Yeehaw. I'm packin' the kids into the Honda and gonna go see this flick.

A few reviews of Cat in the Hat. [Thanks to the ever vigilant Country Store for the warning on this gobbler.]

I like this one:

"If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more." -- Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBER.

For the benefit of To the Barricades, (a) Ted Geisel was Dr. Seuss and (b) the review was intended to be sarcastic, not a suggestion, and (c) Dr. Seuss was the author of The Cat in the Hat, the book, not the movie.

You're welcome.

Another Alisdair McIntyre Sighting.

Andrew Hagen, who I have been led to believe is a good old fashioned liberal, was pondering Gay Marriage recently and has come out against it. I find this line of reasoning promising:

Now, however, the gay movement is attempting to take control of marriage, one of the pillars of society, the institution that raises children. Subverting and taking control of one of society's most precious, cherished, and revered institutions is not what a civil rights movement is supposed to do. Taking control of marriage through judicial decisions that run counter to legal, logical reasoning is unhelpful to society. It will open the door to judicially strike down any and all moral decisions made by our state legislatures. It will end society's ability to regulate itself. It will lead down a slippery slope of terrifying consequences that will eventually force the cutting of the tie between marriage and society. Marriage would be informal and short-lived. Divorce would be casual and convenient. True marriage would continue to exist, but only in abbreviated form. More and more would immorality and wickedness become acceptable. We would enter into a moral dystopia, a stage of decadence that only Caligula could love.

We are running off the cliff that Alasdair MacIntyre describes in his book, After Virtue. We are entering a time when morality itself is questioned. At a time when our society faces threats external from terrorists that emanate from the civil war within Islam, our society is turning against itself. The result will be either devastation and a new dark age, or perseverance and a society better able to take on greater, higher challenges. Let us work and sacrifice untiringly for the brighter future, the one where our values and our liberty are preserved. I suppose this marks me as halfways conservative, but at this stage in time I am left with the conclusion that this is a crisis, and we can either protect what we have and improve upon it, or we can lose the freedom and cultural inheritance bequeathed upon us by countless, voiceless generations who only wanted to give us a future with their meager gifts. Unapologetically do I defend this civilization of virtuous freedom. It is by far our most precious gift, and yet no one can see or touch it. Civilization only lives in our minds and hearts, and so for its vulnerability we are bound to either protect it honorably, or betray it and fall into ignominy and disrepute. If only it were readily and immediately apparent to all what was happening. Instead, people only slowly perceive what is coming, and without the advantage of historical knowledge and perspective are further blindered. Education and discussion are the needed solutions.

(emphasis added.)

We may be running off a cliff indeed. The problem, though, is between two approaches to social institutions. One approach places the emphasis on subjective feelings writ large. To such people, at an extreme, the injunction against murder boils down to "I don't like murder and you shouldn't also." (In truth, I'm not making this up. as McIntyre illustrates in the first chapter of After Virtue these folks actually existed.) Under this approach, all we have are feelings disconnected from the world and feelings are inherently equal and equally valid. Like esophagi, everyone's got them.

The alternative, according to McIntyre, is the classic teleological approach whereby we define the virtues of a thing according to its ends and uses. "Thou shalt not murder" because, well, a virtuous man - a man of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance - just doesn't go around murdering people.

McIntyre depicts the conflict as a conflict between Nietzsche and Aristotle. Nietzsche claimed to be an immoralist. His great philosophical contribution was essentially psychological. Man was an animal. Virtues didn't exist. The good life was to be lived by the artist who would define his own values and move beyond good and evil. Aristotle, in contrast, believed that there were virtues. The good life was lived by living the virtuous life. Virtues could be explained as something more than mere emotions.

Ironically, you get the clear impression that American Constitutional law is Nietzschian in the area of the personal life. Consider the the famous "mystery of life" passage which a plurality of the Supreme Court gave us in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992) :

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under the compulsion of the State.

Trust me, after listening to twelve hours of lectures on Nietzsche, the "mystery of life" passage is quintessential Nietzsche. Which makes sense since if you (a) move to an officially atheistic philosophical position and (b) deny that there can be any ordering of virtues sufficiently important for society to favor over another ordering of virtues - that virtues are essentially in the eye of the beholder - you not surprisingly end up at nihilism. And the greatest nihilist was in fact Nietzsche. (You can see the way the deck is stacked in the "mystery of life" passage by its assumptions. An Aristotelian might say that the "heart of liberty" is found in the formation of people who exercise to a greater or lesser extent the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude.)

