I’m not proud of it—it’s particularly embarrassing given the disdain I have and regularly express for a lot of base pop culture—so I try not to go too often.  Consequently I’m not sure how long this has been available, but it’s awesome:  how about a “constantly updated feed of civilian booking photos“?

Dig:  click a thumbnail and it opens the mug shot, but it also drops you into one of 24 categories (like Cleavage, or Hawaiian Shirts, or Weepy).  You can also select one of those categories to go straight there.

Finally, you can also browse just the celebrities, like you’ve always been able to.  Joyce DeWitt, 25 years past her 15 minutes, arrested on suspicion of drunk driving?  Check.  Tawny Kitaen, looking very un-writhe-on-my-Jaguar?  Check.  Closing on a dozen choices just choosing between Lindsay Lohan and OJ?  Check.

Enjoy.

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I am not bothered in the least that Mitt Romney is a Mormon.

You know, Mormonism is a cult.  Such is a claim with quite a lot of traction in Southern Baptist churches, anyway.  I got that at least twice that I can remember during my adolescence in such a church (which, despite its shortcomings, was more good than bad for me).  I’ve had two people express that concern to me about Mitt Romney.  One is still gaga for our dear Barack, so her vote isn’t in play anyway.  However, she wondered about what kind of effect that might have with Southern religious voters, to which my response was a hearty “none.”  Think about it:  wouldn’t folks who think Romney’s in a cult be the same folks who think Obama’s a stealth Muslim?

So where are they going to go anyway?

And to anyone who’s genuinely, first and foremost put off by Romney being a Mormon:  seriously?  Can you really find anything in that narrative that’s any more objectively ridiculous than any other major religion?  Now I know it’s trendy and probably metrosexual or something to be a jackass loudmouth atheist.  But good luck finding a major presidential candidate without a Judeo-Christian profession.

So within that framework, you’re going to excoriate a guy because there’s a bit more to the story of his faith than that of a “normal” Christian?

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Most of Alabama’s illegal immigration law—widely regarded as the toughest in the country—went into effect on September 29.

It seems “jobs Americans won’t do” might be a rather more diaphanous notion than any of the phrase’s supporters realized, eh?

We’ve got to get over the idea that it’s harmless to allow, and in some cases even actively enable, illegal aliens to access our country’s job market and government benefits essentially unfettered.  The above result startles me in its degree.  Clearly, it does matter—a lot.

Even if you believe it is a legitimate function of government to provide for people without regard for whether the government actually belongs to those people, how is it compassion for us to cut our own throats?  Is that not what we’re doing?

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It also appears very much as if this occurred in Afghanistan, these soldiers are U.S. Marines, and the bodies are Taliban.

“It was inhuman and despicable, an unforgivable act,” said Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi.  (Good to see he found some downtime to comment in between beating and raping women, locking children in boxes to suffocate, and so forth.  But maybe he’s not on those teams.)

The video has been universally condemned by U.S. officials as well.  This condemnation is, of course, correct.  However, its degree is absurd.  I think we have here an administration eager to once again prostrate and flog the United States for the world, and thankful for the opportunity to do so.  Why, they even gets to flavor the whole thing with their thinly-disguised contempt for the military!

A proper response—a strong, mature response—would have been a sincere apology and an assurance of thorough investigation (followed immediately by execution of said investigation, and punishment as appropriate).  The end.

(Actually I’ll put a small asterisk here—*—and say yeah, they could stop today and be leaving it at essentially that, and if they do, then I’ll respond accordingly.  Not holding my breath.)

For one thing, this behavior is clearly very far out of line with how the huge majority of American soldiers conduct themselves, and our highest officials excitedly wallowing in it lends it perceived credence it doesn’t deserve.  For another, we don’t know what immediately preceded this, but we do know they’re not on a nature hike over there.  It doesn’t excuse the activity, but let’s please consider that a 42-second video might be robbing us significant context.

(You know, as we gaze at our iPads, sip our Starbucks, and quack about these horrendous atrocities our boys committed.)

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So, dig:  I had a couple of Sams in my new glass, I’m about to watch the Cotton Bowl, and this is the extent of your post tonight.  Thank you for reading BoWilliams.com.  Have a good weekend.  God bless.  Roll Tide.

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(Nice misplaced modifier.  Hey Bo, you mean that you’ll only open the door to people selling neighborhood children?  Heh.)

That closed-door policy is a result of a final-straw encounter with the magazine gypsies I wrote about before.  If you ring my doorbell unexpectedly and I don’t recognize you, I ask your business through the closed door, and if it’s not an emergency then I tell you to leave.  Besides delivery people, utility workers, and the like, there are friends, family members, neighbors, and people in dire need.  If you’re none of the above, then get the hell out of here.  Rude?  Overreactive?  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  (Even so, perception of this habit of mine is somewhere below strontium poisoning on the list of things I worry about day to day.)

So I say “mostly” in the first sentence because I was circumstantially fooled this afternoon.  There have been workmen across the way all day, and I thought this guy might be one of them with some issue of mutual concern.  Nope.  He’s coming around to get my neighbors to vote for him!  When I asked what that meant, he handed me the stereotypical laminated card and started in about a public speaking contest.  Mildly irritated that I had taken the card at all, I gave it back to him and said “I’m not going to be able to help you with this.”  He left immediately with barely another word, because he knew I’d made him.

