“Got tight last night on absinthe. Did knife tricks.”

Happy belated birthy Papa, I played twelve hours of Mumbly Peg in your honor.

I Think I Have A New Hero

I was doing some further reading on Norman Borlaug and came upon this interview in Reason. You should read the whole thing, but allow me to share with you this one little snippet.

Reason: Environmental activists often oppose road building. They say such roads will lead to the destruction of the rain forests or other wildernesses. What would you say to them?
Borlaug: These extremists who are living in great affluence...are saying that poor people shouldn't have roads. I would like to see them not just go out in the bush backpacking for a week but be forced to spend the rest of their lives out there and have their children raised out there. Let's see whether they'd have the same point of view then.
I should point out that I was originally trained as a forester. I worked for the U.S. Forest service, and during one of my assignments I was reputed to be the most isolated member of the Forest Service, back in the middle fork of the Salmon River, the biggest primitive area in the southern 48 states. I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.

Feed The Hungry

What is better, pestering the man with a loaf of bread to give half of his loaf to the man who has none or working diligently so that both men can have three and a half loaves?
Tip o' the hat to Insty

Barry Bonds' Dog

Accidentally got into his medicine cabinet. Not really.

Cellulosic Ethanol Plant to be Built in Georgia

Ok I'll admit, this comes straight from "geek central" (via Instapundit). No matter it's provenance, this is still very good news.

First, a little intro: I think the whole ethanol from food crops idea is extremely misbegotten. Biodeisel is a much better idea. Ecogeek gives the "run down" on another better idea - a plant to be built in Georgia that instead uses cellulose to create ethanol. From the article:

Cellulosic ethanol can contain up to 16 times more energy than is required to create it! If that doesn't sound ridiculously impressive, consider that gasoline contains only 5 times more energy than was required to create it and corn ethanol is totally lame, containing only 1.3 times the energy required to create it.

I Hate Toronto

I don't, as far as I know, hate Toronto but apparently there are lots of Canadians who do for some reason. This is all news to me. First of all, who knew that there was more than one city in Canada? I was under the impression that all the English speaking people in Canada lived in Toronto, the Inuit lived in Nunavut and the French in Quebec. Apparently Canadians have opinions too? Who knew? Canada is big, nearly twice as big as the contiguous 48, which is interesting since 90% of their 33 million people live within 100 miles of the US border, it makes you wonder what the hell is going on in the rest of that God forsaken icebox. It's like a gigantic Alaska except it's not part of a viable empire, at least not anymore.

According to the CIA fact book Canada spends 1.1% of it's colossal GDP- about half of California's, on defense. France spends 2.6% of it's much larger GDP on defense and think of how wussy they are. Supposedly there was a time when Canada had the third largest navy in the world, after Great Britain and the US . Man how things change.

Borders Books, Tintin and Freedom From Offense

LONDON - Borders is removing "Tintin in the Congo" from the children's section of its British stores, after a customer complained the comic work was racist, the company said Thursday. David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterized as racist abuse.
In it, Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi depicts the white hero's adventures in the Congo against the backdrop of an idiotic, chimpanzee-like native population that eventually comes to worship Tintin — and his dog — as gods.
Remi later said he was embarrassed by the book, and some editions have had the more objectionable content removed. When an unexpurgated edition was brought out in Britain in 2005, it came wrapped with a warning and was written with a forward explaining the work's colonial context.
Enright, who said he first complained to Borders and Britain's Commission for Racial Equality about a month ago, argued such a warning was not enough. "Whether it's got a piece of flimsy paper around it or not, it's irrelevant, it's in the children's section," he said, adding that he felt the book should be treated like pornography or
anti-Semitic literature and not displayed in mainstream bookstores at all.

While I'm sure Enright's sense of outrage and offense are genuine, I would suggest to him that it is easier to wear slippers than to carpet the world and what may be offense to him may be instructive, in a positive way, to another.
It has been years since I've read it, but I seem to remember the "N" word every so often in Huckleberry Finn. Would Enright suggest that this text be removed from mainstream bookstores as well? Probably and he would be just as wrong. Mark Twain, whose Hartford home is literally 2 miles down Farmington Avenue from where I write, was no racist, quite the contrary in fact.
We must guard against genuine erosion's in liberty such as having a book removed because it offends someone. I wonder how Enright would feel if Jerry Falwell joined him and asked that they remove The Necronomicon as well, even though it doesn't really exist?

