There were over 60,000 spam messages in the comments on this blog.

Instead of killing them one-by-one, I destroyed all the comments, including the good ones.

Sorry, but I just wasn't going to do all the work required.

Now, I hope sometime this week I can find time to upgrade the software to preclude spammers from taking over my site.

A lot of people get worked up over email spam; I don't. It's easy to kill. But Web spam is harder to kill, and I do get upset about that. People who construct programs and robots to litter other people's sites with extraneous, off-topic links and messages won't get defense from me.

The new Brad Bird flick from Pixar/Disney is as fine a film as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., or The Incredibles, though with one difference: I doubt that little children will like it as much. This is, really, an adult film. Or, perhaps, an adult film for the whole family, one in which the children might enjoy but only at the expense of not understanding huge chunks of it. After all, it's about gourmet cooking, which is not exactly a kiddie fixation, like toys, monsters, or super-heroes.

Call me romantic, but what could be better? Paris! Cooking! Rats! A youngster realizing his individuality at work!

Besides, this has the best onscreen kiss since . . . Hot Shots, Part Deux.

I was watching and listening to some YouTube videos, and suddenly the sound went off. So I switched to Safari. Nothing. No sound. I fiddled with the Sound panel, switching from my G4 Gigabit Ethernet (Snakebite) PowerMac's speaker to my Logitech headset. No sound.

So I restarted.

I tried again. Nothing. Camino, Safari, Foxfire, all sound is gone.

But the sound works just fine coming from iTunes. Alan Hovhaness's "Tzaikerk" plays just fine from an AAC file. I just switched to my Radio365 player, and my favorite station, and it comes through just fine (playing, as if anyone cares, Einojuhani Rautavaara's music).

And the system sounds, the beeps and so forth, come through.

So I checked video.google.com. And the audio for those videos work! What's up?

So what happened to YouTube? Yoo-hoo! What's up?

Sheldon Richman concludes a good review with a not-so-good aphorism from Swift: It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

Except, of course, that it is quite possible to reason people out of views they adopted as children, when they didn't know better. One effective method is to shame them, to make them feel shame for holding goofy opinions. It will radicalize some, but basically erode the beliefs of others.

For instance, I changed my opinions on several matters as I grew through my teenage years, matters on which I'd settled opinion in part through inertia. Neither of my parents was a libertarian. But I adopted the ideology.

Why did I change my mind on politics? Well, a number of reasons:

• I saw that some of my factual beliefs were just plain wrong.
• I saw that liberty better fit with my other moral beliefs.
• I saw that some previously held norms and commitments were embarrassingly perverse in their effects.

No one person argued these points with me. But over time these and other concerns weighed heavy enough on me to make me change my mind.

Simple enough, really. If a person is really interested in helping the poor, learning something about the causes of economic growth changes one's mind about quite a few policies. But, as Sheldon Richman relates, having just read the new Bryan Caplan book, it's not in most people's interest to seek out anomalies and others challenges to their notions.

Which is why in-your-face challenges are important.

Also: declarations of alternate commitments might work. When others can see your passions, and those passions don't seem nuts, then they are more apt to be sympathetic.

So it's important to show passion as well as reason.

In Some Forms of Realism: A Critique of Representative and Presentative Realism, Celestine N. Bittle mounts a concise attack on two forms of realism. I'll have to go back to this, but comparing his discussion of Spencer's transfigured realism, as expounded in Spencer's Principles of Psychology, and Bittle's characterization of it, I see . . . inadequate representation!

For what it's worth, I think my form of realism would best be described as neither presentative (like Epicurus's and Bittle's) nor representative (like most others'), but, instead, as performative realism. I see the truths in both presentative and representative realism as mere sketches on the way to the development of performative realism.

Yes, I've been influenced by pragmatism.

Bittle dubs his own doctrine as Critical Presentative Realism, which I take to be a mirror to George Santayana's critical realism, which is a form of representatiionalism (though hardly naive, since he doesn't regard the intermediaries between our minds and existent things as icons, but as sometimes rather arbitrary signifiers, thus moving close to my position, that the representations must not pretend to mirror reality — pace the late Richard Rorty's bâte noir — but provide maps that help us navigate it).

It turns out that North Cove, Washington — a town not far from where I live, a mere hour-or-so's drive — is the home town to one of the great politicians of the last generation:

The politician? Well, the man who said this:

"All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian."

I refer, of course, to Pat Paulsen.

The Wikipedia entry on Paulsen lists his home town as South Bend. But on his first album, Pat Paulsen for President, it is stated as North Cove. And if you can't believe a politician's campaign material, what can you believe?

