Sneaking Suspicions
The charges just keep coming

Fritz Schranck explains what "Abuse of a corpse" means. It's bad, but not as bad as it sounds. And it seems they have the guy dead to rights.

Woe Canada

Canadian schools are cutting back on their libraries. To make up for the shortfall, Canadian publishers are turning to the American market. But American purchasers are pressuring them to take out "Canadian references". So "the end result will be fewer truly Canadian books for Canadian children." And, eventually, the Canadians will turn to the dark side.

Liverpool Airport Endorses Atheism

At least, that's what I always thought that line from "Imagine" was about.

EU Leaders OK Economic Measures

Well, how about that. The story isn't too clear on what the ministers agreed on, except that it involved cutting red tape and "freeing Europe from the last vestiges of state monopolies". Also, the French didn't like it, so that's in its favor.

A lot of the talk in the article is about energy deregulation; I wonder if Enron came up. Also, they're apparently looking to invest in high technology, but if they don't understand the importance of the profit motive I doubt it will do much good. And the usual gang of idiots was there:

The summit was followed by a march and rally by tens of thousands of protesters who banged drums, blew whistles and carried banners with slogans such as ``Terror USA'' and ``Against A Capitalist Europe.''

Gosh. I don't know what "Terror USA" means, but I'm guessing it's not a statement of support for the WTC victims. I suggest -- if it's not too much of an overbearing, white-male, capitalist sort of thing to say -- that the protesters explore grammar and syntax. It helps you get your point across.

Alabama's out of the NCAAs, but my field of 64 is taking shape. I've added a bunch of new links over on the sideboard. Most are well-known: Pigs and Fishes, Protein Wisdom, On The Third Hand, Letter From Gotham, and Live From the WTC. I also got around to permalinking to the #1 seed in the Midwest.

Lynn Unleashed is a brand-new blog I like the start of.

Tim Blair

I know that I will never, ever, not in a million years, be the top "Mac". Curse you, Steve Jobs!

Yugoslav Military Arrests American (washingtonpost.com)

From all appearances, this is what the US Government says it is; an attempt by Milosevic allies in the Yugoslav military to subvert democracy. Arrested along with the diplomat was a former general who is now a member of the Serbian government. Milosevic is gone, but his people are still very powerful in Serbia. It's going to be a long time before we see the end of what he wrought.

Chinese Outdid Columbus, Briton Says

By 72 years, according to this guy, meaning that the Norse still beat them by four centuries.

This guy looks like a crank to me; he's going around with "secret pre-Columbian maps" and saying that the Chinese circumnavigated the world in the 1420s. That was certainly possible, I'll grant you. But anytime someone talks about secret historical information, he loses credibility.

At any rate, the thing about Columbus is not that he "discovered" America. It's that he led to a permanent age of colonization. The Chinese era of exploration (which is quite real) ended without issue. The Viking settlement in America died out in a matter of decades, and their Greenland colony after centuries. Other groups (Welsh, African, Greek, even Phoenician) may have crossed the Atlantic, and Polynesians or Japanese may have crossed the Pacific. But they never did anything permanent with it.

The Top Ten Gayest Songs Ever!

Hey, what about "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away?" And nothing by the Village People? This list is woefully incomplete.

The Nando Times: Lott threatens to retaliate for nominee's defeat

Trent Lott is a jackass. He's also a hypocrite, but that's nothing new. He spent the last six years as a leader in the Republicans' efforts to block endless Democratic nominees.

NYPOST.COM Gossip: PAGE SIX By RICHARD JOHNSON with PAULA FROELICH and CHRIS WILSON

A little more on Isaac Asimov:

Deadly error
THE posthumously published autobiography of science fiction master Isaac Asimov reveals that the "I, Robot" author died of AIDS. Due out later this month, "It's Been a Good Life" - which Asimov's wife, Janet, compiled from her late husband's notes and essays - details how he contracted AIDS through a tainted blood transfusion while undergoing bypass surgery in 1983. He finally succumbed to the disease in 1992, at age 72.

The story at the time was that Asimov was suffering from kidney failure brought on by complications of his heart problems -- which in a way, is the truth. The symptoms described were like those of AIDS -- in particular, it seems that at the end his mind was gone, or going. I can't imagine a worse fate for a man who took so much pride in his intellect.

On second thought, maybe the SF/Fantasy fan part is dominant. I look at my shelves, and I see Asimov (lots of that, fiction and non), Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Andersen, De Camp. All of Tolkien, including "The History of Middle Earth". Read all those guys at an early age, and if you don't come out mortally confused, they'll at least start you on the way to learning how to think. Then there are newer guys, from all over the spectrum... Terry Bisson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Sawyer, David Weber, David Drake, Eric Flint, Spider Robinson, George Alec Effinger, Steven Brust, Greg Bear, Sheri Tepper. And that's just from one set of shelves containing the paperbacks that are most of my worldly possessions and are threatening to crowd me out of house and home..

