March 31, 2008
Point Blank: Lee Marvin
http://www.tedstrong.com/lee-marvin-pb.shtml
http://www.tedstrong.com/lee-marvin-outre.shtml
Posted by Mike Lief at 08:20 AM
Unlikely defender of the West
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC26Aa01.html
Posted by Mike Lief at 08:19 AM
March 28, 2008
Implausible deniability
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Leaving Hollywood behind
Whatever happened to John Hughes?
Who?
The guy who wrote and directed Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and the film featuring the best performance by John Candy and Steve Martin ("Those aren't pillows!"), Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
In other words, the guy who pretty much defined the '80s for a generation of moviegoers.
The answer's here.
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Tom Lehrer: familiarity breeds contempt
Patterico spent some time the other night on YouTube, watching some 1960s-era videos of Tom Lehrer performing his satirical ditties.
I loved Lehrer when I was a kid -- still did, actually, up until fairly recently.
But, as with so many entertainers (although it's hard to think of him as one, given he's been retired for decades), familiarity breeds contempt; the more you learn about what they believe, the more difficult it becomes to set that knowledge aside so you can enjoy their act.
In Lehrer's case, his politics prove impossible for me to ignore.
'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."
[...]
He says he couldn't do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians "because I'm against everybody and I can't take a side".
[...]
"They are calling [the Space Shuttle explosion] a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They're calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn't a disaster. The disaster is that they're continuing this stupid program.
"One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon.
"I was against the manned space program then and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up or become confetti, then they've asked for it. They're volunteers, for one thing."
For all his intelligence and wit, it turns out Lehrer is a Bush-hating moonbat; a believer in moral equivalence, incapable of discerning any difference between terrorists and their victims; and someone who fails to recognize the bravery of our astronauts, notwithstanding the politics-driven shortcomings of their spacecraft.
Unfortunately, his albums just don't seem as funny, now that I know a little more about the man he's become.
Posted by Mike Lief at 06:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 24, 2008
Pepperdine prof loses his marbles
Doug Kmiec, a well-known Con-Law professor at Pepperdine University -- my alma mater -- has apparently taken leave of his senses, choosing to endorse Barack Obama for president.
As a Republican, I strongly wish to preserve traditional marriage not as a suspicion or denigration of my homosexual friends, but as recognition of the significance of the procreative family as a building block of society. As a Republican, and as a Catholic, I believe life begins at conception, and it is important for every life to be given sustenance and encouragement. As a Republican, I strongly believe that the Supreme Court of the United States must be fully dedicated to the rule of law, and to the employ of a consistent method of interpretation that keeps the Court within its limited judicial role. As a Republican, I believe problems are best resolved closest to their source and that we should never arrogate to a higher level of government that which can be more effectively and efficiently resolved below. As a Republican, and the constitutional lawyer, I believe religious freedom does not mean religious separation or mindless exclusion from the public square.
Having thus stated nearly all the reasons not to endorse Obama, Kmiec then engages in full-fledged cognitive dissonance.
In various ways, Senator Barack Obama and I may disagree on aspects of these important fundamentals, but I am convinced based upon his public pronouncements and his personal writing that on each of these questions he is not closed to understanding opposing points of view, and as best as it is humanly possible, he will respect and accommodate them.
Really?
Really?! Kmiec thinks Obama -- a politician to the left (way left) of Hillary Clinton -- will "respect and accommodate" his core conservative beliefs and values?
Kmiec says:
As a Republican, I strongly believe that the Supreme Court of the United States must be fully dedicated to the rule of law, and to the employ of a consistent method of interpretation that keeps the Court within its limited judicial role.
He can't possibly believe that Obama, with a Democratic majority in the Senate, has the slightest intention of appointing Supreme Court justices that fit that description.
Can he?
The biggest gains in collectivist ideology and principles -- neo- or quasi-socialism, if you will -- have come not at the ballot box, but courtesy of activist judges and justices engaging in social engineering from the bench.
I'd say it's a safe bet that everything Kmiec professes to favor and value in the judiciary is the polar opposite of what's important to Obama, and it's also a safe bet that at the end of Obama's second term, the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary would be very, very different from today's bench, changed in a way that would make the old Kmiec quite unhappy.
As to Pepperdine, I'd seriously reconsider letting Kmiec in the lecture hall; his analytical skills -- essential to teaching constitutional law -- are in serious doubt.
Posted by Mike Lief at 07:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 23, 2008
Obama disses his grandma to save his campaign
Barak Obama gave a speech this past week, trying to put out the fires started by his race-baiting, hate-mongering pastor and spiritual mentor, a twenty-year association that threatens to derail his presidential campaign.
The press loved, loved, LOVED! the speech, with commentators pronouncing it a historic commentary on race that not only healed and uplifted, but cured cancer and ended world hunger, too.
Less often heard in the media accounts was any dissatisfaction at Obama's failure to explain how it was that Oprah Winfrey could quit the church in disgust over the pastor's racist and America-hating diatribes, but Obama was content to merely make excuses.
But for me, the worst part was the way he used his elderly grandmother to further his own political ambitions, comparing something she did long ago to the hate-filled rants delivered by her grandson's mentor.
Mona Charen was also less than impressed.
Discussing his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who asked God to “damn” America, who called this country the “No. 1 killer in the world,” Obama’s defense was subtle. Oh yes, he agreed, the rhetoric is “divisive … at a time when we need unity” and reflects “profoundly distorted views of this country” that “rightly offend both white and black.” ... And Obama can no more “disown him than he can disown the black community” and no more disown him than he can disown his own white grandmother.
Obama’s white grandmother, according to the account in Dreams from My Father, had once flinched before a black man on a public bus — hoping that her husband would drive her to work the following day so that she could avoid him. On other occasions, he recounts, she had uttered “racial or ethnic stereotypes” that made Obama “cringe.”
[...]
And wasn’t it a bit of a cheap shot to take public aim at grandmother, who sacrificed so much for Obama, who served as his surrogate mother during his high school years? If she used racial and ethnic stereotypes, that was wrong. But the episode about the bus, as related in his book, is hardly a damning indictment of a secret racist. After Obama’s grandmother confessed to having been harassed by an aggressive panhandler, Obama writes:
“He (Obama’s grandfather) turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. ‘It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in she told me the fella was black.’ He whispered the word. ‘That’s the real reason she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.’
“It was like a fist to my stomach, and I wobbled to maintain my composure.”
I don’t claim to know Obama’s grandmother and am in no position to judge her racial sentiments. But it does seem to an outsider that Obama’s judgment upon his grandmother is as harsh as his tolerance of Wright is benign.
