Quote of the day

Yes, I'm a man possessed by many demons. Polite demons that would open a door for a lady carrying too many parcels: but demons nonetheless.

- Kevin McDonald, Kids in the Hall, Season 2 Episode 2.

The "vice" in middle-school vice principal

If you don't home school your kids, you might want to consider it.

(H/T: Volokh Conspiracy, Boing-Boing.)

Happy Valentine's Day Eve

When Linux guys fall for Windows chicks.

How many communists does it take to row a boat?

Luo Yuan, a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences, gave an interview with Reuters (via Best of the Web):

"Just like two people rowing a boat, if the United States first throws the strokes into chaos, then so must we."

(Note to self: never, ever row a boat with this guy.)

Dealing with our government

February 3, 2010

Submitter

United States Patent and Trademark Office
Notice of Document Faxed Upside Down

Your request to record a document in the United States Patent and Trademark Office was received via electronic fax on XXXX.

The faxed submission was received upside down. We are unable to continue processing these images.

Please resubmit your document.

If you have any questions, you may contact our customer service center at XXXX.

Office of Public Records
Assignment Division

Source: Eric Sherman at Bnet.

Mel Gibson

On the New York Times' website, Neil Genzlinger writes about Mel Gibson's newest film. His little blurb begins

Despite the occasional foray into biblical interpretation or drunken anti-Semitic outburst, Mel Gibson has always been about fighting injustice, and his latest film, "Edge of Darkness," which opens on Friday, is no exception.

I presume that the "foray into biblical interpretation" is Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. Thus it seems that the New York Times is a newspaper that thinks that executing convicted criminals in an injustice, but that the Crucifixion wasn't.

Groundhog day?

I just saw a school pass pass another school bus with its lights flashing. Does that mean 6 more weeks of winter?

Fairfield County Realtors behaving unethically

Who'd have thought?

War on Christmas vs. the war on H1N1

Taunton, Massachusetts's town website announces that, in order to combat hospital infections, children under the age of 18 aren't allowed to visit people at Morton Hospital anymore. No exceptions, "including siblings and children of patients."

So if your mom is dying and you want to see her one last time before Christmas then tough luck, kid. And if that bothers you, leave. Taunton is no place for cry-babies.

War on Christmas gets nastier

In Taunton Massachusetts, some second-grade children were drawing holiday pictures. One little boy drew a picture of Jesus on the cross. His father says that this was probably the picture:

It seems that his principal asked "why did you use x's for his eyes?" The little boy replied "because he's dead." So naturally the principal consulted with the school psychiatrist and refused to let the 8-year old return to school unless his family got a letter from a psychiatrist certifying that he wasn't a threat to the school.

The rest of the story is predictable. The kid's dad was angry, the school superintendent wrote a smarmy response, and the traumatized kid was transfered to a new school (which is probably traumatic in itself for most 8-year-olds.)

Want to fight back for this little boy? Tell someone "Merry Christmas" today, and mean it.

War on Christmas gets weirder

The War on Christmas is getting weirder: the Obama White House has moved the White House creche to a less prominent spot, to try to make Christmas "more inclusive".

Actually, according to the New York Times they were going to get rid of the creche altogether, but then decided that that was too provocative, and then finally changed their mind again and moved it into a dark corner. I would be remiss if I failed to point out that this is a repeat in miniature of the President's Afghanistan policies over the last year. Let's hope that bin Laden is less competent at defending himself than the baby Jesus.

Quote of the day

All around me people cough. I particularly object to bronchitis as a substitute for incidental music.

- Alexander Wolcott, Mr. W's Little Game

Quote of the day

Before nominating her for U.S. Attorney General for Montana, Senator Max Baucus gave the staffer he was bonking a $14,000 raise and took her along with him on a taxpayer-paid junket to Asia. At least Tiger Woods pays his prostitutes from his own pocket.

- Christopher Fountain, For What It's Worth

Help wanted in Santa Cruz

A job ad: (via Minding the Campus)

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive. Appointment Range: Associate Librarian III - Librarian I, with an approximate salary range of $52,860 - $68,892, commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Things to be afraid of (3)

Your government is out to help you.

When a small church comes to the Bowery Mission bearing fried chicken with trans fat, unwittingly breaking the law, they’re told “thank you.” Then workers quietly chuck the food, mission director Tom Bastile said.

“It’s always hard for us to do,” Basile said. “We know we have to do it.”
(from Metro International.)

Things to be afraid of (2)

Things to be afraid of

Miss Arab World 2009.

God bless Russia

According to Interfax (via Religion Clause), the Russian Communist party wants to change the Russian national anthem. Its second verse refers to Russia as "Our native land kept safe by God" (Хранимая Богом родная земля.)

The communists want to change this to "Our native land kept safe by ourselves". Of course, when the communists ruled Russia their unspoken motto was "Everything in this land belongs to us".

God bless America

According to the Kansas City Star, a 21-year old Milwaukee college student was walking home

when he was pulled into an alley and told to lay face down with a gun to his neck. Four men took his wallet, $16, keys and his cell phone.

But the reservist said that when one of the men saw an Army ID in the wallet, he told the others to return the items. He also apologized and thanked the reservist for serving.

The reservist said one robber gave him a quick fist bump before walking away.

The victim asked not to be identified because the robbers still have his keys.

Fort Hood shooter attended mosque with 9/11 hijackers

Nidal Hasan, the Army major who murdered at least 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, attended mosque with three of the 9/11 hijackers.

Some people, who clearly have never served in the military, are asking why Major Hasan was allowed to be in the Army. (The government even paid for his medical school.) After all, he openly proclaimed his sympathy for other Islamic terrorists and he was even disciplined for trying to convert his patients to Islam. These are probably the same people who think that Heller's Catch-22 was an over-the-wall satire instead of a piercing social commentary.

But Michelle Malkin asks the next obvious question: "Why is it that we have to read British papers to get the unvarnished truths about the Ft. Hood Muslim mass murderer?"

There'll always be an England

The reigning Miss England, Rachel Christie, has been de-crowned. (I almost typed "de-missed", but stopped myself just in time.) It seems that she had gotten into a bar fight and punched Miss Manchester in the face several times.

"Parents not politicians" storms Norwalk Board of Ed

Bwaha-ha-ha-ha fools now you have to serve on the Board of Education My congratulations to Steve Colarossi, Artie Kassimis, Erin McNeil Halsey and Sue Haynie for their heroic election to the Norwalk Board of Education. Yeah, team!

Quote of the day

If a beginning graduate student sought my advice about, say, studying Africa I would first ask about his or her politics. If they were even slightly "conservative," I'd suggest switching fields, perhaps taking up mathematical modeling since PC faculty hate that stuff and can't read it anyhow.

