Is there a spell-checker for tattoo artists?

 ♦ John Robb: The Coming Urban Terror. Written in 2007. Prescient — think Mumbai.

 ♦ More John Robb: An essay looking back at the privatization of America from the year 2025. Written in 2007, and disturbingly accurate about the economic developments.

 ♦ Keeping you abreast of the news: Tempest in a C-cup – 130,000 boobs lost at sea

 ♦ The security sieve at NASA: Network Security Breaches Plague NASA

 ♦ Wondering what our northern neighbors are up to with their government crisis? A Guide for the perplexed – Canada’s Constitutional Crisis

 ♦ Newsweak looks at the scriptural basis for marriage — and ends up making a fool of themselves (no surprise there): Sola scriptura minus the scriptura. Does the media go out of its way to hire idiots, or do they become stoopid working in that environment?

Remember, the Big Media (or B.M., as I prefer to call them) are far superior to New Media because, you know, they have editors — so what does Newsweak’s editor — who let this piece of drivel be published — think of the criticism it’s getting? “The worst kind of fundamenatalism”: What \'s the standard?. Jeez.

Update: Newsweek’s article, Our Mutual Joy, and Francis Beckwith’s response (with other references) is here. See also Rob Bowman’s excellent fisking: Fallacies in Biblical Interpretation: Newsweek \'s Defense of Gay Marriage.

 ♦ I smell defeat: Those of us in the Puget Sound area have been following a rather strange series of occurrences with our northern neighbors: feet, with shoes still on, have been washing ashore in British Columbia. Investigators have been stumped, but some clues are turning up: B.C. coroner matches pair of mysterious feet

Now, the copy-editor-wannabe in me is wondering why the AP has such a lame headline for this story. Here’s a few which come to mind:

  * “Six feet under in British Columbia”
  * “Friends say missing dancer had two left feet”
  * “Critics say New Balance ‘Rise to the Top’ ad is insensitive”
  * “Foot-weary Investigators Get a Clue”
  * “Proof that the Sole Survives Death”

 ♦ Wonder what the postage was? Inmate escapes German jail in box

 ♦ On the futility and shallowness of secular conservatism: Life, License, and the Pursuit of Pleasure:

Boethius would say that because we are ignorant of the end for which things exist, we think that stupid and wicked people are prosperous and happy. Boethius was a Christian, but that statement could have come from Marcus or Epictetus or Plato. The corollary is just as potent. We can never find happiness, or enjoy liberty, if we are stupid and wicked. It isn’t simply that a wicked and stupid people will lose their political freedoms. They will; but only because they have already lost their last shreds of liberty within. What good is the franchise, when we are slaves all the same?

 ♦ In a similar vein, there’s been a rather nasty spat going on between secular and religious conservatives; in short, the secular folks (e.g., Heather MacDonald & Kathleen Parker) want the religious folks thrown under the bus, because religion is just so “irrational” and without empirical evidence, etc., etc. — and furthermore, it’s keeping “real” conservatives from winning elections. Edward Feser’s response (author of The Last Superstition) should be read as an example of a gracious, yet entirely devastating, rebuttal to this “no empirical evidence for religion” foolishness: An open letter to Heather MacDonald

That’s all for now, back soon.