chattr +a -V

Candidates Want Second Ohio Recount

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Two third-party presidential candidates asked a federal court Thursday to force a second recount of the Ohio vote, alleging county election boards altered votes and didn't follow proper procedures in the recount that ended this week.

Lawyers for Green Party candidate David Cobb and the Libertarian Party's Michael Badnarik made their request in federal court in Columbus.

Needless to say (but I will), the LP had Ohio taxpayers foot the bill for their first recount. Banner at top of national Libertarian Party web site:

The Party of Principle

Some Marine Corps moms in Houston sent CARE packages to the guys in Iraq, but 'Marine X' got a female package. Blackfive has the story:

Then of course, they had the tampons. When he brought this up my imagination was just running wild, but I let him continue. My son said they had to go on a mission and Marine X wanted the chapstick and lotion for the trip. He grabbed a bunch of the items out of his care package and got in the humvee. As luck would have it he grabbed the tampons, and My son said everyone was teasing him about "not forgetting his feminine hygiene products". My son said things were going well, and then the convoy was ambushed. He said a Marine in the convoy was shot. He said the wound was pretty clean, but it was deep. He said they were administering first aid but couldn't get the bleeding to slow down, and someone said, "Hey use Marine X's tampons". My son said they put the tampon in the wound. At this point my son profoundly told me, "Mom did you know that tampons expand?" ) "Well, yeah!". They successfully slowed the bleeding and got the guy medical attention. When they went to check on him later the surgeon told them, "You guys saved his life". If you hadn't stopped that bleeding he would have bled to death. My son said, "Mom, the tampons sent by the Marine Moms by mistake saved a Marines life." At this point I asked him, "Well what did you do with the rest of the tampons?" He said, "Oh, we divided them up and we all have them in our flak jackets, and I kept two for our first aid kit".

Other funny anecdotes at Every Care Package Is Important. I thought CARE originally stood for Committee for American Relief in Europe, for DPs and such, but CARE's co-founder, Arthur Ringland says it was Committee for American Relief Everywhere (Oral History Interview with Arthur Ringland.)

Today's WaPo ( On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows) discusses differences in the Bush and Kerry campaigns' spending:

• 'Pinpoint' targeting of likely Bush voters (not undecided voters, but unregistered eligibles or voters unlikely to go to the polls) through data mining and crafting targeted messages;
• Feedback from the 2002 elections and 2003 Mississippi and Kentucky gubernatorial campaigns;
• Cleaning the databases of inaccurate entries (the next step perhaps being self-cleaning databases).

The result was Bush increased his national vote by 10.5 million over 2000. Kerry's increased by 6.8 million over Gore's, but a lot of that increase was perhaps 2000 Nader voters who went Dem in 2004. (Nader's 2.9 million 2000 votes dropped to 400,000 in 2004.)

The Bush effort was at the counterintuitive margin: increase turnout. (It's counterintuitive because for, probably decades, the presumption has been that higher turnout means more Dem votes.)

The article discusses the uncoordinated, blunderbuss effort by pro-Kerry 527s, which prevented feedback to the Kerry campaign: Kerry was unable to determine the marginal utility of the 527s' efforts.

Effectiveness at the margin can't be ascertained in a marketing or a political campaign until the results are in, of course. But Bush had some experience to go on, and his campaign's working the margin proved better in the end.

Much of liberals' history has been increasing program spending, building new bureaucracies, and defending turf, without regard for the marginal utility or the marginal cost of those tactics. Will Dems wise up to looking at marginal utility in political campaigns, or will they continue to be true to their mascot?

Fight, fight! John Hinderaker at A Columnist Nips at Our Ankles replies to Nick Coleman's column, Nick Coleman: 'Blog of the Year' goes to extremes. Some mighty factchecking in the Coleman column:

3) Powerline sells thousands of dollars in ads, including one for T-shirts that say, "Hung Like a Republican."

But does Powerline or its mighty righty allies take money from political parties, campaigns or well-heeled benefactors who hope to affect Minnesota's politics from behind the scenes? We don't know, and they don't have to say. They are not Mainstream.

