Preventing poor skin.

When winter comes, it usually makes the most impact on your skin. The cold season makes your skin dry, brittle and flaky. Unlike the summer sun’s, the effects of winter are not as obvious because you are usually covered up with your winter clothes. Your dry and cracked skin becomes more of a problem when winter ends and you must once again don your regular clothes. Summer is usually the season in which you go out on the beach with your bikini or exercise outside with tank tops and shorts. However, wearing these summer clothes might become a problem if you do not have healthy skin.

Before summer comes, you can start rejuvenating your skin through constant exfoliation. This process involves removing the dead cells from your skin’s surface. It is a simple process, normally involving only a loofah or a piece of cloth rubbed against the skin. After this, you can apply lotions or moisturizers to avoid drying your skin.

There are many ways of taking care of your skin during the summertime, yet the most effective is using sun protection products to prevent sunburn. These products usually have different Sun Protection Factors or SPF, which refers to the amount of protection it offers against the sun. Choosing the right SPF all depends on whether you have a fair or dark skin. The fairer your skin is, the higher the SPF that you will need. It is safe for everyone to use a sunscreen, which has 15 and above SPF. This will ultimately help in preventing the harmful effects of bright sun’s rays, like skin cancer.

When you apply sunscreens, it is important that you use more than enough to shield your exposed skin. You must always remember treating skin cancer is more expensive than buying sunscreen products. For the sunscreen to work effectively, it is best to rub it on before going outside. The reason for this is that the protection works better after fifteen to twenty minutes has elapsed from the time of application. You must also remember to reapply it after every two hours. When you sweat or go for a swim, the sunscreen becomes less effective, so you must lather up your body again, including your scars after you wipe yourself. The regimen discussed above is an effective way to take care of your skin and keep it healthy.

Glenn Reynolds links to this Reason article about how subsidies and tarriffs hurt poor countries. I was going to find an excerpt, but the whole thing is great. It's not everyday that libertarians and Oxfam are singing off the same songsheet, but it's neat when it happens (and they're both right). Go read it.

For the two people who read my blog and not Atrios's (hi, Jack and Elaine! How are you!), he's got a forceful take on my recent posts. It's great. Check it out.

He's also got a long excerpt from Jerry Falwell's appeal to pastors to encourage pastors to advise their parishoners to cast "Christian" votes. On a purely bipartisan basis, you understand.

I've checked my referral log for weeks now, and I don't think anyone has found this site by searching for "sex with bears." At last, our long national nightmare is over.

Charles Murtaugh has his vote for the world's funniest joke here. It involves sex with bears.

The Onion has more.

And I wish I could find lyrics for the Flotation Walls "I'm a Bear." Just a sample:

I'm a bear!
Wocka wocka!
I'm a bear!
Grrrrrrr!
I'm Amelia Earhart- just kidding, I'm a bear!

A couple of quick hits:

- Rob Lyman expands (here, here, and here) on his reaction to this post of mine. He's got some good points, the sort of which I might make if the tables were turned. I tend to have a bad reaction when I read insults about "the left." I take it personally too, even when the source is full of qualifiers.

If I was going to write a long reply, which I can't do right now, I would state that I wasn't being facetious when I said "so what?" about Bill Quick's post. I think it was way over the line, and I think that it's worth arguing about. But in the grand scheme of things, bloggers don't really matter. Bill Quick doesn't matter, Counterspin doesn't matter, and Ted Barlow sure as hell doesn't matter. If you want to find extremists of any sort in self-published web sites, you will find them.

On the other hand, pundits kind of matter, and elected officials definitely matter. And I just don't often see major liberal pundits or elected Democrats engaging in the same kind of personal, insulting attacks. I don't see prominent liberals denying the intelligence of all conservatives, or attacking their colleagues as unpatriotic, or whatever. You sure don't see elected Democrats treating Bush with the same personal venom that elected Republicans treated Clinton, even before Lewinsky. When Ted Kennedy starts shooting pumpkins in his backyard to establish that President Bush is a murderer, I'll apologize.