It isn’t as if he was raised in Trinity Baptist Church. He chose it as an adult. He chose those sermons he now calls “incendiary” and “inexcusable.” He says now that Wright misses the dynamism of American society, yet when it came time to decide where his daughters would attend church, he chose Trinity, where they would “learn” that the U.S. government concocted the AIDS virus to wipe out the African-American population, that the U.S. would “plant” WMDs in Iraq, and that blacks harming other blacks are “fighting the wrong enemy.” A beautifully delivered speech cannot overcome that history.
I find it fascinating that Obama now says he rejects these sermons as inappropriate, their messages too divisive for America, yet he chose to subject his children to the pastor's lunatic sermons.
If the polling coming out of Pennsylvania is accurate, voters aren't buying the hooey he's selling; Hillary Clinton may take the state by a thirty-point margin, padded by Democrats repulsed by what they're hearing about Obama and his spiritual advisor.
Listening to a political roundtable on XM Radio's POTUS '08 channel, I heard a woman call in to say that she'd campaigned for Obama, cast her ballot for him in the primary, but knowing what she knows now, she wishes she'd voted for Hillary instead.
It may be too little, too late, for Clinton's sputtering campaign, but it doesn't portend well for Obama's chances come the general election.
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Let there be light
It's not the blinding light generated by this new bulb that's so revolutionary; it's that a streetlight's worth of illumination comes from a bulb the size of a Tic Tac.
The side-by-side comparison with the standard bulb is amusing, with the tiny bulb seemingly lost in the middle of the huge weatherproof housing.
According to the video, the plasma inside the pint-sized lamp is the same temperature as the surface of the Sun, making it the hottest Tic Tac known to Mankind.
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Another good gun page
Stephen Camp has a website devoted to the Browning Hi Power pistol -- a gun much beloved by many a shooter, including the indispensible Kim Du Toit -- but he also has a number of informative articles about other handguns, too.
His views on what to consider when trying to select a self defense piece are well thought out (although I'm still not convinced about wheel guns).
The discussion on the effectiveness of the 9mm is refreshingly evenhanded, and his conclusions are quite reasonable.
It is my belief based on data from serious researchers that with FMJ, the 45-caliber automatic is more potent than the 9mm. That does not mean that I believe either to be anywhere near the top of the list for self-protection. I do not believe that "they all fall to hardball."
[...]
Probably the most important factor in stopping power (regardless of caliber) remains placement. That this can be difficult to obtain in the life-and-death fight scenario doesn't change the necessity for it if we want the opponent to go down for physical rather than psychological reasons.
With the best loads, I opine that .45 ACP is a better "man stopper" than 9mm with its best loads, but am not sure of by what margin.
I do not believe that a 9mm loaded with the better loads is an inadequate defense gun and frequently tote one myself.
I do not "trust" either the .45 ACP or the 9mm (or any other handgun caliber) to provide the elusive "one shot stop" unless the brain or central nervous system is destroyed.
[...]
Either of these calibers with any load may fail to provide the desired results even with a "good" hit.
Either may require multiple "good" hits.
Perhaps either caliber would provide fewer failures if we practiced as much as we worry about our caliber's stopping potential.
I believe that we will continue to see stunning successes and dismal failures with all commonly used defensive handgun calibers including the 9mm and .45 ACP.
Camp likes the Glock 26, so he can't be all bad, although I prefer the G-27.
Take a look around his site -- the non-Browning stuff resides behind the FAQs and Other Handguns buttons.
Posted by Mike Lief at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Jackson Five on the skids
Well, as if it wasn't enough that he's a crazy, child-molesting bastard, we now know that Michael Jackson is also a vindictive, cheap, controlling, heartless, S.O.B..
Marlon Jackson, 51, an original Jackson Five member who stocks shelves at a Vons supermarket in San Diego, had to temporarily move into an extended-stay hotel.
Randy, 46, does odd jobs, including fixing cars in a Los Angeles garage owned by a family friend. He recently claimed Michael was going to give him $1.7 million - "a pipe dream," said another brother last week.
Jackie, 56, the oldest and most debonair of the brothers, is struggling to manage his son Siggy's aspiring rap career after an Internet clothing business startup and attempts to produce music failed.
Jermaine, 54, shuttles back and forth from his girlfriend's home in Ventura County, Calif., to his parents' mansion in Encino, where Jackie and Randy still bunk.
Tito, 55, is the only brother still making music, but it's a meager living. The guitarist fronts a blues and jazz band that plays small venues and nets him $500 and $1,500 per occasional gig - a far cry from the days when the Jacksons could pull in 50,000 people at $30 a ticket.
[...]
How did their fortunes crumble? A slew of bad investments, poor advice, bankruptcy, stubborn pride, divorces, IRS debt, child support and a brother, Michael, who would rather give $1 million to Marlon Brando than do a concert tour or record to help make his brothers whole again.
"Michael was not going to work with the family again," said Frank DiLeo, the manager who oversaw Michael Jackson's ultra-successful "Bad" album and tour. "He was concerned only about building his legacy. He had to be bigger than Elvis."
The family's downfall is not entirely Michael's fault, others argue. The Gloved One footed their bills for years. But his generosity came at a devastating price: The King of Pop used his vast power and influence to prevent his siblings from plying the trade that led to such mega-hits as "I Want You Back," "The Love You Save" and "ABC."
Jackson, riding high in the music world, signed his brothers to his personal record label, MJJ, and refused to release any of their music.
"Michael's mission was to make sure his family was broke, and he accomplished that through the industry, which mostly kowtowed to him," said Bob Jones, former longtime director of communications for Jackson and the author of "Michael Jackson: The Man Behind the Mask."
"We were always ordered by Michael to keep his family away from his offices and out of his business," he said. "He hated them. He wanted them broke. Michael even refused to allow Jermaine, who had come over to Europe to see one of Michael's concerts about a decade ago, to guest on 'I'll Be There.' Jermaine was devastated."
[...]
While paying Brando $1 million to appear and giving five- and six-figure fees to artists such as Whitney Houston, Usher, Britney Spears and Destiny's Child to perform, Jacko had his brothers sign a contract that would pay them just $1,100 each.
Michael charged the brothers for hotel and travel, and the siblings were never paid their measly performance fees, according to the brothers.
Yeah, I know, it's called showbusiness, but working to sabotage his own brothers? That's sick.
I'm sure there's another side to this sordid tale, but it probably involves the Neverland Ranch and creepy sleepover parties, so I'm not particularly interested in hearing it.
What a jerk.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 19, 2008
Don't mess with Texas
Man, when it comes to recidivist drunken drivers, Texas is hardcore.
GEORGETOWN, Texas - A Texas man has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for his 10th conviction of driving while intoxicated since 1979.
[...]A statement Tuesday from the Williamson County prosecutor says tests showed [53-year-old Anthony Lynn] Falco's blood alcohol content was 0.17 percent, more than twice the legal limit for driving in Texas.
