Mohamed ElBaradei's "government of national salvation"

The uprising in Egypt has been very interesting. I know that "leaders" are sometimes necessary. But I have no faith in "leaders." Sometimes they are fairly decent people who don't mind sticking their necks out but usually they are the most opportunistic narcissistic types with mixed motives.

If you take a look at the history of the human race, you'll see that demographics is the driving force: surges in population and concomitant expansion and migration, financial booms and busts and cultural developments.

Half of Egypt's population is under 30 and half of them are unemployed or under-employed. Half of them are more educated than their parents and use Facebook and Twitter. But Egypt has concentration camps. Mubarak and his cronies have skimmed a huge share of US aid for themselves. (Mubarack is estimated to be worth more than 20 billion dollars.)

The Egyptians have serious financial and political problems and the uprising is mostly about practical secular concerns.

Demographic changes are like waves. Leaders surf that wave. Good leaders act as a co-ordinators or team-leaders but there are always some messiahs, fuhrers, mullahs and other mad men waiting in the wings.

I've tried to keep an open mind about Mohamed ElBaradei but today I read something that gives me the creeps. He said:

[T]he next step...as everybody now agrees on, is a transitional period, a government of national salvation, of national unity, and that will prepare the ground for a new constitution, free and fair election. These are the three basic demands, what every Egyptian is agreeing upon. And of course, you know, hoping that the army will be able to control the situation.

Uh-oh. Another messiah, fuhrer or mad mullah?

Global food revolutions?

An era of cheap food may be drawing to a close:

A summer drought in Russia led to a suspension of grain exports, rains in Australia downgraded the quality of its wheat crop, and a lack of rain cut Argentine corn output. China bought near-record volumes of U.S. corn, and demand for corn-based ethanol surged.

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions:

This is nothing like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The triumph of secular democracy was hardly in doubt in central Europe. Whatever the mix of aspirations of those on the streets of Cairo, such uprisings are easy prey for tight-knit organizations – known in the revolutionary lexicon as Leninist vanguard parties.

In Egypt this means the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not Nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei ever served as figleaf.
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The surge in global food prices since the summer – since Ben Bernanke signalled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens – is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.

Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its global food index has surpassed the all-time high of 2008, both in nominal and real terms. The cereals index has risen 39pc in the last year, the oil and fats index 55pc.
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The immediate cause of this food spike was the worst drought in Russia and the Black Sea region for 130 years, lasting long enough to damage winter planting as well as the summer harvest.

The deeper causes are well-known: an annual rise in global population by 73m; the “exhaustion” of the Green Revolution as the gains in crop yields fade, to cite the World Bank; diet shifts in Asia as the rising middle class switch to animal-protein diets, requiring 3-5 kilos of grain feed for every kilo of meat produced; the biofuel mandates that have diverted a third of the US corn crop into ethanol for cars.

Add the loss of farmland to Asia’s urban sprawl, and the depletion of the non-renewable aquifers for irrigation of North China’s plains, and the geopolitics of global food supply starts to look neuralgic.

Charles Portis, the man who wrote True Grit

The enigmatic and reclusive ex-marine who created Rooster Cogburn:

Rooster Cogburn, the charismatic rogue played by Jeff Bridges in the Coen brothers’ entertaining new film, True Grit, is fearsome enough – a one-eyed, whiskey-guzzling, trigger-happy US marshal. But his creator, Charles Portis, the reclusive and largely forgotten American novelist who wrote the 1968 book on which the film is based, wasn’t someone to mess with either.

“A reporter from The Times wanted to arm-wrestle, and as I recall, he kept challenging me,” Portis once revealed in a rare interview with Roy Reed for the Little Rock Gazette. “So we went at it and there was a pop. His arm broke. Very strange. He went into a kind of swoon.”
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Roald Dahl – who rarely reviewed books – wrote in praise for the American first edition dust jacket: “True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since…Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last 20? I do not know. I expect some have, but I cannot recall them right now. Marvellous it is. He hasn’t put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer!”

The book is written as a world-weary spinster’s account of the events of 1873, when, as a sassy 14 year-old, she avenged her father’s murder. Portis’s language is blunt but poetic. The murderer, Tom Chaney, was “a short man with cruel features”. Rooster Cogburn, the flawed hero, “a pitiless man who loves to pull a cork”.
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The first film adaptation, starring John Wayne, was made in 1969 and when Portis visited the set he marvelled at the way Wayne and Robert Duvall blew up and stormed off – only to return as though nothing had happened.

The film, though, lacks the book’s charm and power – something the Coen brothers capture far more successfully, a success reflected in the 10 Oscar nominations the new film received this week.
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Despite the enormous success of True Grit, decades would pass before Portis’s next, The Dog of the South, hit the shelves. Before long the writer, now 77, would all but disappear from the public eye. Portis has not published a book since Gringos in 1991.

