perfidy

Thanks to the unwinking eye of James at Hell in a Handbasket, I have learned what my nom de net really means:

• Bloodthirsty? I'm a conservative. Check.
• Unholy? I don't know. I'm at least abholy. Check.
• Cheerleader-Kidnapping? Don't tell my wife. Check.
• Explorer-Torturing? Check. Hate the nosy bastards.
• Horror? Sure.
• Enchanted Arcane Dungeon? Well I don't know about all that magical stuff, but my office is cramped and smelly. Check.

[wik] But then I got to thinking. What do some common acronyms really mean?

• CIA Cheerleader-Injuring Abomination
• IRS Injuring Ravager of Spite
• NSA Nightmare Spurred by Anger
• NOAA Nefarious Orphan-Abducting Abomination

Fun for the whole family. 

[wik] The Ministry of Future Perfidy attempted to find the image that was lost to bit rot, but you don't want to see what we found.

Homeland Security Honcho Chertoff has said that he wants to kick out all the wetbacks. Well, he didn't say it that way, that was me paraphrasing. He did say this:

Our goal at DHS (Homeland Security) is to completely eliminate the 'catch and release' enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions. It should be possible to achieve significant and measurable progress to this end in less than a year.

Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities. Through a comprehensive approach, we are moving to end this 'catch and release' style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process.

Well all right. I have no problem with legal immigration. Within limits, I would actually support raising the number of people legally allowed in this country. I am for lowering requirements for entry from anglophone nations along the lines of Jim Bennet's sojourner concept. But there should be no tolerance of illegal immigration.

I posted a while back on Jerry Pournelle's idea for running a scheme to rid ourselves of illegal immigrants. But that's just one way to do it. Another way to relieve the pressure that led to the catch and release policy is to lower the numbers of people in prison, and use that money. Seeing as over half a million people are in jail for pot possession, that gives us more than a little wiggle room, even if some of those reeferheads actually deserve to be in prison. Decamillions of illegals is just a mockery of the rule of law and good public policy.

Last Saturday in fashionable Old Town Alexandria we had ourselves a blogmeet. I've gotten together with bloggers previously – notably the Cannons games with Rocket Jones but this was the first I guess you could say, official, blogmeet for yours truly. I have noticed – and the participants Saturday amply confirmed this – that bloggers as a whole seem to be awfully nice people. This is a happy conclusion to come to, because if I had discovered that bloggers were rotten, foul and murderous people that would reflect rather poorly on me.

Conversation was scintillating, humorous and chock full of interesting little tidbits of information. Four Widmer Hefeweisens may have colored my perceptions, but it looked like everyone was having a damn good time. In honor of their willingness to be seen in public with someone who goes by the nom de net of "Buckethead," I will now link each and every one of them:

• John of Texas Best Grok, who writes posts about obscure Cold War Era strategic bombers.
• Rob the Llama Butcher makes up amusing conversations between other bloggers
• Mike the Maximum Leader drove hundreds of hours through snow, sleet and Virginia drivers to make the meet. He tells an interesting story of the death of the world's greatest political theorist
• I'd be glad to have a beer with Princess Cat anytime; but I'd have more difficulty explaining to Mrs. Buckethead why I was spending time with a, you know, woman than why I was drinking beers with a graduate student. I mean, that's what graduate students do.
• Matt the blogless wonder doesn't get a bloglink because he's blogless. He fit in remarkably well for someone who doesn't share our particular social problem.
• Dawn isn't anyone to mess with. She's got an appointment. [oh no she di’in’t -ed.]
• I wonder whether this Lysander is modeling himself after this Lysander, or this Lysander.
• Rocket Jones, who knows there's two sides to everything, and especially Pringles.

Thanks to Rocket Jones, for inviting me, and to John for being so important that people are compelled to gather around him, and to all the others for showing up despite knowing that I was going to be there.

And, for those who expressed interest, here is a brand new t-shirt.

I love Civilization. Not just the thousands of years old collection of history, myth, bloodshed, and achievement that surrounds us every day. I mean, everyone should love that. I mean to say that I love Civilization the game, created by Sid Meiers back in the mists of the early computer age. The game that has, through three epochs, sucked months out of my life. And it's now on the verge of yet another life-draining assault with the release of the fourth edition Tuesday next.

As a rule, I do not eagerly await games. The only game in the last five years that I awaited at all was Ghost Recon II. (Which, for the record, bitterly disappointed me by removing everything I thought was cool in the first game and leaving all the schlock.) But today I feel a longing. A physical need to develop deep aches in the center of my back for not moving in hours. A desire to lose myself in a frenzy of virtual creation. A pressure to construct huge armies and smite the French. I feel a yearning to do all this; a yearning to explore with OCD thoroughness all the manifold changes built into the new game. New religions! New Leaders! New Wonders! How do they all fit? What hidden levers can I exploit to win?

And I'll do it no matter how much it pisses off Mrs. Buckethead.

Civ IV is tugging at my soul from its hidden lair in a non-descript suburban warehouse. That itch will grow stronger, more painful, more difficult to ignore over the coming days. Until next Tuesday. Should I even bother going to work? I won't get anything done that day. I'll just be sitting mournfully at my desk, calling my wife every few minutes asking if the package has arrived yet. Maybe I should just stay home and sit out on the porch until it arrives. That way I can be sure that the game won't languish unplayed for hours while I rush home from work. If I go to work, I know that that will be the day they schedule track maintenance for the yellow line. I won't be able to get home, and I'll start gnawing on my fellow commuters from the unbearable frustration.

Yes, maybe I should stay home.

I've put up a small timer in the sidebar to your right. Just so you can share - even if only a little bit – my pain. They say a watched pot never boils. But maybe if enough people watch, it will anyway.

I could call it "Late Summer Lentil Vegetable Medley made with heirloom tomatoes, native leeks, Sugar Snack carrots, and Red Russian Kale" but at the end of the day it's the same goddamn lentils with greens and barley I eat for lunch five days a week anyway.

Good though.

There's been a lot of talk lately about "peak oil" – the idea that we have passed the mid-point in our insatiable quest to rape the Earth of her oil. Having extracted the easy half of the world's oil reserves, getting at the rest will be ever more difficult and expensive. The price of oil will inexorably rise, leading to the collapse of western civilization and forcing the starving and emaciated survivors to survive on a diet of boiled SUV seat leather. Or something.

The above scenario, endorsed with virtual unanimity by all of the professional petroleum geologists employed by the large oil companies, is based on the uncontroversial theory that oil is biogenic; that is, that oil and coal and natural gas are created by a process of heating and cooking of biological material (dead dinosaurs and focuses from previous geological epochs) in the upper layers of the Earth's crust. Given that there is only so much dead T. Rex to go around, there is an inherent and relatively small amount of these fossil fuels to be had.

However, there is another theory. There are some (largely Ukrainians and British astrophysicists) who believe that petroleum is the result of abiogenic processes. Which is to say that oil does not come from T. Rex and the clever velociraptors, but rather from non-biological processes acting on hydrocarbons that were present in the Earth (in stupendous quantities) from the time of the Earth's formation.

The oil company petrochemical experts say bunk to this, and point to the fact that there are biological materials found in oil and coal. That is, in fact, why we call them "fossil fuels." How do you explain that, Mr. Smarty-pants?

Well one of the Smarty-pants on the abiogenic side of the debate is the now deceased Thomas Gold. Gold, originally from Austria, spent most of his lengthy scientific career in Britain, where he worked with Fred Hoyle as one of the proponents of the Steady State theory of cosmology. Now thought to be wrong, no one ever believed that it was stupid – and the contest between the two theories greatly enhanced our understanding of the cosmos. But Gold was right about an uncanny number of things. When the first pulsars were detected, Gold was the first to realize that they must be rapidly rotating neutron stars. Neutron stars had first been theorized in the thirties, but no one had ever detected one. Gold was laughed at, and then proved right.

Gold oversaw the construction of the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo. When radio sources were first seen through Arecibo, astronomers thought at first that they were merely unusual stars. From the 1950's, Gold insisted that they were galaxies. Again after a long dispute, he was proven right. Starting in the seventies, Gold began looking at the problem of petroleum. He published a controversial paper in 1993 on the The Origin of Methane (and Oil) in the Crust of the Earth. His efforts culminated in the 1999 publication of the book, The Deep Hot Biosphere.

