Minor Thoughts from me to you

Here's a confession for you: I don't like reading blogs.

I don't even like thinking of my posts on Minor Thoughts as part of a blog, even though they quite clearly are. Why I don't isn't the point of today's entry, but I touched on it once when I explained why despite my living in South Korea, Minor Thoughts never analyzed the Korean hostage situation in Afghanistan.

"During such crises, there’s very little one lone lil’ blogger can say that isn’t being said everywhere else. The very point of the blog-o-sphere (that’s still what the kids are calling it these days, right? I told you I’m out of touch) is, after all, the opportunity it presents to receive alternative perspectives generally unavailable from the mass media - that is, we no longer need to be told by news corporations what your typical man on the street thinks, because the man on the street is basically running his own newspaper, and what he thinks is sometimes far more interesting than previously reported, even if his presentation is inferior. Republican radio shows in the U.S. became popular for the same reason.

It should go without saying, of course, that if a blog is not providing content substantially different from what we can all get from the pros, then there's no compelling reason for anyone else to check the site - but no: it turns out a high number of people have apparently missed this point, leading to the creation of a seemingly infinitely-expanding cyber-world of political commentary sites even more vitriolic, less in-depth, and as devoid of logic and principle as the pundits for whom people pay.

Now I'm not an elitist in any meaningful sense; I'm perfectly happy that anybody who lives in a Western country can, by this point, throw up a blog about how much they hate someone in office. It's not their freedom which I disdain. It's not even their use of it. It's just most their product. Which is par for the course, I know, concerning any liberalized field - it's in the nature of the free market to produce the greatest number of misfires as well as the greatest number of successes.

Now with all that said, there is one blog I do check daily, and I'm going to recommend it to you. It's called Functional Ambivalent.

The tag line of Functional Ambivalent is "Politics. Culture. Pointless rudeness.", but the ideas on the site concerning the first two are predictably ignorable, interesting only for the webmaster's apparent political schizophrenia. One day Tom (that's his name) will post a perfectly reasonable assessment of why Hillary Clinton's idea of a national baby bond program is insane. The next, he'll turn his energies toward universal health care and deliver a typical you-just-don't-care-if-all-the-babies-in-the-world-DIE-you-monsters type screed. 'Tis strange.

It's the "Pointless rudeness" which makes Functional Ambivalent a site worth subscribing to. Whatever the quality of his logic, Tom is an undeniably gifted writer, and when he's writing to amuse us (as is generally the case), he's consistently far funnier than Dave Barry has been in over a decade. Trust Tom to not only uncover the most bizarre stuff online and bring it to your attention, but to do so with a headline and bite of commentary that doubles your laughs.

He's also both willing to play and donate to worthy causes. A wine connoisseur, Tom has started a pool amongst _Functional Ambivalent's _ visitors, in which one of them can win a bottle from his collection if that person most correctly predicts when Fidel Castro will die.

Where Tom's website shines, though, is in its longer, more personal posts, the product of those times when Tom sits down, shrugs the Great Democrat Chip from his shoulder, and just writes for a while. His most recent such post is typical of him: "Because Baseball Is A Game Fathers and Sons Can Enjoy Together" chronicles his pitched battle with his oldest son to come out the winner in a fantasy baseball league. It's good material, not just grammatically correct but actually well-presented.

And it still pales in comparison to almost any one of his "Sex Day" columns, which unfortunately he doesn't do nearly so many of anymore (they used to be weekly). Yes, it's probably telling that such features on the site are always the longest and most carefully written of F/A's content, but when reading them, you won't care. You'll just be laughing at his apology for writing only a short article about premature ejaculation ("I'm sorry, really. That's never happened before. I usually last a good 3,000 words."). Those who know me understand that I'm not easy to please when it comes to sexual humor, anymore than I am when it comes to toilet humor or Bush humor; I consider them all typically low-brow and unamusing. But Tom manages it (WARNING: That does not necessarily mean he can do it to you. Your preference may skew to the more conservative, in which case I suggest this blog here).

In a society slowly rendering one-man business all but obsolete, Humor is still very much a product capable of being generated only by individuals' personalities. I'd argue that makes it an all but tailor-made export for blogs. Functional Ambivalent is the best one I've seen at it. Please, give it a look.

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus - New York Times

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office's famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of "comparable" magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (Knopf, 2007).

