The Point Of It All

John Hinderaker:

…When conservatives act in a hypocritical manner, violating their own principles, they go astray and screw up their lives. When liberals, on the other hand, act hypocritically, they usually are also acting reasonably. They find their principles hard to follow in their own lives in part because their principles are wrong.

He's talking about the incident where John Edwards sent a flunky lackey volunteer to get him a PlayStation 3. The volunteer tried to get one at Wal-Mart. That "evil, beastly" company that Edwards likes to excoriate.

This case is a good example. Edwards recited the very silly liberal critique of Wal-Mart as a threat to low-income people. His aide, however, when charged with buying the Senator a PS3, quite reasonably went to Wal-Mart because he knew he would get the best price there. Which is, of course, why Wal-Mart is one of the greatest boons to people of modest means in recent history. Edwards should learn from his aide, not criticize him.

In other words, hypocrisy rules are in effect.

Sixteen Miles Of Tears

Imagine a trail of paper that documents terror and death. Imagine the voices of people caught up in those events. Their voices long silent now, but the paper remains. A voiceless echo of the pain and suffering. The screams and the death and the blood and the agony long since gone. All that is left is the paper.

Sixteen miles of paper.

Sixteen-miles. That’s how far stretches the surviving individual records of what happened to millions of the Jews exterminated by the Nazi’s. Those records have been kept under lock and key by the International Red Cross since they were captured by the Allies after World War II. Soon, they will become available on digital copies.

The Nazi’s meticulous record-keeping, which fell apart late in the war, captures the fates of so many who today are only remembered in big numbers that fail to capture the individual horrors. Similarly, the scope of the death operations is now known to be even larger than previously described.

The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

"We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories," said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.

The archive [also] has some 3.4 million files of DPs _ Displaced Persons….

[Also] Some 50 million pages _ scraps of paper, transport lists, registration books, labor documents, medical and death registers _ make reference to 17.5 million individuals caught up in the machinery of persecution, displacement and death.

When I was a very young child, I recall the extended family gathering around a short note from the International Red Cross about the fate of part of my family: Taken out of their village in Belarus by local sympathizers of the Nazi’s, to dig ditches, then hammered on their heads with the shovels, some shot, and tossed into the ditch like garbage.

Read the whole thing. If you are strong enough.

Tracings

Housekeeping

In order to make the new new format work, I had to clear out a lot of the links that used to appear on the sidebar. All of the ones I removed should have been duplicates to ones that already are showing up on the various blogrolls that are fed from Blogrolling. If I inadvertently removed any that were not redundant, please let me know. I'm not trying to delink anyone who has been kind enough to link me.

Leonid Meteor Shower Tonight

Unfortunately, the expected peak will be most visible in Africa and Europe, with a chance that New England might also get a glimpse. The rest of the US will not get all that much excitement, the astronomers now are saying. Well, darn.

Where to see it

Those regions of the Earth that are in prime position to see another potential Leonid outburst are western Africa and western and central Europe where the constellation Leo will ride high in the southeast sky as the peak of the shower arrives.  Morning twilight will begin shortly thereafter. 

In North America, for the Maritime Provinces of Canada, New England, eastern New York and Bermuda, the Sickle of Leo (from where the Leonids appear to emanate) will be above the east-northeast horizon just as the shower is due to reach its peak.  But because Leo will be at a much lower altitude compared to Europe, meteor rates correspondingly may be much lower as well.  However, this very special circumstance could lead to the appearance of a few long-trailed Earth-grazing meteors, due to meteoroids that skim along a path nearly parallel to Earth's surface.  Seeing even just one of these meteors tracing a long, majestic path across the sky could make a chilly night under the stars worthwhile.

Unfortunately, for the central and western United States and Canada, the Leonid outburst will likely have passed before Leo rises; at best, nothing more than the usual 10 or so Leonids per hour will likely be seen.

Keep in mind that for New England and U.S. East Coast, the peak is due locally on the previous calendar day, Saturday, Nov. 18, at 11:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (For the Canadian Maritimes and Bermuda, the corresponding time is 12:45 a.m. on Sunday, the 19th.  For Newfoundland it is also on the 19th, but at 1:15 a.m.).

Oh, well. If you live in New England, you have a chance at a nice show. The rest of us have to hope for a earth grazer to make it a good evening! (If you have ever seen one, you know how neat those are).

Never Saw This Coming

For many years, I told my oldest boy to stop wasting his time playing video games. I figured he was cutting into time he could better spend doing other things. The same with my youngest boy. My daughters were never really hooked on video games, they'd play a few for a while, but then stop. But had I only known then what I know now……

JUPITER, Fla. - Tom Taylor is anything but a computer geek.

