What A Wife

It appears that the blog is rapidly devolving into a shotgun site, so to speak, but I have to brag on my lovely wife, who is not only smokin' hot and unbelievably organized, but has also decided that she wants to learn to shoot Sporting Clays.

Marci is a good pistol shot considering the relatively poor quality of instruction (mine) and the few times she's been to the range. She says it's the steady hands of an old-school graphic designer, but I think there's also a certain amount of innate ability there. After listening to me rave about Sporting Clays, she's decided that this is what she wants to try for a husband-wife sport, and I'm pleased beyond words.

Sporting Clays is in many ways a lot like golf, in that if you begin and learn bad habits you'll spend a lot of time unlearning the things that "feel right" but are actually wrong, so this past weekend we headed off to Prairie Creek Sporting Clays in nearby Gladewater, a Sporting Clays course and the home of Steve Brown. Steve is a Level III NSCA-certified instructor, the highest level of certification in Sporting Clays. He's so dedicated to teaching that he, a right-handed and right-eye dominant man, shot left handed for a year to be able to understand what it's like to shoot cross-dominant (when your dominant eye and dominant hand are opposite) and to be a better instructor. There's not a lot of people that would intentionally handicap themselves that way once they've reached the apex of their sport, but he did it to be a better teacher, something I can respect.

Marci is left-hand and left-eye dominant, so that's not going to be her problem. To be honest, after talking with Steve for an hour Saturday morning, Marci is even more enthusiastic about our upcoming actual lesson with guns and everything this coming Friday. Steve has a lot of empirical experience, and has inferred a lot about neurophysiology and how your brain works while shooting. In wingshooting instruction there are two schools, for lack of better descriptors the "instinctual" school and the "computational" school. Strong adherents of each school find no validity in the other and there are sometimes heated debates about the "proper" method of instruction, but Steve's experience and discussions with investigators at MIT who delve into visual processing may be the Grand Unified Theory of Wingshooting.

What was fascinating in hearing him discuss the debate and the underlying visual-neural processes was that he was explaining both my own shooting experience and my experience in sports in general. Apparently, it depends on what part of your visual receptors you're paying more attention to, the fovea (sharp central vision) or the periphery (the rest). Steve says the image in the fovea, the narrow cone of central sharpest vision is processed virtually instantaneously, and that the information from that perception is available immediately to your subconscious motor control. When you're tracking an object with this sharp, central vision there is no conscious calculation involved in shooting it, my experience of this kind of shooting is that it "feels" mentally like you're reaching out with your hand to slap down the target rather than consciously firing the shotgun.

The other way that you can hit a target is with brute-force computation, and in my experience this is not as natural-feeling as the "reach out and slap" experience. The peripheral vision is not processed in real time, and can induce a delay of up to 2/10th of a second, meaning that you are typically behind on a flying target. When this happens, my "inner" Fire Control Director will observe a bird in flight and give me a big shrug of the conceptual shoulders as to the time and place to shoot. That is never a good feeling, and results in a "lost bird" (miss) often as not. It's like my left brain gives up on the computations and I'm on my own.

What's really interesting to me is that I have experienced precisely the same thing on the golf course. The best golf shots I hit are practically out-of-body experiences, I have to disconnect or distract the computational parts of my brain, and my inner subconscious golfer, who actually knows how to make the shot, is able to direct my motion to the desired outcome. When I stand over a golf ball and find myself thinking intensely about what I have to do with this particular shot, more often than not I don't achieve the desired result.

Something else that Steve mentioned also resonated well, that the subconscious does not respond directly to words or mathematical equations or higher-order descriptors of language. You can't speak directly to your subconscious, it understands metaphors and feelings better than words. In practice, you can tell yourself (as I do, often, on the golf course) to "slow down" or "follow through" without any apparent effect. But visualizing molases slowly pouring out of a jar on a cold morning will get the idea of "slow" across to your subconscious systems.

This is a problem for me in particular, Steve said, because I rely so much on the logical and computational parts of my psyche. If I didn't have ready access to them, I wouldn't have my current job and wouldn't have stuck through an extra four years of schooling and residency. My fallback defense for a challenging situation is to try to think harder, because that works for most everything else I do. In a sports or physical performance situation, that is probably the wrong thing to do, because conscious interference will actually degrade performance. He said that there is a place for thinking in Sporting Clays, but that place is before you begin shooting, not when the shotgun is on your shoulder and the bird is in the air. I have to believe that this concept will help me with golf, as well. "Swing thoughts" are to be considered before the swing, and should be more of the allegorical and metaphorical variety, rather than brute force commands with physiologic monitoring in near-real time. Basically, think before you act, then act without thinking.

