Month: October 2005

On NRA News today, host (and blogger) Cam Edwards interviewed my blogfather Jeff Soyer, and one of the subjects was the DC red light camera fiasco. According to the WaPo story linked by Glenn Reynolds, the data make it overwhelmingly clear that not only don’t the cameras deter red light running, they actually increase accidents:…

Leave it to Steven Malcolm Anderson to bring to the surface some latent feelings still lingering within my cold and too-lifeless soul. In a comment to my last post about Harriet Miers, Steven concluded that he was “at a loss” to parse the philosophies of the current Supreme Court justices: …now I’m at a loss…

Or shameless? WorldNetDaily (who else?) reports that Joel Henry Hinrichs III (the Oklahoma University student who blew himself up), was — get this: a “suicide bomber” in possession of “Islamic jihad” materials. . . ….Doug Hagmann, a seasoned investigator, told WND he was informed by multiple reliable law-enforcement sources familiar with the investigation into the…

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom thinks wireless access is a fundamental civil right: SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who became internationally known for his campaign a year ago to legalize gay marriage, said on Monday he considered wireless Internet access a fundamental right of all citizens. …. “This is a civil…

Walid Phares (Professor of Middle East Studies and Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies) offers a detailed analysis and explanation of the recent bombing in Bali. Excerpt: JI [Jemaah Islamiyah] specifically targets the stability of the largest Muslim nation on earth with the goal of establishing a Taliban-like power, possessing full…

It isn’t often that I sound off about absolutely nothing, so I do hope regular readers will forgive me. But I have to say that I cannot remember the last time that more words were uttered and more ink was spilled over a judicial nobody about whom no one — not even the best legal…

Every once in a while, I like to keep track of my political backsliding from God-knows-where to God-knows-where, so I take tests like this politics test I found via Jay at A Voyage to Arcturus. My result always seems to remain consistently libertarian, which makes sense, as I still think pretty much the way I…

According to Evan Coyne Maloney, the phrase “hunting terrorists” is considered so offensive by Bucknell University officials that they decided to cancel a student event (whose promotional language included “Where were you during the months following September 11?” and “Major John Krenson was hunting terrorists”): ….when the students met with Kathy Owens, after she greeted…

While Glenn is “underwhelmed,” and I consider myself too ignorant to comment intelligently about the Miers nomination, at the risk of being simplistic I would like to offer a simple, off-the-cuff observation. I like seeing headlines like this: Bush Nominates a “Pit Bull” to the Supreme Court (Similar headline here.) Pit bulls have been under…

Whether you consider yourself a RINO or not (and whether you like RINOs or not) if you like Science Fiction, you’ll LOVE this week’s Raging RINOs Carnival. Excerpt from host AJ Strata: Originally the plan was to have Commissar?s team hide in plain site as lower creatures, called ?animals? on Earth. That way they could…

Might sadistic humans have found succor in an anti-fishing campaign? This absolutely sickening practice (warning — it’s an awful picture and story) of putting large hooks through dogs’ snouts, then using them as shark bait, reminds me of something I saw at this anti-fishing web site, where another picture of a dog with a hook…

In what I consider a strange development, I received an email purporting to be from Brian Thevenot (whose bad reporting and failure to admit mistakes I heavily criticized in at least three posts). In the email, he admits his “own mistake,” and argues that I didn’t “expose” him because he already “exposed” himself. While I’m…

In a groggy state this morning, I read through today’s Philadelphia Inquirer to see what might be in the news. The Bali blast — the latest attack by our number one enemy Al Qaida, which killed American citizens — was edged off the front page by the following stories: The Philadelphia Phillies baseball team’s ho-hum…

Some early Fall pictures, taken yesterday and today. Closeup of. . . nature: Crumbling building in Trenton, New Jersey: View in Ridley Creek State Park: Last but not least, I finally got Coco to smile for a photo: Coco treats me better than her Marge Simpson frisbee: I guess “Oh, my goodness!” is the bottom…

I’m wondering whether any of my readers might know whether the MOSSAD has the equivalent of a terrorist “rat line” to report susicious behavior which might be connected to terrorism. While most law-abiding Americans would be unlikely to think this way, I know that if I were a foreign born resident with such information who…

One of the things I’m getting a little tired of is seeing utilitarian arguments passed off as moral arguments. Not that I have any particular or inherent objection to a good utilitarian argument, mind you. It’s just that usually, the people who make arguments based on moral absolutism are fond of condemning utilitarianism. Maybe they’re…

There are altogether too many thoughts here for my backward and reactionary mind to process. While Steven Malcolm Anderson may have beaten me to this (or at least, deposited the idea in my mind), what I’m wondering right now is why I can’t be a pre-post-operative female-to-male transsexual trapped in the body of a man,…

Not everyone thinks the media exaggerated events in New Orleans following the Katrina disaster. I stumbled onto an exceptionally vicious web site (which I doubt will ever receive a fraction of the condemnation recently heaped upon William Bennett). Their Katrina, um, coverage begins with this picture: Caption: The New Orleans Superdome, intended as a refuge…

One of the more pleasurable aspects of blogging is that of control. As the captain of his or her own tiny print shop, a blogger can exercise a despotic editorial control that “real” newsmen can only dream of. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee a readership, perhaps quite the opposite. But it can come in handy.…