Mountain Marauder

I picked up a copy of the 2007 Oregon Big Game Regulations. It's pretty detailed, spelling out exactly the license and tag requirements for every major game animal in Oregon. I did notice, though, that one animal in particular seemed quite exceptional.

Generally you need a license and a tag except

Western Gray Squirrel: No tag required

In fact

Resident hunters 14-17 years of age can buy a juvenile hunting license at a reduced fee if they will be hunting western gray squirrel...

For every hunt only certain weapons are allowed except

Western Gray Squirrel: Any rifle; handgun; shotgun; muzzleloading firearm; or long, recurve or compound bow

Furthermore

Semiautomatic rifles with a magazine capacity greater than five cartridges prohibited (except for western gray squirrel).

No person shall

Hunt any game mammal with dogs, EXCEPT western gray squirrel.

For bow hunting

Broadhead blades must be fixed, unbarbed, and at least 7/8” wide (except for western gray squirrel). It is illegal to hunt with or possess mechanical or moveable blade broadheads when hunting game mammals except Western gray squirrel.

And the hunting season is, of course, limited

WESTERN GRAY SQUIRREL
OPEN SEASON: Aug. 25 - Nov. 7
BAG LIMIT: 5 squirrels daily.
POSSESSION LIMIT: 15 in possession.
OPEN AREA: All units west of the eastern boundary of the Santiam, McKenzie, Indigo, Sprague, and Interstate units. Exception: No bag limit or closed season in that part of the Rogue Unit south of Rogue Rvr and S Fork Rogue Rvr and north of Hwy 140.

Finally there are certain "protected" mammals and birds which include, among others,

...pika (cony), pygmy rabbit, white-tailed jackrabbit, white-tailed antelope squirrel, Washington ground squirrel, northern flying squirrel, chickaree (pine squirrel), golden-mantled ground squirrel, chipmunks, white-footed vole...

But not—definitely not—the Western Gray Squirrel.

Indoctrinate U—The Film

Indoctrinate U is one of the most important documentaries of the year. But it might also be the most important documentary you aren't able to see this year. We know there is a vast audience for this film. But commercial distributors -- the executives who decide what films go into theaters -- don't. So unless we can prove to them that this audience exists -- that you want to see it, Indoctrinate U might not come to a theater near you.

All you need to do is go to their web site and enter your name, email address, and zip code.

Via Instapundit.

The New York Who?

An article by the AP delicately avoids mention of the real loser:

Among large newspapers, the performance was mixed for the six months ending in March, with several showing gains, most notably The New York Post, which is locked in a fierce competition with the New York Daily News.

But the Post and the Daily News are both up, 7.6 percent and 1.4 percent respectively; it's the New York Times that's down, 1.9 percent, but of course the Times wouldn't stoop to "competing" with the likes of those guys.

These People Aren't Threats

Michael Barone admits he was wrong:

When Florida passed its concealed-weapons law, I thought it was a terrible idea. People would start shooting each other over traffic altercations; parking lots would turn into shooting galleries. Not so, it turned out. Only a very, very few concealed-weapons permits have been revoked. There are only rare incidents in which people with concealed-weapons permits have used them unlawfully. Ordinary law-abiding people, it turns out, are pretty trustworthy.

We Will Vote No On 15-75

If the Mail Tribune's online poll is any indication the library levy will be defeated handily.

Contrary to yesterday's post, I encourage everyone to vote against this measure rather than withholding your ballot. The measure will likely fail for both reasons—insufficient turnout and a plurality voting against—but it's important that the margin of defeat be decisive. Not just "No," but "Hell, no!"

I've posted on this topic repeatedly; first on Measure 15-66 last October:

According to the measure's explanatory statement, each year the library loans 1,472,000 items. That's right. Each year they loan out 1.5 million items at a cost of 8.5 million dollars. To spend so much money to so little effect is beyond the ability of the private citizen. That kind of waste requires a government agency.

Then on the library closure in April:

In a cynical ploy calculated to stampede the voters into approving a tax increase the Jackson County libraries have closed their doors five weeks before the special election. It won't work.

Then for background, links to three thoughtful articles on the future of libraries in general.

