If I needed any reminder of why I’m not a conservative, the bizarre contortions that right-wingers have been putting themselves through lately in opposition to the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on gay marriage would provide one. Watching this has been almost as much fun as watching the left thrash itself to pieces in a [...]

From the Telegraph:

A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been
telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: “I will do
whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and
I was afraid.”

This is the quote that will re-elect George W. Bush president.
Because after 9/11, what Americans want is a president [...]

At the end of my essay What good
is IQ?, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other
things) be an important step towards banishing racism. The behavioral
differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are
far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin.
Stupidity isn’t a handicap only when [...]

I removed a comment from my blog today. This is only the second time
I have done so, and the first was just cleaning up an accidental double
post.
To whoever left the original comment #6 on Lessons of
Libya: I won’t suppress a coment for being mindless, formulaic
ranting. Nor will I suppress a comment for being anonymous. [...]

Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya’s dictator and long-time terrorist
sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow
international inspections. The NYT’s December 20th article Lessons
of Libya, covering this development, is unintentionally
hilarious.
An honest account would probably have read something like this:

When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared
him silly. Realizing that the U.S. [...]

Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies
marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely. The movies were a
delight; Peter Jackson’s Return Of The King fully lived up
to the promise of The Fellowship of the Ring and The
Two Towers. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions,
Tolkien fans have reason to be vastly grateful [...]

In response to my post on The Last Samurai, one reader
asked a question I should have expected: didn’t the Tokugawa Shogunate
successfully suppress firearms in Japan?
No. Actually, they didn’t. Many American believe they did because
they’ve vaguely heard the argument of Noel Perrin’s book Giving
Up The Gun, explaining that the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully
suppressed firearms in [...]

Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently.
By ‘surprisingly good‘ I mean that they’re rather better
than one might expect from their genre. Loony Toons: Back In
Action, for example, could have been a mere merchandising
vehicle, a repetition of clichés and tired sight gags. Instead
it was a wickedly funny combination of Animaniac edginess [...]

The organizers of the Internet Summit in Geneva have had Dr. Paul
Twomey, the president of ICANN (the organization that’s chartered to
administer the international domain-name system), ejected by security
guards after he’d flown twenty hours to participate in the
meeting.
I was not especially surprised. The organizers of the Geneva
summit seem to be very much the same scum [...]

This parody below comes to us from an artist named Howard Hallis, to whom all credit is due. I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it here because the design of his website leads me to suspect that this cartoon might be replaced by something else the next time he has a fit of artistic [...]

Yup, the blizzard is big. Here in eastern Pennsylvania we’ve had over a foot of snow and
a lot of drifting today. I shoveled my driveway. I’m going to be stiff tomorrow.

So, the latest trend to hit the business magazines is falling
programmer salaries. I can’t lay hands on the article just now, but
it seems some CEO under pressure to outsource his programming to India
had the bright idea of offering lower salaries (competitive with
Indian levels, not U.S. levels) to programmers in the U.S. He got
90 [...]