“3rd St. Diner,” oil on panel.

Times-Dispatch editorial cartoonist Gary Brookins has a new Website. Go check out some of his excellent work.

Toggle between WRVA (Jimmy Barrett, Glenn Beck, etc.) and Democracy Now (97.3 on your FM dial), where the morning newscast refers to “the so-called war on terror,” “so-called anti-Americanism abroad,” and (my personal fave) “the Iraqi resistance.”

(1) This piece shows one of the ways in which some questions remain unsettled:

In the 18th century European naturalists dubbed the wolves of Canada and the eastern U.S. Canis lycaon, because they seemed distinct from Canis lupus, the gray wolf of Europe and Asia. By the early 1900s North American naturalists had decided that they were actually gray wolves as well. But in the past few years Canadian researchers who have analyzed wolf DNA have come full circle. They argue that gray wolves only live in western North America. The wolves of Algonquin Provincial Park belong to a separate species, which they want to call C. lycaon once more.

Other wolf experts do not think there is enough evidence to split C. lupus into two species. And both sides agree that the identity of the Algonquin wolves has become far more murky thanks to interbreeding. Coyotes (another species in the genus Canis) have expanded east and have begun to interbreed with C. lycaon. Now a sizable fraction of these eastern coyotes carry wolf DNA, and vice versa. Meanwhile C. lycaon has been interbreeding with gray wolves at the western border of its range. So the Algonquin animals are not just mixing C. lycaon DNA with C. lupus DNA--they are also passing on the coyote DNA as well.

(2) Re: yesterday’s column, it might be worth stressing that there’s a difference between teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory and injecting religion into the science classroom. Religious debates belong in religion classes. Scientific debates belong in the science classroom. Among the latter, for instance, are questions about the strengths and weaknesses of Gould’s notions about spandrels. That’s entirely different from saying that “some people believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and scientists don’t really know if that’s so.” Scientists do, and it isn’t.

. . . if you were mistaken for a terrorist, kidnapped, imprisoned, and abused for several months before someone realized they had the wrong guy and dumped you out on the street?

Proably like this guy, no?

We need one to fix the housing problems made worse by this government program:

In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more “affordable” loans made to these borrowers. HUD stuck with an outdated policy that allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to count billions of dollars they invested in subprime loans as a public good that would foster affordable housing.

Housing experts and some congressional leaders now view those decisions as mistakes that contributed to an escalation of subprime lending that is roiling the U.S. economy.

The scientific caucus in Congress is small but growing:

“If we continue to reproduce in this manner,” Mr. Foster began, and Mr. Ehlers finished the thought, “the entire Congress would consist of physicists!”

They were joking — probably. But a Congress full of physicists might solve some worrisome problems, the three-member physics caucus argued one afternoon when they met for a joint interview in the Capitol.

There are 435 people in the House, Mr. Holt said, and “420 don’t know much about science and choose not to.”

Today’s column discusses a new twist on the old creationist-evolutionist debate.

In Richmond today, John McCain declared he would win Virginia.

Time was, that would have gone without saying. Now, the prediction sounds “confident,” perhaps even “gutsy.”

Bad news for McCain: The more gutsy he sounds saying he’ll win here, the less likely he is to do so.

Update: For people who like numbers, here are a bunch of polling data.

At the risk of exploiting a tragedy to flog a hobbyhorse, today’s story out of Japan underscores the point of the two posts immediately below:

TOKYO — Screaming as he randomly stabbed shoppers with a hunting knife, a man killed seven people and injured 11 others at lunchtime Sunday in a Tokyo retail district.

Tomohiro Kato, 25, drove a white, two-ton rental truck into a crowd of pedestrians, running over at least three people, and then emerged from the truck with a large knife, according to police officers and witnesses.

Indiscriminately slashing and stabbing as he went, the assailant then ran and walked through the center of the Akihabara neighborhood, where thousands of young men from Japan and around the world gather for gadgets, comic books and computer games.

“I am tired of life,” police said Kato told them later. “I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn’t matter who they were. I came alone.”

Maybe it would be more productive to explore the, ah, “root causes” of such incidents instead of fixating on one particular instrument, or category of instruments, used to wreak the destruction. If it’s not guns, or knives, or trucks, it will be something else:

ALGIERS (Agence France-Presse) — A double bombing on Sunday east of Algiers killed 12 people, including a French engineer and several members of the security forces, government officials said.

Murder is also on the rise in Washington, D.C., where gun laws also are quite strict, and haven’t changed yet despite the impending ruling in Heller. Another inexplicable mystery!

Gun-rights advocates used to joke that if gun control were implemented, paternalists would go after knives next.

