Like now, when they point out the absurdity of restricting OTC cold medicine to combat meth production: Where Have All Our Cold Pills Gone?

The ONDCP [Office of National Drug Control Policy] cites declines in meth lab seizures as evidence that the peudoephedrine restrictions are working. But as state officials have acknowledged (and as anyone who was paying attention could have predicted), the decline in local production has not reduced the overall supply of meth, because the vast majority of it comes from Mexican traffickers who are not affected by the Dayquil crackdown and who were happy to pick up any slack. There is no evidence that forcing cold and allergy sufferers to register as suspected meth manufacturers has had any impact on meth consumption.

We could’ve told you that, nobody asked.

Bill Curry, who knows at least a little about coaching at Alabama, has a few words on the musical coaches phenomenon that seems the rule today.

(Curry at Alabama: 1987-1989 seasons; 26-10, 1 SEC championship and 3 bowl appearances, including the 1990 Sugar Bowl; he was the 1990 SEC Coach of the Year. Despite all this, the alumni ran him off for going 0-3 against Auburn.)

An alumni list we read suggests that Alabama has the following offer on the table for the former most-hated-man-in-the-SEC:

• $30,000,000 over 7 years
• His son gets to be Offensive Coordinator
• He picks his own Defensive Coordinator
• He gets the AD job when it opens up, if he wants it
• He reports directly to the president, bypassing the existing AD, Mal Moore

It’s probably bullshit, but it’s a fun thought experiment.

Kansas Outlaws Practice of Evolution.

(Onion, natch.)

The reason? Rev. Joel Hunter thought the organization should focus on things other than gay marriage and abortion, like, say, poverty and actually helping people. Apparently, that’s incompatible with the Coalition’s mission, which points out just how much of a lie their name is.

Alabama has dismissed Mike Shula after only 4 years. Shula took over after a particularly fine sequence of events:

Shula took over the proud but troubled program less than four months before the 2003 season after Mike Price was fired following spring practice for his off-the-field behavior — specifically a night of drinking at a Pensacola, Fla., strip club. Price got the job after Dennis Franchione bolted for Texas A&M.

Before that, Mike DuBose was fired/resigned after some sort of affair, as I recall. Yay! Musical coaches!

Shula’s firing would mean Alabama is looking for a head coach for the fourth time since 2000. The Tide has had seven coaches in the 24 years since Paul “Bear” Bryant’s last season in 1982. Bryant had directed the Alabama program for 25 years.

The seven: Ray Perkins (1983-1986), Bill Curry (1987-1989), Gene Stallings (1990-1996; national championship in 1992), Mike DuBose (1997-2000), Dennis Franchione (2001-2002), Mike Price (2002-2003; did not coach any games), and Shula (2003-2006). If memory serves, only Curry and Stallings left of their own accord (though it’s fair to say that Curry was pushed).

Shula hasn’t been consistent (’03: 4-9; ’04: 6-6; ’05: 10-2; ’06: 6-6), but he’s young and this is his first head coach job. Alabama is still feeling the effects of its sanctions, and lost its star quarterback after last year (not to mention an unknown number of other starters like receiver Tyrone Prothro, who’s still out from a broken leg suffered in 2005). Offensive production has been weak, even in the 10-2 season, but is that enough to send a young guy like this packing? Maybe this is the right plan, and maybe it isn’t, but at some point shouldn’t they get a coach and keep him more than a few years to see what he can really do? Review the dates above and you’ll see that no coach has stayed at UA more than 4 years since Stallings. This endless game of musical coaches can’t be good for the program.

The Irish got precisely what anyone with a brain expected last night in their drubbing at the hands of the USC Trojans. Why anyone thought this game was a gateway to a title bid for ND is beyond us; they’ve played only two serious teams all season (USC and Michigan), and got their ass handed to them both times. (No, JoePa’s Lions don’t count — they’ve lost every serious game they played, and some besides.) The Irish have been overrated all year long, and fell a long way early after the Michigan game — yet somehow still started bubbling back towards the top on the strength of midseason wins over such powerhouses as Army, Navy, Air Force, and Stanford. Having 2 losses with ND’s schedule is no mean trick; you can even go undefeated if you play only creampuffs. That doesn’t mean you should be a top ten team. That the Irish are still rated 12 is insane; does anyone really believe that, say, Texas or Tennessee (tied for 17 in the AP) wouldn’t beat the snot out of them? For that matter, does anyone really believe that Wake (16) or Rutgers (13) could beat either UT?

At least the top 5 makes some sense. At the other end of the schedule difficulty scale from the likes of Boise and Notre Dame is the SEC’s LSU, who (as ESPN points out) have played 4 top 10 teams as away games and still escaped with only 2 losses (then-#3 Auburn, and then-#5 Florida). Can anyone else say that?

(Of course, this is just another post saying how fscked up the BCS thing is, and how much we really need a proper playoff system that would, if done properly, make clear what paper tigers ND and Boise are, and how good programs in tough conferences are by comparison.)

