And Another... I haven't been able to find an online reference, but there was another story redounding to the glory of the Northwest on an area news show last night. Apparently there is some car dealer in Washington State who is so incensed over the Pledge brouhaha that he is charging anyone who doesn't believe in God $10,000 more per auto at his dealership. An action, he claims, nowhere near as bad as the one that provoked him into it. Not that he's likely to have a passel o' atheist customers suing him for religious discrimination.

File this one under "So you think you're a jackass?! I'll show you!"

Just Another Day in the Northwest According to Nwcn.com:

Another naked man struggles with police

Just three days after the murder of King County Deputy Richard Herzog, police in Mountlake Terrace are confronted with the same kind of danger. Another naked man, showing incredible strength and claiming to be god, got tangled up in a wild struggle with police.

(Full story here.)

What Did You Do in the War, Mummy? Doubting Thomas accuses warbloggers of being indifferent to (or ignorant of) the horrors of war, and of being "killing Kruger" cowards. (No permalink - see essay for 22 June, "War Stories".)

The essay is as trite as they come, but we may all indeed prove gassy braggarts when the time for boring our grandchldren rolls 'round. I do note, however, that at present there is only one group of non-combatant gas-bags whose members aren't waiting for their dotage and the passage of time. They've already taken to auto-awarding Medals of Courage for actions that do not actually require any. And they are not warbloggers.

A Tart Grasp of the Issues A commentator over at Daily Pundit penned the delightful phrase "pungent grip". I was curious if he had picked it up from another literary effort, or if it were perhaps a googlewhack. Twasn't the latter. Comparing the tone of the missive at the DP's site to the content and tone here, I wonder if this might be the locus classicus:

As I carry a bowl of chili back past the headline, the scent of onions grabs the article in its pungent grip[...]

The other instance, however, is even better, as it has a twofer:

The smell of blood is overpowering, enough to quash the feeble-at-heart in its pungent grip and challenge even those with an iron-clad stomach to remain unphased.

Probably the sort of thing that happens around a temporal anomaly or such...

On the Fritz A little bit of Q&A on Palladium.

BTW, I just looked at the stats, and I appreciate everyone stopping by despite the paltry posting. Shoulder rehab is going pretty well but I still can't sit too long at the keyboard. (Took my daughter along to the physical therapist the other day; she told me I reminded her of Homer Simpson in the Needle Hut.) And don't be giving me any grief because some people manage to post all right with broken wrists. That's different.

Snort

"Falouji scoffed at Bush's remarks, saying: 'Bush is threatening something that does not exist, because the United States has never sent financial aid to the Palestinian people.'"

Crunchy Crunch I liked Kathy Shaidle's rejoinder to the Work piece on the much maligned Hauerwas, because it's applicable to so much more than the issue at hand:

However, I stand by my original assessment of Dr. Stanley, and in his last paragraphs, Clutter's thoughtful defence just gives me more ammo. I'm sick of hearing about how Dr. Elitist Academic and the Crunchy Granola Progressive Press (Catholic or not) is "just trying to get me to understand" this or that. I'm sick of being "challenged" to "dialogue" about "issues" by people who probably don't know how to program their VCRs, assuming they even own one. Sick of being "challenged" to "reexamine" my "attitudes" by Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and others who've appointed themselves my moral and intellectual superiors.

Like the guests on Jerry Springer like to yell: You don't know me!

Plausible Denial

Yassir Arafat today denied that President Bush was referring to him when the US President demanded a change to the Palestinian leadership in his Middle East speech yesterday. Mr Bush did not mention Mr Arafat by name but called for a "new and different Palestinian leadership".

"Definitely not," Mr Arafat said today when asked whether Mr Bush was referring to him.

Sad thing is, it's not an entirely implausible speculation that he may turn out to be correct about this.

The Quotable Blogger Jim Henley, on the possibility of the McVeigh-Iraq connection, and the degree of success of the "message":

Why only partial? Because if it did happen that way, McVeigh's recruiters failed to take into account that nobody around here much gives a shit what a mass murderer has to say about the ethics of violence.

Home Bunny Checking in with my old hometown's newspaper, the Tampa Tribune, I came across this update of the Sami Al-Arian saga. I've followed it sporadically but have never quite made heads or tails of it. Doesn't sound like the FBI has, either. You might find it of interest.