It doesn’t sound so funny anymore.

A rash of knifings in London has led to a crackdown:

Knife crime among young people has sparked a widespread debate in recent weeks in Britain, where police say they have seen “a worrying trend” toward more severe knife attacks involving younger attackers and victims.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Thursday announced a crackdown on teenagers carrying knives, saying that those as young as 16 will be prosecuted for knife possession on the first offense. Previously, anyone younger than 18 generally received only a warning.

“Young people need to understand that carrying knives doesn’t protect you, it does the opposite—it increases the danger for all of us, destroys young lives and ruins families,” Brown said after meeting with top police and government officials at his 10 Downing Street office. “Recent tragic events have reminded us of that.” . . .

While overall knife crime has decreased 16 percent from last year, police say, the average age of attackers and victims has shifted from the late teens or early 20s to the early to mid-teens.

Of the 16 teenage homicide victims in London so far this year, police said, two were shot, three were beaten and 11 were stabbed. Of the 26 teenagers slain in London last year, 16 cases involved knives.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, the government official in charge of public security, said the government has also doubled the maximum sentence for knife possession to four years. And she said the government plans to spend about $6 million on an advertising campaign to steer young people away from knives.

Hang on just a second. According to the news story, nearly all gun ownership is illegal in Britain. But if guns cause crime, then what is causing the rash of knifings in Britain? Do all weapons cause crime? Or is there—and I realize this is just an absolutely crazy thing to say—maybe just a smidgen of truth to the theory that it’s the other way around: that weapons cause crime the way flies cause garbage?

I know. It’s nuts. Forget I said anything.

Today’s column discusses the sport of mixed martial arts.

Invisible Heart, by Russ Roberts of GMU. Here’s a taste:

Suppose you see an ad for anchovy ice cream. The ad promises “It’s delicious!” Convinced? Probably not. You take that word “delicious” with a grain of salt. Actually more than a grain. More like a pound. You realize that the seller of the ice cream is self-interested and just trying to make a sale.

I treat the rhetoric of politicians like ads for anchovy ice cream. Call me a cynic, but I assume they’re trying to make a sale.

So when Obama says on his web site that he’s tired of “divisive ideological politics,” I wonder: what other kind of politics is there? Promising politics without “divisive ideology” is like selling a sure fire way to be a millionaire , working from home using the Internet. Most of us know it’s too good to be true. But Obama is selling like hotcakes even though his promise is just as unrealistic.

We have such a yearning for a candidate with principles and ideals. We like to think our candidate is the good one, it’s the other guy’s favorite who’s the evil opportunist. But they always break our hearts, don’t they? Too many of us, I fear, are living in a fantasy world.

Neologisms involving the names of presidents and presidential nominees provide an endless source of weak amusement. Barack Obama’s name seems to offer more opportunities for wordplay than most. It ain’t even the general election yet (at least not quite), and already we’ve been subjected to Obamamania and Obamanation. Slate’s Mickey Kaus now provides us with Obamagoguery.

Obamism doesn’t seem to have caught on yet, although it’s been around for a while.

Further updates and inventions sure to follow. (Any suggestions? Clean ones?)

P.S.—You can do, and some have done, this kind of thing with slogans, too: Taranto has two in one day today: The Audacity of Trope, and The Audacity of Hype.

Coming soon: The Paucity of Hope, The Audacity of Dope, The Veracity of ‘Nope’. . . . This could go on for a while.

Courtesy of the daily e-mail feed from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

(1) “Blacks undergo leg amputations as a complication of diabetes at a far higher rate than whites, according to a study out today that also found blacks lag behind whites in breast cancer screening and diabetic tests.” (USA Today.)

(2) “Where you stand on the Indian social ladder shapes to a large degree what kind of health you’re in, and what kind of health care you receive.” (The New York Times.)

You can tease out some of the implications of the juxtaposition, and the possible rebuttals to those implications, or inferences, yourselves.

Today’s column is about boyhood and Scouting. (And a little bit about life.)

“Fryer grease has become gold,” Mr. Damianidis said. “And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.”

Story here.

Owing to colleague absences and a multi-day training session next week, this blog will be slowing down markedly until the second week in June. In the meantime, check out some of the other blogs on inRich, or head on over to some other rapid-update sites such as Waldo’s Virginia Political Blogroll or Instapundit. They’ll keep you busy.

And it comes from a local guy, Rick Gray, in a Back Page essay for Style:

Mainstream pundits assure us that an Obama administration would be transformational. Frankly, I suspect that — whoever we elect — the next administration will be more janitorial than transformational.

How bad are things getting? This bad.

Today’s column is about Chesterfield, roads, and whatnot. Mostly whatnot.