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Citizens Split on Citizens United

By Cyberquill • 01/26/2012 • 10 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKZKETizybw

“There are real problems when people want to spend lots of money on a candidate … they’ll drown out the people who don’t have a lot of money,” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer recently remarked in reference to the infamous 5-4 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of 2010, whose dissenting minority of four he had joined. By nature, when a decision isn’t unanimous, “somebody is making a mistake,” he added. But which side was making a mistake in Citizens United? …

The Missing Amendment

By Cyberquill • 01/06/2012 • 9 Comments

Americans love their bread and circuses. The presidential election hullaballoo is in full swing, and it verges on the intolerable, as it does for almost two out of every for years. …

Watchmakers All the Way Down

By Cyberquill • 12/27/2011 • 3 Comments

A body with a fractured calvarium is found lying face-down on the sidewalk. The coroner explains that the victim was smashed over the head with a blunt object from behind. No witnesses, no murder weapon, no footprints, no fingerprints, and no DNA other than the victim’s, who, by all accounts, had no enemies. …

Omar and His Brides

By Cyberquill • 12/15/2011 • 8 Comments

Although I’ve expanded upon this topic twice before, I continue to find it fascinating from a civil rights perspective as well as with regard to an aspect of plain elementary logic which precludes me from hopping aboard the gay marriage “rights” bandwagon in spite of my overall sympathy for the cause itself. …

Fork in the Road

By Cyberquill • 11/26/2011 • 14 Comments

When you come to a fork in the road, take it out. For whatever reason, somebody may have driven a salad fork into the blacktop. Or a pitchfork. A visual artist may have done it. Or a savage road killer. …

Rainy Day ♫

By Cyberquill • 11/23/2011 • 6 Comments

I re-recorded one of my songs so as to improve upon the previous version, if ever so slightly. Eventually, I’m planning to submit this one to the Weather Channel.

Counting Pregnant Women

By Cyberquill • 11/21/2011 • 7 Comments

… Nothing against testing how far we can bend and stretch the words on the page so they accommodate our own views for the purpose of honing our argumentation skills in debating class; in the real world, however, those fewer-than-5,000 words that form the framework of the American system do not mandate everything we want nor do they outlaw everything we despise. …

Tickets for Jihad

By Cyberquill • 11/12/2011 • 8 Comments

One score years ago, during a break while rehearsing a German-language production of West Side Story in which I mimed, warbled, and pirouetted along as of the Jets, the director held forth on the importance of selecting catchy titles for musicals: the shorter and simpler, the better, he explained, and he cited notable examples such as Hair, Fame, Grease, Cats, Chorus Line, and, of course, West Side Story. …

I Had a Dream

By Cyberquill • 11/05/2011 • 20 Comments

Most of my nocturnal dreams I don’t remember at all, and the few that do linger in my consciousness upon waking generally don’t lend themselves to verbal recounting due to excessively convoluted plot lines. …

The Oreo Hypothesis

By Cyberquill • 11/04/2011 • 12 Comments

If you desire to hold on to your belief that God created the cosmos on 23 October 4004 BC, as reportedly sleuthed out from Biblical data by the venerable James Ussher in the 17th century AD, then how do you respond when confronted with truckloads of non-trivial astronomical and archeological data that put the age of our planet at roughly four billion and the age of the universe at 13 billion years and change? …

Let Us Dance Into the Night ♫

By Cyberquill • 10/15/2011 • 4 Comments

This is a new demo recording of a song I wrote a few years ago. It’s about trying to get a woman—or whoever else may be wearing “sexy lingerie” underneath a “pretty flower dress”—to disrobe: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] External Player → You can download it here. The lyrics are posted here.

“Fair and Balanced” and the Contrast Factor

By Cyberquill • 07/25/2011 • 6 Comments

Once upon a time, I worked at a restaurant that featured white cloth napkins, neatly folded, on glossy wooden tabletops. After some time, the owner—no idea what had possessed him—suddenly decided he wanted black napkins instead.

Fine. So henceforth, black napkins graced those wooden tabletops.

One day the laundry delivery was late, meaning our funereal napery wasn’t ready for the dinner shift, and the white napkins from before were pressed into service again.