The answer may be Yes. Reasons for this are ably given by Henry Jenkins in his appreciation for/explanation of the critics' near-unanimous thumbs-down to the third Pirates of the Carribean film. Actually, Jenkins trots out several interesting ideas. Here's one off the main thesis:

Watch a film with a group of critics and it is a rather chilly experience, each trying to suppress signs of their emotional response for fear of tipping their hands to their competition. They don't laugh at comedy; they don't cry at melodrama; and they don't know how to engage in fannish conversation around film franchises, which means that their professional conduct cuts them off from the shared emotional pleasures that are so much a part of how popular culture works its magic on us. For that reason, I trust film critics far more when they are writing about art films which demand distanced contemplation than popular films which desire an immediate emotional reaction.

Hat tip to Jesse Walker, who (in his post to Film Flam) calls attention to Jenkins's well-crafted first sentence:

As a rule, one should never trust the opinion of an established film critic about a movie with a number after its title — and one should multiply the level of distrust for each number over 2.

Theocons of the world, unite! That's the title of Cathy Young's great little article in the June Reason. She does a fine job of showing just how traitorous some on the right can be about freedom:

In Christianity Today, managing editor Mark Galli urged a strong stand against terrorism but also sounded a startlingly sympathetic note toward the Islamic militants' anger at the hedonism, materialism, and secularism the West was exporting into their cultures. In October 2004, in the same magazine, Watergate felon turned evangelical minister Chuck Colson warned that the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States would help radical Islamic terrorists by making our kind of freedom abhorrent to Muslims.

Meanwhile, in May of that year, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan asserted in his syndicated column that on such issues as homosexuality, conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats.

Chiding Bush for urging Muslims to embrace a version of liberty that includes the freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, Buchanan wrote, If conservatives reject the equality preached by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, NARAL and the National Organization for Women, why seek to impose it on the Islamic world? Why not stand beside Islam, and against Hollywood and Hillary?

Well, not allowing people to publish books is illiberal and repressive. Equality, as preached by leftists, is largely a matter not of freedom but coercion. But of course, some parts of the equality preached on the left is liberty, and should be embraced because of it. Buchanan is, once again, showing conservatism's true color: hatred of the left for being the left, not anything positive.

Conservatives, like Muslim whackos, have a problem with liberty. If they disagree with something allowed by liberty, they somehow think that they are being dragooned into supporting it. Hey: if you don't like Salman Rushdie's novels, don't buy them, and bad-mouth them at every chance. Both your boycott and your protest are allowed by liberty. Suppressing the book, on the other hand, isn't.

To suggest that we not defend the right to publish blasphemy, or smut, or whatnot, is quite a suggestion. But the theocons have troubles not making that suggestion. As everybody knows, at the very soul of conservatism is the censor's fire.

Cathy Young rightly parses the conservative excuse, as an ostensible support for liberty and a simultaneous opposition to its abuse or freedom's excesses:

In effect, D'Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company agree with the familiar sentiment that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. Their conclusion, however, is that those freedoms should be curbed — though they would say that they are talking not about freedom itself but its excesses. According to D'Souza, those excesses include the notion that men and women should have the same roles in society or that freedom of expression includes the right to publish material that is sexually explicit or blasphemous.

But of course freedom of expression does include publishing both Playboy and Live from Golgotha, as does freedom of contract, freedom of association, and the like. It follows from the idea of freedom that you may not attack those who peacefully go about doing their thing, even in ways you find offensive.

Offense is one thing. Taking offense another. And using your offense as an excuse to attack another a completely different thing.

Young is right to pillory the American conservative numbskulls and their silly misalliance with the Islamic bigots:

Yet there is no reason to believe that Islamic radicals or even most Muslim traditionalists oppose merely the excesses of, say, women's liberation rather than the basic notion of female equality. The Enemy at Home includes a sympathetic discussion of Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb's critique of America's moral decadence, but D'Souza neglects to mention that this critique was based on Qutb's stay in the United States in the notoriously licentious period of 1948 to 1950.

Radical Islamists' ire is directed not just at The Vagina Monologues but at beauty pageants, and they have often responded violently even to moderate steps toward the emancipation of women. Nor does D'Souza say much about the hostility not only toward secularism but toward other religions that is prevalent in the Muslim world today.

Young errs towards the end. She seems to confuse the true with the politically useful. But otherwise, this is a fine polemic.

Young people tend to recklessness. They haven't realized their own limits. That's why many do risky things.

As you get older, you are supposed to learn what your limits are. And accept them, or work hard to push them further out.

Trouble is, as you get older, the limits come crashing in. Parts of the body, well, they just start to give out.

Young people find this funny. Old people, well, we — uh, they — don't laugh so much.

But we should take it all in stride. This is life. If all goes according to the ideal stretch, you vigorously climb up the hill of your life, then carefully navigate the downside, knowing that, in the end, you are going to fall.

This ancient truth came to mind while reading about a misstep made by Judge Robert Bork.

You may remember him. He famously failed to enter the Supreme Court after President Reagan nominated him. Always a critic — in his heyday, of monopoly law, now nearly of everything (he's one of those who claim the culture's going to heck in a handbasket of our own making) — he now appears before us as a plaintiff. He's suing Yale Club for more than a million bucks.