If public libraries attempt to compete in this environment, they will increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to be: welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson DeMille's newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local Wal-Mart.
—John J. Miller in Opinion Journal

And finally a cost comparison between four library systems in Southern Oregon:

Consider our next-door neighbors Josephine, Klamath, and Douglas County. (Call them, collectively, JKD.)

These numbers are from 2004-05 but even then Jackson County spent $7.5 million on its libraries as compared to $5.2 million for JKD. Yet JKD have 26 branches to Jackson's 15. And JKD serve 250 thousand citizens to Jackson's 195 thousand.

Why is it that Jackson County's libraries cost so much more?

Certainly not, I would suggest, because they're worth it.

Vote No—Or Better, Don't Vote

The wonderful thing about the double majority requirement in an off-year election is that, at a minimum, 25% (plus one) of the registered voters have to vote in favor to raise taxes on all the rest of us.

At a minimum, that is. Twenty-five percent can raise our taxes only if another twenty-five percent pitch in and help by casting "NO" votes. If on the other hand everyone opposed to the levy voted "NO" by tearing up their ballots, then those in favor would have to muster the entire 50% of registered votes all on their own.

The point is obvious. If you oppose this measure, don't vote.

CORRECTION: It has been brought to my attention that this tactic won't necessarily work—it depends, like the prisoner's dilemma, on the actions of your compatriots.

Suppose 30% were in favor and 35% opposed. If everyone voted it would go down. But if 10% out of the 35% opposed tried the not-voting tactic, the measure would pass because the 25% still voting would provide the necessary turnout.

We could try holding onto our ballots until closer to election day to see what the early voting indicates about turnout. But I seem to remember from last fall that not enough information will be released in time to make a decision.

It might be better, then, to go ahead and vote NO. If today's Mail Tribune is any indication, plenty of other people plan to vote NO as well.

Rogue River Valley

This morning, as I have for the last five days, I left the house before six o'clock and climbed Nugget Butte. Here I met the sunrise at 1640 feet; six hundred feet above the river. Wisps of fog formed briefly. It was going to be a warm day.

The Newer The Worse

Taking tinfoil hats to a whole new level.

Addicted to Danger

James M. Tabor picks the five most riveting first-person accounts of man vs. nature:

1. In the Amazon Jungle by Algot Lange (1912)
2. Shackleton's Boat Journey by F.A. Worsley (1933)
3. The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922)
4. K2: The Savage Mountain by Charles S. Houston and Robert H. Bates (1954)
5. Minus 148° by Art Davidson (1969)

All still in print. I notice that Jim Wickwire wrote the introduction to the latest edition of K2. Greg loaned me his memoir Addicted to Danger last year; its amazing cover photo is from our own Mount Hood.

Two addenda: Don't miss the panorama from the top of Everest which I linked to a few weeks back, and also the article in yesterday's Mail Tribune about the two Rogue Valley natives, Brian Smith and Ted Anderson, who just bumped into each other at the base camp on Everest.

Boris the Liberator

Charles Krauthammer:

Credit for the fall of communism usually is given to two sets of actors. On the one side, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II, whose relentless pressure caused a hollowed-out system to collapse. On the other side, conventional mythology credits Mikhail Gorbachev.

This is quite wrong. True, Gorbachev inadvertently caused the collapse of communism. But his intention was always to save it. To the very end, Gorbachev believed in it. His mission was to reform communism in order to make it work. To do that, the Soviet system had to become more human — i.e., more in tune with real human nature — and thus more humane. Gorbachev's problem was that humane communism is an oxymoron.

The man who brought down the Soviet Union from the inside was Boris Yeltsin.

Average and Below

John Derbyshire has written a feature-length essay on an old movie:

The second thing that struck me was that this is a movie about the left-hand half of the bell curve. Of the main characters, I would surmise that only Frank Jr. has an IQ over 100. A couple of the others — Bobby C, Doreen — come across as borderline retarded. All the rest are drawn from that big slab to the left of the mean: people with IQs of 80-something or 90-something. These are normal, unreflective working people who did not get much from their formal education, don’t read books, and don’t think in abstractions, or wish to.

He calls it "one of the dozen or so best movies of all time." Hint: came out thirty years ago, in 1977. One more hint: John Travolta.

No, really.

