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Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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My civilian gun defense use blog
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Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
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An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
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I Hate These People
The ones that write advertising software that gets installed into your computer, generating popups, and slowing your PC to a crawl. I've been helping some neighbors who have a couple of PCs--pretty fast boxes, actually, but running at glacial speed. I was trying to install wireless networking, and it took literally several minutes for the setup program to load off the CD and start running. Why?
When I started digging around, I found WeatherBug--which displays weather information on your computer, in exchange for throwing popups and such at you, and generally slowing your computer to a crawl. I found all sorts of Search tools that purport to help you find stuff on the web--but really, just throw advertising at you.
Even worse than the slowness is that many of these programs (at least ten that I was able to identify) are given misleading names in the Windows Add/Remove Programs list, so it is not immediately clear exactly what this program does. The uninstall scripts for a number of these pigs won't work unless you are online--but I wasn't online, because I had to install the wireless network, and the PC wasn't running fast enough to install the wireless network. Some of the install scripts force you to keep answering questions designed to persuade you not to uninstall the program. Others have the questions phrased in such a way that you will be misled, and leave the program in place. One program required you to "click here" to remove the program--but there wasn't anything to click except a "Download" button that would reinstall it.
I have never bought anything because of a popup ad. I never will, because they are so annoying. Most of what I see advertised on a popup ads I wouldn't buy even if they weren't annoying. How can this revenue model work?
Back about seven or eight years ago, a friend of mine and I had a clever idea for a smarter Internet search engine, one that learned from past choices. It wasn't brilliant, but it was better than the standard search engine approach. Part of why we didn't go forward on it was that we couldn't figure out a revenue stream. No one is going to pay for a smarter Internet search, and it didn't seem plausible that a company could actually make any money with an advertising-supported service like this. I still don't see how any advertisers are getting enough return on their Internet advertising costs to justify most of the advertising I see.
New Campaign Slogan
I'm told by a reader that this came from National Review Online's "The Corner": John Kerry: More Positions Than The Kama Sutra
One of Those Odd Stories You Probably Won't See In Your Local Paper
From AP: WARSAW, Poland - A French citizen has been arrested in western Poland and was being investigated as a terror suspect after he was caught taking pictures of a natural gas distribution plant, officials said Thursday.
Oh yes, one little detail that AP left out, that this report included:
...
He was arrested Friday after being spotted by railway workers hiding in the grass taking pictures of Poland's largest natural gas distribution plant in Swarzedz, in western Poland, Kula said.
"Other evidence gathered in the investigation so far justified the charges and the arrest," said Dariusz Bogaczyk, spokesman for the Poznan branch of Poland's internal intelligence agency. The suspect is of Algerian origin, according to Poland's Fakt newspaper.
He "was arrested Friday while he was cycling around the pumping station at Swarzedz and taking photos of the site," the newspaper said.
According to another newspaper, the Rzeczpospolita, he is suspected of "having prepared the ground to blow up the pumping station".
The Practical Problems of Slavery Reparations
To my disappointment, Alan Keyes has joined the slavery reparations bandwagon.
There is the moral question of paying reparations for slavery. If the U.S. government decides to pay reparations for slavery, the Eastern Europeans, and many of the newly independent nations that used to be part of the Soviet Union can present a bill that will bankrupt Russia. How can we ignore the equally legitimate demand that England pay reparations to the descendants of Scots and Irish, Italians pay reparations to the descendants of all the people of the Roman Empire, Muslim nations pay reparations for their centuries of oppression of the Christians of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the bill that almost every nation in Asia can present to Mongolia will be staggering. I am not being flippant. World history is a long chronicle of oppression of one group by another. Blacks held in slavery were certainly abused, and it was shameful. But they are not alone, nor even in the minority among victims in world history.
But along with the moral question, there are also some severe practical problems. There are blacks whose ancestors were never held as slaves in the United States, but whose ancestors came here free: men such as Colin Powell, and many others of West Indian origin. They might have some claim against various European governments, but I can't see any argument for why U.S. taxpayers should compensate anyone for slavery that took place under another government's authority, and have enjoyed freedom, although not full equality, under this government.
An additional complexity is not just those blacks whose ancestors were free in 1860, but who are descended from blacks who were free in 1640. I would expect that the number whose ancestors were ALWAYS free in what is now the United States is vanishingly small, simply because of intermarriage between them and those freed during the Revolution, in the early Republic, and after the Civil War. I would not be surprised to find that some American blacks, especially those from northern states, have not had an enslaved ancestor since 1800. (I was going through probate inventories for 1811 Indiana last night, and while not surprised, I was still depressed to see that contrary to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the estate included slaves, with instructions to sell them.)
This does raise an interesting question: if the basis for reparations is an enslaved ancestor's inability to get on the American gravy train, and payment for forced labor, why should those whose ancestors were freed during the Revolution receive compensation equivalent to those whose ancestors were freed on Juneteenth, at the end of the Civil War? Those whose ancestors were freed before 1800 have a far weaker claim than those held through 1865. Should those whose ancestors were largely freed before 1800 receive a lesser payment?
I also see some real problems figuring out how much to pay if compensation is paid to individuals based on some theory of individual injury because of enslaved ancestors. Consider a black person today who could trace back their ancestry (still very hard, but getting better) to their great-great-great-great-grandparents. He has 64 of those ancestors. If 16 of them were free, should he receive the same compensation as another black with 64 enslaved g-g-g-g-grandparents?
If it seems absurd to make compensation match the number of enslaved distant ancestors, remember that some white people today probably have a g-g-g-g-grandparent who was a black slave. If they can prove one just ancestor, would it be fair for them to receive the same compensation as the person with 64 enslaved g-g-g-g-grandparents? I don't think so--and it just shows the problems that individual compensation leads to.
