by the Way . . .

Modernizing Exorcism (where Devil involved in an extraordinary sort of way)

2010-11-13T12:41:00.004-06:00

Since the Vatican issued its update of the guidelines on exorcism in 1999, overhauling those issued in 1614, very little has been done to indoctrinate the clergy with the revised requirements. Now, American Bishops are holding a conference to teach Catholic clergy members how to distinguish those that need exorcism from those just needing a psychiatrist, or perhaps a bit of pastoral care. It will take place this weekend in Baltimore, before the annual meeting of the Bishops. It is a closed door affair, the public not invited, but indications are for a good turnout of those of the cloth, to wit, 66 priests and 56 bishops. “Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.”

There are several critical issues it is hoped the conference will settle. One, exemplified by this, from R. Scott Appleby, a professor of American Catholic history at Notre Dame.

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism. “It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ ”

So one issue, of course, is whether we are dealing here with the Devil, or just Demons. While some might say, “once possessed, what’s the difference?”, the difference is crucial. For one thing, there is just one Devil, but as Jesus demonstrated, you can infect a whole hillside of pigs with the Demons from just one man. Matthew 8:28-34. Another issue is the lack of rigor in the reports of successful exorcisms. There is no evidence that any of these used randomized controlled trials, the usual way of establishing whether a drug, diet, pastoral care, or other intervention is really safe or effective. Worse, almost all of these studies have been small, averaging just a single subject. The smaller the sample, of course, the greater the risk of error, including false positives and false negatives. And of course, the risk of bias on the part of the observer, which is why these must be done by priests, and not lay researchers.

On the other hand, the before and after shots can be pretty convincing. Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin. The more definitive would be the language or the holy water tests, as long as you are dealing with someone, despirited or not, is not adverse to getting all wet. In any event, Bishop Paprocki noted that while the Devil is a real and constant force who can intervene in people’s lives — though few of them will require an exorcism to handle it. “The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”

Janet, You're Doing a Heck of a Job

2009-12-29T10:13:00.006-06:00

"The system worked." This assessment by Janet Napolitano of the failure of the attempted bombing of the flight over Detroit has come under attack, but it is clear the Homeland Security system did perform as expected. The system involves passengers leaping over seats and onto any terrorist who ignites a bomb. Admittedly, this system works best when the bomb fails to fully explode on the initial attempt.

This system, known as the "thousand points of light" system, initially developed during the administration of George H. W. Bush, relies on individuals to correct problems instead of government. Most believe this is superior to the George W. Bush system, which is heavily biased toward action by private business instead of government. That system also worked, as evidenced in the aftermath of Katrina, when Walmart, at their own expense, sent in trucks loaded with water and food to the survivors.

The government approach also worked, as the alert level was at "Orange", alerting all to watch out for terrorists.

When the Music Stops

2008-05-05T15:31:00.002-05:00

The FBI and the IRS and the Justice Department are intensifying criminal investigations of the mortgage industry. They think that some lenders may have winked when borrowers inflated their income to qualify for loans. It is not clear why they think there were any qualifications to inflate to. It is clear that they just don’t understand the system.

Banks and brokers do not make loans, they make money by setting up loans which are immediately sold to investment banks on an “as is” basis. Why would you expect a bank get fussy about risk if they are not planning to take any? The big investment banks like Bear Sterns make money by securitizing the loans by pooling them and issuing shares in the pool. Why would you expect them to worry about the details of the loans in the pool if the securities will all be rated by the rating agencies? It is all in the prospectus. The rating agencies make money by attaching a rating, AAA, to the securities, called CDOs. The rating agencies of course rely on the fact that the risk, if any, is spread over the thousands of loans in the pool. They are not expected to look at all the thousands of loan files.

Actually the ratings are not all AAA, since there are traunches. This means that the interests in the pool divided up among different seniorities of CDOs. The senior traunch gets paid first and is the AAA part. The lower traunches take later and may be lower ratings. The lowest traunch is the equity traunch, which gets the highest rate of interest if there is any left after the senior traunches get theirs. The lower traunches know all along that they have more risk than the senior, or else why would they be paid more if there is any?

Naturally, all the players know that if the system comes to a sudden stop, before you can unload the mortgages on the next tier, you can get stuck with a little risk. But, as Chuck Prince, the former CEO of Citigroup, said, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

Now where is the crime in all that?

Fear Downer Salmon Slipping Into Food Supply

2008-04-18T11:39:00.003-05:00

Problems familiar to United States beef manufacturing are emerging in salmon manufacturing in Chile. Like our cattle, the salmon held fin to fin in feeding pens tend to get sick and pale, and need to be fed “medicated food” containing antibiotics and pigment as well as hormones to make them grow faster. In 2005 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris criticized Chile’s fish farming, saying they needed to control the use of fungicides like green malachite, a carcinogen that was prohibited in 2002; and better regulate the colorant used to make salmon more rosy, which has been associated with retina problems in humans. It also said Chile’s use of antibiotics was “excessive.”

Industry backers pointed out that no one has proved conclusively that antibiotics like flumequine and oxolinic acid increase antibiotic resistance in people, and that there have been no reported cases of people going blind from the colorant used. Further, they noted that it was just another of those false internet rumors that growers were using cattle prods in attempts to reactivate salmon found floating on the surface in the pens. They stressed that any such efforts would certainly have been filmed by PETA and put on You Tube by now. Most importantly, they stressed that they had been vetted by the F.D.A., which tested 40 samples of the 114,320 net tons of salmon imported from Chile in 2007. None tested positive for malachite green, oxolinic acid, flumequine, Ivermectin, fluoroquinolones or drug residues.

Nonetheless, the pen muckraking New York Times published a distasteful expose of the problems March 27, stirring up Safeway to decide to stop buying from Marine Harvest, its main supplier of salmon and associated drugs, saying that the virus for infectious salmon anemia was affecting size, and thus quality and taste. There is no word yet from Costco, the other largest Marine Harvest customer. While the Bush administration generally prefers to leave such matters to the free market, the United States Food and Drug Administration sprung into action, saying it was planning an inspection trip to assess Chile’s overall controls on its farmed salmon.

It is 11 pm and the phone is ringing

2008-04-12T17:19:00.002-05:00

Bill Clinton just doesn’t consider the issue is settled about that landing in Bosnia, and brought it up again Thursday. As the world knows, Hillary included a misspoke in her stump speech about her landing in 1996 in Bosnia ``I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.'' The press, “picking on a girl” according to Bill, insisted on showing film clips of Hillary arriving to a much more leisurely and friendly reception. Worse, the press showed clips that documented the misspoke in a number of speeches over several months.

Bill, campaigning in Booneville, Indiana, Thursday, said his wife may have forgotten the details because she was 60, forgetful, and tired. He added that reporters, when they are 60, “they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 o’clock at night, too.” He went on to say “A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me. . . .there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated — and immediately apologized for it — what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up.”

It did not help that both the landing and the series of misspokes occurred in the daytime and Hillary did not apologize until March 24. ``I did make a mistake in talking about it the last time, and recently,'' Clinton told reporters in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. ``I made a mistake. I have a different memory. That happens. I'm human. For some people that's a revelation.'' Later, she called the issue a ``minor blip,'' according to the Daily News. ``I say a lot of things -- millions of words a day -- so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.''

The Clinton campaign was not happy that the issue, coverage of which had died down, was reactivated by Bill, and issued a news release. “Senator Clinton appreciates her husband standing up for her, but this was her mistake and she takes responsibility for it,” the statement said. And for his part, Bill, asked if he regretted his earlier comments, said, “I regret that there appears to be a double-standard about misstatements.”

The Princess and the Pea Brains

2008-04-09T14:43:00.003-05:00

Princess Diana died August 1997 when a car in which she was a passenger crashed headlong at high speed into a pillar in a Paris underpass. The driver had been drinking, and was trying to escape pursuing paparazzi. The princess wore no seat belt. That much was known. What was not known was whether it was just an accident, or whether there was negligence involved, or whether the princess was murdered by Prince Phillip, her ex father-in-law.

Fortunately, that is now all settled. The inquest jury, after 6 months of hearings and 278 witnesses, concluded the princess died as the result of negligent driving, to wit: “caused or contributed to, by the speed and manner of the driver of the Mercedes and the speed and manner of the following vehicles”. This concluded a series of official investigations costing an estimated $20 million. No evidence of a murder conspiracy was developed.

Monty Hall Strategy Shows McCain Heavily Favored

2008-04-08T15:14:00.004-05:00

In the Science Times, John Tierney explains how the economist M. Keith Chen has challenged certain experiments in cognitive dissonance, claiming that the researchers have fallen for a version of the Monty Hall Problem. You remember the old TV show “Let’s Make a Deal” which Monty Hall hosted. One game was the one with the three closed doors, one with a car behind it and the other two with a goat behind it. The idea is to pick the door with the car, unless, of course, you have a car and need a goat.

Now the cognitive dissonance part has to do with which of three colors of M&Ms monkeys prefer. I will leave you to the Tierney article for that, as my concern here is with a problem (albeit possibly related), how people choose between the three current presidential candidates. But first I will let Mr. Tierney explain how the Monty deal works, as I still don’t believe it.

“He shows you three closed doors, … If you open the one with the car, you win it. You start by picking a door, but before it’s opened Monty will always open another door to reveal a goat. Then he’ll let you open either remaining door. Suppose you start by picking Door 1, and Monty opens Door 3 to reveal a goat. Now what should you do? Stick with Door 1 or switch to Door 2? This answer goes against our intuition that, with two unopened doors left, the odds are 50-50 that the car is behind one of them. But when you stick with Door 1, you’ll win only if your original choice was correct, which happens only 1 in 3 times on average. If you switch, you’ll win whenever your original choice was wrong, which happens 2 out of 3 times.”

We have three presidential candidates (doors) and the all important independent voter will determine which goes to the White House. Two doors have donkeys behind them (goats – both ungulates by the way) and one an elephant (car – both big). The voters will pick one door, and then one with a goat behind it will open to let either Obama or Hillary out of the race. Now the independent, most of whom are voting in the Democratic contest, must choose to stay or switch. Enough of the voters will know that the best strategy to avoid a mistake is to switch. That will be McCain, two out of three on the average.

You can prove this to yourself by playing the game on the NYT web site.

Redwoods - The Dark Side

2008-04-07T11:15:00.001-05:00

Ronald Reagan was right when he noted that trees are a problem with respect to global warming. Back then trees were known polluters, but it was not yet clear that shady situations were a crime in California. As governor, he opposed expansion of redwood forests, pithily stating “A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?” And this was before the shade problem.

Under the 1978 California Solar Shade Control Act, it is a crime to let your trees cast a shadow on your neighbor’s rooftop solar panels. That is just what Carolynn Bissett (no, not that one) did to her neighbor Mark Vargas with her eight redwoods (a k a Tree No. 1, Tree No. 2, etc.). In the judgment of the California legislature, redwoods may be somewhat green, but solar panels are greener.

Last December Bissett was convicted in the first prosecution under the Solar Shade Act. The judge found that Trees 4, 5, and 6 were not shading the panels when the panels were installed, but instituted their shading post panel, in contravention of the Act. The judge therefore sentenced all three to be pruned. Trees 1, 2, and 3 were already shading the area, so their shade was there first, thus prima facie they were acquitted, as were trees 7 and 8 which were not involved in the shading at all. As an indication of how tricky this can be, since not only do trees grow, but the sun moves around, the judge deferred adjudication of the adequacy of the pruning of tree 6 (shown left) until the winter solstice. At that point, December 21st, the sun will be lowest in the sky and tree 6 involved in casting the maximum shadow.

Space Cadet

2008-04-05T11:21:00.001-05:00

In 2004 President Bush astounded the world by announcing his goal of putting a man on the moon by 2020. Since then NASA, says Bush appointee Michael Griffin, its administrator, has “spent three years reassessing the policy and codifying it. Changing it now? I think that’s just stupid.”

Dr. Griffin was reacting to a meeting last month at Stanford where 50 space experts gathered to discuss the long range space program. Louis Freidman, founder of the Planetary Society and a host of the meeting, noted that we will have a new president and Congress next year that may not be “wedded to the vision for space exploration” put forth by the current president, and that interest was high in a workshop that might offer alternatives to the Bush plan.

What Dr. Freidman was ignoring is the fact that the Bush plan already has alternatives. A NASA insider, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the program, revealed that one version envisioned a landing module which would separate from a mother ship, transferring several astronauts to the moon surface while another remained in orbit. Depending upon the circumstances, the surfaced astronauts would either return to the ship, or, in the “Katrina” alternative, remain on the moon to establish a permanent colony. Either situation would clearly be mission accomplished. “We could be there a hundred years” he noted.

President Bush is not concerned about any interim administration, since even two terms of Democrats will expire before the anticipated landing date. At that point, Laura Bush, who has been sleeping with the president throughout the planning process, and will be a shoo-in candidate by then, will be ready to go on day one.

Breck Girl Feels Pretty Maligned

2007-04-28T11:31:00.000-05:00

The press blowout that John Edwards paid $400 for a haircut, twice, in fact, really don’t have the story straight. Worse, YouTube has Edwards aka “The Breck Girl” messing with his hair for two minutes to the tune of “I Feel Pretty”, which makes him appear vain.

In the first place, the Breckster would not pay that for a haircut. It was paid out of campaign funds, so it was a free haircut. That is a big difference. Even for the contributors, it comes out to less than one cent per. In the second place, he has decided to reimburse the campaign to show foreigners what America is all about. As he put it, people want to come to America “because people like me can come from nowhere, the son of a mill worker…and now be running for president and pay $400 for a haircut.”

He added, “People around the world look at us and say, ‘That’s what we want. We want that kind of chance.’ ”

Giuliani Promises Twofer With Threefer

2007-04-08T14:16:00.000-05:00

Rudy told Barbara Walters that if he becomes president his wife Judith will sit in on cabinet meetings and advise on federal policy “as much as she wants”. He noted that this is something he would be “very, very comfortable with”. This gives the republic another twofer at no additional cost. He says that the extent the public enjoys this will depend on the extent of Judith’s interest in the affairs of state. He noted that she will have no specific responsibilities, just as she had none in the breakup with Rudy’s second wife Donna Hanover. Donna, the twofer, was not a twofer.

It seems likely that Judith’s scope will exceed that of Nancy Reagan, whose astrology staff primarily vetted Ronnie’s schedule for extraterrestrial conflicts. Likewise with Rosalynn Carter, the first wife to attend cabinet meetings, but who didn’t say much. Hillary may have been the second first wife to attend, but primarily stuck to overhauling the nation’s health care system. This would apparently make Judith the third wife.

Climate Control - The Earth Spins

2007-03-28T11:37:00.000-05:00

Global warming is just a theory, not a fact. In fact, it is officially incorrect. Now when something is officially incorrect, a lie if you will, should the Bush administration be putting out reports and stuff implying that global warming is real? Of course not, but you have to be vigilant, because all these scientists are always trying to run their theories through the government presses. And that is why you have to have the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Now the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform has released documents showing that the WHCEQ chief of staff, Philip A. Cooney, made hundreds of changes to government climate reports to, as the NYT put it, “play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.” Big deal. Mr. Cooney said that the editing was just part of the normal White House review process.

Mr. Cooney has a strong background in climate control. Before joining the White House he was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby. He also has no scientific background, so he was unbiased, basing his editing and recommendations on the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge”. During the March 2007 congressional hearing, Cooney conceded his role in altering reports to downplay the adverse effects of man-made emissions on the planet's climate, but said his past work opposing restrictions on heat-trapping gases for the oil industry had no influence on his work for the administration. "My sole loyalty was to the President and advancing the policies of his administration."

Mr. Cooney left the Bush administration in 2005 and went to work for Exxon Mobil, two days after the first reports on his editing came out in the NYT, but the White House made it clear that his resignation had nothing to do with the disclosures.

Wikipedia Note: In March 2002, Myron Ebell, director of global warming at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote a memo to Mr. Cooney, that was later obtained by Greenpeace, explaining how they were going to deal with the publication of the Climate Action Report 2002 by attacking Christine Todd Whitman, adding that he was helping to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think they are serving the president's best interests by publishing this rubbish."

Booster Boo Ban Boo Hoo

2007-03-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

Last fall a committee of 15 high school administrators from across Washington State met to discuss sportsmanship. The upshot is that the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association has prepared guidelines for fan behavior which will ban booing, along with other unsportsmanlike conduct like pompoms with things printed on them. Those foam fingers are also out.

"I don't know why people think it's acceptable to boo in the first place," WIAA Executive Director Mike Colbrese said. "It's a pretty novel concept to me." He added that "this is still in the draft stages; We want ...all of our nine districts (to) have the same policies. I think there are a lot more positive ways to generate school spirit than by being negative." The association already prohibits any negative commentary about officiating before, during or after any interscholastic activity or athletic event. "Constructive criticism or comments are always welcomed," the organization's handbook states, "and should be made available through the proper channels (verbally or in writing) directly to the person(s) involved and/or their immediate supervisors." Booing the ref’s call is not, however, considered “constructive criticism”, at least when not through proper channels.

Not everyone thinks the boo ban is a good idea. "They're kidding, right?" asked Rainier Beach High School boys basketball coach Mike Bethea. “If they won't let people boo at a basketball game, what's next?" Fortunately, The Seattle P.I. has a feature with the on line story called “Sound Off” where readers can offer their opinions. Unfortunately, not all have been within the proposed rules. Fortunately, there is also a button following each comment labeled “Report Violations”. Among the 179 comments: “boo”; and particularly grievous- “BOOOO-OOOOOO-OOOOOOO!!!!

-Editor's Note: The association is proposing to give a technical foul to the team whose boosters boo. Highschoolers have a sense of humor, and fairness, beyond what these admin types appreciate. Prediction: Award a foul and the opposite team boosters will boo to even it up. Who says it isn't great to be in high school?

Principals of Target Selection

2007-03-15T15:09:00.000-05:00

Shortly after President Bush began his second term, his close associate, fellow Texan, and White House counsel Harriet Miers conveyed an idea, source unknown, to D. Kyle Sampson, former Deputy White House counsel and then Chief of Staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the president’s close associate, fellow Texan, and former White House counsel. The idea was to fire and replace all 93 of the U.S. Attorneys. While everyone was just wild about Harry (she was to have her 3 ½ weeks of fame as a Supreme Court nominee that fall), some were not wild about Harry’s idea, or conveyance thereof.

You see, under the political spoils system every new president fires all the U.S. Attorneys and appoints his own supporters, generally choosing among recommendations from big contributors. The term is four years, and, customarily, if your guy gets reelected, the ride is for eight. The “idea” would therefore involve firing 93 supporters in midstream and replacing them with 93 other supporters. You know about horses and streams.

D. Kyle replied in March 2005, suggesting that they instead just “target” a limited number of U.S. Attorneys to “mitigate the shock to the system that would result from an across-the-board firing” and provided a proposed “strikeout” list. In a continuous stream of email messages between the White House and the Justice Department over the next two years, the list evolved, with targets added and deleted. A list of seven was finally approved, along with a five step blueprint for carrying out the executive action. The targets were advised in December 2006, while Alberto Gonzales and the White House communications office called the senators in the affected states. While Al thereby gained knowledge of who the targets were, he made it clear in his press conference Tuesday that he had no direct knowledge of how the targets were selected. Al also acknowledged “that mistakes were made here”, but no one knows what he meant, exactly. Dan Bartlett, President Bush’s counselor, also made it clear that “the White House did not play a role in the seven U.S. attorneys.”

The next day President Bush took time out of his busy schedule in Mexico to say he was “frankly not happy about” the way it was handled, but defended the removals as “customary practice”, adding “I’ve heard those allegations about political decision making. It’s just not true.”

Hunting Blind in the Texas Legislature

2007-03-12T17:26:00.000-05:00

There is no vision test to get a hunting license in Texas, and no rule against a blind person hunting. But it is still awkward, for obvious reasons. Currently a sighted person has to look over the shoulder of the blind person and tell him there is an animal out there, and which way to point the gun. Sort of “up a little, nope, too high, a little to the left” and so on. The blind person gets to pull the trigger, but the joy of actually killing something is elusive, as it is very difficult to hit anything that way.

State Rep. Edmund Kuempel to the rescue. He has introduced a bill that will exempt blind people from the usual prohibition on hunting with laser sights. "This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that's great," Kuempel said. A laser sight projects a visible dot on the spot where a bullet will hit, allowing the sighted person to give more accurate instructions about which way to move the muzzle (and without standing right in the way of the recoil). As an added benefit, the bill also allows blind hunters to use an otherwise prohibited spotlight. That tends to freeze the deer in place, allowing time to respond to the verbal instructions.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has until January 1, 2008, to come up with rules defining “legally blind” and what kind of proof the hunter will have to carry to justify his laser sight. It is tricky. You could end up with an awful lot of “visually impaired” hunters. You also don’t want to create a cottage industry of blind people hiring themselves out as gun bearers.

