Earth to Libs: Bush Won't Kill You!

In his "earth day" speech yesterday President Bush said, "I would remind people today is...a day in which we recommit ourselves to being good stewards of our land. We didn't create this earth but we have an obligation to protect it." My liberal aunt read this and commented in an email that

[Bush] sounds like an environmentalist to me! Sounds very much like what I wrote to you about a month ago about being good stewards of our world. Unfortunately his policies have not done much to achieve a better environment. We need a better energy policy that conserves our resources and reduces our consumption. Perhaps if we had some rationing of gas and oil so that people were only allotted a lifetime amount, they would consider more wisely the types of vehicles they drive and how they drive and what kind of houses they inhabit, etc. If we want our children to have something we must do our part now to preserve and conserve.

I'll save my comments on the gas-rationing idea for another post. But the dissonance she sees between Bush's words and his environmental policies is important because it's a result of liberals believing their own propaganda. Many of the differences between conservatives and liberals on environmental issues boil down to preferred methods and priorities rather than overall goals. This makes it unfortunate that so many environmentalists prefer to propagandize conservatives as intentional or careless despoilers of the world. For example, Bush was pilloried by environmentalists in the media when his administration delayed changes to the EPA's arsenic regulations for drinking water from 50 to 10 parts per billion in 2001. This despite the fact that the Clinton administration had accelerated the rule change to 5 months ahead of its original schedule so Clinton could implement it in the last days of his presidency. The rule change was finally adopted by the Bush administration in November of 2001, just a few months behind it's original schedule and just two months after NAS, NDWAC, and SAB released final reports on the health effects, costs, and benefits, respectively, of the rule change. (The net benefits are perhaps still questionable, but that is a topic for another day and not one which I have fully explored.) Bear in mind also the following points:

1. The rule change is irrelevant for most of the country where arsenic does not naturally surpass even the 10 ppb threshold.
2. The new rules will not be enforced until 2006 because public water systems need time to implement the new standards.
3. Individual states can and do regulate their own arsenic levels and water quality and some have already adopted even stricter standards (such as NJ at 5 ppb).

The previous standard of 50 ppb was implemented in 1942. So after almost 60 years (including all 8 years of the Clinton administration) of the old rule, what was the response of the environmental community? Bush wants to poison your children! Here are some quotes: Friends of the Earth:

President Bush's message rivals Marie Antoinette for callous indifference: 'Let them drink arsenic,'" said Friends of the Earth president, Dr. Brent Blackwelder. "Millions and millions of Americans are drinking tap water laced with poisons like arsenic. It is clear that the administration is more concerned about the wealthy mining companies who pollute our water than the government agency responsible for protecting it.

Democrats.com:

Now if this were cocaine being knowingly added into our national food supply, you just know the Bush administration would have a zero tolerance policy. But it is only dioxin, which like arsenic, seems to be one of the condiments of choice of the current Bush administration. George Bush the 1st did not like his broccoli, which is good for you. Here is the question: Does George Bush the 2nd like arsenic and dioxin, which are bad for you? What's your bet?

Maureen Dowd in the NYT:

You can just hear Rummy [Donald Rumsfeld], slugging back a Scotch with Cheney in the Oval after they’ve put the Kid [Bush] to bed, grousing about the gazillion dollars’ worth of investments he has to sell to avoid a conflict, and growling: “Real men can drink twice that much arsenic. And how soon can we get some lead back in the lousy paint?”

DNC TV ad:

Little girl holding up glass of water: "May I please have some more arsenic in my water, mommy?"

Never forget: Republicans are evil and want to kill you!

The arsenic rule was just one of a whole host of environmental poison pill regulations signed by Clinton as he left office. And each time the Bush administration reversed or delayed the implementation of these rules to first study their costs and benefits, the mainstream media dutifully charged Bush with an offense against mankind.

Putting Judicial Nominees in Perspective

Edward Whelan knocks the wind out of the argument that Democrats must oppose President Bush's judicial nominees because they are "out of the mainstream". This is just about the most devastating response I've seen on that particular point.

