Category: News

In The Skeptic Volume 10, Number 1, Michael Shermer writes in a review of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of Self:

Alfred North Whitehead once famously quipped that all Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Although Aristotelians would beg to differ, a similar observation may be made that modern theories of the mind are footnotes to Darwin.

As someone who considers himself vaguely Aristotelian (next person to ask me how I am gets that as a response: “Vaguely Aristotelian. You?”), I have to say I have never considered begging or differing with observations that may be made about Darwin.

Heck, no one’s even asked.

On the other hand, I’ll lick any self-important Idealist who wants to tell me that I should be ruled by a class of my betters or that I, as a better, should rule everyone else. If you call a size eleven cheap sneaker applied judiciously to the glutes and occasionally the tensor fasciae latae a footnote, then I guess I’ll have to agree with the poorly-written statement in the quote.

This madness must end! First, they sued Al Franken for using the phrase “Fair and Balanced.” Now Drudge has linked to a story headlined:

Fox attacks girl in her bedroom

Rupert Murdoch must be neutered! Too late? Well, what about hobbled? I read James Fallows’ long, and I thought at the time laughable, clawing at the ankles of an entrepreneur.

It wasn’t until Murdoch’s minions started showing up unnanounced and pulling the pigtails of British schoolgirls that I read the writing on the television!

According to this story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Department of Homeland Security (DOHS!) wants to remove the diamond-shaped placards that display on the sides of trucks that carry hazardous, corrosive, or flammable chemicals. You’ve seen them. They have the esoteric sub-diamonds with numbers that tell you how bad the contents of the truck are when the semi dumps its load on the interstate because the proud mother of a 2001 Girls 7-9 State Champion soccer player swerved into the opposite lane while arguing with her husband on the cell phone whether little Tyler bends it like Beckam or breaks it like Geremi.

You see, those little diamonds tell emergency responders what thickness of rubber to put between themselves and the various oozes and gases when they try to pull Bud, the truck driver, Melissa, the mother, and little Tyler from the green-flaming wreckage. Without those diamonds, the emergency responders either have to resort to taste tests or they have to suit up like they’re invading an Iraqi Chocolate Milk Factory that’s surrounded by barbed wire. These accidents occur with some frequency, you see, because Melissa never learns to just hang up the phone and drive.

But DOHS! thinks that removing these diamonds is a matter of national security. Because, you see, terrorists could see that information! And they could do things with those trucks!

Because these terrorists are spur-of-the-moment guys who see a truck driving through Nevada and say, hey, let’s spill some chlorine!

Without the little diamonds on the side of the truck, the bad men who have been casing the chemical plant for six freaking months will mistake that the tanker truck coming out of the front gates carries nothing but crisp, refreshing (as Mike Shannon alleges) Bud Light, or that the glimmering behemoth bearing the Shell logo carries milk.

Soon, DOHS! will extend the ban to include removing Mr Yuck! from everything under your sink so the Doctor-of-Chemistry-bearing terrorists won’t figure out that mixing a lot of bleach and a lot of ammonia is bad, and then DOHS! will want to strip warnings from cigarette packs because those warnings indicate that lit tobacco emits a colorless, odorless gas capable of killing people in enclosed spaces.

Hey, I cannot blame DOHS! for their efforts; I mean, much of my job is looking busy too, and not every bureacrat can just make up columns of numbers in a spreadsheet to stare at and say, “Mmm-hmmm,” whenever the boss walks by the cubicle door. So keep up the good work, fellows, and keep hiding the pointy things for national security.

You know, the funniest thing in this story about what the Toronto authorities have had to deal with when drivers attempt to “explain” their infractions is that:

The Ontario Provincial Police goes by the abbreviation OPP!

You down with OPP? Yeah, you know me!

Ha hahahahhahasnerk!

Not funny? You’re too old! Or too young, you damn kids!

(Link seen on Fark, of course. Who else besides me and Drew are posting on a holiday?)

