Funmurphys: the Blog

How Times Have Changed

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story(on the front page no less) for Memorial Day that intigues me, a story of local man in WWII. What caught my attention is this passage:

"On the afternoon of May 8, Oettle's company neared the town of Borgo, near the Austrian border. A German staff car approached with a white flag fluttering on the hood.

"The German officers in the car told us the war had ended," Oettle said.

It was news to Oettle's company. For weeks, they had been traveling so fast and so far ahead of their lines that they were attacked by American fighter planes mistaking them for fleeing Germans. In fact, at 1:41 a.m. May 7, Germany had signed an unconditional surrender. The American troops, part of the 85th Infantry Division, moved cautiously forward. Excitement that the war indeed might be over mingled with dread that the next step could trigger a land mine, or that a mortar could come whistling in. Surrendering German troops were passing in droves, heading for the rear.

And then came shots from a culvert up the road. Oettle's crew buckled up inside their armor. But the infantrymen walking in the field beside them could only hit the dirt. Two officers of the German SS - Hitler's most fanatical soldiers - began picking off the American GIs. Armed with rifles equipped with scopes, the SS officers killed seven men and wounded numerous others before they were captured.

"A second lieutenant marched the SS snipers right in front of our tank destroyer," Oettle said.

"He took their pistols away. We already had their rifles. He stood them in front of a foxhole that the Germans had dug and shot both of them in their bellies. They hollered something and fell back." Oettle recalls the exact time: 4:23 p.m. May 8, 1945. The war had ended more than 37 hours earlier.

Sporadic fighting would continue for a few more days in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Croatia and other regions. Most of it involved German troops trying to force their way through Russian lines to surrender to American forces.

But that wasn't the case in Borgo.

"Those SS troops had no business killing seven of our guys when they knew the war was over. They just wanted to kill as many of us as they could," Oettle said. "That was just disgraceful. Seven men dying a day late."

Think about that. A US soldier deliberately gut shot prisoners of war -- executed in the most painful way he knew how -- and it is repeated without remark in a Memorial Day story on the front page of a left leaning newspaper.

Freakonomics

I just finished reading Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, it's a scale-up of some articles in the New York Times Magazine (available from Freakonomics.com):

• The Economist of Odd Questions: Inside the Astonishingly Curious Mind of Steven D. Levitt,
  by Stephen J. Dubner
  New York Times Magazine, Aug. 3, 2003
• What the Bagel Man Saw: An Accidental Glimpse at Human Nature,
  by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
  New York Times Magazine, June 6, 2004

The key insights behind the book:

• Understandig incentives is the key to understanding the root cause of complex systems of behavior ("modern life").
  They assume that men are rational actors in their economic activity (not necessarily moral actors, as they may cheat, collude, or mislead, but rational).
• The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
  As my Uncle John used to say "It's generally accepted, so generally accepted it may not be true at all!"
• Dramatic effects can have distant and subtle causes.
  This does not mean that the authors subscribe to the "Butterfly Effect" (meteorologist Edward Lorenz speculation that "flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas"). They believe that clear cause and effect relationships hold.
• Experts use their information advantage to serve their own ends.
• Knowing what to measure and how to measure it provides simple explanations for complicated situations.

It's a very readable book, but in the immortal words of Mies van der Rohe, "less is more" (or was it actually Robert Browning) and 99.44% of the content in the book can be found in the two articles. I would recommend several others if you are interested in the intersection of economics, systems analysis, and everyday life:

• Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman
• Moneyball by Michael Lewis
• Choice and Consequence by Thomas Schelling
• Micro Motives and Macro Behavior by Thomas Schelling
• Do Lunch or Be Lunch: The Power of Predictability in Creating Your Future by Howard Stevenson
• Bionomics by Michael Rothschild

These books offer insights and ways of looking at the world that can help orient your questions and thinking. The Freakonomics book is interesting, but doesn't really communicate a fundamental perspective or problem solving paradigm(s).

I Feel Safer

First they put Martha Stewart in jail for lying to an investigator about a non-crime, and now that addled 'runaway bride' woman has been indicted for lying to police. Boy do I feel safer knowing that prosecutors go after such big criminals for lying to police about events that aren't crimes. How about we indict some people for lying about real crimes? Wouldn't that be novel.