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn't it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal "food pyramid" telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group's members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

In the Battle Against Cancer, Researchers Find Hope in a Toxic Wasteland - New York Times

Death sits on the east side of this city, a 40-billion-gallon pit filled with corrosive water the color of a scab. On the opposite side sits the small laboratory of Don and Andrea Stierle, whose stacks of plastic Petri dishes are smeared with organisms pulled from the pit. Early tests indicate that some of those organisms may help produce the next generation of cancer drugs.

For decades, scientists assumed that nothing could live in the Berkeley Pit, a hole 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide that was one of the world's largest copper mines until 1982, when the Atlantic Richfield Company suspended work there. The pit filled with water that turned as acidic as vinegar, laced with high concentrations of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc.

Today it is one of the harshest environments in the country. When residents speak of the pit, they often recall the day in 1995 when hundreds of geese landed on the water and promptly died.

But the pit itself is far from dead. Over the last decade, Mr. Stierle said, the couple have found 142 organisms living in it and have "isolated 80 chemical compounds that exist nowhere else."

Panel Sees Problems in Ethanol Production - New York Times

Greater cultivation of crops to produce ethanol could harm water quality and leave some regions of the country with water shortages, a panel of experts is reporting. And corn, the most widely grown fuel crop in the United States, might cause more damage per unit of energy than other plants, especially switchgrass and native grasses, the panel said.

The report noted that additional use of fertilizers and pesticides could pollute water supplies and contribute to the overgrowth of aquatic plant life that produces "dead zones" like those in the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.

Book now for the flight to nowhere - Times Online

An Indian entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere because it never takes off.

In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the "virtual journeys" of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.

"Some of my passengers have crossed the country to get on this plane," says Gupta, who charges about £2 each for passengers taking the "journey".

The Odyssey Years - New York Times

People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments -- moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.

In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.

Overlawyered: Welcome to West Virginia: Joe Meadows v. Go-Mart

Joe Meadows was drunk. Very drunk. 0.296 percent blood-alcohol content drunk, 12 or 13 beers worth. Fortunately, he didn't drive in that state. Unfortunately, he chose to sleep it off by resting under a parked 18-wheel truck. More unfortunately, the driver, Doug Rader, who didn't check to see whether there might be drunks lying under his truck at 1:40 a.m., ran over Meadows. Rader had EMT training, and was able to save Meadows's life, but Meadows lost a leg, and sued both the truck company and the store that owned the parking lot. A Kanawha County jury decided that Meadows was only a third responsible for his injury, which means he "only" gets two thirds of the three million dollars they awarded.

What is Orthodoxy? (Part 1, Part 2)

What is the "orthodoxy" in our "humble orthodoxy" anyway? What do we mean when we say "orthodoxy?" "What must we agree upon? What are the basics, what are the essentials?"

Now this is a dangerous question. And we have to proceed very carefully here, because if you take this wrong, this question can sound a little like the teenager in the youth group asking, "How far can I go? What's the least I have to believe and still be considered a Christian? What can I get away with?" Friends, that is not the spirit in which I'm posing this question. You want to pursue truth in every single matter about which God has revealed Himself in His word. If He's gone to the trouble of revealing Himself, you should care as a Christian, you should want to understand it, so that you can know more about who this God is that you're worshiping.

Part of what we need for doctrinal discernment is to understand what must be agreed upon and how serious errors are. Because you know not all errors are created equal--they're not all the same. We need to understand the significance of the doctrine that is in question.

... So God, the Bible, the gospel.

Those are the things that we must agree upon to have meaningful cooperation as Christians. True Christian fellowship cannot be had with someone who disagrees with us on these matters. These are the essential of the essentials.

Finally, for Adam, Pastor John Piper's view of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Several years ago, after I read Adam's copy of Atlas Shrugged, I disagreed with her view of altruism. But I couldn't put my feelings into words. Now I find that John Piper has.

Atlas Shrugged Fifty Years Later :: Desiring God

My Ayn Rand craze was in the late seventies when I was a professor of Biblical Studies at Bethel College. I read most of what she wrote both fiction and non-fiction. I was attracted and repulsed. I admired and cried. I was blown away with powerful statements of what I believed, and angered that she shut herself up in what Jonathan Edwards called the infinite provincialism of atheism. Her brand of hedonism was so close to my Christian Hedonism and yet so far--like a satellite that comes close to the gravitational pull of truth and then flings off into the darkness of outer space.

