Trick!

Happy Halloween from our cat Delilah.

Syria Scrubs Attack Site

Pictures can say a thousand words, and the New York Times has a couple of interesting ones from high over Syria.

New commercial satellite photos show that a Syrian site believed to have been attacked by Israel last month no longer bears any obvious traces of what some analysts said appeared to have been a partly built nuclear reactor.

Two photos, taken Wednesday from space by rival companies, show the site near the Euphrates River to have been wiped clean since August, when imagery showed a tall square building there measuring about 150 feet on a side.

I loved this line from deep in the article:

Later in the interview, he said, “ We understand that if Syria even contemplated nuclear technology, then the gates of hell would open on us.”

Did they understand that before or after Israel's attack? I'm guessing it was after a window of hell opened on their nuclear site.

Bobby Caina Calvin, Media Idiot of the Week

Bobby Caina Calvin of Knight-Ridder/McClatchy is a short-sighted, self-absorbed moron.

Calvin's post at his blog is spreading around the web like wild fire, but if you haven't seen or heard it yet, here's the quick and short of it. Calvin wrote on his blog (reproduced here) about difficulties he had getting into the green zone in Baghdad because two forms or ID were required at the checkpoint and not just the one that he had, identifying him as media with Knight-Ridder. The American soldiers at the check point did not know what Knight-Ridder was. No big surprise there; I'd wager that a majority of Americans do not know what Knight-Ridder is. It was a classic "don't you know who I am?" piece from someone that really had no justification for expecting people to know who he was or who he was with.

Calvin was short-sighted because he wanted to breeze in and out of the green zone as if it were a Parisian cafe. Fortunately for Calvin and other media members of his ilk, the green zone is safe because it is not a place that can be entered and exited breezily. Scrutiny of identification is what has kept out the type of people who would love nothing more than to kill someone like Calvin because he doesn't worship in the exact same religion. Calvin doesn't have to like the scrutiny, but if he appreciates the existence of a 'green zone', then he damn well better accept it.

Calvin was self-absorbed because he had absolutely no justifiable reason to expect a soldier at a check point would know or even care what Knight-Ridder, a company that publishes(ed) no newspapers in its own name, is. And even if they did, they would still be absolutely justified in expecting a second form of ID as stolen or faked identification is hardly a rare thing in this world. In his post, Calvin essentially throws a hissy fit about the failure to be recognized by a young man who is basically on the front line in his position as a check point guard to an area that enemies would love to breach. Given that, Calvin's post epitomized selfishness.

Typically, I'd have skipped this story because opinion on it is already a dime a dozen. But Calvin's selfish irresponsibility should be recorded, and now that his original post seems to have disappeared, I'm more than happy to join in with the others who makes sure it stays recorded.

Clearing away Jena 6 myths

As the national media reported on the Jena 6 story, some things just did not seem to add up and the string of the story didn't always seem to connect quite right. In the Christian Science Monitor, a local Jena reporter says that was because the national media did a horrible job covering the story. In his CSM piece, he also addresses some of the 'myths' of the Jena 6 story. It is worth the read.

Quick Hitters

I've read a number of things today that I've found noteworthy. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to write about them and I'm probably not going to be able to in the next couple of days. Just the same, I'd like to share these quick hitters with everyone.

*Fred Thompson has laid out his immigration plan, and it looks pretty good to me. It might help him in the primaries, but it might hurt him in a general election. We'll see.
*Remember the Israeli bombing of the supposed Syrian nuclear site? Last week a Syrian official confirmed it was a nuclear site, and again very quietly. It is as if nobody wants to touch this story. Except Stanley Kurtz at NRO, but even Kurtz leaves many questions unanswered.
*The momentum continues to grow against ethanol.
*I've done a few searches on Flickr in the last couple of days on the fires in Southern California. By and large, it looks like people are being smart and staying the hell away from the flames. Still, a few cool pics like this one have popped up.
*Ya know, anti-war protests keep happening, but does anyone really notice?

China Continues Offensive Military Space Program

Next time you see someone criticizing the U.S. for militarizing space, remember that we didn't start this fire:

A Chinese submarine will send test signals that could change the course of a satellite when China launches its first moon orbiter, as part of the country's effort to develop space war technology, a human rights watchdog said Tuesday.

The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said two survey ships are deployed in the South Pacific Ocean and South Atlantic Ocean to send signals to maneuver the lunar exploration satellite, expected to be launched Wednesday. At the same time, a nuclear-powered submarine will send simulated signals to the satellite as a test, it said in a statement.

Once the satellite-maneuvering technology matures, the group said, China would have the know-how to destroy other satellites in space in wartime. China could launch cheaply-made weapon-carrying objects into space and change their courses to destroy or damage satellites of other countries by sending signals from submarines, the center said.

China shocked the world in January by firing a missile at an old weather satellite without notifying anyone in advance, showing off its anti-satellite weaponry and its ability to shoot down satellites without being immediately noticed.

Some might point out that we got the ball rolling with 'Star Wars'. The 'Star Wars' missile defense idea, while partially located in orbit, is/was a defense system of earthly concern. The Chinese are aggressively pursuing offensive, space focused weapons, and unless we get on the ball soon, they are going to have us, and our communications, completely defenseless.

The Time We Invest in Controversies of Fiction

I couldn't care less if J.K. Rowling has thoughts of a gay Dumbledore dancing in her head. Really, why should we care, besides the fact that some parents of kids that read the news are going to have to explain that gay doesn't really mean happy anymore. You can't really shelter your kids about that for very long anymore, anyway (unlike, say, the early 1980's when it worked on me...partially.) Personally, I think Rowling is just tweaking people now that she's finished the series, and she is probably sitting back with a drink, laughing at the froth she's created.

Your friend, the hurricane

So we are taught that hurricanes and tropical storms are bad, and more of them is worse. With that, I give you Atlanta.

For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. Sandy beaches have expanded into flats of orange mud. Tree stumps not seen in half a century have resurfaced. Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life has, for the most part, gone on just as before.

Everything has its place in nature. Hurricanes in particular send us into hysterics but they are incredible, if inefficient, contributors to the aquifers they cross.

I am at times amused by our current opinions of conservation. On the one hand, we are hell bent on freezing our ever changing nature as it was at a time in the past we deem as 'perfect'. On the other hand, we view some parts of nature as menaces, but even menaces like hurricanes can be beneficial to us. I'm sure that parts of the east coast would trade a good tropical storm right now for the water conservation they've been forced into by drought. I'm also sure that if we could find a way to eliminate or re-direct those storms, we'd do it.

Rest in Peace, Max McGee

I know that I'm late to this one, and there isn't much to be said that hasn't been said already. I would like to say a few things, just the same. I grew up with McGee. We went on a lot of Sunday rides with my grandmother when I was a kid, and one concession my Raider fan father always made was to flip the radio to the Packer games in the fall. McGee and partner Jim Irwin provided the descriptions that allowed the game to play in my head. McGee played the part of the colorful, knowledgeable fan, and I stress colorful. It isn't every day that you'll hear an announcer today refer to a wrap around draw, common in the early Holmgren days, as an "enema draw". Once in a great while this would get him in trouble, but by and large McGee's commentary was much appreciated by Packer fans who suffered through horrible teams during much of his radio career. His ten Wisconsin "Sportscaster of the Year" awards were much deserved. Rest well, Max.

"Way of the Warrior"

This sounds like it will be interesting:

As a United States soldier in the second decade of the 20th century, Edward DeNomie chased Pancho Villa and fought in all seven major battles of World War I. He took shrapnel in his ear and lost a lung in a German gas attack. He saw some of his best friends die, all while serving a country of which he was not a citizen.

That is because he — like 12,000 other soldiers who volunteered for military service during World War I — was Native American.

Patty Loew, a veteran television journalist and an associate professor of life sciences communication, has long wondered what motivated men such as DeNomie, who also happens to be her grandfather, to fight for a country that considered them outsiders. Now, she has produced “Way of the Warrior,” a one-hour documentary that will air nationally on the PBS network in November, to explore these questions.

In chronicling the war stories of Native American soldiers from World War I to Vietnam, “Way of the Warrior” offers an interesting counterpart to Ken Burns’ seven-part series, “The War,” which was criticized by some for neglecting the contributions of minority soldiers in World War II. Like Burns, Loew uses historical footage, primary documents and interviews with veterans and their families to relate deeply personal tales of bravery, heroism and loss. But she also probes social stereotypes and aspects of tribal cultures that have made the experiences of Native American soldiers unique.