Yeah, he spends hours a day behind a screen obliterating little green men or "master chiefs," but this self-professed ladies man has made more than $450,000 blasting sinister agents since becoming a professional video gamer in 2004.

In August, Stuff magazine featured him on "The Power List: the Top 20 under 30" alongside LeBron James, Ashton Kutcher and other celebs. He just debuted in an 11-week reality series on USA Network, and this weekend he's slated to compete for a $100,000 purse at the world championships in Las Vegas.

Taylor, aka Tsquared, is very different from the stereotyped computer nerd trapped in his parent's basement. He's one of a handful of teens who have made their own fortunes in the $7 billion a year industry in the U.S. — a sales figure that's almost doubled since 1996, according to the Entertainment Software Association.

Thanks to the Internet, a couple dozen magazines, a cable network devoted to gaming and corporate-sponsored tournaments attended by tens of thousands, the video game industry has cemented its place in pop culture. And by promoting the best gamers as professionals, the industry helps push its product — much the same way the visibility of pro golfers sells clubs and balls.

The financial rewards of video games are immense. For example, Halo 2 grossed $125 million during the first 24 hours of its release, according to Microsoft sales statistics. Another example: Friday morning's launch of the PlayStation 3 — one version with a retail price of $500, another for $600 — drew throngs to electronic stores across the country.

Read the whole thing. There are some people making enormous amounts of money doing this. It's enough to make a grown man cry. Or go out and buy several video games and encourage the youngest boy to start neglecting his studies!

Fork In The Road

Well, the new Crabitat appears to be running fairly well although there still are a few formatting issues and whatnot to take care of. There are also a number of housekeeping chores to take care of with the blogroll before that goes back up. But I've already received a housewarming gift from Jim over at bRight and Early:

So, what do you think of the new digs?

And You Thought You Knew….

…What WTO stood for. It's in the papers all the time, right? All these negotiations you thought had to do with trade, right? Hah! Shows how smart you are. Because WTO doesn't stand for World Trade Organization. Nope, it stands for World Toilet Organization!

It is the fifth annual World Toilet Day, organized by the Singapore-based non-profit World Toilet Organization (WTO), which lobbies for better toilet standards in developed and developing countries.

"We started in a small way but it is growing and growing," WTO founder Jack Sim told AFP.

"This year we have discounts from supermarkets."

He said Singapore's NTUC FairPrice and stores in Malaysia would mark the event by selling discounted toilet cleaning items over the following week.

While the sale promotes hygiene of toilets at home, the WTO is also pushing for sparkling public facilities.

"Public toilets should be as clean as your home toilet," Sim said.

As another way of marking World Toilet Day, the WTO has posted on its website short films about toilets at schools in Singapore, Vietnam and the United States.

Sim said World Toilet Day could be celebrated in various ways. (Ed. Note: Celebrated?)

"Some do it by cleaning together," he said from Bangkok, where he was touring a school toilet as part of the World Toilet Expo. The WTO was a key organizer of the event, at which hundreds of delegates discussed how to help the more than 2.6 billion people, including 1.9 billion in Asia, without access to proper sanitation.

Now we really know why those negotiations go on and on and on. It's all because they are trying to solve the really, really big impasse. Should the seat be left up or down?

Damn The Fact(orpedoe)s, Full Condemnation Ahead!

Tom Maguire has this way of completely dismantling some of the worst of the hysterical hyperbole from the left side of the 'sphere. He uses these inconvenient things called "facts" that you may have heard of. Several bloggers have apparently discovered, as Maguire puts it, that Ann Coulter can successfully bend the space-time continuum and make events happen in the past! I'm not a big fan of Coulter, as I have mentioned several times, but this is just plain funny.

I am not Rick Morans and I would never attempt to encroach on his territory, but here we go - there is no causal connection.  Both Steven D, in his own comments, and Mr. Neiwert, in an UPDATE, acknowledge a tiny flaw in their cause-effect scenario - let's hand the mike to Mr. Neiwert:

NOTE: Yes, it's true that the poisoned cookies were sent in 2005, and Coulter's remark was in January of this year [2006]. The point is this: Coulter is one of the leading luminaries in a sustained program of demonization against liberals and government generally — including so-called "judicial activists" — for several years now.

Yes, well, whatever.  Cookies were also sent to the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy, and Air Force;  and the director and deputy director of the FBI - has Ms. Coulter specifically, or other righties generally, been demonizing them?

