Month: July 2007

Commenting on the Republican candidates, Newt Gingrich seems to think it will be the country’s problem if he doesn’t become president: Asked by the Examiner if he was prepared to commit to a run, Gingrich said, “I’m perfectly happy to do what I do,” he said. “Whether that leads to the presidency is the country’s…

I’m a Salvador Dali fan as well as a Grateful Dead fan, but it never crossed my mind to inquire whether these two forces of overstimulation of the cosmic imagination ever met up. Until today, when, as my cosmic luck would have it, Rock Scully’s “Living with the Dead” arrived in the mail. While flipping…

Because I was in a hurry and late on Saturday I did not have time to finish the thoughts I started here about being late and being made late. In an honest and amusing piece, Burt Prelutsky explained why he is irate when people are late: As a rule, I’m an easy-going guy. Hardly anything…

A few more flowers from yesterday’s visit to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden: Coco stayed home yesterday, but I made it up to her today by taking her on a nature walk. Here she stops to admire a large and picturesque fungus: While the fungus is more subdued in color than the flowers, I think it…

Not much to report from New York. The subway system proved to be so dysfunctional that I wasted hours trying to get around. As my luck would have it, yesterday they shut down several major lines for maintenance, and shifted trains to tracks belonging to other lines, while putting up incomprehensible signs like these: I…

Lubos Motl is complaining about the invasion of personal gossip into physics. David Goss has sent me a flawless article from the July 19th issue of Nature, pages 297-301. Everyone who prefers articles about physics itself over fourth-class porn about physicists sleeping with other physicists – the kind of junk that numerous Woits and Smolins…

Burt Prelutsky has a very amusing piece about people who are chronically late: When you live in Los Angeles, as I do, people are constantly arriving late and then using traffic as their excuse, as if they had no reason on earth to expect there might actually be other cars on the road. So, first…

I complain about bureaucrats a lot, and one of the reasons is that I was a small business owner for years and I know what it’s like to deal with bureaucratic inflexibility and ineptitude, when all you’re trying to do is run a business or be a small landlord. Inspectors can be a real pain…

Randy Barnett has been doing some writing on Libertarians and War. Most recently this Wall Street Journal piece. Which has spawned a lot of discussion with Randy at the Volokh Conspiracy. A number of commenters have noted that the Iraq War started without a declaration of war, but instead Congress gave the President an authorization…

As Jose Guardia makes clear, political satire (like the picture of Bush and Blair in the last post) above could be censored in Spain — at least, if it involved the Spanish royal family. According to the court, slandering the royals is a crime: A spokeswoman for the National Court, who could not be identified…

A guy named “Gary” came up with a couple of real classics today. The comment he left to Dr. Helen’s post on gay marriage is too rich to ignore: Gary : Dr. Helen states in part: “First, let me start by saying that I am for gay marriage. As a right-leaning libertarian, I believe that…

I like to say that I hate statistics, which of course I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find statistics like these an endless source of entertainment: 2.2lb of beef is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions which have the same effect as the carbon dioxide released by an ordinary car travelling at 50 miles…

I picked up a new vacuum cleaner the other day. Well, it wasn’t exactly new. And I’m not sure calling it a vacuum cleaner is completely accurate, because, while it looked like one of those tiny old classic vacuum cleaners, it turned out to be missing the entire motor. What I picked up was a…

Via Pajamas Media, Sissy Willis has some excellent macro photographs of spiders, along with some keen observations like this: the night stalker had moved its silken bundle across the room to a more secluded wall near the sink. We tried to get a closer look using one of those bar-magnifier rulers. When it inadvertently touched…

M. Simon has just informed me of some wonderful news! Oregon Guy has “tagged” Classical Values! Ugh! But thanks! Whether this creates any obligation for me to comply with the rules, I do not know. I did not — and do not — make the rules, and I don’t think they’re legally or morally enforceable.…

I just read a bit touting Bill Richardson as a strong Democratic contender for President. Here is a bit of what the stands for: …he advocates complete and total withdrawal of troops from Iraq within six months… You don’t make babies or win wars by total withdrawal. H/T Instapundit Cross Posted at Power and Control…

One of my pet peeves is the inability of so many gun control advocates to recognize that the militia clause in the Second Amendment is not a limitation on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, but explanatory language. An explanation is not a limitation, and had the founders wanted such a…

Eric at Classical Values is discussing Clayton Cramers’s piece on the prevalence of abortion before Roe. His conclusion about abortion is that it may actually be happening at a lower rate since Roe. Clayton’s most important point is his conclusion. If you have to arrest and try your own citizens for a crime on a…

Attempts to censor the blogosphere seem never to stop. Via Pajamas Media, I read that Gates of Vienna, Atlas Shrugs, and Jihad Watch are all having problems. The latter two report being banned in a number of places. In addition, Atlas Shrugs’ Pamela reports a sudden and dramatic Google traffic loss, while Baron Bodissey reports…

Regular readers know that I write a lot about the issue which the media calls “gun violence.” The argument is that guns kill people (often reformulated in an endless loop as “guns make people kill people”). I tend towards the belief that guns are inanimate objects which will not kill anyone unless someone picks them…