Two researchers at University College Hospitals, London, have found no correlation between penis size and shoe size. But they're not done:

"There are suggestions from the literature that hand span, finger lengths or nose size...may be predictive," according to Shah.
"I have some ideas that I am currently putting together as a research proposal," the researcher added. "There must be some part of the body that is predictive of penile length...the search continues."

Who says that socialized medicine stifles research?

Except that he's being criticized for trying to protect the privacy rights of citizens. But since these citizens are gun owners, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick feels their privacy rights shouldn't be protected:

For instance, last fall, Ashcroft blocked the FBI from using gun purchase records gathered under the auspices of the federal Brady Act to determine if any of the 1,200 suspected terrorists detained after Sept. 11 had purchased a gun. This is the man who didn't hesitate to lock these same people up for months without charges, insisting that looking into their gun records violated their privacy.

Maybe Ashcroft is just, you know, concerned about civil liberties? Ever think of that? Sheesh.

Eugene Volokh has a typically erudite legal criticism of the article.

My trivial layman's contribution to this discussion is this: Isn't this an example of the power of the executive branch, which is balanced in our system of government by the legislative and judicial branches? How else can the executive disagree with the legislature? We don't have a parliamentary system, where the government is the legislature; the executive is allowed to disagree, and there must be some mechanism for doing so.

Finally, and a little facetiously, I ask you: is anyone really claiming that Ashcroft, by all accounts a competent attorney with political ambitions, is actually making deliberately unconstitutional policy on subjects that are laid out clearly in the Bill of Rights?

Wait... don't answer that.

Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's major daily newspaper, has these two articles up on it's English-language edition.

First, from an article titled The power of the American far right:

The increased influence of the far right ... [has] consequences such as ... the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people ....

Second, from an article titled Farms show better financial results - wealth unevenly distributed:

The distribution of the wealth was quite uneven. The top ten percent of farms had a financial result of at least EUR 34,200, accounting for more than a third of all agricultural income in Finland.

Funny how that works. Wealth is unevenly distributed in Finland's agricultural sector -- with better performing farms earning more income. (Helsingin Sanomat headline: Dog Bites Man, Film at 11.)

But when the same thing happens in the U.S. -- when some people who earn money spend it and others keep and invest it, and thus "concentrate" wealth, it's by the action of "the US far right wing ... lurking behind the shoulder of President George W. Bush".

Really.

(I've been over wealth-distribution rhetoric once before.)

Update: Yet a third article covers this ground in a slightly different way. Finland's majority party's policies (Social Democratic Party, SDP), are contrasted to those in neighboring Sweden:

Instead of wealth distribution, the SDP is focusing on a policy of growth.

Wealth distribution on the brain! A wealth distribution trifecta! Let me see if I have this straight. It's a vast right-wing conspiracy when it happens in the U.S.; it's vaguely regrettable when it happens to farmers; it's sound public policy to avoid it when grubbing for votes. What is it? Weath redistribution!

ABC has this Reuters story: Poll Says Arafat Expected to Win January Election

The Palestinian-run Jerusalem Media and Communication Center survey said 60.6 percent of 1,199 Palestinians polled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip expect Arafat to be re-elected. That compares with 47.5 percent in June.

The story doesn't mention any opposition candidates. Does that mean that only 60% of Palestinians expect Arafat to be re-elected in the absence of any alternative? What do the other 40% expect? That he'll be dead?

I haven't figured out where I stand on the future war with Iraq.

But it seems clear that the anti-war crowd lost a lot of traction in their past opposition to the ridiculously easy subjugation of Afghanistan. They said Afghanistan would be another Vietnam; it would be a quagmire -- just look at the experience of the Red Army; our allies were degenerates on horseback, riding against tanks. Then the whole thing was over in a matter of weeks.

Turns out that it's a lot easer to liberate a country from an unpopular religious mafia than it is to try to impose an unpopular communist dictator.

Now that the ground war phase is over in Afghanistan, those who oppose the war in Iraq claim we should spend more time on Afghanistan:

They could have been more outspoken about the war in Afghanistan, insisting that the Administration put resources behind police work, humanitarian aid and nation-building.

Seems to me that this comment (part of a larger argument against war in Iraq) misses the point. People were quite outspoken about the war in Afghanistan. But they didn't offer constructive commentary about resource allocation. It's a shame, in retrospect. It might have been better taken than the left-wing dittoheaded "quagmire" chorus we got at the time.

The U.S. is done with Afghanistan, at least in an instrumental sense. The Taliban no longer poses a threat -- done! Since we're somewhat enlightened, and to reward our allies, we're helping out around the house as are some of our European allies. (Or not.) But the aid is incidental. It provides further incentive not to harbor terrorist groups in the future. The U.S. war aims for Afghanistan are done, and there's no more mileage to be gotten talking about it.

I want to keep a record of this James Lileks quote, so I'm dumping it in here.

LILEKS (James) The Bleat

Bush often seems distracted, as if he has just realized there is a weasel in his pants and he'd best finish up and get out of here so he can tend to this here weasel. And when he gets wound up he's often like a man with a wheelbarrow full of rocks going down a hill, trying to keep his balance and his cargo intact. I don't care. He's good with a prepared speech, because he has a secret weapon: he means it.

I have a minor quibble with Steven den Beste's otherwise inspiring rant about ethnic studies programs. Steven argues, effectively, that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and that ethnic studies programs are in fact an industrial-strength way to waste minds.

However, he has this to say about the organization of departments and schools in USC:

It appears that the "college of letters, arts and sciences" is a garbage can where they dumped everything that didn't fit into one of their 17 "professional schools"

I disagree with this characterization of a common non-professional college as a "dumping ground." I had the displeasure of doing some graduate work at UC Berkeley, and their organization of schools and colleges is even more baroque and annoying than USC's.

For example, the College of Chemistry contains the departments of chemistry and chemical engineering. Physics and the other sciences are delegated to the College of Letters and Science, which includes all the fuzzy stuff as well. The College of Engineering is where you'll find all the other types of engineering, including Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). So if you're interested in studying materials at Berkeley, it's going on in three different colleges: Chemistry, Letters and Science (as "condensed matter physics") and Engineering (in MSE).

I suspect that this arrangement is a holdover from the time that dinosaurs named Lewis walked the earth. (That's G.N. Lewis as in Lewis structure.) It was probably necessary to give chemistry its own College to keep Lewis happy, and the bureaucracy acquired power and has been too strong to kill ever since then.

In a sense, USC is lucky to still have all of its non-professional programs under one roof; that'll make it easier for them to shift funding from a dying department to a growing one.

I actually once met someone who is in the target market for Juan Gato's new foil product.

She was the only anti-Catholic bigot I've ever met. She actually claimed that Jean Chretien [Prime Minister of Canada] was taking some political action (I can't remember what it was; maybe a soft line on illegal immigrants? Appeasement in Kosovo?) because of direct orders from the Pope. Apparently she didn't know that I was Catholic.

