Island Passage

An eye-opening article from the Times of London about the necessity of Christianinty--from an atheist. Some snipettes: Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good... ...Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing. First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christi...

The Pacific Northwest is having a white Christmas this year. To commemorate it, here are a couple of photos I took while going about the day. On a dog walk: A trip to the grocery store: Down a quite road:

...play on, give me excess of it. A fascinating article in The Economist about the speculative evolutionary roots of music. Some comments: Today, people are so surrounded by other people’s music that they take it for granted, but as little as 100 years ago singsongs at home, the choir in the church and fiddlers in the pub were all that most people heard. My father's family was very musical. Old tintypes of them show them at family reunions looking like a small orchestra. Occasionally, when he was disgusted at popular culture, he would talk about how the entire town of Roff, Oklahoma would meet and everybody was expected to to have something, such as a song or recitation, to entertain the others. Of course, I find that the hypothosis fails in this regard: Another reason to believe the food-of-love [evolutionary] hypothesis is that music fulfils the main criterion of a sexually selected feature: it is an honest signal of underlying fitness. Just as unfit peacocks cannot grow splendi...

You're doing it rather well, actually...

'Race to Witch Mountain' Theatrical Trailer @ Yahoo! Video

This week marks the kickoff of the Holiday shopping season, so from the wonderful Unplug the Christmas Machine : The Ten Hidden Gift-Giving Rules: Give a gift to everyone you expect to get a gift from. If someone gives you a gift unexpectedly, reciprocate that year. (Some people have pre-wrapped generic gifts for just this event.) When you add a name to your gift list, give that person a gift every year thereafter. The amount of money you spend on a gift determines how much you care about the recipient. Gifts exchanged between adults should be roughly equal in value. The presents that you give someone should be fairly consistent in value over the years. If you give a gift to a person in a certain category (for example, a co-worker or neighbor), give a gift of roughly equal value to everyone in that category. Women should give gifts to their close women friends. Men should not give gifts to their close men friends—unless those gifts are alcoholic. Whenever the above rules cause you any ...

Now that the Republican Party is looking for it's next standard bearer, we all have been compiling lists of what qualities the ideal candidate will have, and what priority we should impose on those qualities. Let me state that whoever leads the party and whoever becomes the candidate in 2012 must be, in the words of Joe Biden, "...articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking." She aces "bright," "clean," and "nice-looking;" but much as I love Governor Palin, she did not demonstrate "articulate" during the recent campaign. Why is this so important? I think that while we have seen that George W. Bush has been an effective administrator in protecting the country for the last 8 years, his inability to communicate his plans and directions ceded to his opponents the marketplace of ideas and opinions. So his accomplishments (no attacks on the order of 9/11, forstalling a depression in 2002, etc.) became not victories, but clubs used ...

Michael Moore told Larry King this : In an interview Wednesday with CNN's Larry King, Moore criticized the automakers for ignoring the desires of consumers, building instead bigger, more profitable cars as foreign automakers pursued both SUVs and more fuel-efficient sedans and compacts. Moore suggested that Congress demand change in exchange for the money, including a call to help rebuild mass transit in the country. "President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we're going to use this money to save these jobs, but we're not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer," Moore said. "We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reins on these companies. They're to build mass transit. They're to build hybrid cars. They're to build cars that use little or no gasoline." What would such a Congress-mandated car look like? Why, the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Editio...

Daniel Henninger writes in his November 20th "Wonder Land" column about the link between Christmas (or the lack of it) and the current economic meltdown: What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward. Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas." It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious poli...

I love the sound of it. Oogedy-Boogedy! Oogedy-Boogedy! Oogedy-Boogedy! Oogedy-Boogedy! UPDATE: Oogedy-Boogedy!! MORE UPDATE: I was amused by the controversy over the idea that Christians should vote like we are told and drop the "Oogedy-Boogedy" stuff. As I pointed out last month : Many critics stand ready to mock Palin’s Christianity. Fair enough. Will they also mock Obama’s and Biden’s? Christianity is a miracle religion. Absent belief in the miraculous, there is nothing left of Christianity worth the name. I don't ask that my political allies believe in the miraculous, I just don't what them to expect me to deny it.