Let me throw another can of gasoline onto the fire: what about blacks today whose ancestors include slaveholders? While abolitionists hyped this for both its prurient appeal and its emotional impact (and Hollywood continues to do so), if you could trace the ancestry of every black in America, you would find that some had slaveholder ancestors. How do you factor that into the equation of turning a number of slave ancestors into a compensation? Especially because at least some of the time, a slave woman managed to turn sexual availability (and sometimes genuine romance) into something that improved her status, and that of her children--very occasionally, freedom for herself and her children. (Let me emphasize that for many slave women--and, much more rarely, slave men, there was no negotiation.)
The time to have compensated for slavery was in 1865. Forty acres and mule to every freedman (not every black, because many were already free, and some free blacks were rich) would have been inadequate, but at least it would not have been difficult to figure out who had been injured. (You will also notice that the compensation to Japanese-Americans, when it came, was to those who had been actually interned; that wasn't a hard one to figure out.)
I can tell you a very great deal about my ancestors in 1865, partly because I have had relatives prepared to spend the time digging through records, and because my ancestors were white and free, those records exist. Blacks in America are starting at an enormous deficit on the essential records required, and this makes the entire notion of individual compensation hopeless as a matter of justice.
I know that some of those arguing for reparations are making the case that instead of compensating individual American blacks, the reparations should be spent on social programs intended to help the poor (since there would be no lawful way to create racially discriminatory social programs--this might even stretch the current Supreme Court's patience). I think the case has been made pretty effectively that the Great Society did enough damage to blacks already, by unintentionally re-creating one of the more severe family problems of a slave society: it broke the natural connection between a father's work and the care and feeding of his children. It didn't matter how hard a slave father worked, his children would be fed the same by the master.
Trying to turn the moral argument for reparations into an excuse to repeat the 1960s social programs is going to be politically less popular than individual reparations payments--and I suspect that any attempt to impose tax increases to fund individual reparations would cause a political earthquake that would dwarf 1980. Whenever I talk to people outside the academic community--even those of pretty liberal persuasion--I am just amazed at the hostility to the idea. As you can tell, I'm not happy with it either, but I do my best to explain the theory behind it, and the brutality of both slavery and Jim Crow. The idea of individual reparations is as much of a non-starter in America as any idea that I have ever seen.
Another Reminder Of Security Problems
This story reports on how hackers use Google to find servers that were put online with the default settings--including the default security settings: By searching for default server page titles, for example, an attacker can find easily exploitable servers. Applications left in default modes can also be found by searching for error pages generated by the software. And searching for specific file names can pinpoint vulnerable servers connected to the Internet.
"It is the first step to finding vulnerable targets," Long said.
A simple search for the log-in page of Microsoft's Web server software, the Internet Information Server, turned up 11,300 sites on the Internet that exposed the page to the public. Gathering log-in information for poorly configured databases is also easy, he said.
Another Argument Against Smoking
From AP: BLACKSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) - Warning: smoking in the toilet can be dangerous. A portable toilet exploded Tuesday after a man who was inside it lit a cigarette.
...
The explosion, which occurred in Blacksville, resulted from a buildup of methane gas inside the portable toilet. The methane did not "take too kindly" to the lit cigarette, said a spokeswoman for Monongalia Emergency Medical Services.
Interesting Piece of History Concerning Blacks in the North Carolina National Guard
Geitner Simmons has an interesting piece here about blacks in the North Carolina National Guard at the start of the Spanish-American War--a very inauspicious time, when white supremacy as a political doctrine was reaching ascendancy.
The Story Gets More Bizarre Every Day
The doctor who claimed to have been Cipel's gay lover--and gave the utterly bizarre interview that I mentioned yesterday--has been ordered into a psychiatric evaluation: Miller, 51, pleaded not guilty to charges of impersonating law officers and public officials, creating false public alarm and making a false report to law enforcement.
The mental evaluation was ordered after Assistant Prosecutor Judy Gagliano listed a series of what she called "bizarre" statements attributed to Miller, including that he was a CIA operative and that a tenant has Al Qaeda ties and would blow up public buildings, including the courthouse where the hearing took place.
How Can You Tell A Journalist is a Liberal?
By his ageism and sexism. From Michelle Malkin's account of being on Hardball with Chris Matthews: As I am seated at the table with Matthews, who I am meeting for the first time, he cracks a joke--and not in a well-meaning way--about how I look. (There are quite a few people who are hung up on this.) "Are you sure you are old enough to be on the show? What are you? 28?" I grit my teeth. He badgers me again with the same question. I politely answer his question and supply my age.
I have long suspected that a lot of why liberals have remained focused on the triumvirate of sex, race, and class--even though most Americans have moved past prejudice on these issues--is that liberals think that the rest of America is as sexist, racist, and classist as they are.
(I wonder how Matthews' wife, the respected TV journalist Kathleen Matthews, who hosts a show about working women, would react if informed about her husband's treatment of a fellow female journalist. I've been in the business a dozen years and would be happy to talk to Mrs. Matthews about my firsthand experience with Neanderthal chauvinism in the workplace.)
Why Do People Buy Guns For Home Defense?
Because of situations like this: A Dunwoody man Wednesday said thieves have traumatized his family three days in a row.
Chris Heavern said burglars broke into his home Friday of last week and stole jewelry, video games and car keys.
The next day, his SUV was stolen, and on the third day, his wife’s car was stolen from the garage.
Heavern said his wife saw her car being stolen. “She pursued them on foot,” he said.
She called 911, but no law enforcement officials arrived at the scene for two hours.
The SUV was later recovered and the two men driving it were charged with theft.
His wife’s car was found abandoned. The Heaverns said they found a handgun and a bag full of clothing belonging to the apparent thieves inside the vehicle.
The Brady Campaign Goes Into The Psychiatric Business
From their press release, in which they demonstrate their ability to diagnose mental illness without ever seeing the patient:
I'm glad that I don't have to actually touch their press release--I wouldn't want to get all the foam on my hands.
is ready to serve America's extreme psychotics right away.