It was a fascinating conversation, you generally don't expect to hear about neurophysiology and visual processing when you go to talk to a fella from East Texas about shooting a shotgun. Marci and I are both looking forward to Friday and bustin' some birds.

As far as the shotgun selection goes, Steve said that left-handed folks shoot right-eject semi-auto shotguns without difficulty all the time, and that about 60% of his female clients shot semiautos, with the other 40% shooting over-unders. When talking about the relative merits of both, he got as far as "The over-under is much easier to clean, if that's important to you," before Marci and I shared a knowing look. Neat freak wife = over-under shotgun. He also told the story of his own wife, who started with a custom 28-gauge and came in third in her first tournament. Someone told her, "You shot really well, if you used a 20-gauge you probably would have done better." So she got a 20-gauge, practiced, and came in second at the next tournament, at which some helpful soul said, "You probably would have won if you had used a 12-gauge." Needless to say, in Steve's personal and expensive experience, he felt Marci should use a 12-gauge with reduced-recoil loads to begin with. He has a beater Beretta AL391 with a ladies-length stock for her, and I imagine she'll start with a semi-auto on Friday. I also imagine there is a Beretta Silver-something over-under in her future.






I don't know why, but there's just something inherently cool about a beautiful, intelligent woman who can blast things with a shotgun, and asks you to take her to the range. Pics and a report this weekend!

The New (S)hotness

Note: I promised more than a whole war ago to review my Benelli Nova Tactical pump-action shotgun, and before the last war I wrote a whole article with pictures and everything only to have a Blogger service outing wipe out the whole thing before I could save it. And since I had promised that review next, I have to write this before I get anything else out, so here it is.

If there's anything that convinced me of the need for personal protection, it was the breakdown in social order that followed Hurricane Katrina. Now, New Orleans was never highly-regarded for social order, probably part of its appeal, but there's something about portable firepower that has a way of convincing ne'er-do-wells that things are actually better with the cops around. Cops have rules. Homeowners, eh, not so much.

When it comes to firepower, one definition is "the relative capacity for delivering fire on a target". In firearms literature, this is usually some combination of rapidity of fire combined with the impact of fire on the target, with some debate about slower & heavier vs. faster & smaller. One thing that is relatively not debated is the apex of short-range defensive weapons available to civilians: concealed-carry concerns aside, the winner is always the shotgun.

Seeing as the shotgun is a smoothbore weapon as at home in the 18th century as the 21st, this would seem to be counter-intuitive. Part of the reason for the utility of the shotgun is the inherent flexibility in choice of projectile. Shotguns can shoot birdshot (tiny pellets), buckshot (multiple large pellets between .17 and .36 caliber), and slugs (one single large ball of lead or copper). You can hunt anything from dove to bear with a shotgun, and have a reasonable chance of success. In addition to the metallic projectiles, there is bizarre variety of other projectiles that can be loaded into a 12-gauge barrel that is .729 inches in diameter, from beanbags to little darts (flechettes) to illuminating rounds to bags of metallic poweder designed to blow a lock apart without killing anyone on the other side. The shotgun survives in part due to its flexibility.

But the original claim was in regard to short-range firepower, and a bit of math is due here. The fastest pistol shooter in the world is Jerry Miculek of Bossier City, Lousiana. Mr. Miculek can fire eight .356-diameter .38 Special rounds in one second, and cover the group with the palm of his (large) hand at ten feet. He's a freak, and he's the best. Heckler & Koch's famous MP-5 submachine gun is a 9mm weapon reknown for reliability and controllability in full-auto fire. A trained operator can fire 13 9mm (.356 diameter) rounds in one second, and most likely hit his target with nearly all of them.

