Month: July 2011

  • Identity politics sucks

    PJM founder Roger L. Simon has weighed in on CPAC’s decision to kick out gay conservatives, and Andrew Breitbart’s decision to support them: …I had to speak out personally in immediate support of my friend Andrew Breitbart regarding GOProud. I too will not be attending CPAC next year unless the ban of this organization is…

  • The Debt Deal

    HotAir is reporting this is done. I’ve been following the debt limit debate pretty closely at Megan McArdle’s and Tyler Cowen’s, but haven’t said much here. A couple quick thoughts: First, the MSM coverage has been atrocious. Straight news pieces have consistently conflated reaching the debt ceiling with default, even after it was explained in various places this was…

  • How to depress an economy and create crime

    One of the things I noticed driving in Ohio yesterday was that gasoline prices were substantially lower than they are in Michigan. ($3.85 in Ann Arbor versus an average of $3.60 in northern Ohio.) As to why this is, I don’t know. Ann Arbor is known for high gas prices, so it isn’t representative of…

  • Should Motel 6 be worried?

    While I always stay in dog-friendly Motel 6 motels when I’m on the road, today I saw something a bit different. A Motel 7. Never knew there was such a thing, but there seem to be others. Whether it’s part of a chain, I don’t know. Darn. I never asked whether they allow dogs! Instead…

  • The Big Tabloid Divorce

    So, here I was, trying to explain the reason I’m unagented, so that I wouldn’t have to answer a bunch of questions at Worldcon, and so that rumors couldn’t circulate that turned this into the big Hollywood divorce. Can you say “misfire”? Sure, I knew you could. All that’s lacking now to complete this circus…

  • getting serious about suspicious behavior

    Earlier I read that the TSA is readying a “new behavior detection plan for airport checkpoints“: The federal government is planning to introduce new behavior detection techniques at airport checkpoints as soon as next month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Thursday. TSA already has “behavior detection officers” at 161 airports nationwide looking for…

  • How The Government Works

    The Congress (the House actually) authorizes spending. The President (effectively) signs the checks. The Social Security checks. And yes the money is there. It is in all those certificates in the Social Security Lock Box. He could start cashing those. If you don’t get a Social Security check next month it is because the President…

  • If You Don’t Quit Harming Yourself We Will Punish You

    We do live in a society that is a masochists dream. A really weird place to be since I’m not into pain for recreation. What brought this post on is my ongoing series about Christians, ignorance, drugs, and the love of punishment. The last piece in the series An Education In Tolerance elicited some interesting…

  • An Education In Tolerance

    In what appears to be an ongoing series commenter Thomas was spouting some popular misconceptions about drugs. I wanted to make more public my reply. With a few additions. Thomas, There is no such thing as addiction. If you are in pain you will take pain meds. When the pain goes away so does the…

  • Powered Up

    Last night around 9:30 PM (local time) we had a heck of a windstorm in Rockford. A large branch of a tree is sitting on our front lawn. Since the tree is on city property I get to haul it out to the street and wait for the city to pick it up. The best…

  • saving nature from the unnatural will naturally require sacrifices

    Ann Althouse’s post about problems posed by dry cleaning alerted me to a problem I didn’t know existed. The most widely used dry cleaning chemical is doomed: It’s really quite awful. Your clothes are dumped — along with everyone else’s dirty things — into a giant machine full of perchloroethylene, which should be banned and will…

  • Against The Flow

    A few things to keep in mind over the coming days and weeks, as we endure the inevitable lectures about the dangers of right wing extremism: Anders Behring Breivik was a radical environmentalist who insisted we all stop using oil and institute one-child policies, a quasi-communist who wanted to nationalize all major corporations, an anti-American…

  • What Do Drugs Do?

    There is an interesting discussion going on at my recent article Social Movement. Commenter Russ was saying that Christians might favor prohibition because they “see what drugs do”. Really what they see is what prohibition does. But never mind. Let us take a look at “what drugs do”. This is for you Russ: OK Russ.…

  • Federal Revenue

    Talking about how the Federal Government doesn’t take in enough money seem to be all the rage this morning (well the New York Times did take the lead). “We as a society will either have to pay more for our government, accept less in government services and benefits, or both,” says Douglas Elmendorf, director of…

  • The (Publishing) Times They Are Achanging

    (Or Why I’m No Longer Agented) … or I won’t be when the thirty days for contract expiration run out. First of all, because dropping ones agent in publishing is a lot like a Hollywood divorce, particularly when you’ve been together for eight years, as Lucienne and I have, I’d like to say it’s not…

  • the convenience of reason

    People love fantastic stories, and this misleading headline would seem to supply them with something to cluck about: “New Zealand goldfish survive 134 days without food“ Sounds incredible, right? The problem with the story is that if you bother to read it, the fish had food. They were in a 26 gallon tank filled with…

  • DIY — but not your own surgery!

    A man who tried to remove his stomach hernia with a butter knife has succeed in earning his 15 minutes of fame, plus a trip to the loony bin: A 63-year-old Glendale man was in stable condition after he attempted surgery on himself with a six-inch butter knife to remove a protruding hernia from his…

  • Social Movement

    Jim Hoft has a nice article up about why the Norway shooter was not a Christian. And of course a load of commenters chimed in about Christian compassion. I will believe in Christian compassion when I see a call for an end to the pogrom on heroin users. Did you know that about 70% of…

  • We get annoying comments

    Apologists for murder — especially mass murder — annoy the hell out of me. Unfortunately (and unbelievably), a couple of recent commenters have been apologizing for the evil actions of Anders Breivik. I do not delete such comments; as long as I pay my monthly bandwidth charges, they remain forever. Anyway, a commenter calling himself…

  • Crisis Averted: President Signs Debt Limit Hike

    But I’m still a bit worried about the 64K memory chip manufacturers. Seriously, though: he actually told them to stop writing checks? I also didn’t see any concern over rating agencies, end of the world, etc.  Hmmm.