- Robert Weissberg, "Rescuing the University"

First they came for Rupert Murdoch ...

... and then they came for edmunds.com. (Note to President Obama: we like you. You're our chief executive. "Dignity of the office" isn't just a campaign catchphrase. It's a noble goal to live for when you hold a public trust.)

Halloween creepiness

Here's the official word from the Democratic Party about what sort of place they want America to be:

One of the 20 finalists in health care video contest run by Barack Obama’s campaign arm features a mural of an America flag splattered with health care graffiti until it’s covered completely by black paint.

In the video – which is accompanied by the sound of a heart monitor pumping and then flat-lining – words such as “pre-existing conditions,” “homeless” and “death panel” ultimately obliterate the flag, which reappears on screen seconds later with the words “Health Will Bring Our Country Back to Life” on the blue field where the 50 stars usually are.

The finalists were chosen by a panel of Democratic National Committee “employee judges.”

It's not surprising that some of the Democratic filmmakers who lost out to this hymn of hate don't think choosing it was a good idea.

“They should never pick that,” said the contestant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It makes the Democrats look really, really bad.”

Gee, doesn't the fact that a committed Democratic activist only feels comfortable dissenting under condition of anonymity show the Democrats in an even worse light?

On the scale of totalitarian creepiness, I find this video scarier than this one, but not nearly as creepy as this one. Happy Halloween!

Love laughs at locksmiths

From The Hill, via Volokh:

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren’t present.

Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.

For months Towns has refused Republican requests to subpoena records in the case. Last Thursday Committee Republicans, led by Issa, were poised to force an open vote on the subpoenas at a Committee mark-up meeting. The mark-up was abruptly canceled. Only Republicans showed up while Democrats chairs remained empty.

The Democrats kept those pesky Republicans from holding hearings by the simple expedient of locking the committee room's door. My favorite quote from the story:

Towns’s office said in a statement the locks were changed on Republicans "because they don't know how to behave."

I'd like to use this as an example of the Democratic party turning our country into a kleptocracy, but really this illustrates something even worse: there are too many lawyers in Congress. If only one of the committee members was a locksmith instead of a lawyer, we'd be halfway to investigating Countrywide's lending practices by now!

Henry Kissinger and Yassar Arafat, eat your hearts out

The president is to be awarded the Nobel prize. Details are here.

Oops, I meant to say that the details are here. I can't imagine what I was thinking.

Salvador Polanksi

Writing about the reaction to Roman Polanksi's extradition, Jim Lindgren quotes George Orwell's discussion of Salvador Dali's autobiography. I hope I'll have time to read Orwell's essay tonight.

James Thurber wrote a wonderful autobiographical review of Dali's autobiography. It had the memorable line:

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.

I read that line in a paperback collection hidden behind a textbook during French class in the seventh grade. The teacher was very annoyed at my giggling.

Today is the 400th anniversary of Gallileo's telescope

Sonnet -- To Science

  by Edgar Allan Poe

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! 

  Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, 

  Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? 

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise? 

  Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering 

To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies, 

  Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? 

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? 

  And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 

To seek a shelter in some happier star? 

  Has thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, 

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me 

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

A very Colorado story

According to the Colorado Daily, Justin Chentnik

a sous chef at a retirement home, says he was completely naked in bed about 4 a.m. Friday when Skip, the mini goldendoodle he was watching for friends, started barking up a storm. His friend and roommate, Laura Nelson, swore someone was in the house, but he told her to go back to bed.

Miss Nelson, who I think we can safely say is a force to be reckoned with, threw a glass of water in Justin's face and told him to go out and investigate the noise. Justin, still naked, went outside and saw someone attempting to steal Miss Nelson's car. Justin seemed to be less afraid of tackling a car thief in the buff than reporting failure to his roommate: he jumped into the passenger side of the moving car and wrestled the thief to the ground.

In the struggle, the thief hit Justin with a bottle of Louis Jadot Pinot Noir that he happened to be holding, but Justin managed to subdue him in the end. (I should pause and note that the thief, confronted by a naked man jumping into a moving car and wrestling him to the ground, had the presence of mind to grab a bottle of cheap wine as he was being dragged from the car. Could a fondness for alcohol explain why he took up a life of crime?)

The police arrived to find Justin still straddling the car thief's chest. Skip, the mini snickerdoodle, brought Justin his underwear so that the police didn't have to get a statement from a naked witness. The Daily's reporter, regretably, didn't follow up on this angle of the story. Is Skip trained to fetch Justin's underwear? Is this a common chore in their household? For that matter, why didn't Laura Nelson bring Justin's underwear out? It seems that, having given the dog Skip some underwear and instructing Skip to bring it to Justin, she had full confidence that her instructions would be carried out and saw no need to go herself. I suppose this gives us yet another brief insight into her masterful and enigmatic personality.

Quote of the day

The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.

- Tom Waits

Photography

Ellen van Deelen has too much time on her hands.

To the moon

A real gee-whiz moment: the Virtual AGC and AGS project has put the source code for the Apollo 11 lander and orbiter computers online, together with an emulator for running them. (The comments on Lambda the Ultimate are more interesting than the source code itself.)

Now, about that planet Mars ...

Condolences

We're awfully sad to hear that Saad bin Laden has passed away. If anyone knows how to reach his father, please let the nearest US embassy know so that we can send him our condolences.

The Wizard of Oz

I'm glad I'm not a lawyer, but I'm even gladder that I'm not on jury duty.

Freedom: use it or lose it

Forty years ago yesterday, Buzz Aldrin became the first man to serve holy communion on the moon. I wasn't aware of this until I read David Water's column this morning:

Aldrin's brief and private Christian service never caused a flap, but it could have. Aldrin has said that he planned to broadcast the service, but NASA at the last minute asked him not to because of concerns about a lawsuit filed (later dismissed) by atheist Madelyn Murray O'Hare after Apollo 8 astronauts read from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas.

Don't think that there are worse things than censoring national heroes while they are actually in the process of risking their lives for humanity? Think again! Australian historian Roel Van Leeuwen had his thesis, Dreamers of the Dark: Kerry Bolton and the Order of the Left Hand Path, a Case-study of a Satanic New-Nazi Society removed from the University of Waikato's library for 8 months because, and I'm not making this up, there was concern that he was not being fair to the Nazis. After suppressing the thesis for the better part of a year, Waikato's Chancellor, and again I point out that I'm not making this up, told reporters that his insitution "was a place of academic rigour which did not shy away from tackling controversial research."

Ugh. Thank goodness we still have freedom to speak and write in the United States, huh?

Thank goodness you can't believe a politician

Before going to Cairo last month, President Obama told the world that the United States is a "Muslim Nation."