By comparison, a single round of 12-gauge 000 buck fires eight .36-caliber balls in one trigger pull. Assuming you can rack the slide and pull the trigger in one second (not difficult at all), a shotgun user can get 16 projectiles on target faster than any other hand-held means. With proper motivation, three shots a second are possible for a total of 24 aimed projectiles per second. And if you shoot a slug, the impact is appreciably greater, with a 429-grain (one ounce) lead slug moving out at 1600 fps or greater. By comparison a .44 Magnum fires a 240-grain bullet at roughly the same speed. The impact is significantly more powerful at short range than all but the heaviest big-game rifles. In short, a shotgun has 100% more firepower than the fastest pistol shooter in the world, at least 20% more than a fully-automatic submachinegun, and you can buy them with nothing more than a Form 4473. Ain't this a great country?

So the 12-gauge shotgun owns the flexibility and firepower titles. And a further feather in its cap is the fact that shotguns are less likely to be dangerous at long ranges in case you miss. The round projectiles of a shotgun lose energy in the air much easier than aerodynamic bullets, even for strictly defensive purposes you must be sure of your backstop up to 3 miles beyond your target with a rifle like an AR-15 or AK-47, and even pistols pack a punch at long range. Using a weapon defensively, a major goal is to not shoot through walls and injure noncombatants, and to not cause injuries to those uninvolved. Shotgun shot in the BB range (.17-caliber) is not predicted to penetrate a wall with lethal force, and is not expected to be even injurious beyond 80 yards or so. It can be disconcerting to have birdshot fall on you on the Sporting Clays course, but it's unlikely to hurt you. Properly used, a shotgun will hurt what needs hurting and protect what needs protecting.

And as far as the pump-action, it's reliable and simple and requires less cleaning than a semi-automatic weapon. It's relatively insensitive to ammo choices and won't balk at light or heavy loads. Plus, the distinctive sound of a pump-action shotgun being loaded has a cachet and deterrent effect all its own.

When it comes to buying a pump, there are numerous options from Winchester/FN, Remington, Mossberg, Maverick and a variety of foreign makers as well as specialty manufacturers like Wilson Combat's Scattergun Technologies division. Making a personal defense shotgun generally involves obtaining a shotgun with a shortened barrel, to allow for maneuverability in enclosed spaces. Different sights may be selected and an extended magazine added to increase the number of rounds carried, a small magazine capacity being one of the drawbacks of a shotgun. I considered the FN Tactical Police model, and the Mossberg 590 series, but they're both a little more than I wanted to spend. Instead of buying a Remington 870 or a Maverick 88 and doing all of this work myself, I went with the Benelli Nova Tactical.

Ordered from the factory, it comes with a legal 18.5" improved cylinder barrel and "ghost-ring" sights well-suited for fast and accurate target acquisition. The Nova came out in the 1990s, and has been proven over time to be a reliable and simple design. The forend and stock are plastic to reduce weight and signs of wear, with a plastic receiver holding a metal insert for strength. The unitary stock prevents adding a pistol grip or folding stock, two things that other than the Knoxx CompStock I find to be unnecessary.

Being unable to leave well-enough alone, I added a Weaver rail to accept a secondary sight like an EOTech or Aimpoint, and a magazine extension tube from TacStar. Benelli has unaccountably stopped selling magazine extensions to civilians, and rather than paying $150 for one on E-Bay I went with the TacStar aftermarket one for $50 and also added a "sidesaddle" shell carrier on the left side of the receiver that holds four extra rounds for faster reloads or flexibility in load selection. The pump action allows me to switch quickly between slug and buckshot depending on the range to the threat. I can put a slug on target to about 50 yards or so, which is a relatively long shot for buckshot and gives me -- again -- flexibility.

The gun itself was $371, the Weaver rail plus installation was $105, the mag extension was $50 and the shell carrier $30, for an all-up cost of $556 or so, tax and shipping included. Compared to the Scattergun Technology offerings, which start at a grand or more, this seems to be a rather cost-effective system. The Nova is one of the few shotguns, especially in this price range, to allow use of 3-1/2 inch 12-gauge shells for shooting at geese and, I guess, tanks and APCs. I don't plan to use these, the standard 2-3/4" shells work fine and with the magazine extension I can carry seven in the tube and one in the chamber, for a total of 8 shots. Added to the four on the sidesaddle, that's an even dozen 12-gauge rounds on or in the gun, enough to deal with nearly any eventuality. Empty and with the stated modifications, it weighs 7.6 lbs and handles well. Pumps can be stiff from the factory, this one is not. The ghost-ring sights are adjustable if need be, and work very well for aiming. The trigger is smooth and doesn't have much in the way of creep or overtravel, at least in my opinion. It's not glass-rod smooth, but this isn't a target rifle.

