Out of curiosity, how many of y’all know who I am in reality?

How many of you figured it out? (Wasn’t like I was hiding.)

How many of you do I already know under different names?

You don’t have to comment; just up-ding if you know who I am, and down-ding if you have no idea.

It’s an experiment.

SCIENCE!

Seriously, that’s what he said.

“If they want a 30-round clip, they’re going to get it out of Brazil or the Soviet Union,” Bryant told reporters.

This is one of the things that is most confusing and worrying about the U.S. gun control debate to people outside the U.S. One side, or at least the people from that side getting the press, do not appear to live in the world everyone else lives in. And there seems to be a thick temporal field that prevents reality from intruding.

Read more here.

Fantasy and Reality

You’ve seen the ads. Pristine beach… not a speck of sand out of place… a cold beer sitting just out of reach… clean water as far as you can see… a palm tree drifting into the top third of the photo.

Paradise.

Dream vacation.

At least the word “dream” is accurate.

We don’t think a beach exists on the planet without bits of plastic on it.

We’ve taken our fantasy of a pristine beach and trashed it.

Our pals over at Heal the Bay just posted some photos of Santa Monica after the “first flush” (the term Southern Californians use to describe what happens during the first heavy rain of the winter). The photo is a “first flush” photo. If you think this pic is nasty, check out the others here.

We, surfers and beach lovers, are sick of this trash.

This is why we do what we do.

Thank you Pat.

Decent short article on the new non-reality based theories of conservative thought.

“Conservatism is true.” That’s what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will’s basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America’s present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.

MORE…

Nick Cohen, a ‘Zionist’ and long-time severe critic of the left, both American and British, has this to say about the current situation in the middle east :

Nick Cohen on the Gaza blockade

Sympathise with Israel, but not the blockade

The situation in Gaza is a gift to apologists for extreme Islam

Israelis do not see why they should blink first. Their belief that they are on the receiving end of a hypocritical campaign sustains their siege mentality and nurtures the fear that if Israel pulls back from Gaza’s borders, Hamas will grow in strength and arm itself with Iranian missiles.

Israelis are not being irrational. The same fears persuade the Egyptian government to blockade Gaza from the south, although we rarely hear about that. But the way to handle hypocrites is not to say as Israelis do that “the world will condemn us whatever policy we follow” but to call their bluff. If Israel were to relax the import restrictions and Hamas were to rearm, reasonable opinion, including reasonable Palestinian opinion, would see it for what it would be: a declaration of war.

As things stand, reasonable opinion, including reasonable Palestinian opinion, is merging with the opinions of every variety of conspiracy nut and Jew-baiter. Leaving all humanitarian arguments to one side, no Israeli government should tolerate that.

guardian.co.uk