Next time some patriotic genius tells you that our foreign policy has nothing, nothing at all, to do with terrorism, because it’s American culture that provokes such all consuming hatred in the Muslim world, point ’em to this photo of young Arabs headed off to fight against U.S. troops in Iraq: Yup, he’s wearing a […]

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…a ton of longer items I’ve wanted to blog all week but haven’t had time for shall be up over the weekend. (I’m increasingly working on pieces that people actually pay me to do… whoda thunk it?)

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Apparently, some of the police who patrol my (overwhelmingly Hispanic) neighborhood think it’s both permissible and entertaining to pull over Latino families under false pretenses, then berate them, make fun of their ability to speak English, and threaten them with arrest without cause. Some of them also think they’re not obligated to provide badge numbers. […]

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According to John Quiggin, Al Jazeera is reporting that Salam Pax has been wounded and is hospitalized. If that’s true, and if even Al Jazeera now knows who he is, that probably means he’s in danger, if not from his wounds then from reprisals.

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So, looking back over the last few posts, it occurs to me that I’m doing a fair job of ensuring that I’ll return to academia at some point by burning all the journalistic/pundit bridges someone like me would have taken. NatRev? I’ve mocked those poor stupid bastards more times than I can count, and don’t […]

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So I decided this weekend, more or less on a whim, to stop smoking, at least for the near future. I haven’t had one since Saturday, which doesn’t sound like all that long, but bear in mind that I normally would’ve had 40 or 50 since then by now. Anyway, my reaction so far is […]

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Tim Lambert observes that even if we believe Kopel (and I do) when he reports having inserted the Kleck attribution, this doesn’t necessarily mean this wasn’t the source of the number, since neither did he typically attribute the 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually (almost always mentioned in the same breath as the brandishing figure) […]

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Ok, whatever you think of the war, this is fairly amusing.

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Ok, I’ve got to confess, this makes me a touch uncomfortable. Seems some ignorant yahoo has a website where he posts photos of antiwar protestors, calling them “pathetic,” “un-American,” and even “traitors.” His hope, apparently, is that some of them will get fired. That’s stupid and thuggish, but it’s not the only thing that makes […]

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A reader sends the following regarding my bagging on K-Lo (below): You should *never* judge someone’s intellect or writing ability by how his or her prose looks once it’s been through the meat-grinder that is the American Enterprise’s editorial process. I’m no K-Lo fan, but you may want to cut her D’Souza review some slack. […]

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