Month: June 2007

Clayton Cramer has an interesting post about the legal doctrine of “substituted judgment” which was invoked to determine that an incompetent leukemia victim had the right to refuse treatment for leukemia — apparently because he would have had the right to refuse treatment had he been healthy! …this guy can’t clearly state what he wants…

Jose Guardia has an eye-opening post (now also a PJM piece) about the Spanish government’s weak-kneed capitulation to ETA (Basque) terrorists. The latter now plan to resume their war: Three years ago we had a weakened ETA virtually in its last throes after a successful campaign from law enforcement both in Spain and France. Now…

That’s pretty much Randall Parker’s take on California AB 1634 (California’s mandatory spay and neuter act): My late great Australian Shepherd Oakley never got registered (and when I say great I’m describing the consensus of a lot of people who were more objective about him than I was). Under Lloyd Levine’s law Oakley, as a…

We are at war. We are at war. We are at war. Sometimes I need to repeat that lest I forget. I have to admit that one of the things I like about the Iraq War is that it tends to focus the war attention on a place where there is something resembling an actual…

“The communities that I represent in Philadelphia are very different than many other communities across this commonwealth. In other parts of the state, they hunt animals; in Philadelphia, guns are used to hunt people.” — Philadelphia’s State Representative Angel Cruz Notwithstanding Representative Cruz’s divisively stereotypical remarks, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, surrounded as it is by farming communities,…

There is a move afoot in Congress to require new wind turbine project developers to do envionmental impact statements on potential bird kills by turbines and to monitor wind sites for bird deaths. The Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act, a wide-ranging energy bill introduced this month, would create new standards for the placement and…

Unless the government says “Just say know!” An interesting look at how the LSD culture got started. Your tax dollars at work?

Yesterday I wrote a post about NASA’s Michael Griffin, a scientist who earned the wrath of the New York Times for daring to engage in “denial” of what the Times called the “overwhelming scientific consensus.” Bear in mind that it wasn’t the point of yesterday’s post to either accept or deny the existence of a…

Here are a couple of Youtube videos with Freeman Dyson talking about Global Warming mania. He starts out in the first video (on the left) talking about vegetation. He says you can’t do good science without good data. He notes that the data on vegetation is sparse (as in almost totally non-existant). The money went…

Over at The Astute Bloggers Avi Green is discussing the planned attack on JFK Airport in New York that was foiled by an informant who was recruited by the police with the offer of a lienient sentence on a drug crime. Reliapundit has this to say in the comments: if drugs were made legal as…

What is “news”? Can anyone tell me? Important current events and happenings? What events? What happenings? Important to whom? Certainly there is nothing democratic about the definition. I’ve noticed that it has less to do with what happens than with what an individual reporter wants to write about (and, of course, what the particular editor…

Yes, Coco really does seem to have an intuitive appreciation for the music of Bela Bartok. Here she is, in a New Jersey parking lot, carefully listening to Bartok’s String Quartet No. 6. The last of his quartets, No. 6 was written in his native Hungary in 1939, not long before Bartok fled the pro-Nazi…

Here is the full page version which has much better resolution. What is this all about you ask, other than some pretty pictures and nice music? Here are some answers: Bussard Fusion Reactor Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion Polywell – Making The Well Nuclear Fusion – wiki Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

Because I’m fascinated by the dynamics of groupthink (especially the way people are pressured into shifting their opinions), I have been unable to ignore the massive attack on NASA’s Michael Griffin. While the man is a believer in anthropogenic global warming theory, this is no longer enough to please the activists I’ll call “overwhelming scientific…

I’m back and I’m just not up to speed yet, so this will be a self-indulgent travel-related post. Yesterday I drove from Des Moines, Iowa to Rockford, Illinois, and I think it was the most harrowing drive I can remember. It had been raining heavily in Des Moines all morning, but stopped around noon so…

Here is a link to some lectures on physics by Nobel Winner Richard Feynman. If the chunks are too long for you or you don’t have the right video player Lubos Motl has some links to the whole thing segmented in shorter clips. Feynman is very wise to do what I normally do. When he…

Eric and I met up again in Rockford, This time we went to the Octane Lounge. Eric will be posting pictures on his return. In our long and rambling discussion we talked about the nature of blogging. I can think of no finer introduction to the world of competitive blogging than the movie His Girl…

Women in Art. H/T Don Surber

The Captain’s Quarters has a story up on the fall off in small donations at Republican National Headquarters. The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political donations to all parties and affiliated committees, confirms that the Republicans have a fundraising problem. The smaller donors with whom the RNC’s call center interfaced have decreased their contributions…