I was noticing that the current crop of Samuel Adams commercials seem to be geared toward folks tormented by the “paradox of choice.” One that’s been running a lot shows a couple of guys looking at a dictionary-sized menu as a haughty waitress with an Austrian accent tells them how many different beers from different […]

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I was summoned for jury duty today and had the vertiginous experience of reading Discipline and Punish in the Jurors’ Lounge as I waited to hear “Sanchez-499” on the list of names and numbers they were rattling off. I was called down after a few hours, waited perhaps 45 minutes with fellow prospective jurors while […]

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Just read it.

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A little surprised to see Ampersand making use of the question-begging pro-life locution “unborn children.” If you don’t share their view about the moral status of the fetus, that’s like calling a pile of bricks an “unbuilt house” or, for that matter, a blank screen an “unwritten blog post.” Let’s not give them this one.

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A piece on cybercafe regulations in Garden Grove, California: “Smile, You’re on Cafe Camera”

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One thing that never fails to piss me off about debating free trade is that you invariably will get a few halfwits out there who respond with something like: “Well, if your job were threatened like mine has been, you’d sing a different tune.” In other words, they’re advancing the notion that somehow when you’re […]

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Glenn Reynolds says: GOOD POINT: “The question of whether Saddam Hussein was a monstrous, murderous tyrant has two answers – ‘no’ or ‘yes.’ There is no ‘yes but.’” No, it’s not. It’s a transparently retarded point. The obvious answer is: “Yes, but being a murderous tyrant has never been and shouldn’t be sufficient reason to […]

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So, I got randomly to thinking about the use of the word “allegedly” in jounalism in the shower this morning. One thing I’m noticed is that the use of the adverb is so automatic—probably a good thing in general, good to be careful about what you say about people in news, and not just for […]

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Ed Rothstein looks at the connection between one of my favorite authors, Albert Camus, and modern neoconservatives. But only real similarity—that Camus had been an intellectual of the left who turned on Communism—suggests at best a parallel with the original group, not so much with the current version of what’s going by the name of […]

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Via Radley, I see that Stan Kurtz is weirdly claiming that it’s a “concession” for Cathy Young to acknowledge that arguments for gay marriage mostly work as well for recognizing polyamory. Except, with Radley, I’ve never heard of a libertarian (the audience Kurtz says he’s debated this with) who wouldn’t have included polyamorous groupings in […]

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