Unhatched Robert Weinberg's interesting article in the June Atlantic covers a lot of cloning-debate ground - fact, hype, profit, peer review, etc. All food for thought, but I noticed an odd but familiar leap made between the penultimate and final paragraphs of the article. He accurately lays out the ineluctable (and really unresolvable) moral question at the center of the debate:

The clashes about human therapeutic cloning that have taken place in the media and in Congress are invariably built around weighty moral and ethical principles. But none of us needs a degree in bioethics to find the bottom line in the arguments. They all ultimately converge on a single question: When does human life begin? Some say it is when sperm and egg meet, others when the embryo implants in the womb, others when the fetus quickens, and yet others when the fetus can survive outside the womb. This is a question that we scientists are neither more nor less equipped to decide than the average man or woman in the street, than a senator from Kansas or a cardinal in Cologne. (Because Dolly and the other cloned animals show that a complete embryo can be produced from a single adult cell, some biologists have proposed, tongue in cheek, that a human life exists in each one of our cells.) Take your pick of the possible answers and erect your own moral scaffolding above your choice.

But then, it seems to me, he does attempt to elude it by presenting another issue - the pressing concern of maintaining top-notch research in a crucial area of science and medicine - as if it were equal and not properly subsequent to the first issue. (I acknowledge that I may be misreading him, and that he is merely laying out the obvious consequences of either choice.)

In the end, politics will settle the debate in this country about whether human therapeutic cloning is allowed to proceed. If the decision is yes, then we will continue to lead the world in a crucial, cutting-edge area of biomedical research. If it is no, U.S. biologists will need to undertake hegiras to laboratories in Australia, Japan, Israel, and certain countries in Europe - an outcome that would leave American science greatly diminished.

I hold no brief against any honest debater in this issue. (My disgust is reserved for those ardent pro-lifers, like Orrin Hatch, to whom it has recently been revealed that an embryo in a woman's body possesses a human soul and that the same in a refrigerator does not.) What I do find annoying, and unfair, is a reflexive tarring of all anti-cloners as Luddites. There are anti-cloners who certainly are Luddites, but an anti-cloning pro-lifer may merely be adhering to the logic of his belief in the sacredness of human life. He is no more a Luddite than I would be a Luddite for objecting to (hypothetical) "crucial and cutting edge" research involving experiments on premature babies or retarded children. That I am not persuaded that a blastocyst is a human being, or that such research may be going great guns in other countries, does not therefore make an anti-cloning pro-lifer an anti-science obscurantist. And though it may be an apt argument in certain circumstances, I'd like to have a firmer foundation for my fundamental ethical decisions than "if we don't do it the Chinese will".

The Whole Bloody Lot of Us You can't read the articles in the Sunday Times of London anymore without a subscription, so I don't know the content of these two articles, headlined one after the other on the home page. Too bad. Can't help but think it would be interesting to compare and contrast the content.

We're all racists, says top prosecutor Tom Robbins Sir David Calvert-Smith, the director of public prosecutions, says almost all British people are racist and that society as a whole has a problem

British Muslims bankroll Al-Qaeda
Marie Colvin, Islamabad
Muslim communities in Britain are financing an alliance of Al-Qaeda commanders and Pakistani militants planning fresh attacks against the West, according to intelligence officials and radicals

Soldier On The Timekeeper analyzes his enmity toward an "educator" who graced the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's not that the writer's general concerns are without merit. But, my curiousity aroused by the article's party-line tone, I googled up the edumacator, one Louise M. Wisechild. The Timekeeper is too kind. I found this moving reflection on her search for a gift for her benighted nephew:

I would even brave the mall for the sake of my nephew, visions of old Christmas movies featuring Macy's dancing in my head. But surely Santa himself would balk at delivering his requests for the latest computer orgies of combat, with names like Diabolical and Masters of Evil. Or a model submachine gun that turns into a CD player.

I like my nephew. He looks like Dick out of the "Dick and Jane" books of my childhood, brown hair with an endearing wave in the front, eyes bright with curiosity and a sense of adventure. I remembered when he stayed with us a couple years ago. He was 11 then. We played hours of badminton, swam in the community pool during family swim, and threw thousands of darts. He moved like a deer or a dolphin, with strength and grace. But the badminton racquet kept turning into a rifle as he erupted into sounds of rapid fire, aiming at the swallows crossing the summer sky. The darts became grenades. I flinched at his zeal for weaponry and choice of innocent targets.

I knew his short life hadn't been very encouraging or comfortable. His family lived on military bases with not enough money, his father absent for months at sea, serving the country but not his son. I wanted to respect my nephew instead of preaching at him. But his anger and his fascination with guns frustrated me.

Good thing for me my father the career officer had retired before I came along. Else I would have been traumatized, as surely my elder siblings were, by living on military bases while Dad, who was doing something pointless for his country in the South Pacific, neglected them.