Thank goodness that this is just another one of his empty promises.

Scary pictures

Here's a quick personality test. Which of the following pictures do you find to be the scariest:

or this:

or this:

Tough to decide, huh?

Tough to be a girl today

... especially when men act like pigs when you threaten them

... and when other women act like fools when you disagree with them

... or when being a girl sucks in its own right.

Our European friends

Our German allies in Afghanistan are no doubt brave and well-meaning. But they are only a token force, and furthermore their leaders have nevertheless allowed them to do almost no fighting during the course of the war.

Now it seems that German forces consumed 90,000 bottles of wine and 1,700,000 liters of beer in Afghanistan alone. In a single year. (Most other countries' soldiers aren't allowed to consume alcohol in the war zone.)

Germany has only contributed 3,300 soldiers: so if they drink this much it may very well be that it's a good thing that they aren't doing more fighting.

A confession

We're commanded to love everyone, but I have a lot of trouble feeling sorry for

• Gregory McCalium, who tried to rob an elderly man at knifepoint. The elderly man turned out to be a retired boxer and, well, you can guess the rest
• Ruth Madoff, who has been reduced to living on a measly $2,500,000
• Any parent selfish enough let a pet python into their home
• Married men who have "tragic love affairs"
• Anyone who doesn't like Mollie Sugden.

Who am I kidding? I feel sorry for them all.

Hug your family this weekend

Michael Jackson's family is going to charge admission for his memorial service.

Family resemblence

The picture on the left is Moreelse's portrait of Ambrogio Spinola, Marquis of the Balbases and Governor of Milan (1569-1630.)

The picture on the right is Mike Spinola's High School yearbook picture.

Coincidence? I think not.

I won't be eating at Subway any time soon

Subway terminated the lease of a franchise owner who was fighting in Afghanistan, sold it to a Subway insider for $35,000, who then sold it for $135,000.

Apollo Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment ends

On July 20, 1969 two American astronauts stepped onto the moon's surface. They weren't tourists, they went there to do important work. One of their jobs was to place a mirror on the moon, so that scientists on the earth can precisely measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a laser.

For 40 years, the government has been observing the mirrors that were placed on the moon during this period, but alas the government has decided that the cost of the laser ranging (about $125,000 a year) is more than the science produced is worth.

Quote of the day

Dude, if a park ranger warns you about the bears, it ain't cause he's tryin to keep all the bear hugs for himself.

- Questionable Content, via CJ Biro's Facebook page.

Friday morning arts notes

A neat video from the Newark Museum about blowing glass beads in Ghana. (Disclosure: my freshman roommate from college, Tim Wintemberg, is the museum's Director of Exhibition Design.)

Some photos that Aesop would have taken credit for, if he had a camera.

A photo that nobody would want to take credit for.

An essay that I really, really, really think isn't funny.

An exhibition that I'm too busy to go see.

An exhibition that's well worth running the gauntlet of the Frick's rude staff.

Pot meet kettle

From his web site :

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced today that he has asked several companies -- packaging, beverage and food manufacturers -- to provide details about an apparent campaign to use fear tactics, political manipulation and misleading marketing to fight regulation of bisphenol A (BPA).

The Attorney General is supposed to uphold the laws of the State, so I suppose that now Mr. Blumenthal thinks that publicly disagreeing with him is unlawful. And if part of whatever suit he brings is that the manufacturers are using "fear tactics" and "political manipulation", is he going to call himself as an expert witness?

(hat tip to Walter Olson.)

Moving registered sex offenders nearer to Columbus School

I went to the Zoning Commission meeting last night. Does anyone read H.P. Lovecraft nowadays?

There are vocal qualities peculiar to men; and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.
- Call of Cthulhu

A foreign country

For the first time in centuries, a common criminal in England is being tried without the right to a jury. The judge (whose name, confusingly, is Judge) explained that

trial by jury is a hallowed principle of the administration of criminal justice. It is properly identified as a right, available to be exercised by a defendant unless and until the right is amended or circumscribed by express legislation.

If a "right" that is available until amended or circumscribed strikes you as oxymoronic, well, that's what you get if you have a living constitution instead of a written one that's taken seriously.

David Letterman decides to act like a man

Finally.

Liked machines machines machines

I saw machines machines machines machines machines machines machines. At long last, a play about real people acting realistically.

Hope for the future

I saw two t-shirts this weekend that gave me hope for the future. I'm not sure why. The first I saw for sale on the street near NYU. It read:

Kim Jong Il is Illin'!

The second was being worn by a teenager in Norwalk:

OK, so I took the road less travelled. Now where am I?

Quote of the day

Always use the proper tool. If the proper tool isn't available, use a hammer.

- Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer of the Starship Enterprise, as quoted by Charly Kühnast.

You know from the title this happened in New Jersey

Lawyer Reprimanded for Alleged 'Cut You Up' Remark to Adversary's Client

The New Jersey Supreme Court on Tuesday disciplined a lawyer who allegedly told an opposing party, "I'm going to cut you up into bits and pieces, put you into a box and send you to India and your parents won't recognize you."

(Via Overlawyered. The discipline, by the way, seems to have consisted of a written reprimand.)

"The President doesn't negotiate second rounds"

Oh, and anyone who asserts any legal rights is a "terrorist".

Promising start of a marriage

Bride saves family from burning house

Shortly before 5:30 Sunday evening, Clemons, formerly Georgette Fogary, had just been married to Charles Clemons and was being driven from Testo's restaurant where the reception was held when she spotted smoke coming from the Eitelberg's home.

Hanifah Bost, who was driving the car, said Clemons suddenly yelled, "Stop the car, stop the car."

"There was smoke coming from this house and as soon as I stopped the car, Georgette got out in her wedding dress and ran toward the front door." She said Clemons ran through the smoke into the house and she ran after her.

"I don't know what she was thinking, she had just got married," Bost said.

What a way to begin a life together. Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Clemons!

Why my next car is going to be an Acura

From the New York Times:

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry

David Bernstein's observation:

It's funny, but just the other day I was telling my wife that I hope the automobile industry's future ... is in the hands of early 30-something political operatives working on law degrees from Yale who have no formal background in business, economics, engineering, or marketing.

Alleged homicidal rapists tip well

Pizza delivery man Chris Turner called the police to report that while delivering an extra-large supreme pizza to a remote mountain cabin, he noticed a woman whose hands were tied together. The police raided the cabin and rescued the woman. Her husband later called Mr. Turner to thank him, and said that his wife was doing well. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed the driver:

“I was doing my job and being a citizen,” the 32-year-old deliveryman said. “Plus, I got $13 off the delivery. That’s not bad for a half an hour.”

