Just added YACCS comments to the template…
…can someone smarter than I tell me how to move the little “Make a comment” link to the right a couple dozen points? I did manage to figure out how to change the size and font…sigh.

JunkYard Blog has a set of scary pictures…wonder what Gore Vidal has to say?
Courtesy of Instapundit

I thought Spring was already here; but based on the comments in the blogoverse, the testosterone is rising now instead. Den Beste, and then Den Beste again, is answered by Olsen, and then Raymond offers a harder-core perspective.
Olsen seems to have come out the worse, based on what looks like his backing off. [Note: this has changed since I wrote this, and he is in his own words, ‘clarifying’, not backing off.] Since things have cooled off, let me dump some ether on the embers and take his back.

I’m a hippie liberal who thinks sex is great and p0rn isn’t. Not just for the reasons outlined by Raymond above – “that it’s anti-erotic and not well done” – but inherently, because it externalizes and commodifies what ought to be a core human experience, and because it a part of a dangerous larger trend which risks making us all passive consumers of our lives, instead of participants in them.

It’s not just p0rn, it’s the NBA and NFL and NASCAR; the replacement of sport – in which we can participate at the park, or rink, or even the local dirt-track – with spectacle, in which hundreds of participants entertain tens of millions of spectators.

The idea that we would ‘professionalize’ sex in the same ways that we have professionalized sports and entertainment appalls me.

I try and explain to my sons – who all have a healthy teenage interest in the female form – that it’s better to hold hands and smooch with a real girl than to jerk off to pictures of someone you’ll never meet, much less get to go to bed with.

When Olson says:

You can talk to them, you can even touch them, but you have to treat them as individuals, as actual people with identities of their very own, or they will know that they aren’t real to you, that they are just symbols, and no one wants to be just a symbol. They want to be loved, they want to be touched, they want you to do everything to them that you want to do to them; but they want to be treated as actual flesh and blood, not as bloodless abstractions. No one ever had a relationship with an abstraction.

He’s speaking from the POV of the ‘object’ of attraction. What I’d add to that is that as the one who is attracted, you’ll have a better time when you acknowledge that your attraction is to a person, rather than an image.
So instead of buying p0rn, go meet someone and ask them out. Instead of watching the NBA finals and tying your identity to a team of mercenaries, go down to the park and play some hoops. Don’t wear someone else’s jersey, wear your own.

Or maybe, instead of sitting and consuming what passes for news and commentary these days, start your own blog.

Declan McMullen’s excellent site has a link to a new expansion of wiretapping and logtapping (what else would you call it?) powers in the U.K.
Apparently they are giving every local Animal Control Board rights to read your email.

It extends the list of public authorities that can issue RIP s22 notices
(ie to access traffic data from telcos and ISPs)…
…to add the following central Government departments
1. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
2. The Department of Health.
3. The Home Office.
4. The Department of Trade and Industry.
5. The Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions.
6. The Department for Work and Pensions.
7. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment for Northern
Ireland.
AND pretty much any local authority
8. Any local authority within the meaning of section 1 of the Local
Government Act 1999
9. Any fire authority as defined in the Local Government (Best Value)
Performance Indicators Order 2000
10. A council constituted under section 2 of the Local Government etc.
(Scotland) Act 1994
11. A district council within the meaning of the Local Government Act
(Northern Ireland) 1972

This isn’t how to win a war on terrorism, this is the way to create a Stalinist state.
Even a liberal like me can see that.

Joe Katzman, over at Winds of Change, has a series of excellent articles on dirty bombs and the political/tactical effects of the recent Chicago arrest.
How do these guys do it?

Eric Raymond has a great response to Howard Owen’s and my blathering about liberals and conservatives.
I always put it less thoroughly, but a bit more succinctly: It’s a choice between the people who gave you the S & L scandals and those who gave you the DMV.

Conventional wisdom has unpopular Gov. Gray “SkyBox Liberal” Davis in a lock for this election over his stiff and inexperienced (but wealthy) opponent Bill “Daddy’s Money” Simon Jr. in the election for Governor of California. Could the CW be wrong? Today’s S.F. Chronicle suggests that an election could break out in California this fall.
At this point I can’t in any conscience vote for Simon; but in opposition, I’d rather get my hands chewed off by a woodchipper than vote for Davis, who is a corrupt, small-minded, visionless functionary. Fun decision, no? Is Mel Brooks running?? Gov. LePetomaine, anyone?

…sorry, Professors Reynolds and Vokoloh…
Check out my neighbor, Little green Football: EU shuts off the money.
I’m off looking for confirmation.

TAP backs up Lou Dobb’s assesment that the Islamists are the threat.
They also set out a pretty good agenda for the Democrats, if the Democrats had anyone bold enough to stake out a position.
Thanks to Instapundit for the lead.

Gene Expression, written by three scientists and a venture capitalist.