If you want a big, overbearing, orchestral movie score, John Williams is the man. I kid! I kid because I love his work. But not as much as this: UPDATE: Just to be clear, the video is of a chap lip-synching to an acappella quartet. The quartet is called "Moosebutter," they approved of this video. For more Moosebutter, check out www.moosebutter.com .

Back in mid-October, Ben Smith published an email that really shocked me . It was about focus group results from a test of a McCain ad: Yes, they believed the charges against Obama. Yes, they actually think he's too liberal, consorts with bad people and WON'T BE A GOOD PRESIDENT...but they STILL don't give a f***. They said right out, "He won't do anything better than McCain" but they're STILL voting for Obama. The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups: 54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President." The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but s...

I have, in the last few weeks, enjoyed watching several of the Republicans who were in the Presidential campaign. Some have retreated to their tents to sulk, some to their caves to lick their wounds, and some have started laying foundation for future campaigns. The king of this last group is that Energizer Bunny of Conservative Ideas, Newt Gingrich. Newt writes books, founds think tanks, and turns up on the news talkers as frequently as most candidates inhale. But now Newt is being joined in his Long March by Huck. Mike Huckabee now has an interview show of Fox and had released a new book: Do The Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America. Time magazine reviews the book : Many conservative Christian leaders, who never backed Huckabee despite their holding very similar stances on social issues, are spared neither the rod nor the lash. Huckabee writes of Gary Bauer, the conservative Christian leader and former presidential candidate, as having an ...

So I am fooling around with the look of the blog. So far: meh. If anyone wants to point me to a cool template (minimalist, lots of white space, focusing on the posts rather than the graphic of Ratatouille in the heading), post the link in the comments.

HERE DEAD WE LIE Here dead we lie Because we did not choose To live and shame the land From which we sprung. Life, to be sure, Is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, And we were young. A E Housman

From Ace, this link to an article in the Seattle PI documenting the sudden fashionability of American flags in Seattle: With newfound patriotism, Seattleites want to wave the flag, hang it from their homes and stick it on their cars. "The thing that's kind of astounding to me is I never ever would have cared to own a flag," said Rosemary Garner, 42. "This is the first day in my life I actually feel this funny sense of pride about my country. It's a very foreign feeling, but it's a good one." "It's just a rare feeling to feel that type of, I don't know, national connection," said Noah Kriegsmann, a 33-year-old builder from West Seattle. He feels that Obama's win will help America's standing in the world, and he bought a flag to fly on his truck, though he admitted it felt strange to see the flag in his hand. "I have just historically felt shame for what the symbol of this country is internationally. Being in som...

A eye-opening, jaw-dropping, election-day article that atriculates a lot of what I've been thinking and feeling: On Polling: With polling, the collective delusion is the belief that the product of polling is the data. Remember, polls are a product that is sold like any other product. That stupid little chart that appears in the corner of every USA Today was not made for the purpose of 'research' and 'data'. It was made just to show a stupid little graph on the paper because USA Today knows that little graphs and charts 'sell' the paper more. Just because information is displayed in a chart or a graph does not make it 'scientific' or a real 'analysis'. But the product was to make the reader FEEL like it was and to sell more papers. The product of polls can and often are the readers. This became much more popular ever since polls became 'news items' themselves (before, polls were only supplements to news tories).... One thing that is ve...

That's the story of this election cycle--who will be the standard bearers for thier parties in 2009 and beyond. And it all comes down to this...

