When a co-worker first told me about BumFights I thought he was making it up. After selling 250,000 copies of their video, though, filmmakers Ty Beeson and Ray Laticia are laughing all the way to the bank. I'm not ready to link to Bumfights itself, but I will tell you that I found the linked story via the quirky Obscure Store.

So, what is going on with the homeless?

Juxtaposition of the day

I've written before about how the most notable difference between reality and a Tom Clancy novel lies in the real world's lack of thoughtful, efficient government bureaucrats.

It turns out that the truth is even more bleak than that. Not only do federal workers lack the zeal of their fictional counterparts, USA Today reports that many of them are there merely for their paycheck, and for no other reason. Like standing in a dole queue, but with an office, and good benefits.

No wonder the public has again lost faith in the government. The public's increased pride in federal workers after Sept. 11 has been flattened by persistent cynicism about what makes the government tick. Before Sept. 11, the vast majority of Americans said federal employees cared more about keeping their jobs than helping the public -- and we've found that the vast majority still thinks so today.

In fact, the public may be right. In a Brookings Institution Center for Public Service poll that we are releasing today, two-thirds of the federal employees interviewed this spring said they took their job for its security, pay and benefits -- not the chance to help people, make a difference or accomplish something worthwhile. Two out of five said they come into work solely for the paycheck, while fewer than one in 20 said they show up to help the public.

Worse still, employees that do show initiative, creativity and foresight might not only be shown the door, they risk an FBI investigation and loss of their security clearance. The San Francisco Gate has an article today about Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a biodefense researcher who in 1999 commissioned a study depicting the effects of a hypothetical anthrax attack using the mail to distribute the anthrax.

I suppose that showing initiative is suspicious behavior for a federal employee, anyway. Is it any wonder that the administration griped about how things were "outside the scope of imagination," given that the federal government is filled with drones?

Well, this whole Coulter-Couric "airhead" quote battle got me wondering what really was said on those three days back in 1999. I did some digging, and the relevant transcript pieces and parts that I found are posted here.

In all its pre-interview airing hype, Couric and the crew at Today made it seem like the biographer's conclusion was that the Gipper is an airhead. Note the lack of the word "apparent", and the lack of explanation that that was merely Mr. Morris' first impression, which he came to change.

The author talked about how when he first met Reagan he though he was an "apparent airhead," but over time he came to know that Reagan was "a very bright man."

Either the Today show was intentionally lying to build hype about the story, or they were totally incompetent in reading the book (if they even bothered to read the book), or they were biased in their presentation, taking the release of the book as an opportunity to independently slander
President Reagan.

I leave to the reader to decide if they did this to further an ideology, or merely to hype a story to improve their ratings.

I also posted the transcripts here, in case the link above doesn't work.

Yahoo News has two pages that resemble a protodemocratic blog, and from them I find lots of things to post about. One page shows you the most viewed content of the last hour, and the other page shows you the most emailed content over the last hour.

The most emailed content is also available for the last five or fifteen minutes, six, twelve, or 24 hours, or the last seven days.

There, I did it, I gave away one of my greatest sources of fun stuff.

I'm so proud, my first hit from a daypop search, and it is this:

http://www.daypop.com/search?q=nipples&t=a

</sarcasm>

Well, I previewed this elsewhere tonight, but I may as well throw it out here, too:

click to buy

We must act to stop this backward practice of homefeeding!

Do It For The Children!

Other than the Stampede, the main story in Calgary media when I visited there in 1999 concerned the province's attempt to allow private clinics to open. Unhappy with their ration of socialized medicine doled out by Ottawa, Albertans wanted to supplement their local health care system with a private pay-for-care system. So far as I know the national government never allowed this to happen. Under Canada's current system, private health care is illegal.

"Interesting things happen to two adjacent countries with dissimilar health care funding and delivery mechanisms". For years we've heard that Canadians head south of the border to acquire needed and/or wanted healthcare in the United States that they simply could not or would not wait for any longer, sometimes with the blessing and assistance of Canada's nationalized system. Heading north with busloads of seniors seeking lower cost, Bernie Sanders draws attention to this discrepancy in cross border pricing, without ever bothering to draw any conclusions about tort reform.

Well, some enterprising Canadians have taken a cue from Bernie and organized a bus trip to the U.S. for Canadian patients not receiving needed care from their socialized government health care system.

Free will, what a concept.

Well, the US GAO has spoken [WSJ link, paid registration required], and it looks like Gov. Gray-out Davis has lost even more of his hope of using Enron to explain away the California energy debacle.

