The fun part is re-drawing the tree every ten years

Professor Crompton moves the monkey up front:

Humans learned to walk upright in the trees, not on the open land, experts have said.

The new theory marks a U-turn in scientific thinking. Previously it was assumed humans only began to stand upright after moving out of the forests on to the wide open savannahs of East Africa.

Moving on two legs was thought to have evolved slowly from the all-fours "knuckle-walking" displayed by chimpanzees and gorillas today. But a study of orangutan behaviour, published in the journal Science, suggests this is wrong, according to a British team of scientists from Liverpool and Birmingham universities.

They believe knuckle-walking evolved only recently* as a way of getting around the forest floor.

Of course, I have no idea if Dr. Crompton's right or if his research will become widely accepted, but I rather doubt it will, because it will turn out to be too radical and therefore too inconvenient.

The major competition in the field of human origins has to do with finding early ancestors, defined very loosely as monkeys that walked upright. Lucy, discovered by Donald Johansson and computer-modeled by Dr. Crompton's team, was the world's most famous pile of bones at the time of her finding because she was thought to be earliest upright-walking hominid. She surpassed the work done by many others, just as many others are today looking to beat Lucy**.

If Dr. Crompton is correct, all of that is for naught, because all of the real ancestors already walked upright. That would mean that whatever those paleontologists are scrounging around Kenya for today is irrelevant. It also means that all the arguments, publications, and charts written in the last 40 years explaining how knuckle-draggers evolved into upright walkers would all have to be tossed. I don't expect that to go over well, no matter the evidence. There is too much invested and too many careers at stake***.

In fact, even if Dr. Crompton's work does become accepted, his children's children will probably be the first to see the chimp ahead of Man in that famous artist's rendering. And that only because Pierre Boulle turned out to be more correct about the future than scientists about the past.

* So now that knuckle-dragging is an advanced behavior, what will they call fundamentalists?

** Thus taking Dr. Johansson's place on the rubber-chicken circuit as he took it from Louis Leakey.

*** It would also cause a whole lot of glee in Creationist circles, so there's a certain political angle here that must be respected as well.

Which Final Fantasy X Character Are You?

You are Auron. Wo0t.
Take this quiz!

Wodenus Vindicatus

They say that every generation rewrites history, but I don't know if that's true except inasmuch as every generation finds the unprovable presuppositions of prior generations lacking and substitutes its own in their place.

Case in point: I was meandering through the Medieval Anglo-Saxon genealogies tonight when I came across a wonderful paper by Thomas Hodgkin, published in Hermathena* in 1902. In reviewing the same genealogies, he counts back the generations of each Angle and Saxon royal house to Woden (aka the Germanic god Odin), and after some quick math (proposing 3 generations per century) fixes Woden's position in history thus:

West Saxon line: 200ad
Bernician line: 250ad
Mercian line: 240ad
East Anglian line: 260ad
East Saxon line: 240ad
Hengist and Horsa's line: 320ad.

Then after noting several very good reasons "to attribute a certain amount of real historical value to all these pedigrees," he immediately shares two historical assumptions that allow him to keep Woden safely mythical:

1) "We may probably assume that when the memory of Cerdic's ancestors stopped, a divine ancestor was introduced," and
2) "Looking upon the name of Woden at the head of each list as a confession of ignorance as to all the yet earlier links..."

Together they add up to the following: each of these royal houses knew x number of historical names, and when they reached the end they inserted a divine, mythical ancestor to anchor and legitimize the pedigree. The Venerable One (pbh) informs us that every Saxon royal line credits Woden as its wellspring; Hodgkin assures us that there is no historical basis for such an assignment.

His reason for making such an assumption? "Few persons probably in our own day... could readily ... furnish an inquirer with the names of eight ancestors...." That these did so, he notes, is "a feat creditable to the men, probably minstrels of the court, by whom it was performed."

But do those assumptions hold water? Do they ring true to what we know of them and of ourselves? I think not, for several reasons.

The first is that to assert this to be the case, we have to believe that seven royal houses, all with completely divergent pedigrees, living in different places and speaking different dialects, placed at the top of those pedigrees the same name**, yet in each case he would have lived within a century of all the others. In fact, if we propose a missing link or two in Hengist's genealogy (and such gaps do occur; in fact the Venerable One (pbh) himself misses Hengist's grandfather "Witta," who is named in Nennius) and give the West Saxon line 30 years per generation instead of 35, we can put all seven within about 40 years of each other, surely not too long a period for a verile and powerful king to father sons. That all these lines would accidentally reach mythological levels so close together strikes me as particularly unlikely.

The second is that there is evidence that Woden was not always considered divine. In fact, in the cases of Welsh historians Nennius, who saves Hengist and Horsa's genealogy, and Asser, who records King Alfred's, Woden is completely skipped over in the divinity department and it is his something-something grandfather, Geat, "who, as they say, was the son of a god" (Nennius) and "which Geat the pagans long worshipped as a god" (Asser). Given that Nennius and Asser were both churchmen who should be expected to note - and did note - the pagan deities of their subjects, is it not odd that Woden is so publicly dissed? Why would that be? I suggest that it is because Woden, though a very powerful king from whom many lines of kings descended, was still considered human at the time the Saxons arrived in Britain in the Fifth Century. And if he's not divine, there's no reason to treat him as any more mythical than any other name in those lines which Hodgkin notes have "real historical value." In a similar sense, that Caesar was deified after his death does not make him less historical; rather it shows that the history he made mattered.

The third, I think, is the no-brainer. To assert that none of us could name eight ancestors is irrelevant, because that's not our job. I'm sure that any one of us could remember a string of eight items (neighbors, phone numbers, children, cities, etc.) that we come into contact with every day, as would have been the case for the minstrels of the courts that Hodgkin asserts probably kept these lines. Rather than being the length they are because that was the limit of memory, I suggest that these lines were only carried back to Woden*** because that was as far as they needed to go to establish the royal pedigree. Woden's authority was unquestioned; why trace the royal line back to other, less famous names?

Woden was not in the lists because he was a god; he became a god because he was in the lists, a powerful driving force - in song and in tale - behind the mass of Germanity that swallowed Europe whole. In other words, Woden was not a myth, but a man who became one.

* A literature, science, and philosophy periodical from Trinity College in Dublin.