They are Extreme.

When I read that, about the ads, I thought 'what's he writing about? what ads?'

I read the Powerline rss feed with akregator and rss/atom reader, which doesn't have those ads. It does have the site's own ads, but strips out or doesn't download, stuff from blogads.com.

whap whap whap "Nickie, Nickie, wake up Nickie, are you all right?"

whap whap whap [coming to] "Huh, oh, yeah, I'm fine"

whap whap whap "Then STOP SLAPPING ME!"

With the end of the calendar year, reflections on the events of 2004 are popular. Ed Driscoll's The Year Of Blogging Dangerously, with its top ten, is typical.

A common theme in the reminiscences is the rise of the blogosphere and its influence on public opinion, increased accountability, and Old Media's loss of control.

But before the blogosphere, there was fetchmail, a software package to retrieve emails from remote servers and forward them to ... well, allowing you to read your emails. It's open source, maintained by Eric S. Raymond. By itself, it's not remarkable, simply another example of a useful program donated to anyone wanting to use it.

But in taking over development of an earlier program (popclient), and hacking at his code, Raymond learned some lessons:

• Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
• If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
• Treating your users [readers] as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging [analysis].
• Release early, release often, because 'Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.' (This is Linus Torvald's Law: 'many eyeballs make shallow bugs'.)

From these lessons, he abstracted the difference between the 'cathedral model' and the 'bazaar model' of software development, but which is equally applicable to the rise of citizen cooperative analysis:

In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.

In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena -- or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.

White Paper: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, page four. And more users [readers] find more bugs [flaws in the analysis].

More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more different ways of stressing the program. This effect is amplified when the users are co-developers. Each one approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem. The "Delphi effect" seems to work precisely because of this variation. In the specific context of debugging, the variation also tends to reduce duplication of effort.

So adding more beta-testers may not reduce the complexity of the current "deepest" bug from the developer's P.O.V., but it increases the probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way that the bug is shallow to that person.

So, nihil sub sole novum (Eccl. 1:10 in the Vulgate): 'there is nothing new under the sun'. The blogosphere's networked ability to raise and address issues is the bazaar in action.

Kids Raise Money for Soldiers' Phone Cards is just the kind of hometown, kids showing gratitude and initiative, helping others, story that has absolutely nothing to do with politics or military policy.

So, what do you think the Associated Press says in the first paragraph?

For all the billions of dollars being spent on the war in Iraq ( news - web sites), 14-year-old Brittany Bergquist is surprised that the U.S. military doesn't do what she and her little brother are doing: helping soldiers phone home free.

There's not one word in the rest of the article, not one word, where Brittany Bergquist criticizes the DoD, any of the branches, the administration, or anyone serving the country, civilian or military. Here's a story about a 14 year old girl and her 12 year old brother, who have raised a quarter of a million dollars in less than nine months, and the AP cannot resist the urge to get in a dig.

It must be really hard to always look at things that way. It must really take a lot of antacid for the anger those reporters and editors feel. Maybe we can start a fundraising program to get them Zantac.

Patrick Ruffini wonders in Winning Young Voters how the GOP can appeal to young voters, but he looks at only one slice of the 18-29 voters: college students.

Plenty of those 18-29 year olds are starting families, and from personal experience, one of the most important decisions young couples make is where do we send the kids to school? Sometimes you have a choice of religious or other private schools, but when you're earnings are low, you have to set those plans aside because of the tuition they charge.

Bush and the GOP is bent on removing so many low-income earners from the Federal tax rolls that if the GOP looks at tax credits, there'll be no one (or few) qualifying.

There are voucher experiments in place around the country, and a voucher experiment on a grand scale, especially in the Northeast (think New Jersey with its crushing real estate taxes), would open up a major league voting bloc the Democrats count on.

Bush did better than most Republicans with Catholic voters (well, at least those Catholics who actually go to Mass), and it's a real shame how parochial schools in the Northeast have been closing and how the ones remaining open have a lot times majority non-Catholic enrollments.

