Why are Obama and the Dems freaking out about Bush's Knesset speech? Because he hit a nerve, and rightly so.

Rove: The GOP must stand for something. I suggest Patriotism, Freedom, Free Markets, Opportunity and Optimism. That would offer a dramatic contrast. Related: Hillary's lessons for McCain

A $1 image stabilizer for your camera. Very cool.

This "deeply unpopular war." Villainous. Nobody would be complaining if it had been quicker, and nobody expected a proxy war by Iran.

Brazil update.

A contemporary bust of Julius Caesar found

McCain opposes the Farm Bill. Me too. It's welfare and political bribery.

If you like peanut butter, an invention long overdue.

Excellent essay by Prof Deneen re oil and politics. He is stuck on the Peak Oil thing, though. I am stuck on the pro-nuke power thing, and we will never need to worry about energy.

A positive view of No Child Left Behind

You want government medical care? Who do you trust?

Tigerhawk loves Starbucks

Obama not a hit in the Bluegrass State

Civil servants make us all tax slaves.

Copyright and the 1st Amendment. Volokh

Here's what the Polar Bear story was all about - preventing oil drilling and mineral exploration

Kerry, Redux. Pathetic.

I've been online since 1987 when I bought my first modem, a 1200 baud monster.  Oh, sure, I could have spent the extra bucks on the hot, new, ultra-fast 2400 baud modem, but who'd ever need to go that fast on the Internet?

Then, a while later, I bought the 2400.  Then a 9600.  Then a 14.4.  Then a 19.2.  Then a 28.8.  Then a 33.6.  Then, finally, as modem technology reached its zenith, I bought a hot, new 56K modem and figured that was it.  Sure, there was something called "broadband" on the distant horizon, but I didn't have much interest.  After all, who'd ever need to go that fast on the Internet?
 

A few years later I had one of the first broadband lines in the country, an "experimental" ADSL program being conducted by Pacific Bell.

I'd say the experiment worked.

And, over the long years, I've tried innumerable tweak files and 'download accelerators' and the like to increase my download speeds.

And not one of them ever worked.

Until now.

Continue reading "Doc's Computin' Tips: Double your browsing speed"

Gun Broker.com

Patchwork Nation, from the CSM. Push "reset map" to clear the counties and start over.

I took their "Where do you fit in?" survey. It said " Your zip code puts you in XXX, which we've identified as Monied 'Burbs community type. Based on your responses, you have a 85 % match with other people in your community type."

Depressing to fit so much in a mold.

How DNA works (a big h/t to Flares for finding this). You can tell me all day long that existence is simply mechanical and not a miracle, but I won't buy it.

At the end of this bit, at the bottom of the YouTube screen, click on the other DNA and protein-construction videos. It's Biochem 101, without the details. Amazing visualizations, I think.

From Peggy Noonan's critique of today's Repubs, Pity Party:

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined "brand," as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

This is and will be the great challenge for John McCain: The Democratic argument, now being market tested by Obama Inc., that a McCain victory will yield nothing more or less than George Bush's third term.

Why socialized medicine is not insurance. RightWing Prof

Dating divorced people. Dr. Helen

Marriage: Homosexuality, polygamy, and incest (h/t Lucianne)

McCain having problems raising money

One person's opinion on the 1001 movies you should see before you die. (h/t, Flares)

What are the lessons of the W VA primary? Am Thinker

Do African kids need laptops for school? Of course not.

Sad but true: Wildlife populations plummeting (not because of "global warming")

Krauthammer on Israel, a quote:

Look at Gaza today. No Israeli occupation, no settlements, not a single Jew left. The Palestinian response? Unremitting rocket fire killing and maiming Israeli civilians. The declared casus belli of the Palestinian government in Gaza behind these rockets? The very existence of a Jewish state.

Israel's crime is not its policies but its insistence on living.

A quote from Kathleen Parker: Dems offer thrills 'n chills (speculating that Edwards will be VP candidate):

To succeed, they must first create a divide of resentment the size of Montana among the have-not-enoughs toward those perceived to have too much. No one has tried this more brazenly than Edwards with his "two Americas" presidential campaign, which failed twice, by the way.

The question -- should this duo have their way -- isn't when will the poor be wealthy enough? But, when will the wealthy be poor enough?

While we're waiting to find out, Edwards' tortured Southern shtick is supposed to help Obama with the demographic of white, rural, working-class (non-college) Americans he's been having trouble with. Green room translation: poor, ignorant racists.

The words on this KY campaign flier read:

My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want. But I won't be fulfilling God's will unless I go out and do the Lord's work.

In a way, I have no big problem with those words (although how one can even attempt to discern God's use for you without tons of prayer and a worshipful heart is beyond me). However, I thought it was a big problem that Bush was inspired by his faith. Somehow this guys' wanting to do his version of God's work to me is apparently no problem.

What's up with that? Doesn't this kind of thing raise urgent Church-State concerns for the Lefties? Or is he just trying to reinforce the idea that he isn't a Moslem?

In my opinion, nobody has the right to claim that they are doing God's work. That is hubris. Somebody else can say it about you, though, which is a great compliment.

(h/t, Insty)

Re the California court decision, do I have to be homosexual to marry a guy, or lesbian to marry another girl? Or can I do that if I am straight, for insurance benefits or for inheritance tax purposes, or just for the heck of it? Lots of people get married on crazy impulse. And can I marry my brother? If not, why not? If you are gay, why not be able to marry a family member? And then it would only be fair (equal protection) to let straights have the same right.

So here's a cool idea for single guys: If your Mom dies, marry your Dad and dodge all inheritance taxes. Vice versa for single gals.