Sentences like these made me want to scream. No. No. No. Altruism (treating someone better than he deserves) does not have to involve "betraying your values" or "sacrificing a greater value to a lesser one." In other words, I agreed with her that we should never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. But I disagreed that mercy (returning good for evil) always involved doing that.

Above: "Achmed, they've just subpoena'd Osama!"

You could quite justifiably tell me I'm a little late to discuss whether captured terrorists should be allowed full trials according to American law; after all, the Supreme Court ruled the answer to be a big old Yes well over a year ago now.

But I've got something to get off my chest, so I'm gonna give it to the old college try anyway.

Even if you don't remember the reactions to the verdict, I'll bet you can probably imagine them without any help. The Democrats crowed over their latest victory; the Republicans jeered that the Democrat candidate's slogan for 2008 should be "The Party for Terrorists' Rights".

I wasn't one of the jeerers. I certainly wasn't on the side of the Democrats, though, either; despite being apolitical due to my religious beliefs, I still have a bit of the old soft spot left for the grand U.S. o' A, and that being the case, I've always tended to sympathize with Americans more concerned for their own safety than-... well, the safety of people who hate them and are trying to kill them. I'd write "That's not so hard to understand, is it?", but for today's Democrats, the answer stupefyingly seems to be yes. Their own soft spot for Lady Liberty hardened over a long time ago, it seems. Bring on the Socialist States of America.

I digress. I didn't want to support the bozos; I didn't quite feel right about supporting the conservatives. So I never entered into that particular debate.

I really should have. The answer was clear from the get-go - and the answer is, quite embarrassingly, exactly what the bozos and the Supreme Court justices have been saying all along.

It's also right there in the United States' Declaration of Independence, written in simply lovely penmanship:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

The conservative argument for terrorists' lack of speedy trial and non-Geneva treatment has always been, at its core, that the terrorists are (a) not playing by the rules which guarantees them protection by the law and (b) are at any rate not Americans, thus not subject to its laws.

But the second objection is obvious poppycock, because one of the most beautifully brazen acts of the Declaration of Independence is not simply to declare Americans endowed with inalienable rights, but men (and later, we logically extrapolated "men" to include women). It's not just a smack in the face to anybody who would oppress us; it's a smack in the face to anybody who oppresses anybody else!

The first objection likewise doesn't hold up to any logical scrutiny. Basically, the Geneva Convention is a set of agreements amongst nations to treat each other's soldiers well, should they end up fighting, since those soldiers are fighting on behalf of their governments. It's a special dispensation of extra rights to soldiers ("Your uniformed citizens can kill ours without being criminally charged if our uniformed citizens can kill yours."). A theoretically good idea.

However, you can't enforce such a contract except by - er, force, which is a fairly useless threat in circumstances where the revocation of the Convention is an issue in the first place. That being the case, if one army decides not to play the game by Convention rules, the only proper response is to hit them with what the Geneva Convention was meant to protect them from: criminal charges.

Thus losing coverage under the Geneva Convention simply returns a killer to civilian status, to be tried under civilian law.

There, now. It all makes sense, doesn't it?

Yes. I think so, too.

I just wish I'd thought so before now. Sorry about that, Libs; score one for you.

From a letter to the editor of The Economist, concerning congressional hearings in the U.S. on subprime mortgages:

"Taking up the reference to Oscar Wilde, an English man of letters, we could say that, in contemporary credit markets, the cynic knows the listed but not necessarily transactable price of everything but neither the probability of default not the loss given default coefficients of anything."

The forecast for every day of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing is Sunny.

Because the Chinese army will be firing rockets at any clouds that dare to undermine full enjoyment of the spectacle, according to the Daily Mail. The paper writes:

"Boffins have come up with a cunning plan to force the heavens to open by firing chemical-infused rockets at storm clouds, forcing them to burst before the set-piece spectacle gets underway."

This is why I always say you need multiple perspectives on an issue. Who but the officials of China's government would have considered shooting the weather? It takes a special kind of mind to think like that - the kind of mind, for instance, which would also ban Buddhist monks from reincarnating without government permission, or allows for its people to meet at official churches, just so long as they never suggest that Jesus is coming back.

I haven't walked into a bar in a couple of months.

My contract with a Christian boarding school specifically forbids it.

