February 26, 2007

To the surprise of, I’m sure, absolutely nobody, “An Inconvenient Truth” won the Oscar for best documentary. 
Did anyone really think any of the other documentaries had a chance?  Consider that there may have been 20 people in the entire audience who didn’t vote for the documentary’s star, Al Gore, in 2000.
Of those 20, I’d guess [...]

February 15, 2007

“Roman writers tell us that Cleopatra was intelligent and charismatic, and had a seductive voice,” she said. But, tellingly, “they do not mention her beauty at all.”
Notions of Cleopatra as a beautiful seductress probably began when William Shakespeare’s epic tragedy “Antony and Cleopatra,” rolled off some primitive printing presses in 1608.
“Age cannot wither her, nor [...]

February 13, 2007

He can’t call our troops ungrateful mercenaries without people getting all hot and bothered.
Howard Kurtz writes about Arkin’s misadventure here.
Arkin, who apologized on the blog for his “blasphemy,” says in an interview: “Mercenary is a very strong term. If all this has been precipitated by one word, there’s not a question in my mind I [...]

February 11, 2007

This post over at Bill’s Comments offers his comments on the nuclear Iran scenario. His first point is that it doesn’t look like we’re going to do anything to prevent it.
It has now become obvious that the Western world will not take the necessary measures to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In fact, [...]

February 8, 2007

After William Arkin posted his thoughts on his blog, he got letters.  Lots of letters.
Now, he’s complaining about the content of those  letters. 
James Taranto asks:
Oh, and how come he isn’t grateful no one has spit on him?

February 5, 2007

Last Wednesday, we had a security scare in Boston.  Devices, attached to highway overpasses and other spots, turned out to be ads for a new cartoon.  Boston, it would appear, overreacted, and closed down major parts of the city for no good reason.
But anyone charged with the public safety has to ask a very important [...]

February 1, 2007

At least that would be an honest headline for William M. Arkin’s piece at the Washington Post blog.
I’ve been mulling over an NBC Nightly News report from Iraq last Friday in which a number of soldiers expressed frustration with opposition to war in the United States.
…
I’m all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who [...]

January 30, 2007

This has been all over the radio.
A leading Islamic doctor is urging British Muslims not to vaccinate their children against diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella because they contain substances making them unlawful for Muslims to take.
As Instapundit notes, “think of it as evolution in action”.  If this advice is followed by the jihadist [...]

January 22, 2007

I found a link to this article on Cheat Seeking Missiles and couldn’t resist commenting on it.  The passage in question reads:
Here’s the most fascinating part of the story:

“Sasha (Litvinenko) remembered the man making him a cup of tea.
“His belief is that the water from the kettle was only lukewarm and that the polonium-210 was [...]

January 17, 2007

Charles Murray continues his three-part series on IQ and education.
The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today’s simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.
…
To have an [...]

January 16, 2007

A little something from The Corner at NRO… 

D’Souza discounts the fact that “The radical Muslims are against modernity and science and democracy” and goes on to say:

The traditional Muslims are our best bet. Besides, they’re not asking us to live like them. They’re asking us not to attack their religion, which conservatives do with depressing regularity. [...]

Charles Murray writes this piece in today’s Opinion Journal.  There are lots of people who aren’t going to like what he has to say.  Not at all.
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a [...]

The left, as usual, is upset.
However, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said al-Tikriti, also known as al-Hassan, the former head of Iraq’s feared secret police, had been decapitated.
“In a rare incident, the head of the accused Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan was separated from his body during the execution,” Mr al-Dabbagh said.
Another government official described the decapitation as [...]

Bruce Schneier has an article at Wired about computer passwords. 
Offline password guessers have gotten both fast and smart. AccessData sells Password Recovery Toolkit, or PRTK. Depending on the software it’s attacking, PRTK can test up to hundreds of thousands of passwords per second, and it tests more common passwords sooner than obscure ones.
So the security [...]

January 11, 2007

Here’s an article from Forbes Life magazine about armored cars. One important point:
The first lesson you learn on entering the market for an armored car is that you’re not buying a tank. You’re buying time on the clock, a second chance to escape, a delay switch on death.
An armored car gives you (or your [...]

Tech Central Station contributor James D. Miller has a blog.  It’s subtitle is “adventures in economics”.  It’s well worth reading.

January 3, 2007

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus for the past couple of weeks.
The Saturday before Christmas, my girlfriend and I drove up to Oregon to visit my parents over the holiday.  It was a very nice, pleasant, and restful trip.
On the way back, though, I hit an icy patch on the Grapevine.  I was [...]

December 18, 2006

Some folks may not have heard of the rape case being prosecuted against three Duke University Lacrosse players.  More people may not have been paying attention to the way the case seems to be falling to pieces, yet the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, continues to prosecute.
Doug Powers has a proposal:
In the meantime, here’s my modest proposal, [...]

December 15, 2006

Robert McHenry writes at Tech Central Station:
I haven’t literally been dreamin’ about nuclear weapons, but I’ve been thinkin’ about them more than a little bit. The press, the blogosphere, the commentariat - in whatever form you take your medicine - are divided on the great question: How likely is a nuclear attack on the United [...]

December 12, 2006

Someone at The Corner on NRO asked if anyone knew what self-declared Libertarian Charles Murray’s views on immigration might be.  It turns out one person knows — Charles Murray:
Regarding illegal immigration:
1. Making laws about who gets to become a citizen, under what circumstances, is a legitimate function of the state.
2. Protecting borders is a legitimate [...]