Fingers

What the length of your index finger says about you:

[F]or many decades now, scientists have noticed an extraordinary link between the ratio of two digits on the hand — the ring and index fingers, known in scientists’ jargon as 2D and 4D — and a whole host of seemingly unrelated traits.

Evidence is growing that this ‘digit ratio’, especially when applied to the right hand, is a fundamental indicator of sexuality, aggression and ­diseases suffered by men.
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[S]trong evidence has emerged of a link between the ‘2D:4D finger ratio’ and a man’s likelihood of developing prostate cancer.

Specifically, men whose index fingers are longer than their ring fingers are significantly less likely to develop the disease, according to scientists at the Institute Of Cancer Research.

Working out your digit ratio is not simply a matter of looking at your hand and comparing the position of the tips of the fingers. You must measure the distance from the midpoint of the lowest crease at the base of the finger, on the palm side, to the very end of the fleshy tip (obviously the fingernail does not count!).

A long index finger also correlates strongly with a lower risk of early heart disease.
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People with relatively long index fingers are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, allergies, eczema and hay fever.

Young boys are more likely to be clingy and anxious than their low-ratio peers but also, ultimately, less attention-seeking and better behaved in school.

While a long index finger is considered a more feminine hand — men who have them are more likely to be homosexual — a short index finger relative to the ring finger is a more masculine hand.

It correlates with higher male fertility and sperm counts, higher levels of aggression and increased aptitude for both sport and music.

Women who have this masculine finger pattern are more likely to be lesbians than those who don’t, and display higher levels of aggression — as well as enjoy greater professional success.

The extraordinary thing is that these assertions are based on serious scientific evidence.
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According to developmental biologist Dr John Manning, who has been analysing digit ratios for more than 20 years, this subtle difference in finger lengths is linked to a foetus’s exposure in the womb to sex hormones, notably the ‘masculine’ hormone testosterone.

Put simply, more testosterone equals a greater chance of a more ‘masculine’ hand, i.e. one with a ­relatively short index finger.

And it is this exposure to testosterone in the womb that has very profound effects on our behaviour and susceptibility to diseases.

Studies have found that foetuses which have had a high exposure to testosterone — and have short index fingers — tend to be associated with an extroverted personality, a willingness to take risks, higher levels of aggression, stronger muscles and, interestingly (because musical ability is not commonly identified as particularly ‘masculine’), a much greater likelihood of playing an instrument well.
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[P]eople of both sexes with relatively short index fingers tend to be more sexually adventurous. They are more likely to experiment with drugs; they like watching violent movies and become addicted to alcohol more easily.

People with short index fingers make better soldiers, engineers, speculators and chess players, and are better at solving problems such as crosswords.
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Scientists have found that a longer wedding ring finger can help increase accuracy when throwing objects. And men who could throw well killed more animals, ate better and thus made better mates. So they would have been preferred as partners by the available females, thus ensuring that the masculinity-long ring finger link was passed on.

Chart of the day: changing attitudes to gun laws

Nancy Pelosi and JFK

Nancy posted this pic on her Facebook page last week. She was 22 when it was taken at JFK's inauguration ball. She doesn't look quite as demented then as she does now. JFK looks quite avuncular. I'm no fan of JFK but at least he could keep his drooling under control compared with his murderous brother who seemed to be slavering over pussy like Jabba the Hut until the day he died.

Oregon number three on "inbound" list

John Walkenbach:

United Van Lines does an annual analysis of inbound and outbound moves, by state. (GREAT LAKES REGION LEADS NATION IN OUTBOUND TRAFFIC.)

Washington D.C. was #1 in the inbound list. Other states in that list are North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, and Idaho.

New Jersey was #1 in outbound moves.

So you think you're cold?

The law of unintended consequences

Maud Newton interviewed Misha Angrist, member four of the Personal Genome Project to have his entire genome to be published online, and author of Here Is A Human Being:

I think what will happen is that more and more people of reproductive age will undergo carrier screening in order to avoid conceiving kids with relatively rare genetic diseases that are caused by single genes gone awry. I'm talking about cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy, etc. One can imagine a day when having kids with those maladies will be stigmatized—a kind of GATTACA-lite.

That would suck, IMHO, and perhaps not only because of the icky eugenic implications. It could also suck because the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who's to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn't similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?

Bear eats psychedelic mushrooms

While we're on the subject of psychedelics:

Jared Loughner used the hallucinogen salvia

Could the drug have affected his brain?

Salvia is still legal in a majority of states, and millions of Americans have used the drug without incident. That includes pop star Miley Cyrus, who was caught on video last year smoking salvia from a bong.
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What little research that has been done shows that all strains of Salvia divinorum, a plant grown for centuries in Mexico, produces a chemical called Salvionon A. This chemical affects the kappa opioid receptor, a part of the brain that’s in large part responsible for our perceptions of reality.