Again, this may very well be just my bias; I'd certainly admit that I pay closer attention to conservative smears than liberal ones. Let's talk.

- The Bloviator has a valiant defense against Glenn Reynolds' attack on public health. And he admits the crux of the issue right up front:

My hypersensitivity to criticism of public health is matched by Glenn's itchy trigger finger when it comes to gun control data.

- Matthew Yglesias has a great post about "the fun, fun right wing" that begins:

As we all know, everyone on the left is a man-hating feminist who wants to take your porn away, whereas American conservatives are a fun loving bunch who think you should have all the sex you want. The only exceptions to this rule are, on the one hand, every prominent Democratic elected official and, on the other hand, the President of the United States of America...

And then he gets into this story about the Bush Administration's bad behavior in sex education. They're promoting abstinence-only programs and harassing AIDS organizations, while suppressing evidence that abstinence-only programs don't work as well as other programs.

But Bush has decided that, research and commonsense be damned, abstinence-only is the way to go. Back in February, touting his request to raise the 2003 funding for abstinence-only education to $135 million, the president asserted, "Abstinence is the surest way, and the only completely effective way, to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.... When our children face a choice between self-restraint and self-destruction, government should not be neutral."

And when our president decides that his personal moral opinions are more important than the health of this nation's young people, Congress should not be neutral. We may not be debating war here. But lives are on the line nonetheless.

I got a kind email last week when I wasn't posting from Steve Verdon at Deinonychus. He asked me to comment on this post about whether Saddam could be deterred.

Like a jerk, I haven't done it yet. I'm sticking it here so that (a) I remember and (b) you visit.

Kevin "CalPundit" Drum asks:

TURNING THE TABLES....In the past 50 years has there ever been a case where it was Congress that was hot to go to war and the President who was reluctant?

Just wondering.

I'm pretty sure that the answer to that is "no." It got me thinking of two more questions, but I don't know how I'd answer them.

1. In the history of the United States, has there ever been a case where Congress tried to push a reluctant Pesident into war?

2. If not, does this have any relevance to parliamentary systems of government in general? Specifically, does it imply that Parliamentary systems of government are less likely to go to war?

I like the concept of Blogcritics a lot. I don't do it because I can rarely come up with more than a sentence or two about why I liked an album.

One album that I really like is The Stone Roses. It's a 60s-ish catchy power pop album that shimmers, creeps, and performs lots of other verbs. I've listened to this album a lot this week, until I realized what it did to me- it made me sentimental for a time and place (Manchester in the late 80s) which I didn't actually experience. Neat trick, that.

Three interesting posts from the Hoosier Review, which doesn't get as much attention as it might if it toed a party line:

Paul Musgrave has a story that might be an exclusive. MIT professor Ted Postol accused defense contractors of falsifying results of two test runs of the missile defense system.

During test runs of the NMD system, scientists at defense company TRW manipulated the data from the kill vehicle to make it appear that the system had acquired the warhead -- when in reality, the kill vehicle couldn't tell the difference between the decoys and the target. "You'd ruin your career as a scientist if you presented this as serious data," Postol told the audience of graduate students, professors, and a handful of undergrads.

****************************

Joshua Clayborn links to a story about a meeting at anti-racism conference in which delegates voted to expel non-blacks from a discussion of slavery. Jebus. I'll be the first to admit that this kind of bullshit sure makes the left easy to parody.

*****************

And, from Brian Balta, a post that challenged an assumption I've been making. I’ve been ready to assume that many Iraqi troops will abandon Saddam in the face of overwhelming odds. But would they?

I am a commander in the Republican Guard. I have my own division under my command. We have spent the last two weeks under heavy American bombardment. Many of my comrades, my friends, have been killed in their vehicles by American bombs. There is a massive American army marching towards us. They intend to kill us. They hate us. They have hated us for a decade.

