Bull Moose Strikes Back

I wasn’t going to say anything about Obama’s shot at the SCOTUS, because, who cares? SCOTUS had the binding word.

But it has slowly been dawning on me how politically stupid it was: Almost all politically hot decisions are going to be 5-4 votes one way or another for the foreseeable future. So what does Obama do? He scolds the swing vote to his face in the State of the Union for the most recent majority opinion he authored.

Good luck to the next attorney trying to move Kennedy over to the administration’s point of view next term.

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Sigh. Every time I see something like this, I wonder how anyone could have the nerve to get mad at me when I call militant environmentalism what it is: Anti-human nihilism.

Do a quick exercise. If 6.5 billion people lived in the same population density of New York City, how big would the city be? About the size of Texas? Check my math.

So why do we have proposals like that being made as the western world commits suicide? (2.1 live births per woman is what is needed to maintain a stable population.) Liberals – classical liberals in the historical sense of the word, not people who necessarily voted for Obama or against Bush  – who value things like freedom of speech, religion, women’s rights, tolerance of homosexuals (as in not killing them), clean air and water, science, and everything else western civilization has spent 2,500 years developing shouldn’t want to turn the world over to the backwards civilizations that appear on the top of that list. But people like Diane Francis seemingly can’t wait to do so to the point where she wants to mandate it.

You’d think people would be embarrassed to still be pushing this particular boogie man after all this time. Especially since even some at UN are predicting the world population topping out at 9 billion in 2050. (Sure, that’s only a prediction, but does anyone see the next generation of the western world, Russia, and China having more kids than their parents?) So that’s Texas and New Mexico. Still seems like a lot of room left for growing rice, wheat, and trees.

The answer to the world’s problems, whatever they may be, is not a population crash, especially in the societies likely to produce technological solutions.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I missed the most obvious problem with a global one-child mandate: Can you imagine a world totally populated  by sufferers of only child syndrome? I shudder thinking about it.

UPDATE 2: D’oh. This post got moved to “Private” for a while. I hate when that happens.

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If they are going to keep making the Nobel Peace Prize more and more of a joke, I’m just going to recycle my same shtick every year:

The following conversation took place in the afterlife this morning:

Teddy Roosevelt: Say, Root. Remember when the dynamite magnate’s organization gave us a prize for promoting peace?

Elihu Root: Oh, yes. they gave you one for forcing a settlement in the war between Russia and Japan, and gave me one for arbitrating some peace treaties. Say, remember what you said to that Russian fellow. Ha!

TR: Oh yes! Quite bully!

Root: But what about the peace prize?

TR: Remember those fellows we met who also got the prizes? Albert Schweitzer, Lech Walesa, and Martin Luther King?

Root: Oh, yes. Quite interesting fellows who did a lot to help their fellow man. Old Woodrow Wilson also received one as I recall?

TR: What did I ask you about not mentioning Woodrow Wilson?

Root: Sorry, Roosevelt.

TR: But even Wilson… All of us did something to bring about peace, agreed?.

Root: Yes. Well, except for that unpleasant man they dragged out of here a few years back. Yassar something or other.

TR: Oh yes. Nasty business, that one. Even though we had something in common. Most of the individual winners of that award had never personally killed anyone.

Root: But what’s all the talk of this award all of a sudden. You usually just talk about the time you shot a rhino and the like.

TR: Well, it’s the fellow they gave the prize to this year – the new president Barack Obama.

Root: Oh yes, the negro Harvard man.

TR: You are supposed to call them African-American now, Root.  Though I just say “black.” Can’t stand that hyphenated business.

Root: A black president. If only the people who hated you for inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with you could see that. But you say he won the Nobel thing? Didn’t he just get elected? Or have I lost track of time again?

TR: No. He was inaugurated this January past. I can’t get used to these January inaugurations.

Root: So it was for something he did before his presidency?

TR: That’s the rub, Root. No one really understands what it was for. He hasn’t seemed to have done much at all which would qualify him for such a prize.