Because Native Americans were not guaranteed U.S. citizenship until 1924, most Native American soldiers in World War I wore the uniform of a country that did not permit them to vote. Some chose to serve in guard units for a steady income, Loew says, but many others were motivated by tribal values of obligation, service and protection.

About 8 years ago, I met Loew and and I had the opportunity to have a long discussion with her. I was very impressed with her intelligence and her depth of knowledge. I'm sure that this will be a very interesting documentary.

B.S. Alarms Hit Rare Eddie Haskell Levels in Eau Claire

This amused me. The Eau Claire Leader-Telegram brings us the story of the Girls Gone Wild bus that visited the Water Street bar The Pickle last Friday. In it, they talk with a UW Eau Claire freshman who had this to say:

"I'm against the objectification of women," he said. His friends declined to comment.

What a fine lad, right? Well, now let's work in the context.

UW-Eau Claire freshman Dan Bock and two of his friends took cell-phone pictures of each other in front of the coach bus Friday afternoon. Bock said he has never seen a "Girls Gone Wild" video.

I'm guessing his friends declined to comment because they were laughing too hard. But hey, if smarmy works for Bock, more power to him.

AFP Taxpayer Rally in Madison

Taxpayer Rally 128
Originally uploaded by Jibby7

I had the opportunity to hit the Americans for Prosperity's "Defend Wisconsin Taxpayers Rally" in Madison today. It was interesting, to say the least. To see some of my photos, go here.

I decided right off the bat that since I was already on board with what the AFP was saying, I wanted to hang with the counter protesters. They were going to be much more...amusing. I also figured that they'd make better photography subjects. I was right on both accounts.

The first thing that struck me was that a portion of the counter protesters seemed to be under informed. Before the rally, AFP blasted a campaign promise made by Jim Doyle over their speakers. In it, Doyle promises, amongst other things, to not raise taxes and to be open to solutions to Wisconsin's budget problems. After it had come over the speakers a couple of times, I heard one counter protester turn to another and say, "That's funny. Look at all these no new taxes signs. They don't seem very open to solutions." She had no idea that the voice coming over the speakers was not someone with AFP, but Jim Doyle.

The second thing that struck me was that the many of the counter protesters were completely divorced from reason and completely married to emotion. Emotion is a fine thing, but by itself it is merely dangerous. When the rally began, I was standing between two male counter protesters. I did not hear one intelligent thing come out of the mouth of either all day. One was very skilled at spewing vitriol. He in fact, after pulling out all the expletives he knew, started several of the "Do your job" chants that were yelled out today. The only problem? They were yelling "do your job" at people who weren't lawmakers but private citizens. The other gentlemen joined in all of the chants at the top of his very voluminous lungs. But he did one other thing that I found pointless. As if he thought he could drown out the speakers all by himself, he'd blare "Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah!" over and over and over and over again. Counter protesters such as these seemed to have no interest in winning over converts to their beliefs, but rather seemed more interest in just making sure their opponents couldn't be heard themselves.

And speaking of emotion. The prime emotion that seemed to be the currency of the counter protest was rage. And at least in the area where I was standing, bloggers seemed to particularly evoke rage. Bloggers Fred Dooley and Owen Robinson both spoke at the event, and some of the most vile things I heard all day were directed at them. It was at that point that I actually began to get nervous about the froth the counter protesters were working themselves into. I started to work my way to the opposite side of the counter protest to see if the rage was all consuming on that side. Thankfully, it wasn't, but quite another thing dawned on me as Madison and Milwaukee talk show host Vicki McKenna finished up her speech, and that was that the end of this event was going to be potentially dangerous. You see, the rally was held on one of the malls that led up to the capitol building. It was blocked off on both sides leading up to the capital in order to keep the protesters/rally members and the counter protesters separated. Unfortunately, that meant that there was only one way out for the rally participants. As Mckenna finished up her speech, I worked my way back to that choke point. When I first got there, the counter protesters had left the exit unmolested. As more rally participants began to leave, that changed. I began to be pushed forward by people coming up from behind me to crowd the exit. I went with the flow and followed around to get a better look, but while I was crowded out, I heard a guy shouting at someone who in hindsight I think was Karen Carpenter. I ended up in a crowd of counter protesters that created two very narrow and curvy lanes for rally participants to leave. While they harassed the participants aggressively at first, they calmed down a little bit when it became apparent that police were not going to tolerate a free for all. It was still a potentially ugly situation that I hope can be better planned for the next time around.

Jiblog on The Google

Search terms are fun, especially when they are goofy terms and your site ranks high in the search. Take for instance the search that brought some poor, unsuspecting soul here last night. She (I'm assuming it was a she) did a Google search for "All Men Are Pigs." Interestingly enough, Jiblog is the number 2 result for that search right now. So what sage wisdom about men did she receive from me? Only this post wherein I encourage guys to ogle Milka Duno.

Sorry, but I did say we're all pigs.

Bonfire Displays Pope John Paul II?

Some people think so. Here's the picture:


Normally I'm not one to pick on religion, but give me a break. Two things. First, this is like looking at a cloud-you can see whatever you want to see. I looked at this pic and two famous movie characters came to mind before Pope John Paul II did:


Now keep in mind, I'm much more religious than I am a fan of Star Wars (of which I'm not very much at all).

Second, this is a photograph, and not one at a very high shutter speed. That means the light had a little bit of time to "play" while the shutter was open. A faster shutter speed, and the fire/light never forms this image.

I'm not a Wisconsin blog...

...according to BlogNetNews. But then again, neither is the Badger Blog Alliance.

Two Things You Might Not Have Known, Baseball Edition

I enjoy the occasional random factoid, so it is my pleasure to pass along a couple that I learned today. Did you know...

1. Robin Yount won as many MVPs in his career as Ted Williams and Willie Mays did?

2. Over the course of their franchise histories, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cleveland Indians have won the same number of MVPs with 3. The Indians were a charter member of the American League. The Brewers are less than 40 years old. If Prince Fielder were to win the NL MVP this year, something that seems unlikely at this point, then the Brewers will move into an MVP award tie with another charter member of the American League, the Chicago White Sox.

The Iranian "Threat" to Putin

Over the weekend a Russian news service reported that Russian officials were aware of a specific assassination threat against Vladamir Putin during his upcoming visit to Iran. It is entirely possible that there is a threat to Putin's safety in Iran, but something struck me as unusual about this story, and I just can't quite put my finger on it. I then began to wonder if Putin wasn't doing a little PR to continue to bolster his brave, manly image in Russia as he refused to cancel his trip, which then got me wondering if the "threat" was completely made up by the Russian government to begin with. It's thin, I know, but not something I'd put past this current rendition of the Russian government.

The Heineken Bottle Brick

It's too bad this never caught on.

Mr. Heineken’s idea came after a visit to the Caribbean where he saw two problems: beaches littered with bottles and a lack of affordable building materials. The WOBO became his vision to solve both the recycling and housing challenges that he had witnessed on the islands.

The final WOBO design came in two sizes - 350 and 500 mm versions that were meant to lay horizontally, interlock and layout in the same manner as ‘brick and mortar’ construction. One production run in 1963 yielded 100,000 bottles some of which were used to build a small shed on Mr. Heineken’s estate in Noordwijk, Netherlands. One of the construction challenges “was to find a way in which corners and openings could be made without cutting bottles,” said Mr. Habraken.

I knew guys in college that made virtually all of the furniture in their apartments out of cases of returnable Leinie's bottles. They'd have switched brands for bottle bricks and then they'd have built an addition onto their apartment.

U.S. to Owe $100 Billion Gambling Debt?

Maybe.

A Brussels think-tank has accused the US government of reneging on commitments made to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over internet gaming.

Panellists at a trade forum levelled harsh criticism at the US, focusing on a burgeoning trade clash between the US and Europe over internet gaming.

The forum believes that the US could be liable for up to US$100 billion in trade concessions to European industries after placing illegal discriminatory trade restrictions on European gaming operators.

The disputed concessions arise from Antigua's victory earlier this year when the WTO ruled that the US violated its treaty obligations by excluding online Antiguan gaming operators, while allowing domestic operators to offer various forms of online gaming.

