If I Were President

Thu   13 Jun 2002   10:35 by McGehee [blogoSFERICS]

I just don't see the point of creating a new department -- or for that matter, creating the Ridge office in the first place. True, the National Security Council was originally conceived to deal with the international scene, but why didn't it occur to Dubya and his staff simply to amend the charter to bring homeland issues in under its umbrella, with Justice and the FBI coming in much like State, Defense and the CIA are now? Sometimes I guess there are drawbacks to having a Harvard M.B.A.

Hasn’t Bounced Yet

Thu   13 Jun 2002   10:17 by McGehee in Coweta County, GA [Humor?] [Here's Your Sign] [blogoSFERICS]

I went ahead and replied to Dr. Adebayo Jones: Dear Dr. Adebayo Jones: Has anyone ever told you your name sounds like that of a Daffy Duck character in a 1950s cartoon? I'm afraid I must decline your invitation to become the victim of this moldy old scam, as I only have 98¢ and a month-old ham sandwich in the bank, and being from Nigeria you're probably not interested in the sandwich. I would be happy, however, to notify the multinational corporation from which this alleged $25 million was defrauded, and let them know where they can apply to get their money back -- please reply with the name of said corporation, and I'll take care of the rest. Cheers, Kevin M. McGehee Coweta County, Georgia

Only a Lousy $25 Million!!??

Thu   13 Jun 2002   7:35 by McGehee [Here's Your Sign] [blogoSFERICS]

I've just received in my e-mail what must be the seventh different offer to use my bank account to launder a wad of "overlooked" African money. This time it's Dr. Adebayo Jones (sounds like a character played by Daffy Duck in a 1950s cartoon), "chairman of contract award and review committee set up by the federal government of Nigeria under the new civilian dispensation to award new contracts and review existing ones." He writes, "I came to know of you in my search for a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential transaction, which involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to a foreign account." "Reliable and reputable"? Okay, which one of you jokers has been telling lies about me behind my back? The notable thing about these scam spams is that the alleged money involved accumulated through either a fraudulent deliberate overbilling, or an accidental overbilling, of some poor sucker of a multinational corporation, and that the scheme involving the recipient of the message is a fraudulent attempt to avoid returning the money to its rightful owner. I suppose that's why the victim is always a multinational corporation -- stealing from them is mere justice, right? Anytime I've tried to write back to whoever sends me these things, the message always bounces back as undeliverable. Seems kind of pointless to try to get confidential information from me about my bank accounts, and not provide a valid reply address to receive the desired information. Or maybe after they send the message they discover that I only have 98¢ and a month-old ham sandwich in the bank, and they close the e-mail account before I can reply...

Adventures in Headline Writing

Thu   13 Jun 2002   7:21 by McGehee in Coweta County, GA [Media Ochre] [blogoSFERICS]

Yesterday's installment of OpinionJournal.com's "Best of the Web Today" contains some real howlers from Big Media's headline writers: Headlines of the Day "Bush Pledges Fight Against Evil," reads the headline on an dispatch by Ron Fournier, the Associated Press's White House correspondent. Tampa's TBO.com Web site, however, somehow included part of the byline in its headline, which reads: "Bush Pledges Fight Against Evil AP White House Correspondent." A Reuters headline reads "Dutch PM to Bosnia: Don't Blame U.S. for Srebrenica." But the first paragraph of the article tells a different story: Outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, who resigned over his country's failure to prevent the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, told Bosnians on Tuesday they should blame Bosnian Serbs for the slaughter and not his people. In other words, the headline should have read "Don't Blame Us," not "Don't Blame U.S." We guess the folks at Reuters are so used to blaming the U.S. for everything that this is an understandable mistake. If you read James Taranto's daily digest regularly, or get it by e-mail, you already saw this. If you don't, why?

Ideas Have Consequences

Tue   11 Jun 2002   15:40 by McGehee in Coweta County, GA [blogoSFERICS]

The Volokh Conspiracy is a closet egghead's paradise. Not only have I found Eugene Volokh to be a source of some of the most rewarding reading I've found in years, but now his brother Sasha has sparked the ol' gray matter with an item questioning the way in which philosophy is studied. A quick exchange of e-mails resulted, and although my initial response to Sasha's post was muddled, his reply helped me to focus my thinking. Mathematics is about numbers. Economics is about values and exchanges. But philosophy is not about ideas. It's about the consequences of ideas. Any idea, no matter how long ago it was developed, is as valid today as it was then. That goes for Socrates on logic, or Euclid on geometry, or Adam Smith on economics, or Karl Marx on -- whatever the hell it was Karl Marx was blithering about. And so if all we were interested were the ideas themselves, we could simply divorce them from the historical context in which they were put forth. But simply studying ideas for their own sake gets us nowhere useful. What we need to know is what will happen if we apply these ideas. Mathematical ideas can be tested in equations. Economic ideas can be tested in the marketplace. Where do we test philosophical ideas? The only laboratory available is human experience, of which the record is history. Furthermore, the consequences of past ideas create the milieu in which newer ones are conceived and offered for testing. Philosophy as intellectual history is the only analog that such a discipline can have to the lab notes of a scientist testing a hypothesis. But unlike that scientist, we can never draw a final conclusion and close the experiment -- because like history, the evolution of ideas, and of the consequences resulting from them, will only end when humanity does. In recent years we have been reintroduced to the notion of "unintended consequences." This is something we have had to rediscover only because the attempted divorce of ideas from consequences is fairly recent; generations of Dead White Males understood that ideas have consequences, both intended and otherwise -- which is why they took philosophy as seriously as they did. What -- you wondered why our highest degree of learning is the Doctor of Philosophy?

