Category: Uncategorized

The New Your Post is discussing President Present’s inadequate response to the Gulf Oil Spill. As usual I think the best commentary is in the comments. Like this one: Mainer1776 06/13/2010 6:22 AM This week we’ve learned that assistance from countries that are experienced in oil spill clean-up was rejected repeatedly by the Obama administration…

While I never liked the term “fag hag” or the superficial stereotypical thinking surrounding the whole meme, an article in Scientific American discusses the latest research results. Not only are women who are attracted to gay men not as ugly as commonly supposed, but according to one expert, their existence has encouraged and facilitated gay…

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the Toledo Museum of Art, and I only wish I had visited the place earlier. In my state of ignorance, I had assumed that the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) would be the the be all and end all, and I was both annoyed and disappointed by a…

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The US Government has a plan. A plan to deliver us from the the scourge of drugs. Really. For sure. Well OK not so sure. It is hard to sell sure after the twentieth or thirtieth time. Well it is all good. But not in fun. Law enforcement agencies have arrested more than 2,200 people…

A new trend in crime is taking the form of vicious, potentially fatal attacks by children. They prey on older people whom the attackers deem incapable of defending themselves: Vincent Poppa, 72, spent 39 days at Methodist Hospital after he was assaulted, robbed, and stomped by a group of youths, the victim of the notorious…

I’ll bet you didn’t know that wasting trillions was a conservative strategy. It is. In one of the biggest pork barrel projects in America. The Drug War. After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence…

The Euro is going down. Not with a whimper but with a bang. A trillion dollar bang. Mrs Merkel is right: “The euro is in danger… if the euro fails, then Europe fails.” What she has not yet admitted publicly is that the main cause of the single currency’s peril appears beyond her control and…

Do you have the right to eat what you want? To most people, even posing such a question would seem ridiculous, as we take such freedoms for granted. Yet the idea that there should be free choice in foods is under relentless assault by neo-Prohibitionist busybodies who believe that the government should prohibit food deemed…

On CNN.com: But scholars say Obama’s critics ignore a lesson from American history: Many white Americans don’t like angry black men. Oh good Lord, what a crock. Americans of all ethnicities love Samuel L. Jackson’s ferocity. Will Smith is arguably the biggest star in Hollywood, and he gets angry in every movie. Michael Jordan’s triumphant…

White flight. The term denotes racism, as it means that white people run away from black people. White flight is the sociologic and demographic term denoting a trend wherein whites flee urban communities as the minority population increases, and move to other places like commuter towns. The loaded term carries with it the implication that…

I don’t know why these things don’t make it into my local newspaper, but thanks to Memeorandum’s link to a post by Eugene Volokh, I learned that I am in a higher crime neighborhood than I ever imagined! In fact, based on the behavior that I witness regularly at drunken late night parties, many of…

Chairman Bernanke says no double dip recession. Sort of. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday he is hopeful the economy will gain traction and not fall back into a “double dip” recession. “My best guess is we will have a continued recovery, but it won’t feel terrific,” Bernanke said. That’s because economic growth won’t…

Watching Steve Jobs’ so-called “keynote meltdown,” I could understand the guy’s frustration, because no one likes to look foolish in public, and regardless of whether it was his fault that the WiFi was hopelessly overloaded, he’s Mr. Big — and expected to be some sort of magician. So even though what happened to him would…

While it’s not his fault because he didn’t know, I blame M. Simon for inspiring this post, which started innocently with a pleasantly haunted photo taken by me inside a former church: It was when I started to see reflections that I realized my initial effort to photograph what I thought I was photographing had…

Writing about the pervasiveness of what he calls “lawsuit culture,” Philip K. Howard noted in passing the demise of the jungle gym: Jungle gyms, diving boards, and seesaws seem relics of some past civilization. They really do. I can’t remember when I last saw a diving board (in the United States) or a seesaw. And…

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) did not melt down from an excess of energy production. It is melting due to budget excesses. It has been billed as the solution to tomorrow’s energy crunch, but ITER, a massive fusion experiment by seven international partners, is under serious threat from a present-day problem: the financial crisis.…

Patrick Dorinson has an interesting piece on the so-called Western “Watersheds” Project in which he touches on the plastic issue: …hidden behind the facade of planting trees or discussing the virtues of “paper or plastic” is a well-financed global group of dedicated radicals who are bent on changing the way we live whether we like…

It’s a Beautiful Day is the band. Led by possibly the finest rock violinist ever. David LaFlamme. I had the honor of seeing one of their concerts back in the day. On another related note: I play harmonica (Marine Band) and was rather good at it when I practiced regularly. My favorite was to do…