So it looks intimidating as heck, particularly when being held by someone as big as me, but how does it shoot? The Wife and I took a trip to the lovely East Texas Rifle and Pistol Club for some shooting. As I had never before fired slugs or buckshot, I went to Academy and loaded up on Remington Express (i.e., inexpensive) 1 oz. slugs and No. 4 buckshot (.24-caliber), tossed in some IPSC targets of roughly humanoid shape and drove the few miles to the club.

East Texas Rifle & Pistol Club, one of the five ranges

Having recently fired a couple hundred rounds of #7 1/2 shot at the ACU Sporting Clays event (where our team took third without practicing, have I mentioned that?), I had some recent memory of what recoil in a gas-operated semiautomatic shotgun is like, and this brings me to the other drawback of shotguns. They do not repeal Newton's Laws, if you're throwing a lot downrange, it will throw a lot back at you. Standard slugs have considerable recoil, more than my brother's .308 and more than I have fired previously in a shoulder-mounted weapon. Not enough to make me flinch, but enough to make me know that something powerful just happened. The short barrel (9.5 inches shorter than my Beretta AL391) and light weight (8-9 lbs loaded) of this shotgun are no help in this regard. If the Nova had the ability to add aftermarket stocks I would probably go with the Knoxx Compstock as I have seen this recommended in many publications. As it is, I will probably shoot my Remington Express for practice and carry Remington Reduced-Recoil Slugs. Why get beat up? Benelli also offers a mercury weight system in the stock to add another 13 ounces, but I have heard varying reports on the effectiveness of this addition.

Before:

And after: As you can see from the target, fired standing offhand at 25 yards, it's accurate enough for combat purposes and leaves BIG holes, the diameter of my index finger. Any of those hits is going to be instantly incapacitating and most likely lethal.

I fired two rounds each of #4 buckshot at 10 and 15 yards. A pic of me in action:

Shot doesn't spread as much as you'd think, but sometimes more than you want. The rule of thumb is that it spreads one inch a yard, so even at close ranges you still have to aim a shotgun. It's easier to aim with two hands, though, so it works out pretty well compared to a pistol. The larger holes are where the plastic wad that holds the shot in the barrel punched the paper.

Ten yards:

Fifteen yards:

That's 27 .24-caliber pellets per shot, moving out at about 1200fps. This is like you and your 26 best friends firing one shot from one of those cheesy little Raven .25 ACP pistols all at the same target at the same time. Lots of little holes do make a mess. At 15 yards, nearly all pellets stay within the average torso size.

A final note about the sights. Ghost ring sights employ an interesting physiologic ability most people do without thinking. One of the tricks most humans do well is centering something within a circle, in this case the circle is the rear sight that will "ghost out" or become blurry. The thing to be centered is the front post, in this case a nice bright white dot. This works even for people who have age-related nearsightedness, which I do not but will, assuming I live long enough. It's a fast and easy way to get sights on target, and missing with a shotgun doesn't help anybody. The sight picture looks something like this:



In summary, the Benelli Nova Tactical is a relatively inexpensive personal defense weapon. The Nova line has earned a reputation for reliability, and as it has been said that "There are two things you never want to hear around a firearm: a bang when there should be a click, and a click when there should be a bang," the Nova has at least the latter covered. For defensive purposes, it's about ideal for a house gun with appropriate ammo (typically BB shot). And I emphasize defensive purposes, because your ability to hit reliably beyond 75 yards will likely be limited. A rifle can do that, but if it's more than 75 yards from you, it raises a question as to whether or not it's self-defense. If I had to add anything else, I would add a flashlight of some sort for low-light conditions. Particularly for home defense, it's important to know WHAT you're shooting at and WHAT'S BEHIND your target, and sometimes all it takes is the Lithium-Powered Light Of Truth And Justice to make people reconsider their choice of actions.

Sporting Clays followup

Well, Troy Stirman's prediction that he would beat our team proved to be accurate...by one bird. The DeLoache-Duvall quartet finished a surprising third this year, surprising because other than new-this-year DeLoache cousin Jimmy (shooting in place of Averill, who was in a golf tournament that weekend) the rest of us couldn't hit squat. I hit 65, Dan broke 70 and Patrick had, if I remember rightly, 46. Jimmy broke eighty-something, though two STINKIN' birds would have been enough to propel our team into second.

