The Lemon presents a short timeline of Internet history.

Some highlights:


1981 Bill Gates embarks on heroic and lifelong quest to piss off every person in America.

1996 Parenting groups become concerned that spending extended time online is depriving children of important time spent watching television.

1998 3lit3 hax0rz, d00d: Teens become most prolific illiterate writers in history.

2001 Blogging invented. Promises to change the way people bore strangers with banal anecdotes about their pets.

(via Joanne Jacobs)

Prof. Lemon thinks that if you subscribe to some flavor of communitarianism you should be able to keep the departmental refrigerator from becoming a pig sty.

Are public school officials chosen for their complete lack of common sense or does it develop while on the job? As if the scores of zero-tolerance policies aren't bad enough, suspending students for taking their vitamins at lunch or carrying plastic knives out of the lunchroom, now they've moved on to the staff. The latest idiocy concerns a Pennsylvania teacher's aide who has been suspended without pay for wearing a cross pendant in the classroom. There must've been complaints from the local vampire groups. (And the school's not even in Sunnydale)

Joseph Yeager explores the intellectual roots of multiculturalism and political correctness and provides a short history of cultural communism.

The theoretical and historical foundation of cultural Communism is known as the Frankfurt School.  The Frankfurt School was not an institution, but rather, a school of thought within Marxism.  In the context of contemporary cult-com, its most significant figures were Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.  Raymond Williams, who shared much with the Frankfurt School, and whose influence is great among today's cult-coms, may be considered an honorary member.

The Frankfurt School coalesced in the mid twentieth century, largely in response to the discontent that many Marxist intellectuals felt toward orthodox Marxism, and to the growing realization that the much desiderated class war in the capitalist West was unlikely to occur.  Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Williams et. al., then began to speculate on how best to subvert the capitalist society they hated so much.  Willy-nilly, they concluded that capitalism was far more vulnerable at the cultural than the economic level and that, therefore, the cultural norms of capitalist society should be attacked.  The obliteration of capitalism's cultural infrastructure would bring down capitalism and make possible the construction of a Communist society in the West.
...
Whereas the anarcho-coms urge violence, terrorism, mass vandalism, civil disobedience, and syndicalist strikes to bring down the system, the cult-coms deploy the slightly subtler weapons of multiculturalism and political correctness to achieve identical aims.  Where the anarcho-coms envisage a dramatic and cataclysmic revolution, the cult-coms seek to gradually mold the United States into an entity that all neo-coms could embrace, but that would resemble the United States in name only.
...
Political correctness, which stems directly from Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse's views on language and rhetoric, is cultural communism's primary tool for altering white consciousness.  The cult-coms believe that the very words we use serve to legitimize and buttress the power of the dominant class and to suppress the "subaltern" elements of society.  Moreover--and as David Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate have pointed out--they believe that free speech reinforces hierarchies because elites have access to organs of communication while the disadvantaged do not.  The elites use this advantage to cement their high status and to seal the pitiable fate of the less fortunate.  The solution, therefore, is to gain control over society's cultural, educational and media spheres (a veritable fait accompli), and to use these redoubts as bases from which to regulate "hurtful" language and suppress the speech of the so-called elite class.  Over time, the enfor ced usage of "benevolent" language and outlawry of "hate speech" will reconfigure white consciousness along progressive non-racist lines.

The multicultural program is every bit as sinister and Orwellian as its politically correct adjunct.  It is a massive effort in deception, mendacity and reeducation designed to bring haughty white society down a peg, and to elevate non-white (but especially black) history and culture to its rightful position of high honor.  In realized form, this means denigrating and covering up the accomplishments of Western civilization while usurping and inventing achievements for non-Western societies.  It means focusing monomaniacally on atrocities committed by Westerners while sweeping non-Western abominations under the rug.  It means claiming that the philosophical, scientific and literray heritage of ancient Greece was in fact stolen from "black" Egypt.  It means pretending that slavery and wars of conquest are uniquely American, while eliding the successes of America's democratic government, its economy, its breakthroughs in science and industry, its struggl es on behalf of human rights, and the courage and decency of its soldiers.  And, of course, it means asserting that the United States got just what it deserved on 9-11, and that any punitive American responses were unjust.

Jeff Jacoby doesn't understand what Castro's numerous supporters could be thinking. (Hint: They're not.)

''CUBA IS AN anachronism in our hemisphere, an anachronism on the face of the earth,'' Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked the other day. ''And the whole international community should be condemning Cuba.''