** An argument probably best made by Bill Cooper in After the Flood

*** When they were only carried back to Him. Both Asser and Nennius go to Geat and beyond.

Reactionary Progressives

Nancy of the House digs in her high heels:

BERLIN (AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday she led a congressional delegation to Greenland, where lawmakers saw "firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality," and she hoped the Bush administration would consider a new path on the issue...

"We hope that we can all assume our responsibilities with great respect and that our administration will be open to listening to why it is important to go forward perhaps in a different way than we have proceeded in the past," she told reporters.

It's not climate change, it's Climate Progress. We are informed by political pundits* that those who prefer stasis are "conservatives" and that those who work for change are "progressives," the assumption being, of course, that since to progress we must have change, ergo change is synonymous with progress**. And since progress is good, change is good, and those who stand against change by definition are in favor of yeast infections and lead-based paint and segregated lunch counters and putting leeches on people to control their high blood pressure. Or something.

So why should the temperature be any different? Change is good! Change is Progress with a capital P! Yet here are all these "progressives" screaming because we are moving forward climatologically. Even while speaking the mantras of progress (e.g. a "new path" to "go forward") they do not mean it, but are working for stasis: they are trying to keep us from going forward. In doing so, they reveal themselves as ultra-conservative, even reactionary, trying to recapture some mythical Good Old Days of climate perfection. We cannot let Climate Progress be stopped by such short-sightedness!

Chant it with me: We won't go back!

UPDATE: On that same note, a really good article today by former Climate Reactionary David Evans, talking about the intersection of science and government money, and why such always results in bad science.

* Of the port side mostly, but not uniquely.

** For example, this is exactly how the doctrinaire Communists who opposed the "progressive" Gorbachev were transformed into ultra-conservatives.

Misleading, to say the least

I haven't hit the housing market for a while. Why bother, as the headlines, at least relating to the ongoing subprime mess, make my commentary passe*. However, occasionally a headline will seem so out of place that it deserves a post all to itself. So it is with this one:

Monthly new-home sales hit a 14-year high

Reading a headline like that will doubtless give the impression that the trouble is over for the market and we are back to halcyon days, right? After all, if sales are higher than they have been since 1993, all that noise about trouble in the housing market was just whistling past the graveyard. Nothing to see here people, move along.

But don't move too fast. As is often the case with headlines, the commentary that follows tells a different story:

WASHINGTON -- The beleaguered housing industry is sending mixed signals, with sales of new homes surging in April by the biggest amount in 14 years while prices endured a record plunge...

That was the biggest one-month sales gain since a 16.4 percent surge in April 1993. Even with the increase, however, sales are 10.6 percent below the level of a year ago.

The median price of a new home -- the midway point between the costliest and cheapest -- fell to $229,100, a record 11.1 percent below the March level. The price was 10.9 percent below the level of a year ago, the biggest year-over-year price decline since 1970.

So it was not monthly new home sales hitting a 14-year high at all, as raw sales are a good 10% below what they were a year ago. Rather, coming off 3 months of declining sales, sales of new homes jumped by a record amount, mostly due to builders cutting prices (and I might add, losing money that they expected to make when they started building these homes). It's not unlike gasoline sales jumping on a price cut, as all those people who held off because of high prices rush the market. Such is to be expected, but it's nothing you can build a market on because you can't cut prices 10% a month forever.

The increase is doubtless good news for builders. That is to say that it would have been far worse news if they had cut prices and sales did not jump. But it does not mean builders will be building more new homes, as

David Seiders, economist for the National Association of Home Builders, said he was looking for sales of new homes to fall by 18 percent for the whole year, matching last year's decline.

Sales are expected to be off a total of more than 1/3rd for the 2-year period, meaning the builders will be building only 2/3 of the houses they built the year before last. That also means 33% of the people who worked in the housing industry - from roofers to real estate agents** - can expect to receive their pink slips by year end if they haven't gotten them already, a frightening statistic since in the last 5 years, 60% of all new employment has been directly related to housing.

Maybe all this noise is just whistling, I don't know. But we're walking past a really big graveyard.

* Not that I'm above flogging a supine equine. Oh, don't act surprised.

** Used car salesmen, on the other hand, can rest easy, as my wife bought me a new(er) car today, a 5-speed candy apple red 2005 Saturn Ion. It'll probably pay for itself just on gas saved by parking my Jeep. I knew I married that woman for some reason.

Monsters are real

10 feet long and half a ton of angry pig. Just imagine the story it* would leave behind were we people who had to fight such with swords and spears. Beowulf, anyone?

I always love, however, the reactions of those for whom all animals are bunnies and parakeets**:

You should be ashamed, not proud! Why didn't you just put your name on with a majic marker to show you could have killed him but that you were a better person than to take his life? ... How many other animals have you caught or outran and for no reason killed them? Maybe someday someone will outrun you and then guess what I hope?

I guess her granddaughter wrote in as well:

Fuck you you fucking idiot!!!!!!! What the fuck is wrong with you?? You little fat ass punk!!! Think your so cool cuz you shot a huge pig! Just because it was different from other pigs doesn't mean it doesn't have a life, a mate, a family!!!! How would U like it if U were killed for no reason other than ur fat!?! I would sure be happy!

These are the kind of people who would have denounced Saint George because dragons are endangered species, methinks...

* It's a good thing science assures us that such animals haven't existed for million of years.

** screaming in all caps removed and edited for readability. Few things are more difficult to comprehend (in many ways) than a granola grandmother on a rampage.

I don't remember these being the words...

Might as well let them graduate

Because 13 years of school did them no good:

FORT WORTH — Students who had been planning to walk across the stage at graduation ceremonies this weekend were instead walking a picket line Thursday morning.

The Trimble Tech High School seniors marched in front of Fort Worth Independent School District headquarters to protest Wednesday's decision by trustees to bar students who failed the TAKS test from commencement exercises.

If you click on the pic, you'll get a larger version of it. Then read the sign.

Hat tyip: (BOTW)

And then a miracle occurs...

or a mixed metaphor:

FOUR people have walked away with nothing more than a few scratches after their plane ditched into the Torres Strait off Cape York in far north Queensland...

All four people on board were able to escape the plane wearing life jackets.

A Customs Coastwatch fixed-wing aircraft located the four, before a helicopter was dispatched to winch them from the water.

Whoa! Where's Richard Dawkins when you need him?