In an unmodified state, salvia—whether it’s smoked, chewed, or swallowed in extract form—produces an intense high, lasting less than half an hour. “It’s one of the most behaviorally impairing drugs that we’ve come across,” says Dr. Matthew Johnson, assistant professor of psychology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “At the higher doses, people are completely dissociated from this reality . . . They describe being completely transported to another dimension.”
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There is, however, at least one reported case of salvia leading to a mental breakdown. “We had a case of a male who came in, 23 years old, and was actively psychotic,” says Dr. Peter Przekop, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California. “The only thing we could attach it to was the night before, he had smoked the XXX [high-strength] salvia. We stabilized him, put him on medication, transferred him to the psych department. When we tried to gradually wean him off antipsychotics, the symptoms returned. This was permanent psychosis we suspect was brought on by this drug.”

Przekop, who published a letter detailing his case in the American Journal of Psychology, hypothesizes that the patient had a predisposition for mental illness brought on by salvia use.

Loughner was using Salvia Divinorum which is used by the Shaman's of the Sierra Mazateca and is often called Seer's Sage. Although it is indigenous to Oazaca, Mexico, it can be, and has been, ordered from online companies. In fact, it is legal in most states.

Salvia divinorum:

In their rituals, the shamans use only fresh S. divinorum leaves. They see the plant as an incarnation of the Virgin Mary, and begin the ritual with an invocation to Mary, Saint Peter, the Holy Trinity, and other saints. Ritual use traditionally involves being in a quiet place after ingestion of the leaf—the Maztec shamans say that "La Maria (S. divinorum) speaks with a quiet voice."

I probably experimented with every known psychedelic drug in the Sixties but not salvia as it was not available in those days. I'm glad I didn't after reading this:

I used it on a number of occasions, and I can say there were no positive qualities associated with it. It makes you entirely dissociative and causes powerful hallucinations. The "come down" kind of feels like going from insane => sane. I couldn't describe it any other way; your thoughts are jumbled, you don't know where you are or what matters. If you speak, it's generally nonsensical to the sober people around you. Unlike mushrooms or LSD, there is no insight, no feeling of empathy - just a powerful feeling of alienation and jumbled, dissociative thoughts. I can easily see a young mind, susceptible to mental illness, being snapped by a couple salvia trips.

I'm not saying this should turn into a witch hunt against salvia, but if there was ever a drug that I felt young people should not be able to get their hands on, salvia is the one. Frum's cannabis argument is pretty specious, but I'm telling you, salvia is a psychologically dangerous drug, especially when smoked as an extract, and especially for young, or mental-illness-prone minds.

All drugs are dangerous. Most psychedelic plants are not physically toxic and cannot be overdosed but I watched quite a few folks in the Sixties who were mentally unstable before taking a psychedelic drug go off the deep end. One close friend went nuts on LSD and turned to heroin (which, unlike psychedelics, dulls the mind.) He ended up being a heroin addict for 20 years. Another friend (the nephew of Harold Pinter the playwright) flipped on Acid and sort of recovered only to kill himself ten years later.

Psychedelics have traditionally been used for "divination" or some other sort of "spiritual" experience. They are not recreatational drugs and should be used with respect and caution.

I wonder, if Loughner's lawyer fails to convince jury that this kid is permanently and completely insane, if she will then attempt a "temporary insanity brought on by drugs" as an alternative defense. It has succeeded in some cases usually with alcohol but most notoriously was successful in the "Twinkie defense" used by Dan White's lawyer to reduce the crime from murder to manslaughter.

Being married makes you deaf

Scott "Dilbert" Adams says "being married is a lot like being deaf":

As I'm sure you've learned, it's impossible to speak to a spouse if he or she is near running water, or using power equipment, or concentrating on something else, or eating something crunchy, or wondering if the squeak in the distance is the cat dying, or there is a child within a hundred yards. Amazingly, that covers 90% of every conversation you might attempt at home.
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I have the added disadvantage of being a serial mumbler. In my head, everything I say is clear and loud, sort of like Prince Charles. But I have been told that my actual sound is more like a corpse farting in a rolled up carpet.

It's probably not only married couples. After 29 years with Chas and 18 years with Andy, the same thing is happening to me. Just ask them. Or maybe it's just that I'm getting old and everyone - especially Prince Charles - is starting to sound "like a corpse farting in a rolled up carpet."

Gun fair organizer acquitted in boy's death

When I first read about this case last month, I was hoping that sanity would prevail. It did.

The organizer of a gun fair in which an 8-year-old boy accidently killed himself with an Uzi submachine gun was acquitted by a jury in Springfield, Mass., on Friday.

