Oh, wait. I'm sorry.

That wasn't her focus at all . . . my bad!

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. . . on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Via Ed Driscoll, via Glenn.

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"Look, I teach Constitutional Law, and I know that individual communities need to take illegal handguns off the street. If they do that by making all handguns illegal, so much the better. By the way, NRA = bad. Supreme Court decisions that strike down handgun bans = good. Now let me finish my waffle; they told me I could eat all I want—they'll make more."

h/t: Captain Ed at Hot Air.

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Yeah, Professor: I do agree that when Scalia discussed the virtues of handguns over longarms for those with less upper-body strength, he probably had women in mind, along with the elderly and disabled. But the Kool-Aid consumed by orthodox feminist groups—and even readers of mainstream women's magazines, such as Family Circle and Women's Day—is powerful stuff: we have been told repeatedly for years and years that merely having a gun in the house puts us and our children in danger, and that handguns are terribly easy for potential attackers to turn against us. Because, you see, they often have greater upper body strength.

For more of the nonsense we've been reading about for decades about how women are "armed and in danger," skim through this discussion thread over at McArdle's place, and find those juicy bits that display how egregiously the gun-grabbers have been "lying with statistics" to women for years.

(X-posted at Right Wing News.)

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"After all," I explain, "that is not the same thing as a dog."

"Puppies have a marked tendancy to turn into dogs," he tells me.

I sigh. "Don't you remember what Juie Bernstein told us?&mdaash;'Once a puppy, always a puppy. Though sometimes the dimensions get slightly larger.'"

"The dimensions always get larger, unless you manage to off it," he responds.

You see how badly he wants one, right? Else why protest so much?

"You know," I tell him, "I think you're getting way into some left-brain-dominant thinking. Do you need to go back to T'ai Chi class? Because it seems to me like you aren't living in the now. Be here now. Don't worry about the future. If your heart calls out for a puppy, you need to respect that call."

See, he thinks I want a pit bull, or a golden Lab, or German Shepherd, or a retreiver. But to me a tiny little terrier would be just fine, once I got Mandy acclimated to him or her. Mandy is very tender with little doggies, once she understands that they are family members.

So I think we have everything all settled, now. Except for the part wherein A the H sees the puppy and realizes the error of his ways, and submits to what he really wants, deep down. And how long could that take?

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1 Oh, gee, Greg--thanks for the help!

Posted by: Attila Girl at July 02, 2008 03:59 AM (1q/ac)

2 You have no idea how long it took to come up with that flamebait, okay? That is possibly the only recipe featuring dog meat online that I could dig up in anything resembling Net-time. And then no response whatsoever... sigh. In all seriousness, the way some people treat dog cultivation in China is offputting. I'm not against eating dogs, but the idea that a St Bernard gave his life so's I could eat some stew is kinda nauseating. Bambi, not so much. You haven't lived until you've had venison cooked with ginger and soya sauce in a hot pot. And a dash of wine...

Posted by: Gregory at July 02, 2008 04:55 AM (4VYLZ)

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I love the portrait, but scroll down. People have to play games about sex? I dunno. Life is short. I got this via McArdle, who has her own grotesqueries to relate from her friends' stories—male and female.

I am acquainted with an older man who, in marriage #3, no longer feels a need to fool around behind his wife's back. The reason? Well, it's probably a bit complex (wives #1 and #2 were interesting ladies), but I think in his 70s he's real hip to the demographic data: if something were to happen to his marriage, he wouldn't have to be alone if he didn't want to be. The male:female ratio among senior citizens is simply enormous.

Therefore, he's got nothing to prove any more.

I cannot imagine ever not being a flirt, and it's safe for me now because I'm married. My sister-in-law wore a wedding ring on a sojourn to the Middle East, though she was single. If I were to lose my husband I'd probably keep wearing the ring, because guys like me, and I don't believe in hanging out in a dark theatre without an "Exit" sign clearly visible.

Naw—I won't have to gain a bunch of weight to check out of the game, either. If A the H has a heart attack and checks out early, I keep the ring, watch my back even more than I do now, start carrying again, and stay single.

It isn't that I don't like men. I love men. But they now make detachable shower heads that pulse and vibrate and do all kinds of things. And no ego games.

I'm good at the games, but I have no aversion to being single, either, should I lose the love of my life.

If something happened to my husband, I'd be crushed. I might never get over it. But compared to the rest of the elderly sisterhood, I'd be sitting in the catbird seat.

