auditor) to make a judgment about the probability that the note will be repaid, and to record current profits or losses based on that judgment. In most companies there would be a bias toward overstating the positives in such judgments, so when you look at numbers like this — pure judgments on someone’s part — generally it’s smart not to think of them as having been objectively arrived at. These judgments are what we’re seeing here with the recording of a $6.3 million loss. Since I don’t know the size of the entire loan, I don’t what percentage of it has been written off now as a loss — but it would have to be a huge loan for this to be an insignificant portion of it. I can’t quantify it precisely, but it sure looks to me like this was a significant write-down.

In other words, it looks to me like Lakes Entertainment isn’t very optimistic about their investment in the Jamul Indian Village Casino. If you’re a typical Jamulian, that’s very good news indeed — for who would know better than Lakes what the actual situation is?

Also interesting in that press release is the statement about reduced size and scope of the casino. Part of that, surely, is the recent announcement by the Jamul Indian Village that they’ve dropped out of the negotiations with the state, and that they’re going to switch to games not covered by the compact. This statement in the press release implies that the size of the casino may also be reduced. I don’t want to see the casino at all — but if the casino does get built, the smaller, the better. So I’ll take that as good news, too.

We certainly don’t see in this year’s statement of Lakes Entertainment financial results the same buoyant, upbeat assessment of the Jamul Indian Village Casino that we saw last year. Another difference you can see is that Lakes is making good money in other areas now — especially the televised poker tournament — and I would bet that leads the management team to focus more on those profitable areas, and less on the risky or unprofitable areas. That would also be good news…

Patrick Webb (attorney for Walter Rosales and Karen Toggery) made a statement the other day about things coming down to the wire from the perspective of the Jamul Indian Village. This financial report from Lakes Entertainment looks like validation of his musings…

Stretching the Truth

My regular readers know that I rant occasionally (ok, frequently) about the anthropomorphic global warming hypothesis that the Goreacle and his fellow afflicted are trying to turn into this century’s new hit religion. One of the topics I have repeatedly written about is how climatology funding is selectively directed to those scientists and organizations who hew to the politically correct position (i.e., they agree with the Goreacle).

Cox & Forkum routinely produce some of the best “cartoon commentary” around. Here’s their take on the funding issue. As usual, they have more discussion on their site.

Sheesh

Just yesterday, I wrote this:

Leon Acebedo, the tribal chairman, is known to some locals as “Lying Leon”. I can’t help but wonder whether he actually did warn the opponents on Saturday about this possibility. I also can’t help but wonder to what degree the executive council is under his thumb, and their “override” was engineered…

Today, Rob Davis (writing for Voice of San Diego) reports:

Jamul tribal chairman Leon Acebedo told me yesterday that he’d warned opponents that he didn’t have the authority to make such an agreement, that his 51-member tribe’s executive council could overrule him. They unanimously did Monday morning.

Jacob said that no such warning was given Saturday, when the agreement helped diffuse a tense standoff between tribal security and casino opponents. The agreement, which Acebedo signed, said the tribal council would meet Monday to “affirm” the d´etente.

In an interview today, Acebedo said that he, in fact, had not told opponents that he could be overturned.

"I was very aware that I could be overridden,” he said. “I didn’t talk to them (the opponents) about it. I just wrote what was requested of me."

Looks like Leon is living up to his moniker.

Joe Gets It

Senator Joe Lieberman spoke at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) National Policy Conference on Monday. It was a good speech over all, and notable (sadly) simply because a Democrat was expressing these sentiments. One passage in particular resonated with me:

Our fate is now inextricably linked to Iraq’s. And our divisions cannot be allowed to become so deep that we cannot find unity in the face of Islamist extremism. Suicide bombers who kill civilians to make a political statement should not be allowed to triumph—in New York or Tel Aviv or Samarra. We must stand strong and united against barbarism—and, with your help, we will.

I understand the anger about Iraq, but I am deeply troubled by how this anger, and the feelings of animosity that many people have for President Bush, have begun to affect the way we talk and think about what is happening in the world beyond Iraq and America’s role in it.

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism.

There is something profoundly wrong when there is so much distrust of our intelligence community that some Americans doubt the plain and ominous facts about the threat to us posed by Iran.

And there is something profoundly wrong when, in the face of attacks by radical Islam, we think we can find safety and stability by pulling back, by talking to and accommodating our enemies, and abandoning our friends and allies.

He’s talking about what’s wrong in his own party.

As he wrapped up his speech, another passage jumped out at me:

The esteemed historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, was in Washington this past week. He said that, when he looks at the world today and the threats we face, it reminds him of the 1930s—and that he hears far more voices that sound like Chamberlain than like Churchill.

Indeed. In fact, the more one reads of Neville Chamberlain’s fantasy-filled appeasement pronouncements, the more one is reminded of today’s mindless, plan-less Democratic “response” to the war in Iraq.

So far as I can observe, Senator Lieberman is the only Democrat serving at the federal level who is able to look at the threat from radical Islam as a national issue rather than as a political issue — and he does it with great eloquence and clarity of thought.

How sad is that?

And what does it portend, should the Democrats win the White House in 2008 while keeping their House and Senate majorities?

