Well, Hello Sailor

The Hill reports that a Capitol Hill lobbyist who will remain nameless but who:

represents a chemical company, Clariant. He lives at Hill House, an apartment complex that many lawmakers call home, and has been a registered lobbyist since May 15 of last year.. (Ed Note, they left out the shoe size)

Has had a close encounter with the hive mind of the squirrels.

The alleged squirrel encounter occurred the week prior to July 4. No, he wasn’t tired, he says. Yes, his mental health is quite satisfactory, thank you. “I felt fine, there was nothing unusual,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, I know it’s weird.”

ITK met with Squirrel Man in the basement restaurant of the Capitol Hill Club last week, just a stone’s throw from the “crime scene” — a bench in front of the Cannon House Office Building. For reenactment purposes, he then led ITK to the bench where he was sitting when the squirrel approached. He looked around, made kissing noises at several squirrels and noticed a woman at another bench putting on shoes and socks. “Now that’s weird,” he said.

His version of the event: The lobbyist was sitting on the bench smoking a cigar when the squirrel approached, looked him in the eye and “distinctly said hello to me.” That particular day, the lobbyist did not have the stash of nuts and bread he usually brings to feed the animals.

So perhaps the squirrel was taunting him?

The lobbyist knows his story sounds strange. But, he says, he’s tired of keeping quiet. It’s a lonely feeling and he wants to know if anyone else in the community has ever heard a squirrel talk. “Every time a squirrel comes around I stop and wonder,” he said.

Anyway, since all squirrels share a group consciousness, we asked the resident of the walnut tree out in the side yard what, exactly, all this meant. He (well, it could be a she, but we thought it improper to ask) said that the squirrel in question had actually been trying to make small talk leading up to asking the lobbyist to represent them. The Lobbyist missed a big contract. The squirrels are agitating for a "greenhouse gas control measure" involving the planting of walnut trees. Since the lobbyist they approached ignored them, they have found another firm, Dewey, Dickem and Howe to lobby for them.

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Dissenter

There's an old movie, probably forgotten by a lot of people now, named The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I won't go through the long explanation of the plot, you can read it here if you're so inclined. The closing scenes are the important ones. Far out in front in a race, the protagonist, Colin Smith, stops and refuses to move along with the rest of the runners. When the movie ends, he is exiled to a menial job - but it is rather evident that he did the right thing, refused to buckle under to authority and accepted his fate. Which is all a rather dramatic introduction to this article about Richard Lindzen, the contrarian on global warming alarmism.

"All scientific issues—and this is no different—are difficult to understand," he tells a group of cadets and locals assembled in an auditorium at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. "Extreme weather events are always present. There's no evidence it's getting better, or worse, or changing."

Lindzen's relaxed delivery gives the audience a comfortable sense that they, like him, are smart enough to question the pronouncements of nervous scientists and high-octane advocates like Al Gore. Skepticism is a good idea, he says, since so many people who sound off about global warming don't bother to read the documents that supposedly forecast climate apocalypse. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, if you read it—and no one does …" he says, and that phrase alone prompts laughter.

This ability to put people at ease helps explain why, after nearly two decades of effort, Lindzen has achieved exalted status among the current crop of global-warming doubters. He has personally briefed President Bush's top science adviser on climate change and is very popular with senior GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill. He publishes opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal and speaks publicly several times a month, both in the U.S. and abroad. With so many Americans searching for answers on climate change, an endowed MIT professor with pithy quotes offers a level of assurance that few can rival.

In doing so, however, Lindzen is challenging the scientific establishment, which tends to sing in scary harmony about this issue. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international scientific body, 2,500 researchers strong, that weighs in on the planet's climate health every five years or so. Earlier this year, the IPCC rolled out a series of three massive documents asserting that global warming is an established fact and outlining where it all will lead.

