Humor

Why Waste It?

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I put up a post over on sci.space.history, in which I had complained about the ancient joke about the Poles sending an expedition to the sun, in which they’d go at night to avoid being burned up.

I pointed out that jokes about ethnic groups that just point out how stupid they are are pointless, since the groups themselves are interchangeable, and have nothing to do with any actual characteristics or history of that ethnic group. In that vein, I provided an example of an appropriate (and I think funny) ethnic joke. I figured that, since I spent the time typing it over on Usenet, I might as well post it here as well:

A guy is walking down the street in Gdansk, and he sees a lamp. He picks it up, brushes the dust off it, and of course, out pops a genie.

“In reward for releasing me from my bondage, I will grant you three wishes. What would you like?”

The guy thinks about it for a while, then he says, “I’d like the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”

The genie scratches his head at the strange request, then shrugs and says, “OK, here you go.”

The Chinese march in and pillage the Polish capital.

The genie says, “OK, now what’s your second wish? Make it a good one this time.”

The guy thinks about it for a while again, and then he says, “I’d like the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”

The genie is wondering if he hears him right.

“What do you mean? That was your first wish. They’ve been there, done that. Don’t you want something else?”

The guys says, “No, I want the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”

The genie throws up his hands, and has the Chinese pillage Warsaw again. This time no woman is left unraped, no one is left alive, many of the buildings have been leveled.

“OK. You get one more wish. Don’t waste it, like you did the others.”

The guy thinks for a long time, and finally, he says, “You know, what I’d really like, is for the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”

Now the genie is about to have a fit.

“What are you talking about?! There’s nothing left to pillage!”

“I don’t care. I want the Chinese to pillage it anyway.”

Well, the genie has to honor the wish, and this time, when all the festivities are over, the former Polish capital is nothing but a smoldering crater.

The genie says, “You know, we aren’t supposed to ask these things, but I’ve just got to know. Why? Why, three times, you have the Chinese pillage your own country’s capital?”

The guy says, “Look, they did it three times, right?”

The genie says, “Right.”

“So, every time they do that, they cross Russia twice.

Administrative

Emergency

I stupidly made air and hotel reservations for this week, but not car rental. No one has anything. Which should have been obvious. I thought about the difficulty of staying in Las Cruces, and got a hotel in El Paso, but it didn’t occur to me (as it should have) that everyone would be flying into El Paso and renting cars there.

Is anyone going there this week, and staying in El Paso, from whom I could bum a ride for five days? Including tomorrow afternoon, when I get in?

Space

Heading For Enchantment

I’m flying out to Las Cruces in the morning, and will be there all week. Hope I’ll see some rocketry.

Assuming that my hotel was on the up and up about broadband in the room, I hope I’ll have some updates from the X-Prize Cup festivities.

General

Missed It By That Much

Unlike (apparently) many who were in Hawaii yesterday, I’ve been through several significant earthquakes. But if our trip to Kona had been one week later, we’d have gone through the closest major quake in our lives, despite decades in southern California. It would have been only ten miles away, off shore. And if our itinerary had been the same, we’d have been in bed, on the fourth floor in a condo, above the beach, so it would have been pretty exciting. But there was never a concern about a tsunami, at least not there. It didn’t have enough distance to build up a big wave, even if it was a big enough displacement to cause one (it wasn’t). But we’d probably be stuck there for a couple more days, at least.

Political Commentary

For The Children

One of the catch phrases of the Simpsons is when Reverend Lovejoy’s wife, in response to some event requiring community action/some new law, is “What about the children! Won’t anyone think of the children?”

Given human nature (particularly the maternal instincts of women, who are more often the target of such political tactics), it’s an effective form of demagoguery. A very effective one.

For instance, it’s often used by gun controllers, by using statistics talking about how many “children” are killed by guns in the inner city. Unfortunately for their case, the “children” killed by guns often turn out to be late teenagers (you know, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen?) and often people even in their early twenties, due to insufficient vetting of the actual ages of those killed in the gangland shootouts (no, tell me that it isn’t so…).