Traitor

U.S. News:

Shortly before 1 p.m. today, the U.S. Senate narrowly approved the conference report for the Iraq spending bill containing a deadline for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops in Iraq, the last vote before the bill is sent to the president for an almost certain veto.

The roll call for the 51-to-46 vote is available here.

Two Republicans, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Gordon Smith of Oregon, voted with the 48 Democrats...

Senator Gordon Smith will be retiring in 2008 if I have anything to do with it.

McCain Don't Make It

Mark Steyn talking with Hugh Hewitt:

I’m astonished by the vehemence of people who are anti-McCain in New Hampshire. In part, that’s just because whether you belong to the gun group or the abortion group, or whatever your particular bugbear is, he said no, we don’t need to hear from you. And people are offended by the whole campaign finance thing, because they think actually, and quite rightly so, that it’s about keeping political speech confined to an elite political class. And I think McCain doesn’t understand that that actually is directly offensive to almost anyone who participates actively in primary politics.

No one likes to be told to sit down, shut up, keep your stinkin' money.

Twenty Years Ago In The Economist

Europe was fussing with its missiles.

The main reason for bringing cruise and Pershing-2 missiles to Europe was to prevent Russia getting a decisive lead in nuclear weapons between the short-range battlefield sort and the intercontinental monsters. It has worked. Imagine that, ten years ago, when NATO first talked of deploying its new missiles, Russia had suddenly said that, well, on second thoughts, it was cancelling its SS-20 programme, scrapping its older SS-4s, and, come to think of it, dismantling its monopoly of slightly smaller missiles too.

Imagine that? In 1977 no one could imagine that.

America undertook new research into poverty:

Those surveys, says America's latest best-selling sociologist, "reveal with striking clarity that the requirements for getting out of poverty in the United States are so minimal that it takes a mutually reinforcing cluster of behaviours" to remain poor. An American's chance of staying poor is less than ½% if he or she does the following three things: (a) completes high school; (b) gets and stays married; (c) stays employed, even if initially only at the minimum wage.

So why don't they? It took Mr Murray another seven years to answer that.

In other news Pope John Paul wanted to beatify Sister Theresia Benedicta, a Catholic nun who died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.

The idea that Edith Stein is a martyr for the Catholic faith has upset many Jews. They argue that she was killed in Auschwitz not in odio fidei (out of hatred for her faith), but because she was Jewish. If she was a martyr, she was a Jewish martyr, like the millions of other Jews who perished under Hitler.

Coincidentally Books and Arts led off with a lengthy review of The Jews of Silence by Elie Wiesel and included on the next page a capsule review of A History of the Jews, by the historian Paul Johnson, a Roman Catholic.

An excellent book, by the way, which I just read last year.

Ratatouille

From Disney · Pixar this summer. Looks like fun.

Thanks, Dave.

Breaking Communism's Neck

If you read only one obituary of Boris Yeltsin read The Economist's.

The country he inherited had few features of a state: no functioning institutions, no money, no food in the shops and, worst of all, a brainwashed people. He surrounded himself with young reformers, half his age and with twice his knowledge, who began to dismantle a planned economy that was rotten to the core.

For millions of Russians, it seemed that Mr Yeltsin's liberalisation of prices in 1992—not the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union—had plunged them into poverty. He refused to back off. Unlike Mr Gorbachev, he did not want to reform the communist system. He wanted to break its neck.

Masterfully written.

Could Have Seen It Coming

Daniel Henninger cites the Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative. Published in 2002. Five years ago.

...the 37 school attacks weren't typically carried out by severely ill, unhinged psychotics like Cho Seung-Hui. This is not to say they were happy campers (the study interviewed 10 perpetrators in depth). Though few of them would get off by reason of insanity, they were all mentally very unhappy campers; and what is more, other people knew that. And in nearly every case, someone knew they were planning the attack: "In nearly two thirds of the incidents, more than one person had information about the attack before it occurred."

Among the reasons widely adduced for not doing something about Cho's violent proclivities are HIPAA and FERPA, the confidentiality laws for health records and college students' records. Well, there's no FERPA for high schools. There is merely the weird cultural refusal to turn in bad actors to adult authority. In one school attack, so many students knew it was coming that 24 were waiting on a mezzanine to watch, one with a camera.

"Why," he asks, "do we refuse to take our own best advice?"