Prosecutor John Bradley says Falco had nine prior DWI convictions and served prison terms from five to 10 years. He also had convictions for theft, family violence assault and forgery.
Hooo-eee! That's what I'm talkin' about!
Nothing like getting these bastards off the road before they kill someone. It's amazing that this guy hasn't slain anyone yet -- and reassuring that he never will. At least with a car.
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Law & Order hates Christians
Emphasizing the disconnect between the real world and Hollywood, tonight's episode of Law & Order features another story "ripped from the headlines."
It begins with the owner of an art gallery, a woman, pelted with rocks -- stoned to death. The detectives find that she was readying a show featuring a veiled Muslim woman, painted by an Albanian artist to highlight the oppression of women by fundamentalist Muslims.
The investigation soon leads to a compound where a demented religious leader indoctrinates his followers, children and young adults, about the spiritual rewards awaiting those who murder infidels.
It's a timely take on a real problem, what with death cults springing up throughout the Islamic world, Arab mothers going on TV to brag about children who have blown themselves up, taking Jewish enemies with them.
But, as the producers like to say, there's a twist.
The murderous fanatics in this episode are Christians.
Just like all those real-life Christian fanatics we're hearing about, slaughtering Muslim clerics, like Mullah Rahho, kidnapped in Iraq and found dead this week.
Oh, wait. He was Bishop Rahho, a Catholic.
Or that Christian fanatic who burst into a Jewish yeshiva and slaughtered teenagers studying the Talmud.
Oops. Muslim. Sorry. Or those Christian suicide bombers who -- erm, never mind.
Because, you see, as everyone but the fools in Hollywood know, the perpetrators of nearly all sectarian, faith-based violence in today's world are Muslims. It's just that those same Muslims get a bit exorcised when films and teleplays and cartoons target them for scrutiny or criticism. And when that happens, fatwas get issued calling for the deaths of the infidels responsible, like the Dutch movie director Theo Van Gogh, who was stabbed to death by a Muslim assassin for the "crime" of directing a film about the oppression of women in Muslim culture, or the cartoonist who dared to depict Mohammed with a bomb in his turban.
In the Law & Order universe, however, who are the villains, week after week? Christians and evil, white capitalists, tycoons, gun nuts and neo-Nazis -- but then, I repeat myself, for they're one and the same to the writers and producers of the NBC series.
What a stunning bit of cultural self-loathing.
Posted by Mike Lief at 10:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
If you can't ban guns, go after the ammo
It's ironic that in a week where we saw both sides argue in the U.S. Supreme Court that the Second Amendment is an individual right -- acknowledging that Americans have a fundamental right to possess firearms (even if the type is subject to dispute) -- California edges ever closer to implementing a back-door ban.
Assembly Bill 2062 is the subject of an e-mail alert I received today from the NRA.
Next Wednesday, March 25, the [California] Assembly Public Safety Committee will consider legislation that would require gun owners to obtain a “permit-to-purchase” before buying handgun ammunition.
Introduced by State Assembly Member Kevin De Leon (D-45), Assembly Bill 2062 puts ammunition sales in the crosshairs. AB2062 would require that law-abiding gun owners obtain a permit to buy handgun ammunition and would impose severe restrictions on the private transfers of handgun ammunition. Applicants for a “permit-to-purchase” would be required to submit to a background check, pay a $35 fee, and wait as long as 30 days to receive the permit.
Under AB2062, it would be unlawful to privately transfer more than 50 rounds of ammunition per month, even between family and friends, unless you are registered as a “handgun ammunition vendor” in the Department of Justice’s database. Ammunition retailers would have to be licensed and store ammunition in such a manner that it would be inaccessible to purchasers.
The bill would also require vendors to keep a record of the transaction including the ammunition buyer’s name, driver’s license, the quantity, caliber and type of ammunition purchased, and right thumbprint, which would be submitted to the Department of Justice or the number of his handgun ammunition purchase permit.
Vendors would be required to contact the purchase permit database, to verify the validity of a permit before completing a sale. All ammunition sales in the State of California would be subject to a $3 per transaction tax. Lastly, mail order ammunition sales would be prohibited.
The California legislature is imposing useless design requirements on firearms manufacturers, too, making it more expensive and burdensome to offer their weapons for sale in the state.
This new bill helps the GFWs* -- who realize they can't possible eliminate the millions of guns already in California -- in their efforts to render the guns useless.
They'll say with a concerned look, "How can anyone say we're banning guns? We're just trying to make California safer for the children."
Trust me, this isn't the last proposal we'll see reducing access to ammo.
Follow the link to find information on contacting your feckless crapweasel representative to register your displeasure.
* Gun Fearing Wussies.
Posted by Mike Lief at 10:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Headlines that compel you to read
Honestly, how can you not read the story beneath this headline?
Woman Goes for Leg Operation, Gets New Anus Instead A German retiree is taking a hospital to court after she went in for a leg operation and got a new anus instead, the Daily Telegraph is reporting.
The woman woke up to find she had been mixed up with another patient suffering from incontinence who was to have surgery on her sphincter.
The clinic in Hochfranken, Bavaria, has since suspended the surgical team.
Now the woman is planning to sue the hospital. She still needs the leg operation and is searching for another hospital to do it.
Crikey!
I know that surgical teams have taken to writing on patients, with arrows, "X"s and circles marking "Cut here!" and "Don't even think of cutting there" zones, but honestly, how do you draw a warning on your O-ring?
There's something so ... fundamentally wrong about this story.
Posted by Mike Lief at 06:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 18, 2008
Obama and his spiritual mentor
Posted by Mike Lief at 06:46 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
SCOTUS and the Second Amendment
People slept outside the Supreme Court last night, trying to guarantee a seat at today's arguments in Heller v. District of Columbia, the first Second Amendment case to make it to the High Court since Miller, back in the 1930s.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, Randy Barnett explains why Heller is so significant.
For the first time in recent memory, the Supreme Court will consider the original meaning of a significant passage of the Constitution unencumbered by its own prior decisions. The majority and dissenting opinions in this case will be taught in law schools for years to come. Here's a layman's guide to the significance of the case:
- Heller will be decided on originalist grounds. Among law professors, enforcing the original meaning of the Constitution is highly controversial. Critics of originalism deny that we should be ruled by the "dead hand of the past." They prefer following Supreme Court precedents that may or may not be consistent with original meaning. Any justice who today professes a commitment to originalism is branded a radical; and all Supreme Court nominees are now grilled on their commitment to the doctrine of stare decisis. But what are old precedents if not the "dead hand" of dead justices?
