Great post on Cold Fury which expresses exactly why I shudder whenever I hear anyone suggest we need some new law or regulation to deal with a problem. Laws against murder not enough, let's have additional laws to examine whether the murderer hated the victim personally, hated him because of his race or just because he wanted some cash. Laws against fraud not sufficient lets make special penalties for CEO's who commit fraud (or perhaps just made bad decisions) in bear markets when their companies go bust. Tobacco bad, numerous laws about where and how you can smoke plus big fines for evil tobacco companies but subsidies for saintly tobacco farmers. Soon congress will start specializing laws by eye color.

Excellent piece by Victor Davis Hanson on European moral hypocrisy:

"No, it is the Europeans themselves who can be scary. We all remember the recent storm of suits, writs, and indictments that faced Mr. Pinochet when he ventured to England. No one wishes to defend such an unattractive character; but why were the Europeans so eager to put him on trial — when literally thousands of much worse war criminals roamed their continent? Whatever Pinochet did, it pales in contrast to the tally of corpses on the hands of eastern European and Russian commissars. Where are the European indictments to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 1956 Hungarian slaughter, or the executions in Czechoslovakia after 1968? Cannot we find a few dozen who ordered all those killings at the Berlin Wall? Ghastly things were done in Cyprus in 1974 that have never been fully investigated. Surely, Europeans should not allow some ex-Soviets to enter their airspace when such operatives helped to butcher thousands during the last five decades. Neither Mr. Ortega nor Mr. Castro has clean hands; are they indictable should they cross into Europe? If Iraqi government agents are in France or Germany, it is more likely that they are buying weapons than fending off EU writs over the gassing of thousands of Kurds. Many of the al Qaeda operatives who planned Sept. 11 organized themselves right under the noses of European policemen."

(via LGF)

SUPREME COURT RULES EARNINGS
SHOULD BE PROTECTED AS "ART"
Recognition of Pro-Formalist Movement Gets WorldCom, Andersen Off Hook

Washington, D.C. (SatireWire.com) — In a surprise decision that exonerates dozens of major companies, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that corporate earnings statements should be protected as works of art, as they "create something from nothing." [more] (from SatireWire)

Why the government is not the right group to fix the accounting mess:

"There's something perplexing about the incessant cry for the federal government to do something about corporate wrongdoing, other than put bad guys in jail.
After all, if honest and transparent accounting is the objective, the federal government isn't the first place you would look.
The federal government has a $2 trillion budget. It routinely cannot account for billions of dollars at any given point in time
It doesn't put the money in the wrong category, as WorldCom allegedly did. It literally has no idea where the money is.
The federal government makes no current provision for the future cost of pension obligations.
And like Enron, the federal government hides substantial debt obligations in off-book affiliates."

Government Overreaction File:
A 12 year old girl in Colorado is on probation because of an 11 week overdue library book. It's a good thing she didn't accidentally damage the book she might be doing hard time now.

Where, exactly, did Mr. Giuliani get $6.8 Million? Hasn't he been in public service for the last 30 years? (Actually the article says he's getting $8 Million in speaking fees this year). Let's see Clinton (B) got what? $12 Million advance for a book he has yet to write a page of + $100K/engagement. Clinton (H) got $8 million for her book plus all the furniture and china she could steal from the White House. 'Public service' is a nice gig, eh?

A judge has released a man accused of obtaining a fake Visa at the embassy in Qatar. He will be monitored electronically. Why was he released instead of being returned to Qatar? What is the INS doing?

At least the House is showing a small bit of sense as they vote overwhelmingly to let pilots carry guns on board. Norman "Make Sure No One Ever Wants to Fly Again" Mineta and the White House still oppose this (which is really quite odd since the White House is pro-gun generally) and the Senate is mixed.

Lucy may have to move over. French scientists have discovered a skull which may be the earliest known member of the human family by more than one million years.

Topless car washes. This would be merely amusing except the story says the city council is "hastily trying to enact a law to prevent topless car washes". Why do they care? Why do politicians feel the need to legislate every last aspect of our lives? Are there no more pressing problems in Moscow, Idaho? If not then they would do better to just dissolve the City Council and thereby save the townspeople the expense of keeping them.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Benjamin Disreali

Thomas Sowell comments on suspicious statistics.

Jonah Goldberg's father Sidney points out more leftist bias -- in dictionaries.

My wife has been wanting to get a freezer for the basement so this from Lileks column today made me laugh out loud:

"So now we have a new freezer. It’s smaller - 60 inches tall. Unlike the previous freezer, which was a 72 or 80 incher, I can look this one in the eye. I have since filled it with the basics of life: three frozen pizzas, irradiated hamburgers whose box boasts two gap-toothed towheads to guarantee purity, some Savory Turkey burgers from Happyvale Sunnybrook Farm (a wholly owned subsidiary of Fear-Drenched Deafening-Screams Slaughterhouse, Inc.) and a bottle of vodka. Also popsicles. Ready for the rest of summer.

None of these items will ever be eaten, of course; they’re there in case fourteen relatives show up without notice on a day when all the restaurants and supermarkets have burned down. They will remain in the freezer until the power fails, and they turn into limp gray slurry. Then I’ll use the vodka to disinfect the inside of the freezer."

