Posted 10:34 PM by Floyd

Don't mess with Army officer and "Iraq Now" blogger Jason Van Steenwyk:

I just don�t get sentiments like this:

The president made a series of promises to us--number one, that he was gonna make every effort possible to build a legitimate coalition. He did not--he built a fraudulent coalition.
--Senator John Kerry, in this interview with Rolling Stone magazine

I've been in Southwest Asia since April. In that time I've personally met and talked to soldiers and civilians from The United Kingdom, Denmark, Poland, Azerbaijan, Moldavia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Japan, and Spain. I haven't met any Italians yet, Japanese, or Spaniards yet, Koreans, but I know they're here. Some of them lost their lives on this ground.

There are also, at any given time, thousands of Iraqis risking assassination or mass murder in order to help rebuild Iraq. I see them almost every day. Are they frauds?

All of them are here on the ground, risking their necks along with us. Is that fraudulent? Within the last couple of weeks, men from Italy and Japan have sacrificed their lives along with our troops. Was that fraudulent?

A soldier from Fiji was wounded -- shot through both knees -- while providing security for an Iraqi Currency Exchange program in the Battle of Samarra. Was that fraudulent, too?

Why don't you come out here and speak to the boots on the ground from our coalition partners? Try calling them "fraudulent," Senator.

Posted 12:38 PM by Floyd

Once upon a time, there was an anonymous blogger from Missouri who went the by the moniker of Juan Gato. (When the Volokh Conspiracy got their fourth or so contributor and he was called Juan Non-Volokh, I briefly thought that it was the same person. But then I got straightened out and I've never been confused about anything ever again, thank you very much.) He later retitled his blog The Shallow End, then Broken Finger, and then The Genius I Was. A few weeks ago he retired from blogging. (Stephen Green, the VodkaPundit, has a drinks-based blogroll -- I am under "Rum and Coke" -- and abandoned blogs like Juan Gato's are listed as "Under the Table.")

One of Juan Gato's regular themes was to post a link to some article involving human injury at the hands ... er, branches of a tree -- say, some addled hippie falling out of a tree he was squatting on to save it from loggers -- and to proclaim, "It's us or the trees, people."

Truer words were never spoken.

Early Tuesday morning I was awakened by some godawful crash. I was startled, and wondered if someone was breaking into the house. I heard no more noises, and convinced myself that the cats had knocked over a chair. After an hour or so I drifted back to sleep.

Tuesday night I decided that I should lift some weights. We have a weightlifting machine in my "lanai," which is a little room adjacent to our living room. The lanai is 20 by 10 or so; the front half has an entertainment center and a couch, and the back half contains the weights and a stationary bicycle. The room is lit by two rows of track lights. I flipped the switch for the back half lights, and nothing happened. I looked up. I saw a little tab extending out of the wall, near the ceiling. "Why have I not seen that before?", I asked myself. The answer was that the track lights plugged into that tab and hid it. Said track lights were lying on the floor. Hence the noise I heard while in bed.

Fortunately the light bulbs had not broken and there was no real mess. The track had been mounted on the ceiling with three small screws, and I assumed that the screws were not strong enough to support the load.

Last night Sherry and I were about to watch a video. ("Bueller ... Bueller ...") When I went to the entertainment center to insert the tape, I noticed a fair amount of dirt on the top of the cabinet. I couldn't think of anywhere that it could have come from except the ceiling. We began to wonder if a tree branch had hit the lanai roof. Most of our house has a sloped roof with wood shingles, but the lanai roof is flat and covered with tar sheet. A year ago November while we were in China, a branch from a large redwood tree broke off and hit the roof. (Yes, all redwood trees are large. This is a big fucking tree.) The branch put a small tear in the tar, causing water to leak into the lanai, and I had to pay some guys to replace a section of the sheet.

This morning I went outside, stood on the railing of my deck ... and saw a ten-foot tree limb easily six inches wide. And there was a puddle of water in the lanai. Beware the trees!

Posted 3:08 PM by Floyd

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, California activists are urging Hispanics to strike today. This is in protest of Governor Schwarzenegger's repeal of a law that allowed illegal immigrants to get California driver's licenses.

I was driving by some building (I think a church) near which were posted some protest signs. One read: "The only benefit of driver's licenses is wise drivers."

An interesting statement, considering that I had just been to a Blockbuster video store and when asked to provide a photo ID, pulled out my driver's license ...