It seems that he was invited to give a speech at an event for the New Criterion magazine a year ago. The dais didn't have a rail, or even normal steps. And Bork was in his 80th year of life. He didn't leap up to give his speech in a single bound. Instead, he tried to step onto the dais . . . and fell backwards. The injuries he suffered were serious, say his lawyers, and Bork's own complaint mentions injury to a leg and his head.

Now, normally I'd have sympathy for the man. I mean, I can't say I've been in his predicament, but maybe one day I will. (And hey: I did fall down a flight of steps last year, and my right hand still hurts.) But, this is a man who's been griping about current tort law for years, arguing that the huge figures demanded have no place in a reasonable system of civil law. He talks about irresponsible juries, runaway justice, that sort of thing.

And now he's charging the Yale Club with gross negligence. The club should've provided a handrail. He's asking for punitive damages, of all things. In a case that should be pretty straightforward.

Well, I wasn't at the event. But we know good and well that Bork himself would have pooh-poohed any similar such suit, years ago, had the fall happened to anyone else. His hypocrisy has been widely noted.

The thing is, he saw the dais. He accepted a risk simply by trying. Now, had he acknowledged his own limitations, when it came time to step up he would have looked up and said something like this: You expect me to climb up there, eh? Who do you think I am, Tenzing Norgay?

After a public chuckle, a few younger men would have offered him a hand.

Perhaps pride prevented him from asking for help. Well, we know what pride goeth before.

An idiotic lawsuit.

My office just lost one of its tenants: a mouse. Perhaps it was a rat. I noticed it last week, scuttling across the floor at night. I was mildly freaked.

I left cheese out for it on the floor.

The next day, I left cheese out for it on a trap.

The critter got the cheese in both cases, with precisely the same result: food, no springing of trap.

I tried peanut butter last night. This morning? Dead vermin. The trap had sprung. I'm pretty sure that the critter didn't suffer much. That was one flattened mini-rat, the head squished under the pressure of the snapped trap.

The annoying thing about all this is the queasiness I get. Yes, even from killing vermin.

I would not make a good flunky at an extermination camps.

Ron Paul has been comporting himself pretty well on various chat shows and interviews. I am agreeing with him now more than I did in the '80s, when he often talked about political economy with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. (Things were always so certain for him, outcomes to policy changes utterly predictable. And yet, they weren't. His prophecies of runaway inflation proved wrong.)

But nothing illustrates Ron Paul's principled libertarian approach to conservatism better than his No vote for honoring Ronald Reagan:

AWARDING GOLD MEDAL TO FORMER PRESIDENT AND MRS. RONALD REAGAN IN RECOGNITION OF SERVICE TO NATION

Statement of HON. RON PAUL OF TEXAS

[Page: H1655]

• Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 3591. At the same time, I am very supportive of President Reagan's publicly stated view of limiting the federal government to it's proper and constitutional role. In fact, I was one of only four sitting members of the United States House of Representatives who endorsed Ronald Reagan's candidacy for President in 1976. The United States enjoyed sustained economic prosperity and employment growth during Ronald Reagan's presidency.
• I must, however, oppose the Gold Medal for Ronald and Nancy Reagan because appropriating $30,000 of taxpayer money is neither constitutional nor, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan's notion of the proper, limited role for the federal government.
• Because of my continuing and uncompromising opposition to appropriations not authorized within the enumerated powers of the Constitution, I would maintain my resolve and commitment to the Constitution--a Constitution, which only last year, each Member of Congress, swore to uphold. In each of these instances, I offered to do a little more than uphold my constitutional oath.
• In fact, as a means of demonstrating my personal regard and enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan's advocacy for limited government, I invited each of these colleagues to match my private, personal contribution of $100 which, if accepted by the 435 Members of the House of Representatives, would more than satisfy the $30,000 cost necessary to mint and award a gold medal to Ronald and Nancy Reagan. To me, it seemed a particularly good opportunity to demonstrate one's genuine convictions by spending one's own money rather that of the taxpayers who remain free to contribute, at their own discretion, to commemorate the work of the Reagans. For the record, not a single Representative who solicited my support for spending taxpayer's money, was willing to contribute their own money to demonstrate their generosity and allegiance to the Reagan's stated convictions.
• It is, of course, very easy to be generous with the people's money.

This is, I tell you, one of the most delightful statements by a Congressman on a piece of legislation in our country's sad and goofy history. For this alone, forget Paul's age. Vote for him for the presidency.

My cat is colored like an orca:

Now, the Orca seems, to me, nicely colored, for protection . . . or, more likely, for stealth. Light on the bottom, it would blend into the background, when seen by fish and other prey from below. Dark on the top, it would blend into the background, when seen from above.

My cat, alas, does not inhabit the ocean. Instead, she tends to rest on dark carpets . . . and not on her back, either. So I've stepped on her more than once.

No element of natural selection could explain this inconvenient coloration — this unprotective coloration — since feline coloration is largely a matter of past artificial selection, or perhaps random variation in environments where protective coloration is largely irrelevant.