BALKO ON LOTT. Basically sums up my feelings. Bleccchhhh. EDITED TO ADD: Go read this post at Regions of Mind–scenes from the 1948 campaign. Read more

SILBER ON ME ON RAND ON ART: First installment in a defense of the claim that aesthetics can be derived from reason alone. I’ll probably write more on this once Arthur’s written more, since right now I feel like two vague things (Rand’s “sense of life” and my “real way that real humans have responded to our real world. They are distilled–there’s that word again–expressions of a Gnostic world, a mortal world, a world of pride. …a way of being–an... Read more

MORE ON MOVIES THAT SHAPED OUR CULTURE: The Rat writes to remind me that the James Bond movies are quite different from the books (which I haven’t read); she suggests that although my Bond–>Lecter connection may be valid for the Bond of the movies, it doesn’t work for the Bond of the books. Rob Dakin adds, “Notably absent from the list was DeMille’s silent ‘King of Kings,’ which I saw every year in the Easter season, still playing annually in... Read more

IRAQ + AL QAEDA = ?: So there have been more reports of a shadowy Saddam/Osama link. Here’s the most recent one–the VX gas transfer allegation. Key claim: “The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October….” What happens if this is true? What does it mean for people, like me, who lean anti-war-with-Iraq? I’m not sure, so I’m going... Read more

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SHADOW DANCE: A rambling post about Angela Carter and gender. Not trying to rigorously prove anything, more trying to show some of the roots of my current beliefs about men and women. Since I actually FINISHED my fall reading list (sorta… I knocked a couple books off it, which I guess is cheating), I’ve been on an Angela Carter rereading kick. I first found Carter in high school. I loved the way she could draw you into an inchoate world... Read more

“Anyway, she was a great convenience for him; he took a certain pleasure in coupling with the wife of a man who taught him ethics; she left most of his evenings free; and he felt, with a puritanical sense of satisfaction inherited from his aunt, that he was learning something important about the middle class.” –Angela Carter, Love Read more

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE “MOVIES THAT SHAPED OUR CULTURE” LIST: A couple days ago I posted a list that forms the basis of Nick Clooney’s new Movies That Changed Us. All of these lists are inherently pretty random–there’s simply too much cultural influence out there. It’s a vast pool; each observer dips a hand in and tries to grab as much of the stuff as possible, then analyzes the handful and pretends the rest of the pool never existed. So... Read more

U.S. SAYS NUCLEAR ATTACKS ARE AN OPTION AGAINST IRAQ. Baby, let’s twist again… like we did last summer… come on, let’s twist again… like we did last year. Top link via Telford Work and Body and Soul. Read more

“Having failed to prove that private prisons are cheaper, the companies that run them have come to rely on political connections to help them win contracts, often contributing heavily to the campaigns of key politicians. Perhaps the king of them all in this regard is CCA. Company cofounder Tom Beasley is among the best-connected men in Tennessee. Before starting CCA, Beasley had served as chairman of Tennessee’s Republican Party, and he was very close to many of the state’s politicians.... Read more