Who could disagree? In a ruthless crackdown just four weeks ago, the Castro regime rounded up 75 peaceful dissidents - economists, journalists, pro-democracy petitioners, even a poet or two - and sentenced them to prison terms of up to 28 years. The combined total of their sentences was a stunning 1,454 years. One US official characterized it as ''the most despicable act of political repression in the Americas in a decade.'' No less barbaric was the fate of three Cubans who attempted to escape Castro's island gulag by hijacking a ferry to Florida: They were killed by firing squad. Of course the whole international community should be condemning Cuba.
...
At least the UN commission didn't issue a statement defending Castro's dictatorship. That is more than can be said for the 160-plus ''artists and intellectuals'' - well, that's what Reuters calls them - who decided this would be a good time to issue a ''declaration of support'' for Cuba. Their statement parroting Castro's claim that the United States is plotting to topple him, warns that Washington's ''harassment against Cuba could serve as a pretext for an invasion.'' Two entertainers, Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, are among the signers. So are a few Nobel laureates, including such icons of the left as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Rigoberta Menchu.

Why do people like this come to Castro's defense? He is a thug, a lifelong enemy of freedom, democracy, and tolerance. Doesn't that matter to them? Over the years he has murdered or imprisoned thousands of Cubans whose only crime was to disapprove of his Stalinist misrule. Thousands more have lost their lives while attempting to flee the misery and persecution of life under Castro. Doesn't that matter to them?

Amir Taheri suspects that the revelations of Iraqi payoffs to European government officials and journalists may be the tip of the iceburg.

Some Iraq experts describe the documents as "weapons of political and diplomatic mass destruction." For they narrate the secret story of over 30 years of Ba'athist rule.
In that period, thousands of politicians, diplomats, journalists, do-gooders, peaceniks and officials of an unknown number of countries in the Middle East, Europe and North America were on the payroll of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Some former collaborators who later joined Saddam's opponents in exile have revealed that the Ba'athist regime targeted politicians and opinion-makers in all countries where Iraq had a presence.

"Putting journalists and politicians on the payroll was a well-established policy," says Khalid Kishtaini, who worked for the Iraqi Cultural Office in London in the 1980s. A prominent writer who later joined the opposition, Kishtaini also reports that the office had instructions to obtain documents from all the recipients of Iraqi largesse, possibly for future blackmail.

Saad al-Bazzaz, another writer who worked with Saddam before joining the opposition, confirms this: "The principle was that everyone could be bought, if the price was right," he says. "You would be surprised to know who was in Saddam's pay."

European (especially French) and Middle Eastern political parties and politicians got cash or anonymous donations through front groups, including fake charities.

Clubbeaux has a good post on how much of what passes for discourse these days consists of not much more than MAPSIs (Meaningless All-Purpose Slanderous Insults) and provides a short guide to some of the more popular ones.

Censorship. No longer do you have to actually prevent or curtail a display, publication or screening of something to be MAPSIed as a “censor,” all you have to do is say you can do whatever you want to, but the government’s not obligated to spend its citizens’ money to subsidize it.

The Worlds Dullest blog. Or is it the online version of Dem. Presidential candidate, Bob Graham's diary? (via Balloon Juice)

Thomas Sowell posts his third installment in a series about universal healthcare.

Slovakia, the land of some of my forefathers (the others are from Calabria), has proposed a flat tax. I always knew they were sensible people. The Calabrese on the other had support a highly progressive tax which they then don't pay. Sensible folks too.

Iraqi poet Awad Nasir celebrates the fall of the Ba'athist regime in a op-ed in todays WSJ.

Those who died to liberate our country are heroes in their own lands. For us they will be martyrs and heroes. They have gained an eternal place in our hearts, one that is forever reserved for those who gave their lives in more than three decades of struggle against the Baathist regime. It is not only the people of Iraq who are grateful for the end of a nightmare. A majority of Arabs and Muslims are also grateful.

The chorus of lamentation for Saddam consists of a few isolated figures espousing the bankrupt ideologies of pan-Arabism and Islamism. A Moroccan Islamist tells us that the American presence in Iraq is "a punishment from Allah" for Muslims because of their "weakening faith." But if the toppling of a tyrant is punishment, then I pray that Allah will bring similar punishments on other Arab nations that endure despotic rule.

The U.S. and its allies should not listen to those who wished to maintain Saddam in power and who, now that he's gone, are trying to find a clone to put on a throne in Baghdad. Those who are urging the coalition to leave Iraq as soon as possible wish none of us any good. A precipitate departure could trigger intervention by Iraq's predatory neighbors and foment civil war.

