Mental Floss has an update. My favorite manifesto:
"I have a 13 point plan that includes better benefits for farmers and veterans. I will also give more funding to our school system and fix the pot holes on our city streets. Not to mention the FACT that I will personally impale any and all wrong doers in the steps of the Governor’s mansion. If you are a child molester, rapist, drug dealer or terrorist you will be IMPALED!"
No, Bill O’Reilly is not running.
And you may be surprised what you hear:
I don’t understand why someone would want to have premarital sex when one can engage in temporary marriage.
Me neither. In the not-so-recent past, I had lots of temporary marriages. Not sure whether Allah would approve though.
A journalist writes:
He dislikes us! He really, really dislikes us! What a relief. Working in a field that, we are told, is increasingly irrelevant and outmoded, it’s nice to know that someone still regards the news media as capable of sapping the self-esteem of 61 million people who are not known for self-pity and who boast a heritage of Shakespeare, empire and the Beatles.
The only tiny silver lining of my friend Chris Matthews’ decision to give hate-monger Ann Coulter a platform is that Elizabeth Edwards called in to confront her – in particular the callous way in which Coulter once spoke of Edwards’ dead son. Watch Coulter wither and flinch. It’s rare to see a simple confrontation on cable television of good versus evil. And it’s encouraging to see evil lose.
Mike Gravel joins the throng.
Get rid of it. My beard is coming along, though. Yesterday it forced a three-year old to point at me on the street and burst out laughing.
They engage in a subtler form of well-meant self-delusion, one that tends to inhibit human freedom at best and create statist nightmares at worst:
The problem with liberals is that they tend to think and have thought that human beings are autonomous creatures with ‘rights’; they tend to think that all people are inherently free and rational and are only being prevented from enjoying an enlightened existence – as defined by them – because of the burdens and constraints of tradition, history and religion; they tend to believe in the therapeutic use of the state for the purposes of social improvement and regard human nature as malleable and perfectible through the reordering of social norms and institutions.
Those Who In Elysian Fields Would Dwell
Do But Extend The Boundaries of Hell.
An informal study of the socioeconomic ramifications of social networking.
I found this discussion sane and helpful. A reader also writes:
I work on a project mapping our species’ ancestral migrations around the globe, using DNA as a guide. In my opinion, more interesting than the differences that we find in our genome (which are real) is the fact that our DNA shows that we are, in fact, more alike than previously thought. As recently as 40 years ago schoolchildren were being taught that human "races" developed independently on several continents – mongoloid, caucasoid, negroid, etc.
In fact, our DNA tells us a far more remarkable story. Roughly 2,000 generations ago, the entirety of humanity was reduced to as few as 2,000 or so individuals living in Africa. From that small group of survivors, who were living just 60,000 years ago, every human on earth is descended. 60,000 years is a blip on a glacial timescale. As we migrated around the globe, we left little genetic footprints along the way that can be found in all of us – but all roads lead back to Africa just 60,000 years ago.
See this article from Vanity Fair by the Director of the project, called the Genographic Project, for more information. In fact, you can submit an anonymous sample via cheek swab and get your own ancestor’s migratory route out of Africa – yes, it’s all non-profit and for scientific research. Sorry to plug – but it’s relevant given the topic!
We are one but we are different. We should not be afraid of our differences.
The Dish 