It's nice to dangle a self-managed retirement plan in front of the young, but authority over their kids education is an immediate, 'exercise and benefit from it now', perk.

Heh. Instapundit links to Bredesen Watch, where Doug Petch talks about Bredesen's 2008 prospects.

TennCare is being dismantled, yes, but will the governor support the move for a constitutional amendment banning a state income tax, as I wondered in Knoxville Slugger on Dec 13, becoming a small government, low tax, Southern governor horse in the nomination race?

Associated Press via yahoo reports

Amazon.com Inc. on Monday said sales of consumer electronics surpassed book sales for the first time and was its largest sales category over the Thanksgiving weekend, launching the online retailer's busiest holiday selling season in 10 years.

The company also said it set a single-day sales record during the period with more than 2.8 million units, or 32 items per second, ordered across the globe.

I wonder how much, as a proportion of Christmas sales, online purchases are. Just as Old Media is being replaced, is Old Retail being replaced? Oddly, no mention in that article or this one which day it was.

I can do my Christmas shopping now.

Boing Boing today links to a Great Moments in Science story, Lemmings Suicide Myth

The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river. It's easy to understand why the filmmakers did this - wild animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings' self-implemented population-density management plan.

So lemmings do not commit mass suicide.

The metaphor will live on, no doubt. "That was a metaphor, do you know what a metaphor is?".

Well, this stinks.

I just spent an hour plus trying the links to the Thu Dec 23 Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC Radio, after Power Line linked to the interview.

The links are bad. Though there's a link to a Real Player file of the whole show, it's a file of only a discussion of Jack Newfield. The link to the Real Player file of the Big Trunk, Wonkette and Pressthink interview is a Real Player file of an open phones discussion of charities and person of the year.

Email sent to the show, Power Line, Wonkette and Pressthink.

I would have completely forgotten about this if I hadn't taken a look at WNYC's home page.

The King's College chapel choir's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols will be broadcast live later this morning, beginning at 10 a.m. EST. There's no way I would ever claim to be an authority on song, but this yearly performance is glorious.

King's College has a site on the annual performance, which takes place in the building whose foundation stone was laid in the reign of Henry VI, and whose glass was removed during World War II for safety.

Traditionally, the service begins with one of my favorite hymns: Once in royal David's city

Once in royal David's city
stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby
in a manger for his bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little child.

He came down to earth from heaven,
who is God and Lord of all,
and his shelter was a stable,
and his cradle was a stall;
with the poor, the scorned, the lowly,
lived on earth our Savior holy.

And, through all his wondrous childhood,
he would honor and obey,
love and watch the lowly maiden
in whose gentle arms he lay:
Christian children all must be
mild, obedient, good as he.

For he is our childhood's pattern,
day by day like us he grew;
he was little, weak and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew.
and he feeleth for our sadness,
and he shareth in our gladness.

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that Child who seemed so helpless
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,
with the oxen standing round,
we shall see him; but in heaven,
set at God's right hand on high;
when like stars his children crowned,
all in white shall wait around.

WUNC doesn't seem to have it. Barbarians.

Looks as if the atmosphere (Clueless at WNYC) wasn't productive of discussion:

I will admit that Brian Lehrer exuded a certain smugness mixed with cluelessness that rubbed me the wrong way, and that I let it bug me.

Having lived in northern New Jersey pretty much all my life, and having listened to Lehrer many times, but not for a few years, I'm surprised: I thought of him as liberal, of course, but fair, and as close to always as you can get, one who's done his homework and is willing to let the guest express his view, argue for it, and discuss it without biases and feelings intruding.

WNYC has the show segments on their site. I'll listen to them later today.

There's an email supposedly from Sen Kerry himself over at John Kerry's latest email reveals much on FreeRepublic:

As a soldier, I remember how much it meant to hear from loved ones - especially at the holidays.

Kerry's branch, of course, was the Navy.

Hat tip to freepers Texas Eagle and dighton (who posted one second after Texas Eagle).

Hello, world. Upgrading to nanoblogger 3.1.