Your terrifying Wednesday morning ponder…

Word of the Day

Intaxication, n.: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

Quote of the Day

By James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, in today’s edition of “Best of the Web Today":

By the way, have you noticed that Cindy Sheehan has fallen off the face of the earth since she disrupted some Democratic events in early January?

As the puppy-blender would say: heh!

Word of the Day

Reintarnation, n.: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Brief Outage

A reader (thank you, BillS) wrote me this morning to let me know that the blog was down. I did a quick check of my systems (my blog is hosted on a server that I own), and discovered that the blog was attacked — this hasn’t happened for almost a year. The attacker used a means that I won’t disclose (but which I am now protected against) to knock me off the air for about a half hour.

From the details of the attack, I know that the attacker was (a) from Iran, and (b) offended by the cartoons that I published last February. The cartoons are still published on my site, and they will remain published on my site. These are the cartoons that the mullahs of Denmark went on a world tour of hate about, fomenting violent demonstrations that killed hundreds of people. They’re worth looking at, so you can see for yourself the utter hypocrisy of the mad mullah’s position. They are screaming with hate and rage over cartoons that are absolutely nothing compared with the vile anti-American, anti-Jewish, and anti-(anything not radical fundamentalist Muslim) stuff that comes out of their press every day.

Dètente Canceled

Just two days after promising to leave the homes of Walter Rosales and Karen Toggery untouched for at least a week, the Jamul Indian Village has destroyed them. Via Rob Davis, writing in the Voice of San Diego:

After years of delays, the Jamul tribe followed through on its plans to demolish the homes of Toggery and Walter Rosales, who lived on the reservation but are not members of the legally recognized tribe.

In doing so, the Jamul tribe reversed course on promises its chairman gave to casino protestors over the weekend. At a Saturday standoff where casino opponents were clubbed and pepper sprayed, tribal chairman Leon Acebedo helped resolve the confrontation by assuring opponents that no construction would happen until Friday.

But Monday morning, the Jamul tribe’s executive council unanimously rejected the temporary reprieve offered by Acebedo, who said he warned opponents Saturday that he didn’t have the authority to issue such a delay.

Leon Acebedo, the tribal chairman, is known to some locals as “Lying Leon”. I can’t help but wonder whether he actually did warn the opponents on Saturday about this possibility. I also can’t help but wonder to what degree the executive council is under his thumb, and their “override” was engineered…

An aside: isn’t Rob Davis' reporting and writing on this story a refreshing change from the pap that the Union-Buffoon has been serving up? I stole the headline for this post straight out of his article…

Later in the Rob’s article, there is this thought from Patrick Webb (the attorney for Walter and Karen) about why the Jamul Indian Village is suddenly breaking off negotiations with the state, and acting to clear the buildings off the land:

"I think it’s down to the wire for everybody,” Webb said. “We have yet to decide what’s putting the pressure on them to do this. We can only assume it’s coming from Lakes Gaming, which has the money up."

Webb’s notion that there is pressure on the Jamul Indian Village to get something done sounds right to me. I can’t think why else there would suddenly be this outbreak of dramatic and rash actions on their part. And his suspicion of Lakes as the source certainly makes sense — for what other entity has any sway on the Jamul Indian Village at all?

Finally, here’s the last paragraph of Rob’s article (but go read the whole thing), with a quote from Karen Toggery:

"You can’t sit here and cry, it’s not going to help,” she said. “I’m not going to give up, if that’s what they think. Land is the most precious thing you can have."

Karen’s not crying, and she will keep fighting. So will we all. I have a fantasy about a future ceremony, jointly held by a new Jamul Indian Village administration and the local residents of Jamul, wherein we burn every last shred of paper related to the monstrous casino.

After we get a burn permit, of course.

JAC

The webmaster for the JAC (Jamulians Against the Casino) web site contacted me today to let me know that their web site, while still under construction, is up and running. There’s useful information up there, especially (at the moment) with regard to the history of the Jamul Indian Village and their efforts to build a casino here.

Go take a look!

Word of the Day

Bozone, n.: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Word of the Day

Foreploy, n.: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

So Sad

Yesterday morning as I bought some repair items at the Jamul hardware store, I heard a discussion amongst several people there about the “commotion” down at the Jamul Indian Reservation. The folks there weren’t entirely sure what was going on, but they suspected that Walter Rosales and Karen Toggery were being evicted. After leaving the hardware store, I drove down to see for myself. The people I talked to there gave me a confused and contradictory version of events, so I wasn’t sure what was going on. The one thing I could be sure of is that there was a vocal confrontation and a significant police presence.

Walter and Karen are Jamul Indians and long-time residents of the reservation who oppose the casino. They refused to move off the reservation, and were “disenrolled” from the tribe late last year — allegedly because of inadequate documentation of their membership in the tribe, but really, I’m sure, because of their opposition to the casino.