VodkaPundit

Stephen Green thinks I might be becoming a [gasp] conservative:

No, I Am Your Father
Mac Thomason, War Liberal, is slowly coming over to the Dark Side.

Love your work, Mac, but when you're supporting free markets, recognizing the value of the US Navy in protecting free trade, admiring free trade, and the talking about the value of a Western education... well, it might be time to drop the word "liberal."

Welcome aboard.

There is something to this: I am, I know, more hawkish than I was last year at this time. But then, I supported the Gulf War -- or what I guess we'll be calling Gulf War I pretty soon -- at the time. My first reaction when I heard about the invasion of Kuwait was, "We should do something to protect an ally, but of course we won't." And I was 20 years old at the time, so a war could have had some profound effects on me. I think I underestimated the impact the end of the Cold War would have on our willingness to intervene. Anyway, about a year later, I took to saying that the US Marine Corps was the greatest force for good in the world.

The worst thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party was the Vietnam War. Of course, the D's were the least of the victims of the war, but from the 1968 convention to the 1992 primaries (when Clinton and Tsongas laid a smackdown on the left) the party was essentially captured by its lunatic fringe, and that fringe hated the military. Even those (the majority) who weren't out-and-out pacifists couldn't understand that the military was not only necessary, but a necessary good.

My mother (the Ginpundit) tried to raise me a pacifist, but it didn't take. When I was young -- about ten, I'd guess -- one of the hot topics was the nuclear freeze/nuclear disarmament. Continental Europeans, I remember, were really big on that. My reaction was basically: "Wait, if we disarmed, wouldn't the Russians just take over, or kill us all?" I was told it was more complicated than that, and I was young, so I believed. A few years later, I realized that it wasn't more complicated than that, and that the Russians would have either taken over or killed us all.

Free trade... Stephen probably doesn't want to hear this, but a major influence on me in that (overcoming the biases of a profoundly unionist family) was Paul Krugman. Really, read his books and his Slate columns sometime. I know he's been way off, especially since September, but I think the shorter format is bad for him. Anyway, I think free trade is wonderful. And I'll point out that it wasn't Clinton who threw up (pun intended) the steel tariff, or the Democrats who produced Pat Buchanan. I've more or less decided that free trade is a battle of the sensible center against the lunatic fringe of both sides.

Similarly, I think Western education -- even more specifically, Anglospheric education -- is wonderful as well. I've never understood how anyone could stand on the campus of, oh, let's say, the University of California at Berkeley (or Oxford or Cambridge!), and not think that. I've spent most of my adult life either attending or working at colleges. Heaven, to me, is a good academic library; the one I work at isn't heaven, but it's probably more than I deserve.

However... I don't consider any of this contrary to "liberalism" as I understand it, to the slightly left-of-center politics of the New Republic or the Democratic Leadership Council, or Bill Clinton for that matter. President Clinton is, of course, a repugnant human being. But I probably agreed with his policies about eighty percent of the time, and I'd guess that if you took out the times when he was clearly pandering and going against his best political judgment (and there was never anything wrong with his political judgment) it would be more like 95%. "Liberal" was used as a smear word by Republicans in the eighties, who used it to mean, basically, "Socialist". I've never felt that way. Glenn Kinen today said that he thinks he's a (John) Kennedy Democrat, and I feel I'm in that tradition, and that of Truman, and FDR.

There are a number of things I don't normally talk about here, because they haven't been part of the national debate lately, but where I'm far out of step with the Republican Party, and more or less in agreement with the Democratic. I'm an environmentalist, though whenever possible I prefer the carrot of tax credits to the stick of regulation. And I favor our current progressive income tax. I think the current Federal income tax structure is more or less right; not perfect, but at least in the top 5 percentile. (I also think that taxes were ridiculously high before Reagan's cut, but most Democrats these days would agree with that.) I wish the State of Alabama would raise the income tax and lower sales taxes. I'm biased (in that my father and my communist sister are trial lawyers and my brother is in training to join the crowd) but I think "tort reform" is mostly a scam corporations are trying to pull to get away with selling defective products and services. (I'm not saying that there aren't times when juries go too far, but that's what judges are for.) I think Ralph Nader's politics range from stupid to abhorrent, but I also think he did a lot to make this country a better place to live, back in the sixties and seventies. I just think it's long past time for him to go. And though I may be a hawk, I think that National Missile Defense is a huge boondoggle and liable to be a waste of time even if it worked, though we should probably keep researching. I'm theoretically pro-union, though I think the AFL-CIO's trade positions are immensely stupid and counterproductive; the American union movement is living in the past and needs to catch up with the postindustrial world.