Fiddling around with nanoblogger's templates and Haloscan code. In other words, breaking stuff to try to get them to work well together.

Update: once I figured out the variables, I added this line to entry.htm, and it works with haloscan:

$([ "$PERMALINKS" = "1" ] && echo '| Trackback')

Heh. So of course the variable NB_EntryID got expanded in the explanation.

Faithful to my contrarian disposition (dumped MS-Windows 3.0 after one morning to return to DESQview/X, then migrated to OS/2 Warp), this blog runs on a User-Mode Linux box at linode.com, and I follow some *nix blogs.

devnulled.com just posted How To Make Firefox Faster, linking to a FreeRepublic thread How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity).

All kinds of good things at FR. (Got to incorporate trackbacks here.)

This sounds like FreeRepublic with pretty pictures on the front page:

BLOGGING: MAJOR Revolution Underway As N.C. Paper Veers To Incorporate Blogging and

More Undercurrent: Action in Greensboro on Open Source Journalism

'Our editor and M.E. have asked me to figure out how we might change our Web site into more of an online community or public square. ...'

There aren't a lot of specifics, so Rosen and Gandelman are free to speculate and imagine and come up with suggestions.

FreeRepublic is a conservative community where, if you're registered, you can post articles, either from other sources, or vanity / 'opus' threads. Likewise, if you're registered, you can comment in the threads.

Along with the threads sourcing other sites, many times 'Live Threads' are started, on subjects as diverse as the baseball playoff games, political conventions, SpaceShipOne, and general and primary elections. Thread views can reach 20,000+.

Members can construct a home page at FR and follow their state or other locale's commentary. There are a lot of 'ping lists', where a freeper or three maintains a list of other freepers interested in a particular subject, and once a thread is started touching on that subject, the list gets notified by a comment pinging listmembers.

Because of the large membership, the knowledge and experience is truly mind-boggling. Comments, ideas, explanations are posted and subjects and questions dissected as you watch or participate.

Up until the The sixty-first minute, Powerline's post on the 60 Minutes II Bush memo story, FreeRepublic was pretty much self-contained, but Buckhead's post at Post #47 in Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard (and TankerKC's: Post #107 in Live Thread: Ben Barnes and CBS Attempt Another Bush Smear (60 Minutes), though Powerline didn't reference that post) was the first instance, AFAIK, that freeper commentary and analysis escaped, into the blogosphere or elsewhere.

Freeper hispanarepublicana created a thread Occasions when FR has Scooped Old Media (vanity thread listing), and the list is impressive:

• the shuttle Columbia disaster
• 
  
• Saddam's capture
• 
  
• Bush in Iraq Thanksgiving 2003
• 
  
• and the live threads on the World Trade Center attacks, where at 9:15 am that day, a freeper opined that bin Laden was behind the plans and execution

What FreeRepublic doesn't have, of course, is a staff gathering news. It does have editors, in the form of moderators, who can delete posts, pull threads, and ban or suspend members. Newspapers have the reporters, and they ought to investigate developing a hybrid webpaper-FreeRepublic site.

Updated to correct some typos.

U.S. Census Bureau: Nation Adds 3 Million People in Last Year:

North Carolina and New Mexico replaced California and Hawaii on the list of the top 10 fastest-growing states this year.

Of the 10 fastest-growing states from 2003 to 2004, five are in the West and five in the South. The South now accounts for 36 percent of the nation's total population, with the West comprising 23 percent, the Midwest 22 percent and the Northeast 19 percent.

...

-- While the South had the largest numerical increase in population among regions from 2003 to 2004 (1.5 million), the West recorded the fastest rate of growth (1.5 percent).

The data are embargoed, but once it's available (in pdf and Excel formats), it will be at http://www.census.gov/dcmd/www/embargo/popest/pio-natst.html

More bad news for the Dems.

John Batchelor is interviewing Barbara Goldsmith right now. Goldsmith has a new book out, Obsessive Genius, The Inner World of Marie Curie.

Madame Curie's notes were sealed for years, since they were radioactive, and when researchers wanted access, they'd have to sign a medical release.