His "anger"? Hell, lady, I'd say for an 11 year old he showed remarkable maturity and self-control in tolerating your witless company. So what did she buy for the now 13 year-old nephew?

I went to my locally owned music store where the much-pierced sales clerk led me to the rap aisle and "Blacks' Magic," by Salt-N-Pepa. The singers were women. The CD had a "clean" seal on it proclaiming it free of violent, sexist, and racist lyrics.

Auntie, he probably wasn't thinking about the sparrows when he aimed that racquet.

UPDATE: Dr. Weevil takes note, with evidence that the Wisechilds of the world have been tormenting small boys since well before our own fretful age. Follow the link and be treated to a hilarious Saki story on the topic. Preview: A J.S. Mill doll fills in for the Salt-N-Pepa CD. Plus a model YWCA:

"Are there any lions?" asked Eric hopefully. He had been reading Roman history and thought that where you found Christians you might reasonably expect to find a few lions.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise Douglas Turnbull has a few words on an agreement that exempts European peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan from the possibility of prosecution by the International Criminal Court. According to the WaPo article cited:

Britain, acting on behalf of 19 countries with peacekeepers in Afghanistan, negotiated the guarantees in January in a "military technical agreement" between the British-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Afghanistan's interim government. Under the terms of the accord, Afghanistan agreed that all members of the force, including U.S. liaison officers, "may not be surrendered to, or otherwise transferred to, the custody of an international tribunal or any other entity or state without the express consent of the contributing nation."

The agreement was reached in "a great rush" and with no public debate, a U.N.-based European diplomat said. Troops from France and Germany also were covered by it.

Wise move, but this differs exactly how from the reservations about the ICC voiced by the U.S., or the draft resolution put forward by the U.S., calling for the exemption of UN peacekeeping forces from ICC jurisdiction?

"It's completely different thing to negotiate a one-off exemption from prosecution in the midst of a chaotic situation than to pass resolution that gives blanket exemption for everyone," a European diplomat said. "It's a ludicrous comparison."

Thanks for clearing that up, European Diplomat. Now I'm persuaded that we ought to go along with your nice little ICC. We'll just file for an exemption whenver we see a "chaotic situation" looming. Not that situations tend toward the chaotic in this world, of course.

I got yer ludicrous right here, buddy.

Do read Mr. Turnbull's remarks.

Rutten Row Have to add my entirely pointless and silly bit to the big blogger sneer at Tim Rutten:

For those who cut that particular math class, "asymptotically" is the adverbial form of the noun "asymptote," which is what you call a straight line that always approaches but never actually meets a curve. In other words, bloggers' frequent errors of fact are inconsequential, since they push a story toward the truth, though it never quite gets there, which apparently doesn't matter.

Is Rutten striving for "fairness and balance" and "painstaking accuracy" by describing the relationship of the curve to the asymptote from an empowered asymptote's point of view? Is he striking a blow against the oppressive hegemony of curves over the silenced Cartesian axes, heretofore always relegated to the passive role in the drama of the curve's aggressive "approaching"? Two, four, six, eight, x y z ain't gonna wait!

OK, I'll stop the silliness, but it's a skunk-ass move to snidely impute an indifference to the truth to Kaus and other bloggers, based on a comment extolling the superior error-correcting properties of a certain medium. And just as stupid to imply that slower, more controlled media are paragons of accuracy and careful thinking. While opining that Kaus's description reveals the blogging approach to be "an excuse and a scam", Rutten fails to mark that "balance" and "truth" - virtues that he seems to be attempting to appropriate from a former editor - are not synonyms.

Of Hope and Hate Howard Jacobson parses the effusions of Cherie Blair and the murderer al-Ghoul in (interestingly) the Independent:

Which brings us to the assumption - almost an idée fixe now, in some quarters - that between hopelessness and murder there is no moral or behavioural transition worth talking about.[...]

What collusion in grievance, and what an elision of responsibility and culpability the idea of "no hope but to" masks! Once upon a time we thought it unacceptable to deduce from our hopelessness the right to kill ourselves.[...]

The politics of active hate, not inexpectancy, speak here. And not to know the difference is to be a fool.

(Via Peter Briffa)

Fragrant Coincidence I had just sat down to read blogs after scraping and cleaning some smelly dog shit off my daughter's sneaks, when what should I encounter but this. Too much mammal poop for a 20 minute span of time, I say. (Co-starring Chris Patten. Via Zachary Barbera.)

I'll Believe It When I See It Judge Jelderks promises a ruling by Labor Day in the Kennewick Man case. (Today is the one year anniversary of the final oral arguments.)

(Links to Kennewick Man posts.)