Don't answer!  We can do even better than that in demolishing this particular fact-free edifice.

Let me first applaud teri, commenting at Wizbang, who offered  this:

Probably her real aim was to cause trouble for the people whose return addresses she used. If she just sent threatening notes and unpoisoned cookies, it would not have made enough trouble for her former acquaintences.

Right the first time!  And why do I say that?  Well, unlike my friends in the reality-based community who can simply see evil in the world and know it is caused by righties, I am stuck with Google and Pacer (the US Court search system), and other such tedious time-wasters.

So let's check the sentencing memorandum (8 page .pdf) for Ms. Barbara Joan March.  This starts at the bottom of page six:

Third, the defendant's conduct does not appear to have been motivated by any personal, political or professional animosity toward the intended recipients of the letters. Rather, interviews with the purported senders of the letters, as well as factors cited in the presentence investigation report, suggest that the defendant's conduct likely was motivated by a misplaced anger toward the purported senders of the letters, former friends and colleagues who in the defendant's mind somehow had abandoned or wronged her.1 See Presentence Investigation Report at ¶88. The fact that the defendant chose to mail the letters to high-level public officials in a misguided attempt to cause more harm to the purported senders has increased her sentence by approximately five years.2

Any questions?  This DoJ press release provides a quick summary of the case as well.  From the sentencing memorandum i see that Ms. March spent much of the past twenty years in prison and has previously engaged in bizarre, violent behavior.

In other words, this had nothing to do with Ann Coulter or even with the people the packages were sent to. Is that a rant I see sinking on the horizon?

Populism=Protectionism?

That is what the Opinion Journal is seeing among the Democrats right now. But, in fact, it is not populism, it is political payback demanded by the AFL-CIO. And that protectionism would inevitably lead to damage to the very people the Democrats profess to be defending.

We wrote earlier this week about the growing Democratic opposition to freer trade even with sub-Saharan Africa and Peru. The Peru pact is already signed, while the African deal would merely extend for one year a textile provision that would save as many as 150,000 African jobs from going to China. For politicians who like to moralize about the fate of the poor, this ought to be embarrassing. Likewise, many Democrats are now hoping to scuttle the Vietnam deal that failed this week due to Republican procedural ineptitude but could still come back in December.

What explains this opposition? Union politics, pure and simple. Once a free-trade supporter, the AFL-CIO began to turn protectionist in the 1960s and is now a relentless opponent of open global markets. Union leaders invested heavily in this past election, and they are boasting about the exit polls showing that nearly one in four voters last week came from a union household. Those voters went Democratic by more than 60%, and now union leaders expect legislative repayment.

This does not mean that all, or even most, Congressional Democrats are truly protectionist. Democrats are split regionally, as are Republicans, between free traders on the coasts and in the farm belt and protectionists in the industrial Midwest and Southeast. However, in their recent years in the minority, most House Democrats began to side with the protectionists. Only 22 voted for freer trade with tiny Oman this year, and only 15 for the Central American agreement in 2005.

The hope has to be that some of this was the easy indulgence of being in the minority. As Bob Dole once said, you can't go wrong voting against a bill that passes–and Republicans in the majority had to do the heavy trade lifting. But now that Democrats are in power, they will be responsible if trade agreements suddenly begin to fail. In addition to the Peru pact, a deal with our South American ally Colombia is nearly final, and one with South Korea is in the works. Democrats will also have to decide whether to extend the President's trade promotion authority when it expires next summer.

We don't think there's much political profit in a protectionist turn. Whatever applause Democrats received from the AFL-CIO, they would lose as much support from business. They'd also advertise themselves as a party of a narrow special interest rather than the larger national good. This is why no truly protectionist candidate has won his party's Presidential nomination, Democrat or Republican, since Hoover. Voters have an instinctive sense that the only way to prosper is by competing in the global economy, not shrinking from it.

I have seen a number of left wing bloggers touting the protectionist agenda as a good thing. But like the isolationist tendencies they have, these are bad ideas. But exactly like the anti-Wal-Mart jihad, it is doing the bidding of the unions at the expense of the poor.

Remembering Lincoln

David Shribman writes about a commission that you have probably never heard of. The year 2009 will be the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. A commission has been formed to plan a celebration of the man who forever changed this nation.

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — He was a man of faint faith, and yet he is remembered as the greatest believer in American history. He was a man of jokes and gags, and yet he harbored more hurt, more sadness, more loss, than any public man of his time or any other. He was an uncertain man, and yet he is remembered for articulating the great certainties in our national life. He was a humble man, and yet he is acclaimed as the greatest American of all time.