Bad numbers

Only about 27% of the aspiring elementary school math teachers this year in Massachussetts passed the mathematics portion of the state licensing examination. Even scarier, this was the first year that new teachers needed to path the math portion: in previous years, you only needed an overall passing grade.

In other words, if this is a typical year, then 73% of all Mass. elementary school teachers in the field don't know school mathematics.

According to the Boston Globe, Tom Scott, the executive director of the state association of school superintendents, thinks that this is because new teachers aren't getting a good college education:

If you look at transcripts of some applicants for elementary school teaching positions, it's possible you could see a transcript without anything math related. Someone could have last taken a math class in high school.

This is not by any means a difficult test; if my fifth-grade teacher had given to me and I failed, my parents would have been very angry. Ironically though, my fifth-grade teacher probably had a real college degree instead of an "education" degree, so she wouldn't be allowed to teach nowadays anyway.

Most appropriate use of the "F" word ever

http://federalism.typepad.com/crime_federalism/2009/05/most-surreal-experience-of-my-life.html

The Jenny McCarthy Body Count

Derek Bartholomaus has been keeping track of the number of people (mosty children) whom Jenny McCarthy has helped to kill with her advocacy of the anti-vaccination movement. Movin' Meat notes simply that "there is a knowable cost of unimmunized children, in preventable illnesses, and preventable deaths."

Humanitarian of the Year

Christopher DiMeo has reportedly confessed to the cold-blooded murder of the Mr. and Mrs. Donnelly in Fairfield.

In light of this magnanimous gesture, his lawyers are asking the judge to force the prosecutors to drop the death penalty. As they explain:

The defense lawyers claim a guilty plea and a life sentence would end a process that could take an additional 10 to 15 years and cost state taxpayers millions of dollars.

"His guilty plea and sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of release would save Connecticut's taxpayers millions of dollars in desperately needed funds during this time of severe economic crisis in our state and our nation," they state.

What a nice guy!

Self-explanatory headline

Obama White House bars press from press award ceremony

- Los Angeles Times, via Instapundit.

St. Patrick's Day in Ireland

President Obama stopped in Ireland yesterday. From the UK's Sky News:

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address in Washington when he realised it all sounded a bit too familiar.

It was. He was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.

Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: "That's your speech."

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the "teleprompt president" over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.

(via Best of the Web.)

Mendeleev to the max!

The periodic table of awesoments.

Te Deum laudus *

Charles Freeman won't be the next Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

(* laudus to the real Deus, not to Mr. Obama. What in the world was the President thinking?)

Life imitates Douglas Adams

From Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Pages one and two had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of nest which the eagle had invented. It was constructed largely of papier-mache and it was virtually impossible for a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of it. The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it.

From the Associated Press:

HONG KONG (AP) - Even the magpies are trying to blend in in the metal and concrete jungle that is Hong Kong. News reports said that a pair of common magpies built a nest on a tree in Hong Kong's Tuen Mun district using scrap metal twigs believed to have been collected from a nearby construction site.

The Sunday Morning Post reported the metal nest was discovered after some of the twigs started falling off the tree and hitting pedestrians.

Stubborn as a mule

The new administration is trying to decide whether to allow people to drive mules without a criminal background check.

(Ken at Popehat's observation is that it's all fun and games until someone flies a mule into the Capitol building.)

Kids today

What is it nowadays with kids dressing up as cops? A few weeks ago Lowering the Bar had the story of a 14-year old Chicago boy who dressed up as a police officer and showed up for work.

The boy, who had once been a member of the "Police Explorers" youth club, apparently showed up at a South Side police station wearing a regulation uniform and claiming to be an officer. A police spokeswoman said that a sergeant "later questioned the boy" and discovered he was not what he claimed to be. True, but according to at least one report, "later" turned out to be several hours later, and only after the "rookie" had been assigned a partner and ridden along on a patrol.

Then in Berlin two weeks ago, two children pretending to be paramilitaries were mistaken for thieves at a factory.

And finally, the Austrian Times reports that the police thwarted a ruthless band of teenage desperadoes who were dressing up in police uniforms and stopping motorists for speeding.

The police in Austria seem to be more on-the-ball than the Chicago police: the teens were caught when they stopped an off-duty policeman, who arrested them. (I liked their judge's money line: "I cannot believe anyone believed you were cops. I would have had a laughing fit!" Judges rarely get to make zingers like that except on TV.)

What's going on here? Is there some TV show that featured kids dressing up as policemen that gave teenagers a similar bad idea in three countries at the same time? Or should we blame the parents? I guess if starts happening in Iran, they'll blame Harry Potter.

Quote of the day

Now, here is where having a logic- and math-challenged Congress really begins to hurt.

- Hodak Value

Hamoud Bin Saleh arrested in Saudi Arabia

Our Saudi allies have arrested another hardened criminal, Hamoud Bin Saleh, for the horrible crime of converting to Christianity. He faces torture and then the death penalty. Meanwhile, here is a complete list politically connected Saudis who have been arrested for their financial support of Al Quaeda and Palestinian suicide bombers:

     (crickets chirping)

Alack, alas, alackaday

Among the casualties in Microsoft’s recently announced plan to lay off five thousand employees is the entire team behind Flight Simulator.

- Patrick at Popehat

Note to self

Mustn't put a tube of hydrocortisone cream next to the toothpaste. Mustn't put a tube of hydrocortisone cream next to the toothpaste. Mustn't put a tube of hydrocortisone cream next to the toothpaste ... on the other hand, there has been a pleasant tingly sensation in my mouth all day.

The wheels of justice grind on

The CIA has reportedly killed Fahid Mohammed Ali Msalam and Sheikh Ahmed Salem Swedan in Northern Pakistan, only 7 years, 3 months and 21 days after the crimes of 9/11.

Drew M. at Ace of Spades' headline was: "Two Top Al Qaeda Figures Killed By Vicious New Year's Eve Hangovers And Hellfire Missiles But Mostly Hellfire Missiles."

Current events

From a letter to the Wall Street Journal today by Murray Ross, of Pleasant Hill, California:

I must have dozed off and skipped a page. Our new policy is to sell government bonds to raise cash to give to private equity firms to lend to non-creditworthy borrowers so they can drive new Chevy Suburbans down our crumbling roads and bridges, converting Middle East oil into greenhouse gases at the highest possible rate?

New Year Quote

The academic partiality in recent years for telling multiple stories in preference to the urgent single narrative, whatever its intellectual merits, has deprived beginning students of those coordinates of time and space by which they might take their bearings. After all, a fact unconnected with other facts is no fact at all but a snippet of trivia. It is hardly art history alone that suffers in this respect.

- Michael J. Lewis, from a book review in the New Criterion, December 2008 (p. 14.)

