Month: January 2004

  • Another original idea — stolen!

    If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when I think up a completely original idea and discover that some con artist has stolen it. Over a year before I thought of it, too! That hurts. Plus, all he has one lousy post — and an insulting one at that: Hello. If you’ve come here by…

  • Penetrating legal issues

    I never thought I would stoop so low as to blog about this latest outbreak of popular hysteria (the neogladiatorial nature of the Michael Jackson case), but the way the television was acting last night, I feel a need to comment — as briefly as I can. An accused criminal defendant was (gasp!) a full…

  • Judging the fear of death?

    Here is a very thoughtful post, which I thought I should answer in my blog; I also posted much of what follows as a comment to the post. (Via InstaPundit.) This very articulate blogger — Phil Bowermaster — maintains that death sucks, and he is right (although he says a few things with which I…

  • Elected unanimously! The world’s NEWEST GOD!

    Last night I invented a new god, and now I am finally getting around to writing the post about it. Or, uh, him. I refer to the brand-new god of ideological purity! It is not the purpose of this post to discuss ideological purity in the depth it deserves, but briefly, I believe that it…

  • Are terrorists disabled?

    Arthur Silber recently noticed lax security measures in Washington DC. This reminded me of something…. Normally, I don’t go around looking for loopholes or thinking like a terrorist, but if I did…. Well, is this ethical to discuss in my blog? I don’t know, but this idea is starting to bother me, so I might…

  • Psychotic but contented German poseur from Spain wants to be Bounty Captain!

    What a strange group of tests today! (Friday is Online Test Day at Classical Values, so I have no choice but to bare my soul.) First, I was told that I am not a nerd: take the nerd test. and go to mewing.net. a nerd utopia. While that sounds normal enough, the next test showed…

  • Encouraging malignancy….

    Years ago, when I served on Berkeley’s Police Review Commission, a tenant filed a complaint against the police for refusing to arrest the tenant’s landlord. The charge? Attempted murder! That was because the landlord dared to smoke in his own building — in which he happened to live. (Berkeley Rent Control is another issue entirely…

  • “A soap opera, kind of.”

    Are bloggers “a generation of compulsive self-chroniclers, a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild”? Last weekend was a big weekend for discussion of blogging in the mainstream media. Tim Russert’s Meet the Press devoted half the show to a sort of roundtable on blogging (which has drawn a lot of attention; Jeff Jarvis has…

  • Lileks bad! Chomsky good!

    Bloggers are saying that this Dennis Perrin guy (whose attack on James Lileks has attracted a great deal of attention) just isn’t even worth fisking, so why bother? Besides, as Lileks himself says, “Who cares?” (Via InstaPundit.) So instead of bothering (what could I add anyway?) I’ll just do what I did with Leon Kass,…

  • Latest threat we cannot protect against!

    I feel compelled to speak up about two topics which are embarrassing and unpleasant for me: monkeys and underwear. For reasons I have explained before, I try to avoid monkeys whenever possible. And underwear? I am too much of a prude to touch the stuff — male or female — in my writing, anyway. But…

  • French libertarianism — an oxymoron?

    80,000 people demonstrating for freedom — and nothing in the Western press? Where did this take place? The Mideast? An oppressed Third World kleptocracy? Think again! The demonstration — by libertarians protesting a near-total shutdown in services by government-unions — was in France! (A government, by the way, which covers up its own wrongdoing while…

  • Miraculous cure at last!

    If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s having canker sores. (I’ve had ’em all my life, and they come and go without apparent reasons.) The medical term for these small mouth ulcers is aphthous stomatitis, and medical science not only cannot cure them, there aren’t any treatments which can truly be called satisfactory. Hell,…

  • Tie your tubes, and ride a bike!

    Clayton Cramer (a guy who probably wouldn’t approve of two gay men holding hands in public) nonetheless has a good point when he cites these remarks about bigotry against “breeders” in the San Francisco Bay Area: [T]hey think I’m overpopulating the world. Probably the strangest experience I’ve had is being pregnant in the Bay Area.…

  • This is not original!

    Every word you will read in this post (and almost every word in my entire blog) has been written before. Not one of these words was invented by me. But if I put words together in a certain order, then they can be said to be a “unique phrase” and if someone else uses it,…

  • Truth, gun control and trolls….

    A few months ago, InstaPundit reported the story of a blogger who shot an armed burglar who broke into his house and made racist remarks. Trolls descended upon this poor guy, and the experience almost made him stop blogging. Well, S-Train, the blogger, is back, and he reports that the burglar (a man with a…

  • End it, don’t amend it!

    Now that poor Friederich Hayek has been dragged — over his own dead body — into the gay marriage debate, I think it might be time to regroup, and ask a few basic questions. Perhaps it is time to think the unthinkable. Well, because the oppportunist in me knows that if I don’t propose this…

  • Intuition running amok

    Now that the race is on, it’s looking more and more to me as if the Democratic presidential candidate will be not Howard Dean, but Wesley Clark. Clark is coming up fast from behind, and if he does well in the Iowa caucuses (without having mounted a campaign there), this will be a sign that…

  • The pathology and etiology of “Liberalism”

    …..according to Ann Coulter. This is from a Question and Answer interview at FrontPageMagazine: FP: Let’s move on to discuss your own personal background. Tell us, what influenced you to become a Conservative? Were there some people or events that molded your views in your childhood, youth, etc? AC: There was an absence of the…

  • Deal!

    This remark from an Islamic terrorist jailed in Italy says it all: They like life, I want to be a martyr…. (Via InstaPundit.) Isn’t it nice when we can find an area of common agreement with our enemies? A win-win deal! Let’s make it happen!

  • Dixie Pics

    A friend got a new puppy! She is a three-month-old, half Australian Shepherd, half Spaniel named Dixie. And yesterday, she came over to my place to play with Puff the Magic Pit Bull, aged fourteen. So, in the finest traditions of Rachel Lucas (as well as in the interest of keeping my readers fully informed…