O Venerable One, help me with my homework

Though I'm not Catholic any more, I still celebrate four Catholic feast days, with May 25th, the Feast of the Venerable Bede, being my favorite*. Bede was an Eighth Century monk/historian who wrote a history through which we know most of what we know about Dark Ages England, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, and who invented the bc/ad numbering scheme**.

In celebration, I'm going to create a three column table in which I'll compare the Roman sections of Bede, Nennius, and Gildas (trying to discover and document Nennius' source material for my annotated translation) and then I'm going out for Chinese.

That may not be exactly how they celebrated in the early middle ages, but what good is a feast day if you can't have egg rolls?

* The others are Saint Peregrine (on Beltane), the patron saint of gnarly leg wounds, Saint Dagobert (Dec 23rd) - I just like him because he was the last of the Merovingian kings and was sainted for no reason I can discover - and Saint John Molson (Dec 27th), the patron saint of Canadian Beer. The last is not technically a saint, but he should be.

** which my daughter informs me is now banned in public colleges, but which I still use on all my papers. I just bug-eye my professors and repeat "anno domini, anno domini" in a sub-human voice until they go away. I think they're afraid to give me anything less than an A.

This looks like a job for Super Congress

The Financial Times says it ain't only oil that needs a congressional tongue-lashing:

Retail food prices are heading for their biggest annual increase in as much as 30 years, raising fears that the world faces an unprecedented period of food price inflation...

US research firm Bernstein estimates that its Food Commodities index, which tracks a dozen agricultural raw materials used by food companies including wheat, barley, milk, cocoa and edible oils, will show cost inflation of 21 per cent this year – the biggest increase since the index started almost a decade ago.

"We don't have to sit by and watch Costa Rica dictate the price of bananas," John Conyers will be sure to say. Americans have a right to cheap bananas in whatever quantity we wish.

Therefore it is incumbent* upon our elected officials to proclaim a legal solution to this economic problem. We must order other nations to sell us cheaper bananas. The Democrats and the 125 Republicans who are economically retarded** should immediately change our anti-trust laws so we can sue Nicaragua and Costa Rica in our courts to force them to grow more bananas and keep their prices down.

Luckily, we've already changed our inflation measurements to exclude food and energy, so that part's taken care of. No inflation to see here. Move along.

* so to speak.

** henceforth known as "Banana Republicans."

(hat tip: Bethie)

There ought to be a lawsuit

Congress threatens the hand that pumps its gas:

WASHINGTON - Decrying near-record high gasoline prices, the House voted Tuesday to allow the government to sue OPEC over oil production quotas...

"We don't have to stand by and watch OPEC dictate the price of gas," Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., the bill's chief sponsor, declared, reflecting the frustration lawmakers have felt over their inability to address people's worries about high summer fuel costs.

The measure passed 345-72. A similar bill awaits action in the Senate.

That but 72 voted against it means that 120-something Republicans* voted for it, illustrating that they, like their Democratic "opponents," truly believe that legal pronouncements solve economic problems - they are not unlike the Soviet-era Politburo in that respect. By allowing (encouraging) our government to assign OPEC production decisions to federal judges, Congress seeks to legally appropriate the work of nations including Iraq, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. The arrogance is astonishing**.

Oil is denominated in dollars. That means as the value of the dollar falls, OPEC is getting less and less real value for its oil. Therefore it is not only fair but eminently reasonable for them to demand more of our phony dollars for the real oil they produce. That is exactly what is happening not only in oil but in all manner of commodities. Is it coincidence that housing prices, stock prices, base metals prices, and food prices are the highest they have ever been? I think not. This is but the first gust of the coming economic storm brought about by our own government's profligacy***.

Will legal action against sovereign nations in American courts bring down the price of oil? Of course not. You can no more order other nations to pump more oil than to grow more bananas or dig more aluminum. But its real effects will be determined by how hard we push OPEC and what they do when they get tired of us insisting on setting their salaries in our courts. If we are not ready to invade and occupy every nation in the cartel, then we'd better tread lightly. A man in hock up to his eyeballs would be wise not to take a swing at his banker.

* I haven't run the numbers, but we can assume the vast majority of Dems did as well.

** What would we think if an Angolan Court told us that we must provide them with military protection, where they want it and at a price they demand? We would laugh to high heaven at the audacity, I hope.

*** The number of dollars we pay for everthing is inversely proportional to the value of those dollars, and that value is completely within the powers of Congress to control. That they continue to destroy the dollar proves that they value the gravy train upon which their careers and power ride more than the integrity of our money. The Decider is certianly the engineer here, but Congress has spent decades shoveling coal for a long line of Deciders.

UPDATE: Dems 220-5, GOP 125-67.

Hoping against hope

Upon hearing that one perpetual presidential candidate pocketed as much money for a single speech on poverty as half* the households in America bring home in a year, Garling Gauge reveals to us the heart of John Edwards:

By using his affluent position to run a presidential campaign spearheading the issue of poverty, former Sen. John Edwards has donned his green tights, hoping to use the compassion and wealth of our country to help those most in need.

Of course, I don't know what John Edwards was hoping to accomplish with his 9-college, $285,000 one-man traveling poverty circus. I'm not in his counsel. But I do know what he did accomplish, and I'm rather proud of him. John Edwards has reduced the number of poor in America by insuring that he, his wife, and his children are never counted among them. What better way to reduce poverty in America than by going out and getting rich?

Now I know what you're thinking: "Come on, El B, he did it by taking tax money from people a lot poorer than himself - it's Robin Hood in reverse. And besides, he's already rich." So what? Don't the rich deserve to get richer? Isn't that the main complaint some level against Halliburton and big oil and corporate farms, that they use the power of government to line their own pockets? I'm disappointed in you. Y'all sound like a bunch of pinkos to me.

If only we could find a way for the Other America** to travel around the country making scads of dough while seeking work*** it would cease to matter if they actually got jobs at all. They wouldn't even need to pretend to don "the green tights" of Robin Hood. They could just be honest and admit that what those who publicly purport to care most about the poor are really wearing are green eyeshades.

* US household median income (2005): $46,326.

** "Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one...One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life." - John Edwards, making damned sure his children live in the better America.

*** technically he was not a candidate, but Garling Gauge notes that "It doesn’t matter if former Sen. John Edwards hadn’t announced his candidacy yet, he never stopped running." That's true enough. And it's a pretty good gig.