Abortions Down Not Up

So have abortions gone up under President Bush? No, they've gone down according to FactCheck.Org a non-partisan group. Will that stop the repetition of the inaccurate claim that they've gone up? No. Does that mean that Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean are liars? No, they just used a study to make inaccurate claims.

Here Come the Judges

I guess I'm the only political junkie in America who neither knows who won or lost in the great judicial compromise of 2005 nor cares. OK, that's not entirely accurate. But as I've said before, judges have only become an issue because we have allowed judicial activism to subvert the bedrock of representative government (that's a fancy way of saying judges have become an unelected force unto themselves that make sweeping decrees based on their own personal feelings while ignoring the clear desires of the people as expressed through referendums and legislation). And while judges do from time to time uphold their important role of safeguarding the minorty or upholding unpopular but necessary principles, all too often it's just a naked power grab for their own viewpoint. So frankly to me the whole fight is over the wrong issue, who gets appoint the tyrants, and not curbing the tryant's power.

Like all agreements with no enforcement power, who wins or loses depends largely on how much each group honors the agreement, and how much real agreement there was. For instance, the agreement is filibuster only in "extreme circumstances"? So what does that mean exactly - in the case of Supreme Court nominees, or in the case of "extreme" nominees with the determination of "extreme" up to who? And what if there is a difference of opinion as to what constitutes extreme circumstances, who adjucates and enforces the agreement? The merry band of 14 senators? On balance I'd say the Republicans came out on top as they have judges in hand in return for hazy future promises. Even with the lack of spine (or ruthlessness) demonstrated repeatedly by Republican senators historically, they managed to kick the can down the road as far as a showdown the electorate would notice while getting appointees who have languished for years finally approved.

Yes, I Am A Game Geek

Greg Costikyan looks at 3-D in gaming and concludes that it's not always a good idea in gaming. I have to agree, and I'll add a caveat that he didn't: If the 3-D affects game play, then it's a good idea. If it's just there to look pretty or because it's a way to update a game without actually improving it, then it's a bad idea. And that's the trouble for both the games he cites -- Heroes of Might and Magic V and Civilization IV -- it's just there to look pretty without affecting gameplay. It's not like the games are 3-D, they just look 3-D. And that leads into another pet peeve -- I'll play an ugly but fun game, but I won't play a gorgeous but dull game. And it seems like far more time and money is spent on looks and not on gameplay. Kind of like the Spy Kids movies.

Beyond Odd

Sometimes are odder than others, and now is such a time. I open up Google news, and what do I read, right after Schroeder Seeks Early Election; Polls Predict Defeat which isn't odd, just uplifting and well deserved but does serve to set up the oddity, namely Dow, Nasdaq advance on Apple-Intel talks! That's a double entodder, a twofer of oddity, a man bites dog while veternarians cheer kind of story. First, the wonderment of Apple and Intel getting together, but to follow that up with the idea that the market rallied on the news: "Wall Street was cheered by the Apple report ... and could make the machines less expensive." I guess themoney that all those traders won't have to spend on the next Apple product is burning a stock sized hole in their pockets or something.

So after scratching my head over that, I move on to a story about Kylie Minogue having a cancerous lump removed from her breast. Nothing odd about that, but it's from a Chinese news agency, Xinhua, that runs a picture that pretty much let's you see where the lump was removed and allows you to compare the two. Breasts, that is. On the same page there's also a picture link to an article headlined "Hot: Tempting Swimsuit Girls" and the picture demonstrates for once there wasn't any bias in the headline writer. Next to that picture is another picture link with a hot tempting woman winning the Eurovision song contest. If I was at some British tabloid site I wouldn't be surprised, but this is the State Chinese news agency, you know, home of the little Mao suit and antidote to the decadent West.

