Month: September 2005

In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, Daniel Rubin (author of the Inquirer’s blog, Blinq) has kind words for my earlier discussion of declining newspaper readership: At Classical Values (www.classicalvalues.com), right-of-left blogger and lawyer Eric Scheie pays some respect, and not even begrudgingly: “While I often disagree with its editorial views, I’m sorry to see The Inquirer falling…

While I haven’t been keeping up with the Able Danger scandal as much as I should, recent developments are disturbing. Lt. Col. Mark Shaffer (the whistle blower in this matter) has been officially silenced, and documents are being destroyed — something I hear is happening without the legally required records being kept. More here. Meanwhile,…

I just stumbled onto another unwarranted federal expenditure — of $3.6 million to build a memorial to slaves who lived more than two hundred years ago at a building in Philadelphia which no longer exists: The nation’s first executive mansion, known widely as the President’s House, was on what is now Independence Mall at Sixth…

While I enjoy ridiculing crackpots who won’t shut up about ridiculous hurricane theories, I am really worried about Hurricane Rita. Yet I can do no more to stop it than I could to stop Hurricane Katrina. Comic relief directed against those who’d compound the misery of the victims (by blaming their favorite political enemies) seems…

While at first glance this might appear to be a ridiculous idea, in the interest of absolute truth I decided to do a little digging, and, as the saying goes, “connect the dots.” Let’s start with the scientifically documented fact that these super-powerful hurricanes are global warming: Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are…

A friend just sent me an email which included this large photograph, purportedly of a crocodile killed in “New Orleans”: The caption read: This crocodile was found in New Orleans swimming down the street. 21 FT long, 4,500 lbs, around 80 years old minimum. Specialists said that he was looking to eat humans because he…

For the past two days, a steady barrage of news headlines like these has dominated the Philadelphia Inquirer. Today’s Inquirer blog, Blinq features a roundup of blogosphere reactions. Here (via Blinq) is a photo of yesterday’s front page: Huge news locally, and considering all the time I’ve devoted to the Philadelphia Inquirer, I guess I’m…

Google the word Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. I thought this was a joke, but I got over 19,000 hits. It’s a disease. But fear not! There is a cure. Naturally, the blogosphere’s been all over it. I don’t know what’s taken me so long.

“The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again…” — Eichmann’s second in command Alois Brunner (in a 1987 telephone interview with the Chicago Sun Times) And now Simon Wiesenthal, who devoted his life to tracking down so many Nazi war criminals, is dead —…

I don’t know why I should find this disturbing (and I don’t know whether I’m whining or ranting), but last night when I was watching the forced landing of that JetBlue plane at LAX, I did my usual switching back and forth between Fox and CNN (to compare coverage). On CNN Larry King was giving…

To illustrate the mechanism of why activists win, I thought I’d use as an example something most people don’t consider a hot button issue — elephants in the zoo. To a small minority of activists, of course, animal rights is not only a hot button issue, it is the only issue. So they’re demonstrating —…

WorldNetDaily has an amazing sense of priorities about what constitutes the biggest news. Today I learned that the most important thing happening is not Hurricane Rita, but the fact that American corporations have joined forces with homosexuals to, to, I guess to “cuddle” (probably code language of some sort for declaring war on America’s values),…

Am I alone in hating fax technology? Time was when I used it, and thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but now? Sending or receiving faxes is one gigantic pain in the ass. I don’t own a fax machine. I had one, but it burned out in the late 90s, and I’ve…

This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is hosted at the skwib, a satire blog by Mark A. Rayner, who begins by announcing a new carnival — the Carnival of Satire. Is it a form of satire to add another carnival to an already bulging list of them? Yes, yes, it is, but we just don?t…

At the same time that the New York Times is slashing its staff by 4%, the Philadelphia Inquirer is slashing its staff by 16%: The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, the dominant daily newspapers in this metropolitan area of five million people, will slash 16 percent of their newsroom staffs through buyouts or layoffs…

From what I have been able to discern, Hurricane Rita is right now a Category 2 hurricane, with a 45% chance that it may turn into a 4. What that means is that the chances are greater that it won’t. While I don’t mean to engage in denial, I just turned off the television, as…

Should there be a special Paul Krugman Corrections Page at the New York Times? When I cited the inaccuracies in a recent Paul Krugman piece (he said that “lethal federal ineptitude” caused the deaths of “thousands”), I made a joke of it, suggesting that Krugman blame alligators for the discrepancy. What I didn’t fully realize…

Here’s a story Drudge appropriately headlined “FBI Launches Anti-Porn Squad, Prompting Scoffs From Some Agents…”: The FBI is joining the Bush administration’s War on Porn. And it’s looking for a few good agents. Early last month, the bureau’s Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a…

Howard Zinn (author of the People’s History of the United States — “a standard text in many U.S. high schools“) was interviewed by Tom Engelhardt of Mother Jones magazine, who wanted Zinn to explain the reluctance of Americans to see their elected leaders as the war criminals they so obviously are: Zinn: I would guess…

The RINO Sightings Carnival is being hosted by J.D. at Evolution, who has titled this week’s Carnival the “Hornitarian Jihad.” J.D. begins with a great description of RINO-dom: In this round-up alone, you will find a great deal of rational discussion of issues ? moral, ethical, scientific, and political. You will find two RINOs who…