Gold maintains that there is another biosphere, one of bacteria living deep in the earth and feeding on heat and oil found in the depths. The total mass of biological material under the earth would be many, many times greater than of all the life on the surface or the oceans. And as the oil, natural gas and other petroleum seeps up from below through fissures along the fault lines of the Earth's crust, it is fed upon by these bacteria – which are where some of the biological markers found in oil come from. As it gets closer to the surface, it collects in reservoirs. Sedimentary rock form particularly good ones, because of the porous structure of the rock. And that is where the fossils come from. But oil has not only been found in sedimentary rock. And human skulls have been found in coal deposits in Pennsylvania. Gold's theory has coal formation a result of petroleum saturating fossil biological material and "freezing." The age of the substrate is irrelevant – the oil comes from below.

There are several key arguments for the abiogenic theory for the origin of petroleum:

The basics:

• The constituent precursors of petroleum (mainly methane) are commonplace in the solar system and it is likely that they were part of the Earth's makeup from the start, and that appropriate conditions (heat and pressure) exist for hydrocarbons to be formed deep within the Earth. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites have been found to contain kerogen-like carbon and hydrocarbons, similar to the precursors for the oil we drill. Heated under pressure, this material would release hydrocarbon fluids in addition to creating solid carbon deposits. Further, at least ten bodies in our solar system are known to contain at least traces of hydrocarbons. Kerogen-like material has been detected in interstellar clouds and in dust particles around stars.

  Dr. Gold, from this excellent article:

  Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?

• Also, it is now accepted that the formation of the Earth was a "cold" process – a process of accretion that didn't heat up until radioactive materials began to sink to the center under the heat and pressure from the cold surface. This process would not have resulted in outgassing of hydrocarbons and methane from the surface as it would have if the surface had been all molten rock. (That surface likely would have done away with all the water, too.)
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous generation of hydrocarbons heavier than methane at low pressures. Thermodynamic calculations and experimental studies confirm that n-alkanes (common petroleum components) do not spontaneously evolve from methane at pressures typically found in sedimentary basins. There simply isn't enough crushing and squeezing energy at these relatively low depths. The materials we find in petroleum would require far greater pressures – those found below 200 km.
• Hydrocarbon deposits have been found in places that are said to be poorly explained by biogenic theory. In the White Tiger field in Vietnam and many wells in Russia, oil and natural gas are being produced from reservoirs in granite basement rock, below all sedimentary rock. In the Vietnamese case, this rock is believed to have no oil-producing sediments under it, so the biogenic theory requires the oil to have migrated laterally dozens of kilometers along faults from source rock. Experiments in Sweden, deep drilling over five kilometers into shield rock has also revealed oil, and microbes. These microbes live on the hydrocarbons.
• Petroleum deposits are often found close to deep structures in the earth – subduction zones, plate boundaries, and the like. They also are found over meteorite impact structures. In short, the places where faults can reach to the Earth's mantle, and release the primordial crude. Oil is often found in sedimentary basins because sedimentary basins fill and cover – cap – depressions over the deep structures. Sedimentary rocks make good reservoirs that allow hydrocarbons to pool, but prevent them from migrating further upward. (Petroleum also occurs in crystalline basement strata, but most petroleum companies prefer to drill sedimentary basins, either because they are looking for large reservoirs or because they hold with the idea that petroleum would only be formed there from organic debris.)
• Some oil fields are being refilled from deep sources, although this does not rule out a deep biogenic source rock. One instance is Eugene Island in the Gulf of Mexico which "began producing about 15,000 barrels of oil per day in the early 1970s. By 1989, the flow had dwindled to 4,000 barrels per day. Then, suddenly, production zoomed to 13,000 barrels. In addition, estimated reserves rocketed from 60 to 400 million barrels." The age of the oil recovered now is reportedly greatly different from that of only ten years ago.
  

  "The Middle East has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma." Off the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says."

  Gold said, in a Wired interview,

  It becomes accessible by recharging, and the recharging process I think I completely understand. There's a stepwise approximation of the pore pressure to the rock pressure - that will always be the case if the stuff is coming up from below. You will not just fill up one reservoir at the top in the shallow levels. It will always be underlaid by another reservoir, and that in turn by another, and so on for a long way down.

Circumstantial evidence:

• Tiny diamondoids occur in oils and condensates. They have similar structure to regular diamonds, and would probably have the same origin - earth's mantle.
• Helium gas has close association with petroleum. Although some He is primordial, much He gas is from radioactive decay of uranium. Helium gas is associated with light oils, sometimes accompanied by nitrogen that allow petroleum to reach shallow levels in crust. No conceivable biological process would result in helium, a noble gas which plays no part whatsoever in organic chemistry.
• Nickel (Ni),vanadium (V),lead (Pb),arsenic (As),cadmium (Cd),mercury (Hg) and others metals frequently occur in oils. Some heavy crude oils, such as Venezuelan heavy crude have up to 45% in vanadium pentoxide in their ash, high enough that it is a commercial souce for vanadium. These metals are common in earth´s mantle.
• Russian geologist Nikolai Alexandrovitch Kudryavtsev first enunciated the modern abiotic theory of petroleum. He studied the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada and concluded that no "source rocks" could possibly have formed the enormous volume of hydrocarbons. (Source rocks being sedimentary deposits with requisite quantities of dead dinosaurs.) Therefore, abiotic deep petroleum is the only plausible explanation.

J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corp. in Houston said there is no real debate about petroleum origination.

There has not been any 'debate' about the origin of hydrocarbons for over a century," he stated. "Competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological material since the last quarter of the 19th century.

Gold Said:

We have two conflicting pieces of evidence. Petroleum contains helium, which the plants cannot have concentrated," he said. "Petroleum also contains purely biological molecules, which petroleum-fed biology deep in the ground could concentrate.

This (upward migration from great depth) is the only explanation I've ever heard of to account for the amount of helium brought up with petroleum.

Gold believes that the amount of oil is hundreds of times greater than the estimates produced by the oil industry's scientists. The Russians are already acting on the theory, and now have many wells producing oil where no western petrochemical engineer would believe it should be. If abiogenic oil exists in the quantities imagined by Gold and the Ukrainians, much of our energy worries are grossly exaggerated. And given the scarcity-driven price of oil, criminally exaggerated.

Ted of Rocket Jones has invited yours truly to a little blog fest in lovely downtown Alexandria. It seems that John of Texas Best Grok is in town for some seedy lawyerly interactions, and suggested getting together for some bloggy goodness. Attendees will include half of the Llama Butchers, Princess Cat of Swift Kick and a Bandaid, The Maximum Leader of Naked Villainy, Ted's spawn Mookie, Dawn of Caterwauling and my own bad self. As Ted said, it sounds like the lineup at a Battle of the Bands at the Council Bluffs, Iowa County Fair. I passed on the word to our resident Canadian Ross, who lives not very far from the bar we'll be infesting - the Union Street Public House, and perhaps he will grace us with his goofy welfare state socialist self. Perhaps others will be there. Perhaps we will acquire groupies. Anything could happen.

Anything.

[wik] If you look at the DC Metro Blog Map, there's another score or more bloggers who probably live within a few miles of the bar, and that's just the ones that bothered to (or knew about) the blog map. How about that.

Or, perhaps more fittingly, "Now that your picture's in the paper being rhythmically admired, you can have anyone that you ever desired."

Protein Wisdom does some Photoshop magic on an old Elvis Costello album cover that really just sort of nails where the President's at right now and makes me feel funny down inside.
 

I realized something today; there's a reason that people in New York and LA think everyone in the middle is crazy. It's because the only time that Beaufort, Montana or Monkeybutt Township, Tennessee makes the news, it's over something really messed up. Flood, famine, fire, bizarre hunting accident, massive KKK rally, or lurid murder plot. Usually the last of those.

Case in point: the place I'm from has made the news exactly once in the past decade, when a woman drowned her kids in a bathtub and maintained that the Lord commanded her to do it. In the past twenty-five years that count bumps to twice, when a budding serial killer was nabbed and identified as a resident. Also, two members of 80s hair-metal also-rans Warrant are from the next town over, so it might just be that I am from a cursed place.

An now my wife's hometown makes its own sad debut on the national stage. The very small, quiet, and lovely river town of Ford City, Pennsylvania is now in the news because some crazy evil woman tried to murder her neighbor and cut her unborn child out of her abdomen to keep as her own. And THIS after pretending to be pregnant right along with her neighbor for eight-odd months. The DA of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania was on the news this AM, and my wife upon seeing him said... "Holy crap... I went to school with his brother!"

