MORE support for Hugh Hewitt’s theory that immigration is the Achilles’ heel of the GOP coalition.
Archive for April, 2005
April 26, 2005
US and US-ally naval officers have told me the big fear in southeast Asia is terrorists hijacking an oil tanker. The terrorists blow up the tanker and create an ecological disaster. Of course this attack could be executed anywhere. Straits (choke points) channel sea traffic. Pirates in small, fast boats can launch a quick attack from the coast. A terror attack will always generate huge headlines, but the headlines will be bigger if international shipping is stalled because a key strait is closed.
He has much more on maritime threats.
THEY’RE ALWAYS DISSING HOME DEPOT over at The Corner, but I usually shop at Lowe’s. I had to go to Home Depot today, and it reminded me why I usually shop at Lowe’s. It took over an hour to execute what should have been a ten or fifteen minute purchase. There were lots of employees, but they were all talking on the phone, often crouched behind desks for maximum inconspicuousness. Once I found someone who would help, she was pleasant but clueless. Overall, not an impressive performance.
UPDATE: Praise for non-big-box hardware stores here.
TOM MAGUIRE looks at some missing stories, and at the Democrats’ Contract With America.
JOE GANDELMAN has a Syria/Lebanon roundup.
I’m curious: how many people do you have to kill, and how many books do you have to destroy, before you’re no longer a benign historical image to be used in a “clever” ad campaign? . . . Next up: Stalin shills for the church! Hey, he was a seminarian, once. See, it’s funny and clever when they didn’t kill anyone you know.
I guess.
GADGET UPDATE: I mentioned that I like this heart monitor for exercise, but my cousin-in-law Brad Rubenstein, who’s visiting, says that he has this far-more-sophisticated gadget and that it works: “You’ll do the run just to see the graph.” Well, maybe. He’s more serious about fitness — and gadgets — than I am, since he runs marathons and works in high tech.
UPDATE: Reader Mark Hoover emails with a reference to this frightening device: the Garmin Forerunner 301 GPS with Heart Rate Monitor.
Forget that FitSense rig. It’s great, but for the ultimate, you want the Garmin ForeRunner 301. Talk about incentive to run! You’re not only looking at a graph of your workout, you’re looking at a map. In fact, you can overlay the map created during your workout onto free downloadable high-res satellite photos (from the Terra server) and literally trace your route.
I use mine for endurance inline skating. To a technically oriented person, having such a richness of performance statistics available allows performance tuning of the body in ways never possible before.
These things have a real cult following. Here’s a great resource page:
Follow the Garmin link to see a graphic that would have looked science-fictional not long ago. Yes, there are lots of people who are both fitter and geekier than me.
CATHY YOUNG dismissed conservative claims of religious bigotry yesterday, producing this response from Stephen Bainbridge, which produced this reply from Young. I agree with Eugene Volokh that Young gets the better of the exchange.
UPDATE: Ann Althouse:
The origin of a nominee’s views — in religion or outside of religion — should not matter. Both Democrats and Republicans have exploited religion to manipulate people in the current squabbles over the judiciary. Some Democrats assert that nominees are religious zealots who will drag us into theocracy. And Republicans will try to immunize nominees because their unacceptable views have a religious source. Both parties need to avoid stirring antipathies about religion and irreligion for political gain.
And neither is capable of such self-restraint, which is why they’re barely capable of governing.
JOHN TIERNEY does a pension comparison, and loses.
A CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY in Florida:
The law will let Floridians “meet force with force,” erasing the “duty to retreat” when they fear for their lives outside of their homes, in their cars or businesses, or on the street.
Many states, of course, already have such laws and have for years, which rather undercuts the alarmist complaints of the critics. But it’s nice to see this modern trend advance.