It's a risk I'm willing to take.

Report says 90% of people who ask their doctor to assist in their suicide later change their minds. (But only if the doctors didn't assist them I guess).

This is pretty cool: Brain wave art. IBVA seems to have a set of interesting hardware and software to let you interface brainwave patterns to your PC for different purposes.

William Safire has a good op-ed on US foreign policy myths.

"Can I have my icecream? I finished my pizza." - Homer Simpson

I always knew bacon-cheeseburgers were good for me.

(for a more erudite discussion, see Eric Raymond's comments or Den Beste's)

Fred on Marxism.

Bob Herbert spouts more environmental nonsense, this time about Superfund and Bush's decision to cut funding. The real problem is that Bush hasn't gone far enough and should completely eliminate this ineffective, expensive and unfair boondoggle, which has cost billions of dollars and done very little actual cleanup.

Hyperbole of the week award:
"Mother Nature has been known to tremble at the sound of the president's approaching footsteps. He's an environmental disaster zone."

Penis trees. No comment except that safe use requires that they should always be planted next to rubber trees.

Ronald Bailey takes on the report by Malthus, er Mathis Wackernagel that we are using 120% of the Earth's capacity to support humanity.

A refreshing change, an honest Arab appraisal of Arab problems as reported by Victor Davis Hanson:

"Yet this novel panel of Arab intellectuals, remarkably, didn't attribute the dismal condition of Middle Eastern society to the usual causes that Western intellectuals and academics have made so popular: racism and colonialism, multinational exploitation, Western political dominance, and all the other -isms and -ologies that we've grown accustomed to hear about from the Arabists on university campuses.

Instead, the investigators cited the subjugation of women that robs Arab society of millions of brilliant minds. Political autocracy -- either in the service of or in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism -- ensures censorship, stifles creativity, or promotes corruption. Talented scientists and intellectuals are likely to emigrate and then stay put in the West, since there is neither a cultural nor an economic outlet for their talents back home, but sure danger if they prove either honest or candid. The Internet remains hardly used. Greece, a country 30 times smaller than the Arab world, translates five times the number of books yearly."

Where is Bob Herbert's piece on the coming Ice Age. When he wrote last month about the extreme warming trend in Alaska and what it forbode for global warming he might have been a little premature.

Jane Galt has a fine post laying out ground rules for civilized debate.

A friend related to me via email what he called an 'Ann Coulter' experience:

"I was sitting in a meeting this afternoon with some people I know and the fellow next to me, a few years older than me, related the story of his recent trip back to Grand Rapids, Michigan for a relatives wedding. After mentioning that a nephew came with a beautiful woman as his date, reputedly a "stripper". He a Sebastopol Liberal began to tell how shocked he was at the number of American flags he saw flying , not to mention the well maintained lawns. He particularly pointed out that he saw only one celebrate diversity bumper sticker but many Pro-choice stickers. He also put the people down because the wedding only served Reuinte wine and beer.
So in my inimitable style of getting right to the point I asked him if diversity meant that everyone had to believe his way. He looked at me like I had just lapsed into speaking Swahili. I could tell from his non response that he was not able to comprehend that people could actually have different view of life than his "correct" position.
As Coulter and Bernie Goldberg have pointed out these people do not even know that their position is actually a position and not the revealed truth.
As I read someplace on your blog -- you can't reason people out of a position that they haven't reasoned themselves into."

ColdFury has an hysterical post on what a Guardian article about the War of the Rings might look like.

Another superb piece by Mark Steyn:

"Out in Alberta at last week's G8 summit, there was a striking difference between Mr. Bush and his chums as they batted around how many gazillions of dollars to lavish on Africa: if Chrétien or Schroeder or Chirac says X billion, X billion it is; but President Bush can only give what Congress approves. Kofi Annan, having endured eight years of meaningless promises from Bill Clinton at these international gabfests, went so far as to express his impatience at the way these rip-roaring schemes by the global elite wind up getting stalled because of the votes of obscure Senators from Missouri and North Dakota. M. Chrétien is so exquisitely imperial a Prime Minister he thought nothing of tying explicitly the money earmarked for Africa to his own continuation in office, but, alas for the convenience of Secretary-General Annan, America is not a one-man state.

That's where the EU, in their haste to line up at the Eurinals and spray their contempt over Bush, are missing the point. Who is this arrogant cowboy, they sneer, to tell the Palestinians whom they can vote for. Actually, that's not what Bush said. The guys who tell people who they can vote for are the Europeans. Only a couple weeks back, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder told the French to vote for Chirac. In February, the Belgian Foreign Minister threatened sanctions against Italy if they voted for Umberto Bossi's Northern League. When Austria proved less pliable and admitted duly elected members of Joerg Haider's Freedom Party to the coalition government, the EU did, indeed, impose sanctions."

Another Lileks Moment
Why you need to be very explicit with children: Yesterday my wife saw my youngest daughter (almost age 4) climbing on a desk chair (swivel with wheels) to get a toy from a high shelf. My wife took her down and told her that it was very dangerous to climb on the chair like that and that she should use a step stool (very stable wide bottomed) to get things from the shelves. Later in the day I found my daughter on the step stool which she had put on top of the desk chair, like some Cirque du Soleil acrobat. She said her mother told her to do it.