Saturday Night Music
Dio, the late great Ronnie James Dio — Last In Line. This video is so 80s, with that kid who I think is Punky Brewster’s older brother in real life who was in all...
Monthly Archive: November 2010
Blog Ends, Merge Left
And I am the final member of The One Best Way to join in this merger with the League. I should fit in well, being of ordinary height, ordinary weight, and ordinary looks. I...
TSA Stays Abreast of the Problem
“Cancer surviving flight attendant forced to remove prosthetic breast during pat-down.” UPDATE (credit Oleg Volk):
Let the music begin
Here’s Slight Figure of Speech, live, from the wonderful Avett Brothers: From the same show, The Perfect Space: Yes, I am a hopeless Avett Brothers fanboy.
Rush Limbaugh on the Other Hand
Doesn’t do as well as Norman Finkelstein in dealing with the “argument from emotion,” at least not at that point in his life.
I’ve Never Been in a Crowd Like This, They’re Nuts
This post is not about my opinion on the Israel-Palestine issue. My ideal solution — a secular pluralistic one state solution where Jews and Palestinians get equal rights of citizenship, and in turn there...
Note to NYPD: This Is Not How You Improve Relations With the Community
Via Brad Warbiany, it appears that it is now an appropriate function of the police to ticket stalwarts of minority communities for the abhorrent crime of….playing chess in a public park and making themselves...
Thanks for Pitching The Road to Serfdom. Now Please Get Lost.
The more I learn of Glenn Beck, the more I’m repelled. (Yeah, I’m slow. I don’t watch much TV.) This is a good example right here. I can understand not liking some of the...
The Social Net Work
My relationship to various social networking sites explained. Facebook: I have more friends than I can possibly keep up with. In pursuit of fairness I avoid them all. It doesn’t help matters that many...
The crazy misadventures of the TSA
Another fun TSA fail via Cory Doctorow (note, this is not Cory speaking, it is a letter from an anonymous soldier): So we’re in line, going through one at a time. One of our...
Defining Moments
“Can you play chess without the Queen?” – Ludwig Wittgenstein Moving from one blog to another and thus one audience to another, a writer will invariably experience a certain amount of deja vu. Clearly,...
Moderating Extremists
Hugh Hewitt, one of America’s Most Easily Mocked Pundits™ argues that the first debate of the 2012 GOP primaries should not be moderated by MSM personalities from Politico and NBC, but instead by “different kinds...
The Class of ’06
There are some good things to be said about absorbing periodic electoral “shellackings.” For one thing, it gives the shellacked party an opportunity to reflect a bit, to let internal battles sort themselves out,...
The Real Miscarriage of Justice
Below, Ned rightly derides Rep. Peter King for calling the verdict in the Ghailani trial a “total miscarriage of justice.” Ned correctly notes that the miscarriage of justice here was not the verdict itself,...
Raindrops, bubblegum, and recursion
From the comments at reddit: Why isn’t it surprising that the porn industry is leading the way in creating an AI that can pass the Turing test?
The Aura of Expertise
I’m preparing to head back to France next Saturday, preparing a Napoleon course for the spring, and trying to land a job teaching at a university in Singapore; so posting will be light! However, I...
A “Total Miscarriage of Justice”
Image via Wikipedia That’s how incoming House homeland security chair Pete King described the Ghailani trial. Ghailani (pictured) was, of course, found guilty on only one of the 285 charges brought against him, and...
The Science of Evil
I’ve gotten some pushback in the comments for citing S.L.A. Marshall’s findings on how many soldiers actually fired on the enemy during World War II. Marshall came up with an improbably low figure —...
Language & Politics
In the comments, Mike at the Big Stick writes: I’ve often used the term Progressive Conservative for myself (although I stop sub-labeling after watching all of ED Kain’s self-labeling acrobatics). I would just note...
Bread & Circuses: A mini-review of Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
I finished the third installment of The Hunger Games last night, Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins, and my goodness what a read. All three books are absurdly intense page-turners bound to keep one up far...