Root: What?

TR: He flies around America, Europe, the middle east and such giving speeches. (Flying! If only I had been President 50 years later.) But he doesn’t have much in the way of solid results which show the world to be a better place because of him.

Root: Surely he’s ended a war?

TR: No.

Root: Negotiated a treaty?

TR: No.

Root: Signed a treaty?

TR: No.

Root: So you weren’t pulling my mustache? He got the prize for winning the election and making speeches?

TR: As far as anyone can tell. Oh, he brings hope too.

Root: Brings hope? What does that mean if it is not backed up by action?

TR: I don’t know.

Root: I thought it was bad when they gave the old peanut farmer the prize, but at least he did something with the best of intentions.

TR: This may be worse than when they gave it to that fear monger two years ago. But at least they had a pretext then.

Root: I didn’t think it could get worse than that.

TR: I don’t know how we’re supposed to think much of this award anymore. We, and many of our fellow winners, brought about an actual improvement to the human condition. We helped end wars, poverty, and racism. Now you just have to say you want to and that is good enough to receive one. If they can not find anyone more deserving who has actually taken action for peace, then the world is in serious trouble.

Root: Quite.

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The next person who wishes me a “Happy Cinco de Mayo” is getting punched in the throat. I don’t celebrate foreign military victories, unless they were allied with the US at the time of the victory.

I certainly don’t celebrate foreign national holidays, especially when the foreign country in question hardly celebrates the holiday in question.

Well, I guess I do celebrate Bastille Day. Viva la revoution!

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A few days ago I got virtual eyes rolled at me on Facebook when I said in a friend’s thread that Earth Day was the day we celebrate the astonishing accomplishment of the mainstreaming anti-human nihilism by packaging it as “Environmentalism.” Notice the capital letter. Of course I said that both partially tongue-in-cheek and in the most inflammatory way possible, because that’s my style on The Internets (see, e.g. this entire blog).

I consider myself an environmentalist – someone who believes in a good-sense balance between conservationism and use of the environment and between protecting the common resources of air and water and acknowledging that there is a tolerance limit of less than 100% pure. But I can’t use that word anymore because it’s loaded, so I tend to refer to myself as a conservationist.

Big-E Environmentalists, on the other hand, err in one way – towards mother earth. (At least when such erring doesn’t affect their lifestyle, that is, but that’s a different post.) The easiest example is DDT. DDT was one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th Century, but it was demagogued out of use. Rather than bothering to figure out how to best use DDT and prevent its overuse, it was just made politically untenable for even the most afflicted countries to use.

But when one sees quotes like “Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, ‘Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.’” (Desowitz, RS. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company.) one wonders how much of it was really about the birds.

But this post isn’t about DDT, there are plenty of places on the web where people are flaming each other about DDT. This post is about something similar that I expereinced that I thought about when I recently had my prescriptions refilled.

I have very mild asthma that is brought on by strenuous exercise. I take a puff of an albuterol inhaler prior to exercise and don’t worry about it. About a year ago I refilled my puffer and had this conversation:

Pharmacist: OK. One albuterol inhaler. That’s $40.

Me: Whoa, whoa, whoa. I want an albuterol puffer, not the cure to AIDS. That’s $5.

Pharmacist: Nope. We had to stop selling the old kind because of environmental regulations. [Walgreens must have made the change a little early.] The new kind of puffer isn’t generic. You have to pay eight times as much if you want to breath. Be thankful your insurance is picking up the balance.

I’m no fan of CFCs, but humans have been doing a good job of phasing them out over the last few decades. So why was so hellfire important that we just needed to get rid of the CFC inhalers before the HFA inhalers are both generic and perfected?

$35 four or five times a year isn’t going to put me in the poor house. But what about the kid who has crappy insurance who needs a refill twice a month? That kind of money could add up fast.