Run, Jimmy, Run

The press often gets things wrong, but seldom do they get them so exactly wrong:

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - The White House on Sunday fired back at former President Jimmy Carter...

Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday's sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.

Actually, the deference has traditionally gone completely the other way: ex-presidents have refrained from criticizing current ones*. Think about how many times you heard Nixon or Ford criticizing Carter, Reagan or Bush I criticizing Clinton, or how many times Clinton has criticized Bush II. There may be a time or two. Maybe. But it has been nothing like Carter who, after spending a few quiet years in democratically-imposedf exile building houses for the poor, has recently re-injected himself into the political spotlight, first with a book that resulted in the resignation of more than a dozen of his own aids in protest, and finally with very public harping about this White House's foreign policy**. Bush is wrong when he says the Carter is becoming increasingly more irrelevant; that is actually what he would be if he had any class.

But there's an easy solution because he is still eligible to run for the President. While Nixon - because he could not run again - could perhaps have been forgiven if he had lashed out at Carter, Carter himself has no such excuse. If he wants to use his experience as a foreign-policy whiz*** to craft a better foreign policy, the door is open. Put up or shut up.

* lest they be found, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, "wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess."

** and the worst part is not that he's wrong, but that it's unbecoming. Of course, siding with terrorists is not a very good foreign policy either, but if he made as much a mess of Palestine as Bush has made of Iraq, we might be arguably if serendipitously better off.

*** If I remember right, Afghanistan and Iran were fun then, too, but for different reasons.

(Hat tip: BOTW)

An Open Letter to Citizens and Legal Residents of the U.S.A.

President George W. Bush and "key" members of the Legislature of the United States of America send their regards.

(Stolen from Huck)

Perhaps good news

Doesn't this guy know it's not nice to mock other peoples' religion:

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.

Man's contribution to the greenhouse gases was so small we couldn't change the climate if we tried, he maintained.

"We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years," he said.

A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria and it was time to put a stop to it.

"It is time to attack the myth of global warming," he said.

The biggest problem for the True Believers would be if we had climate change without having man-made climate change, meaning that this ball in the sky does not come with a promise that the thermostat will always be set at a level convenient for us*. And that's a big problem because suddenly we are faced with an evil god who does not accept our propitiation: the earth may warm or cool, it may rumble and shake, and there's no level of granola-eating, ganja-smoking, or birkenstock-wearing that will appease this new angry Gaia.

The possibility that there is absolutely nothing we can do to affect climate change is simply too terrifying to contemplate, therefore no matter how poorly-done the math is, it must be accepted**. "Don't just sit there, do something!" is a powerful mantra, and so it becomes incumbent upon us to fly jets around the world telling everyone else to use florescent bulbs and one sheet of toilet paper.

Of course, it's probably the "telling everyone else what to do" part that is the real attraction to the High Priesthood***. The rest of it is simply a convenient if necessary mythology.

* It has gone up in the past and it has gone down, sometimes significantly and always for reasons that had nothing to do with us, and I personally don't see any reason to believe that the future will be different.

** Lest one be branded a heretic: Denier.

** Not that it's only their religion that attracts such. Any religion which derives significant power and funding via the state (see: "Christianity, late Roman Empire") is liable to be infested with those who like to get paid for ordering the lives of others.

Perhaps not good news

I'm not all that fond of charts, especially ones that cover such a short time frame. However, based on the importance of the item being charted, I thought I would just throw it out. I don't think we'll know if we've hit Peak Oil until 2 or 3 years after the fact - when it beomes obvious that the direction on the chart is not temporary - so call it next year or the year after before we know for sure, at the earliest.

On the other hand, if oil goes above $90/bbl and stays there (and it will soon enough, if only because of the dying dollar), I expect that many of the economic effects will be the same as one can expect from Peak Oil, whether oil has actually peaked or not.

Good. Can we finally shut up about it then?

CNN notes a happy milestone:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Gasoline prices soared to levels never seen before as even the inflation-adjusted price for a gallon of unleaded topped the 1981 record spike in price that had stood for 26 years.

I, for one, am glad we finally passed it, because that means such outfits as Media Research Center, Newsbusters, and especially Neal Boortz can stop claiming that we are nowhere near record gas prices because adjusted for inflation, they are lower than they were were a quarter century ago.

It's not that they were correct - they still are* - that bugs me, but that they are consistently inconsistent. Every argument they apply to gas prices also applies to anything measured in dollars, yet they neglect to do so when the goal is to protect this President from the evil media.

For example, Newsbusters is fond of criticizing the media for not giving Bush his due and they use the record Dow is evidence of the strength of the Bush economy. But why not adjust it for inflation as well? There is no reason to adjust one but not the other**; if gas is not at a record because it ought to be adjusted for inflation, then the Dow is not either - it would need to be comfortably above 14,000 to match the Clinton-era high.

Frankly, I don't care which way they choose to report them, so long as they report them the same way, taking the good with the bad; because the real problem is one that's not being talked about but rather used to protect or disparage the president: why the dollar has lost 2/3 of its value since gas was last "this high," and what's going to happen when that last third disappears.

* The fact that inflation is understated by at least half, and has been since the Clinton administration institutionalized fraud in the counts, means that the price of gas in that legendary spike was far higher on a pain-in-the-pocketbook basis. How much higher no one knows, which is the great advantage of publishing mythology as economics.

** unless the obvious political advantage serves as sufficient explanation.

More messages from the Anonymous Atheist Complaint Box.

(Hat tip: Misty)

Blowback

My good man Snoop gets Ron Paul wrong:

I have never understood the concept the trying to ban someone from speaking because folks did not like what was said.

Ron Paul is a fucken nobody and has no shot whatsoever of getting the Republican nomination.

Yes he is a nut job and a silly bastard. His statement was outrageous and over the top stupid. Hell Rudy does not want him banned from future debates, he personally raised Rudy’s poll numbers, shit I bet Rudy paid him to make the comments.

What he's talking about is the efforts of the Chairman of the Michigan GOP to ban Ron Paul from some GOP debates for saying, “Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.” In other words, Paul is claiming that 9/11 was not simply a provocation, but a reaction to US policy dating back to the Clinton years and probably further, that it was a case of "blowback," an unintended consequence of our own actions.

Where Snoop is right is that Paul cannot win the GOP nomination and that he probably helps Rudy, especially among the GOP faithful. But where I think he's wrong is in saying that Paul's assertion is "over the top stupid." Rather I think he's right on.