They bombed us many times before. I have lived half my life listening to the sirens over Baghdad. I am their enemy. Their bombs have ruined everything. They destroyed roads, houses, homes. They killed my eldest daughter. A bomb hit near her house in the first war. They killed many in that war. Many of my friends. My family.

They killed my youngest daughter too. She was only 8. I watched her suffer and die. We couldn't feed her. There was no food. The Americans wouldn't let us have food. I watched her whither away. She lied there, looking me in the eyes, in tears. She told me how much it hurt. And then she died. It was so painful for her. The Americans made my daughter suffer so much. I hate them.

We are about to be crushed by them. Our tanks have been destroyed. All I have left is this one weapon. Saddam gave us his last weapon. He told us to use it only if there was no hope left. It will not help us win, but perhaps I can hurt the Americans. Just a little. Just a few of them. If I could only make them feel some of the hurt I've suffered. I want them to suffer so much.

On the other hand, I have this pamplet in my hand that I picked up on the ground a few days ago. It requests that I not use this weapon, because my country will suffer if I do.

Fire.

Brian has gotten a lot of criticism in his comments, so let me make perfectly clear- this hypothetical Republican Guardsman is wrong. I really don’t feel guilty for this stuff, so don’t try to put that tag on me. It seems obvious to us that the cause of his suffering is Saddam Hussein, not the United States.

But it isn’t necessarily obvious to them. Iraq is a police state with no free press, and Saddam has had ten years to blame every hardship on the United States. Isn’t it likely that after ten years of propaganda, humiliation, and strife, a significant portion of Iraqi soldiers will feel this way?

During the Gulf War, Iraqi soldiers were engaged in a conquest of a neighboring country. They were facing an American enemy whom they had no particular reason to hate, and they were fighting them far from their homes. In an attack on Iraq, they’d be in their own cities, repelling a foreign invader. God only knows what they’ll be told they’re fighting for.

Who does the average Iraqi soldier blame for the shortages and the bombs coming down on their country- Saddam or the US? Obviously, I don’t know, and you don’t know either.

Matt Welch is furious at the assholes who shut down the Los Angeles New Times.

I’m getting a lot of friendly e-mails suggesting that this foul news will present a silver-lining opportunity for any new-publication ideas we’ve been working on, but all I want to do right now is drive to Phoenix and throw a brick through the window of the New Times’ corporate HQ. Followed by a bucket of live rats. I hate newspaper-chain companies, and hope to inflict injury on them for the rest of my productive life.

I hate, hate, hate this stuff. I wasn't here when the Hearst-owned Houston Chronicle bought and shut down the Houston Post, and I'm still mad at them for it. Good on you, Matt.

If you enjoyed David Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, you may be interested to hear that his new novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is coming out soon. McSweeneys is selling a specially marked first edition online only. It sound like they're going through a somewhat limited printing, so it may be hard to find otherwise. They're trying to restrict it to independent stores.

You can buy it here, if you're interested.

Via Cal "Where Hip-Hop and Libertarianism Meet", LL.Cool J has endorsed George Pataki for NY governor, apparently making him the first rapper to endorse a Republican. I don't know enough to comment; I just thought it was interesting.

Two good hits:

-Sgt. Stryker has some perspective about the blogosphere:

I'm not here to convince people I'm right or sway them to my way of thinking. It's just not going to happen. When you come to this site, what you read will either validate your views or piss you off. For the most part, I'm just preaching to the choir. Basically, I'm that guy at the end of the bar who keeps going on and on about shit and who you wish would just shut the fuck up, already. Unsurprisingly, that's a true description of most of the blogosphere.

Then he keeps drinking, and segues into some sort of Roger Corman movie. He's going to be a great funny alcoholic uncle.

