Hybrid Vigor

Well, Earth Day passed without much acknowledgement at the Dark Adapted Ranch, though I did drive my Ford Escape Hybrid a bit on Thursday, so I guess that's some kind of commemoration.

I had a 2001 Toyota Avalon that was five-plus years old, paid for, giving me no problems whatsoever and had a whopping 35,000 miles or so on it. So why did I get a hybrid? That's a complex answer.

First, I'm a gadget freak, and I think I heard someone say that "He who dies with the heaviest toy wins," so a 3,150 lb car would put me ahead there. Second, I'm not a tree-sitting Hummer-torching Enviro-Loonie, but I do hate paying for gas and in-town I was getting about 19-20mpg in the Avalon, maybe 25 on the highway. Third, my driving profile would seem to work very well for a hybrid car, I drive about 7 miles each day to and from work in town with a max speed limit of 45 mph on any stretch. Fourth, I chose the SUV class for a hybrid because I'm too big for the current car-type hybrids, and of the ones available (Toyota Highlander, Lexus R400h, Ford Escape), only the Escape offered an efficient package in my opinion for the way I drive. The Ford Escape is the only SUV hybrid with a 4-cylinder engine, in the other cars the hybrid package is designed to boost performance moreso than economy, and economy was what I was after. Plus, it was cheaper than the other two ($32,095 out the door, sticker price).

So on March 13, 2006 I became a hybrid owner courtesy of Tyler Ford, and me and my silver 2006 Ford Escape Hybrid have been getting to know each other. If you're interested, I have some impressions to share.

A hybrid is a car that has two power sources connected to a common transmission: a gasoline engine and an electric motor. In the case of my car, they are a 2.3-L in-line four-cylinder Atkinson cycle gasoline engine, and a 94hp (max efficency) electric motor powered by a large NiMH battery, the equivalent of 250 D-cell size batteries. The 'gas pedal' is electronically-controlled and the 'hybridness' is largely transparent, a computer decides whether you get power to the wheels from the electric motor, the gasoline engine, or both. The car has a more-efficeient automatic transmission called a continuously-variable transmission, in essence it never changes gears.

The ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) not only drives the car when needed but charges the battery as needed, the battery is also charged when you stop through regenerative braking, turning the kinetic energy of the car into electrical energy for your battery instead of wasting it as heat in the brake pads. The smarts are all in the computer and transmission, and Ford showed the smarts to buy the hybrid system largely intact from Toyota. The difference is that I actually can get my 6'5" frame into a Ford Escape, and would do so with some discomfort in a Prius. You can certainly drive a hybrid as a normal car and never give a second thought to maximizing your fuel-efficency and minimizing your environmental impact. It's been designed to be as transparent as possible, the only difference if you use it this way is that your car shuts off at red lights and fires up again with vigorous acceleration.

But that's not me. At heart, I'm a systems analyst, and there's nothing I like more than being given a complex system to analyze. One of the best computer-gaming experiences I had was getting a game called 'X-COM' without any documentation, then figuring out the rules for myself, the game of deducing the game was as much fun as the game itself. Driving a hybrid is also a game and requires some rules, and here's the ones I have deduced so far:

What game are you playing in your car? For some folks, the game is Shortest Time. For me, it's Highest MPG, and given access to the data if you're driving a hybrid for efficiency you'll probably end up doing that, too. It's funny, I don't get frustrated with other people when my engine isn't running, or when their acceleration is so slow that I can keep up with them on batteries. I have the luxury of Doing Something in my car (saving gas), instead of rushing from place to place to Do Something when I arrive. It's a new perspective for me, and strangely stress-reducing. My attention is on being efficient, not being first. I don't mind red lights, they don't cost me anything if my ICE isn't running. I do corner a little harder than I did before, largely to keep up momentum, and I love to slip past a yellow light because I know there won't be anyone behind me to anger (see next point). It has changed how I drive, and since I Drive to Live instead of Live to Drive, I'm thinking I can let my Car and Driver subscription lapse as well.

Driving a hybrid is like playing 'Operation': If you hear the buzz, you've made a mistake. The ICE always comes on at startup and, depending on engine temperature will run for 3-7 minutes. When it shuts off, you can barely tell, but then you're in 'Bonus Time', where you're making progress down the road without paying ExxonMobil for the privilege. The key at this point is careful throttle management. It's a fly-by-wire throttle, so a careful tread on the pedal is necessary for goosing it along without triggering the ICE again. You can tell you're 'winning' when the tachometer drops to zero, you're losing when that evil needle jumps back up to 1200 rpm or so. A light touch is necessary to stay in Bonus Time. The shudder of the ICE lighting up (it will start in 400 milliseconds if needed) is my new designator of failure.

Your ability to maximize hybrid fuel economy depends on your tolerance for frustrating other drivers. I have received my last speeding ticket, I ought to just get a big sign in the back window that says: HYBRID -- GO AROUND. A hybrid will accelerate and keep speed with other cars in traffic, but if you do that you're not using the batteries most of the time and you're paying the weight penalty of dragging around all the extra hybrid components in the car. There is a balance you need to find between keeping pace with traffic and lowering your environmental output, for me that balance is found in differing route selections. Nobody minds if you glide silently on battery power at 25mph through a residential neighborhood. If you can make the trip on batteries, even a slightly longer trip will be more efficient if you can do it slower and with less reliance on the ICE. I don't feel that I have the right to frustrate people for environmental reasons, so I just try to stay out of their way as much as possible.

Think like a bicyclist. Driving a hybrid will make you access the vertical data you store but never consider when driving a conventional car. Think about your route to a common destination like school or work. Where are the hills? Are they steep or gradual? Is there a route where you can take a more gentle slope? Or one where you can burst up a hill on the ICE rather than grinding slowly up the hill for a longer period of time at a slower rate? I'm still working on local strategies, but for starters I boost up the hill and let off the gas just before the apex, coasting over and down before adding gas to get back up the hill. It's the third dimension of driving that you never think about but may be significant. I have gotten my car up to 45mph on batteries alone running downhill, which is unimpressive unless you drive a hybrid, too.

Not to short, not too long, just right The first 3-7 minutes of any trip, you will be driving a heavier version of a conventional car and probably get slightly worse gas mileage. If your trips are mostly 5 minutes in length, you won't benefit from a hybrid at all. The ideal trips are ones in town, 15-20 minutes or more long at speeds in the 35 mph range. On the highway, my Escape Hybrid got 30.3 MPG at 70mph from my house to my sister's house 135 miles away, but in Dallas that weekend running 20-25 minute trips I had my average fuel economy up to 32, suggesting that I was coming close to the EPA City number of 36 MPG. In practice, I have managed to get 29 mpg in town with my short trips and careful throttle control and route selection, which isn't great compared the the EPA number but is about 50% better than I was getting in my Avalon.

As far as the car goes, it's missing some goodies that I had in my Avalon, like the auto-dimming rearview mirror, the temperature readout (though I'm not yet sure I can't get that info, I just haven't read the manuals) and the HomeLink integrated garge door opener. I have to manually turn the headlights on and off, which took some getting used to after 5 years with a slightly smarter car. The acceleration is a little less, which just means I have to think more. On the other hand, it has a GPS navigation system that is pretty trick, and it handles speed bumps better than my last car. The biggest plus is that I've been driving for 23 days and I'm still at half a tank, I expect to make it into May without filling up. Having been on the highway and in town over the last six weeks, I can't really lodge a complaint. I really like the car.

And I'm not writing this to fill the air with Smug, the Federal Tax Credit that accompanies the car is enough reward, plus the fun of a new game inside the usual game of getting from Point A to Point B. I DO NOT think I am better than you or anyone else, I am not a better steward of the environment, etc. I DO think there is a bright future for hybrids, particularly plug-in hybrids with more powerful lithium-ion batteries. I could probably get to work in a plug-in hybrid on electricity alone. The current hybrids aren't a patch on the potential of the diesel-electric hybrid car. Whether we in the US realize it or not, Europe has seen a renaissance of the small diesel engine and with ultra low-sulfur diesel coming out this year, it's likely we'll have cars with even better efficiency than gasoline hybrids. Diesels are ideal generators as they run most efficiently at fixed rpms and temperatures, and a diesel-electric hybrid car could get real-world 70-80 mpg within the next few years.

The hybrid will go mainstream this year when Toyota offers a Camry hybrid variant as part of the 2007 model year, and if you can afford the difference it's worth a test drive at least. I look forward to your comments!

Pray for the Clay...in May

I am not merely waxing (pathetically) poetic in this post, I am revealing one of my semi-Hero powers, that of turning finely-cast light ceramic disks into fragments, with an average score that would garner me a 'C' were it a 100-point quiz. I am a Sporting Clays shooter on occasion, and occasionally a successful one as shown here:
That's me (the lummox in the red shirt on the right) and my brother (to my left) posing with Averill (far left) and Patrick (the Todd Robbins-looking dude in the middle) DeLoache as the winning team for the First Annual ACU Shoot for Success, a Sporting Clays tournament held last year.