Stress Relief

Ann Counter gives us "elected Democrats running like scared schoolgirls from the media's demand that they enact new gun control laws."

Instead, Democrats are promoting a mental health exception to the right to bear arms. We've banned mass murder and that hasn't seemed to work. So now we're going to ban mass murderers. Yes, that will do the trick!...

So on one hand, the mental health exception is a feel-good measure that would be largely pointless. But on the other hand, it's no skin off my back. Liberals go to therapy. Conservatives go to church. And I think we'd all sleep better knowing that David Brock could not buy a gun.

That's a good line, but I'd like to add that libertarians don't go to therapy or church. On Sundays we go to the range.

Smart ≠ Rich

John Tierney wants to know:

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?

I wish I had a good answer for that.

Maoist Ballet

In the field, the shooter will be confronted with the problem of position selection, and he must be ready to meet it. In training I have always attempted to inculcate a critical evaluation of firing position. The principle is to shoot from the steadiest position available. A firing rest is always a good idea, and trees, fence posts, and rock outcroppings are more common than you might expect. Such are not to be counted on, however, and the shooter must cultivate the habit of instant position selection, adapted to terrain and time.

And tempo, perhaps.

Quotation from The Art of the Rifle by Jeff Cooper; illustration from the web site of James Lileks.

We Liked Boris Yeltsin

Lileks confessed yesterday that he always had a soft spot for Boris Yeltsin; apparently, so did Michael Barone:

Gorbachev got up to speak in his mellow voice. In the course of his speech he mentioned Yeltsin. He said something about having fallen in the road. Yeltsin had recently been found in such a position after an accident; perhaps (OK, probably) he had been drinking.

Yeltsin's face turned red as Gorbachev was speaking. The members laughed loudly, and so did many—most, it seemed to me—in the press gallery. Yeltsin was being publicly humiliated in the most deliberate way. His political career was obviously a shambles....

As I watched him on television in August 1991, standing on the tank and defying the coup plotters, it seemed to me that one man was standing between freedom and dictatorship in a country of more than 200 million people. And I remembered how I had watched him being humiliated only 22 months before.

May he rest in peace.

Radio Beacon Tower

This morning I left the house at 5:40 AM and climbed up to the old radio beacon tower on Nugget Butte. Back in 1926 these were state-of-the-art navigational aids. The rotating light is gone now and the NDB transmitter, if it ever had one, is gone too. Space is available if you have an antenna to hang.

I remember watching the rotating beacon on Mount Nebo from our house three miles away, although I can't remember now if it was green-white-green-white every five seconds or just a white flash every ten. When we climbed up to the Mount Nebo tower we found that the concrete base was part of a forty-foot long concrete arrow pointing, we thought, due north. Actually it was pointing to the airport. The Nugget Butte tower's arrow points to the Grants Pass airport, or it would if it weren't buried under brush and leaves.

The old radio beacons are all but gone now. Soon the VORs will follow and then all we'll have left is GPS. When that fails we'll have to rely on ded. reckoning.

Update: Dave Handy says "It was green-white-green-white every five seconds. I was closer than you at Pilger on Harvard and had a direct view from my bedroom window."

Our New Kitchen

When Leslie and I first set up house in a one bedroom upstairs apartment in Reno, Nevada, the kitchen was tiny—an "efficiency" kitchen—but it was ours. Since then we've lived in three or four different houses including the one we bought in 1998 and have been remodeling ever since. Our kitchens have been bigger and smaller, far better and far worse, but the worst we've ever had is the one we've lived with for the last two or three years.

Our waferboard shelves were just "temporary," but like so many temporary situations we've had to endure, it seemed to go on and on until it became more permanent than life itself. Now, finally, thanks mostly to Leslie's genius and tenacity, we have a new kitchen all our own. All the little touches we love so well, we credit to ourselves; we designed it that way. All the little annoyances, same thing. It's ours, 100 percent.

Diminutive Dems

Looked Good On Paper

NASA eschews the term “flying car,” preferring “personal air vehicle” instead. Nevertheless, NASA is designing a flying car that would humiliate George Jetson. The agency is committed to a 15-year time line for three successive generations of flying cars. The first, scheduled for 2008, will resemble a compact Cessna with folding wings that converts to road use (it shouldn’t cost any more than a Mercedes-Benz). The second, with a rollout planned for 2015, will be a two-person pod with small wings and a rear-mounted propeller. The third will rise straight up like a mini-Harrier jet and should be on the market by 2020.

