Month: July 2004

  • One nation under whom?

    I don’t know why, but the following political insight has triggered a Sunday rant: Every time you see them bickering about extending tax cuts, gay marriage, flag burning, and other ?hot button? partisan issues, know that they think those are the things that are most important. Those are the topics they think will ?fire up…

  • Who wasn’t looking? (Who’s STILL not looking?)

    Here’s the latest earthshaking conclusion about the Sandy Berger affair: “We don’t know what he was thinking when he did it.” (Via Glenn Reynolds.) I’m tempted to ask, “What did you not know about what he was thinking and when did you not know it?” While I’m troubled by a number of aspects of the…

  • Tim Blair, call your office

    This image has been making the rounds. A teeny tiny Sydney Opera House. Just sixty four microns long. I know it’s not practical, or even decorative. What it is, is very cool. For the metrically challenged, a millimeter is roughly one 25th of an inch. A micron (or micrometer) is one 1000th of a millimeter.…

  • Leeches beware! My inner cone is guarded by Solid Snake!

    Yesterday was Friday, which means I’m overdue for online tests! Thank the gods for my esteemed colleague Ghost of a flea, for the online test pickins are slim indeed these days. The very resourceful Flea supplied two of them, and while surprisingly, both our results differ, I am much indebted. The first test is morbid…

  • Well, Timing– what have you got to say for yourself?

    Eric has recently ranted on a popular pasttime, namely questioning the timing of things. And since that post President Bush’s payroll records, which the Pentagon previously thought had been destroyed, have surfaced. Every news outlet that lets out to my little apartment has been repeating the refrain that some have “questioned the timing” prefacing the…

  • The love that dare not speak its name?

    Anyone interested in the concepts of shame and disgust should read Julian Sanchez’s interview with Martha Nussbaum: Unlike anger, disgust does not provide the disgusted person with a set of reasons that can be used for the purposes of public argument and public persuasion. If my child has been murdered and I am angry at…

  • Is air security a threat to better “relations”?

    I have not had time to read the entire 516 page 9/11 Commission report. But the Philadelphia Inquirer has, and I can only hope that they’re wrong, because they declare — as a central thesis of the report — that the United States must: ….repair relations with Muslims around the world, saying that growing hostility…

  • It was the breast of times …

    This is from Reuters: Bigger Breasts for Free: Join the Army Jul 22, 9:15 AM (ET) NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Army has long lured recruits with the slogan “Be All You Can Be,” but now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on the taxpayers’ dime. The New Yorker…

  • Moral lessons from the Philadelphia Inquirer

    Here’s the Philadelphia Inquirer, pontificating about Martha Stewart: Let what Martha Stewart did serve as a lesson and a warning to other investors – even if that lesson so far appears lost on the perfectionist homemaker-mogul. Stewart’s crime of lying to federal investigators about a well-timed stock sale wasn’t in the same league with corporate-accounting…

  • It Was The Wurst of Times…

    Here?s an interesting note from Brothers Judd, who also find Dr. Ehrlich contemptible, though coming from a somewhat different perspective. Seems our POTUS was visiting Amish country this week. Read about it here, cause you sure won?t find it in the LA Times. I find the whole scenario charming, as much as anything because of…

  • Ketchin up with the kultural kampfire

    Can’t ketch up with anything anymore, but now I see that Justin Case has written another cool post, so I can relax. At least a little. You really should read Justin’s well-researched fisking of Paul Ehrlich too, if you haven’t already. And if you have, read it again, because I don’t think it’s gotten the…

  • DeLong and the short of it

    Feeling lazy today, so no mammoth research project. Just a short pointer to a lost treasure of science fiction. Aristoi, by Walter Jon Williams. Have you ever tried to daydream a perfect world? I know I have. What Williams portrays so vividly in this novel is precisely that, a world where things have started to…

  • Patriotic dedication?

    Considering that no less of an authority than Linda Ronstadt has called Michael Moore not just a patriot, but “a great patriot,” I think it’s high time that the rest of us ordinary citizens (you know, the dumbest people on the planet) pay attention to patriotism. Patriot Michael Moore certainly does, and he knows patriotism…

  • I QUESTION THE TIMING!

    This story (of nuclear warheads found in Iraq) is so unlikely to be true that I’ll just treat it hypothetically. Let’s just suppose that three nuclear warheads were discovered hidden deep in a concrete trench in Iraq. Would it be reported? If so, would the claim then be made that these warheads are now scattered…

  • “a silicon crystal doped with arsenic impurity”

    Linda Ronstadt apparently enjoys starting fights: “My career has befuddled other people, and it’s befuddled me,” admitted Ronstadt, 58, who finds her fans are polarized by her nightly on-stage salute to “Fahrenheit 9/11” filmmaker Michael Moore. “I’ve been dedicating a song to him ? I think he’s a great patriot ? and it splits the…

  • Sterilization Now: Redux

    The U.S. has refused to aid the U.N.’s Population Fund for reasons cited in Eric’s response to an earlier post on the subject: forced sterilization and abortion in China. Coercive population control as a goal of the radical left has crept up too in Justin Case’s excellent essay on Paul Ehrlich, Estimated Prophet. Eric suggested…

  • Ouch?

    Hey, at the risk of irreverence, since everyone’s talking about accidental shreddings “down there,” check out this story: Crazed surgeon amputates penis From correspondents in Bucharest July 19, 2004 A ROMANIAN surgeon underwent a fit of madness while operating on a patient’s testicles and instead cut off the man’s penis and sliced it into three…

  • When the country was in the best of pants….

    Even though I quoted the man recently, I never thought I’d need to concern myself about the contents of Sandy Berger’s pants! But this story is hard to ignore: WASHINGTON (AP) – President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, is the focus of a Justice Department investigation after removing highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten…

  • Blustering bloggers, complacent Americans, and “complex motivational issues”

    Ever wondered why your local newspaper won’t even use the word “terrorist”? By now just about everyone has weighed in on Alex S. Jones? remarks in a piece called “Bloggers Are the Sizzle, Not the Steak.” Some excerpts: ….this moment of blogging legitimization ? and temporary press credentials ? doesn’t turn bloggers into journalists. …..bloggers,…

  • Zelda doesn’t do Dobie anymore….

    Instead, she attacks the Terminator! Arnold Schwarzenegger recently used the term “girlie men” in a disagreement with lawmakers, and for this he’s being denounced for “homophobia”: Democrats said Schwarzenegger’s remarks were insulting to women and gays and distracted from budget negotiations. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl said the governor had resorted to “blatant homophobia.” “It uses…