The winning team had a low score in the mid-low 80s, and two of the top-five finishers were on that team. They beat the rest of us like a rented mule, so maybe there's some reason to practice. That and any time you can get out in the great (if somewhat manicured) outdoors with a shotgun and make noise, it's a good day. Plus, The Wife wants to start shooting, and this is also good because I need to buy her a shotgun, and any time you can buy a new gun it's ALSO a good day. I'm conflicted between getting a 20ga over-under or another 12ga, it's going to depend on how recoil-sensitive she is. If I go with the 20, at least The Boy can use it if The Wife's interest wanes. We'll see.

Congrats to Troy, and watch your back Stirman -- next year we might practice, and while one bird was enough of a margin this year, it won't be next year!

Next up: Range Report: The New (S)hotness.

Remember what I said about Open-Source Islamofascism?

Well, this may be Exhibit A.

I have to say, there are times when it's not gratifying to be prescient.

This is an Ex-Zarqawi

Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, 39, a native of Jordan was killed outside Baquba, Iraq on June 7, 2006.

By and large, the world is pretty cool with that. So am I.

James Dunnigan had a prophetic post on one of my favorite sites for military information, Strategypage.com. He noted basically that Zarqawi had become such a bloodthirsty thug that he was a liability for the world Islamofascist movement and he was going to be sacrificed in the near future. Either Dunnigan had been tipped off about Zarqawi’s death (he was killed June 7, but the main news didn’t hit until June 8 here), or he meant “near future” as in “the next 12 hours”. A man known for beheading people personally and for inspiring/planning car bombings that killed hundreds, he died as he lived – violently.

First, a few words about the manner of his death. The house he was in was hit by two 500lb bombs, and was almost completely collapsed. He was “alive” when US forces got there, but bomb damage to the human body comes in two main types: damage to the body by bomb casing fragments (the steel shell) or other projectiles created by the bomb (including slamming the human body into things like walls), and overpressure. The expanding wave of pressure from the bomb will seek any entry into the body, the pressure usually isn’t enough to literally crush you but even if you don’t get killed immediately by the blast, the pressure wave moving through your nose and mouth into your lungs will shred your alveoli (the little soap-bubble-like sacs you breathe with) and cause pulmonary hemorrhages. Even if you survive the initial blast, the damage to your lungs can easily be fatal as your shredded lungs fill with tissue fluid and blood. In fact, there is a whole class of weapons called thermobaric weapons designed to kill in just this way. They are, to put it mildy, nasty. Add rib fractures and internal injuries from being slammed against a wall at 200mph by the blast wave and you’re going to die, period. If Zarqawi had been blown up beside a Level I trauma center he would still likely have died. There was no need to “beat him with rifles” as has been alleged. First aid was essentially useless, he was a goner anyway.

As to the significance of the death of Al-Zarqawi, other than being a good thing it’s not like we’ve killed the only boogeyman under the bed of the Iraqi people. While he and his organization were probably among the more vicious of the Anti-Coalition Forces, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia was thought to be only one of fourteen major groups in “the insurgency”. As, or possibly more, important than his death is the information that was obtained by grabbing his document stash, there have been over 400 raids across Iraqi rounding up people he was connected with, with 104 terrorists reported killed. The actual numbers are less important than the fact that his organization has likely been badly decapitated and his communications network unzipped well down the line. AQIM isn’t gone, but their effectiveness is likely badly deteriorated. They still rolled out car bombs in the days following Al-Zarqawi’s death, but don’t be surprised – those were the ones in the workshops nearly ready to go. If all goes as planned, the info haul from Al-Zarqawi’s death will shortly have those workshops under new management.