Instead of complying with the ruling, the Bush administration withdrew the sizeable gambling industry from its free trade commitments.

As a result, all 151 WTO members are considering seeking compensation for the withdrawal equal to the size of the entire US land-based and online gaming market, estimated at nearly US$100 billion.

The European Union, along with India and five other countries, has filed notice that it intends to seek compensation.

What are they going to do if we don't pay, break our Florida? Cut off our Maine with a cigar cutter?

And now, the rest of the story

Heh. When you read the stories today about former Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez criticizing the war effort, make sure you wash it down with this post at Power Line. In it, they reprint the portion of the speech that the media is largely ignoring-the part where he launches heavy criticism of them.

Mondale, The Deathly Endorsement of Presidential Aspirations

I'll admit, I was getting nervous about Hillary Clinton's chances in 2008 until I saw this:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale, the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, is planning to endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), The Hill has learned.

Mondale’s endorsement could prove especially valuable in Iowa, which borders his home state of Minnesota. Mondale won Iowa overwhelmingly in the ’84 primary.

The endorsement is fitting given Mondale’s decision more than two decades ago to select Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, the first time a woman was tapped to serve on a major party’s presidential ticket. If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, she would also make history.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to several requests for comment.

Heh. I'd avoid comment, too, if I were the Clinton campaign. Associating your campaign with Walter Mondale is hardly helpful unless you really think you need Minnesota in the general election.

What Happened to Friday Night Blogging?

My RSS feed reader dried up several hours ago, and normally I can't keep up with the thing. Doesn't anyone stay at home and blog all night on a Friday night anymore? Am I the only uncool blogger left? (I kid, I kid)

Yet Another Profitable Idea From Me to the Recording Industry

I've offered up profitable ideas to the record industry at least one time here at Jiblog. I'd link to it/them, but frankly, I don't care about the record industry enough to do the search. Anyway, here's my thought. Digital music is certainly a growth sector. People love buying music online. But there is an old school segment of the market that still isn't all that big on the internet. So for them, and for some who are internet savvy but love shopping at bricks and mortar stores, set up kiosks in record stores and big boxes. Partner with flash drive manufacturers, and at these kiosks sell flash drives filled with music that the user can sample and select from on the computer screen. Offer several different flash drive sizes at different prices, and for each size let the consumers fill it up with music. Is it a great deal? Probably not as great a deal as buying music online, but it would fill a niche. I know that if I were shopping and I wanted to get a 'no reason' gift for the lovely Mrs. Jib, I'd bite on the chance to buy her a 'mix tape' for the 21st century.

Get Well, Teddy K.

Tonight I came up with what I think is a pretty funny quip about Ted Kennedy but I'm going to wait until he is healthy again to use it. There is nothing I loathe more than when people put their politics above the personal and kick people when they are truly down. So all I have to say tonight is get well soon, Teddy K. We've got more battles to fight with you, but we can't do it until you're feeling better.

On Tonight's Posts

If I haven't managed to get under the skin of 6 of my 7 regular readers tonight, then I just ain't trying hard enough.

Is Tolerance Tomorrow's Politically Incorrect Word?

Let me illustrate. Using American Heritage definitions, here is how the word is popularly used today:

1. The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

Seems cool, right? But what about those other meanings?

1. 1. Leeway for variation from a standard.
   2. The permissible deviation from a specified value of a structural dimension, often expressed as a percent.
   3. Physiological resistance to a poison.
   4. The capacity to absorb a drug continuously or in large doses without adverse effect; diminution in the response to a drug after prolonged use.
   5. Acceptance of a tissue graft or transplant without immunological rejection.
   6. Unresponsiveness to an antigen that normally produces an immunological reaction.

Variation from the "Standard." Not as cool when it comes to the modern meaning because it would imply your belief is standard and someone else's isn't. So let's look at one more meaning:

3. The capacity to endure hardship or pain.

Definitely not cool in relation to our more common modern meaning. If you publicly said that you endured people different from you, you'd be crucified. I'll bet that when our kids or grandkids are our age, they will frown and furrow their brows if they hear us old coots use the word "tolerance." They might even scold us, even though today the word is more than acceptable. Think of that the next time one of your parents or grandparents say a word that falls harshly on your ears.

Atheists to Celebrate "Nonprayer Breakfasts"

This made me chuckle:

Hundreds of atheists are gathering in Madison this weekend.

The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation is hosting its 30th annual convention. Its members will gather for a weekend of nonprayer breakfasts and raffles for God-free currency.

Ooooh, that'll show all of us dumb religionists. Those crazy folks at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, I'll tell ya. I see they didn't push things by having nonprayer bedtimes, though. Imagine the hell that would have raised. Actually, can atheists raise hell if hell doesn't exist?

Vicious Attack on Inflatable Halloween Decorations

I had to double check this story to make sure the culprit wasn't the lovely Mrs. Jib. She hates inflatable decorations.

A woman says a neighbor attacked her inflatable Halloween lawn display of three ghosts and a giant pumpkin, then apparently smashed his head through her window in a fit of rage.

State Police said officers found a drunken John Odee, 43, inside Dawn Garcia's house in the Hudson Valley town of Lloyd on Thursday night, arrested him after a brief struggle and charged him with burglary.

Only three things keep my wife from doing the same thing: A respect for personal property, a sense of decorum, and an unwillingness to smash her head through a window.

Pelosi Erodes America's Moral Authority

I have a simple question. With Turkey already straining at the bit to invade Iraq, and with Nancy Pelosi simultaneously pushing a resolution condemning a Turkish genocide on Armenians from nearly 100 years ago, are the Democrats trying to ruin our relations with our allies? Are they trying to provoke instability in the Middle East? Are they risking our remaining 'moral authority' around the world by going off half-cocked on this resolution that they know is provocative? Why we've allowed chickenhawks like Pelosi rise to positions of influence, I'll never know. The likes of Nancy Pelosi will just make peaceful people like the Turks hate us.

(See Jib's cheek. See Jib's tongue planted firmly in said cheek to make a point.)

A Rare Ann Coulter Non-Controversy Controversy

So, Ann Coulter said on the Donny Deutsch (really, somebody watches it?) show that everyone should be a Christian. Normally I wouldn't touch this story, but would there be any controversy whatsoever if:

-A prominent atheist, say, Christopher Hitchens, said that everyone shouldn't believe in God?
-A prominent Muslim, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that everyone should believe in Allah for salvation?
-A prominent Jew said that the true route to God is through the Torah?

C'mon, now. This smacks more of anti-Christian or anti-Coulter backlash than anything else. I'll let this blogger make a couple of the major points being overlooked:

In reality, Coulter shows a pretty liberal Christian perspective. Deutsch says to her “So I should not be a Jew, I should be a Christian, and this would be a better place?” Her answer: “Well, you could be a practicing Jew, but you’re not.” Catch that? Her view is that a better America would be a more religious America.

She also says, “We believe your religion, but you have to obey.” Judaism isn’t wrong according to her version of Christianity (as I said, she is pretty liberal). She doesn’t say Judaism is wrong. She says Christianity is “a lot easier. It’s kind of a fast track.” Guess what? Christianity is a lot easier than observing 613 Commandments. And she believes it works.

Is this a surprise? In the words of Iago, the obviously, stereotypically Jewish-sounding parrot in Disney’s Alladin—the Jewish character is the one with the mile-long shnozolla, and no one gets upset at that—“I think I’m just going to die from that surprise!” [Yeah, he’s Jewish all right.]

For this, Deutsch attempts to compare her with Iran, and wiping Israel off the map. She then clarifies that this isn’t what she said at all, but that, as Christians, “we just want Jews to be perfected.”

It’s completely acceptable to think your politics are right and everyone else’s is wrong, but to think your religion has it right is evil and backwards—even if she acknowledges that practicing Judaism would contribute just as well to making America a better place. Again, the true target here isn’t Coulter, but religion, and the true intolerance here is coming not from Coulter, but from Deutsch.

I'll say this much-on this issue, he is right: Coulter is liberal. I personally did not grow up in a church that believed that there are other routes to salvation than through Jesus Christ. Coulter seemed to leave that possibility open. But even if she didn't, saying that others should believe what you believe does not mean that you cannot display tolerance towards others who are not like you, and to pretend that Coulter's comments mean that she thinks Jews (or anyone else) should be wiped out is disingenuous at best.

What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas...