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Can she be McCain's Veep and still do what needs to be done in Alaska? There is no other area of this country as critical to assuring our petroleum reserves over the next few decades (beyond the Gulf Coast), other than Alaska. Yes, we need to drill on the Continental Shelves (Atlantic, and Pacific). And, yes, the Gulf Coast is nearly as fecund a source of petroleum as Alaska.

But every other area requires cooperation between states: the expertise isn't concentrated like it is in the Last Frontier. Inter-state cooperation wouldn't be rquired as it would be in the Gulf, and to harvest the shale oil in Utha, Colorado, and Wyoming.

If the Feds—and by that, I mean silly Northeastern congresscritters—would get out of the way, this could happen in a safe, efficient manner that would help to get the boot of Middle Eastern fascism off the faces of the normal people in the world while we develop more sustainably forms of energy.

Every other option we have on the table (other than building a few well-made, God-fearing nuclear plants) will take some new engineering. As Governor Palin states, drilling in ANWR is something we know how to do, and the area in question is a tiny sliver of land—akin to a metropolitan airport.

Plus, the whole operation is a stone's throw from Prudhoe Bay, so we can do what we did there: but better, faster, and in an even more environmantally friendly way.

Plus, Palin is smokin' hot. Look her in the face, consider how popular she is among her constituents, and tell me she's wrong. Come on: it can't be done.

Via Hot Air, which quoted my own Governor running off at the mouth about how he'll keep his Hummer running by . . . . I dunno: getting Production Assistants to peddle really hard, and turning the thing into a giant, combat-ready rickshaw. I didn't read Arnold's critique really carefully. I think he likes being homecoming queen around here, and discussing realistic sources of energy would knock that crown right off his head.

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This is what we are up against when we stand up to the Yemeni thugs:

As always, go to Armies of Liberation for the latest on the Yemeni People vs. the Yemeni Government.

This little girl deserves to have her dad back in her family. Free Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani! Now.

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(Beyond the real "hail, Mary" of putting the Amazon Kindle on there.)

1) But I certainly don't need two of those cheap, cool video cameras. It's just that I couldn't decide whether (should I have a rich , web-savvy aunt whom I don't yet know about) I would rather have the Aiptek A-HD 720P 5MP CMOS High Definition Camcorder, or the Flip Video Ultra Series 60-minute Camcorder.

It seems that the Flip is more compact, but I like the fact that the Aiptek has a fold-out screen that allows you to monitor how the footage is coming out a bit better, without (apparently) increasing the bulk significantly.

Also, the Flip 60-minute has a one-hour limit on it. Period. If you forgot your laptop, or don't have time to download the existing vid right then and there, you're SOL. With the Aiptek (if I'm reading the specs right), if you run out of space you throw in a new card, get the rest of the footage you want, get on with your life, and download the vids that night.

2) Related question: I do want to do a bloggers' talk show with some of the SoCal folk, so does anyone have any idea how difficult it would be to electronically alter someone's fact after the footage were taken? Ideally, I'd prefer to simply repace this one deep-cover blogger with an avatar, but I realized I need a motion-capture suit and a computer-graphics lab to achieve that.

Is there cost-effective technology that would simply allow me to pixillate her face, or would I have to make her wear a stupid mask, and give her her own mike? Thoughts?

Oh, yeah: and my birthday is on July 9th. Cash works, too: or a used desktop monitor for my MacBook that I can use for watching movies thereon. Actually, my very favoritest thing would if you bought Blogads from me.

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1 Video editing software can blur the faces. Download a free-trial version if you don't already have it. I would use After Effects. Duplicate the layer and draw a mask around the target head to be pixellated. Then apply the Mosiac or Blur effect to the masks. If you haven't shot it yet, have the guest in heavy shadows (or strong back lighting) and adjust the camera accordingly (to ignore that information).

Posted by: Darrell at June 27, 2008 07:27 PM (OAJoD)

2 Hey AG, First time reader (happened to find you via a technorati search on Kindle ;-) I have the Aiptek A-HD+ (it adds a very cool 60FPS mode tht is almost surreal to see). It's a little bulky, but the ability to throw in a cheap 8GB card and get HOURS of HD recording is pretty sweet. And in a pinch it captures semi-sorta-decent stills. The main downside to me (and this is true of all the low end stuff) is no image stabilization, so your video can come out kinda shaky. But I hear the new Adobe apps have added a mode to smooth that out. You can find reviews and info of all sorts here: http://forums.steves-digicams.com/forums/view_forum.php?id=92 Good luck o

Posted by: Richard at June 28, 2008 09:40 AM (9tDaW)

3 Woops, hit the wrong key there. Good luck on picking one out If you have any Q's, feel free to mail me (comments aaaattt richard goodwin dootttt commm)

Posted by: Richard at June 28, 2008 09:44 AM (9tDaW)

4 Thanks, Richard! Now all I need to do is find that rich aunt and bump her off. Or, you know--get one of those . . . what do you call them? Oh, right: jobs . . .