Wednesday Blogger Mr. Dr. Frank is appearing for your pundit-y pleasure on FoxNews today. Click on over.

UPDATE: He also finds the Sydney Morning Herald calling him "bloodthirsty". I'm impressed.

Jumbo Jet If a pathology, like obesity, becomes widespread, does business have an obligation to subsidize it? I wouldn't think so, but "fat acceptance" groups are charging that airlines are discriminating by requiring passengers to pay for all the seats that they actually occupy.

We can all sympathize with the discomforts of flying cattle class on airplanes, but if I really needed more room, I assume it would be my move to shell out for first class. (Should I expect the airlines to subsidize my claustrophobia?) "Fat acceptance" is the ultimate "society made me do it" argument. Driving everywhere and relentless sitting, as is our cultural wont, do promote obesity, and therefore law and government must save us from the consequences.

The contradiction here is that while some are screaming for government interference in the food industries (as if we didn't know that sitting on our cans and "supersizing" it makes us fat), others are demanding that we, in essence, promote a pathology by accomodating it. If you're going to sue fast-food providers, why turn around and demand that airlines function as "enablers"? (Having spent more than one airline flight reduced to using half my own seat because a "person of size" colonized the other half before I could get the arm rest down, I rather think the thing to do would be for me to demand half-off my own fare.)

Trivia Time How many phony quotes, fantasy attributions, and falsehoods can you find in this Jakarta Post interview with one Almuzammil Yusuf, director of the Center for Middle East Studies and deputy secretary-general of the Indonesian Committee for Palestinian Solidarity? No points for the obvious whoppers. ("Every chance he's got, [Sharon] would massacre Palestinians. These could be 'tiny', or major such as what happened in Jenin.")

Good Manners Is the South Korean reputation for worse-than-a-New Yorker pushiness and rudeness underserved? When I lived in the western Pacific, in an area with lots of Koreans and South Korean tourists, this rudeness was common joke-fodder. You're probably familiar with the one that was going 'round a few years back: a North Korean, a South Korean, and a Japanese sit down in a restaurant. The waiter arrives and says "Excuse me, but we have no more meat". The North Korean says, "What's 'meat'?" The Japanese says, "What's 'no more'? The South Korean says, "What's 'excuse me'?"

But according to today's Wall Street Journal (no free link, p. A14), 100,000 Koreans "have joined the Korean Supporters, a national program of cheering squads for all 18 foreign teams that have played in South Korea so far during this year's soccer tournament..."

Yes, it's a government-sponsored PR move, and the good intentions are sometimes overridden by the Koreans' natural enthusiasm for the home team. Still, it's a nice gesture, for example, for a homey to go to the trouble of recruiting 250 of his neighbors to chant "Se-ne-gal!" for the visiting team, and to greet the visitors with a friendly bonjour on the way to a match. Beats hooliganism or going to war, at any rate.

Quote of the Afternoon Take heart, everyone:

Meanwhile, U.S. President Bush may send Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Middle East to try to promote peace efforts, AP reported.

Thufferin' Thongs Recent whimsical or disturbing referrals from searches:

Nuclearism as a mental disorder
arm torture [I don't even want to know what this one is all about]
arabic bikini
tiny see through bikinis
"15 year" + "sting bikini"
"are thongs a problem"

I can answer that last one. Thongs are never a problem. They are the perfect shoes for summer, and for year-round in a tropical climate. Man has never manufactured more comfortable foot apparel. I spend the summer in them, with brightly painted toe-nails. Though where I come from we prefer to call them "flip-flops". I don't see what the fuss is all about.

End of the Line "This is not Rashomon". Andrew Northrup's impassioned response to the murders in Jerusalem yesterday.

Regumalation The Timekeeper, in his posh new digs (makes me want to put on a smoking jacket and pour a brandy) indicts a columnist for passing off a press release as an opinon piece. The perp? Molly Ivins.

Talk the Talk Via Vodkapundit, Nicholas Kristof chews a few more mushrooms and beholds in a vision how U.S. ratification will imbue a gloriously toothless international feel-good treaty with magic-working properties:

An international women's treaty banning discrimination has been ratified by 169 countries so far (without emasculating men in any of them!), yet it has languished in the United States Senate ever since President Carter sent it there for ratification in 1980.

After relaying a few horror stories concerning custom-sanctioned brutality against women, Kristof quickly escapes from the point inhering in his own anecdotes:

Twenty years of experience with the treaty in the great majority of countries shows that it simply helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape execution.