...on a hard drive:

The Las Vegas Strip has one of the tightest security surveillance systems in the world. Soon, there will be more eyes watching us on the Strip. That's not sitting well with some people.

The Regional Transportation Commission, which operates the CAT bus system, approved a $554,000 contract with Motorola to install cameras along Las Vegas Boulevard.

I guess just because 'it' stays in Vegas doesn't mean that there isn't a record of it. Which reminds me, I should repeat my corollary to the Vegas Doctrine: What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas...unless 'it' is a baby, an STD, or a huge gambling debt; then 'it' finds a way of following you home.

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for electrons?

This kills me:

Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.

Ha! Massachusetts! That's too funny. Why not California? Silicon Valley is near San Francisco, and one would think they'd want their robots to be happy, right?

This prediction has one thing going against it-do you have to marry something that you can shut off? It also has one thing going for it-the robot can be shut off.

C'mon, At Least Give Us a Nobel Red Carpet

I, for one, wish that the Nobel Prizes were awarded in a ceremony like the Academy Awards. I'd have enjoyed the Al Gore "I'm the King of the World" speech. And who wouldn't have wanted to see Jimmy Carter in a Vera Wang?

The Long Reagan Shadow

I haven't fleshed out my thoughts fully on this, so consider this a precursor to a future, longer post. I am convinced that one of the biggest things the Republican party has to overcome right now is the long shadow, legend, and myth of Ronald Reagan. Long shadow because Reagan truly was a historic leader. Legend because he was proven right on much of his doctrine during his post presidency. Myth because, in retrospect, many of us have chosen to forget that he wasn't perfectly conservative. As a result, all Republicans today are judged against a yard stick that they cannot realistically live up to, and when they don't, it sends we present day conservatives into fits of rage and despondency.

Update
I should have read this first. Jonah Goldberg fleshes out some of my thoughts on this for me.

Republican Presidential Politics and the National League Central

I have just a quick observation on the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. It reminds me a great deal of the National League Central-a bunch of flawed candidates, none of whom seem to really want to win the crown at times. The only question that remains for me is whether this field is the 2006 National League Central that gave us the World Champion, 83 win St. Louis Cardinals, or the 2007 National League Central that gave us the easily vanquished Chicago Cubs.

America, Home of Creative Destruction

I love this post at The Corner from Michael Ledeen:

As I am often vilified for claiming that America is the homeland of "creative destruction," these two quotations (lifted from some comments on The Long War Journal make me palpitate:

"The reason Americans do so well in war, is war is chaos, and Americans practice chaos on a daily basis." Rommel 1942

"The difficulty in planning against American doctrine is that Americans neither see fit to follow their doctrine nor even read their manuals." KGB Document

To which one should add Churchill's observation that Americans always do the right thing after having exhausted all the other possibilities.

And it follows, I think, that the impulse to screw up is ever present, and so while things may look pretty good today, tomorrow is always another day. We still have no Iran policy, do we?

The quotes are all excellent descriptors of America that don't often appear in our self perception, but which contribute to our strength more so than our weakness.

Retail's Weather Excuses

This always amuses me, and I'll explain why in a moment.

Sales at department store retailers like Kohl's Corp., Bon-Ton Stores Inc. and Macy's Inc. did not fare as well as the discount chains in September, with weather being the main culprit for softer sales.

Same-store sales at Menomonee Falls-based Kohl's Corp. (NYSE: KSS) dropped 3.2 percent for the five-week period ended Oct. 6, while total sales rose 5.9 percent to $1.3 billion from $1.25 billion a year ago. Same-store sales is a measure of sales at stores open both years.

"September sales were affected by weak demand in weather-sensitive businesses such as long bottoms, fleece and sweaters," said Kohl's chairman and CEO Larry Montgomery.

Fresh out of college, I did a stint in retail management. Stores are held accountable for their performance, and if performance isn't up to expectations, some explaining needs to be done. Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that we were absolutely, positively forbidden from using weather as part of our reasoning because the individual stores were expected to rise above weather influences to meet expectations. I suspect run of the mill managers in other chains are forbidden to use the 'W' word, too. Yet when retail chains go to their stockholders to explain sub par performance, weather seems to work its way into the reasoning 50% of the time.

Eat Poo...And Live!

That's kind of what this guy is saying over at Slate:

But here is the problem: We have become victims of our own success. Ever wonder why your dog can gobble, lick, and gnaw all he wants along the glorious buffet of a city street and (almost) never get sick? Your dog is used to eating shit. Americans, on the other hand, grow up eating almost no shit at all. Our food is hosed and boiled and rinsed and detoxified and frozen and salted and preserved. Recently, we have begun to irradiate it, too—just in case. As a result, when our bodies encounter the occasional inevitable bug, they're unhappy. Our centuries-long program of winnowing out all the muck has turned us into sissies and withered the substantial part of the immune system mediated by our intestinal tract.

So let me get this straight-the next time someone tells me to eat shit, I should thank them?

Just a Far Fetched Thought on MillerCoors & Stadiums

With the merger of Miller Brewing and Coors, an issue arises when it comes to stadium names. National League adversaries the Brewers and Rockies play in Miller Park and Coors Field, respectively. There is no reason that both cannot keep their stadium names as both of those brands will retain their identity. However, if in the off chance that MillerCoors moves its headquarters to Colorado, the Miller Park name just isn't going to cut it in Milwaukee anymore. In that scenario, I say make it Leinenkugel Park and change Coors Field to MillerCoors Field. At least leave us with a stadium name that still has pertinence to our state.

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Al Gore joins Jimmy Carter as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. And I react with a giant yawn. This only further proves that the Nobel Peace Prize is a political popularity contest. After all, one question still remains for me-what has Gore's crusading had to do with peace? As it turns out, Czech President Vaclav Klaus has similar thoughts.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a rare vocal global- warming sceptic among heads of state, is "somewhat surprised" that former US vice president Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize, the president's spokesman Petr Hajek said in a statement.

"The relationship between his activities and world peace is unclear and indistinct," the statement said. "It rather seems that Gore's doubting of basic cornerstones of the current civilization does not contribute to peace."

Apparently, Gaia worship and ecological harmony and balance equal peace. Now if Al Gore can just find a way to do away with all of us brutish humans who get in the way of that dream...

Additional
Sorry Grumps, but I call BS on this. There always has been and always will be resource wars. Any shifts due to climate change don't change that fact.

Some people are cruel to their pets in October

But it is just too funny.

Raid? What Raid? We Don't Know Nuttin' 'Bout No Stinkin' Raid

The quiet nature of an Israeli raid on a supposed nuclear facility in Syria just keeps getting more and more strange.

Israel has been unusually quiet about the attack on Sept. 6 and has effectively imposed a news blackout about it. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli opposition leader, on Sept. 19 became the first public figure in Israel to acknowledge that an attack had even taken place. Some Israeli officials have said, though not publicly, that the raid hit a nuclear-related facility that North Korea was helping to equip, but they have not specified where.

On Monday, journalists toured the agricultural center at the government’s invitation to prove, Mr. Mehdi said, that no nuclear weapons program or Israeli attacks occurred there. “The allegations are completely groundless, and I don’t really understand where all this W.M.D. talk came from,” Mr. Mehdi said, referring to weapons of mass destruction.

“There was no raid here — we heard nothing,“ he added.

Syria is really going out of its way to deny that this ever happened. It leads me to believe two things: 1) The effectiveness of the raid scares the hell out of Syria, and 2) Syria has more to hide.

A passing thought on a Democratic 2009

If the Democrats win the presidency in 2008 and manage to hold congress, I'm going to buy a great big tub of popcorn and enjoy the cannibalistic horror show. The lefty blogosphere has never experienced being in complete control of Washington. They have not experienced the inherent political disappointments a minority party can and frequently does deliver in our system. Once they do, they are going to devour the Democratic establishment like a particularly aggressive flesh eating virus. It should be a great show.

Kudos to a post at HuffPo

Linger over that headline because it isn't often that you'll see it here. John Ridley deserves the kudos, though, because he writes a post on Che Gueverra that should be included with every Che t-shirt and every copy of The Motorcycle Diaries.

In death Guevara has certainly managed to whitewash his image. A cleansing aided by such personality cultisms as the film The Motorcycle Diaries, which portrays Guevara as a young, wide-eyed do-gooder who travels South America looking to right social wrongs. Romanticized and corporate pimped, for most who even know who Guevara was they have no idea what he stood for. They merely accept that he was the South American Martin Luther King.