And of course, since this story ended up on the national news, the damn fool crazy woman (who of course lives in a double-wide trailer) had to drive her unconscious prey all the way out to Rural Valley to do the baby-extraction part, and then managed to be discovered in flagrante by a kid out tooling around on his four-wheeler. There's a town out there called Rural Valley! Go a little way down 66 and US-422 and you'll also find Oil City, Coaltown, and Distant, Pennsylvania. This area is country.

S. We've got trailers, Rural Valley, a kid on his ATV. and a sensational murder plot that is like stinkbait for the rabid wombats of the national press. That's like some hideous perfect storm of unfortunate stereotypes to make it even easier for the stringers from the AP, Reuters, and CNN to play up (quite unfairly) just how gomerish the place is. Just Ford City's luck that it didn't make the news because the toilet factory opened back up, or for the fine exploits of NFL quarterback Gus Frerotte (who's from the neigboring Kittanning, but that's academic), but because some idiot damn-fool woman thought she could fool the world into thinking that it would be mere coincidence that her neighbor has disappeared and her new baby looks a lot like her.

But all's well that ends without disaster. The victim is alive and in the hospital and the baby is fine, and the crazy lady's husband is shocked and bewildered rather than complicit or room-temperature himself. I just wish for once places like where I'm from would make the news for good reasons. Puppies. Cotton candy. Children getting together and singing in a spirit of love and harmony. Something.

Jesus.

See? This is why I never throw anything away. A late-period Beethoven manuscript from his late-and-stone-deaf period has been discovered in the bottom of a cabinet in Philadelphia. It is a reduction of his Grosse Fugue (originally a string quartet) for two pianos. Although this is a piano reduction and therefore arguably a minor work next to his towering achievements as a non-hearing person, it is still a hugely important find. Beethoven was a merciless reviser and wordy notetaker, so unlike his finished scores which are full of polish, this manuscript in his own hand contains scratch-outs, corrections, emphatic instructions, and even fingerings, thus giving us a rare and precious look into the mind of a genius at work. Check it out.

When even jihadis are telling you to chill the hell out, it's a cinch you've gone too far. Citizen Smash reads the latest letter between international terror superstar Ayman al-Zawahiri and blowin-up-in-Iraq terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. His take: we're winning.

To wit, Zawahiri admonishes Zarqawi that the average Joe (or Jawarhalal, Jafar, or Jakub) really hates the "blowing people up and cutting off heads" thing he's doing so maybe stop that please, begs Zarqawi (currently on the lam in Iraq) to send cash to him, thinks that Iraq is turning out juuuuust like Vietnam (which implies that the terrorists, what... have the material backing of a gigantic and wealthy world power? Read the Democratic Underground? Oh-kay.) and, well, just go read Smash's thing.

It's a cautiously good sign that all the misery Iraqis are bearing might some day not be in vain. Given that an abatement in terrorist acts is probably a prerequisite for long-term stability in Iraq, and given that "you broke it/ you bought it" is currently the USA's lot, here is cause for hope.

(Of course, I'd'a been happier if things had never gotten to this juncture, but hey... you play what you're dealt when it's heads-up time.)

The correspondence between Harriet Miers and the President - all of which is sappy cards and birfday notes since that's the only stuff that doesn't land behind some penumbral state sekrit curtain - is both sad and disturbing. Best governer evar! So cool!

You know what? I hope she gets confirmed. I want her sorry ass on the court for the next twenty-odd years. Because either she'll turn out well and we all win (or, anyway, conservatives probably win), or she'll be a quarter-century embarassment, a wet public fart of a Presidential legacy alongside a massive prescription drug benefit, a mind-boggling deficit, the Department of Homeland Security, and the decline of global American soft power. Somebody shat in my Wheaties this morning, and I want that bland cipher to stand for everything that drives people like me up a wall - the cronyism, the exaltation of the average, the notion that religion is a major qualification for public service, fiscal profligacy, the infallibility of the executive, the nannyish social-engineering moral tightassery - all of it, and I want the wing of the Republican party that thinks all that is a dandy way to be an American pants down and crying in the street by 2008.

When the stinkfinger comes, they will all be touched.

I found this slightly disturbing image over at Rocket Jones. It's funny to a cold hearted conservative like me. But what really made me snort my soda was this sequence in the comments:

Has the five second rule lapsed on this one yet? I mean, if you guys aren't going to eat it, I got a woman to feed over here.

---Posted by shank at October 11, 2005 06:27 PM

I have one of a similar style at home. I like them. They're very simple, yet visually powerful, the more you look at them, the stronger their pull gets.

---Posted by shank at October 11, 2005 06:35 PM

Oh jesus. I just posted on the wrong thread. That second post was for your "Answer" thread.

---Posted by shank at October 11, 2005 06:36 PM

To which I replied,

Shank, your second comment makes you look impressively sick if you're like me and didn't follow the link until after I read the third comment. Though I did wonder why, if you have one at home, you hadn't fed it to your woman.

I ran across a James Bennett article from a couple years ago about differing conceptions of Columbus Day. The whole thing is worth a read, but one thing in particular caught my eye:

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Fairly apt. I first encountered this phenomenon when I worked for an environmental lobby group back in the nineties. It quickly became clear that what they felt was more religion than public advocacy. There I was, proto-conservative in Ohio but with legitimate concerns about pollution and the condition and future of the environment. The environment, after all, was where I lived. While I can tolerate a certain (my wife might say large) amount of mess and filth in my personal habitation, there are limits beyond which it is unsafe to go. At that point, I start cleaning. My views of the larger environment were similary constructed. We'd made a bit too much mess, and cleaning up and forestalling future mess was in order.

However, I didn't view my apartment as a sacred place that was despoiled by the very presence of the works of man. And this was what the environmentalists I worked with did believe. I found it ironic that even though they lived in the same world I did, somehow they were pure and I was not. Even though they wore leather jackets, drove cars and took advantage of aircraft, telephones and in general the entire panoply of modern technology and infrastructure. The concept that I was missing at the time was that they were the Elect, and I was not. Like wealth for the Puritans, there are outward signs of inner grace. For the enviroweenies, it was Birkenstocks, a set ideology of beliefs and a distinct lack of personal hygiene.

Here's yet another view of the Miers nomination, from John Fund of the Opinion Journal. At first Fund was fairly positive about the Miers, but after talking to some people who knew her, he is less sanguine about the likelihood that she will be the staunch conservative that Bush and other Miers boosters claim she is.

The key point that Fund makes is that there are disturbing (for conservatives) parallels between Miers and O'Connor:

What is clear is that her association with George W. Bush has affected her worldview.

David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, who describes Ms. Miers's role in the White House as largely that of a "bureaucrat who couldn't see the forest for the trees," nonetheless believes that Team Bush is right--but only for a while. He believes she will be remain a conservative justice at least until Mr. Bush leaves office in early 2009. "But then the Bushies will have gone home, and she will develop new friends, and then the inevitable tug to the left may prove irresistible."

A friend of both Mr. Bush and Ms. Miers disagrees. He notes that for eight years Justice O'Connor remained largely true to Ronald Reagan's judicial views, even though she had no personal ties to him. "I think Harriet has morphed her views into those of the president," he told me. "I think she will be pretty much the same justice she starts out being for 10 or 15 years. And she is now 60."

Indeed, in many ways, Ms. Miers resembles the early Sandra Day O'Connor, another elected official who backed some liberal positions during her time in the Arizona Legislature. As Justice O'Connor began drifting to the center she became the crucial swing vote on a host of cases. Legal scholars began referring to the "O'Connor Court." Now, with Ms. Miers slated to take the O'Connor seat it may become the "Miers Court."

"This is the most closely divided court in history," says Jay Sekulow , a conservative legal activist who backs Ms. Miers. "Everybody knows what is at stake here." With such high stakes, it should disappoint everyone that the Senate will now have to debate the confirmation of a nominee who, when it comes to Constitutional law, resembles a secret agent more than a scholar.

Despite the at times intense grumbling from the right, I don't think that Miers will be yanked. President Bush is renowned and reviled for his stubborness and loyalty. These factors will not predispose him to pulling support unless research reveals some hidden, fatal flaw in Miers. Short of some evil-doing in her past, she will go before the Senate. And Senate Republicans are unlikely in the extreme to vote against her.

