Cannabis Apology, Weird Baseball Standings

Across the pond, the Independent has apologized for its campaign to decriminalize cannabis. It wasn't so much a reconsideration of their initial position as a reaction to the introduction of skunk, a cannabis product with 25 times the potency of what was on the market in the 1990's. Ah, unintended consequences.

In a recent column, Jayson Stark pointed out that coolstandings.com is playing out the 2007 season using 2006 stats. These exercises tend to amuse me, but there were some strange things about it. First and foremost, the Red Sox were 91-24 when he wrote about it (a figure which has increased to 98-24), and several other teams also had screwy records (such as the Giants now at 32-90). It turns out that the site lets you influence games by "boosting" the team of your choice. So, obviously, the site was overwhelmed by Red Sox fans, Bonds haters, and Dodgers fans, among a few others, all of which makes the site less interesting.

I like to keep track of how long I can maintain a connection to AIM, just because, and it recently booted me at 33 days, 22 hours, and 44 minutes. This is the new self-proclaimed record. Admittedly, some program glitches on AIM deleted previous records, but I think this one tops them. My computer is in rather desperate need of a restart now, which is part of the reason I'm clearing out links now.

And, finally, for no reason whatsoever, nuns with guns. I guess parochial schools weren't strict enough on discipline already.

Happy Birthday Republicans, and Uncompassionate Jerk Gandhi

Happy Birthday to the Republican Party, which was founded on this day in 1854. It may not be perfect, but America is better for it.

Police in India have taken their uniforms in an ... interesting direction. The new uniforms will have citrus and floral aromas embedded in their fibers and will also glow in the dark.I dno't think that bodes well for their first nighttime shoot-out with a criminal. On the other hand, regardless of any scandal that may come, they'll always come out smelling like roses.

An expedition to the North Pole that was meant to draw attention to global warming, drew attention to irony instead when one of the explorers got frostbite. One of the organizers of the voyage (though not one of the voyagers) explained it away as "one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability," proving, once again, that any and all climatic events are evidence of global warming. Also, I'm not exactly sure what they planned as "photographic evidence of global warming" -- holes in polar ice? We've been finding those since we started going to the North Pole, they're nothing new. Of course, global warming alarmists haven't let tat "inconvenient truth" stop them from exploiting people's ignorance and claiming global warming as the sole cause. In somewhat similar news, a group of 24 clergymen marching to raise awareness of global warming were met with a fierce snowstorm.

I always find it interesting the way similar news can be spinned into disparate headlines. MSNBC has the headline "Poll: Iraqis pessimistic about war’s outcome" while the New York Post has "Iraqis' Upbeat Views: Poll Finds Hope." Now, these stories did use seperate polls, but the results were not dissimilar. Just under 50% of Iraqis said they were better off now than under Saddam, which the former news source played as "less than a majority" and the latter played its significant plurality advantage over those who thought life was better under Saddam. The former focuses on safety concerns and feelings towards the allied coalition, while the latter focuses on the fact that most Iraqis do not believe they're in the middle of a civil war, and Iraqis' optimistic views of the future. Larry Kudlow points out that while the number of Iraqis thinking life is better now than under Saddam is in the 40's and the number thinking the opposite is in the 20's, Europeans thinking life is better in the EU is in the 20's while those thinking the opposite is in the 40's. Are we going to see headlines on European pessimism?

Much ink and many pixels have been devoted to the possiblity of Libertarians and Democrats working together. Well, the Cato Institute points out an American National Election Studies survey which included questions on whether funding for various programs and purposes should increase, decrease, or stay the same did not find a Democrat majority for decreasing funding of any of the surveyed programs; the closest they mustered was for foreign aid where "only" 60.1% favored raising funding or keeping it the same.

For those being sucked in by the rehabilitation of Vietnam's image, I always find it useful to point out that they're still a nasty bunch.