There's also a slew of things that I favor that most of the blogosphere would, and where the Democrats are on the side of the angels as well. I think that gay marriage should be legal. I'm pro-choice. Try winning a Republican primary with those stands. In a lot of ways, I'm a small-l libertarian, though I think that big-L party is full of shit. I think that prostitution should be decriminalized. Pot too, and we should pull way back on the drug war all around. I think we have to figure out a way to reform the prison system; certainly people need to be punished for committing crimes, but I see too much human capital being wasted.

The name "War Liberal" came about because that's a good short way to describe my view of things. If I'd started a week later, I probably would have gone with "McPundit"; maybe it's just as well. But labels are tricky things, and I'm not just a "liberal". Let's see, I'm a liberal/libertarian/hawk/zionist/free trader/tax justice enthusiast/pragmatist/feminist/anti-vegetarian/environmentalist/corporate watchdog/space nut/Star Trek fan/technophile/librarian. (Maybe it should have been "War Librarian".) Find me someone whose politics really can be sewn up in one or two words, and I'll show you someone who doesn't really think about things.

Grey or Gray?

It is "Gray" Davis, not "Grey", I checked. But I'm going to leave the post with "Grey Davis", on the theory that common typos drive traffic to your site.

NYPOST.COM Entertainment: LENO INSISTS: I'M NOT JEALOUS OF DAVE'S DEAL By ADAM BUCKMAN

Yeah, right. I bet his next contract, he demands that his salary must always be one dollar more than Letterman's... Leno makes a lot of money, but only a little more than half what Dave makes. That's despite better ratings. There are two simple reasons. One is that NBC has a replacement ready in Conan O'Brien, while CBS's other late night guy is Craig Kilborn, whom nobody sees as a potential late-night star.

Second, the feeling is that Leno's ratings are because of a stronger situation (NBC is much stronger at 10PM ET than CBS, NBC's local stations have better newscasts, NBC has a higher clearance rate) and because the Tonight Show name still means something. That might not be fair, but the idea is that there are Letterman people, and Tonight Show people, but few Leno people, and if someone else took over the show it would do just about the same.

Yates Sentenced to Life in Prison (washingtonpost.com)

Let's face it. Andrew Yates would be on his way to a date with a needle. Not that life (with the possibility of parole in 40 years) is a picnic.

Bush Seeks Foreign Aid Boost (washingtonpost.com)

That's nice, but the key point of it is this:

[T]he Bush administration reversed course yesterday and proposed to grant an additional $5 billion over three years to poor countries that adopt sound economic policies and attack corruption.

The problem with direct foreign aid to governments is that it usually goes either directly into the pockets of their leaders, or -- at best -- into basically futile big spending projects. ("Hey, kids, let's build a dam!") What's needed is not infrastructure, it's the social, educational, and political structure to build a working modern society. And I don't know if the kind of foreign aid the other G8 countries try to push on us helps build that.

One last point (I think I got this from the captain) is that the US is a huge spender in indirect foreign aid. In particular, the US Navy does a huge amount to promote foreign trade throughout the world, by supressing piracy. I'll throw in the American higher educational system. While a lot of smart people leave their countries to work in the West, a significant number of them wind up going back home at some point. The American- (or British-)educated are in many cases the bright hope for poor nations' futures.

GSA Places Enron, Anderson on Suspension (washingtonpost.com)

Boy, what an idea! The government isn't going to do business with nearly-OOB Enron, or federally indicted Andersen. Apparently, those companies lacked a "satisfactory record of business ethics and integrity."

Dems plan pre-emptive strike vs. Mitt

OK, this is just wrong. Massachusetts Democrats are trying to pull the same shenanigans Grey Davis did in California, attacking the more moderate (and more electable) GOP candidate to make sure the more vulnerable incumbent is the candidate in the general election.

Leaving aside that the strategy might backfire and wind up re-electing Swift, it's simply wrong to interfere in the other party's selection process. It's the sort of thing Nixon would do.

Tipper is urged to run for Senate - Friday, 03/15/02

Hey, it worked for Hillary! Of course, I've never gotten the idea that Mrs. Gore was really interested in that sort of thing. I doubt that she can beat Lamar Alexander, but if she did, it brings up the intriguing possibility of Bill and Al attending the same functions in the roles of Senate spouses.

Clinton Plays Favorites in Massachusetts (washingtonpost.com)

He praised Steve Grossman and ignored the midget. This story talks about Reich's criticisms of Clinton and of the national party, but my guess is that the real reason Clinton snubbed him had more to do with Reich running around on his stumpy little legs and claiming Clinton's support when the former President wanted to stay out of it.

Ex-'NYPD Blue' star Andrea Thompson leaves CNN Headline News

I get as annoyed with the attitudes of big-time TV media as anyone. But they aren't just puppets, and they work hard at what they do. Andrea Thompson was a veteran actor, comfortable in front of the camera. (Oh, and easy on the eyes.) And she was a dismal failure as an anchor.

