Never ask a woman

In Roman History today as Witch Hazel* was discussing the Sibyl, a priestess who lived in a cave and occasionally gave advice** (though mostly to men), I had my second politically incorrect thought of the week***:

Women should never ask other women for advice, especially as it relates to relationships, which is the advice they most often request.

I'm quite serious. In fact, tonight as I packed up all 7 of my copies of "The Rules" (a book by women that purports to tell other women how to snag the man they want) for shipment to unsuspecting women buyers/victims, I thought about it again and reached the same conclusion.

The problem with women asking other women for advice is simply this: most women asking for advice do not really want a solution to the named problem; they want sympathy and affirmation. And most**** women who give advice understand this and respond accordingly.

The correct answer to most women's relationship problems (assuming, for the moment, that they are actually looking for a solution) can come from one of two places: either she should ask a man - studiously ignoring all advice from her woman friends, especially those that have proved themselves inept in regards to this particular problem - or, in the case that a trustworthy one is not available, she should take Vox Day's advice to search her feelings and then do the opposite.

The reason is simply one of biology, IMHO. Most men, if you ask them about a problem, will analyze the problem - we are engineerish that way. Most women, on the other hand, will foremostly empathize with your place in the situation*****. Thus if the problem is not being able to find a husband, the man will often recommend changes you can and should effect to make yourself a more attractive mate. The woman will reassure you that you are worthwhile. Of course, if the real problem is just that you feel bad about a situation, then go ahead and ask a Sibyl. You'll feel far better knowing that the problem, while remaining insoluble, is at least everyone else's fault.

* My professor looks just like the picture except that her hat is green.

** She did provide a good bit of history as well, such as this Roman remembrance of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11):

"But when the judgements of Almighty God
Were ripe for execution; when the tower
Rose to the skies upon Assyria's plain,
And all mankind one language only knew:
A dread commission from on high was given
To the fell whirlwinds, which with dire alarms
Beat on the tower, and to its lowest base
Shook it convulsed. And now all intercourse,
By some occult and over-ruling power,
Ceased among men. By utterance they strove
Perplexed and anxious, to disclose their mind,
But their lip failed them; and in lieu of words
Produced a painful babbling sound: the place
Was thence called Babel; by the apostate crew
Named from the event. Then severed far away
They sped, uncertain, into realms unknown:
Thus kingdoms rose; and the glad world was filled."

*** and thus Misty, in using the sole triple-dog dare in her repertoire to get me to post the Aztec rant on Lawrence.com, missed the opportunity for me to post this one, which would have undoubtedly caused several of the feminista brigade to burst their ovaries in blind rage.

**** Except my wife, who will say flat-out, "If you're just looking for sympathy, look elsewhere." She is very unwomanly in that respect.

***** When I once suggested that if a woman wanted to find a good man her bioclock and children were issues, a certain KU professor replied with "Wow. I've never felt so objectified before." One solution is based on an objective analysis of the situation, the other on a subjective evaluation of feelings. Both were unsurprisingly stereotypical responses.

New Header Art Test (Ignore)

I wish

It's snowing outside right now... but not enough.

Watching a baby dragon being born

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- A congress wholly loyal to President Hugo Chavez approved a law Wednesday granting him authority to enact sweeping measures by decree.

Meeting at a downtown plaza in a session that resembled a political rally, lawmakers unanimously approved all four articles of the law by a show of hands...

Hundreds of Chavez supporters wearing red -- the color of Venezuela's ruling party -- gathered in the plaza, waving signs reading "Socialism is democracy" as lawmakers read out passages of the law giving Chavez special powers for 18 months to transform 11 broadly defined areas, including the economy, energy and defense...

Dictatorships are seldom started by men who are unpopular, and if one looks back to the dictators of history, whether elected ones like Hitler or military ones like Caesar Augustus, one will find that at the beginning of their reigns - usually following a period of political chaos or national humiliation (or both) - the vast majority of people under their rule have no problem giving the dictator all the power he needs to get things fixed.

Chavez has several real advantages as he begins single-handedly organizing the details of millions of lives: 1) the current price of oil gives him lots of bread and circus money, and 2) the people he is ruling have a long and glorious history of suffering dictatorships and, when given a chance, creating them.

The first, of course, won't last forever. Venezuela will either devolve into an enormous welfare state that will starve to death once their oil peaks or the price falls, or it will develop into an industrial beehive that will stop exporting oil altogether, wasting instead its vast internal resources on busywork. Either way, a good time will be had by all while it lasts, and when it collapses there will be lots skulls piled up - that's what "Socialism is Democracy" means when you apply it to real people.

The second is precisely the reason GWB's Iraq dreams will never, ever come true. No matter what we do, and probably no matter what we could ever have done.

It's like Jeopardy, but with a cool accent

There are few time-wasters more enjoyable than a quiz that can't get the questions right*. Here's one such presented by that media outlet known affectionately as the Beeb: 5 questions, multiple choice, with several throwaway answers to reduce the chances of you getting a wrong answer and to ensure that everyone feels good about their scores, and one question that you can get right only by being completely ignorant of its subject.

For those who actually want to take the quiz, I won't reveal ahead of time which question is wrong (I'll put it inthe comments). You'll just have to fight it yourself.

* That seems to be a common problem in history quizzes.

Politically incorrect thought of the day

I'm glad the Aztecs are dead. Seriously. I'm glad their empire fell, glad their kings and nobles died bleeding through their pores, glad the Spanish put an end to what was the most bloodthirsty regime that ever soiled the face of the planet, bar none. People who lament that the coming of the Spaniards resulted in the destruction of Meso-American culture* are, in my opinion, fools. It was unalterably evil to the core.

When the Aztecs rededicated their main temple in 1448ish, they ripped the living hearts out of 80,000 captives, a process that took 4 days and resulted in blood streaming down 20 stories of stone steps. The blood smeared on the walls inside their temples was so thick you could slice ribbons of it off with a sword. When they went to war they often fought merely to wound so they could return thousands of live captives in order to rip out their beating hearts in public celebration. Their gods** demanded the living blood of millions of human victims to drink, the priests and nobility their raw flesh to eat, and they cast all of Central America into a two centuries' long orgy of ritual murder. It is quite unsurprising that Cortes and his few Spaniards were able to gather hundreds of thousands of allies on their march to the halls of Montezuma: those neighbors hated the Aztecs with both passion and good reason.