When I came to work that night, a tidal wave of dazzling albescence almost knocked me back out the door. …

The Fox News Paradox

By Cyberquill • 07/14/2011 • 23 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR3eUjD6y6o&t=3m20s

“This network thinks Sarah Palin is a genius, that it’s OK to slaughter any Muslim you see, and that Obama is a Nazi and deserves to be overthrown.” Hard to say whether the commentator who …

Live and Let Live

By Cyberquill • 05/22/2011 • 6 Comments

There is no courage without fear. Implicit in the concept of courage is the notion of acting in spite of being afraid. If you’re not worried that anything bad might happen to you in consequence of your actions, you cannot be said to be acting courageously. …

The Individual Case

By Cyberquill • 05/20/2011 • 11 Comments

In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then-president of Harvard, got himself in hot water for stating that, overall, women’s aptitude for high-end science and engineering jobs was lower than men’s, and although the difference in terms of standard deviation from the mean between male and female was small, it supposedly translated into a substantial gender disparity in the available work pool. ….

Equality for Ketchup

By Cyberquill • 04/12/2011 • 26 Comments

When you go out for brunch, there’s a good chance the ketchup you slather on your mushroom omelet is married. Anyone, such as myself, unfortunate enough to ever have toiled in restaurants is intimately familiar with the server sidework known as “marrying” the ketchup, i.e., pouring the contents of one partially filled ketchup bottle into another partially filled ketchup bottle and repeating the process until one ends up with a bunch of brimful bottles and can toss the empty ones. …

Black Ink

By Cyberquill • 03/09/2011 • 16 Comments

You are my favorite visitor. Absent nonverbal clues, you have no way of knowing whether I’m being sincere, sarcastic, affectionately teasing, polite in a perfunctory way, or none of the above. As written and in isolation, “You are my favorite visitor” could mean you are my absolute favorite visitor, my least favorite visitor, that I’m just goofing around, or anything in between. …

A Novel Window to the Soul

By Cyberquill • 03/06/2011 • 8 Comments

Her eyes may be the windows to her soul, but her unclad epidermis is the window to the souls of her clients—at least according to Sarah White, New York’s famous Naked Therapist and most likely the only therapist in the country that might be able to sway Charlie Sheen to sign up for the counseling he so desperately needs. …

The Bigger Clown

By Cyberquill • 03/02/2011 • 21 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGXAGSLX02k&t=3m40s”>shootout

In my previous post, I discussed a segment on The O’Reilly Factor in which host Bill O’Reilly had stated several times that President Obama was not a Muslim, that he was not born abroad, and that everyone who thought otherwise was “insane.” …

Mullah Obama?

By Cyberquill • 02/15/2011 • 17 Comments

Surveys have shown that a non-trivial percentage of Americans (roughly one in five) believe President Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. Chances are an even greater percentage of Americans hold the Fox News Channel in large measure responsible for perpetuating this perception, along with the notion that Mr. Obama was born not on Oahu, but in Kenya. …

If Words Have No Meaning

By Cyberquill • 01/17/2011 • 19 Comments

The Washington Post reports that federal authorities are planning to move the trial of the alleged gunman in the Jan. 8 mass shooting in Tucson to San Diego. But what is government if words have no meaning?

Carnage on Your Corner

By Cyberquill • 01/12/2011 • 10 Comments

So some feeble-minded twerp with a semi-automatic Glock showed up at a political event in front of a Tucson Safeway—apparently not as safe as the name implies—and opened fire. Twenty people were hit, six of them fatally, yet the primary target miraculously survived in spite of a bullet having entered the back of her head, traversed her entire left cerebral hemisphere, and exited through her forehead. …

The Bison at the Beaver Pond

By Cyberquill • 12/19/2010 • 21 Comments

I grew up near a small creek. Come each spring, my buddies and I would set about constructing a dam at a particular spot in the creek. The dam itself and the little lake it created served no practical purpose whatsoever—we had no plans to add a power plant and earn ourselves candy & milkshake money by supplying the neighborhood with extra electricity, nor did the reservoir ever grow large enough to…

From Crawford With Book

By Cyberquill • 11/27/2010 • 13 Comments

George W. Bush has risen from Texas and is making the talk-show rounds to promote his autobiography “Decision Points.” He says he has few regrets, loved serving the country, gave it his all, is glad to be back home in Crawford, and will leave the final verdict on his presidency to future historians. …

None of Your Business

By Cyberquill • 10/30/2010 • 34 Comments

If I ask you what’s your favorite ice cream flavor, what was the last Hollywood movie you saw, and whether you’ve ever been to Vermont, chances are you’ll answer my questions honestly and with little hesitation, provided you’re in the mood to chat in the first place. If I move on to inquiring about your ATM PIN, your kinkiest sexual fantasy, and your rap sheet, you’ll probably balk at disclosing these items, at least initially, and perhaps you’ll…

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