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After 6000 years of institutional slavery, who ended it's place in the Establishment?

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McDonald’s beats Starbucks

McDonald’s beats Starbucks in coffee smackdown - Los Angeles Times: "In the ultimate coffee smackdown, it was yuppie Starbucks vs. Ronald McDonald.

And the clown won.

Consumer Reports magazine said today that in a test conducted at two locations of each emporium, its tasters found McDonald's coffee to be 'decent and moderately strong' with 'no flaws.' On the other hand, the Starbucks brew 'was strong, but burnt and bitter enough to make your eyes water instead of open.'

The March issue of the magazine, due out Monday, thus advises, 'Try McDonald's, which was cheapest and best.'"

Update: Reader Brian Ellis (and when I say "reader" I mean one of a handful) sends me this factoid from Cooks Illustrated (Subscription Only):

"Most surprising, Starbucks came in not first but fifth out of the eight
samples. "Burnt, with a bitter aftertaste," said one taster. "Like gnawing on charcoal," said another. Top honors went instead to Green Mountain Roasters and
Eight O'Clock, which tasters found complex and well balanced.

By no stretch am I a trained coffee expert, but I also wasn't convinced that I've been blithely sucking down "burnt coffee" twice a day. So I devised one more test--a
tasting of coffee with milk. Why? An informal poll revealed that more than
two-thirds of the Cook's staff (including me) add milk to their coffee, and it
seemed only fair to try the brands that way, too. So I brewed up eight more
pots, added 3/4 cup warmed whole milk to each, and summoned 25
soon-to-be-jittery tasters into the test kitchen for another tour.

Sure enough, preferences changed. This time, Green Mountain and Eight O'Clock, the plain-coffee champs, ended up in the lower ranks--bland and insipid, according
to tasters. In contrast, Starbucks landed near the top, along with Millstone and
Seattle's Best, two other fairly assertive coffees. The bitter, burnt notes that
had menaced tasters in the first round were suddenly "robust" and "complex" when
tempered by the milk. Simply watered down? Not quite. Additional research
revealed that the proteins in milk (and cream) bind some of the bitter-tasting
phenolic compounds, reducing the bitterness and intensity of the coffee flavor."

Free Inquiry? Not on Campus

Free Inquiry? Not on Campus by John Leo, City Journal Winter 2007: "Remember when the Right had a near-monopoly on censorship? If so, you must be in your sixties, or older. Now the champions of censorship are mostly on the left. And they are thickest on the ground in our colleges and universities."

Global Warming Religion

Instapundit.com -: "THE BIG GLOBAL WARMING PUSH IS UNDERWAY: I won't take it seriously until they ban private jets and stretch limos.

No, seriously. A Gulfstream III releases 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide an hour. How can we demand "sacrifice" from ordinary Americans when our leaders -- including those who call for the sacrifice -- are flying in jets like this? If commercial first-class isn't good enough, they should stay home."

It's interesting that Global Warming seems to provoke similar sociological instincts as the now hated Puritans.

Necessary Fanaticism

Townhall.com::Necessary Fanaticism::By Chuck Colson: "William Wilberforce once said, “If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.”"

Day One at GLC Jan 07

Already the food, the fellowship and the work are flowing freely. 

DirecTV is the worst

DirecTV is a customer service nightmare. The geniuses at DirecTV decided they could make their own DVR boxes and kick Tivo to the curb. Probably because they didn't want to pay for a brand name product. When our original Tivo box died after 2 years the box DirecTV replaced it with is an abomination of desolation.

Our "DirecTV DVR" is a functional disaster. As my wife says "it makes me not want to watch TV". Just want you want to pay for from a TV company.

It hangs. It drops the digital time code so you can't fast forward or reverse. I takes 2-5 seconds to respond to remote commands. It doesn't record what it's told to. When you try to record a live sporting event it jumps to the end so that you see the final score without seeing the game first.