My experience with the HFA inhalers, and this is acknowledged by the manufacturer, is that they tend to clog and they tend to clog frequently. A user has to take the medication chamber out of the inhaler, run water through the inhaler, wait a few minutes, then put the medication chamber back in. Again, what is a slight inconvenience to me may be life-or-death to someone with severe asthma.

Once again another regulation came down to protect the “environment” with real human consequences. Was there any thought to the balance between the amount of CFCs released by an albuterol puff versus the consequences of making an HFA puff vastly more expensive, if it happens at all? I actually hope not, because if the bureaucrats deciding to enact this regulation did consider those factors, they enacted the regulation with malice.

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You may have heard the leaked Christian Bale tirade (caution – language like that heard in my apartment at the end of Super Bowl XXXII) at the director of cinematography (or some such person) on the set of Terminator 4. (Best line: “McG, you got something to say to this prick?”) A few months ago some old footage of Bill O’Reilly blowing up at Inside Edition along the same lines turned up. (That by the way provided me with one of my favorite things to say when something goes FUBAR: “F it, we’ll do it live!”) Then there’s this one of Chris Berman. And I’m sure there are endless amounts of them from other celebrities.

Now, I know we’re all supposed to “tsk, tsk” at those people acting like prima donnas, but I won’t. And if you want to dig up some footage of Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann, I’ll defend them too. Here’s why: Because I’m sure if I was on camera as much as them there’d be some even better, funnier footage of me berating someone in an even nastier way for doing something even more trivial. And I won’t apologize for it.

There is an insidious conspiracy of culture that tells us we’re all supposed to put up with a certain amount of incompetence from the people around us. Think about it. You all know a couple people at work who get by on the “understanding” of their bosses. Or the laziness of their bosses, since bosses are also included in the conspiracy of incompetence. And, good lord, we aren’t allowed to fire anyone. We’ll have the union or the HR hug squad down here in a minute.

I remember the very first time I screwed up as a professional. I knew I did. The boss called me into his office to talk about it. Which was good, everyone screws up, the point is how you correct your screw ups. After we hashed out exactly what went wrong and how to do what I was supposed to do correctly I stood up to leave his office. He said, “Thanks. Good job.” I kind of stopped in my tracks, stunned a little. Good job? Well, no, not good job. I screwed something up. That stayed with me for a long time. What if I had a different personality and thought, “Yeah… good job.” I wouldn’t have been motivated to improve my work. I think that attitude is prevalent in the American workplace today, and that is a huge problem. (It didn’t help that this guy was an effeminate repressed homosexual – really, he came out and divorced his wife after I left – who thought he had to be super nice, but I’ve seen the same attitude in non-repressed homosexual bosses.)

I’m sure what happened to Bale and the others was that there was a slow build up of things they weren’t supposed to make a big deal about. The DP is screwing with the lights during your shot; let it go. The teleprompter wasn’t loaded right; oh well. Someone is throwing a party on the other side of the camera; those crazy guys.  So someone softly corrected the situation. Then it happened again a couple days later. And again a week later. And again the next month. Until finally it couldn’t be tolerated any more by the person most effected.

I’ve been in the situation where the only way to get the point across is an extremely loud F-bomb aimed at the right idiot, or beating on really expensive scientific equipment with a wrench, and I’m sure that’s what the tape/video was catching.  And when you look at the people involved in these specific incidents – Bale, O’Reilly, Berman – they are at the top of their professions (commercially speaking) in an extremely competitive world. They have the most to lose from being hurt by other people’s asinine behavior. Why shouldn’t they yell at people who are screwing with their career? I bet the DP doesn’t mess with the lights during Bale’s scenes anymore. I bet the Inside Edition people always double checked the teleprompter. I bet everyone was as still as a statue when Berman did his halftime report.

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Attention black youths: Biggie Smalls, Notorious B.I.G. and whatever the hell else he was called has been dead for 16 years. It is Martin Luther King weekend. A black man is going to be inaugurated as president tomorrow.