Have your credit cards ready.
Washington, D.C. - Tomorrow, there will only be 30 days until the assault weapons ban expires, and our nation will face a new era of criminal and terrorist attacks with assault weapons unless President Bush keeps his campaign promise and gets the law renewed. And some Americans are simply drooling at the notion of deadlier guns.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence today sent the following letter to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives about ArmaLite, Inc., a company contemptibly catering to those who are desperate for extraordinary firepower. [emphasis added]
Look, I own a rifle made by ArmaLite (back when they were still Eagle Arms). Lots of people I know own ArmaLite rifles. The rifles that ArmaLite has been selling for a number of years are different from the ones that they are taking orders for in the following ways:
1. They can now have a bayonet lug.
2. They can now have a flash hider.
And buying such a rifle makes one an "extreme psychotic"?
Who Does This Guy Work For?
If he's trying to make McGreevey look like the victim of an extortion plot, he's failing. If he's trying to make homosexuals look like raving lunatics, he's doing a good job: The mystery man who claims to be Golan Cipel's ex-lover said yesterday that not only is the handsome Israeli gay - he's also still in love with Gov. Jim McGreevey.
The money was not well spent.
"Golan says he's not gay? He could have fooled me," Dr. David Miller of Livingston, N.J., told the Daily News yesterday, as he claimed that he had a gay affair with the ex-McGreevey aide.
"We love each other. Is that a crime? We're lovers," said Miller, 51, an openly gay man and divorced father of two.
In a manic, disjointed interview, Miller said that Cipel had made a pillow-talk confession: He still carries a torch for McGreevey.
...
Miller also claimed to reporters that he is a CIA operative who takes pills doled out by the intelligence agency to make his skin darker so he can infiltrate unnamed groups.
He offered no mementos, letters or photos as proof of his relationship with Cipel.
...
The Daily News reported yesterday that an unidentified college professor had reported his affair to the governor's aides.
If true, Miller could wreck Cipel's claims of being a straight man victimized by McGreevey's predatory advances.
Miller - who insisted on speaking Spanish because, he said, he hates the United States - told reporters he met Cipel in Israel through family friends and that he still had a soft spot for him.
"Despite his problems, I'm going to go visit him," said Miller, shirtless and wearing purple shorts.
...
Miller's own story is reminiscent of McGreevey's coming-out tale. The doctor said he was a happily married man with two children, when, at age 38, he acknowledged he was gay.
"One hundred thousand dollars worth of therapy later and I still don't understand," Miller said.
Iran Is Run By Idiots, After All
I don't remember where I saw the expression "mullahs with their turbans wound too tight," but it sure describes the Iranian government. I thought that as evil as the mullahocracy was, that they were astute enough not to say things like this: DOHA (AFP) - Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warned that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.
Look, the Bush Administration would prefer that Iran's population rise and overthrow the "turbans wound too tight" crowd. The last thing Bush wants is another war. (Our government has its hands sufficiently full cleaning up the mess after invading Iraq.) But a pre-emptive strike on U.S. forces? Even under the predominant leftist understanding of the UN Charter, the U.S. would be completely free to invade Iran, unwind the turbans, and reform their political processes. And it would enjoy popular support in the U.S., and possibly even in Iraq, where Iranian agents have been long at work destabilizing the country.
"We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilities.
"America is not the only one present in the region. We are also present, from Khost to Kandahar in Afghanistan; we are present in the Gulf and we can be present in Iraq," said Shamkhani, speaking in Farsi to the Arabic-language news channel through an interpreter.
"The US military presence (in Iraq) will not become an element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in Iranian hands in the event of an attack, he said.
The Great Society and Crime Rates
Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Thomas Sowell, but everyone (except me, of course) blows it occasionally, and Professor Sowell turns out to be human. In an otherwise sensible critique of the Great Society--Lyndon Johnson's well-intentioned but very destructive effort to alleviate suffering--Sowell makes the following claim: The murder rate had also been going down, for decades, and in 1960 was just under half of what it had been in 1934. Then the new 1960s policies toward curing the "root causes" of crime and creating new "rights" for criminals began. Rates of violent crime, including murder, skyrocketed.
Since Sowell is trying to indict the Great Society for the skyrocketing murder rates, picking 1934 as the comparison year is misleading. Homicide rates* rose dramatically from 1900, picking up speed after Prohibition in 1919. From 1934 onward, they fell to rates that were still historically high--and they were already rising when the Great Society came into existence in 1965. It makes more sense to understand rising murder rates in the period 1960-1980 as a result of the baby boomers hitting their teenage years, when murder rates are highest. You might be able to blame the Great Society for aggravating a problem already under way, but there are any number of other changes going on during this period.
*The "homicide rates" that this chart uses include at least some justifiable and excusable homicides, and are based on statistics provided by the states--not of all which were actually reporting homicides in the first few years of this chart.
A Humorous Story With An Important Point
According to this news story, the U.S. military is now including breast implants among the benefits of military service, and porn star and occasionally political candidate Mary Carey says that bullets are more important than breast enlargements.
The serious side of this story is: does the military provide purely cosmetic surgery? Most private employers don't. Why should the taxpayers fund this? There was a big stink a few years ago when Oakland City Schools in California either went bankrupt, or threatened to do so, because the very generous benefits package included all sorts of cosmetic surgery, at great expense to the city. The function of our military is defense, not self-esteem.
It is possible that someone has taken something out of context on this. There are circumstances where breast reconstructive surgery (such as after a mastectomy) is sometimes carelessly labeled as "cosmetic surgery" in the same sense that breast enlargement is. Breast reductions are sometimes medically necessary because of back pain.
UPDATE: Over here is an explanation of what is going on. Apparently, it is for the purpose of giving military plastic surgeons experience in doing reconstructive surgery under non-emergency circumstances, and is done largely on a "as available" basis. Keep in mind that there will be circumstances where some female soldier is going to badly injured, and military surgeons are going to be expected to do a proper breast reconstruction. Better to practice on voluntary subjects.