California's electricity crisis was the result of demand getting "too close" to available supply as well as the economic and regulatory disincentives that blunted new power-plant development, the U.S. General Accounting Office said in a report released Monday.
...
With the GAO report dispelling the assertion that market manipulation alone caused the power crunch, "We need to move forward to find solutions to correct this problem and fix the California electricity market," [Rep. Doug]Ose [R - Capitalism] said.

Ose also found support in the GAO study for his demand that federal energy regulators act to end control of the state's power-grid administrator by appointees of Gov. Gray Davis.

The report cited state control of the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, and concerns that the power-purchasing state Department of Water Resources will receive favorable treatment in the state's electricity market, as contributing to regulatory uncertainty stalling investment in new generation in California.

"As I have repeatedly said, Gov. Davis's control of the CAISO is a serious problem for California," Ose said. "When the government controls the marketplace and simultaneously represents the largest market participant, it sends a chilling signal to other market participants," he said.

Unless the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission acts soon to address the governance issue, the state will again face supply shortages, blackouts and spiking prices, Ose said.

Wait a minute. Is Lileks kidding? The man visits his local Target weekly, yet in writing about the LA Times he pens "Never trust a company that calls you a guest."

Target not only calls its customers "Guests", it calls all of its drones "Team Members".

Blogger bleat thyself.

Found via The Hub.

In the soon to be out Uniform Crime Report for 2001, the "FBI excluded the more than 3,000 deaths from the Sept. 11 terror attacks."

This strikes me as rather disingenuous.

Had the FBI thwarted the 9/11 attacks it would have claimed a crime-fighting victory. It certainly would have included any terrorist arrests in its statistics for the year.

Excluding the 9/11 murders is yet another attempt by the feebs to sweep their failures under the carpet, and a dishonest one at that.

I wonder if medical treatments developed using virtual humans only work against virtual diseases?

Coming soon to a [home?] theater near you...

Film It, and It Will Suck

Kevin Costner returns to the big screen in "Terms of Indifference." You'll shrug, you'll chuckle, you'll be lulled to sleep. Combining the drama of The Postman with the passion of Waterworld, Terms of Indifference will bring together for the first time the director of Cabin Boy with the producers of Welcome to the Dollhouse and the screenwriting team from Steel Dawn.

---

Seriously, what the hell happened to Costner. I surf by Field of Dreams and I can kiss the rest of the afternoon goodbye.

Tin Cup was serviceable, though mostly because of Rene Russo looking the best she ever has outside of The Thomas Crown Affair, and the screen power of Don Johnson and Cheech Marin in their only joint venture outside of "Nash Bridges."

For The Love of The Game pretty much offsets any joy I took from Bull Durham, so that one is right out.

Now I just want to take Terrence Mann's bat and beat my TV.

A good summary, with original materials mirrored, of the Paul Trummel case.

Sorry I had so little content today. The best I can do for my readers is to attempt some humorous excuses for my lack of posts. (If any of you are left after my virtually content-free Friday.)

• Rational Ignorance
   
• Dismayed over U.S. world cup Loss
  
  
  
  Link
  
• Catatonic after seeing this guy.
  
  
  Link
  

  [And wondering about the missing "A".]
   

• You know that bumper sticker that says "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
  I wasn't.
   
• Spent day in line at bank waiting to exchange my greenbacks for euros.

I think I sat behind this guy
last week at the movies.

Photo from Yahoo

If you drive a car, go watch this fantastico flash animation.

[Found Via Group Captain Lionel Mandrake VC, AFC, RAF (Retd.).]

"Wrench", who typically reserves his comments to matters of aviation maintenance, and writes reserved comments, offers the following:

The "standard" FAA passenger weight is 170 pounds. The seats are designed to support this payload up to 2.5 g's. There is little, if any reserve strength in the seats.

Transport catagory aircraft are designed to operate at gross weight with a plus or minus 1.75 g loading ([It has] been a long time [since I worked on this], but I think that it is correct, right around 2 g's or so.)

A 350 pound (or larger) passenger will damage a typical airline seat in a hard landing or during an encounter with severe turbulence. If the turbulence is bad enough, the seat can totally fail and injure a passenger seated in the row behind .

I have repaired many seats damaged by "plus" sized passengers. The airlines have every right to charge extra for such passengers, it costs more to haul their butts around the sky.

Ray Woodrow III explains how to finance part of your trip to NYC by turning in junk guns for fun and profit.

[Scroll down to his posts and be sure to not miss the second one.]