" In Lower Manhattan, the line for an Internal Revenue Service open house began forming an hour before the event and would eventually wrap around the block. " The I.R.S. dangled the possibilities when it held an open house at the federal office building at 290 Broadway in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. An hour before the fair was scheduled to begin, the crowd began lining up — recently laid-off Wall Street types in charcoal-gray pinstripe suits and trench coats; less formally dressed people; a woman with a new accounting degree on her résumé and a 14-month-old baby in a stroller... ... Some job-seekers said they were casualties of the financial meltdown. Jean Delice had already been laid off as a computer engineering specialist at Lehman Brothers when the firm, as he put it, “hit the rocks.” He said that the firm’s demise had cost him “everything,” including his severance package, and that the long-term prospects of a government agency looked pretty good. “You could get a lucrat...

"Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today!"

According to Michael Kinsley , a "gaffe" is "when a politician [inadvertantly] tells the truth." Not so much telling some objective truth, but revealing said politician's thoughts. In the United States, the preemminant practitioner of the gaffe is Senator Joseph Biden. In Britan, now, he has a serious contender: Prince Phillip. Savor his latest venting: Prince Philip has branded tourism ‘national prostitution’ in his latest unfortunate gaffe. He made the shocking comment to a professor during his State visit with the Queen to Slovenia last week. Dr Maja Uran revealed that the 87-year-old Duke told her: ‘Tourism is just national prostitution.’ He went on: ‘We don’t need any more tourists. They ruin cities.’ His comments come despite royal aides regularly stressing the importance of tourists to Britain’s economy – with one million visiting Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle each year. It follows other infamous faux pas by the Prince – including telling a British...

Gene Fama reminds us: First of all, “the wealth” is a Marxist fiction. There isn’t some large, limited pile of communal wealth that just happened to get allocated disproportionately to “the rich.” Wealth is created. The best economic systems encourage the creation of wealth, they don’t redistribute it—and make no mistake, at the extremes the two are mutually exclusive goals.

Orson Scott Card, Democrat and newspaper columnist, takes local newspapers to task for being in the tank for the Democrats: ...These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party. Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout! What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame? ... If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama. If you who produce our local daily...

X-rays emitted from ordinary Scotch tape By Malcolm Ritter updated 10:23 a.m. PT, Wed., Oct. 22, 2008 NEW YORK - Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers. Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says. "We were very surprised," said Juan Escobar. "The power you could get from just peeling tape was enormous."

For the Democratic party, the era after 1968 was filled with a continual tinkering with its primary rules. At first these re-writes (at the direction of the McGovern-Fraser Commission) sought to restrict and then eliminate candidate selections made by party bosses (in "smoke-filled rooms.") After the candidacies of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter, this drive towards more and more direct democracy in the primaries was countered by the Hunt Commission. The Hunt Commission gave the Democrats the "Superdelegates" that were all the talk of the 2008 Democratic primaries. The Republicans have been influenced by the Dem's drift, but not so much. Daniel Henninger describes what has happened to political parties in the U.S.: The established political pros let the selection process come to this. Presidential candidates such as John McCain and Barack Obama have become untethered from the discipline of party institutions, largely because the parties have lost coherence. So...

Having voted, my thoughts turn to what is ahead for the Republicans. The Party seems to be fracturing along social, and even geographic lines. Tony Blankley throws a log on the fire : ...Miss Noonan's unconscious fear may be that it will be precisely Mrs. Palin (and others like her) who will be among the leaders of the about to be re-born conservative movement. I suspect that the conservative movement we start re-building on the ashes of November 4th (even if Mr. McCain wins) will have little use for over-written, over-delicate commentary. The new movement will be plain spoken and social networked up from the internetted streets, suburbs and small towns of America. It certainly will not listen very attentively to those conservatives who idolatrize Mr. Obama and collaborate in heralding his arrival. They may call their commentary "honesty." I would call it - at the minimum - blindness.

Yes, kids, I loved these songs when they first came out. These are "The Seekers" in their farewell concert in London, July 12, 1968. Listen to the crowd's reactions!