Peace protesters often invoke Gandhi. Former senator, tv actor, and potential 2008 presidential candidate Fred Thompson points out what an uncompassionate jerk Gandhi was:

During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

Speaking of Fred Thompson, Frank J over at IMAO has a nifty list of Fred Thompson facts reminiscent of the Chuck Norris facts. My personal favorite is "Fred Thompson can know both the exact position and momentum of a particle. Furthermore, he knows Schroedinger's cat is dead because he personally strangled it." I suppose that's a testament to my nerdly impulses.

Should You Vote?

There's an interesting quiz purporting to tell you whether or not you should vote at DontVote.org. Despite the name, they are in favor of people voting, but want an informed electorate. The quiz involves identifying various political and pop culture figures from their picture, two multiple choice questions per picture -- one for the name and one for the title/occupation. Aside from the basic question of how important identifying the picture really is to knowledge of, say, the issues, I was troubled by the inclusion of pop culture figures until I saw that the questions were weighted; there are a total of 30 pictures with 60 questions totaling 350 points, and the pop culture figures are worth only a point per question. That certainly lessened my objection. I managed to get a perfect score, how well can you do?

It seems that the Democrats are demanding a retreat from Iraq by August 2008. Thus they have demonstrated, once again, that they know nothing about combat and/or care not a whit about our troops or combatting the Islamofascist terrorist threat.

In celebrity news, John Popper, popularly known as the frontman for Blues Traveler, was caught with a pretty hefty arsenal in his SUV, along with some marijuana. The moral of the story is not to let your friend drive your car 111mph if there's stuff in it that you don't want the cops to find.

In D-or E-list celebrity news, Mexico's 1235 pound man has slimmed down to about 840 pounds, and was able to leave his house. While I think it's great that he's working to shed the extra pounds (his goal is to lose 575 more pounds), I always wonder how people get to be like that in the first place. If nothing else, I'd like to think that you'd at least take the fact that you can no longer get out of bed as some sort of sign that you need to lose some of that weight, or, perhaps, that those who cared for him would have done something as opposed to letting him put on another six- or seven hundred pounds. This goes with my big complaint about people being so worried about hurting feelings or whatnot that they avoid the hard truths.

Dred Scott, Captain America

I didn't get it posted yesterday, but it was the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision. In addition to the general badness of the decision, the opinion invented the "substantive due process" which is at the heart of so much liberal judicial activism today. Damn you, Roger Taney!

Marvel has killed off Captain America. Of course, that might be better than treating him like dirt. Make sure to click the second link to see what Marvel thinks America really stands for.

The web-filter SiteCoach for SiteKiosk apparently lumps together "right-wing" and pornographic content as objectionable content that needs to be filtered. They claim it's a translation error from German; I'm skeptical.

A former defense minister of Iran may be defecting to the United States. Great news, if true. It might mean actually getting some decent intelligence on Iran, what with the CIA doing everything it can to undermine itself after Iraq.

Saturday Morning News Roundup

All, the headlines, the morning after they happen. It's like the morning paper without the funnies.

Swiss troops accidentally invaded Liechtenstein. They did so with weapons that were not loaded and were met with no resistance. I bet a group of twenty men with loaded airsoft guns could overtake that micronation.

The first Wendy's restaurant was closed. It had no drive-thru, limited parking, and served an area that largely shutdown by 5pm and stayed closed on weekends (that's the area, not the restautrant). Certainly makes sense from a business perspective. Dave Thomas's children, despite the nostalgia, seem to agree with the decision. However, the story cites a woman who presumes to know the man better than his own children, and claims that he'd be spinning in his grave if he found out. Being a broker's assistant, you'd think she was more familiar with business operations. Just because something is affordable does not make it a good business decision. The place brought in less than half the business of an average location.

The Democrats are all kinds of mad at Ann Coulter. This time, it's for remarks she made at CPAC: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I - so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards." Sure, Coulter's words were not the most appropriate, and a tad odd, but I'll take the complaints from the dems a lot more seriously when they start denouncing those on their side for calling people Nazis, racists, bigots, et cetera. You reap what you sow.