When you call DirecTV they say the box needs a software upgrade, but it doesn't need a software upgrade, but it needs to be totally reset and erased, and it needs a technician to come and check the satellite. Each time I call I get a different answer. They're either lying or incompetent

Beware.

Withering Critique

From Opinion Journal's Best of the Web:

Classic Maureen Dowd--II

Remember that New York Times piece celebrating the decline of marriage, which we noted Tuesday? Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review astutely critiques the paper on "diversity" grounds:

Apart from a tossed-off paragraph that reminds us that, buried within these statistics, seventy percent of African-American women are single, there is nothing to indicate how the epidemic of single parentage in the black community contributes to this statistic. We imagine--though aren't told--that many of these women are raising children alone and being dragged deeper into poverty because of their unmarried status.

Instead the rest of the article is completely about those middle class white women who insist they have chosen to be without ball and chain. We meet Emily Zuzik, a 32-year-old musician and model who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, and Linda Barth, a 56-year-old magazine editor in Houston. We hear about how happy Sheila Jamison, who also lives in the East Village and works for a media company, is and about how Shelley Fidler, a public policy adviser at a law firm, has "sworn off marriage."

As far as we can tell, not only was there no socio-economic diversity among those interviewed for the piece, there was also no racial diversity. These other women, ignored entirely by the Times, might have told a story quite different than Shelley Fidler, who said, "The benefits [of singledom] were completely unforeseen for me. The free time, the amount of time I get to spend with friends, the time I have alone, which I value tremendously, the flexibility in terms of work, travel and cultural events." . . .

What's going on here? Maybe the Times . . . is just pandering to its imagined audience, among whom middle-class white woman living in the East Village of Manhattan must make up a large share. . . . If in the part of America where reporters live, being free from marriage is an unequivocally positive thing, this shouldn't mean--as this article leads us to believe--that this is the case for every woman in the country. For some, what the Times is describing as freedom feels, one can imagine, like a curse.

It also occurs to us, though, that the confirmed spinsters and gay divorcées the Times celebrates are far from the norm among middle-class white women. Only a bare majority of all women are single, according to the Times, and several factors skew this number:

The Times relied on statistics that defined "women" as anyone 15 and older, but few 15- to 17-year-olds are married.

As Beckerman notes, 70% of black women are single, which means that the rate of singledom among nonblacks (the great majority of whom are white) is correspondingly lower.

The Times itself acknowledges that many older single women are single not by choice but because they have outlived their husbands (the reverse is far less common).

If the Times intends this story to appeal to middle-class white women, then, its audience is mostly married. Why would a married woman want to read a celebration of the unattached life? Because marriage, for all it has to offer, also demands a lot of compromise and toleration. The Times article offers a fantasy to married women who, even if generally happy, find some aspects of the conjugal life frustrating. It is a work of escapism, closer to a romance novel than to serious social-science journalism.

I'll bet this kind of journalism is a big hit in the newsroom.

Trinity Morning

"When we have said these three things, then – that there is but one God, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each God, and the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each a distinct person – we have enunciated the doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness." – B. B. Warfield

It is an interesting fact then when Jesus said to baptize "in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 28:19) he didn't say to baptize "in the names" of the Godhead. He used the singular of onoma and not plural.

The Trinity is a very encouraging doctrine to me because it shows me that God is a God of authority and submission, fellowship and service, hierarchy and equality. I heard in my grad level humanities classes that concepts like good and evil were man made dualities that should be rejected as manipulative and illusory. Yet in my experience, those who hold this view of good and evil passionately enforce dualities like hierarchy and equality; one being "evil" and the other "good". No one uses these terms but they are upheld with religious fervor.

The God of the Bible is three persons who are equal but those persons choose various roles of submission and authority. In the same way it seems right and healthy that adults should are equal but capable of service and being served, having authority and living under it.

I can't wait...

BREITBART.COM - Controversial Google library project grows: "Google announced that another major US college library had joined its controversial project to put the world's books online.