Late yesterday, a reader left a comment on my blog, and this was the first verification I had that Walter and Karen were in fact evicted. Here’s the comment in its entirety — a first-hand account of what happened:

We received a phone call alerting us that the casino faction was forcibly taking Walter and Karen out of their houses this morning about 7:40 a.m. It was a very sad state of events, thugs hired by the casino proponents took them out of their houses and then started throwing all their belongings into U Haul vans. Walter called 911 but it took awhile for deputies to respond and actually sheriff deputies did nothing … did absolutely nothing … to protect Walter or Karen and their homes and property. And later when many residents and Walter and Karen’s attorney Patrick Webb accompanied Walter to his house the thugs beat and pushed and maced people with the sheriff deputies still doing nothing. Everyone felt so helpless because we could not help Walter and Karen protect their homes. Walter is such a kind, gentle man. When someone told him not to give up, he likened it to being in a difficult situation in Vietnam with the Marines and things worked out. I hope this does. I hope all of San Diego County sees the type of people the greed of casinos have turned these criminals into that call themselves casino proponents. Unfortunately it ended with their belongings being hauled off to a storage facility. Robby and I took Walter’s two roosters and two pet conures. Walter had his dog and Karen’s cat was brought out to her in a cardboard box. They were not allowed to go back to their homes. Jamul residents that were hurt filed complaints against the so called “Jamul Indian Police”. Grievances will be filed against the Sheriff’s Department. Diane Jacob arrived to try and intervene but with little success other that a written promise from the lying Leon Acevedo, so called tribal chief promising not to level the homes until after the close of business next Friday. It actually did not seem like something like this could happen in America.

Indeed. How could something like this happen in America?

Well, there are several answers to that. The one most immediately applicable here is that we are seeing (once again) the strangeness that can occur at the intersection of American law and Indian law — the tortured mess that is our law regarding the country-within-a-country status of American Indian reservations. But today — unlike a few years ago — we could see this happening even outside a reservation, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision, which opened the doors wide for any municipality (or other government unit) to “condemn” anyone’s property for any purpose they deem worthwhile — including simply replacing someone’s home with something that generates more taxes for the government. Like a casino…

I got to pondering this morning about all the events that had to be in place for Walter and Karen to be evicted yesterday:

The notion of Indian reservations, with their quasi-independent systems of government, had to be in place.

Casinos had to be illegal off-reservation, but legal on-reservation.

Walter and Karen had to be Indians living on a reservation in a desirable place to locate a casino.

A majority of the Indians on their reservation had to support the notion of building a casino.

The reservation had to secure funding for the casino (which the Jamul Indians have done by striking a bargain with Lakes Entertainment).

A majority of the Indians on the Jamul Indian reservation had to be willing to take some very radical steps. Their six-acre reservation is so small that they couldn’t possibly have a casino and still live on their reservation — so they had to be willing to relocate off-reservation to do this. To some members of the reservation (including Walter and Karen), some of the reservation is hallowed ground, with the ashes of their ancestors and their possessions. And a majority of the Indians had to be willing to force the objectors to comply with the majority’s wishes.

What’s motivating all this?

Money, of course. Period, end of story. It’s all about the money.

Do you find that as sad — and pathetic — as I do? Here’s a group of Americans (the Indians) who, were they assimilated into the rest of America, would have the same opportunities as the rest of us. We’d find them in all kinds of jobs, with the same range of success we see in the rest of our citizens. Instead, they’re part of the reservation system, isolated to some extent in their own culture — and feeling desperate enough about their collective situation to be willing to do the things I outlined above. There’s a message in this about the utter failure of the reservation system…

There are a couple of news stories about the incident. Here are a few excerpts from those stories:

Toggery said she was still in her pajamas when she was ordered to leave her home. “I said I am not going to open my door until I get ahold of my attorney,” Toggery said. “They finally kicked it open."

Walter Rosales was also evicted Saturday morning. He was forced to grab his animals and leave a home he says he inherited from his uncle in 1987. “I was evicted this morning be a bunch of goons, you know, the old goon squad,” Rosales said.

The situation got even more heated when County Supervisor Dianne Jacob — she also opposes the casino — showed up. Jacob said she may place an emergency call to the governor to stop the evictions.

"I strongly oppose the evictions that have take place here today,” Jacobs said. “I think it’s wrong. I think it’s shameful"

"I will promise you this — if there is one piece of dirt that’s moved that looks like they are starting construction that I will notify the governor’s office immediately and ask them to intervene and take action,” Jacobs said.

The evictions led to confrontations with neighbors opposed to the casino in which tribal police used pepper spray and metal batons. Sheriff’s deputies stepped in and paramedics treated some people.

Nobody was immediately hospitalized, although one man shot in the eyes with pepper spray went into a hospital later in the day.

The confrontation ended only after negotiations among Jacob, the Sheriff’s Department, the tribal chairman and Patrick Webb, a lawyer working with Rosales and Toggery who is also a Jamul resident.

Acebedo said he would pay for a nearby house in which Rosales and Toggery could stay and agreed that their homes would not be demolished for a week – giving state and federal courts a chance to consider the legality of the evictions.

What a sad, sad tale.

I, and many other local residents, hope that Walter and Karen prevail. My own support for them derives from two things: one, the just plain awful and unfair way they’ve been treated, and two, the fact their objective (stopping the casino) coincides with my own. I’d like to see the casino stopped in its tracks. I’d like to see the Indians succeed the way the rest of Americans do, instead of by desperate maneuvers like this casino that would evict them from their own property and hold them in thrall (by their debt) to the shady world of gambling companies. I’d also like to see the tribal system completely dismantled to remove the artificial differences it creates — to the tribes' detriment — between American Indians and the rest of Americans.