Carnal Reason discusses why there is so much animosity towards Sarah Palin's faith: Many critics stand ready to mock Palin’s Christianity. Fair enough. Will they also mock Obama’s and Biden’s? Christianity is a miracle religion. Absent belief in the miraculous, there is nothing left of Christianity worth the name. Obama has gone on record as stating that Christ is his Lord, that he prays to Jesus. I see three possibilities: Obama was lying: he believes no such thing, but finds it politically expedient to claim he does. Obama accepts as fact the Resurrection of Christ. Obama is an idiot. Obama is no idiot. So does he believe that a corpse dead on Friday came back to life on Sunday? And if so, does he accept as facts the rest of Christ’s miracles? Prior to his death, Christ is said to have resurrected a corpse, made the blind see, walked on water, and turned water into wine. I can’t see why anyone would believe in the Resurrection, and deny the rest. Why strain at gnats? The theo...

Dave Burge declares that whoever attacks Joe 'the Plumber' Wurzelbacher is attacking us all.

If were going to have socialism, says Jim Treacher , why start with plumbers? If "it's the economy, stupid," aren't higher taxes part of the discussion? I'm no economist, but I do know that every dollar I give to the government is a dollar I can't put into the economy. One campaign is saying they want to lower my taxes, and the other campaign is questioning my patriotism if I complain about higher taxes. And millionaires like Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric are backing up the latter. I would suggest that they find the nearest large body of water and hurl themselves in. And don't give me that "95%" crap. Why doesn't Obama just go all-out and promise that 110% of Americans will get a tax cut? (Oddly enough, that's the same percentage of Americans who've registered to vote.) If we're going to plunge headlong into outright socialism, then I want some of what George Clooney's got. You're a big Obama backer, right, George? Well th...

(And how many times do you see the contraction apostrophe in Hallowe'en these days?) Anyway, via Rand Simberg, James Whale is alive and well and working in the fashion industry :

A few posts back, I said this about the impending government bailout of the financial industry: So the government (via its new version of the RTC) becomes the mortgage holder for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Already the cry from Democrats is "People before profit." Will the US be able to resolve the most clear out the very worst of these loans in an fiscally responsible manner? If there is any possibility of making money on these loans, won't that cause an outcry on the Left? Jonah Goldberg points out : Democrats in Congress had great fun using Fannie and Freddie as public policy piggy banks, rewarding constituencies, funding pet projects, forcing the private sector to dance to their tune. What’s to stop them from renegotiating this week’s deal after the election and using Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and the others as Fannie Mae 2.0? Please don’t say that the terms of the deal are set and the government can’t revise them. If there’s one thin...

Washington has become a vote-by-mail state, so I have just sent off my ballot. I object to vote-by-mail. I think that taking a few minutes out of your day to carry out a civic duty is a small price to pay. Of course, maybe I'm old-fashioned, but this tidbit on this Washington voter information page made me chuckle: Voter Drop Box and Service Center Locations Alley behind the Court House 24 Hour Drop Box 625 West 4th Street Newport, WA 99156 (Pssst! Tell `em Joe (Biden) sent yah!)

...That Jim Treacher has revived his moribund blog and is on a tear .

Thank you, Megan .

James Taranto has spotted this reactionary meme at the first Presidential Debate, in Barak Obama's closing statement: You know, my father came from Kenya. That's where I get my name. And in the '60s, he wrote letter after letter to come to college here in the United States because the notion was that there was no other country on Earth where you could make it if you tried. The ideals and the values of the United States inspired the entire world. I don't think any of us can say that our standing in the world now, the way children around the world look at the United States, is the same. And part of what we need to do, what the next president has to do--and this is part of our judgment, this is part of how we're going to keep America safe--is to--to send a message to the world that we are going to invest in issues like education, we are going to invest in issues that--that relate to how ordinary people are able to live out their dreams. And that is something that I...