But, that just makes jokes about walking into them even more special, so it is with a level of untempered mirth usually reserved for fat people that I now direct you to Postscripts, an "online large-print magazine" which has recently seen fit to publish an exhaustive list of bar jokes.

Wait! No! Come back! They're actually funny! Really, I promise!

Unless you don't think the following are funny, in which case I'll take no responsibility for the soul you've blackened:

A pair of battery jumper cables walk into a bar. The bartender says, "You can come in here, but you better not start anything!"

A grasshopper hops into a bar. The bartender says, "You're quite a celebrity around here. We've even got a drink named after you." The grasshopper says, "You've got a drink named Steve?"

A guy walks into a bar in Cork, in Ireland, and asks the barman: "What's the quickest way to get to Dublin?" "Are you walking or driving?" asks the barman. "Driving," says a man. "That's the quickest way," says the barman.

A baby seal walks into a bar. "What can I get you?" asks the bartender. "Anything but a Canadian Club," replies the seal.

A little pig goes into a bar and orders ten drinks. He finishes them and the bartender says, "Don't you want to know where the toilet is?" The pig says, "No, thanks, I go wee-wee-wee all the way home."

René Descartes is in a bar at closing time. The bartender asks him if he'd like another drink. Descartes says, "I think not," and he disappears.

Have fun.

And while you're at it, you may wish to read Postscript's other articles on the subject of humor (the list of bar-jokes is sixth entry in a series), specifically the first article ("Anatomy of a Sense of Humor: What's So Funny?"). In it, Postscripts repeats the findings of Dr. Richard Wiseman, who held an absolutely gigantic international survey via the world wide web - integrating over two-million entries - in order to find out if nationalities' senses of humor vary.

Turns out they do - and surprise, surprise: out of the eleven nationalities surveyed, Germans have the best sense of humor. According to Dr. Wiseman, we'll laugh at just about anything.

Those of you who know me personally are thinking right now that this explains a lot.

Canadians, interestingly enough, displayed the weakest senses of humor out of all nationalities polled - unless you count the Japanese, who apparently don't have a joke-telling culture.

I am informed that the first five minutes of comedian Drew Volle's debut at The Ice House, one of the more famous comedy clubs in L.A., is now posted up on YouTube.

Reasons to check him out:

(A) He's funny (always a good reason to watch a comedian). A testament to this is how quickly he's risen onto the professional scene: within months, he's gone from the open-mic nights to receiving invitations from The Comedy Store. That's pretty impressive.

(B) He's my brother.

Telecommuting -- the next generation. This is how I need to work from home.

Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do.

He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers' offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks.

About the only thing he can't do is drink the coffee or eat the snacks -- or touch anything, for that matter.

It's not that Bowman doesn't have hands or a mouth; they're just in Halifax, along with the rest of his body.

In fact, it's not really Bowman in the Waterloo office at all. It's IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues in Waterloo from his home office 1,350 kilometres away.

The impossible dream - Los Angeles Times

The vast majority of my dreams are completely impossible: owning Mars, traveling to the future, writing a book. So when -- thanks to the magical economics of failed television pilot writing -- I got to buy a house, and that house needed a new bathroom, I was about to realize one of my lifelong dreams: owning a home urinal.

My contractor, obviously, thought this was the best idea anyone had ever come up with, and immediately went shopping with me for a classy, retro porcelain model, the kind you can saunter up to in a tux and slap a highball on. But then my neighbor, Holly Purcell, a very successful real estate broker, informed me that I absolutely could not install a urinal of any kind if I ever hoped to resell my house. Noting my confusion, she slowly explained that urinals, to my shock, gross women out.

I spent the next few weeks asking women, many of whom I barely knew, what they thought about urinals. The results were not good. First of all, it's got an unfortunate name. Toilets would still be kept outside if they were called crapinals. Also, my female friends said urinals conjured images of large, impersonal institutions such as prisons. They felt like the lidlessness was unsanitary. Basically, what I learned is that women have vastly overestimated the precision of peeing into a toilet bowl while standing up.

When I countered with the clear advantages of the urinal -- toilet seat always down, decreased water use, saved time, ease of cleaning, the option to pour in ice and play the most fun game in the entire world -- the truth came out. Urinals, these women eventually conceded, are simply too aggressively male.

This is just plain cool.