Slippery Slopes & DNA Testing
Professor Volokh cited with approval Judge Kozinski's dissent from the 9th Circuit en banc decision U.S. v. Kincade (9th Cir. 2004) upholding the authority of the federal government to require convicted felons to provide DNA samples while on probation. The argument is that this is a slippery slope.
As much as I worry about slippery slopes, I will tell you that I don't find the argument persuasive for this situation. There is a fundamental difference between a convicted felon, and everyone else. The government can lock up convicted felons in prison. They can't lock up the rest of us. Does that mean allowing the government to lock up convicted felons starts us down a "slippery slope"? Sure--if you are an anarchist, and believe that the government should have no authority to imprison felons, then allowing them to lock up felons creates a slippery slope.
I greatly respect Judge Kozinski, and I generally find Professor Volokh's arguments logical. But if this is an example of a slippery slope, then so is allowing the federal government to maintain files of fingerprints from convicted felons--as Professor Volokh seems to suggest in his blog entry.
Convicted felons lose many of their rights. We have a somewhat complex procedure, with a number of procedural guarantees, to make it unlikely that you will become a convicted felon without very good reason. Convicted felons lose lots of rights: in many states, the right to vote; throughout the U.S., the right to possess a firearm. While convicted felons are still under the supervision of the government, as they are during probation, they are effectively still in prison.
The slippery slope argument would be persuasive for me if the government attempted to impose this requirement on people who have not been convicted of a crime--for example, as a condition of government employment. On this point, I do agree with Professor Volokh that the FBI's expansion of whose fingerprints they get to keep is a slippery slope example, when they crossed the line from keeping convicted felon fingerprints, to keeping those of government job applicants.
Teddy Kennedy on the "No-Fly" List
This news report says it was a "clerical error": CAPITOL HILL The Senate Judiciary Committee has heard this morning from one of its own about some of the problems with airline "no fly" watch lists.
The clerical error, of course, was that he was supposed to be on the "no-drive" list--or at least the "no-drive while pretty young ladies not related to him are in the car" list.
Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy says he had a close encounter with the lists when trying to take the U-S Airways shuttle out of Washington to Boston.
The ticket agent wouldnt let him on the plane. His name was on the list -- in error. After a flurry of phone calls, Kennedy was able to fly home, but then the same thing happened coming back to Washington.
Kennedy says it took three calls to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to get his name stricken from the list. The process took several weeks, in all.
It Wasn't Just Sonoma County
I was just reading an old blog entry by Ambra Nykola about parenting, and her description of the culture in which she grew up sounds rather like Sonoma County, California, the moral cesspool from which I moved my family several years ago: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the murderers from the attack at Columbine High School, somehow managed to have parents completely oblivious of their thorough and well thought out plans to kill their entire school. To be completely honest, I used to chalk this up to the "rich, white suburb mentality"; something I made up to help myself cope with dwelling amongst some of my troubled classmates in high school. These are the same classmates whose parents bought them alcohol for parties under the premise of "I'd rather have them doing it around me than somewhere else". It was under this same premise, that they allowed all kinds of madness to take place under their roof. There were guys whose parents let their girlfriends spend the night in their bedrooms. According to some parents, sex under their roof is better than sex on the school roof. I was fully convinced "my people" just didn't do things like this. After all, none of my black friends parents actually bought them liquor. I now realize, this was a very ignorant judgment call. The downfall of parenting has less to do with color than I first thought.
The only area where I might disagree a bit with Ambra's essay is that even if you raise your kids with a certain set of values, if the overwhelming majority of your child's peers are savages (as in Sonoma County), doing the right thing may not be enough.
I have a story that captures the essence of this. A friend of my wife worked as a ranger at Yellowstone one summer. One group of campers did everything right: food was in a sealed container, hung from a tree, some distances from their tent. Another group did everything wrong. The bear went after the bad campers, and in the ensuing excitement, the bear ran down the hill--right through the good campers' tent, destroying it, and badly hurt those campers.
This, unfortunately, is analogous to the larger society, and why I have become considerably less sympathetic to the more extreme libertarian positions as I have grown older. Short of becoming a hermit, it is actually pretty difficult to isolate yourself from the destructive effects of someone else's stupidity. Sure, most of the injury falls on the irresponsible person, and their immediate circles of family and friends. (Unfortunately, minors usually don't have the choice of opting out of the chaos and damage caused by a parent's "lifestyle choice.")
There are plenty of examples of the moral pollution that doesn't stay close to the idiot: the intoxicated driver who runs into another car, killing or injuring someone else; the drunk whose lowered inhibitions means that they molest a neighbor child; the mentally ill person whose delusions lead him to slash the throats of other homeless people; the person who sells a gun to a 15 year old gang member; the employer who could afford to pay his employees another fifty cents an hour, but refuses to do so; the promiscuous person whose decision to have dozens of sexual partners a month spreads AIDS--and drives up government health expenditures; the smoker whose dying medical bills get picked up by the state indigent aid fund, or Medicare.
Black Bears Just Love to Party
From CNN: SEATTLE, Washington (Reuters) -- A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down three dozen cans of a local beer, a campground worker said on Wednesday.
Somehow, I can't picture Rainier deciding to use this as an endorsement.
"We noticed a bear sleeping on the common lawn and wondered what was going on until we discovered that there were a lot of beer cans lying around," said Lisa Broxson, a worker at the Baker Lake Resort, 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Seattle.
The hard-drinking bear, estimated to be about two years old, broke into campers' coolers and, using his claws and teeth to open the cans, swilled down the suds.
It turns out the bear was a bit of a beer sophisticate. He tried a mass-market Busch beer, but switched to Rainier Beer, a local ale, and stuck with it for his drinking binge.
