cheese it, the cops!

jeb bush on cnn: "the mystery of life itself, it's sort of wondrous." it's comforting to know we have people at the top capable of deep existential reflection on the meaning of, you know, whatever.

hey! no fair! little green footballs and all kinds of other authoritarian structures are making fun of the way anarchists look .

i can see only one possible solution. all anarchists must now wear abercrombia and fitch. that way we'll know each other in a crowd.

i really like michelle malkin. here she gives google shit for paying tribute to van gogh but not to the resurrection of jesus christ. or for that matter to the many-armed incarnation of siva, creator and destroyer of worlds. or to the great god yottle, the omniscient hunk of bronze. or to the resurrection our lord jerry falwell. or to zeus, appearing as a swan to impregnate leda with helen.

hillary clinton  on her plan to censor video games:

Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them," she said in a statement on the issue. "This is a silent epidemic of media desensitisation that teaches kids it's OK to diss people because they are a woman, they're a different colour or they're from a different place."

now i don't think a teenager is going actually to be confused as between video game and reality. but senator clinton surely seems to be. thanks to hairy fish nuts .

gee whiz, thanks.

so as i get it, terri iligan sold naming rights to herself to the golden palace casino for 15k. so now her name is goldenpalace.com. i'm thinking maybe some high-end companies would be interested in product placements in my house and about my person.

i am jerry falwell's bastard son. and i happen to know his wishes. he would want to be removed from his respirator and then dropped out of the window of his hospital room.

i did a couple of interviews with newspapers this morning about the schiavo case. they kept asking me about the politics of the thing, and this was my hopeful conclusion: the fact that around 80% of people thought congress and the pres should not have intervened is a very hopeful sign. it's true that religious issues played pretty well for republicans in 04. but i think that it's a very thin ledge, because a lot of americans have a basic libertarian intuition that there has to be a zone of privacy around families and individuals. in fact, a lot of americans have both these things: a set of values based on religious faith and a hesitancy to enforce them inside households or on people's bodies. i even think the gay marriage thing could be shaped this way to a greater extent and that opposition would tend to melt. on the other hand, maybe i'm just in a good mood today because all my hard drives have disintegrated and my one remaining old computer shuts off suddenly for no reason i can fathom.

my creators column for last week is on chechnya, and this week i'm going to write about a study showing (shockingly) that the professoriate is stocked with leftists .

so i'm thinking that maybe we can put terri schiavo out to pasture through intact dilation and extraction .

continued computer nightmares; i didn't know things could be this bad. anyway, i'll try to blog when i can.

so i'm down at my ma's farm on the blue ridge with my jane, sam, and emma, while the lovely yet immutable marion winik does her star turn in austin. one aspect of the rural splendor is an ancient mac with dial-up connection. so i can't link any entries this weekend.

if there were any photographs circulating of these soldiers torturing people to death - people held without any legal recorse or oportunity to state their case - the pentagon would have no choice but to prosecute them, obviously. as it is, one may as well just call the members of the pentagon hierarchy murderers.

That the apostles would have created such words and ideas out of thin air seems unlikely, for their story [the resurrection] and their message strained credulity even then. Paul admitted the difficulty: "... we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles." A king who died a criminal's death? An individual's resurrection from the dead? A human atoning sacrifice? "This is not something that the PR committee of the disciples would have put out," says Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. "The very fact of the salvation message's complexity and uniqueness, I think, speaks to the credibility of the Gospels and of the entire New Testament."

in the current issue  newsweek appears to confirm the resurrection of jesus . that's an amazing scoop! but the argument is that the disciples' claims that jesus was resurrected is confirmed by the fact that it strains credulity. a remarkable epistemic principle: the more ridiculous a claim is the more plausible it is. applied consistently...oh never mind. but even applied occasionally, this argument  will confirm literally hundreds of thousands of miracles of all religions, from the resurrection of dionysus to the transportation of mohammed to the very latest in alien abductions and elvis sightings. you can't drop a pebble into human history without hitting a miracle that strains credulity. why would disciples makes such a claim, or undergo a process of self-delusion by which they came to believe it? let's see: maybe to assert their status as the respresentatives of god's will on earth.  in an arsenal of bad arguments, this is the very worst. thanks to eric ratner for drawing my attention to the piece.

this makes the kentucky fried rat seem sweet and quaint. and delicious.

speaking of which, i'm reading bertrand de jouvenel's remarkable book "on power," which addresses a most remarkable and disturbing political paradox: that the growth of democracy and "popular sovereignty" coincides with an unprecedented expansion of state power into every aspect of our lives. the answers are acute, sensible, beautifully expressed. i think a goood move would be to read this as a complement to foucault's "discipline and punish," which shows exactly the same developments from a different perspective.

the question of whether or not a war is legal strikes me as rather odd. i suppose killing people is illegal, more or less. but at any rate, are you really going to care about the question of whether this thing is "legal" as you plan the invasion? and who has the sort of sovereignty that would illegalize war?

i haven't done much with the schiavo case because i am conflicted about it, and as everyone keeps saying it's complicated and not the best zone for testing basic intuitions on right to die, of which i am an advocate. of course the idea that tom delay would use it for political advantage is repellant, but we knew that tom was repellant the first time we got a gander at him. anyway, what i don't get is this. george will on "this week" said: "life is important, but so is the rule of law." and this morning the nyt has an op-ed piece titled "federalism has a right to life too." have you people lost your freaking minds? are you saying you wouldn't compromise on separation of powers or states rights to save people's lives?

this is liable to be an important case for we who interlink net content. ironically enough i linked to the story from google news.

gonna get me a crossbow ,  just in case tom delay won't let put my wife - the lovely yet talented marion winik - out of my, i mean her, misery.

With some homeowners worried about prosecution if they kill intruders, the crossbow is particularly popular because of its silence and the difficulty of tracing the firer from forensic evidence.

geez . and these people are worried about being science professors or op-ed columnists?

what say we remove the pope's feeding tube?

maybe now drunk cyclist will think again about his life of petty crime.

this story about the disappeared of chechnya is disturbing enough. but combine it with human rights watch reports that include torture facilities and mass graves. and then consider that their mode documentation is extremely conservative: essentially case by case. when all is said and done we will see tens of thousands of kidnapping/torture/execution victims, all of them the responsibility of  russian "security" forces.

so it seems that the minnesota school shooter frequented the webite of the "libertarian national socialist green party." hey who wouldn't be into that?

you know what's straight-up sickening ? that anyone - especially pathetic children - would express anything but enthusiasm for war. truly, what are we rasing? americans?

wolfowitz  has been consulting with bono. but i have a reasonable compromise to suggest. put u2 in charge of the world bank and put paul wolfowitz in the rock 'n roll hall of fame.

my creators column this week is an appreciation of tom delay.

i'm usually extremely cynical about stuff like this, but this year's inductees into the r&r hall of fame were a pretty inspired bunch. i hate u2. but the pretenders was perhaps my favorite rock band of the 80s and 90s. what an amazing combination of ferocity and beauty. the o'jays: yes. buddy guy: good thinking y'all and keep that kind of stuff coming.

just did my first magic gig: handling cards at the elementary school's "family fun day." i had a blast and the kids seemed to like it. flourishes (fans, table spreads, arm spreads) went over particularly well, maybe because i'm better at them at this point than sleights. anyway, i'm quitting my prof job monday.