So enough Google news or my mind will boggle, but guess who watched the Incredibles this weekend? That would be me and James Lileks, that's who. And it's not like the first time the James and I have been synchronized. The male fruit of the Murphy loins was not at the boyscout campout as planned but was sick at home with me. So we watched movies together, including the Incredibles which even better the second time around, and amazingly enough is really a movie more for grownups than kids. Yes, kids will enjoy it too, but I think the person who will enjoy it the most is a married parent who loves the Sean Connery James Bond movies.

But that's not the oddest thing, no the oddest thing is that somebody left a comment you only dream about: "You nailed it!!!" I usually don't get comments, and usually they point out either where I'm wrong or where I left something out, but nothing life affirming like "You nailed it!!!". Now I just have to figure out if I'm Katrina or a Wave.

The Oops Heard Round The World

As the L'Affaire Newsweek still reverberates around the world, I do have a few wonderments of my own.

For instance, how do the prisoners in Gitmo have Korans in the first place? They were provided by the US government, right? I wonder, do they provide Bibles, or Bhagavad Gitas, or even copies of Dianetics on request? And then the government issued special rules on the proper handling of said Korans, right? Rules that are purely based upon a religion, right? So where are all the screams of Theocracy at Gitmo from Phil Donohue et al? I mean if my local school district or prison (Q. what's the difference? A. prisoner's get time off for good behavior) started passing out Bibles and issueing guidelines on the proper handling of the Bible based on the idea that it is the one true scripture of God, isn't that how they'd react? I mean Hindus would be pleased with the size of the cow that a certain segment of American society would have over that.

And so what's wrong with flushing a Koran down a toilet? Personally, I'm envious of the plumbing system at Gitmo that allows a 464 page book to be flushed when at Chez funMurph I can't get normal human byproducts to flush reliably. I mean, it's not like it was the prisoner's property in the first place, if the US government can give, can't it take as well? Is there something illegal about flushing a book down a toilet? Yes, I understand that good Muslim's have a special reverence for the actual physicality of it (unlike Christians for the Bible), but as a secular society, we can't attach any special importance to a book, can we? Yes, it's an act of insensitivity, but compared to what's been confirmed about some terrible treatment of prisoners at the hands of American captors, including death, why get worked up about the treatment of a book?

So what's going on in the Muslim world that people don't seem to mind people killing other people as long as no Korans were disrespected? And with Muslims getting all scatological on the symbol of the US (which by the way isn't illegal to do, even in this country), where are those decrying the cycle of scatology? When will all this pottyism end? What are the protestors hoping to accomplish by killing and rioting over the treatment of an object besides convincing the rest of the world they're either bunch of violent loons who deserve no sympathy or that they're a bunch of big crybabies who can dish it out but can't take it.

Clarity From The Post

As regular readers (the both of you) know, I often jump on the Editorial page the of St. Louis Post Dispatch with both feet. But my hat's off to them today, they got it right:

"It is tempting to point out the Bush administration's credibility on Iraq and the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib is also suspect. It is especially tempting after the White House high-handedly told Newsweek "it would help to point . . . out" that military has procedures for respecting the Quran.

But trying to shift blame back onto the White House doesn't further the pursuit of the truth. Nothing the White House does or doesn't do absolves the media of responsibility for its errors."

Of course, they did manage to slip in a moment of cluelessness amonst the clarity:

"Journalists must face the fact that the failings of the Times, USA Today, CBS and now Newsweek have made an already skeptical public deeply suspicious of everything they read and see in the mainstream media. Many cynics say they find more truth in the unsubstantiated rantings in the blogosphere than the careful reportage on the front page of the daily newspaper. That breach of trust could prove deadly to journalism and damaging to democracy."

How much careful reportange is there on the front page of the daily newspaper anymore? That's the question, and it's increasingly being answered with very little. How much unsubstantiated rantings in the blogosphere is there? Plenty, but there is plenty on most editorial and op-ed pages too, and there seems to be more careful reportage and substantiated opinion in the blogosphere than in MSM these days.

I long for a paper I can read and trust, but I can't buy one today. The problem is simple -- they've become hollow organizations that just don't have the processes in place to deliver that kind of quality. You will always have mistakes, yes even among American troops in wartime, but what you don't always have are the systems in place to minimize and correct those mistakes. And it seems that most of the people in the business don't even realize there's a problem, let alone what it is. But at least for today the Post Editorial staff gets it.

