From the Comments page on this blog’s dashboard: Akismet has caught 30,138 spam for you since you first installed it. You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. 🙂 This came after I’d bulk-deleted 265 comments, trackbacks and pingbacks which Akismet had identified as spam, pushing me over 30,000. I…
Read More Another dubious milestoneWTF is going on in the UK? According to Terry Sanderson in CiF: In an obscure little debate in the House of Lords last week, the Bishop of Carlisle, Graham Dow ((We’ve encountered him before, here and here. He’s clearly a lunatic, but that doesn’t prevent him from speaking in the House of Lords.)), let…
Read More Christian dentists?I had forgotten how tiring it can be to drive. Back home in Seattle, it’s so rare for me to get behind the wheel of a car that each spell of driving (courtesy FlexCar) is over before I’ve had a chance to register any stress or discomfort. But on this visit to Massachusetts, I’ve been…
Read More Exhausted, but in a good causeOver at Talking Points Memo Josh deflects the kind of shrill anti-Clinton stuff we’ve been hearing from Andrew Sullivan et al, and gets the three points about the current Obama-Hillary contest. First, it isn’t a question of the substance of what’s being said: [T]here’s very little I’ve seen from the Clinton camp that would seem…
Read More Obama, Hillary, and Bill: Josh nails itOn the one hand: UK astronomers will lose access to two of the world’s finest telescopes in February, as administrators look to plug an £80m hole in their finances. Observation programmes on the 8.1m telescopes of the Gemini organisation will end abruptly because Britain is cancelling its subscription. This is a program that the UK…
Read More PrioritiesEssential viewing.
Read More Tufte on the iPhoneOK, here’s the situation. An English woman and her two teenage daughters visit New York on holiday. The woman is taken ill. What happens next? Full marks if you guessed that the girls were taken to an orphanage, separated, strip searched, given a medical examination, told that they couldn’t visit their mother in hospital, and…
Read More The war on tourists continuesVia Greta Christina, here’s a nice piece by the Chaplain entitled: What’s So Bad About Religion?. Here’s the central idea: Even though the vast majority of believers apply rational thought processes in most areas of their lives, there is a corner of their minds, especially for religious conservatives, in which they refuse to shine the…
Read More Pre-rational filtering and foundational beliefsOr perhaps bandit. It’s all in his favourite painting. As Paul Simon put it so succinctly, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
Read More Bush as horse-thiefLarry nails big-Ell Libertarians: Libertarians tend to be upper-middle-class professionals. What these Libertard upper-middle-class professionals fail to realize is that their status and wealth is protected by un-Libertarian law and custom (i.e. requiring law degrees and bar examinations; why not let the market decide who should be a lawyer?) The truly wealthy realize they don’t…
Read More The inherent contradiction in Libertarian thinking