Posted 5:46 PM by Floyd

Porphyrogenitus posts a very long, detailed letter from a "LTC in Iraq" (I assume this means lieutenant colonel?) on duty in pro-Saddam Tikrit.

We learned from a frantic local sheik that same evening that the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein were to be delivered to his village the next day and then buried in the local cemetery. Not pleased at the news as this village also has our men in it we worked all evening to confirm this. We were told to do nothing. The corpses were to be turned over to the Red Crescent after being flown to our city. We were instructed to provide no escort or involvement. We watched at a distance as three corpses (the third being Mustafa Qusay's 14 year old son killed while firing an AK-47 under a bed) were laid into the dirt. Arrogant men, some veiled, surrounded the graves in pathetic prayerful worship over these murdering lifeless forms. They piled dirt mounds above their sunken corpses and then secured an Iraqi flag to each mound with dirt clods along the edges.

Posted 3:46 PM by Floyd

Via Jim Treacher I found "Attention Deficit Disorderly", a blog by Sean Collins. Check out this post where he rips into Rolling Stone magazine. An excerpt:

When a Rolling Stone article on the VMAs [Video Music Awards - fm] begins with the kind of embarassingly breathless dicksuckery normally reserved for Maureen Dowd columns about the Clinton administration, you can feel certain that the magazine, in actually acting (or worse, being) shocked and titilated by the grotesque, 100% prefab sexual assault against two pill-addled middle-aged-men-controlled developmentally-arrested girl-women by an aging self-obsessed insufferably boring harridan intent on reviving her interminable career as quote-unquote provocateur, is an enormous steaming dung-beetle-encrusted pile of elephant shit.

For those of you keeping score at home, that was just one sentence!

Posted 10:02 AM by Floyd

The 101-280 blogger: Witty, and an Efficient Researcher

Here's Evan Kirchhoff's latest take on the recall postponement:

For more on the 9th Circuit's California-recall-deferring decision, I suggest that you type the word "blog" into Google and click randomly on any link that appears.

Posted 4:42 PM by Floyd

A bunch of Chomskyite lefties has released their latest tiresome screed against people who didn't pay attention to them. This wouldn't be so annoying if they didn't try to pose as victims of censorship by labelling their efforts "Project Censored."

vigilant.tv ("Freedom and Technology") responded by posting a list of 25 people who were actually censored. For instance:

#5 - The Chinese government orders journalists to undergo Communist Party propaganda tests in order to obtain licenses. Unlicensed journalists are not tolerated - for example the 10 photographers beaten by police while attempting to cover an education bureau meeting.

Posted 12:49 PM by Floyd

Via Kausfiles I found this wonderful Mark Cooper LA Weekly column, in which he refutes MoveOn.org's arguments against the recall.

[MoveOn:] No. 1: A single congressman brought us the recall with $1.7 million of his own money — while simultaneously putting himself forward as the man to replace the governor.

[Cooper:] Darrell Issa’s money helped spur the petition drive, but authentic voter anger produced the eventual avalanche of signatures.

Even if one accepts the notion that each of the 1.6 million recall signatures was a result of Issa’s funding, he would have “bought” the recall for about $1 per signature.

Last November, by contrast, Gray Davis won 3.5 million votes after spending $76 million. By MoveOn’s logic, Davis bought his election at 20 times the per-voter cost.

...

No. 5: It’s expensive: The recall election itself will cost over $60 million.

All elections are expensive. And at $60 million the entire state can apparently vote for 20 percent less than what it cost Gray Davis alone to run for office last time. Do I hear any Democratic protests over the additional costs now incurred by the court-ordered postponement?

And my favorite:

No. 6: It prevents our elected leaders from working to solve the state budget crisis and other important issues by forcing them to campaign to defend the results of a fair election.

Is this a joke someone heard in Pyongyang?

Mee-yow!

Posted 10:16 PM by Floyd

The Declarer Book Club

Last Saturday while in Eureka I shopped at two used bookstores and scored no fewer than seven used books. (Small California tourist towns have fantastic used bookstores.) One of them was Asimov on Chemistry, a collection of essays by the master of science writing. (I can offer no better praise than the review quoted on the back: "Any book that starts with the words 'Asimov on' is a book which will instruct.")

Asimov was a wonderful science and science fiction writer. In addition, his Foundation Trilogy is one of the greatest mystery novels ever written. But when reading his works, I am always struck by how totalitarian Asimov was. I don't mean totalitarian in the boot-on-a-human-face-forever variety -- I'll get to one of those in a minute -- but rather that Asimov always envisioned real and fictional societies as driven by a single will, by a brilliant and powerful person or conspiracy of persons.

Asmov's totalitarianism resulted in some rather silly assumptions about politics and economics. Examples from the Foundation series: The traders are not independent agents, but rather salesman working on quota. Now why on Earth -- or in the heavens -- would people travelling to barely known regions for months at a time work that way? The plutocrat Hober Mallow uses his factories to combat the Foundation's state-sponsored religion:

And there isn't a factory ... that isn't under my control; that I couldn't squeeze to nothing, if Sutt attempts revolutionary propaganda. Where his propaganda succeeds ... I will make certain that prosperity dies.