Sporting Clays has been described as "golf with a shotgun", and given my wild inaccuracy at golf this would not seem to be the sport for me. Compared to others who are artists with a 12-gauge, it isn't. My brother is the Bwana Devil with a shotgun, with no training and no practice he broke 78 clays out of 100, but then again he has the nervous system of a cat. His skill is really remarkable to people who shoot regularly who find out that he, in fact, does not. In typical terse and self-depreciating fashion, he passes off finding and hammering flying clays that escape many others. "It's a shotgun. I shouldn't EVER miss," he says, and all I can think is that if he's this good with firearms untrained, there are Jihadis in Al-Anbar that should be thanking their god that he's not in a Marine uniform and parked behind a Barrett M107 and within a mile of them. But I digress.

Shooting with the DeLoaches was really neat, they showed up to support the other beneficiary of the Shoot, the Texoma Youth Camp. With this hybrid team of ACU and Texoma supporters it seemed inevitable that we would win...after the fact. There were some shooters there that dwarfed us in talent, one twenty-something whippersnapper broke 92, but the reason our whole team won was that our whole team did fairly well -- Averill shot 77 (with a 20-gauge no less), My Bro broke 78, I got 70 and Patrick, who was 15 at the time, got 56 with a pump gun, no less. You meet the nicest people on the shooting range, and that day was no exception. When we won, the collective response was pretty much, "Whoa, that's random." It was a very pleasant surprise.

The 2006 ACU Shoot For Success tournament will commence on May 6, 2006, at the Elm Fork Shooting Park in Dallas, a gem of a shooting range in the Trinity River bottomlands just a few miles from downtown Dallas (and people wonder why I love Texas?).

My brother and I will be there in the dust of that parking lot awaiting you. Do you have the Mediocre As Shooting Skills Go Stuff to beat us? We, and the ACU COBA, the Texoma Youth Camp and the V.W. Kelly Scholarship Fund would like you to register to find out. And then show up on May 6 to see if you can pry the First Place Team prize from our slightly sweaty and shaky hands. It's for a good cause, the ammo is included in the registration fee and so is lunch. You're going to eat on May 6th, right? So register to eat lunch and consider the shooting as free entertainment. You don't have to be really good or even in practice to enjoy it -- the Bro and I proved that you CAN win without practice, hard work or (in my case) natural ability.

If we can, so can you.

And The Pulitzer Goes To...

My kids love prizes and awards. The big brainwave we had for The Boy's recent birthday was giving little trophies as part of the goodie bag. We built and raced these little AA-powered Tamiya race cars, and everyone got a trophy. I suppose it's part of the feel-good, self-esteem culture we have, but it put smiles on kids' faces and when you're a kid, getting the prize is the big thing. Shoot, my son proudly displays my brother's Little League trophy from 1978. Kids love to win prizes, but when you become an adult (unless you're a world-class athlete), the primacy of the prize seems to diminish.

It's becoming less and less important to me who wins prizes these days, because the things you have to do to win them seem less about what you do than which cause you support. When prize committees stop rewarding work and start Sending A Message, it's time to quit paying attention to them.

I mean, take Yasir Arafat, the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

(Pardon me while I do the same double-take I do whenever I read that. *mind boggles* OK, I'm back.)

Given the current situation in the Middle East, and the right mess Arafat led his political party into (not to mention the theft of funds to help what can easily be considered among the most destitute group in the world), now we have Hamas as the leader of the Palestinian Authority and peace seems as far away as it ever has. Iran doesn't need to fire missiles into Israel when it's clients Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas can just hand-deliver warheads to falafel stands in downtown Tel Aviv. Isn't this kind of like giving the 1999 Lifetime Business Ethics Award to Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling and Ken May? And don't get me started on Jimmy Carter. Good man, very principled, but not noted for foreign policy skill besides being able to get an Israeli who wanted peace and an Egyptian who wanted peace to sign a peace accord, in part by bribing the crap out of both parties ever since. The Nobel Prizes have an undeniable political tint these days, which makes them increasingly unserious in my mind.

So when Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times share the Pulitzer for National Reporting, pardon me while I swallow my gorge. They got someone at NSA to spill one of the most secret programs in the nation. Approaching the White House for comment, the WH asked them in the interest of national security to not report their findings. They didn't, at least until James Risen had his book written, then the New York Times "had" to report the story, since Risen was going to reveal national secrets in any event. I actually bought Risen's book, and it's in the hopper for reading at some point, but the thing that really galls me (besides all the self-righteous harrumphing and demand for an investigation into the Plame affair from the NYT, followed by kudos (and now a Pulitzer!) for revealing an actual secret) is that the reporting was horrifically incomplete. They didn't reveal what actually was happening, just that something was happening. They compromised national security by just by reporting the program, but not enough to do anything but raise spectres of faceless dudes in off-the-rack suits and clip-on ties pawing through your email and IM logs.

Is this a pen register-trap-and-trace? An automated text searcher? Are the communications recorded? If so, for how long? How much of the Internet is involved? Are strictly domestic communications involved? How about if a US party initiates contact, is that it? Hmmmm? Lichtblau and Risen offer only Cheshire cat smiles and silently polish their Pulitzers. Their reporting amounts to nothing more than a Rorschach test for the reader's feelings about government. If you, like me, think that security is the most basic human right, reading about this only confirms what you hoped was going on anyway. If you think Chimpy McBushHitler is really that interested in all of your comments and IMs about what a jerk he is and is going to come punish you in some way (and to be fair, the government can punish you like few others), it's intimidating to say the least. And infuriating, I would imagine, if you didn't like the PATRIOT Act to begin with.

Lichtblau and Risen's reporting is enough to raise questions, and the answers are fill-in-the-blanks with your worst fears or best expectations. The fact that international calls and 'net traffic routed through US switches and routers can be intercepted is enough to make it harder for us to track terrorist communications, and this current crop of n'er-do-wells is not stupid. Their reporting is the equivalent of announcing in 1942 that the US had broken the Japanese Naval Codes, or that the British had automated the cracking of three-rotor Enigma codes used by the Germans. THAT the breach has been made is enough to make smart conspirators change their SOP, and with easily downloadable tools like PGP, cracking those messages is exponentially harder. The simple thing is to use lines that are not routed through the US and are therefore (presumably) much less easy for the US to intercept.

Dana Priest of the Washington Post won the Pulitzer for Beat Reporting, she was the one who published the Most Secret Story of the Year, until the NYT dropped the bombshell about the NSA. Her revelation was about the CIA's network of secret prisons to keep high-value folks like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed off the radar. Personally, I could care less if the guy is dead in a ditch somewhere after having every neuron sucked dry of each scintilla of information about Al Qaeda's networks and operations. If the planner of 9/11 ever breathes free air again, it's too soon for me. That he's kept free from people who intend to provide him the best defense in an American court that money can buy is good enough.

The only thing that elevates Priest's story above Lichtblau and Risen's in my mind is that is has a Beginning and a Middle and somewhat of an End. Lichtblau and Risen's story only has a Beginning, and the Beginning was damage enough, thank you very little. I honestly fail to see the overarching public good served in either story, especially for the NYT story given the very gray area that FISA occupies with respect to the Constitutional powers and duties of the Office of the President. Every President beginning with Carter right after FISA was signed has generated an Executive Order that says, in essence, "I reserve the right to ignore that law when necessary, since I'm the President and the FISA statute is in the Gray Zone." And given the still-opaque nature of how the warrantless program works, the reporting doesn't provide any complete answers, just raises unhelpful questions that the President can't address without further compromising national security. It may be an important story, it may not. But given that further answers can't be forthcoming without committing more felonies, it just sits eating like acid at the foundations of public trust.

Keep your prizes, people. If that's what it takes to win, it doesn't sound like a game I want to be played. And I hope that somewhere down the road, the leakers of two of the most secret things in the US Government get a number and some custom jumpsuits to remind them of their roles in the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes, for the rest of their natural lives.

UPDATE 4/24/06: The alleged leaker of the Dana Priest article, Mary O. McCarthy, has been fired from her CIA job after apparently confessing to being Priest's source. She was an analyst assigned to the CIA's Inspector General's office, doubly ironic because the IG's office is where whistleblowers are supposed to go first. No matter how you spin it, the WaPo is not a part of any government oversight system.

The only government the CIA seems capable of bringing down anymore is our own.

A good, if long, article in Commentary regarding the New York Times article, the NSA program and the Espionage Act of 1950. Summary: if the NYT goes to court, they'll lose.

The Ballad of Bill Hobbs

The top of the list to the right of ACU-X Bloggers belongs to Bill Hobbs, a friend from ACU. Bill was a serious journalism person, I was a tourist drawing cartoons for the paper on occasion (and "borrowing" Letraset from Craig Leese on occasion -- if I see you I owe you $5, Craig). I appreciated Bill for many reasons, not the least of which was that as a skinny, too-tall freshman in the fall of 1986 still adjusting to life in West Texas, Bill was friendly and actually took the time to talk to a non-JMC major who happened to be spending long hours composing the student newspaper with him. Bill graduated about a year later, and moved to Nashville.

Well, come to find out when I belatedly discovered blogging and Instapundit, the Don Corleone of right-ish bloggers also knew of Bill Hobbs and featured him in his blogroll (for non-bloggers, a list of blogs you recommend). Come to find out that Bill was a freelance journalist now and a major blogger in Nashville and Tennessee. Kinda cool to make those connections.

Bill let his site lay fallow on January 10, 2006. He was employed by Belmont University in Nashville as a PR person, and decided that maintaining his busy blog was one of the things he could jettison, even though he had maintained it for four-plus years. I hadn't seen much from or about Bill, until I saw the sickening headline on Instapundit: BILL HOBBS HAS LOST HIS JOB FOR BLOGGING.