I'll have to get Netflix send me the Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson movie. Wake County doesn't have the book in its search database.

Umm. Goldsmith mispronounces the Anglicized name of the Wisla River: it's vis-TOO-la.

Read this.

I'd usually ignore insane ranting like The Republican's Sinister Secret Plan (the thirteen stage plan for World Domination; I think we're at stage eight), but the scales are falling from my eyes:

Hitler a tax dodger, says expert

Friday, December 17, 2004 Posted: 1311 GMT (2111 HKT)

The official who wrote off his tax debt was promoted.

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Adolf Hitler spent years evading taxes and owed German authorities 405,000 Reichsmarks -- equivalent to $8 million today -- by the time his tax debts were forgiven soon after he took power, a researcher says.

...

[Klaus-Dieter Dubon, a retired Bavarian notary and tax expert] found that Hitler earned 1.232 million Reichsmarks in 1933 from sales of "Mein Kampf" -- his book outlining his doctrine of German racial supremacy and ambitions to annex vast areas of the Soviet Union.

...

"The 1.232 million Reichsmarks in income in 1933 is a fascinating number," said Dubon, 71.

"It was a huge income when you consider teachers then had annual salaries of 4,800 marks," he said. "As chancellor, Hitler only earned 44,000 Reichsmarks in 1933 but told the tax office he donated that to a charity for widows, which he didn't."

Tax troubles vanished

To lower his taxable income, Hitler resorted to many of the perfectly legal tax avoidance strategies that Germans still use extensively today. He tried to write off his new Mercedes in 1925 as a "company car." In one exchange with tax collectors Hitler described the car as "only a means to an end."

'A means to an end'. Where is Basil Fawlty when you need him?

Of all the events of 1989 (Czechs commemorated their Velvet Revolution, oh, a month or so ago), the most stunning upheaval was Albania's. I listened to Radio Tirana's broadcasts during the 1970s, and no other dictatorship matched theirs in absurdity. Most of the broadcasts were readings from Enver Hoxha's turgid prose, and the personality cult around him equalled Stalin's, or, the North Korean leaders'. That someone actually invested time and effort in writing such rants boggled my mind.

So, now we have only Cuba, North Korea and, to a lesser extent, Red China as Communist states, and North Korea is the only one which is an immediate threat.

In the Asia Times, Andrei Lankov points out that the DPRK's gross domestic product halved after the Soviet Union collapsed and its subsidies stopped.

However, the economic disaster of 1991-95, and especially the subsequent famine, changed the situation. Markets began to spread across the country with amazing speed.

...

The government also relaxed the restrictions on domestic travel.

...

The tidal wave of small trade flooded the country, which once came very close to creating a non-money-based economy. ... Women were especially prominent in the new small businesses. ... Their husbands continued to go to their factories, which had come to a standstill. The males received rationing coupons that were hardly worth the paper on which they were printed. But North Korean men still saw the situation as temporary and were afraid to lose the trappings of a proper state-sponsored job that for decades had been a condition for survival in their society. While men were waiting for resumption of "normal life", whiling away their time in idle plants, the women embarked on frenetic business activity. Soon some of these women began to make sums that far exceeded their husbands' wages.

This wasn't a loosening of political controls. Instead, it was a loosening of the chokehold the DPRK had over the subdued populace: obey or starve.

Lankov points out in another article that the Party exercises no authority outside of the capitol, Pyongyang. Instead, it is the military establishment keeping the state from collapsing Interestingly, it isn't the radio broadcasts undermining the values of the Party, but cheap Chinese imported VCRs.

So, the menacing facade is again cracking.

What has this to do with Albania? Both states combined total control of the economy, total self-sufficiency, and personality cults beyond description. Albania's democratization took several years, helped by a mass exodus to Italy. The ROK likely fears a similar flight, along with a deserved fear of a military alarmed at losing control. Bush's policy seems to be wait and see -- don't tip the apple cart. Recently, DPRK generals defected to Red China, and they might be a nucleus of a new governing or command structure.