Polygamy is next. Mark my words. It will be for the Moslems, not for the Mormons.

It's sick out there, and getting sicker...

We disagree with CT Sen. Joe Lieberman on many, if not most issues, but we give him kudos for this. Our thanks to CT for re-electing this good guy.

A review of McCain's first major speech, at Pajamas. One comment about it: McCain to social conservatives: No soup for you!

"Rules have to be obeyed." Tangled. The Brits have gone insane.

National Greatness Conservatism. TCS

Mostly Hot Air: Global Warming

Article is titled "5 Mistakes Women make at the Dr's office," but it equally applies to men, I think. Women sometimes tend to think that they are the only humans who experience what they do.

Our Army marksmen plan a trip to Beijing

How NYC politics works.

Is class-based Affirmative Action a worse idea than Race-based?

Politics is irrational because people are only partially rational, and even less so when it comes to politics and other peoples' money. We recently linked to a piece by Stumbling, who asked:

...what role should empirical evidence have in policy-making? Here’s a theory - very little.  Evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) is a sham. I say so for four reasons:

You can read his reasons here.

Case in point: The Polar Bear story. An entirely healthy bear population is put on the Endangered List for purely political reasons: Who wants a sound bite out there claiming "He or she refused to protect the cuddly Polar Bears."? It makes you sound heartless and evil, and nobody is going to listen to the statistics. It's about sentiment.

However, many of my central beliefs about life are about sentiment too. My belief in the freedom of the individual from the power of the state and of the collective, for example, represents my emotional attachment to our Constitution, its vision, and its cultural underpinnings. To me, a self-evident truth, but some would claim that Resistance is Futile to the power of the Borg.

Courage to tell the truth is rare in politicians, of course, because they have their sinecures to look after (which is rational, if cowardly). I give McCain credit for telling the truth about Ethanol, but it's going to hurt him in the corn states: they want to stay on that gravy train (which is rational on their part, if venal and ignoble). Thus people can be most rational when self-interest is directly involved, and sometimes most irrational when it is not.

Image: Polar Bear with a fresh seal dinner. Cute, cuddly-looking Polar Bears are believed to kill over 40% of the cute cuddly baby seals born each year in the Arctic regions in which they dwell. They do catch adult seals, too. Polar Bears eat the skin and the blubber, and leave the rest.

Editor's note:  There is talk going around that the real reason the bears emerged as an issue was as a sentimental proxy issue for preventing drilling in the Arctic, comparable to the familiar "It's for the children..." The thought occurs to me - would this work as well if the bears were black?  Is there a racial subtext here? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Anchoress asks herself:

Q: So, you’re so holy and you pray everyday?

A: I’m not so holy, but yes I do pray everyday; if I did not, I would barely manage to be human - I would be some sort of feral creature rolling about in the teeming muck. All I can tell you is that prayer is a force; it has real power to transform, beginning with oneself, and then externally. Whether praying liturgically or devotionally, scripturally or privately, it moves and shifts our own psychological and spiritual plate tectonics. Deep below our consciousness, it turns our muck into magma and drives us toward constant change, constant growth and even renewal, even if things don’t always look hopeful or promising as it does so.

So, don’t fear the earthquakes or the volcanos, either external or internal. Yes, they’re destructive, yes, they’re alarmingly powerful and they change everything in their path. But they are mere moments in eternity, and after they rattle and scorch, things get quiet, and then life begins again - new growth, new structure, new maps.

Without the great, seemingly catastrophic events, the earth would stagnate, and so would we.

And then we’d have nothing but Sarah Jessica Parker movies in our lives.

Liberals want the US to invade Burma? Darn imperialist liberals. I say to them: No blood for Betel Nuts.

The Farm Bill is a Harvest of Shame. Indeed, it consists of political pay-offs, and offers nothing to the country.

Hey, GW! How about a speech like that in the US?

More on the inconvenient truth that there is no recession. Not yet, anyway.

That $33 million Lucien Freud.

Propaganda for the 21st Century. Vanderleun

...more later

"Something is burning, baby, are you aware?
Something is the matter, baby, there's smoke in your hair
Are you still my friend, baby, show me a sign
Is the love in your heart for me turning blind?

You've been avoiding the main streets for a long, long while
The truth that I'm seeking is in your missing file
What's your position, baby, what's going on?
Why is the light in your eyes nearly gone?

I know everything about this place, or so it seems
Am I no longer a part of your plans or your dreams?
Well, it is so obvious that something has changed
What's happening, baby, to make you act so strange?

Something is burning, baby, here's what I say
Even the bloodhounds of London couldn't find you today
I see the shadow of a man, baby, makin' you blue
Who is he, baby, and what's he to you?

We've reached the edge of the road, baby, where the pasture begins
Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins
But where do you live, baby, and where is the light?
Why are your eyes just staring off in the night?

I can feel it in the night when I think of you
I can feel it in the light and it's got to be true
You can't live by bread alone, you won't be satisfied
You can't roll away the stone if your hands are tied

Got to start someplace, baby, can you explain?
Please don't fade away on me, baby, like the midnight train
Answer me, baby, a casual look will do
Just what in the world has come over you?

I can feel it in the wind and it's upside down
I can feel it in the dust as I get off the bus on the outskirts of town
I've had the Mexico City blues since the last hairpin curve
I don't wanna see you bleed, I know what you need but it ain't what you deserve

Something is burning, baby, something's in flames
There's a man going 'round calling names
Ring down when you're ready, baby, I'm waiting for you
I believe in the impossible, you know that I do."

"Something's Burning, Baby,"from 1985's Empire Burlesque.  The song has never been performed in concert, even in the years immediately after the album's release, so the version below is the original from the album.