The clue that he's not simply making this up onstage is found in the phrase, "Have you ever read," and there are a number of places where one might have read just that:

Like the 9/11 commission report (Chapter 4): "After the United States launched air attacks against Iraq at the end of 1998 and against Serbia in 1999, in each case provoking worldwide criticism, Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg added the argument that attacks in Afghanistan offered “little benefit, lots of blowback against [a] bomb-happy U.S.”"

Some of that blowback is described in the Executive Summary: "Bin Ladin also stresses grievances against the United States widely shared in the Muslim world. He inveighed against the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which is the home of Islam's holiest sites, and against other U.S. policies in the Middle East."

bin Laden himself said: "And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children...the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs..."

What the argument is not about is whether America deserved it, and that's not what Paul is saying. What he is saying is that our bombing of and sanctions against Muslims, our troops in the Middle East, and our support of Israel are bound to create (and did create) just this sort of blowback. In short, he's saying that our long-standing policy of meddling in the Middle East is liable to and did underlie the reasons for 9/11.

To oppose that idea is to claim that our foreign policy does not and can not have any negative effects, real or imagined, on the individuals living in nations where we implement it and that they will never attempt to act on those*. It is to claim that our support of Israel could never enrage their Muslim enemies, that our policy of sanctions and no-fly zones in Iraq never caused animosity, that our bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan can have no effects that might be negative**.

To me, such a presumption is naive in the extreme.

But there's a method to the seeming madness of banning Paul, and that's to keep such things from being said, being thought about, being believed. Because if we thought that our meddlesome foreign policy might have costs to us, then we might have to count those costs.

And counting costs is an activity that politicians are notoriously loth to undertake.

* like in 1941: The U.S... cut off the shipment of oil and other raw materials to Japan...Japan's leaders responded by resolving to seize the resource-rich territories of Southeast Asia...The problem with the plan was the danger posed by the U.S. Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese fleet, devised a plan to immobilize the U.S. fleet at the outset of the war with a surprise attack.

** that something might have negative effects does not mean that we ought not do those things. There may be very good (and I believe there were very good) reasons for some of them. Anything we do (and a lot of things we don't do) are liable to have such costs. And there are times when we have to choose between different sets of costs. But we cannot have an effective foreign policy so long as we insist on ignoring the predictble costs of our actions. Actions have consequences, which is why we undertake them. Ignoring the bad consequences is the best way to ensure that they take us by surprise every time.

Well, on second thought

Newstarget tries to take on an urban legend:

A popular message circulating the internet claims that "guns don't kill people, doctors do," based on statistics that theoretically show that doctors are responsible for more accidental deaths every year than firearms. Independent research by NewsTarget staff shows that this claim is based on a logical fallacy of comparing apples and oranges...

I thought they were going to actually show that guns kill more people than doctors, but other than a few questions about whether doctors intend to kill more people (which I presume they don't), they reach a wierd conclusion: "but according to the hard statistics, doctors do indeed kill more people than guns."

Of course, if one is to compare apples with apples, then one ought to compare accidental deaths via medicine with accidental rather than all gun deaths, which is what the email does (it is the anti-gunners who lump suicides and murders in with gun accidents to try to fudge the stats). But while Newstarget has some trouble finding the numbers ("NewsTarget staff members were unable to find DHHS figures that either supported or debunked the urban legend's claims") I had no trouble at all finding similar numbers. According to the National Safety Council (2003 numbers):

Accidental deaths from firearms: 730
Suicide by firearm: 16,907
Assault by firearm: 11,920
Other deaths (undetermined intent): 232
Legal intervention: 347

So comparing the number of accidental deaths by firearm (730) with Newstarget's own number for accidental deaths by medicine excluding drugs ("98,000 die annually from some sort of error by medical staff") we find that the average person is more than 100x more likely to die via medical accident than firearms accident. It's not the "doctors are 9,000 times more deadly than guns" of the circulating email (that's based on comparing the number of doctors to the number of firearms), but it is significant - in fact, the accidental gun deaths in the email are overstated by a factor of 2.

In the end, they conclude: "But comparing doctor deaths with gun deaths seems odd" because doctors are not trying to kill anyone."

Perhaps not, but neither then are the less than 1000 guns that accidentally do so every year.

Tiny violin alert

I am truly glad that this is how we torture people:

A Pakistani-born US resident detained at Guantanamo Bay has said he was "mentally tortured" there, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon...

Later, Mr Khan produced a list of further examples of psychological torture, which included the provision of "cheap, branded, unscented soap", the prison newsletter, noisy fans and half-inflated balls in the recreation room that "hardly bounce".

Yes, I think Gitmo is an affront to justice and a PR disaster, but that doesn't mean it's not good for a few laughs.

(hat tip: BOTW)

A sample size of one

Caremark Health Resources shows that bull ain't the only danger cowboys face:

An estimated 7 million Americans use snuff or chewing tobacco today. More than one million of those are thought to be under age 17. Many teens, like Bender (that guy -->) in his youth, have no idea that smokeless tobacco can cause one of the most deadly types of cancer known: oral cancer.

Those who use snuff -- also known as spit tobacco --are up to 11 times more likely to develop cancer of the mouth, cheek, gums, tongue, lips, or throat than nonusers. Oral cancer is diagnosed in about 30,000 people every year, and nearly 9,000 die from it annually. Only half of all oral cancer patients are alive five years after diagnosis.

I ran across the above article today when I was looking for that magic number, 7 million, in checking the numbers of another article, this one by two MDs who argue that for smokers, Smokeless Tobacco* Is A Lifesaver. How can they both be right? As is often the case when one is reading numbers in the paper, each side has half the numbers and uses them to tell the half of the story they want to tell**.

So I decided, just for grins, to run the numbers together and see, assuming each article used numbers that were accurate exactly as they were written, whether I could discover the synthesis, the real numbers, and therefore the real danger inherent in smokeless tobacco.

The first number, 7 million users, we'll take as read. It does not appear in the second article, but since the numbers in that article are adjusted, it is less important than I first thought.

The second claim is that many teens have "no idea" that snuff can cause oral cancer. Nothing we can do about that one, it's written right on the side of every can.

