Washington's Birthday, Aquaman's Reprieve, and More

It's George Washington's Birthday. I expect everyone to celebrate appropriately. It's the 275th anniversary of his birth, but, as our tale does not occur in the book of Genesis, he's not around to celebrate. At the time of his birth, the calendar read February 11. However, the British Empire decided to manipulate time in 1752, and, well, today's his birthday.

Step aside, Aquaman, the world has a new lamest superhero. It's Captain Euro! You can watch each week as Captain Euro uses German bureaucracy and French cowardice in his fight against Dr. D. Vider and his assorted henchmen. Dr. D. Vider apparently wishes to divide Europe and create his own empire. Maybe it's just me, but I'd think that he'd want Europe united under the dominion of his empire. I guess that's just due to the typical irrational thoughts of super-villians, and not poor writing by brainwashed socialist one-worlders ... oh, no, it couldn't be that.

I recently discovered that the house of John Tyler (our tenth president, from 1841 to 1845) is still owned by his grandson. That's right, no "great"s in there. As described here:

John Tyler was born in 1790. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, his fourteenth child of fifteen (eight children by his first wife, seven by his second) was born in 1853, when President Tyler was 63. Harrison Tyler, Lyon Tyler’s fifth child of six (three children by each of his two wives) was born in 1928, when Lyon Tyler was 75. And Harrison Tyler, now 79, still inhabits Sherwood Forest Plantation, the Tyler family home.

From grandfather to grandson, 217 years…and counting.

Not a bad piece of trivia.

Rep. Ed Markey (D, MA-7) has a long history of advocating getting our troops out of harms way, as demonstrated here.

Rep. William "Freezer Cash" Jefferson (D-LA) is being given a seat on the Homeland Security Committee.

David Frum has the right idea on how to use the Newbery Award for children's literature.

Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish is quite a name for a baseball player. He shares the record with Greg Maddux, Denny McLain, and Rich Dotson for most consecutive road victories (16), but his career was otherwise pretty unspectacular.

Funny thing about Barack Hussein Obama's voting record in the state legislature of Illinois; on many of the bigger issues, such as banning partial-birth abortion, he didn't vote for or against, but merely cast a "present" vote. How, exactly, does he plan to do that should he win the White House. Should he retitle his book from The Audacity of Hope to The Audacity of Presence?

I was pointed toward a nice pdf file on military deaths. Not that military deaths are nice, mind you. It covers military deaths from 1980 through 2004. Many would be quick to assume 2004 has the highest total, I'm sure, what with Iraq and all. However, the highest total is for 1983 (due to the terrorist attack in Lebanon), followed by 1980, and then ... well, to cut to the chase, 2004 is ninth highest (and 2003 is fourteenth). I'm ranking by total number of deaths; by percentage of total military active duty force, they rank higher. Still, despite being aware that the death rate in Iraq has been relatively low, I was surprised by that tidbit.

For those who've ever felt exasperation trying to explain computers (or technology in general) to someone, here's a nice video from tech support on the upgrade from the scroll to the book. It's in Norwegian, with subtitles in Danish, but it also has English subtitles.

A new ad has been released by 18 Doughty Street. Entitled "A World Without America," the ad is an effort to counter anti-Americanism.

Once again a new record for smallest surviving preemie has been set in America. Born after only 22 weeks of gestation (also a record for a survivor), Amellia Taylor weighed less than 10 ounces and was 9 1/2 inches long. It really rankles me to see America's healthcare system getting knocked, especially those who love to point out our seemingly high infant mortality rate. If a baby is born in America, lives for one minute, and then dies, it's counted as just that. In other countries, it goes down as a miscarriage. If you have a baby born after less than, say, eight months gestation, the United States stands head and shoulders above all other countries.

Purchases That I've Recently Made, Am in the Process of Making, or Will Soon Make

I purchased Season 1 of House from Borders as it was on sale for only $19.99 through today. It's normally more in the $45 range, or, with the insane non-sale prices at Borders, $60. So, basically, it seemed like a good deal. I've heard several people mention their affection for the show; their affection had better be well-placed. I'm not really in the habit of buying entire seasons of shows I've never seen before -- movies, sure, but not television shows.