You Want The Truth?

It amazes me that our enemies feed murdered children to their parents but what rankles liberals world wide is the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Here are some inconvenient facts about our gulag in Cuba:

• More is spent on meals for detainees than on the U.S. troops stationed there. Detainees are offered up to 4,200 calories a day. The average weight gain per detainee is 20 pounds.
• Detainees receive free medical, dental, psychiatric, and optometric care. In 2005, there were 35 teeth cleanings, 91 cavities filled, and 174 pairs of glasses issued.
• Departing detainees receive a Koran, a jean jacket, a white t-shirt, a pair of blue jeans, high top tennis shoes, a gym bag of toiletries, and a pillow and blanket for the flight home.
• The mother of a detainee stated: "Of course they wanted to stay there. They had human rights and good living standards there. They had dentists and good meals, everything they wanted." (London Times, 3/3/04)

I'm sure being in any prison sucks. But name me another prison in the history of warfare where the POWs come out fatter than when they went in. Ask any Euro Weenie where they would rather be imprisoned, modern Gitmo or one of the many allied POW camps run by the "neutral" Swiss during WWII. Of course being Euro Weenies they would opt for the Swiss hospitality and like with everything else, they would be wrong.

Hat tip: Ken Herman

Real Genius: Gary Larson and The Far Side

The term genius gets tossed around way too flippantly these days. The bugg eyed, idiot kid who can beat out tunes for dancing bears on an upended five gallon bucket is routinely hailed as the next Mozart. Madonna has been called a genius, at what exactly I never cared to find out. That Jarvik guy is pretty bright and Stephen Hawking may well be a genius, but who among you can say the read and understand anything he has written? Then there is Gary Larson, creator of the Far Side. There is something uniquely ingenious about a Far Side cartoon. First of all, the drawings couldn't be simpler, just enough to convey the scene. You remember things like:

• The two spiders on the web, one has a bag over his head the other has a stream of silk hanging from him.
• The kid in bed and his father is trying to get him to quiet down, the kids mother is below holding the string of a balloon with a scary face.
• The four idiots looking at a half glass of water.
• The entomologist laying dead on his back his arms and legs curled above him.
• Two giant polar bears talking over the bitten in roof of an igloo.
• The kid, specifically the far side kid pushing on a door that says pull.

The drawing is there to set up the scene, the caption is usually the punchline.

• Bob did I scare you or what?
• Billy are you going to sleep or do I have to stamp my foot three times and summon the floating head of death?
• Half full. Half empty. Half full, no half empty, wait what was the question? Where's my cheeseburger?
• How entomologists die.
• I like the chewy centers!
• Exception: a sign in the art says "Midvale school for the gifted".

I haven't seen a Far Side book or calender since my mom, God rest her soul, passed away. Every year she would send me one for Christmas, but I still remember them. Can anyone remember a ______ from last Thursday? Most other cartoons if they are particularly funny that day might, might mind you, get a chuckle. Some are as about as funny as a gut full of pin worms, i.e. Garfield, The Family Circus, Cathy, Andy Capp, The Peanuts, Blondie, Hi & Lois, Funkie Winkerbean, Momma, Tumbleweeds, etc..

The Banality of Evil

Wretchard comments on the story linked to below by the Dude (Can this be true?)

...One of the reasons Armies were invented, with their uniforms, insignia and badges; with their elaborate rituals and insistence on discipline is not, as some have ignorantly argued, to gratify some fantasy to play out a boy's adventure story. This machinery was created from the necessity to keep armed young men, recruited from all walks of life, often far from direct supervision, inured to violence and frequently stressed beyond normal endurance from going off the deep end. Yon's story reminds me of one I have frequently told. I met a veteran of the Second World War who told me that he entered the Bayview Hotel on TM Kalaw Street in Manila just after the US Army had driven the Japanese from it. This hotel was about three hundred yards from the location of the current US Embassy. And in it, the Filipino veteran found the walls smeared with the jelly of hundreds of human eyeballs. As a child my uncles had told me about how the Japanese, in the last extremity of despair had kidnapped thousands of young women and gang-raped them before killing them horribly. What the veteran described was one of the places it had happened, at the Bayview Hotel...