Significantly, then, both sides in Heller are making only originalist arguments. The challengers of the law contend that the original meaning of the Second Amendment protects an individual "right to keep and bear arms" that "shall not be infringed." In response, the District does not contend that this right is outmoded and that the Second Amendment should now be reinterpreted in light of changing social conditions. Not at all. It contends instead that, because the original intention of the Framers of the Second Amendment was to protect the continued existence of "a well regulated militia," the right it protects was limited to the militia context.
So one thing is certain. Whoever prevails, Heller will be an originalist decision. This shows that originalism remains the proper method of identifying the meaning of the Constitution.
When I entered law school in the fall of '92, the idea that the Second Amendment was an individual right, an important right, was risible in academic circles, and ConLaw classes skipped right from the First to the Fourth Amendments.
To say that there's been a sea change in constitutional analyses is an understatement.
SCOTUSblog will be providing live updates during C-Span's rebroadcast of oral arguments. This should be good.
Posted by Mike Lief at 06:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Virtually perfect mates
Perhaps there's no such thing as the perfect woman -- or the perfect man -- but the boffins at Warped Corp. have created the Virtual Girlfriend and the Virtual Boyfriend, based upon years of research into what men and women want.
They're a marvel of computer design and human psychology.
And very, very explicit when it comes to meeting the other gender's expectations. Take a pass if you're easily offended.
If, on the other hand, you're easily amused, then by all means, click away.
Via Gerard Van Der Leun.
Posted by Mike Lief at 06:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 17, 2008
Out-of-this-world product placement
The picture of the Space Shuttle Endeavor was taken last week, while the bird was in Earth orbit, the astronauts hard at work. According to the information on NASA's website:
ISS016-E-032312 (12 March 2008) --- An overhead view of the exterior of Space Shuttle Endeavour's crew cabin, part of its payload bay doors and docking system was provided by Expedition 16 crewmembers on the International Space Station (ISS). Before docking with the station, astronaut Dominic Gorie, STS-123 commander, flew the shuttle through a roll pitch maneuver or basically a backflip to allow the space station crew a good view of Endeavour's heat shield. Using digital still cameras equipped with both 400 and 800 millimeter lenses, the ISS crewmembers took a number of photos of the shuttle's thermal protection system and sent them down to teams on the ground for analysis. A 400 millimeter lens was used for this image.
Wait a minute -- what's that? Over there on the left. In the second window?
Let's take a closer look.
That, my friends, is an Apple iPod, in an out-of-this-world bit of product placement.
According to the folks at Gizmodo, the regular lithium batteries had to be replaced with akalines, in order to reduce the risk of fire -- all without reducing the cool-factor.
I guess even space gets boring without your favorite tunes along for the ride.
Posted by Mike Lief at 07:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Investigating anti-Marine Berkeley Whackos
The asshats trying to force the Marines to close their recruiting station in Berkeley, California, are still hard at work -- but don't you dare question their patriotism.
This piece of pro-Marine (or anti-whacko) coverage comes -- from all places! -- The Daily Show.
Posted by Mike Lief at 05:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 12, 2008
Second Amendment follies
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in the most significant Second Amendment case in recent history, Robert Novak details the typical left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-is-doing incompetence at the White House, where Vice President Cheney signed a brief -- backed by Pres. Bush -- opposing the position of the administration's Solicitor General.
The government position filed with the Supreme Court by U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement stunned gun advocates by opposing the breadth of an appellate court's affirmation of individual ownership rights. The Justice Department, not the vice president, is out of order. But if Bush agrees with Cheney, why did the president not simply order Clement to revise his brief? The answers: disorganization and weakness in the eighth year of his presidency.
Consequently, a Republican administration finds itself aligned against the most popular tenet of social conservatism: gun rights, which enjoy much wider agreement than do opposition to abortion or gay marriage. Promises in two presidential campaigns are being abandoned, and Bush finds himself to the left of even Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.
What a mess. Novak says that Bush hesitated to act because of Democratic pressure to keep his hands off of the Justice Department.
I love the smell of weak executive in the morning. It smells like ... defeat.
Is there no end to the ineptitude?
Posted by Mike Lief at 05:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 11, 2008
More cons, less crime?
Defense attorneys often bemoan the lengthy sentences prosecutors seek, decrying the too-punitive nature of the system, the perceived uselessness of locking up a presumably salvageable person for years, perhaps decades.
Prosecutors, not too surprisingly have a different take on the utility of time-machine worthy stays in the pen: Years spent in prison are sparing the public years of violence, theft, victimization.
Cops and DAs will tell you that the cast of crooked characters in the criminal justice system is a rogues gallery of familiar faces and names. A set of police reports cross my desk for review and I think to myself, "This name looks familiar .... Ah, it's Tector Gorch, barely on parole 48 hours and already on his way back to prison...."
The fact that the Tector Gorch's are doing life, 16 months at a time (low-term in California) is greatly distressing to many liberals.
The geniuses at the New York Times recently (re)joined the chorus of nattering nabobs bemoaning the large numbers of potential Democratic voters felons languishing in prisons, all while crime rates seem to be dropping across the U.S., seemingly unable to make the cognitive leap connecting the two phenomena.
Fortunately, columnist Thomas Sowell connects the dots for the 'tards at the Times.
For more than two centuries, the political left has been preoccupied with the fate of criminals, often while ignoring or downplaying the fate of the victims of those criminals.
So it is hardly surprising that a recent New York Times editorial has returned to a familiar theme among those on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, with its lament that "incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen."
Back in 1997, New York Times writer Fox Butterfield expressed the same lament under the headline, "Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling." Then, as now, liberals seemed to find it puzzling that crime rates go down when more criminals are put behind bars.
Nor is it surprising that the left uses an old and irrelevant comparison -- between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars versus the cost of higher education. According to the Times, "Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon devote as much or more to corrections as they do to higher education."
The relevant comparison would be between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars and the cost of letting him loose in society. But neither the New York Times nor others on the left show any interest in that comparison.
In Britain, the total cost of the prison system per year was found to be £1.9 billion, while the financial cost alone of the crimes committed per year by criminals was estimated at £60 billion.
The big difference between the two kinds of costs is not just in their amounts. The cost of locking up criminals has to be paid out of government budgets that politicians would prefer to spend on giveaway programs that are more likely to get them re-elected. But the far higher costs of letting criminals loose is paid by the general public in both money and in being subjected to violence.
The net result is that both politicians and ideologues of the left are forever pushing "alternatives to incarceration." These include programs with lovely names like "community supervision" and high-tech stuff like electronic devices to keep track of released criminals' locations.
Just how do you "supervise" a criminal who is turned loose in the community? Assigning someone to be with him, one on one and 24/7, would probably be a lot more expensive than locking him up.