On Amazon, I've placed in my cart (only awaiting the finding of gift certificates) Supreme Conflict by Jan Greenburg, Does Education Matter? by Alison Wolfe, and the four Hannibal Lecter novels by Thomas Harris. When I first heard a member of the mainstream media had written a book on the Supreme Court, I figured it was some tired retread of old ideas, information, and the like; however, I've heard many good things about it, so it seems worth a read. Does Education Matter? focuses on credentialism, and asks less about whether education matters than if our debased version thereof does so. As for the Thomas Harris books, I've been in a couple of conversations about novels recently, and that seemed like a popular series I have not read (though I did see two of the movies). I also have not read the Bourne series, nor any John Grisham novels. As for other popular novelists, I've read only one Koontz and one Sandford, no Cussler, and I don't think any Patterson, though I seem to possess at least three unread books from that group. I need to work more on my reading.

Oh, I also purchased a car. Unfortunately, I had to go into debt.

Tomorrow, I shall be purchasing shiny objects. They're pretty.

Lincoln's Birthday and Other Meanderings

Happy Lincoln's Birthday. You can celebrate by dividing houses against themselves and watching them fall over. Lincoln was born in 1809; in 1909, his likeness was put on the one cent piece (the first time the likeness of a real person was used on a circulating coin produced by the United States; previous coins included generic indians and personifications of Liberty), and in 1959, the Lincoln Memorial was placed on the reverse of the one cent piece. No word yet on official plans for any sort of redesign in 2009.

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The latest IPCC summary report has been released, well before the actual report itself, in a move useful for propaganda by doomsayers everywhere. The London Times ran a piece critical of the orthodoxy for ignoring the role of the sun in climate change. Other pieces have been written by Melanie Phillips and the Weekly Standard, among others. On a more interesting, but also older, note, Ronald Bailey of Reason testified before Congress in 2004 about how amazingly wrong environmental doomsayers have been in the past.

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Little Green Footballs has posted a video from Penn and Teller's show that tackles many myths about recycling. Although P&T can be family-friendly (they did appear on the Muppets, after all), this is them uncensored, and, as such, filled with expletives, so be warned.

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It seems Google-owned YouTube is fine with bashing Christians, but bashing Muslims is out of line. This is par for the course from Google, and it's part of the reason I've switched over to www.goodsearch.com for my search engine needs. I'll admit that it's not quite as good as google, but I much prefer where the money goes.

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You can come up with these ones all the time, but Debra Saunders has a piece on conservative students running afoul of the administration at SFSU after stomping on Hamas and Hezbollah flags.

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From the always-reliable Onion: Thousands Lose Jobs As Michigan Unemployment Offices Close.

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That's all for now. In the near future, I intend to revisit potential and actual candidates for the 2008 presidential election. I was going to do it sooner, but various potential candidates kept announcing their intentions to run or not, so it seemed best to wait before updating my lists.

Clearing Out My Backlog of Links

• John Leo retired from his regular column, but, thankfully, is still writing. He has a good piece in City Journal on censorship from the Left in higher education. I think most of my readers are already aware of the problem, but it's always good to be reminded of the egregiousness of the matter.
• In other higher ed news, the faculty of Yale is objecting to accountability for how grant money is used. I suppose this shouldn't be surprising, as ivory tower residents have been speaking out against accountability for years -- unless, of course, the one to be held accountable is a Republican.
• In lower education news, a Republican state lawmaker in Texas has proposed a law to punish parents for not attending parent-teacher conferences. The proposed law would make it a misdemeanor with a $500 fine attached. While I believe parents should be involved in their child's education, and that this includes at least some meeting with teachers, this seems more than a little excessive. Thankfully, it looks unlikely to pass. I might be willing to tolerate some less severe action on a more local (i.e., school district) level, depending on the details. A private school, of course, could institute its own rules on such matters, without the criminal aspect, though the fines for parents not attending would likely have to be restructured as tuition rebates or some such for those who do attend. That would be imminently reasonable.
• Scientists have re-evaluated their estimated extinction date of the "terror birds" -- flightless, predatory birds up to 7ft in height -- by about two million years. This would not be a big deal if they were originally thought to have died 65 million years ago, but they were thought to have died a mere 10,000 years ago, making this not the minor adjustment it would have been in the former hypothetical case, but an extreme change in belief. Reading the last section of the article, they had believed that the birds migrated from South to North America when the Panamanian land bridge was formed about 3.5 million years ago, but they now believe some fossilized remains found in Texas that they believe pushes the migration date back to 5 million years ago (the article is unclear on exactly how old the remains in Texas are believed to be). All of this furthers my hypothesis that these scientists have no idea what they're doing, and possibly use a dartboard to sort out any questions that linger.
• Damn Interesting has a post on the toothpick fish, which has become one animal I'd fear getting into a confrontation with. How could a catfish that's one of the smallest vertebrates on the planet cause such terror, you ask? Well, let's just say that any fish that would cause men to choose castration is worthy of fear.
• A man accidentally burned down his house because he couldn't find any clean underwear. I don't really have anything to say to that.
• Reuters has decided to turn an eye towards Mormonism's baptism for the dead, under the guise of asking whether Pope Benedict XVI will become Mormon after he dies. Among the Mormons' confusing beliefs about multiple heavens and such is their belief that full access requires a Mormon baptism, that with Christianity having lost its way relatively soon after its founding (I'm not clear on exactly when they believe it lost its way), all other baptisms since that time are invalid. They seem to have been assigning wives to dead popes, as well (some earlier popes did, in fact, have wives, but they mostly, if not entirely, were products of the first millennium A.D., whereas Mormon baptism for the dead seems to have focused on those from the second millennium A.D.).
• Someone left a comment on the myspace page for Mitt Romney's campaign on Groundhog Day (fittingly for that day, it was posted twice). I know the birthdate for Bill Clinton is wrong, which calls into question the other ones (as if the extreme coincidence factor alone wasn't enough) for those curious, but I did find it amusing:

