ARRESTS IN EGYPT: As you can read here Alaa has been arrested , and the situation is turning bleaker by the minute. Given what the egyptian police is like , and how they wanted to hurt Alaa for quite a while now, I don’t think it’s wise to wait until they decide what THEY want to do with him. The fight should start immedietly. The contact information for the Egyptian embassy is below:The Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt3521... Read more

QUICK HITS: Matt Scofield disagrees with me (…sort of) on the merits of Quigley Down Under. Having watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves last night, I will concede two things: 1. Tom Selleck is much, much better in QDU than Kevin Costner is in RH:POT. (A surprise to me. I always kind of thought Tom Selleck and Kevin Costner were the same person.)2. QDU is very far from the worst movie Alan Rickman is in. It is now a toss-up,... Read more

WHEN I WAS THREE, I THOUGHT THE WORLD REVOLVED AROUND ME. I WAS WRONG.: So okay, I Netflix’d a bunch of movies, because… uh… Alan Rickman was in them. And he’s done a lot of random stuff. I mean, Sense and Sensibility was predictable but okay (once you tell me that one sister is played by Emma Thompson and one is played by Kate Winslet, I get that you want me to root for the former over the latter, thanks).... Read more

ONE OF US: Via Sean Collins, this neat-looking, thinky horror blog with an excellent sidebar. Which reminds me that Final Girl is one of my favorite blog titles ever. Read more

Our duty is to form our sensibilities around our convictions, not the other way around.—Party of Death Read more

NATURE IS A LANGUAGE: So apparently next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine will have an article on opposition to contraception. I’m sure it will be a theologically sophisticated, nuanced, understanding, reasonable–no, yeah, lying’s a sin. I expect it will be uber-lame. So here are a couple links instead. Maggie Gallagher on problems with the consequentialist arguments against contraception. (Not sure what I think of this yet. The Lambeth Conference abandonment of traditional Christian prohibitions on contraception seems like a huge... Read more

THE USES AND ABUSES OF JANE JACOBS: …Given urban planners’ almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of “Death and Life”–that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand, utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners. Modern planners have contorted Jacobs’s beliefs in hopes of imposing their static, end-state vision of a city. They use a set of highly prescriptive policy tools–like urban growth boundaries, smart growth, and... Read more

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Reason isn’t the opposite of mysticism. Both reason and mysticism are the opposites of practicality/pragmatism/”muddling through.” Read more

The last night I spent on Blogwatch Street,Goodbye house forever… The Club for Growth has created a new Free Speech Action Center to fight restrictions on political speech: …Since the House passage of H.R. 513, columnist George Will said the action was “traducing the Constitution and disgracing conservatism.” Forbes Magazine called that bill “McCain-Feingold on steroids” and said “the move is like banning printing presses because your opponents use them to publish brochures criticizing you.” The Rocky Mountain News called... Read more

So, for example, some people take the view that human beings become “persons,” and acquire rights, only when they acquire the capacity for abstract mental functioning, and cease to be persons with rights when they lose this capacity. If “capacity” is taken to mean immediately exercisable capacity (as it usually is on this view), then it is possible to allow abortion, research that destroys human embryos, and euthanasia of the permanently comatose and persistently vegetative. There are, however, difficulties with... Read more