"Bummer" doesn't begin to cover it. A decent recitation of the events is available here, an even more detailed one is available here, the nut of the story is that Bill posted a cartoon on a blogpage he started, then immediately abandoned. Later, when he started a blog about the Tennessee Governor's race, the earlier blog was listed as one of his on his Blogger Profile and a former press aide for Al Gore, Mike Kopp, chose this abandoned article to use as a platform to attack the Bryson campaign, which apparently does not employ Bill Hobbs. Another blogger who works for 'Nashville Scene', an 'alternative weekly' like the 'Dallas Observer', used Kopp's blog to bash Bill yet again, and call out Belmont, a Baptist college, about its employ of this hateful, spiteful un-Christian person.

Well, Bill isn't hateful. He's not spiteful. He's not un-Christian. And for reasons that are not yet clear, he's no longer employed by Belmont University, as of today.

Why do I say all this?

1. I like Bill personally and wish him well. The chances of him reading this are slim, but if you do, get a tip jar up on your site somewhere and for you, one of my Blogfathers, I will brave the perils of PayPal and chip in.

2. Bill is an important blogger to me, and likely to a few folks in Tennesee, but it's not like this 'Bill' is Bill Frist. Why Nashville Scene needs to take time out of its day to confront Bill and Belmont about an abandoned blog is not clear to me, other than that Bill has an opinion about the TN governor's race that they don't agree with. Congrats, Nashville Scene. I'm betting this will backfire badly on you, but hey, you're old media so your life ain't so great to begin with. Glenn Reynolds refers to bloggers as 'a pack, not a herd'. I don't live in Nashville and don't have a dog in this hunt, but I wouldn't be surprised to see an organized pack of bloggers casting a gimlet eye at each and every one of your actions in the future. Don't think of it as vengance, think of it as proactive defense on the part of people who don't agree with you. You never can tell which blogger with a different opinion they'll target next.

3. It's unspeakably ironic that "freedom of the press" has been applied by the Nashville Scene in an effort to embarass Bill and Belmont. I don't know the terms of separation of Bill from Belmont. It's entirely possible he was dissatisfied for some reason and this is a good opportunity to leave, or he's falling on his sword to save the school bad press (this, specificially, is not working at the moment), or Belmont pulled the trigger itself. In any event, it's unfortunate that someone's opinion outside of work should impact their job in this way. And as for a "Well, we didn't want him to lose his job" defense, freedom entails responsibility as well. What exactly was the expectation of what would happen in regard to this incident?

4. Freedom of opinion from the political left is apparently limited to freedom to agree with the tenets of the left. You're not just wrong if you don't, you're a horrible, awful, evil person and you should be destroyed.

I have admired Bill and Glenn Reynolds' bravery in posting under their own names on widely read pages on the Internet. My security is largely in anonymity (and if you were wondering and feeling frisky, an alarm system, a concealed carry permit, semiautomatic weapons and personal alertness), that and I'm easily self-employable and a partner in my radiology group. Bill shows anyone who's a blogger the dangers of deeply-held expressed opinion if you don't work for yourself, or have tenure, like Professor Reynolds. Bill didn't get attacked by a newspaper over his cartoon, he was attacked because he was felt to be effective in getting out a message. To a certain extent, that's an honor.

Bill has a short post on his blog:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
- Romans 8:28 -

God Bless, Bill.

Check his blog more frequently, I am sure we haven't heard the last from him.

UPDATE: Lucas in the comments makes a pertinent point. Allow me revise and extend point 4:

4. Freedom of opinion from the political extremes is apparently limited to freedom to agree with the positions of the extremes. You're not just wrong if you don't, you're a horrible, awful, evil person and you should be destroyed. I tend to notice it more when it comes from the left, but from whatever direction it's generally unhelpful for political discourse to assume your opponent does not have the public interest at heart and is simply a bad person. Interpersonally, this behavior is a conversation-killer. Politically, this is part of the wedge driving the country into fractious groups.

Welcome Lucas

In case you missed him down at the bottom of the 'ACU-X Bloggers' list, I've added Lucas Hendrickson to the list. Lucas blogging is probably a lot like the classic busman's holiday, he's been the music editor of CitySearch Nashville and you can momentarily choke Google searching for his name, quotes and articles he's written. He's a prolific writer, a Class A Dude and a fondly remembered friend from ACU. Check out his blog.

Bush Leak? Um, no.

Breathless, the lefty blogosphere(to wit(less)) runs with the AP Story that implicates Bush as "leaking" information from the then-classified National Intelligence Estimate to Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, who then passed it to reporters to counter Joe Wilson's article in The New York Times. According to Libby's defense filings, the release of this information was authorized by President Bush some time before July 8, 2003.

People are in a tizzy because they believe the President is thus shown to be 'leaking classified information'. Well, as it turns out, at least some of what's classified depends on who owns the material, and the NIE is an Executive Branch work product. Consistent with Separation of Powers, the Executive has control of what is and isn't classified in its purview. For the President to leak something classified by statute or by Congress would be inappropriate, for sure, but that doesn't seem to be what happened here.

Of course, anyone who tuned in to Brit Hume's interview of Vice-President Cheney on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 (transcript here) would already know this:

Q On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors -- unidentified -- authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that's been under investigation for a couple of years. I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He's a great guy. I've worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.

Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.

Q There is.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Have you done it?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --

Q You ever done it unilaterally?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.

What can be classified can be de-classified, and parts of the NIE were declassified on July 18, 2003.

Tempest in a teapot. But it's fun to watch it bubble. Note which of your friends freak out about this, and mark them as unserious people.

(Nancy) Grace and the Church.

OK, look, I'm Church of Christ. There I said it.

CoC isn't a cult. It's less non-denominational than it was when I was a kid, since the people that call themselves "non-denominational" started naming their churches after geographic features (Willow Creek, Saddleback), or throwing together a spiritual discipline and the word "Bible", e.g., Grace Bible Church (nice people all). Christianity has gone open-source in the last quarter-century, just download the distro (pick a Bible translation that works for you), get some training in life or in a seminary and strike out on your own.

By and large, Church of Christ folks aren't front-and-center in life in the US. There are exceptions, like bazillion book-seller Max Lucado, Senator John Cornyn, DC Court of Appeals Justice Janice Rogers Brown, champion ice skater and commentator Scott Hamilton and, possibly strangest but most welcome of all, "Wierd" Al Yankovic. If we believe in the Bible as the sole source of authority, it's probably because the extent of Jesus' Recommended Books list is "The Old Testament". Much like our conservative Southern Baptist cousins, we frown on drinking to excess, general lasciviousness and significant deviation from a Biblical life as a lifestyle, being human and cognizant of our own sin doesn't really give us a sense of moral superiority. Done improperly, fundamentalist Christianity can create the Modern-Day Pharisee. Done properly, with humility and recognition that the only way we can really express our love to God (besides worship, which is a small part of expressing love) is to love others like He has loved us, you'd be hard-pressed to find more self-sacrificing, and self-effacing people on the planet.

So now this preacher's wife in Selmer, Tennsesse takes a shotgun to her husband and we're on the top of the threat profile, at least according to Nancy Grace of CNN. Her "investigation" into the possible role of the "cultish" Church of Christ began simply enough on March 24, 2006 with this exchange:

Let`s go to Kelly in Illinois. Hi, Kelly.

CALLER: Hi, Nancy.

GRACE: Hi, dear.

CALLER: I was just wondering, the victim`s family seemed very religious. And I know some religions are viewed to be as a cult. And perhaps her family was viewing that religion as cultish, and she was driven to murder to get out of that cultish situation.

GRACE: Hmm, now, I have never heard of the Church of Christ being "cultish." But I do believe that the religion and the stress of being a pastor -- in this case, a minister`s wife -- will play into it. But I believe the Church of Christ is widely respected across the country. There`s no Jim Jones action going on here.

Fair enough. Evidently this intrigued her enough to call a "friend of the show", Pastor Tom Rhukala (note: on the Feb 3, 2006 Nancy Grace show she gives a shout out at the end of the show to "And a special goodnight from friends of the show here all the way from Finland, Pastor Tom Rukala (ph), his wife, Linda (ph). Thank you for being with us." I believe the likelihood of there being another Baptist pastor in Finland with the first name Tom and a last name that can be spelled "Rukala" phonetically to be low.) and the March 27, 2006 transcript:

I want to go to pastor Tom Rukala, joining us tonight, a special guest, a Baptist minister. I`ve been researching the Church of Christ. I don`t know that much about it. What can you tell me?

PASTOR TOM RUKALA, BAPTIST PASTOR: Well, the Church of Christ is a relatively new church. It was started about 150 years ago by Alexander Campbell (ph). And it`s, unfortunately, a very legalistic sect, and they tend to use methods of intimidation and pressure tactics. They claim that they are the only ones going to heaven, and all other people are condemned to hell. So in case...

GRACE: Uh-oh, I`m in trouble. But I already knew that.

(LAUGHTER)

GRACE: Now, wait a minute. What more can you tell me?

RUKALA: Well, they claim that if you`re not baptized by one of their ministers, that you`re doomed to hell, even if you`re a believer in Jesus Christ, which, of course, breaks completely from the traditional Christian view that all those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved because we`re saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again. For the Church of Christ folks, that`s not enough. You have to be a member of their narrow sect. It`s a very exclusive group. And if you`re not a member of their sect, you`re condemned.