In a similar fashion, you can see the tension in Andrew Hagen's post. Gay marriage, as he points out, is a personal issue. But it's also a public issue. The fact that it's personal doesn't place it into a nihilistic, value free zone. But in modern America that's a tough argument to make.

Glad to see, though, that "right wing postmodernism" is gaining a hearing on all ends of the political spectrum.

Thanksgiving - A Revisionist Narrative

The Ombudsgod - the treasure trove of historical obscurities that he is - has a post on the real "narrative" of Thanksgiving. That narrative includes the first effort at American self-government and the fact that the natives who befriended the settlers sought to use the settlers as a counter-weight against the Native American tribes that were oppressing them.

Or, if you wish, you can believe that the earliest settlers were gold-hungry dupes intent on enslaving anything that walked on two legs, ala Pocahantas.

New Blog/New Concept

TPB at Unbillable Hours notes the emergence of a new blog Blogbook which he describes as a "metablog, a blog about blogging. If you're a lawyer-type - and, really, who in the Bear Flag League isn't? - it might be worth your while to check it out.

Also TPB describes the Massachusett's Gay Marriage opinion as a "royal disaster of an opinion." Since he's a NJ divorce attorney, and, therefore, would benefit from this disaster, er, opinion, that's quite some criticism.

By the by, on the subject of running against economic interest, I read the recent Cal Supreme Court decision creating an affirmative defense against dilatory use of employer sexual harassment policies. It's a good decision, and I say that as someone who had a companion case take up by the Cal Supremes. More, I hope, later.

Further Reflections on the X-Files Post and the Deterioration of American language.

I just realized that I had used the word "viz" in the reference to David Duchovny without really knowing what "viz" is supposed to mean. I had an idea of what it meant. I've seen it used, but it occurred to me that I couldn't define it with any certainty. My sense from seeing it used was that "viz" means something like "with reference to" or "in connection with."

Close, according to one on-line dictionary, the definition is as follows:

viz.

adv : as follows [syn: namely, that is to say, videlicet]


Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Viz \Viz\, adv. [Contr. fr. videlicet.]

To wit; that is; namely.

So my use was probably not according to Hoyle.

Nonetheless, this marginal error neatly underscores a point being made repeatedly by John McWhorter in Doing Our Own Thing, which is to say, or viz, that there is a difference to many, and an increasingly dwindling number, between written and oral speech. Written speech has traditionally been more formal than spoken. In writing, we try words and sentence constructions on for size that we would never dream of using in person. "Viz," for example, is a word I would never used in casual conversation except for amusement value.

McWhorter's point, though, is that the distinction between written and spoken English is in rapid decline, to the intellectual impoverishment of society. Compared to even 50 years ago, our written communication is coarse, simplistic and simple-minded. The reaction against formality and care in communication can be seen in a variety of arenas. One can see this phenomena anytime one wanders over to the Atrios blog and read the comments. Likewise, I remember teaching a class in Corporations Law and using words that while somewhat beyond Reader's Digest, should not have been entirely unfamiliar to anyone with a college degree. I had a few students who were not ashamed or discomforted in admitting that they were unfamiliar with these words and their attitude was that the multisyllabic term I had thrown out was "funny." I suggested to the class that they were in law school and that part of their educational goal might be to adopt an air of humility, to wit, or viz, even though the vocabulary was not included in the Beavis and Butthead lexicon it might still be worth learning. (OK. I didn't really say that, but I did suggest that they look up unfamiliar words in a dictionary.)

Incidentally, I do recommend McWhorter's book. It is well-written and explains things I had wondered long about, such as why Prime Minister Question Hour is such a charming demonstration of wit and intelligence, especially when compared to the inarticulate grunting that American politicians can muster only with preparation; and why print advertising from even the 1960s seems to read like a college textbook; and why modern poetry is absolutely worthless and moribund.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A special Thanksgiving as The Accidental Jedi and Ith documents with a picture.