Your tax dollars at work, as reported in Popular Mechanics.

Via Instapundit.

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

David A. Shaywitz reviews The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

If 100 random people gather in a room and the world's tallest man walks in, the average height doesn't change much. But if Bill Gates walks in, the average net worth rises dramatically. Height follows the bell curve in its distribution. Wealth does not...

The ubiquity of the bell curve lulls us into believing that we can predict the future—but many probability distributions are not normal. And the future may be stranger than we think.

The Case of Einstein's Violin

William L. Sullivan presents his second novel:

In this wacky mystery, half of a missing Einstein formula turns up in a violin case in an Oregon attic. When Ana Smyth sells the case on eBay she suddenly finds herself dodging international spies. To find the rest of the formula and uncover the truth about her own family history, she races through Europe — from a Greek monastery to an Italian cyclotron, the Slovenian Alps, and the German city where Einstein was born.

Sullivan, the author of numerous guides to hiking in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, will present a slide show on "Hiking in Europe" and a reading from "The Case of Einstein's Violin" at Bloomsbury Books in downtown Ashland this Friday, April 27, at 7:30. He will also present a slide show on "Oregon's Most Beautiful Trips & Trails" at Oregon Books, 937 NE "D" Street, Grants Pass this Saturday, April 28, at 3:00.

Sullivan's web site is at http://www.oregonhiking.com.

Boris Yeltsin, R.I.P.

Moscow (AP):

Former President Boris Yeltsin, who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, has died, a Kremlin official said Monday. He was 76.

Totally Retro Drug Bust

The Mail Tribune has a big drug bust story:

Ashland drug sweep nets six people, LSD

LSD? Isn't that kind of old-fashioned? One of those arrested is "Dewayne Paul Crossman, 43, address unknown." Dewayne's hallucinogen of choice was hashish.

I don't know if the Ashland police know how to Google, but Dewayne's also wanted in Iowa.

Kind Of Sounded Like The Kingsmen

Dave Barry remembers Richard Berry:

...for me the coolest thing about "Louie Louie" was this: I could play it on the guitar. In fact, just about anybody could play it, including a reasonably trainable chicken. Three chords, nothing tricky. This is why, when I — like so many teenage boys of that era — became part of a band in a futile attempt to appeal to girls, "Louie Louie" was the first song we learned.

We'd whomp away on our cheap, untuneable guitars plugged into our Distort-O-Matic amplifiers, and our dogs would hide and our moms would leave the house on unnecessary errands, and we'd wail unintelligibly into our fast-food-drive-thru-intercom-quality public address system, and when we were finally done playing and the last out-of-tune notes had leaked out of the room, we'd look at each other and say: "Hey! We sound like the Kingsmen!" And the beauty of that song is, we kind of did.

Another Pulitzer Disgrace

Jonathan Tobin compares Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliot to Walter Duranty:

Both Elliot and Duranty crossed the same line when they allowed their agenda to dictate their coverage. While Duranty covered up genocide, dishonesty about Islamist extremism is no less egregious. What this proves is that those who imagined that Duranty was a relic of journalism's past were wrong. That a travesty such as Elliot's "imam" would bring a Pulitzer is a disgrace that again taints the reputation of both the prizes and the Times.

Who is Downtown Dan?

Anyone who has spent more than a couple of weeks in Medford knows this guy. He name is Dan and he could sure use a buck if you've got one to spare. You'll know right away he's not playing with a full deck; couple of bricks short of a load; that elevator don't go to the top floor. He knows it, too, and he's alright with that. But he sure could use a buck.

Now Mark Freeman of the Mail Tribune has written a feature article on "Downtown" Dan. It's more interesting than you might expect.

The Future of Human Rights

Eric Posner in The Wall Street Journal:

Today, the future of the international human rights legal regime is bleak. And yet if what matters is not conformity with the rules of the human rights treaties, but the well-being of the world's population, things have never been better. Mortality rates are down, per capita income is up, literacy has spread, democracy is flourishing. Economic growth in China and India, which together account for a third of the world's population, largely accounts for improvement in overall well-being, but there is also good news in Latin America, South Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

How can this be? As technology and trade have advanced and spread, so has wealth and education, and with wealth and education has come political reform, and the expansion of civil and political rights. This is part of a long-term trend that goes back centuries.