"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session" -Judge Gideon J. Tucker

Have a Beer, Save a Bear

2007-03-09T14:09:00.000-06:00

The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending two employees to international meetings on the Arctic. One, Janet Hohn, will attend a meeting in Norway on conserving Arctic animals and plants. The other, Craig Perham, an expert on polar bears, will go to the Siberian coast to advise villagers on how to avoid polar bears. The bears have shifted their migrations closer to inhabited areas as warming trends have altered the sea ice.

The Service has provided guidance regarding what the two should discuss while in Norway and Russia. One memo from agency director H. Dale Hall says they “will not be speaking on or responding to questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice….” A second memo from Mr. Hall says Mr. Perham “understands the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to those issues.”

Mr. Hall stressed that it has been a longstanding practice to require strict adherence to a set agenda. While no agenda has yet been established for the polar bear meeting, it presumably will focus on humans avoiding being eaten by polar bears rather than polar bears per se or other no-nos like sea ice or climate change. If a polar bear is after you, you really don’t care why.

The meeting in Norway apparently does have an agenda, as Tina Kreisher, spokeswoman for the Interior Department, parent of the Service, said that climate was “not the subject of the agenda”. She did note that Mrs. Hahn would be free to talk about climate change “over a beer”. There are polar bears in Norway, and they could apparently also be discussed over a beer, but the meeting is about conserving Arctic animals in general, so there will be no reason to get hung up on just one animal.

Don't Touch That Remote

2007-03-07T11:14:00.000-06:00

Are you using your DVR to shirk your responsibilities in the war on terror?

Asked in an interview why he had asked no sacrifice from the American people, President Bush responded: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”

Challenge to Evolution as Jewish Religion

2007-03-01T13:17:00.000-06:00

State officials have discovered that the so-called “science” of evolution is actually a religion, and a Jewish one to boot. As such, they maintain that it is illegal for the government to finance research involving evolution (separation of church and state).

Warren Chisum, R. Panhandle, chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, circulated a memo to all 149 other Texas Representatives, pointing out that “indisputable evidence – long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that the so-called secular evolution science is the Big Bang 15 billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion…. This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings on the mystic ‘holy book’ kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

The memo directed inquiries to the “non-moving Earth and anti-evolution web page” of the Fair Education Foundation website. That site notes that the earth is stationary, as per the bible, and contrary theories are due to thinkers such as “Kabbalist physicist Albert Einstein”.

The memo was sent to Mr. Chisum by the president of FEF, at the request of a Georgia legislator, Ben Bridges, a “long time friend and supporter” of FEF, who had distributed the memo to the Georgia legislature. In his cover letter on the memo, Mr. Chisum said he greatly appreciated Mr. Bridges “information on this important topic.”

Well, there was a big fuss, as the Jews don’t want to be held responsible for evolution, and the memo was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. Mr. Chisum apologized, and noted that while he had read the memo, nobody asked him to edit it. Apparently some of his best friends are Jewish, and he said he had “engaged” one Mr. Wolens to intercede on his behalf. Mr. Wolens, a lawyer whose wife is the mayor of Dallas, noted that he had always found Mr. Chisum to be respectful to people of the Jewish faith.

There has been no reaction from the Bush administration regarding funding of the evolution religion, but it is possible that in the future it may have to be handled through the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives.

Pac up your troubles in your old kit-bag

2007-02-12T11:28:00.000-06:00

The 110th Congress has reformed, some say revolutionized, the business of lobbying. The new rules prohibit lobbyists from paying for everything from meals and trips to rides on private aircraft for congresspersons. These new rules are designed to appear to limit the influence of lobbyists, and to eliminate some of the recent abuses that really looked bad. Well and good, but many feared the rules would disrupt business as usual, depriving the lawmakers of the wise counsel of the representatives of special interests, and the major recreational aspects of representing the public. Not.

Lobbyists continue of course to be the main conduit of campaign contributions. The process of gathering checks from client PACs and presenting them in one impressive bundle, called, understandably, “bundling”, is not affected by the new rules, and Congresspersons continue to be duly appreciative for this vital service. But what good is all that warm feeling if the lobbyist can’t mingle with the lawmaker? Mingling in pleasant surroundings is where all the important issues are discussed. And you can't really mingle without the surroundings. So who is going to pay for the surroundings?

If you guessed “political action committee” but didn’t specify whose, zero credit. It is not the PAC of the lobbyist, or the PAC of his client. If you said “the lawmaker’s PAC”, you may have a future in the field. You see, the lobbyist cannot legally pay for the surroundings, nor can the lawmaker use campaign funds for it. But there are no restrictions on the lawmaker’s PAC. Nor are there restrictions on donations to that PAC by the PACs of the lobbyist or his clients. How are you doing with 2 plus 2 so far?

Right. The lawmaker picks the trip or event, and specifies a corporate PAC donation sufficient to cover the cost. And of course it wouldn’t be much of a fund raiser if the lawmaker didn’t agree to go along. This time of year hunting and skiing trips are in vogue, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal. Representative Mary Bono of California has invited lobbyists to join her at a Who concert in D.C., and for a $2500 contribution you can join Representative Eric Cantor at the Starbucks near his office for a Tazo Chai Crème Frappuccino, courtesy his PAC.

Also important is transportation. Lawmakers can no longer fly on corporate private jets at a discounted rate, but the corporation can donate to the lawmaker’s PAC, which can then reimburse the corporation for the full cost of the flight.

Senator Lindsey Graham, R South Carolina, invites lobbyists to join him on fundraising hunting trips, which he considers an “innocuous fact of life”. “If you are not going to have publicly financed elections and you are getting your support from private individuals … I don’t see any problem with having events where private individuals who give you money can talk to you.”

One often overlooked benefit of the new system is that now, after covering the pleasures of the lawmaker, there is usually enough left of the contribution for his campaign fund to wet its beak a little.

Oh, and you remembered the second line to the title, "and smile, smile, smile". But did you remember the first verse of this WWI classic?

Private Perks is a funny little codger
With a smile a funny smile.
Five feet none, he’s an artful little dodger
With a smile a funny smile.
Flush or broke he’ll have his little joke,
He can’t be suppress’d.
All the other fellows have to grin
When he gets this off his chest, Hi!

Damn Straight!

2007-02-07T16:49:00.000-06:00

Right on the tail of the frustrating saga of the gay sheep comes the heartening revelation that Pastor Ted is now “completely heterosexual”. The Rev. Ted Haggard, who was ousted when he was outed when he pissed off a gay prostitute by being hypocritical, was completely cured in three weeks of intense religious counseling. The Rev. Tim Ralph, an official of the New Life Church that Pastor Ted founded, revealed the conversion and noted that, anyway, PT’s homosexual activity (the three year affair with the professional Mike Jones) was an "acting out" that had not been “a constant thing”.

An expert noted that those of PT’s flock believe that homosexuality is sinful behavior and that if you control the behavior enough, heterosexual attractions will return. Still, the megachurch oversight board recommended to Pastor Ted that he take up secular work.

[Editor's note: It is not known whether Pastor Ted continues to talk to President Bush or his advisors every Monday, or whether he is still feels his quote in the award winning documentary film Jesus Camp, “If the Evangelicals vote, they determine the election.” should not have been outed. He explains how to have a great marriage here in a YouTube segment. See also The Presidential Prayer Team.]

Hey Mohammed, Got Change for a C Note?

2007-02-07T10:58:00.000-06:00

You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.

At that rate it would take 23 days to load 363 tons of $100 bills. How do you expect anybody to keep track of that? L. Paul Bremer III abolished the Iraqi government and disbanded the army, and found that the banks had closed when Saddam left town. “We had to pay Iraqis in cash” L.Paul told a House committee Tuesday. “Delay would have been demoralizing and unfair to millions of Iraqi families.”

Rep. Waxman now wants to know what happened to that $12 billion in cash after the Bush administration flew pallets of the shrink wrapped $100 bills into Iraq on C-130 cargo planes. Rep. Davis, the ranking Republican on Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee noted that it was just an oversight and that “self-righteous finger-wagging” isn’t helping, noting that L. Paul took charge of a “country with, basically, no government.”

And no way to make change, either. You wonder what would have happened if we put L. Paul in charge of New Orleans, and Brownie in Bagdad.

Genographic Project Recalls General Custer

2007-02-02T16:07:00.000-06:00

The National Geographic Society figures it can map the migrations of early man by analyzing DNA samples from indigenous groups around the world. The multi-million dollar effort is called the Genographic Project. The mapping works because most genes get shuffled when the parents combine their DNA, but not the Y chromosome (females don’t have one, technically “Y envy”), and not the mitochondrial DNA, which comes only from the mother. Nobody cares about that, since the mitochondria have their own little DNA, and aren’t even part of the nucleus, where the real chromosomes are. Mitochondria are basically little heat generators, which, when you think about it, explains a lot. But we digress.

The parts of the Y chromosome that are universal evolved while everybody stayed, and shuffled, if you will, in the same geographic area. After a group moved off, it became isolated, so that when a mutation occurred thereafter, it became a distinct marker for that group. Basically, if you find a marker, say, in a North American indigenous group (“Indians”) that is the same as a group across the Bering Strait in Asia, you figure that’s where they came from. That’s because you can walk from Africa to Asia, but if you head west instead of east when you hit Asia, you are going to be lucky if you even get to England. Go east, of course, and you hit the land bridge. The idea is to trace the redskins back to yellow, and then on to black (for some reason having to do with vitamin D, the ones that turned west turned white).

However, nearly every tribe in North America is refusing to give DNA for study, not wanting anyone to prove that “native Americans” really came from somewhere else. There are a number of reasons for this, some dating back to an earlier study with the Havasupai Tribe, which believes that the Grand Canyon is humanity’s birthplace. Researchers got the DNA for a diabetes study, which was OK, but then used it to assert that the tribe’s ancestors came from Asia. These attacks on religious fact never go down very well, even if they are only theories.

There is also the fear that such studies will jeopardize land rights and benefits based upon the idea that their people have lived there since the beginning of time. Dr. David Barrett of the Alaska Area Institutional Review Board, sponsored by the federal Indian Health Service, says their health service might be lost if they turn out to really be Siberian. And there is also the implied put down. Maurice Foxx, a Mashpee Wampanoag, and chairman of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs, says “What the scientists are trying to prove is that we’re the same as the Pilgrims except we came over several thousand years before.

Currently the gathering of DNA in North America is halted, pending agreement by Dr. Barrett’s Alaska board that the consent form that all volunteers must sign fully advises of the risks, such as the possible loss of health services and privacy, and, presumably, of hurt feelings.

PETA Attempts to Queer Gay Sheep Experiments

2007-02-02T11:25:00.000-06:00

About 8% of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams. Dr. Roselli, a researcher in Oregon Health and Science University, is studying what makes these guys gay. A University press release quoted him that the research “has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation … across mammalian species, including humans.”

There are a lot of complaints, some over the killing of the gay sheep to examine their brains, and some for fear the doctor is working on a cure. PETA outed the researchers in an open letter to set the record straight: "To put it simply, these experimenters are cutting open and killing sheep simply because they are gay. These experiments carry the insidious implication that homosexuality in humans can be cured". Marina Navratilova, the gay tennis star allied with PETA doesn’t like either aspect, and writes that the research “can only be surmised as an attempt to develop a prenatal treatment” for sexual preference. Shalin Gala, the PETA representative organizing the sheep campaign, claimed that altering sexual orientation was the “natural implication” of the research.

They may be on to something. The Seattle Times reported that the researchers have zeroed in on differences in the brain at birth, and hope to engineer the birth of gay rams by altering conditions in the womb. The New Scientist reported that “the difference was in a particular region of the hypothalamus - the preoptic nucleus. The region is generally almost twice as large in rams as in ewes. But in gay rams its size was almost identical to that in "straight" females” and further that the differences are almost identical to those identified by the neuroscientist Simon LeVay in his studies of the brains of gay men.

The researchers have a $2.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a test which can determine the likelihood of a ram being female-oriented before it is sold as a stud, thereby avoiding an abomination.

Age of Grand Canyon Settled on High

2007-01-29T13:27:00.000-06:00

If you count your begats you will see that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Ken Ham is creating a Creation Museum as a way to reach people who do not use computers, and thus have no access to the Answers in Genesis web site or his radio show. “People will get saved here”, says Ham. Rev. Jerry Falwell says that when the museum is finished “it’s going to be Cincinnati’s No. 1 tourist attraction. It’s going to be a mini-Disney World”.

Ham points out that the Grand Canyon was created in a matter of days (presumably 40 days and 40 nights) by the floodwaters of Noah’s ark fame, and that the creatures on the ark included the dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus Rex. He says that Noah was a real man, and with Rex on board, who can doubt him?

There is some controversy. Tom Vail’s book about the Grand Canyon, on sale at the National Park Service book store at the canyon, says the canyon is only 4,500 years old, although it agrees that it was formed by Noah’s flood. The book was approved by the Bush administration for sale at the park in 2003. After it got a bad review by a geology professor, the head of the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service asked headquarters to remove the book, saying it is a religious doctrine, not science. But when the park superintendent attempted to remove it, he was overruled by NPS headquarters, which announced that it would do a “high level policy review” and reach a decision by February 2004. To date, while there is no record of any such review, the Bush administration is sticking with the initial approval. The NPS no longer offers any official estimate for the age of the canyon, but it has blocked publication of park ranger guidance which denied any scientific basis for creationism, and approved the posting of plaques bearing Psalm verses at the overlooks.

So how long ago did God create the canyon, anyway? We are going with the 4,500 years rather than the 6,000 years. The NPS is clearly more official than the Creation Museum, and anyway, you can look it up, right there at the canyon.

Expectations

2007-01-29T10:16:00.000-06:00

Hillary has explained her vote to authorize the war: “I would never have expected any president, if we knew then what we know now, to come to ask for a vote. There would not have been a vote, and I certainly would not have voted for it.” But does President Bush know now what we know now? Or if he knew then only what he knows now, would he have met Hillary’s expectation?

Clearly the president is not coming to ask for a vote on the additional troops for Iraq, but if there is a vote, you would never have expected it. As Rummy so aptly put it, some things are just unknowable: "I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.”

You From Detroit?

2007-01-26T12:17:00.000-06:00

The struggle to maintain campus diversity, i.e. an adequate percentage of minority students, is getting tougher. When the California voters adopted Proposition 209, banning racial preferences for non-whites, the public universities quickly sank into inadequate diversity. Michigan voters have now ignored the California disaster and passed Proposition 2, banning race and gender preferences in public education. Amazingly, the measure passed, 58% to 42%, despite opposition from government, business, labor, education and religious leaders. Go figure.

In 2003 the Supreme Court said it was all right to consider race, if it was just one among many factors, and if you didn’t give points for it (white rules, under which white basketball players get extra points for a basket, are presumably illegal under this ruling). After that colleges adopted “holistic” review, accepting minorities which failed to meet the standards applied to whites, but being careful not to assign extra points. That no longer works in Michigan. “We know from colleagues in Texas and California that if we can’t take race into account, we’re at a competitive disadvantage,” said Julie Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan.” Editor's note: the "competition" is not, of course, for below standard students per se, but for "diversity", a crucial academic goal, for which you may need below standard students to reach.

Wayne State University has adopted a new admissions policy which will look to “a set of broader diversity concerns that go to socioeconomic status.” The new factors omit any mention of race, and instead include having overcome substantial obstacles, such as prejudice and discrimination; being multilingual; and residence in Detroit or on an Indian reservation. However, the law school dean, Frank Wu, is concerned that their good faith efforts to comply with Proposition 2 may face a legal challenge: “There’s a new fight building,” Mr. Wu said, “and that’s going to be whether the mere fact that you’re striving for diversity means you’re somehow trying to get around the ban and find proxies, or pretexts, for race, and that that’s impermissible. It’s ironic, but in some quarters our effort to adopt a new policy to comply with Prop 2 has been interpreted as an effort to circumvent it.”

Mesopotamia Surge Redux

2007-01-10T14:06:00.000-06:00

Contrary to popular belief, there is strong evidence that the surge has been highly effective thoughout the history of Mesopotamia (maiden name of Iraq). When the Arabs first invaded in 638 they came with enough troups, and most of the population converted forthwith to Islam. A surge was required to take care of the few unconverted, including the Zoroastrian priests, who lost their lives and property. The Muslims had not yet solidified into opposing sects, and the major theological question was whether, if you died from a cause other than battle, you still got the virgins. Due to the ambiguity of the virgin situation, you didn't want to die over the issue, so peace prevailed.

But then schisms developed, the major one being between the Shiits and the Sunnis. They don’t agree which of them is the proper successor to Muhammad (d.632), followers of His father-in-law Abu or followers of His son-in-law Ali. You see, the Prophet favored a process for choosing a successor, and He also favored an individual to be the successor, but they didn't match up. The process was selection by concensus. Abu was selected successor caliph by community leaders, even though it was known that Ali would have been selected by the Prophet, had he still been around. It goes to show what can happen if you don't have a will. Ali didn’t become caliph until the murder of the third caliph convinced the head guys to throw in the towel. The Sunnis follow Abu while the Shiites follow Ali.

Further, the Shiits require that the their leader be a direct descendent of Ali. In other words, the Shiite position is inherited rather than elected, as the Sunnis would have it. This is a familiar problem, as we see in European history. The direct descendents of Ali were the Imans, the 12th of which went into hiding in 940. He will not re-emerge to rule as the Mahdi until the end of time, so in the interval the Ayatollahs are considered the joint caretakers of the Iman office.

The Sunnis and the Shiites don’t consider each other to be true Muslims, and thus, if not technically infidels, are close enough for government work. Now the traditional way of dealing with infidels is of course to kill them. This has in fact worked pretty well for the other religions throughout history, even though it is not generally considered P.C. currently (with the possible exceptions of Ireland and the Levant). Even for those exceptions it could be argued that outside interference has prevented the inhabitants from working things out in the traditional manner.

Indeed, outside influence has been a problem for Mesopotamia all along. In the 14th century the Black Sheep Turkmen took control, but later lost it to a surge by the White Sheep Turkmen. The Black Sheep have had a bad reputation ever since. In the 16th century the Ottoman Empire took over. The Turks, regardless of sheep preference, generally followed the practice of keeping the Abu and Ali followers from resolving the Muhammad descent question by carefully arranging massacres and hangings. The British continued the practice when they took over after the Great War, imposing a monarchy and drawing the maps without reference to the religious preferences. Unrest and killings dragged along for several years until the big British surge (massacre) in 1920 brought relative peace. Then, as now, there were critics. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote in the London Times August 22, 1920:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. . . Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.
Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. . . . A Minister in the House of Lords said that we must have so many troops because the local people will not enlist. . . We have not reached the limit of our military commitments. Four weeks ago the staff in Mesopotamia drew up a memorandum asking for four more divisions. . . . If the North-West Frontier cannot be further denuded, where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the wilfully wrong policy. . . .

Iraqi army officers took over in 1958, executing the royal family in the palace gardens, ending the monarchy installed by the British. Things went back and forth, with the Kurds continuing to make trouble until 1970, when Saddam Hussein, secretary general of the Ba’th party, engineered a political settlement with the Kurds. Over the next decade Saddam became the de facto ruler, formalizing that in 1979. He was Sunni, and continued the proven practices of the Turks and the British to maintain peace, temporarily ending the need for outside influence. Later a surge would become necessary.

Snow Globe Enigma

2007-01-02T10:35:00.000-06:00

Quick! How many ounces in a snow globe? You know, those little glass things with Santa or a manger scene, that you shake to get the snow swirling around? Hard to tell, right? Well, Homeland Security is on top of it. Here is the rule:

“Snow globes, regardless of size and amount of liquid inside, even with documentation, are prohibited in your carry-on.”

You see, not only can’t the screener tell if you are trying to sneak on more than 3 ounces, it is almost impossible to zip up a one quart plastic bag with the globe in it. This also avoids the problem of the globes with manger scenes, with no plastic reindeer or menorah, which clearly wouldn’t be kosher.

While we are on the subject of carry-on rules, it would be good to update the post of May 16 on carry on service animals: “Fear of Flying? Take Your Duck”, specifically the monkey rules, which are, of course, designed to prevent a terrorist from attempting to board with a monkey carrying prohibited items. Here is that rule:

“When the handler and the monkey go through the W.T.M.D. and the W.T.M.D. alarms, both the handler and the monkey must undergo additional screening…. [Security officers] have been trained not to touch the monkey during the screening process.… [T]he inspection process may require that the handler take off the monkey’s diaper as part of the visual inspection.”