The third claim, however, is where it gets interesting: "Those who use snuff ... are up to 11 times more likely to develop cancer... than nonusers." The second article is a little more specific: "In 1981, writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Deborah Winn and colleagues established that smokeless tobacco users are four times more likely to develop oral cancer than are nonusers of tobacco." they also note that this 4x is still only half the risk that smokers face of getting oral cancer. Since 4 is "up to 11" and is better documented, we'll accept it for now. And that gives us an interesting ratio to work with: If dippers are 4x non-users but .5x smokers, then for every one non-user who gets oral cancer, 4 dippers and 8 smokers get it. So for all cases of oral cancer, 6% (1 in 13) are non-users and 30% (4 in 13) are dippers. The rest are smokers. We'll carry that number down to our next claim.

Claim 4: "Oral cancer is diagnosed in about 30,000 people every year, and nearly 9,000 die from it annually." So if 30k people get oral cancer every year, and 70% (non-users plus smokers) are not dippers, then only about 9000 dippers get cancer every year, and about 2700 die from that cancer. We can make another adjustment: if 6% of those with cancer are non-users, then we can assume that 6% of the dippers would have gotten it anyway, which reduces our numbers to 8460 and 2538. So of the 7 million people who chew annually, 1 in 827 will get cancer and 1 in 2758 will die from it.

Claim 5 I'm not really sure how to handle: "Only half of all oral cancer patients are alive five years after diagnosis." What this does NOT mean is that half the people who have oral cancer die from it within 5 years. Only half the people who receive Social Security are alive five years after they get their first check, but that doesn't mean SocSec kills people. All it means is that they are old. Without knowing at what age the average person gets oral cancer and what else they have, the number sounds scary but there's not much else we can do with it.

On the other side, the second article points out that: "smokeless tobacco use is 98 percent safer than cigarette smoking." This is not addressed by the first article and so we will have to check it. The way they calculate it is to directly compare deaths from smoking (419k, all causes) to adjusted*** deaths from snuff (6k, all causes, and about twice the raw number we calculated above) and get a ratio of .0143, which they convert to "70 times higher".

Running the numbers this way shows not only that our cowboy with half a jaw had a 1-in-5 chance (the odds completely excluding smokers) that he would have gotten oral cancer anyway, he is also one in more than 800 chewers every year who will get it. We have a compelling statistical story based on a sample size of one.

So does this mean chewing is safe? Nope, because while the second story is a "relative harm" story (chewing versus smoking) the second is an "absolute harm" story (chewing versus non-chewing). But it does show that dangers of chewing are not comparable to the dangers of smoking but are rather between the odds of dying in an accident (1 in 2662) and the odds of dying on the space shuttle (1 in 100): not unheard of and worth reckoning. But when the 3k deaths from snuff every year are compared to the 200k deaths every year from medical errors, 100k by obesity-related cancers, and 2000k deaths from all other causes, the odds are pretty good that the average chewer is going to die of something else.

Though no matter how I ran the numbers, the odds of dying of something remain about 1 in 1.

* disclaimer: I chew and have for almost 3 decades. My lovely wife told me, when I shared the content of this article, that the only reason I was saying that is because I chew. It's probably more accurate to say that fact that I chew is the only reason I cared enough to read it in the first place.

** as bw is fond of pointing out in other press number issues, it is a perfect example of the dialectic.

*** They adjust the dipper cancer number because while there are 7 million dippers, there are 46 million smokers. I actually get a higher number: 2538 * 43m smokers / 7m dippers or an adjusted 16.7k/year. That would make chewing only 30x safer than smoking rather than 70x. So if ALL smokers switched to snuff, the total number of oral cancer deaths would drop by about a third (halve the 64% or oral cancers from smoking) and the total number of deaths from tobacco-induced lung cancer and "passive smoke deaths" (if such a thing can be measured - and I have my doubts) would disappear. People would then be forced to die of something else and SocSec would be in REAL trouble.

All it lacks is a wine cellar

If you can't beat 'em

Cry a little:

CINCINNATI - Gasoline prices and oil companies' profits are soaring this spring. Now come the other rituals associated with high prices at the pump.

Members of Congress and state attorneys general are vowing scrutiny of Big Oil and gasoline retailers. And consumers are boycotting. Both have become rites of passage in recent years as consumers fume over gas prices. Neither, historically, has amounted to much change...

Nor will they in the future. Markets are real, talk is not. And those who cannot differentiate them probably boycotted yesterday.

"Harumph, Harumph, bluster, bluster" is no substitute for actually using less gasoline. Nor is it a substitute for simplifying the laws pertaining to the refinement of gasoline, nor is it one for strengthening the dollar in relation to gasoline by limiting its creation. Those are things individuals and politicians could do but refuse. They would rather talk.

And that's fine and will not change, so it behooves those who can tell the difference to go with the flow so to speak. All of these robber-baron profits are going somewhere, right? Where are they going? And how can the individual recover some of them in a way that does not give even more power to blabbermouth* politicians?

I don't give investment advice, but I do confess that I have a specific IRA account that holds any number of the following in it: BPT, DOM, SBR, CRT, MTR, SJT, TRU, WTU. So keep pumping that gas, baby. SocSec's not going to be around to keep me fat, dumb, and happy; I'm just going to have to rely on those consumers who boycotted yesterday and filled up SUVs today.

* At least when they are talking they are not actually doing anything, which if history is any guide will usually make the problem worse in the short term.

This will never work

What good is a Zombie Survival Kit without a buttload of highway flares?

Jerry Falwell, 1933-2007

A long-time nemesis says it all:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that.

I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.
-- Larry Flynt

I read "Listen, America," Falwell's most influental book, back in college, and he made a lot of sense to me at the time. And while he was on the wrong side of a lot of battles, he was also on the right side of quite a few. But I think he was sincere, and I truly think his heart was in the right place. Falwell fought a good fight.

Ultimately, however, I think even he would admit that the fight he fought was lost. There is no other way to objectively look at his battlefield as it existed when he began compared to how it looks now that he has left the field. And I think a good part of the explanation for that loss is that the battle was simply fought in the wrong arena. In making the Gospel a legislative manifesto, he tied the Good News of Jesus to a political movement, an act which, as two of his former assistants explained in "Blinded by Might," necessarily compromised and doomed it. One simply cannot compel a change of heart, and hearts, not laws, are ultimately what need to change to keep us from killing one another in word and deed. One does not reclaim America for Christ by playing kingmaker, but by playing peacemaker. Falwell was, in my opinion, too often a kingmaker.

