Thursday, December 13. 2007
 This planet has had plenty of catastrophic encounters with asteroids over the years, even in recent times.
Wikipedia notes, in the thorough entry on Impact Events: An impact event is commonly seen as a scenario that would bring about the end of civilization. In 2000, Discover Magazine published a list of 20 likely end of the world scenarios with impact event listed as the number one most likely to occur. Until the 1980s this idea was not taken seriously, but all that changed after the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater which was further reinforced by witness to the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 event. Since then there has been more interest from the scientific community and greater public awareness of the possibility of impact events.
Most impact events are small, like shooting stars and meteorites, but the Apophis asteroid is big, and it is due to come too close for comfort in 2036 If it hits the earth, as others have done in the past, it will surely solve all the problems with humans messing up the planet. Help us, Obi-Wan Algore! You're our only hope.
Where old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes over men, democratic despotism infantilizes them. Roger Kimball
 "As a Republican, I'm on the fringe." Being a conservative in academia at WaPo. h/t, TigerHawk
Everything's coming up Bush. Jules Crittenden Why you cannot treat war detainees like domestic criminals. Wizbang The Economist addresses the rising cost of food. Hillary quote of the day: "Where is the G-damn f***ing flag? I want the G-damn f***ing flag up every f***ing morning at f***ing sunrise." -From the book "Inside The White House" by Ronald Kessler, p. 244. (Hillary to the staff at the Arkansas Governor's mansion)
Image borrowed from S,C&A, who has more. 
Wednesday, December 12. 2007
We are expecting a nice, good snow here in Yankeeland. Judging by the radio, you'd think it was the end of the world. "Major storm" and all that. Global snow catastrophe. It's just snow, folks. Nice stuff. Lovely, gently falling like a good dream, covering hill and dale with a pure coating of white. It's wintertime, and it will melt by May. Sheesh. If I lose my internet connection, I'll just go out and find my own stories. Or make them up, like The New York Times does.  Image: A pony keg kegerator. A nice gift for a beer-guzzling spouse, parent, or pal. They also make full-sized for more serious beer afficionados, for whom a pony keg is just a warm-up.
Hey Gals! Whoring for health! I will charge you only a nominal fee for practice sessions, and I am clean, trim, young and single. Call me if you are cute and clean, with no body piercings. (h/t, Mr. Free Market) Comp USA shutting down. Too many doctors? Kevin, MD. No. This jerk wants to fly all over the world warning about global oblivion. No, it's not Al this time. Half of women want to change how their partner looks. Only half? What about vice-versa? 99%? h/t, Pajamas A Brief Primer on the Problem of Evil. h/t, Dr. Bob PM Brown suggests negotiating with Taliban. Ace. Great idea! How come nobody else thought of that? Huckabee displays a strange misunderstanding of forgiveness. School voucher success in Florida. h/t, Chequerboard The religion of peace. Moonbattery Led Zeppelin coming to NYC?
 ...people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin. (Reuters)
We were puzzled by the report about accelerating evolution in humans. Didn't seem to make sense because one would think that the power of selection would diminish as mankind controls and creates his own environment. But it turns out that one of the authors of the suddenly-famous study is on our blogroll - paleo-anthropologist John Hawks. In a blog entry, Why Human Evolution Accelerated, he begins to explain the theory. It's all about population size. Simple math. A quote: ...the ecological changes documented in human history and the archaeological record create an exceptional situation. Humans faced new selective pressures during the last 40,000 years, related to disease, agricultural diets, sedentism, city life, greater lifespan, and many other ecological changes. This created a need for selection. Larger population sizes allowed the rapid response to selection -- more new adaptive mutations. Together, the the two patterns of historical change have placed humans far from an equilibrium. In that case, we expect that the pace of genetic change due to positive selection should recently have been radically higher than at other times in human evolution.
I think that is counter-intuitive. Image: Neanderthal man
 Hillary's campaign begins to rough up Obama re drugs. This is desperate, and will backfire. But they are getting desperate.