The reports maintain that there's more than a 90 percent chance that human activity—primarily the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in increased levels of atmospheric CO2—is responsible for the earth's recent warming, which amounts to a 1.2-degree-Fahrenheit rise in global mean temperature over the past 100 years. Noting that the current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is higher than it's been in the past 650,000 years, the IPCC predicts that human-induced climate change could spell extinction for 20 to 30 percent of the world's species by the end of this century, cause increasingly destructive weather patterns, and flood coastal cities.

It is rather long, at least in the internet world, but it is well worth reading. As for the rather dramatic intro? Here's why, from the last page:

But while Lindzen and his allies are competitive in the marketplace of ideas, they're losing in America's cloakrooms and boardrooms. Democrats, who control Congress, aim to pass legislation in the coming months that will impose the same regulatory scheme that Lindzen opposes, a cap on CO2 emissions. And a host of traditional foes of such government-driven fixes, including the Big Three automakers and ConocoPhillips, now endorse it.

The 2008 election may determine whether Lindzen will continue to have a meaningful role in the public debate over climate change. If any of the Democratic candidates wins, Lindzen will be sidelined even further, since all of them are prepared to regulate emissions. The GOP field remains mostly in lockstep on the issue: John McCain backs mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases, but the remaining Republican candidates are much less enthusiastic about the prospect of such massive regulation.

In the end, Lindzen may get sent to the machine shop. But he's sure he's doing the right thing:

"My best guess is, 20 years from now it will be accepted that global warming is not an issue, and everybody will claim they knew it all along," he says, adding that he's not holding out hope of being recognized for his work by future generations. "Chances are, 20 years from now I'll be dead," he jokes, "and someone else will want to take credit."

(Hat tip to Lew Rockwell for the link to this article. It popped briefly on Memeorandum, thankfully, or I might have missed it.)

Trivialization

Michael Goldfarb links to a post from Andrew Sullivan, once billed as a "gay conservative" but now pretty much just a particularly shrill victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome. He's made yet another charge that President Bush is a "war criminal". It is getting old, Sullivan does it on a fairly regular basis these days. It also trivializes the matter at hand.

Andrew Sullivan is yet again calling the president a "war criminal." This time in response to today's New York Times article revealing that the Bush administration has subjected terror suspects captured abroad to 'severe' and 'brutal' interrogations.

Sullivan has a history of trotting out the charge of "war criminal," sticking the label on George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon counsel Jim Haynes, and Berkeley law prof John Yoo.

And for what? The Times indicts the Bush administration for exposing terrorists captured abroad to "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." Boo hoo. And why does the Times consider this such a dangerous policy? The reporters end the story with this quote, from former Navy lawyer John Hutson, which they must believe to be compelling:

“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.

Jules Crittenden has an answer for Sullivan's hysterics (Goldfarb points to this and quotes).

Article neglects to mention we are fighting an enemy that considers powerdrills into kneecaps and videotaped beheading of captives business as usual. That in fact, we have yet to face an enemy in the modern era that observes anything approaching the standards we do.  Germany, Japan, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq. Disorientation, isolation, beatings, starvation, summary executions, torture … of the bone-breaking, organ-smashing, electrocuting, bloody-drawing variety.

So does Neptunus Lex.

Well, if the worst that comes out of it is a bit of head slapping, the waterboard or chill temperatures I should think that Privates First Class Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, only to name two, would consider that an upgrade.

If only we could ask them.

What the New York Times describes is not torture. Harsh, yes. Something that may require amendment, possibly. But it is not using a power drill on a kneecap and it is not beheading a bound and helpless captive. By sawing their head off with a knife. To call something like this a "war crime" is to trivialize what is happening in Burma right now. It shows a shocking lack of perspective - like the lefty sites that declare an American politician "the worst person in the world" while ignoring the reality of places like Iran that hang people for being gay.

We Now Know The Secret Ingredient

They handed out the Ig Nobel Awards for this year today at Harvard. The "Igs", as they are called, honor some of the more creative research done in recent years. For example, one of this year's winners managed to extract vanilla flavoring from cow manure.