Chabad Trees Airport Over Menorah Omission

2006-12-13T12:05:00.000-06:00

The holiday trees are back up in the Seattle-Tacoma airport. They were taken down last week when Chabad-Lubavitch, the Jewish Orthodox educational group, threatened to sue unless the airport added the menorah. The airport authorities said they didn’t want to get started with covering all the religions, and so wanted a purely secular holiday tree. The draft of the lawsuit complaint claimed irreparable damage if there was no menorah by December 15, when Hanukkah begins at sundown.

The lead plaintiff, Elazar Bogomilsky, a Chabad rabbi, stressed that he never said to take the trees down: “By no means did we want to take away any religious symbols or trees from any other culture.” Unfortunately Chabad published its email address on its web site, and if you think the Grinch got heat… Well, Rabbi Bogomilsky et al said they never intended to file the lawsuit, and joined in the request to restore the trees. So they are back, “just lights and snowflakes and holiday trees” said the airport director.

Makes you wonder if Chabad has heard that Wal-Mart is wishing people a Merry Christmas again. But anyway, the tragedy here, of course, is not being familiar with the plastic reindeer rule. See blog of April 25 etc. The airport could have stuck in a menorah as long as they added something like Frosty the snowman, or, of course, a plastic reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. It wouldn’t have hurt to carve that symbol on the tree, either.

Transgender Community Frustrated

2006-12-12T14:45:00.000-06:00

New York City’s Board of Health has withdrawn its proposal to allow people to determine their own sex on their birth certificate. This on the heels of its ground breaking actions against smoking, and lately against trans fats. The proposal was intended to reduce sex discrimination. Not the old fashioned and somewhat dated kind, against women, but rather the more cutting edge kind, against people who choose to live as members of the opposite sex, opposite of what they are physically, that is (ones who have actually been cut were not affected by this change). You don’t hear much about that, since it can be kind of hard to tell if the discrimatee is correspondently dressed, but apparently that is a problem in New York City.

The Board had anticipated and addressed the problem of people switching back and forth, Willy-Nelly, so to speak, by requiring that a doctor verify that the gender preference was permanent. It was not specified how the doctor was to make the determination, since there was no required physical change, but the thought was there. Permanent ink on the birth certificate would be one idea.

However, as usual when fiddling with peoples prejudices, there came a big fuss. Hospitals wondered how they could determine who to put in a bed next to someone who was still satisfied with their original designation. You probably did not know that nurses checked your birth certificate to determine your gender, but then you may not have been following the latest improvements in your right to privacy. And of course the penal authorities were concerned about whom to jail with whom if sex was just a matter of preference. What if someone changed their mind while incarcerated? Is the change effective immediately, or only when the change is formally entered on the birth certificate? Is there a free trial period?

“This is something we hadn’t fully thought through, frankly,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner. “What the birth certificate shows does have implications beyond just what the birth certificate shows.” The good doctor said the board thought that most jurisdictions had similar rules in deference to the transgender community. “We felt going into it that it was fairly standard,” he said, “but as we looked into it we discovered that it was implicit, not explicit.”

Transgender advocates were not placated, feeling that the city caved to people that feared interacting with men who live as women and women who live as men. “I fear that because of the public attention, they lacked the courage to give the proposed amendment the consideration it deserved” said Shannon Minter, a board member and lawyer for the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

The approach had promised to be a powerful tool in fighting discrimination of all kinds. Suppose you could change your race on your birth certificate? Better yet, your age?

Vote is in. Tendencies no sin.

2006-11-15T11:36:00.000-06:00

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, at their semiannual meeting Tuesday, passed several measures supportive of gay men and lesbians. First, they welcome gays into the Church. Second, they affirm that “homosexual inclinations”, while inherently disordered, are not sinful. Gay sexual activity is, of course, still sinful, as is most sex, including heterosexual fooling around within marriage if, as universally practiced, it involves artificial contraception. It should be noted that the Bishops, by casting the same stone at two birds, gay and ungay sex, refused to discriminate against homosexuals. The Archbishop of Kansas City said that neither type of sinner should receive Holy Communion.

The document stated that artificial contraception introduces a “false note” into a marriage. The chairman of the doctrine committee said that the committee did not consult with any gay men or lesbians about the document (at least as far as they knew), or with any married people, gay or ungay.

Neither sinner group seemed to appreciate the gesture. The president of Dignity USA, an advocacy group for gay Catholics, said “At some point the bishops have to realize that they speak in willful ignorance about what homosexuality is and about sexuality in general”. There was no challenge to the apparent over-statement. On the married front, the president of Catholics for a Free Choice noted that “almost no one is looking to the bishops for guidance on contraception, sexuality and law making.”

Shallow End of Gene Pool

2006-11-09T10:39:00.000-06:00

All this conflict between science and religion can actually be traced back to the fool things scientists are always doing. They are either busy proving something that everybody already knows, or worse, something that doesn’t make any sense. Take this latest thing, proof that Neanderthals are in the gene pool. Who doesn’t know that? The big surprise was that only 30% of people worldwide carry the gene.

The gene in question is the one that regulates brain size, called microcephalin. Now if you know your Latin, you know micro means small and cephalin means brain. The old version emerged over a million years ago, and made small brains, which, when you think about it, makes sense. Then the gene underwent a significant change about the time the modern form of human migrated into Europe, some 40,000 years ago. Some 70% of the humans got the new version, while the Neanderthals, and 30% of the humans, were stuck with the small brains. The pure line of Neanderthals went extinct over the next 10,000 years.

Now it has long been suspected that there was fooling around between the camps, so to speak. The scientists are now debating just how much there might have been. The report published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggested that matings between Neanderthals and modern humans caused the mutation in the gene, leading to bigger brains. Dr. Lahn, the senior editor of the report, cautioned that the interbreeding may not have been widespread, and could have been rare, or even a single event. See, first they demonstrate the obvious, and then make some dumb statement like that. He obviously wasn’t one of the guys in high school, when we were all out drinking beer and looking for action. Imagine if there had been a Neanderthal high school in the area.

This lack of real world experience reminds you of this business of the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. If you are into topology, you know that this is the idea that a rabbit is the same as a sphere, because it doesn’t have any holes in it. Now that had been proved earlier for rabbits in space of more than three dimensions, but it took Grisha Perelman to prove it for three-dimensional space. This was pretty exciting, and now a bunch of mathematicians who have never seen a rabbit are busy polishing up Grisha’s proof, as Grisha promptly disappeared. I think you are beginning to get the idea.

A Strategy By Any Other Name

2006-10-26T10:09:00.000-05:00

In a long awaited shift in White House strategy, Tony Snow announced Monday that POTUS will no longer use the rallying cry "Stay the Course". Tony (snow boy), recently recruited from Fox News to give the press secretary spin a new center of gravity, is beginning to take hold. The situation in Iraq clearly requires a change in slogan, since continuing to say "stay the course" gave the impression that the administration was not aware that many of its backers had tired of it. As Foxy put it "It left the wrong impression of what was going on and allowed critics to say 'Well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,' when, in fact, it's just the opposite."

The change in the slogan demonstrates that the president is not inflexible as he continues to pursue mission accomplished in Iraq. There was no announcement regarding "cut and run", which will continue to apply to the Democrats, as well as "homosexual agenda". Still, such a major marketing change this close to the election required a lot of cojones, particularly without a suitable replacement strong and virile description of our strong and virile Iraq policy. Generally you don't like to change horses’ names in the middle of the stream.

Change in Consulting Arrangements on Iraq

2006-10-20T11:52:00.000-05:00

Breaking news today. Bush says he will now consult with his generals about tactics for the war in Iraq. While it was not announced who or what he was consulting with before, based upon results it was apparently not God.

Annual Mission Accomplished Celebration Postponed

2006-10-06T10:56:00.000-05:00

The $20 million set aside in the military spending bill for a celebration of the success in Iraq and Afghanistan will be carried over until next year. As an efficiency measure, the celebration was to take place this year in the nation's capital instead of the more expensive venue of an aircraft carrier. Diverting those babies from docking pending the top gun fly in is not cheap. The Republican bill also authorized the president to proclaim the day a national holiday, but did not specify whether it had to be on a Monday.

Democrats are calling attention to the carryover, saying they were against it, and the Republicans are saying that is just an attempt to embarrass them right before the election. In truth, though, the Democrats clearly voted for it before they voted against it, as the measure passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House by overwhelming majority. This was, however, before the Nancy Pelosi rule that requires voting against all Republican proposals, so it would have required some backbone to vote against honoring our troops with a trip to Washington.

At this point, it is not clear whether the national holiday, or the rollover, for that matter, will be permanent.

A Real Page Turner

2006-10-01T16:02:00.000-05:00

Wouldn’t you know it? Now it comes out, with just 5 weeks before the election. Representative Mark Foley, co-chairman of the House caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, has been sending sexually explicit emails to teenage boys who worked as House Pages. The Republican leadership of the House was tipped off last year about at least one “over friendly” email but kept it confidential. That included Rodney Alexander, R. Louisiana, John Boehner, majority leader, Thomas Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. Their investigation failed to turn up any really nasty stuff, but ABC News did better and Friday confronted Mr. Foley, who promptly resigned. That left the House leaders to circle most of Saturday with staff and legal advisors to get the story straight and to contain any possible adverse political complications.

A statement released late Saturday made it clear that Speaker Hastert has no recollection of ever being told, but also that “he has no reason to dispute Congressman Reynolds’ recollection that he reported to him on the problem….” A joint statement by Mr. Hastert, Mr. Boehner, and the majority whip Roy Blunt called for specific rules about contacts between pages and lawmakers, and the creation of a toll-free number so pages and their parents could report untoward attentions. Other Representatives that serve on the board overseeing the page program were aware of the email problem, but refused comment because the matter had been referred to the ethics committee by a vote of the House.

Thus handled, the Republican leadership faces an even bigger challenge. The resignation of Mr. Foley leaves a Democrat challenger unopposed in the south Florida district previously considered “safe”. Who can they find pure enough to face the intense scrutiny that will obviously result? A priest maybe?

Hastert et al will get no help on this outing. ABC has posted the explicit IM messages on its own web site. Parental Discretion Advised. More keeps coming out. Stay tuned.

Eyeglass Screwdrivers But Not Swords

2006-09-25T15:04:00.000-05:00

Homeland Security has announced a liberalization of the carry on rules. You can now carry on travel size liquids, gels, and aerosals, up to 3 ounces, as long as they all fit in a quart plastic bag. You must put this quart bag in a separate tray for screening. This includes, specifically, bubble bath balls, which has been a real trouble item. They are a little more liberal on cough syrup, eye drops, and "personal lubricants", which can go to 4 ounces.

In the potential weapons catagory, you can now carry on those little screwdrivers that come with the eyeglass repair kits, toy weapons as long as they don't look real, and, thankfully, toy transformer robots. Specifically prohibited are ice picks, sabers, meat cleavers, and swords. Also banned were bows and arrows, spear guns, hatchets, billy clubs, throwing stars and nunchakus. You know how people are, you let them on with those eyeglass screwdrivers and pretty soon someone has a nunchakus or two in their brief case. Spears were not specifically covered, but may be passable if less than 7 inches long and not sharp (reasoning from the screwdriver rule).

Parents Choosing Intelligent Design Over Natural Selection

2006-09-04T15:00:00.000-05:00

The intelligent design folks are vague as to who or what the designer might be, aliens, FSM, whatever (see posts 1/3 and 1/8), but it is a sure bet they weren’t expecting it to be the parents. But there it is. More and more the parents are selecting the genetic makeup of their children, or at least selecting among the various possible offspring to avoid undesirable genes. It is called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, P.G.D., and here is how it works.

The parents elect in vitro fertilization (that is a down side right there) so that a number of fertilized eggs can be grown in a petri dish. The embryos divide for three days, 2-cell, 4-cell, 8-cell. At the 8-cell stage one cell, called a blastomere, is removed from each embryo and tested for its genetic makeup. The ones with the desired makeup are implanted or frozen for possible future use. The culls are thrown away or used for research if permitted by President Bush, i.e. no federal funding. Currently the procedure is believed to be used primarily to avoid children carrying defective genes that cause or predispose to serious disease such as Huntington’s or cancer. Experts expect that growing acceptance of genetic selection will lead to use of P.G.D to select for less serious defects and perhaps even matters of preference such as sex, height, blondes and so on. Of course, the genetic makeup for many traits, such as good wheels, is currently unknown.

Of course, the array of ethical issues is expected to grow along with the embryo screening menu. First, there is this persistent problem of the rich having more than the poor. The rich are already healthier and live longer than the poor, and P.G.D., which can cost $25,000, threatens to widen this gap. Some critics fear this is the first step toward a genetic caste system based upon genetic purity. Second, P.G.D. has been accused of being “unnatural selection”, as opposed to, presumably, “natural selection”. For the critics that also prefer I.D. over natural selection, this could become a real head scratcher. Religious confusion can be as deleterious as poverty. Not to hang on labels, it is probably just the feeling that these parents should take the crap shoot re the health of their children like the rest of us.

Then there is discrimination. Critics say P.G.D. could be used to select against homosexuals, women, people with disabilities, against all sorts of people who would have been born with perceived imperfections. And the critics that say the Plan B pill is an abortion will obviously have to attack P.G.D., since those culled bundles of blastomeres have been fertilized. The standard dodge is to freeze them “for future use” but if there are a dozen or so, it gets a little thin. Finally, there is the worry that removal of that blastomere, being 1/8 of the action at that point, might cause a mental deficiency in the resultant individual.

While some countries have responded to these concerns by outlawing the procedure, in the U.S. the technology is not regulated and the decisions are currently being left to the doctors and their patients. However, given the Terry Schiavo Congress and the recent Bush veto on stem cell research, stay tuned. There may be more people operating one blastomere short of a full deck than commonly thought. Unfortunately, having to go to Singapore for this procedure will just add to the cost and the unfair advantages of being rich over being poor.

It's The Infrastructure, Baby

2006-08-26T15:32:00.000-05:00

Plan B, the “morning after pill”, has been approved by the FDA for over the counter, well, under the counter, sales, without prescription, to persons 18 and over. Plan B has been available for many years, but the prescription requirement has effectively kept it off the market. We last visited this conundrum last November when the FDA postponed any decision because Dr. Galson, then director, decided that not enough girls under 16 had been asked whether they would be more likely to have sex if Plan B was available. Since then the struggle, involving multiple directors and many thousands of hours of top FDA management, which includes President Bush, has been over the age requirement. For the many reasons we will discuss, it turns out to be 18, which will at least keep temptation away from most high school girls.

Unfortunately the democrats injected politics into this complicated scientific issue. When Dr. Crawford was nominated last year to replace Galson as head of the FDA, Senator Clinton placed a legislative hold on the nomination until the FDA promised to make a decision by September 1 of last year. But once Crawford was in, the FDA announced further delays. Crawford resigned weeks later to spend more time with his family. Under the “fool me once” Senate rule, the nomination of his successor Dr. von Eschenbach (“Andy”) was again put on hold, this time until a decision was issued. Coincidentally the FDA has completed its study, so the hold proved to be unnecessary and will now be lifted.

Why 18? Dr. Andy says that is because that is the age used for nicotine and cold medicine. “This approach builds on well-established state and private-sector infrastructures to restrict certain products to consumers 18 and older”. This makes sense, given the established connection between sex and smoking after. But it also fits with some of the other common sense issues that have had to be resolved by the FDA.

First, there have been concerns about whether a high school girl could handle the requirement that the pill be taken within 72 hours, followed by the second pill 12 hours later. Think about this from a practical standpoint. The pill will be taken immediately, of course. This is not something you contemplate for a few days. Then, with the timing of most high school sex, given curfews and all, the teenager is going to have to get up early on the weekend, or at least before noon, to take that second pill in time.

And of course there is the original concern that some high school students might be more likely to have sex out of wedlock if Plan B was available. While the surveys got snickers and a lot of “like, what?” from the older girls, the fact that nobody went around asking grade school girls had to concern the no child left behind administration. And then there is the abortion issue. The pill proponents claim the pill will reduce abortions, while the pill poopers claim the pill is an abortion. How can we expect a 17 year old girl to take a position on that in the heat of the moment? At least an 18 year old is out of high school and can smoke if she wants to.

In a press conference President Bush announced “I support Andy’s decision”. This brave position was somewhat shadowed by the lack of a cute nickname for Andy, but that is understandable given the statement released by the Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer (Tommy Oot) of Human Life International. “Let there be no mistake about it. Today’s decision lies at the feet of President Bush and has created a lasting rift with the Catholic faithful….” The Onion also objected that the decision “undermines (the) attempt to turn America into the contraceptive-free utopia that is Africa.”

Note that boys who want to carry Plan B around in their wallet will also have to be 18 or over.

Neptune and Aquatic Biology Escape Censure

2006-08-24T18:36:00.000-05:00

Item 26.1303 — evolutionary biology, no longer appears on the list of majors eligible for the SMART federal education grant for low-income college students. There is now an empty space between line 26.1302 (marine biology) and line 26.1304 (aquatic biology). Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants, says the omission was just a clerical error.

Scientists interviewed by the NYT were concerned, but suggested that students in the field might be able to slip by listing just “biology” as their major, or one of the other biology fields that remain legal. One professor allowed that “removing that one major is not going to make the nation stupid”. An on line search of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum showed no recent additions.

People majoring in planetary astronomy are watching the list, in view of the action by leading astronomers Thursday reducing the number of God’s planets from 9 to 8. Various proposals before International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague would have added planets, bringing the number to 12, or even 40, but were voted down. In the end, Pluto was eliminated even though it was round because it had failed to “clear the neighborhood around its orbit. The item it had not cleared was Neptune, with which its orbit overlaps. It would appear that Neptune has also failed to clear its orbit (of Pluto), but no action was taken, possibly to test the waters for reaction from either God or the Bush administration, or from Poseidon for that mater.

The motion erasing Pluto from the list passed by a majority of the 300 astronomers voting, with 2200 abstentions. Two other heavenly bodies that had earlier appeared to be shoe-ins for the list, the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and the recently discovered 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto, lost out as well.

NASA said that this would not affect its New Horizons mission, which earlier this year began what had been thought to be a planetary exploration mission. It will affect My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

As yet there has been no (known) reaction to either deletion from the Bush administration.

Big Wind From Vail

2006-08-08T12:49:00.000-05:00

Environmentalists everywhere are cheering Vail Resorts’ move to 100% wind power. Not only that, but Vail is encouraging visitors to convert at home, giving out free ski passes to those who sign up. But don’t worry about running into those big poles on your way down the slope (or in your back yard if you sign up). Here is the way the NYT explains it:

“Buying wind, though, will not mean building mountain windmills. Rather [Vail will] buy the equivalent amount of their energy needs in wind power credits from a Boulder company called Renewable Choice Energy. Renewable Choice will then buy wind power from producers – mainly in Minnesota, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota - and inject the amount of power Vail uses into the national electric grid.”

Now the power Vail actually uses will still be generated locally, mostly by coal-fired generators. The good news is that individuals who sign up don’t have to change providers. They will still pay their regular electric bill. Those “switching” to wind power just pay an extra $15 a month to Renewable Choice, which will “buy credits for the amount of wind used by their household”. Now get this, that $15 gets you all you can use! It is a flat fee, regardless of how much wind you gobble up. Makes you wonder how they can do that!

What happens to your wind if you don’t sign up? Should you feel guilty? Well, yes, but not why you think. It turns out that the government requires the utilities to buy all the wind power produced in their area and put it in the national grid. Without that, your wind would be wasted, in fact, not harvested at all. Think about how wind mills work. The wind blows, you get power, it stops, you don’t. The utility (and the customers) can’t wait for an ill wind. It has to keep generating a regular supply (the old way) or your lights (and the ski lift) will only be on when the wind was blowing. So kind of like a sail boat, which has to have a backup motor, the utility has to have the ability to supply all the power demanded from its coal fired plants regardless of how much juice comes in from the wind farm. When the wind does blow, the utility simply operates its “backup” plants as less than full power, which is inefficient. The total cost to the utility, given this inefficiency and what it is required to pay the wind farmer, actually goes up when the wind blows. The utility is not one of those whom the ill wind blows good. Entrepreneurs, not utilities, build wind farms.

There are important reasons to buy one of those Vail wind packages. The Vail CEO says visitors expect high environments standards when deciding where to spend their money. “It’s a way to get closer to our guests” he says. But what about you as an individual? For most, just doing good is rewarding. Remember the old deal the Catholic Church had going, where you could buy indulgences to spring someone from purgatory early? It was wise to buy even if you didn’t have any relatives on the inside. Unspent indulgences were like wind credits, and could be used later for a besmirched loved one, or even yourself, heaven forbid. Nowadays you hear more about buying pollution credits, “carbon offsets”, and wind credits, but the principle is the same.

