Seen among another blog’s comments:

Unusual ideas can make enemies.
Posted by: Thomas Jennifer at December 9, 2003 06:33 PM

Cultivated people foster what is good in others, not what is bad. Petty people do the opposite.
Posted by: Sakano Jennifer Goldsborough at December 20, 2003 01:47 PM

Since neither observation has any obvious relation to the history of the kilogram, I am not particularly amazed to find that each contains a p*n*s enl*rgem*nt link.

2004 Oct 30: Now that I have comments, similar fortune-cookies have been submitted here.

Unqualified Offerings have yet another forceful word to say about the conduct of the War of the Year:

Here is the thing you must understand about David Brooks and Max Boot and William Kristol and the whole “national greatness” gang. The “brutal measures” are not regrettable means to a noble end. They are a noble end. The national greatness types have been bemoaning America’s supposed softness and urging it to toughen up since the mid-1990s. The war on terror has simply been their opportunity to sell a preexisting product. That product is, chiefly, your sons and daughters, brothers, sisters and schoolmates shooting foreigners. Some of the foreigners shot may indeed be our enemies. Others may be the sons and daughters, brothers, sisters or schoolmates or our enemies. Or at least standing somewhere in the vicinity of where our enemies are or have been or may think about being. No matter. The real enemy is “decadence,” which is their word for liberty.

Tim Lambert (Deltoid) is compiling a table of bloggers’ scores in a Political Compass quiz. I scored in the middle of the Right Libertarian quadrant, close to Will Wilkinson (The Fly Bottle). I suspect I’d be further left if some of the questions were worded differently.

Later: I wonder whether the creators of the Compass website are doing any factor analysis on the responses (analogous to that which produced the Animation of Congress) to check the validity of their scoring rules. (I also wish I had a clue about how factor analysis is done.)

Update!

2006: I didn’t record my exact score back then; so I did the quiz again just now and scored (+4.63, -5.85).

Jim Henley wrote a year ago:

Sadly, Unqualified Offerings changed its mind about drug prohibition well after it was too old to benefit personally.

That’s odd. Jim is a couple of mere weeks older than the Ogre, who remains convinced that a change in drug policy (particularly an amendment by shredder) would do him some good.

I’ve recently been linked by several strangers or new acquaintances: How What Why; Reflections in d minor; The Wood Dragon.

Update 2006: Reflections in d minor moved here.

Since my host upgraded its version of Apache, visitors to my blog archives (most of whom come from searches) have seen raw HTML rather than cooked webpages, because the filenames don’t end in .htm(l). So I’ve republished the archives (now daily, for speed’s sake, rather than weekly or monthly) with new names, and corrected the internal links to match. (I’ve even repaired a lot of broken links to Blogspot.)

Maybe someday I’ll learn enough to intercept requests for the old archives and translate them.

This became moot a year later when I converted from Blogger to WordPress.

Black Man With A Gun — Firearm Activist of Color