I can dream, can’t I?

The Union-Buffoon article also contained this nugget:

Tribal leaders also announced that they plan to sidestep a 1999 agreement with the state and fill the casino with less profitable games so they can get around local opposition.

Under federal law, the so-called “Class 2” games, based on bingo and poker, don’t require an agreement with state governments as do Las Vegas-style games.

“We’ve broken off negotiations with the state,” said tribal Chairman Leon Acebedo.

This is an interesting development, one that has always been present as a possibility. I infer from this that the Jamul Indian tribe (and their backers, Lake Entertainment) have been entirely unsuccessful in negotiating a profitable casino operation under the pact that governs tribal gambling for most games in California.

The spin from casino supporters in the rest of the article is that this is a good thing for them, and that there is still a profitable casino to be had. But clearly this is the less desirable course for them, or else they would have skipped the negotiations in the first place. However, it must be attractive enough, as a business proposition, for Lakes Entertainment to be willing to fund it anyway. From my personal perspective, it doesn’t matter what games are being played inside the casino — the monstrosity and the people it will attract are just as antithetical to our community either way…

Nuclear Email

This morning I received an email from a friend with a video clip about a tame Canadian goose who has made friends with a man and his dog. The video has some amazing sections showing the goose flying along side a speeding motorboat, so close that the man can reach out and touch it. My friend knew I would enjoy this video, and so he passed it along to me.

Another friend had done the same thing, with the same video, just a couple of days before. That sort of thing has happened to me many times; sometimes I’ve received the same joke, photos, sound clip, or video dozens of times. What’s going on here?

As I was trying to word a response to my friend, trying to find a way to say “Thanks! But I’ve already seen this…” I got to pondering this phenomenon. Why does this happen so often? And why are the contents of these emails quite often genuinely entertaining or interesting (or both!)?

So I started with my own behavior. When I get one of these emails, what do I do? Sometimes I post it on my blog, where it will be seen (and often passed along) by somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred people (the number of people reading my blog varies tremendously from day-to-day). Sometimes I forward the email, and when I do, I usually forward it to 10 or 12 people I think might enjoy it. The majority of these emails I read, enjoy, and delete. I would guess that I delete 80% or so of them. But the 20% that I don’t delete get seen by something like 20 people (averaging between the blog and the forwarded emails). So…if 20% of the emails I receive are seen by 20 people each, that means that on average, every email I receive is then seen by 4 other people.

Am I typical? I don’t know. But just to be conservative, let’s say my behavior is double the average person’s forwarding behavior. If that were true, that means that every email sent out is see by 2 additional people, on average. This process is self-selective on the quality of the email’s contents, too — because of course the more entertaining or interesting contents will be forwarded more often…

Now lets see what this implies. Imagine that you created a short video of the earthworm you laboriously trained to do backflips on verbal command. This is something most people would consider both interesting and entertaining. Now you send this video to your two friends — and three people will have seen it. If, on average, they send it to two people, that means four more — a total of seven — will have seen it. If those four now each send it to two people, then eight more — fifteen in total will have seen it. And so on. We can reduce this to a simple formula: V = A^G - 1, where V is the number of people who have viewed the email, A is the average number of unique new viewers that each viewer sends it on to, and G is the number of “generations” including the original sender. So…if A = 2 and G = 10 (meaning that the email has been forwarded 10 times) then V = 2^10-1 = 1023 people will have seen it. But if G = 20, then A = 2^20-1 = 1,048,575 people will have seen it — and twice that many on the very next generation! How long does it take for an email to be forwarded 20 times? I would guess just five or six days, maybe ten at the most. And if this went on for 33 generations — then every single person on the planet will have seen the email!

The analysis above is not rigorous by any means. For starters, it’s almost certain that A varies from generation to generation, especially in the early generations. But it does illustrate just how quickly one of this email can propagate. It also shows just how likely it is that multiple people would send it to you at nearly the same time — if a million people have seen an email, what’s the chances that you know two of them? Or if 100 million people have seen an email? Pretty good, I think…

In fact, the process reminds me of another phenomenon of quick propagation: a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, as you’d find in a nuclear bomb. In these reactions, each decaying atom throws out two (or more) high-energy particles — each of which can then cause another atom to split and decay. The nuclear reaction proceeds much faster than email, as the energetic particles are moving at near the speed of light, and they only have to move an inch or two at most. But the underlying math is very similar…

Email and nuclear weapons are related!

Beautiful Jupiter

The New Horizons robotic spacecraft recently passed Jupiter on its way to Pluto and the outer Solar System. On its way around Jupiter, it took many photos of the planet and its moons, including this montage showing the Big Red Spot, the Little Red Spot, and their respective whirl-filled wakes.