So Nick, are you saying that Pakistan has ratified this treaty? Doesn't seem to have improved the lot of Zainab Noor, whose story you relate, and whose horrible torture you appear to be blaming on John Ashcroft. And your evidence for fewer killings even in the above limited cases of rape and pregnancy is - what? No doubt one could find a few cases where international uproar over a specific woman's situation, which some journalist happened to be around to publicize, has saved a woman or two from getting it in the neck. But a bit of googling doesn't turn up much that's terribly persuasive concerning the salutary effect of this treaty on the safety and freedom of women in Pakistan over the last twenty years. (But never fear - a couple of years ago an agreeable solution to Pakistan's social problems, including the rather deplorably common "honor killings", was offered by a sharp-thinking Federal Minister for Information and Media Development.)

Kristof does note that American women already enjoy the rights and freedoms this treaty can allegedly enforce. He does not note that American women's enjoyment of these rights has something to do with intrinsic cultural factors and nothing to do with international pressure. (In magic 'shroom land, I guess we can benignly enforce our own culture's views on the rights and freedoms of women without practicing "cultural imperialsim" - without doing violence to already existing, deeply entrenched cultural attitudes.)

Mute Testimony Nature reports a study purporting to show that viewers have less recall for commercials aired during programs featuring sex and violence. If true, this would be bad news for advertisers, who wouldn't do any better with "neutral" content programming - as one source stated, "[W]hy advertise on neutral programming if the target audience doesn't watch those programmes?"

But my question is, who the hell, aside from the tormented members of remote-control deprived households, watches or listens to TV adverts? I know there're sick people out there, but god almighty...

Zionist Zombies, cont'd, cont'd Much hay has already been made of Hubert Védrine's latest fantasy solution for the Middle East. What is remarkable about this opinion piece is the way it baldly and unapologetically, with no pretense to nuance and sophistication, lays all the blame squarely on Israel :

I have come to this conclusion after closely reviewing all the previous peace overtures -- and the reasons they failed -- including many that I supported, sometimes as France's foreign minister.

If Israeli conservatives and the extreme right-wingers continue to impose their policies on the rest of the world, including their rejection of any true peace process, the Middle East problem will never be settled[...]

[Bush must b]e ready at the outset to withstand several months of opposition from the Israeli right and its allies in the United States. Despite this resistance, it will be vital to lay out the peace plan and fix a calendar and a deadline for creation of a Palestinian state.

At first, American conservatives probably will react sharply, along with a faction of the Likud Party in Israel; the two groups are so closely identified that for a while, it will be hard to know which country has more influence over the other: the United States or Israel.

Well there ya go. "I used to think this was a complex, multivariate problem which needed the most delicate and informed diplomacy. But whadda ya know? It was just those damned Jews causing the problem all along!"

I posit a correlation between sharp criticism of Euroweenie pronouncements in the American press and increased Euroweenie invocation of the "Jewish lobby" to explain both press criticism and American policy. What other reason could there be for having one's wise opinions lambasted?

Of Arm and the Whiner Very limited posting recently - arm relapse. (Insert string of animal-like howling and outraged swearing here.) Instead of producing what inevitably must be posts of crabby and peevish tone, I'll direct you to the medpundit's further thoughts on the subjects discussed in the previous post. Good read, food for thought and debate, highly recommended.

If I can get an appointment or score some pain-*%&$#-killers that actually relieve the *%&# pain, I'll get back to the longish post I started, on the same topic. If not, noble stoic that I am, I'll spend the weekend whimpering in a corner, or whining, bitching, cursing medpundit's put-upon profession, and generally making life miserable for my family, who would be wise to lock me in a room and head for the beach.

Y'all have a good weekend.

Meanwhile Back in the Swamp The medpundit has a friendly reminder that the CDC is closing its public comments on smallpox vaccine shop at 5 pm (EDT, I assume) today.

She has, as usual, several worthwhile posts on her site today, including some thoughts on legally mandated training in abortion technicques. Medpundit speculates that such laws may result in professional pressures on residents who choose to forego such training. It's an interesting case in the problem of how law, institutional culture, and economics impinge on choice in such issues as abortion and euthanasia.

I don't hold the sanguine view that a nice little dose of properly-drafted law can protect us from the troubling complexity, potential for coercion, and moral murkiness that inhere in these issues.

Not that I believe tht keeping the state out of the equation magically clears the murkiness and removes the threat of "it's for our your own good". I'll throw in an anecdote here, because I found it food for thought. A friend of mine had her medical insurance through one of the largest U.S. HMOs. She unexpectedly became pregnant at the age of 37, and the nurse-advisor recommended insurance-covered amniocentesis because of the higher risk of age-related genetic disorder, Down syndrome in particular. My friend, because she had no intention of having an abortion in case of Down syndrome, declined the procedure as a waste of time and resources. What followed, according to my friend, was a long bullying lecture on the social irresponsibility of taking the risk of having a child with Down syndrome. The secondary implication was that my friend was of course entirely too stupid or naïve to understand the difficulties of caring for such a child.

