Month: July 2010

Over at Watts Up With That they are discussing Al Gore’s marital and hotel difficulties in relation to a hockey stick graph that is most amusing. So I thought I’d add a few words to a most ribald discussion. It was all the fault of improperly labeled RAP music. Just ask Tipper. Tipper is definitely…

So, Obamacare had a provision saying insurance companies cannot refuse to sell insurance policies on children who are already sick. Much as they might stop selling fire insurance if required to cover people whose houses are already aflame, insurers have responded by no longer issuing any individual policies for children, with the result that more…

Speaking of morality (and priorities), I just love this illustration by Thomas Rowlandson: Human sexuality is OK,* but animal sexuality is eeeevil! The guy may have been born in 1756, but he was quite prescient in his anticipation of modern American morality. *Under certain conditions (an oath of fealty to the Democratic Party being the…

There has been a long, drawn out argument in a series of comments to some recent posts, and it’s unfortunate for me, because I’m not an especially comment-oriented person. But OTOH, I don’t want people to think that my not replying to comments means anything. Silence does not indicate agreement or disagreement; often it means…

Putting the criminal justice system in charge of treating drug addiction is literally attempting to do brain surgery with a billy club. Cross Posted at Power and Control

Shirley Sherrod says this about Andrew Breitbart: On Andrew Breitbart: I know I’ve gotten past black versus white. He’s probably the person who’s never gotten past it and never attempted to get past it. I think he would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he would…

It’s not every day that I learn about local Ann Arbor politics from InstaPundit, but Glenn Reynolds linked this Michigan Capitol Confidential story about something all too typical. The debate in Ann Arbor, where firefighters are being laid off due to a multimillion dollar budget deficit, is over an $850,000 piece of art. That’s how…

A friend sent me a link to something I could not watch. It is 4 minutes and 23 second long video of a debate between two people I find annoying — Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly — and I was only able to get 1 minute and 3 seconds through it when I just had…

In the course of perusing the relatively new research implicating “third-hand smoke” as yet another dangerous carcinogen, alarm bells went off in my paranoid brain, and as I hope my worries are misguided, I thought it merited a blog post. An article in the OC Register (“Should smoking be banned in apartments?”) — which linked…

The band is pretty raw. But I like their youth and enthusiasm. Here are the liner notes so to speak. Here is our cover version and arrangement of one of the all time greatest songs ever written, Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”. It is such an incredible song in so many different ways; of…

After all their support, do they really deserve this?

I have to admire the enterprising nature of the homeless man who is said to have broken into an abandoned bar and opened it to the public: A Placer County man has been arrested after he broke into a shuttered bar, reopened the business and started selling drinks to unwitting customers, according to the Placer…

In response to the moral panic over CO2 production I was inspired to say a few words: Even if every one in the US committed mass suicide it would make very little difference to the global CO2 burden if we don’t get the Chinese aboard. If it weren’t for the carbon footprint I’d suggest a…

While it may seem a bit frivolous, I joined the “California Serpentine Awareness! Keep our Rock! Fight SB 624” Facebook group, because I think the Trial Lawyers are being ridiculous and imperious with their heavy-handed attempt to defrock California’s official state rock. The lawmaker (Senator Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles) and others who would like to…

I just learned that Clayton Cramer has been sued for quoting from and commenting on a newspaper article headlined “Slain store clerk, 77, mourned.” I found the article here and as I am assuming it is the same article, I will exercise my Fair Use rights under the First Amendment, and reprint it here simply…

Francis Cianfrocca is discussing Class Warfare In America. At the end of his piece he mentions a businessman’s lament. …I had a conversation yesterday with an old friend who runs a high-ten-figure hedge fund. (They’re flat for the year, like the rest of the hedge-fund world.) What he wants is to join a political party…

Eric at This I-dosing thing is giving me heavy flashbacks, man! is discussing how there is a call for government to look into how kids (it is always the kids) are changing their brain waves with music instead of drugs. And the panic is that currently the government has no control over music. Or stereo…

What is getting high? Does it require drugs? What are drugs? Must they be actual chemical substances ingested by a person? Or might things which stimulate the body to produce its own highs be called “drugs”? These questions were on my mind as I read about the latest form of hysteria and counter-hysteria: I-Dosing: How…

Andrew Breitbart posted a video segment which shows racist remarks being made by a USDA official and applauded by NAACP members. (M. Simon’s earlier post has the embed and a discussion.) When Glenn Reynolds linked the video, he also linked a post by The Anchoress who said she wanted to see the entire video. And…

I think M. Simon got it right in his post about the decline in morality (which was already in steep decline before the homos are alleged to have destroyed it). A commenter in an earlier post about a subject I tried to keep in the closet yesterday called “the legitimizing of homosexuality” a “lynchpin in…