I sure wish we’d invest more in these robotic explorers. The science done by any one of them exceeds the total science done in the current manned space program, at a tiny fraction of the cost…

Blooper of the Day

From a church circular:

This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

Chuckle brought to you courtesy of GeorgeK…

Word of the Day

Giraffiti, n: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Old Goats

Forwarded by SimiL (one of my tiny-but-loyal group of regular readers):

A group of Americans were traveling by tour bus through Holland. As they stopped at a cheese farm, a young guide led them through the process of cheese making, explaining that goat’s milk was used. She showed the group a lovely hillside where many goats were grazing. “These” she explained “are the older goats put out to pasture when they no longer produce.” She then asked, “What do you do in America with your old goats?” A spry old gentleman answered, “They send us on bus tours!"

Hah!

But here in San Diego, old goats have a different fate: they are rented out to eat chaparral. Seriously! Brush-clearing-by-goat has become quite popular here, both with local governments and landowners. And from what I can see on the couple of occasions that I’ve seen the old goats in action, they seem to like it as well…

Word of the Day

Sarchasm, n: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

What's Right?

Read about Megumi Yokota (from the Wall Street Journal$):

Megumi, who was abducted in 1977, has become the symbol of the movement to free the abductees. She was 13 years old and on her way home from school when she was snatched off the streets of the western Japanese city of Niigata by North Korean agents. Imprisoned in the hold of a ship and taken to Pyongyang, she was forced to teach spies how to pass as Japanese. In 2002, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il admitted to kidnapping Megumi and 11 other Japanese citizens.

Their stories are equally heart-rending: A young couple disappear in Kagoshima Prefecture while on a date at a beach, where they had gone to watch the sunset. A 23-year-old woman vanishes in Europe; the last her parents hear from her is a postcard from Copenhagen. A mother and daughter go missing during a shopping trip in Niigata Prefecture. At the time, police who investigated these and other disappearances had no notion of North Korean involvement. In recent years, Japan has reopened many of the missing-persons files from the era but the scent has grown cold. There are only 17 people on the official list of abductees — the most recent was added in November — but officials say privately that the victims may number in the “hundreds.” South Korea, whose appeasement-minded government prefers not to talk about the kidnappings of its citizens, has 485 people on its list of abductees.

Pyongyang allowed five of the Japanese abductees to return home in 2002. (They were required to leave behind their Korean spouses and children as guarantees that they wouldn’t badmouth their captors.) It claimed the rest of the abductees had all died, but the causes of death they cited were so absurd as to be unbelievable — a 20-something young woman who dropped dead of a heart attack; a man who drowned while swimming in the ocean during a typhoon; and so forth. Megumi was reported to have hanged herself. But the DNA evidence provided by Pyongyang in her case and others proved to be fraudulent.

Can you imagine being the victim of such a kidnapping? Or the relative of one?

To my mind, this behavior all by itself is sufficient and compelling cause for the world to use all means necessary to remove crazy Kim and dismantle his evil government. At the very least, North Korea should be sealed off from the rest of the world until it collapses under its own incompetence — though certainly the effects of this would be awful for the North Korean people. An alternative would be a military effort from all directions: China, Russia, Japan, and the West — though certainly that would incur a substantial number of casualties amongst the military and civilians. In other words, of course this effort would be messy and would have consequences. But I can’t imagine how we (the world outside North Korea) can stand by and let this happen.

But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for over 50 years. And it’s not like we just figured out that Kim (and his father before him) was evil — this has been perfectly clear since the early 1950s.

As I ponder that reality — the world’s inaction against unambiguous, clear evil — the one piece of clarity that emerges is this: that the United Nations is completely useless as a way to control rogue governments. The UN wouldn’t stop another Hitler; in fact, it would probably send him aid.

Ain’t that a comfortable thought to start your day?

Strange Statues

Now here are some things that you just don’t see every day. Clearly there are quite a few sculptors with well-developed senses of humor and whimsy.

Most of these are sculptures that I would love to see in the public spaces of San Diego (the nearest large city to me). Instead, with just a couple of notable exceptions, we have sculptures that I just don’t understand. The epitome of this class of sculpture is the … whatever it is … monster sculpture of what looks sort of like the prow of a ship, hanging from a bizarre arrangement of steel beams, at the corner of Laurel and Harbor Drive, near the airport. I cannot imagine why anyone would want such an ugly and uninteresting thing in their city.

But a piece of sculpture that puts a smile on people’s faces? That’s something to aspire to!

Don’t miss the rest of them.

Book Recommendation

I just finished reading an excellent overview of American involvement in the Middle East: Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael Oren. Though I’m a bit of a student of history, this book taught me a lot about America’s involvement in the Middle East, especially our involvement prior to the 20th century. I was especially surprised to learn just how big a role the Middle East actually played in the earliest days of our country.

For anyone interested in our current involvement in the Middle East, I highly recommend this book for background. You can get it on Amazon.

The Reminder

Tip o’the hat to SimiL for this little story:

An elderly gentleman of 83 arrived in Paris by plane. At the French customs desk, the man took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry-on bag. “You have been to France before, monsieur?” the customs officer asked, sarcastically. The elderly gentleman admitted he had been to France previously. “Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.” The American said, “The last time I was here, I didn’t have to show it.” “Impossible. Americans always have to show their passports on arrival in France!” The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained. “Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn’t find any Frenchmen to show it to."

