Medary.com

I've got a few things going on, from family visits, to catching up on various tasks, to some software upgrades various places that need to be made.  I'll try to post at least once a day, but this is by no means guaranteed.  Light posting might last through the rest of the month--it all depends on how everything shakes out.

I think that much is certain, watching Russian forces move into the (breakaway) Georgian province of South Ossetia, and watching Russian air strikes hit in and around Georgian cities that are not South Ossetia.

These two paragraphs from the New York Times, no warmongering rag, should give everybody pause right now:

In Washington, American officials reacted with deepening alarm to Russia’s military activities on Sunday. Georgian troops had tried to disengage, but the Russians had not allowed them.

“The Georgians told them, ‘We’re done. Let us withdraw,” one American military official said. “But the Russians are not letting them withdraw. They are pursuing them, and people are seeing this.”

This is not anything like the American adventure in Iraq.  It's eerily similar to the Sudetenland, 1938.

The free world will stand up to aggression now, or we will fight a bigger war, later.  I am not hopeful tonight that we will make the correct, difficult choice.  We shall see.

I'm not sure if this is another clever photoshop, or the real thing:

Hat tip:  let's see . . . Doug Ross, via Fausta's blog, via Protein Wisdom.

Or rather, my web browsing history is.

This site has a neat little button, hit it and it'll tell you what percent male vs. female it thinks you are, by reading your web browser's history file.  Go on, try it.  It won't hurt.

(Although you poor sorry misguided Internet Explorer users might experience a delay.  Get with the program and use Firefox, already, like all the cool dudes and dudettes do.)

New York Times, via Yahoo Finance and Instapundit:

But a couple of months later, Mr. Steele noticed the site had been charging his credit card. While he believed he had signed up for a free report, he had actually enrolled in a credit-monitoring service that cost $14.95 a month. He says he never expected that it would cost anything.

"It's called FreeCreditReport.com," he said. "It's kind of easy to make that assumption. I didn't see anything in the process of signing up that said, 'Hey, if you don't cancel in 30 days or whatever, you're going to get charged.'"

BigRipOff.com is more like it, in my opinion.

As the article points out, if you want your annual free credit report mandated by Federal law, go to Annualcreditreport.com.  That one is The Real Thing.  Accept no substitutes.  Believe no ads, especially ones with guys singing insipidly insidiously catchy ditties.

Oh, and we also need to send the Starving Evil Whippet Dog Devil Ravening Pack the way of those responsible for the entire GEICO and Progressive Insurance ad campaigns, while we're at it.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is available for viewing free-of-charge on Hulu.

Wrenching this delightful little piece of guerilla strike-breaking further into political allegory. . . who can you think of in the news is:

• Arrogantly convinced he's right;
• Gets fawning press;
• Takes credit for good things, regardless of whether or not he's actually responsible for them;
• In the end, (well, that's a spoiler).

I can't help but think of a certain Presidential candidate this year.

And no, that doesn't mean that I think that the other one is Dr. Horrible.  Although . . .

Here is the tale of our trip to Europe, featuring two Transatlantic cruises (eastbound, then westbound).
I'm doing the syndication-trick of posting all ten parts of our tale, one post per day, through the magic of modern web site technology.  All ten parts have been posted, so this here post is more or less a table of contents.

So, here's our travel tale of how we sailed across the Atlantic to Europe, spent a few days there, and sailed back:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10

Ship images from Wikipedia:

Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas

Cunard's Queen Mary 2

In case you're wondering why I split it up like this . . . it's to reduce the load-time.  I try to limit the pictures to ten or fewer per posting, to allow those with slow Internet connections (such as, for instance, those on cruise ships at sea, don't cha know) to read the story without waiting forever and a day for the darn thing to load.

Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 10-- below (or at the "read more").

May 20 (Tuesday, Day 24, At Sea) –

Even with the time change we slept in until around 9:30 AM.  We ordered coffee and a fruit plate and Snookums finally showered in order to do a load of wash.  Then we went to lunch at the buffet.  The buffet is separated into four distinct areas that are actually pretty far away from each other.  It’s a weird layout since you have to walk quite far to get items from the four different stations.  There is an Asian station, the grill station, the Italian station and the carving station.  Today we both ate from the Asian station and enjoyed red curry with beef and vegetables.

Ship's library

A hand-slapping-your-own-head "duh" moment, courtesy Reason:

Hospitals gain a "charity" tax deduction for the difference between what they collect and their "list" prices. If they can actually collect the money, which they often do by threatening collection lawsuits, they make a tremendous profit. If not, then they deduct from taxable income their phantom "losses" from patients who don't pay.

So, for example, an ambulance ride with a "list cost" of $1000 could bring in $1000 from a patient who pays or a tax deduction of $1,000 from the patient who doesn't, which then can be deducted against other income. Furthermore, the "list" prices inflate other medical costs. The uninsured today are a major source of hospital profits, as detailed in J. Patrick Rooney and Dan Perrin's America's Health Care Crisis Solved. The book describes how a Denver hospital patient tracked down the charges for his treatment paid by medicare and health insurance companies, which totaled $6,000, compared to the $67,000 the hospital demanded.

I always wondered why medical bills were so enormously much higher than what the insurance companies would pay for the services.  Now I know.  The fix is in the system.

A couple of thoughts which bear on this year's Presidential election:

First, on environmentalism:

There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled 'Nature.'" The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" — but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the Naturist reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e., his own self-hatred.

In the case of "Naturists" such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.
As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women — it strikes me as a fine arrangement — and perfectly "natural" Believe it or not, there were "Naturists" who opposed the first flight to old Earth's Moon as being "unnaturaI" and a "despoiling of Nature."

And:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

Via Instapundit.