The cavemen from the GEICO commercials have gotten their own sitcom pilot. They always struck me as more the "that's somewhat amusing, but not enough to make me laugh" kind of funny. Gee, cavemen trying to make it in today's world -- sure, it flopped forty years ago (though with a decent theme song), but let's try it again!

Savannah State University kicked a Christian Club off campus. The college accuses Commissioned II Love of harassment because its members shared their faith and hazing because its leaders washed the feet of new members. Got that? Apparently, having their feet washed is “an activity which endangers or is likely to endanger the physical health of a student, regardless of the student’s willingness to participate in such activity.” Perhaps SSU doesn't install showers in their dormitories, either. Anyways, with those two charges, the group was suspended. Several members of the group went to an off-campus worship concert, so the college then decided to escalate from suspension to expulsion. Somehow, I get the suspicion that if the student group had been the Al Qaeda Student Association strapping bomb belts onto new members, the administration would be more accepting.

Doug Hoyt compiled a scorecard comparing real-life results with global warming models. Let's just say the models did not do well. In other global warming news, here is a nice piece on how the European Union's Greenhouse Gas Emissions are rising (at a rate twice as fast as the U.S. since signing Kyoto, and three times as fast since Bush took office), including a nifty graph with an "inconvenient truth" for Europe. Two scientists are trying to claim Richard Branson's $25 million prize for an idea to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with their tongue-in-cheek idea to have everyone "stop breathing so much." Okay, that last one is sort of a joke, but the first two links are certainly worth a read.

Hitler Cats, Giuliani, Huckabee, Bad Teachers

For all those who have suspected that cats are evil, there is now a website devoted to cats that look like Hitler. I looked at their top four, and perhaps it's just me, but #3 reminds me more of Stalin.

Back on the serious matter of politics, Giuliani has recently been expressing his admiration for judges in the mold of current Justices of the Supreme Court Scalia, Alito, and Roberts. However, his judicial appointments as mayor had a decided leftward tilt. Now, admittedly, the judicial appiontment system there is more restricted, in which he was only able to choose from three applicants that had passed a screening panel for each vacancy, so he might not have been given the oppurtunity to nominate many judicial conservatives. However, the panel is appointed by the mayor (the article is unclear about whether each mayor appoints his own panel, or if each panel member serves a specified term, or what), so he did have some control. Plus, selecting only six Republicans out of his seventy-five total nominations (and fifty Democrats) is a poor track record regardless. My opposition to Rudy periodically lessens, but then there's always something like this to bring me back. Also, his position in the polls is greatly aided by the fact that many people have no idea where he stands on the issues, as pointed out here. (UPDATE: It seems Giuliani had much more discretion than implied, see here for details.)

There's pressure on former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to drop his declared presidential bid and instead take on democrat Mark Pryor for a Senate seat in 2008. I had considered Huckabee a potential candidate for my support for the presidential nomination, but he finished out his governorship in lackluster fashion, and I've discovered his illegal immigration views are all too similar to McCain and company. Still, I could support him in a run for the Senate, especially as he seems to be Arkansas Republicans' only real hope to take the Senate seat. There's an Iowa straw poll in August; a poor performance there could prompt him to drop out of the race in plenty of time to still make a solid run for the Senate.

There seems to be a boom in bad-teacher stories in the news. There's the middle school teacher (female) who had sex with five students, the substitute who taped students to their desks (which really seems much ado about nothing), an Italian teacher who cut her student's tongue with scissors when he wouldn't be quite, a Pittsburgh teacher who shared a sexual poem with a seventh grader, and, while it's not quite the same, the students caught trying to make a porn film between classes in the drama classroom. Those are only stories taken from headlines that appeared in the last 48 hours on the FOX News website.