The Igs, as they are known, are chosen by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research to highlight scientific papers that, in the words of the magazine, "first make people laugh and then make them think."

Among the winners were a British-US duo who examined the side effects of sword swallowing and a Spanish team who finally answered the question of whether rats can discriminate between Japanese and Dutch spoken backwards.

"It was a surprise, it was the last thing we expected," said Nuria Sebastian-Galles, one of the Barcelona team of scientists, of the findings. The awards, she said, "bring out the freak inside most scientists."

Past winners have included the creator of the plastic pink flamingo, the inventor of an alarm clock that runs and hides and a researcher who reported the first known case of homosexual necrophiliac behavior in the mallard duck.

Research highlighted by this year's awards ranged from a study of how sheets wrinkle and how the word "the" causes headaches for indexes to why humans can't stop eating when presented with an apparently endless bowl of soup.

Also honored was a Taiwanese man who patented a device to net bank robbers.

The prestigious peace prize was given to a US Air Force laboratory for researching what the committee dubbed the "gay bomb" — a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

Japanese researcher Mayu Yamamoto, who received the chemistry Ig, got an additional honor: a local ice cream shop created a new flavor, the "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist," to honor her work extracting vanilla flavor from cow dung.

Why do you think they call it a cow pie?

Wait a minute. An alarm clock that runs and hides? Oh. My. God.

“The Guy Don’t Have A Leg To Stand On.”

The exact quotation of Captain Tracy Ledford of the Maiden, North Carolina Police Department commenting on the department's decision to return a human leg to its previous owner. (Regular readers will remember the postings about this incident here and here.) The leg was amputated from a Mr. John Wood after a plane crash. He kept it because he wanted to be buried (or cremated) "whole". Mr. Wood fell on hard times and was unable to pay the rental fees where the leg was - for unknown reasons - kept in a barbecue smoker. The goods were auctioned off and a Mr. Shannon Whisnant had discovered the severed appendage. This caused a great deal of excitement and Mr. Whisnant contacted the police and gave them the leg. Mr. Wood was notified and was to retrieve his leg.

That is until Mr. Whisnant discovered he could charge people a modest fee to view the leg's former residence, the barbecue smoker. The PT Barnum instinct kicked in and Whisnant announced he wanted the leg back - ostensibly because he could then make more from his grisly display. A legal battle over who owned the leg was in the offing. We'll let the latest article pick it up:

The dispute over the leg John Wood lost in an airplane crash three years ago was apparently resolved when police decided the buyer, Shannon Whisnant, had given up ownership by calling authorities and asking them to take it away.

"The simple fact is that he said he didn't want it," said Capt. Tracy Ledford of the Maiden Police Department, who chuckled his way through an interview about the case that has made for lively gossip in the small North Carolina town.

"The guy don't have a leg to stand on," Ledford said. "He's not getting the leg back."

The charming Mr. Whisnant is quoted as saying: "It's a hell of a conversation piece," he told the Greenville News. "I bought it. It's mine." There is, of course, a solution. Mr. Whisnant could contribute a portion of his anatomy to the display. Well, except for his heart. He hasn't one.

Etruscan Political Center Discovered?

Archaeologists in Italy believe they may have found the long-lost political center of the Etruscan League, that group of city states that fell to Rome many years ago. Fanum Voltumnae is mentioned by the Roman historian Livy as the place where the Etruscans met to pick their leader. It is also the place where they refused to aid one of their member cities besieged by a Roman army. That city, Veii, duly fell to the Romans. As did each of the twelve that made up the Etruscan League.

Fanum was already famous in antiquity as a religious shrine and a meeting place where the 12 members of the Etruscan League, a confederation of central Italian cities, used to gather every spring to elect their leader.

In the autumn of 398BC an extraordinary policy meeting was held in Fanum.

A Roman army had been besieging the town of Veii, a wealthy member of the Etruscan League, which lay only 16km (10 miles) north of Rome.

The citizens of Veii, exhausted by years of warfare, appealed for help and asked the other members of the league to join them in declaring war on Rome.