If you don’t believe in that sort of thing, consider the politics. Your wind credit money will ultimately encourage the building of more wind farms. How you say, considering that it goes to Renewable Choice and the utility who owns the power, having been required to purchase it? Remember what we said about the total cost to the utility going up when the wind blows? That happens only when nobody like you or Vail signs up. Buy enough wind credits and the utility starts to like wind power. At the next “not in my back yard” protest, you may find the utility CEO on the opposite side from Ted Kennedy

The Great Decider

2006-08-01T14:08:00.000-05:00

The president has the power to veto bills he doesn’t like, but the problem is, the power is not unlimited. Congress might override the veto. And what do you do when you like some parts of a bill, but not others, and you don’t have a line item veto? The solution, of course, is just to pick out the parts you have decided should be unconstitutional and tell the executive branch officials (they are, after all, the only ones with the guns) not to enforce those parts. You do this with a presidential signing statement which you sort of append to a bill when you sign it.

This actually works better than the old fashioned system, because there is nothing for Congress to override, and if they try to restrict signing statements, its unconstitutional (see?). And so far, the Supreme Court, which early on said that the constitution said that the Supreme Court had the final say on what the constitution said (the Marbury bootstrap case), hasn’t really got a handle on the signing statement issue, unless it is a line item veto, which it isn’t. You have to be careful in this area, as you remember what Andrew Jackson said about the Indian-symp court: "they have made their decision, now let them enforce it".

Furthermore, when the Supreme Court declared that they were the “decider”, they didn’t say other branches couldn’t also be the decider, they just can’t be the decider of last resort. In fact, if a majority of the Court agrees, they will defer to Congress, who decided the law was constitutional or they wouldn’t have done it. President Bush is likewise the decider, having issued over 130 signing statements containing more than 750 constitutional challenges. You would think Congress would be a little more careful.

An American Bar Association report has condemned the presidential signing statement as a threat to the separation of powers. You might wonder why there would be any objection to President Bush being a decider if it is OK for Congress and the Court to be deciders. It is really a version of the “safety in numbers theory”. As President Bush said on July 9, 2004, “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job”. We are confident that the 535 in Congress and the 9 on the Court feel the same way. The thing is, when God speaks we always feel better if there is more than one witness.

Trofim Lives!

2006-07-23T13:11:00.000-05:00

Here is a compact definition of Lysenkoism from the educational site After Darwin:

In the U.S.S.R. of the 1930s, Trofim D. Lysenko rose to considerable power by claiming that his version of genetics, rather than that of Mendel and Darwin, could assist in the development of socialist ideology. If each successive generation of citizens had to be educated in Marxist ideology, he claimed, the utopia they envisioned would take too long to be realised. Rather, Lysenko rejected Mendelian heredity as bourgeois, and interpreted Marx as stating that man and nature are improvable and perfectable. He claimed, for example, that a winter wheat could be changed to a spring variety simply by altering the temperature at which it was grown, and that, by similar means, he could change wheat into rye in one generation. Darwin¹s struggle for existence, too, was dismissed as a bourgeois tool used to justify competition-based capitalist society. His erroneous assertions dominated Soviet biology for 30 years. He was eventually ousted, in 1965, due to rampant crop failures and shortages. Lysenkoism has come to represent the devestating consequences of marrying science to ideology.

We were ignorant of this history.

Lawyers Hopefully Close to Cure for Cancer

2006-07-17T16:02:00.000-05:00

Cancer has been cured in mice, and the biological process may apply to humans. Researchers at Wake Forest University have accidentally discovered a strain of mouse that is immune to cancer. Better yet, when the immune mouse’s white cells are injected into normal mice, it cures their cancer.

The researchers were injecting mice with a lethal strain of mouse cancer cells, when one mouse did not die. So they increased the dose, and still the mouse stayed healthy. Since they failed to kill the mouse, they decided to breed it to see if the trait would be inherited. In 2003 they reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the trait was inherited by all descendants. In a second paper just published, they reported that the colony is now 2,000 mice strong, all immune, and all with the trait that when their white blood cells are injected into normal mice with tumors, the tumors disappear.

Unfortunately, none of the mice have been shared with other groups because Wake Forest has not been able to reach agreements with other institutions on protecting its intellectual property. As a result, there has been no confirmation of the results by any outside group, and due to limited resources the specific gene involved has not been identified. Humans and mice have many of the same genes, and identification of that gene in humans may indicate humans possessing it are immune from cancer. If so, and if the injection of white blood cells from immune humans dissolves tumors in cancer patients, the long sought cure is at hand.

The intellectual property issues involve the potential claims to part of the pot that will be made by other scientists, institutions and drug companies who make contributions on the way to developing the cure. It is also not clear just how big the pot might be on this one. This is not one of those pills that cost little to manufacture and can be sold for a few hundred dollars a month to maybe or maybe not extend life. Here the threat of death is immediate, so thousands of dollars a shot is likely, more if the government pays for it for poor people. With billions potentially at stake, the legal issues have so far proved insurmountable.

It is not known when the legal breakthrough is likely to come. If you suspect you may have cancer, call your lawyer immediately.

Science Evolves in Kansas

2006-07-16T15:20:00.000-05:00

Dorothy actually said "Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore”, not “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” It is important to get that right, as Dorothy was carefully stating a hypothesis that could be tested and disproved, a theory, not a fact. The fairy under the house and the immediate arrival of the good fairy were supportive evidence, but not proof. There could be fairies in Kansas. Still, a lot of people feel she was a bit too tenative.

In a democracy, these things are determined by majority rule, most commonly through our elected officials, and it has been established as a matter of fact that at that point Dorothy (and Toto) were not in Kansas. Even people who have not seen the movie are convinced. It is pretty much the same with evolution. Those voting for it feel it’s a theory, while those voting against it feel it’s a theory, while their own contrary view is an absolute fact. In those situations, the swing voters tend to go for certainty. This led the Kansas State Board of Education to revise the state’s science standards to include criticism of evolution. Given how humans have turned out, that is certainly a reasonable view.

While the Board was at it, they also revised the official definition of science, removing the words “natural explanations” from the old definition, which decreed “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us”. The old one wasn’t the greatest, but at least it wasn’t intimidating to the average high school student. The new definition has a bunch of stuff about hypothesis testing and experimentation, thus is more intimidating, but at least it leaves it open for the student who already knows the reason for everything to avoid a bunch of uncertainty. This is why we prefer to rely on elected politicians for this sort of thing. If you left it to most scientists, you would end up with some proposition like "a law of science can never be proved, it can only be used to make predictions that can be tested, and possibly proved wrong". Who wants to learn something that changes later?

Our old friend Galileo maintained that there were two equally valid ways to understand the divine, one by contemplation of the Bible, His Word, and the other by scientific contemplation of the world, God’s creation. The problem was he never really clarified what he meant by “scientific”.

No College Left Behind

2006-07-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

"How terrible it is to lose your mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is."

The panel appointed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has issued a highly critical draft report on the quality of higher education, noting a lack of accountability to show students are learning anything. It found college education to be of uneven and “dubious quality”. However, the panel chairman described the draft as a “work in process” released “to further engage the public in our national dialogue.” The deputy press secretary for the Department of Education said Ms. Spellings had not read the report, but looked forward to reviewing it when it was final.

The report said both teachers and students should be better prepared, and students should not be in college learning things they should have learned in high school. It advocated regular testing to measure student learning, particularly in math, reading and critical thinking, and the posting of the results on the internet in such a way that prospective students could see how much they would learn at that various institutions. It did not get into detail about students who are not taking math, or reading or thinking for that matter.

There was dissent. Robert Zemsky, a professor of education, said the report did not reflect his views, and “is really by the staff and the consultants and not by the commission.” However, the professor, referring to the process that produced the report, misspelled the word “bollixed”.

Florida: American History is Knowable, Not Some Construct

2006-07-03T11:52:00.000-05:00

In 1763 the Timucua, originally the most numerous native people of Florida, were exiled to Cuba and subsequently eradicated. You probably didn’t know that, as it is not in most history books. In the first place, it was prior to the Declaration of Independence, the universal principles upon which we were established. You see, to understand history, you have to deal with abstractions. Abstraction is the process of picking the important facts to get to the essentials we call reality. In a democracy, we vote, through our elected representatives, on the assortment of facts that make up reality. That is called the establishment function.

Now nobody likes someone messing with reality. Historians (hist-libs) tend to want to slip in new facts and change old ones, in the process disturbing reality. We have been discussing the challenges legislatures face in deciding what is good. Historically speaking, that requires picking the essential facts.

The Florida legislature, in its recently enacted education statute, provides that American history “shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” and as “knowable, teachable, and testable.” So there. Further, “the history of the United States shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence”. The statute goes on to enumerate these principles, including “natural law, self-evident truth, equality of all persons, limited government, popular sovereignty and inalienable rights of life, liberty and property” (how can anyone be against self-evident truth?). Of course, not all of that (like limited government and rights of property) is literally in the Declaration, but it is in the penumbra.

Most of us prefer the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution anyway. The founders actually voted for the war before they voted against it. Plus it is shorter and catchier. It is a lot easier to remember “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” than it is all that detail about what fraction of a person a slave is (I think it was 3/5. Indians were zero).

Breast Feeding Good, No Bull, Says Government

2006-07-01T10:53:00.000-05:00

As noted in the June 28 post, deciding what is good is the third rail of effective government. An important corollary of course is deciding what is bad. In fact, bad may be even more important, since a lot of people feel free to ignore what is merely good (how are you doing on your dark leafy greens?), while bad can get the class action lawyers onto you. And what about all those things that haven’t been labeled by legislatures or the courts? When you’re good you’re good, and when you’re bad you’re bad, but when you’re only half way good you’re neither good nor bad.

At long last the government is doing something about breast feeding. The two year national breast-feeding campaign by the Office of Women’s Health in the Department of Health and Human Services included TV commercials showing a pregnant woman being thrown from a mechanical bull at a bar, and noted that it was the same thing to fail to breast feed. Senator Tom Harkin has proposed requiring warning labels on infant formula, like on cigarettes. That should get mothers’ milk out of limbo.

This is a sensitive area, and you can’t count on the courts here. Sure, mothers should be liable for all that damage, which includes acute infections and chronic diseases, not to mention lower IQs and obesity, but lawyers know there is always going to be some old coot on the jury mewing about motherhood and so on. No way are they taking your suing your mother on a contingency basis.

There is some dissent. Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, says “I am concerned about the guilt that mothers will feel. It’s hard enough going back to work.” Look at poor Karen Petrone, an associate professor of history at U of Kentucky. “I desperately wanted to breast-feed”, but when her babies failed to gain weight, she had to supplement with formula. “I felt so guilty. I thought I was doing something wrong. Nobody ever told me that some women just can’t produce enough milk.” And think about all those women who don’t even have a college education.

While guilt has not yet been legislatively determined to be good or bad, it feels bad, so Senator Harkin might want to make it clear on the label that formula is bad, except when natural production is inadequate, at which point it is good. As we have pointed out, this good and bad stuff is the toughest job a public servant faces.

FEMA Cleaning Up Trailer Free Riders

2006-06-29T11:06:00.000-05:00

There is confusion in Mississippi about who should be kicked out of their flipping trailers or non flipping mobile homes. It is all about that distinction between long term shelter as opposed to short term emergency housing, which has looser eligibility requirements. See the discussion in the post of April 27. Suffice here to note that is sort of related to need and how the paperwork was completed.

In Mississippi some 40,000 families live in FEMA trailers or mobile homes. Some are the long kind and some the short. Eligibility, that is, not the trailers. Now FEMA needs to clean up by evicting the short and moving the trailers/mobile homes to storage at airfield or equivalent. FEMA got off the first 500 eviction notices (of 3,000 planned) but there was a fuss. An official said the difference between long and short had not been explained because in the agency’s experience storm victims could not comprehend such distinctions.

Anyway, in what is not a policy change but rather just a delay to dot i’s and cross t’s, FEMA is now trying to locate the 500 evicted to tell them they can stay for a while. Problem is they don’t know where they went. Hopefully a notice mailed to the last known address will suffice. And hopefully the dotting and crossing can get done soon, as you can’t have people living in those 240 square foot trailers if they don’t need to, i.e. just for the fun of it or whatever.

Correction: Third Crucial Government Function Recognized

2006-06-28T12:02:00.000-05:00

There has been a flood of complaints regarding the previous post, which stated: “Government has two functions, to fund external economies and to redistribute income.” Apparently most readers consider “deciding what is good” is a very important third function, and not just a subset of the external economy function. It can certainly be the most challenging. Everyone agrees that other people’s money should be shifted to the more deserving or entitled, or used to build things for the betterment of humanity, such as the Punxsutawney Phil weather museum, but “good” often entails a fight.

Our post of June 2 detailed the valiant struggle in the California legislature over the state wine. They rightly didn’t give a fig if the scientists thought chickpea 20/20 was a more “historic” wine. The New York lawmakers have been struggling with similar issues. Horrified to find that the state insect, the nine-spotted ladybug, was extinct in their state, they had to break from their other two functions, involving health care spending and property taxes, to switch their flag to the pink spotted ladybug. The bill’s sponsor, assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, noted “Why do we want to get something like this wrong? It would be like having a dinosaur as our state reptile.” Assemblyman Jeffery Dinowitz (no relation) sponsored the bill naming the snapping turtle the state reptile, just in case. He noted that since the state already had a state muffin, a turtle certainly made sense. And preempts the dinosaur risk. There was no change in the designation of the stripped bass (official saltwater fish), which, while pretty well fished out, was clearly not extinct.

All of this went down pretty easily compared to Fluffgate, the battle in the Massachusetts senate. State Senator Jarrett T. Barrios discovered his son’s elementary school was serving Fluffernutters. That is a sandwich made with Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter (not to be confused with smores). When the senator moved to amend a school nutrition bill to limit the number of times per week a school could serve the sandwich, defenders filed a bill to designate the Fluffernutter the state sandwich. The fight consumed the legislature for a week, after which an uneasy truce allowed a return to considering the state budget.

On a related issue, the U.S. Senate fell one vote short yesterday on sending the flag burning Constitutional amendment to the states for ratification. Hence the revised Federalist Papers will not circulate at this time. It’s a bill of rights issue anyway.

FEMA Unfairly Criticized- Mobile Homes Safe

2006-06-27T10:26:00.000-05:00

There they are, safe and sound. In all the discussion of the 200,000 flipping travel trailers, you may have been wondering what happened to all those “not in my neighborhood” mobile homes FEMA bought at $34,500 a throw. Turned out it was not near so bad as the critics contend. About half, the 10,000 stored at an airfield in Hope, Arkansas, are not, repeat, not sinking into the mud. Plus, they have been cleverly stacked so tightly, a la Pearl Harbor (remember storing our planes close together in the center of the air field so nobody could get to them?) that they are impossible to vandalize. Where would you stand?

The NYT, which is always exposing and criticizing our secret government efforts to do things, today reported that Katrina produced "one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history“ that cost taxpayers $2 billion or so. You wonder what they expect from an ill wind. That unfair assessment not only overlooks a lot of far more expensive bungles (you up on current affairs at all?) but completely misses the point of government. Government has two functions, to fund external economies and to redistribute income. External economies are those investments that benefit the public at large, or some politician, that would not be made if left to the private sector. For example, Grand Coulee Dam, IRAQ, or those two bridges in Alaska.

As for the redistribution of income, not much of it was stolen by the rich, so the $2 billion went mostly to people who could really use the money. It is all just an application of the trickle down theory. We are just not used to seeing it go directly to the quick witted poor.

Condom Condoned Confusion Causes Cardinal Contradiction

2006-06-15T12:42:00.000-05:00

The Roman Catholic Church has never condoned the use of condoms, and is the Pope Catholic? There was that riff from Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, the retired archbishop of Milan, who commented that condoms could be a “lesser evil” when used in context of marriage to prevent HIV. Then Javier Lozano Cardinal Barragan, who heads a Vatican health committee, blurted that his committed was working on a report that would “reconsider” the church’s stance.

No way, Jose. Barragan had to do a quick Galileo. He said it was just an internal study, and it hadn’t moved. Not that the Pope doesn’t see the problem. He suggested chastity. See this discussion of whether the act, when without procreative or unitive significance, is intrinsically evil or merely suboptimal.

New Orleans To Get 5,000 Garden Apartments

2006-06-15T12:02:00.000-05:00

That was quick. Federal housing officials announced yesterday that more than 5,000 public housing apartments in New Orleans will be bulldozed to make way for those nicer “garden” developments for people with a wider range of incomes. You remember the arithmetic from yesterday’s post. Pre-Katrina there were about 8,000 public housing apartments, although an unknown number were uninhabitable. About 1,000 units have been reopened, and the officials promise to release another 1,000 in the next 60 days. So the housing stock in the city will only decrease by 1,000, less what was already uninhabitable. You might argue that you should also reduce availability by the number of units shifted to higher income people, but remember, those people have to be living somewhere now, perhaps in those FEMA trailers. It was not clear how many, if any, of the new garden units will be set aside for the previous residents of the projects, but the trailers have already attracted a nicer mix of incomes and races, so it will all work out.

Previous posts have noted that the FEMA trailers roll over in the wind, but this should not be a problem if they are packed together in the density preferred by the previous project residents.

Federal officials recognize that there is a severe housing shortage now, which has caused rents to increase, but they are meeting that with a 35% increase in the value of the rent vouchers for people who want to rent apartments at market rates. As a side note, you can see how this is a lot smarter than the practice in New York City, where rent controls keep rents well below market, “market” being the rate at which supply will equal demand. In New Orleans, where landlords are in effect renting to the federal government, the supply will come when it can be built, presumably after those 5,000 new garden units are finished.

Advocates for the poor are predictably refusing to take the long view, arguing that people need some place to stay now. It does make you wonder what happened to all those 100,000 FEMA trailers, not to mention the additional ones on order. There haven’t been any high winds yet, so we don’t have to look in Kansas, Dorothy.

New Orleans Housing Projects Strive For Wobtroid

2006-06-14T12:27:00.000-05:00

It is very difficult to anticipate all of the problems you can run into when you start subsidizing things. They say that what you subsidize you get more of, but it is hard to see how that could apply to public housing. If you give people things, you clearly make them less poor, and at the borderline you should move some out of the poor category altogether, meaning less poor folks. But let’s get to the New Orleans situation.

Like many places, rent subsidies have been provided in New Orleans for people of limited legal income. For some yet unknown reason, poor people tend to shy away from the thinly populated areas of town, and to concentrate in select districts. The market often doesn’t provide enough rental properties in these areas to subsidize, so you have to build these large apartment buildings, known colloquially as “the projects” (apparently because they are government projects). And, of course, you want to build them where your prospective tenants prefer to live. Moreover, since you don’t want to give public money to the well-to-do unless there is a hurricane, you set the rents at a nominal full market rate, and then forgive some or all of it for the needy. That way those that move in that can afford it, the rich and the well off middle class, pay the full rent.

In New Orleans there was a totally unexpected result. Perhaps the nominal “full” rents were set too high, or perhaps there was a parking problem, but for some reason only poor people moved into the projects. The projects didn’t get a good balance of income levels, or even a good racial balance. As demonstrated in the June 7 post re webtroids, racial balance is highly desired by government, but tricky. As hizzoner famously explained, you have to add milk (honkies) to get chocolate milk. Even more surprising, the area around the projects developed a high crime and drug use rate. This doesn’t make sense unless you consider the absence of adequate subsidized public transportation. It seems that the wealthier type crimes are committed in offices, or at least away from home, while the poor are stuck within walking distance.

Katrina changed all that. It seems that the poor preferred areas at the lower altitudes. When all the people in the project areas were shifted to Houston, and elsewhere, the crime and drug problems were drastically reduced. Critics claimed that the crime rate in those other places went up, but in fact, the percentage increase was far less than the percentage drop in New Orleans. Even better, the cost of rent subsidies was shifted from the state and local sources to FEMA. As put by Representative Richard H. Baker, a Republican from Baton Rouge: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it. But God did."

But there is a new challenge. The various FEMA rent subsidy programs around the country are coming to an end, and people naturally want to return to the reasonable rents at their former project homes. The New Orleans officials are trying to figure out what went wrong with the original projects, and what changes need to be made to get a nice income and racial balance. “We don't need to recreate pockets of poverty," the president of the City Council, Oliver M. Thomas Jr., said. "They don't work. We want more mixed-income, working communities." So far officials have reopened less than 1,000 of the 8,000 public housing units, even though a lot of them have minimal or no damage. Unfortunately, the previous tenants are climbing the razor wire fences officials have erected to obtain time for study, and moving back in. Since this is against the law, right off you have a crime problem that you didn’t even have before.

