Wait, I thought WE won

So the Brits have their lacy black undergarments in a knot over a wink?

We won the Revolutionary War. Sure, the French fleet played the decisive role, we won very few pitched, set-piece battles, and our soldiers were often tattered bands of irregulars. And King "Cut and run" George III decided he had better things to do with his troops.

Still, we won. We won over the principle that birth makes one person better than another. Even GWB had to stand for election, twice. You may think his birth helped him, but it doesn't define him. GWB didn't win because of his birth. He won because Al Gore and John Kerry are two of the biggest empty suits in the history of politics.

If I want to wink at the Queen, I'll wink. Even if I were President. She is not elected, she has no authority except control over millions of pounds of financially and genetically in-bred wealth and property.

If he had MOONED her, sure, that would be an outrage. But momentarily misspeaking, "17....1976" and then winking....Give me a break.

That isn't in the top 100 of GWB's most appalling blunders.

The Brit newspapers can all just line up and BITE me.

(Nod to AE, who loves queens, and the UN, and other authoritarian structures)

UPDATE: The backrub. THAT was a blunder. You don't touch an elected leader of another country to give them an uninvited backrub. That was appalling. Of course, in 1938, when the Germans decided to give all of Sudetenland a backrub, THAT was okay. I guess it just depends who is getting the backrub....

Someday We'll Look Back on This, and It Will All Seem Funny

But not now.

Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defence Department's false espionage warning earlier this year, the Associated Press has learned.

The odd-looking – but harmless – "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-coloured 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy – Canada's flower of remembrance – inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.

The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defence Security Service, an agency of the Defence Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

One contractor believed someone had placed two of the quarters in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.

But the Defence Department subsequently acknowledged that it could never substantiate the espionage alarm that it had put out and launched the internal review that turned up the true nature of the mysterious coin.

Meanwhile, in Canada, senior intelligence officials expressed annoyance with the American spy-coin warnings as they tried to learn more about the oddball claims.

"That story about Canadians planting coins in the pockets of defence contractors will not go away," Luc Portelance, now deputy director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, wrote in a January e-mail to a subordinate. "Could someone tell me more? Where do we stand and what's the story on this?"

ATSRTWT

(Nod to RL, who isn't scared of Canadian money, and I can prove it. In fact, he actually wants MORE of the darned stuff)

Why Liberals are Losing the Court

Interesting. The left lost the Congress, but fortunately the Republicans managed to show themselves to be incompetent and corrupt. So the Democrats got it back.

But what about the Supreme Court? There just seems to be a disconnect, and I notice it myself all the time, when we talk about abortion or civil unions. (I am on the "left" side on both issues, by the way.)

You have to try to make arguments, and understand the other side. Instead, the left has gotten lazy, and just assumed that the Court will back up their secular state religion of group rights and female empowerment.

As John Yoo, law professor at UC Berkeley and former lawyer in the Bush
Justice Department, put it:

"Rather than develop reasoned responses to the Court or the arguments of
conservatives, liberal critics resort to the mystical for easy answers. They
suggest that irrational religious faith or pure Catholic doctrine handed
down from the Vatican drives the Justices. It is much easier to dismiss your
opponents as driven by mysterious forces than to do the hard work of
developing arguments built on human reason."

ATSRTWT

John Edwards, and some of the other Dem candidates, are now trying to act like they have religion. And religion was apparently okay when it was Dr. MLK doing the preaching. (I'm not sure the Rev. Al and the Rev. Jesse believe in anything other than their own fundraising....)

But you aren't going to appeal to the religious unless you make real arguments. Dismissing them as primitives is going to result in a disaster for those of us who believe in individual human rights.

(nod to KL, who believes)

Pointer

Not sure why this is so amusing. But it amused me.

If you move the mouse around quickly, there is excellent action.

(Props to BS, who is unique. Thanks be to God.)

Simmer....Simmer...Simmer...Down!

Wow. Some of you folks have too much time on your hands.

A YouTube video, on "Mrs. Munger's Class."

Sent to the End by....well, I'll just say it was a grad student who may be in grad school for quite a while.

Good gravy. Let's break for lunch.

UPDATE: Holy cow. There's a whole series. Appalling.

Clip 1
Clip 2
Clip 3
Clip 4

UPDATE II: All right, I take it back. This was a real find, after all. Apparently Disney chose especially funny looking people from yearbooks, and then FAILED TO GET THEIR PERMISSION TO USE THEIR IMAGES. Said funny lookers sued, and Disney bailed.

Surely, there were funny looking people who worked for Disney would have donated their images.

Anyway, the grad student who sent this gets a smiling puppy dog from me. Great stuff. I had never heard of it.

I See Dumb People....

The mayor sent me this link.

He got it from my main guy, Russ Roberts. His post was here. The comments....well, some people just believe in magic, and that's all there is to it. Boogabooga. Abracadabra. Clutch hitting. All magic.

As fine a piece of baseball humor writing as I have ever seen.

And, of course, Fire Joe Morgan.

The Big Kite

Parachute "big kite".

Pretty impressive visuals. Looks perfectly real.

For some reason, people think it IS real, when it would be awfully dangerous.

But it can't be.

Right?

Tag Clouds

Here is an obvious, but very concise, way of analyzing debates, or almost any political phenomenon: TAG CLOUDS!

What interested me was the focus of Clinton and Edwards. Both had just a few main concepts, and they were VERY different.

















And you can really see the effects of either strategy or personality. Wonkiphonetics don't play very well. Candidates need to be Hemingway, not Faulkner. Look at the word totals for the debate:

1,872 - Senator Obama
1,766 - Senator Clinton
1,518 - Senator Edwards
1,281 - Governor Richardson
1,180 - Representative Kucinich
961 - Senator Biden
912 - Senator Dodd
753 - Senator Gravel

I actually Biden talked more than that, but maybe it's because he is like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

(Nod to TK-S, who knows stuff)

From Freeze Productions: Car Trek!

From the Freeze Family Video Archives: Car Trek.

I like the sound they make when the car whooshes by. I think they just blow into the microphone. Very nice.

As the Lawyer says: Sic faciunt omnes

Wow.

This story in the Rocky Mountain News describes some "meetings" between a judge and prosecutor.

The story, in brief:
Douglas County judge and a female prosecutor admitted having sex in his chambers, and on more than one occasion he slipped into the women's showers at the courthouse for a tryst.

Those are some of the details included in a complaint filed Friday with the Attorney Regulation Council, which is looking into allegations that could result in their disbarment.

Grafton Minot Biddle, 57, resigned Dec. 18 after his fourth wife sent a letter to the chief judge saying he was having an affair with Laurie A. Steinman, 29.

Carol Chambers, district attorney for the 18th Judicial District, fired Steinman on Dec. 22, the day she admitted to the affair, the complaint said.

As rumors of their romance became fodder for courthouse gossip, the complaint said, Biddle encouraged Steinman to permanently delete messages they exchanged using their e-mail accounts at work.

"If people read this stuff, we're dead," Biddle told Steinman, according to the complaint.

What I like is the expression on the judge's face. He is 57, she is 29.