He was not.

Guevara was a brutal, egotistical killer without the smarts to enact lasting economic reform nor the guile to achieve true insurgent victory. His most significant military achievement -- the taking of Santa Clara during Castro's Cuban revolution -- might have been more a matter of financial bribery than military strategy.

What is in little dispute is the savagery of his tenure as the commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison. Think of it as Cuba's Abu Ghraib. In a mere five months Guevara oversaw and personally signed off on the execution of as many as 500 people. Men, women, children. Not all merely loyalists to overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Also executed were political prisoners, dissidents, artist, intellectuals and homosexuals. A representative number of the left the revolution was supposed to be lifting up.

His bloody handiwork should come as no surprise. Before Guvera was a soap pitchman from beyond the grave, he was the "The Butcher of la Cabaña" who preached: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."

Mr. Ridley makes a gross error of scale in comparing La Cabana to Abu Ghraib, but he is otherwise dead on in his treatment of Che.

Phantom phone vibrations

I keep my cell phone clipped to my belt on my hip, mostly because I'm afraid I'd lose the damn thing if I put it anywhere else. I also keep it on vibrate mode because I hate the sound of ringing cell phones. So I was very surprised to learn that I'm not the only one who feels phantom phone rings.

If your hipbone is connected to your BlackBerry or your thighbone is connected to your cell phone, those vibrations you're feeling in the car, in your pajamas, in the shower, may be coming from your headbone.

Many mobile phone addicts and BlackBerry junkies report feeling vibrations when there are none, or feeling as if they're wearing a cell phone when they're not.

The first time it happened to Jonathan Zaback, a manager at the public relations company Burson-Marsteller, he was out with friends and showing off his new BlackBerry Curve.

"While they were looking at it, I felt this vibration on my side. I reached down to grab it and realized there was no BlackBerry there."

I'm no cell phone addict. Hell, people don't even call me that much. Still, I get the phantom ring.

Did you know? Lethal Weapon Edition

Did you know...

...that Al Leong was a cast member in two of the biggest action movies of the 80's? In 1987's Lethal Weapon, he played Endo, the character who shocked Martin Riggs with a car battery. In 1988's Die Hard, he played Uli, the terrorist seen stealing candy early in the movie.

...that Jackie Swanson, the woman who played prostitute/porn starlette Amanda Hunsaker in Lethal Weapon, went on to greater fame by playing good girl Kelly Gaines in the TV show Cheers.

Iran So Far

On Saturday I mentioned an amusing short on Saturday Night Live that featured Andy Samberg. For those of you who missed it, here it is:

Must be one of them "Happy California Cows"

Talk about your species confusion:

When Beverly and Ernie Fischer gathered up their cattle this fall in Morton County, they rounded up a little more than they expected. We were moving some cattle, and we got a moose," Ernie Fischer said. "He thinks he is a cow," said his wife.

I'll pay good money to see a mooing moose

...And speaking of unsanitary public places

Ya might want to avoid the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn:

A New York City College of Technology biologist released a report Thursday finding the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn tested positive for gonorrhea contamination.

Umm, yuck.

Forget Miller's Sponsorship

The real issue should be the numerous public health code violations at the Folsom Street Fair. That looks like it is the most unsanitary public event from which I've ever had the displeasure of seeing pictures.

Is Larry Craig a masochist?

Seriously. Does this guy get gratification from all of this?

Republican Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho reversed course on Thursday and said he would remain in the U.S. Congress despite his conviction in a sex-sting operation at an airport men's room.

In a statement just hours after a Minnesota court refused to let him withdraw his guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, Craig said he planned to complete his third term that ends in January 2009.

There is no good reason for him to stay on at this point, and he's going to have to deal with this continually. I'm beginning to wonder if he's enjoying this.

Traffic cat is out of the bag

Traffic is important for most websites. It determines ad rates as well a website's influence. Most people do not question traffic numbers very much, but they should. Patrick Ruffini (via Dean Barnett) shows us why:

Our own Patrick Ruffini made some headlines a couple of days ago with an extremely interesting post. Delving into the vicissitudes of the Sitemeter counting system, Patrick estimated that Sitemeter overstates the amount of Daily Kos traffic by roughly 60% and that the actual number of Daily Kos readers is closer to a 250,000/day than the much ballyhooed figure of 600,000 a day.

Sitemeter is a great little web application, but it is not a reliable tool. Unique visitors is the key measurement for traffic. Established and commercial traffic trackers like Hitbox will track unique visitors over the course of a day, week, month, etc. Sitemeter tracks unique visitors per 30 minutes and no farther. That means if you visit a site once an hour, all day, you will count as 24 unique visits under Sitemeter's system. This creates an echo chamber than can over count the actual number of unique visitors to a site like Daily Kos in a day, and thus greatly skew how much influence such a site has in the political process.

That's not to come down on Sitemeter. Sitemeter was never designed to be an authoritative voice on traffic, and that's part of the reason you don't see it on commercial web sites. But even among those companies that are in business to count and log traffic there can be significant disparities. There is no defined standard for counting traffic, and that means there is a lot of gray area that can be exploited. And in the case of blogs and Sitemeter, you can be sure that the actual number of unique visitors in a day are smaller in most cases (RSS feeds play a part in this, too, but that is another discussion for another day).

Headlines you wish you never clicked

This one is at the top of my list:

Charges dropped in sherry enema death.

I'll let you decide whether you choose to make the same mistake that I did. Note: The last paragraph is the kicker.

It's time to put a leash on Jimmy Carter for his own good

I can only imagine how terrified Jimmy Carter's cohorts were in this situation; I'm quite sure some emergency underwear changes were required.

Former President Carter got in a shouting match Wednesday with Sudanese security services who blocked him from a town in Darfur where he was trying to meet with refugees from the ongoing conflict.

The 83-year-old Carter walked into this highly volatile pro-Sudanese government town to meet refugees too frightened to attend a scheduled meeting at a nearby compound. He was able to make it to a school where he met with one tribal representative and was preparing to go further into the town when Sudanese security officers stopped him.

"You can't go. It's not on the program!" the local security chief, who only gave his first name as Omar, yelled at Carter, who is in Darfur as part of a delegation of respected international figures known as "The Elders."

"We're going to anyway!" an angry Carter retorted as a crowd began to gather. "You don't have the power to stop me."

U.N. officials told Carter's entourage the Sudanese state police could bar his way. Carter's traveling companions, billionaire businessman Richard Branson and Graca Machel, the wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela, tried to ease his frustration and his Secret Service detail urged him to get into a car and leave.

I assure you, former President Carter, when a guy is holding a gun in a third world country with a propensity for using said gun, he does indeed have "the power to stop" you.

Smell of chili evacuates a restaurant

From London:

Super spicy chili sauce being cooked at a London Thai restaurant sparked road closures and evacuations after passers-by complained that the smell was burning their throats, police said Wednesday.

London Fire Brigade's chemical response team was called after reports that a strong smell was wafting from the restaurant in the heart of London's Soho district Monday afternoon, a Metropolitan police spokesman said, speaking anonymously in line with force policy.

Authorities sealed off several premises and closed roads. The Times of London described shoppers coughing and spluttering as firefighters wearing special breathing masks sought the source of the smell.

I've been in rooms that I wish had been evacuated because of chili caused scents-but never before the meal had actually been served.

Question of the Day

Does it give a law professor a feeling of superiority to question the word usage of a Supreme Court Justice in a situation where the word has variant spellings and the editor did not even flag it? It just seems an odd thing to critique.

The Toothless Bear Growls Again

Russia continues its recent pattern of scare tactics:

Russia's military space commander vowed to retaliate with an arms race if any country started putting weapon systems into orbit, he said in remarks published on Wednesday.

"We need to have strong rules about space, to avoid its militarization and if any country will place a weapon in space, then our response will be the same," Space Forces Commander Colonel-General Vladimir Popovkin told the newspaper Trud.