(Media bias watch: The Mercury News vastly exaggerates the effect of the boycott. The "top local story" teaser on the home page says "Some Bay Area schools with heavy Latino student populations reported absentee rates as high as 90 percent today." But when you read the story, you find out that only two specific schools had absentee rates this high, because their students were participating in protests.)

Posted 1:46 PM by Floyd

Tim Blair linked to this tempest-in-a-teapot story which took place in Eureka, California. Eureka is one of my favorite places to visit in California. It has cool foggy weather, beautiful scenery, wonderful bed-and-breakfast Victorians, the fantastic 301 restaurant. (My wife and I have played a total of four bridge sessions there and have won 0.9 masterpoints -- are we experts or what?)

The Redwood Art Association held an exhibition in Eureka. One hundred ninety-four works of art were displayed, and second place was awarded to this presentation of the "Bush lied -- people died!" theme:

Chuck Bowden's picture, The Tactics of Tyrants Are Always Transparent ...

In the 28cm by 35cm drawing, a crown and halo-topped Bush stands on a grave, his hand dripping with blood as bodies fall to the ground from the World Trade Centre towers in the distance.

Click that link and look at the picture. It is terrible. Even the worst hack cartoonist is usually able to make the target of his ridicule recognizable, but not in this case -- without the article's helpful explanation, I would have come to the conclusion that the artist was really angry at some ten-year-old boy.

Also, check out the horizon behind the falling towers. There's some lettering which I assume is meant to say "Permanent Wars". But the end of "Permanent" is obscured, so what is visible reads "Perm Wars". Kill the bleached blondes! Lift high the banner of Clairol!

The puerile junior-high alliteration of the title is most sophisticated thing about the painting. The excessive symbolism, the obsessive cursive script that surrounds the image (squint at the lower left corner and you can see the word "cabal") -- everything indicates that the painter is a half-crazed crank.

The painting was pulled from the exhibit, though not because of its political content:

David Ploss, president of the Redwood Art Association, insists that Bowden's work was not censored. He said the decision to pull the piece from the display was a matter of money.

"It did not get displayed because of insurance issues. It had nothing to do with the content of the work," Ploss said.

Bowden priced his work at $47,400, far exceeding the average cost of the other 193 works on display, which were covered by a total insurance policy of $193,226, according to the Humboldt Arts Council.

Ploss said the association asked Bowden for an appraisal of his art's worth, or receipts from prior sales of similarly priced art. Bowden produced neither and Ploss said the financial risk of showing the work became too great.

Ladies and gentlemen: Forty-seven large! By the way, how would you feel if you were the creator of one of the 192 works that were judged worse than Bowden's drivel?

Posted 11:20 AM by Floyd

Today's example of liberal media bias: The San Jose Mercury News reports on calls by Hispanic activists for immigrants to strike:

Boycott by immigrants urged in license protest
By Edwin Garcia
Mercury News

The message to Latino immigrants in the Bay Area and around California is sweeping: Keep your kids home from school Friday, don't go to work and stay away from stores.

The unprecedented request, made by immigrant advocates to protest the repeal of a law that would have allowed illegal immigrants to apply for driver's licenses, is intended to show state leaders the collective economic and social clout of California's growing immigrant population.

Now if the strike actually happened and a large number of people participated, that would be news. But when Garcia wrote the article, it was just a plan by some activists. Why is the Mercury News serving as a forum for Hispanic activists' press releases? It is not news when a stuck-in-the-60's liberal plans a protest, any more than it is news when young men view porn on the Internet.

I rather doubt that conservative activism would be touted in this manner. A concrete example: On July 26th Republican activists held a pro-recall rally at the California state capitol. The rally was attended by over a thousand people. I searched the Mercury News archives and found no advance mentions of this event.

Compare and contrast: Liberals tell people to take a day off work or school, and get their plans aired in a front-page puff piece. Conservatives tell people to drive to Sacramento and stand around in 105-degree heat, and no one hears about it. Then repeat after me: There is no liberal media bias.

