Month: March 2007

  • Congratulations!

    I noticed this morning that thorium blogger Kirk Sorenson has a new son, Elijah Frederick Sorenson. Belated congratulations are in order. Mr. Sorenson’s blog is a wonderful resource if you want to learn about liquid-fluoride reactors. Or even if you don’t. And I totally agree with his choice of nomenclature. Such devices are often referred…

  • Converts and heretics unite!

    Every once in a while I need a reminder of why I am not a liberal “progressive,” and this kind of thinking went a long way: …members of the movement Right demand that their candidates buy into the Entire Package of Wingnuttia. This isn’t simply political purism, it’s about validating a worldview. There are all…

  • Who profits most from provocative idiocy?

    Neal Boortz (via Glenn Reynolds) recently examined the question of “why people think conservatives are idiots“: Tell me .. how do you counter the “conservatives are ignorant” argument, and how do you manage to recruit more people to the cause of lower taxes, less government and more individual responsibility when you have people running around…

  • Catching up with the fifth grade

    I hate television. Which is why I don’t tend to watch as much video as I probably should. Still, I hate being ignorant — especially when other people are blogging and talking about stuff in a manner which suggests that you really ought to know what they’re talking about. Ignorant was precisely how when I…

  • Free Granny Dunham? (Or just invade her privacy?)

    I’d never heard of this issue before, but at Free Republic, at least one commenter says that “Free Granny Madelyn Dunham” should be a T-shirt slogan. This controversy seems to be mostly generated by this Newsmax.com report written by Andy Martin, who claims that Barack Obama is keeping his grandmother imprisoned because she is white:…

  • the right to oppression?

    Via Pajamas Media, I see that Roger L. Simon is having anger management problems over the way hostage Faye Turney was forced to cover her head when she appeared on television: I feel like smashing the television. One thing about those mullahs – no matter what their apologists in the West are like – they…

  • The dirtiest nuke ever?

    A daily WorldNetDaily reader I am most definitely not. But when the coffee still hasn’t yet corrected my sleep-deficit disorder and I see a headline that begins with “Nuke bomb hidden inside Hillary,” I just have to read on. As it turns out, it’s a South Park episode. The bomb is called a “snuke.” Here’s…

  • if this is a close ally, who are our enemies?

    Here’s a lovely example of our petrodollars at work: RIYADH (AFP) – Saudi King Abdullah, whose country is a close US ally, on Wednesday slammed the “illegitimate foreign occupation” of Iraq in an opening speech to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh. “In beloved Iraq, blood is being shed among brothers in the shadow of…

  • For every horror, another horrible law?

    The idea of adding a “homeless” category to hate crime legislation is not a new topic for me, but it seems that every time a homeless person gets attacked, there’s another push for it. (The way activists talk, you’d almost think it was legal to attack homeless people.) Anyway, I was appalled to read about…

  • Screw incandescence! I’m screwing in my fluorescents!

    Just as I am no Christian theologian, nor am I an electrical engineer. So this contentious Wiki argument over potential hidden costs of CFLs is largely lost on me. All I know is that my crackpot artistic side was fascinated by Right on the Right’s post which blamed Glenn Reynolds for the actions of a…

  • News From Zimbabwe

    This Is Zimbabwe has the latest news coming out of Zimbabwe. Like this story Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 34 years for women and 37 years for men. I would really like you to think about that for a moment. How old are you? How much longer would that leave you to live or have…

  • Palestinian Lesbians Safe In Israel

    It is not safe to be a lesbian in Palestine. Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population. How is that for irony? I got the link from…

  • Hacking

    Phone hackers morph into computer hackers. Steve Wozniack is featured. I never got into phone hacking (I did work on Motorola’s first Electronic Moblie Exchange [EMX] where I learned a lot about tone switching. I was writing a section of the manuals.). However, when the Altair hit the cover of Popular Electronics in January of…

  • A History of the Middle East in Just a Few Minutes

    How the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started in 2 1/4 minutes.

  • Fred Thompson just keeps looking better and better

    Regardless of whether there’s anything to the idea that a man should be judged by his enemies, I can’t think of anything more likely to get me to vote for Fred Thompson than this news: Focus on the Family founder James Dobson has dealt a potentially devastating blow to Fred Thompson’s presidential aspirations, saying the…

  • A very shrewd move

    Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that the Equal Rights Amendment has been reintroduced. While this is largely symbolic and unnecessary (for the reasons Eugene Volokh points out), it’s nonetheless a very shrewd move. An election move? To whose benefit? Well, we’re always in the middle of an election, so any move can be seen as…

  • From mourners to suspects overnight. Who knew?

    Yesterday I marveled over the inability of the Philadelphia Inquirer to make any mention of suspects in huge front page story, headlined “Woman dies while trying to help children — Another family is left to mourn.” There’s even a picture of mourners: Which has this accompanying caption: Rashiek High (left), whose wife was killed Sunday,…

  • Educating Diplomats

    Michael Ledeen has a few complaints about American Diplomats. What I would like to do is suggest a remedy. They really need to read some Retief novels. Our military reads Starship Troopers and used to read the Dorsai Novels. The official reading list. Evidently it changes from time to time. Maybe Foggy Bottom needs a…

  • soft spot for crocs?

    I don’t know exactly what to make of the Palestinian woman who strapped on three live crocodiles (via Pajamas Media) and tried to smuggle them into the Gaza from Egypt. (No, I don’t mean she got the crocodiles from Pajamas Media! That’s where I got the link.) I’m troubled, though, because I think this woman…

  • “I Bet The NY Times will jump on this”

    No really. Since the New York Times and so many other members of the moronocy have demonstrated a huge need for moron offsets (as Glenn Reynolds says, “demand may outstrip supply”), I think they might want to do as this ebay listing suggests. For less than a million bucks the Times can’t go wrong. I…