By the way, Thanksgiving. To whom are we giving thanks and for what? I think I know the answer to the first question - but let's not point that out lest some judge decide that this holiday is "unconstitutional" - and as for the second it varies from year to year. For me, this year is, of course, like every year I give thanks to the Creator who let me be born in a country where freedom and opportunity are taken for granted, where my children will grow up without the need to submit to the ruthless tyranny of human beings or economic subjugation. Most of all I am grateful for the wisdom of the framers in drafting Article II, section 1 of the Constitution of the United States, without which we would today be governed by a man whose support was limited to the population within certain areas located no more than 100 miles of the Eastern and Western seaboards.

Odd. I had imagined that Jay Manifold would look more like David Duchovny.

Chicago Boyz is providing a photoblog of the recent Chicago Boyz Blogger Bash. There's even a photo or two of our favorite number crunching Arcturoid.

By the way, viz the Duchovny reference, I'm watching the X-Files episode, The War of the Coprophages. I may need an intervention. I'm finding myself attracted to the entemologist, Dr. Bambi. She's really... what's the word I'm looking for.. ah, yes..."hot." And she loves science fiction. Alas, such a woman could never exist in our workaday world.

Also, the reaction shots on Scully during her phone calls with Mulder are priceless. And the "This is no place for an entemologist" line was classic.

I think I could stand to borrow a life.

Update: Maybe I need a hobby like raising chickens.

Those crazy radical kids.

Antioch Road reports on a Gallup poll in which 72% of girls ages 13 to 17 consider abortion to be morally wrong.

No doubt this poll will be given a great deal of air time by the mainstream media.

Incidentally, for the benefit of To the Barricades, that last sentence was an example of sarcasm.

You're welcome.

The American Compromise

I am probably not alone in my generation to have been taught by my parents that the Pope has no role in politics, that his infallibility was limited to matters of morals and theology. That formulation represents the "American Compromise" of Catholics with democracy, and my generation was probably uniquely positioned with respect to that compromise. Previous generations had worked out the compromise, such that within 18 months of my birth the first American Catholic president could be elected. The concept of the compromise was elevated by Kennedy to almost a credal dimension when Kennedy pledged to keep his religious views hermetically sealed from his political policies. I've always unconsciously accepted the compromise as a part and parcel of being a good American.

On the other hand, as Disputations observes the compromise had an unintended corollary:

Many Catholics who reject the Kennedy doctrine see the neutering of one's judgment by removing all that is uniquely Catholic as a great victory for secularists. It is, certainly, but I think there's something more fundamental at work here. Kennedy declared his doctrine, not at a meeting of secularists, but at a meeting of Baptist ministers.

A man "whose religious views are his own private affair" is not a Catholic in any meaningful sense. By cutting his faith off from community, he necessarily becomes a non-credal Protestant, since Catholicism is by definition a shared and public affair.

The risk to Catholicism in the U.S. is that, in fighting against secularism, it can make concessions to non-Catholic Christianity -- the traditional Protestantism of the country -- that makes impossible a genuinely Catholic character.

So the first Catholic president was effectively a non-credal Protestant.

It's an interesting thought. I suspect that younger generations of Catholics aren't taught the creed of the compromise since the idea that the Pope or the Church would ever be able to dictate or influence political judgments is dim at best.

Forget the whole gay marriage thing. The next thing we have to outlaw is plastic surgery.

Ghost of a Flea -who has an exuberant if misguided love of bad science fiction - has a link to what Michael Jackson would have looked like at 45 without plastic surgery. Here's the link to the computer reconstruction. In the reconstruction, Jackson looks, well, human.

That plastic surgery is some kind of scary stuff. There's even a website devoted to celebrity "awful plastic surgery." It's like watching a train wreck. On the other hand, it does explain Mickey Rourke.

Shudder.

A Slice of Life.

The nice thing about blogging - at least for me - is the immediacy and transparency that the journal like process of blogging provides to readers, offering a view into experiences and perspectives previously unknown. A case in point is this post by Mullatoboy following this post by Cobb on the subject of what it's like to be presumed to be a sharer of the values of another merely because of one's race. Cobb's point - that underclass values are presumed to be real and authentic compared to cultured values - and seems to be something similar to the point that John McWhorter is making in Doing Our Own Thing.

As for me, I've got no similar experience to draw upon. No redhead has ever presumed that I would "hook him up" because of our shared colormorph. Albeit I do know what it's like to date a redhead - weirdly similarly to incest, and I don't mean that in a good way.

While I've got zero real experience to add to the conversation - and I really do recommend both posts - ignorance has never stopped me from sharing my purely theoretical insights. Those insights boil down to the words "affinity fraud."

If you ever go to an on-line legal research system and type in words relating to fraud, you will see an interesting pattern. The cases are often named things like Kirkerian v. Kazillian or Yang v. Chee or O'Reilly v. Murphy (particularly the cases before 1970.) This pattern is replicated in the practical experience of the business litigation attorney who finds the most egregious instances of fraud to happen within churches. These fact patterns make out "affinity fraud" where people within an ethnic groups and ethnic churches will prey upon members of their own group because it's easy, because the victims have the guards down, because the victims are trusting. Racial solidarity talk is simply affinity fraud institutionalized. (By the way, as should be obvious from context, I'm making no assertion that someone named, for example, O'Reilly sued someone named Murphy, nor am I referring to any specific person. I've pulled these case names either out of the air or my vast practical experience. If you think that I'm referring to a specific actual published decision, a real case or a specific person, you have absolutely no basis for making that claim.)

My take-away from my observations of affinity fraud is not dissimilar to that of Cobb and Mullatoboy. I've resolved never to do business with Irish Catholics, and certainly not with redheaded Irish Catholics.

You just can't trust those cheating SOBs.

The Decline of Rhetoric.

I just picked up John McWhorter's Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music - and here is a link to the book's website - which is discussed in this Aramvirique post. So far, and I'm only into the introduction, the book reads well. It is well written and makes a fair points that while linguistic change being inevitable, there does seem to have been a "sea-change" in rhetoric and culture that can be traced to the 1960s. Should be interesting.

Here's another "oo-whee-ooh" Factoid

Which is supposed to represent the theme to "Dark Shadows.

Anyhow, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the deaths on the same day of John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. My favorite Catholic book store - the Holy Child on the Northwest Corner of Palm and Bullard - has the Peter Kreeft book which imagines a dialogue between the three as they wait in the afterlife's big waiting room which is mentioned in this The Corner post. I'm told that it's an excellent book.

Speaking of Upside Down Priorities.

Lileks slams Salaam Pax for his whine about poor service in Post-Saddam Iraq. It seems that America spilled a glass of tomato juice on a dirty carpet and has to clean up the whole thing, or somesuch. Lilek's response is epic:

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Let me explain this in simple terms, habibi. You would have spent the rest of your life under Ba’athist rule. You might have gotten some nice architectural commissions to do a house for someone whose aroma was temporarily acceptable to the Tikriti mob. You might have worked your international connections, made it back to Vienna, lived a comfy exile’s life. What’s certain is that none of your pals would ever have gotten rid of that “scary guy without the hideous moustache” (as if his greatest sin was somehow a fashion faux pas) and the Saddam regime would have prospered into the next generation precisely because of people like you.

Update: Bill Cork suggests that my title and Lilek's blast are out of line.

I don't think they are. As I note in the comments, Salaam Pax claims that he lost family and friends who disappeared into the Baathist security apparatus. Given the level of access to information that he claimed during the war and the well-known tradition that totalitarian systems have of compromising their citizens - in an early purge, Saddam had survivors execute the purged for that very reason - I think that there is a fair chance that Salaam was implicitly complicit with the Baathist regime. (And, really, who wouldn't be?) Salaam says he is grateful to America for toppling the Baathist regime.

But he wants to lecture America for not in six months time bringing to Iraq the same level of social, political and technological development enjoyed by Cleveland.

I stand by what I wrote. Salaam doesn't have the moral position to criticize America.

Now, it is true that America wasn't invited into Iraq. Or is that true? Were there no Iraqis who were asking America to do what it did last May? The Kurds, perhaps, who were saved from genocidal annihilation only by continuing American military intervention? Don't they count?

We intervened and it is our tradition to rebuild, but I don't accept the idea that we didn't have a causus belli. Iraq was regularly shooting at our aircraft in the no fly zones. Here is a Reason article from October 21, 2002 referencing the causus belli available to America last year, including the constant pot-shotting of American military planes. And here is the pertinent passage in case anyone has forgotten:

Since then, the coalition (mainly the United States and Britain) has flown more than 250,000 sorties over Iraq. "Iraqi forces have fired on these aircraft thousands of times, and U.S. and coalition pilots have returned fire thousands of times," note Stevens, Wall, and Dinlenc.