So while my professor is of such sterling quality that I can pretty much say anything without fear of political reprisal so long as it's adequately footnoted, it's still probably a good thing my research paper is 15 pages on Cortes' supply train.

* Sure, I wish more history had been preserved, too, but the Aztecs purposely destroyed that before the Spaniards even arrived.

** Terrible gods make for terrible people, and the gods of the Aztecs were the most evil imaginable.

You could at least feign surprise

What kind of goth are you?

Legalism ad absurdum

The Theological Ninja drops an interesting plumb line:

Lots of people ask me, “Hey Ninja, how do you come to your conclusions about what’s proper to do in a worship service?” To which I reply, “Silly grasshopper, I use the Bible. Sola Scriptura!”

For those of you that have never heard of the Regulative Principle let me enlighten you: If it isn’t in the Bible it is absolutely forbidden. Do you see microphoned being used in Paul’s churches? No dice. Do you see a church office called “worship leader?” Nope. Did the Galatians use instruments in their meetings? The Bible doesn’t say they did and neither should we...

If it doesn’t say it, don’t do it. If you do, you might be damned.

Of course, that means that dedicated church buildings, personal bibles, even closed windows (Acts 20:9) are somehow forbidden Christians in their places of worship. Anyone who attends a church service that is not held in someone's house is in big trouble with God, because the original churches did not meet in churches, they met in homes (Ro 16:5, 1Cor 16:19, Phi 1:2). Don't go to church: you might be damned*.

But why stop at worship? After all, if the Regulative Principle** is fit for worship, it ought to be fit for the rest of life. And since as Christians we are to walk in Christ (Col 2:6) it ought to follow that we ought never do anything the Bible doesn't say he did or was never done to him, right? Therefore we ought never put diapers on our babies (Jesus was never potty trained in the Bible), change our socks, or condition our hair. We ought never wear underwear, flip a burger, or pet a dog. And we certainly ought to never use a computer, drive a car, or save money. After all, if these things were good, certainly the Lord of Life would have done them.

And the Bible never once, not one single time, says Jesus went to the bathroom. So don't ever talk to a man about a horse or bury a quaker: that's surefire damnation. After all, God will "cut off ... him that pisseth against the wall" (1Ki 14:10).

It's quite easy to claim that because the scriptures are able to make us wise to salvation (2Tim 3:15) that the scriptures are an exhaustive list of "do"s and "don't"s*** for every area of life. But the scriptures are written for examples (1Cor 10:11) for our living. It is then up to us to live wisely in whatever world we find ourselves.

* There seems to be a certain type of Christian whose God is always looking for some excuse to toss him into hell.

** Which, I note, is not in the Bible.

*** and especially the latter, apparently.

The highlights for those who didn't watch

Of this they are wilfully ignorant

Ronald Reagan once noted concerning liberals that, "It's not so much that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that ain't so." But I think there are plenty of cases that show that they are not only ignorant, but that they are so because they refuse to accept obvious data that contradict their worldview:

Labour has been accused of losing control of gun crime as new figures show a sharp rise in armed robberies.

Guns were used in 4,120 robberies last year - a 10% jump - including a 9% rise to 1,439 in the number of street robberies where guns were used.

There was also a rapid and unexplained increase in the number of times householders were confronted in their own homes by armed criminals. Residential firearms robberies show a 46% leap, a record 645 cases in England and Wales - up 204 on the previous year and four times the level recorded in 2000-01.

Read that last paragraph again, pondering, just briefly, the word "unexplained." It's not remotely unexplained to anyone with the ability to consistently get "four" when two twos are added together, and those who insist that the result is unexplained either lack mental firepower or simply choose not to believe the truth.

The truth is that the more onerous Britain makes gun ownership (recommending rather that those whose homes are invaded by armed thugs "retreat to a secure room,") the more brash those who disobey the laws become. Armed criminals need no other reason to be emboldened than the knowledge that their intended victims are less and less likely to be able to defend themselves. It is so always and everywhere.

In 5 years since 2001 (a year in which the BBC noted that handgun crime was already up 40% since handguns were banned just 2 years prior) armed home invasions have increased fourfold. Yet the liberal politicians' consistent answer is to make the problem the solution:

Home Office minister Tony McNulty ... added: "We have some of the toughest firearm legislation in Europe."

It seems that another aphorism is quite correct in the case of liberals who assert that gun crime can be stopped by passing laws against gun ownership: there are truly none so blind as those who will not see.

Type Carefully

Implosion

I wrote a post last month called "Wave Goodbye to Subprime Mortgages," in which I confessed the fact that I had completely overlooked the real problem with the subprime mortgage market:

"I missed the paramount danger, which was not that someone who's today in a home owned by the bank will live tomorrow in a home owned by a landlord. It's what happens when lots and lots of similarly-classed people are forced from their mortgaged homes in a very short period. In other words, the true danger in the housing market is not that 1% or 2% of people can't pay their bills, it's that an entire class of assets, upon which trillions of dollars in other assets is suspended, has created a massive and potentially disasterous undercurrent that all manner of do-gooders did not foresee."

The real danger to the economy is not what happens when a lot of people can't pay their mortgages, but when a lot of people in a defined class upon which is built an entire sector of the economy and financial markets can't pay them.

The first thing we should expect as the subprime mortgage market implodes is the death of specialist companies in that market. Thanks to the Implode-O-Meter (link added on the left as this will be an ongoing problem*) we can see that such is exactly what is happening:

Count of US Mortgage lenders that have croaked in the past 30 days:

2007-01-24: Mandalay Mortgage - Subprime lending
2007-01-23: Rose Mortgage - Originator
2007-01-19: EquiBanc - Subprime subsidiary of Wachovia
2007-01-19: FundingAmerica
2007-01-09: Popular Financial Holdings - Subprime unit of Banco Popular of Puerto Rico
2007-01-08: Clear Choice Financial/Bay Capital
2007-01-08: Origen Wholesale Lending - Lending arm of a modular home company
2007-01-05: SecuredFunding - Originator and Home Equity specialist
2007-01-03: Preferred Advantage
2006-12-29: MLN
2006-12-20: Harbourton Mortgage Investment Corporation

I note with interest that many are followed by the notation "No Story**," though the details are usually linked to company websites that all list in official legalese that the company is tats up so don't bother to call.