-Andrew Northrup is cleaning out his record collection. Damn, that's funny. I'm going to restrict myself to two quotes:

If you can't remember who these guitar gods are, they made millions in (when else?) the eighties by playing their guitars really, really, really fast. They were in such a hurry to play their guitars, in fact, that they forgot to write any songs, and so they each put out about 4 billion albums that sound like some guy saying "needlyneedlyneedlyneedly" in a high-pitched voice over and over for 60 minutes...

While I will admit that this probably not Rush's most embarrassing rock opera, I must also admit that that "better than Rush's worst rock opera" is probably the faintest praise that has ever been given to anything.

Via Brad DeLong, an inspired rant by Mark Kleiman about the importance, and rationality, of funding prison literacy programs. I love this kind of argument.

Let me take a look at one of the proposed cuts: literacy training for prisoners. That's guaranteed to increase crime, and on balance it will certainly cost money rather than saving money. It's about like trying to cut health care costs by not giving people flu shots.

Here's the arithmetic: keeping someone in prison costs about $25,000 per year. More than half of those released will be back in prison within three years, and some of them will cycle in and out for a long time to come. The expected present value of the future costs of imprisonment alone (ignoring the costs of the crime itself) for a prison releasee is on the order of $100,000.

Reading scores are strong predictors of recidivism, because employment competes with crime and people with better reading scores have better employment prospects. Literacy programs cost a few hundred dollars per prisoner. So a literacy program that has an impact of less than 1% on future crime and imprisonment has already covered its costs just by reducing imprisonment, with the benefits of reduced crime to the victims and the other benefits of employment to the prisoner, his family, and his neighborhood thrown in as bonuses...

The only reason not to is sheer malevolence: Prisoners are BAD. They deserve to be HURT. Let's not spend any of OUR money on those BAD people. That kind of stuff is still good for a few votes. And on a purely cynical calculation -- I'm still waiting for evidence that this crew is capable of any other kind -- crime isn't obviously bad for Republican electoral prospects. A neoconservative was once defined as a liberal who had just been mugged. Maybe Daniels and Bush are concerned that falling crime rates have been drying up the supply of converts.

On a lighter note, the world's funniest joke has been revealed. Enjoy.

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"

Dwight Merideth at PLA had a well-argued post the other day about the failure of the Bush White House to "change the tone in Washington." He and I both agree that Bush has failed to do so, or even to give it much of a try. But, to be fair, it's isn't just Bush's fault. The problem seems to be deep in the DNA of his party.

Jeff Cooper had a post a few days ago which clearly hit a nerve; I've seen it quoted by several left leaning bloggers. In brief, Jeff said,

I find myself reading the warblogs less and less. It's not simply because they support the president's posture toward Iraq, a subject about which I have serious misgivings. It's that so many of them deny any legitimacy whatsoever to those who hold positions different from their own.

He cited a post from Bill Quick

The left is clueless, suicidal, morally bankrupt, and ethically a contradiction, concerned only with power for the sake of power and, yes, in their lust for a phony "internationalism," deeply and profoundly unpatriotic. They hate the spirit of the Constitution, wish to pick and choose among those few parts of it they like, loathe America, are ashamed to be American (despite all their lies about "loving America, they don't really love this country - they love only their desperate, ugly wish for an America structured to the socialist, statist horror they truly desire), and would destroy the America of the Founders and the Constitution in a moment if they could wave a magic red wand and do so.

The comments are down on this particular Bill Quick post, which is a shame. There was a real Alleluia chorus underneath. Someone said that they wish they had the money to print it as a full-page ad in newspapers across the country. Someone else suggested that Bill should work for the Republican Party. I didn't see anyone saying that Bill had gone too far.

So what, right? It's just a blogger, just a comment board. It's not exactly news that there are people out there who loathe "the left". There are people who think that we're actually malevolent trolls who want to destroy the United States. These are probably some of the same people who wrote to Glenn Reynolds in anger because he linked to a commercial for the House Democratic Caucus.

