I’m leaving for a two week ski trip in Colorado, so no blogging for a while, I’m afraid.
Want to get to know me better? Check out the new section of my bio page.

In other news, Castro as Hitler on Cuban front page sparks hunt for mystery satirist.

After asking voters not to focus on “guns, God and gays,” Howard Dean is using Jesus in his campaign rhetoric – but only in the South. Dean is a “Congregationalist” (wtf is that?) and has a Jewish wife and children. Methinks that (a) Dean is too pragmatic to hold any kind of explicit abstract belief, and (b) Dean already has his bases loaded with deities to worship – like the environment and the “common good.” Cox and Forkum comments:

In other news, Dean thinks Bin Laden should be presumed innocent until a jury decides otherwise:

I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,” Dean said. “I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.

Earth to Dean: There is an essential difference between a civilized, law-abiding country and a war zone. It is just as absurd to hold jury trials in a war zone, as it is to use machine guns and bombs against a common thief. Both Saddam and Bin Laden (if he is captured alive) should be tortured to obtain any relevant information and unceremoniously shot and dumped back into the hole they crawled from. If either is presumed innocent, then why did hundreds of U.S. soldier’s lives and uncounted billions of dollars go to kill them?

The next environmentalist mass hysteria is at hand: the earth is slowing down. Collision with sun/moon is imminent.

Correction: what I meant to say is that after billions of years, the earth has stopped slowing down — since 1999 that is. The difference is less than a second a year, but the missing leap-second is significant to scientists and many communication systems.

CATO: “The sad truth is that the best purpose for the homeland security advisory system is for the federal bureaucracy to be seen as “doing something,” to prove to the public that politicians and government officials are not asleep at the wheel-if something actually does happen, they can claim they gave fair warning.”

I’ve been working on converting my website to a content management system that I can easily deploy on other sites. If you’re familiar with PHP, you can download my first hack at it CMS.rar">here. The interesting stuff is in cms.php and .htaccess. (File compressed with WinRar.) I used the CMS to generate this mobile/AvantGo version of my homepage.

Texas A&M has cloned a deer, which brings up the total number of species cloned at Aggieland to six. Nice to know that my own little neck of the woods is at the forefront of cloning research.

SelectSmart has a “presidential candidate selector poll.” Given that my answer was not listed for 2/3 of the questions, I think that the results are fairly accurate:

1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)
2. Libertarian Candidate (71%)
3. Bush, President George W. – Republican (69%)
4. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO – Democrat (43%)
5. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT – Democrat (42%)
6. Edwards, Senator John, NC – Democrat (37%)
7. Kerry, Senator John, MA – Democrat (33%)
8. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT – Democrat (31%)
9. Sharpton, Reverend Al – Democrat (25%)
10. Phillips, Howard – Constitution (23%)

Though you will never see a campaign banner on my site, I will almost certainly be (once again) voting for Bush. Not because I like him or his policies, but because I alternatively shudder, laugh, and cringe at the alternatives.

Kwanzaa is different. It has connections to still-living violent criminals. It is an insult to the African American community, very few of whom celebrate Kwanzaa and even fewer of whom would celebrate it if they knew the full story of its recent history, to suggest that it is an “African American holiday.”

More on the founder here:

Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.

After spending most of a decade in prison, the author of Kwanzaa turned hardcore Marxist and is currently protesting the commercializing of his (explicitly socialist) holiday.

This TCS op-ed has to be the most insightful article on the peace movement I’ve ever read.

And here we begin to see why there is this strange and unholy alliance between idealistic liberalism, the vestiges of the old socialist left, traditional third world authoritarians, and the unrelenting forces of Islamic totalitarianism, theocracy, and terror. However various their ideas of what is the good, all are united in their desire for an enforced law of the good. Even elements of the human rights movement, much of the anti-globalist community, and a large swatch of the philanthropic world — the so-called NGOs — still yearn for a government that, through sumptuary laws, high taxation, political correctness, and entitlements, would force to happen what people ought to, but do not make happen of their own free will.

Interesting story about the hunt for Saddam @ Newsweek: “Saddam struggled and spat, until a commando slugged him.“