Month: June 2008

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Art Carey remembers by talking to some of the veterans. Excerpt: A Girard College alumnus whose father died in a coal-mine accident when he was 3, Barletta enlisted in the Navy in January 1944 when he was 17. At 5-foot-2 and 120 pounds, he barely met the physical standards. But Barletta was…

I want to live together with the Muslim people, but it takes two to tango. — Pim Fortuyn Incidents like this (and it was by no means the first one) demonstrate to me how right Pim Fortuyn was. At a fashion show to promote tolerance of gay people on April 30, a national holiday in…

Is there a fine line between “rallying the troops” and creating (or stoking) a political backlash? The reason I’m asking this question is that I’ve seen many an issue advanced not by its proponents, but by popular backlash against the tactics used by its opponents — especially personal attacks and emotional, overwrought hyperbole. I discussed…

Adjust your tinfoil hats, and heed the words of an electronic-emission-plagued Frenchman quoted here: With the good sleep results obtained out of my home, I decided to built a FARADAY cage around my bed. During day time I wore a special shielded cap. That special shielded cap has an incredible history; one day when I…

Dr. Helen has an excellent piece about a systematic practice — in which professional organizations force their members to fund politically correct causes by way of required dues: Are you a doctor, lawyer, or other professional who belongs to an organization that you resent sending money to every year? I was until this year, when…

Blogger Diana West at PoliticalMavens.com discusses Obama’s ties to The Nation of Islam. Very interesting. But that is not what caught my eye. “Another Obama connection to supporters of Farrakhan comes from Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod. “WND reported this week Axelrod sits on the finance committee of St. Sabina, the Chicago Catholic parish…

One of the things that has long appalled me about Child Protective Services (CPS), as well as the various agencies charged with enforcing animal welfare laws, is that unlike normal police, neither the child cops nor the animal cops seem to believe the Constitution applies to them. It’s as if they think the founders of…

A self replicating Rapid Prototyping machine has just been developed. A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and – in addition – make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost. A…

Via Ann Althouse, Chris Matthews is behaving in a clearly, um, contumacious manner. I watched the video, and Matthews didn’t seem contrite!

I just came across a most interesting bit of information. Despite a whole host of folks, including Andrew Sullivan, coming out with the idea that if Iraq is not yet won, a win is likely, a book has recently come out which says all is lost. Defeat is at hand, and well deserved. One must…

“Obama can win without her, but he can’t lose with her.” So says veteran Clinton lawyer and troubleshooter Lanny Davis (who has started a petition drive aimed at getting Hillary on the ticket as the vice presidential nominee). I think Obama can’t win without her, and I think Hillary knows it. Unfortunately, I think Lanny…

What is reading? Don’t laugh, because the question is not as simple as it might appear. If you’ve read the last two sentences, did you actually “read” in the traditional sense of the word? The reason I ask is that I’ve heard talk radio debates pitting “the Internet” against “reading” — the argument being that…

Ann Althouse notices that whether she realized it or not, Hillary Clinton was making what amount to de facto McCain commercials. Like this: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign. I will bring a lifetime of experience, and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002.” (An antiwar…

I hate it when I forget my camera, and it happens too often. Anyway, yesterday I saw two bumperstickers on a car driven by a perfectly run-of-the-mill-looking Obama supporter, and unfortunately all I had was my cell phone’s built-in camera. This is the result: Unfortunately, there’s no way to read either bumpersticker, but here’s the…

Is there a “neurobiological antagonism to difference”? Mike Godwin explained the mechanism behind this theory: ….after we reach a certain age (12, about the age of sexual maturity), our brains look at the world for confirmations of their perceptual frameworks, and so cope less well with “difference” — data that challenge our perceptions. In the…

I haven’t linked to Andew Sullivan in ages. Since after he lost his cahones about the War in Iraq. Well I’m linking today. And to what? This article on the changed situation in Iraq, suggested by Jennifer Rubin of Commentary. Via Instapundit. I’m sure this is white hot because in some respects it represents Andrew’s…

Citing a Rasmussen poll that John McCain is “Trusted More Than Obama on Economy, Iraq, National Security,” Glenn Reynolds made the following observation: As I said before, a lot of Republicans don’t like McCain, but it seems clear that the GOP primary process nominated the one candidate with a decent chance of winning in November.…

While I’ve complained about (and even tried to analyze — ugh!) the Lieberman-Warner “cap and trade” bill, I worried that it might pass, because it was a bipartisan bill that most voters didn’t even know about. So naturally was delighted today to see apparent evidence that the vast majority of voters oppose it: As the…

The Culture War is dead! Long live the Culture War! A few days ago, I scrupulously avoided an Australian Culture War debate over whether the Culture War was “over.” This was despite the fact that Glenn Reynolds had gone out of his way to passively-aggressively link the debate, which made it much harder to get…

Some one in this thread said: “our products aren’t competitive” I said: A real shame exports are growing at a rate of about 2.8% a year. It is a shame manufacturing is booming. It is a shame Germans are moving factories to America. It is a shame the Iraqis are getting a handle on Iraq.…