Someone In This Club Tonight Has Stolen My Ideas.

The New Zealand Herald has an article about the authors of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” suing the author of “The Da Vinci Code” for stealing their intellectual property.

The funny thing is that there ought to be no way that they can maintain that their book is factual and that someone has stolen it.

If they are describing reality, then that is not their creation and not their intellectual property.

If what they have written is their creation, then it is fictional, which they do not want to admit.

Russia Not Free

From ABC News:

MOSCOW Dec 20, 2004 — A U.S.-based organization that tracks the progress of political rights and civil liberties across the world said Monday that Russia had fallen to the status of “not free” far behind the democratic nations Moscow sees as its peers.

“Russia’s step backward into the ‘Not Free’ category is the culmination of a growing trend under President Vladimir Putin to concentrate political authority, harass and intimidate the media, and politicize the country’s law-enforcement system,” Freedom House Executive Director Jennifer Windsor said in a statement.

“These moves mark a dangerous and disturbing drift toward authoritarianism in Russia, made more worrisome by President Putin’s recent heavy-handed meddling in political developments in neighboring countries, such as Ukraine,” the statement said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment on the report.

What? They’re dissing on Bush’s best buddy “Pooty-Poot”? But Bush looked into his soul and saw a kindred spirit! How can this be?

Episcopalians Are Grumpy Elitists

Seriously. Check out my two favorite Episcopalian bloggers: Father Jake has to get over his snarkiness about mixing up Advent and Christmas, and PJ is all disgrumpled about “badly done liturgy” which sends her “into hysterics.”

We’re not attending our local Episcopalian church anymore for reasons unrelated to grumpy elitism and not something to go into in a blog, and there are a lot of things to miss about it, but that’s one thing I don’t miss.

Maybe it’s insecurity about the whole King James affair that permanently infected Anglican churches with this kind of reactionary prissiness; I don’t know.

We dislike most seeing that in others which we deny in ourselves, and this particular kind of crankiness — though not on this particular topic — is something I’m prone to in myself, though I don’t like it. So take this all as a confession disguised as an accusation.

Why is being fat like being gay?

Brilliant two part article via bigfatblog.

The big difference of course is that fat is hated by both the left and the right.

Exercise: Read the quotations from the New England Journal of Medicine, the editor of the Harvard Medical School Health Letter, and the Clinical Psychology Review, summing up what is known about the relationship between eating, exercise, and weight, and the existence of safe, reliable techniques for making fat people not fat anymore.

Then go back and read the “left” and “right” links. Do either the Bush Administration’s CDC or the politically correct filmmaker seem to have any grasp of reality, or are they working from unscientific, disproven folk beliefs about weight, exercise, and obesity? If eating too much and failing to exercise does not actually correlate with obesity when one controls for socioeconomic class, does it matter whether McDonalds gives us big portions or not, or whether helpful government programs encourage us to eat less?

(The comments are interesting…. a lot of them seem to go along these lines: “despite the fact that 80 years of science gives us no indication that weight equals calorie input minus exercise, it is clear that weight does equal calorie input minus exercise, because that’s what I have always been told and what I prefer to believe. Therefore….”)