Any of those are a good reason to knock off stuff like this or this.

I’m sure there has been a white person or two that was stabbed over the rivalry between Dale Jr and Jeff Gordon, but I don’t think it is as predictable.

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It’s that time of year again: Orthodox Festivus. I pull the Festivus Pole out from behind the Christmas Tree and perform feats of strength. Unfortunately for you, you can’t join me for those. Fortunatly for you, you are able to read my grievances:

• We’ll get the annual eggnog shake-related grievance out of the way. Silverdale McDonald’s:  I would never eat there for lunch except for the lure of the eggnog shake (and in March the Shamrock shake). So it’s a little bit infuriating when their shake machine is broken on Christmas Eve day and I’m stuck in the drive-in line.
• The 1 in 5 HDTV owners who can’t tell the difference between HD and SD are legally blind: Why is this one of the biggest problems that the adoption of HD faces? The difference between SD and HD is the same as the difference between black and white and color.  (And anti-grievance to DirecTV who has done a very good job in correcting their former “HD Lite” problem this year. It still can’t compare to Blu Ray / HD DVD, but an episode of “Friday Night Lights” on the 101 looks very pristine.)
• The People who felt the need to yell at me when I had a flat tire on my motorcycle on I-5: May someone laugh at your accident on the freeway one day. And may it be a single-car fatality.
• Football coaches, especially Badger and Packer coaches, who haven’t figured out that the prevent only prevents the win: I only enjoy fourth quarter comebacks if my team is the one coming back.
• The Bremerton K-Mart: Yes, combine K-Mart and Bremerton and it is as horrible as you’d expect. However, that’s not the problem. I’ll accept the terribleness for what it is when I go in there because something is on sale for an awesomely low price or because it is the closest store of its kind. What I don’t care for is the fact that they let salesman for other companies ambush their customers inside the store. One minute I’m looking for kitty litter, the next I’m trying to get away from a guy pitching me storm windows.
• Every other retail store I was in this year: No, I don’t want your credit card. And you know what? No one else needs them either. We need to stop basing our economy, budgets, and government on stupid amounts of crappy debt.
• The City of Seattle: When it snows you let the city fall into anarchy because you refuse to use salt on the icy roads. Why exactly? Environmental reasons? Salt is used on the roads from Montana to Maine, and the perch and trout are just fine. I know it is horrifying to think of all the salt draining down to the salt water of Puget Sound and then emptying with the tide into the Pacific Ocean, aka Asia’s toilet.
• Brett Favre: So… what was the point of all of that then?
• Ben Sheets: That’s a fantastic time you picked to get hurt there. Worked out great, thanks.
• Michael Phelps: I understand the need to cash in while the cashing in is good, but can we expect to ever see you in a pool again?
• Fellow half-marathoners who felt the need to give me a thumbs-up or some other patronizing gesture: Yeah, I know, you don’t see many people my size on the course, so you just can’t help yourself. But I wouldn’t have been out there if I hadn’t been preparing for it. Here is the equivalent: I see a 170 pound guy kicking your 110 pound ass, and I give you a thumbs up for hanging in there against what would be an easy fight for me to win.
• People who use self-checkout stations even though you know you are going to get your ass kicked by it: Please, for the love of God, stop. If you are over 65 or didn’t graduate high school or could never set the clock on your VCR, you really need to ask yourself whether you think following simple prompts from a computer is something you can handle in less time than it would take to wait in line at a human checkout stand. Especially if there is a membership or savings card involved. Especially if it is lunchtime and the regular check-stands aren’t that crowded to start with. Especially if I am behind you in line.
• Related to the above are people who still write checks in retail stores: Are you trying to commit fraud? Then why are you writing a check? I love standing there while the clerk writes down your two forms of ID, runs the check through the computer, and then calls her supervisor when your check makes the computer beep. Maybe you can weigh out some gold dust next time, that might take a little longer and my ice cream can melt completely.
• People who are complaining about gas prices plummeting: Don’t think I haven’t noticed the huge overlap of people complaining about low gas prices with the people constantly crying a river about the working poor. One of the biggest things the working poor need is cheap fuel. Yeah, yeah, alternative energy… this is how this thing is going to play out: If there is an end to the foreign supply, the world will use it up. The price will rise as the third world comes online and the oil supply drops.  At some point some threshold will be crossed where we’ll use our domestic supply of oil while we figure out alternative energy (and ironically, we’ll have Democratic drilling obstructionist from the last 20 years to thank for the reserve). I’m not saying that’s ideal; I’m saying that’s the economic reality.
• Everyone on both sides who made this last election intolerable: It’s hard to make me see an up side to living in a dictatorship, yet you did it.

