Month: November 2006

In what’s being described as a presidential “three man race” consisting of Senator John McCain, former Mayor Rudulph Giuliani, and Massachusetts Governor Romney, Governor Romney is complaining that McCain is trying to have it both ways on same sex marriage: Romney was less charitable to McCain, who on Sunday told ABC News: “I believe that…

Do suicidal Salafists suffer from sexual hangups? According to former Salafist Tawfik Hamid, they do. He thinks the West is in denial about this, and about the nature of the Salafist threat: “North Americans are too squeamish about discussing the obvious sexual dynamic behind suicide bombings. If they understood contemporary Islamic society, they would understand…

This story reeks of the slimiest sort of identity politics: Six Muslim imams were removed from a US Airways flight at Minneapolis- St. Paul International Airport on Monday and questioned by police for several hours before being released, a leader of the group said. The six were among passengers who boarded Flight 300, bound for…

Be sure not to miss this week’s Thanksgiving RINOs Carnival. It’s hosted by Jim K at Right Wing Thoughts, who’s quite funny despite feeling lazy. Lots of Thanksgiving humor, but not one of the posts is a turkey. A few favorites: Bill at INDC is going to be an embedded reporter in Iraq. We need…

One of my longtime concerns has always been what to do if a SWAT team arrives because of a bureaucratic mistake, kicks in my door and shoots Coco for trying to defend me. (Yes, police shoot dogs for precisely that.) I like to think this is a remote possibility, but then, I didn’t think it…

All politics is local and all principles mutable. Most big cities are run by Democratic politicians whose decisions are driven by activists on city commissions, and if you’re trying to analyze what they do in the context of principles or logic, you’ll either go crazy or (in my case) write long and useless blog posts…

Walking around the neighborhood earlier, Coco and I were both startled to see that an older Volvo had apparently accomplished a mythological task, as you can see in the bumper sticker: Alas! No Mt Icculus for us! We returned home and were forced to content ourselves with a more mundane activity: I was experimenting with…

I hate colds, and the one I had a couple of weeks ago has been aggravated by a sinus infection plus what should fairly be called post-election blog burnout. Fortunately, the sinus infection has a limited life, and it is starting to clear up. I’m confident that the post-election syndrome will also fade without my…

What is “promotion”? Is it possible to promote something by attacking it? While this is not a new question for me, I was reminded of it yesterday when I learned of WorldNetDaily’s attack on a book ostensibly written for the purpose of sex education which (claims WND) is a sexually explicit diatribe aimed at converting…

I just scanned my woodblock print of Salvador Dali’s depiction of Dante’s Inferno, Canto 12. Commonly known to scholars and galleries as “The Minotaur,” some revisionism is needed, because as anyone with a minimal knowledge of mythology can see, the image clearly shows a centaur — and a female centaur at that. There’s a male…

Dr. Helen Smith links to a highly sophisticated psychological profiling test which she characterizes seductively as “another stupid quiz.” While the judgment of anyone submitting to such state-of-the-art psychological profiling online might be open to question, the fact is, my voyeuristic side has always enjoyed taking online tests of any kind, so I fell for…

While I have a bit of a problem with what seems to be a central premise of the film, I very much enjoyed Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers.” A lot of people are saying it’s intended to be an anti-war film about Iraq, but I just didn’t get that message. The horrendous battle scenes…

Caught this via Drudge: “He’s a Republican, I’m a Democrat, we work together on issues that are important to the state of Nevada. And I wish other people had the same nonaggression pact we have,” Reid told reporters. “It’s not a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ situation,” he added, referring to last year’s film about two gay cowboy…

I’m sorry to learn that Milton Friedman has died. They don’t make ’em like that any more. One of the high points in my life was attending one of his lectures, and a dinner in his honor. My favorite Friedman observation was this: The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the…

At a dinner the other night, a woman sitting next to me was carrying on quite heatedly about Global Warming and Greenhouse Gas theory, and while I didn’t want to start trouble, when she finally demanded to know what I thought, I expressed skepticism as gently as I could. Far from calming her down, my…

Michael McNeil (author of Impearls) emailed me about an omission from the long-running Classical Values torture poll. (“What ancient form of execution would you LEAST prefer?”) I neglected the fine old tradition of impalement. It’s certainly one of the most dreadful of punishments, and I really should have included it. Anyway, Michael sent me a…

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more depressing, it began to dawn on me that we may be entering a new era of humor in American politics. Republicans and war supporters were so caught up with Murtha’s demands for troop withdrawals in Iraq that they may have missed out on the fact that…

Found a cute little critter crawling around on the edge of a mushroom today. Fortunately, I had my camera, and I got a fairly decent macro shot of the little beastie: While it looks like a red aphid, at 1/16th of an inch it was too big for most aphids, and also too big to…

I hate expressions which are not defined, because that makes reports like this impossible to decipher: PHILADELPHIA – About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study. Fine, but precisely what does the phrase “sexually explicit” mean? Literally pornographic pictures? I don’t think so,…

I don’t know what Tony Blair is smoking. “Constructive engagement” with Iran? A country that has vowed to incinerate Israel, which is busily manufacturing nukes, and which now wants to take over al Qaeda? ….[T]he revelation that Iran is working hard to establish a closer relationship with bin Laden’s fanatics, who provoked the war against…