Anyway, she complained about radiation, too. The microwave, you know, it gave her headaches. She had to turn it on, and then leave the room. Not to mention the headaches she got from the "low-quality" (Chinese, she confided) fluorescent lighting most merchants had in their stores.

I told her about Faraday cages. I almost tried to convince her to get an old birdcage and wear it, like a hat, with foil wrapped around the bars. But I didn't try.

There wouldn't have been any challenge in it.

Avdi, whom I've never read before, has an excellent point on the subject of war toys:

Some day I'm going to be handing my stepson one of the most important material gifts I'll ever give him - his first gun.... I could not in good conscience educate my children about the necessity of war unless I knew that I was doing everything humanly possible to impress on them them what a horrible, inhuman necessity it is.

I don't mind guns but don't like war toys, and I haven't thought hard about why that is. This post really grabs me.

I hope Avdi sticks around.

Today was busy. Started with walk 20 run 10 (runner's knee, right leg, more pronounced, possibly stage II; exacerbated by walking quickly). The exercise was fun, though. We talked about drug policy; or was that Thursday? Sunrise is around the time we're getting back, and it's often a spectacular one.

Wasted a bunch of time this morning on the 'net. My wife wanted to do some more work (we're behind on time for September, even with all the on-site days we put in for the conference), but I stalled indefinitely -- well, until she started playing Age of Empires, at which point I know I'm safe. But she answered some client e-mail during the game, which was a quarter here and a quarter there.

We painted the all the rough spots on the exterior of the house that are reachable from a low stepladder, which is to say all but about two of them. Scraping, sanding, cleaning, priming all took under an hour in the late morning.

We went over to her parents' house for lunch. Pea soup and fresh yuppie bread -- nice! After lunch we got to ride around in the fancy rental Jetta station wagon, which is cool but probably not what I'd buy if I actually wanted a car.

We put on the first coat of paint and then headed our for our wild orgy of home-improvement shopping. First to IKEA: plant stand, curtains, sheets, hooks for towels and coats. Then a quick run to the fabric store for material for more curtains. Then we swung by the Ben Moore store, even though it was after six and we knew they'd be closed, because we wanted to see what their Sunday hours are. Their Sunday hours: closed. I do love that company, even though their treatment of their franchisees inconveniences me. I guess as a Christian I shouldn't be complaining.

Then we drove down to Home Depot, looked at some of their crappy paint and decided not to get any. Then we bought 5 feet of rubber-backed entryway carpet for the back entrance. Excuse me. We stood around for 20 minutes while the perfectionist Home Depot flooring guy carefully plastic-wrapped the linoleum for a very harried mom with two small kids. Then he phoned for relief, as it was 7:00 and evidently he was off shift. Then he stood around waiting for his relief for ten minutes while we waited and another flooring-starved family waited. Finally, he decided to help us.

"I want five feet of this carpet," my wife said, brandishing our measurements of the entryway. "That's within an inch, since we've got the door on one end and the stairs on the other end."

"It's not that precise," he said. "The machine is out by a bit."

"Well, how much is it out by?"

"It's out by how much it's out." Deep thoughts from the Home Depot flooring guy. He looked at us accusingly. "You just don't want to cut it."

"That's right. We want you to cut it."

So he ran out five feet of material according to his measuring device. And we measured it with my measuring tape in my pocket. And it turned out to be five feet on the dot. So it wasn't out by much.

We took off after that. Actually, there was a long interlude with a composter, vinyl floor tiles with hardwood patterns, laminate flooring, and a serious relationship discussion of our flooring preferences before we made our ultimate decision: to move the library to the basement after our housemate moves out, and to install real hardwood floors down there because we can't stand the way laminate feels. But basically, we left Home Depot with our rug and two impulse items (airplane-hijacker knife and tiny impulse buy can of WD-40 for the water shutoff valve in the basement, which is stuck.)

On the way home I had the familiar joy of getting onto the Whitemud Freeway from Calgary Trail (see my previous post on the subject if you care). Once home, my wife stained all the raw wood pieces from IKEA while I complained about the fumes. And now I'm blogging, so there.

One of my serious concerns in moving to Edmonton was, how will the driving be? This is not a flip question, as any Angeleno can confirm. Driving comfort matters in city life, especially in big, spread-out post-automobile cities like LA and Edmonton.

Edmonton's pretty good. The speed limits are funky -- I still don't have a visceral understanding of 50, 60, 80, 90, 110 kph the way I understand 25, 35, 50, 65 mph. People don't really know how to drive here, especially when there's a little traffic. People check for space but ignore speed on freeway lane-changes, a typical bad habit in low-density traffic areas (I've noticed the same thing in Albuquerque).

Where Edmonton mainly suffers is in the road design. Somehow, Edmonton managed to hire perpetually drunken road and highway engineers to creatively destroy the driving habitat of the city. I feel certain that these engineers were imported from the San Francisco Bay Area, which is the worst driving environment I've ever had the extreme discomfort of living and driving in. Some examples follow:

Suicide Merges: A "suicide merge" is a freeway entrance/exit that requires exiting freeway traffic to cross the traffic stream that's entering the freeway. Typically, the entrance rolls onto a new lane parallel to the freeway, lane-changing is allowed between the new lane and the freeway for some distance, and then the lane exits from the freeway. Suicide merges are tempting because they're economical in land, but they can't handle traffic growth the way a conventional cloverleaf merge can. They're very popular in the Bay Area -- sometimes only allowing about 50 yards (about 12 car lengths) for merging traffic to get up to freeway speed, find a slot in traffic, and merge in. Bizarrely, they're also popular on Edmonton freeways, where land is ... shall we say, not at a premium.

Bizarre lane direction: This is a problem of design which can sometimes be fixed by repainting or re-signing. Even though cheap fixes are available, nothing is done about it, leading me to believe that the engineers in charge are criminally stupid.

One Bay Area example: about two miles before the 13 southbound terminates into the 580 (a two-lane freeway joining a five-lane interstate), the left lane is signed as "580 East" and the right lane is signed as "580 West". The conventional interpretation of this signage is if you want to go east, you'd better get in the left lane. In fact, to go 580 West you must soon exit right from the right lane. If you stay in the right lane, you pass first the 580 West exit; an ordinary street exit; and then you get onto 580 East. (That's right: both lanes ultimately go onto 580 East.) I can't count how many times I've seen Pokey the Family Minivan switch into the left lane on seeing the first sign, and roll on in the left lane for two miles at 50 for no reason.

Edmonton example: If you turn left from Calgary Trail Northbound(*) (major N-S surface street corridor) onto the Whitemud Freeway (major E-W highway), there's a four-lane rollup to the freeway entrance. Left lane is turn only onto Calgary Trail Southbound; the next two lanes (#2 and #3 lanes) are freeway entrance lanes; from the right lane, after crossing the intersection, you can either get into the #3 lane and try for the freeway or else go straight ahead and go on a service road paralleling the freeway. On the freeway, the #2 and #3 lanes merge with the three existing freeway lanes, sort of. Actually the #2 lanes merges immediately with the freeway #3 lane (looking over your shoulder as you're coming down a hill, look out for semis), and the #3 lane becomes the freeway's #4 lane which is exit-only for 111th St. -- the same destination as the service road. The exit ramp for 111th St. is approximately twice as long as the suicide merge distance between the Calgary Trail entrance and the breakoff for 111th St.