Also, Surber: A tortoise flipped on her back. The problem Mrs. Clinton faces is that the more people see of her, the less they like or trust her. Maybe the Dem primary voters are tiring of The Clinton Show? I know I am. I am a Fred-Rudy guy, but I know Obama would talk to me, and I'd love to have him as a next-door neighbor. Hillary would see me as an enemy. Regardless of her politics, she seems like an angry lady with little sunshine in her heart. Just like Huckabee strikes me as a light-weight twit - or should I say "goober." If politics is going to go back to slime, whatever happened to the Hillary is a Lesbian story, anyway? How did that interesting juicy story disappear so fast? I found it titillating.
Since we're speaking of global warming today, check out this chart. The red line shows the average annual temperature in the northeast United States, while the blue line shows the average number of home runs hit per game in Major League baseball each year (the graphs have been overlaid for convenience of comparison). Graphs are science, and the two lines clearly track together: the gradual warming of the first half of the century moving along with the end of the dead-ball era; a slow cooling as home runs declined from the 1950s to the 1970s; then a spike in the late 80's and 90's, with the warmest year all time (1998) the same year that McGwire and Sosa were chasing the home run record. My conclusion is that while Al Gore is definitely right on about the warming caused by CO2, we also need to do something to cut down on the number of home runs hit if we are going to get this runaway warming under control. Maybe controlling steroid abuse can help. Regrettably, we heard nothing about this critical subject from the soccer-oriented and baseball-deprived attendees at the UN Bali conference this week. (Related: see our piece on monomania) 
Viking Pundit to run Citigroup - What? Oh. Never mind, it's Vikram Pandit. You can understand my confusion. Viking Pundit
While a good society should certainly never want to go to war, it must always be prepared to do so. But a society will not fight for what it believes, if all it believes is that it should never have to fight. Robert D. Kaplan, in Forgetting the Obvious, about societal decadence. h/t, Roger Kimball
History does not entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Taking another look at the data, Holland in a piece titled The Marketing of Global Warming in On Line Opinion finds data cherry-picking all over the place. Here's the now-discredited scary hockey stick (no longer defended by anyone due to erroneous stat analysis, plus the Southern Hemisphere is, of course, entirely different): 
Here's the unmanipulated graph:  Holland's piece, with many more graphs and analysis, is here. h/t, An Englishman's Castle. Related: The Sky is Falling. And I see that the Pope, a far more scholarly sort than the pompous, thesaurus-addicted Al Gore, is a skeptic, but where's that Pope link I had earlier? Got to find it...OK Here it is.
Davy Crockett's 10th grandson kills bear at 5. I see a bright future for this lad.
 Leadership and intellectualism. Am Thinker
Now it makes sense. The Venezuela vote Hillary's Glass House. National Journal The Camorra - Naples' international criminal empire. Don Martin's genius. Dirda in WaPo Study: Ethanol can improve mileage. h/t, reader Hillary Clinton quote: "We just can't trust the American people to make those types of choices.... Government has to make those choices for people " -From the book "I've Always Been A Yankee Fan" by Thomas D. Kuiper, p. 20 - (Hillary to Rep. Dennis Hasert in 1993 discussing her expensive, disastrous taxpayer-funded health care plan.) My reaction? Who the heck is she to make my adult decisions? She's not my mommy.
 Quoted by Dr. X:
Anatomists have found that in most areas of the cortex, for every fiber carrying information up the hierarchy, there are as many as ten fibers carrying processed information back down the hierarchy...
Ten times as many going "down" than "up"? I find it fascinating that there are such identifiable anatomical structures which correlate with what we know well: perception is not "input." It's our brain and mind's interaction with the input not just in the cortex where we expect processing and interpretation to take place, but also back down to the sensory level itself. So sensation itself is not passive reception: it is shaped by the cortex. Another quote: [Y]our understanding of reality is a far cry from reality itself. Your understanding of reality is constructed in large part according to your expectations and beliefs, which are based on all your past experiences which are held in the cortex as predictive memory. This is worth repeating: Many of your perceptions—what you see, hear, feel, and think is real—are profoundly shaped and influenced by your beliefs and expectations.