I guess that’s enough for 2008. I hope that 2009 is much less annoying.

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This reminds me. I have to start putting together my annual list of Festivus Grievances. It’s going to be an awesome list this year.

I think that the Festivus Pole may have been the only way to go with the story. Everyone involved with the lunacy in Olympia deserves to be mocked, especially the evangelical atheist, and I think the Festivus Pole makes that point nicely.

And if you think this was a circus, just wait until the vernal equinox when I petition the state for permission to display my Feast of Maximum Occupancy exhibit in the Capitol.

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Did anyone call in gay today? Was anyone affected by someone calling in gay? I’m sure that the theater and hair-dressing industries were devastated today, but I tend to doubt that the 10% (2%) of the population that is gay is shutting down many industries outside of San Fran and Seattle. Maybe there are not as many male flight attendants today, I suppose.

I’m going over to Seattle in a few hours for an exam. I wonder if I’ll be able to get a coffee at a non-chain coffee shop on First Hill or if it will be closed up tight.

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The entire Wisconsin Band has been suspended? That’s funny. I definitely think that those who have tickets for Saturday’s Penn State game will miss out on some great atmosphere provided by the band, but this has been a long time coming.  Tales of the band’s stupidity have been widely known since I started college there fifteen years ago, and I’m sure they had been around way before that.

Reports of band members’ hazing, alcohol use and inappropriate sexual behavior prompted the university to put the band on probation after the trip.

Let me expand on the “inappropriate sexual behavior.”  I’ve heard some of the stories from alumni band members, and frankly they made me blush. And I’m a disgusting pig. Then I remembered that it was band nerds participating in that behavior and I got a little sick.
Mike Leckrone should retire at this point. And if he doesn’t retire, he should be fired. He’s starting to become an embarassment to the University of Wisconsin.

An unrelated Wisconsin band story that I always found an amusing illustration of their inflated sense of importance:

Some friends of mine came across some band members fighting. It seems that it was the trombone players’ turn to host a party during that particular weekend. However, the tuba players’ rudely scheduled a party on the same weekend leading to the aforementioned confrentation. During the course of the confrontation one of the trombones yelled at one of the tubas, “You need to earn it on the field!”

Yeah tubas, you can’t host a party, you totally blew coverage last Saturday.

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Matt Damon had this to say about Sarah Palin the other day:

In terms of governance, it’s a disaster. You do the actuary tables, there’s a one out of three chance McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it’ll be President Palin… I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago, because she’s going to have the nuclear codes. I want to know that, or if she banned books, or if she tried to. We can’t have that.

I can refer him to factcheck.org for the book banning stuff. And if he wants to worry about the dinosaur thing, that’s fine. (Though I’m not sure about why it matters with regards to the nuclear codes: “President Palin, we have irrefutable proof that North Korea has an Iranian nuclear warhead on a missile they are fueling.” “Quick, I need to know what they think about dinosaurs before I can authorize a strike.”)

I also think that whether Palin can step in as President is a legitimate question. However, what I find amusing is that he tries to legitimize his concerns using statistics. He’s probably caught on by now that no one wants to listen to Matt Damon on issues outside how to pretend to be a secret agent and writing an Oscar winning screenplay that is never followed up so he makes an appeal to science.