When a frequently flying fatty sued SWA back in 2000 the suit was dismissed. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Marilyn Hoffman threw out the case when she agreed with Southwest its policy on overweight passengers is neither illegal nor discriminatory. (ADA, anyone?)

Fatties cry foul over airlines charging double fare
Sunday, December 17, 2000

Airlines in America will be able to charge obese customers an extra fare if they spill on to adjacent seats after a judge dismissed a lawsuit by a 135kg woman who sued for discrimination.

The decision angered America's politically correct lobby and shocked observers who had grown used to the country's tireless campaigners for equal rights.

Cynthia Luther, from California, complained after Southwest Airlines asked her to pay for her own, plus a neighbouring, seat. The airline said her bulk made the adjacent seat unusable.

Miss Luther claimed this was "fat discrimination".

The airline initially told Miss Luther she would have to hire a seatbelt extension because the regular ones were not long enough to fit round her.

Then Southwest told her she would have to buy the other seat or not be allowed on the flight.

The airline tried to soften the blow by telling Miss Luther she would be entitled to receive two snacks - one for each fare she had purchased.

Miss Luther filed a discrimination lawsuit claiming the airline harassed and embarrassed her. But Superior Court Judge Marilyn Hoffman agreed with Southwest lawyer Arthur Willner.

"The procedure and policy is directed in any situation where it appears for whatever reason a passenger might significantly encroach on another passenger," she said.

---

Also see the case of Arlene Edelman, an 800 pounder that had to buy TWO AND A HALF TICKETS back in the early 1990's

---

What the HELL is in my Yahoo profile, and why is Yahoo showing me this ad?

After asking for a bunch of demographics, the bottom half of the ad goes on:

What part of Beinggirl.com interests you? (Check as many as apply.)

• Community: It's all about going through it with other teens just like me. [And/Or dirty old men.]
• Mind & Body: I like straight talk about what's going on with me. [And I hate my parents.]
• Puberty & Periods: It's like having a big sister online. ["Big sister" just got out on good behavior.]
• Product Info: Somebody tell me how to use this stuff already! [No way even I touch this one.]
• Relationships & Sex: So what's the real deal with friends, family, and boys? [And Priests?]
  

[UPDATE: Reader "Sam" cautions that this might be some "sort of a sting operation." While I welcome the caution, concern, and paranoia, I'm pretty sure there is no attempted entrapment here. I just think that Yahoo is doing its advertisers a great disservice by not targeting its adverts more carefully.]

For the first time in quite a while I am actually excited about the prospect of having to get on an airplane. I just ordered a bunch of copies of the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights. This edition of the Bill of Rights is printed on a piece of metal sure to set off the wand, and likely to set off walk-through detectors. The fourth amendment is printed in red. The joke, in case you haven't gotten it yet, follows this sentence in white colored text. To see the punch line, highlight this blog entry.
After searching you, the "guards" will be forced with the decision to take away the Bill of Rights from you, as part of a warrantless search!
[Security Edition found via Penn Jillette's site via the rather bizarre 8128.org. Thanks!]

Bad comedy fueled headlines rule the day, even when covering "Piano Man" Billy Joel's trip to Silver Hill for rehab:

• Rehab State of Mind (Newsday)
• A bottle of Red? Joel reportedly treated for alcohol addiction (Stamford Advocate)
• Not a headline, but the first sentence of the E! Online story reads "Billy Joel is apparently looking for a substance-free state of mind."

Update to my post [immediately below] about Flying While Fat. Though I wish I were making this up, NAAFA (the National Association for Agravating Fat Assholes) actually has a webpage with tips for mile high fatties titled Airline Tips for Large Passengers. Easily the most annoying tip:

When you get to your seat during pre-boarding, raise the armrest between seats. This may give you the inch or two of extra space you need. The chances are that the passenger who will be seated next to you won't say anything; if he does, smile pleasantly and say that you'll both be more comfortable if the armrest is up.

In just a few sentences Jean Soncrant and Lynn McAffee manage to be sexist, selfish, fake, annoying, imposing and downright dishonest.

Combine this new item(#1) with this news item(#2), and voila, the perfect solution to airlines' problems:

Fatties can provide anti-hijacking airliner security while riding in the comfort of free first class upgrades, so long as they promise to sit on the bad guys. (Value carriers, shuttle flights, and other single class flights will need another plan.)

From Item #1:

While buying a ticket for a Southwest flight from Sacramento to Burbank, Calif., he was told he'd need to buy an extra ticket.

The reason? He's what the airline calls "a person of size" - the PC term, evidently, for someone so large he may need more than one seat.