I think it's a big leap from the micro-anatomy of basic sensory perception to the theme of construction of reality, but it's always a good topic. The piece is further quoted and linked here. Photo: A stained cortical neuron in a sea of dendrites
Tuesday, December 11. 2007
 "BOHICA." Bend over, here it comes again. Thanks for the useful new lingo, Synth. Will use it.
Warming skeptic scientists urge world to do nothing. Hillary desperately searching for dirt on Obama. That lady "security guard" who saved many lives was an armed church volunteer. Great story. Powerline notes that this was a true hate crime. More on the Canada/Steyn story. This evil sword is two-edged. Special to Maggie's Farm: This morning, from a cave somewhere in Pakistan, Taliban Minister of Migration, Mohammed Omar, warned the United States that, if military action against Iraq continues, Taliban authorities will cut off America's supply of convenience store managers. If this action does not yield sufficient results, cab drivers will be next, followed by Dell and AOL customer service reps, and finally Motel 6 managers.
We have been writing about evolution, and this makes no sense in evolutionary theory. Jews speak up for Christmas. Walter Williams on poverty in America: Listening to people like Lou Dobbs, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee lamenting the plight of America's middle class and poor, you'd have to conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket. According to them, there's wage stagnation, while the rich are getting richer and the poor becoming poorer. There are a couple of updates that tell quite a different story.
Read the whole thing, which tells the truth.
It was 78 degrees in Nashville today - an all-time record for the date, and perfect weather for taking a walk outside. Here's a scene along Belmont Boulevard, the former site of another streetcar line. 
A reader notes that these may not in fact be from Carlin. Wherever they're from, they're useful - and Carlinesque.  GEORGE CARLIN'S NEW RULES FOR 2008
New Rule: No more gift registries. You know, it used to be just for weddings. Now it's for babies and new homes and graduations from rehab. Picking out the stuff you want and having other people buy it for you isn't gift giving, it's the white people version of looting.
New Rule: Stop giving me that pop-up ad for classmates.com! There's a reason you don't talk to people for 25 years. Because you don't particularly like them! Besides, I already know what the captain of the football team is doing these days --- mowing my lawn.
New Rule: Don't eat anything that's served to you out a window unless you're a seagull. People are acting all shocked that a human finger was found in a bowl of Wendy's chili. Hey, it cost less than a dollar. What did you expect it to contain? Lobster?
New Rule: Stop saying that teenage boys who have sex with their hot, blonde teachers are permanently damaged . I have a better description for these kids: 'Lucky bastards.'
New Rule: If you need to shave and you still collect baseball cards, you're a dope. If you're a kid, the cards are keep sakes of your idols. If you're a grown man, they're pictures of men.
New Rule: Ladies, leave your eyebrows alone. Here's how much men care about your eyebrows: Do you have two of them? Good, we're done.
New Rule:There's no such thing as flavored water. There's a whole aisle of this crap at the supermarket, water, but, without that watery taste. Sorry, but flavored water is called a soft drink. You want flavored water? Pour some scotch over ice and let it melt. That's your flavored water.
New Rule: Stop screwing with old people. Target is introducing a redesigned pill bottle that's square, with a bigger label. And the top is now the bottom. And by the time grandpa figures out how to open it, his ass will be in the morgue. Congratulations, Target, you just solved the Social Security crisis.
New Rule: The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the a ** hole. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a 'decaf grandee, half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low, and One NutraSweet,' ooooh, you're a huge a ** hole.
New Rule: I'm not the cashier! By the time I look up from sliding my card, entering My PIN number, pressing 'Enter,' verifying the amount, deciding, no, I don't want Cash back, and pressing 'Enter' again, the kid who is supposed to be ringing me up is standing there eating my Almond Joy.
New Rule: Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn't make you Spiritual. It's right above the crack of your a ** . And it translates to 'beef with broccoli.' The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren't pregnant. You're not spiritual. You're just high.