Got Arachnophobia? Here’s Your Worst Nighmare - New York Times

Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

The gossamer strands, slowly overtaking a lakefront peninsula, emit a fetid odor, perhaps from the dead insects entwined in the silk. The web whines with the sound of countless mosquitoes and flies trapped in its folds.

Everything's bigger in Texas...

Growing up, I always heard that I should have an "attitude of gratitude". That phrase sounded annoyingly pat back then and still does now. That doesn't make it any less true. Here are two examples of people with a great attitude of gratitude.

First, Chef Mojo from Daily Pundit wrote about experiencing life with new hearing aids. Daily Pundit » The Hum and Roar of the World.

At some point when I was a child, it became apparent that I was a bit different from the other kids. Namely, I couldn't hear the things they heard.

This was somewhat expected, my mother being hearing impaired. I stepped into this life with the genetic code that dialed me down a notch or so when it came to sound. A childhood of constant ear infections only increased the damage.

...

The audiologist took the results of my test and input them into a program on her Dell laptop and dialed up the brands and models of aids that would apply to me. ... The thing was an inch long and little over a quarter inch thick, with a very thin tube encasing a wire that attached to a transmitter in the form of flexible silicone earbud. No more ear molds.

... The Lady gave me a little look and said, Hey sweetie. And she started reading from a poster in the office.

I almost started crying.

I'd never heard her before. Not like this. Not this way. Not to the point of being almost normal. Her voice was pure sparkling clarity and oh so sweet.

I turned to the audiologist who said, the humming is the light fixtures overhead. I looked up and it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me within this tiny office. I could hear the secretary a room away on the phone and the printer printing and a phone ringing behind me, and I knew right were it was.

How often are you thankful for just the simple ability to hear, and to hear well?

Secondly, how about waking up from a coma after 19 years, to find that your entire world has changed? BBC NEWS | Europe | Pole wakes up from 19-year coma.

Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988. ... Doctors gave him only two or three years to live after the accident. ... When Mr Grzebski had his accident Poland was still ruled by its last communist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski. ... The following year's elections ushered in eastern Europe's first post-communist government. Poland joined the Nato alliance in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

"Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin," he told Polish television. "When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Mr Grzebski said. "What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning," said Mr Grzebski. "I've got nothing to complain about."

Every so often, I try to stop and remember what life used to be like. I try to talk to people who remember what life was like in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's. Really, we don't have it so bad today.

So, as you go through your day, try to have an attitude of gratitude -- no matter what happens.

The Ladies Home Journal predicts the future, in 1900. Our "now" was their nearly unimaginable future. Their vision of our present tells us more about them then it does about us, I'm afraid.

Some of the predictions are fairly prescient:

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.

Others missed the mark by a mile:

There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.

At the time, adding new states was a fairly common occurence. Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii hadn't yet become states in 1900. So, of course, they thought it reasonable that eventually most of Latin and South America would decide to join the Union.

Check it out. Not only was it fun reading, but it's a warning against getting too smug about our own understanding of the future.

Vitamin C doesn't do much to fight colds, lycopene probably doesn't prevent cancer, and eating a quarter of a grapefruit a day could kill you.

Kinda shakes up your world, doesn't it?

The Club for Growth exists to "promote public policies that promote economic growth primarily through legislative involvement, issue advocacy, research, training and educational activity." They influence politics through the Club for Growth PAC. "The primary tactic of the separate Club for Growth PAC is to provide financial support from Club members to viable pro-growth candidates to Congress, particularly in Republican primaries."

Last year, they supported Tim Walberg against a tax-happy Republican incumbent. That support paid off last weekend, when Walberg -- a freshman congressman -- urged newly elected Blue Dog Democrats to support the Bush tax cuts.

Democrats in Congress are discounting advancements made possible by the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts passed by Congress and are trying to slap U.S. taxpayers with a $400 billion tax increase that will slow our economy's current progress.

If Democrats follow through on their budget promises, the American people will face the following:

• A $500 per child tax increase.
• A 55 percent Death Tax.
• A 13 percent tax increase for many small businesses.
• A 33 percent tax increase on capital gains.
• A 164 percent tax increase on dividends.

I believe Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress must join together to ensure the American economy is not crippled by a massive tax increase. I recently introduced the Tax Increase Prevention Act, legislation that would make permanent tax relief passed in 2001 and 2003.