West Virginia's Finest

This is too good to miss! Senator Byrd threatens to execute Senator Frist on the floor of the US Senate (metaphorically--I think...):

Don't Hamanize the United State Senate. Remember Haman. The Leader and his party may some day be on the same gallows that we in the minority find ourselves on today. Hamanize. Don't travel that path. Because the Leader and his party may some day be executed on those same gallows. Think about it. Don't Hamanize the Senate of the United States.

Listen to the entire 6 rambling minutes of this former Klu Klux Klan Kleagle-cum-Democratic party leader and, if you are a liberal, pray that you never lose your MSM PR machine!

Impeachment Dreams

One more dreaming liberal:

Hidden behind the runaway bride and Michael Jackson stories last week was the unveiling of the smoking gun in the George W. Bush impeachment drive. Last week, the Times of London published an explosive top secret British government memo that proves, once and for all, the the Bush administration was fabricating and twisting the evidence on Iraqi WMD’s and ties to al Qaeda. And, once again, the corporate press sleeps. One oligarcy protecting another. Ain’t it grand!

“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Now, if the Republican party only had some real morality, they’d kick that criminal right out of the office he stole twice.

Never let context interfere with your conclusions! The most common and meaningful definitions of "fix" are perfectly innocent in this context: 1) "To place securely; make stable or firm"; 2) "To put into a stable or unalterable form"; 3) "To correct or set right; adjust"; 4) "To make ready; prepare". This makes perfect sense to anyone who has ever gathered information in support of a policy position or business decision. You don't dump raw data on your audience; you analyze and reassemble it in a coherent form.

If you want to argue that the author of the memo intended the more inflammatory meaning "To influence the outcome or actions of by improper or unlawful means" you'd better have some additional evidence to back up your contention. As John Hindraker of Powerline pointed out in this post the known facts point in exactly the opposite direction:

[T]he constant implication of the BUSH LIED! lefties, is that the administration really knew that Saddam didn't have any WMDs, but fixed the intelligence to make it appear that he did. But we know that isn't true. The consensus estimate of the U.S. intelligence community has been made public, and it clearly says that, with a high degree of confidence, Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons. The Senate Intelligence Committee's report has confirmed that this is what the intelligence community believed and reported to the President, and that there is no evidence that the administration improperly influenced the gathering or reporting of intelligence ("The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.")

And, whatever the British note-taker meant by the sentence quoted by Cole, he obviously didn't mean that there was any doubt on the part of British intelligence or Blair's government that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. On the contrary, the notes specifically refer to Iraq's WMDs, in sections not quoted by Cole:

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD...

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

I know responding to stuff like this over and over is a waste of time...Oh, well.

Schiavo Memo Update

A couple of important updates on the Schiavo memo at powerline here and here.

San Francisco East?

Maryland lawmakers just passed a bill requiring Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll on health benefits for its workers. The bill technically applies to any company with more than 10,000 employees in the state, but since Wal-Mart, which employs 15,000 workers in Maryland, is the only company that meets the criteria it's clear they were specifically targeted. Now might be a good time to invest in manufacturers of self-checkout machines. As this article points out:

[They] can save money for the retailer. Each unit costs about $24,000 to buy and install, plus another $4,000 or so per year for maintenance, according to IHL Consulting. The firm estimates that the devices pay for themselves in fewer than 15 months through labor savings, increased customer use and because they take up less floor space than typical checkouts, opening up more room for promotions or products. IHL President Greg Buzek said the systems have also cut down significantly on theft, or, in industry parlance, "shrinkage." "The single biggest factor in shrinkage is employee theft, and at the front end, this is the cashier giving their friends big discounts by scanning a pack of gum but putting a higher priced item in the bag," Buzek said.

According to IT Facts the number of self-checkout machines is already predicted to grow from 34,000 in 2003 to 244,000 in 2007. Maryland's Gosplanites will certainly accelerate the process.