That said, there's a lot of celebration going on tonight, and to be honest, it saddens me. But I understand it, I truly do. I hope that I am not as jubilant when Castro dies* though I am fairly certain I will be: I'm human and no better than any other human in that respect. What I see in the hearts of others is in mine as well, so this is not so much a rebuke as a confession.

But I am reminded of a pensive line from Nennius about the mission of Saint Germain in 5th Century England: by his ministry many were saved; but many likewise died unconverted. Many died never overcoming the darkness that they held and sometimes cherished, many lost a last chance to see what the light offered. To celebrate a death is to revel in the fact that someone did not see the truth and will never get another chance. It is the blindest of hatreds, and we are blinded to it because it is so close to justice.

As Gandalf once said of Smeagol's deserved death, "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement." To celebrate a death is to revel in judgment. Fine for the judgmental, I suppose, but unbecoming of those who hated Falwell's monumental judgmentalism.

"For as you forgive men their trespasses, so will your heavenly father forgive you." (Matt 6:14) Forgiveness does not mean pretending the forgiven was something nice when he was cruel, something good when he was evil, something right when he was wrong. It simply means voluntarily giving up our right to get even and our feelings of self-righteousness, and rather to hope that in some small way what is broken might be mended. It is, as CS Lewis said, the most hateful of virtues. Which is why, perhaps, it is the most rare.

Larry Flynt, whose cartoon claiming that Falwell's first sexual experience was in a Virginia outhouse with his own mother resulted in him fighting the man tooth and nail on campuses and in courtrooms for 2 decades, ultimately called Falwell a good friend. And that, I think, offers a better witness to the kind of man Falwell truly was** than an hundred CNN eulogies.

* my life will go on, unchanged, just as these folks' lives will go on. Perhaps we will both need to seek new demons when the ones we name are gone.

** and Flynt still is.

This still gives me goosebumps

Not just Earth, Mars, and Pluto anymore

The World Climate Report notes an inconvenient correlation:

[A]n article has appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters showing a stunning relationship between the solar output, Neptune’s brightness, and heaven forbid, the temperature of the Earth...

Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980; furthermore, infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that the planet has been warming steadily from 1980 to 2004.

It's amazing how given the documented increase in solar activity and intensity in the past quarter century and the documented warming on Mars, Pluto, and now Jupiter, people still insist that the same effects that are obviously not caused by mankind there are caused by mankind here.

It's almost as if they viewed mankind itself as the problem. Nah, that would be crazy.

For this we need experts

Who wants socialist children anyway?

LJWorld spars with up the biggest home school myth of all:

Martha Bachert is sick of the question: How do your children meet anyone if they’re home-schooled? ...

Many home schooling families say a lack of socialization is the biggest myth they face when talking about their practice. There are plenty of options for their children to meet peers, they contend, and their children can avoid bullying and peer pressure by not being at a brick-and-mortar school.

But public school advocates and some psychologists say interactions that take place in schools — even the negative kind — can help children learn to negotiate a diverse and sometimes unfriendly world.

One of the questions that proponents of the "Homeschoolers are hermits whose children don't realize that other people their age exist" myth never seem to ask is, "are those children who attend public schools adequately socialized?" And asking them that question most often results in the answer that socialization is assured by being placed in an age-segrated environment - in fact, that is the very definition of socialization.

But as soon as one asks for more specifics about what this socialization is supposed to entail, one opens a can of worms, because for every specific there are plenty of public school children who lack precisely the same social skills that home schoolers are alleged to lack*. Examine the life of any school shooter and you'll see it in spades, but watch any kid who's not at the center of a clique (jocks or grubs or geeks, it doesn't matter) and you'll see the same thing: isolation of the individual. And I would assert that it's far more painful to be isolated in a crowd than within a family, because it entails contant personal rejection, day after day, year after year.

That home schoolers are necessarily isolated is a myth** but one that the critic can find or manufacture enough evidence for to hold as Well Known Fact(tm). That public school kids are not isolated is a bigger one, a far more painful one, and as events too often prove, a far more dangerous one.

* For example, according to the article, there is a lot of critical thinking developed by negotiating whether the ball was in or out when playing four square. Such skills are unavailable to home schoolers who can only play one square but are guaranteed to those who have to play multiple-square games with others. Never mind that the question is often decided by who is biggest or has the biggest brother nearby.

** Even as rural homeschoolers taking part in minimal outside activities, my kids never lacked friends, most often public school friends several years older than they - those were the kids they were on a development level with. [sarcasm] I'm constantly amazed by the ability of well-adjusted, intelligent, confident kids to find friends all by themselves [/sarcasm].

UPDATE: LJWorld is running an entire series on homeschooling in Kansas. The articles are far less illuminating than the comments that follow them. My favorite is the "On the Street" section where they ask everyone, whether they have any knowledge or not, for their opinion. From that we learn that homeschoolers are a) geniuses and b) morons, and that the "family oriented trend for providing kids with a quality education is a noble effort, but is doomed to failure as a catalyst for social change." Funny, I thought that quality education, rather than social change, was the goal in the first place.

Sinning against Science

Vox Day recently asked a question of one atheist: what are the the 10 greatest sins of Christianity against science? The reason was his impression that "the offense Christianity causes the scientific community and its emanations and penumbras in the populace is primarily environmental in cause rather than specific." And while Pharyngula took up the challenge, he mostly affirmed Vox's impression, I think, in that most of his list boils down to things that annoy him - the results of "odious patterns of thinking" - rather than being actual specific acts.

But there was one specific mentioned a few times in the comments and summarized best by Chuck Morrison, who wrote: "The destruction of the Library of Alexandria should top any list of Christian crimes against science." And since its plural mention shows its high position on the alleged Christian Sin Totem Pole, I figured I'd just take a look at it to see if it really was a sin against science, just an emanation or penumbra, or something else entirely.

The short version of the famous library's destruction is that there were several times when it was partially damaged or destroyed. Once was in the time of Caesar, who in burning his own boats managed to catch it on fire. Damage was probably minimal, however, as a generation later the Greek geographer Strabo claimed to have worked in it. The second time was in 116, when the Jews of Alexandria revolted. The Emperor Hadrian "restored the city [and] founded a new library in the Caesareum". And it follows that if Hadrian founded a new library, it's at least probable that the old one had suffered significant damage. The third time is mentioned in Wiki without citation as occuring when Septimius Severus sacked the city, though it is again probable that the library survived in some form. The fourth sacking is the one that gets atheist goats, however, as according to Christian chronicler Socrates Scholasticus, "At the solicitation of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, the Emperor issued an order at this time for the demolition of the heathen temples" in Alexandria. This happened in 391ad, and though the library is not specifically mentioned as being destroyed, we are probably on solid historical ground if we assume that it was.

