Month: June 2006

At the risk of alienating myself from the blogosphere, I think some self reflection is in order here. This morning I was jolted into the sudden realization (a realization which grew stronger in direct proportion to the amount of coffee I consumed) that maybe I had been unfair to Ann Coulter last night. That in…

From the enemy comes “joyous news“: Al-Qaida in Iraq confirmed al-Zarqawi’s death and vowed to continue its “holy war,” according to a statement posted on a Web site. “We want to give you the joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahed sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” said the statement, signed by “Abu Abdel-Rahman al-Iraqi,” identified…

Via Pajamas Media, James Joyner has what I guess should be called an Ann Coulter roundup, and Ann doesn’t seem to have too many friends right now in the right-of-center blogosphere. Whether it’s just her shtick or a form of trolling, conservatives are complaining that it makes them look bad. Rick Moran, Don Surber, and…

Via Pajamas Media, Tim Blair is making fun of the people who are mad at people who made fun of the people who are mad at people for having fun warming the planet. (At least I hope I’ve got the factual scenario right.) There’s nothing funny about college kids having beach parties when others are…

The Inquirer’s Jennifer Moroz has a good writeup of the Canadian terror plot, noting that many Canadians behaved the same way their neighbors to the south are behaving — with an “it can’t happen here” attitude: Federal officials told them they were a target. So did Osama bin Laden. But Alicia Allison didn’t really believe…

University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos (who yesterday called Glenn Reynolds a “Bush dead-ender” and “jingoistic right-wing ideologue”), has an interesting idea about how to resurrect Bill Clinton which he shared recently. After complaining about the 22nd Amendment (which he claims “most people now agree… was a mistake”) he offers an intriguing way to…

There are a couple of interesting editorial pieces in today’s Inquirer. Reacting to recent medical pronouncements about road rage, Claude Lewis weighs in against medicalization of bad behavior: There was a day when drug addiction, alcoholism and other pathologies were seen for what they were: human failures by individuals who had lost control of their…

People who can’t write shouldn’t. At least not for publication. Dialogue (or monologue, as the case may be) is notorious because idiom shifts and is never easy to capture even by those for whom the idiom is natural. That’s why Mark Twain’s achievement is so remarkable: his characters, particularly in Huck Finn, are detailed, dialectically…

While this piece of satire was written last year, it has a timeless sort of quality, so I think it’s appropriate to share: The Americans came in killing like mad men, I never thought I would say this, but life was better with Adolf Hitler. June 6th, 1944 ? Normandy Around three hundred French civilians…

Time for a little international news. Never one to flee from a ghost (loud groan!), Nick Packwood (fresh from a little blasphemy-blogging) links a Guardian piece about the curse still haunting the Guildford Cathedral, site of the 1976 Omen film: ….the negative connotations of this scene from the 1976 horror film The Omen have overshadowed…

At the risk of sounding irrational, that last post wasn’t emotionally satisfying enough! That’s because I barely explored the underlying issue of why people don’t mind spending more money on things that are not in their apparent rational interest, while refusing to buy things (or do things) that are. This begs the question of what…

I never thought I’d write a post about such a mundane topic as peanut butter, but here I am, doing just that. Where it comes to buying peanut butter (a staple food for me), I’m one of those cheapskates who couldn’t care less about brand loyalty; I buy whatever is on sale. Jif, Skippy, Peter…

Via Pajamas Media, Jay Rosen has a thorough, link-filled analysis of the recent takeover of the Philadelphia Inquirer and what it might mean. His conclusion: I don?t have any advice for the people in Philly. Too early. Like Meyer, I?m excited to see what happens. My prayer for the Philly papers is simple. I pray…

Watergate prostitution involving the CIA? Please. This is getting old. (And I do mean old.)

Long drive today! (Which means no blogging, probably until tomorrow.) And while master’s away, Coco must stay. I always feel guilty leaving Coco behind, because at her youthful and vibrant age, she has unbelievable amounts of energy. She’s so fast that it’s hard even to get a photo of her, but to give you an…

In a thought-provoking post at Gay Patriot, Dan (GayPatriotWest) reviews a movie I haven’t seen and wasn’t planning to see (The Da Vinci Code), and the film made him think about the tension between our joint Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritage: Sir Leigh?s insistence on exposing how he believes the Catholic Church misrepresented its own history…

Is there such a thing as inherited guilt? Right there, I’m realizing that the question I posed makes no sense. For, obviously there is inherited guilt, because people believe in it. The concept is as old as original sin, and probably older. And psychologically, there is a tendency to inherit a sense of guilt. So…

I found a couple of very thoughtful posts on the gay marriage issue which I think are well worth reading. I say “thoughtful,” because both are sincere, and not hemmed in by ideological considerations. Sean Kinsell criticizes the implicit (maybe explicit) tyranny in the approach of demanding approval: Anyway, I know I’ve banged this gong…

Michael Yon has a full and disturbing account of how a French conglomerate called HFM put his photograph of a U.S. soldier cradling a mortally wounded Iraqi girl on the front page of a new trashy exploitation mag. Over the Memorial Day weekend they used his photo (of a soldier behaving in the most honorable…

Via Pajamas Media, I just listened to a very informative podcast interview with Bill Roggio by the Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez. Bill Roggio is in Afghanistan, which he describes as much more stable than Iraq. He discussed the recent riot in detail, and gives a very different story from the one I read in today’s…