the tindog coffeehouse

Is reclusive North Korean president Kim Jong-Il still alive? Some say no. But the Photoshop experts at Worth1000 say otherwise.

(I don’t think that last one is Photoshopped.)

John C Abell at Wired’s Epicenter blog argues that companies receiving money from the government’s $700 billion bailout rescue plan should be free to use that money to pay for executive bonuses. To come to that conclusion, he looks at the public funding of Planned Parenthood in the 1980s:

In 1984 the Reagan administration denied family planning funds to any overseas group that offered counseling about abortion, and generally opposed public sex education for teens (which works) and supported abstinence education (which doesn’t).

It was willing, in other words, to make a bad investment in order to advance a principle.

The funding decision affected Planned Parenthood, which is under the umbrella of an overseas organization. They made an intriguing case for being able to spend as they saw fit while taking the money: we won’t spend your money on abortion education. We have other money; we’ll use that.

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OK, so the Texas Longhorns are going to Lawrence, Kansas, this week to face off against the Kansas Jayhawks, their last road game of the regular season. I’ll keep this brief since I know very little about KU, except that head coach Mark Mangino is the spitting image of Mr. Lunt from VeggieTales:

Hee-hee.

OK, I’ll try to be serious now. (Giggle-snort.) Yeah, so anyway, the Jayhawks have a great quarterback, Todd Reesing (an Austin native), who will probably be more of a challenge to the Texas defense than Baylor’s Robert Griffin. But Texas still has Colt McCoy and now-healthy Quan Cosby and Fozzy Whittaker. Plus, Kansas has a 6-4 record, so barring any major injuries or a complete breakdown of coverage, the Horns should win this one pretty solidly.

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Christy’s been sick the past couple of days with a cold. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that flu activity in Texas, at least according to Google, is still considered “Minimal”. Apparently, we’re the only state in the country to claim that status. Yay, us!

President Bush (and yes, he’s still the president for two more months!) has come to the defense of free-market capitalism, rejecting calls from other nations for extreme regulation of financial markets:

“Government intervention is not a cure-all,” Bush was to say in New York, according to prepared remarks released in advance by the White House. …

“The crisis was not a failure of the free market system,” Bush said. “And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.” …

“History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market but too much,” Bush said. “It would a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I made a similar point, although not as explicitly, a few weeks ago:

Yes, tighter regulation of U.S. financial markets is necessary, especially in the short term. But the government is not the best decider of supply and demand; just ask the Soviet Union. So in that regard, we need to give the market plenty of room to sort itself out.

I came across the following AP article yesterday that caught me off-guard: “Holocaust survivors to Mormons: Stop baptisms of dead Jews”:

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

“Posthumous baptisms”? Huh?

It’s called baptism of the dead (also known as “baptism by proxy” or “temple baptism”), and it’s part of the Mormon doctrine. I had never heard of it before.

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