What those who are looking are seeing, however, is a massive and immediate change in the subprime lending market, driven by rising interest rates, delinquencies, and the fact that Americans have simply borrowed about as much home equity as they can borrow. Consumers are tapped out, and in the short term it will not get any better. We are nowhere near the bottom of the housing market, but we may very well be reaching the limits of the current housing-driven economic expansion.

Rogue mentioned to me last week the surfeit of stories she has seen recently about the need for Americans to save money. This was right after I read her quarterly retirement newsletter that - while it has a vested interest in people saving - was remarkable for the fact that it was almost pleading with its customers to spend less and save more. Someone is very scared about the economic near future***.

I don't think these stories are accidental. Something wicked this way comes.

* The Implode-O-Meter also has a list of lenders that may be on the brink of shutting down.

** This is a story that is not in the regular press yet.

*** besides me, I mean.

UPDATE: 1/25

2 more lenders fled the market today, Millennium Bancshares and Summit Mortgage. That makes seven in the last week.

A number of people (okay, just 1) have written telling me that from 12/20/06 to 1/24/07 is more than 30 days. You're correct, it's 35ish. So sue me.

Everything evolves

Except when it forgets to, apparently:

A type of shark, rarely seen alive, has been captured in Japan.

Frilled sharks have swum the Earth's seas since prehistoric times* and normally live nearly 550 metres under the sea.

Now, a fisherman has found a 1.6 metre long deep sea frill shark swimming in the shallows in Japan.

The eel-like creature, which has a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth, is often called a living fossil, because it's evolved so little.

Fossil records can be found of the animal dating as far back as 80 million years ago.

The phrase "living fossil" has always intrigued me. It sounds as if there's a secret time vortex leading from the Paleocene Epoch directly to the modern coast of Japan where Gamara and Godzilla are just waiting in the wings for that nuclear blast to melt their frozen prison so they can come ashore near Tokyo for a really good time**. What it really means is far more mundane: in the time it took man to evolve from rats, mice, and squirrels***, this guy evolved from a frilled shark into, well, a frilled shark.

Way to keep up with the pack, buddy.

* Circa 3000bc, as "prehistoric times" are properly defined as the time before written history.

** Whew! That was quite a sentence.

*** Don't laugh. Squirrels are some of the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodents you ever laid eyes on.

Good little Democrats always obey Mommy

This would actually be funny in an over-the-top, laugh-at-the-Utopians sort of way if Democrats were not completely in earnest about it. "Why Mommy is a Democrat" might not be the official Democratic party platform*, but it does capture what the Democrats who endorse it call the party's "core values."

Because most people already teach their kids the nice things the book promotes, the distinctive Democratic core value here seems to be that there is no difference between families and governments: government is, in effect, just a big Mommy. And the real reason Mommy is a Democrat is because she wants the government to coerce people into doing the things she would make them do if she had all that power herself.

Other people ignore her will because she's not really their mommy, so Mommy works hard to build a government that can make them obey her anyway.

* They would need to add at least five pages suitable for coloring.

(hat tip: Misty)

Am I reading these numbers completely wrong?

Or is the Associated Press pushing an agenda:

State inmates outlive people on outside

WASHINGTON -- State prison inmates, particularly blacks, are living longer on average than people on the outside, the government said Sunday.

Inmates in state prisons are dying at an average yearly rate of 250 per 100,000, according to the latest figures reported to the Justice Department by state prison officials. By comparison, the overall population of people between age 15 and 64 is dying at a rate of 308 a year.

For black inmates, the rate was 57 percent lower than among the overall black population - 206 versus 484. But white and Hispanic prisoners both had death rates slightly above their counterparts in the overall population.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics said 12,129 state prisoners died between 2001 through 2004.

Check me if I'm wrong, but isn't the number of inmates dying in prison completely unrelated to the length of people's lives simply because a) most prisoners are younger than the general population*, b) most prisoners are released - alive - after a few years, and c) excluding people aged 65 and older from your sample is a damned poor way to tell who's living longer?

The vast majority of people who do time do not die in prison simply because they serve a term and then are released**, while everyone on the outside dies eventually. Comparing the number of people dying in any given year from such disparate statistical samples seems to me quite unlikely to lead to the conclusion the AP reaches.

I do notice, however, that the one number that would prove the headline and conclusion true beyond a doubt - the life expectancy of a life-without-paroler - is absent from the article. In light of that missing number, what's the AP trying to accomplish by implying we'd live longer if only we could all be prisoners?

* "...people ages 25 to 44 are overrepresented among prisoners compared to their share in the general adult population; older people are underrepresented among prisoners. "
-- "Who's in Prison? The Changing Demographics of Incarceration" p.4

** It's seemingly only those waiting to be executed who die of old age.

What if it creates a black hole or something?

So I was moving around a couple of icons on my desktop and accidentally dropped the Recycle Bin into my My Documents folder. But since Windows does not allow the Recycle Bin to be moved from the desktop, it placed a shortcut in the folder instead. I found the shortcut and tried to delete it, but Windows asked me, "Are you sure you want to send 'Recycle Bin' to the Recycle Bin?"

And I thought, if I do that, where would it go?

Plans 1 thru 8

Big Beaver is watching you

Another Defense Department fairy story crumbles beneath the unbearable weight of mockery:

WASHINGTON: Reversing itself, the Defense Department now acknowledges that a U.S. government espionage report it produced warning about Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside was not true.

The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has launched an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns...

Intelligence and technology experts were flabbergasted over the initial report, which suggested such transmitters could be used to surreptitiously track the movements of people carrying the coins...

The service initially maintained that its report on the spy coins was accurate but said further details about the spy coins were classified.

Technology challenges aside, it would take a pretty stupid spy to place a tracking device inside an object that the person being tracked is unlikely to carry with him. Seriously, how many American defense contractors do you suppose carry around Canadian nickels in their pockets and never spend them? If you're carrying it, it's to get rid of, if you're not likely to get rid of it, you're not going to carry it. Use of coins as a "tracking device" doesn't even make good fiction. Try placing them in tooth fillings or eyeglass rims next time.

