by the Way . . .

“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.”

"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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.’ ”

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.

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."

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.”

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

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.

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.”

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.

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!

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.

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[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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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:

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.

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: