For a little light reading...

IMAO: 00000101 00000101 00000101 Carnival Of Comedy (Week 2)

Rules For Men (continuing)

1. Never, ever, EVER assume a women is pregnant. She may be having contractions every two minutes, but the microscopic chance that is it really just heartburn or gas pains should prevent you from making the assumption. You have very little to gain and everything to lose.

2. Only go into a women's purse under extreme duress. Purses are actually small black holes that contain 1) more stuff than should be able to fit into that space, and (more importantly) 2) things that men just weren't meant to see. I am not talking about "feminine hygiene products" and the like. I am talking about things that will make you shake your head and get you in trouble if you ever mention it. Consider the reverse, she looks in your (toolbox, computer harddrive, whatever) and starts a sentence with "Why do you have...?" No good can come of any of it.

From James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today", second article down. This is where the "it is not a life until the moment of birth" argument falls down. That argument would strike down any and all punishment of pregnant women (or anyone else) whose actions endanger and harm "the fetus". One can go up to a pregnant women, hit her hard in the belly with a baseball bat, kill "the fetus", and only be charged with simple battery against the mother. That is not right...

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "Abortive Liberalism
'The first woman charged in Wyoming for allegedly using methamphetamine while she was pregnant is back in jail for an alleged drug violation,' the Associated Press reports from Riverton, Wyo.:

Michelle Ann Foust, 31, was jailed last Wednesday when a urine sample allegedly showed the presence of methamphetamine, which would violate the terms of her bond agreement.

Just five days earlier, Foust was in court for a preliminary hearing on a charge of child endangerment. She was arrested last October shortly after she gave birth to a son after blood tests allegedly showed both Foust and the infant had meth in their bloodstreams. . . .

The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized Fremont County Attorney Ed Newell for bringing the case. Foust's attorney, Gordon Ellis, said the law shouldn't apply to Foust because a fetus is not a child.

A fetus is not a child. This story encapsulates how pro-abortion absolutism has warped American liberalism. Perhaps liberalism's greatest virtue is its professed concern for the most helpless and vulnerable members of society. But here we have the ACLU, the premier liberal organization, taking the position that we have to tolerate what amounts to (alleged) child abuse in the name of dehumanizing the 'fetus.'

Liberalism also claims to respect science. But what scientific basis can there be for the claim that 'a fetus is not a child'? It's a defensible distinction if the question is whether abortion is permissible early in pregnancy, but as a biological matter, at some point a 'fetus' becomes capable of surviving on his own and thus indistinguishable from a child by any criterion except location.

To say 'a fetus is not a child' is to say that the act of birth somehow instantly transforms a mere clump of cells into a human being. If that is true, then birth really is a miracle--and Gordon Ellis is a creationist."

Xinhua - English

I applaud this UN statement. I just wish they had a little more credibility on stuff like this. This kind of language for 3 women and not much more for tens of thousands of people in the Sudan. As it is, it just seems like low-risk posturing, knowing that they (the UN) won't actually have to do any real work about this case. Whereas, in the Sudan, they are actually in place and responsible and failing.

Xinhua - English: "KABUL, May 5 (Xinhuanet) -- The United Nations on Thursday called upon Afghan government to initiate a probe into the murder of three women in northern Afghanistan and bring the culprits to justice, UN spokesperson Ariane Quentier said.

'It is particularly important that the authorities spare no effort to bring swiftly the perpetrators of this crime to justice,' she told journalists while quoted a statement of spokesperson of the special representative of UN secretary general for Afghanistan."

You wouldn't know it by the headline, but this is an article about the 2005 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Award winner. What does it say when this kind of headline gets more attention than a"Sorenson wins Teacher Of The Year Award" headline.

St. Paul Pioneer Press | 05/02/2005 | Dead bull pulls a crowd

a small victory: "For some reason they don't mind swimming in a dark, murky lake with a bottom so muddy that you have to wear sneakers in the water, where you have to swim with snakes and newts and mosquitoes and where you might get entwined in a crop of lily pads, which, as everyone knows, are really evil, living things and will wrap their vines around your legs so you can't move or swim and you'll find yourself pulled under the swampy water where some evil beaver will hold you down until you drown and then bury you in the mud to save you for winter dining."

One of the worst things my friends ever did to me was was just like this. We were waterskiing on Lake WInnebago and they drove over to the weedy part of the lake AND STOPPED THE BOAT! I slowed down and sank into the nastiest mass of weeds. The vines wrapped around my legs, started crawling into my swimsuit....... I still get the willies thinking about it 25 years later.

