Month: November 2005

According to Robert Spencer, wife beating in Australia is becoming a religious rite right: Can wife-beating be justified under any circumstances? According to some in Australia, yes ? if the couple is Muslim. The Australasian Police Multicultural Advisory Bureau has published and distributed 50,000 copies of an 82-page handbook for Australian police officers, directing them…

I don’t normally print emails, but I thought I’d share an amusing one from reader “Kristin Edwards”: Subject: http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/000019.html [That’s the Leon Kass ice cream post, folks.] To: escheie_AT_yahoo_dot_com There are maybe 100 people in America who are disgusted by eating in public. those people are probably very old and sad. YOU are retarded. people…

A Philadelphia jury has found the two LaSalle University basketball players (in a case I’ve posted about twice) not guilty of rape: A jury yesterday found two former La Salle University basketball players not guilty of raping a 19-year-old woman last year, but the judge rebuked the pair for their behavior. “This court does not…

Here’s something you don’t see every day: Galapagos tortoises having sex. It was amazing to see these huge things get so excited, and the male (at least, whichever one was on top) was making a strange bellowing sound which sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. A male peacock was watching, and eventually a crowd…

A local art gallery is featuring works of propaganda art by “urban artist” Shepard Fairey. Long considered a champion of an anarchic, neo-Dadaist street art subtly calculated to ridicule conventional propaganda (whether of the commercial or political variety), Fairey has now decided to take a political turn which many would consider crass, but which is…

Via Hobbyspace, a long and quite informative article on the Japanese Hayabusa asteroid mission. Much interesting stuff is due to start happening… After overcoming a host of obstacles, including several life-threatening solar flares on its 1-billion kilometer journey (about 620 million miles), the JAXA spacecraft finally arrived at Itokawa in September. Currently, Hayabusa — which…

The new UK citizenship test is now being bandied about in the culture war across the pond: Being British is not about whether you know the lyrics to God Save the Queen or can order tea in a cool accent. It’s not about your familiarity with Shakespeare, your knowledge of the Restoration or your command…

Writing about Steve Gilliard reminded me that as a blogger, he is far more successful than I am, and will probably remain that way. Being jealous of people who are successful in their endeavors is not my style. While I know that rich and successful people like Bill Gates are the target of much jealousy…

Cathy Seipp shares her thoughts on Islamic hypersensitivity (if in fact it is that) in contrast to the other religious sensitivities: An orthodox Jew I know, for instance, told me that the handwritten Torah (not a mass-produced copy, like the Korans of those detainees) is considered so sacred that people have died trying to prevent…

In opposing GooglePrint, Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr are guilty of the same kind of old-world idiocy that has been making the record industry look foolish for the past few years: And so we find ourselves joining together to fight a $90 billion company bent on unilaterally changing copyright law to their benefit and in…

While I was inclined to dismiss recent outbursts by blogger Steve Gilliard (a minstrel caricature, use of the term “Sambo,” etc.) as sui generis, the pelting of black Republican Michael Steele with Oreo cookies would seem to indicate that something more is going on. A coordinated approach, possibly? I suspect so, and I suspect the…

As a general rule, I would never chase after a story that Glenn Reynolds has already linked to. I mean, you’ve already read it there, right? Why indulge in pointless redundancy? But in this case, the link was rather inconspicuous, and the word “NanoBioTech” may have discouraged some readers from clicking through. That being the…

He wanted you to have it.

I really hate it when I find an important Philadelphia news item going largely unreported in the Philadelphia Inquirer. But according to this report in a journal devoted to driving issues, “accidents have increased 10-20 percent since red light cameras began issuing tickets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” Why have I seen nothing about this in the…

John Beck was the guest of honor at a quasi-official summit conference between Classical Values and Incite the other night, and quite a lot of liquid refreshment was consumed. (And liquidated.) While I hate to get involved in conspiracy theorizing, a seemingly innocuous (if not insignificant) topic appeared on John’s blog on the same day…

Over at The Ergosphere, there’s an interesting post proposing that alternative energy is civil defense. What with one thing and another, we all live in potential disaster areas and I’ve long thought that we don’t emphasize civil defense enough in this country. Though one can argue over the details of what makes for a more…

There’s almost always something worthwhile going on over at Defense Tech. A couple of articles caught my eye today. First, this evaluation of troop morale… Over three weeks in and around Baghdad this July, I spoke to dozens and dozens of soldiers about their views on the conflict. For the most part, morale among these…

Last week I remarked something in an afterthought to a post: ….attempts to discourage something can nonetheless glamorize it just as much attempts to encourage it. Many a social ill (and many a social good, for that matter) has been encouraged and spread by persecution, and by attempts to stamp it out. To the extent…

Once the “Scalito” business settles down, it will be interesting to see what the so-called “talking points” against Judge Alito turn out to be — and how well they’ll resonate with voters (and, of course, Democratic senators). Whether he has an inside line to Democratic strategy or whether’s he’s just prescient, Dick Polman has a…