I know that there is a strong sentiment out there against the militarization of space, but the realist in me says that it is unavoidable. Space wasn't militarized from the 60's to the 90's because: A) The USSR/Russia knew it couldn't compete with us and would lose any space militarization race B) We had little desire to militarize something that did not need military presence C) The technology and the sophistication wasn't their yet to do it at anything less than astronomical costs. All of that is changing now, though. Except for A. With China showing great interest in militarizing space, we leave our satellite dependent society very vulnerable if we are not prepared to do the same. Additionally, the next space race may be one with economic benefits, and as such there will inevitably be national conflict over space "turf". And the technology is there and space programs seem to be developing into more sophisticated programs that involve long term human presence in space and on other heavenly bodies, making a military presence more realistic than in the days of less than one week orbits and months spent confined to a space station.

Russia is rattling its sabers on this for the exact same reason it agreed to co-operate with us in space during the Cold War and for the same reason that it agreed to space being a demilitarized zone in the first place-because they know they cannot compete with us or the Chinese. If you can't do, then you can't lose much by trying to scare.

Beautiful

Saturday Night Live. It has it's moments, like tonight when Andy Samberg does a gay love song to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I expect that the video will be making the rounds on YouTube by tomorrow.

Another thought on the Fonze

Fonzie was an immigrant to Milwaukee from New York. Had the writers decided to give the show more of a true Milwaukee flavor and made the Fonze a Polish or German city resident, could he have been as cool? Would his catch phrase have been "Aiiinnnn'aaa!"?

Completely Unrelated Sidenote
Before writing this post, I Googled the alternate aina spelling of enna. Google wanted to know if I meant to search for Enna Jameson. Amusing.

Postscript
For those of you coming here from outside Wisconsin, ain'a is perhaps the most well known word in a form of speech known as Milwaukee-ese. There, ya learned something today.

Other statue ideas for Wisconsin

With a statue of Fonzie on Milwaukee's horizon (an idea I kind of like, by the way), I got to thinking about other statues we should look at erecting here in the state of Wisconsin. The following ideas are just off the top of my head; if you have your own, please share 'em in the comments.

1. In Titanic, Jack Dawson proclaims himself a native of Chippewa Falls who fell through the ice at the then non-existent Lake Wissota. I propose a Jack Dawson statue that sticks through the ice on Lake Wissota every winter. If we could use the actual Leonardo DiCaprio, all the better.

2. This one is a must for this state, but we just have to decide where to put it: Red Foreman with his foot in Eric Foreman's ass. I propose we carve off a portion of the property that the Governor's Mansion is on, name it Point Place, and locate the statue there.

3. How can we not represent Chachi? I propose a statue of Chachi on a corduroy couch. I think this one will have to be located in one of Milwaukee's gentlemen's clubs, though.

4. Port Washington gets a statue of Frank and Carol from "Step by Step". I'm not sure what the final work should look like, but it will definitely include a Thighmaster.

5. Milwaukee gets yet another, this one of Alice Cooper. In Wayne's World, Cooper teaches more Milwaukee history than the Milwaukee School District.

A Giuliani Supporter's Bad Idea

It would be best if this idea were quashed:

A supporter of Rudy Giuliani's is throwing a party that aims to raise $9.11 per person for the Republican's presidential campaign.

Abraham Sofaer is having a fundraiser at his Palo Alto, Calif., home on Wednesday, when Giuliani backers across the country are participating in the campaign's national house party night.

But Sofaer said he had nothing to do with the "$9.11 for Rudy" theme.

"There are some young people who came up with it," Sofaer said when reached by telephone Monday evening. He referred other questions to Giuliani's campaign.

It is in bad taste and it can easily be turned against Giuliani as an example of his campaign using 9-11 for his own benefit. His staff needs to deep six this idea, and quickly.

Will China Beat Us Back to the Moon? Probably

In the opinion of NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, China will likely beat us back to the moon. I agree with him, but for more reasons than he gave in the linked speech. I have no doubt that China has a more comprehensive moon program than we do, but I think it has another advantage over us: China's program does not have an inordinate fear of accidents.

That's not to say a haphazard space program is a better space program. Quite the contrary. A diligent, well thought out program will have more success over the long run than a haphazard, unsafe program, and to a certain extent that was played out during the US-USSR 'space race'. We have developed accident paralysis in our space program, though. There is zero tolerance for accidents and deaths in our space program today, and that makes our program slow, cautious, and at times it almost completely shuts down our manned space program. China does not have that same accident paralysis. If they have an accident as they make their way to the moon, they'll dust off and move forward, and that benefits them because there has been no frontier opened by humans that has not come at a human cost. Because of that, I think we'll see China on the moon long before our program makes very much progress at all.

I'm a big supporter of a vibrant US manned space program because there will be huge economic and, with China's entry into space, military benefits to a more permanent human presence in space. I'm increasingly convinced that because of our space program's proclivity to accident paralysis, we are going to have to rely on a fledgling commercial space program to compete with China.

Calling BS on the New York Times

One of the problems that occurs when the specifics of an advertising discount become widely known is that the ad reps will end up with a mess on their hands. Existing advertisers usually get upset that the same discount was not made available to them when they paid a higher rate, and new advertisers try to take advantage of the new opportunity to get a cheap ad. So it was inevitable that this happened:

... MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

Perhaps this really is the case, but I sincerely doubt it. Once the Post went public with the Moveon.com rate, I'm sure the Times ended up with a rate crisis on its hands. The surest way to put a stop to it is to say that a rep screwed up, tighten the line on rates for a couple of weeks, and then let the reps go right back to the discounting they were doing before.

Update
And given what I've said above, I disagree about my previous post on this topic putting me in any kind of awkward position.

Darn

I received this email from the Milwaukee Brewers today:

Thank you for registering for a chance to purchase tickets for potential 2007 Division Series games at Miller Park. Unfortunately, your entry was not selected for this ticket offer.

But don't forget, there's still a chance to see the Brewers in the postseason at Miller Park! By entering the Brewers' Postseason Ticket Opportunity, you've also registered to win the chance to purchase tickets to potential 2007 League Championship Series and World Series games at Miller Park. Drawing dates have not yet been determined, but you will receive an e-mail to let you know if you've won the opportunity to purchase tickets to those exciting games!

Thank you for entering, and good luck in future Postseason Ticket Opportunity drawings!

GO BREWERS!

Drat. Oh well, I'm holding out for World Series ducats, anyway.

On Dan Rather's Lawsuit Against CBS

Dan Rather is, always has been, and always will be a very strange man who somehow managed to anchor a major network's nightly news. The "always will be" explains his $70 million lawsuit against CBS. (I'm big fan of brevity lately).

Courage.

The Jena 6

Let me be perhaps the first blogger to ever utter these words: I don't get it.

If you are unfamiliar with the Jena 6, head over to Instapundit to read a summary.

Back? Good. Okay, here's my issue. Surely people aren't protesting because these six are being charged and tried for beating the hell out of a kid, right? They put a pretty good smack down on the kid, and they deserve to be charged and tried. There is no justification for what they did, period. So is the protest over the nooses in the tree and the failure to expel the kids responsible for it? If so, why has it been so long in happening? So if that isn't it, then is the logic behind this that the Jena 6 don't deserve to be charged for beating the hell out of a kid because some other kids got off light for the repugnant act of putting nooses in the "white tree"? That's the only reason I can think of for people like David Bowie contributing money to the Jena 6 defense fund. And if that's the reason, I can't get on board with this.

Update
Welcome, Instapundit readers. If you feel like casting some more light on this issue, feel free to join the conversation ongoing in the comments.

Yeah, but would anyone notice?

In news you wouldn't expect out of current day Western Europe, ethnic divisions could lead to a national breakup in Belgium.

Belgium has given the world Audrey Hepburn, René Magritte, the saxophone and deep-fried potato slices that somehow are called French.

But the back story of this flat, Maryland-size country of 10.4 million is of a bad marriage writ large — two nationalities living together that cannot stand each other. Now, more than three months after a general election, Belgium has failed to create a government, producing a crisis so profound that it has led to a flood of warnings, predictions, even promises that the country is about to disappear.

“We are two different nations, an artificial state created as a buffer between big powers, and we have nothing in common except a king, chocolate and beer,” said Filip Dewinter, the leader of Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Bloc, the extreme-right, xenophobic Flemish party, in an interview. “It’s ‘bye-bye, Belgium’ time.”

Radical Flemish separatists like Mr. Dewinter want to slice the country horizontally along ethnic and economic lines: to the north, their beloved Flanders — where Dutch (known locally as Flemish) is spoken and money is increasingly made — and to the south, French-speaking Wallonia, where a kind of provincial snobbery was once polished to a fine sheen and where today old factories dominate the gray landscape.