EDog reminds us that a very special time of the year is approaching. A time when we are encouraged not merely to spew mediocrity into the unplumbed depths of the interweb in a haphazard and random way as we do all the time, but rather to spew mediocrity in a focused and methodical way. The charmingly if cluckily named NaNoWriMo gives us an excuse to vomit forth 50,000 words of moderately crappy to horrific prose in a single calender month. Yes, we are asked to write an entire novel in 30 days.

Last year, EDog participated and crafted a compelling and heartfelt homage to the sword-wielding milkman locked in mortal combat with his eternal enemies the aliens. This year, he will enter the fray yet again with a Roman à clef concerning the existential plight of forklifts. I am tempted to join in myself, if for no other reason than to have an excuse to write something besides long and rambling screeds about the multifarious shortcomings of NASA and our imminent subjugation by inteliigent and ill-tempered robots.

Maybe I'll write a story about flowers...

Flowers with guns and a lust for world conquest...

And the efforts of lichens and pine trees to resist angiosperm domination...

Dude, have you seen my bag?

This is something that has always fascinated me. Constitutional Amendments. There's the constitution over their, writ in stone. It’s the law we live by. Yet, by jumping through some (admittedly rather high up in the air) hoops, we can change that constitution, and rewrite the operating code for our nation. There have been 33 amendments passed by Congress and sent to the states. Twenty-seven of those have been adopted. (This process has actually happened only seventeen times, though. The first through tenth, twenty-seventh, and one of the pending amendments were all submitted at once. You could even argue that the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth were so close together that they were in effect one process, like the Bill of Rights.)

Here's what happened to the six that didn't make it in (yet).

There are four pending amendments, which, having been proposed by the required majorities in both houses of Congress were submitted to the states. Unlike more recent amendments, none of these included expiration dates so theoretically they could be adopted at any point provided enough state legislatures voted yea. They are:

• Article I of the twelve initially proposed amendments in 1789 (1st Congress), ten of which became the Bill of Rights in 1791, and one of which became Amendment XXVII more than 200 years later in 1992. The unratified Article I would have regulated the size of the United States House of Representatives and is still technically pending before, and subject to, ratification by the state legislatures. It became moot, however when the population of the United States exceeded ten million people, and an additional 26 states would need to approve it.
• The Titles of Nobility amendment proposed in 1810 (the second session of the 11th Congress) came extremely close to being ratified by the legislatures of the requisite number of states. Its provisions would have stripped the citizenship of any American citizen who accepted a title of nobility from a foreign nation. It remains pending before, and subject to, ratification by the state legislatures. Like Amendment I, it would require another 26 state approvals to take effect.
• The Corwin amendment, proposed in 1861, sought to prevent future amendments that would have permitted Congress to interfere with the practice of slavery:
  

  "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

  Interestingly, this measure passed the Congress through, in part, the lobbying of President Elect Lincoln, and despite the fact that seven states had already seceded from the Union and were no longer represented in Congress at all. From the Wikipedia:

  Today, with 50 states in the Union, ratification by the legislatures of 38 states is required for a proposed amendment to find its way into the Constitution—and with specific regard to the Corwin Amendment, 36 more in addition to those two whose previous ratifications remain valid. Because the amendment uses the term "domestic institutions," and because that term is quite broad, a belated ratification of the Corwin Amendment in modern times might not pertain to slavery at all.

• A Child labor amendment proposed in 1924 would grant Congress exclusive authority to legislate on the subject of child labor and to force state law to yield to federal law. This is rather a moot point since the Feds already have that power thanks to a broad reading of the Commerce Clause. This proposed amendment led to the later use of deadlines amendment language when several states that had earlier balked at approving the amendment later reconsidered. The case Coleman v. Miller established that unless amendments have a deadline, they come into effect whenever ¾ of the states approve it. Even if, as in the case of the 27th amendment, that is more than two centuries after it was proposed.

Beyond the those still considered "active," only two others have been passed by the Congress and submitted to the states. These two had expiration dates that have passed without gaining the required number of state approvals. One was the arguably redundant Equal Rights Amendment, the other the DC voting rights amendment that would have granted DC representation in the US Congress as if it were a state. (Interestingly, it would also be counted as a state for purposes of Article V, amending the constitution, even though DC has no legislature.)

But beyond that, there is the vast field of amendments that have been suggested but never passed by Congress, or sometimes never even got out of committee. And, sometimes not even into committee. Over ten thousand have been introduced in Congress, and sometimes hundreds in a given session. Some are proposed repeatedly, year after year, like the Flag Burning Amendment. (Which sounds as though it's for flag burning when you say it that way.)

Some of the recent, or at least more interesting amendment proposals include:

• A Continuity of Government Amendment that would provide for replacing large numbers of Congressmen or other officials in the event of terrorist attack or natural disaster wiping out Congress. You know, like in Mars Attacks.
• In 2004, Zell Miller proposed repealing the 17th Amendment that provided for direct election of Senators.
• Someone's always proposing repealing the 22nd, for Presidential Term Limits.
• There's the Schwarzenegger Amendment, which would allow foreign born citizens to become President.
• Perennial favorites also include Marriage Amendments, Anti-Flag Desecration Amendments, and School Prayer Amendment.
• A Balanced Budget Amendment might be a good idea. Of course, they'd have to include a lot of text defining what a budget is.
• A Human Life amendment would give fetuses the protection of the fifth and fourteenth amendments.
• The Bricker Amendment would limit the powers of treaties with foreign powers to affect US law.
• Victim's rights amendments have also been proposed to limit the liberal-squishiness of the justice system.

But that's not all. Here's a buttload more amendment proposals from usconstitution.net:

• To specifically permit prayer at school meetings and ceremonies
• To allow non-natural born citizens to become President if they have been a citizen for 20 years
• To specifically allow Congress to regulate the amount of personal funds a candidate to public office can expend in a campaign
• To ensure that apportionment of Representatives be set by counting only citizens
• To make the filibuster in the Senate a part of the Constitution
• To provide for continuity of government in case of a catastrophic event
• To lower the age restriction on Representatives and Senators from 30 and 25 respectively to 21
• To ensure that citizens of U.S. territories and commonwealths can vote in presidential elections
• To guarantee the right to use the word "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto
• To restrict marriage in all states to be between a man and a woman
• To remove any protection any court may find for child pornography
• To allow Congress to pass laws for emergency replenishment of its membership should more than a quarter of either house be killed
• To place Presidential nominees immediately into position, providing the Senate with 120 days to reject the nominee before the appointment is automatically permanent
• Calling for the repeal of the 8th Amendment and its replacement with wording prohibiting incarceration for minor traffic offenses
• To specify that progressive income taxes must be used
• To specify a right to "equal high quality" health care
• To limit pardons granted between October 1 and January 21 of any presidential election year
• To require a balanced budget without use of Social Security Trust Fund monies
• To allow for any person who has been a citizen of the United States for twenty years or more to be eligible for the Presidency
• To force the members of Congress and the President to forfeit their salary, on a per diem basis, for every day past the end of the fiscal year that a budget for that year remains unpassed
• To provide a new method for proposing amendments to the Constitution, where two-thirds of all state legislatures could start the process
• To allow Congress to enact campaign spending limits on federal elections
• To allow Congress to enact campaign spending limits on state elections
• To declare that life begins at conception and that the 5th and 14th amendments apply to unborn children
• To prohibit courts from instructing any state or lower government to levy or raise taxes
• To force a national referendum for any deficit spending
• To provide for the reconfirmation of federal judges every 12 years
• To prohibit the early release of convicted criminals
• To establish the right to a home
• To define the legal effect of international treaties
• To clarify that the Constitution neither prohibits nor requires school prayer
• To establish judicial terms of office
• To clarify the meaning of the 2nd Amendment
• To provide for the reconfirmation of federal judges every 6 years
• To force a two-thirds vote for any bill that raises taxes
• To repeal the 16th Amendment and specifically prohibit an income tax
• To provide for removal of any officer of the U.S. convicted of a felony
• To permit the States to set term limits for their Representatives and Senators
• To allow a Presidential pardon of an individual only after said individual has been tried and convicted of a crime
• To allow Congress to pass legislation to allow the Supreme Court to remove federal judges from office
• To provide for the reconfirmation of federal judges every 10 years
• To provide for the recall of Representatives and Senators
• To remove automatic citizenship of children born in the U.S. to non-resident parents
• To enable or repeal laws by popular vote
• To define a process to allow amendments to the Constitution be proposed by a popular ("grass-roots") effort
• To force a three-fifths vote for any bill that raises taxes
• To prohibit retroactive taxation
• To provide for run-off Presidential elections if no one candidate receives more than 50% of the vote
• To prohibit abortion
• To bar imposition on the States of unfunded federal mandates
• To disallow the desecration of the U.S. Flag
• To allow a line-item veto in appropriations bills
• To expand the term of Representatives to four years
• To provide for direct election of the President and Vice-President (eliminating the Electoral College)
• To force a balanced budget
• To prohibit involuntary bussing of students
• To make English the official language of the United States
• To set term limits on Representatives and Senators
• To repeal the 22nd Amendment (removing Presidential term limits)
• To guarantee a right to employment opportunity for all citizens
• To grant protections to unborn children
• To provide for "moments of silence" in public schools
• To allow Congress to regulate expenditures for and contributions to political campaigns
• To provide for the rights of crime victims
• To provide for access to medical care for all citizens
• To repeal the 2nd Amendment (right to bear arms)
• To prohibit the death penalty
• To protect the environment
• To repeal the 26th Amendment (granting the vote to 18-year olds) and granting the right to vote to 16-year olds
• To provide equal rights to men and women

