Coffee and Provocation

• Blind Dachshunds and AKC Inbreeding:
  Gene-testing of wire-haired dachshunds shows that nearly 10% of the dogs carry the gene mutation that causes day blindness (aka "cone-rod dystrophy”). Why would anyone buy a Kennel Club dog with this kind of genetic load? There is clearly a market here for someone to cross out a small scruffy-looking terrier and a regular dachshund in order to get a wire-haired dachshund that is truly healthy. I hope someone will do it quickly and advertise widely: "Wirehaired dachshunds for sale without the Kennel Club defect!"
  
  
• The American Taliban's Madrasha:
  Virginia's Liberty University -- America's very own madrasha -- has decided to shut down the campus Democratic Party Club because that club supports a woman's right to choose. Never mind that a woman's right to choose is the law of the land, and has been the law of the land for more than 35 years.
  
  
• The Mile-Long Que for a Tennessee Elk Tag:
  Back in October, 12,800 people paid a non-refundable $10 fee just to apply for four elk tags. This was the first Tennessee elk hunt in over 150 years. Kentucky already has a herd big enough to hunt.
  
  
• Armed Men On Powerful Drugs:
  MSNBC reports that: "In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two ongoing wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies and troubled minds. And many of those service members are then sent back to war theaters in distant lands with bottles of medication to fortify them. According to data from a U. S. Army mental-health survey released last year, about 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent of those in Afghanistan reported taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or sleeping pills. Prescriptions for painkillers have also skyrocketed. Data from the Department of Defense last fall showed that as of September 2007, prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty troops had risen to almost 50,000 a month, compared with about 33,000 a month in October 2003, not long after the Iraq war began. In other words, thousands of American fighters armed with the latest killing technology are taking prescription drugs that the Federal Aviation Administration considers too dangerous for commercial pilots."
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