Posted by: Attila Girl at June 28, 2008 10:31 AM (1q/ac)

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Every once in a while, the man makes a good point.*

Congress has always had a soft spot for “experts” who tell members what they want to hear, whether it’s supply-side economists declaring that tax cuts increase revenue or climate-change skeptics insisting that global warming is a myth. Right now, the welcome mat is out for analysts who claim that out-of-control speculators are responsible for $4-a-gallon gas.

Back in May, Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager, made a big splash when he told a Senate committee that speculation is the main cause of rising prices for oil and other raw materials. He presented charts showing the growth of the oil futures market, in which investors buy and sell promises to deliver oil at a later date, and claimed that “the increase in demand from index speculators” — his term for institutional investors who buy commodity futures — “is almost equal to the increase in demand from China.”

Many economists scoffed: Mr. Masters was making the bizarre claim that betting on a higher price of oil — for that is what it means to buy a futures contract — is equivalent to actually burning the stuff.

But members of Congress liked what they heard, and since that testimony much of Capitol Hill has jumped on the blame-the-speculators bandwagon.

Somewhat surprisingly, Republicans have been at least as willing as Democrats to denounce evil speculators. But it turns out that conservative faith in free markets somehow evaporates when it comes to oil. For example, National Review has been publishing articles blaming speculators for high oil prices for years, ever since the price passed $50 a barrel.

And it was John McCain, not Barack Obama, who recently said this: “While a few reckless speculators are counting their paper profits, most Americans are coming up on the short end — using more and more of their hard-earned paychecks to buy gas.”

Why are politicians so eager to pin the blame for oil prices on speculators? Because it lets them believe that we donÂ’t have to adapt to a world of expensive gas.

No. It's because we don't want to tackle the most important steps:

• increase use of natural gas for transportation needs;

• build environmentally sensitive, clean-burning nuclear power plants so we can develop the electricity to use for our electric cars;

• enhance harvesting of domestic petroleum (in ANWR, on the Continental Shelf, and in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah);

• increase use of shale oil—that is, reverse the moratorium on its harvesting‐and repeal the prohibition on its use for military applications;

• create a fair, flat, arch-capitalist playing field among the various biofuels we're researching; and

• encourage flex-fuel vehicles that will take either petroleum products or biofuels, thereby insulating the economy from market shocks as supplies of different types of fuels wax and wane.

Do I sound like a broken record, here? That is most certainly my intent.

* James Thurber [from memory, but it should be close]:

Don't get the impression that writers never agree at parties. They usually do, once during the course of the evening; it generally sounds like this: "you're right, you're absolutely right. The problem is, you don't have the faintest idea why you're right."

h/t: The Memesters.

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. . . so I'll quote his editorial in today's WaPo:

Mr. Obama, in his first national TV ad rolled out Friday, claims credit for having "extended health care for wounded troops," citing the 2008 defense authorization. That bill passed 91-3—but Mr. Obama was one of only six senators who didn't show up to vote. This brazen claim underscores the candidate's thin résumé and, again, his chutzpah.

Mr. Obama has now also played the race card, twice suggesting in recent weeks that Republicans will draw attention to the fact that he's black. Who is unaware of that? Americans overwhelmingly find it a hopeful, optimistic sign that the country could elect an African-American president. But they rightly want to know what kind of leader he might be. They may well reject as cynical any maneuver to discourage close examination of him by suggesting any criticism is racially motivated.

The candidate's self-centeredness has been on display before. Having effectively sewed up the Democratic nomination, he could have agreed to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations (states Hillary Clinton had carried). While reducing his lead by 50 to 55 delegates, it would not have altered the outcome. But Mr. Obama supported cutting these battleground-state delegations in half. At a time when magnanimity was called for, the candidate decided he'd strut.

Mr. Obama's alpha-male attitude was evident even as he stumbled towards and over the primary finish line. First, his campaign announced in May it was talking to Patti Solis Doyle after Sen. Clinton fired her as campaign manager. This served only to pour salt in the Clintons' wounds.