What makes this all worse is that Calgary Trail Northbound is Highway 2 (Alberta's major N-S road; incidentally the main access road from the international airport) up to the Whitemud, and then the 2 continues along the Whitemud. So in order to stay on the 2, you have to do the following:

• Get in the #1 lane of Calgary Trail as you approach the Whitemud.
  
• After the big blue building (it's an IKEA, but you can't tell that from this direction), change into the new leftmost lane that was just created.
  
• Turn left at the second light, making sure to wind up in the #2 lane.
  
• Go straight through the next light, getting on the onramp to the Whitemud Freeway.
  
• Accelerate downhill and merge left with freeway traffic at 80-100kph. Beware of merges from your right as people try to avoid the immediate exit/suicide merge onto 111th St.
  

But overall the driving in Edmonton is decent. The drivers are courteous, at least compared to Berkeley driving practices, which is what this post was originally going to be about.

* "Calgary Trail" is of course the traditional Edmonton name for the road that leads to Calgary -- which is Highway 2 for most of its length. Inside Edmonton, it's a major N-S surface corridor on the south side of the city consisting of two one-way roads a block apart called "Calgary Trail Southbound" and "Calgary Trail Northbound". Recently, the northbound road was renamed "Gateway Boulevard" because some astute idiot pointed out that you can't get to Calgary by going north. I will continue to use the traditional name, because everyone else in Edmonton still does. Twenty years from now people will still be saying things like "Get on Calgary Trail Northbound -- you know, Gateway Blvd -- and ...." My wife's relatives still give directions in terms of "the first old traffic circle" and "the second old traffic circle" -- and these traffic circles were removed at least ten years ago.

Students at the university in town are steamed about the high cost of organic grains at the local health-food store. So they've decided to start a grain-buying cooperative, located in the basement of the student union building (link not available at press time; reported in SEE magazine).

They're going to get lower prices by going direct to the grower (the phrase "cut out the middleman" was used by the spokesstudent in the article), and by using volunteer labor. The services of the co-op will be available to non-students as well as to students. "Fair-trade" coffee is another of the products they'll be offering.

I guess I should laugh about it. Anybody holding stock in Planet Organic or Earth's General Store, divest now -- the students are coming to get you! Who needs a local retail economy, anyway? We'll all live off student loans.

Here's a real-life example of a slippery slope. Today while driving I was listening to Stafford on the local right-wing radio station, 630 CHED. (I can tell it's right-wing because they syndicate Dr. Laura Schlesinger.) There is a morning show call-in show called "Rutherford" and an evening call-in show called "Stafford", some traffic news, and lots of irritating sports programming.

Anyway, I was listening to Stafford, and he was going on about personal responsibility. The topic of the evening was a proposal for Alberta Health Care to not cover the health care costs associated with accidents where the accident vicitm was not wearing a seat belt. The logic here, apparently, is that these scofflaws (Alberta has mandatory seat belt legislation) are running up the health care costs for the rest of us.

The slippery slope here is with the socialized health care system. Without publicly-funded health care, it would be meaningless to suggest the withholding of such care as a punishment. Without publicly-funded health care, it would have been harder in the first place to justify government intrusion into the passenger compartment, to enforce the seat-belt law. A side-effect of the public health care system has been to severely restrict our previously-enjoyed freedom to drive around without our seat belts on.

Darn.

But it's still a real live slippery slope.

Another thing that Stafford said, and I'm afraid that this quote is only approximate, was on the subject of house parties. He said:

When I go to a house party, I don't see people being tied to chairs, their mouths being forced open, and alcohol poured down their throats.

Tonight saw a significant amount of bandwagon-disembarkation. Sushi was bought. Sushi was eaten. (Sushi contains refined sugar; mayonnaise which contains egg; and is eaten with soy sauce which contains wheat protein.)

I'm still stubbornly off caffeine, though one coke each was pounded by my housemate and my wife.

I don't know why, since there's no rational purpose anymore. The whole scheme was pretty much in support of our housemate's attempt to determine whether she has a milk protein allergy, and if there are any other allergies which contribute to that. Since it's easy to test for a milk protein allergy (Doctor's advice: "Go to the store and get some lactaid. If you don't react to that, you're just lactose-intolerant. If you do react, you have a milk protein allergy."), it's not clear how a multiple-food-elimination diet would help.
And dropping caffeine cold turkey has got to be one of the world's worst ideas.

But I continue in my caffeine-free state. It doesn't make any sense, since I really do like coffee.

In the meantime, I've been drinking lots of double-strength generic mint tea (IGA brand). My wife claimes this makes my breath smell like cheap pot, annoying her terribly. So I guess there is a minor bonus in it for me.

Suppose someone offered you a drink of a pleasantly hot beverage and said, "Here, drink this. It will give you a feeling of increased energy. For the next two days you will have a splitting headache. You will wantonly try eating and drinking anything you see, just on the off chance that it contains the substance you need to cure your headache." You'd be a fool to drink it, wouldn't you?

Perhaps it is obvious that I am suffering through caffeine withdrawal. This was an expected consequence of the multiple food elimination diet that we began on Tuesday. What's unexpected is the unusual severity of the symptoms. I had been under the impression that I'd cut out caffeine before, and the symptoms were never this bad. The inescapable conclusion is that in the past, I've cheated. That really pisses me off.

I distinctly remember the first time I decided to cut out caffeine; it was at a summer job (my first ever) for Evil Health Care Corporation. One of my cow-orkers dared me to cut out caffeine, so I did with little difficulty. Until I realized that there was an enormous and ever-growing mound of Twix wrappers on my desk, and the light bulb flashed on -- chocolate contains caffeine. So attempt one was a failure.

Since then I've cut back several times, but in retrospect I've never cut it out before. I did a substance-free year (easy) but somehow caffeine wasn't a "substance". Hey, I was in school -- how could I expect to live without caffeine?

Every other time I've cut down on caffeine or cut out caffeine entirely, I must have reintroduced coffee at a low level sometime during day 2 or 3. Last time I cut out caffeine was only a few weeks ago, but a lot of work needed to be done in the run-up for the conference, so it was a bad time for me to spend twelve hours a day in the fetal position. So I started up again.

This time it's all three of us: me, my wife, our housemate. On Tuesday afternoon we literally sat around the kitchen for two hours complaining about our headaches and sarcastically offering each other Coke (them) and coffee (me). Sounds like a real party, I know. This is the morning of day 3. Mild headache.

The funniest effect is the "tasting" impulse. Here's a banana -- try it, it might have caffeine in it. No. Yuck. Anyone want a banana with just one bite out of it? Perhaps (though I don't know anything about this), this is an additional reason people quitting smoking tend to gain weight. Not only have they stopped ingesting nicotine, an appetite suppressant; not only have they stopped their major oral fixation; but their body is manipulating them to eat food on the off chance that a dietary source of nicotine will be found.