I checked his numbers, and I think he could have used Will Hunting’s help on his numbers.

The Social Security Administration’s acctuary tables are here. John McCain just turned 72. At the end of a first term he would be not quite 76.5. Let’s be generous and up that to 77.

Reaching back in to the recesses of my brain to undergrad statistics, the way to use those tables is to multiply 1-the probablity of death at 72 with 1-the probability of death at 73 and so on for all the years to 77. That product is subtracted from 1 to give the overall probability of death in those years. The number I get is 0.1845. So there is an 18.5% chance that McCain does not survive a first term according to actuarial tables. That is a little less than a 1 in 5 chance, not the 1 in 3 chance. A 1 in 5 chance is worth thinking about, obviously, but it isn’t 1 in 3.

Looking at the life expectancy column, a 72 year old has a 50/50 shot of living another 12 years. That’s enough for two terms and getting the library opened.

And before anyone says, “Yeah, but, McCain has had cancer…” those numbers are for all 72 year olds, not a 72 year old in pristine health. McCain has had no evidence of heart disease, for instance, which is the biggest killer of older people. Hell, even if McCain’s cancer came back it would be associated with a five-year survival rate of about 78 percent and a 10-year survival rate of about 66 percent, according to this article.

And even if you want to say that McCain falls on the ugly side of the median, fine, but 1 in 3 still then just becomes a guess, not anything backed up by actuarial tables.

My point is that Matt Damon tried to look smart by citing atuarial tables, and he just ends up looking like a dumb ass. If he wanted to say “McCain is old and his backup worries me,” I’d have nothing to say about his opinion. But since he did, I have this to say: ‘Matt. Damon.”

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Heh. My Patent Law final was based on a hypo with something similar to this invention. At the time I was writing the exam I thought it was too stupid to actually exist.

Not that having a portable microwave would be stupid for something like car camping trips, but you know some jackass would be zapping his coffee to 208 degrees while going 93 mph down I-5 through the middle of Seattle.

At least the one in our exam had safety mechanisms to keep the door from opening while the car was in motion (that was one of the patentable features).

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I forgot that I actually took a picture of the epic point missing that I referred to in this post.

I’m sure someone will say, “But all of those people died to give her the right to wear a Che shirt there.” And they will be correct. Doesn’t make it any less stupid.

And actually, I’m not sure she has the “right” to be dress however she wants and visit Arlington National Cemetery. In public, yes, but I think a dress code can be enforced at a National Cemetery.

A lot of the men in that cemetery died fighting the vile totalitarianism – whatever its form whether fascism, communism, or miscellaneous – that Che helped impose in Cuba and wanted to impose in other parts of the world. Wearing his image on a shirt there is at best ignorant at worst sick.

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I fully admit that I own a Bluetooth headset that I use in my car or while I’m at home or the office and I know I’ll need to use my computer while I talk to whoever I’m talking to.

But can we all take the damn things off when we walk into Costco? I had to run to Costco at lunch to reload on Milk Bones (I don’t want the dog joining with the cat to burn down the house) and a good 10 percent of the adults were wearing them. And they weren’t the same 10 percent of people like me who ran into Costco at lunch from their job. No, judging by the speed at which most of them moved or used the self checker (Why, why do dumb or old people try to use the self checkout machine when they know they will never be able to figure them out?) these people had no where to get to at any specific time. Just because the government says you have to use them in your car doesn’t mean you can never take them off.

Who wants to have a conversation at Costco anyway? I frequently use my cell phone at Costco – when I call my wife’s cell phone to figure out approximately which square mile of the store she is in when I’m done with whatever I was looking at. I am not anti-cell phone, but seriously, even if Billy is in the emergency room, the time it takes to stop and take your phone out of your pocket won’t make any difference.

Here is my new corollary: The more likely you are to be wearing a headset in a retail store, the less likely it is that the phone call you are making/receiving is of any importance at all.