I also remember suggestions for amendments to establish a ten year sunset for all US laws, and to establish a general line-item veto.

And I'm sure there's plenty more out there. More information, and more links than I was willing to include here can be found at the wikipedia and at the wikipedia. Also, at the wikipedia.

Here's an online book for you. A detailed look at Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, or molecular nanotechnology replicating assemblers, or little things that will turn you into grey goo when you're not looking. I read the first chapter, and it's fascinating stuff, and it's really not that far off.

Sounds vaguely obscene, no? New research shows that stereotypes of national characteristics have little basis in fact. Individuals from diverse cultures scored more or less the same on basic personality indices. All very interesting, in a we're all pink and bloody on the inside kind of way. But these national characteristics are more typically just that - national characteristics. Of course there are sloppy, lazy and cowardly Germans and clean, martial and brave Frenchmen. But it seems to me that national sterotypes are useful in getting an idea about how large groups of people will act, rather than individuals within those groups.

There's an old joke, attributed to of all people Hermann Goering: "Take one German you have a good worker. Two Germans and you have a Bund. Three Germans and you have a war. One Italian, you have a good tenor. Two Italians and you have a retreat. Three Italians and you have a unconditional surrender. Take one Englishman and you have an idiot. Two Englishmen make a club. Three Englishmen and you have a world spanning empire.

National characteristics do not necessarily have a direct relationship to the characteristics of the individuals that make up the nation.

James Carville is as slimy and repulsive a character as we've had to endure lurking around the orifices of our body politic in a long time. He's slimier than Karl Rove, and has a stupendously grating manner of speaking. Nevertheless, he is an acknowledged expert on Democratic politics. Over the last few years, since his patron was unceremoniously removed from power by the 22nd amendment, Carville has been increasingly, well, forceful in his advice to his fellow democrats.

Witness:

The problem with Democrat campaign speeches is "litany," and they need more narrative like Winnie the Pooh stories, political consultant and pundit James Carville said. ...Democratic candidates can’t succeed by shouting out to every group in a crowd. Instead candidates should tell stories with the three elements of any good story — setup, conflict and resolution.

"No Kumbayah crap," Carville said.

... In addition to breaking away from a laundry list of special interests, Carville said, Democrats need to learn that a candidate who can’t campaign can't succeed. "If you’re not competent in campaigns, you don’t have a chance to be competent in government," he said. Using Al Gore as an example, Carville said being a smart candidate is not enough.

...Democrats need to bring their causes together and work for them actively, he said. For example, the political consultant suggested taking the specific issue of racial affirmative action and helping those of all races with income-based affirmative action. If Democrats try to single out every issue, they’re back to litany, Carville said. He also said Democrats just can't say "no" to causes from gay rights to abortion to the poor.

"Sometimes the problem with being a Democrat is being a Democrat," he said.

That's not bad advice, and I hope that someone is listening.

Two more conservative heavyweights have, uh, weighed in on the Miers nomination. On both sides.

Newt Gingrich tells us to trust the President. For liberals, this presents something of a conundrum. They already don't trust the President, so does that mean the nominee will be a Souter or an Anti-Souter? Fear or relief? For conservatives, the problem is less stark, but still a problem. The core of Gingrich's argument is this: Bush ran as a conservative, and has held true to that over the last five years. He assembled a team of conservatives. He said that he'd appoint conservative judges, and has consistently done so to the dismay of many liberals. Miers is the one who helped him do this, and he's known Miers for years. Trust George. As far as the conservative judges go, 'ol Newt has a point. But Bush has not been consistently conservative, though I'll buy mostly conservative. But the spectre of steel tariffs, the prescription drug entitlement and other misteps haunts.

So far, this is the strongest argument I have seen in favor of Miers, aside from Patton's point that the Constitution says that the President can pick whomever he damn well pleases.

Charles Krauthammer has a rather different take. In an essay entitled, "Withdraw this nominee," the Kraut says - and I quote at length:

There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvie Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous.

It will be argued that this criticism is elitist. But this is not about the Ivy League. The issue is not the venue of Miers's constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement. The issue is their nonexistence.

Moreover, the Supreme Court is an elite institution. It is not one of the "popular" branches of government. That is the reason Sen. Roman Hruska achieved such unsought immortality when he declared, in support of an undistinguished Nixon nominee to the court, that, yes, G. Harrold Carswell is a mediocrity but mediocre Americans deserve representation on the court as well.

To serve in Congress, or even as president, there is no requirement for scholarship and brilliance. For good reason. It is not needed. It can even be a hindrance, as we learned from our experience with Woodrow Wilson, the most intellectually accomplished president of the 20th century and also the worst.

But constitutional jurisprudence is different. It is, by definition, an exercise of intellect steeped in scholarship. Otherwise it is nothing but raw politics. And is it not the conservative complaint that liberals have abused the courts by having them exercise raw super-legislative power, the most egregious example of which is the court's most intellectually bankrupt ruling, Roe v. Wade?

The President has a right to choose the nominee. But I have a right to carp and whinge that it is not a good choice. And I don't think that this one is a winner, not when there are so many other clearly distinguished candidates.

Quite a few things have been happening on the space front over the last week. Of interest to anyone in the DC area, Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne is now ensconced in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, right next to the Spirit of St. Louis. I had intended to go over and pay my respects today, but seeing as it is raining a bit (3” expected over the next 24 hours) I think I’ll wait until next week.

Rocket Jones noted this and even came up with a cool title, but I can’t leave it to him entirely.

A private group of rocketeers has banded together to create the Rocket Racing League with aims at blurring the line between competitive racing and human spaceflight. Their vision: A fleet of at least 10 stock rocket planes flown by crack pilots through a three-dimensional track 5,000 feet above the Earth.

This is just too cool for words. The RRL will conduct its races at Los Cruces, NM, where League co-founder Peter Diamandis (also founder of the X-Prize) is holding his X-Cup festival this month. The first races are scheduled for next fall, and should prove to be very interesting. These races aren’t going to be like drag races, where the fastest rocket wins. It will be more like formula one racing, or even yacht racing. Each rocket plane will have to stay inside a defined path, make turns, and complete the course in the fastest time. Since the burn time on an XCOR rocket plane is only about four minutes, pilots will need to strategically start and stop their engine, combining powered flight and judicious gliding to win the race. And since the kerosene/LOX rocket will have a bright orange plume, this race should be visually spectacular.

Back in the early days of aviation, one of the chief means of stoking public interest in and acceptance of airplanes was air races. As airplanes evolved, so to did the races. Here's a brief outline, adapted from the Society of Air Racing Historians:

Air Racing Eras 

Gordon Bennett Trophy Races: 1909-1920
This first important era of air racing brought to public attention the likes of Glen Curtiss, Maurice Prevost and Jules Vedrines who flew Bleriots, Curtiss, Wrights and Deperdussins. 