Knowing my friend, this incident for me has high comic import. At this point in the story, I know what's coming next. No one who is any judge of human beings would have sized up this woman as the sort who could be profitably bullied. The advisor will be subjected to the verbal equivalent of being grabbed by the collar and smashed up against the wall. The advisor will end up stuttering and back-stepping. The subject will not be raised again.

But how often is this sort of thing played out with a less stalwart and less pyrotechnic leading lady? It is in the interest of the HMO, a private company, to promote abortions rather than the birth of children with genetic defects.

More of this currently incoherent ramble later. I'm off to torture session physical therapy.

Zionist Zombies, Part MDXXVII Those crazy kids at Arab News are at it again.

Why do their references always make you feel that they hacked their American media reading list off Dale Gribble's computer?

Desperately Seeking Closure Andrew Northrup wittily reviews two series (one mini, one sempiternal) and concludes:

I missed the 60's by a decade, but there certainly seemed to be some silly business going on there. Most of this seems to have been the fault of people named Fonda. Someone needs to be held accoutable for Easy Rider, if nothing else. But isn't it time we moved on?

(Not that I'm necessarily in agreement with Mr. Northrup on all of this - he being a simpering liberal and I being a righteous reactionary and all...)

Thugs on Parade I don't know why I was so behindhand in checking out Fred Pruitt's Thugburg page. Nicely done. Keep tabs on many of your favorite thugs by name, organization, or position (e.g., "cog").

That Long Northeastern Nasal Whine Parts of the Blogosphere have been going to town over the alleged Midwesterner-dissin' comments of Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Yglesias, re Coleen Rowley. I've been enjoying the posts and accompanying comments over at Electrolite and Spleenville.

Apparently I'm not the only one who perceived a little Northeastern chauvinism in the original posts. As a, er, person of accent, I have on occassion endured prejudicial Yankee attitudes towards regional speech patterns (particularly in my youth, when my drawl was much more marked). But Midwesterners take heart! At least you get credited with being high enough on the food chain to qualify as a dismissable mid-level cog. If you show up with a Southern accent they assume mental retardation.

Yes yes this is an exaggeration (with a large grain of truth). Just follow the links and have fun.

Addendum: On a more serious note, see the discussion on Rowley over at Bennett's.

Blogger on the Lam Where's Natalie?

String Theory Eric Olsen is not happy about Steven den Beste's meditation upon the string bikini.

Though I'd agree with him that, contra Steven, there really are women that beautiful, even without the lighting and make-up, the rest of Eric's post is a puzzling diatribe against the simple joys of looking, and normal biology.

I can certainly understand a taste that finds the string bikini lewd and less sexy than either nudity or more modest clothing, and that most women ought to stay out of thongs. (Technical aside here: there is a distinction between a string bikini and a thong bikini.) Still, there's something a bit too fastidious about someone whose first reaction to a good-looking young woman in a string bikini is to fret that the style doesn't promote the illusion of a tiny butt. Eric must be quite the man of exacting taste if he finds thongs unflattering to those shapely tushies he links to. But, to each his own. (I got the spouse's professional guy opinion on this: "I can think of a good reason why I wouldn't want those women walking around me in those thongs, but it's not because they don't look good.")

Worse is the contention that anything that isn't a "meaningful" interaction between the sexes, that doesn't involve an appreciation of the whole person, is "pseudo-sexuality", not real sexuality. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm sure that 99.9% of the men who ever flirted with me in my life had no tearing need to know me in the fullness of my humanity. They flirt because flirting is fun, because it is a civilized pleasure, and for no other reason that I'm female and happen to be there. And this has everything to do with sexuality, and it is not "pseudo" because it is light and fleeting. Same with a man's "girlwatching". He looks on them with desire because they are beautiful and desirable, and beauty and desire are good in themselves. Nothing in the enjoyment of "meaningless" flirtation, or the beauty and sex appeal of young women, precludes the capacity for deeper relationships. And what's this all about:

[String bikinis] are openly hostile: all show, no go. In this way there is nothing LESS sexual than a string bikini.

What a load of twaddle. Most of our myriad sexual interactions are "no go". By this definition just about all female sexual display is "hostile", since most females have not the slightest interest in having sexual relations with any but a tiny percentage of the men who are attracted to them. Modest little black dresses that are nonetheless sexy as hell must thereby be "hostile". Outrageous but "non-goal oriented" flirtation - hostile. And asexual. Huh?

