OK, I still don’t get it:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday ordered his staff to begin revising the California’s lethal injection procedure to allay concerns raised by a federal judge that condemned inmates are being subjected to unnecessary pain. (Full story.)

I posted on this months ago: We’re only going to kill him if it doesn’t hurt.
It’s […]

Recent history:

Pope says Islam is violent
Islamics react with violence
Pope apologizes

It was not smart of the Pope to quote that 14th century sentence about Islam and violence. But it’s hard to argue that Islam is a religion of non-violence if, every time Islamics are offended, they react with violence.
Here’s a very good summing-up of the issue.
What […]

I just saw POV on PBS: Waging a Living, and I am ashamed that I am ever in any way discontent with my life or my job or my salary.
Waging a Living follows the lives of 4 individuals who are “working poor.” (More details about them.)
One’s a security guard in downtown San Francisco, making $9-10/hour. […]

Well, if there was anydoubt at all, this should lay it to rest:

Visiting Venezuela President Hugo Chavez has denounced Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon as “genocide,” likening its action to war crimes committed by Germany’s Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
“Israel often criticizes Hitler … but they have done the same thing, perhaps even worse,” Chavez told […]

Does language mean something? Should you use terms that adequately describe what you’re trying to convey? Should the words you use have some level of equivalence with reality?
I think so. Apparently, Dave Pollard does not. We will not ever all agree. That’s OK. The least that can be expected, however, is that we argue fairly.
Pollard […]

OK, so it used to be lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Not any more.
(Reuters, AP, and NY Times photo fraud, explained, demonstrated, and eviscerated, in detail. More details: check out this video.)
Tags: reuters, fake, lie, NYtimes, AP, lebanon, israel, hezbollah, hizbullah, PR

There’s an important story on the Huffington Post about a Ted Koppel article in the NY Times:

Koppel goes on to note that “over the past couple of months alone, he told me, Hamas has received more than $300 million in cash, provided by Iran and funneled through Syria” and “the more than 12,000 missiles and […]

In Canada about 50% of our gas price is tax, a fact that Toronto Sun columnist Linda Leatherdale is not happy about.
Well, I’m not either. I hate tax - it pulls money out of my pocket and into the bottomless depths of governmental waste. But I don’t think we should reduce the gas tax.
Right […]

Cruised through the L.A. neighborhood of Brentwood - O.J.’s home - on our way to La Jolla today. Beautiful. Lots of gates.

Can someone please tell me why Americans are obsessed with race?
I happened to be searching for quite a few schools online today - double-checking a small subset of some contact data that we had received to gain some assurance that all of it was good - and all the school info aggregators had a high […]

Last night I finished Friedman’s The World is Flat.
It’s a fairly wow big idea book; following are some of my notes and thoughts. This is not a review or anything like that; it’s just things I want to remember from the book.
Ten forces that flattened the world:

Berlin Wall coming down, opening the iron curtain and […]

Okay, am I the only one who thinks this whole story is just completely bonkers?

A CONVICTED murderer in California was due to be put to death with a new kind of injection in the early hours of this morning after a federal judge ruled for the first time that the usual method may inflict “excessive […]

Houston police chief Harold Hurrt wants to put surveillance cameras in all kinds of private spaces … including homes.

“I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at […]

This is a great quote about the whole Cheney shooting incident:

Dr. David Blanchard, the emergency room chief, estimated that Mr. Whittington had more than 5 but “probably less than 150 to 200″ pellets lodged in his body.

From the New York Times.

This BBC story says that “former senior Communist party officials” have written and published a public letter denouncing at least one form of government censorship in China.
The officials include:

. . . Chairman Mao’s former secretary, Li Rui; the former editor of the Communist party’s own mouthpiece, People’s Daily, Hu Jiwei; and ex-propaganda boss, Zhu […]

OK, I guess I have to be the millionth blogger to post on the Islamic cartoon fiasco.
First off, Mark Steyn is more right than wrong in pointing out that always worrying about other people’s sensibilities is a good way to lose all our freedoms. And my good friend Mike Skovgaard echoes his sentiments.
In a […]

OK, everyone knows: Google is selling out.
China is big, China is profitable, China wants control over communication and transmission of ideas. Google is big. Google is profitable. Google, whose original purpose was to enable easy access to all the world’s information, is helping China censor communication and transmission of ideas.
And the rather idiotic “don’t […]

We had an election today and nobody came.
Sorry, I just wanted to use that line for no particular reason. That’s what you can do when you have your own blog.
Actually, what happened, of course, is that we elected a lame-duck minority Conservative government that will have to battle every step of the way to […]