Then, after the primaries ended June 3, Mr. Obama's campaign leaked word that Leon Panetta (a Clinton supporter who'd apparently angered the Clintons by persistent criticism of their performance) and Ms. Doyle would conduct its outreach to the Clinton camp. Ms. Doyle was named chief of staff to the as-yet-to-be-chosen vice presidential running mate. All this was pointless, but reveals a disposition certain to manifest itself in other ways.

Mr. McCain will be helped if he uses Mr. Obama's actions to paint his opponent as someone driven by an all-powerful instinct to look out only for himself. In a contest over who is willing to put principle above personal ambition and self-interest, John McCain, a war hero and a former POW, wins hands down. That may not be the most important issue to voters in electing a president, but it's something they will rightly take into account.

Read the whole thing; it's freakin' beautiful—the more so because Our Dark Lord tends to prefer understatement, but couldn't help getting a few jabs at Senator Hubris.

Via the Memesters.

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We've got a lot of competing fuels out there, and the more choices the consumer has, the better. Via one of my favorite roundups on biofuel research, National Geographic's cover feature from October of last year, Brazil's experience provides an instructive example:

It's easy to lose faith in biofuels if corn ethanol is all you know. A more encouraging picture unfolds some 5,500 miles southeast of Mead, where the millions of drivers of São Paulo, Brazil, spend hours a day jammed to a standstill in eight lanes of traffic, their engines, if not their tempers, idling happily on álcool from Brazil's sprawling sugar belt. The country had been burning some ethanol in its vehicles since the 1920s, but by the 1970s it was importing 75 percent of its oil. When the OPEC oil embargo crippled the nation's economy, Brazil's dictator at the time—Gen. Ernesto Geisel—decided to kick the country's oil habit. The general heavily subsidized and financed new ethanol plants, directed the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to install ethanol tanks and pumps around the country, and offered tax incentives to Brazilian carmakers to crank out cars designed to burn straight ethanol. By the mid-1980s, nearly all the cars sold in Brazil ran exclusively on álcool.

Formula One-loving Brazilian drivers embraced the cars, especially since pure ethanol has an octane rating of around 113. It burns best at much higher compression than gasoline, allowing alcohol engines to crank out more power. Best of all, the government subsidies made it significantly cheaper. Not that ethanol didn't hit a few bumps in the road. By the early 1990s, low oil prices led the government to phase out the subsidies, and high sugar prices left the sugar mills, or usinas, with no incentive to produce the fuel. Millions of alcohol car drivers like Roger Guilherme, now a supervising engineer at Volkswagen-Brazil, were left high and dry.

"Guys like me had to wait in long lines two hours or more to fuel up," Guilherme says in his office at the massive Volkswagen plant in São Bernardo do Campo. "Consumers lost confidence in the alcohol program." A decade later when oil prices started to rise, Brazilians wanted to burn alcohol again, but given their past experience, they didn't want to be wedded to it. So Guilherme's bosses gave him a challenge: Find an inexpensive way for one car to burn both fuels. Guilherme's team worked with engineers at Magneti Marelli, which supplies fuel systems to Volkswagen, to write new software for the engine's electronic control unit that could automatically adjust the air-fuel ratio and spark advance for any mixture of gasoline and alcohol. Volkswagen introduced Brazil's first TotalFlex vehicle in 2003, modifying a small soccer ball of a commuter car called the Gol, which means—you guessed it—"goal!" It was an instant hit, and soon every other carmaker in Brazil followed suit.

Today, nearly 85 percent of cars sold in Brazil are flex: small, sporty designs that zip around the lumbering, diesel-belching trucks in São Paulo. You can even get a flex Transporter—the beloved loaf-shaped VW van, still made here. With a liter of alcohol running an average of one Brazilian real cheaper than gasoline at the pump, most flex cars haven't burned gas in years. Sugarcane, not engine technology, is the real key to Brazil's ethanol boom. The sweet, fast-growing tropical grass has been a staple export for the country since the 1500s. Unlike corn, in which the starch in the kernel has to be broken down into sugars with expensive enzymes before it can be fermented, the entire sugarcane stalk is already 20 percent sugar—and it starts to ferment almost as soon as it's cut. Cane yields 600 to 800 gallons (2,300 to 3,000 liters) of ethanol an acre, more than twice as much as corn.

