Into Thin Air

Of late I've been reading one of my Christmas gifts, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. The book is his account of his experience as a climber on the Adventure Concepts expedition to climb Mt. Everest in 1996. Four of the climbers in his group died on the mountain, including the man who led the expedition, Rob Hall. It's a gripping and personal recounting of the climb and how things went wrong in the Death Zone, more than 5 miles up.

I guess I have trouble comprehending why a person would be willing to do what it takes to climb Everest, given the odds are about 1 in 4 the mountain will kill you. That's with modern equipment and the fifty years of experience gained since Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay climbed it first in 1953. The danger starts even before you reach the base camp, with the possibility of dying from altitude sickness. Then the mountain gives you warnings on the way to the intermediate camps on the route to the summit in the form of bodies of those who have died on the mountain in previous expeditions, all the while the risk of serious illness or death just from the altitude continues to increase. Then there's the chance of a fall, or being crushed by an avalanche before getting to the last camp at 26,000 feet, from which the climbers make the final ascent (usually with supplemental oxygen). The climbers can be trapped and/or blinded by storms at the peak, and incipient hypoxia makes decision making in the event of emegency a bit dodgy at best. I just fail to comprehend what drives people to do it.

Patterico, Stalinist

Although I frequently criticize the Minneapolis Star Tribune for the sloppiness, vitriol, and general unfairness on their opinion pages, at least I don't have to put up with the Los Angeles Times. Unlike the LA Times, no one actually pays attention to what the Strib's editors think. Patterico, however, takes up the burden of fact-checking the LAT and gets this reaction for his pains. Apparently it's rather easy to be a Stalinist these days - just correct the LA Times! Not one to take it lying down, his response is here.

On the Local Radio Front

we have a change in format at 100.3 FM (now known as KTLK-FM) from "Smooth Jazz" to mixed misc. talk, and I had a chance to sample their wares today.

I heard some of the Janecek and Lambert show and I guess I wasn't wowed. Part of the problem is that although he's not as annoying on the air as he was in his reviews at the Pioneer Press, I still find Brian Lambert grating. I resented his political commentary in his reviews at the PP, and I don't see any reason to reward him for it by listening to his talk show.

I guess the more interesting question will be how KSTP-AM fares, with the loss of Limbaugh and Hannity to KTLK, and Tommy Mischke moving to evenings. I don't think evening drive is quite ready for Mischke... .

I Forgot

to say what should be done with the folks that Abramoff bribed. If they're convicted, throw a whole damn library of books at 'em.

The Abramoff plea deal

Jack Abramoff (Lobbyist, Thief) copped a plea today, pleading guilty to offenses including wire fraud and tax evasion. Since WSJ's Law Blog did the work, I'll point to them for links to the plea deal and other info on the deal and on Abramoff.

Abramoff is a thief, perhaps not a common thief but certainly no better than any other. And the fact that politicians from both parties were busy lining up at his trough disgusts me. I don't think it matters what party all that much, since if the Dems were in power instead of the GOP, Abramoff would have still probably done the same sorts of things, since getting stuff and making lots of money were his lodestars.

The GOP should be especially ashamed. Part of reason they gained control of the House in '94 was because they convinced us they were better, less corrupt than the other guys. I don't think many really believed they were that much better, but it wouldn't taken much to be better. What they've proved instead since '94 is they were just as venal as the Dems who controlled the Congress in the days of Rostenkowski and Wright. Not to mention how cheaply they could be bought. Charge millions, buy politicians for a few hundred grand, what a racket! So what do we have now? Two major parties, neither of which is fit to govern. A Republican party that can't see past keeping control, getting lots of campaign dollars and lots of perks, or a Democratic party obsessed with regaining control and campaign dollars, plus ideas which make them unfit to govern my backyard. The pols in New Orleans would be so proud. I'd yell for throwing out the sleazebags, but who there isn't one?

Just color me one disgusted American citizen, at least for today.

Oh those guys at Reuters

In a story about the Pope's call for the defeat of terrorism, trust Reuters to use only the incidents involving the United States as examples of bad behavior. Beheadings and suicide bombings don't count, eh? Hamas and Islamic Jihad just don't rate, I guess.

Welcome to 2006

which so far, seems rather like 2005... .

I just want to wish everyone who stumbles across this place a happy 2006, and especially I want to thank those who are serving us in hostile places far from home. May you all be safe and make it home for 2007.

