As the spouse of a legal immigrant, I concur with the Queen of All Evil.

The "Love Mexicans" design is Copyright © 2007 invadesoda. If I see this on a T-shirt that I didn't authorize, I will hunt you down.

Note to the fine folks at Project Vote Smart who are monitoring this blog: the sentiment expressed by the design is intended as hyperbole. I wouldn't advise "clubbing" anyone.

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/^\

Hey, Emilio! You've won the South American chess championship! Are you going to Disneyland? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

I wonder if cows can buy methane offsets.

I wonder if Little Mosque on the Prairie is coming to the U.S.

I wonder if self-stewardship is what Christian libertarians should call self-ownership.

I wonder if Ayn Rand considered the family as a quasi-government, rather than what it is, a quasi-individual.

I wonder if all those blogs of the "My period started today" variety face an uncertain future.

I wonder why NPR didn't give Jeremy Paxman a dose of his own medicine when they interviewed him, and why he actually seemed like a nice guy.

I wonder if the prophet Hosea got the first two letters of his name from having been told by God to marry one.

I wonder if there is an undiscovered deist Bible with a single verse: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and then He went fishing.

Alex Singleton of Samizdata.net has created something extremely useful which functions as a sort of "digg for libertarians." It's a social news portal called Spontaneous Order and you should check it out. I liked it so much, I put its rss feed on my sidebar, and it's how I found the article about the fair trade coffee scam in my last post.

It is always encouraging to see some people still using the term liberal in the somewhat archaic sense of being in favor of freedom. Thomas Papworth at Liberal Polemic is one of those people.

Papworth explains what "fair trade" coffee really is:

a form of charitable subsidy or a misguided means of convincing farmers to keep producing coffee when their labour would be more usefully turned to some other product.

I had mentioned that Liberty Dog, the libertarian blogger, is blogging again. He posts all kinds of topics of interest to libertarians, and is highly recommended. He has some great posts up on gun control and Al Gore style environmentalism. It is also the home of the famous "Girl Friday" feature. On a personal note, he was the first blogger to link to this blog when I first started blogging and made some brilliant graphics for my blog, including the including the banner you see above with a plane dropping propaganda leaflets. In fact, for that one he not only came up with the graphic, he came up with the concept.

I want to call attention to his post calling for the legalization of prostitution. He has said "I am interested in hearing any arguments against the legalization of prostitution that you guys may have. Post them in the comments and I will then try to give the reason why it is an invalid argument."

Do so here.

I am one of a handful of people who still considers the MPAA movie rating relevant. It's hard to believe in this day and age, but there are still a few of us who still look at the those content ratings—G, PG, PG-13, R—as a very rough guide to determine whether it matches my mood and who should be watching the movie with me: parents, in-laws, the wife, or oh yeah, the children. I know the ratings are inconsistently applied, but I like to think it gives a ballpark estimate of what to expect. With so few people considering the MPAA ratings relevant, you would think the MPAA would be bending over backward to keep people like me on board. You would be wrong. The MPAA has decided to put on-screen adult smoking on a par with sex and violence in considering content ratings.

As far as I can tell, the only way to escape an R rating will be to have some historical context such as the depiction of a real life chain smoker. It will also help if the movie doesn't "glamorize" smoking, whatever that means.

The First Amendment Center gives the reaction of Kori Titus of Breathe California:

"I'm glad it's finally an issue they're taking up, but what they're proposing does not go far enough and is not going to make a difference."

I lost my blogroll during the hijack. I went through the oldest template I could find and tried to put most of them back, but I don't know if there were any blogs added after that. All political blogs that were on the sidebar before the hijack should be back, let me know if I missed yours and you are still posting. I'm still adding some techie blogs and other things on the sidebar.

I had a couple of issues with my feed. The first one is that New Blogger actually changes the feed (if this happened to you, use View Source on your blog to see what it changed yours to.) No problem, I was using Feedburner anyway, so I just pointed it to the new feed.

Then I couldn't figure out why old posts where bubbling up to the top of my feed just because I tried to add categories, and phydeaux3 has not only noticed the same thing, he posted a fix—thanks! But when I went back to the the feedburner site, I was in for a shock:

Hello, our name is FeedBurner.
AOL is in the house. Read about our latest deal.

All the great ones get Latinized names eventually. Canis Libertas, aka Liberty Dog, has resumed blogging.

UPDATE:
He is already posting some great stuff again. Please check it out. I will be fiddling with my sidebar a little longer.

Check out Bush shaking a tail feather at an event for Malaria Awareness Day. Hat tip to Huffington Post.

("Walk Like an Egyptian" was a hit song by the Bangles in the 80's. No slight against Egyptians is intended, of course.)

I have gathered a handful of quotes from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. First, from Slaughterhouse Five, generally regarded as his best work:

It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space...[who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the gospels actually taught this: before you kill somebody make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understoond that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

My body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists... And if I should die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

The National Union of Journalists has a plan to free the BBC journalist Alan Johnston who was kidnapped in Gaza: boycott Israeli products. Abba Gav reports. As far as I can tell, no one is accusing Israel of kidnapping him. This seems to be a case of Abba Gav's maxim that "There hasn't been a problem yet that couldn't be solved with less Israel."

I was trying to understand this a little better from the Wikipedia entry on it but got nowhere. Apparently the journalist was a supporter of Palestinian causes, which could be a clue—or not.