Here's background on the case from Associated Press:

Jurors heard testimony over seven days during the trial of Edward Fleury, the former police chief in Pelham, Mass. His company co-sponsored the machine gun expo at the Westfield Sportsman's Club where Christopher Bizilj of Ashford, Conn., fired a 9 mm micro Uzi submachine gun that kicked back and shot him in the head. The boy's father, emergency room Dr. Charles Bizilj, recorded a graphic video of the accident that was shown to the jury.

Fleury had faced up to 20 years in prison on an involuntary manslaughter count, and up to 10 years in prison for each of three counts of furnishing machine guns to minors.

Fleury's lawyer, Rosemary Curran Scapicchio, asked the jury in her closing argument why Fleury was being made a scapecoat in the boy's death. She said Fleury was taking $5 from patrons at the gate and wasn't supervising the firing line or picking out weapons for children.

"Where is the reckless and wanton conduct? There is none," Scapicchio said.

She said Fleury thought everything at the event was legal and safe, and he had checked with the local police department beforehand. The event had run seven years without incident. Scapicchio noted that there were several police officers at the machine gun expo who saw children shooting machine guns and did nothing to stop them.
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She said there were safety officers on the firing lines. She said parents decided whether their children could shoot automatic weapons. Scapicchio also said Charles Bizilj was responsible for allowing his son to shoot the Uzi.

"He's got some parental responsibility here," she said. "If you think it's a dangerous activity, don't do it."

She noted the testimony of Michael Spano, who supervised Christopher at the time of the accident. Spano said he told Charles Bizilj twice that he didn't think it was a good idea for Christopher and his then-11-year-old brother, Colin, to fire the guns because of their strong kickback and rapid fire.

But prosecutor William Bennett said it was Fleury who made it possible for Christopher to fire the Uzi that day. Bennett said Fleury recklessly organized the event.

"Dr. Charles Bizilj recorded a graphic video of the accident."

I understand that the father is grieving his son's accidental death but - excuse me - he was video-taping it instead of advising his son not to do it.

"Inception" and Loughner's "conscience dreaming"

Of course he meant conscious dreaming - but who am I to argue with such a prodigal who imagines that "the government controls us through grammar."

I just said this in an email to my son:

We tried to watch "Inception" but I stopped watching after 20 minutes not only because the "music" was horrendously loud and demonic but because the writing was so goddamn clunky - like the tawdry fantasies of a 14 yo chronic masturbator surfing for free internet porn - or worse: a video game. Ugh! Or like that Tucson killer nut who believes in "conscious dreaming" and had probably watched "Inception" too many times.

I would not be surprised to find that the sophomoric plot of "Inception" inspired Loughner's "conscience dreaming".

Premonitions or predictions?

Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC:

"For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action."

Actually there are consequences to what we think and say.

John Lennon had premonitions that he would be shot:

He even stated that his fear of murder caused the Beatles to break up. "We were not bored," he said "and certainly did not run out of songs. I was paranoid about somebody trying to bump us off." When he heard that the Beatles's former road manager had been shot dead by Los Angeles police, he said over and over again, "I'm next, I know it."

Just 3 months before his own death, John Lennon, spoke about pacifists dying violent deaths in an interview with Playboy.

Lennon was quoted as saying, “Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are great examples of fantastic non-violents who died violently, I can never work that out. We’re pacifists, but I’m not sure what it means when you’re such a pacifist that you get shot.”

A paranoid describes his mental illness

Guess who?

The interesting question is not whether inflammatory rhetoric can influence action, that question has been settled a thousand times by a thousand demagogues in just about every place in the world. The relevant issue is why the individuals engaging in this rhetoric (now mostly from the right, but not long ago in this country from the left, for example, The Weather Undergound) cling to the rhetoric as if their very identity and existence depends upon its validity.

The defensive posture of the right speaks directly to their existential crisis. Theirs appears a reactionary, reflexive narcissism, lashing out at the world that refuses to bend itself to their ideological demands. Unfortunately there is no psychotherapy or drug therapy available for our culture. The fear is that the craziness spins out of control and before devouring itself (for the appetite of paranoia is never satisfied) it will eat the rest of us. That "inflammatory rhetoric can influence action, that question has been settled a thousand times by a thousand demagogues in just about every place in the world."

What crap! The only thing that's settled is that psychos don't need "inflammatory rhetoric" to be homicidal maniacs or suicidal terrorists. That's as stupid an excuse as "the dog ate my homework."

This particular paranoid seems to fear being eaten. I hope he's got a gun - or some steak sauce.

Eek! It's Palin's fault - she was photographed with a gun!

So was Giffords who used to be a Republican but switched because she is pro-abortion. But she's still pro-gun - or at least she was before that nut shot her.

Jared Loughner is a product of Sheriff Dupnik’s office

This is the report that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been dreading since the tragic event on Saturday January 8:

The sheriff has been editorializing and politicizing the event since he took the podium to report on the incident. His blaming of radio personalities and bloggers is a pre-emptive strike because Mr. Dupnik knows this tragedy lays at his feet and his office.
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Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County. Amy Loughner is a Natural Resource specialist for the Pima County Parks and Recreation.
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The Pima County Sheriff’s Department was aware of his violent nature and they failed to act appropriately. This tragedy leads right back to Sherriff Dupnik and all the spin in the world is not going to change that fact.

