Recently there has been another argument over military death statistics and what they mean. This round started with this Red State post: Take a look at the actual US Military Casualty figures since 1980. If you do the math, you will find quite a few surprises. First of all, let’s compare numbers of US Military [...]

Time magazine recently published an article headlined How Operation Swarmer Fizzled about the ongoing Operation Swarmer in Iraq. The reporters presented it as an attempt by the US military to provide a photo op rather than conduct a serious counter terrorist operation. In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in [...]

Wafa Sultan, the Los Angles MD who has severely criticized Islam on Al Jezzera and has been accused of being worse than the Danish cartoons by a Muslim cleric, characterizes the current situation thus in a recent NY Times profile (registration required): “The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of [...]

(click to enlarge) Zooming in on the head and shoulders of the figure we get a very exact illustration of Persig’s ideas about the depiction of light in painting. Near the end of Chapter 26 of Lila he writes of a painting of Christ by El Greco: …the clouds in the sky behind his head [...]

(click to enlarge) This drawing by Ted Cole is not specifically about the MOQ discussion of light but is rather a view of the Pacific Coast Highway where the latter stages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are set. Remember, MOQ members please comment on the mailing list, others can comment here.

In a recent post regarding the importance of India to the future of the world James C Bennett of Albion’s Seedlings highlights the importance of the English language in the future of India’s economic success. As to where India stands with the Anglosphere, well, that’s a work in progress. The key issue at this point [...]

These are two images which I have put up to illustrate a point on a Metaphysics of Quality discussion forum for people who have read and want to discuss the philosophy of Robert Persig as expressed in his two novels Zen and the Art of Motorcyce Maintenance and Lila. Regular readers of Yankeewombat are invited [...]

Norm Geras has a nice post called Paternalistic Interference defending the rights of smokers and deplores the hounding of them from public places. He appeals to John Stewart Mill’s dictum: That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm [...]

I took last week’s image and ‘reskinned’ it to change the season to Summer – leaving every object in the picture exactly where it was previously. The program I use to create these images – Bryce5 – allows one to create an object – a mountain, a body of water, a sky or a stone [...]

Victor Davis Hanson covers a lot of the same ground as I did in my previous post, Partisanship and Outcomes, as only he can in this op-ed piece in the Wall St. Journal. An excerpt: Conservatives who insisted that we needed more initial troops are often the same ones who now decry that too much [...]