Month: June 2005

From the pages of The Progressive… Nina Siegal: You have stated that the debate on stem cell research and human cloning comes down to ?whose life matters most: the lives of sick children and adults facing risks of decay and premature death, or the lives of human embryos who must be directly destroyed in the…

Adidam is a complete Way of life, the gift of Avatar Adi Da Samraj. As His devotees, we practice this Way in relationship to Him because we recognize, at heart, that Adi Da Samraj is Real God appearing in human form. Adi Da was born Conscious as Perfect Love, Bliss, and Happiness – a state…

I’m often accused of avoiding the real issues, and I fear that every time I don’t write a post about a real issue (a crime I commit for a major portion of the sixteen hours a day that I don’t write posts) I am probably guilty has charged. And here it is Sunday morning. And…

?Koran mishandling?? Please spare me. What’s next? Urinegate? (No; that still means something else….) Seriously, is this why we fought the war on terrorism? I mean, I didn’t have any more respect for the Koran than the Bible or any other damn book before the war. Since when am I supposed to grovel in shame…

Two views of the same scene — from the nearsighted perspective of my camera’s macro lens: A closeup of rosebuds in the rain: And a closeup of the same rosebuds, but with my helper in the background: Puff’s fading fast, and out of focus, but he’s still in the picture. Still alert enough to watch…

At the risk of being a total bore (I try to make this blog fun, and if there’s one thing I hate it’s being forced to take things seriously), I have to raise a serious question about Mark Felt. Please bear with me, even though I know it isn’t funny. I’ll start with a quote…

In the course of debating the identity of Deep Throat, there’s an important point which should not be forgotten: the character was Woodward and Bernstein’s creation. An anonymous identity made up by them to protect who they claim was a vital source. Thus, in logic, only Woodward and Bernstein would seem to have the intellectual…

Rick Moran at RightWing Nuthouse has an excellent summary of the little-known Moorer-Radford affair. (Before Watergate, the military had been spying on Nixon, who called the ring “a federal offense of the highest order” when he found out about it, but eventually reliquished the matter to historical obscurity.) Excerpt from Rick: It just didn?t seem…

Forty nine years ago, in the very heart of the former Confederacy, a squalling but healthy infant entered this world. (As we will see, it was an important day in history, too!) His proud mother looked much like this at the time, and his father, a Navy man, was proud to have another boy. What…

“It’s OK to leave things out to protect the identity of a source, but to add something affirmative that isn’t true is to publish something you know to be an inaccuracy. I don’t believe that’s ethical for a reporter.” Thus spake Bob Woodward in 2002. But that was then. The reason for Woodward’s 2002 “ethics”…

Startling new developments in etymology from Charles G. Hill: “Boycotts,” some girl once said, “are etymologically sexist.” Anyhow, Charles is sick of boycotts, in particular those organized by the AFA: they will boycott anyone at any level for anything they don’t like. Certainly they have a right to do so, but I’m getting to the…

Over at Chiasm, John Atkinson reveals his true feelings for that annoying peak oil guy… James “Clusterfuck” Howard Kunstler, “one of peak oil’s bigger showmen,” has been busy getting as much press as possible before “The Long Emergency” gets moved over to the ‘classic science fiction’ bookshelf in a few years. His cartoonish apocalyptica would…

Robert Heinlein’s house in Colorado springs. The one he built himself. From the pages of Popular Mechanics, no less. How about that? Here are a couple of postcards from his boyhood home, Kansas City, made within a few years of his birth. If you click here, you’ll have access to a number of brief audio…

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked to Ben Stein’s rather grim “what-if” reflections on Watergate and the Deep Throat fallout: When his enemies brought him down, and they had been laying for him since he proved that Alger Hiss was a traitor, since Alger Hiss was their fair-haired boy, this is what they bought for themselves…

The 141st Carnival of the Vanities is being hosted this week by Wayne Hurlbert at Blog Business World. There are so many posts I don’t know how he managed to do it. Well, it turns out that Wayne had help: I have a giant stuffed duck sitting beside me here as I type, as a…

If Deep Throat was Mark Felt, then Woodward was lying. About Deep Throat, of course. And if Woodward was lying, considering that Deep Throat was Woodward’s (and Bernstein’s) construct, then why the fuss about Deep Throat? I’m just not buying. (It’s their game.) Yawn. But what has Bernstein to say? Here’s the Post: “Felt’s role…