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The pathetic and brutal legacy of Che Guevera. I generally give Glenn Beck a solid “meh” but that article is very good.

Once I saw a woman in a Che t-shirt walking through Arlington National Cemetery. Epic point missing.

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Ha! Now The Dallas Morning News is running what has to be satire as real news.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”

I’d almost refuse to believe that was true. I mean at least with the “niggardly” incidents the word in question is not that commonly used. But not knowing what a black hole is? It’s not like you have to be a professional astronomer to know what that is. This idiot complaining should be made to watch Cosmos, or, if you’re feeling mean, The Black Hole.

Of course, he does know what a black hole is, he just has an issue with reality. The real world doesn’t think less of you because you are the color of person called “black” and there is a thing called a “black hole” that sucks in everything, including light. They think less of you because you act like a moron complaining about people using “black hole.”

Now RWN reports that this guy says “devil’s food cake” and “black sheep” is prohibited. Seriously, this is a joke right?

I hope someone tells that guy to stick it. Don’t we have real things to worry about? Dallas has a reputation of being a city that has bigger things to worry about. Like how to keep the Cowboys from raping the citizenry, for instance.

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This has got to be a satire. Surely Drudge and Breitbart were fooled into picking up a repackaged Onion article:

“Toddlers who say “yuck” when given flavorful foreign food may be exhibiting racist behavior, a British government-sponsored organization says.”

Have these people ever tried to feed a real-life toddler? They come in two varities:

1. The kind, like my daughter, who only want to eat their favorite foods, so they will say “yuck” to anything put in front of them. Even if they taste it and like it they’ll stick with “yuck” just to spite you for not giving them pizza with chicken nuggets on top.
2. The kind, like my son, who will wolf down anything put in front of him on the chance that it might be carbon based

Neither sits around thinking that they don’t want to eat the food because the people who originally ate it were brown.

I don’t know how Britain went from an imperialist country that thought its culture was so superior that it gave them the right to colonize half of the world to a culture that is so self-loathing that they can hardly wait to surrender it to, well, whoever, in less than three generations. (And not for nothing, the British culture did improve many of the countries they colonized.)

What’s next, the implementation of Sharia law next to British common law? Oh, wait. I guess that is next.

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When I woke up on July 4 and heard that Jesse Helms died, I waited all day for the news that Ted Kennedy had died. I thought that a really low-rent version of Jefferson and Adams dying on the same Independence Day might be appropriate for 2008.

Helms should serve as a great example of how people can change. As John Hawkins points out, he was at one point a racist, or at least played to racist sentiments for political reasons, at one point in his political life, no doubt about it. But by the time he left the Senate, he had black staffers working for him.

One of the stupidest things I’ve ever experienced is connected to Helms. At my brother’s college graduation, the speaker – his name is long since lost to me – was an alumnus who lived in North Carolina. He took the opportunity – at the University of Wisconsin mind you – to rail on Jessie Helms and the “uninformed” voters of North Carolina who kept re-electing him. My grandfather, who had retired to North Carolina and was no doubt one of the uninformed who kept re-electing Helms, was sitting next to me. I was quite embarrassed to have to apologize for my alma mater because they had invited a speaker to insult him after he traveled a thousand miles to see his grandson graduate college. Fortunately, having been around the block a few times, he understood that the University of Wisconsin, like most universities these days, is run by a bunch of left-wing hacks who don’t necessarily reflect the student and alumni body.

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My new office is near a park. The park attracts ice cream trucks in the summer.

I’m sure I looked crazed just now chasing the ice cream truck down the street dressed in my lawyer garb in hot pursuit of a chipwhich after hearing the truck’s music from my open window.

Probably for the better, I didn’t catch the truck.

I have to hand it to that ice cream guy. He didn’t let the fact that 1) it barely cracked 60 degrees today and 2) school is still in session stop him from peddling ice cream on the street.

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