Don't Gore My Ox

Judge Lefkow, who was the target of one murder plot and whose family was murdered by a man who had appeared in her courtroom, spoke on Capital Hill the other day. Part of her testimony was a call for Congresspeople to "publicly and persistently repudiate gratuitous attacks on the judiciary" since "Fostering disrespect for judges can only encourage those that are on the edge, or on the fringe, to exact revenge on a judge who displeases them."

I'm not going to address the content of her remarks, but the possible spin that could be put on them. I can easily see her remarks being denounced as an assault on the Constitution and/or the First Amendment - she's calling for restriction on speech after all. Just because it's voluntary wouldn't stop the spin and complaining. Don't agree? Just consider Ari Fleischer's remark about watching what you say and the hornet's nest he stirred up.

OK, so what's my point? My point is how we all filter people's words and actions through our own thoughts and feelings towards them and their associations and can react oppositely to essentially the same words or actions depending on who's doing the talking or taking the action.

Are All Links Equal?

Shelley Powers at Burningbird has been discussing >gender and racial inequalities in linking in the blogosphere and has often been met with defensiveness and rudeness for doing so. What strikes me about the discussion is how it mirrors the discussion of Affirmative Action in the US. Shelley isn't calling for quotas, but a lot of bloggers she discusses with take it that way. And they don't like it one bit. I think much of the defensiveness is just people natural dislike of even the whiff of criticism. But some of it reflects the reality that if the observation is true, then for many people the solution follows naturally from the problem - a requirement to link to more women, to in fact achieve link parity. The ironic thing is, most of this discussion is taking place amongst good liberals and progessives, and the other ironic thing is that who you link to matters far less to a blog's quality (the effect is pretty much zero) than who a business hires matters to the fortunes of the firm. But I'm struck by how much the discussion follows the lines of discussion over AA.

But that's not the full scope of Shelley's dissatisfaction - her observations on gender extends to far more than just link patters in the blogosphere, and her observations on linking are far more than just gender/race equality. I'm not always in agreement with her, but she certainly sets a thoughtful and civil tone in her discussions and her points are always worth consideration.

Full disclosure - Funmurphys links to more women than men, more whites than minorities -- at least in the case where I know the gender and race. This is not policy, this just is. When it was just an ordinary website called the Murphy Nexus, which focused much more on just family stuff, my links to and from were in fact mostly to women because they ran similar sites. Should I make more of an effort to link to more women and minorities, or should I try to make more of an effort to link to better bloggers, or should I give up the blogroll altogether? Well, I wish I had more time to do more blog exploring, and the blogroll is really there for me - I use it in my blog readings. So it's not going away, and if you think there is a blog out there I should be reading, please let me know.

Great Minds Think Alike

Wretchard at The Belmont Club looks at four seemingly unconnected events and sums up with:

"This survey of events suggests (and it just my opinion) that the real strategic danger to the cause of freedom and democracy isn't from the noisemakers of the Left but from the temptation to betray principles for tactical gain. It lies on the very same path that Galloway, Martin and Newsweek, in their cunning, have taken. The Left hitched its wagon to the worst men of the 20th and 21st century and it is dragging them into the dustbin of history. Let's go the other way."

Amen, brother Wretchard.

Michael Totten, fresh back from Lebannon, looks at just Uzbekistan and instead of lamenting missing the pro-democracy changes in Syria, calls for change in our policy in Uzbekistan quoting George Bush:

"For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy."

Amen brothers George and Michael.

Thanks brother Jim for the info.

Not the Last 'Star Wars'!

I have news for everybody else on the planet: "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" is not supposed to be the last movie in the "Star Wars" collection. There are supposed to be three more!

Yes, I know that everybody is saying this is the last "Star Wars" movie. That's even what director George Lucas is saying:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/17/star.wars.overview/index.html

But here's how I figure it. Take out your Bullfinch, and look up the great epic poems by Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. If you don't have Bullfinch or can't find it up in your attic somewhere, just look on-line instead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey

The great epics of classic literature are supposed to:
1. start in the middle of the action,
2. have someone recap the earlier events,
3. drive toward the final gripping conclusion.