There is a problem if a middle-aged man finds young women in their late-teens and early-20s to be the height of sexual attractiveness. Sexual attraction can never be based purely upon looks alone: there is no real person who consists of only looks, therefore it is counterproducive, at best, to find most-attractive women with whom there is no hope of actual interaction. [...] The women most attractive to a middle-aged man should be those with whom he could have an actual relationship. Beauty isn't only found in the very young, and the combination of physical beauty with some actual life experience is vastly more sexy than the callow beauty of youth alone - that is if you find actual living, breathing women more sexy than stereotypical abstractions.

Should? Sexual attraction is based on whatever it damn well pleases to base itself on. But putting aside this false notion that we have some sort of rational control over what we do or do not find attractive (which is a different issue from how we act upon it), where does anyone get off telling other people what they should or should not find attractive? It isn't a "problem" that a man of any age finds young women in their late teens and early twenties highly sexually attractive. It's biology. He may choose not to act on it, or may have little interest in pursuing a serious relationship with a young woman, but it is not a "problem" in itself that he is attracted to her beauty. And sometimes young women and middle-aged men fall in love and live happily ever after.

Women who wear string bikinis are not looking to interact with men, merely to tease and frustrate them in a display of power. The look both titillates and repels, is brazen but distancing, lewd but unflattering. It is a huge "shove off" to men who would like to actually interact with the women who wear them, rather than simply ogle them from a safe distance.

Ah geez. "Display of power". Oh pull-eeeeze. Good-lookin' young women displaying their charms poolside are not out there for the joy of rubbing men's noses in the dirt, any more than the men who take pleasure in beholding these beauties are bent on "dehumanizing" or "exploiting" them. It's not about alienating, isolating, avoiding interaction. It's about the joy of living.

Eric is careful to tell us that he "is not a prude". Well, I am a prude. I'd say I have a fair claim to being the biggest prude in the Blogosphere, with exacting tastes and unapologetic prejudices. But sometimes a string bikini is just a string bikini.

Crusade vs. McJihad Public nuisance Alex Frantz penned a few words last month on the "jihad" and "crusade" controversies. It would be interesting to do an extensive search, in appropriately selected sources, for recent uses of the words "crusade" and "jihad". From there one could examine how often each word was used in the context of a call to waste people who don't happen to share certain beliefs regarding religion or the proper organization of society. Surely one would find a deplorably high number of instances, in English language publications, of "crusade" being used with this bloodthirsty and coercive connotation.

Sweet sweet beer Kevin Holtsberry is striving manfully to identify the country that produces the world's finest beers, but I'm afraid the definition of "perfect beer" is elusive. There is excellent beer and there is execrable piss-water, and about this all sensitive palates can agree. But the fact is that the best beer is the beer that is the perfect beer for an exact time and place.

Let us leave aside the technical discussion on the definition of beer, and open the floor to ales, stouts, bitters, etc. I have had beer epiphanies with beverages from many countries. The creamy, creamy stout on a damp and bitter winter's day. The chilled Sapporo that - paired with a sandwich of grilled fresh wahoo and a lonely, distant beach in the Western Pacific - made me know the "mean animal goodness of living" right down to my bones. (Later testing verified that a Kirin with mahi-mahi was comparably enlightening.)

And the Bass Ale in a strip mall deli that tasted as if its brewing had been planned by God himself at the beginning of time, just to make Miss Moira Breen, in the year of grace 1987, feel the wonder of being a creature. Or the San Miguel with the sauteed squid, in that seafood joint in Agana that was always being shut down by the health department. The homey taste of that Singha I always order when the grandparents, the parents, and the grandchild sit down for Sunday dinner at the neighborhood branch of a local Thai chain.

Then the products of Oregon's microbreweries: a smooth IPA with a juicy burger, after a long hike through Mt. Hood's forest, or a sharply hopped brew that puckers your mouth and sets the perfect tone for a gloomy, rainy, Northwest winter's afternoon. What country makes the best beer? An abstract question unsuited to the specific, the contingent, the temporal nature of man's adventures with grain, vine, and Saccharomyces. Who makes the worst beer? Though as a patriot it saddens me, I must admit that we can probably answer that question far more easily.

The Pause That Confesses Richard Bennett provides a link to an intriguing but unsatisfying article on research showing that women are better liars than men:

The survey found that men are almost twice as likely as women to pause or hesitate while speaking.

When telling a lie, the gaps between words often increase, making it easier to decide that a man is lying. Scientists at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, who counted the pauses in normal speech, found that women have greater fluency and are less likely to become tongue-tied when lying.