McAllister is, in fact, a big man - 6 feet 2 inches, 350 pounds. But the former college football player says he's never been accused of taking up more than a single seat on a flight.

"Says he's never been accused of taking up more than a single seat."

Note, he does not deny that he does take up more than a single seat, he only claims that he's never been accused of taking up more than a single seat. People are probably afraid to tell this behemoth much of anything. Or, unlike he, they display a modicum of civility when flying.

From Item #2:

Police in Maryland say a man who tried to rob a store died after a customer sat on him.
...
He was sat on by a six foot two man who weighed 280 pounds after he was spotted stuffing packs of cigarettes into a bag.

[Reuters] A government employee negligently started a forest fire last month in Alaska.

A wildfire burning in Alaska's interior was ignited by state biologists using firecrackers to ward off an aggressive cow moose, officials said on Tuesday.

The 92,000-acre wildfire, which started last month and is burning spruce forest south of McGrath, was inadvertently started during a field study into elevated calf mortality.

I wonder how much he elevated moose-calf mortality by burning down 92,000 acres of forest? How about next time you just shoot the damn moose and get on with your business?

[USA Today] Don't look for things to get better in China anytime soon. Red China now contains 40,000,000 or so guang guan(literally "bare branches"), men with no prospect of ever getting married because there are no women in China for them to marry. Since the institution of Communist China's one child per family rule, Chinese parents have engaged in a campaign to destroy their female offspring through the use of selective abortion and infanticide. Their shortsightedness now leaves them with a dramatic number of unattached bachelors, men who will have to be dealt with in one way or another.

The Chinese government's one-child policy makes matters worse. Worried that runaway population growth would devour China's scarce resources of food and water, the government in 1979 began limiting most families to one child -- sometimes forcing women to have abortions and fining couples who had a second child.

I probably deserve a "stating the obvious" award for this, but Communism isn't a very hopeful ideology. I like to think that if we faced a population crisis in the U.S., we would look for ways to increase our productivity to support the growing population. Having none of optimism or hope, the Red Chinese threw up their hands, declared that they would not be able to support so large a population, and set out to kill off future Chinese generations by the tens of millions.

Think of this next time you see that GE advertisement for its portable ultrasound machine. Like all technology, even a seemingly innocuous piece of gear like an ultrasound system, can be used to perform evil acts. In China, even though it is technically outlawed to disclose gender as a result of an ultrasound, parents often make the decision to abort female fetuses.

The article goes on to list the four ways that societies have historically dealt with this problem, and the Chinese are already doing three:

• Imposing authoritarian rule
• Sending them off to war
• Dispatching them to public works projects far from the cities
• Co-opting them with jobs in security forces

How long until they decide to use their new found "resource" to wage war? Further, as all these lonely, unsuccessful, and unattached men wind up aching for a fight, I wonder how many of them will turn against their neighbors? Maybe the government? Pardon the pun, but I wonder if the Communist's one-child policy may have sowed the seeds of their own destruction?

I got a little creeped out this morning by my wife's singing. No, not that, she actually has a nice voice. The words were what struck me, and what she was singing made me think again of how "Homeland" Security is sort of a creepy term. Edelweiss, an innocent song, but its words of homeland tie in strongly with the Edelweiss' history of association with German soldiers.

Maybe we shouldn't complain. They could call it FatherLand or MotherLand security...

This reminds me a bit of an excellent post that Mike Trossman wrote on the connection between Patriotism and Pop Culture. (If archive does not work, try the link to his front page and scroll down to June 16,2002.)

In a roving and frolicking discussion that goes from Jasper, to Clarus the DogCow, to implications about a society based upon how it views mans' best friends, James Lileks throws us this tasty bone:

Cultures produce curious strictures that seem bizarre and ridiculous to other societies. But the fewer taboos a society has, the more important they are, the more they are observed, and the more likely the society to be progressive and adaptive because it’s not picking its way through a mine field every time it points a camera at the heavens or dissects a human body. You can almost look at the position of dogs in a culture as a barometer of social health - on one end, hatred of dogs; in the middle, tolerance and consumption of dogs, and on the other end love of dogs so intense there are surgeons who specialize in reconstructing their hips so they may chase squirrels three years into their second decade.

Hypothesis: To hate dogs you have to hate the part of yourself dogs represent. Frolic. Drooling enthusiasm. Blind trust. Perhaps at the absolute extreme some see dogs as an affront to God because they live in the moment, unconscious of tomorrow let alone eternity, and have no desire to govern their appetites. Show them a steak and they deploy that pale purple tentacle and stare at you with desire. They have no word for shame.

