Friday, January 31, 2003

Bards Of The World Unite: under the banner of the peace quill world poets take an opportunity for a multinational group hug with friends, allowing that they have any friends left. In other news, U.S. Secretary of Defense, and nominated Introvert Of The Year, Donald Rumsfeld, apologizes for calling the milquetoast French and Germans an Axis of Weasel.

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

NY Newsday

Hillbilly butterhog cum Senator, the Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton inveighs against current foreign policy:

"Our people remain vulnerable...We have relied on a myth of homeland security -- a myth written in rhetoric, inadequate resources and a new bureaucracy...The truth is we are not prepared...and our approach to securing our nation is haphazard at best.”

Saturday, January 25, 2003

German's highest elected official sees "growing support" for the European anti-war position, while the Financial Times notes his party's slide into a historic low in support amongst voters.

Châteaux Appeasement, reservations desk, Chancellor Schröder speaking.

Monday, January 20, 2003

If feminism's core moral idea is that women are equal to men in rights and dignity, why isn't the West's sisterhood doing more to help their Islamic constituents?

Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam

Friday, January 17, 2003

Nietzche: 'God Is Dead' — Nitschke: 'Care To Join Him?'

Pro-death advocate from Down Under, Dr. Philip Nitschke, has developed an "exit bag" where a person places the bag over his head, pulls a drawstring, and suffocates, receiving apparent inspiration from warnings on plastic pillow sheaths.

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Yahoo! News

Fraulein Sheryl Crow, Sun-Tzu of her generation, waxes wise about war and leads my mind to wander about what karmic retributions will befall the heroin gaunt Ms. Crow for her aural crimes:

"I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies."

Sunday, January 12, 2003

Yahoo! News

North Korea, a proud member of the Axis of Evil, dispatches this truculent epistle from an underground bunker where they horde American food shipments and gaily karaoke Judy Garland records:

"The claim that we admitted developing nuclear weapons is an invention fabricated by the U.S. with sinister intentions...[and] if the United States evades its responsibility and challenges us, we'll turn the citadel of imperialists into a sea of fire."
The Common Review

Here we find E.O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, in the throes of brain fever and nattering like an insufferable fool regarding the definition of philosophy and the extents of scientific inquiry:

Modern champions of science, however, increasingly emboldened by its triumphs, particularly in biology, have no such qualms about claiming the ground once occupied by religion. For Wilson, science is the via media to saving the planet from ecological extinction. He shares with [C.P.] Snow the Enlightenment belief that salvation will come from the triumph of the scientific method. He regards the humanities and the social sciences in their present incarnation as largely irrelevant mystifications of their subject matter. "Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking dominion," Wilson writes in Consilience. "We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science."

Thursday, January 09, 2003

Quote of the day:

"The new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything." - G.K. Chesterton

Monday, January 06, 2003

That evil exists is obvious to even the most casual observer, as my father used to say, and as a subject has attained topic du jour status in post 9-11 commentary. Epicurus famously asked "What is the cause of evil" and though he doesn't engage that question, Christopher Hitchens recently wrote a thoughtful, though ultimately disappointing, essay defending the use of the word as "the best negative superlative that we possess".