If the officials can maintain the status quo, that is, the current status quo, not the status quo ante, the answer seems to be to upgrade the projects so the well to do will move in, keeping the percentage of prior folks to maybe 15 or 20 percent. According to the NYT, the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which took control of the bankrupt local housing authority years ago, says it is continuing to assess the storm damage to the buildings. "I wish I could say everything's great, come on home," an assistant secretary, Orlando J. Cabrera, said in an interview. "But it's not great. We've got entire parts of the city that have very few services, that have questionable ability in terms of infrastructure. We have to ask the hard question: 'What would these folks do? Can we put people in there?” Mr. Cabrera said considerable federal money was available to allow private builders to redevelop public housing in such situations. The Housing Authority has begun to apply for those funds.

There has been some success. The St. Thomas Project, redeveloped and renamed “River Garden” has a much nicer balance, clearly attaining a racial and income wobtroid. “We find it has worked out, and we’re looking into doing it at a lot of the other sites” said Adonis Expose, a spokesman for the Housing Authority. To reach this new balance a few of the former tenants were invited back to a really improved situation.

Now if they can just get some time to redevelop the rest of the properties. You know what the razor wire people say: "Good fences make good neighbors."

Bush Opts For Gay Marriage

2006-06-09T11:50:00.000-05:00

You have to hand it to President Bush on this gay marriage thing. This is one of the most difficult political calculations to come down the pike. The upcoming election looks tough, and the Dems are all going to be talking about Iraq, as if there weren’t any important moral issues in the world. So what amendment to the Constitution do you go with? Gay marriage or flag burning? And when?

Contrary to popular belief, it really isn’t too likely that your base is going to roll over and vote for Kennedy or other lib symps. What you have to worry about is how the issue will play with the great unwashed. And nobody really knows at this point. If the issue is a goody, you would want to trot it out closer to the election, but if it is a loser, best now so there is plenty of time for people to forget it and to shift to your flag burning issue. It is weaker, sure, due to the shortage of hippies, but safer than global warming, with all those polar bear huggers out there.

So, smart play, a ban on gay marriage has been trotted to the Senate first to vote on, conserving the House for later. Well, if you want to be persnickety, the Senate actually voted to shut off debate, well, actually the vote fell short of that required to shut off debate, but the expression of opinion effectively killed the issue for the year. Now it goes to the polls and focus groups to see what they think of Bush's valiant effort to save marriage. If it plays in Peoria, and if it can make it in New York, it can make it anywhere. If not, the House goes on the flag burning issue.

Hey, you say, “there is a lot more to this gay marriage thing than political calculation, what about all guys walking around holding hands?” You really need to think this through. You see all those young heterosexual couples walking around holding hands? You think any of them are married? Let’s get logical. If what you really object to is gay sex, and prefer not to mind your own business, you really ought to be in favor of gay marriage.

Well, you say, “what about all those guys that will get the spouse benefits from companies where the other guy works.” Try to keep up! Corporations are well along in phasing out most spousal benefits anyway. About the only thing supporting it is the fact that most CEO’s wives don’t work and therefore need the coverage. But if they have to they can afford to reach in their own pocket, so this is not absolute. A whole bunch of same sex sign-ups would provide a good cover for eliminating spouse benefits altogether. This is another non-issue. So what is your problem?

OK, you say, “but what about the threat to the sanctity of marriage? And to my marriage? You have to pass laws to protect the institution. Look at bigamy? We go after those Mormons who marry a bunch of people. You can’t just let people do as they please.” Again, really not an issue. You think that if you just left the Mormons alone all of a sudden all the non-Mormons would be adding a bunch of wives? How many mothers-in-law do you want? How many different places can you go on Christmas? That probably explains why the Mormons often marry sisters. But you think the supply is unlimited?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to trying things out in focus groups or polls. I just think the flag burning is a better issue, hippies or no.

The Wobtroid Imperative – Our Country’s Deepest Constitutional Conundrum

2006-06-07T18:48:00.000-05:00

Nearly everyone has at least an instinctive grasp of the centroid and its social derivative, the wobtroid, but since art history majors tend to confuse it with the vanishing point, please bear with me while I go over it again.

The centroid, nicknamed “the center of a planar lamina”, is simply that point on which a two dimensional object balances. Or you could say the center of mass. While you can find the centroid of any polygon mathematically, most of us don’t feel like looking for a pencil when we run into this in everyday life, so we just wiggle the object around until it pretty much balances. “Pretty much” is the key concept here, since unless you accidentally hit on the exact centroid, it is going to wobble some. When you reach the set of points where the wobble is tolerable, you have reached the “wobtroid”. Examples abound. Anyone who has ever hung a ceiling fan knows you cannot get it perfect. You go for the wobtroid, which is the point where your wife says “oh the hell with it”. If you shorten the string hanging down from the switch, you won’t notice it goes in little circles.

Have you noticed the little lead weights they always put on the rims when you get new tires? That is because no tire is perfectly uniform. Since you cannot find the center of mass, you change the mass. But you can only slam so many of those on, and you only have three sizes, so you have to satisfy yourself with the wobtroid, which is the point at which people won’t point and shout at the customer that his tire is wobbling. When you are dealing with social issues, no one can even agree on what the centroid is, so you have to content yourself with a wobtroid that is politically attainable, and which you can get by the courts.

As you know, for certain purposes you can’t discriminate on the basis of color, sex, age, or a couple of other things. For other purposes, of course, you can (even though most don’t at closing time). Somehow it has worked around that it is improper discrimination if you don’t have “balance”, such as in the race of children at a school. Now you see how important the wobtroid is. The issue becomes how you attain or maintain a wobtroid, thereby not discriminating, without discriminating. That is, just how do you wiggle things around? Thank goodness the Supreme Court is now going to tackle that issue. They just agreed to review the Federal appeals courts’ approval of two school district plans, one from Louisville, Kentucky and one from Seattle. Both plans offer the student a choice of schools, but take race into account in deciding whether to allow a request.

We are going to get into some detail here, but in case you are in a hurry, here is the executive summary. You can choose to transfer from your school to a different one, but if the move would worsen the racial imbalance at either school, you can’t go. If you are a black wanting to transfer to a white school you are probably OK, unless of course you are the only black in your present school, and the other school already has one. If you are a white wanting to transfer into a predominately black school, you are OK, well, legally, that is. Other permutations, however, are likely to make that string swing wildly.

Let’s add two other pieces of background. Just three years ago the Supreme Court, Justice Day writing, approved a racially conscious admission plan at the University of Michigan Law School. She said that discrimination for that purpose might be necessary for another 25 years. Maybe so, Sandy, but you needed to stay on the court for those years. Also, just 6 months ago, the Court refused to review the a plan of Lynn, Massachusetts which is essentially identical to that of Seattle and Louisville.

The “not so fast, Snow White” Louisville plan, called “managed choice” says that if a district is at least 1/3 non-white, the school must seek black enrollment of at least 15% but no more than 50%. This kindergarten white kid was refused because the target school was short blacks. The Seattle plan, called “open choice”, just uses some “tiebreakers” in deciding whether the open choice is yours or theirs. One is race. Any school that deviates more than 15% from the present balance, which for the 10 schools covered is 60% black, must consider the applicant’s race so as not to deviate further. Reread the next to the last paragraph for the translation.

You might be asking yourself, “self, why do they even have these transfer plans? Didn’t have them when I was a kid.” The idea was to help kids, presumably black, who were stuck in segregated schools in poor areas, transfer to better schools, presumably not segregated (read “more whites”). You could hardly say that only black kids could transfer, not directly anyway, not P.C. you know. Besides, that would be discriminating. There was no way to anticipate that white kids would try to take advantage in one way or another. But don’t worry, the Supreme Court will say whether or not you can discriminate in order to avoid discriminating.

'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice, 'what that means?' 'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.' 'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

Days of Wine and Poses

2006-06-02T14:28:00.000-05:00

You know how things always seem to start in California and just spread everywhere. Rainy days and Mondays, hippies, flowers in the hair, political correctness, homosexuality, stuff like that. Well, there is more trouble coming, if their legislature can have an end. Can you imagine how paralyzed governments will be across the country if we all have to pick a state wine? That is what they are trying to do now.

State Senator Carol Migden, D. San Francisco (what else?) proposed designating zinfandel the official state wine, saying it was “quintessential California”. This of course was crushed by proponents of chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, thunderbird, et al. It even knocked short dogs of MD 20/20 right out of the park. Finally a compromise passed the Senate, giving zinfandel the less auspicious title “The Historic Wine”. Opponents are now fighting in the Assembly to water that down to “A Historic Wine”. "The" is just too imposing. You know, "The Donald", "The Arnold". Advocates complain that this dilutes the dispute down to something meaningless.

So what is more important, history, the Judgment of Paris, or sales? Zinfandel buffs claim it was there first, clear back in the early days. The cabernet and chardonnay buffs point to the 1976 blind taste test Paris showdown between California and France, won by their grapes, putting California on the map. And of course the Pharisees back merlot, for which sales has edged out cabernet and are overtaking zinfandel. Individual history, of course, backs Thunderbird, which most of us grew up on at $1 a short dog. OK, and a nod to you snooty Night Train aficionados. You were willing to sport an extra $.35 to put on the dog. As if money could buy class.

Let’s just hope the scientists don’t get into this. Look what they have done to the state crop of Iraq. There has been a long running dispute about the historical primacy of grain and legumes versus figs as the earliest cultivated crop at the dawn of agriculture. The conventional wisdom favored chickpeas, but the fig folks point to what Adam and Eve threw on as proof that the fig tree grew wild in Eden, now suburban Ur. You will remember that they were allowed to eat almost everything in the garden, but had to avoid anything that might alert them to the fact that they were naked. This regulation was probably intended to protect the fig tree. Anyway, there the mater rested, until now.

Now the analysis of some old burned figs has shown they were grown over 11,000 years ago, and were cultivated, not wild. They know that because comparing the current wild fig with the domesticated fig showed that the ancient fig had sweet fruit but no fertile seeds. It is not known whether grabbing the leaves off had anything to do with this mutation. It turns out that while this sweet fig couldn’t reproduce by itself, humans could grow new trees by sticking a piece of stem in the ground. You can see why that is a lot easier than plowing for chickpeas, and led to doing the fig first. Only when you get very tired of fig newtons are you going to switch. If your alternative was chickpeas, it could take a while.

So you see, the scientists get into it, and all sides are wrong. Who knows what the result in California might be? Suppose they dig up an old bottle of chickpea 20/20? That could knock zinfandel right off its pedestal.

Invisible Hand Sets CEO Compensation

2006-05-31T11:59:00.000-05:00

You hear a lot about excessive CEO compensation, mostly from poor people like college professors and journalists. Here our examination of the dictates of nature, history and the scientific basis of compensation theory should set the record straight. You will see that the term “excessive” simply has no relevance.

First, we are talking about the CEOs of major widely held companies. This excludes CEOs that hold a significant percentage of the stock in their company, as that would be like taking a portion of your compensation from your own pocket, which really spoils it. Likewise we exclude companies with just a few shareholders, because there you have to share, i.e. if you take more out of the company, they want more also, which is obviously no good. We confine our discussion to those situations where no stockholder has any say, or really any interest, in the level of your compensation, as it is irrelevant to their decision to hold or sell. If they think your compensation is outsize, it is still basically a “fly in the soup”, i.e., distasteful, but given the size of the pool you don’t eat that much.

The basic rule of nature is that everyone takes all they can get. This applies to all animals, but with most the limit is how much they can eat or how many females they can keep track of. With humans it is different. We are way more advanced than animals and have developed so many ways to consume that we have abolished all natural limits. We can take until something stops us, some outside limit. Now let there be no misunderstanding, the poor people (and that includes the “working poor, basically everyone but CEOs, politicians, and thieves) are taking all they can get, it is just that they can’t get very much. So there is no moral issue here. We are all in the same tote. You doubt it? Let’s do a little thought experiment, like Einstein made so popular. I place two stacks of cash on the table, one of $100,000 and one of $1 million (I have reduced the amounts way down so you can grasp the concept). Given the choice, which one will you take? OK, next issue.

History is replete with examples of taking and limits. The pharos of ancient Egypt may have looked like they had no limits, being gods and all, but there is only so much you can do with golden cats and statutes. They had to turn to pyramids, only to face a new limit, how many stones you could get moved before you died. Try to exceed that, and you end up with someone else in your sarcophagus, or worse, moving in while still under construction. And we should note here that one of those babies, never mind the Great Pyramid, costs a whole lot more in current dollars than the measly 3 or 4 hundred million most CEOs take. Why do you think none of them have pyramids?

Do-gooders (the poor plus the super rich worried about facing the afterlife with no pyramid, yes, you know who you are, Bill) suggest that CEOs and the boards that dish compensation should be limited by embarrassment or public opinion. This not only ignores the basic law of nature, see above, but assumes that somehow the CEO thinks he is taking more than he is entitled to. Au Contraire! The whole take is governed by scientific measurement and the principle of sharing. This is a different kind of sharing than what we discussed about companies with few shareholders. The sharing is with outside compensation consultants and the directors, and while not major, forms the basis of the modern limit.

This is how it works. The consultants determine the range of CEO total compensation for all companies for the previous year. The midpoint of the range is the 50th percentile. The board then rates the CEO. "Average" means he should be at the 50th percentile, "excellent" at 75th and "superior" at 90th to 100th. The scale has lower values, but no board would retain a CEO they think was below average, so these are rarely used. As you would expect, given the excellence of management in the United States, in general the ratings fall in the excellent to superior slots. It is as if there is an “invisible hand” in the till. No board should be embarrassed for giving amounts which have been vetted by one of the very few top consultants (there are very few, as the dullards have been weeded out, a la Darwin). And of course, there should be no poor people on the board. Having never made any real money, they lack the perspective and experience necessary to rate a CEO.

Never forget that the CEO also labors under a heavy obligation to his class. He must take what the scientific studies award. Suppose you read all that poor people carping and decide to commit an unnatural act and only take only $1 million a year. You have just lowered the midpoint of the range. When the boys at the club and your regular foursome find out you might as well take up bowling with the working poor.

Baghdad Press Club Gets Preferential Treatment

2006-05-30T11:54:00.000-05:00

A real question of fairness has arisen concerning the way the Bush administration is treating domestic reporters. After it was disclosed earlier this year that columnist Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 to plug No Child Left Behind legislation, and two other columnists were only paid $49,000 and $21,500, respectively, to push Bush’s $300 million initiative to encourage marriage, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the administration thought children should come before marriage. In the face of this Bush immediately ordered that all U.S. reporters be taken off the government dole.

These disclosures came just a month after the discovery that an outfit called the Lincoln Group had received tens of millions of dollars to plant articles in the Iraqi press, paying Iraqi reporters for favorable treatment. This caused an outcry in Congress, but it turned out that military and White House officials didn’t know anything about it. President Bush was described as “very troubled” about it.

An investigation was ordered, and now that review, under Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk, has called caution in making such payments, fearing that the practice might somehow undermine American credibility, and even Iraqi freedom of the press. Payments are continuing, but pentagon officials do say that Secretary Rumsfeld is considering ordering a further review to clarify existing policy. This would presumably include clarification regarding payments to the Baghdad Press Club, set up by the military in 2004 to pay reporters for stories about reconstruction efforts.

General Casey, the senior American commander in Iraq, who appointed Van Buskirk to do the review, has made it clear that he favors the use of the media to influence public opinion, and plans to continue. While Van Buskirk found that hiding the source of the articles was “appropriate”, since Iraqis would not believe anything coming from the American military, he suggested that there should be some new guidelines to determine when and if attribution may occasionally be appropriate.

The Pentagon has an unreleased study commissioned from the RAND Corporation that is also critical of the military’s efforts, saying it has not been enough, and calling for a more sustained, coherent planting of paid articles. This, it says, is the “key” to changing the mindset of ordinary Iraqis. So it looks like the Baghdad Press Club will continue to get the secret payments, on a pay for performance basis, of course, but that the Washington D.C. Press Club will not, at least as far as we know. Is that fair?

Nigerian Money - Please Handle With Care

2006-05-25T11:21:00.000-05:00

Representative William J. Jefferson has been videotaped by the FBI picking up $100,000 in cash in a Nigerian deal. They later raided his home freezer and found 9 bundles of $10,000 each in frozen food containers. The FBI has already muddied the water and precipitated a constitutional crisis over the matter, and we will get to that, but first it is important to see the several points where Jeffy Man went wrong in handling the Nigerian money. Judging from my email, there are a large number of Nigerian deals available where you could end up with a big chunk of change just for helping legitimate ex rulers and princes get their funds out. These situations are not available to everyone of course, as the emails note my national reputation for honesty and business acumen, but if one falls your way, you better know how to handle all that money.

And who knows nowadays what is legal, what with the Patriot Act, Sarbanes Oxley, and so on? So while I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with taking the cash, like the Congressman said in his news conference in New Orleans, a prosecutor may choose “to view the facts in the worst possible light.” So it never hurts to preserve a little deniability. First, stay in your car and let the contact open your trunk and put the luggage in. Mouth something like “oh thanks, I am always forgetting my laptop when going through security”. When you get home, leave the brief case by the door, and attach a note, “oops, wrong case, return tomorrow”. Leave it there for a few days. If the feds have set you up, they get itchy and it won’t be long.

Now even if you fail, like Jeffy Man, to take these precautions, you can still recover if you are not grabby. If the money is going in the freezer, put ALL of the money in. That way you can say that it was already in pizza wrap when you opened the case, and just thought it was another food gift like the turkey they gave you at Christmas, and you put it in the freezer without opening it. If you don’t get all of it in, you will have to fall back on the old “ten thousand of it looked like it had thawed, and the package said not to refreeze, so I threw it out” dodge. Thin, but better than nothing.

Fortunately, even if you miss every step, all is not lost. You can count on the FBI to make a little slip here and there. For example, in applying for the search warrant, they accused him of the “attempted bribery of a Nigerian official”. Come on. In the entire history of modern Nigeria, there has never been an “attempted” bribery. Simply not credible. Then, apparently in a panic to find the other 10 Gs (they probably borrowed it from the evidence room to make the sting), 15 agents went in Saturday night and searched his Congressional office! And took stuff “in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers, the speech or debate clause of the Constitution, and the practice of the last 219 years” according to a rare joint statement by J. Dennis Hastert (R. Ill) and Nancy Pelosi (D. Ca.). Note: 1887 was when the Constitution was adopted by the convention, so this does not necessarily imply that there was hanky panky by the FBI prior to that.

Justice Department and FBI officials say they are dismayed at the tone of the joint statement, but that they can’t return any stuff because it is now in the custody of the FBI as evidence in a criminal case. They also said they only went in and took the stuff because the Congressman didn’t give it to them voluntarily. This seems like the kind of circular argument we are used to getting from this administration. They might have done better to leave the stuff by the door with a note on it.

Patent Business Primer - Openings Available

2006-05-23T17:09:00.000-05:00

You may think the purpose of a patent is to protect your exclusive right to do something. Au contraire. The real purpose is to prevent someone else from doing something. A patent is an important exception to the Hobbs Act, which defines "extortion" as "the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, ... under color of official right". For example, suppose you could threaten to shut down the Blackberry wireless email service. How much do you think Research In Motion would pay you to stay in business? A million? Half a billion? More? Did you guess $612,500,000? OK, now guess how long it would take you to make that much providing the service yourself. Long time, huh? OK, you get one more guess. What would it be worth if you could do the same thing to a bunch of other companies? Today you learn how.

There are actually two similar, but distinct, businesses built around this application of the patent law. While these could be considered "mechanisms" or "business methods" that under current patent office practice could themselves be patented, no one thought of that before I applied for such a patent, just before this posting. So don't get any ideas.

The first method is to discover something about a natural function, such as a gene or cell and how it works, and then patent it to prevent further investigation into the process. The current patent office will even give you a patent on parts of the human body, such as a stretch of chromosome. There does have to be something previously unknown about it. You can't patent a finger or toe, for example the finger known as the "bird". It is already in common use, and besides, it would be impracticable. If you tried to enforce it you can imagine the reaction.

But if you are a drug company, you find out new stuff all the time. If you just patent a particular drug, some other guy might create a different drug that does the same thing, maybe even better or, heaven forbid, cheaper. But if you patent the WAY your drug does something, like preventing a virus from attaching to a cell, you can kill off any further research that border on that, and hopefully prevent any further "cures". If the disease is killing or maiming a lot of people you can imagine what you can charge for your pill.

The problem with this first business method is that you actually have to discover something, which takes time and effort. Therefore it is not what you are looking for. The second method overcomes this problem. Not only that, but it can be done by non-scientists, lawyers for instance. First, you choose some company with a technology or method that is crucial to their business. Then you search the records for some previously issued patent that looks close enough to what they are using. "Close enough" means that you think you might be able to convince a jury of it, or, better yet, convince the company you can convince a jury of it. Then buy the patent and send your infringement letter. Note that you can do it the other way around, buy a patent and look for a company doing something similar, but it is not recommended. Suppose you find one that doesn't have any money?