She's no Eunice Branca, but the question remains; "Is that ALL paint?"

(REUTERS/David Gray)

(AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

A U.S. Forest Service employee started the Colorado Hayman forest fire, while out patrolling, ostensibly to enforce a campfire ban! She'd received a letter from estranged husband that infuriated her so much she set it ablaze, and then things got out of hand. Forestry technician Terry Barton, 38, faces up to 10 well-deserved years in the klink for this one.

I'm reminded of the 1999 Shasta-Trinity Forest fire stared by a BLM employee conducting a "controlled burn". Of course, in that case the employee was not so much to blame as was the ridiculous policy of attempting a "controlled burn" in a forest filled with an unnaturally high concentration of fuel, fuel present only because of the enviro-whack agenda of not utilizing natural resources.

I went back and checked the page-challenged homeland security manual that I linked to here, and it is now fixed. The .pdf file, created by Lewis_G, was updated on June 10th, so it took them four days to fix, and I don't know how long to publish, the page that was missing in the first release. I have a saved copy of the original, email me if interested.

I know I'm late to the bandwagon on this, but damn it is fun!

A few weeks ago a Philadelphia, PA police dog was killed by its handler's negligence when the officer left his four legged partner in the cruiser for hours on a hot sunny day. Officer Joseph Arrison, who is described as being "devastated by the death of his partner" has been reassigned pending the results of an IAD investigation. There were no charges of animal cruelty, no calls for an investigation, no community outcry, and no discipline for the officer. The officer did not claim responsibility for the incident. By all accounts this was an "accident," and not the result of negligence. A local philanthropist came forward with $400 per car to equip K-9 units with emergency ventilation systems, seeking a technological solution for a human problem.

Compare that reaction to what happened when a similar thing recently happened in Scott City, Kansas. Officer Doug Haire left his canine locked in a police cruiser for three hours on a hot day, killing the dog. Haire resigned his position from the police department following public outcry, stating that he quit because "basically I'm responsible for the dog." The local prosecutor is considering filing animal cruelty charges against the officer, though as yet there is no talk of filing a civil suit against the officer for the $8,000 value of the dog he negligently destroyed.

Remember this next time somebody refers to a small town police force as amateurish, "Barney Fife" like, or calls them a bunch of goat ropers. It may be how the local media values animals, it could be local values, or it just may be that small town police officers are different than their big city cousins -- They still take responsibility for their actions, they don't hide behind all powerful unions, and they have the good sense to admit when they make a mistake.

When first I heard about Eclipse Aviation's plan to build a six-passenger sub-million dollar private jet I was excited at the prospect of some added competition to the air-travel market. Freedom and capitalism would both win as the market provided a platform for competitively priced high speed travel to both owner's and those who charter flights.

I was dismayed to read that Eclipse had its hand out grubbing for government assistance. Eclipse lobbied hard to get in on the government guaranteed loan program created after 9/11 to help airlines recover, even though it has yet to produce a single aircraft. In a twisted way, Eclipse will arguably benefit from the damage done to commercial airlines by 9/11, as those with the means to afford an aircraft like this will have an even better reason to avoid commercial travel. So much for capitalism.

For those of you keeping track, you can add Detroit Metro to the list of airports where "random" pre-boarding searches can be avoided by carefully choosing your place in the boarding line to be sure that someone else is being searched when you arrive at the front of the line. (I have observed this at O'Hare, Bradley, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids and Philly.) It winds up that if you are first in line you will get searched or if you get to the front when the guards finish their prior search you get nabbed. If you are too dumb to notice this trend, you will get searched, even if you used to be Vice President of the United States.

This system not only wastes resources, I believe it is very susceptible to spoofing. Send one person to the head of the line with a very big, loaded carry-on bag with many "items" of interest and they could tie up the guards for a very long time.

That's it for now. I'll be away from net access for a few days. In the meantime, feel free to check out these excellent sites:

How Appealing-- Howard Bashman's blog devoted to appellate litigation. It is of a similar quality to the excellent New York State Law Digest, but daily, and national in scope!

Daily Probe-- Satirical newspaper that vows to "Outwit, Outmock and Outrage, Because Real News Sucks." More hit and run than Da Zwiebel. My favorite over there is the running joke of Travistan, a sovreign apartment nation ruled by the benevolent, and hilarious Travis Ruetenik. [Make sure to use the dailyprobe.com link. "TheDailyProbe.com" is something else entirely!]