Okay, well the Iliad doesn't exactly work like this, but the Odyssey does pretty well:

1. starts in the middle (Books 1-7). Imagine all this in dactylic hexameter:

Sing, oh Muse, of brave Odysseus,
Beloved of Calypso, she who keeps him in chains of love,
Whilst Penelope, at home on Ithaca, tries her best
To fend off a bajillion suitors and pay the mortgage,
etc.


2. someone recounts earlier events (Books 8-13)


So tell me, mighty but forlorn Odysseus,
How came you to this benighted shore?, quoth some literary flunky,
And why backwards do your sentences run?
I'm glad you asked that question, replied the great mariner.
Achilles and I did upon the Trojan shore leap out,
And smote with all our strength the Achaean walls,
etc.


3. the gripping conclusion (Books 14-24)


At last! cried Odysseus, and drove with his mighty bow
the arrow through five suitors' bodies at once!
Nice shot, remarked Telemachus,
Can I have my turn now?
etc.


You get the idea. I figure that George Lucas, being fully aware of the great Homeric epics, back in 1977 decided to model his great "Star Wars" epic on the poems of Homer. I swear I thought of this in 1980, when "The Empire Strikes Back" came out and we all learned that it was episode V! Why else would George Lucas just make a set of movies backwards? He didn't - of course he was emulating the great sagas of ancient Greece. "Star Wars (4)" starts the action in the middle of the tale, "The Phantom Menace (1)" recounts earlier action, and future Episodes 7-9 are supposed to pick up where "Return of the Jedi (6)" left off.

Of course, we have an obvious problem: George Lucas was 32 when he made the first "Star Wars" movie, and he is 61 years old now. From various interviews I gather that Lucas does not have three more "Star Wars" movies left in him. He also doesn't have a story, having tied things up all-too-neatly at the end of Episode 6. Drat. No, make that, Double drat!

But that little difficulty should not stop some ambitious young movie director from picking up where George Lucas is leaving off. Come on, somebody out there! Get the gleam in your eye!!! Think great thoughts! Dream fantastic dreams! Finish the greatest epic story of the 20th century! I would do it myself, but I'm still face down in meteorology graduate school.

You can do it!

For Your Consideration

Joe Carter explains why he's a reluctant Republican that makes a lot of sense. So much sense that for I don't consider myself a Republican at all, just someone who often votes for Republican candidates. I've voted for Democrats, Libertarians, Independents - in short, who I thought the best candidate was in that election. And in doing so, Joe brings up a good point about Pat Robertson, namely, Pat doesn't represent me as an evangelical. The media is constantly turning to people like Pat to represent particular groups, and typically they pick the person who best represents the caraciture they have of that group, which is why a bozo like Robertson is draped around the vangelical neck.

Dodd has two good posts - one comparing the sex life and the overall health of Democrats and Republicans and the other about the continuing misrepresentation of comments about Judge Owen by Judge Gonzales by those elite newspapers, the NYT and the WaPo.

Speaking of elite newspapers, the St. Louis Post Dispatch had a fun front page this morning, what with the old fraud Bill Moyers foaming that mouth over the right wing with statements like:"That's because the one thing they loath more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth." I call Mr. Moyers a fraud because he claims to be a journalist telling the truth but he's really just a left wing activists who lies pretending to be a journalist. He was speaking at an event here in St. Louis call the Conference for Media Reform, and seeing as how he received several standing O's according to the article, I doubt the conference will have any positive effects.

But next to that article was one where NEWSWEEK admits that, so sorry, they just don't have a shred of support for their claim that interrogators at Gitmo desecrated Korans. Somedays the Post is priceless, in ways I doubt intended.

Carnelian Down, Aquamarine to Go

This saturday was The Murphy Family 17th Anniversary, so we celebrated in style at Bristols. We had planned to go see a movie afterwards, but there wasn't much out we both wanted to see. Yes, I'd like to see Kingdom of Heaven, but my wife doesn't go for sword epics. I'd like to see Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but my wife doesn't go for screwball British comedies set in outer space. She had already seen The Interpreter with my daughter, so I nixed that one. So we settled on Fever Pitch, despite my reservations that Jimmy Fallon could ever be in a movie that was worth seeing.