Having visited France a few times on business, I can tell you that the premise of this story — the sneering French official — rings very true. Especially in the big cities, Americans are frequently “treated” to condescension and insult from French citizens. To any American with even the slightest knowledge of history (ok, I know, that’s only 2% or so of Americans) this is galling, to say the least. To someone who was actually there on D-Day, surely it’s much worse…

I’m reminded of an article I read a few days ago concerning the NATO troops in Afghanistan. I’m not sure why this surprised me, but it did… While it is absolutely true that NATO is supplying the foreign armed forces in Afghanistan, and that virtually all NATO members have troops there — it turns out that most members have placed significant conditions on the use of those troops. In fact, with the exception of Britain, the U.S., and a few new NATO members with tiny forces there (because their countries are tiny!), all the NATO “partners” have forbidden their troops from participating in combat! Huh? What, exactly, is their purpose, then? Well, it turns out they’re engaged in logistics, training, and police work.

The French troops are amongst those that are not allowed in combat roles. Thanks a lot, “partners” — which must be French for “cheese-eating surrender monkeys"…

Word of the Day

Inoculatte, v: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Casino Update

The Voice of San Diego — a refreshing change from the Pulitzer Prize winning San Diego Union-Buffoon — has an informative, well-written article today on the Jamul Casino. In this one article, they’ve got more information than the Union-Buffoon has managed to get into the sum of all their articles on the subject. A sample:

At the same time, for Toggery and Rosales, it is an intensely personal quest. They are reluctant dissidents, convinced of their cause but hesitant to embrace the hero label bestowed by fellow, non-tribal opponents. The two protest that the casino would destroy burial sites they consider sacred.

But they also worry that their battle may end soon. Eviction notices were taped to their doors Feb. 24, promising they’d be removed from their homes within five days. The Jamul tribal chairman says the two dissidents will be gone in 90 days. The casino, he says, will be built by 2009, the latest promised construction date.

This is why Toggery and Rosales talk about human fences and their plans to stand in front of bulldozers. This is why a neighbor hired security so the two could sleep soundly at night. This is why Toggery says she is afraid to leave her home for more than an hour, fearful she won’t have a house when she returns.

Still, they have fought the casino, despite the alienation, the threats, the severance of longstanding familial relations.

"What we have here, and what’s in the ground, it should stay,” Toggery says. “As long as you have one person who believes, that’s all that really matters."

As they say, go read the whole thing.

One very useful thing I discovered while reading this article is that the Jamul Indian Casino web site has finally put the environmental impact report (EIR) online. They did it in a quite awkward fashion however, so I’ve downloaded all the individual Word document files they provided and put them in a single ZIP file, which you can download and save yourself.

I haven’t had a chance to read the entire report myself yet (but I will, as it’s not that long). However, a quick sampling of a couple of sections shows that (as usual for such things) it’s more a public relations piece than it is an objective, factual report. It’s what I was expecting, but not what I was hoping for. The EIR was commissioned by the tribe and Lakes Entertainment (their backers), and it sounds like it. If Jamulians Against the Casino were to make an EIR, I suspect that darned near every issue listed would have a completely different conclusion. An awful lot of time and money is spent on EIRs, which are required by law in many circumstances, but I really can’t see the point when the result is so obviously biased…

Grocery Shopping on the Web

This Thursday — yesterday — we received a flyer in the mail from Von’s (a western chain of grocery stores that’s part of the Safeway grocery conglomerate). The flyer spoke glowingly of Von’s new web store, and how one could order anything you’d like from the grocery store and have it delivered to your home even that same day.

Do you remember PeaPod and WebVan from the dot-com days? This was their premise as well, and after squandering vast quantities of venture capital, these fine companies went out of business. They never did deliver to rural areas, either — you had to live quite close to their distribution warehouses to be eligible to use their services. We live in a veryrural// area, about 20 miles from the nearest Von’s — and probably a lot further from their warehouse, where I suspect these delivery vans are being dispatched from.

But the Von’s flyer said they covered San Diego County (amongst many other areas). Not “the popular parts” of the county, not “selected areas” — the inference was that they covered all of San Diego County. So I decided to put it to the test. On Thursday afternoon I went to their web site, created an account, and was pleasantly surprised when no apologetic “Sorry, but we don’t serve your area” page popped up when I entered my address. The web site just accepted it as though I lived in some normal area, and invited me to enter my grocery list. Which I did — some $220 worth of groceries of all kinds, which is most of a month’s groceries for my wife and myself.

During the checkout phase, I discovered that I had a choice of delivery times — and for $9.95 I could have a two hour delivery window, as opposed to $7.95 for a four hour delivery window. Actually, both of those sounded good to me — living out here in the boonies, we’re used to delivery windows expressed in days, not hours! For any order over $150, they knock off $5 from the delivery charge — and for the first order, as a promotion, the delivery was free. So I signed up for a Friday delivery (the next day) with a two hour window from 10 AM to 12 PM.

This morning, I fully expected to get either an email or a telephone call telling me that I was outside the service area and I could just forget about it. So sorry, but if you’re so dumb as to live 20 miles from a grocery store then surely you can’t expect us to deliver to you!