The Defense Department's response to questions about the revelation, "The story is true but the details are classified," was as unoriginal as it was entirely predictable. It wasn't until defense experts reacted with open scorn and derision that the DoD decided to admit that the "report" was merely an urban legend from the beginning.

But remember kids, if Canadian spies ever try to make you witdraw money from an ATM, you can summon the police immediately by entering your PIN number in reverse. Really.

Well, because horses are naturally immortal

The Democrats apparently don't like French cuisine all that much:

The House of Representatives last year passed legislation to ban federally inspected horse slaughter in the U.S. Federal inspection of meat from slaughtered horses allows it to be exported to countries like France and Belgium where horsemeat is considered a delicacy. The bill died in the Senate after farm state lawmakers blocked it. But now its back, as lawmakers re-introduced the measure in both chambers of Congress this week...

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D), one of the original co-sponsors of the Senate version of the bill to ban horse slaughter, said in a press release that it's "cruel and inhumane" to slaughter horses for human consumption. The Landrieu press release didn't say why it's crueler to slaughter a horse for food than it is to slaughter a cow, pig or chicken for that purpose.

When all is said and done, Democratic and treehugger arguments against horse consumption boil down to "horses are pretty" while pigs and chickens are not. Horses that are not eaten by people will simply be eaten by something else, most likely flies and maggots and coyotes in the ditch behind the barn, or will be made into glue once again. If Frogs want to join the feast, so what?

As this bill gets tabled in the Senate once again, I fully expect to see Lady Clintdiva* riding naked on a horse to protest the injustices visited upon these august beasts, who deserve taxpayer-funded nursing homes and Social Security benefits rather than the ignoble death of a meat-packing plant.

* Actually, I just threw up a little bit in my mouth at the thought of a naked Hillary riding through my village. The imperial bust thing was bad enough.

Christians and the State

La Shawn Barber wraps up her argument on the immorality of illegal immigration with the totalitarian's* favorite scripture, Romans 13:1-4:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.

The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you.

For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing.

Now while I have no problem with any of Ms. Barber's points about whether the government has the right to limit immigration (it does), I have a very large problem with using these 4 verses, without context, as a universal command**, because to do so ignores a great deal of biblical teaching and leads very quickly to a slippery slope that has been followed too many times in human history. But before I get into that, I feel a Moral Quandary Interlude(tm) coming on

Moral Quandary Interlude: assuming that all acts mentioned below are done in perfect accordance with the law, if the government was rounding up illegal immigrants and commanded that every citizen turn in those they were aware of, should the Christian turn in immigrants:

a) knowing they would be severely scolded and set free?
b) knowing they would be deported to a starving nation?
c) knowing they would be killed by their own nations after deportation?
d) knowing that our government was going to secretly kill them all?
e) knowing that our government was going to forcibly convert everyone to Scientology?
f) knowing that our government was going to flay the children alive in the public square as a warning to other immigrants?

In all probability, each one of us probably started out with a yes and at some point stopped going along. And yet the average pro-government conservative who uses Romans 13 to submit the Christian to government in all cases cannot logically stop*** at any of those points, because it's all legal. If the government is to be obeyed in all things, then it would be morally required to turn infants over to be flayed and salted if the government says so, and there's no sense bothering over Anne Frank, either. There must be something wrong with that interpretation, and there is.

What is wrong with it is that it makes the assumption that when Paul talks about "right" and "wrong," he really means "legal" and "illegal," that "those who do right" are the selfsame as "those who obey the law" and do the former by doing the latter. But arbitrary laws - immigration laws, import laws, speed limits, and the like - seldom have anything to do with morality at all; they are negotiated (or purchased) standards. Saying "It's against the law" in reference to any of them may be a fact, but it is not and cannot be a moral argument.

When it comes to moral arguments, law may intersect with morality or it may not. There are certain things that are right and must be done irrespective of whether they are against the law. When commanded by the authorities to stop preaching the Gospel, Peter and John simply went on doing what they were doing, "obeying God rather than men," and accepted the consequences of that. Jesus healed on the Sabbath in violation of the law and virtually dared the Pharisees to stop him.

And there are certain things that are wrong and ought not be done whether they are required by the law or not. A soldier commanded to kill an innocent person is a murderer if he obeys, no matter how high up the chain of command his orders originate. He can avoid the wrath of his commander by following the order, but he'll not avoid the wrath of God in this life or the next.

In short, morality overrides law; it always has and always will. While Paul seems to be making a universal statement if we take it in isolation, too often we ignore the fact that it is simply one rhetorical point in a larger teaching on peaceful Christian Living within a larger non-Christian society.

So how do we balance Paul's seeming universal "no authority but from God" with Peter's "obey God rather than men"? We don't balance it, as if each is half right. Rather we discern, based on the law itself, whether it is a legitimate exercise of God's authority through men or not. If the law commands a moral wrong that law is illegitimate, and the Christian is not only right in ignoring it but must do so no matter the cost. If the law forbids a moral good it is illegitimate, and the same results must occur. In short, when it comes to law, even arbitrary law, we ought to follow Paul's admonition to submit to government, for such contributes to order and peace, and Paul's admonition is a recognition that the rules of government generally promote peaceful interaction and should be given the benefit of the doubt. That is, up to the point that there is some moral demand or responsibility that requires us to discard it. Then we must ignore it and obey God instead.

So all that said, what has it to do with immigration? Bloody little, actually, because immigrants are individuals who may have legitimate moral reasons for ignoring the law or may not. One simply cannot make the argument that being an illegal immigrant is a de facto moral offense, yet that forms the basis of Ms. Barber's accusation of "un-Christ-like behavior" by those who break immigration law:

Kindness ... (is) about holding people accountable and encouraging them to make amends for their wrongdoing, to alleviate the suffering they’ve caused others. Why don’t I ever read a Christians-and-illegal-aliens news story that mentions the moral and legal obligations of Christ-following illegal aliens?

...Having “compassion for the alien” is Christ-like, but so is holding other so-called Christians accountable for their un-Christ-like behavior..

It is silly to try to make a case that illegal immigrants are necessarily "wrongdoing" because they are living peacefully on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. If the immigrant is truly doing wrong or causing suffering to another person, then such person ought to be called to account under the same laws as any other person. But if (for example) the immigrant has children to feed and the only way to meet this real moral responsibility is to break the government's unenforced and arbitrary standard - and is in no other way harming his neighbor - I'm certainly not going to criticize the morality of his doing so.