But after such a fine meal, we decided to skip spending 17 bucks to see a movie we weren't really interested in and rent one we did want to see instead. So we picked out Phantom of the Opera as we both enjoy musicals. I have to say that it makes a better musical than a movie (as soon as I saw Minnie Driver, I knew it wasn't going to be as good as I hoped), but I still enjoyed it. The thing about musicals is that they rely on great music and singing, and the characters and plot are just incidental. With a movie version, the characters and plot can be explored in greater depth, but so what? A movie version of Chicago makes sense because it's really a dansical, and so while again the plot and characterization is incidental at best, you can see the dance moves so much better at the movies than on the stage. And Moulin Rouge, which either you loved or hated (I'm in the love camp), was a creature all it's own.

What's New?

Everybody is getting into the blogging act: The Annals of Improbable Research now has a blog! Certified better than anything that has Huffington in the title.

But wait, there's more: The Urban legends Reference Page has one too, only they don't call it one, the call it weird news/Daily Snopes. And in honor of Dodd, here's the skinny on the name change of Ken***y Fried Chicken to KFC: It has nothing to do with the stated reason, namely that fried was associated with unhealthy among Americans, but that the state of Ken***y trademarked the name to raise money and was going to force KFC to pay royalties for its use. No you know why I didn't use the full name of the state.

Two From Tom

The ever interesting Tom Maguire informs me that I must be Captain Archer -- or at least according to the Pew Research Center now that they've divided Americans into nine political viewpoints, one of which is:

Enterprisers are highly patriotic and strongly pro-business, oppose social welfare and overwhelmingly support an assertive foreign policy. This group is largely white, well-educated, affluent and male ­ more than three-quarters are men.

It could only be more me if they tossed in that the men were mostly middle aged, out of shape, married to a wonderful wife, volunteered with the boy scouts, and still had most of their hair.

But the esteemable Mr. Maguire, despite having a hard to spell last name (I want to make him Celtic) continues to inform, with a look at Tom Friedman's look at the problem of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, and how it isn't our fault, well, not directly anyway. I'm sure that the reflexive America bashers will pick up on how it really is our fault because we're just so darn powerful and bossy that it's our fault that China and Europe are free riding on us and shirking their responsibilities. You know what I say - polarize the armor and load the photon torpedoes cause we're taking out the garbage, with our without the Chinese and Europeans.

Only Started With A Little Kiss

Back when I spent several months in Pakistan (see the pictures here!) one couldn't help but notice the editing of TV shows -- no kissing. There's Ward heading out the front door where June waits, jump cut, and Wards walking out the door. Gone is the peck on the cheek as Ward leaves for work, or returns home, or whatever, just as long as there is no kissing. Of course, porno video tapes were a hot commodity on the black market. At the American club, any movie involving more than kissing was broken because the staff had worn it out watching the same scenes over and over. But on TV, no hanky panky of any kind, and that included kissing, probably because it would lead to dancing.

But a Pakistani movie star wants to change all that (well, the kissing part anyway) according to the Gateway Pundit. She's gone to Bollywood where she can kiss, and by the looks of the promo shots, it's no Ward-June peck on the cheek. It's as sizzling as Karachi pavement in August. She's hoping this leads to a melting of the relationship and closer ties between India and Paksitan. I can imagine that most Indian men, after seeing the movie, are melting and hoping for an equally close relationship with at least one Pakistani woman.

Snot Nosed Kid

What good are sinuses? What do they do besides collect snot and then serve it up in heaping helpings that clog other, more valuable real estate? Scientists are stumped, but we're stuck with the darn things anyway. Can you tell I'm on my third illness in as many weeks? Can you guess what it is? Sure you can.

More Mignon McLaughlin (3)

Adding to my April 25 and 28 entries are four more from "The Complete Neurotic's Notebook" by Mignon McLaughlin. This book, no longer in print, combines the epigrams from "The Neurotic's Notebook" and "The Second Neurotic's Notebook."

