Month: August 2006

With as much coverage as there has been in the blogosphere about the disrupted plot to blow up as many as 20 planes and commit mass murder on an unprecedented scale, bigger than 9/11, there isn’t much for me to add. But I’m still wondering about the emotional need people have to make terrorism go…

Music is weird, and writing about it is always troublesome. That’s because musical taste varies, as do the personalities of musicians. With classical music, we don’t think too much about the personalities of particular musicians, because most of the composers are long dead, and (assuming a competent orchestra) what they wrote is pretty much designed…

Earlier this week, a Canadian British antiwar activist journalist writing in the Observer cited “Iraq Penal Code Section 111” for the proposition that not only is there a religious honor killing exception to Iraq’s laws against murder, but the killing homosexuals is considered honor killing. In trying to find the statute, I provided this link…

Maggie’s Farm sees the Lamont victory as a victory for Jihadist appeasement: …what do the results say? 1. About half of CT Dems are really tired of Iraq on the news. 2. About half of CT Dems are fond of Lieberman, and/or see the war as a necessary evil. None of that is very surprising,…

Will the Lieberman defeat help or hurt Hillary Clinton? Dick Morris (who knows her well) says it will definitely hurt her: “The big loser last night was Hillary Clinton,” Morris said. “She has to go through the Democratic [presidential] primaries to win and it is an increasingly hostile place for someone who voted for the…

According to the conventional wisdom, the Democratic voters of Connecticut have spoken, and “they” have delivered a “strong message” to Senator Lieberman. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dick Polman declares Lieberman a “casualty of war,” and sees his defeat as evidence of an antiwar “sea change taking place within his party,” claiming Democrats “want leaders who will…

You’re no better than blind if you can’t trust your sense of sight. So what are you when you can’t trust your sense of information? Presumably a medical term exists for one deprived of all sources of sensory input (including the lesser known senses such as echo-location, gyroscopic spatiality, and so on). To a “normal”…

Baghdad Bob, look out! The Green Helmet Guy is definitely gaining on you! Via Pajamas Media, I see that he has his own blog. It’s called “Green Helmet Guy” of course! Here he is, in New York: There are a lot more, of course, including a damning shot inexplicably left out of the Zapruder film!…

Drudge is reporting the earliest polls, and it appears that Lieberman lost. Connecticut // U.S. Senate – – Dem Primary 29 of 748 Precincts Reporting – 3.88% Lamont, Ned Dem 6,814 59.77% Lieberman, Joe (i) Dem 4,586 40.23% This will complicate things for Hillary, I guess. Who know how it might play in the Fall?…

The stuff that happens in today’s nanny state never ceases to amaze me. In San Francisco, a devoted mother lost her 6 year old son because her pit bull bit another dog on the ear: Valerie Louie’s nightmare started the day her young son accidentally left their front door ajar last year. Two of her…

Wikipedia can be a useful tool (I often use it to provide background details involving largely uncontested historical matters), but when partisan allegations or activists are involved, beware! As an example, take a look at the huge difference between the current Wikipedia entry on George W. Bush, and the Google cached version. In particular, take…

If Jennifer Copestake the journalist is the same activist who did things like this, it worries me, and I hope she doesn’t typify the MSM: The steel bars of the heavy-duty, black Magnum bicycle lock wrap around her throat almost delicately, and as the police siren wails in the distance, Jennifer Copestake smiles to herself.…

I don’t know how true this story is or whether it has been independently confirmed, but if it is true, Iraq is rapidly becoming like Iran in its treatment of gays. Homosexuality is seen as so immoral that it qualifies as an ‘honour killing’ to murder someone who is gay – and the perpetrator can…

This week’s Raging RINOs Carnival has been posted at DANEgerus. Host Dane Gunderson has a picture of an amazing model RINO, which is so good I’d reproduce it here (except I don’t want to spoil your visit to the Carnival). As always, the posts are great. Go check it out!

Things like dogs, guns, pornography, and drugs go to the heart of the distinction between two philosophies which diverge generally (if crudely) into what we call “libertarianism” and “communitarianism.” I’ve gone so far as to place the words in quotes and use the lower case “l” and lower case “c” because I think they represent…

Via Pajamas Media, I’m catching up on Reutersgate — the primary focus of which right now involves cloned smoke, and staged “rescue workers.” (More here, and Riehl World View explains the technique.) It must just kill Reuters to have to give credit to blogs. (Although, of course, the news agency repeats its photographer’s assertion that…

My Toyota Tercel is a great car considering it’s 11 years old. I’ve had to do nearly nothing to it other than routine maintenance. But last week I started to smell gasoline while driving, and then I noticed that it would leak for a little while after shutting off the ignition, and a few spots…

Is there too much democracy in the world? And are “we” — the naifs who think like Sharansky and Bush — part of the problem for having spread it? Jonathan V. Last seems to think so, and he provides examples of bad democracies. Beginning with Lebanon: Until a few weeks ago, Lebanon was regarded as…

I guess that’s the theme of these two oddballs . . . (I’m taking a light break. Nothing illuminating about that!)

I finally got around to listening to Nick Schulz’s interview with Andrew Keen, and while I disagree with Keen more than ever, I think I should make a couple of things clear: One: I understand the need for a legitimate debate about these things; and Two: in my earlier post, I overreacted. TCS’s Nick Schulz…