O'Connor Criticizes Disabilities Law as Too Vague (washingtonpost.com)

Sandra Day O'Connor doesn't like the Americans With Disabilities Act; generally, that's not a good sign for a law since she's the swing vote. But the real story here is O'Connor's secret endorsement of Glenn Reynolds' Senate campaign:

The Americans With Disabilities Act is an example of what happens when a bill's "sponsors are so eager to get something passed that what passes hasn't been as carefully written as a group of law professors might put together," O'Connor told an annual meeting of the Corporate Counsel Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.

Amazon.com: buying info: It's Been a Good Life

Uh... I'm rarely speechless, but this one did it. Isaac Asimov was my favorite writer, and his autobiographies are coming out in a newly condensed format, with some new information. One of the new bits of information is that Asimov died of AIDS. He had blood transfusions in 1983, when he had bypass surgery, and at that time, they weren't screening blood properly.

(Via Ted Barlow.)

Appeals Court Choice Rejected (washingtonpost.com)

Heck, I don't know if Pickering was a good choice or no. It was a party-line vote, meaning most likely that nobody on the committee knew either. Basically, the Democratic leadership decided to shoot him down, and that was that.

I want to say to everyone who thinks this is a scandal... This is nothing compared to the treatment of Clinton nominees by the Senate while it was in Republican hands.

Andersen Charged With Obstruction in Enron Inquiry

Let's see if this is just the first of many charges. As it is, this is the first time that a major accounting firm (as opposed to its individual partners or employees) has been charged. I've a feeling it won't be the last.

I just want to fill in a few blanks here. I'm not anti-business. I'm pro-business. But I think that publicly held corporations have a duty to conduct their affairs openly, and their accountants are one of the linchpins of that. If their accounting can't be trusted -- because their accountants are corrupt or incompetent, or because the corporations are withholding information from them -- the whole structure is damaged.

Saddam, Again By June Thomas

Finally, Blogger let me in!

The South China Morning Post wants you to be a premium subscriber; if the quote included in "International Papers" Wednesday is a reasonable example, they shouldn't have many takers.

[T]he war against terrorism is unlikely to achieve its goals through military conflict. The longevity of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and Cuba's Fidel Castro are proof of that. Instead of threatening and snubbing its rivals or calling on other nations to justify its use of military force against them, the Bush administration must listen to world opinion. It must practise what it preaches and turn to the accepted conflict-resolving strategies of diplomacy and dialogue instead of military muscle.

WHAT? If anything, those examples show what happens when the military options are restrained by those who were opposed to them in the first place. The US could have brought overwhelming force to overthrow Castro or Qaddafi, except that we were kind of trying to avoid World War III. And in Saddam's case, we should have overthrown him militarily, but held back; ten years of diplomacy have done absolutely nothing to weaken him.

States Try to Regulate Flight Schools

Of course, only the FAA can issue pilot's licenses. So (a) this isn't really a state deal, and (b) all you'd need to find is one state that doesn't have a good screening program, (c) which is why the FAA wants the states to stay out of it.

Sense of Balance Tough to Find in Mideast (washingtonpost.com)

The world may be in chaos, but there are always some constants. Geraldo is still an asshole.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution | Al-Amin

The former H. Rap Brown, now a Muslim cleric, got life without parole for killing a deputy sheriff. It's probably for the best. Generally, I don't care a whole lot about the death penalty, as I've said before. But a sentence of death here might have blown up in the authorities' faces. I don't see that it would have accomplished anything, really.

Bush Orders Inquiry Into Visas Granted to Terrorists After Attack

I should hope so. Ignoring the usual slow processing times, doesn't anyone at INS read? I don't handle paperwork on a normal basis, but I can't help but glance over it when I do. I'd think somebody would see "Mohamed Atta" and wonder, "Now where did I see that name before? Did I go to high school with him?"

Joe Lieberman wants to make Tom Ridge's job a cabinet post. Yes, that will fix everything. Yes, he'd be subject to Senate confirmation. But Ridge would have been confirmed by the Senate in a breeze, and he's incompetent. The Senate confirmation process seems largely to be about finding scandals, not actually deciding if someone can do the job. Which, of course, leads to the exact opposite type of person we'd want in a vital position holding top jobs -- boring drones who are unobjectionable, rather than flawed stars who inevitably will piss some people off.

U.S. Will Take Action Against Iraq, Bush Says (washingtonpost.com)

It probably says something about me that I'm loving this. I voted for Clinton twice, and I'd do it again, and I never had any use for Reagan. But I'm enjoying having a President who says of Saddam, "He is a problem, and we're going to deal with him." Problem-solving, now that I can get behind. Not so crazy about the domestic agenda.

USS Clueless - Are we alone?

Steven Den Beste's first-anniversary essay is on one of the big questions.

I won't comment on the astronomy; I haven't kept up in the field since college, but it more or less matches what I've heard. I'm going to take another tack, one that matches my own predilections better, a natural-historical look.