Final Results Are In

Tue   11 Jun 2002   9:40 by McGehee in Coweta County, GA [blogoSFERICS]

Total unique visitors tracked yesterday by ExtremeTracker: 578. That's more than ten times the pre-June 10 daily average, yet the bulk of it came after the slightly-before-2:00 p.m. EDT Flyover update for 'Dirty Bomb' story news, and the slightly-after-2:00 p.m. EDT InstaMention in which the Professor hyped Flyover. It remains to be seen how much of that traffic will sustain itself. In a side note, apparently a lot of Flyover visitors check out my Web Log links, because John Dunshee of Just Some Poor Schmuck credits the Flyover empire with a high number of referrals to his blog. Happy to help, John. Call it trickle-down InstaPundit traffic.

‘German Antique’

Tue   11 Jun 2002   9:32 by McGehee [Wackadoodle] [blogoSFERICS]

That's the heading on an item in today's "Inside the Beltway" by John McCaslin. It's carried in The Washington Times but doesn't appear to be archived there (as far as I've been able to determine), so I'll copy the item here: German antique Could that have been President Bush's controversial former secretary of labor nominee Linda Chavez and her husband, Chris Gersten, arguing Sunday afternoon with a Purcellville, Va., antique dealer peddling a Nazi flag? Yes, says our eyewitness. "The local merchant had the flag hung over the edge of the table to display it for sale — this was a consignment item," says Ken Hottenstein. "After all of the yelling and threats by the Chavez's to get the [news]papers, call the police and people in high places involved, the merchant rolled the flag up just to get them to leave, which they did." Mr. Gersten was reportedly so agitated at the display of the flag that he "picked up an item and threw it down on the display table. Mind you, he had not purchased that item," the witness says. The couple, who live near Purcellville, in rural Northern Virginia, could not be reached for comment yesterday. "I am a conservative and I can't stand it when people wish to censor and hide history," says Mr. Hottenstein. "Are we to take every thing that offends people and destroy it?" Mrs. Chavez last year withdrew her nomination to head the Labor Department after reports surfaced that she'd hired an illegal immigrant in her home. She denied the charges, saying she was only helping a penniless Guatemalan refugee flee an abusive relationship. She was later critical of the Bush administration for not being overly supportive during her failed confirmation process. On the one hand, strong feelings about the Holocaust and its perpetrators are a good thing. On the other hand, it's a bad thing to censor history. There are those who would like for everything about the Confederacy to be erased from remembered history, never pausing to think what would happen if they succeeded: "Mommy, who did we fight the Civil War against?" "I don't know, sweetheart." "Then how do we know we were the good guys?" Ditto the Holocaust. Rush Limbaugh says once conservatives have achieved total victory over liberalism, we should preserve a few of them on college "campi" so we'll never forget what they were all about. If we are to remain a healthy civilization with a healthy understanding of what we stand for, we must never eradicate any and all discussion of the things we stand against. UPDATE: Chavez wrote a column about this incident, defending her conduct by stating, among other things, that the item in question would have attracted all kinds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. I don't know about that, but it sure attracted Linda Chavez and her husband.

He Should Change His Name to Ptarmigan

Mon   10 Jun 2002   19:17 by McGehee in Coweta County, GA [Humor?] [blogoSFERICS]

The Corner has an item declaring that one of the senior British officers in Bagram is a Lt. Col. Chicken. If he gets promoted, he can take comfort in the fact that the Brits, using different rank insignia, don't distinguish full colonels from the "lite" variety by referring to them as "bird colonels." (Re the title I've given his item: there is a village in Interior Alaska named Chicken. Local lore claims the founders thereof wanted to name the place "Ptarmigan" but decided "Chicken" was easier to spell. Thus, exotic comestibles in Alaska are all said to taste like ptarmigan.)

How Did I Get THERE?

Sun   9 Jun 2002   20:47 by McGehee in Coweta County, GA [Our Times] [blogoSFERICS]

It started with an item at InstaPundit, which promised a discussion of "why pornography is (usually) bad". Turns out it wasn't a discussion of the morality of pornography, but the quality. It proved, nevertheless, to be interesting reading, and of course to fully understand the points being made I had to examine the, er, exhibits. You know, you just never realize the philosophical ramifications of some topics until -- well... The original discussion has become a blogbuzz, with further commentary here. My opinion? Uhhhhh...... People who fuel demand for pornography typically aren't the most ambitious people you're likely to meet -- otherwise they'd get their jollies the old-fashioned, pre-Magic Lantern way. So if the quality of what they get isn't all that great, who should be surprised if they settle for it rather than demanding a better -- a better, uh... You know.

Well It’s About Time!
Sun   9 Jun 2002   13:24 by McGehee in Coweta County, GA [blogoSFERICS]	I didn't even have anything I wanted to blog today -- just with Blogspot being down, and then my cable modem having a cyberfart, and now Blogger being so dang buggy, I've been chewing at this since this morning and it's about @#$!! time I was able to get through. Maybe I'll have something to blog about later. If something else doesn't go wrong.

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