I'll bet he didn't even use a silencer

Annoyed Viewer Shoots Noisy Man in Movie Theater

Merry non-Kwanzaa

Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year?

- Ann Coulter

Merry Christmas

Wishing you a "tense" Christmas.

Strangeness in Michigan

I confess that I think of Michigan as a place where even the loony left is boring; but two court cases in the news yesterday make me reconsider that prejudice. In the first court case, a harmless nut by the name of Diane Andersen Anderson was jailed for writing a web page that criticized a probate judge:

Twice Monday, [Wayne County Probate Judge David Szymanski] jailed Diane Anderson over the Web site and ordered the site to be “shut down immediately.”

“Yes, I was going to keep her in jail until the Web site was shut down,” Szymanski admitted Wednesday. He said he acted out of frustration with Anderson's argumentative behavior.

(Source: Detroit Free Press)

Judge Szymanski rescinded his order and ordered Ms. Anderson released after some lawyers pointed out that there are laws against locking people up for what they write. According to the Free Press, he said "I may take some lumps for that -- but so be it."

In the (creepily similar) second case, a Baptist minister called Edward Pinkney in Grand Rapids was jailed for quoting the book of Deuteronomy in a way that didn't flatter a state judge:

Judge Butzbaugh, it shall come to pass; if thou continue not to hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God to observe to do all that is right; which I command thee this day, that all these Curses shall come upon you and your family, curses shalt be in the City of St. Joseph and Cursed shalt thou be in the field, cursed shall come upon you and your family and over take thee; cursed shall be the fruit of thy body. The Lord shall smite thee with consumption and with a fever and with an inflammation and with extreme burning. They the demons shall Pursue thee until thou persist.

The quote is from a rag called the "People's Tribune", and Rev. Edward Pinkney is such a flake that he was only able to garner 1% of the vote in a Green Party primary. The gist of his story in the People's Tribune was that Judge Butzbaugh allowed a series of unlawful things to go on in his courtroom during Rev. Pinkey's trial. His most incredible accusations were that he was tried without even being arraigned; that he was convicted after a secret trial; and that a juror claimed to be a witness to one of the accused 's attorneys committing a crime in the parking lot of the court!

Normally if you heard accusations like this from a source like Rev. Pinkney in a paper like the People's Tribune you'd roll your eyes and ignore them. But now it's reasonable to wonder whether there's anything to his accusations. (At least, I so wonder. The reporter doesn't seem interested enough in Rev. Pinkney's allegations to tell us the back story.) What's going on in Michigan?

The House that Jack Built, part 2

FourthAmmendment.com gives a summary of the curious law case of Frohner v. City of Wildwood, 2008. According to the New Jersey Public Safety Officers Law Blog:

The lawsuit asserted numerous claims arising out of the arrest and handcuffing of plaintiff, an undercover FBI agent, by defendants, local police officers. Defendants suspected plaintiff was a motorcyclist impersonating an FBI agent.

FourthAmmendment.com's headline: "Irony of the Year Award: FBI undercover agent sues for false arrest while working undercover for impersonating an FBI agent".

Women in politics

From the Washington Post's Al Karmen: "Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party."

(Note to self: if were Sarah Palin instead, would the Post have even cared? Is it any wonder that women quit politics?)

Say it with pictures!

BoingBoing points out that the recent bank bailout has cost more (much more) than the most heroic government projects in our history. Wade at Voltage Creative, a marketing company, has put BoingBoing's numbers into pictures:


(Click to make the image bigger. I'm not endorsing BoingBoing's inflation-adjusted numbers. I don't know where they came from. But it's instructive to see that a marketing guru knew just how to present this data for maximum effect.)

What every defendant wants to hear from his prosecutor

We need to stop pointing fingers about things that are in the past that are out of our control.

- Tracey Cline. Ms. Cline is Durham, North Carolina's new District Attorney.

Cut-and-paste, or pride-and-prejudice

When I was in high school I did a one-week summer program at West Point. They had these nifty graphical X-terminals that used these new-fangled things called "mice". You painted over the text with the mouse and then you could cut text and paste it somewhere. I thought that was really neat.

Later, in college, I had an account on one computer and I could telnet or ftp into other computers in different rooms or cities. I thought this was really neat.

A few years ago I was at a trade fair and saw a program called VMWare, that lets you easily run a virtual computer inside another operating system. I thought that was really neat.

Yesterday I needed some emergency dental work, so now I'm rushing to get some projects done before the weekend. I need to cut-and-paste a lot of text between two pieces of mathematical software. One application is on a remote machine that I can only get to on my MacBook via Windows Remote Desktop running under XP running under Parallels running on my MacBook. The other application is on a remote Mac that I can only use via Mac Screen Sharing. It is running under XP on that Mac using VMWare. Every time I cut-and-paste the data it disappears. I suspect that some scientist in Mongolia is trying to figure out why my model data is appearing on his desktop. I don't think this is neat at all.

The sex life of computer scientists

According to Counterpoint Magazine, researchers have found that 83% if all Wellesley mathematics majors are virgins, but only 40% of all CS majors are. (Study: IQ Linked to Virginity.)

Who people are voting for and why (guest post)

From Lisa Archer:

I'm voting the opposite of my brother just to make him mad.


(Note from Jeff Hall: this woman's brother must have the patience of a saint.)

Who people are voting for and why (guest post)

From Ronald Corcillo:

I'm voting for Barack Obama because I make less than $200,000 a year and he wants to cut my taxes.

Oh, he's also the only candidate who's pledged to capture Osama Bin Laden, the guy who killed 3,000 Americans (including my best friend from college) over 7 years ago but has somehow been ignored by George W. Bush.

The Republicans continue to try the "If you can't make an argument, attack the plaintiff" approach. But for once, people aren't falling for the trumped-up personal attacks. People are actually voting based on the issues - and that spells a lot of trouble for the Republicans.

Election eve

In a few hours, barring another 2000 or 1876, we can all stop worrying whether John McCain has cancer or whether Barack Obama is going to surrender to al Quaeda. And of course even if your worst nightmare about either of these two men were true, the Republic would still survive and prosper. We have designed our Constitution so that the Executive branch is unitary, but surprisingly weak, and that's the way most people like it.

America in 2012 is probably going to look much the same whether President McCain or President Obama is running for reelection. They are both pretty smart, and our country is a big place that can mostly look out for itself.

But that doesn't mean that the character of the intervening four years aren't going to matter to us at the time. My greatest worry isn't that a President Obama would raise taxes or let Iran get the bomb or give his interesting Chicago associates government jobs. My worry is simply that he has demonstrated no respect for liberty, and has surrounded himself with people with no respect for dissent. Am I worried for nothing? Ah ...