And This Country Has Too Many People Like Ted Rall
I couldn't make up a person as vicious as Ted Rall--the liberal poster boy: Tourists are pleasantly surprised when New Yorkers act as friendly and polite as the people back home in Maybury. However, delegates to this month's Republican National Convention shouldn't expect to be treated to our standard out-of-towner treatment. The Republican delegates here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, they will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown in their direction. Children will call them obscene names. They will not be greeted as liberators.
I presume Rall's parents are billionaires (or else his politics make little sense), but I can't quite place them.
Well aware that it is barren soil for their party's anti-urban, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, overtly racist ideology, Republican leaders have wisely avoided New York City as a convention site for the past 150 years. Even as the rest of America turns red, we New Yorkers remain as liberal as the people's republic of San Francisco: fewer than 18 percent of the citizens of New York's five boroughs (which include relatively conservative places like Staten Island) cast ballots for Bush/Cheney in 2000. But White House strategist Karl Rove sees the continued exploitation of 9/11 for partisan political gain as Bush's key to victory in November. That means bringing the big bash three miles north of the hole where the Twin Towers used to stand, where most of the victims of 9/11 were burned, suffocated, impaled and pulverized.
Making hay of the dead is also the point of this confab's timing. The 2004 Necropublican National Convention is being held a full month later than normal, from August 30 to September 2. The original plan was to have Bush shuttle between Madison Square Garden and Ground Zero for photo ops to coincide with the third anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Bush's visits to the Trade Center site were quietly canceled a few months back after 9/11 survivors expressed revulsion at the idea. But it was too late to change the date.
...
Rejecting ex-mayor Ed Koch's call to "make nice" with the party that used the deaths of 2,801 New Yorkers--most of them Democrats--for everything from tax cuts for the rich to building concentration camps at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib to invading Iraq to enrich Dick Cheney and his fellow Halliburton execs, some groups are encouraging liberal-minded New Yorkers to volunteer for the city's squad of official greeters. Creatively altered maps of streets and subways will be handed out to button-clad stupid white men. Other saboteurs wearing fake RNC T-shirts will direct them to parts of town where Bush's policies have hit hardest. Rumor has it that prostitutes suffering from sexually transmitted diseases will discourage the use of condoms with Republican customers.
This Country Is Full of Young People Like This
I don't know how; it must be in spite of the culture that the entertainment industry tries to create: A young Boisean who worked as a volunteer football coach for his high school and extended his Army enlistment to go to Iraq died Tuesday while on patrol in Baghdad.
Brandon Titus, 20, triggered an "improvised explosive device" at 8:50 a.m. Baghdad time while at a military checkpoint. He died 10 minutes later.
A member of the Army's 10th Mountain Division headquartered at Fort Drum, N.Y., Titus was a machine gun team leader and a lead gunner on a Humvee. It was unclear whether he was on foot or in a vehicle when the device, similar to a land mine, exploded.
Titus left for Iraq on an 18-month deployment in June of this year.
"He wanted to go to Iraq," his father, Boisean Tom Titus, said. "I razzed him because he extended his enlistment by something like six to eight months to go to Iraq and then got in the 10th Mountain Division and would have gone anyway. I told him the last thing I wanted him to do was join the military because of what happened to me, but he'd made up his mind."
Tom Titus was an Army Ranger who served most of two enlistments in Vietnam. His home is decorated with military medals, commendations, photographs and flags. He lost his sight in one eye in Vietnam, has shrapnel in his head and still suffers from exposure to Agent Orange.
Brandon Titus grew up in Boise and graduated in 2002 from Borah High School, where he played football. He joined the Army on a delayed entry program, staying in Boise to work as a volunteer coach for Borah's sophomore football team. He left for active duty that October. After the service, his father said, he hoped to attend college and teach at Borah.
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Lawrence Lumley, a next door neighbor, remembers Titus as "a super nice kid. He was well-mannered, which is something you don't see a lot in kids these days. His friends were the same way. They were good kids who were respectful of other people. You couldn't help but be impressed by Brandon."
What Passes For Journalism At The New York Times
This blogger points to an embarrassing example of bias in an interview with a Yale economics professor: NYT: As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for creating an econometric equation that has predicted presidential elections with relative accuracy.
Okay, what is left out by the elipsis changes it a bit--but not a lot.
Ray C. Fair: My latest prediction shows that Bush will receive 57.5 percent of the two-party votes. ......Historically, issues like war haven't swamped the economics. If the equation is correctly specified, then the chances that Bush loses are very small.
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NYT: It saddens me that you teach this to students at Yale, who could be thinking about society in complex and meaningful ways. NYT: But the country hasn't been this polarized since the 60's, and voters seem genuinely engaged by social issues like gay marriage and the overall question of a more just society.
Ray C. Fair: We throw all those into what we call the error term. In the past, all that stuff that you think should count averages about 2.5 percent, and that is pretty small.
John Kerry's Hunting License: Does It Exist?
This blogger suggests that some clever person could probably embarrass the heck of John "Deer Hunter" Kerry: However, as we have seen with his claims of Christmas in Cambodia, there exists a written record that will undoubtably expose John Kerry to be the liar he is. And what record is that - simple, in order to hunt, Mr. Kerry would have been required to apply for a hunting license and a deer tag. If he hunts as often as he lets on, then he certainly can dig up some documentary evidence of this (and show how he has been licensed for years, not just the last year), and if not, then an audit of the state records in whatever state he crawled around with his trusty 12 guage in could show it.
In addition, while Massachussets doesn't require a license to own a shotgun, the state does require a license to carry or firearms identification card for the purchase of ammo and the possession of a shotgun while hunting.
I don't have the time to do this search (I'm already trying to take down enough enemies of America at work), but surely the NRA or the G.O.A. or some of my resourceful readers have the werewithall to FOIA these otherwise public records.