Pretty damn smart of Mallow, to gain control of every factory in the Foundation! And how unenterprising of other industrial magnates not to step in and sell their products where Mallow boycotts.

Another example, from my new Asimov on Chemistry book, is from an essay on gases with low boiling points. Asimov describes the strange properties of helium, which include the facilitation of superconductivity in certain metals. This statement, from 1960, is worth a smirk:

Properly manipulated, such a "cryotron" [tantalum wrapped around niobium, immersed in liquid helium] can be used to replace vacuum tubes or transistors. ... a giant computing machine of the future may well be desk-sized or less if it is entirely "cryotronized".

But then Asimov goes off the deep end. He calculates the amount of helium present on Earth, notes that it is in short supply, and proposes that we obtain helium from Jupiter. A base on Jupiter V -- I think this is the small moon Amalthea -- can scoop up helium that escapes from nearby Jupiter. Asimov has no use for a bunch of individuals with computers; he proposes that all computers be built on Amalthea, to create "the nerve center of the solar system."

Asimov's reasoning is that this would save the expense of transporting the helium back to Earth. Well, yes, but sending the helium back here avoids transporting a slew of computers to Amalthea, along with tons of lead to shield the computers from Jupiter's lethal radiation. It also avoids speed of light delays, which will make you wait for several hours to find out which 40-year-old-pitcher has the highest batting average. In fact, maybe you could just seal the fucking computer chassis real good so they don't leak any helium.

---

I bought another wonderful book that I had been seeking for several years: William Shirer's Berlin Diary. Shirer, author of the classic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was an American correspondent in pre-war Austria and Nazi Germany. Berlin Diary is his diary from 1934 through 1941. I am now reading the entries from the early part of World War II. Like any decent human being, Shirer was nauseated and terrified by the victories of Hitler over the free world.

Decent human beings were a minority in Shirer's environs. Here is a memorable passage from time of the Anschluss (Germany's forcible union with Austria):

Back to the [Cafe] Louvre. ... Emil Maass, my former assistant, an Austro-American, struts in, stops before the table. "Well, meine Damen und Herren," he smirks, "it was about time." And he turns over his coat lapel, unpins his hidden Swastika button, and repins it on the outside over the buttonhole. Two or three women shriek: "Shame!" at him.

Posted 10:23 PM by Floyd

I didn't post last weekend because I was away on holiday. Sherry and I left Friday morning for Eureka, in northernmost California. Thursday and Friday were warm days in the Bay Area, and as we drove north of San Francisco to the local hot spot, Santa Rosa, the temperature climbed over 100 (as measured by my Subaru's thermometer). We drove still further north, and the temperature stayed above 95. Still further north, and the temperature was above 90. An hour south of Eureka saw the 80's, and my wife expressed the hope that Eureka would be warm too.

The next morning, we went into a little knickknack shop and the owner gushed about what a pleasant day it was and what a nice summer Eureka had had. And it was a nice day, in this the warmest month in Eureka -- whose average daily high in September is 63 degrees. For the whole weekend the climate was 66 degrees, sunny, blue skies, slight breeze.

(The highest temperature ever recorded in Eureka in July is 76 degrees. Eureka's all-time record high is 87, which I assume caused people to parade around nude with buckets of ice inverted upon their heads.)

Sunday we drove back; near the halfway point we detoured half an hour east to kayak in Clear Lake. In 94-degree heat.

Here's the bed and breakfast we stayed at. Evan Kirchhoff please note: it is not just Yerba Buena that boasts gaudy, self-parodying Victorians. This house was built by the current innkeeper for his personal use; he then figured out that 6500 square feet of living space was too much for him and his wife, so he began to take in guests.

Posted 2:06 PM by Floyd

The top story in today's webbed Mercury News is a thinly veiled attack on Proposition 54, which would ban collection of racial data by most government entities. Here is the teaser:

Equal opportunity?

EXPERIENCE ILLUSTRATES PROP. 54 DEBATE

Elizabeth Romàn wasn't considered college material, but she got help by checking "Latino" on forms and earned two degrees from SJSU. If voters pass Proposition 54 in the Oct. 7 election, the state will not be able to collect and use this kind of racial and ethnic data.

The full article is only slightly less biased. Connerly does get to respond to the oh-gosh-prop-54-will-take-that-little-girl's-education-away simpering:

To Connerly, Romàn is a perfect example of why his measure is needed. Students should receive special consideration based on measures such as family income or parents' education level, which have nothing to do with race.

``It's based on income, class, whether a student's parents went to school. It's based on neighborhoods,'' he said of student achievement. ``There are ways of getting that information without saying, `Are you black?' ''

But neither Romàn nor reporter Katherine Corcoran have asked themselves whether it would be right for a student named, say, Floyd McWilliams to check "White" on a form and thereby obtain special assistance.