Different Answers

A relative of mine once confided that he voted for Ronald Reagan barely more than a decade after he asked that copies of The Daily Worker be mailed to him in Vietnam. I asked him why he did so, and his answer was that he “was tired of feeling ashamed of being an American.” 28 […]

Didn't Take Long

48 hours later, and I’m already composing an apologia for Obama. Well, let’s get into it on Rahm Emanuel: I live in Chicago I contributed money to Obama’s campaign Emanuel is the representative for my district To be honest, the main reason I had for bothering to vote in the election before the bailout was […]

Preach It

As someone who used to attend an Assembly of God church in Illinois, this struck me a pure gold: The Assemblies of God churches are not going to come up with anything to help with global warming, alternative energy, new medicine, new reproductive technologies, new discoveries, new ideas. Losing the sense of the argument, PZ […]

Body of Lies

The background is this: Friday night on the way home, some dumbassed yuppie on the bus was yaking loudly on thie phone about how he didn’t want to see it, because he didn’t need to see another movie about how bad America was. The yuppie in question later went on to suggest An American Carol […]

Pick A Side

Compare: In the years of its rise, the movement little by little brought the community’s attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust to fear and suspicion. […] By 1933 at least five of my ten [Nazi] friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable, and […]

The 1930s

I’ve updated the blog theme, and I’m just enough of a pretentious bastard to talk about it. Two years ago, I took a photograph of the “back forty” behind my apartment building. The building itself was stuck at the edge of civilization, at the end of a small cul-de-sac hanging off a street which divided […]

Phrases

One phrase that I never want to hear again, ever: “Speaking Truth To Power” No, seriously, way to make the act of dissent played out.

Elections

[Disclosure: I dropped a day’s pay on Obama’s campaign about a week before the pastor thing happened, and hope I never feel compelled to write about this election again.] Matt Taibbi is (as usual, and in spite of his ridiculous humping of Hunter Thompson’s legacy) repeatedly correct in his assessment of American politics as a […]

Xen and The Art of Free Speech

Aside from the laughable idea of “militantly” supporting anything with a blog post, Miguel simply noted that these people exist, have written a book, and will be doing the speaking-tour-thing near him. Does he agree with the contents? (shakes eight-ball) Signs point to Yes. Is he free to do so? Also yes. Are you free […]

Recursively On Virginia Tech

Via Wil Wheaton: It’s a feeding frenzy of demagogues and frauds from all sides, rushing like ambulance chasing attorneys to find some way to blame the tragedy on whatever they already hated the day before the tragedy.Reactions to The VT Shootings, Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Fool Me Once

For anyone who wants to handle dynamic DNS (either in conjunction with DHCPd or not) with Bind and absolutely hates the verbosity of nsupdate, here’s a shell script which handles the common-cases of adding and removing: Forward/reverse entries CNAMEs The command line arguments are -k (privkey) -a (action) -h (hostname) -i (ipaddr) -c (cname) -d […]

I Say 'God-Damn!'

God damn, god damn, god damn. But not all of them are focused on border concerns. If you talk to the Minutemen long enough, the subject of immigration inevitably floats to the surface. “I see the nation descending into poverty, philosophically, and part of it is illegal immigration, a big part of it,” says a […]

More of Thomas Sowell

I’m with Robert Love: end those damned agricultural subsidies, and lower the prices of food. After all, it’s not like the U.S. has a tragic history with over-farming and both economic and ecolological destruction, all following the one-two punch of “market-oriented” economic policies and a hitherto unprecedented heat wave. In that vein, here’s Mr. Sowell […]

Fixing the Internets

Stealing fromA mashup of Sadly, No! and Slashdot…