Month: May 2010

House Bill H.R. 5143 is touted as a review of Criminal Justice in America. According to the summary its purpose is: National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2010 – Establishes the National Criminal Justice Commission. Directs the Commission to: (1) review all areas of the criminal justice system, including federal, state, local, and tribal governments’…

Has Tom Friedman heard? There’s always been a fundamental error in the notion of “growing” a “green economy” — you don’t create efficiencies by purposely introducing inefficiencies, you destroy them, reducing productivity and by extension GDP. Contra Friedman’s longstanding premise that “green technology” is some sort of burgeoning new growth sector, these programs are virtually…

Remember the computer I bought at the salvage yard for ten bucks? I’m on it right now, running Puppy Linux on the 128 Megabyte Compact Flash card, which I plugged into one of these: The computer’s BIOS is tricked into believing that the flash card is a primary Hitachi hard drive. Once again, the simplicity…

Watts Up With That reports on a primary race in Oregon. Art Robinson ran in the GOP Primary to represent the Oregon in 4th Congressional District. Wise Republican voters selected Dr. Art Robinson to represent them in the November 2010 Congressional race against Democrat Peter DeFazio. I saw an online video by Art Robinson at…

Retired police officer Howard Wooldridge meets up with some big time illegal pot growers (inadvertently) and finds out what they fear. Hint: it isn’t the police. I spent my second week of the Oregon speaking tour like the first… speaking to various groups, media etc. The most memorable question of the tour came from a…

This is why I subscribe to Reason. In the face of murder and violence and threats against the practice of free expression, the only acceptable answer is defiance. In unrelated news, multiple sources report hearing a clanking sound from Nick Gillespie’s pants when he walks.

To my consternation, I just learned via an email from a friend that incoming students at UC Berkeley are being asked to provide DNA samples. Voluntarily, of course: Instead of the usual required summer-reading book, this year’s incoming freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley, will get something quite different: a cotton swab on which…

Recently I wrote about the tragic accidental shooting of an innocent grandmother by a carjacking victim who happened to be a concealed carry permit holder, and who fired at the carjacker. At the time I said this: Imagine if the same criminal had robbed a police officer who was inside the same house, and managed…

This is my first post written on a solid state computer. I am running the elegantly minimalist Puppy Linux from a 128 Megabyte Compact Flash card inserted into the IDE adapter I bought (described and pictured here) which fools the laptop’s BIOS into thinking that there’s a real hard drive there. It’s shockingly quiet, and…

Commenter Forgotten Man at The Belmont Club had this to say about how to win the battle in Afghanistan: …things like opium growing and Heroin production need to be stopped. Yes. Of course. We have been working on stopping it for 96 years so far and real soon now we will have success. Or we…

From time to time, my attention is drawn to an American political philosophy I consider downright scary, and that is “Declarationism.” What scares me is idea is that the Constitution is not actually the supreme law of the land (even though it plainly states that it is), but that it is actually subordinated to the…

This blog is now seven years old. And lo and behold, the “Culture War” has not only not ended, it’s become virtually impossible to define. Which makes my “work” easier and harder at the same time. That silly thing at the top still says “End the Culture War by Restoring Classical Values.” It was meant…

When I saw Glenn Reynolds’ link to a post titled “Is it His Katrina Yet?,” I assumed that it would be about the disastrous flooding in Nashville. Instead, it was about the oil spill. William A. Jacobson documents a horror story of “bungled permitting, delays in response, and understating the impact” and asks, What will…

I’m wondering about the ethics surrounding hard drives. I don’t mean legal ethics so much as personal ethics. I have bought a variety of computer parts on ebay and in a local building material salvage yard, and I seem to have this uncanny knack for winding up with hard drives just loaded with personal information…

I was reading the comments at this Victor Davis Hanson piece and came across an interesting set of observations on the state of the economy. 14. Foobarista As for the “gray market” in California, I’m convinced that regulators – and politicians – are well aware of its existence and don’t want to touch it. My…

While the “What is being gay?” poll I created in an earlier post did not mention bisexuality specifically, it was hardly my goal to erase the concept from discussion. Especially when I saw Eugene Volokh’s discussion of “bisexual erasure” (in the related context of Elena Kagan — whose sexuality seems undetermined): ….the great majority of…

One of the fringe benefits of having a dog like Coco is never having to worry about terrifying incidents like this: STRONGSVILLE ANIMAL COMPLAINT, DRAKE ROAD: Residents called police because they were trapped in their home by a temperamental squirrel. The squirrel was desperate to get in the house, according to the residents. The squirrel…

Roger L. Simon has a very thoughtful piece about Laura Bush’s support for gay marriage. Yes, that Laura Bush. The former first lady. Barack Obama is now to the right of her on this issue. She proclaimed that support in her characteristic well-mannered, low-keyed fashion on Larry King Live. (Okay, nobody’s perfect.) I even had…

That’s what I wondered when I read about a disgusting children’s event in Berkeley, in an article titled “Middle School Brainwashing: Would MLK Approve of Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism?” The event features a notoriously anti-Semitic rapper named Lowkey, and one of the most viciously anti-Israel activists in the world — a man named Norman Finkelstein…

A horrible carjacking in Detroit resulted in the tragic death of an innocent grandmother, but the headline and the focus of the front page story in today’s Detroit Free Press is on a bullet. They really make it stand out too. Geraldine Jackson was happy her granddaughter was back from the South. To welcome her…