I love a good line and this one is very good.

Jonah Goldberg had this to say about a movie I never heard of:


"The Sum of All Fears," is the 2002 film that started Ben Affleck's career on a downward glide-path to the center square on "Hollywood Squares."

Dietary Salt

The federal government has decided to make all of us pay for a program to tell us salt is no good. Actually it's the science that's no good.

The federal anti-salt bureaucracy launched expensive public service announcements that warn Americans to cut back on salt. The ads intoned, ominously, "You eat more than 20 times the salt your body needs."

Eat "no more than 2,400 milligrams a day," said Dr. Jeffrey Cutler, the official behind the government's anti-salt campaign.

Cutler decided that Americans should eat less salt because high blood pressure can lead to heart disease and eating less salt can lower blood pressure. It's a plausible theory, but it doesn't prove that less salt leads to less heart disease. Too many other things may be going on.

Many experts on blood pressure told us there isn't enough scientific research to justify the government's anti-salt campaign, and there definitely isn't enough to justify Cutler's 2,400-milligram limit.

"I can't imagine how they came up with that number. I mean, there isn't a single bit of evidence that suggests 2,400 milligrams is better than 2,100 or 3,700," said Dr. Michael Alderman, who headed the American Society of Hypertension, America's biggest organization of specialists in high blood pressure. He says some people should cut back on salt, but for most people, it's pointless. Some studies have found that those who ate the least salt were four times more likely to have heart attacks.

The problem with all this is several fold, but the main one for me is I have to endure my 91 year old Mother chastizing me when I salt my food because she heard on Good Morning America that salt is going to kill you.

More from Mark Steyn

Whenever I’m on a radio show these days, someone calls in and demands to know whether my children are in Iraq. Well, not right now. They range in age from five to nine, and though that’s plenty old enough to sign up for the jihad and toddle into an Israeli pizza parlour wearing a suicide-bomb, in most advanced societies’ armed forces they prefer to use grown-ups.

That seems to be difficult for the Left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterise them as ‘children’. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the Oval Office shagpile and chow down on Bill Clinton, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee ‘child’ who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.

Why I love Mark Steyn

Jared Diamond currently has a bestselling book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A timely subject, so I bought a copy. More fool me. It's all about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. That's why they're not a G8 member. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies". Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.

Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. Russia is collapsing and it's nothing to do with deforestation. Conversely, Diamond's book is a huge bestseller with those who see it as a warning on the perils of excessive consumerism - even though, in fact, America returns land to the wilderness every year, and my own town is far more forested than it was in either 1905 or 1805. Diamond's book couldn't be any loopier than if he'd argued that deforestation of Arabia was responsible for September 11.

Choices

It is hard for me to watch and read about the devestation in the Gulf Coast and New Orleans without reminding myself how much of life hinges on choices we make as we go through life. It starts early when we accept the concept of studying and preparing for later life or sliding by with the wrong group of "friends". Later we choose mates, careers, family size, savings plans and a large number of other options. All of these choices have consequences and it is impossible to make all of them perfectly, but those who usually make the best choices usually fare better in life.

Today I read an article about how the rich and the poor in the U.S. differ in spending money on electronics. The poorer people spend about the same amount for large screen color TVs, DVDs, and other entertainment items as the more affluent. According to the census, less than 20% of the poor own a PC, and just 15% have access to the Internet and its vast treasure of knowledge. In contrast, 83% of upper-income Americans own at least one PC, and 74% are online. The poor simply choose the wrong tools for success. They could easily buy a basic Dell with Internet access for what they shell out on two color TVs or just one big-screen TV. But many opt not to.
It is a matter of priorities.

So, as I watch the hapless victims in New Orleans and Biloxi and other places on the gulf coast, I also listen to survivors who relate how they made the decision in face of the warnings to "ride it out" in their homes or elsewhere instead of leaving as everyone implored. As the disaster story unfolds we will learn how many others made the same decision and are not now alive to tell about it. Others will be forced to finish out their lives knowing they elected to stay and their children are no longer alive. Choices.

Just wondering

If this hurricane and its resultant damage to property and human lives had occurred anywhere else on earth, the U.S. would already have assistance on the way to help. Let's see who offers to help the victims on our Gulf Coast.