Jonah Goldberg busts out with this comment:

[even warmongers] have no desire to make Chad or Afghanistan or Israel or any place on the globe an American colony or — heaven forbid — a 51st state (though, personally, I do have my eye on some Canadian real estate).

Just days after Colby Cosh says:

No, actually I think Albertans are stupid: why else are we still in Confederation? In Liberal Canada there are all of two provinces which are net contributors to the union: one of them, Ontario, gets permanent political dominance in exchange for its acquiescence. Our own reward can be seen above: we're the hewers of wheat (hewers??) and drawers of oil who should know their place. Like the literal scapegoat of old we're a "source of pollution." We should have gone a long time ago. The Constitution allows for it, and Albertans in fact favour it. If our chickenshit domestic political leaders didn't think it would limit their career opportunities, they'd be doing the right thing and saying "Screw you forever" to a country that tolerates us because it needs somebody to steal from.

Push it now! We can't get Alberta into the union before the '02 elections, but if we hurry we can make it for the '04. And Texas won't object, since Alberta is 255,303 sq. miles while Texas is 261,914 sq. miles.

The principles of anarchy are about what you'd expect.

Actually, it turns out that the whole site is blank (here here here), but I like the principles best.

I found this one while researching the nearly year-old Concordia University flap about the student agenda, Uprising. The line quoted on that page, "Stealing is when you take a yuppie's BMW for a joyride and crash it into a parked Mercedes just for the hell of it," seemed certain to be part of a longer set of stealing vs. theft parallels. Here's the full paragraph, from the original document:

And remember, we're talking about stealing, not theft. Stealing is just. Theft is exploitative. Stealing is when you take a yuppie's BMW for a joyride, and crash into a parked Mercedes just for the hell of it. Theft is when you take candy from a baby's mouth. Stealing is the re-distribution of wealth from rich to poor Theft is making profits at the expense of the disadvantaged and the natural environment. Stealing is an unwritten a tax on the rich. Theft is taxing the poor to subsidize the rich. Stealing is nothing more than a tax on the rich. There is solidarity in stealing, but property is nothing but theft. [sic]

Now I invite you all to join me in a brief moment of silence for the English language. All of you, go forth and steal, but don't commit theft. Perhaps someone out there can enlighten me as to what distinction exists here?

The other bizarre consequence is that here we have finally found someone who feels that Adbusters are too stodgy and conservative.

For the next two weeks, our household will be going on a Multiple Food Elimination (MFE) Diet. That's jargon from Doris Rapp's book Is This Your Child, a book about "Discovering and Treating Unrecognized Allergies in Children and Adults".

Bleah.

In order to follow this diet, you must spend seven days not eating any common allergens. A long list is provided, along with a more useful and significantly shorter list of allowed foods. Then, one class of allergen is gradually introduced each day over the next eight days. It's not a weight-loss diet, but I don't see how I could gain any weight on it.

The real problem is that adults are supposed to eliminate all nicotine (no problem), alcohol, and caffeine for the whole period. If my blog entries seem more dazed, sleepy, or (God forbid) sober than usual, you'll know what's to blame.

I fully expect to find no unrecognized allergies and food sensitivities. I might be wrong, though, and the only sensible-seeming way to find out is to run the experiment.

Bleah.

Doris Rapp (M.D., did I mention?) appears to be a bit of a crank. Yeah Doris, watch out for them chemicals -- they're poisoning our children. Sheesh.

Colby caught me! A very kind response to my posts on health care and drug legalization.

I'm feeling backwards today, so I'll touch on a few of the drug legalization points first.

First, let me admit that I don't care about marijuana legalization because I don't care about marijuana. It's a dumb drug -- that is, it makes me feel dumb -- and it's an inhalant; I don't like inhalants. Maybe in a different universe where pot was legal, I would have developed expensive tastes for fancy weed, as I have for beer and coffee in this one. But I haven't.

When talking about the stoners on Whyte and the innocent passerby, I was considering a hypothetical example of an extremely sensitive person exposed to aerosol intoxicants. I've certainly never had a contact high worth mentioning.

Since Colby blows off the slippery slope claim, I'm assuming he hasn't read Eugene Volokh's treatise on the subject. So let me enumerate a couple of slippery slope consequences of legalization that I am concerned about.

Once pot is legalized, and home growing is legal, it will not be practical to re-criminalize. Once the knowledge and the seeds are widely distributed, as Colby ponts out, all you need are water and dirt (don't you need electricity-sucking grow lights too?). If legalization turns out to be an error, it will be too late to reverse it.

Once pot is legalized, pot advertising will be protected commercial speech. Perhaps that's not such a big problem here in Canada, where restrictions on tobacco advertising are pretty common. In the U.S., however, the position is less clear. Volokh argues persuasively in his paper that the U.S. supreme court would regard prohibiting advertisement of a legal product as unconstitutional (section II E).

What's wrong with that, you might ask? Governments make irrevocable decisions all the time -- carrying out the death penalty, for one. And certainly the court should grant equal protection to all industries; I'd be pissed if the computer software industry was singled out as not being allowed to advertise its dangerous, addictive products. (Oh wait, we already are: here, here.)

Public outside pot smoking areas, separated by a fence? Coming soon to a concert or fringe theater event near you. Smoking, non-smoking, or pot-smoking restaurant sections? Possible, but since I don't smoke I can't tell you if it would be annoying for someone to light up the other substance in my presence. What about etiquette and hospitality rules? We're probably doing pretty well on those, since we have rules for offering smokes, declining smokes, and even requesting that you not smoke in my presence, thankyouverymuch. But I would expect some change, at least to change the offer words to "Have a cigar, cigarette, blunt?"

These are some of the conservative objections. Perhaps they sound shallow, but it's the conservative's job to stand around saying "No! No! No! Don't do that!" to social change, even if the justification turns out to just be "We fear change." The system works pretty well now, doesn't it? I mean, if Colby can claim that a SIZEABLE number of people are growing and rolling their own without molestation by the forces of the law, then why explicitly legalize? Do you expect the Canadian federal government will return the money saved by enforcement cuts to us in tax cuts? If so, I have some fine beachfront property for you in Saskatoon...

But really, what we're getting at is the deeper question, rather two questions: (a) when do people need to be protected from themselves and (b) when is it appropriate for government to do it? The libertarian answer to (b) is "Never" so I guess I'm not one of those. I'll have to come back to this later, as I too have work and a meeting today, but next time I want to talk about gambling; also health care and education.

I wanted to find this article by Christina Hoff Sommers to back up a point for an upcoming blog post, but I couldn't remember the title. So I looked up "Christina Hoff Sommers" in Google, to little profit.

Then I searched on a phrase I remembered from the article, and I found it right away. Check it out: Google search: "scrofulous hippies".

Now that's cool.

