A butcher knife on a blind date...

AP Wire | 02/13/2005 | Airport screener misses butcher knife
An amusing story, but it misses the real point: God made men and women, Colonel Colt made them equal (which I swiped from Ann Coulter, politically incorrect person that I am).
Ladies, if you need to be armed, take a stand-off weapon. A knife lets the bad guy get too close!

The New York Times Editorial: The Ship That's Sinking the Navy

Editorial The Ship That's Sinking the Navy.htm">The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: The Ship That's Sinking the Navy

The editorial illustrates some very good points that need to be made -- although these aren't the points the grey lady had in mind.
First, although the short term threat is assuredly littoral, there is no very good reason to believe we won't face a blue-water threat at the end of the DDX's life. Vide: PRC.
Second, although the DDX (and, for that matter, the Arleigh Burke class) certainly aren't optimized for littoral warfare, they're not incapable in that area. In other words, the threat is multifaceted; therefore, the response must be multicapable. An attempt to overspecialize the shrinking fleet would lead to a return to the high/low concept of the mid-late 70s.
Last, although it's extraordinarily easy to claim the Navy's over-the-moon with advanced technology, the added capabilities are largely driven by perceived threats twenty-to-thirty years out.

Invented evils...

Thanks to Diana Hsieh:

"I vaguely remember hearing (perhaps from Stephen Hicks) that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hard left faced an inescapable either-or choice between socialism and reality. Unsurprisingly, they abandoned reality in favor of socialism -- and thus postmodernism was born. Based upon my readings on Soviet Russia and Red China, I'm certain that most (if not all) hard leftists abandoned reality decades earlier. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the last shred of their pretend concern for the facts disintegrated. Postmodernism then served as a convenient rationalization for their abandonment of that pretended concern for facts: Wow, as it turned out, the idea of objective fact was just a myth!"
Yep, the emphasis was added
Read it all:
Diana Mertz Hsieh: NoodleFood

Error Theory

Error Theory

A major, albeit pointed, hoot: Earth Day 2030: "A new eye blinked open upon the world"

Error Theory: Earth Day 2030: "A new eye blinked open upon the world"I do believe I'll have to keep track of "ErrorTheory"!

Wired News: U.S. Military's Elite Hacker Crew

To the surprise of every two-year old, DOD has cyberwarfare plans. Duh.
Wired News: U.S. Military's Elite Hacker Crew

Diane Knippers, Godspeed

Home - Institute on Religion and Democracy - LIVE SITE

I don't agree with her on everything; nonetheless, the world's a little dimmer today.

BANG! You're dead in a thoroughly politically incorrect way.

(CBS) U.S. scientists are on the verge of creating a laser weapon that could give American forces an awesome advantage on the battlefield, but would also raise tough questions for Pentagon war planners, a newspaper reports.

The subject is fascinating. The story, predictably, is written by someone who obviously thinks someone shot by a laser is deader -- or more horribly deader -- than someone skewered by a spear. I further suspect the writer(s) isn't(aren't) posessed of a great deal of scientific knowledge, though I'd love to be proved wrong.

The inimitable Jane Galt strikes again, puppies!

http://64.235.242.204/~janeg/cgi-bin/MT/mt-yoohoo.cgi/4623

OUCH

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/ --- click on 11 April 2005

Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson". The greatest introduction to economics

in the English language is available here
Thanks to JaneGalt

Lux Aeterna dona, Domine

I am not Roman Catholic. However, there's no question that John Paul II was a titan of our age:
Come, labor on.
No time for rest, till glows the western sky,
till the long shadows o'er our pathway lie,
and a glad sound comes with the setting sun,
"Servant well done."

Whose Life Is Worth Living?

I spent a time pondering the Schiavo case, the value of life, and making notes about what I wanted to say. Then, Orson Scott Card said it for me:
------------
It wasn't that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book.
Read it all

Gives a whole new meaning to the appellation "Meathead", doesn't it?

PETA's School Raid Rolled Into Sushi
You would be forgiven for thinking that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) cares more about a school of fish than a school of children. Once again, the group is swimming upstream from common decency by trying to brainwash children with anti-fishing messages. This week PETA activists descended on a Florida middle school. "The only problem was," The Miami Herald reported yesterday, "the kids weren't buying it."
Looking unfavorably upon a PETA activist clad in a giant fish costume, one student mustered his finest vocabulary, exclaiming: "What the hell is that? Get that out of here." His friend (perhaps not on the debate team, but chock full of common sense), added: "We're getting really pissed off, so we need the fish to leave."
Read it all

Good news: some deservedly obscure lawyers get their 15 minutes

Bad news: they're wrong
From Reason Magazine:
"In December, after a federal jury convicted McLean, Virginia, pain doctor William Hurwitz of running a drug trafficking operation, the foreman told The Washington Post "he wasn't running a criminal enterprise." Don't bother reading that sentence again; it's not going to make any more sense the second time around.
I read it again for you. The author, Jacob Sullum, is absolutely right; it doesn't make any more sense.
Hurwitz, who is scheduled to be sentenced on April 14 and will go to prison for life if U.S. District Judge Leonard Wexler follows the prosecutors' recommendation, was charged with drug trafficking because a small minority of his patients abused or sold narcotic painkillers he prescribed for them. Prosecutors argued his practice amounted to a "criminal enterprise" based on a "conspiracy of silence"—i.e., a conspiracy in which Hurwitz did not actually conspire with anyone—because he charged for his services and should have known some of his patients were faking or exaggerating their pain.
Emphasis mine.

It gets worse:
The government's main medical expert, Michael Ashburn, testified that consumption of high narcotic doses by patients with chronic pain who do not have cancer is a sign of drug abuse.
Latest poll, which is way up says he's wrong:
In a letter they wrote before the verdict, six past presidents of the American Pain Society rebuked Ashburn for this statement, along with several other misrepresentations of pain treatment standards. "We are stunned by his testimony," they said. "Use of 'high dose' opioid therapy for chronic pain is clearly in the scope of medicine."
Yes, the emphasis' mine.

What has this got to do with me, you ask? Well, if you get into a situation where you need high doses of opiods to control pain, you'll be facing a doctor who may go to jail if he prescribes you the painkillers you need:
As these pain experts recognized, Hurwitz was not the only person on trial at the federal courthouse in Alexandria. So was every doctor who has the courage to risk investigation by treating people who suffer from severe chronic pain with the high doses of opioids they need to make their lives livable.
Read it all

But you do feel much safer now, don't you?

This is, officially, just plain silly

but lots of fun:

Jane Galt on homosexual marriage

Asymmetrical information indeed! Wow, I wish I'd said this:
"Unlike most libertarians, I don't have an opinion on gay marriage, and I'm not going to have an opinion no matter how much you bait me. However, I had an interesting discussion last night with another libertarian about it, which devolved into an argument about a certain kind of liberal/libertarian argument about gay marriage that I find really unconvincing."
Read it all

HERETIC! APOSTATE! Drive a stake thru their hearts

Y'know, Harvard's going to be driven out of the liturgy of liberals if they don't watch out. Life Satisfaction indeed!