There is no guarantee that it will continue, but one central fact needs to be recognized: The role of legalized international human rights in this process has been minimal or nil. Much more important in the 20th century were the determined efforts of liberal democracies to oppose powerful, dangerous, expansionist states...

Favorite Whine

From the Mail Tribune.

"We really need a stable funding base," said Borovansky. "We're operating hand to mouth."

Translation:

"You can't expect us operate like a business," said the overpaid bureaucrat, "We need a subsidy."

Gun Crimes Up Sharply

James Q. Wilson:

As for the European disdain for our criminal culture, many of those countries should not spend too much time congratulating themselves. In 2000, the rate at which people were robbed or assaulted was higher in England, Scotland, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Sweden than it was in the United States. The assault rate in England was twice that in the United States. In the decade since England banned all private possession of handguns, the BBC reported that the number of gun crimes has gone up sharply.

Instapundit already quoted him, but I think it's worth repeating.

Fashion Felony

Incontrovertible evidence
that young Bill Clinton used drugs.
Heavily.

Vigilantes

By way of The Corner and Bob Tarantino a personal account by Buck Wroten of the Texas Tower Shooting of 1966:

None of the professor’s offices were occupied except for one whose door was open. As I walked down the hall toward that office the sound of a large caliber rifle thundered from that open doorway followed by two men talking. After all the bizarre events of the last few minutes it didn’t seem strange to me when I peeked around the office doorway to see one professor shooting a deer rifle at the top of tower while the other fed him ammunition. It never entered my mind to question why an English professor would have his deer rifle in his office complete with boxes of ammunition. This was Texas after all.

When you shoot at Texans they shoot back.

Sun-Kyung Cho's Statement

A statement issued to press by Sun-Kyung Cho, sister of the killer.

On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy.

We are heartbroken.

We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world.

Every day since April 16, my father, mother and I pray for students Ross Abdallah Alameddine, Brian Roy Bluhm, Ryan Christopher Clark, Austin Michelle Cloyd, Matthew Gregory Gwaltney, Caitlin Millar Hammaren, Jeremy Michael Herbstritt, Rachael Elizabeth Hill, Emily Jane Hilscher, Jarrett Lee Lane, Matthew Joseph La Porte, Henry J. Lee, Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, Lauren Ashley McCain, Daniel Patrick O'Neil, J. Ortiz-Ortiz, Minal Hiralal Panchal, Daniel Alejandro Perez, Erin Nicole Peterson, Michael Steven Pohle Jr., Julia Kathleen Pryde, Mary Karen Read, Reema Joseph Samaha, Waleed Mohamed Shaalan, Leslie Geraldine Sherman, Maxine Shelly Turner, Nicole White, Instructor Christopher James Bishop, and Professors Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, Kevin P. Granata, Liviu Librescu and G.V. Loganathan.

We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced.

Each of these people had so much love, talent and gifts to offer, and their lives were cut short by a horrible and senseless act.

We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person.

We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.

He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare.

There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.

Our family is so very sorry for my brother's unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us.

Ted Nugent: I've About Had Enough

Master of subtlety Ted Nugent weighs in:

Zero tolerance, huh? Gun-free zones, huh? Try this on for size: Columbine gun-free zone, New York City pizza shop gun-free zone, Luby's Cafeteria gun-free zone, Amish school in Pennsylvania gun-free zone and now Virginia Tech gun-free zone.

Anybody see what the evil Brady Campaign and other anti-gun cults have created? I personally have zero tolerance for evil and denial. And America had best wake up real fast that the brain-dead celebration of unarmed helplessness will get you killed every time, and I've about had enough of it.

Hunker down and listen to him. But keep in mind: he wears earplugs.

Losers

Peggy Noonan in Opinion Journal:

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.

Read it all.

Wikipedia, Baby

Computer programmers like to joke that doing floating-point arithmetic on a binary processor is a good way to "get wrong answers fast." The same caveat applies to Wiki. Keep it in mind when you use this handy reference. Cross-check your answers. Bucky can't edit the whole web—just his corner.