Fours

Reposting this set of fours from my comment at Mitch Berg's:

FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE
1) Farmhand
2) Domino's Delivery Driver
3) Teaching Assistant
4) Computer Programmer

FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER
1) Quigley Down Under
2) Friday Night Lights
3) Star Wars
4) The Great Escape

FOUR BOOKS YOU COULD READ AGAIN AND AGAIN (only 4?)
1) The Guns of August
2) India: A Million Mutinies Now
3) Lord of Light
4) The Mote in God's Eye

FOUR CITIES/PLACES YOU'VE LIVED IN
1) Adrian, MN
2) Brookings, SD
3) Mpls/St.Paul, MN
4) Atlanta, GA

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH
1) Mythbusters
2) House
3) Gilmore Girls ('til they jumped the shark...)
4) Columbo

FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION
1) Ireland
2) UK
3) Germany
4) Chicago

FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY
1) National Review Online
2) Instapundit
3) Arts and Letters Daily
4) Althouse

FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS
1) Lemon Grass Chicken
2) BBQ Beef/Pork/Chicken
3) Pizza
4) Indian

FOUR PLACES YOU'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
1) Kennedy Spaceflight Center
2) Ireland
3) Mexico City
4) Tokyo

And a Bonus catagory, since what fun is food without drink...

FOUR FAVORITE ATTITUDE ADJUSTING BEVERAGES
1) Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
2) Basil Hayden's Straight Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey
3) Talisker
4) Midelton Very Rare Irish Whiskey

Oh, Star Tribune...

You editorial types at the Strib should take a look at this work from your colleagues at the Chicago Tribune. Just be sitting down before you do, so there is no injury when the vapours strike. They concluded the fellow you so love to hate (that guy in the Oval Office) did NOT lie about Iraq. Would y'all like to reconsider a whole bunch of your editorials now? (via Instapundit)

The Conservative Mind

Jeffery Hart's essay in Opinion Journal is worth reading (especially by liberals) if only to remind people that there is an intellectual basis to conservatism. I don't have the ability to critique most of it, but there are a couple of points that I have some disagreement with.

On abortion, he contends that the Roe v. Wade decision was a libertarian one. With all due respect, it cannot be considered a libertarian decision if the child in the womb is considered to be human since the child's rights are not considered. If the fetus is not considered to be a child, there is still the question of ownership. Half the genetic material comes from another person who surely has an interest of some kind in the fetus, also not considered by Roe.

On foreign policy, he considers the GOP to be a party of Wilsonian utopianism, because George W. Bush has decided embrace democracy in the Middle East. I don't think Bush's policy has been chosen out of utopian impluse but out of pragmatism. The other types of 'realistic' foreign policy implemented in the past haven't improved (and maybe helped create) the mess the region is in now, so why not try democracy? It isn't utopian to look at a situation, and decide that trying the same failed solutions over and over again probably won't get us a better outcome this time.

I would like to unreservedly endorse his remarks about the environment. It is my belief that conservatives have not lived up to their ideals on this concern. Private propery rights and the free market by themselves are not a guarantee that the wild will be preserved or our environment will not be poisoned. Both can be useful tools but they rely on the goodness of human nature, which conservatives know to be flawed. Thus a need for some government intervention.

Overall, a fine essay well worth the read. For more debate over the contents there's plenty at The Corner. (Just keep scrolling).

Those Sinister Conservatives

The Strib has detected an 'attack' on the Livable Communities program. Apparently questioning whether the best way to spend two and a half million dollars in project money on a park by the Mall of America and in Apple Valley is an attack, in the view of the Strib's editors.

Do the Strib's editors actually think that money couldn't be better spent in other parts of the metro? Especially since Bloomington and Apple Valley are both weathly suburbs that could come up with the money themselves if they really wanted the parks? I expect there are projects in Minneapolis, Richfield, St. Paul or other not-so-wealthy suburbs that would be of greater benefit. So why is questioning the spending an attack? Or are the questions bad because they are being asked by conservatives?

Now I expect that conservatives could make a pretty good case against providing tax subsidies to private developers, which doesn't fit in well with the idea of free markets. But from reading the items linked above, that wasn't the intent of the objections from Mr. Georgacas. So, is this more distortion from the Strib's editors?