And sure enough, at 11:30 AM I got a call from Von’s. But it wasn’t the call I was expecting. Instead, it was the driver of the delivery van, telling me that (a) he was running about 20 or 30 minutes late, and (b) he had no frickin' idea where I lived, and could I please give him so directions. This had me thoroughly flustered, as I really didn’t believe there was much chance they’d really deliver my groceries. But here I had a real, live (and very polite) driver telling me that yes indeedy he’d be out here in less than an hour.

And at 12:20 the delivery van pulled into my driveway. The driver was every bit as polite in person as he was on the phone, and he proceeded to show me how it the delivery part all worked. My order was in five blue plastic bins: three in the unrefrigerated section, one in the refrigerator, and one in the freezer. He stacked them all up on a cart, wheeled them to my front door, and then helped me bring them all into the house. All my groceries were in the same shopping bags they’d have been in had I done the shopping myself. In just a couple of minutes, all my groceries were in the house and I said goodbye to my delivery guy.

Then I checked out my order, which was actually fairly complicated. I had a dozen or so items (produce, meat, etc.) where I had entered specific directions to my “personal shopper” on the web site. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that with one exception, everything was exactly as I had ordered. The exception: they had substituted ordinary Kosher bologna for the Lebanon bologna that I ordered. If you know anything about Lebanon bologna, you know it is nothing whatsoever like ordinary bologna — but this was such a small and really insignificant mistake that I am not disappointed at all.

Think about it. I live about 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store. To buy these groceries, I’d normally have driven for an hour — using about $10 in gas — and spent another hour or so in the grocery store. Two hours of my life, and $10 in gas. With this service, I spent less than 30 minutes online, and zero time or dollars driving. This privilege cost me zero this time, and in the future will cost me $2.95 (the $7.95 charge for a four hour window, less the $5 they knock off for orders over $150), as we’ll most likely order only once every three or four weeks, and that order will easily exceed $150. This is a complete no-brainer for us, unless the service deteriorates very badly.

I hope to never visit the grocery store again!

Oops II

Bruce Hall, on his blog Hall of Record, has done a very interesting piece of analysis that takes several posts over the past week. It’s a great example of one of my favorite kinds of analysis: the “sniff” test, or a quick test to see whether a hypothesis correctly predicts something.

The hypothesis in Bruce’s case was global warming. Not what’s causing global warming, but the simple hypothesis that there is global warming. Bruce thought that if our globe was really getting warmer, then we should be able to see evidence of that in climate records. And it just so happens that the United States has been keeping widespread and very accurate temperature records for over 100 years.

So Bruce had this interesting — and testable — thought. If global warming is a real phenomenon, then surely it should be true that we’re setting more record high temperatures in recent years than we have in past years. It turns out that this data is readily available. Bruce got the data, did the analysis, and (in his words):

Sorry, but I just don’t see “global warming” in these extremes. It must be happening on some other part of the globe. CO2 is just not doing its job.

Go read the whole thing (and check out his very useful graphs).

Word of the Day

Hipatitis, n: Terminal coolness.

Oops!

Some interesting news from, of all places, Mars. Data from NASA satellites around Mars indicates that Mars is also experiencing a “global warming” of its own. NASA’s satellites gathered information for the past several years on the polar ice caps of Mars (which in its case, are carbon dioxide ice, not water ice). That data indicates that Mars has experienced a warming trend that matches the one seen on Earth — and, like the one on Earth, correlates quite nicely with the increase in the output of the sun.

In other words, on Mars as on the Earth, a brighter sun produces a hotter climate.

The oops? This is a pretty solid indication that mankind’s activities — especially the increased carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere — aren’t the only explanation for global warming. In fact, it’s pretty good evidence that even if mankind weren’t here at all, we’d still have global warming. After all, there are darn few gas-guzzling SUVs on Mars. As in zero. And there’s not even a Hypocrite’s Mansion on Mars, as there is in Nashville.

What say ye to this, oh Goreacle?

Read all about it in the National Geographic magazine. It’s quite amusing how those scientists who are on the global warming funding teat quickly find ways to discredit this…

Word of the Day

Osteopornosis, n: A degenerate disease.

Religion of Peace

Shortly after 9/11, I first read about a poll of Muslim countries (at that time, primarily Arabic countries). This poll was designed to find out what sort of support there was for Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and their terrorist activities amongst the ordinary citizens of Muslim nations. Since then, dozens of such polls have been conducted, in a broader range of Muslim countries, with some of them seeking to further clarify the initial findings by sampling not only whether a citizen was Muslim or not, but also what branch of Islam the citizen believed in (Shia, Sunni, Wahabi, etc.).

The results of these polls have been remarkably consistent.

Support for Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and terrorist activity directed at America is always between 80% and 95% of those sampled in the poll.

Some of these polls went further: they sought to understand why this support existed. Their results are also remarkably consistent.

The overwhelming majority of supporters of terrorism directed at America cite one reason for their support. It can be summarized — fairly, I believe — like this:

The Quran (Koran) says that infidels must be coerced to either convert or die, and that it is the duty of all faithful Muslims to coerce them. America is the leader of the infidel nations. America must be coerced. The best weapon the Muslims have to fulfill their religious duty (at least, until Iran gets nuclear weapons) is terrorism. There is no stricture in Islam against killing infidels (in fact, quite the opposite), so engaging in terrorism is completely consistent with their religious beliefs.