But of course no one is proposing any such thing. Having the released criminal reporting to some official from time to time may be enough to allow the soothing word "supervision" to be used. But it hardly restricts what a criminal does with the other nine-tenths of his time when he is not reporting
Part of doing "complaint review" is scanning the defendants' rap sheets, looking for serious and violent felonies, prior stays in prison, and other aggravating factors, all of which can be used to allege "special allegations." In California, every prison prior is good for an additional year in the Big House, provided the defendant didn't have a five-year break between visits. And those serious and violent felonies? They're what we use to allege "Strikes."
You've heard of the Three Strikes laws, haven't you? One, two, three strikes and yer outta here.
Forever.
Anyhow, what's interesting as you read the rap sheets is how the gaps, the periods where no new crimes are committed, are almost always preceded by a sentence sending the crook to prison.
He gets paroled and Voila!, new crimes, new arrests, new convictions, new victims start showing up again.
Folks, this ain't rocket science. Getting criminals off the streets is a lot less expensive then the cost they inflict on society. Using Sowell's numbers out of the U.K., there's a 30-1 return on dollars spent incarcerating crooks.
Seems like a pretty good return on the pound -- er, dollar.
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The right stuff
An excerpt from a terrific piece of writing on the joy of flying higher and faster than a speeding bullet.
One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky.
Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again.
To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky. Where dark spaces in the sky had usually existed, there were now dense clusters of sparkling stars. Shooting stars flashed across the canvas every few seconds. It was like a fireworks display with no sound.
I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments, and reluctantly I brought my attention back inside. To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off, I could see every gauge, lit by starlight. In the plane's mirrors, I could see the eerie shine of my gold spacesuit incandescently illuminated in a celestial glow.
I stole one last glance out the window. Despite our speed, we seemed still before the heavens, humbled in the radiance of a much greater power. For those few moments, I felt a part of something far more significant than anything we were doing in the plane. The sharp sound of Walt's voice on the radio brought me back to the tasks at hand as I prepared for our descent.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
SOCOM gets a new rifle -- and it's a humdinger
Kim Du Toit posted recently on the new rifles approved by SOCOM (Special Operations Command) for use by U.S. elite troops, replacements for the late-model M-16 variants with which few seem satisfied.
The folks at OPFOR tracked down this video, giving you a close look at the SCAR heavy and the SCAR light. They seem like quite an improvement over the current generation of rifles we're fielding.
It's just a shame they won't be offered to the regular grunts, who are stuck with their short-barreled M-4s.
I wonder if anyone in Congress is listening; every so often, the politicians force an improvement on an unwilling military -- a break from the usual pork-barrel politics wherein the troops get some substandard gear or gold-plated gadget to satisfy a pol's homestate defense industry.
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2008
An awe-inspiring Vista. Not.
Some dissatisfied PC owners have had such an awful time with Microsoft's craptastic new operating system, Vista, that they've decided to sue the software giant.
Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.
Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”
Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.
It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.
Now, those hapless Microsoft execs obviously aren't the plaintiffs; they're just some of the unfortunate souls who must regret upgrading from XP -- and whose e-mails were turned over to Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen as part of the discovery process in the duo's legal assault on the Washington-based computing behemoth, which has been upgraded to a class-action suit.
I take no joy in their troubles (he tapped out on the keyboard of his reliable, remarkably stable OS-X powered iBook G4), but those e-mails sure are ... a bit embarrassing for a company determined to prove that Apple's not the only game in town when it comes to elegant and easy-to-use operating systems.
More on the suit -- and Vista's suckitude -- courtesy of the New York Times here.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hugo: The cat of a thousand faces
Gloriously random, strangely compelling -- if you're an odd duck.
Like me.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
But was it any good?
I'm pretty sure Dustin Knowles -- the head blogger at Pajiba! -- doesn't like the new Martin Lawrence movie.
Why would God even invent movies?! Why! Why! Why! (*pout pout pout*) The Supreme Being is one mighty sick f*@k — if he is all powerful, would somebody please explain to me why he’d use that power to create a medium for which Satan’s minions could mentally torture us en masse.
Donny Osmond and Martin Lawrence — in the same movie! This is Adam’s fault, isn’t it? That motherf*@ker bit the apple, and this how God punishes us ... Throw me into eternity’s bonfire and stick a spiked poker up my ass; make me gargle a volcano’s ejaculate; force me to watch “The View” on endless repeat (the Rosie O’Donnel version, even) just don’t ever make me experience College Road Trip again.
I need a brain douche; squirt some boiling vinegar and antiseptic into my ear; inject Scrub n’ Bubbles through my nasal cavity, anything, God anything to cleanse my mind of what I’ve just witnessed.
I don’t think I’ve quite captured my hatred for College Road Trip. I don’t think there are enough synonyms for hate in the thesaurus (loathe and execrate are powerlessly weak up against the force of my indescribable disdain). I feel as though I’ve just had my urethra jerked out and pulled over my face.
Granted, I am a critic who is given to hyperbole on occasion, but I like to think that relative to others in my profession, I’m spare with superlatives. But, I’ve seen an incredible amount of family films; both me and my alter ego have reviewed most of Martin Lawrence’s movies over the past four years (sure, I didn’t actually watch one of them), and I can safely say: This is not only the worst Lawrence film I’ve suffered through, but it may be the worst family film I’ve ever suffered through in my whole goddamn increasingly miserable life — College Road Trip actually made me long for the simple atrociousness of Ice Cube, Vin Diesel, Tim Allen, and Eddie Murphy family flicks; at least with those, I could articulate my contempt.
But this … this abomination … this monstrosity … this aborted love child of Godzilla and a skyscraper of excrement was just …
Like I said, I've got a sneaking suspicion he's not a big Martin Lawrence fan. But then again, I could be wrong; maybe it's a case of being ashamed of how much he really likes the "actor" and his latest piece of cinematic magic.
Nah.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 09, 2008
Great song, great video
Have you heard Sugarland's song, Stay? It features the country duo's Jennifer Nettles singing the first song she's written without the assistance of others, accompanied only by Kristian Bush on guitar, with his brother lending a little subtle support on an electric organ.
It's a wonderfully sung song, but it's also one of the few I can think of that gains power and emotional depth from its video. Staying true to the minimalist production values of the original track, the video simply features Nettles singing against a black background, Bush strumming his guitar.
Raw talent and emotion are what music is supposed to be about, which goes a long way towards answering a question: Why do I like country music -- and loathe rap, hip hop and most modern rock and pop?
Because they, unlike country, don't tell a recognizably human story, with real emotions -- or should I say, emotions other than hate -- set to a melody more prominent than the pounding, thumping bass line.
What country manages to do, at least when done well, is make the listener feel empathy with the singer, feelings that usually relate to love: love of family, of friends, of country and faith.
Country: Where seldom is heard a discouraging word -- like pimps or bitches or ho's.
Anyhow, take a few minutes and watch Stay. I think you'll be moved. Isn't that what music's supposed to do?