This kind of activity has served to justify military action - war - in the past.

Moreover, and more importantly, Iraq clearly was supporting al Quaeda and other groups. It may not fit neatly in Just War Theory, but after September 11 American leaders can no longer allow states with access to biological, chemical and, eventually, nuclear weapons to support, incite or aid non-state terrorist groups. Too much damage can be done to easily for America to accept a rule that we will only retaliate only if we have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

Iraq has been benefitted by America's military action. But for that action, Salaam might have been "disappeared" into the maws of the Baathist security apparatus, even if he was a Baathist stooge. The purpose of Terror often requires that fellow-travelers be sent to the mass grave. Thousands of others probably would have been likewise. They live and have the chance to decide their own future. If they refuse to "cowboy up," but instead choose to continue the attitudes of subjects in a totalitarian state, then they will lose the chance we've given them. But it's their decision, not ours.

Call that arrogance if you wish.

Second Update: By the way, and to be clear, I think that Bill Cork and Mark Shea are doing yeoman duty in cautioning against arrogance. This kind of prophetic activity has a grand and proper history. Sic transit gloria munde the slave would whisper to the Roman general during the triumph. Pride goeth, as they say, before the fall. We are Americans and we have a tradition of the common man as soldier. Our soldiers are not conquistadors or jihadistas appropriating personal demesne's for their glory and profit. Hence, referring to Iraqis as "Haji" is clearly wrong and arrogant.

On the other hand, excess must be avoided in all things, including self-abasement. Our soldiers are not the slave soldiers of a tyranny. They are free men and women freely fighting for a free people. Their presence may be just exactly the model of interracial, intertribal, interreligious cooperation that might appeal to the aspiration of umma that the Iraqis need.

Or at least that's my prayer.

Road Trip.

I'm off to San Francisco to see if I can settle a cancer disability discrimination case. I've got some lectures on Nietzsche in the car so don't be surprised if on Saturday I'm not focusing on whether arguments over gay marriage are instantiations of the "will to power."

A Civil Dispute.

There is nice little disputation going at the appropriately named Disputations over the meaning and role of "inclusive language." Much give and take. Much irony and humour. No name calling or tendentious attacks on deliberate misreadings of arguments. The folks at To the Barricades should take notes on how to do a civil dispute.

Incidentally, Jcecil3, who dropped something into the comments here last week and appears to be a well meaning sort of progressive, has this observation in the comments:

What I would say is that a woman is only sexist if she resist inclusive language and the promotion of equal rights. Only a conservative woman can be sexist.

From the context of the comment, I don't think this was meant by Jcecil3 as hyperbolic or ironic. It does, though, offer an insight into something I was wrestling with on the "civil disobedience" thread over at Mark Byron's site where various comments asserted that the majority could not legitimately engage in civil disobedience, only the minority could. I guess the buried paradigm is something like civil disobedience is legitimately used only as an attack on the power structure, the power structure is conservative/reactionary, therefore only liberal/progressive attacks through civil disobedience are moral.

I think that actually sums up the buried assumption that the posters were making. The logic of the paradigm is obviously both absurd and self-serving for all kinds of historical and logical reasons, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was the core axiom among a substantial segment of society whose representatives are even now applying their pragmatic approach to civil disobedience against the power structure in Florida.

Boston Marriage Redux.


Cobb offers a compromise on the "gay marriage" issue as follows:

Therefore the state should not *recognize* 'Marriage' any more than it recognizes 'Extreme Unction'. The state buries unidentified bodies in the ground but that does not make it a Funeral. The state recognizes civil unions but that doesn't make them Marriages.

I'd like to subscribe to this position, but I can't. Here's why.

As I explain to my "pregnancy discrimination" clients, pregnancy discrimination really isn't about "discrimination." In pregnancy discimination cases we're not really asking employers to treat their pregnant employments equally. We are actually asking that pregnant folks - women, we call them - be given preferential treatment over folks with ulcers. You can fire the latter after three months given all kinds of side-constraints dealing with hours worked and number of employees, but the former have to get rehired in the same position after four (or seven) months.

This is justified, I explain (or, as we say in Fresno, "It's all good"), because we kind of want there to be folks in the future to pay taxes, provide labor and defend the borders. To get those people - children, we call them - we kind of have to encourage, or at least de-incentivize, folks - i.e., "women" - to get pregnant - or, as we say in Fresno, the "baby-making way."

Even so, making babies, and raising children, will be either exclusively a heterosexual project (in the former situation) or largely a heterosexual project (in the latter.) To that extent, social policy should encourage the institution that is most likely to lead to the creation of healthy, productive future citizens - and that in our middle class bourgeousie culture is long-term monogamous marriage. Social policy should encourage such an institution for exactly the same reason that scocial policy currently favors the "disability" of pregnancy over the disability of gout - to wit, because a healthy, productive society requires healthy, productive replacement economic units, which we call "children."

Now, when I take off my Catholic/Aristotelian hat, I have zero opposition to the existential concept of same sex marriage. More power to them, I sez. I hope they will all be as succesful as I was. More money to the divorce lawyers and God bless them all, sez me.

But as a conservative who has noticed the altogether dreadful consequence of minor adjustments in social policy, I have to be skeptical. Back in the seventies, no fault divorce was intended as a minor adjustment to the institution of divorce. What could it hurt? Divorce might climb a few percentage points, but, really, the horrible charade of connived divorces, where "incompatibility" was founded on purely fictitious excuses, would be ended. It would all end in utopia as those few, sad couples who wanted to divorce would maximize their joint and several utility

Ten years later when the divorce rate climbed to 50%, the genie was out of the bottle. Now, when the first generation of the divorce culture is now beginning to have its own children, one has to wonder which was worse, the tremendous exposure of children to poverty and violence, or the denial of growth opportunities to the parents who had them? (And, incidentally, like the famous mock NY Times headline "World to end tomorrow; women and minorities hit hardest," the fact is that the breakdown of the family hurt the most vulnerable populations. For example, the drop- out rate at Fresno High School, which in the 1950s was the premier Fresno high school and graduated Baseball greats Tom Seaver and Dick Ellsworth, presently is around 40%. These students simply disappear and never get a High School degree. Not coincidentally, I was told by a teacher at Fresno High that her long term marriage of thirty years was unfathomable to her students who were usually working on their third or fourth stepfather.)

But it's all good. Gay marriage is a marginal issue. How many gays really want to marry? It couldn't possibly further erode an institution that desperately needs to be slapped awake and sent off to Betty Ford. But then I have to reflect on a culture that celebrates Madonnna and in which the homosexual ethos has a tremendous influence in popular culture and politics. I have to reflect on the fact that that influential social group has essentially no structural investment in fidelity in the traditional sense of warding off bastardy or ensuring the relationship of father and child, which is so very important to marital fidelity and, concomittantly, to marital stability.

See you in about twenty years.

Master and Commander Review.

Here is a review of Master and Commander. Looks promising, plus plus the French are the villains. What's not to like?

Public Service Announcement.

About a year ago, I signed up with Paypal in order to donate some money to Mark Shea for his most excellent work - ministry, I believe some call it - in spreading moderate Catholicism on the internet. No good deed goes unpunished. This morning, I received my bank statement to find that my personal banking account, which had been used with the Paypal account, to find that I had been cleaned out, with nearly $10,000 taken out over a three week period.

For me, it's not a disaster. I have a separate business account. I caught the problem within the required time. The money drained out of the account should be reimbursed within a week or so.

On the other hand, if I didn't have the business account - such as when I was an employee - things could have been dicey during the interim. For me, now, this is simply a substantial inconvenience; for someone else it could be a disaster.

Now, I have no bad feelings about the folks at Paypal. But a warning is in order. Check your accounts. If you've done business through Paypal, and maybe other similar operations, you may want to check your account for unusual activity sooner rather than later. For me, in the future, I will probably do my internet donations through credit cards where my personal accounts have less transparency to internet criminals.

More Acquired Irony Deficiency Syndrome.

Patterico whomped up a a dead-on parody of the demand letter served on Justene Adamec at Calblog based on the Nigerian e-mail scam. That has, of course, inspired postings of charges across the internet that Patterico is a racist.

I dunno. I thought it was funny.

Remember, everyone, it's not funny unless it accuses a Republican of rape or of being in an asylum.

By the way, Right on the Left Beach has dug up some more information on those punks at that low budget, low class Infotel operation.