American Incompetence
I've seen this material before, but it's worth being reminded that the function of the news media and soft-brained leftists hasn't changed in the last 60 years: to hold America responsible for everything that goes wrong, and predict the worst possible results of our actions: The first winter of peace holds Europe in a deathly grip of cold, hunger and hopelessness. In the words of the London Sunday Observer: “Europe is threatened by a catastrophe this winter which has no precedent since the Black Death of 1348.”
These are still more than 25,000,000 homeless people milling about Europe. In Warsaw nearly 1,000,000 live in holes in the ground. Six million buildings were destroyed in Russia. Rumania has her worst drought of 50 years, and in Greece fuel supplies are terribly low because the Nazis, during their occupation, decimated the forests. In Italy the wheat harvest, which was a meager 3,450,000 tons in 1944, fell to an unendurable 1,304,000 tons in 1945. In France, food consumption per day averages 1,800 calories as compared with 3,000 calories in the U.S.
Germany is sinking even below the level of the countries she victimized. The German people are still better clothed than most of Europe because during the war they took the best of Europe’s clothing. But their food supply is below subsistence level. In the American zone they beg for the privilege of scraping U.S. army garbage cans. Infant mortality is already so high that a Berlin Quaker, quoted in the British press, predicted. “No child born in Germany in 1945 will survive. Only half the children aged less than 3 years will survive.”
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“Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans,” puts in the lanky young captain in the upper berth, “but…”
“To hell with the Germans,” says the broad-shouldered dark lieutenant. “It’s what our boys have been doing that worries me.”
The lieutenant has been talking about the traffic in Army property, the leaking of gasoline into the black market in France and Belgium even while the fighting was going on, the way the Army kicks the civilians around, the looting.
“Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier’s pay,” interrupts a red-faced major.
The lieutenant comes out with his conclusion: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” You hear these two phrases again and again in about every bull session on the shop. “Two wrongs don’t make a right” and “Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans, but….”
The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.”
Prozac in the Water Supply
I saw this news story a few days ago, and it provoked both a serious and humorous reaction: LONDON (Reuters) - Traces of the anti-depressant Prozac have been found in Britain's drinking water supply, setting off alarm bells with environmentalists concerned about potentially toxic effects.
When I took my family to Britain for a vacation in 1999, after spending a few days looking at the vast, expressionless, seemingly depressed London crowds, my wife's reaction was, "Someone needs to start adding Prozac to the water supply." And they did! But as the article points out, not a therapeutic dose.
The Observer newspaper said Sunday that a report by the government's environment watchdog found Prozac was building up in river systems and groundwater used for drinking supplies.
The exact quantity of Prozac in the drinking water was unknown, but the Environment Agency's report concluded Prozac could be potentially toxic in the water table.
Experts say that Prozac finds its way into rivers and water systems from treated sewage water, and some believe the drugs could affect reproductive ability.
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Prescription of anti-depressants has surged in Britain. In the decade up to 2001, overall prescriptions of antidepressants rose from 9 million to 24 million a year, the paper said.
My more serious reaction is that while I do believe that mood-altering drugs perform a very useful function, I also think that they tend to be overprescribed--especially the anti-depressants.
There are two big causes of depression: biochemical imbalances which seem to be genetic in origin, and situational. My impression is that people who are genetically depressed are rare relative to the situationally depressed.
Situational depression is anger or disappointment that the person feels that they have to control or suppress. If you do this long enough, your body starts to respond inappropriately. From what I have seen of depression in family and friends, situational depression seems to sometimes turn into a biochemical problem such that even when the bad situation goes away, anti-depressants may be necessary to get the depressed person out of it. Used in that way, these are powerful and wonderful drugs.
But what about the person who is prescribed anti-depressants for what is fundamentally situational depression? These can mask the problem, but they don't correct the situation. I've seen a lot of marriages over the years fail because the anti-depressants didn't correct the underlying problem of the marriage, but they did enable the depressed spouse to continue to function--until the pressure cooker finally exploded.
I don't want to pick on Britain. My impression is that there's a lot of similar problems in America with overuse of anti-depressants. We just have a low enough population density that it isn't showing up in the ground water.
The Income Gap News Story
This AP news story appeared in a number of newspapers around the country: WASHINGTON (AP) — Over two decades, the income gap has steadily increased between the richest Americans, who own homes and stocks and got big tax breaks, and those at the middle and bottom of the pay scale, whose paychecks buy less.
Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? It's that "two Americas" thing, isn't it?
The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant, and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared.
The wealthiest 20 percent of households in 1973 accounted for 44 percent of total U.S. income, according to the Census Bureau. Their share jumped to 50 percent in 2002, while everyone else’s fell. For the bottom fifth, the share dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent.
Well, to my surprise, some newspapers (including the Boise Idaho Statesman) and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are including a graph with the story that presents a bit more of the story--but neglect to point out what that graph tells us. The graph shows the mean household income in 2002 dollars, from 1967-2002 for the top 20% and bottom 20% of households. The top 20% are indeed, substantially better off (although this seems to be a measure of income not wealth--there is a difference). In 1967, the top 20% had $81,883 annual income; in 2002, $143,743. (Remember: all these amounts are inflation adjusted.) But even the bottom 20% are better off: $7,419 in 1967, $9,990 in 2002. If you want to argue that this is "unfair," because the top 20% have 75% higher household incomes than in 1967, while the bottom 20% have only a 35% higher income than they had back then, I guess you would be right. But there are some details getting lost here that make the story look a bit different.
1. A lot of those top 20% income households are two professional households. This is something that the left insisted was necessary: every woman working outside the home, and they passed laws that encouraged this. In 1967, there were relatively few mothers working outside the home in the top 20% income brackets. IBM, for example, would actually pressure its salesmen (and let me emphasize, they were salesmen) to have their wives not work outside the home.