I had no doubts whatsoever about the Bayview Hotel story. And even though I don't know for a fact whether the al-Qaeda baked an 11 year old boy and served the carcass to his family, I have no doubt that it could happen. If the Japanese can do it, the Arab can. There but for discipline, culture and force of habit can go anyone at all...

Read it all.

Yet Another iPhone Review

Yet another iPhone review From A Pointless Waste of Time:

Usually I can find ways to avoid Mac users in my day to day life. Not anymore. Soon, everybody who owns a cellphone is going to be a Mac user, thanks to Apple's latest "innovation", the iPhone. And just like its portable audio predecessor, the iPod, I predict that people will be rendered incapable of referring to the device in generic terms. I promise you, I'm going to fly-kick the first person who tells me they're going to whip out their iPhone and give me an iCall.

Zaphod won't like it, but I still think it's pretty funny.

Live Earth 07/07/2007

Throwing a gigantic 24 hour international concert to "raise awareness" about environmental issues is just plain asinine. Forget the preaching to the choir aspect of it, if these people really believe that global warming is killing the planet, why do they waste resources and pollute Gaea so recklessly? Because they are chock-full-of shit ass-hats that's why.
So without further blathering, here are the top five pointless gestures to raise awareness or what have you.

1. A twenty four hour drive by shooting marathon to raise awareness about urban violence and hybrid vehicles.
2. The US Army's new, super high tech, twelve million dollar, web based podcast to recruit the Amish.
3. Nathan's Hot dogs sponsors a hot dog eating contest to raise awareness about bulimia and animal rights.
4. A worldwide ticker tape parade to raise awareness about profligate littering and pointless gestures.
5. Barbara Streisand tours the world in a private jet and chauffeured limousines, owns several homes, comprising of at least 80,000 square feet of heated and air conditioned living space, makes her living selling plastic discs double wrapped in two different types of plastic that require yet more energy to use, but she's coming to your town tomorrow for $175 a seat to tell you how you should live if you want to save the environment. (This one isn't fiction.)

Kim du Toit Shares His Love of iPhones

Okay, so you buy this magical new appliance with which you are going to run your entire life, communicate with others, communicate on the Intarweb, listen to music, live by the built-in calendar/scheduler… ...until the batteries run down.

Read the whole thing, it's kind of funny.

Movie Review: The Cider House Rules

The Cider House Rules is, as you probably know, a pretty good movie. Well acted, well shot, an overall "A" effort from Hollywood. It's also unrelentingly anti-Christian and pro abortion.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, The Cider House Rules is about a doctor, played by the always excellent Michael Caine, who runs an orphanage in Maine. He's a kind man who comes from a difficult background, who provides a loving home for his wards. He also performs abortions. His protege and "work of art" is an adult orphan, played by Tobey Maguire, who is skilled at delivering children and learned how to perform abortions, although initially he doesn't like to.
The whole story is set up to present the pro-abortion side of the argument. The doctor, voiced by Caine, gets to eloquently present his position, Maguire's character more or less feebly opposes it because? We're not exactly sure why he opposes it, other than the fact the he was an unwanted child himself. That's about the closest thing you get to a pro-life argument. There is a scene when the doctor is riding in a truck with Maguire and another orphan and he's saying why abortion is necessary, Maquire points out that he and the other kid wouldn't be there if their moms had had the chance to abort them.
That, in a malformed, rather verbose nutshell is my problem with the film; it doesn't honestly try to portray both sides of the issue. Had it done so, I think it would have been a much better movie.
SPOILERS BELOW
The title of the film comes from a set of rules posted on the interior of the apple picker's house that tell cider makers how to act. They resent these outsider, boss-man made rules and feel they are insulting and in due course, ignore them. There is some dialogue about how people make their own rules everyday, blah-a-dee-blah-effin-blah. I might be more sympathetic to the those who would make their own rules, except that Mr. Rose, very well played by Delroy Lindo, the main proponent of rule breaking, is guilty of fathering a child with his own daughter, then assists in the abortion of his child-grandchild, gets knifed by that daughter and then commits suicide, more or less. Call me simplistic, but I think this man could use some moral guidance. Five word review: Moral bankruptcy posing as virtue.