Abraham Lincoln was born 198 years ago, which is about the least remarkable thing you can say about the man with the stainless soul who steeled the Union for its struggle for survival, who thought through the difficulties of emancipation and reconciliation, even if the former made the latter more difficult, and who spoke of bonds of affection, mystic chords of memory and the greater angels of our nature — three of the most evocative phrases in American history, all the more astonishing when you consider that they appeared in one luminous paragraph.

Lincoln was born in Kentucky in 1809, and the pressures of the decimal system and the calendar are conspiring to make the 200th anniversary of his birth, a little more than two years from now, a very big deal. Already Congress, where Lincoln served a single term, has jumped in and created the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. So far the group hasn't come up with much, but it hasn't spent much either, so, in bicentennials as in basketball, no harm, no foul. There will be a commemorative dollar coin, which, if the John F. Kennedy half-dollar and the Susan B. Anthony dollar coins are any indication, will have no more impact on society than the real Lincoln coin, the penny, has on your family's disposable income. There's also going to be an international conference, but then again GATT was an international conference, and for all its worthy achievements do you know a soul who can describe what it is? Thought not.

Which is not to say that there won't be a lot to celebrate in 2009. Lincoln — born poor and rural, fired with idealism, haunted by a sense of justice, blessed with pragmatism, burdened by contradiction, obsessed with mission — is the nation made flesh.

I have long admired Lincoln both for what he was and for what he was not. An imperfect man who still was able to do what nobody thought was possible. A man who spoke and wrote in and admirably succinct and direct way. A man beset by agonies that would have killed lesser men and who was able to retain a sense of humor despite it all.

Shribman believes that the commission will have little real impact, however. The civic structures that used to make such celebrations work are no longer functional. That is a real pity. Instead he suggests encouraging people to read at least one book on the Civil War or on the life of this indispensable man. His very existence forever changed this nation and left an indelible mark on us all. Shribman suggests taking the few minutes to read (or re-read) Lincoln's two inaugural addresses as a very good place to start. He's quite correct. Here is the first address and here is the second. They are astonishing documents that resonate as much today as when they were written.

Media, Ethics And Outing

Dave Kopel, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, make a strong argument against the practice of some activists to "out" homosexuals. Referring to the Haggard outing just before the election (which I strongly criticized for its complete violation of basic journalism rules). Kopel's argument is more fundamental: why does the media cooperate with this basic violation of human privacy?

Was the Colorado media acting ethically when it "outed" the Rev. Ted Haggard? Is outing usually ethical, as long as the media have sufficient evidence? I suggest that the answer to both questions is "no."

One justification for the Haggard outing is that it involved not just homosexuality, but also crime, because Haggard was both patronizing prostitute Mike Jones and using him to procure drugs.

But does anyone really believe that if methamphetamine was still legal in Colorado, and if Colorado had Nevada-style legal prostitution, the media would have ignored the Haggard story?

Homosexual journalist Michelangelo Signorile is the ayatollah of outing. He asks "How can being gay be private when being straight isn't?" Rejecting Signorile's neo-Maoist argument that no one has privacy rights, gay writer C. Carr responded: "Everyone - gay, straight, and in-between - has an absolute right to decide that their intimate lives are nobody's business" (Village Voice, March 19, 1991).

Signorile writes, "by outing we do not discuss anyone's sex life. We only say they're gay." Actually, on Signorile's radio show, and on Peter Boyles' talk show on KHOW, the hosts encouraged Jones to provide explicit information about particular sexual acts with Haggard. Properly, the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post refused to repeat Jones' tales.

Today, threats of outing are used as blackmail, and might amount to criminal extortion, depending on the jurisdiction. Last year, Washington, D.C., homosexual blogger Mike Rogers warned that a vote for the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito would result in the outing of a senator. Several weeks ago, Rogers followed through on his blackmail, although the claim was so bereft of evidence that it received little attention from most media, other than Air America's Ed Schulz.

Read the whole thing, it is a strong condemnation of this execrable activity and of the "justifications" used to explain it.

Bringing The Jihad Home

A teacher in Smithfield, North Carolina has resigned after complaints about one of his assignments to his Spanish class. It seems that Khalid Chahhou handed out a paper with instructions to translate words and use them in a word search puzzle. Words like 'destroy America'.

Khalid Chahhou, who was in his first year of teaching in Johnston County, gave students a worksheet in which they were to translate words and find them within a word-search puzzle.

Some students started uncovering strange words in the process.