  Many will recall that on July 8, 1947, witnesses claimed that an
  unidentified object with five aliens aboard crashed onto a sheep and cattle ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico.
  
  This is a well-known incident that many say has long been covered up by the U.S. Air Force and the federal government.
  
  However, you may NOT know that in the month of March 1948, exactly nine months after that historic day, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., Hillary Rodham, John F. Kerry, William Jefferson Clinton, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Charles E. Schumer, and Barbara Boxer were born.
  
  See what happens when aliens breed with sheep.
  
  This piece of information may clear up a lot of things.

• The Snickers ad that showed two men unintentionally kissing in Lady and the Tramp fashion has been pulled. I didn't think the ad was particularly great, but it was somewhat humorous. The usual suspects started complaining that it was "homophobic" and their bully campaign got its usual results. Really, though, 90% of men in this country do not want to be kissing another man (at least in such a romantic fashion) -- it's not "homophobia" (a word that's come to mean just about anything gays don't like), it's reality.
• Returning to the topic of higher ed, George Leef has an article on the usefulness (or, more appropriately, lack thereof) of law school, or at least the ABA's version of it, with which I largely agree. It doesn't get into everything (such as how the ABA-mandated third year adds very little to what could easily be a two-year study), but it's good for a shortish article.
• The other day, aljazeera.com (affiliated with the magazine, not the television station) hotlinked a photo from Snapped Shot. Snapped Shot decided to fight back in an interesting way.
• Ah, the lunacy of the U.S. Senate and media bias. The Dems want a (non-binding) resolution opposing the troop increase. The Republicans have offered some other, competing resolutions, which the Dems dislike. The Dems want to limit debate to a couple of resolutions, while the Republicans want another one considered. The dems tried to end the debate over the parameters of the debate, and the Republicans blocked cloture, leading to headlines, such as this one in the Washington Post, accusing Republicans of stalling debate. They tried to keep open debate in order to have a broader debate, but are merely accused of stifling it. Par for the course. Also, one of the Senate Democrats, I forget who, spoke out on the urgency with which the nation needs a debate over Iraq. I despise the notion that until the Senate has debated it, the nation has not. Moreover, there has been debate over Iraq since before the 2002 election, and it's been a more or less continuous debate over the last four and a half years. Now, you can certainly despair over the quality of that debate (I do -- "No blood for oil!" is not a debate point), but to pretend it hasn't existed is absurd. What they really seem to mean by "we haven't had a debate" is "we haven't won the debate."
• The AP, once again, is talking about how much tax cuts "cost" the government. There are several problems with this. First, given the variablity of the economy, receipt of income taxes is the least reliable of budget projections. Second, those projections do not account for the positive economic impact of those tax cuts, and, in turn, the improved income tax receipts based on that (I'm not going to argue that it's always a net increase, as some tend to, but budget projections of income tax receipts following a tax cut are always low). Thirdly, "cost" implies that the government is intrinsically entitled to a higher proportion of your income.
• It looks like Hillary is a student of Hugo Chavez style economics, at least when it comes to oil companies. Chavez may not like her ends, but he's crazy about her type of means, even though he may not like their application to oil companies, which could negatively affect his bottom line.
  