This sounds like the new, improved Vitamin E

I ran across an article on curcumin which is an active ingredient in tumeric. It is being studied as a treatment for a variety of diseases and a preventative for others. The studies are based on a reduced incidence of several diseases observed in India. Curcumin (present in curry) is cheap, widely available and has no known toxicities. It has been shown in preliminary studies to lower cholesterol, is an anti-inflammatory, and has Cox-2 inhibition properties like Vioxx and even some anti-cancer properties. Women in India cover themselves with tumeric to prevent wrinkles and mix it with milk to ease an upset stomach. The research currently being done is wide-spread and limited in that the doseage needed is not known. So before you run to the store to buy some, keep in mind that the amounts being used in an Alzheimer's study at UCLA is 4 grams per day. That is a bunch (something like 120 curry dinners per day). It seems to be an impressive antioxidant, however, and I will look into it further and will probably put what I find on this blog site.

Mark Steyn's Constitutional Analysis

The Shia get an acknowledgment that Islam is "the official religion of the state," just as the Church of England is the official church of that state -- though, unlike the Anglican bishops, Iraq's imams won't get permanent seats in the national legislature.

The Kurds get a loose federal structure in which just about everything except national defense and foreign policy is reserved to regions and provinces. I said in the week after Baghdad fell that the Kurds would settle for being Quebec to Iraq's Canada, and so they have.

The Sunnis, who ran Iraq from their days as Britain's colonial managing class right up to the toppling of Saddam, don't like the federal structure, not least because it's the Kurds and Shia who have the bulk of the oil. So they've been wooed with an arrangement whereby the country's oil revenue will be divided at a national level on a per-capita basis.

If you'd been asked in 2003 to devise an ideal constitution for Iraq's very non-ideal circumstances, it would look something like this: a highly decentralized federation that accepts the reality that Iraq is a Muslim nation but reserves political power for elected legislators -- and divides the oil revenue fairly.

And if it doesn't work? Well, that's what the Sunnis are twitchy about. If Baathist dead-enders and imported Islamonuts from Saudi and Syria want to make Iraq ungovernable, the country will dissolve into a democratic Kurdistan, a democratic Shiastan, and a moribund Sunni squat in the middle. And, in the grander scheme of things, that wouldn't be so terrible either.

To be sure, we shouldda done this, and we shouldda done that. Yet nonetheless Iraq advances day by day. The real quagmire is at home, where the kinkily gleeful relish of defeatism manifested by Cindy Sheehan, Joan Baez, Ted Kennedy et al. bears less and less relationship to anything happening over there. Iraq's future is a matter for the Iraqis now -- which, given the U.S. media, Democrat blowhards like Joe Biden and Republican squishes like Chuck Hagel, is just as well.

Relationships in the market place

The previous post and others about the crazy way people are financing housing has consequences for other things we may not realize immediately. For example, the machinists are striking Northwest Airlines because the company has asked them to take a wage and benefit cut so the company can continue to fly. The union called a strike without consulting members and now there is some discord in the ranks. The following shows why some union members are taking actions which continue to weaken the union movement.

Sue Dorr, who has spent eight years as an airplane cleaner in Detroit, said she began looking for work a month ago, anticipating that the union would go on strike. But, Ms. Dorr said, "I'm going to have to take two jobs just to keep my house."

Sue may not be successful in keeping her house and the union may not be able to convince its members that a strike which may lead to not only a job loss but a loss of your home is worth it.

This is pretty scary

New products give homeowners increasing leeway as to how much equity they can tap and how fast they can tap it. Credit cards that allow consumers to draw on their home equity loans are one such device.

CMG Financial Services, a mortgage company in San Ramon, Calif., introduced another tool this summer: a combination checking account and mortgage.

It works like this: Your paycheck is deposited into your account and immediately applied to your mortgage principal. Over the course of the month, as you spend money on food, gas and other necessities, the principal creeps back up. But the result is that your mortgage debt gets paid off more quickly.

That's the theory, at least. Of course, if you're indulgent, you can pay much less of your mortgage — like none. Any shortfall is added on to the principal.

Iraq Sunnis

Sunni Arabs are getting fed up with the terrorism, and lack of order in Sunni Arab areas. The contrast between the poverty stricken Sunni Arab areas, and the peaceful, and increasingly prosperous Kurdish and Shia Arab zones, is growing. Sunni Arab tribes are taking sides, and going to war with each other over this issue. That’s part of the problem with the deadlock over the new constitution. The other problem is that many Sunni Arabs really believe that they represent the majority of the population. Even those Sunni Arabs who know better, believe that the Sunni Arabs deserve more power, and oil income, than their 20 percent of the population justifies. The fact that Sunni Arabs have called the shots for centuries is something the Sunni Arabs just cannot give up, or at least not give up easily. At the same time, Sunni Arabs appear to be clueless when it comes to confronting their blood soaked past, and the fact that they grabbed most of the oil money for the past half century. Too many Sunni Arabs believe that reality does not apply to them.