Replacing one of the most vicious tyrannies with a working democratic system is no easy task. But it is a task worthy of the world's bravest democracies.

Let's hope this disease doesn't jump from animals to humans. There is apparently a new form of flesh eating venereal disease affecting African baboons.

The disease targets the reproductive organs of the primate. The consequences for male baboons are particularly gruesome, says Elibariki Mtui, of the African Wildlife Foundation in Arusha, Tanzania. "The genitals kind of rot away, then they just drop off," he told New Scientist.

The disease first appeared a month ago and while cases seem to be confined to Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania, there are fears it will spread from the affected troops of olive baboons to others nearby. "People are really concerned that it could be an epidemic," says Mtui. Wardens at the park confirm that some of the infected males had died.

Ouch!!

This is a few years old, but I had not seen it before and it is well worth reading. Charlton Heston's 1999 speech at Harvard Law School on 'Winning the Cultural War'.

I’ve come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated.

For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 - long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else’s pride, they called me a racist.

I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.

I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.

Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country.

But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

Follow the link and read the whole thing.

Richard Cohen has written one of his, twice a year, decent columns and has decided that Jeanne Kirkpatrick was correct in her 1984 RNC speech.

At the 1984 Republican National Convention, Jeane Kirkpatrick, then the Reagan administration's U.N. delegate, gave a speech on foreign policy that has stuck with me. She blasted the Democratic Party's approach to foreign affairs, repeating the phrase "the blame America first crowd." I hated the speech at the time, but have recently reread it. It has aged better than I have.

Kirkpatrick's mantra -- blame America first -- mostly applied to the Cold War and the United States' attempt to contain and then roll back communism. But the appellation could just as aptly be applied to some of those -- note the modifier "some" -- who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and almost everything else the United States has done.
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That same tendency to blame America for the moral shortcomings of others unfortunately permeates the left and the Democratic Party. I wish it were otherwise, but I got the first whiff of it after Sept. 11 when some people reacted to the terrorist attacks here by blaming U.S. policy -- in the Middle East specifically but around the world in general.

Had we not supported Israel, had we not backed the corrupt Saudi monarchy, had we not been buddies with Egypt, had we not been somehow complicit in Third World poverty, had we not developed blue jeans and T-shirts and rock music and premarital sex, the World Trade Center might still be standing and the Pentagon untouched.
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The same sort of reasoning -- if it can be called that -- surfaced before and during the war with Iraq. Although I supported the war, I could always understand some of the arguments against it. But I could not understand those who said the war was about oil or empire or reconstruction contracts and who seemed to think that Saddam Hussein was the lesser of two evils -- the United States being the greater, of course.

Below the surface of this reasoning seethes a perplexing animosity toward the United States -- not the people but the government and the economic system. Possibly it has its roots in the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed kaput and socialism so promising, and the government an adjunct of moneyed interests. At the same time, of course, governments on all levels -- federal, state and local -- were unabashedly racist. (via Hoystory)

Shades of the Aristocats: Tinker the Stray Cat Inherits Fortune. (via Electric Venom)

Joe of Attaboy has a small, er, tribute to a Senator I hold in similar esteem: 'The Conscience of the Senate', Robert Byrd.

I fail to understand why this man, who has a record of racist activity and commentary, who filibustered against every major civil rights bill in the Sixties, has fought against the nominations of both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and who even played a Confederate general in a recent movie, has managed to be revered as such a statesman during his interminable run in the United States Senate. I doubt you would be able to find a single human being in the history of our nation who has managed to redirect more of the taxpayers money to his state, for the most meaningless projects, while proudly having his name slapped on every one of them.

Thomas Sowell extends his piece on universal healthcare.

Some believe -- contrary to all evidence -- that the government can provide things cheaper, that it can "bring down the cost of health care," for example.

Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry -- whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?

When people talk about the government's bringing down costs, what they really mean is that the government can impose price controls. But bringing down costs is wholly different from not allowing those costs to be paid in full.

Carnival of the Vanities

This weeks Carnival of the Vanities is up. Click on the above link to get to all the bloggy goodness.

Paul Rosenzweig has a very good piece at the Heritage Foundation site on the increasing criminalization of social and economic conduct.