Post Bias

William Booth of The Washington Post takes labeling bias to a new low in a feature story today on Andrew Mickel, an anti-corporate leftist who gunned down police officer David Mobilio of Red Bluff, California in 2002:

The coming revolution against the United States government was announced on the Internet via a manifesto by a self-described "proud and insolent youth," a college sophomore who sought to be our leader. This was to be the spark: At 1:27 a.m. on Nov. 19, 2002, Officer David Mobilio of the Red Bluff Police Department was working the graveyard shift when he pulled his cruiser into a gas station in his quiet little farm town. As he stood beside the car, the 31-year-old husband and father of a toddler was shot three times, twice in the back and once in the head, at very close range. Beside Mobilio's dead body, someone left a handmade flag with a picture of a snake's head and the words "Don't Tread on Us." ... Mickel explained that "prior to my action in Red Bluff, I formed a corporation under the name 'Proud and Insolent Youth Incorporated,' so that I could use the destructive immunity of corporations and turn it on something that actually should be destroyed." The name is a reference to the novel "Peter Pan." "Just before their final duel and Capt. Hook's demise, Hook said to Peter, 'Proud and Insolent Youth, prepare to meet thy doom,' " Mickel wrote.

So what does all this bring to Booth's mind? Why right-wingers of course:

But seen another way, as the prosecutors do, Mickel -- with his stubborn stoicism, his cold calculation, his military training, his anti-government diatribes -- seems a cousin to McVeigh. Mickel sees himself as the vanguard of revolution. McVeigh thought the same thing. It is as if Mickel, in his thinking, had gone so far to the fringe left that he started to look a lot like the fringe right.

Never mind that the story spends several paragraphs discussing Mickel's similarities to Ted Kaczynski, the left-wing Unabomber--though he is not labeled as such. Or that there are plenty of other plain-old, left-wing, terrorist extremists out there who blow things up and kill people. Unfair labeling is perhaps the most quantifiable type of anti-conservative media bias, and groups such as the Media Research Center have assembled quite a catalog of examples. But the Post takes this to a new low. In the Post's world even leftists can be accredited to the political right when they become inconvenient. The Post wants to draw parallels with McVeigh, so I have a question: When does the blame for Mickel's crime get apportioned to Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and other leaders of the angry left for their inflammatory rhetoric, as conservatives were so quickly tagged with guilt for McVeigh's?

Fake GOP Memo

Powerline sums up the evidence against the so-called GOP talking points memo on Terry Schiavo:

So it seems clear what happened. The Post originally wrote a story that explicitly claimed that the "talking points memo" was drafted and distributed by the Republican leadership. That version of the story went out over the Post's wire service and was picked up by dozens of news outlets. Before the paper went to press, however, someone at the Post apparently realized that the paper had no basis for attributing the memo to the Republicans, and the key language was deleted from the story that actually appeared in print. That story said: "An unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters." And ever since, reporter Mike Allen and others at the Post have said that they never meant to imply that the memo was created or distributed by Republicans. This position seems disingenuous. The Post apparently did distribute a version of the story that explicitly attributed the memo to the GOP's leadership. And even in the revised version that appeared in print, the implication that the "talking points memo" was a Republican strategy document is clear. That is how everyone understood it. And, as we have pointed out in our prior posts, the Republican party has taken a giant PR hit as a result of the popular belief, fueled by news reports on the fake memo, that the party pursued the Schiavo case out of political calculation rather than principle. Both the Post and ABC now claim that they never meant to accuse the Republicans of authoring or distributing the notorious memo. But neither has printed a retraction, clarification or correction. The Post has done nothing to correct or retract the version of its story that apparently went out on the evening of March 19. And to our knowledge, not a single one of the dozens of newspapers and other news outlets that printed the false claim that the memo was circulated by the Republican leadership has retracted or corrected that defamatory claim.

UPDATE: A couple of important updates on the Schiavo memo at powerline here and here.

America is Great II

Here is a great feature story from Wired about four illegal immigrants from a poor high-school in Phoenix who competed against corporate-sponsored teams from major universities like MIT to win the national underwater robot championship. Amazingly the writer ends on a sour note: Because the four teenagers are illegal immigrants they don't qualify for federal loans or in-state tuition to Arizona universities. Please! They're in the country illegally, they've gotten a free secondary education at the expense of Arizona taxpayers, they won a prestigious engineering contest and were profiled in a national technology magazine, and we are supposed to feel sorry for them because they won't get more free money from the government until they straighten out their immigration status!? UPDATE: Since the Wired story ran readers have donated over $50k to a scholarship fund for the boys.