SYRIA HAS PULLED OUT OF LEBANON ahead of schedule:
Hundreds of Syrian troops left the country over the weekend after burning documents, demolishing walls and filling bunkers. Yesterday, Syrian intelligence abandoned Anjar, the headquarters of Rustum Ghazaleh, the intelligence chief who was once the most feared man in Lebanon. He was reported to have left for Damascus last night but was due to return for today’s ceremony.
Meanwhile, Michael Totten is explaining why Lebanon matters.
WANT HEALTHCARE BLOGGING? Then visit this week’s Grand Rounds, where among other things we learn that hoofbeats sometimes come from zebras.
MY EARLIER FITNESS POST produced a fair amount of email, including requests for workout tips.
I don’t have anything especially great — like a lot of what I do, my fitness could fairly be described as “not bad — for a law professor” — except that, as with everything else, only maybe moreso, eighty percent of it is just showing up. It’s much more important that you work out regularly than that you pick any particular workout.
I’ve been doing a lot of balance-and-stability type work lately (one-legged squats, squats on a half-ball, etc.) which works all the little stabilizer muscles and which has done wonders for my computer-related aches and pains. I also find that doing any exercise regularly for too long tends to produce diminishing returns and increasing aches and pains, so I’m big on variety.
But I’m no Tom Bell when it comes to exercise. But then, neither is this guy!
Old posts on this subject here and here. Meanwhile, Tom Maguire reflects on svelteness.
UPDATE: I should say that I do have one of these,
UPDATE: A reader writes: “What manner of fool writes to a law professor for tips on fitness? With all of the other resources on the web, they write you for advice on how to blast their abs?”
Yeah, go figure. If they were smart, they’d write Tom Bell!
MORE ON PUTIN’S SPEECH: Publius says he was pandering to pensioners.
JOHN TEMPLE, the editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, has started a blog, and he’s not afraid to expose his paper’s internal debates.
That’s excellent, and I hope we’ll see more of this kind of thing.
A study of the first year of the Iraq war revealed some typical Pentagon failures. The main problem was the lack of war reserve stocks. These are supplies (especially ammo and spare parts) that are stockpiled in peacetime so that, when a war comes, the troops would have adequate supplies for the first few months of the conflict. Or at least until new supplies could be ordered and delivered. After the Cold War ended in 1991, the war rather large reserve stocks were allowed to run down, or were sold off. The Cold War stocks were large, and expensive to maintain. It made sense to reduce them. But not much was purchased to create “post-Cold War” war reserve stocks. To compound the problem, the Pentagon had not developed an effective inventory control system for wartime operations. The military war reserve stocks were managed like there would never be a war.
As the piece notes, this has always been the historical pattern, but we need to do better in the future.
WINDS OF CHANGE has its regular Monday war news roundup posted.
Why don’t the LAT and NYT (and Time, and Newsweek, and The New Republic, etc.**) accurately disclose to their readers the date they were actually finalized (e.g. the date they were printed)? They could easily do it. The reason they don’t is because readers prefer to read the latest information, and the publications want their customers to think they are getting information that’s more up-to-date than it actually is. In other words, it’s not just an unavoidable problem, or trivial lack of disclosure. It’s conscious deception for commercial gain!
They’d certainly be hard on another industry that did that sort of thing.
INAPPROPRIATELY DRESSED: A somewhat frightening photoblog, and it’s asking for your submissions.
Maybe I should take a camera to Dollywood this summer . . . .
CARNIVAL OF THE CANADIANS: This week’s Red Ensign Standard is up!
STINGINESS UPDATE: Over a billion dollars in private tsunami relief from Americans. And thanks to Chuck Simmins for keeping track.
EUGENE VOLOKH looks at the military’s policy on sodomy and observes that reports of a sensible policy change have been greatly exaggerated.
I HAVEN’T SEEN ONE, but my neighborhood email list is reporting coyote sightings. This is part of a more general phenomenon of wildlife and predators becoming comfortable in suburbia.
If a coyote eats one of my cats, I intend to make a coyote rug.