“There are two extremes, some screaming that Belgium will last forever and others saying that we are standing at the edge of a ravine,” said Caroline Sägesser, a Belgian political analyst at Crisp, a socio-political research organization in Brussels. “I don’t believe Belgium is about to split up right now. But in my lifetime? I’d be surprised if I were to die in Belgium.”

I'm all for a breakup, if only because the nations of Flanders and Wallonia sound funny.

Freelance Intelligence Analyst

This is just awesome:

Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists.

Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.

Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video — before al-Qaida had announced it.

Now if we can just replace Congress with a freelance Congress...

On blogging in 2007

Things have been slow around my little corner of the blogosphere this year. I'm certainly not blogging with the zeal that had me at 6 to 10 posts a day a couple of years ago. Some of this is because life intervened and I found my attentions drawn elsewhere, but that isn't the whole of it. I've really been struggling to figure out why I've slowed down in posting. Tonight, things started to come together, and I think I know why my volume of posts has dropped off: 2007 has been a very vapid news year.

Politics in Washington have been somewhat inconsequential. President Bush squandered any political capital he had after his re-election, and there are no more pet conservative projects in the pipeline because of it. Now in 2006, that provided plenty of fodder for blogging because the Bush Administration's failures in pushing so many conservative programs is, in my opinion, what lost Republicans control of Congress that year. This year has been devoid of much of what would normally get a conservative fired up, and both parties have resorted to little more than political jostling for 2008.

Meanwhile, the great conversations of war and peace have been played out, and here we are with two wars on our hands. An ambivalence has set in amongst the American public, and any increases in support of the Iraq war can probably be attributed to the fact that some Americans have resigned themselves to the fact that the easiest way out of Iraq will be to actually finish the job. North Korea has fallen off the map as Iran has loomed larger, but even with Iran there has no sense of urgency. China and Russia have been major players in the news, yet both still seem like tomorrow's problem. In our own backyard, we've failed to give enough attention to pressing issues like how a post-Fidel Cuba will affect us, or what will be the consequences of growing socialism/communism in Latin America.

Rather than attention focusing on the vital issues above, we've numbed ourselves by injecting heavy doses of Britney, Paris, Teen Pagent Queens, OJ, and other brain dead celebrities directly into our national veins. What disturbs me is the nation did something similar toward the end of the Clinton administration, and our desire to ignore real issues allowed our leaders to avoid the tough topics like the growing threat of terror. That threat still exists, and many others have been brewing on the horizon. I hope that we (myself included) snap out of our haze, and soon.

My thoughts on Sally Field's Emmy speech

I couldn't care less what Sally Field feels about anything, so I'll pass. But give me a double helping of the kid getting Tasered at the Kerry event. I don't care who you are, that's funny right there.

My thoughts on OJ

Wake me when he and Al Cowlings hook up for another drive. Until then, I'm ignoring the murder.

Arrr!

Ahoy, maties. Talk like a Yooper day be just around the corner.

Update
The date of this year's Talk Like a Yooper Day will be November 18th. Don't forget your blaze orange and make sure you cheer for da Pack.

Strange occurrence on a dark road

Okay, I've spent the last hour or so debating whether to post this or not. I've wavered but I've decided to go ahead with it. Consider it either a PSA for the Fort Atkinson area or just a quirky story.

The lovely Mrs. Jib and I were headed back from Madison this evening, and it was a dark drive on Highway 12. We got to a point about a mile west of Fort Atkinson when the high beams picked up something on the side of the road. It took a moment to make out what it was. It was a man standing just off the road. He was in jeans and some sort of long sleeved shirt. Neither of us could see his face or his head. In fact, there was just a kind of blackness where his head was. It appeared to the lovely Mrs. Jib that he was wearing some sort of black hood and looking down. The guy was directly facing traffic, which at that time of night consisted of us and another car about 3/4 of a mile behind us. His hands were down near his fly, but because he passed in and out of our headlights so quickly that neither one of us could make out what his hands were doing down there-or if something was out that shouldn't have been. There was no car parked near by, and we didn't see any bags. He was standing there, not walking anywhere, and he didn't hold his thumb out, so we don't think it was a hitchhiker, a broken down motorist, or even someone just out for a walk.

I'm not pleased at the possibility of someone getting off by flashing people in the dark of night just outside of the town that I live in, so I called it in to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, if somewhat reluctantly (that's not the easiest thing to report). The dispatcher seemed rather disinterested by it and didn't even ask my name. If a deputy was dispatched, I'm sure that the person was long gone by the time they even got there. Just the same, if anyone else has a similar experience around this area, I encourage you to report it, just to be on the safe side.

Ye Olde Time Solution to Low Fertility Rates

With Russia trying novel ways to boost fertility rates and writers looking at even more ways, I say let's look back in history to see what our ancestors did. With that, I am going to quote this entry from (*cough*) Uncle John's Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader by The Bathroom Readers' Institute (Page 72, Bathroom Readers' Press 2006, First Printing):

• BACHELOR TAX. A favorite strategy of governments to encourage population growth and raise money at the same time. Julius Caesar tried it in 18 B.C. The English imposed it in 1695. The Russians under Peter the Great used it in 1702, as did the Missouri legislature in 1820. The Spartans of ancient Greece didn't care about the money-they preferred public humiliation. Bachelors in Sparta were required to march around the public market in wintertime stark naked, while singing a song making fun of their unmarried status.

I think the Spartan method is more a form of shrinkage than a tax.

On the New York Times discount to Moveon.org

If you hadn't heard, the New York Post reports that the New York Times gave a pretty big discount to Moveon.org for its full page ad disparaging General Petraeus.

The New York Times dramatically slashed its normal rates for a full-page advertisement for MoveOn.org's ad questioning the integrity of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
[...]
According to Abbe Serphos, director of public relations for the Times, "the open rate for an ad of that size and type is $181,692."

A spokesman for MoveOn.org confirmed to The Post that the liberal activist group had paid only $65,000 for the ad - a reduction of more than $116,000 from the stated rate.

A Post reporter who called the Times advertising department yesterday without identifying himself was quoted a price of $167,000 for a full-page black-and-white ad on a Monday.

Before we get ourselves too worked up over this, it should be known that display (not classified) ad sales reps typically have leeway in the prices they charge for ads. Some have the independence to do whatever they need to do to get an ad, some have to get approval for big discounts, but most do have the flexibility to discount. Call it media ad sales' dirty little secret. Price flexibility (i.e. discounting) is used for any number of reasons-a publication or rep may want to bring in a new customer that they see doing a large dollar volume of business over time. The rep or the publication might need to bring in last minute funds to meet a budget. The customer might already be a good customer that is doing an extra buy. The ad might be part of a larger "package" of advertising a customer has agreed to in exchanged for preferential pricing. An ad may have fallen out at the last second and the space needs to be filled. Finally, the rep in question might just be bad at meeting price objections and caves into discounting pressures easily.

This discounting flexibility is not without its problems for media. Most publications are really planned for ads to sell very near the published price, and it is in most reps interest to do so. In some segments of media, there has been horrible price erosion for ads because of discounting and predatory competitive discounting. This leads to some publications having little choice but to discount, sometimes significantly, in order to meet the budgets. In some segments, published prices have almost no meaning anymore. Yes, if someone calls out of the blue and asks for the price of an ad, they are going to be quoted published prices. But if there is any price erosion in that market at all, that first price is little more than the beginning point of negotiations.

I don't know the situation that ad reps for the New York Times are specifically facing. For all I know, this was a good ol' boy discount. I doubt that it is, though, because in most cases the higher ups aren't aware of the price of an ad until long after it is on the books and the ad is published. Some forms of print media are brutal ad markets right now, and I suspect the newspaper business is one of them. With the advent of internet advertising, some print mediums like papers are facing even more pricing pressure. I would think the New York Post is very aware of that, and I'm more than a little surprised that they launched this volley because I'm sure that a look at their books will show more than a few heavily discounted ads, too.

I can't beat him, can I?