Dambisa Moyo: "without change US will almost certainly become a socialist nation"

Dambisa Moyo is that rare type of person – an economist who makes waves:

Her first book, Dead Aid, angered many in the charity sector by arguing that foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be phased out.

Her second, which is published in London on Thursday, accuses America and other Western powers of squandering their world economic dominance through a sustained catalogue of fundamentally flawed policies.

How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead goes so far as to predict that the US will be a “bona fide socialist welfare state” by the latter part of this century.

“Indeed, if nothing else changes it from its current path,” writes Moyo, “it is almost certain that America will move from a fully-fledged capitalist society of entrepreneurs to a socialist nation in just a few decades.

“The trouble is, it won’t be just any socialist welfare state... the US is on a path to creating the worst and most venal form of welfare state [poorly developed and designed] – one born of desperation from many years of flawed economic policies and a society that rapaciously feeds on itself.”
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Zambian-born Moyo, 41, is not afraid of being a pioneer. The London-based former Goldman Sachs economist is arguably one of the most powerful women in British business, sitting on the boards of FTSE 100 constituents Barclays and brewing giant SAB Miller.
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Moyo says the idea of unintended consequences is a running theme in both Dead Aid and How the West Was Lost, with policies that Western populations have rallied around as great ideas turning out to produce detrimental results.

In this way, she says, Western governments have implemented laudable notions like the idea that everyone should have a roof over their head, receive access to food and be supported in old age by pensions. These have led to unfortunate outcomes in terms of capital, labour and productivity, the key ingredients for economic growth.
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In Dead Aid she argued that more than $1 trillion of development aid from Western governments to Africa over the past 50 years has not helped Africa but has ruined it, with millions of people poorer because of aid.Destroying the myth that aid works, she said, means making charity history.
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Born and raised in Lusaka, Moyo achieved a chemistry degree and MBA at Washington DC’s American University, a doctorate in economics from Oxford University and a masters from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government before working as a consultant at the World Bank and then for nearly a decade at Goldman.

China builds world's longest bridge

It's 26.4 miles long:

The Qingdao Haiwan Bridge would easily cross the English Channel and is almost three miles longer than the previous record-holder, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in the American state of Louisiana.
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The vast structure links the centre of the booming port city of Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong Province with the suburb of Huangdao, spanning the wide blue waters of Jiaozhou Bay.

Built in just four years at a cost of £5.5 billion, the sheer scale of the bridge reveals the advances made by Chinese engineers in recent years.

"His goal was the congresswoman"

The lefty pundits will probably try to make out that judge Roll was Loughner's real target; that he was an anti-immigrant Tea Partier who assassinated Roll because of the judge's decision to allow a group of illegal aliens to sue a private rancher.

But the assassin had already talked to Gifford. As his friend twittered today: "He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in '07, asked her a question & he told me she was 'stupid & unintelligent.'"

He was aiming for Giffords; Roll was "collateral damage":

Another chilling twist was the presence of John Roll, a district judge, among the dead. He and his family were given protection in 2009 after he ruled that a lawsuit by illegal immigrants could proceed – a decision that was denounced on conservative talk show radio and brought an estimated 200 death threats.

The shooting took place in a car park outside a Safeway grocery store in a Tucson shopping mall as Miss Giffords was talking to an elderly couple at a "Congress on your Corner" event which she had advertised an hour previously on her Twitter account.

Andrea Gooden, an eyewitness who was working across the road from the shooting, said: "I heard about 15 shots. Then there were people racing across the parking lot."

Steven Rayle, who was on the scene at the time of the shooting and helped to hold the suspect down while waiting for police, told the Gawker website: "The event was very informal. Giffords had set up a table outside the Safeway and about 20 to 30 people were gathered to talk to her. The gunman, who may have come from inside the Safeway, walked up and shot Giffords in the head first."

Alex Villec, 19, a campaign volunteer, was organising the line of constituents when the shooter first approached.

The gunman "said, 'Can I talk to the congresswoman?', or something to that effect," said Mr Villec, who told him to join the queue.

A few minutes later, the man left the back of the line and walked toward Miss Giffords amid a group of 20 to 25 constituents, employees and volunteers.

"He was intent when he came back - a pretty stone-cold glance and glare," Mr Villec said. "I didn't see his gun, but it was clear who he was going for. He was going for the congresswoman. A few staff members were caught in the crossfire...His goal was the congresswoman."

Mr Villec saw him raise his hand and heard gun shots before ducking behind a pillar and later running across the car park to a bank for safety.