The origin of modern criminal law can be traced to early feudal times. From its inception, the criminal law expressed both a moral and a practical judgment about the societal consequences of certain activity: to be a crime, the law required that an individual must both cause (or attempt to cause) a wrongful injury and do so with some form of malicious intent. Classically, lawyers capture this insight in two principles: in order to be a crime there must be both an actus reus (a bad act) and a culpable mens rea (a guilty mind). At its roots, the criminal law did not punish merely bad thoughts (intentions to act without any evil deed) or acts that achieved unwittingly wrongful ends but without the intent to do so. The former were for resolution by ecclesiastical authorities and the latter were for amelioration in the tort system. In America today, this classical understanding of criminal law no longer holds.

The requirement of an actual act of some form is fundamental. As an initial premise, Anglo-American criminal law does not punish thought. For a crime to have been committed there must, typically, be some act done in furtherance of the criminal purpose. The law has now gone far from that model of liability for an act and, in effect, begun to impose criminal liability for the acts of another based upon failures of supervision that are far different from the common law's historical understanding.

Similarly, the law historically has required that before an individual is deemed a criminal he must have acted with an intent to do wrong. Accidents and mistakes are not considered crimes. Yet contemporary criminal law punishes acts of negligence and even acts which are accidental. In the regulatory context, as Justice Potter Stewart has noted, there is, in effect, a standard of near-absolute liability.

Here is a link to the full text of the the essay. The above link is to a summary.

HOW TO SING THE BLUES

1. Most Blues begin, "Woke up this morning."

2. " I got a good woman" is a bad way to begin the Blues, 'less you stick something nasty in the next line, like " I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town."

3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes ... sort of: "Got a good woman - with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like Margaret Thatcher - and she weigh 500 pound."

4. The Blues are not about choice. You stuck in a ditch, you stuck in ditch; ain't no way out.

5. Blues cars: Chevys and Cadillacs and broken-down trucks. Blues don't travel in Volvos, BMWs, or Sport Utility Vehicles. Most Blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train. Jet aircraft an' state-sponsored motor pools ain't even in the running. Walkin' plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So does fixin' to die.

6. Teenagers can't sing the Blues. They ain't fixin' to die yet. Adults sing the Blues. In Blues, " adulthood" means being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.

7. Blues can take place in New York City but not in Hawaii or any place in Canada. Hard times in St. Paul or Tucson is just depression. Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City still the best places to have the Blues. You cannot have the blues in any place that don't get rain.

8. A man with male pattern baldness ain't the blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is. Breaking your leg cuz you skiing is not the blues. Breaking your leg cuz an alligator be chomping on it is.

9. You can't have no Blues in an office or a shopping mall. The lighting is wrong. Go outside to the parking lot or sit by the dumpster.

10. Good places for the Blues:
a. highway
b. jailhouse
c. empty bed
d. bottom of a whiskey glass

Bad places:
a. Ashrams
b. gallery openings
c. Ivy League institutions
d. golf courses

11. No one will believe it's the Blues if you wear a suit, 'less you happen to be an old ethnic person, and you slept in it.

12. Do you have the right to sing the Blues? Yes, if:
a. you're older than dirt
b. you're blind
c. you shot a man in Memphis
d. you can't be satisfied

No, if:
a. you have all your teeth
b. you were once blind but now can see
c. the man in Memphis lived.
d. you have a retirement plan or trust fund.

13. Blues is not a matter of color. It's a matter of bad luck. Tiger Woods cannot sing the blues. Gary Coleman could. Ugly white people also got a leg up on the blues.

14. If you ask for water and Baby give you gasoline, it's the Blues. Other acceptable Blues beverages are:
a. wine
b. whiskey or bourbon
c. muddy water
d. black coffee

The following are NOT Blues beverages:
a. mixed drinks
b. kosher wine
c. Snapple
d. sparkling water

15. If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it's a Blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, and dying lonely on a broken down cot. You can't have a Blues death if you die during a tennis match or getting liposuction.

16. Some Blues names for women:
a. Sadie
b. Big Mama
c. Bessie
d. Fat River Dumpling

17. Some Blues names for men:
a. Joe
b. Willie
c. Little Willie
d. Big Willie

18. Persons with names like Sierra, Sequoia, Auburn, and Rainbow can't sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.

19. Make your own Blues name (starter kit):
a. name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Lame, etc.)
b. first name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, Kiwi,etc.)
c. last name of President (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.)
For example, Blind Lime Jefferson, or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore, etc. (Well, maybe not "Kiwi.")