Even more egregious is those who, like potential Nobel laureate (and the fact that she is even being considered for this is at least as devastating an indictment of the uselessness of that award as the actual awarding of it to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter) Cindy Sheehan, talk about sending our “children” to fight and die in Iraq. This ignores the fact that no one goes into Iraq involuntarily–all who sign up for the all-volunteer military do so under the influence of their own will. (Note: If anyone can find a case in which someone delivered their “child” unto the evil maws of the Bushitler-Cheney-Rumsfeld war machine, with the infant kicking and screaming in protest, let me know pronto, so I can amend this post). Moreover, these “children” are old enough to drive, to vote, and (in many cases) to legally purchase alcohol. But it makes for much better anti-US (not anti-war–many of them are just on the other side) sound bites to bleat about the “children” that we are “sending” off to die.

So now comes the usually reasonable Representative, and aspiring Senator, Harold Ford, who reportedly said yesterday:

I’m just not going to take morality lessons from a party

Political Commentary

What Comes Naturally

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Instapundit has a roundup of links about a story that students are actually being taught to defend themselves.

All of them seem to miss a critical point.

There are few instincts to any life form, let alone humans, more fundamental than those designed for survival. If we have to tell people (yes, even children) to defend themselves, we ought to be asking why such advice is necessary.

If children have to be told to not hide under desks, to throw things, to not be passive sheep, why is that? Why is it that, in contravention of their genetic heritage, they would be expected to act as a herd, and not a pack? Why is it that, in opposition to their fundamental nature, they would have to be instructed in basic survival techniques?

One can only conclude that, because one of one of the more modern traits inherent in humans, it is because we have trained them to be passive, to submit, to go along with whatever program whatever terrorist has planned for them, because after all, The Man will come and save them, if they can only survive long enough for the actual negotiators to come along and offer whatever submissive supplications that the terrorists will demand to spare the lives of the tots.

After all, we all know that the way to peace is submission. Appeasement. Surely their demands must be reasonable–else they wouldn’t make them. Wouldn’t they?

So, every day, we inculcate our young’uns in the culture of appeasement, to protect them. If they’ll be nice to their captors, their captors will surely be nice to them.

Well, actually, we learned a different lesson on September 11th. More specifically, the passengers on UL Flight 93 learned that perhaps going along with the program wasn’t the ideal course of action. But they’d have never known it from their pre-flight instructions, or the constant barrage of propaganda from the peacemakers in the media and their supposed protectors in government agencies. No, they had to learn it from forbidden cell phones, from which they learned, illegally, that other planes, just like theirs, had been hijacked, and flown into skyscrapers.

They were headed for Washington, where there were no skyscrapers. There were only national monuments. And a White House. And a Capitol Building, with many representatives of the people inside. And a Pentagon…

They had been told not to resist, but they did. They were adults, with the faculty of reason, and the ability to change their programming as events, and information about them, required.

But the thought that we have to teach children to defend themselves should give us pause. How did they know to defend themselves when we were living in caves? How did they know when under seige? How did they know when on the frontier, against the wolves, and the cougers, and the bears?

They knew because they were bred to know. It is only today that we have to reteach them things they already know, because we’ve previously taught them nonsense. Let us hope that the unteaching of nonsense is easier than the teaching of it, and more enduring.

Technology and Society

A Lifesaver

Literally, from this medical breakthrough:

Composed of peptides, the liquid self-assembles into a protective nanofiber gel when applied to a wound. Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, research scientist in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and Kwok-Fai So, chair of the department of anatomy at the University of Hong Kong, discovered the liquid’s ability to stop bleeding while experimenting with it as a matrix for regrowing brain cells in hamsters.

The researchers then conducted a series of experiments on various mammals, including rodents and pigs, applying the clear liquid agent to the brain, skin, liver, spinal cord, and femoral artery to test its ability to halt bleeding and seal wounds.

“It worked every single time,” said Ellis-Behnke. They found that it stopped the bleeding in less than 15 seconds, and even worked on animals given blood-thinning medications.

The wound must still be stitched up after the procedure; but unlike other agents designed to stop bleeding, it does not have to be removed from the wound site.

The liquid’s only byproduct is amino acids: tissue building blocks that can be used to actually repair the site of the injury, according to the researchers. It is also nontoxic, causes no immune response in the patient, and can be used in a wet environment, according to Ellis-Behnke.

Is this a drug, or a de-vice? I hope that the FDA won’t get in the way of immediate field use. We need it on the battlefields, both in Iraq and in the emergency rooms of the inner cities. It seems to me that if what’s stated is true, unnecessary (e.g., for further animal or even human testing) delay in deploying it should be considered criminal negligence.

[Note: misspelling of de-vice necessary for some arcane reason known only to the creators of Moveable Type (if they know)]

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!