Words fail me, for once. I'd love to see the picture of the "martial arts" figure, though. Talk about an unfair advantage.  ¶ 12:08 PM 0 Comments

So France is pissed that US attorney Robert Spencer intends to seek the death penalty for 9/11 suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker."

It is good and well that a country which sold its own people up the river under foreign occupation now lectures us on human rights. The French have a long and noble history in places like Guyana and Algeria, which no doubt grants them an elucidatory familiarity with the issue, especially considering they gave the practice up not some time before the first, second, or thirty-sixth Republic, but all the way back in 1981.

Who is it that is pleased to read this sort of moral-equivalncy tripe? The same people who say, "Well it is a terrible thing that happened on 9/11, but..." In other words, moral cretins.  ¶ 3:40 PM 0 Comments

This, plus the fact that he was a cheerleader in college, would be enough under most circumstances to cement the question of whether Dubya knows the love that dare not speak its name. Next thing you know, the reporters will ask how his weekend was, and he'll say that "Me and Dick had a gay old time."  ¶ 2:57 PM 0 Comments

David Gelernter is possibly one of the brightest thinkers of the present age, and no stranger to political violence, having been the unfortunate recipient of a care package from Ted Kaczynski, AKA the Unabomber. His vision is all the more interesting because he is on one hand a famed computer scientist, and on the other a man of great faith, and the two blend together seamlessly.

In The Suicide of the Palestinians, he asks a very difficult question:

Everything has changed, including (for many of us) our ideas about Islam. We ought to have paid more attention to the latest developments. We now learn that suicide bombers are told to expect a heaven full of comely virgins as their next assignment. To the suicide-murderers, those waiting virgins are real as dirt. The killers call themselves "martyrs," but in their own minds they are the next thing to sex criminals. "Pardon me, sir or madam, do you know why I plan to murder your child? Because the authorities are offering me great sex--and, after all, I don't get many opportunities."

People who think this way are shielded from view, up to a point, by their own sheer evil. They are painful to contemplate. We instinctively look away, as we do whenever we are confronted with monstrous deformity. Nothing is harder or more frightening to look at than a fellow human who is bent out of shape. And moral deformity is the most frightening kind by far. How can Muslims of good faith allow such people to call themselves Muslim? But they do allow it. What does that mean? And is it possible that we have located here, in this inspiring vision of heaven as a whorehouse, the most loathsome idea in the history of human thought?

This is a religious war, folks. Not between Islam and Christianty, but between the sane and insane branches of Islam itself. Every time some wacko shoots up an abortion clinic, priests and ministers of even the more fundamentalist persuasions rush out to denounce the act. When Muslim spokesmen say, that it is only a very few who hold extremist views, I believe them. So where are they when the bombers strike? Could it be that beneath the veil of moderation, they believe that Israel deserves this, that American deserves this...

I am shocked by how liberals of good conscience, who claim legitimately to care deeply about the great humanistic values, can look at the Arab world and see any color but red. This story, about the exquisitely sensitive Saudi religious police, illustrates wonderfully the fundamental moral bankruptcy of these banana republics. It is true that we (speaking as a civilization, meaning The West) once oppressed them, and it is true that we are frequently guilty of misunderstanding. But they are guilty of barbarianism. It is not our duty to engage them, but rather theirs to come to terms with us.  ¶ 2:47 PM 0 Comments

One of my German co-workers is in town, and quite excited about coming to Southie to see the parade. He mentioned that in Cologne, they also have a parade, but it's really a gay parade. Maybe the people protesting here should go there?

So I had to explain to him that this was something of an issue in this country from time to time, that the Irish Gay People's Association or whatever they call themselves, wants to march in the parade sponsored by a bunch of Catholics, who have all sorts of problems these days. I explained that this is America, and as a private group, the parade has every right to exclude the gays. Likewise, when they have their nasty Gay Pride parade in Boston every summer, they would sure as Hell have the right to exclude a Catholic group that wanted to march under a banner reading, "You're all a bunch of filthy sinners."

Sophisticated people often preach that America can never tolerate compromise, but only simple extremes. My mother used to say to me, "You can't always divide the world into black and white," which bugged me far more than "pick up your dirty socks." Gray is indecisive, muddled, a situation where everybody- and nobody- wins. The way I see it, separating the parade scene into the Hibernians' Catholic parade, and the other side's Mardi Gras-style hedonistic farce makes perfect sense. Let's face it: there are real differences of philosophy at work here, and it's intellectually honest to present both sides in their own light. That means contradictory extremes, but like Emerson, we as a nation contain multitudes, and our magic is to contain them without constant civil war.  ¶ 8:19 AM 0 Comments

Thanks to an "upgrade" at my ISP, the entire backend to the Snob you came to know and love was completely and irretrievably destroyed. That being said, I came to sense shortcomings in its design which this accident offered the opportunity to remedy.

For those who haven't heard, "Blogs," or "Web Logs," are today what e-mail addresses were in 1994, home pages in 1995, ICQ accounts in 1996. And if I know nothing else, it's a good bandwaon when I see one. Far away from the madding crowds of Flash ads, chat-room flamewars, and the all-in-one Web empires of AOL and MSN, Blogs are delivering on the original promise of the Internet as a place where everyone could be part of "The Media." Matt Drudge long had this space to himself, but now has competition on all sides. My own personal favorite is Andrew Sullivan, whose blog has become the home of the Orwellian conscience in support of the war on terrorism. But politics is only one angle, and there are blogs, from excellenet to awful, in support of nearly every topic imaginable or otherwise.

Why have Blogs delivered where other approaches of the sort failed? I think it has to do with their style. Unlike a web-zine, which attempts to mimic a paper entity, blogs make sense only on the internet. They are real-time, short-attention span publications, often the fruit of a single auteur. Typically updated in frequent short bursts, they stay fresh and timely. It's not quite a conversation, but more like a tapping into the stream of consciousness of the person behind the blog.

So here, four years on, I'm trying all over again. Time will tell whether this works any better than the previous three grand attempts at critical mass.  ¶ 8:03 AM 1 Comments