Flexibility, as much as keeping supply somewhere in the neighborhood of demand, is not just a good idea: given how closely linked our energy challenges are to our national security challenges, it is our duty to demand not just

(1) hybrid vehicles;

(2) improved use of electricity for our vehicles [better batteries, more use of plug-in cars];

(3) enhanced use of natural gas for transportation;

(4) building of state-of-the-art, environmentally sensitive, clean-burning nuclear power plants so we can get the electricity to use for our electric and hybrid-electric cars (whether they are Priuses or Volts or something even better);

(5) enhanced harvesting of domestic petroleum (primarily in ANWR, since we have the technology to do that right now in an efficient, environmentally responsible fashion), but also on the Continental Shelf, and in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah;

(6) increased use of shale oil—and a repeal of the prohibition on its use for military applications;

(7) a fair, flat playing field among the various biofuels we're researching;

( flex-fuel vehicles that will take either petroleum products or biofuels, and insulate the economy from market shocks as supplies of different types of fuels wax and wane; and

(9) Get rid of the tariff on imported ethanol.

It's time to roll up our sleeves, here.

UPDATE: Darth Aggie had to remind me of item #9. Added!

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From Popular Mechanics:

Amidst increasing criticisms of ethanol's shortcomings—lower energy density, energy-intensive production and distillation, and the inability to transport the fuel within existing pipelines—a growing handful of companies are betting that the biofuels of the future will look almost identical to the petroleum-based fuels of the present.

"It's getting easier and easier, but it still takes a decent amount of effort to engineer a biological system into doing something that you want it to do," says Neil Renninger, co-founder of four-year-old Amyris Biotechnologies, a company that previously engineered microbes to churn out inexpensive antimalarial drugs. "So before going down the route of engineering a bug to make a biofuel, we wanted to make sure we were making the best biofuel possible."

The claim is that these "test tube" biofuels approach the energy-density of gasoline itself.

Faster, please.

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Philips SHL9500 Lightweight Premium Headband Headphones.

They're cool--not quite noise-cancelling, but more comfy than earbuds. And they'll work with the computer or the iPod.

And they fold up.

Also, they didn't cost a jillion dollars. Earphones shouldn't cost a jilion dollars.

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I adore Megan, particularly since she doesn't preach veganism—nor even vegetarianism—for the rest of us. She's just bein' her bitchin' self:

Prosperity allows us to have things that we all now regard as moral requirements. It permits us liberal democracy, a form of social organization that doesn't much work in hunter-gatherer tribes. It enables us to forgo infanticide, a necessary form of population control when Mom has to carry the babies everywhere and an extra unnecessary mouth might doom the whole tribe. It lets us reserve the death penalty for the most heinous violent crimes, because stealing a loaf of bread no longer threatens its owners own nutritional health. We don't have to stone adulterers, because we have enough breathing room that such behavior no longer poses an existential threat to the tribe. Wealth enables charity in the deeper, older sense of the word.

That this is true in no way undermines the decision to be charitable. Morality lies in doing the best you can with what you have. Given that I do have the luxury of finding delicious vegan food and non-leather shoes, I believe I have an obligation to do so. If that should change, I will go back to eating and wearing animal products without moral regret--though with a fair amount of digestive distress.

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I may need to go to Alberta, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming to do some petroleum research. So please send me more money; thanks.

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Poor people produce energy (unless they live in Alaska or Utah, where it's just naughty to do so). Rich people consume energy, but—as with sausages—they don't want to know where it comes from.

This is a genius picture by Rick Lee; for the backstory, go here. My point is that this isn't the view from the Kennedy compound, where even wind farms are verboten.

h/t for the Surber story: Glenn. h/t for the Rick Lee story; Surber.

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It'll be interesting to watch Clinton's Senate career for the next 12-24 months.

If she stays in the Senate—and I think she should—it might be Obama who has to come to her, hat in hand, to get anything done over the next few years.

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Barack Obama criticized Ralph Nader fpr "talking like a far-left, out-of-touch loon."

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"Anyway, you'll note that I made it good to her, which she certainly didn't do with me."

"You did say something about feeding her your gun."

"I made the point that that was metaphorical, and represented the fact that I had no intention of getting all suicidal anymore because of other people's tactlessness. That's growth."

"Also, you called her a 'cunt.'"

"Ah--but I meant that in the Canadian sense. What do you want?--A fucking affidavit? 'I hereby do concede that I overreacted to KT's overreaction.' I'll even sign it and get it notarized. You guys will have it on the East Coast in a matter of days, and you can all fucking frame it."

I don't sound defensive, do I? I'd hate to think that I was acting defensive. My imaginary friend Binker gets defensive all the time, but that's Binker--just a volatile guy.

More James Thurber/New Yorker cartoons: "The hounds of springs are on winter's traces--but let it pass, let it pass."

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