Forward Biased (Less-than-current Events)

Dave...Dave, please stop...

I read several medical blogs, but my favorite by far is Respectful Insolence.  Orac is eminently readable and his views and passions are remarkably similar to my own.  Here's his intro/manifesto so you can get to know him well.  He can become quite funny, as when he relates his frustrating encounter with HAL9000, something we can all relate to.

Wear your steel-toed boots, though, as the odds are good that your toes will be stepped upon.  Such as the recent study concluding that echinacia has no effect in helping colds, for example.  He writes a lot on various pseudomedicine/pseudoscience topics such as thimerosal and autism, creationism, pareidolia, etc.

Go forth and read.  And tell him how much you like Forward Biased leave nice comments.  :o)

You can see why I like this guy, and why he's on my blogroll.  I like to find bloggers who are smarter than I am and spread the word.  So spread already.

UPDATE:  Many thanks to Daily Pundit for linking--and especially for blogrolling.

"Dang, I shoulda thought of that!" dept.

"Dread Justice Roberts."  Heh.

I hope it's at night...

Now this is cool:  a little applet that shows the real-time position of the Shuttle and a few other major satellites.  It also calculates the "first visible" pass any of these craft will make over your longitude.

(Thanks to Searchlight Crusade.)

Go, Burt, go!

Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, who won last year's $10 million Ansari X-prize in Space Ship One, has teamed up with Sir Richard Branson to create a new company, The Spaceship Company.  They plan to concentrate on developing spaceflight technology for affordable tourist flights.

“We’re taking the technology of SpaceShipOne and developing it into a usable commercial vehicle to give thousands of people the chance to experience the majesty of space,” said Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic—the space tourism venture that is a subsidiary of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

Branson told the Oshkosh crowd that the commercial spaceship can carry 7 paying passengers, along with a two-person flight crew. “We hope that we can get those spacecraft built roughly two and a half to three years from now,” he said.

...At present, seats onboard Virgin Galactic spaceships are price tagged at $200,000 each.

But Branson hopes that this seat price will drop over time. “Our aim is to bring the price down,” he said. 

“Our principal aim behind this is not to make money. The principal aim is to reinvest any money we make into space exploration,” Branson said. “We expect to double, triple, quadruple the number of astronauts in the next few years that have currently experienced space,” he said.

Very cool indeed.  I certainly wish him Qapla' and good luck.

(Thanks to Rand Simberg.)

...but is he a pinball wizard?

The only word I can think of for this story is incredible.  I couldn't even decide what category to put it in at first.

Brice Mellen is a whiz at video games such as "Mortal Kombat." In that regard, the 17-year-old isn't much different from so many others his age. Except for one thing: He's blind.

And as he easily dispatched foes who took him on recently at a Lincoln gaming center, the affable and smiling Mellen remained humble.

...Blind since birth when his optic nerve didn't connect because of Leber's disease, Mellen honed his video game skills over the years through patient and not-so-patient playing, memorizing key joystick operations and moves in certain games, asking lots of questions and paying particular attention to audio cues. He worked his way up from games such as "Space Invaders" and "Asteroid," onto the modern combat games.

I never realized there were so many audio cues.  And even though that explains a lot, it's still incredible.

(Thanks to Paul at GeekPress.)

Fool me once, shame on you...

Alright, boys and girls, get out a sheet of paper and a no. 2 pencil.  It's time for a quiz.  Don't worry, it's a simple one.

Who are the following people talking about?

• "He's a scholarly man; he has a good education; he has been recommended by legal authorities; he has a good record in lower courts." – President Bush
• "This decision had the advantage of being acceptable to conservatives, plus Democrats won't be able to attack him. There is nothing to grab a hold of, to whack him on." – An administration official
• "Virtually every conservative who knows him trusts him and thinks he's a competent guy." – Newt Gingrich
• "His view is: 'Here's what it says state government can do – and if it doesn't say it can do it, then it can't do it.'" – Lawyer who argued cases before the nominee
• "[He] seems to be a judicial conservative, what we call a constitutional constructionist. ... That's satisfactory with us, if that's true." – National Right to Life's John Willke
• "This is a home run." – President Bush's chief of staff

I'm not going to bother taking up papers, because I already know that the word "Roberts" is on most of them.  Maybe all of them.  And you're all wrong.

He is David Hackett Souter, only the most recent reason Republican presidents – especially Republican presidents named "Bush" – have lost the right to say "Trust me" when it comes to Supreme Court nominations.

The other reasons are: Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy.

The worst part of all this is a reminder that the Republican Party is the Party That Forgot It Won.  They have no idea what to do with the power they have.  They don't have the stomach for a fight, and they've already tried appeasement.  They've found out that appeasement never works--your enemy will always act in his best interests, even when you refuse to do the same, hoping to score brownie points.  Brownie points don't spend.

The Senate was majority Democrat back then. The Judiciary Committee consisted of eight Democrats and six Republicans – two of whom were aggressively pro-abortion. A year later, faced with the same Democratic Senate, the current president's father nominated Clarence Thomas. Who would have thought the current Bush would be less macho than his father?

Who indeed?  This is the man we entrusted with dealing with Islamofascist terrorism, and he's afraid of a little filibuster.