More Sad Sack

My December 15th Strib went into the bushes rather than on my step last week, so I missed this lovely Sack cartoon (# 2 in the slide show) on the Iraqi elections. He portrays Iraqis as ducks in a shooting gallery, implying the courage and will shown by Iraqi citizens to vote in spite of threats of violence is futile. I imagine that describes the hallucinogen-inspired but reality-challenged views of the Star Tribune's editorial board perfectly.

Yes, there was some violence. But not a lot, and an estimated 66% of eligible Iraqi voters participated, including many Sunni Arabs. (Would that the U.S. have similar participation.) So, despite the perceptions of the Strib's editors, real progress continues to be made there. Not that Steve Sack noticed.

On the U of M and the Solomon Amendment

Today's Star Tribune has a commentary written by three faculty members of the University of Minnesota. Their purpose: taking Katherine Kersten to task over her column criticizing the Law School's suit challenging the Solomon Amendment, which makes equal campus access to military recuiters a condition for receiving grants from the federal government. Let's start with this:

First, let's make clear what she does not: the law school does not bar military recruiters. They get the same access every employer gets.

While technically true, the fact is they do indeed ban military recruiters because of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy dictated to the military by Congress. They use their anti-discrimination policy to justify it, but saying they do not ban recruiters is ludicrous on its face.

The law school follows the non-discrimination principles laid out by Minnesota's Human Rights Act and by the University Board of Regents' policy on equal employment opportunity. Accordingly, recruiters using the law school's facilities have long been required to pledge that they do not discriminate against our students on the basis of several criteria, including race, sex, religion, and sexual orientation.

These forms of discrimination are morally wrong, contrary to the values of the legal profession, and harmful to our students. For example, we would bar employers who refuse to hire black law students, women, or Catholics.

Similarly, we bar employers who discriminate against gay law students. However, under a federal law known as the Solomon Amendment, the whole university would lose all federal funding if the law school barred recruiters from the military, which in effect excludes gay Americans from service under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

In 2004 alone, this would have jeopardized $351 million in federal grants to other parts of the university for important medical and scientific research. The law school, which is not dependent on federal funds for its operations, has neither the power nor the right to impose this huge penalty on the rest of the university. It's not that the law school's principles are for sale, as Kersten's column suggests, it's that our principles can't be enforced at others' expense.

This gets to the nub of things. If the rest of the university allows recruiters except for the law school (apparently in violation of University policy), isn't the principled course of action for the university to ban all recruiters from campus and not take the money? Federal grant money is not an entitlement, after all, and Congress is not required to make grants to the University if it doesn't want to. Congress also has a pretty free reign to attach conditions to that money. Congress also imposed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" on the military. (I'm not claiming the military is chomping at the bit to admit gays, but the policy came from Congress.) Now since other parts of the campus do allow recuiters (and take the money), is it possible that the Law School has interpreted the policy incorrectly, or are their academic colleagues just sellouts to the Man? It seems fairly simple to me - if you don't want recruiters on campus, don't take the government money.

They also make the interesting claim that their First Amendment rights are being violated. How? If they object to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" they are "welcome to speak up" in the same way they advise students who disagree with the law school's discriminatory policy against the military. The faculty can protest, they can set an information booth next to recuiter to explain their point of view, etc. . I guess it's less work to ban the dissenting viewpoint instead of engaging it. As far as the possibility of money being denied to other schools on campus, no one said that First Amendment rights are consequence-free.

I also find it interesting how little they trust their own students. The faculty seems to think the mere presence of recuiters at the law school will turn their students into raging homophobes. On the contrary, their students are adults in their own right and are quite capable evaluating the pros and cons of military service for themselves without faculty indoctrination or interference. If these faculty really believed in the First Amendment, they wouldn't be trying to "protect" their students this way in the first place.

I wonder

what Susan Lenfestey and the editors of the Star Tribune would have to say to this Marine.

Here's a Carey Tennis demonstrating his support for democracy at Salon. Anyone who actually believes in democracy wouldn't be writing junk like that, and if he hadn't flunked his civics classes in elementary school he would know there will be a change in administration in 2009.

Salon must be in dire straits to keep publishing this kind of junk.