This is easier than you might think. First, there is no such thing as a totally new idea, as everything builds on what has gone before. As Sir Isaac ("Zack")said “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Second, while patents are suitable for framing, usually not much comes of them. There is a lot of risk, cost, and work creating a new business around a patent, and most inventers are not business types.

It is also easier than you might think to convince a jury your way. Remember, 70% think creationism is a science, and maybe a quarter believe dinosaurs cohabited the earth with man, but reject the idea that man and the chimpanzee may have evolved from a common ancestor. Note: that is the general population. If you work at the jury selection, you should be able to improve those percentages, and you won’t have to spend as much time selecting your stalking patent.

One final note. The patent office issues a ton of patents and feels that there is really no reason to worry about validity if nothing is ever going to come of them. Their idea is that on the few where validity becomes an issue, they can check it out then. This is why so many are later nullified. But in this business, you don't have to worry about the patent office declaring your patent invalid. Patent review is slow, and if you can get your jury to rule it valid, it doesn't mater what the patent office says. The judge will take the opinion of the jury over that of the patent office any day. You saw that in the Blackberry case.

Companies in this exciting field are called Patent Holding Companies. If you are not a lawyer and would like to get into this business, there are contingent fee patent trial lawyers that will assist you in your noble venture. One blog says it this way: Those trying patent lawsuits on behalf of individuals, small companies and holding companies should expect to be attacked on the grounds that they are "pirates," that they "don't make a product," that they are "suing for money" and that their motives are somehow sinister. The fact is these attacks are unfair and, at their core, fundamentally unsound. If it's your privilege to represent a small patent owner in the face of such arguments, don't be apologetic and don't be afraid to attack these arguments head on. Most jurors understand. Enforcing patents is a noble endeavor. Doing so on behalf of those facing formidable opposition is nobler still.

Milberg Weiss Indicted - Class Action Mechanics Explained

2006-05-19T09:46:00.000-05:00

The largest class action law firm, Milberg Weiss, has been indicted. So that the action can be enjoyed by lay persons who have not yet been involved, this post will explain the key concepts supporting the country's second most profitable profession. We must analyze the class action, the contingent fee, the race to the court house, and the settlement. As you will see, each interrelated element is the way it has to be.

The class action is when a bunch of similar claims are bundled together in a single lawsuit in order to involve enough money to support sufficient legal fees. If an individual had to pursue a relatively small claim on his own, he couldn't afford a lawyer. Further, even when you bundle a bunch of claims, you still can't expect all those plaintiffs to kick in for the fees, so you have to do it on a contingent fee. That is when the lawyer only gets paid when he is successful. "Successful" usually means agreeing to a big settlement, as few of these deals actually go to court.

Now let's kill two birds with one stone here, and make full disclosure and explain the race to the court house in one swoop. The various companies I have been with have been sued numerous times by Milberg, Weiss, or their birds of a feather who got to the court house first. It was always over acquisitions or buyouts. You announce one at the end of the day and the next morning 3 or 4 lawsuits are filed claiming the transaction isn't fair. How do they do that? Well, they have to have the complaint already in their computers so that they can just fill in the names and print. That may sound funny to you, but you have to do it that way. If you waited until you could find out any of the facts, the New York lawyer down the street will have filed his lawsuit first. This matters because the lawyer that files first gets to be the lead lawyer. The lead lawyer gets almost all the fees, and the slowpokes get chicken feed.

Now we are closing in on the Milberg, Weiss problem. There is another peculiarity in the law. Lawyers can't just sue on their own. If they could it might look like they were just in it for the money, so they have to be representing some little guy who is actually the plaintiff in these affairs. And the little guy has to have a patina of being wronged. These are difficult hurdles when you have to file your suit within hours of hearing about the presumptive unfairness. And there is another, even more serious hurdle. Each wronged little guy ("WLG") doesn't end up with much. It is usually only pennies on the dollar of the qualifying shares (those are the shares you bought that you were wronged about). And worse, the law does not allow any WLG to get more than any other, even if he happens to be the named plaintiff. So how do you get a WLG to stand by to sue by already having his name in the computer? If you can figure out how to do that without kicking back some of the fees to him, you have a great future in the law.

More problems. It is also illegal for a lawyer to pay anything to a plaintiff for bring a lawsuit. Otherwise, we would give new meaning to "Katy, bar the door." Actually, that could result in a shortage of lawyers, which may be what the law was intended to prevent.

To sum up, you can't win the lead lawyer spot without a ready WLG, but the WLG can't get much from the settlement, and you aren't supposed to cut him in on the deal. This doesn't work, so it is that last parameter that has to slide a little. It turns out the named plaintiffs do get a little extra. According to the indictment, a retired California lawyer or members of his family served as plaintiff in nearly 70 suits and got about $2.4 million. Another plaintiff, a Beverly Hills ophthalmologist, served in nearly 70 suits, and got $6.5 million. It is not clear why one professional WLG got so much more than the other professional WLG. Maybe there ought to be a law.

Daisy Chain Leak By Leaking Head Proper

2006-05-18T16:55:00.000-05:00

This business of classified information seems to confuse the pundits, but it is really very simple. The government says what is secret and what is not, and they have stamps for that. In fact, you can stamp over a prior stamp, and the latest one rules. We saw in the March 13 post how the 30 secret reviewers in the secret program in the secure facility were removing documents that had been stamped "declassified" from the public shelves, restoring denied access. Now here is the key point. The reviewers could have stamped "reclassified" over the "declassified" stamp but they didn't bother. First, since these documents were determined to have been improperly declassified in the first place, they were still classified, making the stamp unnecessary. Second, they didn't have a stamp for that.

And just like the stamp for "declassified" is merely a temporary convenience, it is not necessary for a proper official to make something not secret any more. Now you can quibble about who is a proper official. Like they say: "Don't try this at home!" But someone has to be proper, and no matter where you draw the line, POTUS is "proper". In this administration anyway. So, clearly President Bush can declassify stuff, and no stamp is necessary. Some things would be hard to stamp anyway.

So, according to court papers, The Scoot testified that POTUS authorized his shotgun The Dick to authorize The Scoot to release to Judy Miller, the NYT reporter, previously secret stuff about all the WMDs Saddam had, and, to suck in the tabloids, the name of that really cute spy. Judith's notes had "Valerie Flame". That is close enough for me. But we digress.

So what is wrong with that? PODUS can not only release stuff, at which point it is no longer secret, but can also say who else can do it. Even if he had a stamp, and of course he could if he wanted to, you wouldn't know what to stamp here. As an aside, Judy was not authorized by the NYT to report on WMDs any more, due apparently to some perceived gullibility problem, but who says the NYT is running the country?

Here is the way Scott McClellan put it: "The president believes the leaking of classified information is a very serious matter. And I think that's why it's important to draw a distinction here. Declassifying information and providing it to the public, when it is in the public interest, is one thing. But leaking classified information that could compromise our national security is something that is very serious. And there is a distinction.. And thank goodness we have a White House that gets that distinction."

That works for me. And I agree with the Scottster. If you don't get it, you are guilty of "crass politics". But keep that confidential.

Summer Camp Relocated to Limit Relocations

2006-05-17T15:33:00.000-05:00

While there appears to be some criticism of the POTUS plan to deploy 6,000 National Guard soldiers to the Mexican border, a little analysis will show the brilliance of the president's speech. First, like the Bush tax cuts, you shouldn't count the whole thing if the initial commitment doesn't extend very far. While it will be 6,000 the first year, it reduces to 3000 the second year. Second, each soldier will only do 3 weeks, that is, his regular 2 week summer camp obligation, plus a week to allow for coming and going and so forth. Each participant reports to his regular post, and then gets portal to portal credit for time on the bus to the border. It looks like there will be little breaks for the border patrol in between sets, since if you try to get the next set there before removing the last set, somebody is going to go over the limit. If the Mexicans flock to these swim sessions, it will just prove the effectiveness of the plan, as it is easier if you know when they are coming.

Even more important, this is just an expansion of the current program. We have had about 400 NG troops along the border since 1989. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the NG Bureau, said the new mission would be "substantially similar" to the existing one, but noted that the size of the force would be greater. Maj. Gen. Charles G. Rodriguez, who handles the Guard in Texas, clarified the mission: "We are not in the business of detaining or apprehending or catching anybody", explaining that the Guard provides administrative support and analysis assistance to the Border Patrol. On occasion, he said, the soldiers also assist with surveillance, and "there are times when our analysts go a terrain walk with the Border Patrol."

The individual troopers are reported to view this plan a significant improvement over last year, as the 20,000 analysts in Iraq were not accorded portal to portal time.

Fear of Flying? Take Your Duck

2006-05-16T11:03:00.000-05:00

“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply... “Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly.”

If you have an emotional support animal, there is no telling where you can go. The 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act says that anyone relying upon a specially trained animal to function has to have full access, with the animal, to all businesses that serve the public. Most people thought that primarily referred to seeing eye and hearing ear dogs, but in 2003 a ruling by the Department of Transportation stated for the first time that animals aiding people with emotional problems like depression or anxiety must be given the same airplane access and privileges as the seeing and hearing ones. Moreover, the D.O.T. ruling, which some say is a little dotty, didn't say anything about special training. American Airlines says that it is still mostly dogs flying, they have also had to board monkeys, miniature horses, cats, and in one instance, an emotional support duck.

The idea is catching on. People naturally assume that if the DOT(y) says I can take my animal on a plane, well, then, I can take him anywhere. So restaurant owners are letting Fido dine, albeit nothing on a duck yet (who knows what the duck might do if he saw a relative on the plate), rather than take a chance on violating the ADA, bringing down problems far more serious than a little scooping.

And the New York courts, not to be outdone by California, are ruling that a tenant in a no-pets building can have a pet if one is needed for emotional support. The lawyers see a new specialty here, suing landlords, and one was quoted in the NYT that she has 99.9 percent success if you have a note from your doctor. If you think about it, that is ducky. You have your pet, but don't have to worry about stepping in anyone elses.

Oh, and just in case the restaurant threatens to get mulish about it, you can order off the internet a "service dog in training" patch for his service vest, and cards that explain your rights under the ADA, as well as the phone number of the Justice Department.

Secret Approval of Secret Program Kept Secret

2006-05-11T15:46:00.000-05:00

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has been investigating the conduct of certain Justice Department lawyers who approved the controversial N.S.A. domestic surveillance program. That program involved the illegal secret wiretapping of people in the United States without court warrants. That investigation has now been closed because the O.P.R. investigators were denied security clearances, preventing any progress. A Justice Department spokesman said the program was secret, and anyway, the legality has been reviewed by Justice Department lawyers.

¿No Comprende?

2006-05-10T13:21:00.000-05:00

A judge in Oakland has issued a ruling banning the California exit exam which high school seniors have to pass to graduate. He held that the standardized math and English test discriminated against students who don't speak English.

A Flash and a Fish Panned

2006-05-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

After meeting last week with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Merkster), POTUS revealed a couple of items from his inner being that led to a bunch of unjustified gnashing by the pundits. A flash and a fish, so to speak. First, he said he got a "glimpse into her soul". You will remember that, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin he said was "able to get a sense of his soul". For heaven's sake, now everyone is parsing "glimpsing" with "sensing" to see whether there has been another revision of the Bush Doctrine. What difference does it make? Glimpsing, sensing, flashing, perusing, sneaking a peek, that's not the point. For hundreds of years philosophers debated whether there was even such a thing as a soul, and here we are worried about what kind of a look it is getting.

Then came the fish. A German newspaper asked him to cite his best moment as president. He thought it over and said "I would say the best moment was when I caught a 7 ½-pound largemouth bass on my lake,". Now, according to the pundits, that isn't a big enough fish. They even called the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to find out how big a "big" fish was in Texas (15 pounds). Now if you had a 7 1/2 pound fish on very light gear, you would darn well know what a big fish was. And Bush is known for working with very light equipment.

Crony Fairy No Magic

2006-05-08T10:11:00.000-05:00

Being president is a tough job, and the worst of it can be this appointment business. In 2001 Bush eliminated the longstanding role of the American Bar Association in the evaluation of prospective federal judges, but like an old neutered tom cat they continue to come out. Although not asked, they have rated his latest appointment "not qualified". Vanessa L. Bryant would be the first black woman in New England to be a federal judge. She is a sitting state judge and teaches Sunday school. Vanny was recommended by governor Jodi Rell. It is not clear whether Vanny is a 2nd or 3rd degree crony.

If the ABA is going to continue with the unsolicited opinions, it would do well to take into consideration just how difficult it is to find minority women within the 7 degrees of crony. First, men and women don't crony easily. Jodi herself may actually be a 2nd degree crony, relating through the White House Project. Then there is the race thing, and while there is such a thing as a "token crony", there is usually a two stroke penalty.

Crony Theory Breakthrough in Political Science

2006-05-07T10:02:00.000-05:00

The noted economist Paul Krugman has introduced an analysis of one of the most vexing problems in modern political science, shaking it to its very foundations.

Presidential appointments of cronies to important government posts is a well studied and understood phenomenon. It is known that the success of the crony strategy is largely determined by the quality of the cronies. Examples are replete. John F. Kennedy dipped from two pools, Harvard, a well known crony pot, and his WWII navy buddies. The results are legendary. The Harvard cronies were of extremely high quality and made excellent government officials. The WWII buddies controlled the appointments for female companionship (governmental affairs), and if you think the Harvard appointments were top notch, you ought to see this group, where Marilyn Monroe and Judith Campbell Exner were only average quality. Conversely, while the appointments to government posts were good during the Clinton administration, Clinton attempted to handle appointments in the girl-crony category himself, with haphazard results. It has been suggested that his impeachment resulted directly from his lack of military service.

However well explored this first degree cronyism is, scientists have never been able to explain what is known as "the 7 degrees of cronyism". This is when a presidential appointment is not of a crony of the president, but of a crony of a crony (2nd degree), or of a crony of a crony of a crony (3rd degree), and so on to the 7th degree. This has received renewed attention during the Bush administration, although nothing beyond the 5th degree has yet been noted in the field.

Enter Paul Krugman ("Craggy Boy" to the president). He has posited the existence of the Crony Fairy, "who visits key agencies by the dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees." He was led to this discovery, he says, by his study of the report on responses to Hurricane Katrina ("Trinky") by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. [Here again we see the natural bifurcation of the posting and the affairs duties]. The report points to many deficiencies, but contains no hint of what may have caused the qualified people to leave and be replaced by unqualified people. Craggy concludes, reasonably, that these must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.

It is too early to gauge the impact of this new vision, but a government spokesgirl has stressed that the Crony Fairy is only a theory, not a fact. The author agrees that further study is necessary.

Wanna Go Two Out Of Three?

2006-05-03T15:58:00.000-05:00

NYT: A study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded that the lower atmosphere was in fact growing warmer and that there was "clear evidence" that it was due to human influence. That eliminated the debate about whether things were actually heating up. However, White House officials made it clear that this was just the first of 21 assessments planned to address what it has called "unresolved questions". The officials said the administration remained focused on studying the remaining 20 questions and using voluntary means to slow the growth of heat trapping emissions.

A spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality welcomed the report, and said it showed that President Bush's decision to focus $2 billion a year on climate monitoring and research was "working".

Know Your Nearest Bus Stop

2006-05-03T10:27:00.000-05:00

Mayor C. Ray Nagin announced the new New Orleans evacuation plan, 8 months in the making. No more Superdome stays. You now catch the bus to the Superdome, where other buses will swish you out of town on the freeways. He emphasized that everyone is responsible for looking out for themselves when the order comes, which presumably is knowing where your nearest bus stop is. He is allocating Amtrack trains to extracate the elderly and disabled, but it was not clear whether the feeder bus would stop at the train station first, or after the Superdome.

Everything will be a lot easier this time around, as of the 130,000 or so that didn't have cars, only about 10,000 have returned. That is still quite a crowd at the bus stop, so it will be good to start early. Even better, consider sleeping out at the bus stop. Think of it as the morning after Christmas at Walmart. There will also be some practice runs, as the 7,000 or so in unstable trailers will be ordered out for little warm up storms.

This is in the middle of the Mayor race, but C. Ray pointed out that if his opponent is elected the plan won't work. "If somebody new comes in, they would have to be Einstein to figure this out". I know what he means. Ever try to read those big city bus schedules?

Be Grateful For Baksheesh

2006-05-01T09:50:00.000-05:00

I don't understand the negative reaction to the Republican plan to send everyone $100 to pay for gas this weekend. Many parts of the world are said to run on baksheesh, so why can't we? Baksheesh comes from the Persian word بخشش , meaning a gift. One of the 5 tenants of Islam is the giving of alms to the poor. The giver is made more holy by the action. In fact, in Pakistan and the Muslim world the giver of alms often salutes the beggar for having given the opportunity to gain merit. So this should be understood as a Republican salute to the motorist, and in no way connected with the upcoming election.

The NYT reported some outraged motorists as emailing sentiments like "Do you think we are prostitutes? Do you think you can buy us?" And Rush Limbaugh suggested Congress was "treating us like we are a bunch of whores." Boy, does that show how out of touch some people are. It is $100 Rush. At least we know something you haven't been doing in the last 20 years. Our senators know what they are doing, as Dr. Frist's chief of staff pointed out: Constituents "believe government out to step up to the plate rather than loll around in the dugout" ("loll" is an intransitive verb meaning "lie" or "flop"). Baseball metaphors show the team is sincere. David Winston, a pollster who advises the Republican leadership, called the rebate an intuitive way to show the voter the Republicans were on their side. "It is like putting the American family budget ahead of oil company profits."

The Democrats are extremely critical. Senator Debbie Stabenow proposed raising it to $500. Swing for the fences, Debbie! Another weekend is coming up!

FEMA Changing Ticket to Ride

2006-04-27T15:56:00.000-05:00

I think I’m gonna be sad,
I think it’s today, yeah.
The girl that’s driving me mad
Is going away.
She’s got a ticket to ride,
She’s got a ticket to ride,
She’s got a ticket to ride,
But she don’t care.

The Beatles, being from across the water rather than under it, were not referring to FEMA. Many evacuees are upset because they think FEMA is trying to change the ticket in midstream, telling many recipients of long term housing vouchers they are going to have to pony up for utilities. It is really just a big misunderstanding.

You see, FEMA has two programs for rental housing. The voucher ride provides free housing and utilities "for up to a year", and you can get it regardless of "need" if you hail from a disaster-stricken area. The other program, the "individual assistance program", just sends you a check for your rent. So what, you say, so its just utilities? No, no, no, that program has a couple of much nastier drawbacks. First there is the matter of need. If your home wasn't damaged much, or your insurance covered all the loss, you may be ineligible for free rent. That was no problem under the voucher ride. Worse, there is that $26,200 limit on the total FEMA can provide a family. Well, the voucher ride doesn't count, but the individual assistance does. And it is really not fair, because all those trailers (100,000 so far) don't count either. FEMA officials say the trailers don't count because they are not as "comfortable" as apartments. "Say what?" you say. No, if you think about it you can see why FEMA has to be able to pick what counts and what doesn't. I mean, you really couldn't charge folks for the boat ride or the Superdome seat. So judgment is required.

Naturally, people on the voucher ride understood that they were promised a whole year. FEMA says "up to" means could be less, and the recipients, as well as landlords and state and local officials, say it means all the way up to. They have a point. If you are "up to" your neck in do-do, it isn't just waist deep.

And naturally again, there are some communication problems. Many of the cut-off letters gave as a reason category "ineligible - other". According to the NYT, one poor lady had put the insurance proceeds from her destroyed house into investments that matured at the end of her free year, and here came the cut-off letter. She would like to appeal, but the letter gave no reason, saying she was "previously notified of the reason". Pshaw! Why doesn't she go ahead and appeal and in the space for reason, just put "previously notified".

Two Prong Approach Enhances Plastic Reindeer Defense

2006-04-25T10:10:00.000-05:00

The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal concerning a school's refusal to post a kindergartener's poster because it included a picture of Jesus. The assignment was to design a poster on environment. Jesus didn't have much to say about the environment (we will check with our consultant) but he was presumably in favor of it. Anyway, that wasn't the problem. The concern was about the establishment clause of the Constitution, which prohibits government, in this case the kindergarten, from establishing any religions. The artist's parents sued the school district on the grounds that the refusal to post violated his free speech rights, and discriminated against religion. Of course we can't have kindergartens interfering with the speech of 5 year-olds, any more than we can have them establishing religions. Sure, years ago when you were in school they interfered with speech all the time, but that was before there were so many lawyers.

The refusal to post occurred over 7 years ago, so the case has been very expensive for the school district. This is all unnecessary, and the purpose of this blog is to show how a more intelligent strategy can avoid that legal expense. Pay attention, even if you aren't a school district. If you receive any government funds, even Medicare Part D, and like to put mangers in your yard at Christmas, this could save you a lot of grief.