GRACE: You know, Pastor, you keep saying "sect." "Sect." You make it sound like a cult.

RUKALA: It kind of is a borderline cult, unfortunately. I don`t want to make it out to be some kind of Hare Krishna group, but it has cult-like characteristics and...

GRACE: In what sense?

RUKALA: Well, in the sense of the exclusivism, the attitude that they are the only ones who know the truth. The tactics that they use are sometimes just -- not only un-biblical but unethical, and they can be very ungracious, unfortunately.

(Emphasis added)

Apparently, not quite as ungracious as Baptist ministers to Finland. Unfortunately.

Also apparently, "unfortunately" is Finnish for "bless their hearts", the All-Purpose Texas Attempt-To-Get-Out-Of-Tacky-Comments-Free Phrase. It doesn't cover Pastor Rhukala's misstatements and distortions of our practices, um, unfortunately. If you're not considered baptized unless it's "by one of their ministers", I've been laboring under a delusion of salvation since my father baptized me in April of 1980. The snarky comments about "being the only ones going to heaven" are a couple of decades out of date, at least. The baptism issue is not one I see him taking up with Rick Warren, for one, and he shows no inclination to give a biblical example of salvation without baptism. And why he wouldn't want to make a public gesture identical to the one his Savior made is beyond me, but then, I don't have to deal with 9 months of winter a year, it's possible he's a bit around the bend -- or more likely he's quoting what he learned about the CofC back in seminary in the 1960s, again, unfortunately. He may be mistaking the mainstream CofC for Kip McKean's International Churches of Christ a branch that split off in the 1980s, which does have a cult-like reputation, one that is well-deserved and most loathed by those of us who lie in the mainstream of the CofC movement.

I'll say this about Nancy Grace, she at least has the common decency to have an opposing view on the show rather than simply letting slander lie. So on March 29, 2006, she had Rubel Shelly on to present the Church of Christ side to the have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-esque question, "Are you a cult?" Dr. Shelly gave a pretty well-reasoned response:

GRACE: Is the Church of Christ a cult? Is it cult-like? Did that play into this murder in any way?

With us, Dr. Ruble Shelly, professor of philosophy and religion at Rochester College. He`s a Church of Christ minister. He knows the Winkler family. Let`s take a look.

Single leader, cult-like qualities, trying to isolate members, members happy and enthusiastic -- I don`t think that`s a bad thing -- experimental rather than logical, hide what they teach, say they`re the only true group.

Dr. Shelly, response?

DR. RUBLE SHELLY, CHURCH OF CHRIST, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY: It certainly doesn`t fit the criteria you just gave. We certainly have never created those charismatic personalities. We`re a network of independent, local churches.

And your guests so far, I`m the only one who has to plead guilty to being a member of the Church of Christ. And Churches of Christ certainly are not cultic in any of that classic sense.

We`re a conservative, religious group in the Christian tradition. You`d ask one of our members, and we`d say we jump right off the pages of the New Testament. Historically, we come out of what`s called the American Restoration movement, but the cultic label -- I can`t imagine anyone sticking that label.

GRACE: Dr. Shelly, what is the role of women in the Church of Christ?

SHELLY: Well, we believe that God created the human race male and female in his image and that Paul said there is no male or female in Christ. There are some male leadership options, in terms of elders of churches, and most preaching ministries that are reserved to males, but that`s not a cultic fact.

GRACE: Why? Why?

SHELLY: Well, that`s because of a biblical interpretation issue that Southern Baptists and many other groups share in common with Churches of Christ about male leadership in local churches. Churches of Christ are a conservative religious group.

GRACE: OK, wait, wait, wait. Dr. Shelly, no offense, by why, why only male leadership? Does anybody remember Mary Magdalene, ding ding?

SHELLY: Well, Mary Magdalene was not an apostle. All of the apostles were, in fact...

GRACE: Well, Judas was, and that certainly isn`t saying very much.

SHELLY: Well, we don`t want to quarrel with gender issues, with regard to salvation. And probably, I`m more broad-minded and a bit more liberal in terms of things that I would affirm that women have a right to do in church leadership than some of the people in our churches, but generally...

GRACE: OK. Dr. Shelly, let me move on, because I agree with you.

SHELLY: No, you asked the question as to where it came from.

GRACE: Yes, and I`d love an answer.

SHELLY: First, Timothy 2:11 and 2:12 talks about male leadership in churches. And that text has a great deal hung on it by religious conservatives to say that fathers in homes and elders in churches as male leadership, protective leadership, not abusive leadership.

GRACE: Dr. Shelly, do members of the Church of Christ church believe that that is the only way to heaven?

SHELLY: No. Churches of Christ began in an historical movement whose slogan was, "Christians only, not the only Christians"...

(CROSSTALK)

GRACE: No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, don`t need a history lesson, as much as I appreciate it. We`re only an hour long. Do you believe that Jews and Muslims...

SHELLY: Well, you asked the question. The answer is no, because our slogan is...

GRACE: ... will also go to heaven?

SHELLY: Christians only, not the only Christians. We don`t believe we`re the only Christians or the only ones going to heaven.

GRACE: OK, now, you know...

SHELLY: There may be individuals who do.

GRACE: You have got a great sense of career as a lawyer.

SHELLY: Churches of Christ are a loose network of independent churches. And I suspect you could find someone who believes most anything on your scale.

GRACE: Reverend, yes, no, do you believes that Jews or Muslims can go to heaven?

SHELLY: I believe that Jews and Muslims are to be shared the gospel of Christ. Now, that`s a much larger issue.

GRACE: Gotcha, OK. All right. I get it.

SHELLY: I do believe that Jesus is the only path to heaven, of course. Conservative Christians believe that.

No disagreement there. Notice how Ms. Grace seizes terrier-like on the role of women in the church. Somehow, I'm thinking that shooting your husband in the back is not much of a theological argument for women leading more prayers in worship. Anyone who knows anything about the CofC could tell you that the women are the most active, participatory and evangelical part of the church, and that more happens in a given week under the guidance and direction of women in the 167 hours we don't spend in congregational worship than happens under the "direction" of men during the hour in worship. Women are the cornerstone of every vital and active church, there may be some outliers (some CofCs are REALLY conservative) but overall the woman's role in the church is vital and highly regarded in the CofC even if they don't preach on Sundays or serve communion.

The truly funny thing about this is that if she wanted to know about the Church of Christ, all she had to do was ask her guest of March 28, 2006, a certain Max Lucado, whom she asked to comment on the Terri Schiavo matter a year after her death.

And funny enough, given a free shot to bash the stuffing out of the Church of Christ, Bob Jones, Chancellor of Bob Jones University, (mostly) passed on the opportunity, on March 29, 2006:

GRACE: OK. I want to go very quickly now to a very special guest, Bob Jones, chancellor of Bob Jones University. Welcome, Reverend. A couple of questions. This case has highlighted a very serious concern, and that is, when you look to your religious leader, in this case the pastor of their church, people look to them and their family for religious guidance. They are somewhat examples to the members of the flock.

How serious is this? How serious a blow is this to this church`s flock? And also, many people have suggested the Church of Christ is a cult. Now, they deny that. What do you think?

BOB JONES, CHANCELLOR, BOB JONES UNIVERSITY: Well, Nancy, it`s obvious that when your Christian leader, be it pastor or whatever he may call himself, falls into sin, it`s a terrible -- it`s a terrible blow. And in this case, the pastor`s wife has obviously disappointed her Lord and her congregation. And just like all over the world, there are very disillusioned Catholics whose priests were revealed as pedophiles, and when that all got revealed, it just shattered everybody`s confidence. And so yes, it is very disconcerting.

The Church of Christ is a legitimate national denomination. Their beliefs about salvation, in particular, would be one of the things I would have vast differences with them with personally because I think, you know, it`s very clear from the scripture that we`re redeemed to Christ through the blood of the cross, not by the baptismal waters. But I could not personally call it a cult in any way. It`s just a denomination who has doctrines that I personally don`t subscribe to because they aren`t biblical.

So at least from Bob Jones, we aren't a cult. And he should know. ba-dum-dum! The non-biblical thing is, as always and ad infinitum, debatable.

So basically, Nancy Grace is probably not done with us yet, I think she can squeeze another segment out of this. At least she had the fairness to have on a couple of Church of Christ ministers, one apparently unknown to her for reasons unrealted to the Winkler murder.

And I take more than a little solace in knowing that even if she declared the mainstream CofC a cult, almost nobody would find out. Bill O'Reilly beats her better than 3:1 in the same time slot. :)

A Resounding 'Duh'

Gateway Pundit: Wires: Bush, Chertoff, Nagin & Fats Domino Warned Before Katrina

Nice roundup by Gateway Pundit about how much was known prior to the hurricane by everyone in the week leading up to Katrina. The fact that Bush personally called Ray Nagin to urge a mandatory evacuation should be proof enough that Bush was engaged and knew of the impeding disaster. Even news people don't grasp or aren't willing to explain the difference between levees being "topped" (so much water that it flows over the levees) and "breached" (structural failure at less than capacity). The levees broke, they didn't get "topped", which is what is being warned of in the videoconference.

