Month: May 2004

During the furor over Columbine, what pissed me off the most were the endless invocations of the most heated Culture War rhetoric imaginable. On the left, the endless meme (epitomized by Michael Moore) was that the United States is a violent society, a culture of guns. The kids were simply products of that. Mindless automatons…

Not much time to engage in these silly antics today, but my sense of tradition compels me to present the Classical Values Friday Online Tests anyway. As long as people keep writing these things and I keep finding new ones, duty calls! The first test — “What movie Do you Belong in?” assigns me to…

I have not had time for any of my usual long-winded posts this week. Lots of personal stuff is going on including the sudden serious illness of a friend who was fine last week but who’s now about to die. Death is something I am experienced with, so I am helping out the family. In…

Considering the Pooping for Peace? campaign (see the current Bonfire of the Vanities), and the fact that so many of the worldwide “peace activists” have been the recipients of United Nations “dirty” money, I feel obliged to direct everybody’s attention to this timely item: Items can be hidden right under their noses with these specially-designed…

Don’t forget to read the Carnival of the Vanities (which was too early for me to enter this week. WAAAAHH!) At the Carnival, the Smallest Minority is having a duel with Tim Lambert, with whom I’ve tangled previously over his statistical gun fetish. Peter at The World of Pete relates an incredible tale of being…

Having a toad cross your path in Spring is supposed to bring good luck. (Fertility and long life and all that superstitious stuff.) Fortunately, I had my camera along, so I can prove it happened. It would have been nice if the toad had cooperated a little more, but he disappeared into the foliage so…

Regular readers might have noticed that last week I linked to a debate between John Kerry and John O’Neill. Let’s see…. It was right here in Philadephia, in 1971. Subject was Vietnam. The two served in the same unit, and neither one has forgotten the issues. Then or (as Glenn Reynolds highlighted) now. Let’s start…

What’s up with Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave? In a piece called “Looking for the Exit”, he makes it sound as if we’ve lost the war in Iraq, and the only question about getting out is not if, but when: If it wasn’t a quagmire, it was certainly quagmiry. And the first prominent retired…

Is there some sort of strategy going on? A pattern? There have now been repeated examples of exortations — by Americans — to kill U.S. soldiers. And then, when a heroic soldier has been killed, the same crowd tells us he deserved to die. When a soldier-traitor kills his fellow soldiers, the battle cry becomes…

By “three-way” I mean triple boot, of course! I know I just can’t shut up about Linux, but I am so enamored of both SuSE and Mepis that I decided to use two old hard drives — one partitioned with Windows 2000 and SuSE Linux; the other with Mepis Linux. SuSE comes with the GRUB…

Did you know that you can build a functional TASER from an ordinary disposable camera? These disposable cameras (about $5 dollars a pop) have a capacitor that can store up to 600 volts of stopping power. When the capacitor discharges those volts, it delivers an amperage comparable to stun guns. Perfect for our shocking device.…

I almost forgot that yesterday was May Day! That’s a big day for Marxists, and while it wasn’t celebrated with the customary splendor of the past, a notable tribute was paid by General Vo Nguyen Giap, who took the occasion to offer (as my local paper put it) “insight on Iraq“: HANOI, Vietnam – The…

Here’s a story about Jesse Jackson in the Inky’s local news section, which reveals some very poor logic at work: “We sell the most guns. We’re the most violent country on Earth, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” the noted civil-rights activist and former Democratic presidential candidate said as media crews, community activists…

I first learned about the Iraqis-tortured-by-MPs story here, and my immediate reaction was to figure out how to stop the torturers from returning to the United States and finding work as police. I figured, if this story only leaked to the press by accident, what more might there be? If the stories are true, I…