Month: April 2007

What other inference can one draw from his column, where he also rightly bemoans the humiliation of Britain? Money quote:

The quid pro quos were not terribly subtle. An Iranian "diplomat" who had been held for two months in Iraq is suddenly released. Equally suddenly, Iran is granted access to the five Iranian "consular officials" — Revolutionary Guards who had been training Shiite militias to kill Americans and others — whom the United States had arrested in Irbil in January. There may have been other concessions we will never hear about. But the salient point is that American action is what got this unstuck.

Charles is not without his sources in the upper regions of the Bush administration. Tehran and London say no deal was done. Charles says there was. Who made it? Cheney? Bush? If so, the Bush administration just caved to Iran and traded hostages for hostages. Big news. Who will ask the president who authorized it?

Bangor, Maine, 7 am, yesterday.

It is waged by the federal government in ways both irrational and cruel and fathomlessly stupid. I mean, of course, the war on medical marijuana. I know it’s easy to laugh about pot-smoking, and laughter is certainly appropriate in many instances. But when the harmless substance is needed by the very sick, I don’t find many reasons to laugh at a government’s assault on the health of its own citizens. Here is yet another enraging instance of government over-reach. Even when states have sane policies on the matter – and, yes, I do believe that restricting access to medical marijuana has not a single, solitary rational reason behind it – the Bush administration seems determined to persecute the sick. If this is compassionate conservatism, then please give me the callous variety.

It comes in five stages, apparently:

1. Denial: "The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq."

2. Anger: "The treasonous far-left-liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq."

3. Bargaining: "If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours."

4. Depression: "Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta."

5. Advanced Literary Theory: "The hegemonic binary of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq."

The nerd humor continues here. The RedState object of derision is here. And, yes, I laughed. Before I cried.

Eeww.

A scientific study finds that wealth is inversely correlated with intelligence in determining how best to spend a small amount of money. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.)

Why people are leaving institutional religion behind. On the other hand, I also see this guy’s point:

I can’t stand outside and throw stones. The very things that pain and disappoint me in the church exist in myself, and I don’t like them there either. Often I feel like a hypocrite among hypocrites – all of us pretending to live something we are constantly contradicting.

A swipe at Edwards and a defense. Count me among the latter.

A reader writes:

Do you think God knows that you won’t have very good answers to the points Sam Harris brings up at the end of his last reply?

A scholarly study of a day’s rants at Ace of Spades, one of the more conspicuously drooling froth-monsters of the bloggy right. Money quote:

The blogosphere is a gold mine for writers. I don’t mean you can make a ton of money doing this — I mean it in a figurative sense, which is the only sense in which most writers, online or off, will ever see much gold of any sort. That is, you can observe certain human behaviors under glass — the glass of your monitor, in this case — in much the same way Ibsen used to observe the behaviors of that scorpion her kept in a beer mug on his desk.

Let us follow the tail-swishings of one Ace O. Spades …

Mr. Fish, let me introduce you to Mr Barrel.