We are talking about two prongs here, and the first prong is of course the plastic reindeer defense. This was explained in our posts of December 9 and 21. Suffice here to note that you can't "push" one religious view over another. Here the school failed to take the most elemental precaution of including posters with other religious pictures (we can assume there were plenty with "no religion"). Surely a few hints to these preschoolers would have produced some Buddha ones, and Kwanzaa would really be easy: (Hey Johnnie, wouldn't some funny marks look great on that tree?"). An actual plastic reindeer might take a little too much coaching, but surely they could manage Smokey the Bear. Close enough for government work. A few fundamentals and the school could leave all the posters up and have a good legal defense.

But "ha", you say, that doesn't save paying the lawyers. Here we come to the second prong. What you do is first put the Jesus poster up. Then when you are sued under the establishment clause, you take the poster down, causing you to be sued under the right to free speech. After that you can post or not post, considering the merit of the poster, as you have both sides covered by public spirited people with lots of money to pay lawyers. You interplead the parties, claiming you are just a stakeholder and don't know which claim is right. Ergo, you sit on the sidelines from then on. It is probably better to leave yourself in the "non-posted" position, as if you are in the "posted", you won't dare take it down 7 or 8 years later or the case might be moot.

Back to you Medicare recipients. When you put up the manger scene, include your reindeer accoutrements, but when you get sued, take it down and get some outfit like the Liberty Counsel to defend your right to free speech. As they say on their web site, they are committed to "restoring the culture one case at a time". They represent the kindergartener's parents in the suit. You can even order cool t-shirts (illustrated above) and books on their site. And in kindergarten size!

This just in from Dr. Davison, the blog's religion consultant. Our assumption above was correct: "Regarding Jesus and the environment, we know he is the Lord of creation, as John said about the Word made flesh, "and without Him not one thing was made, that was made." Jn 1:3!!! Also, in Genesis, man was given the responsibility and authority to "tend the land (the creation)." (Still in effect for Christians). So I believe that Jesus is the ultimate environmentalist!"

Evidence of Intelligent Design

2006-04-08T11:52:00.000-05:00

Tom Delay said that God told him to drop out of his re-election race. We have it second hand that the exact Words were "IF NOT NOW, WHEN?"

It turns out that there was no other reason for him to exit, as the various accusations are all blarney. This was clear in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, reported by CNN.

BLITZER: You would have still gone on that trip to Scotland and played golf at St. Andrews?

DELAY: Excuse me, but those trips were vital trips. I was working with Margaret Thatcher in building a conservative movement in England. She had asked me to come over and work with conservatives in England because they had just lost an election and they wanted my advice on how to rebuild their conservative movement. I worked very, very hard on that trip. And yes, at the end of the trip, I went and played golf. I love golf.

Kerry Disputes Jesus Christ's Approval of Several Bush Policies

2006-04-08T10:56:00.000-05:00

Speaking yesterday to a political conference organized by his friend Al Sharpton, Senator John Kerry said that he believed "deeply in my faith" and that the Koran, the Torah, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles had influenced a social conscience that he exercised in politics. "I will tell you, nowhere in there, nowhere, not in one page, not in one phrase uttered and reported by the Lord Jesus Christ, can you find anything that suggests that there is a virtue in cutting children from Medicaid and taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich," Mr. Kerry said.

Our religion consultant, Dr. Keith Davison, confirms that Kerry is correct, in that there is no mention in the Bible of Medicare or the Federal income tax, although Jesus did disapprove of money changers, who may have done some of that. Taking money that is. Dr. Davison also noted that Mr. Kerry "won't find many words of Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles!". He was unable to confirm regarding the Koran or the Torah.

Alleged Missing Link Found - Explanations Vary

2006-04-06T10:19:00.000-05:00

Scientists have unearthed fossils of a fish that walked the earth, ah, well, proto-digited it, 375 million years ago. Most of this guy looks like a giant fish, 4 to 10 feet long (individuals may vary), but his forward fins and some other parts are similar to four legged land animals that were the next step. We call the later "tetrapods", Latin for four foot, which seems appropriate. So this guy (you will see why I am calling him that in a minute, and remember, this is a gender free zone) is the missing link, at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. OK, his name is "Tiktaalik roseae", which was suggested by the local Indian chiefs. Tiktaalik is Nunavut for "large shallow water fish" and roseae means "redskin". The discovery was made in the far northern Canadian Arctic, a hop and a skip from the North Pole, so all the controversy in the U.S. about naming sport teams and cub scout troups like that obviously hasn't reached there yet. I guess it is not quite as bad as Guanlong wucaii. My post on that Wookey February 10 apparently didn't help.

Naturally some people are trying to make out that this is a rebuttal to the creationists, who have argued that the absence of such a fossil cripples evolution theory. Duane T. Gish of the Institute for Creation Research says "This alleged transitional fish will have to be evaluated carefully. He added that he still found evolution "questionable because paleontologists have yet to discover any transitional fossils between complex invertebrates and fish, and this destroys the whole evolutionary story."

POTUS and I believe that all the various views on the subject should be respected, and you should "teach the controversy", including stuff about this alleged fish. For instance, why would the Nunavits already have a single word that means all that? You don't think it was passed down for 350 million years, do you? Remember that the 5,000 year folks that rely on the "begats" suggest that all these alleged fossils were just planted there at the creation. At the moment I can't think of the "why?", but I remember it made sense when I heard it.

And then there are the views of the Flying Spaghetti Monster people (see post of January 8). I believe it is primarily an "alien" based theory, and that it has a lot to say for it. For one thing, it is more flexible, as there could be more than one visit. Picture the aliens seeing this large shallow water fish flopping around on its fins, stuck in the mud. The liberals probably would have liked to give him a leg up right then, but the conservative approach might prevail, evolving the design just enough to allow movement, but leaving him in the mud. The tetrapod business could wait for the next ship. Come to think of it, the FSM theory should satify everyone, as it has intelligent design and evolution built in.

Praying Found to Increase Performance Anxiety

2006-03-31T13:25:00.000-06:00

It has long been known that swearing and fun poking do not help with performance anxiety, and in fact may worsen the situation. A new, long awaited study has now shown that prayer may have the same effect.

The study followed 1802 patients recovering from coronary bypass surgery. They were divided into three groups, two which were prayed for, and a third which were not. Half of the prayed for set were told that people were praying for them, and half were told they might or might not receive prayers. The prayers were delivered by three congregations, who, as required by HIPAA Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information, used only the first name and first initial of the last name of patients. Notwithstanding the inevitable duplications, it was hoped that this would be sufficient for God, the angels, or the saints, as the case may be (the prayers were told to use their regular approach) to sort out the intended beneficiaries. The study cost $2.4 million, mostly privately funded. This was over and above the $2.3 million the Bush administration has spent on other prayer research since 2000.

The researchers found no differences in the incidence of complications in patients that were prayed for and those who were not. However, those that knew they were prayed for did worse, 59% having complications, compared with 51% who were told they might or might not be prayed for. This notwithstanding that the prayers all requested "healthy recovery and no complications". The authors conjectured that being aware of strangers' prayers, even on a first name basis only (and last initial), may have caused a kind of performance anxiety.

Despite the careful controls in the study, the experts said they could not overcome the largest weakness, the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends and family, and congregations around the world who regularly pray for the sick and dying. Ethical considerations prohibited requests to those people to withhold prayer, a not uncommon problem in this type of medical study. Likewise, if the early results had shown significant improvement by those receiving prayer, it would have been necessary to terminate the study and immediately institute prayer for the remainder of the patients.

Bob Barth, Director of the Office of Prayer Research, cautioned that "research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started."

The experts failed to note another, possibly more important, weakness in the study: human nature. Suppose you are in the hospital and are told hundreds of people are praying for you. Aren't you likely to relax a little, maybe skip the regular pray regimen? Cool. It's handled. But now suppose you are told maybe nobody is putting in a word for you? You get busy, right? Now what is likely to work better? And you will probably use your full name. Just in case.

FEMA - New Evacuation Environment To Fool Mother Nature

2006-03-29T11:08:00.000-06:00

This just in! FEMA will no longer use shelters like the Super Dome for people fleeing a storm. Instead, they will "create an environment for all of the individuals to leave in the face of a storm instead of staying" said Terry Ebbert, a homeland security advisor, speaking at a press conference with federal officials.

The "environment" hasn't been created yet, but they hope it will be completed prior to the beginning of the hurricane season on June 1. The expert prediction is for about 31 storm events this season having winds exceeding 111 mph. As noted in the previous post, the travel trailers tip over or otherwise blow away at winds of 60 mph, or 75 mph "or so" if properly anchored. R. David Paulison, acting director of FEMA, said that moving people out would be even more challenging this time around because now there are more than 94,000 trailers housing evacuees from the last time around. He said that those folks will face mandatory evacuation even for small tropical storms. He did assure everyone that the federal government will not make the same mistakes, and that "we have a different situation now".

The environment, when created, will include an improved public education campaign and new ways to use buses, trains and airplanes. There is one problem that was not addressed. Heretofore it has been illegal to ride in travel trailers while they are being hauled, even if hauled by the federal government. Since the administration has never been willing to ignore the law of the land, this will probably require legislation, and before June 1.

FEMA - Tipsy Travel Trailers Transit Turmoil

2006-03-21T14:41:00.000-06:00

Well, those travel trailers seemed like a great idea. As reported here February 15, FEMA had 100,000 of those travel trailers and was ordering more. The more expensive mobile homes were sinking into the mud and couldn't be released, since it is illegal to place them in a "flood prone area". One big flood shouldn't make an area "prone", but you know how cautious government is.

The travel trailers, however, are exempt from those rules, as well as zoning and building codes because they are mobile. That is the "travel" part. So we figured when the evacuation sounds people could just hitch up. And even better, when you run out of gas along the freeway, you have a place to sleep.

There was no way anyone could have anticipated that the trailers would tip over if the wind got to 60 mph. Mark Smith, spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security, thinks a properly anchored one won't tip over until winds reach 75 mph "or so", which is the threshold for evacuation anyway. With so many trailers along the coast, he expects to call for evacuations more frequently this year, that is, if they can get announcement ironed out. "The key", he said, "is going to be trying to figure out how to word it so people don't get a false sense of security, but people don't panic, either."

Who knew trailers were dangerous in severe thunderstorms, tornados, or hurricanes? Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says he too is worried, not only about the falling over, but about wind blown projectiles, as people perversely tended to put their trailers on their own property, next to their damaged houses and piles of debris. Who knew? Full disclosure: I have warned Maureen Dowd about her calling Chertoff and crew "chuckleheads", in violation of my patent on the Chuckles curve (see post of December 18).

Worse, now officials want to discourage people from trying to evacuate towing their trailers. Jesse St Amant, emergency preparedness director for Plaquemines Parish warned: "I imagine there are going to be some people who consider it, but I hope they think better of it. Trying to haul a travel trailer during an evacuation would be cumbersome and dangerous." I really don't see why, as long as you were careful not to drive over 59 miles per hour (you take the anchors off when towing). And that was no problem in the last evacuation.

Even the head chucklehead (damn, now she's got me doing it) says he has spoken with officials of FEMA to make sure the federal agencies are ready to help in an evacuation. He says "We are going to make sure we have those capabilities in place." If that doesn't mean hauling trailers, what does?

Access to Secret Documents Revoked by Government - Check Your Files

2006-03-13T11:53:00.000-06:00

Just because a document was stamped "declassified" and put on open shelves at the National Archives doesn't guarantee you haven't violated the Espionage Act if you have a copy. Not if it was really secret all the time. Likewise, it might be a good idea to check your book shelves for copies of the State Department's history series "Foreign Relations of the United States". It turns out that those books have secrets in them, like that 1948 memo regarding the CIA idea to float balloons behind the Iron Curtain to drop propaganda. That memo was reclassified in 2001 under a secret 7 year government program that wasn't discovered until this year. Well, not really "reclassified". You see, when a reviewer thinks something was improperly declassified, it really wasn't declassified, so pulling it from the shelves is not really reclassifying. The law requires removals to be reported to the Information Security Oversight Office ("ISOO"), so reporting depends upon the meaning of the word "removals". These weren't.

Due to complaints from historians, the ISOO has started an audit of the "reclassification", no, well "removal", no, well, whatsamajigger ("WSMJ") program. That was after 16 documents were reviewed, actually rereviewed, actually rereviewed again, and ISOO concluded that none should be secret. However, since the ISOO doesn't have authority to release, revise, or do whatever it is that would make the documents available again, they are still secret. The head of the ISOO said that he could "urge" something though, which seems to be the purpose of the reporting requirement if any reporting was required, which it wasn't.

The ISOO said that the program had "revoked access" (there we go!) to 9500 documents, more that 8000 since President Bush took office. That includes the 1962 George Kennan telegram containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear program, which was improperly sent in the clear. That is close enough for government work by the 30 reviewers full time on WSMJ. It is efficient too. It only cost around $1 million to create the secure facility where they work. Not bad, considering it kept the program a secret for over 7 years. Or probably it is still a secret. In any event, you couldn't have the reviewers stumbling over all those historians.

The following was copied from a document that used to be available to the public. When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty which is to be master—that's all.

Burn this.

No Access to Bush for $25,000

2006-03-10T08:40:00.000-06:00

All these Jack Abramoff and Indian tribe news stories would have you believe that you can buy a ticket to chat up the President at a photo op for 25 big ones. Pshaw. If you believe that you have something fluffy in your bonnet.

Let's look at the facts. At Jack's request, the Winneythepoo tribe gave $25,000 to a tax lobbying group just days before meeting with the President at a gathering about taxes. The Louisiana Coushattas tribe also gave that amount just before the meeting, but no photograph of their chief hobnobbing with the pres has been released. According to the chiefs, Jacky Boy never said the donation was the price of admission, just that it was a "good investment". The White House knew nothing about the donations. No surprise there.

All that shows is that JB had enough swat left over from his peripheral good deeds to get two major lobbying clients in on a photo op. If you think the 25 Gs had anything to do with it you aren't up much on human ego. If that token a sou would get you a ticket, who wouldn't sign up? I sure would. I bet my local paper would even print the picture of the Pres seeking my opinion on some weighty matter. Probably asking too much, but I wonder if that might include a nickname? Not Charley Boy. Too southern. Chasy? Coopster? Hmmm. What would it be worth for the most powerful man in the world to say: "You are doing a heck of a job with that blog, Chuckles." Priceless.

So unless you see a big line around the block waiting to see the pres, assume you can't participate that cheap. If you are hoping for a picture to show your grandchildren, you better get in bed with someone who has slept around. Preferably in the Lincoln bedroom. You can't just buy love, well, inexpensively. You should know that.

Senate Fuss Over Travelola

2006-03-08T14:46:00.000-06:00

The Senate is working on the lobbying rules, the fall out over what Jack Abramoff did to the Indians after it wasn't OK any more, but we certainly don't want to make it impossible for Senators to see their constituents, raise funds, or go to speaking engagements. That is exactly what is threatened by the move of a few dissenters like Senator Finegold, who calls senatorial travel on corporate jets "a serious abuse that should be stopped". He would make Senators who travel on corporate jets pay their share of the actual cost. Right now they reimburse the company at first class commercial rates if commercial flights are available to that destination. If there are no commercial flights they have to reimburse at charter rates, which are at least 5 times as much. The fact that no Senators fly to such places now proves how inhibiting the proposed rule would be.

Corporations recognize the legitimate travel needs of lawmakers, and not only furnish their jets, but send along their lobbyist to make sure things go right. US Tobacco, the top provider, says it has more requests for planes and representatives than it can handle. Number two, FedEx, always sends a representative, but rejects the notion that this gives their lobbyists undue access. A spokeswoman said "When a member of Congress is on a trip and has to go somewhere they do not want to talk to anybody on the airplane. They get on the airplane and they either read or sleep or they talk to their staff person. They don't want to talk to anybody from FedEx."

This was confirmed by the number one user of corporate planes, Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia. "The way you get there is less important than what you do while you're there". Mr. Chambliss said he never spoke to a lobbyist "about any particular issue" on his trips.

As usual, the proposed rule will actually create a problem where none now exists. Note that the proposal is for a Senator to reimburse the company "his share". Right now he would usually split the cost with just one company representative which the Senator doesn't really notice on the flight. But if the company has to send more representatives to reduce the Senator's share, a crowd could be harder to ignore or sleep through. Ever try to read in that three abreast seating when your seat mates want to chat?

Big Bang Opinion Under Political Review

2006-03-01T09:32:00.000-06:00

Detractors contend the Bush administration is anti-science, or not interested in science, and so on. Contraire! Science is at the center of national politics and the subject of intense interest.

Just look at some of the recent incidents. George Deutsch, a 24-year-old NASA public affairs officer, a presidential appointee, emailed scientists at the agency to append the word “theory” everywhere next to the phrase “Big Bang.” "The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.... This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

Dootsie was subsequently dismissed because he had inadvertently claimed on his resume that he had graduated in journalism from Texas A&M. That should not detract from his example of enthusiastic attention to scientific detail.

In another example of attentiveness, NASA headquarters deleted comments about the ultimate demise of the sun from a press release. An email from Erica Hupp said "NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with doom and gloom scenarios." You would think that the scientists would catch on. On the February 16 post the efforts of the administration to keep from scaring the public (and polar bears) to death about global warming were noted. Pretty soon our elected officials will be spending all their time doing science instead of reducing taxes and other stuff we need.

A lot of people thought that "teach the controversy" applied only to evolution. They forget that when the Kansas school board in 1999 removed evolution from the curriculum, they also removed the Big Bang. The issue is alive, and the administration is paying attention, as they should. How else are we going to get everyone to agree on the past, and for that matter, the future?

Arabs to Operate 6 major U.S. Ports

2006-02-20T13:59:00.000-06:00

Some members of Congress seem to think there is a security risk in letting an Arab country run our ports. This overlooks a number a mitigating factors. First, the country is the United Arab Emirates, a loose federation of seven emirs, tribal heads that run the place, not Iran or Saudi Arabia. Sure, the 9-11 hijackers entered the U.S. via the U.A.E., as did much of the funds supporting their operation, but everything in the area goes through Dubai. Only two of the hijackers were actually from there.

Second, the Emirs are not directly involved. They own Dubai Ports World, the company authorized to take over the ports, which is buying a British company, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation (P&O) to actually run the ports. And P&O already runs some U.S. operations, so you see, we already have a foreign government (British) involved in our port operations. Note that Dubai has never invaded the U.S., or burned the White House. In fact, P&O runs over 100 ports worldwide, including many in England, so the English will have their ports run by the Arabs also, clearly spreading the risk.

Even more important, the purchase of P&O by the Arabs has been approved by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). All the cabinet secretaries are represented, even Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security. If you can't trust Homeland Security, who can you trust? PLUS, and get this, the panel has done due diligence, and, as Chertoff told ABC's "This Week":
"We make sure there are assurances in place, in general, sufficient to satisfy us that the deal is appropriate from a national security standpoint".

Mr. Chertoff was naturally unable to elucidate, since the information is classified, just like the due diligence, which was secret too. So you already have a good bit of security.

The DP web site is clearly friendly, and besides detail views and virtual tours of the Jebel Ali and Port Rahid ports (above left), even has a kids zone. Unfortunately no detail maps of U.S. ports have yet been added, but with the detail you can click down to, will be very handy when they are.

McCain Pork is NOT Earmark

2006-02-18T15:42:00.000-06:00

Senator John McCain is the nemesis of pork barrel spending, particularly of the earmark kind. It is clear that his bill to direct $2 million annually for 5 years to the University of Arizona to establish a center honoring the late Chief Justice Rehnquist is not an earmark. This is because it wasn't snuck into a bill about something else at the last minute. The taxpayer should note that it is a free standing bill. Mr. McCain's general counsel, Pablo Chavez, confirms "It doesn't have the marks of an earmark.

Besides that, the bill makes it clear that "the public would be well served by a more robust body of scholarship and broader education" about federalism and judicial independence. The school could spend the $2 million a year to have forums for academic discussion, which up to now has apparently not been robust. If you think that is a lot of coffee and donuts, you just don't understand center necessities. You have to provide stipends for politicians and judicial leaders to address the issues of independence, and these forums have to be in a decent place. You want them to have to rely on lobbyists to provide all this?

Unfortunately I was unable to find a porker without an earmark, so just ignore that left ear.

Political Appointees Dowse Global Warming at NASA

2006-02-16T13:37:00.000-06:00

Top political appointees at NASA are operating well within established precedent in suppressing news on glaciers, climate, air polution, and other earth sciences. In 2004 the NASA archives show nearly 50 news releases regarding scientific findings that run contrary to administration policy. There has been much progress in 2005, as there are only about 12 examples of blasphemy. Religious authorities, in this case the Bush administration, have always had to be careful about the release of scientific findings that conflict with established beliefs or policies, particularly if the findings run the risk of upsetting the hoi polloi. Now-a-days a lot of them vote, but even in Galileo's time letting out too much information could be dangerous. Remember when Leo was insisting that the planets moved, threatening to turn everyone into atheists? See the November 14, 2005 post.