The gods of the shrine of Fanum were duly consulted, but the vote went against collectively defending Veii.

Two years later the town fell to Rome.

It was the beginning of the end for the Etruscan League, all of whose cities eventually fell to Roman invaders.

We know all this ancient history through the Roman historian Livy, who wrote his famous account of the origins of Rome towards the end of the 1st Century BC.

The scientists have not yet found any inscription that would prove the dig is actually Fanum Voltumnae, but the leader of the team is quite confident they have found it.

Ban Internet Taxes

The temporary Federal ban on internet taxes expires on November 1st, 2007. If the moratorium is not extended, state and local governments will start adding taxes for your access to the internet. While another extension is the absolute minimum that is needed, what really needs to happen is a permanent ban. There should be no taxes on your access to the internet. Grover Norquist has a piece up at Real Clear Politics about it:

Luckily for taxpayers, there is bipartisan support for extending the current Internet tax moratorium permanently. Even state groups like the National Governor's Association support temporarily extending the ban on taxing the Internet.

However, there are already a handful of states that were allowed to keep the taxes they had on Internet users in place when the ban was originally approved in 1998. It comes as no surprise that more big-spending state governments are lining up to join them if the moratorium is allowed to lapse. Some states, like Michigan and Texas are claiming the right to tax Internet access now under their tax structure that targets the gross receipts of companies in their states.

Individuals logging on to stay in touch with family and friends would not be the only taxpayers hit by Internet taxation if the door is opened this fall. Small businesses are increasingly online. Taxing Internet access would add another layer onto the burden businesses already face. A heavier burden on businesses means a heavier restraint on economic growth, job creation and higher prices.

So why is an extension not enough? The specter of possible Internet taxation further down the road presents a disincentive to the same businesses and entrepreneurs that have brought the Internet this far to continue innovating.

Ed Morrisey has a video from Mitch McConnell up and has this to say:

Why would a federal ban apply? The Internet exemplifies interstate commerce, which places it under federal jurisdiction, even among the most ardent federalists. The entire intent of the Internet is to allow individuals to reach out to the global community. Oversight on tax policy that would discourage or limit that access rightly belongs to Congress.

Taxing the internet is bad for everyone, regardless of political leanings. Support a permanent ban on internet taxes.

Cohesion At A Real Cost

Rasmussen Reports has a poll result up about the electablity of a possible third party candidate if one is backed by Christian conservative leaders. Bottom line: no chance at all and hand the win to the Democrat. It is 1992 all over again.

If Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination and a third party campaign is backed by Christian conservative leaders, 27% of Republican voters say they’d vote for the third party option rather than Giuliani. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that a three-way race with Hillary Clinton would end up with the former First Lady getting 46% of the vote, Giuliani with 30% and the third-party option picking up 14%. In head-to-head match-ups with Clinton, Giuliani is much more competitive.

One of the reasons I cite Rasmussen fairly regularly is that they do provide some thoughtful perspective on their results rather than pure spin the way a lot of news organizations do.

The latest poll highlights the potential challenges for Giuliani, but the numbers must be considered in context. A generic third-party candidate may attract 14% of the vote in the abstract at this time. However, if a specific candidate is chosen, that person would likely attract less support due to a variety of factors. Almost all third party candidates poll higher earlier in a campaign and their numbers diminish as election day approaches. Ultimately, of course, some Republicans would have to face the question of whether to vote for Giuliani or help elect a Democrat.

What this means is that a doomed third party run would hand the election to the Democratic nominee. Which is what James Dobson appears to be quite happy to do:

After two hours of deliberation, we voted on a resolution that can be summarized as follows: If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate. Those agreeing with the proposition were invited to stand. The result was almost unanimous.

The other issue discussed at length concerned the advisability of creating a third party if Democrats and Republicans do indeed abandon the sanctity of human life and other traditional family values. Though there was some support for the proposal, no consensus emerged…..