America is Great I

Here is a fantastic quote from historian Paul Johnson, from The Spectator:

The plight of Europe is such that, whenever I have the chance to talk to young people now, at any age from 12 to 20, I always urge them to make their future in America, particularly if they are clever and energetic, qualities essential for a vigorous life over there. America has everything Europe lacks. It has the world's most dynamic economy, making impressive gains in productivity while expanding the number of jobs at the rate of a quarter of a million a month. It is growing in numbers, attracting the world's best immigrants, and with a healthy birth rate of its own. Population is just topping 300 million and will be 425 million by mid-century. It has a democratic spirit at all levels of society so that people really feel they create and participate in government. In science and philosophy, in painting, sculpture, music and literature, it makes Europe seem provincial. It has nearly 4,000 universities, including all the world's best. Most of all, it has a belief in its own future, a confidence that the world can be made, and will be made, a better place, not only materially but spiritually. It is the nearest we have in the world to The Good Society, and my only regret is that I did not make my home there 30 or 40 years ago, when I was still young enough to weather the change. Instead I have to make the best of enjoying the bits of England that are left, morsels of culture, dignity and civilisation not yet gnawed or gobbled up by the rodents of New Labour, the yobs and celebs, the hobbledehoys of mass entertainment and the picklocks and con men who dominate that combined brothel and mortuary, the Palace of Westminster and all its sinister and unsavoury purlieus.

Congratulations Michael

Congratulations, Michael Schiavo. You've won. You've bludgeoned Terry Schiavo to death with the law. A perimeter of policemen guarded her death and prevented all succor from reaching her to the end. May her specter haunt you to the grave.

Surplus Self-Esteem

I normally dislike generalizing about either conservatives or liberals, but several recent articles have gotten under my skin enough to make an exception. So here goes: In an article today that otherwise makes some good points on the benefits of presenting intelligent design in the classroom, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post drops a revealing side comment:

I am as devout a Darwinist as anybody. I read all the essays on evolution by the late Stephen Jay Gould, one of my favorite writers. The God I worship would, I think, be smart enough to create the universe without, as Genesis alleges, violating His own observable laws of conservation of matter and energy in a six-day construction binge.

A few days ago Howard Dean explained yet again that Democrats' electoral failures result from their hyper-developed intelligence (Powerline has a good post on this):

One major reason his party lost the 2004 race to the "brain-dead" Republicans is that it has a "tendency to explain every issue in half an hour of detail," Dean told the semi-annual meeting of Democrats Abroad...

Last month Jonathan Chait of The New Republic posited that if God came down to settle our political disputes and showed that conservatives were right most liberals would humbly accept His judgment; but if His judgment favored liberal positions most economic conservatives would heartily resist (interesting qualifier--I guess even Chait doesn't believe that social conservatives would dis' God if He arrived in full glory to revoke a commandment or two):

Imagine that God were to appear on Earth for the unlikely purpose of settling, once and for all, our disputes over economic policy. And suppose that, to my enormous surprise, he announced that every empirical claim advanced by conservatives was correct. Cutting taxes produces such great economic growth that even the poor benefit. Privatizing or eliminating social programs like Medicare and Social Security will cause the elderly to save more money and enjoy higher living standards. Slashing regulations, by eliminating unintended side effects, actually does a better job helping those whom the regulations were intended to help than the regulations themselves. Suppose that God presented these conclusions so convincingly--if his stature alone did not suffice--that everybody immediately accepted them as truth.

How would liberals respond? No doubt by rethinking and abandoning nearly all their long-held positions. Liberalism, after all, claims to produce certain outcomes: more prosperity and security, especially for the poor and middle classes; a cleaner environment; safer foods and drugs; and so on. If it were proved beyond a doubt that liberal policies fail to produce those outcomes--or even, as conservatives often claim, that such policies hurt their intended beneficiaries--then their rationale would disappear. It may be hard to imagine liberals advocating capital gains tax cuts as a way to lift up the working stiff. But that's just because there's no evidence to show they do. If the evidence were to change, so would the liberal mindset. The point is that liberalism has no justification other than the belief that liberal policies produce beneficial outcomes.