Life began very early on Earth, probably about as soon as conditions made life viable -- about 3.5 billion years ago. That indicates that life would be fairly common under the type of conditions that exist on Earth, if not inevitable.

However, for the vast majority of life's tenure on this planet, it was exclusively monocellular life. Moreover, those cells weren't even of the same type as those making up our bodies, and those of other multicellular animals. Life prior to about 1.5 billion years ago was exclusively prokaryotic; that is, the cells lacked the internal structures (nuclei, mitochondria, etc.) of eukaryotic cells like those in the bodies of all multicellular organisms -- and even most larger monocellular ones.

I doubt that prokaryotic cells could ever have been the basis for truly multicellular life. After all, for two billion years they didn't. But then, for two billion years, they didn't get together to become eukaryotic cells either. For me, it's just a function of the math; if eukaryotic life took two billion years to get going, that strongly argues that it wasn't inevitable. Two billion years could easily have become four billion, or ten billion. (Some of this section is stolen from my memories of Stephen Jay Gould's [boos from the right side of the Net] Wonderful Life.)

Then, let's go to the other end of natural history, to humanity. Humanity is -- I am absolutely certain on this point -- an accident. Again, that's partly just the math. Genus Homo has been around about 2.2 million years. That's a long time, but it's about one-twentieth of one percent of Earth's existence. Carl Sagan had his Cosmic Calendar; I expect most people reading this are at least vaguely familiar with it, but it was the timeline of the universe as shown as reduced to a single year. And in that year, the tiniest part of Dec. 31st would be all of human history.

Sagan was a firm believer in extraterrestial intelligence, or someone who wanted to believe in it. I wonder if he ever examined the implications of that illustration. Intelligent life, broadly defined, is no more than a couple of million years old; life capable of communication outside the planet only a couple hundred thousand. The technology is only a couple of hundred. Versus 4.5 billion years of a planet's existance, that's not big enough to be even a statistical error.

Robert Wright [boos from everybody I didn't lose when I mentioned Gould] likes to say -- I oversimplify -- that evolution caused life to grow ever more complex, and insinuates that intelligence was therefore inevitable. My question is, then what took so long? The dinosaurs weren't much less complex than mammals, and they (despite "Jurassic Park") weren't anywhere close to being intelligent. And they were wiped out by accident. Even after mammals took over -- which was a close thing, the birds easily could have won out, and consider the implications of the avian wing for an intelligent species, not to mention the word "birdbrain" -- they got big pretty fast, but sure took their sweet time about getting around to being intelligent.

Finally... Den Beste is a carbon chauvinist. I'm a primate chauvinist. I see lots of mammals who could have become pretty smart, but I don't think any except the primates could have been sophisticated tool users. No hands, and no possibility of getting hands. Their forepaws are too specialized to evolve into something that could grasp. Only primates, of living animals, would fit the bill. But other than humans, look at the primates. Most non-human primates today are monkeys. They're plenty smart, for animals, but they're not anywhere close to evolving true intelligence. They don't need it; they do just fine without it. Baboons, maybe they'd have a shot. The great apes might have that in them, but they're also rare, and growing rarer. True, that's largely because humans have usurped their habitats, but it's also because they have limited habitats.

Intelligence did arise from the primates, of course. But that was a fragile thing, one lineage in one branch of the apes -- a branch that is now extinct, save for the one species that now bestrides the Earth. That species wiped out most of its competitors, of course; given its well-known propensities and abilities, what if it had wiped itself out as well? Technological intelligence might never have had another shot.

Senate Passes Buck on Fuel Standards (washingtonpost.com)

To the White House. Gosh, I wonder what they're going to decide.

I'm in favor of stricter fuel standards for a number of reasons. I'm not one of the internal-combustion-engine-is-evil crowd, OK? (And I drive a gas guzzler myself.) Not using fossil fuels would be stupid. But I have three reasons why I would prefer stricter standards:

I think fuel standards have been a huge boon by making our air cleaner. While the alarmist claims about running out of oil were unfounded, eventually we will run low. And cutting back on oil usage would damage the ability of Saudi Arabia, et. al., to fund terror.

Television Without Pity » 24 » Recaps & Extras » Season 1 Episode 14

Three tidbits:

1) I really like 24; if you haven't been watching it's probably too late to get in on it, but FX should have a marathon sometime.

2) This recap starts off with a fun little riff on Gary Condit.

3) I'm no fan of the Newtster, but how could anybody possibly think he's slimier than Condit? On the poll on page 2, they're tied, way ahead of President Clinton.

More Bugs: Dr. Weevil's Weblog

Looking at Dr. Hendry's CV, I find that he was teaching at the University of Alabama when I was a student there. (His years were 1990-97, mine 1991-93, plus graduate work and the annus horribillus that was law school.) I don't think our paths ever crossed, largely because of my utter linguistic incompetence -- he taught Greek 102 and I washed out of 101 after two weeks. I'd already taken Greek Mythology by the time I got to UA. (I love Greek Mythology.)