So there is a lot of back-and-forth about whether the Paulson Bailout will cost the U.S. trillions of dollars; or whether it will in the end reap a windfall of trillions of dollars. The question that I have for those that think this may actually make money is this: Are you nuts? (Note that I generally applaud buying up distressed assets a fire-sale prices, then making a killing once everybody starts to realize how stupidly they have acted. I am, after all, a heartless capitalist.) Andy Kessler makes this point in his Wall Street Journal article : In 1992, hedge-fund manager George Soros made $1 billion betting against the British pound. In 2007, John Paulson's Credit Opportunities fund correctly bet against subprime mortgages, clearing $15 billion for the year and $3.7 billion for him. Warren Buffett is now hoping to make big money on Goldman Sachs. Chad Crowe But these are small-time deals. My analysis suggests that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (a former investment ba...

This is all very inside baseball. If you haven't been following the presidential campaign since 2006, it may seem as though it is an argument in progress. It is. Feel free to skip. Just a few posts ago I was wondering about Barack Obama, " Who Does He Owe? " It seems as though one of the people he owes is William Ayres . As pointed out by Hillary Clinton, Obama used the position that he had in Ayres operation as a bullet point on his resume. This is the absolute sticking point for me. My family calls me McCarthyite and say that I'm attempting to smear Obama with guilt by association. And yet. "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility." "We weren't terrorists," Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not co...

Things I didn't know about George Putnam : "I detest labels," he once told the Los Angeles Times. "I've been called many things in my career: right-wing extremist, super-patriot, goose-stepping nationalist, jingoistic SOB. And those are some of the nice things. "But those people have never bothered to determine my background: Farmer-Labor Party, Socialist Party, lifelong member of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], member of the Urban League. I went through the Depression, and my father was reduced to selling peanuts door-to-door . . . I fell in love with Franklin D. Roosevelt. I've been a lifelong Democrat. I'm a conservative Democrat." Sorry. My head will stop spinning in just a minute.

I saw the video of Senator McCain being besieged by the harpies of "The View," and it caused me to reflect. What I wanted McCain to do, what I wanted Sarah Palin to do when confronted by Charlie Gibson, was to laugh . I wanted John McCain to toss back his head, hold his stomach and laugh at the silly improbability of it all until tears rolled down his cheeks. When you think about it, "Do I have to be worried about the return of slavery," seems to require one of two responses. The first is outrage that your viewpoint could be so distorted by a sadly un-funny comedienne. I have no doubt that Senator McCain could rise to heights of outrage should he so desire. The second response is to look at these Lilliputian scold-hens and see how ludicrous their jabber really is. I don't want to hear a mean snarly laugh, nor yet a derisive snort, but a belly laugh that reflects his amusement that these people, these people , contend that they speak for the American people. Ha...

Other than Jobs helped create a multi-billion-dollar industry where there was none? I am anticipating the return of Saturday Night Live this weekend with the election in full swing. In an article about the comedians who will do impersonations of the candidates, Fred Armisen talks about "doing" Barack Obama: Obama might at first seem almost too straight of a character for Armisen. While Hammond is a somewhat traditional standup (he performs frequently and has recently begun appearing on Broadway, notably in "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee"), Armisen is closer to absurdist, Andy Kaufman territory... But he says Obama reminds him of another character of his: Steve Jobs. "There was something about Senator Obama that I felt they had some similarities — in their presentation, in their love for what they do," says Armisen. "Steve Jobs really makes moments happen." So the similarity is that Barak Obama has his own Reality Distortion Field ? F...

I have avoided posting about the Sarah Palin Veep situation. I, like almost everyone else, was caught near flatfooted. I had considered Palin, but had filed her in my mind in along with Bobby Jindal in a box marked: "Rising Stars, check back in 2 years." I have been revolted at the toxic waste dump of hate that has been spilled by her political opponents. But the Obama campaign's featherweight response to Palin was telling in its ineptness. It's like that they felt that had to throw something out there, rather than let the announcement dominate the next six news cycles while they did opposition research. But the response was pathetic . Calling Palin a "former mayor," rather than a "sitting governor?" Getting trapped in comparing the top of the Democratic ticket with the bottom of the Republican ticket? This ineptness in choosing Joe Biden, blowing the Palin announcement, and the daily gaff-o-matic tone of the Obama/Biden ticket has me puzzled. How ...