These poll results are consistent with another piece of evidence, one not often spoken of in our lamestream media: Al Qaeda and its ilk are quite well funded. They are spending many millions of dollars annually on training, weapons, ammunition, logistics, and so on. Where does this money come from? Well, actually, that’s well known (if little discussed): an interesting fraction comes from terrorist-supporting governments (Iran, Libya, etc.) — but the majority comes from individual donations. The money is solicited from Muslims much as a Christian minister or priest, or a Jewish rabbi, might solicit money from their flock for charity. The Muslim imams — both directly and by endorsement — overtly raise money to help the terrorists kill infidels. Overwhelmingly the target of their rhetoric is American and Jewish (e.g., Israeli) infidels.

So here’s the ponder…

Does anything short of eliminating Islam remove the threat to America?

The contention of the lamestream media, propaganda outlets like CAIR, and most other defenders of Islam — including the imams of many mosques in the U.S. — is that Islamic terrorists are a tiny minority of Muslims, and that most Muslims condemn their actions. These polls show that contention to be false.

If we could somehow wave a magic wand and round up every single Al Qaeda member this instant, what do you suppose would happen next?

If I believe these poll results (and I know of no reason why I shouldn’t), then surely another Al Qaeda would arise very quickly. It would have no trouble either recruiting or obtaining financing. So long as their remained a Muslim base with the beliefs indicated by those polls, this would be true.

So…

Logically, it seems to me, there are only two ways to eliminate the threat to America.

One way would be to change the beliefs of Muslims. How on earth could we do that? Even attempting to induce such a change would be confirmation of our infidel status, and further “proof” of the need to convert or kill us.

The other would be to eliminate Muslims (or better, only the Muslims who believed they had a duty to kill infidels).

Would anyone care to point out the error in my logic?

Word of the Day

Karmageddon, n: It’s like, when everybody is, like, sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s, like, a serious bummer.

Word of the Day

Glibido, n.: All talk and no action.

Word of the Day

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Bit of History

In the Soviet Union, between 1924 and 1937, there was once a group of people dedicated to the promotion and preservation of the Latvian language and culture. They called themselves the “Prometheus Society", and they financed themselves by manufacturing and selling various items (including slide rules), and by putting on concerts, shows, and art exhibitions.

I recently acquired one of their slide rules, and with the help of my friends Vera and Konstantin Stankevich, I found out quite a bit about this society. Their end was tragic: in one of Stalin’s infamous purges, every member of the society was either killed outright or set to gulags (most likely for a slow death there).

This is one of the most interesting stories I’ve heard associated with slide rules, and thus a particularly good example of the unexpected benefits of my hobby.

Read more about the society here, or see the slide rule here…

Word of the Day

Arachnoleptic fit, n: The frantic dance you perform just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

Please...

The year was 1980, and the FBI was running a high-level sting operation to catch government officials taking bribes. It was called “Abscam", and it was doing great work until the lamestream media exposed it. Here’s an extract from a videotape of one of Abscam’s most famous moments:

On tape, Murtha told the undercover FBI agent: “When I make a f***in' deal I want to make sure that I know exactly what I’m doing and … what I’m sayin' is, a few investments in my district …"

It is a profound and shocking fact that Murtha even showed up at this meeting, knowing he was going to be negotiating bribe money with Arabs.

Murtha added that he wanted the investment in his district to look like it was done “legitimately … when I say legitimately, I’m talking about so these bastards up here can’t say to me … 'Jesus Christ, ah, this happened,' then he (someone else), in order to get immunity so he doesn’t go to jail, he starts talking and fingering people and then the son of a bitch all falls apart."

For those of you just joining us, no, this isn’t a scene from “The Sopranos.” It’s an actual conversation between a U.S. congressman and an FBI agent posing as an Arab sheik offering a bribe.

"Murtha” is Congressman John Murtha, D-PA. Yes, that Murtha — the one that the Democrats have proudly chosen as the leader of their anti-war efforts.

Sometimes you just have to wonder whether you’re in the real world, or in someone’s demented, loony-bin dream world. Because in the real world, surely something this obviously wrong wouldn’t happen, would it?

Please, someone wake me up and get me back to the real world!

H/T to Ann Coulter…

Fortress Report

As I write this, my contractor continues his never-ending stream of lies, broken promises, and just plain immoral behavior. It’s really quite sad.

And quite annoying, since it’s my money he’s got, and my fortress he’s not building!

Several of my concerned readers have asked me privately to name this contractor, as they would like to avoid making the same mistake I did. Privately, I have responded to them — and if you’re about to make a decision on a concrete contractor, feel free to contact me!

However, I’m not quite ready to disclose his name publicly — although I’m very, very close. I’ve gotten some advice from an attorney on this matter, and there’s one more step I’m going to take before I’m ready to go public with the contractor’s name. In a few days, if I don’t have a positive response (meaning visible progress on the fortress), then I will name him here.