The title of this post is a quote from the movie Tombstone, and right now I feel like Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earp did when he uttered those words to Doc Holliday. You see, I am up for Real Debate Wisconsin's coveted "MRQ of the week." I think my comment about not being able to trust the UN or anonymous sources is pretty good, but I also know that I'm up against a damn good quip in Harvey's "As long as remembers her panties." It is always tough to beat a quote about panties. So I need any an all of you to be my Doc Holliday and slay Harvey's quote by hitting RDW's sidebar and voting for my quote, "There are two things you can never trust in this world, besides the government: Then UN and anonymous sources."

Yeah, but what will it do to sea levels?

This is one of those discoveries that it pays to be aware of, but not get too excited about-at least not right away.

An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.

The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

It is one thing to discover something, and it is quite another to apply it, make it practical for general use, and then make it sustainably profitable. If they can do that with this discovery, great, but then get yourself ready for greenies who are upset about what we are doing to the world's oceans.

Learn something new every day, baseball edition

Rule 3.09 from the Major League Baseball Official Rule Book:

3.09
Players in uniform shall not address or mingle with spectators, nor sit in the stands before, during, or after a game. No manager, coach or player shall address any spectator before or during a game. Players of opposing teams shall not fraternize at any time while in uniform.

At the very least, this rule is broken every time a player signs an autograph before a game or hands a ball to a kid during a game.

The question here is not should but rather how?

Over the past week there has been discussion in the media and on the internet as to whether we should still commemorate 9-11. With a doubt in my mind, the answer is yes. My only question is how. As a blogger, I don't want to tell the same old stories over and over again, to express the same emotions. That's what my archives are for, and what I've written still stands. There is little sense in me repeating it every single year. At some point, the story of my 9-11 loses its significance. The stories that really matter as time marches on are those of the living and the dead who were there.

As for real time commemorations, do we ritualize them, doing the same thing year after year? If so, does that lose its impact over time? I'm not sure. All I know is that history will remember the date September 11 in much the same way that it remembers December 7, and much like Pearl Harbor Day, from this point on, our commemorations will slowly fade, marking time on anniversaries that end in fives and zeros. Neither day will ever be forgotten, but in the American way of always moving forward, while we will always offer our respects on both dates, we will not allow tragic events to dominate those dates forever. We do not forget, but we do carry on.

Seeing the game in a whole new light

For the first time in many years, I am playing fantasy football this season. A friend is teaching his kid how to play, and they needed an extra to fill out a small four team league. I came into tonight's game in a bit of a hole, and I needed nice nights from Chad Johnson and Frank Gore. Neither had a good enough night to propel me past my opponent, but I was amazed at how having a fantasy football interest in the games change the way I watched them. The games became a completely self serving endeavor, so much so that I found myself flip flopping on who I was cheering for in each game several times. This is going to be an interesting season. I just hope the kid doesn't beat me.

Millard Fillmore's impact on Wisconsin History

Tom McMahon has a post called Rank Then By Their Comedic Potential: 5 Pre-Civil War Presidents and 1 Member of the Ill-Fated 1969 Chicago Cubs. Number one on the list was Millard Fillmore. Funny name indeed, but a significant player in Wisconsin's history. I tried to leave this as a comment at McMahon's site, but comments are down so I'll post it here.

Millard Fillmore, funny name and all, actually played a significant role in Wisconsin's history. Zachary Taylor had signed an order removing all Chippewa Indians to Minnesota. After Taylor died, Chief Buffalo of the Lake Superior Chippewa traveled to D.C. at an advanced age and convinced Fillmore to stay the order. Minus Fillmore's decision to allow them to stay in Wisconsin, there would be no Chippewa in Wisconsin today.

I Can't Decide if...

...Osama bin Laden is...

...a diarist at the Daily Kos:

"People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there."

...or an old Soviet communist:

"It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations."

...or Noam Chomsky and Al Gore:

He goes on to call Noam Chomsky "among one of the most capable of those from your own side," and mentions global warming and "the Kyoto accord."

I'm voting for Chomsky and Gore.

Argh! Doh! Slap!

(Begin rant) If there is one creature I'd be happy to see the extinction of, it would be bird-sized mosquitoes. I just finished mowing the lawn and I think I lost a pint of blood. I let the cat out today and two mosquitoes almost carried the little lard butt away. If we get any more rain, we're going to need .22s to kill the blood suckers. It is September-I should be enjoy high school football and crisp fall air, not waging a one man Custer's Last Stand against mosquitoes. (Rant over)

UN cleaned out by...a cleaning agent?

Remember the big hubub over the chemical weapons found at the UN? Well, it probably wasn't that big of a deal.

Fooled again.

Chemicals discovered in the United Nations' Manhattan offices - feared to be a toxic agent produced by Saddam Hussein's regime a decade ago - may be nothing worse than a cleaning solvent, sources said yesterday.

Preliminary tests show the substance, which was found Aug. 24, was not the potentially fatal phosgene, sources said.

I say "probably" because we'll likely find out tomorrow that instead of cleaning solvent it was the essence of the anti-Christ. There are two things you can never trust in this world, besides the government: The UN and anonymous sources.

By the way, it is time to start paying attention

This presidential campaign has already seemingly lasted longer than the dark ages. I've been a huge advocate of ignoring it up until this point. Labor Day has come and gone, though, and each party's selection process begins in 4 months. It is time to start paying attention again.

On Fred Thompson

I eschewed tonight's Republican debate but I did watch Fred Thompson's presidential announcement on The Tonight Show. I have an open mind when it comes to Thompson, so before you Fredophiles out there light into me, remember that I'm not opposed to him. I even like him a bit. Having said that, I didn't like his appearance all that much. Fred Thompson is going to be his own worst enemy. Sometimes he has all the charisma of a mushroom growing on a mossy log. That is going to contribute to both people's opinion of his work ethic (an unfair accusation that already seems to have stuck) and his likeability. His ideas are most certainly good, but remember that a lot of voters never get past the superficial. In fact, that's why so many politicians now appear on late night television-to crack a few jokes and appeal to the superficiality of portions of the electorate. On top of that, he has the slower speech of an old southerner. Again, nothing wrong with that per se, but some northerners are still going to have trouble getting past it-in fact, it may reinforce some of their negative opinions about his work ethic. I hope his campaign realizes that some of his own personality traits are going to be stumbling blocks with some voters, even as they are positives for others. My concern is that there will be voters who take his traits negatively than positively. Unless, of course, he ends every episode with the Law & Order "duhn-duhn."

Oh, just one more thought, and this one might get me crucified by the Frediacs, but Mr. Thompson, know your audience! I always cringe when I watch a politician go on Leno or Letterman and he or she is almost completely serious. There is a time for that, and late night talk shows are not that place. People want a little laughter before bed, and they certainly don't want to be reminded of the serious, humorless Bob Dole of 1996. They want to see if you have a lighter side to your personality, if you are someone they'd like to have a beer with. Don't like that? Then don't do the late night talk shows.

It sucks to be a trend setter

Especially an Apple-maniac trend setter:

Meanwhile, gadget enthusiasts who snapped up the ballyhooed iPhone before Wednesday are coping with a bitter aftertaste now that it is $200 cheaper within 10 weeks of its introduction.

The price cut, from $599 to $399 for the 8-gigabyte iPhone, immediately set off a debate on online tech forums between early adopters who said paying a premium price came with the territory and those who said they felt burned. The price reduction was too much too soon, some complained.

Hey, deal with it. This happens every time a new technology comes out. I myself bought an expensive camera in late '05 that saw price cuts in '06 and then a replacement in time for Christmas of '06. But for that fleeting moment, I had a camera most people didn't. Granted, Apple dropped their price pretty quickly, but that's life with Apple, where you are lucky if you have the latest and the greatest for a year. At least they aren't rolling out a better phone in time for Christmas.

As for me, I think I'll wait until they are giving away iPhones with new contracts. In other words, I ain't ever getting one.

Badger football photos

Thanks to my father in law, the lovely Mrs. Jib and I were able to take in Saturday's Badger game at Camp Randall. It was her first game ever, and she had a blast. Meanwhile, I had a chance to play around with my Canon XT at a major sporting event with favorable lighting for the first time. Some of the pics turned out pretty good, but it was a learning experience for me so they could have been better, and will be next time. If you'd like to see the pics, you can check them out here. If you'd just like to see a couple of the highlights, then go to this post and this post at the Wisconsin Sports Bar.

The sights of the digital age

Years ago you'd have never seen a crystal clear, frame-by-frame view of an in air collision at an air show. Today you do. And in images like those, the horror of these events is even clearer than they used to be.