Islam Is At War With Us

I’ve been warning since 2002 that the West really is in a war to defend civilization against Islamic barbarians, and had better face up to that fact before the consequences of whitewashing Islam as a “religion of peace” get worse. Comes now Fjordman, a blogger from Norway who tells us that Moslem immigrants to Sweden… Continue reading Islam Is At War With Us

Open Letter to Steve Lohr & John Markoff

You’ve described only symptoms in Windows Is So Slow, but Why?, not the underlying problem. Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.

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Categorized as Software

HOWTO updates

I’ve just upgraded to Fedora Core 5. As a consequence, I’ve updated the following HOWTOs Fedora Core on Thinkpad X40 HOWTO Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO

The End of Faith

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is a well-executed polemic of a kind that, in retrospect, has been curiously absent in the West over the last fifty years. Not since I read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian in the early 1970s have I seen an attack on organized religion as clear, uncompromising,… Continue reading The End of Faith

The Rape Exception

Logicians know that when you deduce a contradiction, your premises are broken. When human beings express a contradiction, it usually means their true beliefs are not their stated or conscious ones; they’re rationalizing a position which they may not be fully aware of.

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Categorized as Politics

Hotness in Hollywood

I had planned my string of meditations on the movies to stop with three. But, having succumbed to the mischievous blandishments of my beloved wife Cathy, here’s a fourth. Today I shall consider hotness in Hollywood — some movies that at least partly sold me with sex, and how they did it.

When Hollywood Gets It Right

My last two posts (If Hollywood Were Really Brave and Out of the Frame) have slammed Hollywood pretty hard for cranking out preachy, boring crap while congratulating itself on its bravery. I’ll make it a triptych by examining some recent movies that I found truly excellent.

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Categorized as Culture

Out of the Frame

Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars, comes today’s report on the status of the film industry. The most hyped movie of 2005 was a depressing, pokey flick about gay sheepherders. The Oscar nominations were otherwise dominated by one movie that flogged us all for our… Continue reading Out of the Frame

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If Hollywood Were Really Brave

The Oscar night of 2006 brought us the unedifying spectacle of George Clooney (whom I must say I truly admire when he shuts his yap and acts) celebrating Hollywood’s bravery for being willing to make movies like Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck. Conservative commentators have already pointed out how hollow and laughable… Continue reading If Hollywood Were Really Brave

Rethinking Imperialism

One of the effects of the Soviet meme war I’ve been writing about recently is that to most educated Westerners it is absolutely taboo to think that Western imperialism might have been a good thing. Since the end of World War II, even conservatives have generally conceded this point, as a way not to look… Continue reading Rethinking Imperialism

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