Posted 3:19 PM by Floyd

Tony Pierce gets on Kwanzaa with a 2-by-four. With a tactical nuke. Stomps all over it. There is just nothing left but atoms when Mr. Pierce gets through.

wilton north of beverly has some kickass homes. two million dollar ones. million dollar ones. big ones. bigger ones.

huge ones.

on some of the huge ones i saw some equally huge christmas decorations. i saw a blowup snowman that was at least a story tall and twenty feet wide.

i saw christmas lights the size of footballs.

and yes, i saw some gigantic images of santa claus.

of all the people in the world who should be saying, man im glad you were born, my lord, it would be them.

but instead they celebrate the birth of their messiah with huge images of winnie the pooh wearing a fake white beard

like fools.

and then theres kwanza.

one thing black people can do well is praise jesus. we do it better than anyone in the world. the music we make when we do it might be the most magical of all music, the preachers we have might be the best there ever were, and the clothes we wear to church are the sharpest.

then on the flip side we have our brothers and sisters who are muslim, and watch them pray. they win at praying. they win at pilgrimiging. they win at letting their spirituality become a solid and regular part of their lives.

with those two options, theres no need for any damn kwanza. some watered down bullshit made up strip mall phony holiday so you can wear a koofi? fuck that shit. we need to focus up on the biggest birthday of the year. we dont need no stinkin kwanza getting in the way.

(Found the link on VodkaPundit.)

Posted 2:19 PM by Floyd

The Dodgers' change of ownership led to rumors that A's general manager Billy Beane would be heading south to manage them. But who needs the Moneyball man when you can get ... a talking horse?

081- Leo Durocher Meets Mister Ed

Original Airdate: September 29, 1963

Ed's favorite team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, aren't doing so hot. Ed, being the baseball expert that he is, calls up Leo Durcocher and gives him tips on how to help his players. Leo doesn't pay much attention to him at first, but realizes Ed's tips are right. Thinking it's Wilbur who had called him, Leo invites Wilbur down to the field to give him some more tips. Unfortunatly, Carol and the Addisons want to go to Palm Springs. Ed fixes that, by giving Carol a phony weather report for Palm Springs. Ed and Wilbur travel to Dodger's stadium to give some tips.

Classic Scene:

Ed hits a homerun! He runs the bases and slides into home.. too bad he missed second base.

(Link via Baseball Musings.)

Posted 2:09 PM by Floyd

Here is more evidence that "diversity" means "left-wing groupthink," in the form of a letter to the San Jose Mercury News:

SJS search panel needs diversity

California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed and Bill Hauck wrote on the importance and responsibility of appointing a president to lead a CSU campus (Opinion, Nov. 28). At issue is the recent rejection of the three finalists recommended by the trustees and its San Jose State University campus-based advisory committee.

We want the best president for our community. San Jose State has a rich history that has well served the economic viability of Silicon Valley. Many San Jose State graduates are major contributors to the success and entrepreneurial spirit of our valley.

After discussions with leaders in Silicon Valley, it became apparent that the makeup of the advisory committee did not represent the rich diversity of our community. We encourage Chancellor Reed to reconsider his position.

Why is this statement of significance? For the same reason we suggested to the chancellor that there is value in having diverse opinions; that is part of what makes our country great. We ask only for inclusion in the process.

Inclusiveness is not a dirty word. CSU needs to revisit its policy to ensure that the community has a voice in the selection process. To do so will be a credit to CSU and to our community.

Manny Diaz
Assembly member, District 23
San Jose

Yoshihiro Uchida
San Jose

Now if "diversity" and "inclusiveness" really means picking people with varying opinions and ideas, then how would a more "diverse" committee have prevented the rejection of any of the three finalists? The more people a group has, the harder it is for that group to agree on anything.

But if "diversity" means "everyone will have the same left-wing politics and will select a like-minded candidate for chancellor", well ...

Posted 6:01 PM by Floyd

Instapundit links to John Ellis' TechCentralStation essay on Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean. Ellis lists many effects of this action:

And this week [Gore] all but announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination by endorsing Gov. Dean for president.

...

Today's endorsement is a transformational event in two respects; (1) it will make Gov. Dean the prohibitive favorite to win the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and, (2) it will make you think differently about Al Gore.

...

It's a very shrewd move. Start with the least likely outcome. If Governor Dean defeats President Bush in 2004, Al Gore becomes Secretary of State or a Supreme Court Justice or whatever he wants, the day after the election is over. That's how much Dean will owe him.

If Dean loses, Gore will be the rightful heir to the Dean apparatus; the single most impressive fund-raising and organizing operation in Democratic Party politics. He'll inherit the only network that is capable of competing with and defeating the Clinton network, which it has by proxy in the Dean v. Clark competition. If politics is finally a matter of real estate, as Norman Mailer argued in his classic study of the 1968 conventions, then title to the Dean property is without question the single most valuable asset of the 2004 experience. It will be Gore's and Gore's alone on "the day after Dean goes down."