Terry Oglesby has admitted him to the Axis of Weevil, even though he's in Maine now; I mean, he is Dr. Weevil.

Roll out the Bloggage: Patio Pundit

I hadn't run across this one before today. (Via His Tipsiness.)

The World According to Vegetarians (washingtonpost.com)

Renegade chef and unrepentant carnivore Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" merrily bashed vegetarians, calling them "enemies of everything good and decent in the human spirit" and referring to "their Hezbollahlike splinter faction, the vegans," as "a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn."

I have a new personal hero! He did forget "self-righteous elitists", though.

The Post put together a roundtable of not only vegetarians but of their Hezbollah faction. Oh, for joy. This next is a long quote, and my favorite part:

Q: But humans have eaten meat throughout their history. Meat has always been the symbol of prosperity and health. Poor immigrants to this country, as soon as they could afford it, added more meat to their diet. Why should we change all this?

Gabai: We eat meat because our government makes sure meat is cheap. Meat and dairy are subsidized by the government so that people will buy them.

McQuirter: The USDA guidelines are political choices based on the beef and dairy industry. They make it hard for a family to do anything but eat animal products. They dump animal products into the school lunch program. A family would save money by being a vegetarian.

Ginsberg: Why are we the most obese country in the world? Why does the Food Pyramid [dietary guidelines from the government] come from the USDA and not HHS [Health and Human Services]? It's because the beef industry and the dairy industry sit on the board that decides that pyramid. In the WIC nutrition program [Women, Infants and Children], families can't even get soy milk or soy products, even if milk makes them sick. The program won't pay for them. We're forced to choose animal products.

Is it me, or did they just spend over 150 words and completely avoid answering the question? Yes, I thought so.

You will eat the meat. (TM Denis Leary.) Human beings are technically omnivores, but that's only because meat has traditionally been the most difficult thing to get. We are primarily carnivores, and decended from carnivores. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, maybe don't survive primarily on meat, but will go far out of their way to get it.

You can survive on an all-meat diet, far more easily than on an all-veggie diet. The human body doesn't produce a lot of things we need to survive; we can either get that from eating animals that do produce them, or we can scramble around for lots of different plants to find the right combination. For most people throughout most of human history, just getting enough calories to survive was difficult enough without being too finicky to eat animal flesh.

Americans probably eat too much meat; that I'll admit. But these people take things way too far. Have you seen these folks? They call it "healthy", I call it "emaciated".

Vandalism draws tough sentence | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Vandalism" is pretty soft language for a quarter million in property damage. But I'll point out that these teens will serve nine years of a 20 year sentence behind bars. Their prison time is only one year less than the minimum for the moron teen murderers I mentioned last week.

Charge of multiple husbands | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This is refreshing, it is. You hear all the time about some guy who has wives in three different cities. Tammie Rider, to use one of several last names, had six husbands in four states. Way to go, sister!

Of, course, it usually seems that the male bigamists get support from their wives -- at least, that's what I usually hear. Not this time:

Thomas Rider Jr. said he reported his wife to Clayton County sheriff's deputies after he learned she had other husbands.

''I think she should get the book thrown at her,'' he told WAGA-TV. ''Because I've been used. The other husbands have been used, lied to. She gets away with this, who know what she'll get away with it.''

I like that she got five counts of bigamy. After all, one of the marriages has to be legit.

March 13, 2002 - The Daily Prospectus: There He Goes Again

Bud Selig is also a tremendous asshole.

On a related topic, I saw George Will on TV yesterday, and of course he wanted to change baseball's financial structure. And of course, he wants to do that by capping salaries. So much for the free market. I've noticed that when it comes to sports, conservatives have no problems with regulation. I'm sure that has nothing to do with how in sports the players -- the workers -- have the upper hand.

"Googlebombs away!"

"Kill Marc Herold Afghan casualties meme by Googlebombing it. For the uninitiated, “Googlebombing” takes advantage of the fact that Google gives a high ranking to regularly updated sites; this means that if a lot of bloggers link to, say, Iain Murray’s take-down of the Herold Afghan casualties study, using relevant search terms like Afghanistan civilian casualties and Herold collateral damage and Marc Herold Afghanistan study, we can move Iain’s article to the top of Google’s search results."

Urine Nation

I admit it -- I like the "Survivor". Tonight, a female castaway will urinate on a male teammate's hand. Fun for the whole family!

U.N. Council Backs Plan for Palestinian State

Syria (good thing they're on the Security Council, huh?) abstained. The more important part of this is that this resolution was drafted by the US, and the first time we've backed a Palestinian state, at least openly. The administration hopes that this will help General Zinni's mission. I'm not counting on that.

Grasshoppa: [Never to forgive, never to forget]

Should have linked to Grasshoppa a long time ago.