Frost on the car windshields and plants this morning at 6:45 while running. Air was quite cold, too. Discussed doing the run first, then walking, with my exercise partner. Maybe -- but breathable fabric, icy winds, and cooling-off sweat seems like a bad idea. Stage I running injury, runner's knee, right leg.

One bonus to work eating my brain for the last two weeks is that we were helping our client run a conference/training session for their out of town clients, and as a result, we got conference swag. It's a thermos that looks like a section of a Titan IV missile. It's so badass that it has its own shoulder strap and snap-out carrying handle. I may post a picture if I can figure out how to redact out the client's name, so my blog life doesn't mix with my real life...

Gotta go -- Frederick the attack cat is going to the vet. Colby: relax, I'm taking aim at Steven den Beste today. (;

I am opposed to marijuana decriminalization.

So let's look at why Colby Cosh is in favor, and some of the reasons he cites for his position, and some of the bad reasons cited by others for my position.

First, I believe that there is no reasonable medical-use slippery slope that would lead to legalization. If there are useful medical uses -- something that's still being studied -- then there should be MJ-based prescription drugs. Or maybe prescription pot, if we can't figure out how to isolate the active ingredient. This doesn't require mass measures such as legalization or decriminalization any more than we need to legalize heroin to prescribe morphine.

In the immediate short term, when there are anecdotal but widely accepted claims of valid medical uses, the current protocol of minimal enforcement is a humane compromise. In the long run, the medical value claims will be proved or disproved, and prescriptions will be available appropriately to those who need them, and we can go back to strict enforcement.

Why shouldn't marijuana be legalized, Colby asks, when alcohol is legal? And I add, when tobacco is legal? Although alcohol is an intoxicant with dangerous side effects, no-one proposes restricting its sale or use. We've tried that, after all, and every reasonable person regards Prohibition as an abject failure. Although cigarettes pose severe health hazards and are highly addictive, no-one proposes banning them -- because the government is addicted to cigarette tax revenue. Instead, we are regulating legal public smoking areas out of existence.

Unlike alcohol, though, marijuana cannot be made in every house or shed from locally available materials (sugar, water, yeast). It's pretty easy to make beer -- I do it every couple of weeks. (With work eating my brain the last two weeks, I let myself run out of beer. Probably brewing later today.) It's pretty easy to set up a still and make the hard stuff -- I've done it in chem lab. Alcohol prohibition failed for these pragmatic reasons, in addition to failing the "it's my body" ideological test.

But legal pot falls down right here: it's not just your body. Pot is an intoxicant which, when smoked, poses serious health hazards. Furthermore, its secondhand smoke, unlike tobacco smoke, can be intoxicating. (Anecdotal reference only, sorry -- try searching google for contact high and see what you get: I find churches and counselors.) If public pot smoking can intoxicate innocent third parties, then it is unacceptable. If tiny amounts of alcohol intoxicate you, you can choose not to drink and you'll be fine. If tiny amounts of d9-THC intoxicate you, and you walk past a couple of stoners on Whyte, you're catching a cab home. That's the core problem here. That's why public pot use is a public harm, rather than neutral or good.

Then there's the cognitive effects. The editorial that Colby claims will help you "learn the facts" about cognitive impairment concludes:

In conclusion, currently available scientific evidence shows that almost certainly, some cognitive deficits persist for hours or days after acute intoxication with cannabis has subsided. The consensus across studies is strong enough to discount the likelihood that this finding can be explained by any combination of confounders. But whether these deficits increase with increasing years of cannabis exposure remains uncertain.

I read that as "smoking pot makes you stupider and we're not sure if it's cumulative." Excuse me, Dr. Pope, but DUH! We knew that one back in the dorms, only it was usually phrased differently. I clearly remember one guy (physics major), who was freaking out because he couldn't remember things related to his classes. When he sobered up, it didn't get better, because he couldn't remember what it was that getting baked made him unable to remember.

Maybe this can help explain why people who smoked pot as kids now prevent their kids from smoking pot. Maybe the keyword for their behavior is not hypocrisy but chagrin.

I wouldn't be against legal pot if I thought that it could be kept in private enclosed spaces among consenting adults, and if strict penalties -- like those related to alcohol intoxication -- should be applied to those who drive or operate heavy machinery while high. But I'm worried about slippery slopes, and conveniently, Eugene Volokh has a lovely paper explaining when a slippery slope is a valid concern.

In particular, I'm worried about the commercial free speech rights pot vendors will claim, after the Supreme Court makes mincemeat out of tobacco advertising restrictions. I certainly don't support full legalization, with billboards, pot smoking sections in restaurants, and the whole nine yards.

So I'll stay opposed to decriminalization, even though it's ideologically appealing. I'm not going to help push the rock halfway -- because I'm afraid that the rest of y'all will take it from there.

Last night my sister-in-law hit a moose. She was driving about 100 km/hr on the 16, a large east-west freeway.

Luckily, no person was severely injured. She suffered some minor cuts on her hand. The passengers of another car, which hit the moose's corpse and rolled, weren't so lucky: the driver had a minor concussion, one of the passengers broke a leg.

Moose-vehicle collisions (MVC's) can be quite serious. They're popularly perceived as very dangerous; even as likely to cause multiple fatalities. The argument for this is that a moose is basically a 450 kg mass up on stilts. Most of the mass of your car is down below the moose's body. When a car meets a moose, the theory goes, the moose flies through the passenger compartment, above the heavy frame and engine.

It appears that this popular belief is an exaggeration. Statistics from Newfoundland show that injury only occurs in 18% of MVC's; serious injury in only 1.8%. So this was a highly unusual accident by these stats: serious injuries were sustained by the passengers in the second car, which was totaled.

My sister-in-law's car was basically fine. Sure, the windshields were smashed and there was a dent in the side. Apparently the bumper was torn up some. But the frame seemed fine, and the car was certainly drivable. This is all the more surprising considering that the likely main point of impact was the left front roof support post. The car is a Volvo, so it's tempting to put this down to Volvo's safety mania.

I think a different reason is operating here.

The Swedish national car manufacturer only sells moose-proof vehicles.

The conference we were helping with for work is finally over, so we have been enjoying our free time today. The cats need it, too. They're so annoyed that we've been away that even Oscar, usually a paragon of responsible bathroom behavior, has started pissing in the closet. Bad Oscar!

So today is a rebuilding day. I am sitting on the couch, drinking my own coffee (not hotel coffee), and keeping Dizzy company.

Canada's snipers are getting favorable press from the home-front:

He says the years of realistic training has paid off -- Canadian snipers are among the best in the world at their highly specialized, deadly trade. "We're the centre for excellence for snipers," he says proudly.

It's encouraging to see some pride in Canadian military achievements -- it's much better than the usual tripe (search for 'submarine').

Perhaps the reflexive dissing of Canada's military by Canadians is a defense mechanism against the obvious fact that the U.S. has more armed forces than Canada. Well, duh! With ten times the population, a stronger per-capita economy, and a commitment to Cold War peacekeeping, I should hope the U.S. winds up with a better military, overall. And Disneyland has more submarines than the U.S. Navy, too.