CNN’s got a story talking about how The Onion is continuing to thrive. No, check that, it’s TheOnion.com that’s the real story, even though:

Today newspaper ads from its five regional editions still account for 50 percent of the company’s revenue, compared with about 30 percent from Web advertising. (The rest comes from book proceeds, a few thousand subscribers to the paper, and other businesses.)

Huh! So it’s TheOnion.com that’s turning a profit, wot? Somebody with the national press, banging out this story instead of Shakespeare in a room full of colleagues, probably hasn’t seen the ubitquous paper in its stands in Wisconsin, where it’s full of local ads for bands and music venues. Instead, it’s the big time now that it’s on the Internet and important people like him or her can see it.

Sure, I am a little cheesed off, but those sellouts moved out of Wisconsin. Dang them all to New York!

(Link seen on The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Nick Gillespie has identified other bad behaviors students learn from Hollywood. It’s not just smoking, swearing, and fornicating.

The only solution is the simplest one: put out the damn kids’ eyes. For the children!

In an article on TechCentralStation, Ralph Kinney Bennett offers, among other things, architectural advice to thwart truck bombs.

On September 11, 2001, I worked in an office building shared by a United States government office, so I considered the changes in architecture, including setbacks and remote loading docks, that would offer greater safety for workers. However, I also expected a fundamental shift in everyday life following that day, and it’s not happened yet, fortunately.

As long as we remain relatively safe and the danger remains fairly low, underlying infrastructure won’t change, including architecture and law enforcement. Those poor dozens, or hundreds, of people who perish in the isolated attacks are expendable to keep prices low.

Of course, for all the paranoiac I portray, I still live in a suburb of a major city. Were I a committed paranoid, wherein my paranoia where schizophrenic instead of mere neurotic in nature, I would live in Wyoming or Montana with a bunch of guns and dogs instead of a mad-money IT job and a hot wife. Werd.

After several years of hounding, Stephen Hatfill, the most interesting person the FBI has discovered since Richard Jewell, is suing the government for hounding him and effectively hindering his life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without due process.

Good luck.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

Pud‘s linking to a story in which Abercrombie and Fitch are claiming ownership on the number 22 on clothing. More to the point, American Eagle Outfitters shouldn’t be allowed to use it, because Abercrombie and Fitch were the first to devise the addition of eleven and eleven. Perhaps both Abercrombie and his faithful henchman Fitch were polydactyl and each had six fingers on his left hand, so 22 is an important sum for ANF.

But if the next intellectual property grab is going to be numbers, alphabetical characters, or glyphs, I right now want to stake my claim on the exclamation point (!). Back off, you hosers, it’s mine!

The wonderful exclamation point, known to some as a bang (translated from the German “nicht”), is not just a character, it’s a way of life. !me, !now.

!funny to the non-geeks in the readership, but who cares? Any time they’re excited and say, “I love you!” in a love note, I’m suing. Werd.

(Apologies to Leslie Fish whose filk song “The Gods Aren’t Crazy (They’re Higher Than Kites)” produced the headline, and to my dear readers, who won’t find the song’s lyrics online and would be hard pressed to find the song on CD or cassette.)

Fark points to a story about the wonderful world of coincidences, and how the laws of probability indicate that every billion or so tries, a billion-to-one event will occur.

It’s only old Pan, and he’s crocked to the gills.

Meanwhile, at the decaying center of the patchwork of municipalities, the City of St. Louis (which is not itself a part of St. Louis County due to a bit of short-sighted governmental miserliness before suburban expansion made the county’s tax base a multiple of the city’s) and its Metropolitan Police (known less-than-affectionately by those who have been threatened for jail time for fencing as “Metro Tins”) are cracking down on people who come into urban neighborhoods and sell their product for bags full of money.

That’s right: they’re taking the ice cream man down hard.

Those of us who live in the St. Louis area can easily get inured to the absurdity that passes for politics in the area’s dozens of postage stamp municipalities, where high school drama kings and queens can ply their cliquish fantasies decades beyond graduation. The spectacles tend toward comedies, in the sense that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel or own land about to be eminent domained for a new Wal-Mart.

