DocJay, speaking of leather goods: here's an item about Aristotle Onassis's yacht and the upholstery of its bar stools (see the description of the Aris Bar).

Patients say the charmingly-named "Shang Ring" device is mostly painless and surprisingly easy to wear for the ten days it takes for the separation of the foreskin to be complete.

Seems like a good fit for Africa's needs: safe, easy and cheap.

Paul, that would be this memo from the CDC.

Hostage video? More like the forced confession of errors so familiar to those who remember the USSR (or observe present-day China and Cuba).

Shane is not only the best Western movie, but the best movie of all time. Followed closely by High Noon.

And after all, if one doesn't like people getting killed by reckless drivers, make killing people by driving recklessly illegal.  Problem solved.

The free choice to responsibly drive drunk or at NASCAR speeds on the public roads should be something every right-thinking conservative supports.  So long as those who irresponsibly abuse that choice are held accountable for any harm they cause, everything will be fine.  (Well, except for the dead and maimed people they leave in their wake: it's not clear how they'll come out of the deal with their rights intact.)

/sarc

The thing about psychotropic drugs is that they directly act on the citizen's faculties of judgment and responsibility.  Tobacco and caffeine don't (much), alcohol does, and illicit drugs do even more.

I don't think the words "sensible use" match up with cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine.

Surely this is how Obama sees himself. But as Mistheocracy points out, Obama is doing none of the heavy lifting himself.

Everything Cyrano says in response to the insult, "Your nose is rather large."

I am confused. The parts of the woman's letter you quoted don't mention love at all, only sex. The advice columnist is also confused: she seems to think that the sole purpose of marriage is to have sex.Sexual obsession is not love. It also is an insufficient foundation for a marriage (outside of those instant marriages that last only long enough to legitimize a sexual relationship).The letter writer probably is acting out her anxiety about entering into marriage and pledging fidelity to one man. Her sex partner represents a lifeline to her youthful freedom and she is terrified of letting it go. She isn't drawn to the sex partner by love: she's afraid of the love she has with her fiancé and the power it will have over her.

What's to worry?  Can't be more than a tenth of one percent of those 47 million who'd be willing to carry out terrorist attacks on the West.

That's only... carry the two... hold on...

47,000.

47,000 individuals willing to be used as human bombs... hmm....

Okay, worry.

The crowd is now assembled at Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of Oakland's City Hall. The cops are keeping them contained, although at some point I am sure the protesters will attempt a rampage through downtown, as is their wont.

Here at the Oakland Federal Building, the crowds haven't materialized yet. Even the two ladies from the MacArthur-Temescal Neighborhood Alliance who were holding up the "Occupy the Federal Building" have left. All the action is at the Wells Fargo Bank at 14th and Broadway - there were about 100 protesters there a couple of hours ago, but I don't know if their numbers have grown or shrunk since. It seems to be business as usual for most of downtown Oakland.

One misstep that Sarah Palin made that still rankles me is when she let Biden off the hook in the Vice Presidential debate for saying, "We and France forced Hezbollah out of Lebanon."  That was the most phenomenally blatant example of making up history I have ever seen, and had Palin called him on it, she would have destroyed the narrative that Biden was a foreign policy expert and she was a foreign policy naif.

Obama is a keen student of the public reaction to the media.  He saw how Palestinian politicians could thrive by saying soothing, emollient things about peace in English to a Western audience and turning around and pledging armed resistance in Arabic to their domestic audience.

The current conventional wisdom is that a politician can't really get away with that kind of telling-each-audience-what-it-wants-to-hear behavior, because the Internet and phone cams make it impossible to keep the message to one audience away from other audiences to whom the politician has said the opposite.

However, this conventional wisdom doesn't account for two factors: first, a whole lot of people aren't interested in looking for information that contradicts the nice things the politician told them, and second, people have a very deep capacity for rationalizing the behavior of people they like.  When confronted with the same guy saying the opposite thing to another audience, people often assume he's lying to the other people and telling them the truth.  As the old joke goes, "Who you gonna believe - me or your own eyes?"

No!  This cannot be!  I have it on the highest authority, straight from a Ricochet contributor, that "George Zimmerman is a punk who shot a boy he did not conclude was armed."  To that contributor, it "sounds like he hunted that boy," and if you disagree, he'll tell you you're a liar.