Now imagine the opposite were to happen. God appears in order to affirm liberal precepts: Current tax levels barely affect economic incentives, social programs provide tremendous economic security at modest cost to growth, and most regulations achieve their intended effects without producing undue distortions. Would economic conservatives likewise abandon their views? Some certainly would, but a great many would not. Economic conservatism, unlike liberalism, would survive having all its empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it.

(Jonah Goldberg offers a partial response to Chait here.)

After I read Mathews article my first thought was to make a few smart comments and move on (Well, sheesh, if liberals are as smart as God no wonder us common folk have trouble understanding them!). But these juxtaposed quotes are emblematic of the mindset that prevents establishment liberals from connecting with many Americans and demonstrate astonishing intellectual arrogance. The first part of that mindset, which prevents liberals from speaking believably about God and religion, may never be overcome. Many liberals are simply irreligious, but for many others such as Mathews and Dean (remember the bike path?) it comes down to this: They prefer a god created to serve them over the God they were created to serve. This difference is so fundamental to one's understanding of mankind's place in the universe that it itself underpins a host of other conservative vs. liberal disagreements. In Mathew's church it may be quite normal to consider God a fool not to agree with you. In conservative Christian or Jewish circles this would be tantamount to blasphemy. The other part of this mindset, to believe that one's political positions are the result of an inexorable and comprehensive calculus whose brilliance lesser minds cannot grasp, points to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way most people--even many intelligent, well-informed people--evolve their mature political positions. And I use the word "evolve" very deliberately. For most people don't take a very reasonable path at all. Rather, they journey through a series of formative life experiences and accumulations of half-knowledge that come to shape their most deeply held values in a process that is more like the grinding of driftwood by the surf than the purposeful assemblage of a complete and intricate structure. Most of us know very intelligent people who span the range of political ideology. So the answer is clearly not that one political group is more or less intelligent than another. Instead, at the heart of most political disagreements are differing value systems and assumptions about human nature. That's what's so troubling about articles such as Chait's. He claims that liberals are pragmatic and dispassionate about their politics while economic conservatives are pinned to an inflexible value system that they would not discard, even under duress from the Almighty! After the vitriol spewed at President Bush over the last four years what else is there to say except, "Huh!?". The self-proclaimed reality-based community should realize that reality is too complex for any of us to fully understand and predict. The scope of human knowledge is too great for any of us to be an expert on more than a few small slices. Is it too much then to ask a little more humility of liberals? After all, the principles of economic conservatives that Chait derides flow from an acknowledgment that the world is too complex to model at the macro level, and from a recognition that our best chance of predicting the consequences of public policy is to analyze the incentives of individual actors. Is this method perfect? Of course not. But it parallels methods used successfully in many of the hard science and engineering disciplines such as fluid dynamics--where we can't stand on the beach and predict which way the next wave will swirl but can model the interactions of water molecules well enough to design more efficient turbines and hulls. Obviously human motivations are more complex than those of water molecules, but they can still be usefully measured and modeled.

Perhaps it is true as some have suggested that liberals are far less likely to suffer exposure to conflicting views than conservatives because of the media they consume or the people they work with. Whatever the source of this mindset it grows exceedingly tiresome. The constant refrains of "liberals are smarter" and "Republicans just got lucky this time" begin to sound like my 10 year old son who insists that I "get lucky" every time I beat him at Madden NFL 2005. That excuse becomes less and less plausible with every defeat. :)

Inside the Gates

Wired magazine reports that 80 percent of Microsoft employees with a portable music player have an iPod. Apple's iPod is definitely inside the tornado (half of the 10 million iPods sold to date were sold in the last quarter of 2004) and if this story is true Apple is well on its way to becoming a music industry gorilla. Buy stock. Now. Google on the other hand appears to be no more than a market king*. If you own stock sell. Now. If the Lilliputians of the US Justice Department and European Commission weren't still swarming furiously over Microsoft Google's position would be even more tenuous. The music industry appears to have left its future firmly in Apple's hands. This is probably a good thing for music consumers. Steve Jobs certainly seems savvy enough to understand the long tail phenomenon, and Apple will likely have enough clout in a couple of years to start pushing the floor on single song prices** down quite a bit.

