Month: April 2006

  • Why white people are annoying

    A black student at Haverford College explains. Fascinating. UPDATE: An answer, of sorts. (Glad I don’t have to go to college these days.)

  • sights, rites and colors

    In the old days, when people thought of May Day, they didn’t think of Communism, or International Workers Day (or even massive immigration protests). In simpler times, lovely young maidens would dance around the Maypole. “They … set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their…

  • petrodollars at work?

    I’m suffering from a serious time crunch, and I won’t have time for writing until much later in the day. I did find an interesting piece from the Washington Post which may shed some light on a serious error in logic committed by many Americans — that Shia Islam is “radical” and Wahhabi Islam is…

  • Music for nerds? Or disgruntled deans?

    This video is hilarious. It’s described by the Washington Post: Just check out the music video created by Columbia Business School students lampooning their dean’s disappointment at not being chosen to succeed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chairman. But no description can do it justice. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. But…

  • Buchanan for President? (Well, not really . . .)

    Mickey Kaus notes the dire importance of immigration as an election issue. According to a new poll, a hypothetical candidate promising “to build a barrier along the Mexican border and make enforcement of immigration law his top priority” . . . . . . beats the generic “Republican” nominee by 9 points– 30 to 21–and…

  • The best defense is a good chicken hawk!

    Just before yesterday’s Saudi-based DOS attack, Captain Ed announced the formation (along with Frank J. and Derek Brigham) of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, and Derek designed this incredibly cool logo to go with it: Baldilocks and others have signed on. Count me in. More from Captain Ed: First of all, the term “fighting keyboardist” describes…

  • More than a theory?

    At the risk of stating the obvious, this country wasn’t founded as a land of submission, and the First Amendment wasn’t intended as a theory never to be put into practice. (Unlike the Stalin Constitution [link from Patrick Crozier at Samizdata] which recited that “freedom of speech” is “guaranteed by law.”) I’ve often marveled, though,…

  • More shocking local news

    Well, not that local. But I am amazed — yes, shocked — to see that in neighboring New Jersey, consideration is being given to allowing citizens personal freedom on a magnitude I’d never have believed attainable in that state: TRENTON – Motorists in New Jersey could soon be introduced to a foreign concept: pumping their…

  • Local reporting wastes time and shoe leather!

    What do you do when the Saudis [more properly, computers in Saudi Arabia] shut down your blog? I dunno. It occurs to me that maybe I should retaliate. But how would I do such a thing? Not buy gasoline? Nah, that wouldn’t work. Gasoline is fungible, which means it comes from all sorts of countries…

  • No fair! no peaking!

    DDOS attack at Host Matters (which Glenn Reynolds says originates from Saudi Arabia); hope this goes through, and please forgive any errors I haven’t caught! (BTW, there is a Classical Values backup site, which I rarely use….) Anyway, I’m more than skeptical about peak oil theory, and I appreciate Justin’s recent post on the subject.…

  • Opens today — but not in your city!

    …the film has been banned in parts of South America because it depicts revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in a negative light. —Film Stew Despite my earlier enthusiasm over what was described as today’s “opening” of the Andy Garcia’s “The Lost City,” I now find myself perplexed and puzzled to see that it isn’t opening in…

  • “Rush Limbaugh drove them to it!”

    Speaking of “eliminationist rhetoric,” I expect vocal conservatives who support closing the border and immigration enforcement (and who are often angry in their pronouncements) to be blamed for this: SPRING, Texas Two white teenagers severely beat and sodomized a 16-year-old Hispanic boy who they believed had tried to kiss a 12-year-old white girl at a…

  • When I was a kid, there were real numbers . . .

    Despite my hatred of the slide rule, one of my fondest memories of the slide rule period was that there tended to be “statistics” (“official numbers” if you will) which scientists as well as lay people could consult. The “unemployment rate” is officially estimated to range between 4% and 6%. (The current figure, according to…

  • Signs of the times

    I enjoy strange and unusual signs, and I try to photograph them if a camera is handy. Frankly, the signs in California are better photographic subjects than the ones on the East Coast, and I don’t know why. I’d hate to say that California is a “more interesting” place, because that might insult East Coasters…

  • Nested Idiocies Hatch Futile Plot

    Zoolander replicant Andrew Keen strives to prolong his fifteen minutes. Eastern European sophistication is called upon… Now the politics of the Great Seduction is truly out of the bag. In a provocative piece in In These Times, cultural iconoclast Slavoj Zizek gets to the political heart of the digital matter. Zizek explains why post French…

  • Jane Jacobs Has Left Us

    She will be sorely missed. If any of our alleged “cultural critics” could be said to have any value at all, then Jane Jacobs would surely exemplify the best of that small subset. I don’t have a single unkind thing to say about her. The woman had a marvelous way of looking at things, a…

  • Allergic RINOitis makes me sneeze inside the tent

    Glenn Reynolds links to a really good post by a man calling himself “GoldwaterRepublican.” I agree with almost everything he says, and here’s an excerpt: When someone asks me why I am a Republican, I say I am a Republican because I believe in free trade, fiscal responsibility, personal freedom, individual responsibility, and state’s rights.…

  • Disappearing news item?

    Newsstands in Philadelphia have been disappearing in the middle of the night. It seems a man who didn’t own them hired a crane to just yank them off the sidewalk and move them to corners where he felt like operating newsstands: A man hired a crane to uproot six newsstands Sunday that were not his…

  • Can’t wait for this!

    I just stumbled onto a new film I’m surprised was ever made, and which I can’t wait to see. It’s The Lost City, directed by and starring Andy Garcia: Set in Havana, Cuba, during the 50’s, a club owner is caught in the turbulent transition from the oppressive regime of Batista to the Marxist government…

  • Not in North America

    I almost forgot about last week’s visit to Bolinas. A charming Northern California town where just about everyone over 50 has taken too much acid, and where the teenage kids are pretty wild too, Bolinas isn’t on the North American continent, but on the Pacific Plate. Here’s a NASA aerial photo of the place: The…