…..If the major political parties decide to abandon conservative principles, the cohesion of pro-family advocates will be all too apparent in 2008.

I pointed out that I thought this was a bad idea here.

That is the looming disaster: losing the courts. We already see the Democrats blocking judicial nominees. You know they are balking so that they can pack the courts if they win the White House. And activist, leftist courts are already a problem. Conservatives watched all of this play out before. They watched as the courts leaned farther and farther to the left. They watched as third party candidates split the votes at a crucial time.

Dobson appears to be willing to lose the courts and cheerfully lead the march over the cliff. Because no matter how you slice this one, it is political suicide. One that many people are going to regret on their way to the bottom.

Pop Culture Hauntings

Benjamin Radford, who thoroughly enjoys poking holes in "mysterious" things, has another column up over at LiveScience that discusses how pop culture media influences the public's beliefs in "supernatural" phenomena. The occasion is the 25th anniversary of the movie Poltergeist.

About half of Americans believe in ghosts, according to a 2003 Harris poll. Since the scientific evidence for ghosts is shaky at best—and since relatively few people claim to have personally seen a ghost—most people get their information about them through the media.

Steven Spielberg, who wrote and produced "Poltergeist," is well known for his influence on pop culture in general. But his films have also shaped the public's perception of the paranormal. His successful films often include supernatural themes, including ghosts, aliens (e.g., "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," and "War of the Worlds"); miracles (the Indiana Jones series); and psychic powers ("Minority Report").

While audiences know the films are entertainment, there is a clear (if subtle and sometimes subconscious) influence on their beliefs about these topics.

Many horror films (including "The Amityville Horror" and "The Exorcist," to name two blockbusters), claim to have been based on a true story or real events. There is of course much creative license taken, and when those "true stories" are investigated, they turn out to be hoaxes or heavily embellished accounts of non-supernatural events. Entertainment depictions of ghosts and demons not only encourage the public's belief, but also inspire other stories. The Amityville story didn't appear in a vacuum; the "true" (actually fictional) account borrowed story elements from (and capitalized on the pop culture interest in) "The Exorcist," which came out several years earlier.

Well, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard have learned a valuable lesson from Mr. Radford's work. Since movies featuring the supernatural made Spielberg gobs of money, why couldn't the Crabitat do the same thing? Here's the trailer for our new movie - in theaters soon! - The Amityville Exorgeist.

Didn’t Get The Memo

Daniel Henninger from the Opinion Journal points out the sad fact that the monks in Burma didn't get the memo from the western elite. It isn't about democracy, it is absolute stability.

In the U.S. and Europe, the notion of creating "a balance of power that favors human freedom" as a counterweight to terror networks is now routinely mocked as "a dream," "a fiasco" and "a failure." And as soon as the abominable Bush and the neocons are gone, their "oversold" democratic pipe dream will be replaced by an American foreign policy that is more "modest."

As it happens, the opposition party in Burma, the one getting shot, is called the National League for Democracy. Not the National League for Stability, but Democracy. One hopes the monks, reported by the BBC to be headed for internment camps, aren't expecting too much from "the world," because not much is coming. If before deciding to fill Rangoon's streets the "saffron-robed" monks had spent more time reading pundits and foreign-policy intellectuals in Washington or Western Europe, they would have known that democracy has been demoted.

The Bush Doctrine's critics will say this is unfair, that they support aspiring democracies, that their critique of the neocons is mostly about Iraq. Perhaps, but I would argue that this tidy distinction–"we only mean Iraq, we're all for Burma"–has been lost on the popular imagination. The anti-Bush, anti-neocon obsession has been so constant, so often pegged to the broader Bush "dream" for democracy and freedom, that its critics have tossed out the world's democratic babies with the Iraqi and Afghan bathwater.