And without knowing the specific moral responsibilities of the Christian immigrant, neither should anyone else.

(hat tip: Snoop)

* This is not calling names, it is recognizing that the totalitarian has no more powerful weapon than in convincing the Christian citizen that the ruler's will and God's will are one and the same. If the government is the final arbiter of right and wrong, government is for all intents and purposes God.

** In all fairness, big-government religious conservatives admit it's not universal, like when they protect and take part in the law-breaking, "un-Christ-like behavior" of bible-smugglers in China or write letters to save Christians in Afghanistan. However, so long as it is in reference to laws they wish to see enforced, they consistently promote it as a Christian's undeniable duty.

*** Not being able to logically stop does not keep people from stopping, thank God, because most people innately understand that governments on occasion and with some regularity oppose God rather than acting as his regent. Logic, when built on false premises, is often a hindrance to life rather than a help.

If you don't know who the mullet is

you're the mullet:

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The third-poorest city in Pennsylvania is a lot poorer because of a 28-year bet on interest rates that already has gone awry.

The Reading, Pennsylvania, school district, which has 18,323 students, this week must pay $230,000 to Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's largest bank, because it's on the losing side of a wager that long-term interest rates will rise faster than short-term interest rates. In April, the board rushed approval of the so-called interest rate swap in eight days after its adviser said the transaction may* earn the district $16 million by 2034.

While Reading's taxpayers are liable for the loss, bankers and advisers already have pocketed $1 million in fees for arranging the swap...

Local governments from Augusta, Georgia, to Oakland, California, are being lured by similar opportunities to speculate with derivatives created by the world's biggest banks. Most of the $400 billion of private agreements sold to municipalities escape taxpayers' notice and are little understood by the public officials and administrators who approve them.

The loss, of course, is not remotely over, because the position is not closed out and is almost certainly highly leveraged. That means that there may be many more quarters without heat in the schools until Reading passes a bond issue to pay off the bankers. It also means that in addition to being the third poorest city in Pennsylvania, Reading ranks among the tops in credulity**. Hey, we all need to excel in something.

A few simple questions (that are seemingly never asked) could have completely avoided the situation above:

a) What is a school board doing investing in interest rate swap derivatives in the first place?
b) Where did they think the magical $16 million was going to come from? A Nigerian prince?

Unless they could answer those two questions, the Reading School Board had absolutely no business pretending to be investors***.

But rather than just mocking the foolishness of one elected school board****, the important points here are that there are no risk-free transactions and that the bankers who issue these derivatives are more than happy to sell that risk off to the credulous to get it off their own books. There are untold trillions of dollars' worth of such risk, and as this systemic risk spreads, so do the nooks and crannies into which it must be tucked to keep the game going. The world is full of idiots who are willing to spend your money to buy a seat in this rigged casino. But don't complain, you elected them.

It's not surprising, of course, that the banksters took their cut ahead of time and made off with a million in taxpayer funds. That's what they do. What will be a big surprise is when school boards nationwide create classes in what Sir Alan Greenspan called "cascading cross defaults"***** to explain what happened when the fools who bet more than they had on whether interest rates would go up or down could not pay, leading to other fools who could not collect and therefore could not pay, leading to other fools who could not collect and therefore could not pay, leading to a lot of people who didn't understand much about economics eating dog food to survive.

And if you don't know who those people are, they may very well be you.

* "May" is the most dangerous word in finance.

** The two are almost certainly related.

*** They should stick to pretending to be educators.

**** Why beat a dead horse?

***** He said about Long Term Credit Management - a hedge fund run by two Nobel Prize (economics) winners that went tats up when a couple "sure thing" bets went bad - that "... it was the FRBNY's judgment that it was to the advantage of all parties--including the creditors and other market participants--to engender if at all possible an orderly resolution rather than let the firm go into disorderly fire-sale liquidation following a set of cascading cross defaults." The Fed rushed in with handfuls of free money to stop the dominoes that had begun falling. It worked in 1998, but today the problem is just a bit bigger than it was then. Hey, maybe it'll work again. I sure as hell hope so, too: my dog is not big on sharing.

All's fair in love and espionage

Neal Boortz goes looking for war in all the wrong places:

Iran is saying they shot down a U.S. spy drone that supposedly flew into their airspace. Just how long are we going to put up with this nonsense? First they send Islamic terrorists into Iraq to make trouble and now they're shooting down our planes? In another time, this would amount to a declaration of war.

The first thing that ought to be noted is that the US Military is denying any such shootdown, and since the claim was made by some otherwise unheard-of MP for publication in Iran's state-controlled newspapers, it is in all probability nothing more than propaganda, and poorly-done propaganda at that.*

However, assuming it's true for just a moment, does it amount to a declaration of war? Let me ask it this way: if we shot down an Iranian plane overflying American territory, would they have any casus belli? If they were violating our territorial airspace, I suggest that we would be well within our rights to shoot them down. If that's the case, then we truly have nothing to complain about. We had such a plane shot down over the USSR once (it was called the U-2 Incident**) and Old Ike didn't go crying on the radio about how those mean old Soviets were blowing our hardware out of the sky and he didn't apologize, either. He just built better hardware.

Note to Neal: if you break into somebody's house and they shoot you, you don't get to complain. If you overfly someone else's country and they shoot you down, you don't get to complain. Guys with funny beards have property rights, too, and if we're going to ignore them, we just need to build better planes.

* At the very least al-Reuters or AFP should have taken pictures of a burning tire dump so they could pretend it was a plane.

** Not to be confused with the U-2 Indecent, which wasn't, so much.

CNN calls out the Green Mountain Boys

I'm no friend of Vermont, but that was a bit uncalled-for.

Grab a shovel, then

I'm not sure if this headline is the best pun of the day or the worst:

Castro Reportedly in 'Grave' Condition

Either way, who says there's never any good news in the paper?

Another reason to hate poodles

Does this actually mean anything at all?

Here's a paper that was not to be missed:

"Feminist studies, followed by gay and lesbian studies, and to a certain extent queer studies have opened up the ancient world in new and fruitful ways. The newest feminist work foregrounds borders, and their permeability. Transgender studies puts into high relief the resiliency of gender and the constructability of the physical body. Transnationalism studies different regions, comparing them and taking into account the speaker’s position and power differentials."