The Arizona assassin Jared Loughner

Of course the lefties immediately called 22 year old Jared Loughner a Tea Party nut but he's a radical lefty druggie.

From a friend's Twitter page:

Saying Jared Laughner was the gunman. Really hoping that's not the same guy I went to HS with, really good friend. Freaking out right now!!!
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Official I went to high school & college, & was in a band w/ the gunman. I can't even fathom this right now.
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I went to high school, college, & was in a band with the gunman. This tragedy has just turned to horrific.
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He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in '07, asked her a question & he told me she was "stupid & unintelligent"
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he was a pot head & into rock like Hendrix,The Doors, Anti-Flag. I haven't seen him in person since '07 in a sign language class
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As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.
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he had a lot of friends until he got alcohol poisoning in '06, & dropped out of school. Mainly loner very philosophical.
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more left. I haven't seen him since '07 though. He became very reclusive.
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I haven't seen him since '07. Then, he was left wing.
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it's loughner just checked my year book.

Two Brits discuss living in the USA

A gay seaman defends Enterprise officer Honors

Joshua Green:

I was reading about the Navy's lewd videotape scandal when my phone rang. Total serendipity--it was Pete Clark! Longtime readers of this blog will recall that Pete was the profane sailor who'd served under Eric Massa and made a memorable appearance in the item I wrote when Massa tickled and groped his way out of Congress last year ("Eric Massa's Navy Files"). Pete's the guy who introduced "snorkeling" into the political lexicon. "Meat-gazing," too. Pete is to profanity what Mozart is to music. You have to marvel.
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Turns out that in addition to knowing Eric Massa he's good friends with Captain Owen P. Honors of the USS Enterprise, the same guy who made the videotapes that are all over the news and was relieved of his command today. Apparently, Pete is plugged in to every sex scandal in the Navy. He was furious because he felt the media was railroading his friend O.P. [Capt. Honors] and ignoring the other side of the story.
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"I grew up with O.P. in Syracuse," Pete told me. "He was my brother's best friend growing up. I know both of these people very well, Massa and O.P. Honors. I've never met a person that's never not loved the guy [O.P. not Massa], from high school till now. Even the crew."

"Dude, there's a whole story behind the friggin' political correctness and how it's friggin' ruining this country. We're relieving the most beloved aircraft carrier captain I've ever heard of, in my life--and I know a lot of people in the Navy--he's being relieved for a bunch of videos that were misrepresented because they were all cut and spooled together. See, the crew LOVED this guy. Loved him. So if you read any of these people who served with him on Facebook--black, white, female, male, gay, straight--gay people are like, 'He was great, we loved him!' It's unbelievable."

I said I hadn't realized Honors had gay supporters.

"Dude, there's gay people on the support website supporting him! Because it was a joke! It was a spoof! It was a series of tapes over an entire deployment! So then they cut 'em into, like, the funniest parts, which obviously everyone else would think was insane, and someone turned in this video, and it looks bad, but it's not! Not when it's been fully examined. But the bottom line is, he got relieved."
...
"Here's a perfect example [of what I'm talking about]. Have you ever seen the movie 'Brokeback Mountain'? It's kind of weird I'm using it as an example, but have you ever seen 'Brokeback Mountain'?"

Actually, no.

"I know you don't want to admit to it, you liberal. You pole-smoker! You can't even say 'pole-smoker' anymore without getting fired! What a fucking joke. Snorkeler! You can't say snorkeler."
...
"But here's the deal. In 'Brokeback Mountain,' there's parts of that movie where they're makin' out, and basically gettin' it on with each other--it's very aggressive--and if somebody just took clips of that they would think that that was what the movie was all about, and no one would have seen it. And it's actually about these two guys who are in love with each other, which--whatever. But the thing is, no one would go see the movie if you just took the clips! So that's all they did from these series of [Navy] movies over five or six months. They took these clips, and, you know, it was an ongoing story that they were telling. Ships are a really stressful environment. There's 24/7 around the clock launching of aircraft, bomb-making, fixing the bombs in the ships. On the deck it's completely dangerous. People are stressed out. And the only thing they look forward to is this movie night with the X.O. [executive officer] because before they show the movie, the X.O. usually passes the word about what's going on for the week, and O.P. is genius enough to come up with a way to do it via skits, like water conservation, things of that nature. The crew loved it! Because the previous X.O.s, all they ever did was, like, read off a freaking teleprompter or read their notes. O.P. did these skits that the crew loved! And they got ratted out for it, four years after when he had command of another ship!"
...
"Dude, this is the first casualty of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell! You take this political correct bullshit, you take Major Hassan [the Ft. Hood shooter, who Pete believes wasn't stopped because of political correctness], you take a couple other things and it leads to real degradation of the military, it really does."

