Category: Uncategorized

Last night around 9:30 PM (local time) we had a heck of a windstorm in Rockford. A large branch of a tree is sitting on our front lawn. Since the tree is on city property I get to haul it out to the street and wait for the city to pick it up. The best…

Ann Althouse’s post about problems posed by dry cleaning alerted me to a problem I didn’t know existed. The most widely used dry cleaning chemical is doomed: It’s really quite awful. Your clothes are dumped — along with everyone else’s dirty things — into a giant machine full of perchloroethylene, which should be banned and will…

A few things to keep in mind over the coming days and weeks, as we endure the inevitable lectures about the dangers of right wing extremism: Anders Behring Breivik was a radical environmentalist who insisted we all stop using oil and institute one-child policies, a quasi-communist who wanted to nationalize all major corporations, an anti-American…

There is an interesting discussion going on at my recent article Social Movement. Commenter Russ was saying that Christians might favor prohibition because they “see what drugs do”. Really what they see is what prohibition does. But never mind. Let us take a look at “what drugs do”. This is for you Russ: OK Russ.…

Talking about how the Federal Government doesn’t take in enough money seem to be all the rage this morning (well the New York Times did take the lead). “We as a society will either have to pay more for our government, accept less in government services and benefits, or both,” says Douglas Elmendorf, director of…

People love fantastic stories, and this misleading headline would seem to supply them with something to cluck about: “New Zealand goldfish survive 134 days without food“ Sounds incredible, right? The problem with the story is that if you bother to read it, the fish had food. They were in a 26 gallon tank filled with…

A man who tried to remove his stomach hernia with a butter knife has succeed in earning his 15 minutes of fame, plus a trip to the loony bin: A 63-year-old Glendale man was in stable condition after he attempted surgery on himself with a six-inch butter knife to remove a protruding hernia from his…

Jim Hoft has a nice article up about why the Norway shooter was not a Christian. And of course a load of commenters chimed in about Christian compassion. I will believe in Christian compassion when I see a call for an end to the pogrom on heroin users. Did you know that about 70% of…

Apologists for murder — especially mass murder — annoy the hell out of me. Unfortunately (and unbelievably), a couple of recent commenters have been apologizing for the evil actions of Anders Breivik. I do not delete such comments; as long as I pay my monthly bandwidth charges, they remain forever. Anyway, a commenter calling himself…

But I’m still a bit worried about the 64K memory chip manufacturers. Seriously, though: he actually told them to stop writing checks? I also didn’t see any concern over rating agencies, end of the world, etc.  Hmmm.

While I guess it should come as no surprise, I just learned that the longest prison sentence Anders Breivik can receive is 21 years: The fact that Norway’s maximum penalty for any crime is 21 years in prison is facing rising criticism in the wake of the twin attacks that killed 93 people, with many…

One of the many people quoted in Anders Breivik’s manifesto was Bruce Bawer, a gay American writer living in Norway. In a recent PJM column which Glenn linked, Bawer (who is understandably very upset) discusses what Breivik said about him in web site comments.  Among other things Breivik had called Bawer “a liberal anti-jihadist and…

I’m continuing to slog through Anders Breivik’s 1500 page “A European Declaration of Independence” (easy to read Word doc file here), and I think the following speaks for itself in terms of both the motive for the crime and the willingness of the author to kill large numbers of people: 3.44 Traitor – classification system…

I’ve been slogging through “A European Declaration of Independence” (said to be confirmed as having been written by Anders Breivik, aka Andrew Berwick) and while I am not about to attempt to dissect it point by point, several things stand out. Whoever the “author” (editor, really) may be, he is completely fluent in writing English,…

Notably absent from both Krugman’s and this post about deficits and debt: spending numbers.  Federal spending more than doubled between 2000 and 2009. Total gov’t spending is now at ~40% of GDP, which has destroyed any hope of growing our way out of this mess (yes, the GOP deserves lots of blame for this too)…

A conservative I am not. (The reasons are complex, but for starters, I am utterly missing the third leg said to be vital to supporting the conservative “stool.”) So I typically call myself a small-l libertarian, or libertarian conservative, but even those terms have their limitations, as I just don’t fit any mold entirely.  I…

Arnie Gunderson and friend explain why It Can Happen Here. From the blurb about the video at Arnie’s site: The well-known safety flaws of Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors have gained significant attention in the wake of the four reactor accidents at Fukushima, but a more insidious danger lurks. In this video nuclear engineers Arnie…

People always say that ideas have consequences, but I disagree. Ideas themselves do not have consequences. It is the implementation of an idea that has consequences, which means that those responsible for implementing bad ideas are to blame, and not the ideas themselves. So the hell with ideas. In and of themselves, they are harmless.…

This weather makes me understand why people like California despite all the problems. Here’s the national picture Drudge linked earlier: Notice that the California coast is absent from the measurements on the Drudge picture. So is the Pacific Northwest…. Here are today’s highs. Quite predictable to anyone who has lived there. Other people have to…

“If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.” Michele Bachmann allegedly said the above in 2004. That remark, along with the many others that are being repeated all over the Internet, will not endear her to gay voters, 25% of whom generally vote…