This is a non-news event. All of this was known before. What is new is an opportunity to media-swarm the Bushies. Seems like there was a dearth of bad news about Bush, what with the ports deal in 45-day hold and Iraq resisting the urge to tear itself apart.

What about the buses, Mr. Mayor?

I'd love to see the video where that idea was considered and discarded.

Don't believe the hype.

Bird Flu Update

Since I wrote that last part (and thanks for all the kind comments), there have been some significant developments.

The H5N1 virus has spread to Europe and Africa following migratory bird flight pathways, and H5N1 has been confirmed in Germany, Nigeria and Iraq. Human deaths have increased to about 100 worldwide, with most still in Asia where the virus apparently originated. There has been a recent report of dead birds in the Bahamas, and it is feared that they may have died from H5N1. This is not confirmed as H5N1 as far I can tell, but it's an inevitability that H5N1 will get to North and South America, so when it arrives is basically irrelevant. This year or next year does not really matter in the great scheme of things.

This article demonstrates why this bug is so nasty, apparently avian viruses have an attachment protein that allow it to adhere to cellular organelles in many different cell types in humans, including brain and other cells. The 1918 pandemic most frequently presented as pneumonia, but others had cholera-like diarrhea and a few had encephalitis as their presentation. This rather sad paper, based on virology samples and autopsy of a six year-old H5N1 victim, showed viral replication in the lungs and intestine, which makes sense as H5N1 is primarily an intestinal infection in birds.

Viruses are less a carefully plotting life form and more an adaptive program running at the biochemical level. Right now, H5N1 is compiled to run on the 'AvianOS' and only runs on 'ManOS' by accident. At a biochemical level, the situation is suboptimal for human infection -- the average bird body temperature is 106 F, for example. Chemical processes that run best at that temperature may not do so at 98.6 F. Our outer cell proteins that H5N1 depends on to attach to our cells and become absorbed are not quite the same as bird proteins, making efficient infection a problem. That being the case, lack of efficiency can be overcome by sheer numbers, and if you handle a bird that is dead or dying from H5N1, or hang out with a lot of bird poop, the Law of Large Numbers is that you'll get infected. Being that one virion that makes it into a cell and sets up shop will crank out 100,000 or so copies of itself, it doesn't take a large number of infected cells to get you into trouble.

The sloppy replication process of the virus also aids in its perpetuation, and is our main concern. Rather than high-fidelity replication that we as humans enjoy, viral replication is more like a big game of 'telephone'. The message is a little corrupted every time it replicates, and you can never tell when the message will be corrupted into 'The combination to infection of human cells is 7-32-78...", and they'll get it right. The theory now of how the 1918 pandemic started is that precisely this process occurred -- random mutation into a virus will all the nastiness of bird influenza, with the capability to infect humans.

The other risk of H5N1 is that another animal that is susceptable to human AND avian viruses will get both at the same time, and the genes for both reassorted into a version that "steals" the human combination and maintains the pathogenicity (ability to cause disease) of the bird flu. Pigs are the main suspect here, which explains why they end up on the chopping block with birds. The upside of this is that not all of the badness of the bird version may make it into the final combined product, but it's still a concern.

There endeth the virology lesson for today.

Preparation and Reaction

As far as what to do when the pandemic hits, the best advice I have seen is to stay put. Trying to go somewhere else in the middle of a pandemic isn't going to help you, wherever you go they'll a) be having problems, too, and b) won't welcome you warmly given that you'll be considered infectious until proven otherwise. People can spread influenza for something like 48 hours before they get symptomatic, so if you do go somewhere and they quarantine you, you'll spend 48 hours with other people, some of whom may be sick. Not ideal.

If you or yours do get sick, the biggest problem in 1918 was a lack of nursing care. Dehydration, especially in kids, is a killer. Get your respiratory rate up to 30 a minute, run a 104 F fever and have a sore throat that makes swallowing feel like gargling glass shards is a recipie for rapid dehydration. The 'drink liquids' thing is not a suggestion, it's a rule. People who get sick on their own are often so ill they can't do for themselves, and in some remote areas like Inuit villages the flu killed everyone in 1918 because nobody was healthy enough to tend to the others. One big advantage of being obese Americans is that we have the reserves to go a week without eating. Not drinking is another matter.

Getting a fever down is a lot easier today when you can go to Wal-Mart and buy 500 ibuprofen for $10. Tylenol, ibuprofen and naproxen sodium are all effective fever reducers, and alternating tylenol and ibuprofen is a trick we use in pedi patients with really resistant fevers -- tyenol every 4 hours (or six, depending on the bottle), and ibuprofen every six hours. The added advantage of NSAIDs is that they help with the muscle aches, keeping hydrated will do that as well. Aspirin works for this, too, but kids especially shouldn't get aspirin because of a rare side-effect called Reye's Syndrome, and adding gastric bleeding problems to a raging influenza is not a recipie for success. Buy one of those oil cans of your NSAID of choice NOW, before you get sick. It'll keep for a couple of years, and you'll probably use them in the meantime.

It's time to go to the hospital when you can't get fluids into someone and have them stay down for more than 24 hours or when people start getting blue around the lips. Your hospital will be overwhelmed, but unless you have the Noah Wyle (TM) Home Intubation And Ventilation Kit, it's the only place you'll be able to find respiratory support or IV fluids. Most hospitals will not be prepared for this, and those that think they're prepared won't be. The US healthcare system is about the best for acute care, but not everywhere all at once, there is limited surge capacity and when your hospital's vent beds are full, that's it -- no vent for you. As previously stated, going somewhere else won't help.

There is some chance for societal breakdown in this, and if that happens, there's little that is a better persuader than a 12-gauge shotgun. I have the Benelli Nova Tactical on order, it's intimidation defined but with BB shot loads it won't go through your neighbor's house. I'm all for being neighborly and helping out others, but when your neighbors start to help themselves, a firearm is a good way to start a conversation about community responsibilities and consequences in Adult Mode. Two-handed firearms are easier to handle and use, so the 12 pump is my choice.

There is a veterinary vaccine that may protect domestic flocks from H5N1, but we'll have to see about that. Living as I do a couple of dozen miles south of a large poultry-producing region, a coming bird flu outbreak is not a welcome event, but I'd be surprised if we don't see it here in bird populations within 12 months. Let me emphasize that you NOT HANDLE DEAD OR DYING/FUNNY ACTING BIRDS. Emphasize this to your kids, now -- being curious they'll be excited to get close to the duck that normally flies away, not understanding the risk.

Meanwhile, pray if it's your orientation for wisdom for the researchers and public health people, stock up a little on basics (food, medicines you need), keep yourself mindful of the news on this issue and GET THE FLU SHOT when it comes out and if you care for adults over 65 get their docs to give them Pneumovax. The 1977 Swine Flu vaccination was a freak, nobody since then has gotten sick from the flu vaccine. Remember, if you get sick you might feel like dying but you probably won't.

I Passed 8th Grade Math

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Algebra is the one basic math that everyone should learn and know by heart. Calculus has some applications and I was a fair calc-jockey at one point in my life, but I would be helpless now. I saved my Calculus book, in part because I will be asked to help the kids with it one day and I need to re-learn it with familiar material.

Geometry is, well, dull. Trigonometry is useful but tedious, trig identities are pain defined for a non-rote memorizer like me.

Algebra, though. Algebra is the bomb.

This is worth watching

Inspiring, unexpected video here. Hollywood only wishes it could write stuff like this, but if someone did it would be dismissed as 'too Pollyanna', 'unrealistic', 'a naked play for emotions'.

Thanks to Jason McElwain, cynicism can stay on the bench when they put the autistic kid into the game, at least for today.

Hat tip to Stephanie Grosz.

Edit: Fixed link.

Am I Going To Be Right...Again?!

Thanks to Gateway Pundit for pointing out in this welcome post that there are signs of Iraqis responding to the attack on the Al-Askariya Mosque with unity and not bloodshed.

Don't throw in the towel, folks. If they can get through this the "impeding civil war" will be seen as something that is occurring primarily in the minds of the media. Always good to put a sharp stick in the eye of those folks, not to mention far better for the Iraqis and for our long-term goals for the region. There's little that peeves Al Qaeda more than Sunnis and Shi'ites demonstrating brotherhood in Islam, and whatever frustrates AQ is most likely good for the rest of us.

UT 1, Ricin 0 (like I said)

Me, yesterday afternoon:

"My first thought is that this is not really ricin, and more laboratory testing will show that in the next week."

Nice to see yourself proven correct. Especially when other, more famous bloggers were a little excitable.

At least when it comes to bioterror, you know where to go for the straight info. I've been interested in the nefarious applications of science for a long, long time, I wrote a paper for a HS biology class called "Nerve Gas: Pesticide for People" back in 1985-6 or so. You, too, can acquire knowledge of biological weapons if you want, read the books I have read:

Biohazard by Ken Alibek and Stephen Handelman. Alibek was the director of the USSR's bioweapons program. This book will curl (or straighten, as appropriate) your hair.

The Ultimate Terrorists by Jessica Stern. Don't remember a lot about this one.

Germs by Judith Miller, et al. Before she went to jail and was fired by the NY Times.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Great read, a near-miss of an Ebola outbreak in the US. What a difference a couple hundred nucleotides can make.

Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. That a terrorist would fly a plane into a building on purpose came as no surprise to anyone who reads Tom Clancy books, we knew about it after reading one of the books prior to this one. This one is about biowarfare, and Clancy may get some details wrong here and there but he does pretty well at helping you think about what a bad, bad thing biowarfare would be. The prequel book to this one (in the Jack Ryan series) is Executive Orders, which also deals with bioterror.

Zinsser Microbiology when you just can't sleep at night or have a pesky door to prop open.

And I learned most of what I know about microbiology from Dr. Dan Brannan at Abilene Christian University, one of those great profs that parachutes out of The Real World and lends a spirit of practicality to otherwise dry academic pursuits. Thanks, Dr. Brannan!

Happy, if disturbing, reading.

Ricin (not Rice) vs. UT

I'll admit, this story is creepy.

A sophomore opens a roll of quarters she's had for months, and out comes a crumbly white powder. She's cognizant of this not being a normal thing, calls the authorities and after laboratory assessment, the result is apparently ricin, an exceptionally toxic biological compound.

This is creepy for more than one reason. First, ricin has natural origins in the castor bean, but you can't just go out and buy it -- which is a good thing. Ricin was known to be toxic since the late 1800s and was developed into a weapon by the US during WW II but never used. The most famous person killed by ricin poisoning was Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident killed in London in 1978 by Bulgarian secret police using a 1.5mm platnium pellet injected into his leg with a modified umbrella. The pellet contained an estimated 500 micrograms (half a gram, barely enough to see) of ricin toxin, and killed him within three days of injection. On a dose basis, ricin is roughly 30x more toxic than VX nerve gas, which is one of the things we wish we could un-invent -- and unlike VX and cyanide and many other nasty things, there really isn't a good treatment for ricin. If you get enough of it, you'll die, and there's not much modern medicine can do. It's a cellular poison, it stops protein synthesis and since protein synthesis is pretty much what your cells are about if you stop that the cells die.

A crumbly powder isn't a really effective means of distributing ricin, there is some suggestion that the humidity Austin is famous for worked to this young lady's advantage, because it's even more deadly inhaled than injected or ingested. A dirty little secret that works in favor of those of us in the civilian population when it comes to biological warfare is that it's really hard to make a powder that will float in the air like a mist. When you make particles small enough to be inhaled, they'll typically clump together due to static electricity. Overcoming the static problem is what separates the pros from the wannabes in biological terror, which is one of the reasons the anthrax from 2001 was a real threat and this particular ricin trick is far less of a threat.

Using money to spread a biological agent works better for infectious agents than for toxins. The first mention of this I remember was in Frank Herbert's book The White Plague, a book I do not recommend, Herbert produced one work of unparalleled genius in the form of Dune and promptly jumped the shark. Money is a good means to spread disease, your momma was right when she told you to not put that in your mouth, but even touching contaminated coins and touching your eye is enough to expose you to highly infectious diseases like influenza. In this case, if the powder didn't aerosolize when the roll was opened, you'd have to ingest the powder, and even an Aggie wouldn't eat the white stuff that came out of a roll of quarters. Aggies are too tough to be killed by anything so pedantic as poison, but they wouldn't eat it anyway.

My first thought is that this is not really ricin, and more laboratory testing will show that in the next week. If this is ricin, given what we know it's most likely the product of some loner crank along the lines of the as-yet-unapprehended Tylenol cyanide poisoner from the 1980s. The presence of this compound at a university suggests the typical greasy-grad-student-with-grievance scenario, I imagine the young lady at the center of the investigation will be contact-traced by the FBI back to her first-grade teacher in an effort to find a suspect. The roll of quarters is a unique method of distribution and if inserted at the bank level it would imply a wider conspiracy aimed at random people -- if the UT chick isn't the primary target but a random bystander intended to cover the death of another, a review of other people who died precipitously with fever in the last several months in central Texas would be in order.

The object lesson, at this point, is don't put money in your mouth, especially if it has white powder on it. We will await further developments.

Rebuilding Something Better

I imagine you've heard by now that a cultural/religious atrocity was perpetrated recently in Iraq. The Al-Askariya Mosque, also called the 'Golden Mosque' in Samarra (north of Baghdad) used to look like this:

Following the application of high explosives by persons unknown, it now looks like this:


From what little I know about the history of Islam, this makes cartoons of Mohammed look like, well, cartoons in comparison -- particularly to Shi'ite Muslims. For a relative and probably incomplete comparison of the emotional impact, imagine if persons unknown blew up the Lincoln Memorial, except that Lincoln isn't such a revered part of our national history that we have festivals where we venerate our political leaders by whipping ourselves with barbed wire and chains. This is as close to the religious heart of a Shi'ite as you can get, it's difficult for me to think of anything more insulting except for blowing the mosque in Najaf that also holds great symbolic importance to the Shi'a.

Who did this is the subject of much speculation. 'Who benefits' would be the forensic question. The Iraqi Sunnis are outnumbered 4:1, so provoking a civil war isn't in their interests. The mosque stood in Sunni-controlled territory for a thousand years and all through Saddam's reign, it's unlikely that a local Sunni got a wild hair and decided to redecorate. It's possible a Shi'a group did this as pretext for a civil war, but that's pretty extreme and deep into 9/11 Conspiracy Theory territory. The most likely suspect is an Al-Qaeda affiliated group, for a couple of reasons. First, as extremely fundamentalist Sunnis (Salafists) they have a basic objection to any memorialization of the dead, this is a cartoon of Mohammed to them in terms of representing idolatry and shrines like this are one of the reasons they consider Shi'a infidels and apostates. Second, somebody who knew what they were doing did this, AQ doesn't lack in demolitions knowledge. Third, it lets them poke a stick in the eye of all Shi'a without any civilian casualties and to this point the car bombing hasn't worked -- and had the unintended side effect of embarassing even their putative allies in Iraq. My money is on Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq as the operators for this job. This wouldn't be the first thing of cultural significance Islamofascists have destroyed, the Buddhas of Bamiyan was one, and not the first religious sites they attacked, they are blamed for the attacks on seven churches in Iraq on January 29, 2006.

Why this happened is pretty clear - the goal is to start a civil war between the Shi'a and Sunni. Shi'a religious festivals have been bombed for years following our invasion, and the Shi'a are taking it on the chin in terms of terrorist attacks. Al Qaeda can't function safely in a democratic environment, their goal is to eliminate governments like Iraq's budding representative one and replace them with a Taliban-like system with Salafists in charge. They benefit short-term from lawlessness and long-term from the protection and assistance of a compatible government -- and the current government of majority Shi'a and Kurds isn't to their liking.

When this happened is also important, because Iraq is currently in the process of trying to put together a national unity government comprised of Kurds, Shi'a and Sunnis, the big three demographic blocks that make up Iraq. This makes it really hard for the Shi'a political umbrella organization, the UIA, to sit at the same table with the Sunnis, and if you want a civil war (and to keep the Sunni politician from accepting the minority role that their population gives them in a democratic system) this is a pretty good way to start it. Begin a cycle of atrocity and reprisal, then back out of the way and let several hundred years of sectarian tension play out. It didn't help that the first thing the UIA did was to condemn this as a Sunni attack, now the Sunnis are angry and are waiting for an apology before going back to talks about forming the government. The voting is done, the questions revolve around who gets to head what Ministries, in particular the Interior, Defense and Oil Ministries.

The remaining question is How Iraq is going to respond to this challenge. The easy and pat answer is that a civil war will occur, the DailyKos addendum to that is "because the US intervened." Almost beyond my personal expectations and strangely in fullfillment of my hopes, this doesn't seem to be occurring. On the day of the attack there were random attacks on Sunni mosques, resulting in the deaths of at least 3 Sunni imams, but so far as I can tell, there have been no Sunni reprisals despite a reported 130 people killed in random and not-so-random violence. Sunni mosques in Baghdad were reported to be broadcasting Shi'a prayers of mourning from their speakers. There is anger, for sure, but there are encouraging signs that rather than forcing the Iraqis apart on sectarian lines, this attack is bringing them together in outrage at the people who perpetrated the attack, not each other.

The largely unsung hero in our interactions with Iraq is Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the religious leader of the Shi'a who, unlike his religious bretheren in Iran, is not seeking personal political power. His first move was to call for seven days of mourning -- and peace. He's an old, not particularly well man, and Iraq had better get a couple of power transitions under its belt before he dies or the Shi'a could be a real problem. He seems to be opposed to the Islamic Republic model that is Shi'a practice in Iran, and quite frankly one Islamic Republic on the model of Iran is plenty. The one good thing about being Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the President of Iran, is that you don't have to think too much about who to blame for any tragedy, the stock answer is "Zionists and occupiers". Good to know he's got the school solution down on that one.

I remain hopeful and prayerful that this attack will demonstrate the futility and waste that will accompany a civil war. This will be only the first mosque blown to bits if there is a civil war, I would hope everyone there would take a minute to consider that, and who their enemy really is. More 'Iraqis' and fewer hyphenated variants would do everybody some good.

The Ports Thing

This whole Dubai Ports World issue is ticking me off, if for no other reason than the level of poor knowledge being displayed. I can't decide which is worse, the willful ignorance of the folks spinning this for political gain, or the genuine honest ignorance that is going to play as anti-Arab hatred when Al Jazeera and friends get their hooks into the story.