I'm a skeptical about the assumptions here, concerning lying and getting away with lies. If it is true that the length of pauses in speech increases with lying, is it true that people actually recognize this, and successfully use this perception to smoke out a liar? If people do perceive pausing to be deception, do they consider women to be more honest than men? (I've seen contradictory reports on this.) The following seems plausible -

"When it comes to lying, if you are having to create something, you would want to pause longer because you would want to be careful about what you are going to say.

"The longer it takes you to formulate what you are going to say, the more likely you are to pause, so the more likely you are going to use an 'um' or an 'ah' to fill in the gap."

- but is this really so? (Or does it just cover bad liars, or bad liars in experimental settings?)

I was under the impression that human beings are actually rather inept at detecting lying, despite folk wisdom about what to look for in honest speech. However, this impression is probably based on something that fell into my head watching some cheesy Learning Channel special, rather than from any serious research into the question. Vee must examine zis issue furzer.

On the other hand, I think enough data has accumulated to verify the superiority of men in the other social skill mentioned in Richard's post.

Mortar Bored There isn't much to add to the tedious pieties in this NYT article on the Harvard commencement "jihad" speech. The author, wide-eyed, muses on how intolerance and misunderstanding are at the root of why many people are offended by the word "jihad". His plan of action for reclaiming Islam from the bad guys:

As Muslim-Americans, we grieve for our fellow citizens who died on Sept. 11, but we also grieve the hijacking of our faith. For us, the healing process means mourning those who were killed in the terrorist attacks as well as re-appropriating our religion from those who do harm to it.

Mr. Yasin's address about jihad is a step toward reclaiming what is ours. Muslim-Americans need to do this bit by bit, word by word, to show our fellow citizens that America has nothing to fear from Islam. Tolerance never comes easily. It often means learning about concepts that might initially seem painful or hostile. Such learning may as well begin on commencement day, when my classmates will find there is no reason to fear a Muslim talking about the meaning of an Arabic word.

Was something between the first and final sentences in that last paragraph carelessly edited out? Or does the author mean that "re-appropriating" one's faith from murderous fanatics calls for focusing on rehabilitating one's allegedly intolerant fellow citizens, rather than on the guys who are working hard to give a certain Arabic word, and a world religion, a bad reputation?

Fortress of Blood Yes, Patrick, Andrew is funny as hell. If you haven't yet read The Poor Man, go read this post, then settle into the archives.

Entirely Too Much of a Lady to Promote Myself I see I'm on the sexiest female blogger ballot. Surely all bloggers of taste will cast a vote for my modest and refined charms instead of falling for the crass appeal of those brazen sluts who constitute the rest of the list.

I Are An Idiot Instantman writes:

My daughter and I read all the way through the Narnia books this year. I loved them when I was a kid, and they're even better as an adult. Anybody who savages Lewis is an idiot, as far as I'm concerned.

OK, the context here is this Amy Welborn post. And I'm not going to savage Lewis. Obviously he is a wonderful writer. I remember quite enjoying his planetary trilogy in high school (though I suspect I wouldn't much care for it as an adult). I've gotten pleasure out of his essays and even his religious apologetics. But man, I hated those Narnia books. I never read them as a child. I did read them a few years ago with my daughter, a voracious reader, and they didn't do it for her, either. (I think she tolerated The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe only because it had a hero in lion form.) Both mother and daughter had the same reaction to the laid-on-with-a-trowel allegorizing.

But that's just us.

Ice Age Portraits Via Mary C, rediscovered cave portraits that may be 15,000 years old.

Lots of interesting links at Mary's blog Science Fair, which I just discovered. Unfortunately she claims she won't be posting there much. Fortunately she also claims she will be team blogging at Gene Expression, along with Godless Capitalist, Elizabeth Spiers, Razib, and Joel Grus. (There is a claim Gene Expression will be moving off blogspot in July - which is a good thing, because I just hate that golf-ball template they're using now.)

Summer Loveless High school causes teen sex!

Hey we knew that. Well, technically, attendance at high school correlates with teen sex, according to this synopsis of a study applying "diffusion entropy analysis" to the study of teen conception patterns.

Before I read this I was innocent of the concept on "non-stationarity" in statistical analysis. Not that I now have any idea what it or DEA really do or if they're a stunningly useful concept and method. I admit that I snickered at the author's last name. (Due to the stubborn stationarity of my sense of humor in its adolescent phase.)

Smallpox Saga The medpundit continues her commentary on smallpox vaccine. She provides a helpful llink to the CDC smallpox home page, noting public comment link.