'Brink' is ratings dunk for ESPN

ESPN's movie of A Season on the Brink aired in two versions. A version with all the cuss words (and there were many) intact aired on ESPN and did very well. A bleeped version aired on ESPN2 and didn't.

And this should surprise us?

Anyway, we're probably about two-three years away from the F-word on prime time network TV, I guess. And Steven Bochco will be there, rest assured.

Denver Post.com - Team fights mascot's stereotype with humor

Speaking as a white person, I'm not upset that a team (a college intramural squad) is calling itself the "Fighting Whities". I don't think that you're going to get the high school in question -- much less the Redskins or the Braves -- to change their mascots that way. If anything, it's kind of cute.

Anyway, as a Celtic-American, I already get to put up with the "Celtics" and "Fighting Irish", now, don't I?

Off the Kuff

Charles Kuffner breaks down and savages the arguments made by "We the People", the anti-tax group a Samizdata poster was raving about last week. He goes into a lot more detail than I, and does it a lot better than my somewhat snide remarks.

Also, I got a perfectly reasonable note from Perry at Samizdata, saying that Dale Amon is in fact an expatriate American. (I said I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, that an American should know his consistution better than that.)

The Miami Herald | 03/12/2002 | Airbus to fix tail on jetliner

This is the same type of plane as the one that crashed in Queens last year; an ultrasound inspection showed damage that had remained hidden for almost five years.

I have to wonder how many planes that's true of. I hate flying.

Tom DeLay Is An Enormous Asshole

(Via Ted Barlow.)

Poor Tom. He couldn't go to Vietnam because so many poor minority youths had volunteered for high-paying jobs fighting the Viet Cong in the jungle.

This is an old story (early 1999, it appears) but I've never seen it before. It's still amazing.

I could write a "Tom DeLay is an asshole" (or "Trent Lott", "Dick Armey", etc.) every day and twice on Sundays. I choose not to; there's not really any point. Anyone with an ounce of intellectual credibility knows that DeLay is an asshole. And it's just too easy. Fish, barrel, smoking gun.

New terror alerts to be more specific

Wow, first a Cardassian general in Afghanistan, now Tom "Choctaw" Ridge is using a version of the Star Trek alert system. We're on "yellow", which as everyone knows, means "There may be a problem, but we don't know what it is yet."

Afghans don't get it

"Afghan leaders were considering a plan that could allow enemy survivors to leave the area unharmed."

Christ. What is the problem with these people? That whole point of this operation is to wipe out al-Qaeda. If we let them go, we'll just have to round them up again. It's "Operation Anaconda", remember? As in, "squeeze the life out of them, then swallow".

The offer was made by Gul Haider, commander of an Afghan force sent here last week by interim leader Hamid Karzai, according to the deputy police chief of Surmand, Ghulam Mohammed Farooq.

Farooq said Haider told local leaders that if they wanted to extend a peace offer, he could guarantee a 10-day halt in the fighting if the al Qaeda and Taliban commander "is ready to join us or leave the area."

Local Afghan leaders were considering whether to extend the offer. Farooq said Haider guaranteed that the Americans would accept the peace offering if the Afghans decided to extend it.

"Gul Haider"? Sounds like a Cardassian.

Anyway, you can guarantee that all you want, but we're not going to take you up on the offer. Sorry if it offends your sensibilities. We really do try not to do that, when it can possibly be avoided. But when the job can't be done any other way, or if the loss of life will be unacceptable any other way, we're going to ignore you.

I expect that Haider is going to get a very stern talking-to by President Karzai. And nobody's going to be allowed to go, though if they're willing to surrender we'll be happy to take them.

Bodies found at Ga. crematory | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Marsh is charged in Tennessee

I don't even want to know what "abuse of a corpse" means.

Oprah plans to leave talk show

Two down!

Well, not until 2006, but still, we're getting there.

TeeVee Station Break - The Terror of Afghan Rugs

James Collier always makes me laugh.

This takeoff of the drug-war ads that ran during the Super Bowl is a pretty good one -- and when you think about it, probably makes a better argument than the real ads.

Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing: March 10, 2002 - March 16, 2002 Archives
God Saves One Man, Leaves Others to Die

Like a lot of us, the Sarge isn't comfortable with people who see the hand of God everywhere:

Also, I'm disturbed that Stanley seems to think that the Lord is just there for his life and nobody else's. A greater miracle would've been if the Lord's hand had pushed that plane away from the building averting profound death and catastrophe... Me, me, me. "He knew I had to get to safety before he let go of the building." Well, as long as God's looking out for you. Neither you nor He seemed to have given a damn about everyone else.

In God's defense, at least He's moved on from making sure some guy hits a field goal.

Entertainment Weekly's EW.com | A sneak peek at Fox's ''Ice Age''

This is an abridged version of the story I read in the print edition this weekend, and it lacks the bit that pissed me off, but whatever... This movie was promoted relentlessly during the Winter Olympics. (Are they over yet?) One of the filmmakers was excited about the commercials but was also apprehensive. Why? He was afraid someone would "blow up Michelle Kwan", which would hurt the publicity for his little cartoon movie.