All the complaining now is just an example of how, if you let up even a little, the underlings get out of control. The new administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Michael D. Griffin, just two weeks ago called for "scientific openness" at the agency and the response? Researchers and public affairs workers are openly complaining about how political appointees have altered or suppressed news releases on scientific findings. Well, not openly exactly, as they say they are afraid of losing their jobs if they give their names.

You know what kind of stuff these scientists are trying to put out about global warming. The ice cap melting, polar bears dying, New York, Washington DC and Boston inundated by rising sea levels, all of that. When you hear things like that you can become very upset about the polar bears. That is why releases have to use the term "climate change". An email message from NASA headquarters in July prohibited the use of the term "global warming" in a presentation. "It is standard practice to use the phrase "climate change" the email said.

The administration has a strong scientific basis for its efforts: (Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. So when you get down to it, who needs all this upset?

When the authorities were discussing a possible revision with Galileo, they brought out instruments of torture, just to kind of show Leo how they worked. At least today we do not condone torture, so in some important ways there has been progress.

Not In My Flood Plain, Buddy

2006-02-15T16:05:00.000-06:00

Regular readers will remember all those hotel room extensions Howey the New York Lawyer convinced Judge Woody to grant. See the detail on the January 14 post. We figured that the hotel residents had it made until February 27 (or maybe forever), since all they had to do is call FEMA for a number, after which they were good until they got a mobile home or an apartment. Turns out that 12,000 FEMA was paying for never called, so the money for those stopped flowing to the hotels February 7. Howey went to court again, but this time the judge didn't go along. Seems like we ought to be able to tell if 12,000 families were wandering around on the street, but so far very few reports.

There is more work to do for Howey and Judge Woody, so we hope they are not discouraged. There is the mobile home vs. travel trailer issue. FEMA purchased 25,000 mobile homes that ran about $34,000 each, and about 100,000 travel trailers, a bargain at $10,000. We couldn't quite get the math straight on our February 9 post because we hadn't focused on the difference. One main difference is that FEMA policy prohibits installing mobile homes in a flood prone area. I think you can see how that could create a problem in this situation. Anyway, only 2,700 of the mobile homes have been installed, and the rest are stored, apparently in a flood plain. Richard L. Skinner ("Skinny"), the Homeland Security Inspector General, told a Senate panel that many would have to be sold as surplus, stored for some future disaster (that didn't involve flooding, one assumes), or given to some other federal agency. Asked for their value as surplus, he responded "It's certainly not going to be very high, given the way they were being stored at a spot where some are sinking into the mud. Some of the trailers that we inspected are actually warping, have lost wheels, and some have been cannibalized, parts taken out, and we don't even know where the parts are right now. So their value is going to decrease tremendously."

The situation is a lot better on the 100,000 travel trailers, of which 72,000 have been installed. Apparently you can install these in a flood prone area, because in case of a flood you just hitch up and move. The highways were a little crowded in the Katrina evacuation, so you might want to allow a few extra days, but other than that, it seems pretty clever. FEMA is ordering more travel trailers, so these will be just in time to replace the 28,000 currently in storage, that is, if Judge Woody will order those distributed to evacuees. One caution, Judge. It would be better if you didn't make people call in for a number.

Fog of Hunt Hits Press Corps

2006-02-15T10:41:00.000-06:00

The Vice President shot a lawyer and the whole press corps is up in arms about who knew what and when did they know it and why was the scoop given to the local press instead of all those reporters hunting for stories at the White House. The shooting took place just as the hunting was getting good Saturday evening. That is when the quail settle back into a field for a drink and the evening. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times got it Sunday morning but it wasn't until the Monday morning press conference that the big reporters got it. The complaining was such that the White House press office even had to put out an email Monday afternoon entitled "Response to a Question from the Briefing" that began "Q: So when did the president definitively know that the vice president had shot somebody?". This shows that Katrina has sunk in. There won't have to be Congressional hearings this time.

Then there are the jokes: "Cheney bags lawyer" and "according to the best intelligence available there were quail hidden in the bush". And opinions from Ambassador Pamela about who was at fault. All this is poppycock. To understand these events you need a grasp of history, law, custom and ballistics. As usual, this blog will pull all this together.

When the vice president shot somebody in 1804, Thomas Jefferson didn't make any announcement. Aaron Burr left town, but soon came back when there wasn't any fuss. Nor was there a bunch of discussion of who was at fault, even though it was clearly Dr. Charles D. Cooper (no relation, I think)who published the insult that led to everyone getting their back up. Likewise Hamilton, who was also armed, elected to waste his shot.

As for the law in Texas, regardless of what you hear, it is illegal to shoot lawyers. Except in self defense, of course. And you don't have to retreat first, like you do in those sissy states. Cheney will be fined $7, but that is for a related offense. Cheney did not have a quail stamp, which is a crime if it involves firearms. Sure it came up because of the lawyer shooting, but that doesn't make it the proximate cause of the fine.

The customs that govern bird hunting are also clear. If you are 30 yards behind a fellow hunter and an alleged quail flies up between you, and you see the other hunter rotate to bring his firearm to bear on you, you are supposed to yell "SHEEEEIT!!" and hit the dirt. This lawyer waited until after the shot to do both. Likewise the ballistics in this case are impressive. The VEEP was using a 28 gauge Perazzi that shoots about 250 pellets. He had that Perazzi choked down to where it threw a 12 inch pattern at 30 yards (as you can see on the lawyer). You have to be an excellent shot to hope to hit any quail with such a pattern. So on top of it all, the VEEP was for giving all a sporting chance.

Back to what did he know and when did he know it, it was revealed Tuesday that someone in the hunting party called the Situation Room shortly after the shooting, said there was an accident, but did not reveal that the VP was himself the shooter. They say they don't know who called, but I don't have the number for the Situation Room, do you? Anyway, the staff there told Andrew Card, the chief of staff, who told the president, but again no identification of the shooter. Fortunately, after Card told Karl Rove, Karl became curious about it, and called the ranch's owner, who stool pigeoned. So the president knew about 8pm Saturday. So what was he supposed to do? Call FEMA?

Discovery Casts Serious Doubt on I.D. and SPM

2006-02-11T10:43:00.000-06:00

Regular readers know the mission of this blog is to give you news analysis not available from big media, always with the Big Tent approach, accepting all beliefs and viewpoints. However, a fact has surfaced that casts serious doubt on the main tenants of both Intelligent Design and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and we are obligated to report this, even if we lose readers.

No, it is not the hippopotamus. He might not be what you would design, but he looks cute enough to other hippos, and if you think about it, that is all that matters. It comes from an article in this week's Science Times about leeches. It turns out that there is a species of leech that lives only on the rear end of a hippo. "Say what?" you say. "Gowan Withcha" you say. No, it is true. Now if you will just suspend disbelief for a moment, you will see that this is really an outstanding arrangement. The hippo is in and out of the water all the time, and no one, believe me, no one, is going to bother you. Oh sure, if you see another hippo noticing how cute your hippo is, you might want to drop off for a while, but always in life you have to know when to hold em and when to fold em.

But back to the point. This leech's living arrangement. Now the I.D folks have to ask themselves, "who would have thought of that?"

Chinese Problem - Extinction of Dinosaurs

2006-02-10T09:25:00.000-06:00

Remember how fascinating dinosaurs were when you were a kid? And the names, which we all memorized, were great. Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Ankylosaurus. And it was pretty easy, as all were sauruses, which means "lizard". The dino was the scary part, unless you were afraid of lizards, like a girl, and means "fearfully great". [Sir Richard Owen, 1842]. Oh sure, there were a few "dons" in there, and the triceratops, but you could tell that from the picture, teeth and so on. And your parents encouraged it all, because you were learning Latin and Greek, and might turn out to be a doctor, or at least a pharmacist. Even worst case, a lawyer.

And that was before dinosaurs had feathers, which is enough to make you take down the bird feeder. Yes, all this stuff that passes for "progress" isn't so great. So now Chinese and American scientists have unearthed what they call the granddaddy of all tyrannosaurs, a primitive crested dinosaur that lived 160 million years ago. There is a lot of speculation about the evolutionary track on down to T. Rex, a 100 million years later.

That is all well and good, and it is nice to see us getting along with the Chinese, but that brings us to the big problem. What do you think this fellow's name is? Granddaddisaurus? No chance. Of course Saurolophus, meaning "crested lizard" was taken already, and would have been hard anyway (lizard in the front), but "Guanlong wucaii"? Come on, how is a kid supposed to handle that? The Guanlong part means "crowned dragon", apparently what they have in China instead of lizards. The "wucaii", the species part, refers, hold on to your hat, to the rich colors of the Junggar Basin, the discovery site. Actually, the discovery was made in 2002, so it took a while to get up the courage to announce it, as they did yesterday in the journal Nature.

There is speculation as to what the crest on this fellow's head is for, which the scientists said was a thin as a tortilla and only 2 1/2 inches high. Shows how long these guys have been out in the wucaii. Everybody knows that sort of thing is to make you sexy. Apparently it should have been higher, as he is extinct, as will be dinosaur fascination if they keep going on like this.

Editors Note: For those of you that believe the world is only 5,000 years old, and that these fossils were just faked for the sake of appearances, note that you still have to have to have something to call this stuff. In fact, naming the fakes is even more important when they are planted as part of a plan rather than just randomly occuring due to some haphazard genetic thing. This wucaii business just flies in the face of planning.

Earwax Gene Key to Why Cowboys Smelled Worse than Indians

2006-02-09T15:10:00.000-06:00

Researchers have found the gene that controls whether you have wet or dry earwax. It turns out that almost all the people Europe and Africa have the wet type, while dry is universal amoung the Han Chinese and Koreans. Both types seem to keep the bugs and dust out of your ears, so you might wonder why it was obviously such a big deal, either in individual survival (selection) or in design by aliens (selection). Lo and behold, the researchers found that earwax type and armpit odor are correlated (none with snot or other disgusting secretions was noted), with the dry earwax types sweating less, so you can connect the dots. In cold climates you do better if you don't sweat, particularly because you are indoors more with other people. Those northern folks also have smaller nostrils, a complimentary trait that may be from one of the other three genes on that particular stretch of DNA.

From earlier postings (January 7) you know that Indians migrated across the Bering Stait with their domestic cats from Siberia, so it should come as no surprise that they all have dry earwax too. Igloo, wigwam, it is all pretty close quarters.

As you probably guessed, the gene is the ATP binding casette C11 gene, a good name to remember in any argument over hygiene.

Global Warming a Hoax?

2006-02-09T13:58:00.000-06:00

Michael Crichton's new book, "State of Fear", has won the prestigious annual journalism award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. The book dismisses global warming as an imaginary threat which some scientists are using to their own ends. This premise has the support of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

The communications director of the association conceded that the book was fiction, but noted that "it has the absolute ring of truth".

Followup: A new book relates that in a visit to the White House, Mr Crichton found that Mr. Bush had "avidly read" his book and was in near total agreement. The White House said this created a false impression of the President's views, noting that in several speeches he had acknowledged the need to confront global warming, while questioning the degree to which humans contribute to it.

While it will be difficult to "confront" the global warming not attributable to humans, we can help by cutting down more of those long suspected polluters, forests, and of course, there is always beano for the cows. Makes you wonder just how much polar bears, with that seal diet, are contributing to their own problem.

FEMA - Now the Trailers are Trailing.

2006-02-09T10:46:00.000-06:00

You can see why President Bush prefers to use private enterprise whereever possible. After Katrina FEMA contracted for about $2.5 billion worth of trailers, and in just 6 months over 100,000 have been built and delivered, to FEMA that is. FEMA has managed to fill about half of the 135,000 requests for a free trailer, and thinks it has about 19,000 in holding areas. That doesn't quite add up, but it is certainly close enough for government work.

The problem is that local authorities have something to say about where the trailers go. The original idea was to build FEMAvilles, filling huge tracts of vacant land with extended trailer parks. The opposition of locals and would be residents was totally unexpected. Some people seem to want to put the trailers in their yard, next to their damaged house. Full disclosure, that is where I plan to put mine, if I ever get it. But then you run into those local regulations about electricity, sewers, and so on. You can't just stick one there to sleep in you know.

So think of what would have happened if the government had simply told suppliers that it would pay for any free trailers the suppliers could give away and get installed somewhere.

If "12th Man" Illegal, What About the "Terrible Towel"?

2006-02-04T15:01:00.000-06:00

The Seahawks fly the number 12, representing the 12th man, which is apparently the whole set of fans in the stands. This is based upon the proposition that thousands of people shouting is equivalent to one man doing something. Unfortunately for audience participation, it turns out the Aggies of Texas Agricultural and Military School have a trademark on the phrase "12th Man" and have secured a temporary restraining order in a Texas court prohibiting the Seahawks from saying "12th Man".

The Aggie tradition is somewhat different from the Seattle one, to wit, thousands of people standing rather than thousands of people shouting. To them, the 12th man was E. King Gill, who was called from the stands and suited up to be ready if the team ran out of players. They didn't, so he didn't play, but everyone appreciated the gesture. Nowadays, everyone stands in case they need to be called down to suit up, and, of course, it includes the females, as required by Title IX.

The Seahawks flag, which is still flying from the Space Needle, has only the number 12 on it, and no "man" (see Title IX), and not even any "th". That didn't help them in the Texas court. But inexplicably, the Aggies have not attacked Pittsburgh's "terrible towel". Their tradition includes waving a 12th Man Towel. If you can't say "12" denuded of th and man, you sure can't wave a towel just by substituting "terrible" for "12th man". Can you?

Government Strong Defender of Privacy

2006-01-31T11:22:00.000-06:00

Anyone who questions the federal government's commitment to privacy just isn't paying attention. Just look at the way the administration is fending off Congressional requests for information regarding communications between FEMA and the White House regarding Katrina. And that extends clear to the local level. The Waco Tribune-Herald found that as of the second week of January, FEMA was paying for 119 people to stay in 47 hotel rooms in Waco, but when reporters called all of the hotels and motels in the area, all said they did not currently have any evacuees as guests. Most said they hadn't had any since right after the storm.

Susan Solomon, a FEMA spokesperson, refused to name the hotels receiving payments, saying the information could not be released for privacy reasons. See? She also said that perhaps hotel staff were simply trying to protect evacuees' privacy by saying none were at their properties. The reporters also questioned the various charities that have been helping evacuees, and no one knew of anyone who was still in a hotel. Probably just another effort to protect the evacuees' privacy. Congressman Chet Edward's office was likewise unable to get any information from FEMA about evacuees staying in local hotels.

In the old days a hotel would consider that a guest had left without checking out if the bed had not been slept in for a day or two. Today that is just a fairy tale: "Someone's [not] been sleeping in my bed and she's still there!" exclaimed Baby bear.

CWD Risk to Humans Greater Than Thought

2006-01-27T14:43:00.000-06:00

The infectious proteins that cause chronic wasting disease in cervids such as deer and elk have been isolated in the muscle of deer suffering from the condition, U.S. researchers reported Thursday. Previously federal health officials have assured hunters that they would be OK as long as they did not touch or eat an animal's brain, spinal cord, or other nervous tissue. Now that the proteins have been isolated from the haunch and leg meat ("venison"), the portions favored for eating, hunters are warned to not eat any portion of such animals, even in sausage.

The disease, generally termed transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (translation: things that that you can catch that turn your brain spongy), in deer and elk is known as chronic wasting disease, in sheep, scrapie and in cows, mad cow disease. There is no generally accepted term for the disease in humans, although hunters who consume deer or elk with the wasting disease sometimes develop sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, which may or may not be the same thing. If so, it is likely that the popular term will be mad cow, since there is already stuff that sounds like wasting disease and head scrapie in humans. Epidemiologists are now looking for signs of brain wasting among hunters, which you would think should be easy to find. Contraire, it is complicated by the fact that scientists are uncertain of the symptoms, although they seem to include an unusually intense desire to harm animals.

Research into human mad cow disease was given a huge impetous when it was contracted by the popular Boston lawyer Denny Crane. It is not known how humans contract mad cow disease, but the infectious protein appears to be somewhat different according to what type of animal has it. In deer and elk it is known as a misfolded prion, to distinguish it from the normal prion that is around. In sheep it is a misfolded wedgeon, and in humans a misfolded klingon.

Researchers are exploring the disease by inserting the properly folded protein genes of other animals, including humans, in fertilized mouse eggs. This has created mice that possess human, deer and elk folders, respectively. Later the brains of these mice are injected with venison from deer in the final stages of wasting disease. The first procedure apparently made the mice susceptible to misfolding, as every one of them contracted wasting disease (there is no separate term for the mouse version yet, but you still should under no circumstances eat them). To see if the disease can be spread by eating, the investigators next hope to feed the mice feces and urine from infected deer, which is how they think the deer spread it around. So far it has proved difficult to get the mice to eat it, even when spread on cheese. It is also tricky to get the deer to go on the cheese.

In our December 14 post we discussed the ethical questions arising from injecting mice with human stem cells. It is not known whether any of those mice have also been injected in these later experiments, or have become avid hunters.

New Vaccine a License to Have Sex

2006-01-24T09:25:00.000-06:00

The trouble with science is that it just keeps discovering things that are harmful. They have now developed a vaccine that is 100% effective against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that is the primary cause of cervical cancer. They say it should be given to all girls at the age of 12. While cervical cancer kills 3,700 women a year in the U.S. alone, what about all the teenage sex the fear of it prevents?

Fortunately the Family Research Council is leading opposition to the vaccine. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group.... Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex." . Tony Perkins, president of FRC, says it is not anti-vaccine, but that Hillary Clinton is against condom labels that truthfully point out that they are not effective against HPV. This is relevant because "only the practice of abstinence...can prevent ALL those 'serious ramifications'....

While we need to stay vigilent to protect our 12 year olds from sex, we should not be too concerned, as this vaccine is not approved by the FDA yet. This is just the situation with Plan B, the morning after pill, all over again. There the FDA refused to approve the pill because, while the company studies showed that while teens 14 and up said the pill wouldn't encourage them to have sex, there were no 12 year olds in the study. As this blog pointed out in the November 17 post, that was probably impractical. "How much would they have to pay you to hang around playgrounds asking 12 or 13 year old girls whether they would be more likely to engage in sex if the pill was available?"

The Henry Gabriel Cisneros Affair

2006-01-23T11:20:00.000-06:00

Ending his 10 year $22 million investigation, the independent counsel has filed his final report on just how much money Henry told the FBI he gave his mistress. You may remember that Hen was the popular mayor of San Antonio in the 80s, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Clinton from 1992 to 1997. It was in the FBI vetting process for that office that Hen screwed up, understating his mistress gratuities. Not that Hen didn't fess up once the cat was out of the bag, and four years into the investigation (1999) he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI, and was pardoned by President Clinton. That was the end of that, except of course that the independent counsel had to keep going and going and going, after all those other loose ends. We will get back to that.

Some avid readers of this blog complain about our policy of never expressing an opinion or drawing any conclusions from the rich loam of foibles reported. So as a special exception to our just the facts ma'am policy, here are some suggestions.

Rule 1. Do not keep a mistress. [but if you do]
Rule 2. Do not let your wife find out. [but if she does]
Rule 3. Do not let it become public knowledge so as to embarrass your wife. [but even if it does]
Rule 4. Do not give your mistress money. (This is the hard one). [but if you do]
Rule 5. Do not let your wife find out about the money. [but even if she does]
Rule 6. Do not give your mistress a lot of money. [but if you do]
Rule 7. See Rule 5.

Even if you blow rule 4, don't whistle past rule 6. Remember, you are a charming rogue, not a lobbyist, and if your wife finds out, hell hath no fury like a woman shorn.

OK, back to the independent counsel investigation. You know what they say: "Its not the crime, its the cover up." Like with all rules, there is an exception to the "don't let your wife find out" rule. While you should take all reasonable precautions, you don't want to fudge with the FBI, for obvious reasons. But even so, you ask, what took 10 years? Since some of the fun funding was by the redirection of his speaking fees, there arose an income tax question, which the IC of course had to investigate. Then the IRS pooh-poohed it, so the IC had to investigate the IRS. Then the Justice Department told him to stick to one tax year, so the IC had to investigate the Justice Department. So you progress from play money to obstruction of justice by the entire government, and it takes a while. And finally there was the legal battle over what part of the report to release to the public. That last thing really should be investigated too, but Congress let the independent counsel law expire.

As to why the FBI should ask exactly how much he gave his mistress, I think it must have been a trick question.