Month: August 2007

A friend emailed me a link to this YouTube video, and I’m not sure how seriously to take it. I don’t watch much television, and I have never seen the Maury Povich Show, but I just found myself wondering whether this girl and her mother aren’t both putting on an act to get attention. (Trash…

Considering the Wikipedia editing scandal that’s erupted lately, I don’t know whether this is the right time for me to be raising questions which go to Wikipedia’s “integrity,” so perhaps I should hold off on publishing this post; perhaps not. Much as I’m tempted to dive into the Wiki fun roundup that Glenn Reynolds posted…

Must be the season for correcting myself (or being corrected), but I figured since it’s that time of the year that I ought to do another searching and fearless moral inventory self pounding. In an earlier post asking “what page am I on?” I parenthetically ridiculed the notion that there is such a thing as…

I have been following the climate debates rather closely these days. I’d rather be doing IEC Fusion but that is stymied for lack of research funds. So the climate debate keeps my brain engaged until I can put it to more productive uses. Let me start from the beginning. Here is how the warmists say…

Mrs. du Toit asks what I consider question of dire importance: Karl Rove has resigned. Oh, nooooooo!!! Who is running the country now???? What sort of American would not want to know the answer to a question like that? I’m not sure it is entirely fair to characterize those who leave no stone unturned in…

Glenn Reynolds has repeatedly criticized the use of Patriot Act provisions in ordinary law enforcement. The most recent example of this involves the use of the sneak-and-peek search provisions in a criminal case involving cock fighting. “But cock fighting is awful!” you might say. Yes, and you might say that about a whole host of…

In a scathing analysis of the immigration amnesty bill, William Rusher offers an interesting explanation of Republican and Democratic bipartisanism at work: It is extremely difficult to focus the attention of the people at large on any policy, however bad, that is wanted eagerly by an influential minority. The policy in question — namely, to…

Why this didn’t get into the Philadelphia Inquirer I don’t know, but a group of local activists with the Nation of Islam’s Millions More Movement are threatening to sue the National Rifle Association. For lobbying! On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the MMM [Millions More Movement] Self Defense Committee, under the direction of mosque captain…

No, not really. (Har har.) But there’s a big fuss lately about Hillary Clinton’s White House records being held back by “archivists” working in Little Rock, Arkansas: LITTLE ROCK, ARK –Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her experience as a compelling reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her…

Via Pajamas Media, here’s John Leo on reportorial objectivity: We now live in a docudrama world in which techniques of fiction and nonfiction are starting to blur. Many reporters think objectivity is a myth. They see journalism as inherently a subjective exercise in which the feelings and the will of the journalist function to reveal…

Not everybody’s name gets to be a verb, but some such enverbed names are better known than others. As Glenn Reynolds (whose blog name is itself much enverbed) noted in remarking the Lamberting of James Taranto, Tim Lambert is one of those guys whose name has become a verb. This is an honor he shares…

When I read a very long, very maudlin, front-page Inquirer story about crime in Newark, I was left knowing very little about the exact nature of the crimes, other than the fact that there were “shootings in the schoolyard.” And here’s all there is about the principle suspect: Five days after the shootings, Jose Carranza,…

According to an interesting piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the campaign against “sprawl” is getting expensive, with local governments discovering that there are actually costs associated with acquiring and owning property. Even if the noble goal is to stop “development” and “the developers,” it costs money to cut grass, bring buildings up to code, and…

Ever since Steve McIntyre nudged the Goddard Institute for Space Studies to correct its error in the “adjusted” data many of the AGW folks (global warming is man made) have been saying that this is a minor correction. [in the comments] Without “the hottest year on record was 1998” the climate looks more naturally variable.…

Clayton Cramer has written a piece on how we treat our mentally ill that is just heart breaking. I have seen some of these issues play out with a close relative. Very painful. Sadly, there is not much help out there and hardly any one interested. When we de-institutionalized people with mental problems a considerable…

There must be something wrong with me. Not only did I go out of my way not to be interested in Harry Potter (and found myself in wholehearted agreement with Dr. Helen’s post about what I consider aging adolescent hysteria), but now I’m finding myself having a Harry Potteresque reaction to the Barry Bonds uproar.…

No seriously. Some leftie writer named Monica has taken issue with the name “Fred”: Say it out loud. Do it. Fred. Fred. In the South, Fray-ud. Fur-red-duh. It has the tonal quality of something being dropped on the floor, something heavy and damp-ish. Waterlogged paper towel. Bear in mind that Monica wrote the above for…

H/T Something… and Half of Something

At the gay issues debate the other night, Bill Richardson (a man I’m sorry is doing so poorly in the Democratic race) said something a lot of people who believe in freedom and free choice might have said about homosexuality: At least one candidate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, seemed to stumble when asked by…

I was reading the comments at Coyote Blog since I just finished a bit about a climate article they had put up and I came across this little gem by dearieme posted Aug 9, 2007 12:15:51 PM: “Government scientists ..refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software”: the default interpretation of that is…