Which doesn't mean that Canadians can't kick our asses:

That turned into a bit of a kick in the butt for the Americans," he says gleefully, pushing back his baseball cap on his bald head. "Canadians won almost all the top spots on their home ground."

Staff Sergeant Justin Shaffer, 27, a sniper section leader with the U.S. Army's 501st Airborne Regiment, acknowledges that his Canadian counterparts are among the best he has seen.

"They have an excellent program here," he says. "These guys are very, very good."

As long as the US-Canada alliance remains in place, Canada would do well to emphasize high-value, training-intensive, low-materiel military fields, such as scouting, sniping, artillery spotting, and intelligence. As SSgt. Shaffer's shows, above, Canada gets recognition from its allies when it shows military excellence. Perhaps this National Post article (encouragingly, part of a series) will help improve Canadian perceptions of their own armed forces. That will benefit the US-Canada military alliance.

We can work on our political differences tomorrow.

Colby Cosh writes the first cogent argument in favor of health care user fees that I've ever seen:

Maybe it wouldn't help anything: we don't have very good hard data on the degree of stress placed on the system by hypochondriacs, lonely seniors, and confused drunks. But that's precisely the point--we don't have any good way of ascertaining that, or of reading people's minds to see if they're using the system "appropriately". Prices are how we find out.

Asking the doctor to collect information doesn't seem to work. Forcing the doctor's office to collect money and using that as a proxy for the information we need is very clever. Unfortunately, user fees are still a bad idea, for several reasons.

First, there's the additional cost associated with accepting payments. The fee Colby proposes -- CAD $20 -- might actually cover the increased costs in training, supplies, accounting and surveillance caused by requiring user fees. I know that the typical US copay is in the $5 - $10 range, which is near the break-even point for doctors. Surveillance is a cost because petty theft is a real problem with cash copays -- I've heard doctors discuss hiring office staff in terms of keeping the theft at a reasonably low level.

Second, any user fee will have the effect of discouraging use of the system -- which is all to the good when the system is being abused by hypochondriacs, idiots, or the incompetent. But if we're aiming to control costs by providing cheap preventive services to avoid expensive emergency services, user fees are not the way to go.

And although we can use the market, and the prices it assigns, to estimate the value of most services, the market is distorted by the infinite demand for life-saving health services. We can't price emergency health care like we price avocados: "You're going to die if I don't do this -- how much is it worth to you?"

No, the value that government health care provides to the public is the privilege of not stepping over dying indigents as we walk the public sidewalks. In this regard, the public health systems of the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. all succeed.

Which is not to say that they can't be improved.

HS Foreign 10.9.2002 - A time for Europe to grow up

This excellent article appeared in Helsingin Sanomat's English edition on September 10. Among the choice quotes are:

"The United States' importance in the aggressive stemming of Communist influence was paramount. Without the Americans, Stalin's troops would almost certainly have rolled forward at least as far as the English Channel. For this alone, Europe owes the Americas a big debt of gratitude."

The conflicts in the Balkans appeared to be offering NATO a new mission, but in the end this became no more than a new humiliation for Europe. Once again the Americans had to rescue the Europeans from themselves.

... the United States cannot really expect any sort of battlefield help from the Europeans that it could not supply itself.

But the main thrust of the article is about NATO membership for Finland. This is akin to discussing whether to get on a sinking ship. Hei Suomi: forget NATO and just sign a bilateral mutal defense treaty with the USA. We're good for it.

Fall is in the air, and a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of getting his furnace fixed.

It all started last January, which, I hope everyone would agree, is a lousy time for a furnace to break. In this case, not only was it -15 C outside most days, but we had also just got back from Africa. Cold, cash-strapped and unused to weather, we tried to get the furnace fixed.

We got a recommendation to use Competent Plumbing and Heating, but they were busy -- except for emergency calls, which this wasn't. We have two furnaces in our house, and the one that failed heats the upstairs. If you're going to have one furnace fail, have it be the upstairs one, as the upstairs rooms are heated by waste heat from the downstairs furnace.

They said maybe they could send someone in February. We asked for a recommendation, they told us about Other Heating Company, which also turned out to be unavailable. But they gave us a recommendation to Notably Incompetent Furnace Repair.

So we called up Notably Incompetent, and they sent out a guy the same day. In retrospect, I now know this was a bad sign. Like when an HMO physician can see you right away. He looked at the furnace, fiddled with his multimeter for a while, and came up with this: "Your transformer is blown. You must have had a power surge. Anyway, I can replace the transformer -- that's a $60 part. But if the transformer blew, the gas valve might have blown too. That's a $300 part -- if I can find one for a furnace this old -- and it'll go again next time you have a surge. Would you like me to get you a quote on a new furnace?"

Sure, why not? I mean, if the new furnace is $1000, then we'll have more efficient heating and less likelihood of failure, for the cost getting this old thing repaired twice.

So the sales guy came. And he made a big show of measuring our floor space, even though we had all the measurements already. And the whole process took about an hour. This was annoying, because we'd hoped to have been working some of the time, as we planned to go visit with a client later that morning. We wound up rushing him out the door, but we did get a couple of quotes out of him. Not in the realm of $1000. More like $5000, or $8000.

So we told him we'd call him if we were interested.

This was still in middle January, and the temperatures had climbed back up into the -5 C range, so we decided to put off the whole furnace thing until summer. I mean, how cold could it get? March saw two weeks straight of -30 weather with occasional dips down to -40. Oh.

In July we tried calling Competent Plumbing and Heating again, and they told us to call back in September. In September, we tried one last time and got The Guy, and he said he'd be out to see us Monday. That's last Monday, for those of you keeping score at home.

And he did come out, actually. He came out and fiddled around with his multimeter for a while and confirmed that the transformer was broken. "I don't have a plate-mount one in the truck, but we can try swapping one in to see if that's all the problem was," he says, and zips out to the truck. He comes back with the new transformer, hooks it up. It doesn't work. So he takes our transformer and tests it in an electrical outlet. It works.

Fiddles around with the multimeter for another five minutes. "It's your switch," he says. "That's a $6 part. I don't have a three-position switch in my truck, but I'll order one and come back and install it."

He looked over our furnaces. "Have you had the heat-exchangers inspected?" I allowed as I had, a year ago, when we bought the house. "These things are like Sherman tanks," he said. He rapped on the cover plate with his knuckle. "Inefficient, but they'll last forever."

Part of me wants to dance with glee and mock Notably Incompetent for trying to sell me a replacement furnace for my broken switch. The rest of me wonders when -- if? -- Guy from Competent Plumbing and Heating will ever call back. It's starting to get cold, you see...

Luckily, my neighbor has a multimeter.

RAWbservations

We're working through it and are back up as of today. As I deal with both companies, it feels more and more like I am a child caught in the middle of a divorce. Conniver is unable to provide us with DSL service, so they had to give up temporary custody of us to Ipsco for the meantime until the courts finish their ruling. If the court finds in favor of Connectant, we go back to live with them. Otherwise, we're with Ipsco.