Playing on the IPOD: Cheap Trick: Surrender, Cher: Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves, then Joe Jackson from his swing album. I feel like I should be ashamed, but hey, I like what I like. And now Deep Purple. I love randomness...

SpaceShipOne and Burt Rutan are running into roadblocks by the US government (hat tip Instapundit). Expected, but disappointing nontheless. A couple of points:

1. The planet must develop a private space travel industry. Competition for money will drive innovation and is the best way to make it available to everyone over time. This is important because of #2.

2. We need to not have this planet a the only place that humans live. The chances of us screwing things up big time is going to get greater as weapons, nanotechnology, genetic research, and others. all continue to move forward. In general, those things are all good things (feed the world, cure diseases, etc.), but have the potential to be problematic. Having permanent, self-sustaining populations off earth is essential to the long term existance of the human race.

3. Space flight is dangerous and will be dangerous for the next couple of decades. That is a reality that no one person or government entity can change. The key is to find the people that have better approaches and track records to safety, like Burt Rutan, and learn from them. Government should be in the role of facilitating space travel, not frustrating it. See the quote below for how regulation is getting in the Rutan's way.

4. The technology transfer is an real issue and should not be ignored. However, it does need to be balanced with the importance of space travel. Hopefully some sort of arrangement can be worked out.

The safety bit from a BBC article...

BBC NEWS | Technology | US export rules frustrate Virgin: "Mr Rutan saved his harshest criticism for another branch of the US government, the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which oversaw the flights of SpaceShipOne.

'The process just about ruined my programme,' he said. 'It resulted in cost overruns, increased the risk for my test pilots, did not reduce the risk to the non-involved public, destroyed our 'always question, never defend' safety policy and removed our opportunities to seek new innovative safety solutions.'

Mr Rutan said the problems arose because the same rules that applied to unmanned, expendable boosters were being applied to passenger spaceships.

The risks of unmanned rocket launches are assessed on the basis of failure scenarios - involving calculations of, for example, how many people might be killed or hurt if an explosion occurred just after lift-off.

Instead, passenger-carrying spaceships, like airlines, needed to be handled with a focus on reducing the probability of failure, Mr Rutan said.

'The regulatory process was grossly misapplied for our research tests and, worse yet, is likely to be misapplied for the regulation of the future commercial space liners,' Mr Rutan added."

groan.....

The View Through The Windshield - A Car Blog: "Bad Pun Of The Day: If a spider is in a corn field, does it make cob webs?"

An editorial by Paul Bremer in the Wall Street Journal. One interesting piece...

OpinionJournal - Featured Article: "The interim constitution set out a goal that women should constitute a quarter of the National Assembly. In a marvelous tribute to the Iraqi people, women comprise 31% of the newly elected assembly, one of the highest proportions in the world--and twice that of the U.S. Congress."

Arthur Chrenkoff has his regular good news article up. Lots of good stuff on the hard work of democracy and education. The first bit on the Afghan Women's Soccer team is interesting and quoted in its entirity here.

OpinionJournal - Extra: "Sometimes, a simple story can better encapsulate the essence of a situation than dozens of learned articles and reports. This is one such story:

They practice on concrete rather than on grass, and their kit is far from uniform, but Afghanistan's premier women's [soccer] team is looking forward to making history this summer when it plays its first international match.

Even before they step onto the pitch at the Banuwan women's competition in Iran in August, the women of Kabul Selected will have overcome more obstacles than most athletes.

The team has been playing in organised leagues for a little more than a year. When they began, most training took place behind closed doors. While they still lack the amenities available to male players, the best players from the capital's 12 girls' teams have moved into the open.

The team is now practicing next to the grass pitch of Kabul Athletic Stadium, where the Taliban used to conduct their public executions--making one wonder whether, perhaps, God is a woman, after all.

Just as it reveals Afghanistan's triumphs, the story also illustrates the challenges facing the Afghan people: lingering discrimination and the need to maintain the struggle against ingrained backward attitudes, lack of resources and an all-too-slow flow of foreign assistance. But positive developments should not be overshadowed by negativity; Afghanistan has had enough of it for the past quarter of a century. The difference now is the unparalleled range of opportunities opening to Afghans, and the fact that with some much needed and generous help they are starting to make a better tomorrow. Here are some of their stories from the past month."

Instead of spending all their time ripping each other, what would happen if the Democrats made a serious effort to clean up government and the Republicans made a serious effort to clean up business?