20. I don't care how tragic your life: you own a computer, you cannot sing the blues. You best destroy it. Fire, a spilled bottle of Mad Dog, or get out a shotgun. Maybe your big woman just done sat on it. I don't care.

(Note this is not original, it's been floating around the 'net for years with numerous variations. I just felt like posting it today)

Magazine icon predicts dot-com resurgence
Tony Perkins has been at the forefront of Silicon Valley's technology industry for the past 15 years. Through his work at Silicon Valley Bank and as a co-founder of the now-defunct Red Herring magazine, Perkins has consistently ridden the crest of each technology wave that washed across the valley. His current project is a dot-com startup he funded with $50,000 of his own money. Called AlwaysOn LLC, it is a Web-based hybrid of business reporting and online journals popularly called "blogs" that he predicts will turn traditional media on its ear.

Good on you, mate!

Michael Barone has a very perceptive piece in US News & World about the differences between "Soft" America and "Hard" America and the differences between 18 year olds and 30 year olds (Hint: the differences are related).

One of the peculiar features of our country is that we produce incompetent 18-year-olds and remarkably competent 30-year-olds. Americans at 18 typically score lower on standardized tests than 18-year-olds from other advanced countries. Watch them on their first few days working at McDonald's or behind the counter in chain drugstores, and it's obvious that they don't really know how to make change or keep the line moving. But by the time Americans are 30, they are the most competent people in the world. They produce a stronger and more vibrant private-sector economy; they produce scientific and technical advances that lead the world; they provide the world's best medical care; they create the strongest and most agile military the world has ever seen. And it's not just a few meritocrats at the top: American talent runs wide and deep.

Why? Because from the age of 6 to 18, our kids live mostly in what I call Soft America--the part of our society where there is little competition and accountability. In contrast, most Americans in the 12 years between ages 18 and 30 live mostly in Hard America--the part of American life subject to competition and accountability; the military trains under live fire. Soft America seeks to instill self-esteem. Hard America plays for keeps. (via PowerLine)

For those folks out there who think hydrogen-based energy is some distant pipedream of a few wacked-out tech heads, check out this story.

And yes, in case you were wondering, I'm long Icelandic real estate. I have been for a few years now.

What shape is a proton? The answer (or lack of it) in todays NYT:

"It's not a well-defined question," said Dr. Robert L. Jaffe, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the realm of the subatomic, shape is not a straightforward concept. At the very least, a new theory suggests, a proton, a basic constituent of atoms, may not be as simply round as physicists once thought and as drawn in textbooks.

Next week the NYT revisits the question of how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Strange Brew

Thomas Sowell takes on universal health care and defends, *gasp*, profits.

If there was one defining moment in the debates among an already crowded field of Democrats seeking their party's presidential nomination in 2004, it may well have been when Congressman Dennis Kucinich, pushing for government-provided health care, spoke with obvious disgust of the "profits" of the insurance companies and provoked a burst of spontaneous applause from like-minded members of the audience.

Insurance companies, like every other kind of institution, have to earn money in order to keep functioning. So does every individual who was not born rich. But some people react to the word "profit" with automatic responses, like Pavlov's dog.

Such prejudice against a word was far more common half a century ago than it is today. Congressman Kucinich may think of himself as a "progressive," but he is in fact a throwback to a bygone era.

CotV Reminder

We are still accepting entries for this weeks Carnival of the Vanities until tomorrow morning, so get any entries you want to submit to us at commonsensewonder-at-yahoo-dot-com.

Robert Prather has a post on why animosity toward the Germans has been much more muted than that toward the French.

The first thing to remember with regard to the French, and I've said this several times, is that we haven't been real allies with them for forty years. de Gaulle saw to that. He pulled France out of the military wing of NATO, the primary device for controlling the Soviets at the time, and demanded that all American soldiers leave France. Lyndon Johnson shot back by asking if he meant the dead ones too. In addition, de Gaulle is the author of French suspicion of "the Anglosphere". He claimed, correctly it seems, that England would never be a real European country because of its relationship with America.
...
Why is Germany being treated differently? Well, they mostly deserve to be treated differently. The Schroeder government is certainly a screwy bunch, but prior to that the U.S. has had genuinely good relationship with Germany. In the early 1980's, in an attempt to actually win the Cold War, the U.S. wanted to place intermediate-range missiles in West Germany. Against the popular will the West German government went along. That's the act of a friend and these things are not forgotten.

Theodore Dalrymple argues in the London Times that the current climate of cultural and moral relativism and lack of historical perspective helped create the two suicide bombers who born and raised in England.