A few days after Green posted that interview, he added:

I wanted to share this note from a gay sailor who served under Honors aboard the USS Enterprise and wrote in to defend his former captain. (He provided his discharge certificate verifying that he'd served aboard the Enterprise). It's a viewpoint I haven't seen elsewhere and thus is worth reading and thinking about. His letter:

Josh,

My name is Eric, I was a gay sailor that served aboard the USS ENTERPRISE during the '06 and '07 deployments. I'm not sure exactly what information you need other than that I was never once offended by Capt. Honors choice of words of brand of humor. I have been making contact with many of my fellow gay service members that served aboard that time as well, in hopes that we can get the word out there that Capt. Honors never created an anti-gay work environment and that these slanders of calling him a homophobe and gay-basher are unjust.
...
I can't help to think about the GEICO commercial during all this. The one with the retired drill sergeant acting as a therapist. In all honesty, do Americans really want a military full of men and women who's first reaction to a harsh word or off-colored joke to go running to mama crying? Do we really want those people as our defense against the ever growing terrorism threat and foreign nationals with a vendetta against America? It seems thats what the media and the higher ups that be wish... Before you know it they'll be administering sensitivity training on the polite and politically correct way of killing the enemy.

If you have anymore questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. And thank you for taking the time to hear this perspective on an issue that should have never made it this far. The moment this hit the media, the military should have stepped in and handled it, and not allowed the media to blow it out of proportion.

Thank you for your time,
Eric Prenger

Chart of the day: imagine whirled peas

It's getting better all the time:

According to a new report from the Human Security Report Project, the number of deaths from armed conflicts around the world continues to fall, even while intercommunal wars have jumped and other conflicts have become increasingly difficult to bring to an end. What wars are fought are less lethal, too. "The average annual battle-death toll per conflict in the 1950s killed almost 10,000 people; in the new millennium the figure is less than 1,000," the report states.

President Boehner?

If Boehner is elected Speaker, he will be next in line after Biden if anything happens to Obama. Boehner may not perfect but he will at least not be Obama or Biden. I'm saying my prayers that Obama and Biden both die of swine flu.

Q. Why did God give liberals annoying, whiny voices?

James Delingpole:

A. So that even the blind could hate them.

This is one of my favourite jokes from a new book published today called 365 Ways To Drive A Liberal Crazy. Modesty forbids me from naming the author but if you buy it in sufficient quantities I can offer you his cast-iron guarantee that not a penny of the proceeds will be spent on anything remotely worthy or eco-friendly.
...
Yeah, all right, I admit: the author’s me. The book is written with some feeling because, having reached middle age without ever once having gone through a socialist/bleeding heart phase, I am aware that my entire conscious life has been spent being made to feel I’m a bad person by people on the liberal-left. And now it’s payback time. I want to make liberals – that’s liberals in the US sense of the word (I wrote the book for an American audience not a British one, so if you’re not American save your money for Watermelons) meaning pretty much everyone of a leftist or ecotard hue – to be made to feel as uncomfortable as they have made me. I want to give them a verbal waterboarding.

But not a literal waterboarding. And it’s this which is one of the quintessential differences between liberals and conservatives – as my so-called rival Dan Hannan pointed out in a characteristically acute blog post the other day. In case you missed it, or are not altogether sure who Dan Hannan is (or if he even exists) here’s the relevant bit:

A glance at any online political forum will reveal how much more readily Left-wing posters use phrases like “evil” and “I hate” than conservatives do.
...

Like most conservatives, I do not wish any of my liberal enemies dead. I want them alive, the better that I may tease them and laugh at them and expose the idiocy of their ways.

As Margaret Thatcher said: “The facts of life are conservative.” And they are. Never a let a liberal forget this. It’s something liberals hate more than anything in the world: that no matter how hard they try and how much they show they really care, they will always be wrong about everything that matters.

X-rated USS Enterprise

For my Andy who served on the Enterprise (the aircraft carrier not the space-ship) - the Captain of the USS Enterprise is in trouble over some videos he made while serving as the ship's Executive Officer:

In other skits, sailors parade in drag, use anti-gay slurs, and simulate masturbation and a rectal exam. Another scene implies that an officer is having sex in his stateroom with a donkey.

They're all part of a series of short movies produced aboard the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier Enterprise in 2006 and 2007 and broadcast to its nearly 6,000 sailors and Marines. The man who masterminded and starred in them is Capt. Owen Honors - now the commander of the carrier, which is weeks away from deploying.
...
The Enterprise, the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is set to deploy overseas this month.
...
A female sailor who was assigned to the Enterprise at the time said she and a number of other women on board were offended by the videos. She said some crew members complained about them, and in fact, Honors acknowledged it on camera. In one movie, he says, "Over the years I've gotten several complaints about inappropriate materials in these videos, never to me personally but, gutlessly, through other channels."

He adds, "This evening, all of you bleeding hearts... why don't just go ahead and hug yourself for the next 20 minutes or so, because there's a really good chance you're gonna be offended."