This reminds me of our DSL bankruptcy/acquisition story. We were with PacificNet, but because they couldn't provide service in our area code, they subcontracted us to another company. That company went out of business and sold all our accounts to Moon Global. Except that our account -- being a PacificNet account -- got transferred wrong, or wasn't transferred. Anyway, we had a month-long outage while we tried to get someone to release our line. "We can't do that because of the bankruptcy proceedings," -- our old provider. "We can't do that because the provider has to approve it," -- the phone company. Busy signal -- Moon Unit Global.

We got a lawyer to write them a letter.

When I was finally able to raise someone from Moon Global about a month later, they said, "Oh? Your DSL isn't up? <type type>." And our DSL was up. Two days later they shut us down, at the (previously long-ignored) request of our lawyer.

After another month, we had another provider. They didn't suck, but we moved. Now we have both DSL and Cable.

Optimization-related heisenbugs are ass.

Update: It was all our fault, of course.

Daimnation!

A year ago, Bosch Siemens Hausgeraete (BSH), the firm's consumer products joint venture, filed two applications with the US Patent & Trademark Office for the Zyklon name across a range of home products, including gas ovens.

The problem is that the average English speaker knows about 10 German-sounding words, all of them associated with WWII and the Nazi era. For a German, these words are often normal vocabulary words without special freighting.

Case in point: anschluss, which just means "connection". You know, like a train connection. But the first time I saw "Anschluss ->" on a sign in a Frankfurt subway, I nearly spat coffee out my nose, because the only "Anschluss" I ever heard of was the 1936 Nazi annexation of Austria to the Third Reich.

My German friend nearly died when I tried to explain this to her.

Relevant Portion of CBC Interview Released

You know, the poor, relatively, get poorer all the time. And the rich are getting richer all the time.

This is wrong in so many ways it almost seems unfair to pick on it.

Almost.

Yo, Jean, I used to have a negative net worth -- I got out of school with $1000 in my bank account and $17k worth of student loans. Does that qualify as poor? And then I -- get this -- worked to earn money, and didn't piss it all away on consumer goods. And now my net worth is non-negative. Does that make me rich? Whoah, counterexample!

Maybe relative to the wealth increase enjoyed in the same period by Bill Gates all my efforts were insignificant. But I find it much more pleasant to live in a 2400 sq. ft. house than in a 300 sq ft. apartment, so maybe it wasn't insignificant to me.

Resentful? A little. Not of other people's earned wealth, but of sanctimonious kleptocrats.

Let nobody say that no Canadians are helping in the worldwide war on idiotarians.

Bump of Truth Action : SF Indymedia

I just caught someone trying to put one on my Celica by I am Canadian -- Thursday September 12, 2002 at 02:49 PM

Funny I should see this now. I just got home from work. Out in the parking lot, what do I see? Someone squatting by the back end of my Celica. Figuring he was trying to break into the car or just vandalize it, I went over there to pimpslap the little bastard.

Grabbed him by the neck, chucked him to the ground and asked him what the fuck he was doing. I look over - see the "I caused 9/11" sticker - look back, and he's standing and taking a swing at me.

I guess you have to be pretty stupid to endorse the use of these stickers anyhow - but taking a swing at a 6'1", 185lb guy you don't even know, after he catches you trying to deface his car - that's pretty fucking stupid.

Naturally, I beat the shit out of him and called campus PD (I work at a university). He took the first swing - it was self-defense. They cheerfully carted him away. Hopefully he'll meet up with a big burly man named Bubba in the holding cell.
Not even Canadians are immune from this shit. I guess dickheadedness is a trait felt worldwide.

SF entrepreneurs can't compete against the man.

"We were going to try all out," said entrepreneurs, "but now we're going to half-ass it and if we don't win, blame it on patronage."

Can I just tell you all how happy I am to have moved out of that region?

Why is it more acceptable if the U.S. bribes the other security council members into not opposing a U.S.-led attack on Iraq than for the U.S. to just go in alone? What am I missing? Why?

Brain getting eaten again, but it's just work this week, not video games. Done writing up presentations for now, so they can go to the printer tomorrow.

Read the new Clancy book. It's no Cardinal nor even Bear. What happened to the bubble memory?

Sleep now. blog later.

One year ago this morning I woke up to the clock-radio, thinking that I was half dreaming, mixing the Tom Clancy novel I had been reading the night before with the morning news.

Last night I made sure the clock-radio was in beep mode.

I don't know how we've been lucky enough to avoid it for so long.

Oscar is our 2-year-old male. He's entirely white from head to tail. He's not albino, as he has blue eyes. But white fur, pink skin, blue eyes -- he's a bit short in the pigment department. And apparently for cats, pigment and key brain lobes are coded on the same chromosome, which Oscar lacks, because he is DUMB.

Actually his stupidity is kind of endearing. Mostly he sits around looking dumb, but sometimes he looks confused or even puzzled. It's nice though, because he's so dumb that he thinks he's a dog. He'll come when called (actually, when you call any cat, he'll come) and he'll play fetch with cat toys.

He also drinks out of the toilet.

He claws at the glass-fronted hutch (that belonged to my wife's grandparents) when he wants out. This is because he believes the glass doors on the hutch to be exterior doors.

Anyway, until last night, he had never abused a roll of toilet paper. But as we were bedding down, Oscar was finishing his evening ablutions in the toilet bowl. (SLURP, SLURP, SLURP.) Then he stood up on the toilet seat and eyed the toilet paper roll. Certainly he was seeing it for the first time. He batted it exploratorily. It unrolled a little. He batted it some more. It unrolled some more. I pointed this out to my wife. We rolled our eyes at each other. Then he stopped, so we forgot about it and went to bed.

This afternoon I found that the nearly-finished roll of TP that was doing kleenex duty on the kitchen table had been knocked down under the table and unrolled. Could have been an accident, I thought, rolling it up.

Three-quarters of the way down, the roll was ripped to shreds.

No toilet is safe.

Yahoo! News - Canadian Senate Urges Legalization of Marijuana

But U.S. politicians have expressed unhappiness with the idea of Canada in any way easing its stance on marijuana and some say if Ottawa did relax its rules, this could lead to a clampdown on the countries' long joint frontier.

I am in awe of this quote.

Okay, really the last addition to this non-debate. Colby sez:

but I missed the leap to sentence three. The First Amendment says that Congress may not prohibit the free exercise of religion. The argument seems to go, "Therefore, Congress is positively required to provide chaplains for religious Congressmen at the public expense." Is that what the free exercise of religion means? Is my freedom inhibited because my place of work doesn't allow me to have--much less pay for--a shaman at my elbow?

The leap to sentence three is: Congress has decided to waste (ahem! spend) our money on providing religious services to religious members. We aren't all blessed (sorry!) with an employer so willing to spend the its money on fringe benefits. I mean, who in the private sector gets unlimited free postage and has a special electric train that goes back and forth between their office and their meeting room?