The latest twit to be appointed the head of the AQIM organization is a relative unknown named Abu Ayyub Masri or Sheik Abu Hamza Muhajer. “Who?” you ask...well, that clunking sound is AQIM hitting the bottom of the barrel. Al-Zarqawi was smart to have survived in Iraq prior to Saddam’s fall, and for three years afterward. Anybody that is replacing him is at least less experienced, and less-experienced folks tend to make more mistakes. It’s hard to develop an institutional memory when the “old guy” has been on the job six weeks longer than you. It’s also hard to have an institution at all when your money men are enjoying the less-than-tender mercies of the Iraqi justice system. And I can’t help but think that if we knew more Arabic we’d be less intimidated by the names of these guys. They almost never use their own names, they make stuff up – Al-Zarqawi was from Zarqa in Jordan, thus the name. This is like being threatened by people named “Jimmy the Neck” and “Brooklyn Tommy” from The Sopranos.

So in short, one player is off the board, the Iraqis are happier and things are rosy in the short term, at least they were perceived to be rosy enough for GWB to take Air Force One to Baghdad and actually leave the airport for several hours. Al-Zarqawi had trouble making friends in Iraq, there have been plenty of reports of Sunni tribesmen attacking AQIM forces because AQIM found a particular chieftan too inflexible or too infidel and offed him, earning the enmity of his clan. The final straw actually came from Jordanian Intelligence, they caught a border guard who was assisting AQIM and he sang like a bird about Al-Zarqawi. Had Al-Zarqawi not blown up three hotels in Jordan I’m not entirely sure the Jordanians would have shared their intel with us in such a timely manner, but Al-Zarqawi had long ago made his bomb crater and on June 7 he got to lie in it. Good riddance.

As far as where this leaves the US in the medium term, the answer IMO is only slightly better. There’s still tons of ordinance unaccounted for from the Saddam regime that is being slowly tallied as it is used in IEDs and car bombings day by day. One of the more vicious organizations is going to need a lot of time to recover, if they ever do. This leaves (by one count) 13 more to go. The plusses are that Al-Zarqawi won’t be able to continue to foment Sunni-Shi’a intercine fighting, though between the legacy of Saddam, about a thousand years of history and predations by both sides on the others’ populations, that particular fire has enough fuel to sustain itself if properly tended by those remaining on both sides. Iraqi PM Al-Maliki has finally gotten some acceptable people into the Interior, Defense and Energy ministries, and if they’re good and effective technocrats who can be trusted by all parties, things will perk up substantially there. Al-Maliki also has a face-to-face visit from GWB under his belt, and in a society that highly values respect I can’t help but think that will give him some standing. Bush and Blair have both in the last month come to HIM, not the other way around. Most Iraqis, most people in the Arab world IMO, understand the gulf between their countries and the West, and the leaders of the two richest and most powerful nations in the West have both come to Baghdad to meet this one person. That has to count for something.

We got some breathing room, I think. Iraq still needs to get toilets that flush, clean water, cheaper gasoline and kerosene and electrical power 24/7, police that don’t steal and exploit, an army that is a servant of the people and not its oppressors. Roads, schools, hospitals and above all, domestic peace. Getting the place down to the criminal activity level of Washington, DC would be an advance. As Churchill said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Canada 17, Iraq 1

Been busy for a while, I need to DL the shotgun pics for my review of the Benelli Nova Tactical 12 Ga. That will be next, but meanwhile some interesting events have taken place.

First (chronologically, maybe not in importance), the RCMP arrested seventeen people in Canada on a variety of terrorism-related charges. The suspects had been under surveillance since 2004, apparently through Internet monitoring and possibly some cell phone intercepts as well. They had visited with a couple of Georgia Tech students, also apparently Islamic radicals, and had gone on to radicalize even further. The event that set up the bust was a RCMP sting operation, some members were arrested when they bought three TONS of what they believed to be ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer and half of the commercial explosive called ANFO, (Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil). If you remember back to April 1995, one ton of ANFO mixed with diesel fuel took down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. This is not paintball jihad, these people were serious. One of the conspirators had expressed a desire to behead Stephen Harper, the Canadian PM, during a takeover of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa. Other potential truck bomb targets included the headquarters of Canada'a CSIS, their equivalent to the CIA/NSA, and the CN Tower, a 1,400 foot steel and concrete golf tee in the middle of Toronto.