It's Ronald Reagan's Birthday

He would have been 96. Be sure to celebrate.

On a tangentially related note, what's the deal with great presidents and February birthdays? Reagan, Washington, and Lincoln ... if only William Henry Harrison hadn't caught pneumonia at his inauguration ...

My Own Impromptus

Jacques Chirac is up to his usual blathering idiocy. He wants Europe to tax imports from the U.S. as long as we don't sign Kyoto (sorry for the NYT link, but it's what I had handy). There are a few problems with this, of course. The first would be that the U.S. had actually signed the accords, just not ratified them, but this could be the normal ignorance of a NYT journalist, as it was not placed in quotes. More to the point, any tariffs the EU would impose on U.S. goods would be met with a retaliatory tariff, so that doesn't get us very far. More to the point, though, what would Chirac do about countries that ratified the treaty, but failed to meet the emission goals laid out therein -- countries, like, oh, say, France?

For no particular reason, here is a video of Tickle Me Elmo on fire.

Ten interesting inventions are here. I'm not sure I'd call them the "ten strangest" but they are certainly not the norm.

I'm quite the fan of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. His most recent move (which isn't actually that recent, as I'm being slow to post, as usual) was to strike a blow against multiculturalism by renaming the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. This, naturally, drew protest from the usual suspects, but I say bravo.

John Edwards's new house has been getting some attention, and rightfully so. The main structure is over 28,000 square feet (it was originally designed to be two structures, but they decided to add a heated walkway between the two), plus there are an additional two houses on the lot, and, as memory serves, another building for a pool. In and of itself, I don't have a problem with anyone buying land and building such structures with their own money; however, I have two problems with Edwards doing it. The first is the immoral way he got his money in the first place. The second is his rank hypocrisy between his "two Americas" spiel and his living accomodations. At least one of his houses is located in a gated community, about which someone (I can't quite recall whom) humorously observed that the gate serves to keep one America out of the other. There are plenty of links available for this, but I'll stick with this funny little faq.

Moving up the 2004 Democrat ticket, John Kerry recently said in Davos that every spot of the globe between the two poles was experiencing warming. Well, not quite.

Might as well have a third global warming related post -- Popular Science, always a purveyor of global warming scaremongering, throws out a statement that global temperatures could rise by 10 degrees Farenheit by century's end, without indicating that it is easily the high end of the spectrum of predictions in a piece on the "scariest" ideas in science.

I'd heard about it before, but once again I'm reminded that NASA has lost the high-quality tapes of the first moon landing. Our government in action.

I'm not one to take glea in the death of a horse, but I will hardly shed a tear of the death of Barbaro. That horse had its surgery and recovery covered more closely than most human athletes. ... Though I think that if a team were to have a player who failed to recover euthanised it would generate more headlines than the horse.

William Arkin of the Washington Post is slandering our troops. I don't care to link to the actual slandering itself and drive up the web traffic there, so I direct you instead to a place which fairly summarizes and quotes from it at length.

The Yale Daily News saw fit to publish a piece decrying the "myth" that virginity is a good thing. The author makes a fair point, though one which has been made often enough before, that men and women face different societal expectations of virginity (though she carries this beyond a point which is readily defensible). The rest of the piece is some claptrap about how virgins should give it up and sleep around, and how sex outside of relationships should not be stigmatized. Sad, really.

On a lighter note, Greg Gutfeld has the top 11 reasons Islam isn't as bad as the celebrity left.

Speaking of celbrities, it seems that even those who spend their entire life in Hawaii manage to have politics that irritate me; Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, who managed to weigh over 750 lbs., was a promoter of Hawaiian independence.

More smearing of the pro-life movement from the Times, but this time the one in London: an article on the new Virgin stem-cell storage company says "Some anti-abortion groups believe that any use of stem cells will lead to human cloning." This shows the typical media ignorance of the difference between stem cells and embryonic stem cells. Aside from groups that are against modern medecine altogether, I know of no figures in the pro-life movement who are against the use of stem cells from cord blood or adult stem cells. There is some controversy over the new Virgin endeavor, but that's over the issue of a private company operating a stem cell storage facility.

A few churches in Australia have put up "Jesus loves Osama" signs. While I understand the basis for this, it strikes me as rather misguided. First and foremost, the signs can certainly be taken offensively, which hurts the church in its evangelical mission. The quote from Matthew 5:44 which appears in small print at the bottom of the sign would make a better, if less eye-catching, sign. The sign also seems to be promoting passivity more than forgiveness.