Read the whole thing here.

This should be fun.

Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for tasks of high complexity, according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn concludes.

They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rose. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, typical for people with first-class degrees.

When scores rose to 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.

Tularemia Outbreak

An outbreak of rabbit fever, or tularemia, a rare dangerous disease, registered recently in the Volga provinces of Central Russia, could have been caused by a leak from biological warfare facilities present in the area, a U.S. Website surmised Thursday.

Earlier this week, Russian news agencies reported on dozens of cases of tularemia registered in Russia since early August. From Aug. 4 as many as 96 people including 15 children sought medical assistance at hospitals in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod and Ryazan.

Mike Yon reports from Iraq

Everyone should read this report of action in Mosul. Absolutely amazing.

Swedes are really strange

The Malmo, Sweden library lets you borrow people to talk to for 45 minutes in an effort to overcome prejudice and discrimination. So, if you are sitting in a bar you can call up and ask for the library to send over a veiled Muslim woman, a gay, a gypsy, a hard-drug user, or whatever. The theory is by asking questions and carrying on a conversation for a while you will won't think negatively about such people in the future. If this catches on in other parts of Europe, some of us may have to go over there and let them talk to us to overcome anti-Americanism.

Mil;itary Enlistments

First time military enlistments are running a bit behind, another product of a burgeoning economy, but re-enlistments, even from soldiers in combat zones, are running ahead of expectations.

What does it mean when the guys in the thick of it, closest to the action, at risk, on the ground and looking at things with their own eyes, decide to stay for another hitch?

They must believe in what they're doing.

From IBD

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court this summer gave New London, Conn., the green light to seize private homes in the city’s Fort Trumbull area and sell them to a private developer. The developer plans to build houses, stores and offices where the homes now stand. The city claims the development qualifies as “public use” because it’ll generate more in local taxes than the homeowners will pay.
This alone is an outrage clearly inconsistent with our constitutional rights and liberties. But the barons of New London aren’t through.
Drunk with the power imbibed from the Kelo v. New London decision, they’re trying to collect back rent from the seven homeowners who fought the seizure, arguing they’ve lived on city property since 2000, the year the homes were condemned.
The New London Development Corp., front group for the city’s shakedown, is also offering buyouts based on the market rate in 2000 instead of present-day value. Given the real estate boom, the difference is significant.
Some say New London’s decrees add insult to injury. Others call them childish vindictiveness. Either way, they’re unconscionably abusive and decidedly totalitarian.
According to the Fairfield County Weekly, some homeowners in this working-class (but unblighted) neighborhood will owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent. Matt Dery has been assessed more than $300,000. Susette Kelo, owner of the little pink house above, says her rent will be a more modest $57,000. But she’d still have to “leave here broke,” she told the newspaper.
The city also wants any money the homeowners made from tenants who rented their properties. In some cases, the rents are the homeowners’ lone source of income.
We have to keep reminding ourselves this is Connecticut, U.S.A., not Zimbabwe, Africa, where thug-in-chief Robert Mugabe has seized virtually every white-owned farm and pushed the country near starvation.

Our newest grandchild

Jackson Alexander Finley at 120 minutes

This should work

BANGKOK (Reuters) - With Asian tourists still shunning its southern beaches, Thailand is calling in a revered Chinese sea goddess to ward off the restive spirits of the thousands who died in last December's tsunami.

A statue of Godmother Ruby, known as Mazu in Chinese, will be brought to the Thai island of Phuket from the Chinese coastal province of Fujian next month for ghost-clearing rites, said Suwalai Pinpradab of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

"After the tsunami, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Chinese and other East Asians dare not come because they don't want to visit places where mass deaths took place," Suwalai told Reuters on Friday. "It is inauspicious."

Mazu, a Taoist goddess of the sea, has a huge following among fishermen and shipworkers in coastal provinces of southern China and Taiwan.

Thailand's official death toll from the December 26 disaster stands at 5,395, of which 2,436 are believed to be foreigners. Of these, fewer than 50 were East Asians.

Bathing suit in Saudia Arabia

This is from an ad selling bathing suits to Saudi women. My wife and dermatologist would love them.