Fun stuff
- Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Take-a-Gander – Olympic photography.
- Fancy-shmancy thermostat – Yeah, this sort of thing gets me to thinking. Often with expensive results.
- WFMAD Day 3 – More writing exercises.
- Mister Clean – How to get men interested in house cleaning.
- Simon’s Cat is Everycat – “The wrong side of every door.”
- Radiation! In! SPAAAAAAAAACE! – Tak-tak-tak-tak-tak-tak …
- Because what could possibly go wrong? Wait, we know the answer to that … – A millionaire wants to clone dinosaurs …
Serious stuff
- Gay employees of Chick-fil-A – For a lot of them, this has been a sad wake-up call. And not about the company they work for.
- Um … free speech, anyone? – The judge in the Apple/Samsung fight seems to be overstepping just a wee bit, in my opinion.
- The Twilight of the Manual – I do love my manual transmission. Sadly …
And politics (which are sometimes fun, sometimes not)
- Rationing in the marketplace of ideas – Because a university is where you are supposed to talk about ideas, not silence them.
- Phoiling Phelps? – As much as I loathe the Westboro Baptist gang, finding ways to hedge in their detestable speech makes it easier to to the same for others.
- Drought, corn, ethanol, and cows – What a climate-changing mess.
- Giving the President a pass on the economy – At least that’s what one major candidate has asked us to do.
- Yes, this is definitely how an anti-Christian administration behaves – Yet another reason why the Religious Right’s accusations about Obama are hysterically laughable.
- The job numbers – They aren’t good, but they aren’t significantly worse. As much as some would like them to be.
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Just out of interest, has Margie been as interested in mens diving and swimming as my wife has. ..
Margie has a fine appreciation for the well-rounded male athletes — diving/swimming, water polo, beach volleyball.
That she sticks with me, regardless of my appearance in trunks, I take as a sign that I’m great in the sack.
Re: The Odious Phelps
I don’t see anything at all wrong with the 300 foot restriction. I’m not sure about the time restrictions. We’ll have to wait and see because I’m sure TOP will take legal action. 300 feet sounds about right to me. The Odious Phelps’ right to free speech should not trump the rights of families to mourn in peace. Perhaps my view is slanted, having experienced picketing by Phelps, not at a funeral, but at the General Convention of our Church in Philadelphia some years back….back before the news media made TOP and his deluded followers (at that time, I believe they were all his family) famous beyond the Kansas state line.
Some restrictions on distance are possibly a reasonable compromise — but have already been tried. The restriction on time is much more problematic.
The problem, of course, is that the Phelpsies’ freedom of speech is constitutionally protected; the freedom of privacy for a family in mourning is human decency, but not necessarily protected by the constitution.
Nobody is stopping them saying it. just where. You already accept boundaries to free speech, to constantly treat the First Amendment as some sort of inviolable adjunct that anyone can say anything anywhere and any time is ignoring that fact.
@LH – I’d argue that it’s something that requires constant push-back against infringement.
You’ve previously supported the right to make dog fighting videos under ‘freedom of speech’, even though you appeared to agree with the prosecution of the person who organised the fight.
How do you feel about child porn? Is that not freedom of expression, especialy because in many places the age of consent is lower than the the age at which a person can appear in porn?
@LH – Hmmm. Trying to think of when I supported that right re dog fighting videos.
That said — viz child porn, while I despise it with a deep and abiding passion, it is on some ways a Godwinesque example in the realm of censorship, which makes it particularly dangerous to use as a standard upon which to base efforts to decide what to, and not to, suppress. Which gets even dicier where you have different countries with lower ages of consent (if country X has an age of consent of 8, can/should child porn with 8yos from country X be outlawed in country Y?).
It’s an area I’m willing to err on the side of suppression, but with the understanding that it’s fine example of the conflicts of principles in a very complicated world of varying instances.