Typically, it’s the powerless home owners against the slightly less powerless municipal Powers-That-Pose-To-Be in their own government. However, the regularly-scheduled development brouhaha takes a novel twist when it’s the citizens of neighboring communities who try to dictate development in a neighboring community.

To sum it up in a nutshell for those of you who don’t want to click the link, a tony suburb called Town and Country (whose very name conjures up visions of failed Warren Beatty movies and Lincoln-Mercury minivans) wants to throw in one of those strip malls guaranteed to bring in $2.4 million in sales taxes every year until the next development siphons half or three quarters of the sales next year. However, residents in neighboring communities whose lots abut the development site have annointed themselves to determine what’s best for not their communities, but Town and Country. That land would be better used as a park to raise their property values than anything the duly elected government of Town and Country could approve.

That sets off my special Rant-Sense. You see, it’s bad enough when municipal governments and the fascist power of the majority gets to infringe on the property rights of owners, whether homeowners who don’t want to sell or developers who want to build, but for unelected and un-asked-for people from different communities to start their a-clamoring and a-litigating…. Well, it’s so very wrong and against many principles upon which this country was founded. Self rule. Property rights.

I wonder if these same “activists” think that the United States government should submit to the will of its neighbors before making decisions in Minnesota or Arizona. I’m not sure which would trouble me more: hypocrisy, in which they would say, “Of course not!” or eager belief that a single world government is a good idea, and that Luxembourgers could best determine where to put a Target.

Drudge links to this story in the Washington Post about the two soldiers who some Iraqis had claimed to have captured. The Pentagon, in this story, points out that the soldiers aren’t missing at all.

But the story points out:

LBC broadcast close-ups of the cards: one carrying the name of Capt. Katherine V. Rose of the 142nd Corps Support Battalion from Fort Polk, La., and a Pennsylvania driver’s license with the name Andrew C. Peters, 37. A call to the address on the driver’s license was answered by a person who hung up.

Why in the wide, wide world of sports did the reporter include that sentence? What sort of pavement-pounding (or Internet-searching-and telephoning) petulance prompts someone to point out that he or she got the abrupt brush off when he or she called the family of a serviceman reported as capture by probably psycho enemies? He or she’s probably lucky he or she only phoned; a slamming door might have bruised.

By putting the sentence in the story, the reporter wants our sympathy. He or she was trying to do his or her job, when this person out of Pennsylvania showed a lack of cosmopolitan sensibility and good breeding by refusing to emote publicly for Associated Press. Something our intrepid reporter thinks he or she has, and assumes we share.

Not likely.

Mark Steyn examines how a person’s views on homosexuality are often used to impugn the person’s rational capacity to do some job.

(Link seen via Tim Blair.)

The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass has uncovered the story of a raging pack of Chihuahuas, over 150 strong, on the rampage in California.

Who’s laughing about this horrible force of nature? Probably everyone not in California.

The venerable Chicago Tribune has a story about the dangers of Aspartme.

Of course, aside from the headlines and assertions, the story does indicate:

But does it really cause headaches or, worse, seizures, lupus and multiple sclerosis?

Most experts and studies say no.

Anyone who’s been to Snopes knows that “Warnings about drinking too much diet soda have circulated on the Internet for years” but that the warnings are bogus.

So it’s good to see the Chicago Tribune wasting column inches dignifying these assertions by exploring them (next week’s e-mail undoubtedly will say As scene in the Chcago Tribune!!!).

I am looking forward to upcoming hard-hitting Tribune investigative exposés (what you don’t know might hurt you):

• The health benefits of blooding.
• World is round, Earth not center of universe.
• Disco rocks the house.
• No aether in space.
• They don’t actually live, it was just a movie, learn and obey, citizen.

In today’s Washington Post, Anne Applebaum compares the impolite, overly-subsidized airline industry to the bureaucracies in a totalitarian regime.

She’s right.