What's so creepy about this is that these people were, up until the arrests, mostly average Canadians in the eyes of their fellow Canadians. Most of us can understand some sort of radicalization under persecution or a Stalinst state like Hussein's Iraq, what is somewhat jarring to even anti-Americans is that this would occur in Canada. For people who believe that terrorism is the result of an insufficient level of government services, it's hard to believe that the People's Republic of Canada, with it's largely lassiez faire attitude toward immigration and loud claims of tolerance as well as a generous social safety net would be fertile ground for Islamofascism. "Dirt poor" by Canadian standards is still rich beyond measure in most Middle Eastern countries, and the level of oppression in Canada is essentially negiligible (though not zero, racial intolerance is neither an export nor a strictly indigenous product of the US). Somehow, living in this "nice" place like southern Ontario, these people went rather far around the bend.

I would prefer that there have been an Al Qaeda trainer or recruiter found in the mix, it would be comforting to know that Islamic radicalism is being franchised like McDonald's. The reason this would be comforting is that the alternative to homegrown hatred is that Islamofascism is now an open source movement. Get online, download the MP3s of the Friday sermons at the more radical mosques around the world, print out the PDFs to hand out at your own mosque, study the Koran from an apparently authoritative (but skewed) viewpoint and you can practically roll your own terrorism cell. This kind of Islamofascism I find to be far more worrisome than one or a few organizations quietly sending out people to spread the word. If the messengers were the problem, we could kill or imprison the messengers and the cancer would be contained. The fact is, it's worse than you think. The message is out there, and if it can take root and blossom into weapons practice on a farm in northern Ontario and deals for enough HE to blow up several buildings, there is a major problem.

Maybe it's because I live in Flyover Country, but as bad as 9/11 was I believe there are worse ways we could be hurt. The Beslan school incident, in which Chechen terrorists took over a school and ended up killing a couple hundred people including many children, was awful enough Over There. For the vast majority of Americans, New York and Washington were Over There. The terrible acts of terrorists are magnified when perpetrated in major media markets like NYC because of the narcissistic nature of journalists who congregate in NYC, and I can understand why that's a tempting target. But the lives of people in NYC are so separate and different than most of our lives that it's difficult to identify with them, what got many of us was that we have almost all been passengers on airplanes at one time or another -- THAT was something we could relate to. It's the things we relate to where the malignant energy of terrorism resonates within us the best.

This is why I was paradoxically happy to find out that John Allen Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo were the pair behind the DC Shootings a couple of years back. For a total cost of $700 for a Bushmaster AR-15 and maybe a couple grand for a junky Caprice, two losers terrorized metropolitan Washington, D.C. for a week. Mayhem for the sake of extortion is something we can deal with, even if we don't want to. We are at least familiar with the concept of crime, even murder, in the pursuit of financial gain. Had this been the first of a number of low-cost Al Qaeda operations, I would begin to believe that Al Qaeda was getting serious about disrupting everyday life in the United States. The problem with Open Source Islamofascim is that you don't need NSA intercepts of international phone calls, you don't even need to see a change in calling patterns or any of the other things that amateurs or sloppy professionals will do that allow our law enforcement agencies to track and dismantle them. No Al Qaeda connection is necessary, these people are independent operators seeking to redress their grievances with commonly-available means. Islamofascism in New York is enough to make us collectively angry. Islamofascism in Fresno, Colorado Springs, Columbus and Charlotte all on the same day, with mall bombings, school takeovers and chemical plant attacks all on the same day would be far more troubling to us. We don't all live in or go to New York frequently, but most all of us have children in our lives, and the video of a school takeover will resonate far better than collapsing towers ever could. Oh my goodness, that child has the same shirt my son wore to shcool yesterday. And that one's hair looks just like my daughter's...

I think you get the picture.

The only benefit I see to Islamofascism being the driving force behind these losers is that the deeper you go into any cult-like organization, you of necessity leave behind your relationship to the world the rest of us share. What becomes important to you is not important to us. We mourn the 3,000 dead on 9/11 but the planes and buildings are just stuff. We can replace stuff in the West almost without thinking, in five years another building will rise at the WTC site, and probably it will be larger and more beautiful than the ones it replaces. A person on one of the Internet message boards I frequent pointed out that Islamofascists are drawn to destroy what the Islamic world cannot create, by destroying the symbols of our great technological leaps ahead of them they demystify our power and show that the favor of Allah is not with the infidel. This kind of ignores the unbelievable feats of engineering in nearby Dubai, but it could be fairly argued by fundamentalist Muslims that Dubai and the Emirates are a bunch of free-living sybarite infidels as bad as or worse than we are. My theory on the "Big Bang" concept of going against large public targets is that Islamofascists only have so many people willing to blow themselves up in spectacular fashion, and blowing away a Denny's in South Bend with a truck bomb doesn't have the same impact that an attack on the Eaton Centre in Toronto would, so if you have one shot you need to swing for the fences. The fact that Palestinian terrorists will go after the same falafel stand in the Old Tel Aviv bus station not once but twice suggests that they have manpower to spare.