Enjoy.

There was a shooting yesterday in the small upstate New York city of Plattsburgh that reminds me of a famous shooting a few years back.

A young man is out so late at night that it is now early in the morning. He bangs on the door of a house, repeatedly, scaring the elderly residents who shoot and kill him. Strange thing is that he has no criminal record, and as of now no one seems to know why he was at that house. Some of his friends speculate that he might have been out looking for the next party of the night/morning and that he went to the wrong house. He had been at a party earlier in the evening eight doors down on the other side of the street. The paper did not indicate if toxicology tests have been ordered or returned yet.

If the slain in this case had been a Japanese national student instead of a white assistant manager at Footlocker just starting his eight day vacation, maybe this shooting would have made the national news. As it is this will likely never be spoken of again outside of Plattsburgh city limits. Funny how the "equality" loving mainstream media treat individuals so differently based upon external characteristics. To be fair, post 9/11 tragedies seem a bit muted, and there is no 'culture-clash' angle on this story. Still, why was Yoshihiro Hattori's life so much more valuable to the media, if not for the ability to play the race card?

The local paper's article is here.

I wonder if the author of this AP story about a shooting at a Missouri abbey chose his words with malice, or just a lack of caution.

The college lists a staff of 19 priests, eight brothers, one sister, six lay professors and student body of 97.

Catholics may need to find a new word to describe the non-ordained.

Time Magazine had a brief article yesterday about how no one wants to run the FAA anymore. I can't say I blame any of the leaving leaders. They were given a very difficult task, but not given the authority or freedom necessary to do a good job.

Tom Ridge faces the same problem in his current post, though he lacks the sense to resign. Further, I think he lacks the skills necessary to do a good job even if given the necessary authority. The fact that he took a job with so much responsibility and absolutely no authority is the biggest strike against him.

[Link to article found via Airliners.net's new feed.]

.

One of the few (OK, two) permalinked blogs on this site is Armed 'N Dangerous by Eric S. Raymond. ESR so infrequently posts that by the time I notice a new post it is often several days old, but always worth the wait. His latest post on porn tells us quite a bit, perhaps more than you might want to know, about why the quality of porn is so bad, and what that means about men and women.

"And typical porn is actually far worse than this. Mostly the models have a vacant-eyed, stunned look to them."

Stunned may just be part of the story. I think it was Jay Leno, long before he got totally boring, corporate and straight laced, who used to tell a joke about how all the women in lower-tier porn, "Always have one pupil bigger than the other, and they have a look in their eye that says 'Can I get my money now?'" For many of them I suspect that posing is the last step before prostitution, if not merely moonlighting on their pimp, or working to pay their dealer. For an alternate theory of their origin and motivation, see Jim Belushi's Greedy Show #5.

I exclude, for some reason, soft-core produced by big money firms with big money budgets. Maybe the difference between porn and erotica isn't just the the quality of women, or the photographer's choice of pose, exposure (pardon the pun), lighting and focal length, but the difference between cheap and expensive. Like the difference between eccentric and crazy, or alcoholic and wino, societally acceptable soft-core porn may be acceptable simply because it has a large bankroll. Taking pictures of successful, highly paid models does not have the air of desperation seen in low budget productions.

Perhaps that is why amateur stuff is so compelling. Somebody not doing it because they need the money hasn't hit rock bottom. Yet. [I'm tempted to re-link to the David Brin piece on "Living in an Age of Amateurs," but I don't want to sully his work with links to such gutter topics.]

I make no judgment about the good or bad of letting someone take pornographic pictures of you for money, but in the real world people typically have to fall pretty far before they will pose for Screw, Oui or Hustler. Sure, lots of girls (and I do mean girls) dream of using an appearance in Playboy as a stepping stone to a better life, but posing pretty much anywhere else means the end of your old, good life, and entre into a shitty world filled with thugs, predators, cretins and users.

With all that said, Unablogger does offer some amazingly high quality photographs, which you may or not consider to be good porn.

Secret No More: U.S. News has a scathing report on the U.S. Secret Service. It's got everything you want in a soap opera: sex, drugs, embezzling, adultery, brawls, biting, shootings and political intrigue. Pay special attention to the mention of Catherine Cornelius, a central figure in the travel office scandal.

Here's something I've never seen before, I surfed over to Amazon.com and it is 'temporarily' closed. I remember the days when ebay would be down for hours at a time several days a week, but in my 8+ years of using the web I've never seen amazon.com down. Freaky. [Unlike some of my more sarcastic posts, this is not a hoax. I just thought it was interesting.]