We Are Big Brother—Rightly So

Greg sends a link to an article by Pat Sajak (yes, he's a columnist as well as a game show host) who says we are Big Brother.

Thanks to cell phone cameras, email and Internet sights such as YouTube, we have become self-appointed spies keeping close watch on everything our neighbors do. It isn’t the government surreptitiously taking pictures... it’s our fellow citizens.

He has a point, but when it comes to privacy or the lack of it, to my mind technology has never been the issue. In a small town in the 1890s, everyone knew what everyone else was up to. The communications medium was the gossip chain; probably faster and clearly more efficient than text-messaging.

Maybe we have too much privacy these days—that's where the psychos hide. Why should we mind our own business and leave them alone? Maybe if we bothered them a little more, forced them to answer a few questions, explain themselves and so on, their sickness wouldn't have a chance to fester.

Would the hardware store of the 1890s sell a sidearm to that kid Joe Sung-Wee who's been acting a might peculiar lately? I don't think so. Better ask the sheriff first.

Across Town Only $3.99

I just ordered a book for a friend of mine in Roseburg. When I got the shipping notice I tracked the package on UPS and discovered that it was shipped all the way from...

Roseburg, Oregon

I googled a bit and found that Roseburg is "home to the largest book distribution warehouse in the nation, Ingram Book Company."

$3.99 for shipping across town. I think I got ripped off.

Unholy Trinity

Norman Lebrecht tells the story of Elsa Schiller, who spent time in a concentration camp, Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi party in 1933, and Ernst von Siemens, the director of Deutsche Grammophon.

Between them, the three conspirators promoted a global acceptance of the pernicious idea that art can be detached from the circumstances of its creation, and that war crimes can be washed away in a haze of perfect beauty and commercial success.

Lebrecht's book The Life and Death of Classical Music is available from Amazon.

Learning to Drink and Drive

George Will noted this morning that America's drinking age of 21 "has moved drinking to settings away from parental instruction and supervision." And that's a problem.

I've always thought that the drinking age should be 16, like France, while the driving age should be 18, like Japan. Get a little experience with the bottle before the throttle.

Twenty Years Ago In The Economist

The leader warned:

Looking ahead, it is easy to imagine the worst. The United States declares trade war on Japan; then, with the Reagan administration egging the protectionists on, Congress raises tariffs... the victims retaliate... American interest rates jump... Latin American debtors default; the slump which follows is at least as deep as 1980-82.

That prospect, unfortunately, is not just a fantasy.

To forestall disaster The Economist implored Mr Reagan to raise taxes. He did not, and the economy continued to boom.

In other news the magazine devoted four pages to recapping its successful defense in a libel case.

[The Economist] has no bone to pick with Mr Bobolas and is happy to apologise for the allegation... that he received Soviet funds to start Ethnos. He didn't. On this score, Foreign Report got its facts wrong. As was made clear at the trial, The Economist maintained, and could not apologise for, the allegation that Ethnos was, from the outset, a mouthpiece of the Soviet propaganda machine.

Mr George Shultz went to Moscow but avoided the American embassy.

The building's evident insecurity meant that he had to communicate with Washington from a Winnebago van specially flown in for the purpose. The stunning realisation that the new embassy may be irretrievably riddled with bugs is an issue that has yet to explode with full force.

And in the Finance pages,

Battle lines are drawn for the first of Wall Street's insider-trading cases to be challenged in court. Since Mr Dennis Levine was arrested in May 1986, all the ten investment bankers accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Mr Rudolph Giuliani, the federal investigator, have pleaded guilty and cooperated. Not the Latest batch.

On April 9th, three arbitragers (speculators in takeover shares) were indicted on charges of insider trading, involving four counts of felony. They are Mr Robert Freeman, partner and head of arbitrage at Goldman Sachs; Mr Richard Wigton, head of arbitrage at Kidder Peabody; and Mr Timothy Tabor, formerly of Kidder Peabody. All three denied the charges through their lawyers.

And all three—innocent victims—walked, though their lives and careers were irreparably damaged.

Mr Giuliani was, and remains, undeterred in his battle against real and imaginary evil.

Gun-Free Zones Safe For Shooters

Miss Coulter says:

The reason schools are consistently popular targets for mass murderers is precisely because of all the idiotic "Gun-Free School Zone" laws.