This is completely brilliant. MooveAlong.org It's a goof site promoting the movie An American Carol .

A fascinating article by John McWhorter in The New Republic on the changes in oratorical styles in the last century. If Abraham Lincoln were brought back to life, one thing that would throw him, other than electric power and the Internet, would be that audiences disrupted his speeches by clapping after every three or four lines. As ordinary as this seems now, this kind of applause is actually a custom of our times: Wesleyan political scientist Elvin Lim has documented that, in records of presidential addresses since Franklin D. Roosevelt, 97 percent of the applause lines appear in speeches by Richard Nixon and his successors. To speakers in Lincoln's day, a public address was typically a lecture. In our time, it is more often a love-in, more about the speaker "connecting" with the audience than teaching it anything new; hence the constant interruptions for clapping. ... Given the standard assumption that our political culture would be better off if everyone would just ...

...In the latest issue of Tikkun, in an article titled “Election 2008: Why is it Close?” [Rabbi Michael] Lerner concludes “there is another factor operating that dares not speak its name: RACISM.” His solution for helping Barack Obama put the election away? “Imagine the cultural impact if tens of thousands of Obama activists were to volunteer the month of October to go door to door in the contested states and ask people to discuss the issue of racism!” (Dear Barack Obama — Please heed Michael Lerner’s advice. — Sincerely, John McCain) --Mark Hemingway in National Review Online ...With new polls showing Barack Obama's once-commanding lead over John McCain all but evaporated, the Obama campaign announced today it has begun deploying its vast volunteer army of downtown hipster douchebags to help reconnect the presumptive Democratic candidate with middle-American voters. "Unlike Iraq, this is one surge that is actually going to work," said Obama campaign manager David Axlerod...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been chided here before for her quoting of Bible passages that no one, not even (nor especially) those familiar with the Christian scripture recognizes. Now she is lecturing the Catholic Church on it's doctrine and dogmas. Once again, she's wrong. Oh, so wrong on so many points. First: REP. PELOSI: I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And Senator–St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose. Roe v. Wade talks about very clear definitions of when the child–first trimester, certain considerations; second trimester; not so third trimester. There’s very clear distinctions. This isn’t about abortion on demand, it’s about a careful, careful consideration of all factors and–to–that a w...

As a public service follow-on to my original Taking the Fifth posting, I present the following two videos. They are both from the law class of James Duane at Regent University. Professor Duane tells why he advises never to talk to the police. He then turns his class over to a police officer to give the other view of the Fifth Amendment. Hilarity ensues. The videos are about 25 minutes apiece, but move very quickly.

I am a big fan of the Television show Firefly. I own the DVD box set and have watched it again and again. I have loaned it to friends and relations causing a few to buy their own sets. Now the word comes out that the series will be released in Blu-ray. Well, here is the news item: Firefly: The Complete Series drops on Blu-ray high-definition disc on Nov. 11 from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in a three-disc set that includes all 14 episodes, a new Firefly Reunion roundtable discussion and a new episode commentary from series creator Joss Whedon and select cast members; the set carries a suggested retail price of $89.98. $89.98?!?!?!? I'd love to see the roundtable discussion and hear the new commentary, but nearly $90 for a discs that I already own...

From an MSN Money article on knowing when to spend more on an item to save in the long run: Americans in their 20s and 30s are now at least one generation removed from the era of homemade clothing and hand-crafted wood furniture, Underhill says. "In the 1950s, 90% of homes had sewing machines, which means women knew something about how clothes were put together. They could look at something in the store and tell if was of good construction or crappy construction," he says. "In my office, I don't know anyone who has bought a custom suit. They don't know the difference between off-the-rack and custom." My mother had a Singer sewing machine, and, being a daughter of the depression, made lots of clothes for the family. Those she didn't make, she likely altered to fit the next-smallest child. For one brief, shining moment I owned a wardrobe of hand-tailored clothing, including hand-made shoes. I was in Asia for a year and was buying clothes that weren't...

