perfidy

Check this out-- I stole the picture from Occam's Toothbrush (original pointer from the vodkapundit). The Israelis have a gun, a working, shooting gun, that shoots around corners. Note the tiny video display sighting mechanism.

The future is now. Where's my jet pack? I was promised a jet pack.

[wik] GeekLethal helpfully suggested the above headline. I think it's much better than my original nod to "Get Smart," which is all funny and stuff, but who the hell wants a shoe phone? Not me!

Who's your daddy indeed....why, it's Strom Thurmond! What an asshole. He sleeps with a black maid at age 22, gives his daughter hush money (but not enough to give her a comfortable existence) all her life to keep the story quiet, and goes on to build a political career as an unrepentant racist and segregationist. The very definition of a class act. Just look at the picture at CNN-- his daugher is the spit and image of him, except black like the people he dedicated his career to working against.

Just a fun fact, his daughter is now... seventy-eight years old. Strom Thurmond was around a long, long time.

Stuart Benjamin has more at the Volokh Conspiracy.

[wik] Al Barger has more, in screed form at blogcritics.org.

Geek Lethal, the lethalest geek of them all, is a saint and a man for all seasons.

His Christmas gift to me: Arthur S. Locke, et al., "Principles of Guided Missile Design" (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand & Co., 1956). Sweeeeeet. Now all I need is a backyard, an engineering degree, and money. Oh, and also a total disregard for my neighbors. Ever read Dad's Nuke?

I also recieved this weekend a pack of "Iraq's Most Wanted" playing cards. I opened the package, went to bed, and woke up the next morning to find that the Ace of Spades had turned up in the flop. Woo!!! Read 'em and weep, the dead man's hand again! And other Motorhead-related elations.

Truly this is a blessed fricken' season.

[wik] I have changed the link to the Guided Missile tutorial above, lest people get the mistaken impression that Mr. Lethal is some sort of nut. He's not. He's a very specific form of nut.

Gregg Easterbrook sounds off on the lack of positive press coverage of Bush's "environmental initiatives".

I started wandering around the CBO site and the EPA site, trying to get a feel for how the budgets have changed over the past decade or so. It's pretty hard to do -- the budget offices have conveniently changed their categories and document formats, seemingly every year...which makes it really hard to break out a category, such as air quality, and understand it.

EPA gives the 2004 legal services budget as $46 million or so. That sure doesn't seem like much; $46 million to chase after every non-compliant polluter in the country? My understanding is that the EPA is absolutely snowed under -- major polluters are out there that they simply do not have the budget to go after. In some of these cases, there are crimes being committed. The budget just isn't there to pursue it.

My overall impression is that Bush has gutted the enforcement end of the EPA budget. We all know that nothing pisses off a Republican more than some pinko commie environmentalist wanting to save a stupid squirrel or spotted crap-warbler or whatever it is that's currently in front of the bulldozer. Scattered searches have shown me that there's been around a 20% reduction in enforcement manpower over the past two years.

One way to avoid having pollution laws is to stop enforcing them. This is the Bush method.

Easterbrook says "The rub is that existing Clean Air Act power-plant regulations and "state implementation plans," which govern overall airshed quality, have led to runaway litigation, with the typical Clean Air Act rule taking ten years of legal proceedings to finalize, according to a study by Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute. Bush's Clear Skies bill would scrap the litigation-based system and substitute the "cap and trade" approach that has been spectacularly successful at reducing acid rain. "

Makes me wonder if a "cap and trade" system would work for crime. You know, criminals in low-crime communities could buy the right to beat people up or kill people from criminals in high-crime communities. Everybody wins! Crime goes down.

Or, maybe we realize that pollution is a bad thing, and whatever we can do to reduce it is probably a good idea.

Let's remember that Bush is gutting the current legislation, which would have achieved the pollution targets far more aggressively (particularly with regard to mercury -- remember that Bush's EPA suppressed a study on mercury for nine months because they didn't like the scary sounding results), in favor of a much slower approach. The justification is that the current system is "litigation intense". It doesn't make sense to complain on one hand that a system can't litigate fast enough, and then to cut that legal department on the other hand. Bush is essentially creating a problem (or, to be fair, making it worse) by cutting the budget, then pointing at that problem as the reason for scrapping the program.

All I see here is that we could have chosen to enforce the current laws, and air pollution would have been dramatically cleaned up inside of five years. Instead, we're on a 15 year merry-go-round, subject to the whatever the current whims of the energy industry are, as channelled by Bush and Corporation.

Continuing Johno's environmental theme, you really need to read Robert Kennedy's piece detailing what Bush has done. It's pretty scary.