Baseball, Weaponized Chimps, and Al Gore

George W. Bush managed to get on a baseball card with Mickey Mantle and Derek Jeter. Apparently, someone at Topps decided to photoshop the photo for the Jeter card. The card seems to be going for fairly ridiculous prices on ebay at the moment. Topps officials claim they decided to leave it that way because changing it would cause shipment delays. I think they left it that way as a publicity stunt. Discuss.

In other baseball news, Joe Girardi is in some hot water (though he can't exactly be fired twice) over giving Jon Lieber some advice after Girardi's Marlins lit him up for nine earned runs in 4 2/3 innings on July 31 last season. I didn't see mention of it in the stories I read, but I consulted Lieber's gamelog (mlb.com's was not showing, and espn has gamelogs for the last five seasons, so they win) for the season, and saw a few interesting things. While the July 31 outing pushed Liber's ERA over 6.00, he kept it under 3.50 for the rest of the season. Before talking to Girardi, he had faced Florida three times and given up 18 runs (17 earned), with no outing resulting in fewer than four earned runs. Afterwards, he faced Florida twice, and got the win both times. Now, to be fair, he didn't earn it the first time, as he gave up four earned runs (again) in 5 1/3 innings (but with no walks and seven strikeouts), but when your team scores 14 runs, wins tend to fall your way. The second outing was a 7 IP, 2 ER, 0 BB, 6 SO performance. I'm not saying any of this means anything, mind you, but it would seem that there would be more mention of the fact that Lieber faced the Marlins twice mroe and received wins on both occasions, even if the one was not much deserved.

As you may have heard, we're one step closer to The Planet of the Apes. Weaponized chimps killing bush babies, what's not to like about the story? Mark Steyn has his own humorous take on the tale, relating it to the Mesa SWAT team's study of the use of capuchin monkees in intelligence gathering.

There's a new group opposing illegal immigration -- the Mexican wives of illegal immigrants.

Iranian teachers were given a test with questions mocking Mohammed. Hilarious. The questions at the end seem odd, but fairly ho-hum by th standards of our culture; by the same standards, the one in the body of the story is quite funny.

It seems that Al Gore's residence manages to consume over twenty times the amount of electricity consumed by the average American household, and that's despite having natural gas as well. This is in addition to all his private plane trips (an estimated 1 million miles last year). Not exactly Earth-friendly. What's more, his energy use has actually increased since his propaganda film -- er, "documentary" -- came out. Gore and other apologists for his hypocrisy point to his use of energy-saving measures such as flourescent light bulbs (given the way his electrical use has increased, maybe he's actually confused and switching from flourescent to standard light bulbs; this is Gore we're talking about, would that really surprise anyone?), or that he gets most of his electricity from "clean" sources, ignoring that these sources could be used to provide others with non-"dirty" electricity were it not all being hogged by him. They also point to his "carbon-neutral" philosophy, which essentially means that rich people can buy their way out of the system. I am sick of people who set themselves up as champions of the poor, but live more like robber-barons. In other Gore-ish news, I recommend the Planet Gore blog hosted by National Review.

I decided to use an online calculator for individual "carbon footprint" out of curiosity. I came away with a below-average footprint, but the animation it gave me showed me to be some sort of horrible Earth-destroyer who makes flowers wilt, birds fall from the sky, and trees die on a darkened Earth. I suppose I was starving the plant life of the CO2 it needs to survive, thus depriving the bird of the food it needs, and the darkening of the planet -- well, you got me on that one. At any rate, I think the message it was sending is that I need to work on creating more carbon dioxide.

A long list of numbers and what's special about them. Most of these "specialties" will have little interest, or even meaning, to those who are not mathematically inclined.

The EPA has finally decided to update their fuel efficiency ratings to reflect "real life" driving. The new ratings will be used starting with 2008 models, but they provide a calculator for those unable to determine what kind of gas mileage their present car has been achieving. Or, alternately, for those shopping for a car in the interim.