Did you think that the election was over? Nope. In the Minnesota Nov 4 Senate election, Al Franken (D) lost by 206 votes (out of almost 3 million). This close of a margin requires a hand recount. About 34,000 votes were rejected by machines (uncounted), primarily in Democrat-heavy districts. With this…
This is a charming little story. Priest dumps all over his parishioners. Now, I was never a Catholic, but I once considered marrying a Catholic girl and went through some of the obligatory classes at her church. We got to the part about promising to raise the children Catholic and…
I wrote this originally in 2004, upon the passage of an antigay measure in Missouri. With the passage of Prop 8 in California, I thought it would be worth reposting here.
You may have heard. Missouri has become the first state in the union to establish a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. More will follow, of course, but it’s something to be the first.
I live here. This is my state.
Shame on us.
This was not, however, unexpected. Did anyone actually believe Americans, especially in the middle of the country, are ready, en masse, to embrace such a substantial change in attitude toward an institution that extends back to the murkiness of prehistory?
Prehistory. Genesis notwithstanding, I make that claim based on the fact that we have no documentary evidence that at a given moment Marriage was invented. It’s something homo sapiens brought with it into the historical period, which is really only that part of time in which we have had writing. Writing that survived, to be more specific. For all we know there may be a cache of stone tablets or whatever yet undiscovered extending that time backward reliably by a century or millennia or more. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the historical era has lasted (reliably) for ten thousand years. We can quibble over certain dates, but we’ve got evidence suggesting that humans have lived in organized social groups for at least that long, which suggests that we’ve been doing so for a …
One of the comics that I read is called PhDComics ("Piled Higher and Deeper"). Originally a student strip from Stanford, and now grown into a franchise of its own. Go here to see how the author reports on our 2008 presidential election, as he experienced while on tour in Europe.…
[rant warning!] Wait, who's dead? Three of the bastards who carried out the Sari club bombing in Bali in 2002. They've been sitting on death row since then and within the last 24 hours were shot dead by an Indonesian state death squad. Their coffins, predictably, were paraded through the…