"There were words like 'kill,' then I saw it said 'destroy America,'" Eric Herrera said.

As they read on, students found the puzzle contained a paragraph that contained the following phrases:

• "Sharon killed a lot of innocent people," a possible reference to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
• "Palestine is not a terrorist group."
• "Allah help destroy this body of evil making humanity miserable."

"It was kind of scary at first to think about, you know, your own teacher in your own school that is teaching you," Herrera said.

School administrators said they confronted Chahhou about an unidentified concern Wednesday and he resigned.

But not to worry says the teacher. He had just read an article that angered him.

"When I made the assignment, I was upset and angry about a story I recently saw on the news. If any message appears, it is more of a message to myself, not to my students. I never meant to hurt or upset any students or parents," he said.

Un-freaking-believable.

I Can’t Really Think Of A Way….

….To make this story funny. I have the running joke around here about the animal uprising and have a lot of fun mangling news stories to fit into that series. People seems to enjoy the stories, too, judging by comments and emails. So I thought that this story would fit right in when I saw the headline: "Raccoons invade California enclave". I mean that sounds like a headline I can work with, right? Wrong. Because the story shows that there are people in positions of authority in Los Angeles that have the most serious case of rectal-cranial inversion I have ever heard of.

The reasoning appears to be thus: if packs of vicious raccoons invade your neighbor and are literally attacking and killing your pets and generally savaging the area, it's the resident's own fault and they need to learn to get along with the ferocious beasts. Just so the humans will learn to be better humans. Or something to that ludicrous effect.

LOS ANGELES - One balmy summer night, Larna Hartnack awoke to the cries of her dog Charlie and, to her horror, found the Dalmatian in a battle for her life — pinned by a gang of raccoons that tore into her flesh and nearly gnawed off her tail.

Charlie survived. But recurring raccoon attacks on dogs and other creatures have unnerved people along the Venice Canals, a funky, well-to-do beach neighborhood packed with ardent dog lovers, many of whom are now afraid to walk their pets at night or leave them alone in the back yard.

Communities around the country are plagued by destructive or aggressive raccoons, and many of them routinely trap, remove and even kill the animals. But this being California, the city's animal-control agency is instead urging people to try to get along with the raccoons — a notion that strikes some as political correctness gone wild.

"What we're trying to inculcate in the L.A. community is a reverence for life. If we have more reverence for life, it translates into all our programs — for women and infants, the elderly and everybody in our community," said Ed Boks, the head of Los Angeles Animal Services.

"As we develop these programs that demonstrate our compassion for creatures completely at our mercy, it makes for a more compassionate society all the way around."

Just so you're clear on this: you as a human have inferior rights to those of the animals that are attacking and killing your pets. It will teach you to be a better human after enough of your pets are torn to shreds, don't you know? It is social engineering theory gone completely, and I mean completely, over the edge of sanity. And it actually gets worse, because you, as a victim, have brought this all on yourself:

The animal-control agency sees people as part of the problem: They are tempting raccoons by leaving dog food and trash bags unguarded.

"If you live in a high-crime area and don't put bars on your windows and you've had break-ins before, you're asking for it," said Gregory Randall, a wildlife specialist with the agency. "Our goal here is coexistence and making the alterations you need to make."

Now tell me exactly how that reasoning is one bit different than the Australian mufti who compared women to uncovered meat? He said that if women were not covered well enough with clothing, they deserved to be gang raped. In Randall's world, if the raccoons are killing your pets or attacking and destroying your home or landscaping , you asked for it. Oh, and make sure you fortify your home and remove any landscaping the raccoons might like:

He advised residents to try to keep raccoons out of their homes by getting rid of trellises and bougainvillea, closing cat doors and locking up kibble. Strobe lights, motion-activated sprinklers and talk radio can scare off the animals.

Venice Canals, a community of 400 homes, is the kind of place where nearby shopkeepers greet customers and their dogs by name and often have a bowl of water or dog biscuits on hand. One resident turned part of his property into a dog park.

Dogs have not been the only victims of the raccoons. They have chomped on ducks, a parrot and the legs of a turtle that they dug out of hibernation. Nadine Parkos, former president of the Venice Canals homeowners association, said the koi fish in her pond were massacred.

Personally, I'm in favor of immediately relocating the raccoons. Right to the offices of the Los Angeles Animal Services. They, after all, have a reverence for live and are asking for it.

Doing A Little Overhaul

I'm rearranging the furniture in the Crabitat, so things may be a bit strange for a while as I rebuild the look a bit. Please excuse the mess, we're under construction.