Then Honors tells his viewers to get ready for something that always pleases: "the F-bomb." The video goes on to show a string of clips edited together in which he uses the expletive.

The next portion is a series of clips displaying Honors and other sailors, including officers, pretending to masturbate. It's set to a song called "Spank."
...
After that, the video returns to Honors. "Finally, let's get to my favorite topic - something foreign to the gay kid over there: chicks in the shower," he says.

He gestures to the person next to him - who, through a trick of video, is Honors wearing the blue coveralls of a Navy surface warfare officer, or SWO. SWOs include the officers who crew the ship; they don't include fighter pilots and other aviators. Repeatedly in the videos, Honors, a former Top Gun pilot, draws distinctions between aviators and SWOs and refers to SWOs as "fags."

The video then shows two female sailors pretending to shower together and two male sailors pretending to shower together.
...
The videographer said that while he knew the movies weren't appropriate, in some ways he can understand how they happened.

"In his defense, I'll say that sometimes, when you've been out to sea for a while, cut off from everything, you start to think things that you would never normally do are actually a good idea," he said. "You do stupid stuff to stay sane."

Boys will be boys and that goes double for seamen. And, no - my Andy does not glow in the dark.

Stranger in a strange land

As a former South African living in America I enjoyed this article written by an American living in South Africa:

My father arrived in America in 1951, after selling the last of everything the family owned to begin new lives in New York.
...
They were a gypsy sort of family, roaming from Italy, to Algeria, to Tunisia and, finally, America; first New York, then to California. He was a third-culture kid well before it became part of the global lexicon. I suppose that was partially why my father was never quite clear about his background. He never would readily admit to being Italian, despite our surname, which was a dead giveaway and led straight back to the Sicilian village of Calatafimi.
...
Now it's my daughter with the accent. She tells anyone who will listen she's American. Mostly because she knows that's where Mickey Mouse lives and, I suspect, finds it a bit exotic because wherever it is, it takes a really long plane ride to get there.
...
Not that she remembers much about America. We've been back in Johannesburg for five years and she's returned only once. She speaks with a South African accent, one that makes her American cousins giggle when she talks to them on Skype.
...
[I]f she heads back to the land of her birth, she will be a foreigner in a foreign land just like me. My daughter, despite what her passport says, will be a South African.
...
My daughter also has Czech to add to her cultural CV. My husband, who I met in Prague not long after graduating from university, is South African by way of Czech parents. He left his birth country in his young mother's arms on a train in 1970, his father holding on to his six-year-old sister. It was two years after the Prague Spring and his father refused to stay with the communists.
...
When I went back to California recently and asked the woman behind the till at a dress shop if she would throw away my cash slip in the "rubbish bin", she smiled (Americans say "trash cans") and asked with a thick Spanish accent, "Where are you from?" I chuckled to myself.

In South Africa I am a foreigner, too.
...
South Africa has the most asylum seekers in the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And xenophobic hatred simmers from boardrooms to townships. After all, what are all of us foreigners doing here taking South African jobs?

In some ways, South Africa is much like America. Growing up, my friends' parents were from all over -- Armenia, Argentina, Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, France, England -- and immigrants from Central America, Thailand, Korea and Iran were commonplace. Here in South Africa, my two last employers have been foreigners: one a Serbian, the other a Zimbabwean. Our new neighbours are Canadian by way of Bangladesh and my daughter's best friend has a Dutch mother and a South African father from Polokwane.

The other day I met a lawyer from America who has four children, all raised in South Africa; his oldest is now at Columbia University in New York.

Part of being from different places really means you are of none. Your sense of self is fragmented.
...
Your memory mixes and fades and your sense of self and attachment to culture, tradition, family and place are a mirage. You reach out for something firm, something to believe in, something that has existed and will always exist and it dissipates as you wave your hand. There is a base -- the constitution of your father and mother that is your very skin -- but different places, different people make for different ideas.

And nothing is certain. Certainly not the weather. Not capitalism. Not democracy, not tradition, not the merging, mixed cultures and ethnicities and religions. Globalisation and third-culture kids are the present and the future; mutts, all of us, borders shifting, allegiances wavering.

Mozart

The composer once called a lightweight is now celebrated for his hidden depths:

Mozart’s place as the greatest of composers has not always been so secure. We have had a love-hate relationship with his music, and it is not so long since Maria Callas declared that “Mozart’s music is dull” and Glenn Gould complained that “Mozart was a bad composer who died too late rather than too early”. It was probably overexposure to some of the simpler, emptier arias and piano sonatas that provoked those remarks: harder to forgive is Delius’s jibe that “if a man tells me he likes Mozart, I know in advance that he is a bad musician”.

Mozart is the perfect example of popular classical music - mostly crap but with occasional brilliance - unlike Beethoven who is mostly brilliance with occasional crap.