Well, but it's not just bloggers. At Uggabugga, there's a list of some of the things that major right-wing pundits have said about Al Gore last week. There's the persistent story that Bob Somerby has been attacking all week, in which Brit Hume edited Gore's quotes to make it look as if Gore had flip-flopped. In my opinion, Hume forfeited any pretense of journalistic credibility by editing Gore's truthful statement into a lie, but the new story of "Gore's flip-flop" is entering the common wisdom.

Ah, but that's just Al Gore, right? You can't expect right-wing pundits to tell the truth about Al Gore.

But it's not just right-wing pundits, either. It goes up to the very top of the Republican party. Pandagon has a swell collection of quotes from just one week. For example:

"[T]he Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people."*
-George W. Bush

"I always see two Jewish communities in America. One of deep intellect and one of shallow, superficial intellect...Conservatives have a deeper intellect and tend to have 'occupations of the brain' in fields like engineering, science and economics. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to flock to 'occupations of the heart."
-Dick Armey

"You've never seen a campaign where anyone will attack [Sen. Tom Harkin] like we're going to attack him[.]"
-Greg Ganske

And there's this case:

In a heated C-SPAN debate with his colleague, Representative Bob Filner, Wilson said, "This hatred of America by some people is just outrageous. And you need to get over that." Filner asked, "Hatred of America? ... Are you accusing me?," to which Wilson replied, "Yes!" According to The Washington Post, Wilson proceeded to accuse Filner of "hatred of America" four more times and being "viscerally anti-American" once.

If I read a quote like Dick Armey's on a right-wing blog, I wouldn't think much of it. It's just a blog; people have the right to be idiots. But this guy is the House Majority Leader. He is one of the most powerful people in the world. And if I'm reading him correctly, he's capable of dismissing a position, not because it's right or wrong, but because it's the left-wing position. For people like him, right is right, and left is left, and that's all ye need to know. (Am I going beyond his original statement? Maybe. But as a Texas Democrat, do I have a prayer of expecting him to fairly consider the issues important to me? Not bloody likely.)

Can you imagine Tom Daschle or Dick Gephardt insulting conservatives- all conservatives- in that way? Call me a partisan hack, but I can't. Can you imagine a Democratic Congressman accusing a Republican colleague of hating America, and then refusing to apologize? I can't.

I treasure my favorite conservative bloggers; I consider them invaluable to achieving a nuanced understanding of politics. But it bothers me tremendously to see the Coulterization of so much of the right wing, from the top to the bottom. How do you argue with people like this?



* Incidentally, I've been cautioned about taking stuff from Media Whores Online, so consider yourself warned. But this got my attention.

American People Care More About Special Interests Than Own Security
Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates.

Latest: Sept. 26-27, 2002.
N=1,011 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (total sample).

"In creating a new Department of Homeland Security, the Bush Administration wants to remove union status from approximately 170,000 workers, in order to have greater authority to hire, fire and deploy workers. Do you approve of this proposal to remove the union status of current workers in a new Homeland Security Department, OR do you think these workers should keep their union status?"

Remove union status 23%
They should keep union status 65%
Don't know 12%

To quote Atrios, "Why does America hate America so much?"

UPDATE: Rob Lyman says I'm a partisan hack. Fair enough.

Well, it's the issue that everyone is talking about. To me, it seems pretty clear. Deadlines are deadlines, and rules are rules. When candidates miss them, especially after disgracing themselves by violating the laws they're sworn to uphold, they shouldn't be on the ballot. There is no legal argument to support these candidates, just vague appeals to "the will of the people." That's why I join with principled, consistent conservative commentators to insist that Katherine Harris be removed from the ballot in Florida.

chirp, chirp

I spent seventeen hours yesterday trying to make a row of numbers behave like another row of numbers. I can't tell you more, because it's already been optioned to Searchlight Pictures. They're hoping to get Mark Wahlberg as me and Elizabeth Hurley as the divisor.

Jeff Cooper and Glenn Reynolds, you flatter and honor me. But blogging will be light today until I learn how to inject coffee directly into my heart.