Posted by Mike Lief at 11:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Patterico tells dishonest jurors to piss off
Patterico has a very different take on jury nullification than does Radley Balko (Pat's agin' it). Don't miss the debate taking place in the comments of that post; it's at a rolling boil.
Posted by Mike Lief at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 08, 2008
"Bird brain" no longer a put-down
It's not just birds that have gotten a bum rap and a moniker -- "Bird Brain" -- as a result of humans being too dense to see how smart they really are. An article in the new issue of National Geographic takes a fascinating look at a bunch of animals that have been unfairly labeled as being dumb as a stump.
Take for instance sheep; their very species is used to describe easily led, idiotic voters: Sheeple. The movie Babe even played against expectations back in the '90s, showing sheep to be aware and resentful of their reputations for being the barnyard 'tards.
Now, researchers have found that sheep recognize faces -- 30 sheep and 10 humans -- and remember what individuals look like for as long as two years.
But Alex the parrot blew my mind.
Alex, an African Grey Parrot, not only had a huge vocabulary, he could count, understand colors, shapes and sizes -- and even understood the concept of zero.
[Researcher Irene] Pepperberg walked to the back of the room, where Alex sat on top of his cage preening his pearl gray feathers. He stopped at her approach and opened his beak."Want grape," Alex said.
"He hasn't had his breakfast yet," Pepperberg explained, "so he's a little put out."
Alex returned to preening, while an assistant prepared a bowl of grapes, green beans, apple and banana slices, and corn on the cob.
Under Pepperberg's patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for all of these foods, although he calls an apple a "banerry."
"Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them," Pepperberg said.
Alex could count to six and was learning the sounds for seven and eight.
[...]
After breakfast, Alex preened again, keeping an eye on the flock. Every so often, he leaned forward and opened his beak: "Ssse ... won."
"That's good, Alex," Pepperberg said. "Seven. The number is seven."
"Ssse ... won! Se ... won!"
"He's practicing," she explained. "That's how he learns. He's thinking about how to say that word, how to use his vocal tract to make the correct sound."
It sounded a bit mad, the idea of a bird having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and watching Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg's explanation for his behaviors. She wasn't handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds.
"He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them," Pepperberg said, after pronouncing "seven" for Alex a good dozen times in a row. "I'm not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language," she added. "That's never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition."
In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird's basic understanding of the world. She couldn't ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex's eye.
"What's same?" she asked.
Without hesitation, Alex's beak opened: "Co-lor."
"What's different?" Pepperberg asked.
"Shape," Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words—and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.
For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues.
And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird's brain, Alex spoke up. "Talk clearly!" he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching mispronounced the word green. "Talk clearly!"
"Don't be a smart aleck," Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. "He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he's like a teenage son; he's moody, and I'm never sure what he'll do."
"Wanna go tree," Alex said in a tiny voice.
Alex had lived his entire life in captivity, but he knew that beyond the lab's door, there was a hallway and a tall window framing a leafy elm tree. He liked to see the tree, so Pepperberg put her hand out for him to climb aboard. She walked him down the hall into the tree's green light.
"Good boy! Good birdie," Alex said, bobbing on her hand.
"Yes, you're a good boy. You're a good birdie." And she kissed his feathered head.
He was a good birdie until the end, and Pepperberg was happy to report that when he died he had finally mastered "seven."
Betsy, a Border Collie from Austria, understands more than 300 words -- and learns new ones faster than primates. And human toddlers.
Just how easily new mental skills can evolve is perhaps best illustrated by dogs. Most owners talk to their dogs and expect them to understand. But this canine talent wasn't fully appreciated until a border collie named Rico appeared on a German TV game show in 2001. Rico knew the names of some 200 toys and acquired the names of new ones with ease.Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig heard about Rico and arranged a meeting with him and his owners. That led to a scientific report revealing Rico's uncanny language ability: He could learn and remember words as quickly as a toddler. Other scientists had shown that two-year-old children—who acquire around ten new words a day—have an innate set of principles that guides this task. The ability is seen as one of the key building blocks in language acquisition. The Max Planck scientists suspect that the same principles guide Rico's word learning, and that the technique he uses for learning words is identical to that of humans.
To find more examples, the scientists read all the letters from hundreds of people claiming that their dogs had Rico's talent. In fact, only two—both border collies—had comparable skills. One of them—the researchers call her Betsy—has a vocabulary of more than 300 words.
"Even our closest relatives, the great apes, can't do what Betsy can do—hear a word only once or twice and know that the acoustic pattern stands for something," said Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist who worked with Rico and is now studying Betsy. She and her colleague Sebastian Tempelmann had come to Betsy's home in Vienna to give her a fresh battery of tests. Kaminski petted Betsy, while Tempelmann set up a video camera.
[...]
Betsy's owner—whose pseudonym is Schaefer—summoned Betsy, who obediently stretched out at Schaefer's feet, eyes fixed on her face. Whenever Schaefer spoke, Betsy attentively cocked her head from side to side.
Kaminski handed Schaefer a stack of color photographs and asked her to choose one. Each image depicted a dog's toy against a white background—toys Betsy had never seen before. They weren't actual toys; they were only images of toys. Could Betsy connect a two-dimensional picture to a three-dimensional object?
Schaefer held up a picture of a fuzzy, rainbow-colored Frisbee and urged Betsy to find it. Betsy studied the photograph and Schaefer's face, then ran into the kitchen, where the Frisbee was placed among three other toys and photographs of each toy. Betsy brought either the Frisbee or the photograph of the Frisbee to Schaefer every time.
"It wouldn't have been wrong if she'd just brought the photograph," Kaminski said. "But I think Betsy can use a picture, without a name, to find an object. Still, it will take many more tests to prove this."
Uek, a New Caledonian Crow, has a relative who is impressing researchers at Oxford University with her ability to not only use but make tools for specific tasks, an ability scientists believed was limited to primates.
"People were surprised to discover that chimpanzees make tools," said Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, referring to the straws and sticks chimpanzees shape to pull termites from their nests. "But people also thought, 'Well, they share our ancestry—of course they're smart.' Now we're finding these kinds of exceptional behaviors in some species of birds. But we don't have a recently shared ancestry with birds. Their evolutionary history is very different; our last common ancestor with all birds was a reptile that lived over 300 million years ago.
"This is not trivial," Kacelnik continued. "It means that evolution can invent similar forms of advanced intelligence more than once—that it's not something reserved only for primates or mammals."
Kacelnik and his colleagues are studying one of these smart species, the New Caledonian crow, which lives in the forests of that Pacific island. New Caledonian crows are among the most skilled of tool-making and tool-using birds, forming probes and hooks from sticks and leaf stems to poke into the crowns of the palm trees, where fat grubs hide. Since these birds, like chimpanzees, make and use tools, researchers can look for similarities in the evolutionary processes that shaped their brains. Something about the environments of both species favored the evolution of tool-making neural powers.