The more than one million written works at the University of Texas library in Austin will be converted to digital format and added to Google Books Library Project, according to the Internet search powerhouse"

Luis Fabiano y Diogo a Piñazos

This is the worst fight I've ever seen. Soccer players, sheesh.

Fetus Envy?

A crowded womb | the Daily Mail: "A twin leans over and kisses the cheek of her sister in a heart-warming picture that would not be out of place in any family home.

Yet these siblings are a not even born and the astonishing images have been captured on a new 'four-dimensional' ultrasound scan of the womb."

New Day

So last night I sat down with my kids to read the "I have a Dream" speech from "The Book of Virtues" to celebrate MLK.

Then I thought better of the times and pulled this up on the old pc.

What an age we live in.

Junk Science

Instapundit.com -: "MORE ON THE ANTI-GUN JOYCE FOUNDATION'S funding of anti-gun research. Again, this isn't necessarily wrong but if the NRA were doing this, it would be considered a huge national scandal of bought-and-paid-for science. But the Joyce Foundation is at least as political and doctinaire as the NRA. So why does this get so little attention?|"

The Wounds of Friends

OpinionJournal:

"Dear President Carter,

As members of the Board of Councilors each one of us has been proud to
be associated with the Carter Center in its noble struggle to repair the world.
However, in light of the publication of your latest book Palestine; Peace Not
Apartheid and your subsequent comments made in promoting the book, we can no
longer in good conscience continue to serve the Center as members of the Board
of Councilors.

In its work in conflict resolution the Carter Center has always played
the useful and constructive role of honest broker and mediator between warring
parties. In your book, which portrays the conflict between Israel and her
neighbors as a purely one-sided affair with Israel holding all of the
responsibility for resolving the conflict, you have clearly abandoned your
historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side."

Add this to my reasons for distrusting Jimmy Carter.

Think Different, with only one choice.

Boing Boing: iPhone - the roach motel business model: "It's ironic that a company whose name is synonymous with 'Switch' has built its entire product strategy around lock-in. The iTunes/iPhone/iPod combo is a roach-motel: customers check in, but they can't check out.

And it doesn't stop with the iTunes DRM. Apple and Cingular have been trumpeting the technical prowess they've deployed in locking iPhone to the Cingular network, to be sure that no one can switch carriers with their iPhones. Even the Copyright Office has recognized that locking handsets to carriers is bad for competition and bad for the public.

There's another thing you can't switch with the iPhone: the software it runs. You can't install third-party apps on handset. Steve Jobs claims that this is because running your own code on a phone could crash the phone network, which must be news to all those Treo owners running around on Cingular's own network without causing a telecoms meltdown.

Lock-in isn't good for you. Does anyone really believe that Apple will make better products if its customers aren't free to switch to a competitor? Or that Cingular's network and pricing will be improved by lock-in?"

Born Free?

From The Best of the Web:

The Gay Science?

A frequent complaint about social conservatives is that they are "antiscience" because in some cases (most notably embryonic stem cell research) they oppose scientific inquiry for moral reasons. But here, courtesy of the Times of London, is a case of social liberals who are antiscience for reasons of ends rather than means. That is, there are some things they do not think we should know:

Scientists are conducting experiments to change the sexuality of "gay" sheep in a programme that critics fear could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans.

The technique being developed by American researchers adjusts the hormonal balance in the brains of homosexual rams so that they are more inclined to mate with ewes.

It raises the prospect that pregnant women could one day be offered a treatment to reduce or eliminate the chance that their offspring will be homosexual. Experts say that, in theory, the "straightening" procedure on humans could be as simple as a hormone supplement for mothers-to-be, worn on the skin like an anti-smoking nicotine patch.

The research, at Oregon State University in the city of Corvallis and at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, has caused an outcry. Martina Navratilova, the lesbian tennis player who won Wimbledon nine times, and scientists and gay rights campaigners in Britain have called for the project to be abandoned.

Navratilova defended the "right" of sheep to be gay. She said: "How can it be that in the year 2006 a major university would host such homophobic and cruel experiments?" She said gay men and lesbians would be "deeply offended" by the social implications of the tests.