New Rule: Competitive eating isn't a sport. It's one of the seven deadly sins. ESPN Recently televised the U.S. Open of Competitive Eating, because watching those athletes at the poker table was just too damned exciting. What's next, competitive farting? Oh wait, they're already doing that. It's called 'The Howard Stern Show.'
New Rule: I don't need a bigger mega M&Ms. If I'm extra hungry for M&Ms, I'll go nuts and eat two.
New Rule: If you're going to insist on making movies based on crappy old television shows, then you have to give everyone in the Cineplex a remote so we can see what's playing on the other screens. Let's remember the reason something was a television show in the first place is that the idea wasn't good enough to be a movie.
New Rule: And this one is long overdue: No more bathroom attendants. After I zip up, some guy is offering me a towel and a mint like I just had sex with George Michael. I can't even tell If he's supposed to be there, or just some freak with a fetish. I don't want to be on your webcam, Dude. I just want to wash my hands
New Rule: When I ask how old your toddler is, I don't need to hear '27 months.' 'He's two' will do just fine. He's not a cheese. And I didn't really care in the first place.
New Rule: If you ever hope to be a credible adult and want a job that pays better than minimum wage, then for God's sake don't pierce or tattoo every available piece of flesh. If so, then plan your future around saying, 'Do you want fries with that?'
Thanks, Lawrence, for linking our Darwin and Religion piece, which was a response to your mini-essay. When we get linked by Insty or Powerline, we usually graciously thank them via email, but these are deeper waters in which to swim. Thanks to a good blog pal on our beloved upper West Side of Manhattan, where I spent many good years, long ago. Chasing girls and talking politics and drinking beer and listening to the music at the West End. "Hey, Jude." Flip side, "Revolution." Am I old? Naw, not yet. A touch of grey.
A healthy trend, from John Fund in Opinion Journal (my bolds): In 1997, the Stockholm Network had five members; it now boasts more than 130 affiliated groups, stretching from Iceland to Armenia. In Bulgaria, the Center for Market Economics has played a major role in building support for the country's adoption of a 10% flat-rate income tax, effective Jan. 1. "Watch Bulgaria," says Steve Masty, an economic development specialist based in London. "The intellectual light bulbs that have been switched on there are now having real-world results." More than one guest at the Stockholm Network dinner commented that several countries in Europe that escaped the Soviet bloc less than two decades ago are now pursuing reforms that would be regarded as too radical for Western European electorates. In Slovakia, the introduction of a profit-based health system has led to the entry of two private health-insurance companies that have helped drop the state share of the health-care market to 65% from 80% in just two years.
Read the whole thing. "Free-markets and free people" is what is truly "progressive" in today's world. What is termed "progressive" in the US is retrogressive: it's not the 1930s anymore. Totalitarian socialism and Communism had their chance, and the results were not pleasant. Parts of Europe, Canada, and Australia are moving backwards, and parts forward. What about the US? Today, the true progressives are the bearers of individual freedom and not the bearers of State power. If the word "progress" has any meaning at all, it should mean the unleashing of the human spirit from external power and control. Just my humble opinion, but I deem myself smarter and more worldly than politicians and bureaucrats. I do not like or trust people who want power over me. They are sickos, by definition, who should be worrying about running their own lives in a sane and sober fashion instead of trying to run mine. Who are these people? as my friend L. often asks.
The Dem-controlled House has passed its Energy Bill, which is an exercise in fantasy. For one thing, it requires more ethanol than can be produced by the entire US corn crop. Adios, corn-on-the cob? Adios, grits 'n gravy? Furthermore, what good do plug-in hybrids do? Where do people think that plug-in electricity comes from - magic? It comes from gas and coal-fired power plants. Duh. What's the difference in whether you burn it in your engine, or the utility burns it? And what difference does it make anyway, with a world market in gas and oil? 
Myron Magnet, former editor of City Journal, has had a change of heart about immigration.
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