From afar, Albania seemed to shrug off the personality cult quickly, as if the populace had long ago understood Hoxha and his wife's lies were just that. With the wealth of the ROK and Japan to the south and east, and China's economy improving to the north and west, and with the smuggled videos displaying free societies, the DPRK's collapse should come about from within.

Much of what's been in the news lately just doesn't interest me: the Peterson case, who's in and who's out in Bush's cabinet, the Palestinian elections. There are probably others, but those are the ones which come to mind.

What Bush does with Social Security and with Federal involvement in education are two domestic issues which do interest me.

But, the past few days I've been thinking about the guys running for chairman of the Democrat National Committee (no gals in the race, hmm). It seems as if the leftist and liberal blogs I read are pushing Howard Dean (he of the Conversion on the Lake Champlain Bike Path [irrelevant parenthesis: a relative of mine was a 'Champ Marine' in the Korean War]).

Ignore the four-year long opportunity this hands Karl Rove to parody the Democrats ('I have a scream', 'God, guns and gays'). Dean as DNC chairman would lock the party into the camp with the least credibility on defense and security. With security, not 'values', being the most important factor in voters choosing between Bush and Kerry, do the Democrats really want to spend the next four years with Dean as their public face?

Not only would Dean be the Democrat Party for four years, filling that spot would make it more difficult for a pro-War on Terror candidate to emerge: folks inclined to a strong prosecution of the WOT would shun the party.

Democrats didn't have an organization deficit in 2004: Kerry's 59 million votes were the Al Gore voters (51 million in 2000) and 2.5 million Ralph Nader got in 2000, plus another 5.5 million, better than a 10% increase. Bush's organization did a lot better than Kerry's. Bush's votes went from 50.5 million to 62 million, more than 20%. No one knows whether there will be as large a turnout in 2008 as this year, but Democrats (and Republicans) better not count on it.

The Democrats in Washington have the same defects: they don't appeal to security voters or to values voters. Neither Senators nor Congressmen nor insiders such as Ickes are trusted to successfully prosecute a war because they haven't since Korea. I'd also add that the Washington Democrats don't have any budget-cutting credibilty either, so they're hypocritical about Bush's deficits. So, no to Howard Dean and no to Washington candidates.

That pretty much limits the field to people from the States with organizational ability, and that means Governors or a Mayor. From 22 Governors, you'd have to eliminate Warner of Virginia, since he's rumored to have his eye on the 2008 nomination. A strategy of expanding the 2008 Democrat vote outside 2004's, and overcoming the association with the Northeast and Upper Midwest, rules out Rendell of Pennsylvania, Granholm of Michigan, Blagojevich of Illinois, Doyle of Wisconsin, Vilsack of Iowa, and Locke of Washington. Maybe if Phil Bredesen of Tennessee can get the state constitution amended to ban an income tax and the TennCare mess cleaned up (he's actually pulling the plug on the program), he'd be the face of low-cost, low-tax Democrat government.

If he won't fill the chairman's spot, could he be the nominee?

Something very odd is in the air.

Friday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution carried this story: Basketball player gung-ho to be Marine, reporting on Robert Brooks, the Ramblin Wreck grad enlisting (not headed for OCS at Quantico) in the Marine Corps. He was due at MCRD Parris Island on January 10, but 'the date was moved up to Dec. 27 at his request.'

Staff Sgt. Antonio Risby, the Marine recruiter in Jonesboro who signed up Brooks, said, "He's totally different from a lot of the recruits we get. He has a drive. He's on a mission."

...

When asked to list the reasons he wanted to join up, Brooks put patriotism first.

Brooks said he is disappointed in his generation. "They have no loyalty, no motivation, no dedication," he said.

Over the last two months, as Brooks finished his final class at Tech, he has assisted the Marine recruiters as they visited high schools trolling for potential recruits in Henry and Fayette counties.

Then, on Saturday, and also in Atlanta, we have this:

March pushes moral agenda

Thousands of Christian soldiers marched through one of Atlanta's most storied neighborhoods Saturday, opposing gay marriage and promoting what they see as a moral agenda for the country -- especially African-Americans.