But suppose Congress decided to fund a Congressional shooting range and gun cabinet. (Okay, get up off the floor, stop laughing.) Would that offend those members who chose not to exercise their 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms? No, because the rights of those people who choose not to exercise a right (e.g., by not owning any firearms) are not offended by someone else's exercise of such a right.

There certainly is a libertarian argument against the provision of taxpayer-funded chaplain services to congress members, but it's the same as the libertarian argument against the taxpayer-funded provision of a building to hold sessions in: it's not necessary; let them fund it out of their own pockets if they want it.

Please realize that this is all based on the "religious services" line proposed originally by Ehrbar. If the chaplains are opening sessions with prayers and calling for blessings on the legislative houses, then there is a grave risk of ACLU lawsuits on the grounds of establishment. Clearly if we're going to let the Protestants pray and the Catholics sprinkle holy water, we have to get the Greek Orthodox guys in there waving their censers, and I don't even want to think what the Animists, Pagans and Satanists would want to do to bless the place. (It would make the comment "Congress keeps making new stupid damned laws." technically accurate, I suppose.)

The correct thing is to let the stupid issue die. But I can't.

So I mistake Colby at his point, fine. I thought he was arguing that atheists would find themselves unable to use the services provided by the congressional chaplains. But in fact he's arguing that the presence of the chaplains constitutes an establishment of religion, contrary to the first amendment.

But that's what Steve Erbhar pointed out wasn't a problem in the first place, right? The government can pay for religious services (as a fringe benefit of employment) to be consumed by government employees (e.g., uniformed personnel and congresscritters), as long as it's not an establishment. Common sense and judicial wrangling has led us to decide that it's not establishment as long as you let everybody in -- that means the wiccans too. It's just that there isn't anyone to bring in for the atheists.

The government is trying to balance between the free exercise clause and the no-establishment clause. Allowing free exercise to government-employed believers seems to involve providing them with on-site religious services. Non-establishment requires that the government not discriminate against any religion (in particular, not for any).

The ACLU has successfully argued that teacher-led prayer in school constitutes establishment. With pupils trapped a mandatory education system, that's signifcantly different from providing optional services to volunteer military and civilian employees who are all consenting adults.
Sheesh, it starts to sound dirty.

No, Colby's right -- the correct option would be to pretend the whole thing doesn't exist. I mean, if we're going to go after the chaplains, shouldn't we also go after the Doorkeeper of the House, whose job consists of banging a stick on the ground and announcing visitors?

Just a quick addition to the landmine discussion -- although the U.S. is portrayed as the big bad guy for not wanting to sign, other states -- notably Finland -- have signed the export ban and are considering caving on the production ban because they have enough land mines already.

Land mines are a part of a defense plan. If you have one static border to defend, you can mine it, forget it, and sign any treaty you want. If, like the U.S., you sometimes want to deploy your army to places you haven't been before, you have to be able to put new land mines in. So in fact, a ban on land mine production is really (like the ICC) another European attempt to prevent American "military adventurism."

I am shocked, shocked to find that Starbuck's coffee is for sale in the gift shop of the new L.A. Cathedral. Cappuccinos must be popular. But do they sell Popesicles?

Caffeine can be used to control slugs -- apparently even very dilute solutions of it are fatal to mollusks. Very large amounts of caffeine are fatal to people, as documented in the case of James Bird, an apparent suicide.

And Cadbury/Schweppes, makers of 7-Up, are introducing a new drink. Dubbed "dnL" (wonder how much that cost them), it's sort of an anti-7Up, as it contains caffeine and is not clear. Bizarre.

Oh, and for both of my American readers -- be aware that Canadian Mountain Dew is caffeine-free, so there's absolutely no mitigating reason to drink it, up here. Go to a coffee shop instead.

Colby Cosh further discusses the constitutionality of the Congressional chaplains.

His closing paragraph is the clincher:

Mr. Ehrbar's last point brings us into the question of the right approach to take when continuous, standing practice conflicts with the principles in the documents. I believe the Lincoln view on this has outlasted the Douglas one, for better or worse.

Colby's comparing religion to slavery -- a Marxist device, no? -- but that's not the thrust of his post. The question is, does the maintenance of chaplains conflict with the principles of the founding documents? More precisely: what rights does an atheist have under the "free exercise" clause?

None, in fact. The atheist has the right to free exercise of his lack of religion. He does not have the right to object to anyone else's practice of religion. Nor even to require that government money not be spent on obtaining religious services for government employees -- any more than I, a Catholic, can demand the expulsion of Protestants from the chaplaincy.

There is no prejudice to the atheist's right to stand on the streetcorner saying "There is no God" -- this is covered by the first amendment right to free speech. But the atheist has no special protection for the practice of his atheism, because you don't have to do anything to be an atheist.

Bloggers have more cats than is usually considered reasonable, a sambal.org study revealed today. Of the blogging population, fully 87% have 3 or more cats.

The study also showed that blogging was highly correlated with being overweight or having been overweight; exercise; and right-wing politcal views.

Film at 11.

Where can you get sambal in Western Canada? I mean besides here, of course.

You can get it at Edelweiss Imports down in Calgary. Sambal Badjak is the good stuff, but it's all good.

Charter school kids test worse than public school kids, according tothis article. Usual disclaimer that charter school kids are "looking for a way to improve their skills."

Down near the end there's the following assassination sentence: "Because charter schools' finances aren't always closely scrutinized, they sometimes close after only a few years because of financial mismanagement." Wow! Charter schools are run by criminal fraudsters. I didn't know that, and now I'll never know otherwise.

What is the charter school failure rate? Not reported. What fraction of failures stem from "financial mismanagement"? Not reported. What fraction of such cases could have been prevented by closer scrutiny? Not asked nor answered. How does this compare with the fraction of public schools which suffer from financial mismanagement and would benefit from closer scrutiny?

The uncritical reader is left with an impression of charter schools as educational mini-Enrons, run by swindlers, and getting paid to teach without doing any teaching -- certainly not improving test scores. What's left is to decide if this was deliberate on the author's part. I'm inclined to blame ignorance instead of malice.

The full report from the Brookings Institute

Tom Tomorrow used to be a lot funnier, when his comic was mostly about the travails of temp office workers. In this comic, the punchline (don't worry, I'm not giving anything away -- go read the comic, I'll wait here) is
"We've got to pay for the tax cut somehow!"

Actually, no. Our government does not have to "pay for" the tax cut. It just has to spend less now that it's sucking less blood from the income-earning citizens. Taxes and economies are not zero-sum, especially not in the very narrow sense implied here.

Folks, there's nothing sacred about any particular year's federal budget number -- we don't have to meet or exceed that next year. One day (gasp!) our federal expenditures could actually decrease. And that would be a good thing. And when it happens, I hope they cut taxes.

But you know they're going to be sitting around figuring out how to spend "our" surplus. And an attempt to cut taxes will be decried as a "raid" on some "trust fund".

Yesterday at Symphony under the Sky there were a bunch of soldiers standing around in fatigues, a first aid truck, and three artillery pieces.

Anti-aircraft? Crowd control?

No. They're just doing the 1812 overture.