Since writing the essay C.S. Lewis is morally
incoherent I have finished rereading the entire Narnia series. I
could go on at length about how the writing deteriorates as Lewis’s
imaginative impulse is more and more smothered by the clanking and
wheezing of his allegory machine, but Adam Gopnik makes the point
better than I could in Prisoner
of [...]

Leon H. at RedState writes in Intelligent Design (The Debate Isn’t Helping):

In other words, my feeling about Krauthammer, Derbyshire, et al is
basically this: if you wish to denigrate ID and insult its proponents,
go find an ID discussion board (they are legion) and do so there -
don’t use the pages of NR or your token [...]

Aha. The Sunnis
say they want to work with US. This comes hard in the heels of
reports that the Baathist dead-enders protected al-Qaeda polling
places from jihadis during the just-concluded elections, in which
turnout pushed 70% even in the heart of the Sunni triangle.

My wife Catherine has written an excellent review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which we saw just last night. I concur with it; the movie is a meandering, flabby, over-long, self-indulgent mess that will be deeply disappointing to many of the fans Jackson attracted with the Rings movies. I hope it bombs, and [...]

The last two days have seen a triple whammy for the Islamofascists
and their Western quislings. The Iraqi elections were a thumping
success; congressional Democrats voted in a resolution supporting
prosecution of the Iraq war; and the Patriot Act failed to be renewed.

Long-time readers of this blog will be aware than I’m fascinated by the semiotics of pornography. Not by pornography itself; as I wrote in Why does porn got to hurt so bad? I find most pornography ugly and unappealing. No; I’m interested in the meaning of pornography, the code it’s written in [...]

I like SF. I like wargames. I like naval adventure fiction.
These tastes put me square in the middle of the target audience for
David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels. And yes, I do
enjoy them; Weber may be a hack, but he’s a very competent hack who
delivers good entertainment value for my money. So [...]

I contemplete this
news story:

Earth’s north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and
toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular
Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday.

The story goes on to say “exactly why this happens is a mystery”.
No it isn’t, or no it won’t be as soon [...]

This is my response to If
this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? by Andrew Brown of
The Guardian.

I’m having real trouble understanding the current flap over allegations that
the CIA is running secret overseas prisons for terrorists and enemy combatants.
I would prefer not to believe this is just another outbreak of reflexive
anti-Americanism, but I don’t see any principled case against what is
being alleged. Can anyone explain it to me?

There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group
calling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group
called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill
them unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from
Iraqi jails are met. What makes this interesting is that CPT exists
to oppose [...]

This is an essay blog; I don’t normally just carry links to other peoples’ postings,
but Iraq Gun Porn is just too informative, and too much fun, to pass up.
I was particularly tickled by this:

The ..45 pistol: Thumbs up. Still the best pistol round out there.
Everybody authorized to carry a sidearm is trying to get their [...]

Ever had a moment when somebody else drops an insight on you, and you feel
totally stupid because you had all the facts and all the motivation to generate
it yourself, it was about something you’re expert at, but you
just…didn’t…see…it? And you should have, and you’re damn annoyed with
yourself for missing it?

So, LinkSys (formerly independent, now a tentacle of Cisco) has
brought the Linux version of their WRT54GL wireless router back to
life. We’d previously heard that Version 5 of the box would run
proprietary VxWorks firmware. But according to this
story over at LinuxDevices.com,

LinkSys is shipping a Linux-based WRT54GL model that it says it
created specially for Linux hobbyists, [...]

In the comments to my posting on the incoherence of Narnia, it has
become apparent that some of the respondents are deeply confused about
the relationship between mathematical and empirical truth. Symptoms of
this confusion have included a superficially plausible but mistaken
application of the Law of the Excluded Middle and an an attempt to
invoke Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to [...]