Thursday, July 24. 2008
 Bruce at No Looking Backwards says "I think I need a little help defragmenting my hard drive."
 How many of you fellows out there are on statin medicines, like Lipitor or the others? Raise your hands.
Well, it's a good idea to take them. It may turn out to be a good idea even if your cholesterol and triglyceride levels are in the normal range. Why? Because the way they seem to reduce arterial disease leading to heart attack and stroke may not be just - or even mainly - so much by altering cholesterol and triglyceride blood levels, but by stabilizing the endothelium (inner lining) of arteries. Here's a technical paper on the subject. One quote: Several clinical trials including Heart Protection Study (HPS), Collaborative Atorvastatin Diabetes Study (CARDS) and Treating to New Targets (TNT) Study have suggested that statins can offer protection to patients with normal lipid levels through various nonlipid-lowering effects.
The inflammation, clots, and plaque on arteries are the main cause of terrible events. American males already have visible arterial disease in their 20s. I saw it and touched it when doing autopsies in medical school, in young people who died of other causes. Everybody dies. Statistically, if you reach maturity and don't die in a car crash, the odds are that half die of cancer and half of heart/arterial disease. So, if you can postpone that arterial disease, you get to die from a cancer. That's today's cheery medical news.
John H at Powerline: "If committed by a Republican, this would be a gaffe of historic proportions." So true. This guy is phoney baloney, but he has one heck of a road show. PS: Here is The Committee
 We stuck with the Piedmont's local Barbera wines during our Italy trip. Barbera d'Asti and Barbera d'Alba. That same grape has been grown up there at least since the 13th century.
I did not realize that the Barbera grape is the most abundantly-grown grape in Italy. These are basically good table wines, nothing too complicated or fancy, and far down on the wine totem pole from the great Northern Italian wines like Amarone and the Nebbiolo grape-based Barbaresco and Barolo. About Barbera d'Alba, this site says: In the hilly area around Alba, only vineyards in the hills with suitable slopes and orientations are considered adequate for production. The terrains must be primarily clayey-calcareous or sandy-calcareous in character. DOC recognition is excluded for terrains with northern exposures and the bottoms of valleys that are flat or semi-flat. The colour of the wine is intense ruby red when young with a tendency to garnet after ageing.
This site says: The high-in-acid Barbera Grape of north-western Italy is a chameleon-like grape which changes considerably according to yield. As an everyday variety, it is a juicy glugger but it can metamorphose into a concentrated, rich, plumy and cherryish wine with undertones of sweet vanilla and spice when aged in small new casks. In Argentina, it tends to the former style with a little less acidity thanks to plentiful Andean sunshine.
Photo: Barbera grapes
"Forgiveness is to set a captive free, only to realize that you were the captive."
Anonymous
 More on the scary powers granted to the EPA by the scientists on the SCOTUS.
Velcro and mustard seeds. SISU Obama throws his father under the bus. Related: Dino notes orgasm at the NYT. Related: "A 12-step program is needed." Neoneo "I'm from the past and I'm here to help." Sipp Socialized medicine and longer life. Pajamas "There are too many places for people to get information," says O'Shea. Driscoll Gun-hating family produces Olympic shooter. "Yes, it is socialism and yes, it is happening here." Classical Values 'Toon from Theo. It's wrong, though. Without mosquitoes, we would have no Gin and Tonics. The Good Lord works in mysterious ways.
A re-post from our archives: Excellent piece in the CS Monitor on the condition of religion in Europe by Peter Ford. In it he quotes Grace Davies, who notes that the Enlightenment led in different directions in the US and Europe - here, we tend to view, as did the Founding Fathers, religious belief and practice as something that needed protection from State power, while in Europe they tended to see the State as protecting the people from powerful religious institutions. It's an interesting difference in the role of the State in relation to religion, and I wonder whether it reflects a larger difference in the view of individual rights in general - whether they are seen as being provided by the State, as if from a King, or whether they belong to the individual by virtue of being human, in other words, granted by God or by Natural Law rather than by the State. I wonder whether different expectations of the State derive from this. If the State is seen as the provider of rights, then why not a provider of everything? After all, you can contort the concept of freedom rights and label anything a "right" if you want to, including a right to watch TV in jail, a right to a driver's license, or a right to a stress-free life. But if the State is an organization we have created to protect the freedoms we own anyway, will we not be less inclined to view the State as a benevolent, loving, parental provider in general? The liberals/progressives have already transferred their dreams and hopes and faith to the State. Their fascistic/statist undercurrent has been apparent for a long time - there will never be enough government to satisfy them. The piece is a good update on European attitudes towards God, with some surprising findings: What place for God in Europe? | csmonitor.com
 Image borrowed from Anchoress in "President of the World?" That flyer creeps me out.