Can This Be True? More from Michael Yon

Speaking through an American interpreter, Lieutenant David Wallach who is a native Arabic speaker, the Iraqi official related how al Qaeda united these gangs who then became absorbed into “al Qaeda.” They recruited boys born during the years 1991, 92 and 93 who were each given weapons, including pistols, a bicycle and a phone (with phone cards paid) and a salary of $100 per month, all courtesy of al Qaeda. These boys were used for kidnapping, torturing and murdering people.
At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

I have a fairly vivid imagination and I'm not easily nauseated, but can this possibly be true?

Happy 231st Birthday Beautiful

"Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence; as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our States, in a great one. 3. Under governments of force; as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that, enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too; the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject.
But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787

Pardon Scooter Libby

I strongly believe that the GWB should pardon Scooter Libby. A complete, unconditional pardon. I could give you several good reasons to do this, but I lost interest in the whys and wherefores a long time ago. The President should do it, neigh, must do it for one all important reason: it causes liberals to go further insane. If you thought the rank and file pinko had bush derangement syndrome before, you should hear them now. Their plaintive whines and howls of injustice are exquisite. Better yet we get to listen to them try to explain how Bill Clinton's rash of questionable pardons were somehow different, somehow better. Hmmmm, delicious.

Prediction: The president will wait until HRC is the nominee and then pardon Libby fully. The subsequent discussion of pardons and presidential privilege and how Bill Clinton pardoned everybody except the Rosenbergs on his way out of the oval office will not play well for Hillary.

Frivolous, Ridiculous Law Suit

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The mother of a US man whose 2006 execution took 86 minutes and involved sticking needles into him 19 times has sued the prison team which oversaw the execution for civil rights violations.
On Monday Irma Clark filed suit in the Cincinnati, Ohio, district court, alleging her son Joseph Clark was exposed to "excessive suffering" violating the US constitution when he was put to death on May 2, 2006, at a state prison in Lucasville, Ohio,
according to court documents.

Fair enough, so long as the victim(s) of Joseph Clark get any proceeds resulting from this law suit. I doubt they had a pleasant time getting murdered either. Maybe we should counter sue Irma and Clark's father for raising a murderous drug addict? Or would that be vindictive?

I despise the faux humanitarianism of lethal injection, perfectly symbolized by the quick wipe with an alcohol swab and a sterile needle filled with deadly poison. A more honest and appropriate approach would be to put the condemned in wooden chair, pin a target over his/her heart and shoot them dead. Barbaric? It sure is, but it's also unquestionably effective and more reflective of the general idea of killing someone.

Michael Yon on the Ground in Iraq

While we enjoy baseball, iced coffee and all the other benefits of our society, like religious tolerance, rule of law, equal protection under that law and political moderation, Michael Yon describes the gruesome discoveries on and below the ground in Iraq. The descriptions and pictures are not for the squeamish, so be warned, but you should read what he has to say and see what he has to show.

Big hat tip to the corner at NRO.

Baseball: Sox n' Rangers, Pettitte Gets Shelled

Julian Tavares, the fifth Red Sox starter, has pitched damn well this season, damn well, which has been one of those pleasant surprises, like Mike Lowell coming alive offensively. Today Tavares lost after giving up two measly runs to the Texas Rangers. I'm not sure what parallel universe we've stumbled into here, but apparently it's one where the Texas Rangers can win two games in a row against the Red Sox by out pitching us. Scary.

While it sucks that the Sox have lost two in a row, I take great consolation in the desperation of the Yankees and more importantly their fans. Andy Pettitte gave up eight runs today against Oakland and was Yanked in the second inning. Ouch. I'm shocked the Yankees haven't had a major shake up considering they've been performing. Yesterday on YES Johny Judas was nearly in tears trying to explain their failure to win, Derek Jeter was trying to explain why they've been struggling as did Jorge Posada, each failed at that too. The bottom line is that with, by far, the biggest payroll in the game, the Yankees have a bunch of players who are overpaid and under performing. I almost hate to admit this, but it's more fun when the Sox and Yanks are neck and neck and every game means something. The Sox being the Sox and the Yanks being the Yanks, this can still happen before the end of the year so I'm not complaining about an eleven game lead at the All Star break.