Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Some of us will remember how Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and in charge of regulating the Internet, demonstrated his grasp of the technology: It’s not like a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. Now he’s defending himself:
“I have a letter from a big scientist who said I was [...]

One way I’ve found to relax is to work on the dry stone walls that are scattered around our property. These are walls I’ve built from scratch, from pallets of what’s sometimes called Tennessee River Stone. I think I’ve put up on the order of six or seven tons of the stones into [...]

I’m of the age when if I were to ask my friends if they’d ever collected baseball cards, the answer would be, “Of course!” I wasn’t a real collector, in that I had no more than a few dozen at any time, but they were a part of my boyhood (I think baseball cards [...]

Ryan Lizza flags a quiz that tells you whether you’re in the Red Tribe or the Blue Tribe, politically speaking, based on your lifestyle choices. It turns out that I’m “Red, Enough Said”, with a score of 8, just like Ryan.

My outrage knows no bounds. Martin Peretz, in a piece called “The Exercise of Common Sense”, writes,
I have just read the five Lebanon Travel Warnings issued by the Department of State from November 18, 2004 through today, July 19. OK, forget about the last one. It came too late for those trapped in Lebanon [...]

Some comments from (current or former) supporters of the war in Iraq simply enrage me. Andrew Sullivan:
As for my later comments about opponents of the Iraq war being “objectively pro-Saddam,” that seems to me to be indisputable. If they’d had their way, he’d still be in power.
Let me propose an analogy: It’s not hard [...]

Addresses foreign leaders with “Yo!” (while talking with his mouth full), gives uninvited shoulder massages to female colleagues, wipes his glasses on some else’s shirt, fiddles while Rome burns plays guitar while New Orleans floods: world-class jerk or President of the United States?
Update: The latest word on professionalism, from Tim Grieve. I just [...]

Josh Marshall quotes Bill Odom saying, “A reverse domino theory may be playing out in the Middle East.”
I’m being overly pedantic, but a reverse domino theory would have all the dominoes, once having fallen down, standing up on their own again. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, future historians may end up describing what’s [...]

I was reading Simon Blackburn’s book, Being Good, last night (I’m a big fan of his other popular book, Think), and I ran across a quotation from David Hume’s An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals:

When a man denominates another his enemy, his rival, his antagonist, his adversary, he is understood to speak the language [...]

So I have to be out of my office until about mid-day today, for an off campus meeting with a former student. I get back to my building, notice that it’s warm, a bit stuffy, and a bit darker than usual–a power transformer has blown. Surprisingly enough, I can be productive (as productive [...]