So, Turkey Day and all that. Enjoy.

However, there’s another possible Safari exploit floating around out there that once again points out a key bit of configuration advice every Mac user should follow immediately.

1. Open Safari

2. Choose the Safari menu (upper left, next to the blue apple) and pick Preferences

3. Click “General” on the left hand side

4. Find the option that says “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading”

5. MAKE CERTAIN THIS OPTION IS ABSOLUTELY NOT CHECKED OR ENABLED.

That is all. It’s a stupid security hole Apple uncharacteristically created by allowing Safari to open (read: execute) certain “safe” files as soon as you download them. With it off, you’ll have to do it yourself. The difference is key; some nefarious sites may send unexpected files with nasty payloads, which Safari would then open automatically. Whups!

With the option off, this can’t happen — unless, of course, you decide on your own to open the weird, unexpected file on your own. And you know not to do that, right?

Happy Turkey Day.

It should surprise no one to learn that the cop in question has a history of dubiously justified violent episodes, and was at one point fired from a “real” police force.

Bush’s nominee for the family planning department of Health and Human Services thinks giving birth control to women is demeaning.

The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”

Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.

Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.”

The appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, was the latest provocative personnel move by the White House since Democrats won control of Congress in this month’s midterm elections. President Bush last week pushed the Senate to confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and this week renominated six candidates for appellate court judgeships who have previously been blocked by lawmakers. Democrats said the moves belie Bush’s post-election promises of bipartisanship.

The Keroack appointment angered many family-planning advocates, who noted that A Woman’s Concern supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and does not distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts.

Great.

A UCLA student was tased multiple times yesterday when he failed to leave the library rapidly enough after a “random” check revealed he didn’t have his student ID with him. The guy’s name is “Tabatabainejad,” so we’re not all that convinced the check was random, but whatever. There’s video, taken by another student. It shows them repeatedly shocking the guy, at least a couple times for not standing up after being tased quickly enough. Nice. Even better? The cops threatened to tase anyone who got too close, and reportedly even threatened students who asked for their badge numbers and names. More coverage at CBS here.

These thugs need to be in jail, not enforcing the law. At a minimum, they should be personally liable in a civil suit. They have no business “enforcing” our laws.

Slashdot reports that Samsung has developed a machine-gun wielding sentry robot for use along the Korean DMZ. Of course, it also has night vision — and a speaker, so it can warn you before killing you.

There’s video at the second link. We are, of course, completely doomed.

November 10 marked the 31st anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Until recently, we assumed said wreck (a) happened at some distant point in the nautical past and (b) on an ocean instead of during the Ford administration (and our lifetime) and on a (really big) lake.

The particulars, in case you’re interested but unable to click:

The Fitzgerald was a 729-foot, 26,600 ton capacity lake freighter launched in 1958; she was the largest boat on the Great Lakes until the 1970s, when thousand-foot ships arrived. Her primary job was hauling ore across Lake Superior.

On November 9, 1975, she left Superior, Wisconsin under the command of Ernest McSorley with a load of taconite bound for a steel mill near Detroit (not Cleveland, as Gordon Lightfoot sang). Weather turned bad as they crossed the lake, so they turned north towards the Canadian coast to try to avoid it. By the afternoon of the 10th, the ship had suffered minor damage from the storm; a nearby ship, the Anderson, reported heavy wave activity, and radioed the Fitzgerald to warn them. McSorley reported they were “holding their own,” which is the last anyone heard from them. The Fitzgerald went down with all 29 hands soon after, coming to rest in two large pieces more than 500 feet down. (That’s another part we have trouble with: “Holy Shit! There’s a lake 500 feet deep!” We suspect this is due to growing up in South Mississippi.)

Lightfoot’s hit song (it peaked at #2) came out only a year later; he was, for all practical purposes, writing about a current event, not a historical episode. We mention this every now and then, and we are continually surprised that our weird misapprehension is pretty common. “Really?” they say; “1975? Are you sure?” Yep.

And we wonder why no one will play Trivial Pursuit with us.

“Drunken elk terrorizes Swedish schoolchildren“

During World War II, the Leica camera company helped Jews leave Germany by getting them jobs with Leica in the US.

Enormously overrated Louisville (#3!) lost to #15 Rutgers last night.

What IS it about these “unbeaten” or one-loss teams getting ranked highly despite playing few quality opponents? No, Rutgers isn’t really in the title hunt, either, despite their own unbeaten status. Louisville was Rutgers’ first ranked opponent, and they play in a creampuff conference. Louisville itself has only played a few real games, beating the shade-of-its-former-self Miami early in the season, plus a win over likely paper tiger West Virginia (another member of the Big East).

“Undefeated” is meaningless if you only play one or two serious games. Come play in a competitive conference and then see how well you do. We’ll wager any of the one- or two-loss SEC teams would wipe the floor with Louisville or Rutgers.