It goes like this: a British company, Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation (P&O for short) owns the concessions to operate six ports in the US. P&O is selling out to Dubai Ports World, a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, which means Dubai Ports World (hereafter, DPW) will be running the commercial operations at six US ports, in addition to all the ports worldwide where the commercial concession is owned by P&O. This includes ports in the UK, Canada, Europe, Asia, South America and elsewhere.

This is not selling our ports to 'The Arabs.' The ports are owned by the states and localities that built them, just as they were when P&O operated them.

This is not outsourcing security of our ports. The exact same security will be in place for all of the ports. That security is a function of the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security. All the port operator does is handle manifests and load/unload along with scheduling of ship arrivals and departures.

This is not giving US jobs to a foreign company. US unionized longshoremen will still be loading and unloading the ships, just as they were when P&O did the scheduling and maintenence and collected docking fees, etc.

This does not change any current contracts that the local entities that own the ports have with P&O. If they want to cancel the contracts they're free to do so under the terms of their existing contracts for port operations.

There is no American company in the bidding for P&O. The other bidder at one point was a company in Singapore, it would have been taken over by another foreign company in any event. There is one US port operation company: Halliburton.

Most importantly, the risk for shipping is not what we load to go elsewhere, it's what's loaded elsewhere to come here. Shipping a rogue nuclear device OUT of the United States is not as big of a security risk as loading one into a ship in a foreign country that detonates at the docks at Long Beach or Newark. From this standpoint, DPW has been involved in shipping security for years as it has been operating multiple Asian ports including at least seven ports in China. Thousands of containers a day leave DPW-operated ports for our shores, and have done so for years. DPW has cooperated with our shipping security requirements post-9/11 since we put them in place, they're a known quantity to our government because of years of experience in dealing with them.

I understand the concern of people who aren't being given the whole story. The White House needs to do a much better job at laying out what the situation actually is, that DPW has been cooperative with our security efforts and that no local control is being ceded over the ports. I understand why people would be upset with the belief that "We're sellin' our ports to the Arabs!", but that's just not the case here. What bothers me is that there are people who either should know better or can ask a staffer and be informed of the truth of the situation, but who prefer to grandstand. They may be working for short-term political gain leading up to the 2006 elections, but they're overlooking a larger long-term point.

The United Arab Emirates are one of the few Arab countries that look favorably on the United States. Yes, two of the 9/11 hijackers were from the UAE, and some of the money for the 9/11 operation went through their banks. Well, all of the 7/7 suicide bombers were British, so wouldn't that suggest that P&O is a security risk? The money for 9/11 operations also came through US banks, including banks in Florida, should we drop all government ties to companies that use the same banks in Florida? The terrorism threat from the UAE is a canard, and further proof of the weakness of the terrorism argument is that no other country with a P&O-operated port is objecting to the deal, including France and the UK.

The big long-term issue is that it is as important to be friendly to our friends as it is to be implacable foes to our enemies if we're going to change perception of the United States in the Arab world. Chuckleheads like Al Gore mount podiums in Saudi Arabia and expound about how persecuted a minority Muslims are in the United States, which I personally thought was bald-faced lying -- but then who backs him up but Governor John Corzine of New Jersey, Senator Hillary Clinton and worst of all a fair number of Republicans. Now we do look as if we're rejecting an Arab company out of hand when we didn't have a problem with a British one. In comparison to our media and our politicians I don't think Al Jazeera will get the facts wrong about what DPW actually does in ports, because the facts of what DPW actually does make the US out to look far more racist than any story they can cook up. How completely demoralizing would a rejection like this be to moderate Muslims who have to stare down Islamofascists daily and tell them that the US regards Muslims as friends and equals, followed by the soft thud of a US knife in their back?

When there's a company that happens to be owned by Muslims, a company that participates in our security initiatives and is from a country that is willing to be our friend when that friendship puts them in the crosshairs of Al Qaeda, we need to not stand in the way of that deal. Economic ties are a great way to align the interests of moderates in the Middle East with those of the United States, primarily because people don't get shot in the deal.

'Trust and Verify' said Ronald Reagan. It's time we started doing that.


EDIT: Thanks to Jim Geraghty at TKS on National Review for his kind mention. :)

New Word Of The Day

I note that the Oxford English Dictionary 'adds' words to the English language that achieve common usage or cultural significance and rise above simple slang. 'Blog' was added a year or so ago IIRC, and 'truthiness', which is the act of discussing something one wishes were true or as if it was true, as opposed the simple 'truth'.

Well, here is my entry for the Zeitgeist Sweepstakes of 2006:

Beheadering (v): 1. The shutting down of a website by hackers motivated by their dedication to the Muslim faith, e.g., "That Danish website where we got those cool wooden toys was beheadered yesterday. We couldn't check our order status all day."

Michelle Malkin has a big writeup on all the DDoS and defacement attacks that have hit or tried to hit multiple sites since the Cartoon War began. Of course, she doesn't have my word to describe the act, so she's forced to use long, cumbersome workarounds like 'Islamist War On The Internet' and 'Virtual Jihad'. 'Beheadering' works better, IMO.

And BTW, what about this silly Cartoon thing anyway? This is such an AstroTurf (as opposed to grassroots) protest, one of the leaders of the MMA, and Islamist political group in Pakistan was on BBC (heard it on XM) and said that in principle they are against violence, but since the Danish cartoonists aren't in Pakistan (presumably to be torn apart by the mob), they have to lash out at anything Western they can find, so they burn down the KFC and attack a South Korean-owned bus terminal.

Right.

I'm sure that if I were Muslim I would find it offensive to have someone depict something my hard-core fundamentalist Imam tells me should never be depicted. But it seems idiotic on the face of it to decry a picture of Muhammaed with a bomb in his turban as convicting all Muslims as being violent extremists, and then go be a violent extremist to demonstrate how angry being falsely accused of being a violent extremist makes you. Does this make sense to anyone else? Logically, a peaceful demonstration would seem to be a better choice, but I guess the effigy vendors in Pakistan would suffer if there weren't protests in which to burn things, so it's good for some businesses, in a way. I saw that they burned the Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen in effigy...seeing as most people don't know what the Danish PM looks like I find that to be quite silly. I mean, other than a T-shirt that says 'Anders Fogh Rasmussen' there would be no way to know which light-haired white person was being burned in effigy. Makes me wonder if they just put some steel-rim glasses on an old Carter effigy and burned that, I dunno. The logistics of acting like fools in a group for TV cameras is just nothing I had considered before today.

So remember, pass along the term 'Beheadering' whenever your favorite website gets crashed by Muslim extremists, and remember that you heard it here first.

And do buy Danish if you get the chance. Havarti is probably the best cheese in the world, you can have a smooth creamy cheese experience and support the right to free expression in the same bite.

More to the 'Save Farris' Story

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of further background on Farris Hassan, the peripatetic high school journalism student that supposedly went to Iraq for a school assignment. As is typical, there is more to this story than AP originally reported.

1. His high school has no journalism course.
2. His dad was arrested in 1985 for forging Iraqi passports and military IDs during the Iran-Iraq war, the most logical use of these is for Iranian agents to have infiltrated the Iraqi army.
3. While in Beirut, he met with the local leader of Hezbollah.
4. His father was not only aware of his activities, he had authorized the absence from school and was in Iraq himself during these events.

In Michelle's words, "Hmmm." This doesn't sound like an Honors project gone way off track, this sounds a lot more like CIA agent training. I think Langley should look into a scholarship and job offer for this kid, if he's reliable.

Texas 41 USC 38, or Texas Won, USC Two.

Man, what a great football game.

Using the magic of TiVo I went to church, helped put the kids to bed and still managed to catch up to the game by halftime with judicious use of fast forward during the commercials and halftime shows, as well as the innumerable pauses and replays that constitute the majority of televised football.

The male crowd was thin at church tonight. My father, who never misses church, must have had the catarrh or something. I explained to my wife as I stomped slump-shouldered to the car that this was just the Best Football Game Of The Entire Season In Any League, but I went anyway. Turns out I didn't end up missing anything but the commercials and the game just ended and I can finally breathe. God does provide, including the occasional show-stopper finish, and this is one game I am glad I sat through.

Observations:

- Whoever did conditioning for the Longhorn defense should be taken out and flogged. What's all this about "cramping"? In California, in the winter? The Texas D did very well in the first half and only decided to show up for the last two minutes of the second half. Yes they won but it was more stress than I needed.

- Reggie Bush is exceptional and he'll be a marquee player in the pros. Matt Leinart will need a great offensive line to do so well, Bush could run behind a junior high school O-line and still get a thousand yards a season. The other RB for USC, White, was superb as well. If he's not a senior USC should have a decent running game next year.

- Vince Young is a complete master of the college game. I have read about things "slowing down" for high-performing athletes, but Young was so calm in the pocket that he almost looked asleep, if sleeping people can run for 200 yards and pass for over 250. He'll do exceptionally well in the pros, his passing was great and he runs like a deer. If he comes back next year (and he says he will, though I'm sure his asking price in the NFL is probably second only to Reggie Bush's), Texas has a shot at going back-to-back, particularly with their young RB corps.

- Michael Griffin from the Texas defense should be second for MVP, he was always on or around the ball and that pick in the end zone in the first half changed the game.

- The Texas offensive line is fantastic. I hope they can replace the three graduating seniors, 'cause if they do Texas will be #1 again FOR SURE (if Young stays).