By contrast, I would guess that my home, if not in the bottom 20% of income in 1967, wasn't much above it, and both of my parents worked. I would guess that this is part of why the disparity between the top 20% and the bottom 20% is so much larger now; the bottom 20% of households in 1967 were much more likely to have a working mother because they had no choice in the matter. If the left really wants this disparity to end, they could do exactly what happened at the end of World War II, when employers made a "socially responsible" decision to fire women, so that jobs were reserved for men. A lot of those top 20% household income families would lose their second wage earner, and would be a lot closer to the 1967 level.
2. Household size has dropped quite a bit since 1967. In 1967, average family size was 3.63; in 2001, it was 3.15. Unsurprisingly, 35% more income with fewer children means that the bottom 20% are better off.
3. A lot of stuff that used to be quite expensive in 1967 is now cheap. As an example, even the poorest families in America have color televisions. In 1967, we certainly did not, because a color television cost hundreds of dollars back then--the equivalent of thousands of dollars today. (I can't say the quality of what is on the TV has improved any.) On a more important level, the quality of medical care is substantially better today than it was back then--even for the very poor.
There are doubtless many other substantial differences that you could point to that make the story of America's bottom 20% incomes a bit less tragic--and also understandable as a consequence of leftist policies. I would expect that the increase in divorce rates (from 2.6/1000 people per year in 1967 to 4.2 in 1998 probably plays a part as well). But you won't be seeing that in your local paper, will you?
What Matters To The British Electorate
I had friends insisting that the British voters were hopping mad about Iraq. It turns out that this is way down their list:
I am not keen on Tony Blair's "New Labour," but I do respect Blair for recognizing that Iraq was important, and choosing to do the right thing, even though it wasn't popular with the fiercely anti-American wing of the Labour Party.
Iraq is the last thing on people's minds as they contemplate how to vote.
With a general election expected in just nine months, the war came last in a list of 12 key issues put to people by ICM.
Just one in 10 people, 12%, said the conflict was among the most important to them, The Guardian survey showed.
The state of the NHS was named by an overwhelming 59% while 42% said education.
The findings explain why backing for the Government has remained relatively strong despite continuing controversy over Iraq.
Even though I am more in agreement with the British Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher, I wish that there was something to respect there today. They seem to have turned into what Goldwater called "an echo" not a choice.
More On Global Warming
From New Scientist: The controversial idea that cosmic rays could be driving global warming by influencing cloud cover will get a boost at a conference next week. But some scientists dismiss the idea and are worried that it will detract from efforts to curb rising levels of greenhouse gases.
But of course that's the whole point of global warming--to justify more governmental control over the economy.
At issue is whether cosmic rays, the high-energy particles spat out by exploding stars elsewhere in the galaxy, can affect the temperature on Earth. The suggestion is that cosmic rays crashing into the atmosphere ionise the molecules they collide with, triggering cloud formation.
If the flux of cosmic rays drops, fewer clouds will form and the planet will warm up. No one yet understands the mechanism, which was first described in the late 1990s. But what makes it controversial is that climate models used to predict the consequences of rising levels of greenhouse gases do not allow for the effect, and may be inaccurate.
Some proponents of the theory argue that changes in the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth can explain past climate change as well as global warming today. Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Jan Veizer of the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, claimed in 2003 that changes in cosmic-ray flux are the major reason for temperature changes over the past 500 million years (GSA Today, July 2003, p 4).
They argued that changes in carbon dioxide levels over the same period had a much smaller effect on temperature than previously assumed, suggesting that today's soaring levels of the greenhouse gas may have less impact than scientists anticipate. "It makes you think maybe it's a waste implementing the Kyoto Protocol and losing all those trillions of dollars," says Shaviv.
For My Redding, California Readers
Okay, this is a long shot. My mother has just moved from California to Oregon. Her cat Ditto ran away from the Motel 6 on Bechelli Lane in Redding Wednesday night. Ditto is a Siamese, 14 year old female. Black tail and ears, blue eyes, brownish back. Most of the rest of her body is fawn colored markings. Small and frightened inside kitty.
She got out of the Motel 6 room on Wed night a little after midnight, Aug 11th. The motel is the one on Bechelli Lane in Redding, CA.
You aren't likely to get too close to her, but if you see her, or know where she is, please let me know at once.
My Wife Needs A Belt-Fed Machine Gun For Her Class
No, it's not really that difficult a bunch. She's teaching a class in the spring on major authors of the 1920s, and the impact of World War I. If you live in the Boise area, and could bring your belt-fed World War I era machine gun (and I know many in the Boise area have such) to her class one evening, this would add considerable visual impact to the lecture discussing the role of the machine gun in changing the nature of warfare. She teaches at a private university, so there are no legal problems, but a dummy ammunition belt would be appropriate. If all you have is one of the magazine-fed World War I machine guns (a Lewis gun, for example), that would be better than nothing.
Pollution & Dementia
This article from the Guardian is, at first glance, very disturbing: The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered.
Okay, but there are other possible reasons for the increase in death rates. Pritchard claims that they have corrected for the change caused by the increasing age of the population:
The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health.
In the late 1970s, there were around 3,000 deaths a year from these conditions in England and Wales. By the late 1990s, there were 10,000.
'This has really scared me,' said Professor Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University, one of the report's authors. 'These are nasty diseases: people are getting more of them and they are starting earlier. We have to look at the environment and ask ourselves what we are doing.' For other ailments, such as Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, the group found there had been a rise of about 50 per cent in cases for both men and women in every country except Japan. The increases in neurological deaths mirror rises in cancer rates in the West.
Okay, so they adjusted for the population living longer. Have they adjusted for declines in deaths caused by heart disease? I was reading an article in the March 29, 2004 Newsweek "The War on Strokes," that contains the claim:
The team stresses that its figures take account of the fact that people are living longer and it has also made allowances for the fact that diagnoses of such ailments have improved. It is comparing death rates, not numbers of cases, it says. Dr. John Marler, associate director of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS): as we get better at treating heart attacks, "more people are surviving a myocardial infarction and going on to have a stroke."