Folks, if someone you’ve never seen before knocks on your door selling magazines, there is almost no chance it’s legitimate.  (Have a look here and see if you recognize any tactics or keywords.)  If you want a magazine subscription, then fill out and mail a blow-in card, or buy from a fund-raising schoolchild.

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Or maybe I am.  Depends on your perspective, I guess.  The mood I am not in is one in which I self-flagellate for three or four paragraphs on all of the heinous mistakes I made in 2011, then make grandiose pronouncements of wholesale changes in the way I live my life.

What I am going to do is try to fully appreciate the power of the small correct decision.  What does that mean?  Dig:

I’m six months into successfully quitting smoking.  By successful, I mean 100% compliance, without a single slip.  It feels like I’m going to make it, but I’m not so foolish as to announce I have made it, because I’ve been this far down this road before.

The secret, I believe, is the avoidance of the past tense.  I think that for most nicotine addicts, the addiction is out there forever.  It doesn’t necessarily stay ready to pounce continuously, but it keeps an eye on you.  I know from experience it can be sitting on your chest very quickly, and you don’t see it coming until you can’t breathe from the weight.

So what do you do about it?  Well, whether you’re hitting a moment of unexpected weakness six months in, or you’re dealing with one of the eight or ten acute daily cravings right after you’ve stopped, you don’t say you’re never going to smoke again.  Rather, you say you’re not going to smoke for the next five minutes, because hey, you can abstain for five minutes, right?  Thing is, that five minutes tends to get strung together with other five minuteses.  So they build into hours, and hours build into days, and days build into you’ve accomplished your goal.  (Or, rather, you’re accomplishing your goal.)

I started considering what that kind of thinking might do for other areas of my life.  After all, I think most of what I’d like to change about my life also involve errors of consumption.  Shouldn’t have eaten that.  Why did I buy that last week?  So maybe you don’t announce that you’re changing your diet forever, or you’re going to be more careful with your money.  Maybe instead you make a good decision right now.  Then, you make another one.  Then, you make another one.  Drop the ball?  Don’t worry; you’ve got another opportunity to decide well coming up.

How about loving your spouse?  Do you just carry forward a baseline level of love for him/her, and today’s another day, so there it is?  Or do you reinvigorate it with regular injections of positive attention?  Guess which approach I’ve consistently observed in long, successful marriages?

I think meaningful forevers accumulate.

Happy New Year.

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• The correct response to the loss of the UAV in Iran was taking it out with an airstrike (wow, Dick Cheney was right again!), with 30 minutes of humanitarian notice.  The incorrect response was saying “may we please please please have our little plane back, you mighty mullahs?”
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• Merry War on Christmas!  Mark Steyn can’t wait to see what those courageous atheists come up with for Ramadan.
• The eagerness with which we relinquish substantive history because an evil, obnoxious minority dictates its terms to us depresses me.  (A longtime net acquaintance I know to be intelligent has decided that the Confederate battle flag and/or navy jack stands only for seething racism.)
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• Night night, you rotten bastard.  “Ronery” no more, eh?  I’m sure the eighth circle of hell is crowded.

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Paul’s position is essentially that the United States has enemies in the Middle East because we meddle.  If we’d stop bombing and invading and just mind our own business, then we wouldn’t have an Islamist terror problem anymore.  I find this quite naive, mostly because I think it pretends to know too much about what our respective goals and objectives are.  The assumption is that everyone in the world is wired that way—or if there are dissenters, there aren’t enough to matter—and that if we’ll all just leave each other alone, we’ll have trade agreements and the honey will flow and so forth.

The problem is that far too many people have a fire in the belly that explicitly tells them not to leave folks alone.  This can be one of the oldest sentiments there is:  “I’m going to take that because I want it and I don’t believe you can stop me.”  Perhaps more germanely, it can be a drive to implement sharia law (and you know, I can’t think about sharia at all without chuckling at the memory of all those shrieking “theocracy” during the Bush administration).  I think there are dangerous levels of both out there, and I think it takes the biggest kid on the block imposing his will to keep them in check.

Consequently I reject utterly any notion of parity as a guiding principle in foreign policy.  Mutually beneficial is best, of course, and that’s possible with many nations.  (Gee, that list of “many nations” tends to include those with similar values to ours.  Coincidence?  Ha!)  But if impossible, then American interests prevail.  And when I consider that America imposing its will tends to have as its goal the lack of someone inferior imposing his will, I prefer it to any plausible alternative.  We’re not going to have a globe of equals.  We’re going to have the biggest kid calling a lot of the shots, and so I want to be the biggest kid.

Ugly American?  All right.  If you insist.

There is certainly still plenty of discussion for reasonable people.  Whence nation-building?  We can talk about whether the United States should “(embark) on decades-long, trillion-dollar campaigns to make them love us” or “quick ten-million-dollar lessons in why they should fear us,” as John Derbyshire so eloquently expressed.  I definitely tend toward the second position.  Radical Islamists, or two-bit dictators, or whoever can hate America all they want, and as long as that hatred also contains a goodly dose of fear, it doesn’t bother me a whit.

No greater friend; no worse enemy.

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I enjoyed Super 8, though I was disappointed in how simplistic some aspects of it were.  It could have used a bit more subtlety in places.  Then I watched The Final Countdown, which I’d never seen from start to finish.  That made me want to watch Tora! Tora! Tora!, but I ran out of time.  Maybe tomorrow.

Missed work today.  Missing a party as I type.  Boo.

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