Bishop Eddie Long, pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, led the march arm-in-arm with the Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Long organized the demonstration and carried an Olympic-style torch lighted from the eternal flame at the King Center, where the march began.



JOHNNY CRAWFORD / Staff
Thousands of marchers, many of them followers of Bishop Eddie Long, trek down Auburn Avenue on Saturday, supporting a U.S. constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

March pushes moral agenda

Now today, the Los Angeles Times surprises us with Justice Thomas' Line to the Deepest Bedrock by Thomas L. Krannawitter, Vice-President of the Claremont Institute:

Thomas' natural-law jurisprudence represents the greatest threat to the liberal desire to replace limited, constitutional government with a regulatory-welfare state of unlimited powers.

Thomas is one of the few jurists today, conservative or otherwise, who understands and defends the principle that our rights come not from government but from a "creator" and "the laws of nature and of nature's God," as our Declaration of Independence says, and that the purpose and power of government should therefore be limited to protecting our natural, God-given rights.

The left understands that if it is to succeed, these principles of constitutional government must be jettisoned, or at least redefined. Thomas' frequent recourse not only to the text of the Constitution but specifically to the founders' natural-law defense of constitutional government is fatal to liberalism's goal.

Wait, there's more!

The New York Times tells us that pro-free market policies are turning enormous swathes of South America into a new breadbasket for the world.

One of the last places on earth where large tracts are still available for agriculture, the region, led by Brazil, has had an explosion of farm exports over the past decade. The growth has been fueled by a combination of market-friendly economic policies and advances in agronomy that have brought formerly unusable tropical lands into production and increased productivity levels beyond those in the United States and Europe, challenging their traditional dominance of the global farm trade.

...

Changes in economic policies have also spurred the boom here. At the beginning of the 1990's, for example, Brazil lifted longtime restrictions on imports, leading to a surge in purchases of tractors, combines, fertilizers, pesticides and seeds.

A leap in exports came in 1999, when the government devalued the currency and allowed the real, which had been trading at near par with the dollar, to float on the currency exchange market. Today, the real trades at almost three to the dollar, which means incomes for agricultural producers have nearly tripled.

...

Government officials estimate that an additional 50 million acres, much of it as potentially fertile as the land being tilled here now, are likely to be put into production over the next decade.

"There's no way you can go wrong here," Mr. Lawisch said. "We're champions of production already, but we think we can do even better. We aim to feed not just Brazil, but the world."

I just started reading John Birmingham's Weapons of Choice in which an experiment propels Navy ships out of our universe and back in time.

'If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.' John A. Wheeler.

On this date in 2003, delegates met in Merida, Mexico, to finalize and sign the treaty against corruption, at a United Nations sponsored convention.

In the last year, over 110 countries have signed on to the Convention and nine have ratified it. Ratificiation by 30 Member States is necessary for the Convention to enter into force.

...

The Convention must come into force as soon as possible to provide the legal framework for countries to criminalize corrupt practices, as well as to cooperate to deny safe havens to corrupt officials and to help each other recover illicitly acquired assets.

International Anti-Corruption Day - 2004

To remind us, the BBC has an article today, Nations mark anti-corruption day, in which Mark Gregory, a business reporter, writes, without a touch of irony:

[The World Bank] says corruption takes place in rich nations as well as poor ones.

To highlight the scale of the problem and efforts to fight it, the UN initiated the anti-corruption day.

As they say in quantum chromodynamics, 'truth is stranger than fiction.'

After the failure of campaign finance 'reform' this year, Sen John McCain [R-AZ], might be looking for ideas how to reform the reform.

David Stoltzfus has a bakery stand at the Central Market in Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, and he's also got photos of Bush and Bush and Laura hanging ... in full public view.

[City Councilman Nelson Polite] approached Stoltzfus on Nov. 12 and ask him to remove the pictures. The standholder has refused to do so, prompting Polite to say he will ask City Council to change the law so that all political items would be banned in public places.

...

Polite says political items do not belong in Central Market and if Stoltzfus refuses to take down the photos, he'll take the matter before City Council to get the city law changed to ban all political items in public places.

