It’s well known that drugs make you stupid… as evidence, John Ashcroft’s newly declared war on bongs. Of course, this is independently offensive for pretty much the same reasons the drug war is offensive: it punishes willing adults for engaging in a mutually beneficial transaction, in this case, the sale of a pipe. But it […]

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I was looking forward to text-reaming this insipid piece on cloning, so dishonest it could only have been written by a Senator. But alas, Charles Murtaugh got there first. But I knew I’d find something else boneheaded on NRO to mock, and was delighted to find a shockingly ignorant G-File on McCarthyism. But did I […]

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…you find this hilarious (via Eve). Or, for that matter, this and its several different variants. And while I’m at it, an old Mark Leyner piece on pomo and Jenny Jones.

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One of the first things you’ll notice if you go to see MPAA president Jack Valenti speak is that, for a man who seems to regard unauthorized trade in copyrighted material as roughly on a par, morally, with the rape of small children, he has a penchant for appropriation. I saw him give a talk […]

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Eve Tushnet writes that a recent NRO article by Ramesh Ponnuru on the upcoming Supreme Court sodomy-laws case Lawrence v. Texas exhibits “i-dotting, t-crossing care.” Much as I dislike disagreeing with not one but two people as sharp as Eve and Ramesh, color me unimpressed. The piece struck me instead as sloppy, not so much […]

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Ari Fleischer has long been one of my least favorite people in the administration. There’s something especially brazen and unrepentant about the way he peddles bullshit — you get the sense that however obviously, facially ridiculous one of his assertions might be, he would bristle with righteous indignation if you didn’t take it on faith. […]

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A post last week from Ampersand illustrates what I think is a pretty common type of automatic inference, and while I could probably pick on any number of other instances, I just saw this one, so I’m going to use it as a kind of case study. Amp is making the case that “right wingers,” […]

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A recent column from the BBC asks “Is Google Too Powerful?” The proposal for some sort of regulatory agency to monitor search engines strikes me as… how can I put this politely… incredibly dumb. I hope it’s obvious why, so I’ll just let that aspect of it go. Also, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for […]

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This amusing post from Andrew Sullivan links to an unintentionally hilarious letter by a junior at Harvard, sent to the university’s student paper, the Harvard Crimson. An earlier article in the paper had decried the demolition of an enormous (and apparently quite realistic) snow-phallus some students had constructed during the recent aerial bombardment of the […]

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No blogging today; writing something up for Reason, and then going to judge a few debate rounds. I know, I know, your day won’t be complete without reading me shoot off a few more ill-informed opinions. But I’m saving up some stuff to post on Saturday.

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