Pakistan's largest circulation English language newspaper, DAWN, is reporting that Pakistan is not allowing the U.S. military to search for Osama bin Laden in the tribal territory of that country. That's probably not news in itself, given that before 9/11, even Pakistani troops were not allowed there by the hot tribal areas, which are generally considered outside of Pakistani government jurisdiction, and the kind of place where Osama could find friends willing to help him hide.

What makes it more ominous is that elsewhere on the site, DAWN details the increasing pressure being placed on it by the President Musharraf's government, due the newspapers coverage of deals struck with leaders in the tribal territories of Waziristan:

In September 2006 when the government approached DAWN in its attempt to seek a news blackout regarding Baluchistan and the troubled FATA agencies of North and South Wazirstan, the editor of DAWN, Mr. Abbas Nasir, and the Directors of the Board of the DAWN Group, concluded that the government’s ‘request’ was unreasonable and needed to be firmly turned down. (Refer Appendix A 2.2.2 September – December 2006)

As a consequence, the government imposed an almost comprehensive ban on Federal Government advertising. (Refer Appendix A 2.2.2t) with an intent to provoke the financial collapse of the DAWN Group.

1. That the advertising ban by the Federal Government on the DAWN Group’s advertising is both unwarranted and unethical and a transparent mechanism to exert pressure on the newspaper group’s policies in contravention of the internationally accepted norms of objective news reporting.
2. That the decision to withhold a television broadcast license to the DAWN Group by the government is in violation of the judgments of the High Court of Sindh and the consent declarations made by PEMRA and the Federal Minister of Information in the Sindh High Court. Such right should be granted to other applying media groups as well on the same terms .
3. That the Government of Pakistan continue to submit its policies in Baluchistan and its agreements with the pro Taliban tribesmen of North & South Waziristan to the rigorous assessment of public and media scrutiny.
4. That the Government of Pakistan desist from abducting and arresting journalists in the judicious performance of their duties, and desist from physically attacking newspaper offices as has occurred last week in Islamabad.

I don't know, this just struck me as funny for some reason:



Hat tip: Zoobat, which isn't work safe.

I catch Limbaugh on the radio every now and then. He stated recently that there is a 80% chance of President Hillary, and he noted that that her fundraisers did not like him saying that and were trying to dispel that.

The way I see it, the Republican frontrunners are Harriet Myers 1, Harriet Myers 2, and Harriet Myers 3, and I'm just going to wait until these are withdrawn and the real Republican candidates show up.

The conservative talk radio host, Jason Lewis, when he was in Charlotte, once said something to the effect that a lot of people live like conservatives but vote like liberals. Or maybe it was a caller who said that. I can't remember.

The point merits serious attention. Should people govern the same way they live? Or to put it another way, do conservative values necessitate a conservative ideology?

An answer in two acts (Clearly I've been listening to too much This American Life.)

Act One. Conservatives.

I've always regarded the statement "You can't legislate morality" as an idiotic statement. Obviously you can and should legislate laws against slavery, arson, murder, and perhaps a long list of moral offenses.

But—

After a couple of decades, I realized that whether you can legislate morality is a red herring. Of course you can, but on a case by case basis, should you?

Isn't it conservative to teach your kids to do the right thing, not merely the legal thing? Doesn't it undermine parental authority and family values to cede the teaching role to the state? The law is the great teacher, my ass.

Act Two. Liberals, so called.

Independent liberals are one thing, to keep it simple let's imagine a poor mom and dad who try their best to be good Democrats.

Do they give their sons and daughters a little pep rally?

The only way you'll ever get a raise is if the government raises minimum wage.

You'll never become rich, unless you do so on the backs of those less fortunate.

You will retire poor and dependent on subsistence income from the government until you die.

Although such a speech would seem to be consistent with what Democrats advocate for other people's sons and daughters, when it comes to their own children, even they would equate this foolish consistency with something close to child abuse. Any parent ought to govern their children conservatively regardless of their own political ideology.

UPDATE 4/26: I took out a line because it made less sense to me after a while.

Miriam was Moses's sister.

She's the one
who dances on the beach.

She's the one
who writes the poems.

She's the one
who can riff in any key.

She's got the groove.

She moves in mysterious ways.

She's got something going on.

USA Today is reporting on the controversy over Richard Gere kissing Indian film star Shilpa Shetty during an AIDS Awareness campaign in "a country where public displays of affection are largely taboo." Although the fact that lawyers [ADDED: and effigy burners] are getting involved invites the suggestion to get a life (and as Hindus, they get several, from what I understand), maybe there's a little more to the story. Here, watch it yourself:



First of all, this looks very "ugly American."

Secondly, even by American sensibilities, this hardly looks like a genius move by Richard Gere.

Thirdly, this looks more like a public display of drunkenness than a public display of affection.

Finally, I have seen enough Bollywood movies to imagine that if you could edit this footage and insert it into a typical Indian film with ominous music and the canonical dramatic thunderclap, it would suggest to the viewers that the woman was raped.

I may be wrong on that, but I'm curious to know what people in India think of my take.

UPDATE:
I just found out Jon Stewart did a funny bit on this. At one point, Jon says, "I actually believe that's considered offensive in our culture as well," which is what I was saying with my second point.

UPDATE 2:
Akram's Razor sums up the matter better than I. I have to say, I didn't notice the butt-groping. I'll have to watch it again.