Could the same thing be true with respect to these dementias--that the improving survival rate of heart attacks means that people that used to die of those now live long enough to have mental problems instead? Unfortunately, the Guardian article doesn't tell us if they have controlled for that possibility.
The whole tone of the article, unfortunately, is awash in chemical hysteria: The causes were most likely to be chemicals, from car pollution to pesticides on crops and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of modern life, from processed food to packaging, from electrical goods to sofa covers, Pritchard said.
So, Japan doesn't have increasing pollution, unlike the rest of the industrialized world, or they keep it out of their food? The only difference between Japanese and their descendants elsewhere is their food? I sure hope Pritchard is being misquoted by the Guardian. The alternative is that he is not much of a scientist.
Food is also a major concern because it provides the most obvious explanation for the exclusion of Japan from many of these trends. Only when Japanese people move to the other countries do their disease rates increase.
I don't find the claim absurd. But it strikes me as the "chlorinated hydrocarbons are causing our penises to get smaller" sort of science that environmentalists were trying to use several years ago to panic the population into implementing their policies--so obviously designed to provoke emotional reactions that I find myself suspecting intentional dishonesty, not simple error.
One Way To Put a Damper on the Party
This is a pretty serious subject--Virginia's efforts to stop statutory rape--but I was amused by this interesting attempt at using the materials: RICHMOND, Va. — The giant black and white billboard chides young men as they motor along Interstate 95 through Virginia's capital: "Isn't she a little young?" the sign slyly asks. It continues: "Sex with a minor. Don't go there."
There was a time when parents used a somewhat more direct, less "sensitive" phrase to keep men (and by that, I mean adult men) away from their underage daughters.
The billboard is one of many unveiled across Virginia this summer as part of a state health department campaign aimed at reducing statutory rape. Napkins, stickers, coasters and matchbooks bearing the same message have been scattered in bars and restaurants where young men congregate.
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A health department Web site dealing with statutory rape (search) in Virginia registered 5,000 hits in June, up from the normal 100 to 200 a month, said program coordinator Robert Franklin. Franklin said he also has received numerous calls from parents who are worried their teenage daughters might be involved with older men and need advice.
One even wanted to purchase the napkins and coasters for her daughter's birthday party.
Here's the more serious and sobering part of the article--one that certain libertarian law professors will probably find doesn't fit their wonderful theories about statutory rape laws: It is difficult to know how widespread the crime of statutory rape is across the country, particularly among girls who willingly engage in sex with older men. Franklin said Virginia hospital records from 2001 show that in 70 percent of births to girls age 14 and 15, the father of the baby was at least three years older than the mother. That is a felony under Virginia law.
I'm glad that it shocks Planned Parenthood. I've read that when Focus on the Family decided to test this, they had teenagers call up Planned Parenthood to discuss "unplanned pregnancies" and discovered that even when the caller told the Planned Parenthood worker that the father was an adult--and she was a minor--that Planned Parenthood indicated that confidentiality was not a problem. This article, gives examples:
After a trial run of the program in Norfolk last year, officials conducted informal polling of men and found that 69 percent said they knew of someone having sex with a minor.
Grace Sparks, president of Planned Parenthood-Virginia, said studies show that the younger girls start having sex, the older their partners tend to be.
"If she starts at 11 or 12, her partner is more likely to be a decade or older," Sparks said. "It's pretty shocking."The potential for Planned Parenthood staffers to sidestep the law was revealed earlier this year when Life Dynamics, a pro-life investigative group in Denton, Texas, hired a 23-year-old woman to use her “little-girl” voice in a sting operation of sorts. The woman phoned family-planning clinics across the nation, telling the same story: that she was 13 years old, that she thought she was pregnant by her 22-year-old boyfriend, and that she did not want her parents — or anyone — to find out. In each case, she specifically asked clinic personnel if anyone would have to know about the age of her boyfriend.
Transcripts of the taped phone calls to seven clinics in North and South Carolina, six of them operated by Planned Parenthood, reveal that in every case the caller was promised confidentiality, even after the clinic worker knew her age and the age of her boyfriend — an obvious case of statutory rape.
The problem? State law mandates that any healthcare worker or medical services provider must report reasonable suspicions of child sexual abuse. Because underage girls (legal age in North Carolina is 16) are not legally capable of giving permission for sexual activity, any evidence of sexual activity by an underage girl is, by definition, reasonable suspicion of child sexual abuse; and seeking an abortion is clear-cut evidence of sexual activity.
And I Thought Assault Weapons Were the "Weapon of Choice"
This news story tells us differently: BOSTON -- Police say they are seeing a surge in the number of gang-related attacks involving machetes, the huge knives that are a ubiquitous tool in rural Latin America, with blades as thick as an axe and nearly as long as a sword.
Where have we heard this before?
The troubling trend has led some departments to crack down on machetes, and not just in urban areas. Some suburban communities have also enacted new laws to ban the knives.
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The surge in machete attacks has gained less attention than recent gun-related homicides in Boston parks, despite a spate of attacks that have left at least four Massachusetts men hospitalized this spring and summer from machete wounds.
"It seems to be that machetes are the weapon of choice," Detective Brian Kyes, a spokesman for the Chelsea Police, told The Boston Globe. "In the past couple of years, we've confiscated at least 50 machetes that have been used in crimes in the city."
Some Hispanic community leaders say the use of machetes in crime has tarnished the image of a useful tool used to cut sugarcane or clear underbrush.
"For people in El Salvador, the machete is not looked at as a weapon," said Luis Morales, who grew up in El Salvador. He is now the pastor at the Vida Real Evangelical Center in Somerville.
Members of Boston's Hispanic community often hang machetes on living room walls as a reminder of home or gardening.
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"What about baseball bats? They are also used in gang-related attacks. Even a shoe can be considered a weapon if someone uses it to hit someone else," Morales said.
Updated Archive Index
More than one reader has complained that the archive index on the left side (down a bit) doesn't include the latest issues. I've fixed that. I had no idea that anyone cared!
