Babies walking in the womb...

This is so cool.

A new type of ultrasound scan has produced vivid pictures of a 12 week-old foetus "walking" in the womb.
The new images also show foetuses apparently yawning and rubbing its eyes.

Lileks and my Dad... birds of a feather.

When I was younger, the doorbell once rang during dinner. My father opened the door to find a fresh faced young college student who was out shilling for Greenpeace. Now, my father obtained one of the first LLMs in environmental law in the country and actually knows what he's talking about, and unfortunately for the fresh faced young college student, was in the mood to chat.

He basically dismantled this poor kid, who I believe, shortly afterward, decided all of his premises were suspect and is now a hunter-trapper living in a small cabin in Washington State, driving an old pre-emissions law truck.

Anyway, apparently the next generation had the bad fortune to show up at Jim Lileks' door.

A minor political note, if you’re interested in such things. The other day a young girl came to the door to solicit my support for her presidential candidate. I asked her why I should vote for this man. She was very nice and earnest, but if you got her off the talking points she was utterly unprepared to argue anything, because she didn’t know what she was talking about. She had bullet points, and she believed that any reasonable person would see the importance of these issues and naturally fall in line. But she could not support any of her assertions. Her final selling point: Kerry would roll back the tax cuts.

Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide - from the guys who demolished the old stairs, the guys who built the new one, the family firm that sold the stone, the other firm that rented the Bobcats, the entrepreneur who fabricated the railings in his garage, and the guy who did the landscaping. Also the company that sold him the plants. And the light fixtures. It’s called economic activity. What’s more, home improvements added to the value of this pile, which mean that my assessment would increase, bumping up my property taxes. To say nothing of the general beautification of the neighborhood. Next year, if my taxes didn’t shoot up, I had another project planned. Raise my taxes, and it won’t happen – I won’t hire anyone, and they won’t hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?

“Well, it’s a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. “I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.

“But then I wouldn’t have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn’t have new steps. And they wouldn’t have done anything to get the money.”

“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.

“What do you mean?”

“Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”

“They didn’t give it to me. They just took less of my money.”

That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:

“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”

Then she left.

And walked down the stairs. I let her go without charging a toll. It’s the philanthropist in me.

Dogs rule.

According to the Toronto Star, an encounter with a dog convinced a crazy guy not to kill people.

A man drove from the Maritimes with a carload of guns and ammunition, vowing to kill as many people in Toronto as he could — before a last-minute encounter with a wandering dog inspired a change of heart.

The New Brunswick man, in his 40s, surrendered to police yesterday afternoon in front of a supermarket at Leslie and Eastern Sts. He had a loaded gun in his pocket and a car crammed with more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition.

"At that time, he decided he was going to shoot people in the area," said Detective Nick Ashley of 55 Division. "He attended a local park nearby and was preparing the weapons to do that."

By chance, a dog approached the man and started playing with him in the Victoria Park Ave. and Queen St. E. park.

"He happens to be a pet lover and decided that if there was such a nice dog in the area the people were too nice and he wasn't going to carry out his plan," Ashley said.

The anti-Son of Sam, if you will.

Of course, if he had run into a cat, the cat would have convinced him to kill more people. Cats are like that.

[Listening to: Colorful (Rock Star Version) - The Verve Pipe - Rock Star (4:25)]

AFL/CIO

I heard on the radio this morning that the AFL/CIO had decided that they would not hold their convention in Detroit this year…
the labor costs in the convention center are too high!!

Hitchens on Moore

Christopher Hitchens skewers Michael Moore in an article at Slate.

Some choice excerpts (though please read the whole thing):

Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

. . . .

Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.

However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of.

. . . .

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Really. Read the whole thing.

The top 25 weirdest items on Amazon.com

Ok, someone with way too much time on their hands has prepared a list of "The Top 25 Weirdest Items You Can Purchase Through Amazon!"

I especially liked the Gallon of Liquid Fish and Bird Poop and the Atkins-approved Sugar Free Milk Chocolate Dipped Pork Rinds.

[Listening to: New York Girls - Oysterband - Ride (3:01)]

Positive vs. Negative rights

There's a lot of confusion about positive vs. negative rights, and Reagan's death has caused several columnists to well, confuse them again. Stephen Bainbridge responds to William Saletan and notes some important differences between a negative concept of liberty and the positive rights doctrine.

"Jane Galt" also responds to Saletan and makes the salient point:

"But it is Saletan who appears confused, not Reagan. What he is describing is not liberty; it is security. Security is also valuable and good, but it is not the same thing as liberty."

My mother, of course, always understood the point. When I was a sophomore in college, het up on my brilliance and holding forth on freedom, I asked my indulgent audience of parents, "BUT WHAT IS FREEDOM?!" intending to continue on and explain that freedom means freedom from not freedom to.

But my mother responded to the rhetorical question, dryly noting that "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

[Via Instapundit.com]

[Listening to: Conjunction Junction - Better Than Ezra - School House Rock! Rocks (3:44)]

Sharansky on Reagan

Natan Sharansky writes in today's Jerusalem Post about Ronald Reagan:

In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

[Listening to: Birdhouse In Your Soul - They Might Be Giants - Flood (3:20)]

The left's gone insane.

This is really nuts. A theater review in The Village Voice has a lefty spewing forth:

Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.

As Instapundit notes: "Republicans -- not human, and in need of extermination? Sheesh. Hugh Hewitt is right: The Left has come unhinged."

[Via Instapundit.com]

[Listening to: Won't Get Fooled Again (Full Length Version) - The Who - My Generation - The Very Best of the Who (8:33)]

Site additions

I just added an RSS feed to the site (and Blogger's Atom, as well, but nobody uses Atom, so, whatever...).

I've also got this new program called w.bloggar which is supposed to make it easier to blog and will supposedly automatically add whatever I'm listening to on iTunes at the moment to the bottom of my posts so that you will know what sort of strange music is floating around my speakers...

[Listening to: I Wish - Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life (4:12)]

Kerry in Vietnam.

John Kerry's Vietnam legacy:

In the Vietnamese Communist War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the "War Crimes Museum") in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), a photograph of John Kerry hangs in a room dedicated to the anti-war activists who helped the Vietnamese Communists win the Vietnam War.

[Via Right-Thinking from the Left Coast]

Quel surprise.

You mean the UN isn't a completely wonderful organization dedicated solely to the principles of peace and democracy everywhere?

I am shocked, I say, shocked to read Michelle Malkin's story about Palestinian gunmen fleeing an attack on Israeli soldiers employed a UN ambulance with its lights flashing as a getaway car.

Someone want to tell me why this footage, shot by Reuters (and accessible via the webpage to which I linked), hasn't been on any of the major news networks?