Dueling Tragedies: Wholesale Slaughter vs. Wall Street Scandals

Those who take the Bible at face value believe that Herod, Roman governor during the first Christmas, killed all the children in Bethlehem in an attempt to avert the birth of Christ. Now, you'd think that this senseless obliteration of human life would qualify the first Christmas as a good candidate for the saddest Christmas.

Not so.

According to Martha Stewart, her stock scandal has made this holiday season the saddest holiday ever. Future generations will mark these black days, asking us, "where were you during Martha's sad Christmas?"

Hypocriternity

I'm being too harsh on Strom Thurmond with that title, for fathering an illegitimate child with a black maid is not inconsistent with being a virulent white segregationist. Such behavior is surprising in today's society only because segregation has become synonymous with racial hate ...a correlation that may not have been necessary for many of yesteryear's Southern gentility.

I wonder if this child troubled Thurmond at all.

Just as pre-Civil War white landowners often fathered children with their slaves, Thurmond may have felt that such a secret was a perfectly normal episode to have tucked away in one's closet.

Canada claims the Should this be Legal? Crown from California

One of the joys of California's direct democracy is feeling like we pass laws for the sole purpose of testing them out for the rest of the country.

Year in and year out, California's proposition ticket is pretty much a survey of wacky activities to be deemed legal (medical marijuana, for example) or illegal (such as consuming horse meat).

On a global stage, Canada has apparently decided to usurp this crown from California. Legislation sits before the Canadian parliament concerning decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, legalizing gay marriage, and now the Canadian Copyright Board has deemed P2P downloading legal.

Is The Worst of Blogspot.com on the Way?

Remember the long-expired Mirsky's Worst of the Web? Mirsky was an online force until about 1997, when he suddenly closed up shop.

In the early days of the everyday internet, it was amusing to watch Mirsky expose hapless HTML hard-coders, laughing at their broken links, bad tables, and otherwise nasty design. However, the introduction of WYSIWYG HTML-editing programs (and people generally learning how to build web pages), helped make Mirsky's attempted return in 1999 a non-starter. Since then, people just been too busy to revel in this form of humor.

Now that Blogger, et al. empower us to half-anonymously disclose our particular points of view, I wonder if hapless bloggers' push-button musings might just be crappy enough to revive this dead art.

No.

No. No. No. Not happening.

La la la, la la la (fingers in ears). Not happening.

What do you mean I look disgruntled?!?!?!

Jeez, Postal Service. Don't be so touchy.

Nice to see Nixon break all 11 Commandments

By most accounts, Dick Nixon's personality wasn't all roses. However, he apparently didn't think much of Reagan once the cameras stopped rolling.

Arnold Decides He's Innocent

Did I say an independent investigation after the election?

I meant no investigation at all.

Anyone Got a Good Recipe for Quagmire?

Although the article concerns military best practices (rather than policy), U.S. Eyeing Israeli Tactics for Iraq Insurgents has a disturbing title.

How much advice would you take from Israel concerning how to deal with a disgruntled Arab population?

To the Moon and Bust

I'll reiterate what I've said before. The Chinese Space Agency is bound and determined to kill somebody.