And this quote from Obama, at American Thinker, also creeps me out with its implication that the State's job is to provide my life with meaning: "They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them -- that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness."
The last person in the world I'd want to discuss the meaning of life with is a politician. There is an immature grandiosity operating here, and I find it disturbing. What is fascinating about the tingly-leg press is that they are exhibiting the very symptoms of arrested development and star-struck immaturity that they always accuse America in toto of suffering. The usual critique of the elite media is that we are a nation of mindless followers, who go from one fad to another, and value looks, youth, and pizzazz over substance.
But the current spectacle suggests something worse — that the press who claims they know better and are more sophisticated are, in fact, far more infantile than most Americans, and essentially Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and the National Enquirer dressed up with network logos and NY-DC bylines.
Wednesday, July 23. 2008
 Before my brain's hard drive deteriorates, a few more random thoughts about our northern Italy trip a few weeks ago, a trip which has been more-than-amply photo-documented here.
1. An ottica in Verbania fixed my glasses, for free. The nose-thingy fell off, and she put two new ones on. She was young, blonde, and lovely, and wore high black leather boots and a short-short skirt under her lab coat. My thanks to her. 2. Each morning from my balcony in Baveno I watched two families of Grebes, with their young'uns, paddling around the edge of Lago Maggiore. About the size of our Western Grebe. The chicks were just beginning to learn to dive. Sometimes, one would try to climb on Mom's back the way young grebes too, but they were really too big to fit. The Dad hunted for minnows to feed the chicks, and the Moms herded them so they wouldn't wander too far. 3. Wherever you go in Italy - city, town, country village, or farmland - you are being watched. There will be an old lady peeking from behind a curtain watching you go by. Just stop for a moment to admire somebody's tomatoes, and you will see the curtain move and an old face peer out. It never fails. Italians have a paranoid streak to them. Some old lady is always watching you. She thinks I might steal her zucchini. 4. The church choir rehearsal in Baveno. Pure magic. 5. Gelato? An overrated item, in my opinion, although the hazelnut is very nice indeed. Any dessert is always welcome. I have visited Italy several times, and keep hoping that I will discover the specialness of gelato, but Haagen Dazs is better. The local wines are more fun to sample.
 A mini digital Rolleiflex, via Neato.
Amtrak rides high, with gas prices. Mankiw What makes Obama possible? It's domestic In pursuit of teen purity. Time Climate denier update. Related: 32,000 scientist deniers. Including Freeman Dyson. Still a good idea not to overdevelop your taste in wine. Obama at Yad Vashem. Bad move, Barry. Jews are kinda sensitive about the holocaust. You can't wait until somebody prepares your answer. Via Driscoll: "Free piece of advice to the lovelorn Maverick: Perhaps McCain should leave the media mockery to others who haven't had their lips planted on the MSM's backside for decades."
Tim Blair: Global warming panic celebrates its 50th Birthday. Well done, old chap. You still haven’t killed a single human, bug or plant, but at least you’ve made these two change their lightbulbs.
 Merchants invented money for their convenience. Then governments took it over, and that made all the difference. John Steele Gordon, in The American. A quote: The Greek drachma was originally defined as 1/6000th of a talent of silver (a talent was a unit of weight equal to about 56 pounds). But Solon, the leader of Athens at the beginning of the sixth century B.C., ordered the minting of 6,300 one-drachma coins from each talent of silver, an instant profit of 5 percent. (In fairness, it should be pointed out that setting the face value of the coinage slightly above the bullion value also helped safeguard the money supply, because people would not be tempted to melt down the coins for the metal content.) The profit from minting coins with a face value greater than the bullion value is called seigniorage, a word that clearly implies the sovereign nature of the power to coin money. But if the money supply soon came under the exclusive jurisdiction of the sovereign, the sovereign, all too often, became the money supply’s greatest threat. For while governments possess the power to coin money, they have always been hard-pressed to pay their bills—proof, if any were needed, that money and wealth are by no means the same thing.