For the terminally curious, if you scroll down the following text appears "Please note: Per our Site Availability Policy, if this closure lasts longer than 30 minutes but less than or equal to 2 hours, all auctions scheduled to end during the store closure period will be extended by at least twice the amount of the time closed. If the store closure lasts longer than 2 hours, all auctions scheduled to end during the closure period will be extended by 24 hours. " -- Which is odd to me, because I was not going to an auction site. Amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk also seem to be down.

My two-DVD "Director's Cut" copy of Pearl Harbor arrived in today's mail. The two DVD's in the Director's Cut: Tora! Tora! Tora! and Love Story.

Reason #437 Why I Love My Wife:
Tonight, driving home from date night, encountering a few potentially homicidal drivers, I asked my wife
TC: Would you rather be happy or smart?

W:         Rich.

Without missing a beat. Beautiful!

"I came from a place where you had to
be crazy to go to a crazy doctor."

Ummm, will the 10 O'Clock appointment work for you?

Photo Courtesy Yahoo!

I wonder if the fix is in on a Skakel appeal. In what could be a Freudian slip, or perhaps a poorly worded sentence, a Skakel mouthpiece just said the following at a press conference:

"He did not do it, he wasn't there, and he never confessed. I believe in him, I will believe for the next six months, three years -- or however long it takes."

It occurs to me that the most fictional thing in Tom Clancy's novels are not the scenarios or futuristic technology, it is the efficiency of government. Bureaucracies in Jack Ryan's world are filled with bright eyed servants of the people, clever folk who synthesize practically unreachable conclusions out of a menagerie of intelligence sources. Given the way the real system works, perhaps his books would be more accurately shelved in fantasy.

[Found at The Hub] Anyone who has lived in, near or around Washington, D.C. knows the joke that is the Metropolitan Police. (Aside -- Hell, the whole D.C. government!) Their incompetence reached new levels, and will likely reach a new audience, though, given their failings in the Chandra Levy case. Writing about the piss-poor search conducted by the D.C. cops, Josh Marshall pens, "Well, today the two Levy family investigators -- former DC cops -- went to scene to see what they could find. And what did they find? A sock? Panties? Some hair that might have been Chandra's?" For the nigh unbelievable answer to what they found, go read the rest of his post.

Henpecked? [link requires registration]

The wife of the European Central Bank chief has left Amsterdam for her holiday home in France after outraging her Jewish neighbours by draping a Palestinian flag over her balcony and blaming Palestinian's woes on an "elite club of rich American Jews".

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Labor) seems to have a screw loose. In the midst of a possible nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, Harkin took time to urge the U.S. World Cup team to make sure that the balls used it its games were not made by child labor in Pakistan. Stranger still, he made this request during an appropriations subcommittee hearing.

Displaying pictures of young children producing soccer balls for typical third world wages, Harkin wants to take their jobs away in the face of a possible war with India.

Now how's that for a kick in the shins.

(Harkin missed the real story about the balls at the World Cup. This year they switched to an extra-lively ball that doesn't fly straight. The latest reports, however, say that the balls are being underinflated.)

[Later in day update - 3:20PM] Upon further reflection, this should not have surprised me at all. Most of our elected representatives seem more than comfortable squabbling over domestic policy during a time of foreign conflict. The next logical step was for them to start squabling over other nations' domestic policies during their time of foreign conflict.

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I missed King Imbecile's speech tonight, though I did find the Homeland Security proposal over at the hub.

First thought: If the plan is as well thought out as the .pdf is laid out, we are all in big trouble. Check out the top of page three to see what I mean.

Isntapundit writes:

Volokh dismissed your notion that there's a dichotomy between measures taken against implements and measures taken against terrorists. I think he's right in theory but wrong in practice. We could go after both, but we don't. "Taking measures against terrorists" would in practice mean profiling, some of which would be based in race, which we don't dare do, so we concentrate on the implements. If we shed our racial profiling compunctions, we'd probably allocate our resources best by forgetting about the implements and concentrating on the enemy.

I think you could have hit him a little harder on this.

I think I made my point, though not quite as well as you did.

As for not "hitting him a little harder on this," all I can say is that I learned long ago to allow good teachers to go off on tangents. When a teacher the quality of Professor Volokh picks one point and hammers you on it, there is usually a valuable lesson to be learned where they take the discussion.

In this case I learned that my plan would likely be unworkable in today's society. How and why we got to a point where so few people provide for their own self-defense on a day to day basis is a debate for another day. And heck, does it surprise anyone that a law school professor wanted to drive the direction of a conversation?
[Isntapundit also has a piece on racial profiling.]

