The girls made slime

Lunch in the tree house

This is mostly for Hil.  This is probably the easiest way for her to see it.

Pictures from my trip

This is Doha, as viewed from the Museum of Islamic Art.


These are my luxurious accommodations, as viewed from the doorway of my room.


These are astrolabes at the MOIA.


This is Souq Waqaf. The Qataris built a new market and made it look old. That's why some people I know refer to it as "Souq Disney."


This is the fruit market in Wast al-Balad in Amman.


Here is the fuul I had for lunch at Hashem in Amman.

And it's taking forever to upload pictures. Maybe I'll upload more later.

First pictures of Emiko

For those of you here for the pictures of Emiko please feel free to ignore the political entries below. You won't find any recent entries though--Facebook has become my soapbox of choice for extremist right-wing propaganda.

Here are some photos and a video of Emi at one day old.






We're supposed to stay here over two nights but Hilary wants us to go home today. We'll see how that goes.

Liberals are tolerant of everyone...

...everyone who thinks exactly the same way they do.

Case study number 10,000,000: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

Mackey wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal promoting health-care savings accounts and he said that health care is not an inalienable human right. Those are conservative ideas, and Whole Foods' liberal customers went ballistic.

They're calling for boycotting Whole Foods. The Whole Foods forum is inundated with thousands of raging posts: How dare an American voice his personal opinion! He should resign! We refuse to do business with any company associated with someone who thinks differently from us!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/18/AR2009081803613.html?hpid=artslot

Wishing I could be a Metro vigilante

They were avoiding the kid like he was a leper.

Do-rag, black t-shirt, shorts pulled down below his butt cheeks to show off his boxers, blasting rap out of his cell phone, no headphones attached. Chubby guy, maybe twenty years old, with a dumb expression on his face, oblivious to all the dirty looks he was getting as people peeked up over their newspapers.

You're not allowed to listen to music on the Metro without headphones. If I were a cop I probably could have issued a citation. But all I could do was talk:

"Excuse me, would you mind putting on some headphones?" I asked.

"Don't got none," he replied.

"Then would you mind turning off the music?"

"Why don't you come over here and make me?"

I totally could have taken this idiot. I've been fantasizing all day about teeth coming loose from his bleeding mouth. I really wanted to put him in his place. You shouldn't just be able to break the law with impunity, annoy everyone around you, and then be a prick when someone asks you to stop. And then when you invite someone to a fight, he should be legally allowed to kick your ass.

But instead we exchanged unpleasantries and I got off the train, walked ten feet to the door on the next car down, and got back on.

And that's why I've never said anything to these idiots before. I always plan it out in my mind, and I abort the operation because I have no "nuclear option" at my disposal. I can talk, and I can leave, or I can suffer through, but ultimately I have no control over whether the music stops.

Paving the way to legalization of religious persecution

The Senate approved the latest defense spending bill. And the Democrats threw in an unrelated rider: The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. The MSHCA widens hate crimes to include crimes committed against people because of their sexual orientation.

I believe that no crimes should be committed against anyone. I believe that people should not hate other people, and that they should not act out of hate. But I oppose the MSHCA for four reasons:

1. The MSHCA is entirely unrelated to defense spending and should therefore be presented as a separate bill and given an up-or-down vote based on its own merits. As it stands, the Democrats just wanted to attach controversial legislation to a must-pass bill. The MSHCA failed the four previous times that it was proposed.

2. The MSHCA gives special victim status to homosexuals, making crimes targeting homosexuals (as in all hate crimes) a more grievous offense carrying a harsher penalty. If we believe in equality under the law, then we need to erase hate crimes from our laws because hate crime legislation makes some victims more important than other victims. The bill also authorizes federal funds to assist in the prosecution of hate crimes--once again creating a special class of victims who get federal assistance while other victims go unaided.

3. The MSHCA opens the door to controlling religious thought and speech. As of yet, the MSHCA only prohibits speech that would incite violence against homosexuals--but that type of speech is already prohibited. You're not allowed to incite violence against anyone. The only reason why you would need to specifically single out homosexuals here is to set a precedent for later expansion of definitions of prohibited speech.

4. The MSHCA is just one more example of the federal government overstepping its constitutionally defined limits. I can at least understand the context in which original hate crime legislation passed--when some states unabashedly miscarried justice for minorities, forcing the federal government to interfere. But when we don't have an emergency requiring federal involvement, the federal government should stay out, and we should repeal the emergency provisions that allowed the feds to overstep their bounds in the past.