Archive | April, 2004

Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to sue a company that is distributing Arnold Schwarzenegger bobble-heads. Schwarzenegger’s claim is not unprecedented, even among political leaders: The Martin Luther King, Jr. estate successfully blocked the distribution of busts of King; I discuss the case in my Freedom of Speech and the Right of Publicity article.      But as I […]

Clayton Cramer writes: I was reading through John D. Cushing, ed., The Earliest Printed Laws of North Carolina, 1669-1751, and I found [this item] at 2:146 from John Locke’s 1669 Fundamental Constitution of Carolina. . . . 80th. Since multiplicity of comments, as well as of laws, have great inconveniences, and serve on to obscure […]

I’m with Glenn Reynolds on this.

Knight-Ridder reports: As the insurgency and violence in Iraq intensify, the Department of Defense has proposed a new rule for most of the estimated 70,000 civilian contractors working in the war-torn region: They can’t carry guns. At the same time, a top Defense Department official this week acknowledged publicly for the first time that the […]

Jonah Goldberg makes some good points on this. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)

Reader Paul Forsyth points out that C.S. Lewis beat me to my witches observation by decades (not surprising — my point was pretty obvious). Forsyth quotes Mere Christianity, p. 26: But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did — if we […]

Where’s the (necessarily arbitrary) dividing line between Europe and Asia? Setting aside the obvious water boundaries, I understood that Europe included all the USSR west of the Ural Mountains, so the Eastern and Southeastern boundary was the Urals, the Caspian, plus the Soviet-Turkish border. But now it appears that Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan are being […]

D’oh! A federal drug agent shot himself in the leg during a gun safety presentation to children and his bosses are investigating. . . . “The kids screamed and started to cry,” said Vivian Farmer, who attended the presentation with her 13-year-old nephew. “Everyone was pretty shaken up,” Farmer said. “But the point of gun […]

A reader writes, apropos this post: “But part, I think, might be the tendency of some people — at least in some circles — ” In the spirit of light hearted Friday afternoon banter, I offer the following suggestion: You might, under some circumstances, evaluate, consider, or at least entertain the possibility of limiting, restricting […]

My friend Jim Lindgren, who is a law professor and a demographic researcher, writes: In the 1972-2002 NORC General Social Surveys of the US public, approximately equal numbers of Asian women (23%) and non-Asian women (24%) think that “Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men” (FEHOME, […]

There has undoubtedly been a marked change in American Jewish attitudes toward immigration since 9/11, with a much larger percentage of Jews expressing ambivalence or hostility toward liberal immigration policies. The unease Jews feel about immigration these days, with fears that American cities will become more like Paris or even Toronto or Montreal in terms […]

Hussein’s Information Minister was trying to arrange uranium purchase. From the Washington Post: It was Saddam Hussein’s information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as “Baghdad Bob,” who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade — an overture the official saw as a […]

A reader writes: I just wanted to write in and take you to task for the quote, “While I wouldn’t have excluded Communists, past Communists, or Communist sympathizers from all federal jobs (not because I like them, but because of the First Amendment), I surely think it’s perfectly constitutional and proper to exclude them from […]

A reader writes: I wonder if you really meant this: If there were witches, in the standard sense of people who could use black magic to harm the rest of us, then of course we ought to hunt them. The reason I ask is that you’re suggesting hunting witches because they could harm us, not […]

At The Right Coast, Thomas Smith is criticizing New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen for, among other things, “[advising] a man who finds himself exclusively attracted to Asian women [that] he get help for his racism.” I haven’t read that Cohen item, but if Smith is characterizing it correctly, Cohen’s advice is indeed bunk. There’s […]