An overstatement? In a July 2006 Foreign Affairs article, "The End of the Bush Revolution," Philip Gordon of Brookings, now an advisor to Barack Obama, tries to deflate what he describes as a "revolutionary" Bush foreign policy, which argues that "the spread of democracy and freedom is the key to a safer and more peaceful world." He finds "such thinking" still afloat in the president's 2006 State of the Union message. Mr. Gordon places this as "on the idealistic end of the U.S. foreign policy spectrum" and a departure from "the realist view that the United States should avoid meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations."

This March, in the Washington Post, Tony Smith of Tufts, writing from the Democratic left, derides both neocons and neolibs for promoting "market democracy" and urges the Democratic presidential candidates to articulate "a more modest U.S. role in the world."

Short version: You're on your own, Burma. Slightly longer version: You're on your own, Burma and the European Union will be pleased to hold trade seminars with the military junta while it is busy smashing monk's heads in.

It is ironic that the left that used to decry the Cold War "realism" that led to the, "He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard," approach to diplomacy is now embracing that same concept.

Unable To Leap A Tomato In A Single Bound

Honestly, we are amazed at how real life is actually stranger than fiction. The Lord-Mayor of Belfast, prompted by photographers at a food festival, attempted to leap over a tomato. Unfortunately, this did not end well for the tomato. She suffered a slipped disk.

The Lord-Mayor of Belfast was left rather red-faced when he tried to leapfrog a colleague, who was dressed as a tomato - but ended up squashing her.

Jim Rodgers was asked to perform the athletic feat to promote a food festival.

At first he expressed doubt as to whether he was agile enough - but the grey-haired Lord Mayor gave it a go anyway.

He took a dep breath and a running leap, hoping to clear the head of Belfast City council worker Lorraine Mallon, who was wearing the tomato costume.

But the Ulster Unionist councillor caught Ms Mallon on the back of the neck with his leg.

She suffered a slipped disc and has been unable to return to work since the accident on September 4.

Superman he ain't. (They have a picture at the link apparently taken just before impact.)

When Potato Heads Go Bad

We regret to inform our readers that Mr. Potato Head has been busted for drug possession by authorities in Australia.

SYDNEY, Australia - Customs officers discovered nearly 10.5 ounces of ecstasy tablets hidden inside a Mr. Potato Head toy sent to Australia from Ireland, the agency said Thursday.

Upon opening the parcel, the officers were greeted with the smiling face of the popular children's toy, which features a potato-like head and removable facial features. But when they removed a panel from the back of the toy, the officers found 10.34 ounces of ecstasy in a plastic bag.

We are very disappointed. We really hoped Mr Potato Head would continue with his artistic endeavors instead of turning to the dark side. (Direct link)

“Principle Is A Terrible Thing”

Those odd words are part of an op-ed by Jonathan Turley in today's USA Today. In it he admits, much to his dismay, that the NRA may have been right all along: there is an individual right to keep and bear arms. That is a belief he spent his entire life avoiding, by his own admission.

The D.C. law effectively bars the ownership of handguns for most citizens and places restrictions on other firearms. The District's decision to file these appeals after losing in the D.C. appellate court was driven more by political than legal priorities. By taking the appeal, D.C. politicians have put gun-control laws across the country at risk with a court more likely to uphold the rulings than to reverse them. It has also put the rest of us in the uncomfortable position of giving the right to gun ownership the same fair reading as more favored rights of free press or free speech.

Principle is a terrible thing, because it demands not what is convenient but what is right. It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right. It is true that the amendment begins with a reference to militias: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Accordingly, it is argued, this amendment protects the right of the militia to bear arms, not the individual.

Yet, if true, the Second Amendment would be effectively declared a defunct provision. The National Guard is not a true militia in the sense of the Second Amendment and, since the District and others believe governments can ban guns entirely, the Second Amendment would be read out of existence.

No, principle is a wonderful thing and Turley has them, that is obvious. The recent events in Burma illustrate in general terms what the framers were afraid of. Of course, even they could not have envisioned haw depraved socialist tyrannies could be, but they understood the general idea. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is a defense against an out of control government intent on crushing the people's rights.

Turley deserves a thank you for his honesty and principle.