The question I always ask myself when reading these kinds of doom-and-gloom essays is, what motives do the "bad guys" have? In this case it's fairly clear that the motives are financial. Environmental protection is viewed as unnecessary, and stands in the way of profit.

The method of attack is something I've noted before. "We need to study it" is always the last position.

Calpundit discusses Gregg Easterbrook's record on environmental punditry and concludes "I don't know what axe Easterbrook has to grind here, but whatever it is I recommend not accepting anything he says on environmental issues without checking it out yourself first. He's not necessarily wrong every time, but he's definitely untrustworthy."

So there you go. Grain of salt.

Posting will be light from me. I got the SARS again, or maybe it's the grippe, hard to say. But it sucks no matter what it's called.

So two weeks ago I attended the live broadcast of "Hardball" with Howard Dean.

This last Tuesday, I was one of only 800 people to attend a talk by Wen Jiabao, Premier of China. ("How was it, Johno?" "How do you think? I attended a once-in-a-lifetime talk by a leader of the unfree world, and he took audience questions. It was awesome.")

This coming Monday, I'm going to be at "Hardball" once again, this time with Joe Leiberman.

This weekend, I'm going to try to get Goodwife Johno down to Foxwoods for a few hands of blackjack. If my luck's hot, I really oughtta do all I can to cash in. It's the American way!

But seriously... on Tuesday, I attended a speech by the Prime Minister of China. He spoke for about an hour on the topic of "coming together". Never in my lifetime did I foresee a day when a leader of China, in the interest of polite innocuous diplomacy, would openly advocate the democratization of Chinese politics and the marketization of China's economy. Although most of what he said was simple diplomatic boilerplate and therefore only mildly interesting, he spent a lot of time talking about trade, Taiwan (semicircumspectly), and the problems facing China as she tries to deal with SARS, AIDS, industralization, education, and the adequate distribution of goods and services to the entire population. Not mentioned: Tibet, except by a protester who was promptly and gently removed.

Master of All Blogcritics Eric Olsen, And Master of the Master of All Blogcritics Dawn Olsen, have finally had their kid.

Alexander Kirk Olsen was born at 7:05am Eastern, this morning, and weighed 9 lbs even. He was 20.75 inches long.

And yes, I keep using the past tense, but that's because they grow and shrink hour by hour these first few days!

Baby Alexander was overdue, but Dawn had Mexican last night. Consequence: a two-hour labor, total. Mexican sure does go right through you. Congratulations to the Olsens. Ohio just got a little smarter.

Gregg Easterbrook is having one of his rare moments of supreme lucidity not related to football. At the New Republic's Easterblogg, Easterbrook writes

The latest example of the media standing on its head regarding George W. Bush's environmental policies is the treatment accorded the White House announcement, last week, that Bush would impose a substantial reduction in emissions from Midwestern power plants. Did you even know this happened? Of course not, because news organizations either buried the story or twisted it to make it sound negative.

Here's the picture. Front-page treatment after front-page treatment has been accorded Bush's decision to relax the "new-source review" standard that mainly governs repairs at Midwestern power plants. Bush's NSR decision has been depicted--by beat reporters, Democratic presidential candidates, The New York Times editorial page and Eliot Spitzer, among others--as an astonishing, super-ultra horror, though total emissions from Midwest power plants have declined by 40 percent in the last two decades, and though the worst-case reading of the Bush NSR standard is that it will slow the rate of future declines.

Next, Bush has been widely ridiculed for proposing a "Clear Skies" bill that would require power plants to cut emissions, except greenhouse gas, by about 70 percent. Democrats in the Senate, plus quasi-Democrat James Jeffords, have fought Clear Skies with blazing fury, while editorial cartoonists have scoffed. Why are Democrats opposed to a 70 percent reduction in pollution? Because passage of the bill would give Bush an environmental victory before the 2004 election; Bush-bashing, not air quality, is the essence of the issue. Besides, Democrats know that all forms of air pollution except greenhouse gas are already declining anyway, so the harm done by power plants just isn't that great--though for posturing purposes, Democrats and enviros pretend it is a super-ultra-mega calamity.

Interesting. Anyway, go read the whole thing. Easterbrook is justifiably teed off at media sources who won't cut the President a break, even when he's doing the right thing. I need to look into this further before I decide just what pot is calling what kettle what color here, but between the non-coverage of the antiterrorism riots in Iraq earlier this week, this thing, and the endless and sickening promos for "The Simple Life" at all hours, I'm tempted to give up on TV and get all my news by divining tea leaves and chicken innards.

Aziz Poonawalla points us to this version of The Two Towers with all badger scenes fully restored. Which is as it should be.

Go watch! Now!

I said now.

Now! Or are you asking for a fresh one right in the chops?