I'm not sure which is the worst part of Feminist Studies courses: people actually writing crap like this, or people pretending it's meaningful.

Fourth Dwarf of the apocalypse: Hizzoner

The only current presidential candidate to appear on Queer as Folk and Saturday Night Live in drag, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III (Dwarf Name: "Hizzoner") aspires to frolic in the footsteps of George W. Bush as the next Future ex-President of the United States by repeatedly impersonating Bush's mother, Barbara.

Hizzoner is a son of Italian immigrants (as Mike Dukakis would say, "My parents were little people - little swarthy people") who first made a name for himself as the US attorney prosecuting Marc Rich, who fled the country and was subsequently pardoned by Bill Clinton, and Pincus Green, who fled the country and was subsequently pardoned by Bill Clinton. He also prosecuted Ivan Boesky, forcing the financier to surrender almost half of his profits, and bond trader Michael Milken in highly-publicized show trials. The latter faced 520 years in prison and $11 billion in fines, but settled* for significantly less than that.

A favorite of the "Family Values" wing of the GOP, Hizzoner recently tied Newt Gingrich by marrying a third future ex-wife (Hizzoner currently leads the tiebreaker round because he and his current future ex-wife, Whatsername, have 5 marriages between them, one more than Gingrich and his current future ex-wife, Whatsername). A firm believer in the sanctity of non-incestuous marriage, Hizzoner had his first marriage annulled after 14 years when he discovered that he and his first future ex-wife were second cousins. He informed his second future ex-wife, Donna Hanover, of their upcoming divorce in a news conference, but after an expensive extensive geneological search, it was discovered that the happy couple were not actually second cousins, so Hizzoner paid Hanover $6.8 million to be once removed. An even more extensive expensive geneological search is expected to be conducted shortly after Hizzoner meets his next future ex-wife, the timing of which can only be speculated on as of this writing.

When America's Last Great Liberal retired in 2000, it was widely expected that Hizzoner (who had not yet received his Dwarf Name, answering instead to the unlikely moniker "Rudy") would face off against Second Dwarf Bitchy to replace him. However, at the last moment, Hizzoner contracted prostate cancer, upgraded to a hotter future ex-wife, and threatened to sue the town of Farmersville, New York, for believing his promises** instead.

Hizzoner received his official Dwarf Name while serving as mayor of New York City after accidentally defeating*** incumbent mayor David Dinkins. While in office, Hizzoner led a jury considering the case of Oliver Johnson, who sued his landlord because a scalding shower burned his Oliver Johnson. Hizzoner's widely-hailed leadership under boiling water led to his christening as "America's Future ex-Mayor." He was named Time's 2001 Future ex-Person of the Year, preceeding El Borak in that honor by a full five years****.

Since becoming America's Current ex-Mayor, Hizzoner has spent his time selling Nextel phones, being played by James Woods on video, becoming an ex-member of the Iraq Study Group, and locating a future ex-running mate who is hot but not his cousin.

* Milken served 22 months in prison for the crime of "making money while between Hizzoner and fame." He is currently ranked #382 on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. Sadly, Hizzoner is not on the list.

** Hizzoner publicly boasted that any community that wished to refuse NYC's trash (Al Sharpton excepted) was free to do so. In response, the tiny town of Farmersville (pop. 350) announced cancellation of a trash contract with NYC that was not in their interest and banned Rev. Al from entering its city limits. Hizzoner threatened to personally drive Sharpton to the town to falsely accuse its police officers of kidnapping and rape, resulting in a backlash against the GOP in upstate New York and the election of Bitchy to the Senate.

*** Hizzoner was the first Republican elected mayor of New York City since Pericles pounded Testicles in 461bc.

**** I'll admit I did my best Faith Hill impression at the time. But I'm much better now that Time has fixed the oversight.

Kiddyspeak for "Wintertime"

We've had about 3 days of freezing rain, sleet, slop, and more kinds of snow than Eskimos don't have words for, so the whole world seems a shimmering, shining, beautiful place - so long as you don't have to drive anywhere. And as we haven't had much snow this year (one earlier storm gave us a winter wonderland for about a week), this winter thing is still fairly new to my foster kids* for whom everything seems to be a new thing, and filled with wonder.

So once Rogue awoke from her nap, the kids all ran to the glass deck door, as I had promised them they could go outside and play in the ice (don't laugh, it makes for GREAT sledding). After a quick glance outside, the three-year-old looked at me with all seriousness and said, "Look, Dad, it's Narnia outside."

* Three of our four will be leaving us at the end of February (after being here for 14 months). This house will certainly be a less magical place when they're gone.

Nice hair AND brains? Say it ain't so

While surreptitiously running for president, John Edwards accidentally proposes the elimination of welfare, transfer payments, and farm price supports:

I think they've got it just backwards. What needs to happen is we have to shift the responsibility to them. If you think about everyday life, people are more likely to take responsibility when no one else is helping them or propping them up.

Which of course is one of the primary libertarian arguments against programs that guarantee results regardless of efforts. Such programs create, in insurance parlance, a "morale hazard," an indifference to behavior because no loss will be suffered no matter the choice made.

Wise public policy seeks to reduce the occurence of personal irresponsibility, and there's usually no simpler, cheaper, or more effective way of doing so than to stay out of the way and let the vast majority of people take the medicine they have mixed for themselves. When they find they don't like it, they will generally mix something better next time. Responsibility is the flip-side and necessary consequent of freedom.

That not being the Democrat way*, however, we must be missing something. Who in the world is John Edwards, Democrat extraordinaire, talking about?

It's time for the Iraqis to do this.

Oh, yeah. Good advice.

* Liberalism, of course, is the opposite of wise public policy. It removes the natural consequences of stupid behavior, and since in the short run acting stupidly is often more fun than acting wisely, this separation of cause and effect increases stupidity.

Finding Nemo: Impossible

(hat tip: Stormhound)

Well, here's a piece of good news

There appears to be one reason to vote Republican next year:

HOUSTON - Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic, nine-term lawmaker from southeast Texas, took the first step Thursday toward a second, quixotic presidential bid — this time as a Republican.

Paul filed papers in Texas to create a presidential exploratory committee that will allow him to raise money. In 1988, Paul was the Libertarian nominee for president and received more than 400,000 votes.