But is their use of tools rigid and limited, or can they be inventive? Do they have what researchers call mental flexibility? Chimpanzees certainly do. In the wild, a chimpanzee may use four sticks of different sizes to extract the honey from a bee's nest. And in captivity, they can figure out how to position several boxes so they can retrieve a banana hanging from a rope.
Answering that question for New Caledonian crows—extremely shy birds—wasn't easy. Even after years of observing them in the wild, researchers couldn't determine if the birds' ability was innate, or if they learned to make and use their tools by watching one another. If it was a genetically inherited skill, could they, like the chimps, use their talent in different, creative ways?
To find out, Kacelnik and his students brought 23 crows of varying ages (all but one caught in the wild) to the aviary in his Oxford lab and let them mate. Four hatchlings were raised in captivity, and all were carefully kept away from the adults, so they had no opportunity to be taught about tools. Yet soon after they fledged, all picked up sticks to probe busily into cracks and shaped different materials into tools. "So we know that at least the bases of tool use are inherited," Kacelnik said. "And now the question is, what else can they do with tools?"
Plenty. In his office, Kacelnik played a video of a test he'd done with one of the wild-caught crows, Betty, who had died recently from an infection. In the film, Betty flies into a room. She's a glossy-black bird with a crow's bright, inquisitive eyes, and she immediately spies the test before her: a glass tube with a tiny basket lodged in its center. The basket holds a bit of meat. The scientists had placed two pieces of wire in the room. One was bent into a hook, the other was straight. They figured Betty would choose the hook to lift the basket by its handle.
But experiments don't always go according to plan. Another crow had stolen the hook before Betty could find it. Betty is undeterred. She looks at the meat in the basket, then spots the straight piece of wire. She picks it up with her beak, pushes one end into a crack in the floor, and uses her beak to bend the other end into a hook. Thus armed, she lifts the basket out of the tube.
"This was the first time Betty had ever seen a piece of wire like this," Kacelnik said. "But she knew she could use it to make a hook and exactly where she needed to bend it to make the size she needed."
They gave Betty other tests, each requiring a slightly different solution, such as making a hook out of a flat piece of aluminum rather than a wire. Each time, Betty invented a new tool and solved the problem. "It means she had a mental representation of what it was she wanted to make. Now that," Kacelnik said, "is a major kind of cognitive sophistication."
The article has many more photos of surprisingly smart critters, like the octopus who liked squirting researchers and the bonobo who makes tools and may be talking (just too fast and high-pitched for us to understand).
And check out the mouse that recognizes when it doesn't know the right answer.
A tremendously interesting article, and a subject that's fascinated me since childhood. Read the whole thing.
Posted by Mike Lief at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 07, 2008
Ventura County Star -- What's the point?
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/mar/07/no-headline---nxxfcmorningreport08/
Police and Fire: A man with a gun robbed a RadioShack store in Ventura Thursday night, police said.
The robber, who was wearing a black leather jacket, a black beanie and black pants, walked into the RadioShack at 4756 Telephone Road about 7:29 p.m., pointed a gun at employees and demanded money from the register, Ventura police said in a statement.
He left the store after he was given an undisclosed amount of money.
No injuries were reported in the robbery.
Police searched the area, but did not find the robber.
Police encourage anyone with information about the crime to call investigators at 339-4394 or contact Crime Stoppers anonymously at 385-TALK.
Tipsters who give information that leads to an arrest could receive cash awards of up to $1,000.
Robbery
03/06/2008FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Watch Commander, 805-339-4416.
Location: Radio Shack , 4756 Telephone Road.
Date/Time Occurred: March 6, 2008, 7:29 PM.
Officer(s) Involved: Ventura Police Officers.
Victim(s): Radio Shack.
Suspect(s): Black Male, approximately in his 20’s, 6’ - 00”, 190 pounds, goatee, black leather jacket, black beanie, black pants.
Report #: 08-3387.
Posted by Mike Lief at 02:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bad movie alert
I love a good review of a bad movie.
10,000 B.C. (Warner Bros.), Roland Emmerich's new prehistoric adventure, disappoints not because it's a bad caveman movie, but because it isn't one at all. Rather than taking the trouble to imagine what early civilization might have been like—its culture, its language, its warfare, its family life—the movie simply transposes a banal Hollywood epic into Paleolithic times. Or maybe Mesolithic.
Emmerich, who's already done alien invasion (Independence Day) and environmental armageddon (The Day After Tomorrow), excels at staging grand-scale chaos, but he's no stickler for detail. So what if the construction of the pyramids didn't really overlap with the existence of the woolly mammoth? Can you honestly say you don't want to see a herd of crazed mammoths stampeding down the ramps of a pyramid in progress?
[...]
I don't begrudge this plot its stupidity or lack of verisimilitude; some of my best friends are stupid and far-fetched. What makes the movie a drag is the pedestrian joylessness with which it plods through its hypercompressed evolutionary timeline.
The invention of agriculture? Oh, here's a bag of seeds to take home from your journey.
The first encounter with foreign languages? Hey, luckily there's a guy who can translate them all for you.
One of the movie's biggest disappointments is its failure to have fun with language. All the Yagahls communicate in grammatically perfect, vaguely accented English. Even their mellifluous names (D'Leh? Evolet?) could easily appear on the roster of a hippie preschool.
Anthony Burgess created an entire proto-language for Quest for Fire; the best Emmerich and his co-writer, Harald Kloser, can do is to envision a time before the invention of contractions. ("Do not eat me when I set you free.")
It's hard to believe that 27 years have passed since the release of the best caveman movie ever:
Now that's filmmaking!Posted by Mike Lief at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Telling judges and DAs to piss off
The creative talent behind the camera at HBO's The Wire have a message for prosecutors and judges: Piss off. When it comes to drug prosecutions, they've had enough.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.
Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon author a rebuke to the entire "war on drugs" for Time Magazine, making the case for jurors to essentially lie during voir dire, the French phrase for jury selection that translates as "speak the truth."
I'm sympathetic to the idea of jurors rejecting laws they deem unjust -- some states even include the right in their constitutions -- but the appeal of jury nullification rests on whose ox is being
goredprosecuted.Liberals and libertarians anxious to see jurors use subterfuge and deception to free drug dealers and users have forgotten that the last wave of jury nullification made it very difficult to convict a white defendant accused of assaulting or killing a black victim in the American South as recently as the 1960s.
Byron De La Beckwith, who assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, hung two all-white juries, despite overwhelming evidence, until DA Bobby Delaughter shamed a modern jury into proving they were better than that: they convicted the murderer in 1994, 31 years after the crime.