It is an article of dogma among gay-rights activists that sexual orientation is entirely biological in origin and that it is immutable. If one accepts these premises, it is harder to sustain the premise that homosexual conduct is immoral or that gays should not be protected by antidiscrimination laws. But what if science determines that there are elements of environment or even choice at play? Seems to us gay-rights activists ought to think about alternative arguments rather than making their moral conclusions dependent on an empirical supposition that may or may not be true.

BWC Time

Since Tuesday I've been in downtown Boston for the Winter Conference. It has gone very well. Much easier and better than last year. I don't have time to blog though. 

You've got to be kidding, right?

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today:

"Responding to Rangel--IX
We were left with so many unpublished letters about the U.S. military that we thought we'd take the opportunity of the holiday-shortened Christmas week to publish some more of them. We begin with one from Robert Eleazer, who tells us about a bit of recent history of which we'd been unaware:

I spent 25 years in the U.S. Air Force from 1974 to 1999 (not counting 4 years of ROTC from 1970-74). Although my family could not afford to send me to college without financial aid, and although I did not get a military scholarship, I joined because I wanted to serve my country--and the urgency to do so seemed greater to me at a time when the military was unpopular in some circles.

We need to recall that we would know about the attitudes of some leaders towards the quality of people who serve in the military even if the Vietnam War had never occurred, and if we did not have Kerrys and Rangles to remind us.

Robert Strange McNamara's attitude toward the U.S. military was well illustrated by an experiment he imposed on the armed services in the 1960s. Project 100,000 was a plan to place 100,000 retarded people and other mental cases in the military. Presumably, McNamara thought that these people had mental abilities compatible with military service.

Some of the senior officers I served under had the misfortune of having to deal with McNamara's experiment. A decade later they still shook their heads in dismay.

This sounded too crazy to be true, but sure enough, we found a February op-ed piece by Kelly Greenhill of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government that describes the program:

Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara created Project 100,000, a program intended to help the approximately 300,000 men who annually failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude. The idea behind Mr. McNamara's scheme was that the military would annually absorb 100,000 of the country's "subterranean poor"--people who would otherwise be rejected.

Using a variety of "educational and medical techniques," the Pentagon would "salvage" these Category IV recruits first for military careers and later for more productive roles in society. Project 100,000 recruits--known as New Standards Men--would then return to civilian life with new skills and aptitudes that would allow them to "reverse the downward spiral of human decay."

Mr. McNamara further concluded that the best way to demonstrate that the induction of New Standards Men would prove beneficial was to keep their status hidden from their commanders. In other words, Project 100,000 was a blind experiment run on the military amid the escalation of hostilities in Southeast Asia.

Some 150,000 NSM were inducted by 1968. The experiment proved not just foolish but deadly:

A Project 100,000 recruit who entered the Marine Corps in 1968 was two and a half times more likely to die in combat than his higher-aptitude compatriots. After all, they tended to be the ones in the line of fire.

But Project 100,000 recruits fared poorly outside combat as well. . . . Research conducted in the late 1980's revealed that across the services Project 100,000 recruits were reassigned at rates up to 11 times greater than their peers. Likewise, 9 percent to 22 percent of these men required remedial training, as compared to only one to three percent of their higher-category counterparts in the Army, Air Force and Navy.

So the false Rangel-Kerry description of the current volunteer military as a provider of dead-end jobs to losers was, at least in part, an accurate description of the draft-era military--and by design. It's particularly perverse that Rangel calls for instituting the draft (albeit he votes against it) as a way of "solving" this problem, which in fact has not existed for 35 years."

Turnabout

Exclusive: Videographer of Saddam Execution - Newsweek: World News - MSNBC.com: "Ali Al Massedy was 3 feet away from Saddam Hussein when he died. The 38 year old, normally Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's official videographer, was the man responsible for filming the late dictator's execution at dawn on Saturday. 'I saw fear, he was afraid,' Ali told NEWSWEEK minutes after returning from the execution."