There's no doubt destroying the library was a crime against history and philosophy to the extent that the library contained irreplaceable works in those disciplines, but was it a crime against science?

A lot of people would answer in the negative for the simple reason that the Romans did not have science as we think of it, the scientific method being the product (as well as the producer) of modern times. Rather, I think it was, for the Romans did have geography (which is why Strabo was there), astronomy, and a host of other sciences whose accumulated knowledge was lost to us from that point forward. For that there can be no excuses offered.

But perhaps the most important question is, "Did it matter?" Of course it mattered, right? I mean, if Theophilus had not destroyed the library, we would still have all that stuff.

Or would we? It's a sorry excuse (which is why I do not offer it as one, but rather as an illustration) that not a single library from Roman times survived even a few centuries after the fall of Rome, which was sacked less than 20 years after Theophilus. Those in the west disappeared almost immediately, while Alexandria held out for three centuries before falling to Muslims who, while they are perhaps unfairly alleged to to have used the last of the library to fuel the city's remaining bath houses, certainly destroyed the few remaining Greek libraries from Africa to India. As far as I know, only Constantinople survived the middle ages more or less intact, and when it fell in the 15th Century, Christian scholars, carrying much of the surviving learning of the Greek world, fled westward and helped set off the Reniassance in Europe. When Rome fell, all the libraries died with it, so in the end, Theophilus' actions did not matter all that much**.

But another question arises in the minds of the thoughtful, "How do we know all this stuff?" I mean, if all the knowledge of the ancient world was burned up, how do we have documentation explaining who did it? And the answer is that another group of Christians saved it. When Rome fell, the church, from nearby Constantinople to faraway Ireland, saved the last remnants of Roman and Greek learning and copied it by hand, sitting in the sunshine outside their beehive shaped huts and re-introducing literacy and culture to a barbarian population that had destroyed the classical world and wallowed in its wreckage for half a millennium.

The Church deserves condemnation for its part in destroying the accumulated knowledge of the ancient world, to be sure. But if that is the case, it also deserves praise for the fact that we have any of that knowledge today. And I'd like to think that the latter has paid the debt of the former, at least in part.

* One huge issue that I've not addressed here (as it deserves its own post) is the extent to which these acts were simply the way Romans dealt with differences - and the Roman church was filled with Romans who thought like Romans and acted for better or (much) worse like Romans. To a large extent, the Christians burning the pagans books was a tit-for-tat response to the pagans under Diocletian and others burning the Christians' ones. The entire fight was to a large extent less religious than political, and each side, when they got their "ins", set out to one-up the other. In the end that does not change the fact that Christians acted shamefully, but perhaps it does put it in a little perspective.

** Not unlike murdering a man in the throes of terminal cancer. It's still murder, but it is not as tragic as it might have otherwise been.

UPDATE: I removed the Hypatia references for two reasons. The first is that she was killed 20 years after Theophilus and 5 after Rome was sacked... that mixing of periods was bound to be more confusing than enlightening. The second is that she deserves her own post, which I may get to someday.

Wait, I thought the Republicans lost

Meet the new boss:

House Democrats are suddenly balking at the tough lobbying reforms they touted to voters last fall as a reason for putting them in charge of Congress.

Now that they are running things, many Democrats want to keep the big campaign donations and lavish parties that lobbyists put together for them...

Color me so surprised.

Cutting their Losses

It seems these days even Republicans don't like Republicans. According to former Reagan policy advisor Bruce Bartlett:

[N]o Republican can win the presidency next year*. If one accepts this premise, then if follows that it is in the interest of conservatives to support the most conservative Democrat running for that party's nomination. I went on to say why I think Hillary Clinton may be the most conservative Democrat...

The point is that there are better and worse Democrats from a conservative point of view. Those who prefer to go down with the sinking Republican ship may come to regret that they didn't try to exercise influence on the Democratic nomination before the nomination was sewn up.

Rather than being a nice way to hedge bets, trying to pick the most conservative Democrat just illustrates that there is no significant difference between the candidates at all. Bartlett thinks Hillary "may" be the most conservative, but that "Sen. Obama may be acceptable because of his deeply conservative temperament, and some point to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's excellent record of tax-cutting." In other words, just about any leading Democrat but Edwards is the best he thinks Republicans can expect.

But it's all for naught, of course. Any Democrat president with a Democrat congress will owe nothing to conservatives no matter how many jump on board. If Bartlett thinks Hillary or Obama is going to appoint moderates to the courts, limit government, protect freedom, deregulate commerce, or reform taxes in any way but up, he's sadly mistaken.

His major mistake is not his alone but is based on a strategic error made by Bush and Rove and the Congressional GOP since they took office:

if the Republican Party loses everyone except religious zealots, gun nuts, anti-tax extremists and pro-life absolutists, then it is not going to win any national elections. That's not a comment on the rightness or wrongness of the views of those I just listed -- it's simple math. There just aren't enough of such people to put together a winning coalition. The price of purity is political powerlessness.

The price of purity may** be political powerlessness as Bartlett asserts. But the cost of pragmatism is even higher because the political power you do win avails you nothing. When you try to buy your opponents you give away the very victories for which your supporters have struggled. And no one understands that more than conservatives who believed Republican politicians.

Building coalitions out of narrow special interests is the Democrats' strategy, and it has been is a losing one since Truman. The GOP has been successful not when it has tried to cobble various interest groups into a majority, but when it has promoted big conservative ideas that have appealed across those groups (e.g. Reagan Democrats). That the GOP has resorted to a discredited Dem strategy shows that they have no ideas left to offer.

Republicans, following Rove and Bush, have become faux-Democrats, and if the voters are given a choice between Democrats, it should be unsurprising that they will choose the real thing. Wishful thinking and triangulation strategies aside, Hillary is the real thing.

* There are a lot of reasons for it, and most of them have W for a middle initial. The rest can be categorized under "wasted opportunities." As such I see no reason to modify this prediction.

** After all, Reagan had such a hard time wining re-election.