• Many of us who are equal to life's emergencies cannot bear it day-after-dayness.
• An old racetrack joke reminds you that the program contains all of the winner's names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
• If there is something you must do and you cannot do it, you cannot do anything else.
• What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

Standards? Ha

The ever offensive St. Louis Post Dispatch celebrated Mother's Day in style, with a picture too graphic to run in full on their own lousy website plastered on the front page. Some poor lady has horrific scars from a liver transplant, and the Post decides to run that photo on Mother's Day. Brian Noggle is made of sterner stuff than me, because he was actually able to pick the paper up and read the accompaning article about the hazards of donating organs. I figure the article is just the legal-journalistic complex laying the ground work to sue docters, hospitals, etc. over live organ donations, which is even more offensive than running a gross picture on Mother's Day.

Diplomacy?

I have to like the diplomatic style of tinpot dictatorships even as I loathe the dictatorships themselves. No "nice doggy" while you pick up a rock for them. It's mainly in your face personal invective.North Korea insulted President Bush in language considered tame in MoveOn.org circles,calling him Hitler, Jr. So what brought on this tired tirade? Why, we said that we would hold direct talks as part of 6 party talks. What would their response have been if President bush had wrapped a tie around his head, pumped up, oiled down, and slurred into the camera Little Kimmie ... I'm coming for you"?

No Wonder It's A Small Church

In the just plain wrong department file this story: A Baptist church in North Carolina kicked nine members out for voting for John Kerry. Protestant churches have a bad habit of making all kinds of stupid stuff (i.e. unbiblical) tests of faith or fellowship and this is just another. Making political affiliation a test of fellowship is wrong. I'm not a big fan of the milquetoast Jesus, nor of the political Jesus. He was neither, although some try to portray Him that way now.

Happy Mother's Day

To all you mothers out there, happy mother's day. You've made us all possible. Thanks.

In honor of the day, here's a portrait of a mother with children we hope you really like:

Money and Judges

The fight over judges seems to me like the earlier fight over money in politics. We have a similar situation where once people didn't care that much, but now they do. It seems to me that the change in attitude is caused by a change in power. As long as politics didn't matter all that much to one's daily life, there wasn't that much money involved. But as the federal government changed into a 500 lb gorilla that touched everyone's daily life, and every business, money came pouring in. And trying to stop the money flow without changing the power structure is like trying to repeal gravity.

And I see the same thing in the fight over judges. The real issue is that all of a sudden judges matter. They aren't just a bunch of boring old guys in black robes; they are running school districts, defining the meaning of is, involved in elections, ultimately mandating goodness and/or evil. Is abortion really a constitutional right? Only as long as 5 particular judges say so. Can minors and the mentally deficient be executed? That isn't a concern of the governed, nor of their representatives in the legislature, that's a decision for judges. On and on it goes. And so now the fight is on because it's something worth fighting about.

Runaway Story

I just don't get it. I didn't get the attention the story got in the first place, or all the upset now that it turns out that fortunately no foul play was involved. In case you haven't guessed, I'm talking about the runaway bride story -- Georgan woman goes out for a run, doesn't return, foul play is suspected but it turns out she was freaked out by the giant wedding and instead of eating a snickers she hopped a bus to Las Vagas. Then she went on to Albuquerque where she called the police back home and claimed to have been kidnapped. Now prosecutors in Georgia are contemplating filing charges for the false report in what is being mislabled as a hoax. They police are talking about all the effort they put in but somehow overlook it pretty much all took place before the false report. I'm just hoping this is it.

Monday Trio

Heard about Laura Bush's stand up routine at the White House Correspondent's Dinner? USA Today has a complete transcript.

Wondering about what's really happening in politics this very moment? Let Michael Barone (no relation to Ray) explain it to you.

Is old Media collapsing, or is it just going through a Gail Sheehy moment? Terry Eastland of The Weekly Standard has an essay in the Wilson Quarterly sorting it out.

No Shark Jumping Here

Tom McMahon holds off on his four-block obsession long enough to write a very funny look at how different TV Networks would handle the movie Jaws. Here's just a taste to whet your appetite:

TLC: Re-decorate your shark-fishing boat for under $1000.