Schneider Trophy Races: 1913-1931
These great seaplane racers were the fastest aircraft in the world. They brought true speed to aviation, thanks to pilots like Jimmy Doolittle, Mario de Bernardi, John Boothman and David Rittenhouse. They flew planes built by Curtiss, Supermarine, Macchi, Gloster and Sopwith. Aviation progress resulted from the use of huge V-12 engines and advanced streamlining. 

Pulitzer Trophy Races: 1920-1925
These military pylon races brought the USA to the lead in speed, with pilots like Bert Acosta, Al Williams and C. C. Mosley flying Curtiss, VervilleSperry and Loening military racers. 

LONG-DISTANCE RACES: 1920's 1930's
Some of the greatest races were over long courses from one country to another, such as the 1934 MacRobertson Race from England to Australia won by the deHavilland Comet racer. Others such as the ill-fated Dole Race from California to Hawaii in 1927, won by the Travelair "Woolaroc", revealed the true hazards of long-distance flying. 

CLEVELAND AIR RACES 1929-1939
The "Golden Age of Air Racing" in which custom-built raceplanes ruled the roost. Lowell Bayles, Roscoe Turner, Tony LeVier, Art Chester, Steve Wittman, Harold Neumann , Jackie Cochran. Gee Bees, Wedell Williams, Keith Riders, Lairds, Folkerts and many others. These were the classic Thompson, Bendix and Greve Races. 

POST-WAR AIR RACES 1946-1960
Unprecedented speed from cut-down, souped-up ex-military fighter planes: P-38 Lightnings, P-39 Airacobras, P-51 Mustangs, F2G Corsairs, Cook Cleland, "Tex" Johnston, Paul Mantz, Anson Johnson, Beville & Raymond in the Thompson, Bendix and Sohio Races. 

RENO AIR RACES: 1964-???
The current era began in 1964 with Bill Stead’s experiment in the Nevada desert. Unlimiteds (Mustangs, Bearcats, Sea Furys and Yaks flown by Greenamyer, Sheldon, Lacy and Destefani) Formula Ones (Miller pushers, Cassutts and Shoestrings raced by Cote, Falck, Sharp and Miller) Sport Biplanes (Pitts, Starduster and Mongs flown by Christian and Boland) AT-6s (raced by Van Fossen and Dwelle) and Formula Vs (Sonerais and V-Witts raced by Dempsey and Terry).

If the new rocket races achieve any kind of media attention, they could fuel a lot of interest amongst the people for rockets and spaceflight.

And speaking of the X-Prize Cup, the first will be held this weekend. Among the highlights will be a test flight of the XCOR rocket plane mentioned above, a full on test flight of Armadillo Aerospace’s vertical take-off/vertical landing vehicle, and full scale mock-ups of several spaceships currently under development. Los Cruces is well on its way to becoming rockethead Mecca.

I don't suppose the preponderance of Texans we count among our member- and readership will have much use for this recipe, but for those of you in more northerly climes, this is recipe comes directly from my heart to you. It is a fairly simple* fall and winter soup, perfect for those nights when you can get a pleasant buzz on and fart a lot at home contentedly while the freezing wind whips the trees outside.

Vegetable Borscht with Barley

This simple vegetarian vegetable soup has a surprising depth of flavor - earthy, sweet, green, warm, and tangy. It is almost more like a stew than a soup as presented, thanks to the amount of vegetables. If you want a thinner soup, feel free to add more stock and kick up the dill and caraway a tiny bit to amplify their flavor. I like it this way, though. It takes me back to an imagined ancestry in the great sweep of Eastern Europe from Swabia and Poland all the way to Romania, sort of a Swabopolskiczechohungariromanimoldovan cuisine. Or just call it Fake Transylvanian for short. Stay tuned for my Thai-Italian fusion cuisine!

If you wish to use canned beets, you can, but nothing tops roasted beets for complexity. Frozen vegetables are absolutely okay in this soup, but be sure to par-cook any greens beforehand so they don't make the soup bitter.

3 medium carrots, diced
3 stalks celery, diced
2 large onions, diced
6 cloves garlic, minced (vary to taste)
2 tsp dill seeds
1/2 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp dried thyme (more if stock contains no thyme)
1/2 cup hulled barley (the brown stuff preferably, not pearl)
6-8 cups lightly- or un-salted beef, chicken, or vegetable stock or water (at least some of which stock)
1 medium head green cabbage, shredded
6 medium beets (total 8-12 oz), roasted, peeled & diced
other vegetables as desired: green beans, turnips, turnip greens, kale, etc., I wouldn't use potatoes but you certainly may)
1/2 bunch parsley, finely chopped
1 T vinegar, red wine or cider
salt
pepper
vegetable oil

Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat and add carrots, celery, onions, garlic, and 1/2 tsp salt. Sweat until onions are translucent, about 7 minutes. Add caraway, dill, and thyme, reduce heat a bit, and cook about 5 minutes more.

Add liquid and barley. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to simmer for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

Add cabbage, beets, and other vegetables and cook for about 20 minutes more. If necessary, add more liquid to cover. Adjust salt at this time.

Add pepper, vinegar, and parsley and cook 5 minutes. Taste and adjust one last time before serving.

This recipe could easily be converted for omnivores by the addition of maybe a pound of cubed stew meat browned in the pan prior to adding the aromatics and cooking until tender prior to adding the cabbage.

Serve with, oh, maybe a side of potato or sauerkraut pierogis fried with onions, or bread and butter and cheese, plus definitely lots of cold beer or Reisling for an authentically faux-Eastern Bloc experience. Now I'm hungry.

[wik] * About that word, simple. Of course this recipe is simple; it's a soup! But like so many things, "simple" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "easy." Stir-fries are simple, but the entire vocabulary of cooking them is fundamentally different than what Western cooks innately do. And baguettes- they are one of the easiest recipes for good bread going, but they sure aren't simple. Chess is easy too. Bouillabaisse isn't that hard, but there sure as hell is a trick to getting it to taste anything like the sublime fish soup of coastal France.

And, I suppose, no recipe is simple if you don't have a sense of how big "dice" should be, or what "salt to taste" means when you're standing over the pot with the saltshaker, or what a simmer is. So, I take it back, the word "simple."

[alsø wik] Comrade Hall asks how to roast beets. Easy! First, you need to kill your beets. As unfortunate as this is, beet flesh deteriorates very rapidly after death, so you must buy live ones. They are fast, slippery and surprisingly strong little buggers with a lot of fight in them, so this is often a challenge. The traditional method is to stuff one into a sack, grab it by the tail, and beat its head against a hard surface until it stops fighting. Then beat it some more because the treacherous little bastard might be faking. Then, the gutting. Trust me; the payoff for all this is delicious.

Oh wait, wait. Sorry, that was eels.

Beets.

First you need to kill your beets.

No. Damn.

Always buy beets with the greens attached. If the greens are sturdy and healthy, you've got to vegetables for the price of one. If not, they are still a guarantee that the roots are strong and fresh and not old, woody, and tasteless. For this recipe, one or two "bunches" will do, whatever your market or local dirt farmer calls a "bunch."

Remove the greens, leaving 1/2 to 1 inch of stem. Set greens aside to cook or pitch as necessary. Scrub beets gently to remove clinging dirt (though you will eventually peel them, dirt on the beets can contribute a dirty flavor (as opposed to earthy) to the final product) and pat dry. Do not peel at this time. Place beets on a layer of foil. At this point, if desired you can hit them with a little vegetable oil to promote fast cooking**. You can also slip some thyme and salt and pepper in the mix if so desired. I usually don't. Fold the beets up well into a rough packet, whatever you can manage. If you must divide the beets into two separate packets in order to close the foil around the beets, do so. Repeat with a second layer of foil, making sure that the beets are tightly wrapped - we want the steam, for the most part, to stay in. This goes double for the sugar-rich purple juices which will blacken in a second if they get free into the oven, and will stain the hell out of your clothes, hot-pads, and anything else they come near.

Place your double-wrapped beets on a baking sheet and place in a well-preheated (which means, "at temperature for at least 20 minutes with the door closed") 350-degree oven. Beets always take longer than you expect, so smallish to medium size ones will take about an hour, and very large ones can go 90 minutes or more. They are done when a paring knife penetrates to the middle with practically no resistance. (Beets will tend to stay a little harder than other vegetables thanks to their cell-wall makeup.)

Remove from oven, and cool until you can handle them. Then, under running water slip the skins right off with your fingers. Voila.

In case that was too much info, here's the executive summary:
Cut off greens
Scrub
Wrap tightly in double layer of foil
350 degrees, 1 hour to 90 minutes
Cool, peel, enjoy.

