Month: August 2007

The atmosphere has been described by the Profits of CO2 Doom as a blanket that traps the incoming solar energy and warms the planet. Which is true. At a short time scale. At a little longer time scale the atmosphere is more like a heat pipe. This is on the scale of weather. Day to…

In more than a couple of posts, I’ve ridiculed a bumpersticker which simply said: “POVERTY IS VIOLENCE.” But until today I never know what fiend was responsible for that inane and empty slogan which acts as little more than a logic-destroying thought virus. (It helps to know exactly who these people are, so I often…

I’m running incredibly behind schedule today; hence the lack of posting. However, I am in receipt of a postcard which I thought I should scan and share. The topic is gun violence and the Philadelphia Inquirer: I never really made the connection before, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And…

Today, Judith Weiss at Kesher Talk celebrates five years of first rate blogging. Retrospective 50-day multimedia extravaganza here. Go check it out. I love blogs that have staying power, and bloggers who keep it up. Kesher Talk was here when I started and is one of my earliest blogroll links. Here’s to another 5 years,…

If you think you might want to improve yourself but don’t like self help books, I highly recommend reading Dr. Helen’s “Self-Help Cornucopia.” I have never liked self-help books. One of the few I did like was Albert Ellis’ How to Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything: Yes Anything! I originally found it from…

A number of blogs (both rightish, leftish and centrish) seem to be wising up to something that ought to concern everyone. The Democrats are either going along with or giving dictatorial powers to the very Republicans they claim should not have been given the dictatorial powers that they helped give them. I don’t know what…

I loved Jerry Garcia. I wept when he died. But really, $16,000 is too much to pay for a stainless steel kitchen sink, even if it came from what was once Garcia’s house. There was only one Jerry Garcia, but a sink is still a sink. (And a very plain one at that.) What I…

As I’ve said before, Clayton Cramer has always been a gentleman with me (despite disagreements going back to the very inception of this blog), and I have endeavored to do the same. It seems silly to have to point this out, but Cramer has never threatened me in any way, nor is he the type…

This beetle was trying to get into my house earlier tonight. (I suspect it was attracted to the light emanating from the monitor, but then, I’ve become computercentric. It might have just been the regular lighting.) But I think if I was a beetle, I’d prefer to be a beetle spider, like this wonderful hybrid:…

“Alms for Jihad” is already at $160.00 on ebay with three days to go. Googling the book (including its download form) after reading several sickening accounts of the sucessful Saudi censorship campaign, I learned that a ton of people are looking for it, but no one has it for sale. Even the digital download places…

Via Pajamas Media, I found a fascinating test called “Pick Your Candidate,” which tells you which candidates are most aligned with your thinking. It’s a relatively simple test, which asks your opinions on various issues, then assigns (or subtracts from) each candidate, based on the following criteria: If you agree with a candidate, he gets…

I get regular email from a man named Matt Barber, whose opinions I have discussed from time to time. In his latest mailing, he makes a strong claim that seems worthy of discussion — that the Evangelical Lutheran Church is guilty of apostasy: Washington, D.C. — At a recent meeting of the Evangelical Lutheran Church…

Those words didn’t come from a right wing commentator. They came from the Philadelphia City Paper’s Brian Hickey, who’s been following a murder trial which went strangely unreported in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Some black thugs deliberately targeted a total stranger simply because he was white, and fatally shot him: ….whoever pulled the trigger — I’d…

I love holidays. Especially holidays devoted to sex. Pilgrims celebrating the Hindu month of Shravan (mid-July to mid-August) are filling the pockets of marijuana sellers in the Deoghar district of Jharkand, according to a report in the News Post of India. Considered auspicious by followers of Lord Shiva, the month is marked by, among other…

The stuff I stumble onto never ceases to amaze me, but I just learned about a right-wing Polish cabinet official who makes the Israelis so queasy that last year they officially decided to shun him: Israeli officials have decided to refuse all contact with Poland’s new education minister because he leads a right-wing party they…

While the above phenomenon is not to be confused with “panspermia,” (although “which came first” wisecracks do cum come to mind), I keep seeing the above catchy term, and it certainly does describe the reproductive practices of certain men. Then again, it seems more likely to be used in describing the selection practices of certain…

Larry Atkins (a professor of journalism at Temple University and Arcadia University) has written a guest editorial in today’s Inquirer, with a title: Outlets that utilize citizen journalists must be careful And an equally impressive subtitle: Teach them about safety, ethics and accuracy. Use them to augment – not replace – the pros. Well that’s…

I don’t know quite how to say this, but I wish that David Ferguson would apologize to Ann Althouse. There. I guess I just said it. I knew and loved David in his earlier days as a blogger, and I was very upset when he stopped blogging. I had not realized that he was back,…

That’s the latest meme, according to a YouTube video linked by Darleen Click. And all this time, I’d been thinking it was an identity culture, and that the global warmists* must have been born that way. Very confusing. * Yes, there is such an ism.

I don’t know whether this is a case of real life imitating satire, but earlier I was trying to imagine how many gun control laws accused multiple murderer Jose Carranza might have violated. Here are just a few possible violations, just off the top of my head: Illegal aliens are not allowed to buy guns…