• At the end of the longest and most expensive election in history, his campaign takes time out to persecute a small businesswoman for expressing a dissenting opinion.
• His operatives and allies go all out to publicly trash the reputation of a working-class Joe whose only crime was to ask Sen. Obama an unscripted question.
  
• When Joe Wurzelbacher refused to repent his sins, his campaign illegally searched government records in an attempt to find dirt on him.
• When Gov. Palin was nominated for Vice President, his prominent supporters claimed that her baby was actually her daughter's child. When it was revealed that this is impossible, since her daughter was herself pregnant, his prominent supporters launched on of the most vicious series of attacks in our nation's history on this innocent 17 year-old girl. (Even at the darkest moments of the 2000 election recount, could you have imagined that the liberal elite would ever countenance -- laugh at! -- vagina jokes about a Republican candidate's teenager daughter on network TV?)
  Sen. Obama has rightly distanced himself from these outrageous attacks on the baby and the teenager, but he hasn't publicly scolded or condemned Andrew Sullivan, Conan O'Brien any of the childrens' attackers by name.
• His lawyers have threatened legal action against the NRA for running ads that disagree with his characterization of his positions. (If John McCain did this to NOW or ACORN, his own supporters would threaten to abandon him. For that matter, I'd like to think that if Al Gore tried to muzzle his critics with legal threats, his supporters would have abandoned him too. We just don't do this sort of thing in America, do we?)
• In Missouri, Democratic Sheriffs threatened to arrest anyone who lies about Obama. (They later said that they had been misunderstood. Of course it was silly of the public to take them seriously. It's not like the power of arrest is anything to worry about nowadays, right?)
• He's kicked journalists off of his campaign plane who come from papers who don't show any loyalty to him.
  
• More generally, he seems to have a Nixonian ability to take simple criticism personally.

Summing up, my biggest worry is that the fawning personality cult around him goes considerable trouble to discredit and punish anyone who does not support him. Of course, he can't be blamed for what other people do, and good politicians are supposed to try to be popular. But, like Vladimir Putin, at the very least he does nothing to discourage his cult's excesses.

Obama Warns He May Cease To Exist Unless America Believes In Him

INDIANAPOLIS—Unless citizens throughout America keep him in their thoughts, say his name to themselves over and over, and otherwise believe in him with all their might, Barack Obama may cease to exist, the candidate warned supporters Thursday.

"My fellow Americans, I am currently very strong and very, very real," Sen. Obama told a cheering crowd of 12,000 at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. "Even here in Hoosier country, a traditional Republican stronghold, your faith has kept me from growing faint, becoming transparent, and slowly fading from view."

"But please, don't stop now," Obama added. "Unless you continue to believe in me, I'll completely disappear. You have to keep me in your thoughts at all times!"

- The Onion, via Overlawyered.com

Tolerating dissent takes practice

If McCain did this, it would be front-page news:

Journalists from three major newspapers that endorsed John McCain have been booted from Barack Obama’s campaign plane for the final leg of the presidential race.

- Fox News, quoted by Michelle Malkin. The papers banned from the plane are the Washington Times, the New York Post and Dallas Morning News.

Sign of the times

Susan Shea-Gerson of 75 Dingletown Road [in Greenwich] has responded to the recent theft of a McCain-Palin sign from her property with a new one - plus an original sign of her own.

"On 10/22 Obama supporters trespassed on my property and stole my McCain-Palin sign violating my 1st Amendment right to free speech," reads her white sign with block red letters. "Do it again and you will find out what the 2nd Amendment is all about."

- Colleen Flaherty in the Stamford Advocate

Cry, beloved country

New York Times Reporter Trolling 16-Year-Olds On Facebook For Dirt On Cindy McCain

Self-explanatory headline

Obama Campaign Angered by McCain's 'Sense of Humor' Comment

George W. Bush finally leaves the Republican party

Christine Arguello has been nominated as a Federal Judge.

Court grants custody of Christian girls to Muslim kidnappers

I first read about this story at Jihad Watch:

ISTANBUL, July 18 (Compass Direct News) – A Pakistani couple has appealed a court decision to award custody of their two daughters, 10 and 13, to the children’s alleged kidnappers. The court based its custody decision on the girls’ conversion to Islam.

Judge Main Naeem Sardar ruled Saturday (July 12) that Saba Masih, 13, and Aneela Masih, 10, had become Muslims, invalidating their Christian parents’ right to legal guardianship.

There are hundreds of stories like this in the press every year, but they rarely make the major newspapers or TV. If any Chrisitian country anywhere did this to a Muslim family, don't you think'd make the front page of the New York Times? (Together with a snotty editorial about how this is what happens when churches interfere with politics.)

Quote of the day

Je veux d'abord rendre grâce à Dieu et aux soldats de Colombie

- Ingrid Betancourt

Seal of approval

Yourct.com has an interesting observation about the spiffy new bike rack at the East Norwalk train station:

As with most simple things involving public/governmental property it took the efforts of a dedicated biker, Steve Rappaport, the Norwalk Parking Authority, the CT DOT, DPW, Mayor Moccia, State Senator Bob Duff and State Rep Chris Perone. I hear a seal from the Maritime Aquarium may have been involved, but it may only be a rumor.

Thought of the day

I just saw Speed Racer. I want a girlfriend who can fly a helicopter.

Quote of the day

... once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

-Peggy Noonan

You have the right to an attorney

Just when you thought that the Dr. Ian Rubins manslaughter case couldn't get any wierder, Mr. Bajramaj's lawyer proves you wrong:

Norwalk Advocate: Bajramaj's attorney, Darnell Crosland, has said the charges should be dismissed and the bond lowered to zero. Crosland cited an episode of the TV show "Law & Order" and another manslaughter case in Stamford in which defendants faced lower bonds than Bajramaj.

Quote of the Day

It's easy to have high self-esteem -- just aim low.

- Albert Bandura

Creepy quote of the day

... the overall presence of strong governmental control is healthy and should improve operational efficiency of the Games.

- 2001 Report of the IOC Evaluation Committee on Beijing. The committee was evaluating whether holding the Olympics in a communist dictatorship was a good idea. (Dominic Lawson. Mr. Lawson notes that "China and the Olympics are made for each other ... A super-sized portion of hardened commercialism, marinated in whipped-up nationalism and topped off with obsessive media control.")

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people ...

... seems so passé in Connecticut. The State Commission on Human Rights has ruled in favor of its investigator's report that anti-discrimination laws prevent the city from requiring timed exams ... on fireman exams. From the Stamford Advocate:

STAMFORD - The city discriminated against a firefighter with a learning disability by denying him extra time on a promotional test and it must be trained in disability law, state human rights officials ruled.

The state's Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities ruled the city violated anti-discrimination law by denying extra time to David Lenotti, a fire lieutenant with attention deficit disorder.

