The latest. Apparently, book sellers can sell both Christian books and porn. The horror. The horror.
I wonder what they’d do if they found out the my library of 1100 books includes the New Testament, three copies of the old, the Koran, commentaries on all of the above as well as Lolita, Gravity’s Rainbow and the Origin of Species.
Hangings too good for me.
I turned 35 last week. I’ll write more on that later. But as I get older, I find myself becoming more interest in horse-racing. I guess this is part of the metamorphosis into a cigar-chomping Republic-, er, cigar-chomping conservative. So I was disappointed that we are going to have to wait yet another year for a Triple Crown winner.
I actually wonder if we will ever see another Triple Crown horse. The sport has become so hyper-competitive, the field so vast, the pressure so high that the only hope is another Gift of the Horse Gods..
Dammit. The Braves got rained out last night. It was supposed to be a TBS broadcast. But because the game was rescheduled for this afternoon, I can’t watch it on TBS or on MLB.TV. The reason is that any games played in FOX’s window from noon to 6 pm are automatically blacked out of MLB.TV and can only be broadcast by local networks. If it ain’t on FOX during that time, you can’t watch it Extra Innings or MLB.TV or any national cable channel. In fact, I suspect that if I had someone use an iSight to stream it from New England, they’d break my legs.
This is insane. This is second time in two months MLB.TV has screwed me. First I couldn’t watch Mark Buerhle’s no-hitter because my home is in a Texas Rangers blackout zone even while my body isn’t. And now I can’t watch Dice-K and my Braves because a rain delay put us into the Fox bubble.
I suspect that as long as they are raking in the cash, however, MLB won’t care about the real fans.
A good article on why the Post Office should be privatized.
Most of the important stuff Americans buy – food, clothing, and shelter – is produced almost entirely by the private sector. The result? Nearly everyone is fed, clothed and housed.
What’s so special about mail delivery that the government must do it? No one seems to have a good explanation. It’s in the Constitution that the federal government can create post offices – but it doesn’t say the government has to do that, and it certainly does not legalize any postal monopoly.
The reason the Post Office can’t be privatized is that you have a gigantic overpaid group of postal service employees who would suddenly be armed, angry and out of work.
Well, there’s also that rural mail would be more expensive. But frankly, as someone who has chosen to live in a semi-rural area, I don’t need any government subsidies.
A post that pits breasts against government now can you?
You have to love this. The government is paying lots of money to make poor children less healthy. Wonderful.
I love this not just because it involves breasts but because it illustrates to me the fundamental problem of government. We have here a program that is well-intentioned. How can you argue with a program that feeds poor infants, shielding them from the bad life choices of their parents? It is well-funded, well-supported and popular.
And it’s harming the very people it intends to help. The kids lose because they drink formula instead of breast milk. The taxpayers lose because they are forking over money for this nonsense. Mothers who are unable or unwilling to breastfeed lose because the formula is more expensive. The winners are the government employees, the formula makers and the politicians.
Oh, things are going so well in Iraq:
Authorities in northern Iraq have arrested four people in connection with the “honor killing” last month of a Kurdish teen — a startling, morbid pummeling caught on a mobile phone video camera and broadcast around the world.
The case portrays the tragedy and brutality of honor killings in the Muslim world. Honor killings take place when family members kill relatives, almost always female, because they feel the relatives’ actions have shamed the family.
In this case, Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi, was dragged into a crowd in a headlock with police looking on and kicked, beaten and stoned to death last month. (Watch the attack, and what authorities are doing about it )
Authorities believe she was killed for being seen with a Sunni Muslim man. She had not married him or converted, but her attackers believed she had, a top official in Nineveh province said. The Yazidis, who observe an ancient Middle Eastern religion, look down on mixing with people of another faith.
This is Kurd Iraq, where things are going well. The police stood around and watched because she might have been associating with a non-Yazidi.
FINALLY, Brannagh’s version of Hamlet is coming out on DVD. Christ, it’s only been like ten years. The studio that made absolutely sure we had Basic Instinct 2 on DVD at the earliest possible moment sat on this masterpiece for a decade.
Of course, since it’s in 70mm, it’s a legitimate question of whether I should wait until a) the high-def DVD wars are over and one format triumphs; b) the price of the platers comes down. I’ve been thinking more and more about declaring a moratorium on DVD buying until the high-def fight is finished (of course, I’d have to have a high-def TV first). I hate buying movies six times.
Fortunately, the quality of movies being pooped out by Hollywood these days has cut by DVD purchases on its own.
Anyone else reminded of cold fusion?
Pellets made out of aluminum and gallium can produce pure hydrogen when water is poured on them, offering a possible alternative to gasoline-powered engines, U.S. scientists say.
I’m not sure what they’re proposing to do with all this aluminum oxide but I’ll tell you on thing: this won’t work. We seem to have raised a generation that don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics. You can not get more energy out of a system than you put in. I guarantee you that the energy involved in manufacturing, transporting and recyling the aluminum-gallium mix is going to exceed that produced by the hydrogen.
So we’re back to square one.
So, here’s how the logic works: raise the question of blowback and you’re part of the 9/11 Truth Movement. This is disgusting.
I’ve had it up to here with this arrogant Administration and their myrmidons in the Right Wing Echosphere. They have become the Democrats. Smear smear smear. Obstruct obstruct obstruct. Lie lie lie.
George Bush. Sean Hannity. Michelle Malkin. Dick Cheney. You’d make Ronald Reagan switch back to the Democrats.
The Browning of America continues. Don’t get too excited, though. Hispanics and Blacks are far more socially conservative than whites, even if they don’t vote that way.
I have to disagree with Sulilvan and the Left on the Matt Diaz question. There is no doubt the Bush Administration was wagging its genitals at the Geneva Convention, Congress and the Supreme Court. But there’s a chain of command and ways of dealing with these things. Diaz took the law into his own hands.
Much as I respect Dan Savage, he’s buying into the total liberal line with this line of crap:
Here’s the headline from my morning paper: “HPV Factors in Throat Cancer: Study Could Shift Debate About Vaccine.” You bet it will. Up to now, the HPV vaccine—which, again, has proven 100 percent effective against the cancer-causing strains of the virus—could merely prevent 10,000 cases of cervical cancer in American women every year, along with 4,000 deaths. But now the debate could shift—it will shift, it already has shifted—because it’s no longer “just” the lives of 4,000 American women that are on the line, but the sex lives of 150 million American men.
“If men got pregnant,” goes the bumper sticker, “abortion would be a sacrament.” Now that straight men can get cancer from eating pussy, the HPV vaccine is going to go from controversial to sacramental faster than you can say, “Suck my dick.”
I’m sorry, Dan, you’re wrong. As I said before, there are very legitimate reason to oppose mandating the HPV vaccine. I have a friend who suffered the side effects of DES and am nervous about mucking about with a reproductive system decades before use.
One of the things we can not do is let the Religious Right write the script on this debate. The issue is not whether the vaccine is going to create a generation of sluts; the issue is whether the government should be making a difficult and uncertain decision for people.
More in America than in Europe. Imagine that.
Two more sissified weaklings who want the terrorists to win come out against torture.
Oh, wait. One is a former CENTCOM commander; one is a former Marine Commandant.
Why is that the military opposes torture and all the draft-dodgers and chickenhawks love it?