I met Dr. Paul during his last campaign when the Libertarian party bus stopped at DeVry/KC. He's a geniunely good guy and I often wonder how he managed to get elected to Congress in the first place. For those who don't know, Dr. Paul was a GOP congressman from '78 to '85, when he voluntarily* returned to his OB/GYN practice and was replaced by Tom DeLay (not exactly a trade up, in retrospect). He was elected to Congress again in '96 after the Texas GOP redrew districts. It says a lot that when he ran, the GOP party machinery supported his opponent in the primary, Greg Laughlin, a former Democrat who switched parties** about 10 minutes after the GOP took over Congress. Apparently opportunistic Democrats are more welcome in the GOP than are Libertarians.

In reality, I don't suspect Dr. Paul has a snowball's chance in hell, and I hope that he's able to keep his current seat in Congress. But to make up for the sin of not voting for him last time (I voted for Bush; I'm such an idiot), I'd even switch my party affiliation just so I could vote for him in the primaries.

Of course, I'd switch it back as quickly as I could. Wouldn't want to make a habit of voting that way, after all.

* Dr. Paul believes in term limits and applied them to himself. It's called 'integrity.'

** Actually, the GOP bought Laughlin's switch by promising him a seat on Ways and Means, the most powerful house committee. And I guess they'd hate to see that investment lost.

Quote of the day

In pondering tonight why there seems to be such a perverse joy in making false numbers as large as possible, even far beyond any limit of reasonableness or reality, I was reminded of a quote from CS Lewis' "Mere Christianity" that might shed a little light on it:

[S]uppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, or even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included - as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.

Take it for what it's worth. And pity the fools who populate such a universe.

Their own private holocaust

Andrea Dworkin displays the typical feminista disrespect for the integrity of numbers:

"In Europe, women were persecuted as witches for nearly four hundred years, burned at the stake, perhaps as many as nine million of them...."
-- Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

And Ruth Wildes Schuler puts some flesh back on the burned bones:

The Judea-Christian concept of women as the original criminal has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people in a period of three hundred years. Since the late 1400's it has been estimated that at least nine million people have been executed for the sin of witchcraft. The majority of these victims have been women, for witchcraft seems to have been a female crime. Men were generally protected from such accusations because they were considered to be of superior intellect and virtue in both the Judean and Christian cultures.

Little is known about these women who were murdered, for the historians were male and felt that the massacre of witches was too unimportant to chronicle, except as mere footnotes. Three centuries of burning women at the stake in agony was passed over lightly, the genocide ignored because of an acceptance of the Bible's proclamation that females were evil.

Now the first question one must ask about what MikeT (in an earlier comment) called "Burning Time propaganda" is, "How good is that number?" Feministas throw around a whole assortment of numbers of witches burned in Europe during the late middle ages - 9 million, 11 million, some even higher. Do they hold up? As one might expect when exact numbers are accompanied by pleas that "very little is known," there is very little fact underlying the charge. In fact, as historians have started to actually count the number of trials recorded in medieval and Renniassance records, the number been shown to be laughable. Today there is not a single reputable historian who quotes a number more than 2% of Dworkin's. For a little perspective, consider that 9 million is 50% higher than all the people living in Europe when the "Burning Times" began in 1400. It was never remotely a realistic number.

W.J. Bethancourt, whose estimate is 3-5 times that of historians, provides an impressive list of names and a number of "unknowns," with such specifics as the names and places of such burnings. Unfortunately for the list, the specifics list less than 500 and the "unknowns" are encompassing to the point of uselessness, including 100+ male Templars who died under Phillip V's destruction of that religious order and suspected werewolf shot by German police in 1925. Also included are 30,000 burned during the Inquisition, which number is 5 times the total capital punishments many modern scholars assign to the entire episode, including Jews, Muslims, and Albigensians. The 300+ burned at Carcassonne, France, probably never happened.

So where did the number come from? Many historians trace it to 19th century feminista Matilda Joslyn Gage. Where she got it from is unknown (I'd bet it left a hemorrhoid in its passing though). While several methodologies have been suggested, they all suffer from the weakness that they must take a particularly virulent period in a small place and then extrapolate it over the entire continent for the entire period. In other words, the number itself is simply propaganda.

So how many witch trials were there in Europe from 1400 to 1800? Estimates vary, and modern historians have been as high as Brian Levack's 110,0000 trials (The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe) and ~60,000 executions, to Ronald Hutton's (The Pagan Religions of the British Isles) 40,000 executions. It should be noted that in each case, actual trial records were extrapolated to make up for information presumed lost. Actual counted executions add up to less than 15,000.

But that's still enough witches to prove that Europe was consumed with witch fever for 4 centuries, right? Well, 40,000 total adds up to 100 witches every year over the 20+ nations that make up Europe, or about 5 executions per nation per year, and of those many were men, from 25% in England to ~90% in Iceland. Throw in the fact that they tended to happen in groups (there was only one Salem, after all, accounting for the vast majority of American witch deaths), and one reaches the conclusion that it was hardly the ongoing 'gynocide' promoted in feminista mythology.

If you name your daughter "MacKenzie"

You deserve every bit of this.

Life is too short to steal cheap wine

Sometimes, you have to admire the audacity:

Atherton police are looking for 177 bottles of wine, valued at $531,000, that were reported stolen from the basement of a home on Fair Oaks Lane in Atherton on Thursday, Jan. 4.

Each bottle has a street value of about $3,000, according to Detective Kristin Nichols of the Atherton Police Department. The investigation into the half-million dollar heist is "still in the beginning stages," she said.

Anyone who has an encounter with someone trying to unload wine known to be of high value but for a much lower than expected price should call Atherton police...

Sure, there's a market for wines of this nature, but it's small and intimate; these wines will most likely not be sold on it (even giving rare wines a "street value" is nearly as insulting as calling Seabiscuit a pony or the USS Ronald Reagan a boat). The number of people who could even estimate the value is astonishingly small, and they all know each other. Selling the wines now, the thieves would never come close to realizing a half-million from the heist.

On the other hand, as when someone steals other great works of art, there is often a buyer waiting in the wings already, someone who knows the merchandise intimately. I would not be surprised to find if, in the unlikely case that there is ever an arrest, the wine was purchased even before it left the basement*.