Barak Obama is shown here using the " America I Knew " meme. Let me plagiarize myself: What I am annoyed about is that [this is] being intellectually and historically dishonest about where America is and where it used to be. [This is] attempting to appropriate a conservative, even reactionary, meme and use it to advance a point of view that is radically unconservative.... A few years ago John Stossel...played a couple of television commercials from the late 1950s and early 1960s for various products, laundry soap and canned coffee. I was aghast at their sexist bias and insensitivity. What was worse, I remember seeing the commercials when they first aired, and they were completely unremarkable in the cultural context of their day . Younger people who don't remember this time could fall into the "America I Knew" meme because they have no direct memory of those times. I do. Shame on those, conservative and liberal, who trot that old warhorse out. America is a wonde...

I was a Tony Snow fan since the beginning of "Fox News Sunday." His closing comments were gems. His comments following September 11, 2001, when he lost his composure still define the times. I hope that this doesn't sound too self-centered, but you get to an age and notice that the people that obituaries are starting to be about people who are younger than you. Tony Snow faced the monster that was eating him a piece at a time, and he laughed with the joy of the life that remained: Tony Snow in The Jewish World Review, 2005: The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don't. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of love. You feel the gravitational pull of faith. And you realize you have received a unique gift – a field of vision others don't have about the power of ...

"...I do not think it means what you think it means." The Washington Post tells us how rich people spend their time : People invariably believe that money can make them happy -- and rich people usually do report being happier than poor people do. But if this is the case, shouldn't wealthy people spend a lot more time doing enjoyable things than poor people? Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has found, however, that being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed. People who make less than $20,000 a year, for example, told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure -- watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way -- putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities t...

With the possibility of an Obama victory in the offing, John Stewart starts aiming at the Democratic candidate. Two points: 1) Jim Treacher is funnier than me: That’s my favorite part, the nervous, hesitant laughter. You can almost hear the audience thinking, “Is this okay? Will people think I’m a racist?” 2) Democrats are kicking up a dust cloud when they say, "Changing circumstances required Obama to change his mind." Really? When Obama made his pledge he knew that if he won the primary that he would face the winner of the Republican party. What changed there? Did he think that McCain is just a big meanie and that he would have kept his pledge if Fred Thompson was the Republican candidate? Mike Huckabee? What has changed since then? Money. Lots and lots of money. Like the old joke goes, "We've established what you are, my dear. We are now haggling price."

This is why I love the Internets. It's also why I read quality bloggers like James Lileks . Here is a show from the early 1970s that defines an era. And the cast! Burgess Merideth, Hugh O'Brian, Tony Franciosa, and Doug McClure! Here's a link to Search in Jump the Shark.

We hear so much these days about the cultural and demographic challenge to the West by Islam. An interesting article in the Asia Times points out that the challenge goes two ways: For the first time, perhaps, since the time of Mohammed, large parts of the Islamic world are vulnerable to Christian efforts to convert them, for tens of millions of Muslims now dwell as minorities in predominantly Christian countries. The Muslim migration to Europe is a double-edged sword. Eventually this migration may lead to a Muslim Europe, but it also puts large numbers of Muslims within reach of Christian missionaries for the first time in history... As Father Dall'Oglio warns darkly, Muslims...

In The Atlantic Robert D. Kaplan describes the process of awarding the U.S. military's highest honor, and reflects on the disconnection between those who serve and those who are served. Over the decades, the Medal of Honor—the highest award for valor—has evolved into the U.S. military equivalent of sainthood. Only eight Medals of Honor have been awarded since the Vietnam War, all posthumously.... Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith was the ultimate iron grunt, the kind of relentless, professional, noncommissioned officer that the all-volunteer, expeditionary American military has been quietly producing for four decades. “The American people provide broad, brand-management approval of the U.S. military,” notes Colonel Smith, “about how great it is, and how much they support it, but the public truly has no idea how skilled and experienced many of these troops are.” Sergeant Smith had fought and served in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Kosovo prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. To his m...