It must be a cold day in Hades,

because I'm actually argeeing with something Syl Jones wrote. How weird is that? I oppose the death penalty, but I can't see why Tookie Williams deserves more mercy than other murderers who have been executed by the state of California. Having celebrity friends doesn't count, and I'm pretty sure he ain't innocent. I can't say that I have a lot of sympathy for the man who gave us the Crips. It might have helped if he at least took responsibility for his actions and expressed regret for them, but he is unwilling to do even that.

More of the Usual Lenfestey Garbage

The Star Tribune, in its quest to provide a platform for Bush-hating moonbats sound, logical analysis of the Bush administration, has printed another Bush-bashing piece from Susan Lenfestey.

She purports to explain why it is necessary for opponents of the current administration to abandon moderation and civility for the kind of expression she prefers. Stuff like this, or maybe this is more to her liking. Or perhaps stuff like this (via Michelle Malkin) . She probably considers stuff like this to be supportive of our soldiers. What a load of crap.

Her argument is since the government under Bush has become 'uncivil' and is a disaster (unproven by anything she writes here) that any extreme of rhetoric is justified. Not that she can demonstrate how the Administration has become "uncivil", of course. She just disagrees with them.

Her objections to Bush can be condensed basically to she disagrees with the decision to invade Iraq. Like pretty much every other ant-war Democrat, she repeats the the "Bush Lied" accusation, and she fails to say how the liberals and the Democrats would have handled the Iraq situation any better. She also fails to apologize to the Iraqi people for not leaving them under the despotic rule of a murderous dictator, the natural consequence of her position on the war.

Her position seems to be "I disagree with you, so I can make any dishonest, extreme argument I want, regardless of merit." Earth to Lenfestey: That ain't good enough. Oh, and keep spewing the bile - then you can greet President Guliani or President McCain in 2009.

There was one number in her piece that caught my attention. If anyone out there actually reads this and knows something about the subject, could anyone tell me if a single Marine air wing could deliver 500,000 tons of bombs to Iraq since 2003? Is that a reasonable number? Thanks.

Update: If Iraq is the hell Ms. Lenfestey thinks it is why do most Iraqis think life is getting better?

Waiting for the DA

Our boys in purple have won their sixth straight this week and as predicted by many, much of furor over their nautical exploits of October appears to have faded. There's even serious (if not yet warranted) talk about a playoff run.

Before we welcome them back with open arms however, I'd like to wait and see what the DA says. Actually, I have no idea one way or the other whether or not these guys (whichever ones were there) have committed offenses against anything other than good taste and decorum. But if drug and/or prostitution charges are filed, it'll take some of the fun out of it.

What is the Democrat Strategy

Reading this at Althouse (along with the comments) just reinforces something I've noticed about the Democrats ever since the invasion of Iraq.

First the treatment the Dem's rank and file gives to Democrats who don't toe the Dean/Pelosi line on Iraq. Apparently dissent from the position that Iraq is a mistake and an unwinnable quagmire is verboten among the ranks of the Donkeys, and apostates like Joe Lieberman will be punished.

Second, the refusal of the anti-war crowd to even acknowledge the existence of evidence the current situation in Iraq is not an unmitigated disaster. Admittedly the media makes it easier via its singular focus on the problems of the occupation, while not saying anything about the successes. Still, wilfully ignoring facts that don't agree with one's political desires is stupid.

Third, given the Dem's insistence that Bush's execution of the war and occupation are completely incompetent, what is their superior plan? Unless they really believe running away and throwing a fledgling democracy to the wolves is the way to go, where is their winning strategy? If memory serves, I seem to recall that John Kerry's plan for Iraq was basically to do what the administration was already doing, only better. (What "better" meant was unclear.)

So Democrats, where's your better ideas?

Why the GOP wins elections, part II

More reason why a lot of people (myself included) can't take the Dems seriously. The cartoon really doesn't deserve a response as it is just another example (albeit a more disgusting, reprehensible one) of the use of the politics of personal destruction by Democrats and their fellow travelers on the Left. Since a reasoned response isn't really needed, let's talk feelings here.

Mr. Oliphant, your cartoon is a fine example of a mean-spirited work drawn by a no-talent historical illiterate whose drawing ability is only slightly better than those of that other cartoonist you split a half-wit with, Ted Rall. This cartoon says more about you and your employers than it does about President Bush, and if you had an ounce of sensitivity or respect for the craft you would be ashamed of yourself.

(via Michelle Malkin)