The implications for Open Source Islamofascism are pretty dire, I'm afraid. One (or two, if you count the 7/7 bombers in the UK) example is not a trend. But as more cells of non-Al Qaeda-affiliated wanna-be terrorists are identified, the big losers in the equation are the Muslims of the West who see the concept of jihad as an internal struggle and have no desire to attack their fellow citizens. It's worth noting that an important group helping to keep the lid on Islamofascist terrorism in the US are the Muslims themselves, who regularly report people attempting to radicalize their mosques or lead their kids astray into martyrdom and ignominity. It's incredibly valuable to have people inside the community volunteer information that keeps the rest of us safe, establishing agent networks in the American Muslim community would otherwise take time we may not have. The precipitous downside of a successful large-scale terrorist attack in the US, particularly if it comes from a domestic-only source, will be an actual backlash against Muslims as opposed to the Astroturf ones groups like CAIR promote as examples of intolerance.

I don't have time to get to the ex-Zarqawi right now, but I'll add another post in a while.

Something Else To Worry About

A bulletin has gone out about a new-generation gun built to look like a cell phone. It's made of heavy-duty plastic and is difficult to identify as a firearm by casual inspection or metal detection, and fires four .22LR rounds when cocked and when appropriate keypad numbers are pressed. A video of the operation of the phone is available along with a longer article here. Apparently they're being made in the Balkans. Those crazy Balks!

Just in case you think you may have been sold a Cell Phone Gun by accident, here's a Top Ten List to help you out:

Top Ten Ways To Tell You've Been Sold A Cell Phone Gun:

10. Under 'dead areas' in service agreement, it says "head or heart, within about 10 feet".
9. Aftermarket chargers are made by 'Remington'.
8. Comes with earplugs instead of earbuds.
7. Breakdown of monthly service charges include section for 'ammo'.
6. If you bought it used, the guy who sold it to you was bleeding and missing an ear.
5. Firm instructions in the manual to not answer the phone while asleep or taking antihistamines.
4. Phone has no camera, but manual talks a lot about 'sight picture'.
3. After a year, the phone company wants you to upgrade to 'centerfire'.
2. The terrorist beside you on the plane tells you his new phone is smaller and fires more bullets.
1. You have the loudest ringtone, ever.

Recycling For Columnists...And For Pulitzers?

For those of you not keeping up with the inner workings of the print media, newspaper readership is declining. There are many reasons, readership has been slipping since 1970 or so and is accelerating. Even the New York Times has seen a dramatic drop in readership and advertising revenue, to the point where the Board of the company that owns the NYT is pushing to pull the paper out of the ink-stained hands of the Sulzburger family, who own the majority of the voting shares of the company.

Bob Herbert is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, with an axe to grind and, apparently, an affinity for cutting and pasting his own material. The repetition finally got to Nancy Kruh of the Dallas Morning News, who fired up Lexis/Nexis and rather convincingly shows Herbert to be not only obsessed about a few points, but apparently so dedicated an occupant of his own echo chamber that the voices in his head that tell him what to write are actually his own voices. Evan Coyne Maloney at his blog Brain Terminal has even gone so far as to generate an Automatic Bob Herbert script that will assemble a Bob Herbert column with the click of a button. I guess you can add "Opinion Columnist" to "Elevator Operator" and "Buggy-Whip Manufacturer" to the list of jobs now extinct due to technology.

Herbert's recycling is at least a step up from Jayson Blair, the ex-NYT reporter that cut and pasted the work of others or simply made things up when necessary. It's arguable that it's not plagarism when you're cribbing from yourself. It's possibly better than Dana Priest apparently recycling a 2002 story about CIA prisoners into a 2005 Pulitzer Prize. The 2002 story was a group effort by Washington Post staffers and has a more positive tone, the 2005 version is considerably less WH-friendly despite covering essentially the same ground. Read the post and make up your own mind.

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.