** As you know, fats transfer heat more efficiently than water or air. So, by rubbing the skins of the beets with fat you are theoretically aiding the transfer of heat from the oven to the interior of the vegetable. Whether or not this effect is detectable in shortened cooking time is debatable. It probably helps a bit. On the other hand, always oil your baked taters, because the skin will turn out nice and browned and chewy, all of which probably does help the potato's inside to cook.

Peggy Noonan on a larger issue hidden in the littler issue:

The headline lately is that conservatives are stiffing the president. They're in uproar over Ms. Miers, in rebellion over spending, critical over cronyism. But the real story continues to be that the president feels so free to stiff conservatives. The White House is not full of stupid people. They knew conservatives would be disappointed that the president chose his lawyer for the high court. They knew conservatives would eventually awaken over spending. They knew someone would tag them on putting friends in high places. They knew conservatives would not like the big-government impulses revealed in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The headline is not that this White House endlessly bows to the right but that it is not at all afraid of the right. Why? This strikes me as the most interesting question.

Peggy offers some possible answers, but I fear that it might be the last one, "Maybe he's totally blowing it with his base, and in so doing endangering the present meaning and future prospects of his party."

Well, Harriet Miers just leapt another of the imaginary hurdles to her confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Ann Coulter is neither amused nor impressed. As I said during the Roberts confirmation process, if Ann doesn't like the candidate, then the candidate's probably got at least something going for them.

Why? Not because Ann's unintelligent, quite the opposite - she's very bright. She's also, however, highly caustic, so much so that she's far better fun (not informative - fun) to read than to listen to. I've long thought that if she could lose the whiny high-school know-it-all "can you believe it?" tone to her voice, she'd be far more effective at communicating. In this case, however, her causticity (causticism?) is directed at the alleged difference between the Ivy League law schools and the less-adored ones like SMU.

With a nod to the opinions of those who, like me, aren't impressed by Ivy League degrees when someone's actual work history is also available (i.e. Ivy League degree is an excellent credential for a new graduate, but isn't a balm for any occurrences of observed stupidity or incompetence later in life), Ann admits that it's reasonable to not be swayed by the dueling J.D. degree argument. And then she rides it to the hilt, asserting that a conservative from an Ivy League law school is a better and more solid conservative precisely because they remain one after an Ivy League indoctrination.

30 years later. Right. That would be believable if, in fact, the only forum in which rowdy right/left discourse were available was in Ivy League schools, or in college generally. But it's not, and anyone whose cognitive abilities were fully formed on exit from university, remaining unamended by experience since then, ought to be checked for dain bramage. John Roberts, as a ferinstance, is one bright gentleman, to all appearances a gen-ewe-wine legal scholar. But if he came out of Harvard Law as "that guy", I'd be shocked. He's done a bit since then.

And speaking of having done a bit since then, Ann seems to think that the only thing noteworthy that Miers has done is run the TX Lottery Commission. Others who've opined on the matter, such as Bill Dyer, at great length, aren't nearly as exercised about Miers' qualifications, and neither does Bill think running the Lotto is the most impressive resume item Miers possesses.

To the extent my previous mumblings on this matter aren't viewable as a coherent position, I'd state for the record that I will be emotionally and politically unaffected by the result of Ms. Miers' hearings. The process? Oh, that I'll probably react to, one way or another, because it has nothing much to do with her, and all to do with her inquisitors, but if she's ultimately confirmed by the Senate, that's fine by me, and if she's rejected, likewise.

The Republican Party doesn't have a constitutional prerogative to choose SCOTUS appointees, nor does the "administration", the Senate majority leader, or the President's masseuse. That prerogative falls to the president himself, and, in the words of Richard Jeni (which {ahem} I note after a Google source search for the phrase, I've used in this forum once before, but gimme a break - they apply) “Shut up, fat boy - the gentleman has MADE his selection”.

Perhaps I don't take the internal politics of the Supreme Court seriously enough, or think that there's some sort of cock-fight where they compare sheepskins before each deliberation, and perhaps I don't give enough credit to those who think they can accurately forecast the end result of any single Justice's nomination (see "Souter", "Kennedy", or "Earl Warren"), but a choice is a choice, and if she's confirmed, then so be it. And let the chips fall where they might.

All due respect to Ken Mehlman and the rest of the agitators requesting grass roots support for the candidate, I'd ask "why does it matter"?

A disquisition on the economics of bumvertising.

Bum + Advertising. Sweet!

The Hall of Douchebags, with (as an added bonus) a shitload of brick walls. If you're in a band, remember: your band sucks.

People of Mars, you say we are brutes and savages. But let me tell you one thing: if I could get loose from this cage you have me in, I would tear you guys a new Martian asshole.

...You claim there are other intelligent beings in the galaxy besides earthlings and Martians. Good, then we can attack them together. And after we’re through attacking them we’ll attack you.

...You keep my body imprisoned in this cage. But I am able to transport my mind to a place far away, a happier place, where I use Martian heads for batting practice.

...You may kill me, either on purpose or by not making sure that all the surfaces in my cage are safe to lick. But you can’t kill an idea. And that idea is: me chasing you with a big wooden mallet.

The saying goes, you can indict a ham sandwich. Apparently, it has been revealed that Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle failed at least once to get an indictment against DeLay. Witness:

A Travis County grand jury last week refused to indict former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as prosecutors raced to salvage their felony case against the Sugar Land Republican.

In a written statement Tuesday, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle acknowledged that prosecutors presented their case to three grand juries — not just the two they had discussed — and one grand jury refused to indict DeLay.

Not that DeLay is supercool, and I want him to be godfather to my next child - but I think that this is all a bit of a witch hunt on the part of an overzealous and a tad bit politically motivated Mr. Earle.

While I don't feel as Johno does that the recent appointment of Harriet Miers is some sort of presumptive ass covering, I am beginning to feel more strongly that this nomination should be stiff armed by the Senate. While Miers is no doubt a bright, pleasant and even (let us grant) deeply conservative person; I am not prepared to take on trust Bush's assertion that she is the best qualified candidate for one of the more important jobs in our republic.

A common refrain among Bush supporters, and one that I have on occasion used myself, is that Bush is right about the big things even if he occasionally commits some egregious pooch-screwing on the little things. This, however, is a big thing. One of the bigger things. Possibly the biggest, short of the war on terror itself. My stepmom voted for Bush second time around despite her deep opposition to the war for this reason alone. She wanted conservatives appointed to the big bench, and as we have seen Bush is having many opportunities to do so, and might have yet more.

Roberts was a suitable candidate. He is widely respected in the legal profession, adn is clearly as conservative as Rehnquist, who he is now replacing. But this nomination is the real big one, because we are replacing O'Connor - a swing vote.

George Will hits several very good points in his most recent essay. First is this:

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due.

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's "argument'' for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their prepresidential careers, and this president, particularly, is not disposed to such reflections.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers' nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers' name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.

This gets back to the argument against cronyism from Federalist 76. Were I president and nominating a candidate for the Supreme Court, I could select my cousin Chris for the job. I can be certain that Chris would be reliably conservative for the next several decades and ensure that the court goes in a way that I want. That doesn't make Chris a bad person, but neither would it convince anyone that he was the best candidate for the position.

There are so many talented, respected conservative candidates that it is almost insulting that Bush should pick Meirs.

Will moves on and brings out the big, spikey bat:

In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution. The forfeiture occurred March 27, 2002, when, in a private act betokening an uneasy conscience, he signed the McCain-Feingold law expanding government regulation of the timing, quantity and content of political speech. The day before the 2000 Iowa caucuses he was asked -- to insure a considered response from him, he had been told in advance he would be asked -- whether McCain-Feingold's core purposes are unconstitutional. He unhesitatingly said, "I agree.'' Asked if he thought presidents have a duty, pursuant to their oath to defend the Constitution, to make an independent judgment about the constitutionality of bills and to veto those he thinks unconstitutional, he briskly said, "I do.''

This gets to the heart of the matter. Bush clearly either lacks comprehension or conviction on the issue of constitutional responsibility. The Congress has been lacking this for most of a century, and large parts of the Supreme Court for decades. If we had a President who got it, we might redress some of the damage that has been done. The Constitution is the contract we all live by, and you can't go violating the terms of it without storing up some bad karma. The Constitution includes means for amendment, and that should be exercised rather than bending the Constitution out of all recognition.