Yes, the endorsement could be seen as a signal that Gore will reenter presidential politics five years hence. But I disagree with Ellis as to the importance of the act. Gore is not going to receive a huge boost in the 2008 campaign for these reasons:

• Gore's endorsement is not risky.
  
  Gore is endorsing the the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. If Gore had made his endorsement in the summer, when Dean was viewed as a second-tier candidate who had somehow managed to raise a lot of money, that would have been a risky action. Now that Dean has opened up a huge lead in the polls, Gore's endorsement looks more like the inevitable rallying around the winner.
  
  
• Endorsements don't mean much.
  
  Every candidate has a list of endorsements as long as your arm. (Searching for "endorsement" on the Dean For America site produced 76 results.) Did Clinton have a lot of endorsements when he began his 1992 primary campaign? It's difficult to see why Dean would reward Gore with a high cabinet position or Supreme Court seat if elected, considering that Dean's real problem at this point is winning the election, not winning the nomination. Gore's endorsement does not help Dean gain ground on George W. Bush.
  
  
• Campaign volunteers are not fungible.
  
  Dean's campaign apparatus is not some professional organization that can be spun off and merged at random, like a division of a corporation. There are thousands of people who are excited to be Dean's volunteers because they are passionate about Dean, and feel as though they are using the internet for politics in a revolutionary way. Those people cannot be frozen on Election Day, 2004, and thawed out in early 2007 by Al Gore for his own use.
  
  Michael Lewis wrote a book called Trail Fever (now reissued as Losers), in which he details the Republican primaries and general election of 1996. One consistent theme was Bob Dole's use of hired campaign consultants -- "rented strangers" in the words of George Will. The rented strangers, loyal only to themselves, drained Dole's campaign of all passion and spontaneity.
  
  If Gore attempts to "inherit" Dean's campaign, the loyalists will leave and Gore will be left with the most self-seeking of the bunch.
  

Posted 4:38 PM by Floyd

Trendy, urban California has the nightlife that ... goes to bed early. Note these datapoints:

• Winnipeg expat Evan Kirchhoff, now a San Francisco blogger, links to the Drudge-reported story on the DJ whose mummified body was discovered in a Winnipeg club a year after his death. (Kirchhoff seems to enjoy this shocking occurence just a little too much -- does he have an alibi?) He notes that while the province of Manitoba does not technically allow bars -- alcohol is sold in "cabarets" or "lounges" or "nightclubs" -- Winnipeg has it all over San Francisco:
  
  

  
  ...while there is a mandated 2:00 A.M. last call, there's no requirement that you can't accumulate last-minute drinks and nurse them for another hour or two -- they sure as hell don't turn the lights on at 1:48 and contemptuously shoo you out like a bunch of filthy cockroaches the way they do in San Francisco. (Prairie Protestantism: 1, California health-naziism: 0.)
  

  
  
  
• Sofia Sideshow, a blog by an American expat in Bulgaria, compares Sofia nightlife to Los Angeles:
  
  

  
  The night clubs here operate at night, as opposed to LA where everything shuts down at 2am. Things here shut down...well, I dunno, after I shut down, I guess. It's like the refrigerator light mystery, but on a bigger, louder scale.
  

  
  
  Former Communist Countries: 1, California health-naziism: 0.
  
  
• My wife is from Shanghai, and complains endlessly about the uselessness of American nightlife: It's impossible to shop or eat after 9 p.m. In Shanghai the main commercial drags are full of trendy shops that are open all night, and the restaurants are open until midnight or later.
  
  Former Communist Countries: 2, California health-naziism: 0.
  
  
• A high-school classmate went to college at Canisius, in Buffalo. Last call in Buffalo is 4 a.m. Yes, Buffalo residents party two hours later than Californians.
  
  Frozen tundra: 2, California health-naziism: 0.
  

Posted 3:54 PM by Floyd

More evidence of the deterioration of Reason Magazine, from its "Hit and Run" blog:

Canadian Attorney Rocco Galati has announced that he'll no longer be representing terror suspects. Galati had most recently secured the release of Canadian citizen Abdurahman Khadr from Guantanamo Bay. A death threat (which Galati believes may have come from a U.S. or Canadian intelligence agency) has deterred him—and perhaps others?—from defending those charged with links to terror.