We do not teach the accomplishments of our civilisation with any kind of confidence. The freedom and prosperity that we enjoy are the result of a long historical development, which has its less than creditable aspects, but also its accomplishments of universal significance. For example, modern science has been, for centuries, the tradition of Western civilisation alone, and Britain has contributed very significantly to that tradition. Had there been no Islam from the 16th century onward, Mankind’s current scientific knowledge would not have been diminished by one jot or tittle. Of course, individual Muslims can make contributions to science: but only if they accept this aspect of our intellectual tradition. Their own tradition, however important it might have been in medieval times, has contributed nothing to science for hundreds of years.

Our liberty, which is intimately linked to our prosperity, arises not only from a long and sometimes violent political process, but also from long, hard and deep philosophical reflection. The Western philosophical tradition, with its openness to inquiry, is unequalled, and we should have no hesitation in saying so. Our literary tradition is similarly glorious, but multiculturalism, with its insistence that there is only difference, no better nor worse, no higher nor lower, accords it no special place.
...
Modern British culture gives them plenty of ammunition for their disdain. Our modern culture, especially in its most popular forms, is now vulgar and shallow and utterly lacking in refinement, grace or beauty. It encourages and even glorifies every form of social pathology; it mistakes libertinism for liberty. From the purely aesthetic point of view, it is hideously ugly and lumpen. It is scarcely surprising that at least some Muslims — indeed, the more reflective among them — turn their back on it. (via Transterrestrial Musings)

Mark your calendars, May is International Masturbation Month. You can make up your own ways to celebrate.

Thunderstorms are apparently twice as deadly for men as for women. The reason: men are too stupid to go inside when it rains.

Dennis Miller has an op-ed in today's WSJ taking on Norman Mailer's latest screed.

Mr. Mailer was the Father of the Nonfiction Novel and now he can also claim lineage as the distant, addled Third Cousin of the Rational Op-Ed. Studying at the Sorbonne as a young man obviously made a deep impression on him because this thing reads like Jacques Chirac's Dream Journal.
...
Mr. Mailer at one time challenged and provoked. Now he just provokes. Norman Mailer has become Norman Maine, a former matinee idol whom loved ones best keep an eye on, because if this is the best he can now muster, he'll no doubt be walking purposely into the surf off Provincetown any day now. And as Mr. Mailer's prostate gradually supplants his ego as the largest gland in his body, he's going to have to realize, as is the case with all young lions who inevitably morph into Bert Lahr, that his alleged profundities are now being perceived as the early predictors of dementia.

I empathize with Mr. Mailer in one regard, though. Although he's clearly abdicated the lucid throne, it must be hellish for someone who can still arrange words so beautifully--i.e., "the question will keen in pitch"--to wake up every morning and have it slowly dawn on him that he's effectively been rendered totally irrelevant.

Also in Tech Review is a short piece about research at MIT to develop systems to communicate gesture and touch over distance. The first step in much improved virtual sex on the internet. It probably has some other uses too, I just can't think of them right now. (I am, after all, to be banished to the second level of Dante's Inferno).

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have put together a scheme that uses an array of individual actuators, or cilia, that people can push to remotely convey physical sensations.

The scheme involves a pair of devices that look like a row of side-by-side hairbrushes. The devices' felt-tipped bristles are mounted on a rubber sheet, and each bristle is capable moving independently. A combination of magnets and electricity actuate the bristles. When a person moves the bristles on one device the remote device communicates the gesture by mirroring the movements.

MIT Tech Review has an article on the promising new antibiotics, antidotes, and vaccines which have emerged to combat Anthrax.

Flynt Leverett outlines steps we should take to get Syria out of the terrorism business in Saturday's NYT.

...But can we change the behavior of a terrorism-sponsoring state like Syria without unseating its regime? Is it possible to reform Syria's posture not through force, but through diplomatic engagement?

The answer is a qualified yes.
...
The success of engagement depends in large measure on Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Assad is not an ideological fanatic like Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, or an incorrigible thug like Saddam Hussein. He is young, educated partly in the West and married to a British-born woman who was once in J.P. Morgan's executive training program. He has also made it clear that Syria needs to modernize, and that its long-term interests would be served by better relations with the United States.

This does seem to be the approach the administration is taking and so far it seems to be working. As this article in yesterdays NYT indicates, Syria has started to close down headquarters of terrorist groups operating in Damascus.

Someone has finally outdone Lilek's 404 page. (via IpseDixit)