From the people who brought you "zero tolerance," I present the Gun-Free Zone! Yippee! Problem solved! Bam! Bam! Everybody down! Hey, how did that deranged loner get a gun into this Gun-Free Zone?

It isn't the angst of adolescence. Plenty of school shootings have been committed by adults with absolutely no reason to be at the school, such as Laurie Dann, who shot up the Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka, IL, in 1988; Patrick Purdy, who opened fire on children at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, CA, in 1989; and Charles Carl Roberts, who murdered five schoolgirls at an Amish school in Lancaster County, PA, last year.

Oh, by the way, the other major "Gun-Free Zone" in America is the post office.

The Postal Office?

Tillamook County Dairy Princess

Tillamook, Oregon:

Tillamook County has a new member of royalty — Tillamook County Dairy Princess Kristin Hogan.

The 49th annual Tillamook County Dairy Princess Contest at the Tillamook County Creamery Association, April 14, was filled to capacity to support the two young ladies competing for the title — Hogan and Katie Peterson....

Hogan is the daughter of Dave and Rita Hogan.

And very pretty, too.

They Weighed The Risk

The munchkin wrangler:

I know I won't care for the left's instant condemnation of our "loose weapons laws" (the Brady Crowd already put out a press release to that effect), but I'm also not totally in love with the gun crowd howling about how Virginia Tech has "blood on their hands" because they disallow otherwise legal VA CCW holders from toting on campus. This statement may ruffle some feathers, but every CCW holder on that campus who didn't carry a weapon did so by choice. There may have been some who did have a valid license to carry, but they weighed the risk of expulsion against the risk of being caught defenseless, and they made their choice.

Tam endorses.

Earth Week Virtual Cruise Night

Iowahawk says Show Me The Carbon.

That unseasonable chill in the air can only mean one thing: it's Earth Week again! To commemorate this auspicious and hysterical occasion, I am hosting the Second Annual Iowahawk Earth Week Virtual Cruise Night. Last year's inaugural event, won by the nasty twin turbo '66 Mustang of Seattle's Preston Peterson, was a tire-smoking success with nearly 70 entries totaling nearly 300 Gaia-saving miles per gallon. Impressive, but I'm hoping that together we break that record for 2007.

Parts one and two are already up. Check it out!

Bun Warmer

Tokyo (Reuters):

Twenty-six smoking toilets, and three more on fire, put a Japanese toilet maker in the hot seat on Monday.

Toto Ltd., known for its high-tech toilets with bidets that have blow-drying, air purification and seat-warming functions, apologized to consumers and offered free checks and repairs after some of its toilets with bidets and heated seats sent up smoke and three caught fire.

"We apologize deeply for the trouble we have caused to our customers," the company said in a statement.

That's nice. In America they say, "We apologize if any of our customers were inconvenienced." Like, by who ever.

Item noted by Taranto.

Oh my gosh it's spreading.

Japan's second-biggest toilet maker INAX Corp. has joined porcelain powerhouse Toto with tales of smoking toilets and burning bidets...

"We've been promoting a culture of washing one's backside since 1980, and that's given us a 60 percent market share. We want customers to contact us as soon as possible if there's a problem," Matsumoto said.

Try to cool down first.

The Reclusive Mrs. James Lileks

With Mark Steyn and some guy.

Two Worth Reading

Professor Reynolds

People don't stop killers. People with guns do.

And Mark Steyn

A Culture of Passivity: "Protecting" our "children" at Virginia Tech.

Supreme Court Outlaws Infanticide

Justice Kennedy in the Opinion of the Court:

The Act proscribes a particular manner of ending fetal life, so it is necessary here, as it was in Stenberg, to discuss abortion procedures in some detail....

If you disagree with the judgment of the Supreme Court I challenge you to read, with your imaginative powers unsuppressed, Section I-A of the Opinion which begins with the sentence quoted above.

John Stossel's Right

Americans spent 6.4 billion hours complying with the tax code in 2005 — a chunk of time worth $265 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. That's more than the 2006 federal budget deficit.

Those of you who do your taxes yourselves spend an average of eight to 27 hours toiling for the U.S. government.

What a waste.

He says Estonia has a better way. Maybe we should move there.

Sugar Magnolia

Dave went for a walk in the alley with Kat.