My bill simply takes away all the sunset provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax relief packages that passed Congress and provides American families and job-creators the certainty to plan for the future.

If my bill becomes law, the American people will see none of the tax increases Democrats are proposing on things like marriage, childbirth, adoption, earning money, saving money, paying college loans and dying.

Well played, sir.

If you're not already keeping tabs on James Lileks' website, you really should start. He has an absolute genius for taking the ordinary events of life and turning then into comedy gold. While there, you can check out the Gallery of Regrettable Food and Interior Desecrations. Also not to be missed -- Ozark Vacation Dee-Lites. You'll laugh, you'll cry. Actually, you'll laugh until you cry.

If you want the unique perspective on every day life, check out the Daily Bleat. I really enjoyed his series on Disney World (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

Here's an enjoyable bit from today's Bleat:

Tonight I made the worst tacos ever. Home tacos never hit the spot like restaurant tacos. I suspect there's one key spice they withhold from the home market, available only to certain people with the right connections. A powerful, shady cabal. Once the mailman delivered a copy of "Taco Insider" to the wrong address, and the entire family disappeared. They found their bodies in a Mexican grave. Cause of death: they'd been smothered with cheese. The ingredient is probably MSG, I know. But I'd like to think it's a special pepper that tastes different than the other peppers. I've always wondered about those "Five Pepper Blends" "“ wouldn't the strongest pepper render the rest moot? No one dumps five different peppers on their tongue, waits for the burn to leave, then picks up the delicate under flavor of the shy, retiring peppers. I know I'll get mail from pepper enthusiasts who could put a habenero up one nostril and a jalapeno up the other and identify them without hesitation, but for me "“ Mr. Oven Mitt Palate, Mr. Asbestos-Glove-For-Tongue "“ I can't tell. Still, home tacos are just off. Tonight I tried Old El Paso's Stand and Stuff Salsa flavored shells. Everyone had the expression of an elderly municipal librarian finding clown porn on a computer screen.

Go. Read. Laugh. Enjoy the stuff of life.

According to p. 127 of The Best, Worst, & Most Unusual, by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler:

"When a women's collective claimed credit for the bombing of Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, in October 1970, the Cambridge police gallantly defended them.

'This was a very sophisticated bomb,' a police spokesman said. 'We feel that women wouldn't be capable of making such a bomb.'"

PS: Even more ironic is that the 1970 Harvard bombing is primarily remembered by historians as "a moment of light", as the explosives accomplished little real damage to the facility but did successfully unearth the long-lost Bonfil Collection, a set of nearly 29,000 photos of the Middle East so valuable as to be called "one of the great photographic collections of all time." The discovery revitalized the entire institute. Read a full article on it here.

Women in Muslim countries are routinely beaten, raped, stoned, and murdered by the men around them. As such, the Muslim world is the main front in the battle for sexual equality. Of course, you wouldn't know it by the way that American feminists act or speak.

Eve Ensler takes this line of reasoning to equally ludicrous lengths. In 2003 she gave a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in which, like Pollitt, she claimed that women everywhere are oppressed and subordinate:

I think that the oppression of women is universal. I think we are bonded in every single place of the world. I think the conditions are exactly the same [her emphasis]. I think the nature of the oppression--whether it's acid burning in one country, or female genital mutilation in another, or gang rapes in the parking lots in high schools of the suburbs--it's the same idea. . . . The systematic global oppression of women is completely across the globe.

That's from Christina Hoff Sommers' article in this week's edition of the Weekly Standard.

Feminists are also completely unable to tell the difference between American Christians and Afghan Taliban:

Katha Pollitt, a columnist at the Nation, talks of "the common thread of misogyny" connecting Christian Evangelicals to the Taliban:

It is important to remember just how barbarous and cruel the Taliban were. Yet it is also important not to use their example to obscure or deny the common thread of misogyny that connects them with Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. . . .

Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katha Pollitt wrote the introduction to a book called Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror. It aimed to show that reactionary religious movements everywhere are targeting women. Says Pollitt:

In Bangladesh, Muslim fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women; in Nigeria, newly established shariah courts condemn women to death by stoning for having sex outside of wedlock. . . . In the United States, Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have forged a powerful right-wing political movement focused on banning abortion, stigmatizing homosexuality and limiting young people's access to accurate information about sex.