---

* Geoffrey Moore's book The_Gorilla_Game defined technology market kings as market leading companies with at least 2x the market share of their nearest competitor and with advantages of economies of scale, favorable distribution terms, enhanced access to customers and partners, and favorable customer relations. Kings lack the architectural control and high switching costs which protect the market share of technology gorillas. You can read a summary of the book here. ** Record companies and copyright holders still collect between 65 and 75 cents per song for music sold online--which leaves little flexibility for Apple, Rhapsody, Napster, Walmart and other digital music services to cut their prices below 90-99 cents per song.

Silly Sunnis

The Washington Post today repeats the canard that Iraq's elections lack legitimacy without participation from Sunni Muslims:

Shiites, long oppressed under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, comprise an estimated 60 percent of the population. The minority Sunni Muslims, an estimated 20 percent of the population, held much of the power under Hussein, and their clerical leaders urged them to boycott the election. But in its first statement since the balloting, the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars said it would "consider the new government . . . as a transitional government with limited powers." The parliament that is to be formed has already been designated as transitional, charged with writing a constitution and holding another election in December. The clerics' withdrawal from the election last fall had threatened to undermine the poll's legitimacy. Their decision, and threats aimed at Sunnis from insurgents opposed to the election, sharply dampened turnout in some Sunni Muslim areas.

...

The clerics said the expected low Sunni turnout confirms their position that the vote, taken while American and other foreign troops are in Iraq, is illegitimate.

"We make it clear to the United Nations and the international community that they should not get involved in granting this election legitimacy because such a move will open the gates of evil," the statement said.

This has been pretty well chewed over by the blogosphere with most writers pointing out the silliness of claiming that the South African elections in 1994 would have been illegitimate without participation by white Afrikaners. This point seems to have gone over the Post's head so let's try another approach:

[ABC News Studios in New York, February 22, 2008 6:03 PM EST - American Democracy at Risk] Peter Jennings: Good evening. Our top story tonight: Serious concerns about the legimacy of the upcoming Presidential election contest. Today fundamentalist Christian leaders threatened a boycott of the Presidential election if former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani, who is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, is nominated to head his party's ticket. Just a few days ago Mr. Guiliani all but wrapped up his party's nomination with a resounding victory in the South Carolina Republican primary election. Now, Christian leaders including the Reverends Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, and Dr. James Dobson say they will order their followers to stay home in November if Guiliani wins the nomination. [video clip of press conference] Jerry Falwell: This is a Christian nation. It was founded under God's law and it's an abomination in the eyes of God that we are about to hold, for the first time in our history, a Presidential election where both major party candidates are pro-homosexual and pro-abortion. Jennings: Some of the more extreme leaders in the anti-abortion movement are threatening to step up bombings and other attacks at abortion clinics if their demands are not met. Former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center monitors elections around the world, believes we have a real problem. [video clip at Carter Center] Jimmy Carter: Well I think we have to take a step back and consider their position. There are millions of evangelical Christians in this country who are very committed to their beliefs. I was one myself before I fell in love with Yasser Arafat. They are petitioning the US Supreme Court to suspend this election if their concerns are not addressed by the Republican party leadership, and I've ordered our attorneys at the Carter Center to prepare an amicus brief on their behalf. We believe the best solution is to allow President Bush to remain in office into next year if we can't negotiate a timely compromise...

I'm sorry. I can't keep from laughing any longer.

Bilges

bilge (bĭlj) n. 1. Nautical. a. The rounded portion of a ship's hull, forming a transition between the bottom and the sides. b. The lowest inner part of a ship's hull. 2. Bilge water. 3. Slang. Stupid talk or writing; nonsense. 4. The bulging part of a barrel or cask.

Bilges - Sounds like an appropriately humble name for a blog to me.