Will continues:

The wisdom of presumptive opposition to Miers' confirmation flows from the fact that constitutional reasoning is a talent -- a skill acquired, as intellectual skills are, by years of practice sustained by intense interest. It is not usually acquired in the normal course of even a fine lawyer's career. The burden is on Miers to demonstrate such talents, and on senators to compel such a demonstration or reject the nomination.

Under the rubric of "diversity'' -- nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses -- the president announced, surely without fathoming the implications, his belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation. Identity politics holds that one's essential attributes are genetic, biological, ethnic or chromosomal -- that one's nature and understanding are decisively shaped by race, ethnicity or gender. Categorical representation holds that the interests of a group can only be understood, empathized with and represented by a member of that group.

The crowning absurdity of the president's wallowing in such nonsense is the obvious assumption that the Supreme Court is, like a legislature, an institution of representation. This from a president who, introducing Miers, deplored judges who "legislate from the bench.''

I can't really add to that.

This nomination is not an abomination that should be resisted to the last breath. But it is a bitchslap to the face of the body politic. I disagree with ideologues using the Senate to enforce litmus tests on candidates for the courts, or indeed for other positions of responsibility. But the Senate does have a responsibility - detailed in Federalist 76 and elsewhere - to weed out the sick, the weak and the incompetant. A sort of Darwinian control on Presidential appointments. John Tower was a drunk, and was rightly bounced for secdef. Abe Fortas was righteously bounced for being a crony of LBJ. Bork was wrongly bounced for ideological reasons when everyone knew that he was more qualified in terms of constitutional acumen than anyone then on the bench.

There are plenty of good candidates. Alito, McConnell and Luttig right off the top of my head. Maybe we should wait and see if we can do better.

At the risk of sounding a little paranoid, here's a scenario. Say Miers makes it to the Supremes. What happens if, in a few years, a gigantic case or two relating to the activities of Bush I or II while in office come down the pike? The Bush clan are major players in the international development scene, and have been involved in a bushel of morally and ethically dubious and legally questionable enterprises, along with their not-as-erstwhile-as-might-be-hoped friends the Sauds and the like. What if --- what if -- and I'm just saying, something real ugly comes to light and the case makes it all the way to the big leagues.

Would close personal friend and leader of the fanclub Miers recuse herself? Would she not? Is it possible that W doesn't care what constitutional crises he might be flirting with? Does this help explain some of the reasoning behind this pick?

Reading it back, that sounds uncomfortably like Kossite Kool-Ade, but bless my timid fencesitting soul, that's where my head is going when I think about the implications of this nomination. All the more reason that a crony, no matter how qualified, august and Solomonic they may be, are not suitable candidates for the SCOTUS.

[wik] Speaking of... can anybody please recollect for me why exactly Bush I chose to take out Manuel Noriega? What act of belligerence against the United States or its treaty-bound allies triggered that invasion?

Forgive me, but I get the inescapable impression that in trying to do his best, George W. Bush is coming in his second term to resemble more and more none other than... Jimmy Carter. Think about it. He has stocked his talent pool with Texan cronies and other assorted yes-men and seems determined to rely only on their supposedly ex-Beltway judgment for counsel (disregarding Cheney and Rumsfeld, for whom family connections apply) for better or worse. His domestic initiatives are foundering, his international initiatives are suffering from terminal lack of focus, and on a personal level he is a religous man prone to make snap judgments about people's qualities.

I know it's a stretch and probably unfair to both George and Jimmy, but that's the way I sees it.

[wik] With the obvious caveat, of course, that nobody ever doubted Jimmy Carter's integrity.

When I first heard rumors that Miers was on the list of potential Supreme Court nominees, I thought to myself, "Myself, given Bush's propensity to promote loyalists - a propensity that verges on, nay tapdances on the line of cronyism - she's going to be the one. You just watch."

Myself had no real arguments against this kind of solid reasoning. And lo and behold, there it is. A person with no notable qualifications for the position save a near fanatical devotion to the President is nominated. A person who, it seems, used to be a Democrat and once donated money to Al Gore's presidential campaign. To be sure, that was the earlier, saner Gore. Not the more recent android replicant Gore of 2000. As a conservative I have nothing but Bush's assurance that this is the real deal, a full octane strict constructionist. Someone who, once on the court, will not do a Souter and list dangerously to port. The list of conservative commentators irritated by this nomination is longer than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick. People are righteously pissed that qualified, solid conservatives were passed over for Miers.

Maybe it will all work out. Maybe there is some dastardly Roveian scheme at work. But Sen. Reid is already saying she's cool even before the oppo-research lads have gotten a crack at her. That, to me, is a very bad sign, seeing as he voted against Roberts.

This is the Bad Bush at work. We've been seeing a lot more of him lately. And I'm frustrated.

Clinton pursued what was in effect a scorched-earth strategy so far as the rest of his party was concerned. Whatever success he achieved was not transferrable to the party at large, and yet they were saddled with all of his negatives whether they deserved them or not. This was largely a function of his narcisism and ego.

The flap over DeLay, and lingering questions about Rove and Plamegate will not bother the electorate a year from now. But if Bush continues on this track, he will be doing to his party through stupidity and blind reward of loyalty what Clinton did to his through priapism and perjury. The Republicans are not doing anything right now to make their base happy. And unhappy bases do not go out and vote in mid term elections.

The new Hurricane Forecast for October calls for continued high levels of activity. Tropical Storm Stan is expected to grow to Hurricane force before slamming into Mexico this week. And that is named storm #18. The record is 21, back in 1933, with 21. Just four more to set a new record, and also for the first time completely run through the list of names set aside every year. Personally, I think that seeing Hurricane Alpha would be sweet, so long as it doesn't hit where I live. I want to see it on the weather channel, not outside my house.

Of couse, this is all just another sign of Bush induced global eco-apocalypse. Unless of course, global warming is caused by, I don't know, the Sun.

This last Saturday, for the second time this calendar year, a doctor has said to me, "congratulations, we have ruled out any possibility of autoimmune disorders."

How frigging random is that?

A happy Rosh Hashana to our Jewish readers and friends! And Wednesday marks Ee'e'eee'e'e'neee, the dolphin festival of liberation from their shark overlords several millennia ago. A happy week to all, our Semitic and our aquatic friends alike!

This morning, President Bush tapped a bootlicking toady for the Supreme Court slot recently vacated by O'Connor. Harriet Miers is White House counsel and has known Bush since forever, having served with him while he was governer of Texas. She is reputed to be one of the Bush camp's most fervent believers (that's really sayin' som'n), and David Frum has quoted her as telling him that Bush is the most brilliant man she's ever met.

Now, really. That's just over the damn top.

What game could Bush possibly be playing by nominating not only a crony, and not only an unknown, but an unknown crony who thinks he hangs the moon and whose qualifications for the Supreme Court are, well, tissue-thin? Well, I'll tell you.

A hundred dollars says that Bush has floated Miers' name as an "eff you" to all and sundry who think he's headed in the wrong direction. He takes loyalty very seriously and obviously tends to reward faithfulness over competence, and also famously hates to hear bad news or be contradicted. So there's that dynamic at play, this time nationwide rather than in the confines of staff meetings.

But there's something deeper here. Her nomination is likely to piss off his opponents and supporters alike. If she goes down in flames, well, so what? Bush wins whether Miers gets the confirmation or not. If she does, it's a lovely gift for a close personal friend whose heart he has looked into deeply and seen the good inside (viz. Putin), and as he sees it probably a lock on someone dependable to cement his legacy for the next two decades or so.

And if Miers goes down the loser, Bush is banking that in the aftermath of a failed confirmation fight, nobody but nobody will have the stomach to fight a brutal, extended, and potentially politically suicidal second round over the inevitable super-conservative follow-up candidate like, say, Janice Rogers Brown.

If that fight happens and his second choice is blocked (or even if things start looking shaky for that second choice) Bush & co. are betting that this will give him a chance to go to the nation with hands raised in despair over the flotilla of cranks, radicals, and secular-humanist faggot-lovers (present!) that make up the other side these days. Advantage: Bush!

Or, he could just be a cronyist idiot.

[wik] Obsidian Wings has a rundown of reactions from across the web. Guess what: they're mostly negative. Either W is playing a very long and subtle hand, or his failings of imagination are bigger than I'd ever thought.