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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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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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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Media Analysts Sound Pessimistic as Iraq Civil War Fails to Materialize

WASHINGTON — Media analysts sounded an increasingly gloomy note today following news that a full-scale outbreak of civil war in Iraq had been averted. “The prospects for regime change in Washington seem increasingly remote,” said one senior White House reporter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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The Meme War Continues

Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship. Sound like a crazy premise? Wait. It gets better. Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading dissident of the Soviet era whom was invited to testify at the Russian government’s inquiry into whether the Soviet Communist Party had been a criminal institution. got to see more of the KGB’s secret reports… Continue reading The Meme War Continues

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Game Theory and Vote Fraud

Any democracy should aspire to a perfect, fraud-free voting system. But today’s loudest complainers on this issue — mainly Democrats complaining about Republican election victories — should be careful what they wish for, because they might get it. To see why, let’s apply a little game theory to the problem. Ask yourself under what circumstances… Continue reading Game Theory and Vote Fraud

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Outsourcing breeds more jobs

CNNMoney reports: Demand for technology workers in the United States continues to grow in spite of American companies shifting more technology work overseas, according to a new study. Sigh. Is there, like, some cosmic law that reporters have to be poisonously ignorant about economics? Of course outsourcing stimulates domestic demand. Increases in efficiency and better… Continue reading Outsourcing breeds more jobs

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Against Suicidalism from Down Under

Keith Windschuttle gets it. In The Adversary Culture he identifies the same suicidalist pathology that Mark Brittingham and Jeff Goldstein and I have been writing about recently. Windschuttle, an Australian historian, identifies historians and cultural-studies types on the academic left as vectors of the disease. I wonder if he’s read Koch on Willi Munzenberg or… Continue reading Against Suicidalism from Down Under

Ephemeralization against the bureaucracy

Segway inventor Dean Kamen unveils his next act, and it’s a doozy. He’s invented two devices to address the power and clean-water problems in the Third World — essentially, a rugged still and a generator that burns cow dung. But the real challenge to conventional thinking is Kamen’s (rightly) contemptuous dismissal of conventional development economics,… Continue reading Ephemeralization against the bureaucracy

Wal-Mart and the morning after

Politics is nasty enough when it’s about real issues, because it always reduces to somebody holding a gun on somebody else. But somehow I find it hardest to take when it’s about faux issues, all the machinery of coercion enlisted to no purpose other than for fools to posture at each other.

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Gramscian damage

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois. We don’t… Continue reading Gramscian damage

Un-ending the Internet

Recently, The Nation ran an article, The End of the Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer’s monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They also want to be able… Continue reading Un-ending the Internet