From LiveScience comes the news that Antarctica may have been a dramatically warmer place at a geologically-recent time. Summertime temperatures could have averaged in the mid-50s fahrenheit along the coast -- comparable to New York in October, at a time when Antarctica was already sitting squarely over the south pole. Today, summer temperatures hover around 25 degrees at the same location. Co-author David Marchant said "climatologists are uncertain exactly what caused this intense period of cooling."
 Obama still opposes the surge. Related: The Quayle Test
Stuff white people like: Unpaid internships 5 things McCain should say, but won't DNA, the law, and human genetic diversity Fantasy doctor visit. One sample: Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.
Iraq update, via Am Thinker: - US troop and Iraqi civilian fatality rates are at their lowest points since the war began in 2003.
- Today Iraq has legitimate elections, a constitution and a functioning parliament. It is considered more politically free than virtually any country in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait.
- Gross Domestic Product has almost tripled, from $20.5B (US dollars) in 2002 to $60.9B in 2008.
- Oil production in each of the last three months (May-July 2008) has exceeded the peak pre-war estimated rate of 2.5 million barrels per day. Oil exports now bring in about $7 billion per month, and rising.
- Pre-war, only 4 to 8 hours of electricity were available per day nationwide, on average. In July 2008, electricity was available an average of almost 12 hours per day, an improvement of 50% to 200%.
- There are more than twice as many registered cars, more than 10 times as many telephone subscribers and more than 50 times as many internet subscribers.
- Under Saddam, Iraq had no commercial TV or radio stations and no independent newspapers or magazines. Zero. Today it has dozens of TV stations and hundreds of radio stations, newspapers and magazines.
- More children are in school, and more doctors, judges and security personnel have been trained and are being trained.
Tuesday, July 22. 2008
 A lonely candidate: McCain was met by just one reporter on his arrival in New Hampshire today. Probably a local stringer, too. All the national guys are following the celebrity Madonna Britney Lindsay Lohan Obama. They did this with Bill Clinton too. Watch them make McCain invisible. Meanwhile, we have Obama Uber Alles. And we have showtime with fake interviews in the Middle East. Good grief. This isn't a campaign. It's pure Hollywood. When the guy has no script or isn't expounding platitudes to the adoring masses, he speaks pure mush-mouth gobbledlygook that makes you ask "What the heck did he say?" He is a natural performer as long as you don't ask him a question. This election season is becoming surreal. The press only acted like they loved McCain because he was a Repub "maverick" - so they would look "balanced." We all knew that would happen. Now they want the real deal - a camera-friendly extreme Leftist. Can you imagine the reportage if McCain had been associated with right-wing bombers? As American Thinker notes: An analysis of federal election records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 margin over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans . 235 journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans -- a margin greater than 10:1. An even greater disparity, 20:1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain. Searches for other newsroom categories (reporters, correspondents, news editors, anchors, newspaper editors and publishers) produces 311 donors to Democrats to 30 donors to Republicans, a ratio of just over 10:1. In terms of money, $279,266 went to Dems, $20,709 to Republicans, a 14:1 ratio.
When people tell you, "You can’t get up, you’re a victim," that’s when you know it is the devil you’re hearing. Bill Cosby, quoted here. 
Photo: School, Henderson, KY. 1916
The great Shelby Steele in the WSJ. One quote: ...it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama's emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white "race card" -- moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson -- the anti-Jackson.
and Normally, "black responsibility" is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites. When Mr. Obama uses this language, whites of course are thankful. Black leaders seethe. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama's sacrifice of black leverage has given him a chance to actually become the president. He has captured the devotion of millions of whites in ways that black leveragers never could. And the great masses of blacks -- blacks outside today's sclerotic black leadership -- see this very clearly. Until Mr. Obama, any black with a message of black responsibility would be called a "black conservative" and thereby marginalized. After Obama's NAACP speech, blacks flooded into the hotel lobby thanking him for "reminding" them of their responsibility.