"There should be rules," says Polite.

I suppose Councilman Polite (and what a name) could cite Rex v. Haddock [is it a Free Country?].

Since I moved to North Carolina earlier this year, and since I love a good cup of fresh coffee, I looked around locally for a place to buy roasted beans. None of the burnt style for which Starbucks is known; I prefer medium roast. Back up north, I was used to depending on Dunkin Donuts for their beans, mainly because I could find two pounds for $10 deals. Here in Raleigh, the few Dunkin Dounts I stopped in at had no special pricing, so I passed on theirs. Local supermarkets had the usual brands at the usual high prices, so I took to the 'net and found a store in Lorton, Virginia, outside of the District.

Maxey Coffee is a small roaster and mail order supplier which provides excellent service: very fast shipping, freshly roasted, and pricing that can't be beat: three pounds of Ethiopian or Sumatran for $13.75 or $12.25, respectively.

I'm now on my second shipment and love them.

The United Church of Christ tried to buy air time on national television networks for an ad showing people being prevented from entering churches, and stating that "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we." CBS and NBC refused to sell airtime for the ad.

Since I don't own a television, I wouldn't have seen it. Supposedly, in the ad

a gay [sic] couple, a Hispanic man, a black woman and a man in a wheelchair are pushed back from the doors of a church by two bouncers.

Oregon TV stations differ with two networks over church ad

The male couple are holding hands, so I guess that's how they are identified as homosexual.

At first, I wondered why they wanted national network time, and didn't try for local markets, but

Church spokesman Robert Chase said it would be prohibitively expensive to advertise on local stations in major markets such as Boston. But Chase said in several cities around the country local churches affiliated with the United Church of Christ are taking it upon themselves to buy ad time on stations to air the contoversial spot.

Church eyes ad for local TV: Two networks have refused to air gay-friendly spot

Putting aside for the moment the odd claim that national network airtime costs more than local affiliate airtime, what audience is the UCC looking to target? If it's folks who aren't attending their services, the answer is homosexuals, the disabled and some ethnic groups. If it's folks who are already attending, it's the old story of the Pharisee and the publican, applicable to the UCC just as much as to those with whom they want to be contrasted.

11 Pharisaeus stans haec apud se orabat Deus gratias ago tibi quia non sum sicut ceteri hominum raptores iniusti adulteri vel ut etiam hic publicanus 12 ieiuno bis in sabbato decimas do omnium quae possideo 13 et publicanus a longe stans nolebat nec oculos ad caelum levare sed percutiebat pectus suum dicens Deus propitius esto mihi peccatori [the Vulgate]

11 The Pharisee standing, prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican. 12 I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all that I possess. 13 And the publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes towards heaven; but struck his breast, saying: O god, be merciful to me a sinner [Douay-Rheims Challoner version]

Note that the ad doesn't show a UCC church, but instead a church with which the UCC wants to be contrasted. They want to be known as what they are not, just as much as what they are (which is another story altogether).

The German for euthanasia is 'Sterbehilfe' (literally die or death helping; Germans appreciate catenations). At entrances to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and probably other slave labor and death camps was the Nazi slogan 'Arbeit macht frei', or 'Work liberates'.

Since the 'liberation' to which the Nazis referred was death, wouldn't it be appropriate for the Groningen University Hospital to have as their slogan 'Euthanasia liberates':

The hospital has become known for the ground-breaking effort to liberate parents from the effect on them of a child up to the age of twelve, suffering from 'extreme' pain and with 'no hope' for life. Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies

I use the scary quote marks to point out the subjectivity of the standards now being used.

The hospital staff are understandably reluctant to divulge names of those on the committee making the decisions to murder.

But, the staff can congratulate themselves on their sympathy for the child's and parents' quality of life -- to the point of murder.

(The image above was originally from the Dachau death camp. I edited out 'Arbeit' and substituted 'Sterbehilfe' using the Gimp.)

Do the Dutch use ovens yet? After all, advocates for socialized medicine argue its efficency.