* Well, either that or it's insurance fraud. But that's so terribly unromantic.

No good, I've known too many Spaniards

Physorg says they might be getting another bad rap:

(AP) -- Mexicans have long been taught to blame diseases brought by the Spaniards for wiping out most of their Indian ancestors. But recent research suggests things may not be that simple.

While the initial big die-offs are still blamed on the Conquistadors who started arriving in 1519, even more virulent epidemics in 1545 and 1576 may have been caused by a native blood-hemorrhaging fever spread by rats, Mexican researchers say.

"This wasn't smallpox," (Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr. Rodolfo) Acuna-Soto says. "The pathology just does not fit."

He says some historians in Mexico are offended by his theory.

Well of course some historians are offended. Making the diseases native removes a popular and convenient scapegoat, and effective scapegoats are rare treasures which are not to be abandoned without a fight. I mean, if the Spanish are not wholly to blame for wiping out the indigenous population of America, what other things might they not be to blame for?

It will be interesting to see if the theory is opposed (and it will be) using historical evidence or identity politics. I strongly suspect it will be the latter, because in addition to being easier, it makes the victims feel better about themselves.

Which is, alas, one of the main goals of modern secondary education.

Not what you expect

Housekeeping

Those of you using the XML feed probably noticed a whole bunch of old posts republished this morning. As part of the new Blogger upgrade I decided to eliminate the old monthly archives and replace them with labels. That should create a far more useful archive, and I can also avoid archiving ephemeral junk (like this post) and just keep the good stuff.

But in order to add labels I had to republish a lot of posts, thus the XML feed was a) busier and b) more redundant than usual.

Blind Spots, part deux

It's sick, I know, but I was reading a textbook today, Dr. Kenneth L. Feder's Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Psuedoscience in Archaeology. It's a fascinating exploration and rebuttal of any number of questionable archaeological assertions and discoveries*, including Piltdown Man, the Turin Shroud, Atlantis, prehistoric astronauts, and even young-earth creationism.

I started to get excited about doing a "blind spot" post on the book about 2/3 of the way through it, but the author saved himself on the last page so he won't be the subject of it. And the reason I was going to do it is because the Bering Strait theory of American population - which is pretty much assumed throughout the book - is both hated by Native Americans and asserted by many history books to be historical fact. As I've mentioned before, I've never seen the evidence that allegedly underlies that assertion. Now I have (or as the case turns out, haven't and probably won't).

Feder is very direct about how science is supposed to work: "we predict what new data we must be able to find if a given hypothesis is correct.") And the land bridge hypothesis is laid out clearly as well: what we must (his word) find in order to conclude that the native population of America crossed via Alaska is "a trail of successively older sites ... leading from Chile and Western Pennsylvania back to the land bridge."

So is that what we find? Feder follows the last quote immediately with a bit of bad news: "Virtually all researchers would agree that such a trail - at least an unbroken trail - has yet to be discovered.**" We do not find what our hypothesis says we should find. In the words of my son Tommy's favorite TV show, "This myth appears to be busted."

So why do we still teach it? Because we have a blind spot, and that's the often unconscious assumption that if we can only imagine two ideas (they got here by walking across Alaska or they got here by ship from Asia) and we eliminate one, we can automatically rely on the other. Since the ship idea is deemed less likely, "they walked across a land bridge" makes its way into our history books as an assertion*** but it remains only one possibility with no underlying conclusive evidence.

So how did the natives get here? I don't know. And neither does your history book, no matter how confidently it asserts otherwise.

* Yes, the Runestone is mentioned and gets a 2-paragraph brushoff because one archaeologist - who is neither a linguist nor a geologist - "points out that the language on the stone is a modern Swedish dialect spoken only in the American Midwest, and the runes are of recent vintage as well." Of course, the geologist who core-sampled the stone differs on the latter and the former is questionable as well, but whatever. I just thought it cool that Feder included it.

** I would suggest that the accepted theory - that the migration took 8000 years due to "normal processes of migration and population explosion" - is quite unlikely, because it is unimaginable that natives spent 400 generations moving from Alaska to Pennsylvania (a distance of 3600 miles, less than half a mile per year) and left nothing behind, only to build huge structures once they arrived. A population that was moving with purpose could cover that distance in 1% of the time (the Mongols did it in 70 years, warring all the way) so the lack of evidence argues for a fast migration rather than a "normal" one, if in fact it occurred. But arguing from a lack of evidence is strictly a no-no, for obvious reasons. Science is not an exact science.

*** It's not until the last page of the book that Feder admits that the whole thing is still a mystery. And I was pretty disappointed, but decided to do this post anyway and let him off his own petard in a footnote.

...Same as the old boss

NBC discovers that it doesn't really matter after all:

WASHINGTON — Democrats say they were returned to power in part because of corruption and ethical lapses of the Republican Congress. They promised to clean up the swamp and crack down on lobbyists.

But hours after changing House rules to reduce favors from lobbyists, it was back to business as usual in Washington.

Democrats threw a $1,000-a-person fundraising concert in Washington Thursday night, with Hollywood celebrities, big donors and those lobbyists writing checks to re-elect Democrats...

Speaker Pelosi's spokesperson says there were only about 200 lobbyists at Thursday night's fundraising concert, and that this still will be the most open, honest Congress ever.

There are plenty of decent ideas being floated around by Democrats; ensuring all members have the time to read the FINAL version of proposed legislation is one of them. But lobbying is a result of one immutable fact of our republican system of government: people have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. And the one thing Congress cannot do through toying with house rules or issuing press releases is to reduce the power of lobbyists, because the power of lobbyists is always in direct proportion to the power of Congress.

Politicians need to raise money to get re-elected, and to raise money, they need to make it worthwhile for people to give them some. That's why a politician's ability to raise money is often directly proportional to his ability to do the things people with money or who want money wish to talk him into doing. Politicians create lobbyists by doling out favors (in both markets and programs) and they need those lobbyists to remain politicians.

If Congressmen truly wanted to reduce the number and influence of lobbyists, all they'd need to do is to reduce the number of areas in which they meddle and the number of dollars lobbyists can secure through government programs. However, in doing so, they would simultaneously reduce their own ability to get re-elected. That's why no matter what party runs the committees, they won't even try.

After all, if they did that, who would pay $1000 to have dinner with them?