Tomorrow, Hit and Run will air the concerns of Dennis Kucinich re: the orbital mind control lasers. Khadr admitted spending three months in an Al-Qaeda camp in 1998. If Galati really did receive a death threat, it probably came from a friend or relative of one of the three thousand people that his client's pals murdered.

Posted 11:07 AM by Floyd

Here's some shocking news that had not appeared on my radar until now:

Retail chains specializing in music are hurting. Wherehouse is in bankruptcy proceedings; Tower Records has defaulted on its debt; and Musicland, which owns Sam Goody and Media Play stores, was unloaded to private investors in June by corporate parent Best Buy.

Posted 7:07 PM by Floyd

InstaPundit links to a US News article connecting the Saudi government to terrorists. The InstantMan highlights the shameful co-opting of US foreign service personnel:

Saudi largess encouraged U.S. officials to look the other way, some veteran intelligence officers say. Billions of dollars in contracts, grants, and salaries have gone to a broad range of former U.S. officials who had dealt with the Saudis: ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, even cabinet secretaries.

This is not breaking news; Matt Welch was shining a light into the Saudi roach nest months ago. And the problem is not limited to Saudi Arabia. A few days ago the San Jose Mercury News published an opinion piece about Indonesia. The author, Daniel Sneider, noted the tensions between fundamentalist Muslims and moderates. He advocated spending more money on secular education to weaken the influence of the radical Islamic schools, and ended with this quote:

More troubling is the pathetic amount of money he offered -- most of it funds shifted from existing programs -- only $157 million over 6 years. Says former Ambassador Paul Cleveland, who heads the U.S.-Indonesia Society: ``You would get more democracy out of $1 billion spent in Indonesia than $20 billion spent in Iraq.''

Is it really surprising that a man who heads the US-Indonesia Society would advocate spending more money on Indonesia? Could he possibly have just a leetle financial incentive, either directly from consulting contracts or indirectly from the Indonesian money funding the Society? And how surprising is it that Cleveland was an ambassador to Indonesia and then landed a cushy position at the head of a pro-Indonesian foundation?

If I thought that the federal legislature could accomplish anything (besides providing a living for pressure groups, accountants, and lawyers), I would call for former foreign service agents be prohibited from accepting funds from the countries they worked in. But this is clearly hopeless; the government will never do anything to prevent its former employees from lining up at the trough of lobbyists foreign or domestic. (If it's not prohibited for former CIA employees to be bribed with foreign money, how can we hope that anything will be done about former ambassadors?)

The only thing that we can do is to vehemently object to these puff pieces when they appear in the public media.

Posted 7:01 PM by Floyd

Newsflash: The Arizona Cardinals scored two touchdowns! I saw it with my own eyes. Oh, minor detail, Arizona got beat by the 49'ers 50-14 (and it would have been 53-14 if the 49ers had kicked a field goal on 4th and 5 when up 50-7).

If you care about whether the declining 49ers beat the hapless Cardinals, you are a hopeless loser who should seek therapy I am happy to have you as a reader of my blog.

(Special note for despairing San Francisco voters: Gavin Newsome advertised on the Jumbotron while Matt Gonzalez did not. Not that anyone appeared to give a damn.)

Posted 6:56 PM by Floyd

The Mercury News is always trying to help -- brainwash us into being liberals, that is. Here is a recent blurb on the editorial web page:

BIG GOVERNMENT?

• In 2001, California ranked 44th in the nation in numbers of government workers, both state and local, per 10,000 people.
  
• For state workers alone, California ranked 49th, with 107 employees per 10,000 people.
  

Sources: Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto and the Legislative Analyst's Office

Now as a citizen that is the exactly the sort of statistic that I am interested in. Not, say, the tax revenue per capita, which is the sixth highest in the nation. Or the tax climate, ranked 49th worst in the nation by the Tax Foundation. It's the number of government workers that is important because if that number is too high, California might start sticking workers in my closet.

Here's some other statistics that the Merc could publish to show us how lucky we are to live in a small-government state:

• Number of employees per mile of Pacific ocean coastline.
  
• Total monies budgeted for snowplows.
  
• State spending per capita (counting only citizens who have had plastic surgery).
  

(What would it be like, I wonder, to read a newspaper that explained the news rather than obscuring it?)