Gay? Have a psychiatric history? Feeling lonely? In central New York?

Well, be alone no more because the The Finger Lakes Independence Center (FLIC), supported in part by the United Way of Tompkins County, has a dating service for you. Feel free to comment about this on FLIC's bulletin board.

Old but good, Larry Miller flips Islam on its smelly, backwards head. [Link courtesy Mike Trossman.]

"I fear the things, since they are easily concealed and lethal," dribbles Richard Cohen, from somewhere deep inside his Panic Room.

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity," wrote Sigmund Freud in his "General Introduction to Psychoanalysis."

Advantage: Siggy.

Matt Guckenheimer sent a letter to editor of the Ithaca Journal clarifying his statements last week. For posterity I am reproducing the entire letter below.

Recently your paper quoted me as saying that my unit was ordered to kill women and children.

I would like to clarify this quote and provide more context.

Prior to the operation, we were made aware of the fact that the hostile forces of the Whaleback might include women and children. In that event, if those women and children showed hostile intent, we were ordered to kill them as hostile forces, just like any other hostile force we encountered. However, this does not mean that we were ordered to slaughter noncombatants such as babies.

We were further informed that some of these children are trained starting at a very young age to be soldiers. Knowing this, we could not afford to just dismiss them as noncombatants.

However, I do not want anyone to get the idea that we were ever sent out to kill anyone and anything that moves. We are better than that, both as a military unit and as a society.

Matt Guckenheimer

Cayuga Heights, May 31

:: how jedi are you? ::

UPDATE: Mostly unbelievable Pvt. Matt Guckenheimer's interview [Original post on this topic] got picked up by Fox News. [Last of 4 items.] Unlike the highly doubtable Kandea Mosley, Fox actually bothered to contact the 10th Mountain Division to follow up on the story.

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"True, there's always the chance that someone can smuggle a gun on board" writes Blogger Extraordinaire Eugene Volokh in defending the creation of disarmed victim zones in the sky. I think he underestimates the chances of successfully getting a gun through airport security, or to have it brought in around security. Disarming victims serves only to disarm victims. It does not make anyone safer, except perhaps the terrorists.

National Lampoon's Terror Map is pretty damn funny.

Steven Spielberg finally earned his bachelor's degree this weekend.

In a statement, (Spielberg) said he wanted to complete his bachelor-degree requirements "as a 'thank you' to my parents...and as a personal note for my own family--and young people everywhere--about the importance of achieving their college education goals."

That message, "Earning a Bachelor's degree is not important. Hell, look at me. I'm talented and successful, and not having a stupid piece of paper never held me back."

Now, before you go thinking that The Comedian (Damn third person is just too easy to use given that I title this blog with "The Comedian") is a bitter non-college graduate, I should point out that I have a Bachelor's degree from one of those Ivy League institutions, and a JD from a lesser school.

I just don't get people's belief that they need a piece of paper, or what it represents, to feel complete. Spielberg would have better spent his time teaching others. He is a gifted and unique individual who should not need external validation of his success.

Some of the most vital work ever done on Capitol Hill will begin behind closed doors this week as efforts to prevent another Sept. 11 type attack compete with election-year politics.

Time for another quiz. Is the preceding passage the opening of:

1) A lead editorial in the NY Times; or,
2) The first blog I scanned this morning; or,
3) The latest George Will Column; or,
4) A Reuter's News Story?

Click here for the answer.

For bonus points tell me why I thought this was blog-worthy.

Caution: the next post contains a spoiler: The spoiler: attack of the clones blows.

I saw attack of the clones today. [Title purposely not capitalized. This movie does not deserve any recognition.] Dreadful. Simply Dreadful. Would have been better off seeing UnderCover Brother.

Save the price of admission and just watch this wonderful Triumph the Insult Dog piece about fans waiting for the opening of the film. Triumph's ten minutes are far more rewarding than Lucas's latest debacle. Meesa wish Me no paya for da filme.

UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I realize that this is a flatly acted movie portraying characters with whom the audience shares no interest. Joyless characters run through beautiful backdrops and I couldn't bring myself to care whether they died or not, knowing full well which characters had to survive until at least episode three. I must admit I enjoyed watching Natalie Portman's in her white bodysuit during the final act, though I think Lucas played a bit with her body, digitally. (No pun intended.) It is of note that I enjoyed watching Natilie, though I couldn't give a crap about Padme...