The city defended the denial by claiming a fire captain, the position Lenotti sought, must be able to read and process information quickly at a fire scene. But state officials said the city never proved that was true, never consulted with disability rights experts and does not use a promotional test that actually measures how fast a candidate can read.

"It's a very nice victory," Lenotti said. "The city has basically been shown they can't just push people around."

So Mr. Lenotti has a right to a job for which I (and his superiors) think that he is clearly unqualified, and innocent victims of fires have a right to look like this if he is unable to make decisions quickly enough in a fire emergency.

Art and the law

In New Mexico, photography has been ruled to be a commercial enterprise, and thus ineligible for protection under that pesky 1st ammendment to the Constitution.

Photographers Denied
the Freedom To Choose What They Photograph:

Elaine Huguenin co-owns Elane Photography with her husband. The bulk of Elane's work is done by Elaine, though she subcontracts some of the work some of the time. Elane refused to photograph Vanessa Willock's same-sex commitment ceremonies, and just today the New Mexico Human Rights Commission held that this violated state antidiscrimination law. Elane has been ordered to pay over $6600 in attorney's fees and costs.

(From Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy.)

Quote of the day

... if the presumptive Republican nominee can survive five years in prisoner-of-war camps, then surely the Democratic nominee can survive five more months of opposition on the campaign trail.

-Nicole Crosby, letter to the Norwalk Advocate.

This is so unbelievably cool I want to explode

The Great Vowel Shift.

Cindy Shaheen trying to hassle military recuiters ...

... and failing it seems.

(From Little Green Footballs.)

Quote of the day

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to
answer "Present" or "Not Guilty."

-Theodore Roosevelt

Just don't question their patriotism, OK?

From the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, via the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler:

A national tour featuring decorated veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan won't be stopping at Forest Lake Area High School today as planned, after school leaders abruptly canceled the visit.

Steve Massey, the school principal, said the decision to cancel was prompted by concerns that the event was becoming political rather than educational and therefore was not suitable for a public school.

He said the school had received several phone calls from parents and others, some of whom indicated that they may stage a protest if the event took place.

To paraprhase Charlie Brown, "AAAaaaaaaaargh!" I can understand people disagreeing with the war, but are censorship and expressions of contempt for American war veterans really the most productive way to get their point across?

But maybe they are getting their point across. Maybe these people honestly think that American soldiers are evil, and that anyone who disagrees with them is evil, and they think that being courteous to war veterans is teaching students to respect evil.

And maybe that's not the lesson that some teenagers need to learn.

Unfortunate quote of the day

[Former Governor Andrew] Young also quipped that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has her husband behind her, and that 'Bill is every bit as black as Barack.'

'He's probably gone with more black women than Barack,' Young said of former President Clinton, drawing laughter from a live television audience. Young, 75, was quick to follow his comment on Bill Clinton with the disclaimer, 'I'm clowning.'

- Associated Press story, from Mary Mitchell's blog.

Quote of the day

Please avoid anything morbid or grotesque in the display of the dead midget lying under the table.

- 1966 NBC memo about a script for the sitcom "Get Smart" (Wall Street Journal, How Maxwell Smart and His Shoe-Phone Changed TV, March 21, 2008)

With apologies ...

A tasteless but thought-provoking take on our nation's anti-terrorism policies, and an even more tasteless (and mildly obscene) take on the subprime mortgage crisis.

Heartbreaking graffiti in Zimbabwe

Book banning at Indiana / Purdue

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

In a stunning series of events at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Keith Sampson, a university employee and student, has been charged with racial harassment for reading a book during his work breaks.

Sampson is in his early fifties, does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, and is ten credits shy of a degree in communication studies. He is also an avid reader who usually brings books with him to work so that he can read in the break room when he is not on the clock. Last year, he began reading a book entitled Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. The book, which has garnered great reviews in such places as The Indiana Magazine of History and Notre Dame Magazine, discusses the events surrounding two days in May 1924, when a group of Notre Dame students got into a street fight in South Bend with members of the Ku Klux Klan. As an historical account of the students' response in the face of anti-Catholic prejudice, the book would seem to be a relevant and worthwhile read, both for residents of the state of Indiana and for anyone interested in this chapter of American history.

But others at IUPUI clearly did not see it that way. First, a shop steward told Sampson that reading a book about the KKK was like bringing pornography to work (apparently this holds true in his eyes regardless of the context in which a book discusses the KKK, the position it takes, and so on).

The university banned Mr. Sampson from reading this book inthe presence of others after a far hearing. At least we have to assume that the hearing was fair; as it turns out Mr. Sampson wasn't invited to it:

Despite his not being given a chance to defend himself, he subsequently received a letter from Lillian Charleston of the AAO, dated November 25, 2007, informing him that AAO had completed its investigation of the matter. The letter stated,

You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence...you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers.

Ajzar Majeed, who wrote this piece for the FIRE's blog The Torch, compares Mr. Sampson's plight with the bizarre story of Jihad Daniel at William Patterson University.

Dueling CIA's

Gabriel Schoenfeld reports that the Central Intelligence Agency announced this week that it hired a new Head Chef ... 4 years ago.

“Culinary Delights Soar to New Heights at CIA Thanks to Head Chef” – is the headline of a new CIA press release.

The head chef in question is Fred DeFilippo, a 1992 graduate of the other CIA, the Culinary Institute of America. At Langley, DeFillippo works with a special intelligence unit:

Four other chefs assist DeFilippo and spread out the work between the sauté, grill, and pantry stations. The sauté chef handles pasta and vegetable dishes, the grill chef prepares meat dishes, and the pantry chef crafts delicious salads and sandwiches.

This is all very interesting and important, but there is still a question about it: Why is the agency circulating old news? The same press release acknowledges that DeFilippo “has been making a splash with dishes like his Chocolate Tiramisu since he began cooking for the agency in 2004.”

The timing of this announcement is thus curious. DeFillippo was appointed in the George Tenet era. Tenet’s parents owned a Greek diner in Queens, New York. Is there some sort of one-upsmanship going on between the current CIA director, Michael Hayden, and his failure of a predecessor?

Whatever the answer, life in Langley sure beats searching for terrorists and/or a meal of curried goat in the backstreets of places like Peshawar.

Or maybe someone in the CIA Office of Public Affairs is sending coded messages to someone in Pakistan. Still a nice gig though.

Free speech isn't free. It's not even cheap

From the Massachusetts Eagle-Tribune, a story about the Lawrence, MA police:

LAWRENCE — They were real looking enough. Three wooden plaques each embossed with a gold police shield, a small gun piece and each engraved with an officer's name.