Roberts would have been a fine candidate for a Senate in Democratic hands. But now we have 55 Republican seats in the Senate and the vice president to cast a deciding vote – and Son of Read-My-Lips gives us another ideological blind date.

Ow--that's gotta hurt.

Fifty-five seats means every single Democrat in the Senate could vote against a Republican Supreme Court nominee – highly unlikely considering some of those Democrats are up for election next year – along with John McCain, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Lincoln Chafee. We would still win.

"We," of course, means the GOP.  This is a huge reason many of the libertarian-leaning people I know refuse to be associated with the Republican Party.

Republicans are desperately trying to convince themselves that Roberts will be different because they want to believe Bush wouldn't let us down on the Supreme Court. Somewhere in America a woman is desperately trying to convince herself that her husband won't hit her again because he told her "things are going to be different this time." (And yes, that woman's name is Whitney Houston.)

I have a bad feeling about this.

If you want another Thomas, you've gotta nominate another Thomas.  Then be ready to fight for what you believe in.

That is, if you still believe in anything worth fighting for.

(Thanks to Ralph Bristol, Greyhawk, and Outside the Beltway.)

Is Justice (color)blind?

If there's one place in the world where one has a right to fair, impartial treatment it's in a court of law.  Whether you enter as accused, accuser, or a potential jury member, you expect to be treated according to the facts and certainly not according to your race.

In fact, there are numerous laws that have been set in place to insure just that, not the least of which is a 1986 SCOTUS ruling ("Batson v Kentucky") which ruled that it was a violation of the constitution to keep blacks off of a jury solely because of their race.

Lawyers on both sides of a case may seat or strike jurors for almost any reason, but not just because of a potential juror's race.

It seems, though, that this idea does not extend to the courtroom of Circuit Judge Evelyn Clay of Chicago.  Several times over the last few months she has been heard to say that race does indeed play a part in juries seated in her courtroom.

"Folks, you all know I have a rule; I don't seat all white jurors," Circuit Judge Evelyn Clay said as a jury was being picked to hear a murder trial last month, according to court transcripts.

...The first time was the April 20 trial of a man for unlawful use of a weapon. After eight jurors were picked, Clay indicated she was not satisfied with the makeup of the panel.

"I'm telling you folks, I don't know what you all intend to do, but I have no intention of seating an all-white jury," Clay said, according to transcripts.

Now, if Judge Clay had reason to believe that lawyers in any particular case were keeping qualified blacks off the jury solely because of their race, she would and should call them on it.  But this isn't the case.  She has a standing ruling that all-white juries are not permitted, regardless of the individual circumstances of the case.  There is only one reason to have such a ruling:  she doesn't believe that an all-white jury can reach a fair and impartial verdict.  Ever.  In any case.  Otherwise, she would not impose this rule in such a blanket manner.

There is a word we have for judging the behavior of people ahead of time like this.  It's called prejudice.  And since the only criterion used in this case is a person's race, such prejudice could logically be called racist as well.  And this from a judge!

Imagine if any judge stated that she would not seat an all-black jury.  Imagine the cries of "racism!" that would fill the air.  Not in this case, of course.  But at least her behavior has become public and is being looked into.

But regardless of how this ends, the fact is that such a standing rule is prejudiced, and probably racist as well.

(Thanks to Ralph Bristol and Greyhawk.)

Nicole wants to have your baby

Ralph Bristol does us all a favor.

This is chance you don't often get. Nicole Kidman wants to have your baby. Well, maybe not YOUR baby, but she want to have a baby with a "normal guy" who's not interested in all the celebrity stuff. That would be you, right?

Why I belong to LLP

I read today where a prospective member of the Life, Liberty and Property Community (part of TTLB's ecosystem) asked the following of its members:

Hullo,

Just for my own puerile, base, voyeuristic curiosity, i was wondering which side of the bunk y'all crawl into....

I mean honestly, how can i belong to a group and not know the /political/ leanings of the members?

He got lots of answers, but mine went thusly:

I can only answer for myself, but myself sez that it's because liberty is THE most important issue.  As you have no doubt seen, the detailed political leanings of "libertarians" can vary over quite a spectrum and include many distinct views, many of which I share and a few of which I do not.

But because the libertarian ideals of "life, liberty and property" are paramount to me, I joined this group, expecting some diversity of belief but not really caring.  About said diversity.  If you know what I mean.

Heinlein said that "political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surely curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort."

I couldn't agree more (besides, he was smarter than I am).  We will spend the rest of our lives fighting those who think that people should be controlled.

"Self-improvement" dept.

Here are a few things I've learned today via television commercials:

• "Clean" is a noun.  Several products promise a better one.
• The best way to keep bugs out of your home is to not let them in.  Or something like that.
• It's only satisfying if you eat it.
• If I eat Starburst, a tiny Mariachi band will form in my mouth, and little guys will be running for their lives trying to escape from my jaws of death.
• You do not want to be odor.  (But if you are, don't worry--something will doubtless offer you a "better clean" and then you'll be a cleaner odor.)

Do tell.

But shucks, what would the English language be without tautologies, "creative" use of words, pointing out the obvious, etc.?

UPDATE:  So what invaluable philosophical lessons have you learned from commercials?  Let me know--and share your insights with others!

UPDATE AGAIN:  I added a couple of items above that I had forgotten when I wrote this.