Ah, yes. Limiting young people's access to accurate information about sex is exactly the same as having acid thrown in your face. Christina explains, in her article, that none of America's feminists are willing to help out Muslim women:

One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the "underrepresentation" of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women's movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.

As a result, she has some fairly harsh words for American feminists:

Muslim women could use moral, intellectual, and material support from the West to improve their situation. But only a rational, reality-based women's movement would be capable of actually helping. Women who think that looking like a pear is an essential human right are not valuable allies.

Extremely true. Is it any wonder that many people would like to marginalize American feminists and do everything possible to keep them away from the reigns of power?

It's unfortunate that American feminists are unwilling to join the battle in any meaningful way. Sexual equality in Muslim nations could go a long way towards ending the cycle of terrorism that infects those nations:

Women's equality is as incompatible with radical Islam's plan for domination and submission as it is with polygamy. Women freely moving about, expressing their opinions, and negotiating their relationships with men from a position of equal dignity rather than servitude are a moderating, civilizing force in any society. Female scholars voicing their opinions without inhibition would certainly puncture some cherished jihadist fantasies.

Read the entire article in this week's edition of the Weekly Standard. It's well worth your time. You'll discover the America is just as harsh towards women as Uganda and Pakistan. You'll also discover organizations like the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity (WISE) which work to help Muslim women in oppressive societies. Consider donating to the cause. Unlike America's feminists, I think these women are worth supporting.

Earlier this week, Reason Magazine columnist Cathy Young asked why is it still illegal to pay for sex?

Yet prostitution is perhaps the ultimate victimless crime: a consensual transaction in which both parties are supposedly committing a crime, and the person most likely to be charged"”the one selling sex"”is also the one most likely to be viewed as the victim. (A bizarre inversion of this situation occurs in Sweden, where, as a result of feminist pressure to treat prostitutes as victims, it is now a crime to pay for sex but not to offer it for sale.) It is sometimes claimed that the true victims of prostitution are the johns' wives. But surely women whose husbands are involved in noncommercial"”and sometimes quite expensive"”extramarital affairs are no less victimized.

Another common claim is that prostitution causes direct harm by contributing to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. However, that may be the reddest herring of them all. In Australia, where sex for money is legal, the rate of HIV infection among female prostitutes is so low that prostitution has been removed from the list of known risk factors in HIV surveillance. In the U.S., reliable data are more difficult to come by, but a 1987 Centers for Disease Control study likewise found very low infection rates among prostitutes.

Why is prostitution illegal? From a Biblical perspective, I have a very hard time distinguishing between prostitution and plain old adultery. In one case, one person directly pays another for sex. In the other case, one person indirectly pays another for sex through dinners, compliments, movies, and other outings. Why should it be illegal to pay a someone for a sex, but not illegal to take a co-worker out for dinner and drinks before going back to their apartment for sex?

I think the common answer is that sex should only be enjoyed within the context of a loving relationship -- that it shouldn't be commoditized and sold like any other service. I would agree that sex shouldn't be routinely bought and sold. I'm not at all certain that all prostitution occurs outside of a loving relationship. After all, some women would certainly leave a man if he didn't provide enough expensive gifts. Why should we classify cash payments any differently? I am certain that not all adultery occurs in the context of a loving relationship. Many men and women will commit adultery purely out spite and not because they love the person they are committing adultery with.

Simply put, I think there can be a lot of overlap between prostitution and adultery -- and adultery are equally morally objectionable. I don't see the distinction that makes one worthy of criminalization and the other "merely" worthy of scorn.

I'll talk later about whether I think adultery should be criminalized.

The Thirsty Theologian: God Gave C2H6OPart 5: To Abstain or not to Abstain

"I know there's nothing wrong with alcohol, but I abstain for the weaker brother."

What is wrong with that statement? Absolutely nothing, in the right context. However, if that means abstinence as a lifestyle, and categorizing everyone who disapprove

(tags: christianity southernbaptist alcohol abstinence)

The Thirsty Theologian: God Gave C2H6OPart 6: Answering Objections

David wraps up the series.

(tags: christianity southernbaptist alcohol abstinence)

Cato-at-liberty » Charity Chased Hence by Rancor's Hand

The worldview that holds that the same amount of money voluntarily spent on direct charity would have been better spent if only it had been coercively appropriated through a wasteful process of political competition, filtered through a squandering bureauc

(tags: politics government charity rentseeking)