The comments following Radley Balko's post are quite interesting and present a pretty fair picture of both sides of the nullification argument.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 05, 2008
Democrats: More money for the psychiatric lobby!
Good news! In our slow-motion rush toward socialized medicine, the Democratic-controlled Congress has expanded government-mandated coverage for caffeine highs, insomnia and a whole host of made-up, un-verifiable psycho syndromes.
WASHINGTON — After more than a decade of struggle, the House on Wednesday passed a bill requiring most group health plans to provide more generous coverage for treatment of mental illnesses, comparable to what they provide for physical illnesses.
The vote was 268 to 148, with 47 Republicans joining 221 Democrats in support of the measure.
Shame on those "Republicans." Probably the same ones who voted for the Americans With Disabilities Act, another attempt to legislate away the unfair hand fate has dealt to some.
The Senate has passed a similar bill requiring equivalence, or parity, in coverage of mental and physical ailments. Federal law now allows insurers to discriminate, and most do so, by setting higher co-payments or stricter limits on mental health benefits.
“Illness of the brain must be treated just like illness anywhere else in the body,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.
So many places to go with Pelosi's quote.
Heh.
The protections of the House bill apply to people who need treatment for alcohol and drug abuse, as well as mental illness.
Under the bill, if an insurer chooses to provide mental health coverage, it must “include benefits” for any mental health condition listed in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.
E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation, a trade group, said: “Businesses will be faced with the choice of covering every single mental or substance abuse disorder listed in the diagnostic manual, or nothing at all. Neither choice is appealing.”
Among the conditions listed in the manual, critics noted, are caffeine intoxication and sleep disorders resulting from jet lag.
Perfect.
If I was running a business and was faced with this all-or-nothing choice, I'd certainly take a moment to do the math.
"Nothing" costs a lot less than "all," making it less expensive to provide healthcare to my workers for illnesses that I know aren't a bunch of psycho-babble bull if I opt for nothing.
Forcing employers to cover the myriad of quirks, ticks, oddities and weirdness that fill the DSM-IV -- or is that V, VI or VII? -- strikes me as ... crazy.
Posted by Mike Lief at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hewitt and Hitch on Hillary
Hugh Hewitt spoke today with my favorite lefty Brit, Christopher Hitchens, about the resurrection of Hillary Clinton. Hewitt finishes the interview with this Q&A about November.
HH: 20 seconds, who’s going to be the next president of the United States?
CH: Hillary Clinton.
HH: Oh…because of yesterday?
CH: No, no, I’ve feared it for a long time, and there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power.
HH: The Mummy is back.
CH: …people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.
HH: Mordor. Christopher Hitchens, a pleasure. Thank you for joining us from Vanity Fair.
I disagree with Hitchens' analysis; the only way Clinton wins is to cheat, and robbing the nation's first black presidential candidate of a nomination he's won by a majority of about a million votes will destroy the Democratic Party.
The DNC may be stupid, but I don't think they're that brain damaged.
Hitchens and Hewitt have an interesting take on the current state of the race; read the whole thing.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 02, 2008
Talking is better than doing
I listened to some of Hillary Clinton's stump speech (as much as I could stomach) delivered during a campaign swing through Ohio this morning.
It was filled with a hoarse-voiced catalog of all that's wrong in Ohio, thanks to Pres. Bush and the GOP.
Clinton said she'd seen gas prices topping $3.90 on her way to the rally, which made her realize that somebody needed to do something about this problem.
She trotted out the patented blue-collar, workingman's lament to illustrate her point, telling of an Ohio resident who commuted 70 miles each way for his $5-and-change-an-hour job. According to Clinton, the man said he didn't know if he could afford to keep paying for the gas.
Sigh.
Times are tough pal; have you considered getting a job closer to home? It's not as if minimum-wage positions are rare as hen's teeth. In the alternative, how 'bout looking for a better-paying job?
But then, I'm a mean-spirited conservative, not a Democratic politician, so what the hell do I know.
Clinton reiterated her belief that she wanted, needed, deserved to be president because she would do something to fix the problem. Because, you see, it's the job of the federal government to dictate the price of a product, just like in other successful command economies.
Like the U.S.S.R.
Playing along with Clinton's can-do-something spirit, I thought to myself, "Well, what would I do if I wanted to lower gas prices?"
I harkened back to my college Econ-101 days and the mysteries of supply and demand, a theory so easy to grasp even a caveman could do it.
Hmmm. Prices are high. That must be because demand is high and supply is low. The demand variable is difficult to drive down; high taxes and high prices might serve to lessen the pressure, but at a cost too high for consumers -- like the blue-collar worker Clinton supposedly wants to help.
If we can't lessen demand, the other half of the equation is increasing supply. Given that Democrats -- and many Republicans -- believe that we're too dependent on foreign oil producers, finding a domestic source would seem to be rather promising.
So, is Clinton going to back drilling in ANWR? Support tapping vast new reserves in the Gulf of Mexico? Push for new refineries to get the fuel to market?
All this could help reduce the price at the pump.
I can't rightly say, because Clinton never offered any -- what do you call them? -- SOLUTIONS, just a seemingly-endless litany of economic tales of woe.
Listening to all this happytalk, content-free gobbledygook was both infuriating and depressing, mainly because so many in the audience seemed to enjoy Clinton's "plan," such as it is, for fixing our sputtering economic engine.
Even Obama's got more specific solutions. Like building more unicorn factories and new EPA regulations requiring that cars run on rainbows.
This is the best the Democratic Party has to offer us?
We're doomed.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
I
don'tget it
I never understood the appeal of the "Transformers" movie, nor that of the underlying comics and toys.Mundane household objects that turn into something else entirely? Yawn.
Then I watched the video above. Suddenly it all began to make sense.
Robots? Deeply stupid.
Guns?
I like.
Posted by Mike Lief at 07:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Stupid marketing tricks
I know you'll find this shocking, but I've come across something else that irritates me: advertising and marketing gimmicks predicated on consumers being dolts, easily impressed by size -- even if said size has nothing to do with the product.
For instance, take a look at this container.
It's a bottle of tablets that I take for my arthritic shoulders (getting older sucks!); they've actually made a difference over the last year, substantially lessening the aches and pains associated with being me.Anyhow, I unscrewed the cap and removed the protective film, then peered inside.
What the hell? This thing's less than half full. It's not easy to make out how much air is packaged along with the tablets, so let me make my point more graphically.
The pills only come up to here.I can't imaging choosing one brand of this stuff over another just because the damn bottle is bigger. If anything, I'd prefer a smaller container -- easier to store for those of us living in compact homes -- or more tablets per container (fill 'er up, Doc).
And that's my annoyance of the day for Sunday, March 2, 2008.
Posted by Mike Lief at 07:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
