Month: November 2005

In a previous post, I quoted from a blog post and a Washington Times news report which claimed that Oreo cookies were “pelted” at Michael Steele. I now see that the story I linked is being contested (a “complete fabrication,” says Kos). Because I dislike inaccurate news reports (especially those I’ve linked), I think this…

“Few New Yorkers are aware that their city essentially was a capital of U.S. slavery for 200 years.” So says a bold print image placed directly in the middle of today’s Thanksgiving day scolding in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The bold language appears nowhere online, so I photographed it: It is certainly to be hoped that…

When I was a kid, kids knew where turkeys came from, and tasteless beheading videos used to be shown on television (typically they were in children’s cartoons made in the 1940s and recycled over the years for Thanksgiving — although I don’t know the origin of the animated gif below): The country was more rural…

Britain’s George Galloway (Islamofascism’s leading apologist there) is accused of pandering to Islamic anti-gay bigotry by killing a gay rights plank in his party’s platform: The reasons that Galloway and the Respect leaders killed any reference to gay rights in the party’s platform — or its electoral “manifesto,” as party platforms are called in the…

Would the United States lose in a war against China? Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara thinks so — apparently because he’s under the impression that the U.S. military can only withstand a maximum of 2,000 casualties: Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has gone public, warning that the United States would lose any war with China. “In any…

Human Rights Watch reports that two more gay men were executed in Iran last week. (New York, November 22, 2005) ? Iran?s execution of two men last week for homosexual conduct highlights a pattern of persecution of gay men that stands in stark violation of the rights to life and privacy, Human Rights Watch said…

Here’s an environmental irony: THE drive for “green energy” in the developed world is having the perverse effect of encouraging the destruction of tropical rainforests. From the orang-utan reserves of Borneo to the Brazilian Amazon, virgin forest is being razed to grow palm oil and soybeans to fuel cars and power stations in Europe and…

Do law abiding citizens make nearby criminals commit crime? My blogfather Jeff Soyer’s Weekly Check on the Bias (debunking the usual “criminals aren’t responsible for their behavior” nonsense) reminded me of the fascinating uproar in New Jersey over Camden’s designation as the most dangerous city in the United States. For a little background before I…

Ann Althouse is not convinced that the Democrats (including Atrios) care about feminism. I think they care about it as sincerely as they care about gay rights. (i.e. if you don’t agree with our philosophy, you are guilty of “self hatred” and we’re free to abuse you.) Gay conservatives or libertarians are not gay, nor…

This X business fascinates me, and while I’m inclined to go with Evan Coyne Maloney — “CNN should get the benefit of the doubt. There’s an old saying: Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence” — I find myself wondering if there would have been a similar reaction on the left…

Glenn Reynolds’ Pre War Intelligence Carnival has been posted at OSM.org. It’s huge, with lots of posts on both sides. How Glenn managed to tackle a project of this size I don’t know, but he did a great job, and I thank him for including the post I wrote over the weekend. And here are…

As one of my worst driving fears has always been hitting a pedestrian, this report in the Philadelphia Inquirer struck a nerve: Police said the men were driving south on the highway at about 2:30 a.m. when their car became disabled in the lefthand shoulder near the Girard Avenue exit. The men got out of…

This week’s RINO Sightings Carnival has been posted at Searchlight Crusade. Host Dan Melson does a great job. BTW, Dan also has this riveting essay on dangers posed by the illusion of privacy. I’m not about to summarize every post, but the following stood out: Environmental Republican offers some advice for Democrats: The minority party…

If there’s one thing that wakes me up in the morning, it’s a sudden collision with another undefinable word. This morning it was a word I thought I’d understood for most of my life: virginity. As it turns out, it’s suffered the fate of many a word these days: It’s all laid out in the…

The last post reminded me of a topic which has long plagued me: what is the use of debating anything? This is not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with debating, because there isn’t. Many people love to debate things, and one of the reasons is that they want to win. Litigators are usually…

When I saw the topic for Glenn Reynolds’ Carnival of the Pre-War Intelligence — “what was known going into the war in Iraq, who knew it, and more importantly, what should we have known that we didn’t?” — I sighed. That’s because I’m not a war blogger, never served in the military, don’t have any…

Is this a hybrid bike? (Via Glenn Reynolds’ recent discussion of hybrids.) The yellow “juice guzzler” above (rapidly being banned in China) appears to be powered by electricity alone — unless the ability to pedal the thing is considered an additional form of power. If so, then this (a bike with an attached small gasoline…

I’m glad to see that Daniel Rubin (best known as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s blogger extraordinaire “Blinq“) is not only being evenhanded in his treatment of Open Source Media, but he had this to say about OSM’s premature critics: ….it’s not fair to rip something so soon, even if the players are veterans at the game.…

In a comment below, I used the term “NeoNihilism” to describe an emerging (if unacknowledged) coalition between left wing deconstructionists and certain fringe thinkers on the right. Shortly before 9/11, my dark side envisioned a revival of that marvelous Nihilist thinker, poet Ezra Pound. I even composed a musical montage for the avatar of our…

A professor at Brigham Young University named Steven E. Jones is attempting to revitalize the idea that controlled demolitions (not hijacked planes) brought down the Twin Towers. In a paper posted online Tuesday and accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, Jones adds his voice to those of previous skeptics, including the authors of the Web…