A public service announcement from George Takei:

(link via Peter David)

“When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.”
– Dave Barry

Radley Balko has an excellent post about the virtues of libertarian public policy.

The libertarian lesson: Experts can be and frequently are wrong. An expert working for the government is no less susceptible to bias or ill motivation as one working for a corporation. Which is why it’s foolhardy to rely on their expertise when making top-down policies that affect everyone. In fact, the main difference between the two is that when a private corporation’s experts are wrong, the consequences are generally limited to the corporation, its employees, and its investors (there are hard cases, of course. Pollution comes to mind. But hard cases make for bad policy.). When the government’s experts are wrong, we all get to suffer the consequences. Which is a good reason to have government making as few one-size-fits-all policies as possible.

Read the whole thing. It’s good stuff.

“Is anybody really that surprised that Hillary Clinton is running for president? I’m not surprised. I mean, if you were married to Bill Clinton, wouldn’t you want to be able to tap his phone, read his mail, and torture him?”
– Jay Leno

“The late Murray Kempton once described editorial writers as ‘the people who come down from the hill after the battle to shoot the wounded.’ Nowadays, media analysts are the guys who follow behind them, going through the pockets of the dead looking for loose change.”
– Tim Rutten

“breaking news: Anna Nicole Smith’s unstoppable zombie corpse roaming streets of Broward County, 19 dead

No, not really. That would be news, though…”
– MaryAnn Johanson

“No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.”
– Alfred North Whitehead

Capt. Lisa Nowak, an astronaut and space shuttle veteran, has been arrested for several charges related to attempted kidnapping.

An astronaut drove 900 miles and donned a disguise to confront a woman she believed was her rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot, police said. She was arrested Monday and charged with attempted kidnapping and other counts.

U.S. Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, who flew last July on a shuttle mission to the international space station, was also charged with attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery. She was denied bail and is scheduled to make a court appearance Tuesday.

Police said Nowak drove from her home in Houston to the Orlando International Airport to confront Colleen Shipman.

Nowak believed Shipman was romantically involved with Navy Cmdr. William Oefelein, a pilot during space shuttle Discovery’s trip to the space station last December, police said.

Read the whole thing, because the story is just really bizarre.

Now, by all accounts, Nowak is a strong and capable astronaut. So what, I ask you, might have affected her personality in this way? What would possess someone to do this? Theories abound, but I know what my money’s on.

…if you told me a year ago that one of the top ten television shows in America would be a serial drama about a group of people coming to grips with their superpowers, and that this show would be intelligently written and not campy, I’d have said you were crazy.

And yet, here we are. With Heroes. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

This truly is the golden age of television, isn’t it? Seriously, when did TV get so damn smart?

So yeah, I realized that I’d promised that I was going to make snarky comments about every Presidential candidate’s announcement text. But I can’t. I just can’t.

The fact is, Sam Brownback’s announcement text is the most intelligent I’ve come across.

Rattle that around in your brain for a minute. Sam Brownback. Intelligent.

Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Rudy, McCain–all of their websites are filled with banal statements that say absolutely nothing. It’s infuriating and sad.

And I’m not going to torture you all with that stuff.