But these "plaques" sent to the police department Sunday were no awards. They came from a bogus address in Puerto Rico, supposedly sent from a former assistant district attorney and were in recognition for the officers being "corrupt." They were dated "9-11-2007."

As first reported on The Eagle-Tribune's Web site eagletribune.com yesterday, police Chief John Romero has launched an investigation into who sent the packages. He said police are contemplating criminal charges, possibly at the federal level. Police yesterday dusted the plaques for fingerprints. Romero was one of the recipients of the so-called award.

Lawrence police also notified the postal inspector in Boston. The sender could face federal charges for using the U.S. Postal Service "to threaten, harass or intimidate," Romero said.

So let's see if I've got this story straight. An anonymous citizen accused the police in this town of being corrupt, and the police reacted by abusing their authority and using official resources to silence him or her.

Now Norwalk's had more than its share of police scandals recently, but it's stories like this that should make us thankful for the honest and overworked men and women who make up the bulk of our police force.

Great book review

From Mark Steyn's review of Thomas Riis' book Frank Loesser, (volume 5 in the Yale Broadway Masters Series.)

Frank Loesser isn't as famous a songwriter as Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, but, unlike them, he's apparently responsible for this whole clash-of- civilizations thing. A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the U.S. had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:

"The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . ."

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colo., in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colo., in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was "Baby, It's Cold Outside," written by Frank Loesser and sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in the film "Neptune's Daughter." Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11.

I'm a reasonable chap, and I'd be willing to meet the Islamists halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like burqas for women, nuking the Zionists, beheading the sodomites and whatnot. But you'll have to pry "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without Frank Loesser and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" would be very cold indeed.

Don't you wish that you could write like that?

Happy President's Day

Happy Valentine's Day

Too evil for words indeed

From Best of the Web Today

Too Evil For Words:

From London's Times:

The acting director of a Baghdad psychiatric hospital has been arrested on suspicion of supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq with the mentally impaired women that it used to blow up two crowded animal markets in the city on February 1, killing about 100 people.

Iraqi security forces and US soldiers arrested the man at al-Rashad hospital in east Baghdad on Sunday. They then spent three hours searching his office and removing records. Sources told The Times that the two women bombers had been treated at the hospital in the past.

"They [the security forces] arrested the acting director, accusing him of working with al-Qaeda and recruiting mentally ill women and using them in suicide bombing operations," a hospital official said.

Read that again: The head of a mental hospital (allegedly) provided women under his care to al Qaeda to use as human bombs, for the purpose of murdering as many innocent people as possible. We are at a loss for words to characterize the depth of this evil.

It makes you wonder about the folks who condemn America with such self-righteous zeal over morally ambiguous practices like "waterboarding" terrorists or even generally accepted practices such as holding enemy combatants for the duration of wartime. One suspects that they do so primarily out of fear--in order to close their minds to the contemplation of true evil.

Man attempts suicide, foiled by nearby prayer meeting

Answered prayers: Suicidal man persuaded to live
By Sherri Williams
The Columbus Dispatch

When an Ohio University employee decided to end his life Friday, students turned to the power of prayer and the pen to save him. It worked.

About 15 students were at a weekly religious gathering at Galbreath Chapel when they heard that a man was threatening to jump from a ledge on the fifth floor inside the student union.

They didn't know the man but prayed for him, first at the chapel and then outside the Baker University Center, the hub of campus life at the school in Athens. Eventually about 50 people were gathered there.

A freshman met the man before he climbed out on the ledge.

He walked up to her and told her to leave the center because a lot of police soon would be in the building, she said.

She found it odd but already was heading to the chapel for the Praise God It's Friday gathering, which is sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ.

"She found it odd, but ... ." I predict a brilliant career as an absent-minded professor for this woman!

Some of the letters that students at the prayer meeting wrote to the troubled man were posted by the reporter.

(Source: The Columbus Dispatch, Inside Higher Education.)

A capital ship for an ocean trip

PhysX has done a techno version of The Walloping Window Blind

Then blow, ye winds, heigh-ho! A-rovin' I will go!
I'll stay no more on England's shore, so let the music roar!
I'm off for the mornin' train! I'll cross the raging main!
I'm off to the sea, it's the place for me; And there I'm going t'stay!

Quote of the day

If you forced an al Qaeda terrorist to diagram that sentence, Democrats in Congress would accuse you of torture.

- James Taranto, Best of the Web (refering to a sentence in Baltimore Sun article by reporter Justin Fenton.)

Just say no.

Mao and man at Yale

Volokh links to a very well-written article in the Yale Daily News about a bizarre   frightening controversial lawsuit against John Yoo. This lawsuit was brought by a Yale lecturer on behalf of convicted terrorist Jose Padilla against Yoo, who is a Yale alumnus.

Now one way to tell good journalism from bad journalism is this: bad journalism leaves you with unanswered questions at the end of the piece, but good journalism gives you insights that you weren't expecting. With this in mind, consider the following creepy insightful quote in the YDN article from law school dean Harold Koh:

This is a place where a thousand flowers bloom

"Let a thousand flowers bloom" is of course an infamous quote from Mao Zsedong.

Now I'm sure that it wasn't Dean Koh's intention, when he set forth to justify the harassment of a Yale alumni on behalf of someone convicted of conspiring with mass murderers, to set himself on the side of one of history's worst mass murderers.

But the YDN reporter put him on the spot and he revealed more perhaps than he intended to.

Has anyone seen a tooth?

That rascally varmint, the Tooth Fairy, staged a daring raid on my nephew Tom's mouth:

Gun control

I used to think that the appalling case of Tony Martin was the lowest that a democratic government could stoop to when it goes down the slippery slope of limiting an individual's right to defend himself. But, gosh, I was wrong:

Pantomime gun must be registered
A Cornish village drama group has had to register a toy gun with the police to comply with health and safety rules.

Carnon Downs drama group in Cornwall have also had to keep their plastic cutlasses and wooden swords locked up for the pantomime, Robinson Crusoe.

Producers of the show called the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) rules "farcical".

A spokesman for the HSE said the rules were designed to make risks "sensibly managed".

The climax of the show is a fight in which actors use replica 4ft long plastic cutlasses.

There is also a toy gun which produces a flag saying "Bang".

...

Neighbourhood beat officer Pc Nigel Hyde said: "We have been informed and made a note.

"It seems a bit unusual but other forms of replica weapons have been used to carry out crimes and the consequences have been serious."

A spokesman for the HSE said: "We do not want to stop people putting on pantos or having fun as long as the risks are sensibly managed."

I don't want to even think about how these risks might be insensibly managed. But here's what I do want to know: if some punks break into an Englishman's home and he defends himself with a toy gun that produces a "Bang" flag, what are the criminal penalties? Does the poor slob get locked up in a cardboard box labeled "Prison" in magic marker?