I may be an Aggie (by grad school, I'll always be a Wildcat at heart) but I'll doff the maroon hat to Texas for their spectacular performance tonight. Way to go fellas, you just got Mack Brown's contract renewed for life.

iTedium

Marci finally coughed up something she wanted that she didn't have, about 7pm on December 22, and of all things she picked an iPod.

I've been ripping MP3s (of CDs I own -- without having to learn from the example of Durwood Pickle, who was in a small group Bible class with my in-laws at Waterview C of C for years) since 1999 or so, and have ripped almost our entire collection, so there's plenty of content for her to take advantage of. My personal MP3 player, a Creative Nomad Zen that began life as a 30GB model and has seen two additional hard-drive upgrades due to drive failure (everything bounces once, with the general exception of hard drives) to 40GB, currently has something like 33GB full of songs. You want it, I got it.

The hard part was getting the iPod before Christmas. Having had hard drive issues with my own player, we were going to go with a flash drive (no moving parts = nothing to fail). The BestBuy price for the 2GB iPod Nano was $199, but for $50 more you could double the RAM to 4GB. I wanted the 4GB one, but as it turns out so did everyone else, making the 4GB model in essence, vaporware. I was as surprised as anyone to find a 2GB iPod Nano on December 23, and so home it came. Success! As it turns out, 2GB is enough to hold about 50 hours or so of music depending on compression. Seeing as the battery in the Nano will last for about 12-14 hours, 2GB seems practically excessive, score a point for the practicality of the wife.

This past Sunday I finally sat down to open the box and load the player. Turns out there was a copy of most of our MP3s and WMAs on Marci's computer, so I figured we load iTunes, and away we go.

*Buzzzz* Thanks for playing.

Apparently Apple thinks that if you're buying an iPod you're new to the digital music world. When iTunes (the software you load on your computer) starts up, it ought to ask you if it can look on your hard drive and find any MP3s or other music files -- but it doesn't. At least Windows Media Player will auto-search your hard drive by hitting F3 and catalog your music files, but if iTunes will do this it's pretty demure about telling you about this capability.

What iTunes will do is let you 'Add a Folder' to the list of music it knows about. This would work well if your music was all in a disorganized blob in a single folder. In essence, iTunes can only deal with one 'container' of music at a time, so if you're tidy and fastidious with your ripping and have each album in a separate folder, you're in for some drudgery.

The other kicker is that Apple doesn't 'do' a file format called WMA, or Windows Media Audio. If you drop a CD into a Windows computer and tell Windows Media Player to rip your music, you're most likely going to get a WMA file, which isn't all bad. MP3 is a good way to take an audio file and make it small enough to carry around, but it's a relatively old compression algorithm, and there are newer ones that can make files of equal audio quality with less size. Apple's AAC is one, and WMA is another. For a given file size, WMAs will sound better than MP3s, which is one of the reasons I went to WMA when I switched from Windows98 to Windows2000 and WinXP. About half of my collection is WMA, the other half is MP3.

Steve Jobs owns about 70% of the MP3 player market with the iPod line, and his position is that he doesn't have to play WMA files on his device, in part because if you buy music from iTunes you buy AACs and if you buy songs from other online vendors you may get MP3s or WMAs. Why make it easier for the competition to sell songs? At least with iTunes and Windows Media Player 9 (or 10) you can convert your existing, unprotected WMA files to AAC files -- which is what I spent literally four hours doing early into Monday morning this week. Thus, iTedium. At least I managed to read the latest Wired and National Review issues cover-to-cover.

Marci likes the iPod but hates the earbuds. I'm going to have to get her some Shure E2c earbuds to match mine (mainly so I can get mine back from her), but she apparently has the world's tiniest ear canals.

I'm Not Old...

King Arthur: Old woman.
Dennis: Man.
King Arthur: Man, sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?
Dennis: I'm 37.
King Arthur: What?
Dennis: I'm 37. I'm not old.

Upon awakening on my most recent birthday, this was the first thing I thought of, which means a) I need to reduce my intake of British comedy and b) I guess I have a sense of humor (at least) about the whole aging thing. Got my hair cut yesterday, there's a few silver threads in the weave but not too many at this point.

I've lost about 35-40 pounds this year, I'm in considerably better shape this birthday than last, though more activity in 2006 will be in order since I have a basically sedentery job. It's the eternal struggle, I suppose, until the Eternal Rest. Either way, it's a good ride.

Save Farris!

This guy gets points for adaptability, initiative and luck, but probably sets a new record for lack of judgement. Kid hops a flight to Kuwait, tries to get into Iraq, fails, calls his parents, flies to Lebanon and spends a week with family friends, then flies into Baghdad and presents himself at the AP offices "to work". Sixteen years old.

The AP calls the MPs, and Farris gets bundled on a flight back to the US this morning.

Quite an adventure, but not really the brightest move ever.

What did I get for Christmas? Addicted!

Hope all you folks are having a great holiday. We've seen almost all of our family on both sides, and enjoyed each other's company immensely. As far as I know, everyone has either gotten what they wanted or something better, so that's a pretty good score on the Gift Index.

Maddie got clay and art materials. Ross got the Mace Windu ForceFX Lightsaber. Ellie got a drum set. Marci got lots of cleaning equipment, body armor and earplugs (actually, she got an iPod Nano). What did Daddy get?

Well, besides some books and a game or two I wanted for the PSP (and some clothes that are on backorder -- "Ships within 24 hours" my foot), I got Guitar Hero. Sounds lame, you say? Well, that was what I thought, too.

First, I'm a techno-snob, and the PS/2 is getting a bit long in the tooth. The XBox is really a more sophisticated system, and both the XBox and the PS/2 are pocket calculators next to the multi-CPU 3.2 Gigahertzness that is the XBox 360. I had mentally written off the PS/2, and even though I take magazines like Game Informer, PS/2 titles didn't draw my interest. The PS/3 will be out this spring/summer, and the PS/2 is a legacy now. I had vaguely read a review or two about this game, the capsule review is "Dance Dance Revolution with a Guitar", and since I was awful at DDR that was all I needed to know. NEXT!

Then a couple of Saturdays ago we were in Best Buy (known in our house as 'The Daddy Store') and Guitar Hero was the demo game. Not wanting to dismiss the game entirely until I had played it, I picked up the half-size guitar with a strum bar and five fret-buttons, cued up "More Than A Feeling" by Boston and I. ROCKED. OUT. MAN.

The buttons you're supposed to press slide down a video fret board to you, and you have to strum to hit the right "notes". If you're on time and on the right note, the guitar part in the song plays and sounds like you're expecting. If you're not on time or if you hit the wrong note, you get the plaintive "ploink" that all beginning (or in my case retired beginning) guitar players know and hate -- the Muffed Note Of Failure.

Aaahh...but success is the closet thing a lamer like me with a barely-functional left hand (I'm just clumsy, not handicapped) will ever come to playing in a band and making music. I was hooked immediately, and would have bought it then had BB had any in stock. They didn't so I 'had' to go back several times last week to 'see' if they had any more -- and play 'Smoke On The Water' and 'I Love Rock & Roll' a few more times.

Yes, I know this is ridiculous, and that point was brought home to me while standing in the aisle at Best Buy, proud of myself for finishing a song and not getting booed offstage, when Platnium-selling Country Music Artist Neal McCoy walked down the aisle behind me, smiled and waved. That kind of put it in perspective, sort of like playing Schroeder's piano really well in front of Van Cliburn. Stick to reading films, buddy.

Nevertheless, I finally found the game at Circuit City, opened it last night and I think I'm getting calluses from the non-existant guitar strings, and probably carpal tunnel, too. I've beat it on 'Easy', and now I'm just a few songs away from beating it again on 'Medium', with 'Expert' and 'Hard' left to go. The 'Easy' level only used combinations of three keys, Medium uses four of the five fret keys and a slightly more frenetic pace, which I assume will become close to impossible at the higher levels. Funny thing is, the less I think about what to do the better I perform...go figure. I guess the music interpretation and rhythm prediction portions of my brain are not used to taking the foreground.

If you have a PS/2, get Guitar Hero. Bring your guitar to my house when you come visit and I can stomp you (unless you're David or Todd, in which case I'm probably in over my head) in Head-to-Head Mode. It ROCKS!

The Corollary to Godwin's Law

For any of you that are political message board junkies like me, you've probably heard of Godwin's Law, which states that:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

This has become such a fact of life on the Internet that an appeal to Nazism (also known as reducto ad Hitlerium) has become the rhetorical equivalent of waving a white flag.

But there is some push-back, because sometimes a comparison to the Nazis is apt and sometimes it's not just a "Bush=Hitler!" statement but a parallel to economic conditions, etc. I am observing behavior online among some internet veterans that leads me to believe that Godwin's should be expanded thusly:

Duvall's Corollary:

The longer a political thread goes on without reference to Hitler or the Nazis, the probability of the mention of Stalin approaches 1.

I think this about covers it. People too smart to mention Hitler and subject themselves to ridicule now find themselves Hitler's stunt-dummy Stalin to substitute for the horrific excesses of the Nazis -- which, as bad as they were, were actually a mediocre effort compared to Stalin's Great Terror, his mass purges and planned starvation of Ukraine. Hitler killed millions, Stalin killed tens of millions AND outlasted Hitler.

So there you have it. I have submitted my entry to Wikipedia, we'll see what happens.