Afghans Prepare For Final Assault (washingtonpost.com)

Our Afghan allies are actually going to go into the caves to finish off the holdouts. I assume that there will be at the least some American special forces involved as well. This is going to be bloody. They're fighting people willing to die rather than surrender, in enclosed spaces, where obviously there won't be direct air support. I assume we'll use tear gas and the like to clear caves, but there will still be booby traps, plus we probably won't get everybody. This is a very necessary operation -- the "end of the al-Qaeda people" in one Afghan's phrase -- but make no mistake that it's risky. We'll win, but we're going to have to prepare for casualties.

Update: The story is now that they haven't gone into the caves yet. I expect that they will have to eventually.

NIck Denton puts me in my place

The web and weblogs were supposed to reflect the kaleidoscope of opinion. But Blogger has made weblogging so easy that even conservatives can do it. And now the political weblogs - at least the ones to which we all link - have become monotously hawkish. Not Jerry Falwell conservative, of course. But yelling talk-radio poor-are-lazy Clinton-is-evil fuck-the-Saudis fuck-the-Europeans fuck-everybody conservatives. (Okay, not you, Matt.) They make me feel like a bleeding-heart liberal, which is quite an achievement. Where are the liberal weblogs? Okay, let me rephrase that: where are the well-written liberal weblogs?

Goodbye after 3,500 columns

TV critic retires because he (a) got a buyout offer, and (b) hates television.

Sally Jessy Raphael Show Cancelled

Thank god. One down, two dozen to go. Please, let Springer be next.

Mugabe Defies Court Order, U.S. Diplomats Detained (washingtonpost.com)

Like I said, he's stealing the election. But detaining our diplomats is a really bad idea, today of all days.

Andersen in Merger Talks With Deloitte (washingtonpost.com)

This is probably the best that Andersen's partners could have hoped for. The company was doomed the minute its complicity in Enron's Ponzi scheme was revealed. At least this way, some of the company's assets will survive even though it will die.

A home school primer

Are you thinking of home schooling your kids? Then take this easy test to find out if it's best!

1) Do you hate people who are different than you?

2) Do you have more than one of the "Left Behind" books?

3) Do you think evolution is an invention of a secular-humanist conspiracy?

4) Have you ever voted for Pat Buchanan?

5) Do you think Tim McVeigh was a hero?

If you answered "Yes" to at least three of these questions, congratulations! You are a prime candidate to home-school your children!

A Sept. 11 Casualty: 'Radio Man' Jailed for A Month, Then Freed (washingtonpost.com)

Hey, I'm sorry that this guy went to jail. I'm sorry he was (basically) framed. And I'm sorry he got verbally abused. But calling him a "casualty" of Sept. 11 is ridiculous. 3000 people died, Mr. Headline Writer.

I probably should have gotten my "NCAA Tournament" links method up today to match the real thing (Alabama's a #2!) but I'm lazy. I did move some things that are out of service/not being updated to the NIT.

Pair get 20 years in cocaine case

The moron murderers below got 10 to life. Meanwhile, a couple of drug dealers got 20 years with no chance of parole. The moron murderers -- because they're white kids from "good families" -- almost certainly won't serve much beyond the minimum. Because drug dealing is worse than murder.

3 teens guilty of murder

These little morons beat a grocer to death last year. They were all broken up about it, too:

"Does this mean we still have to go to jail?" Zachary Cain asked his lawyer. "I'm not going to jail, they're going to have to shoot me; I'm not going to jail."

Fine, shoot him.

Al-Amin's life now on the line
Jury must decide his sentence for murder

The former H. Rap Brown has been found guilty of murdering an Atlanta-area Deputy Sheriff. His case will enter the death penalty phase now... I don't like the way the death penalty is administered -- I think that there's a clear pattern of racial bias -- but in this case the jury was three-quarters black.

Latino Groups Seek a Top Democratic House Post

I hate racial politics... The headline's a little misleading; it makes it sound like Latino groups just want some Latino, they don't care who, to have some top post in the House, they don't care what. As it is, what they're trying for is for New Jersey's Robert Menendez (unfortunate name, that) to win the job as caucus chairman.

I doubt that most ordinary Latino Democrats care a lot. Who knows who the caucus chairman is, or does?

Powell: Zinni Will Stay in Region to Get Results

The implication is that the poor general is going to have to stay in the middle east until the Israelis and Palestinians stop killing each other. Yikes.

For N.C.A.A. Jury, a Top-Secret Vote

Had dinner with my family last night, and my father asked why the NCAA isn't a state actor, since it's mostly made up of state institutions. And my sister (the communist trial lawyer) and I said simultaneously, "Because the Supreme Court says so."