 It's a quick water taxi ride from Orta San Giulio to Isola di San Giulio. The basilica on the tiny island was first built in 926 but has had many revisions and renovations since then. It's part of an active Benedictine monastery.
Here's a brief history of the island. Most interesting to me were the frescoes, which ranged in age from early medieval to Renaissance. This one, on a pillar, looked Byzantine in influence. I was sure I took more fresco photos, but I don't find them on my camera. Maybe I spaced out. Here's a site with more photos of the frescoes. A few more of my photos from the island on continuation page.
Continue reading "Isola di San Giulio"
I've given it a week, and this story never became a big deal in the MSM. The 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq. I guess this remarkable fact just doesn't fit the media's political narrative. Inconvenient truth, for sure.
Our post on Richard Gatling and his Gun prompted a reader to inform us about two other hand-driven machine guns of the 19th Century: The Nordenfelt Gun and the Gardner Gun. Here's a clip of the Nordenfelt gun in operation:
 NYT: A new frontier for Title IX - Science?!?
Summary of all of the climate skeptics. Their numbers are growing daily, while the earth cools. KFC in Fallujah (h/t, LGF) The growing bans on photographing children. There's an assumption that everybody is a pedophile. More on that IRS tax data that we posted about yesterday There is no system. AVI Information about the Hoyts, whose triathlon video we posted on Sunday. For one thing, Dad is 65. For another, the son is not retarded.
Monday, July 21. 2008
From Insty: MCCAIN OPED RESPONDING TO OBAMA REJECTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES. People are going to start to think the press is in the tank for Obama or something. Oops -- too late!
Powerline seconds it. The Obama-intoxicated press is the political scandal of the year. This all makes Dan Rather look like an amateur.
 A quote from Kristof's essay in the NYT about Asia (h/t, Jungle Trader):
For most of the last several thousand years, it would have seemed far likelier that Chinese or Indians, not Europeans, would dominate the world by the year 2000, and that America and Australia would be settled by Chinese rather than by the inhabitants of a backward island called Britain. The reversal of fortunes of East and West strikes me as the biggest news story of the millennium, and one of its most unexpected as well.
and A half-century before Columbus, Zheng He had reached East Africa and learned about Europe from Arab traders. The Chinese could easily have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But as they saw it, Europe was a backward region, and China had little interest in the wool, beads and wine Europe had to trade. Africa had what China wanted -- ivory, medicines, spices, exotic woods, even specimens of native wildlife. In Zheng He's time, China and India together accounted for more than half of the world's gross national product, as they have for most of human history. Even as recently as 1820, China accounted for 29 percent of the global economy and India another 16 percent, according to the calculations of Angus Maddison, a leading British economic historian. Asia's retreat into relative isolation after the expeditions of Zheng He amounted to a catastrophic missed opportunity, one that laid the groundwork for the rise of Europe and, eventually, America. Westerners often attribute their economic advantage today to the intelligence, democratic habits or hard work of their forebears, but a more important reason may well have been the folly of 15th-century Chinese rulers.
Yes, the problem was that they didn't appreciate good claret. There's a lesson in that. Read the whole fascinating thing. The link is above.
Dr. Helen mentioned a new book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend. Cute titles sell books.  There are indeed evil, destructive, and unimaginably self-interested people out there in the world who behave with "shocking disregard for the people around" them. It's important to be aware, because they look just like ordinary people, and act like them until the chips are down. They only show their true exploitative colors at calculated moments.
The first review of the book at the Amazon link above gives a good sense of what the book is about. I am not recommending the book, just noting that it is an interesting topic. These usually pleasant - if not charming and seductive - folks build careers and lives by preying on the innocent, the naive, and the gullible. They cannot help it, because they are deranged in a certain sort of inhuman way (which often works effectively in this world). They talk a good game, plenty of them go to church, do good deeds, and get by by wearing a "mask of sanity." These folks cannot be truthful to themselves or to others, do not give a damn about anybody except themselves, and inhabit a guilt-free zone. Even their intimate confessions are calculated. Only God can help them. We shrinks do not have the power.
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