Some of my friends in Kentucky (you know who you are) are going to have to submit to a lot of good natured teasing about the latest cultural center to be founded there. (I will save the raw hatred for the people actually doing the founding, of course.) (This is not to say there aren’t some embarrasing museums in Nova… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
Krugman strikes again
Once again Paul Krugman looks at an issue that has had a lot of spin put on it (and surely has a lot more to come) and lays out the facts clearly. But it’s a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would… Read more →
Inspired by tonight’s Daily Show
First of all, let me just say that no matter how much the world blows dead goats, at least Jon is there for me. The worse things get, the angrier he gets, the funnier he gets. That being said, all I have to say is: “She’s a man, baby!” Of course I mean the alleged Isabella Rossellini, who we all… Read more →
H. L. Mencken
In one of my earlier posts on the evolution debacle, I was lamenting the lack of Mencken-like reporters. Now (via William Gibson) I find a quote that causes me to lament even more for the broader political arena “…the larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, the first-rate man occasionally fights his way through,… Read more →
Irony Overload
Gay book ban goal of state lawmaker “Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle,” Allen said in a press conference Tuesday. Well, he gets one thing right. Can the universe please stop with the irony now? Read more →
Employment, considered as a series of brightly coloured pictures
(Sorry Chip). Read more →
This much I know
I may have to subscribe to the Guardian. Any paper with their level of real news coverage, and that has time for lots of Pullman and Mieville is OK with me. Hell, I subscribe to all their RSS feeds (well, OK, not the Sports or Football ones, I admit) and read most of the stuff, so I probably ought to… Read more →
US Currency Part N+1
Continuing the trend of looking at the weakening US dollar, we’ve got a couple of new articles. First, an analysis post from Kitco, a gold bullion dealer, looks at the potential effects of Japan and China cutting back on, or dropping their support for the US dollar. For a while now the US has been pressuring China to let its… Read more →
Halifax prepares for George Bush visit
CBC News: Halifax prepares for George Bush visit I plan to protest. Creative suggestions welcomed. I can’t wait to tell my boss (a rabid, pro-Bush Republican) that I want the time off to go protest. Should be fun. Read more →
Diametrically opposite models
I still can’t believe it’s 2004 and I’m devoting this much time to reading about religiously-based arguments against evolution. Sigh. There’s a nice round-up of evolution vs. “intelligent design” stories over at Orcinus. (I should add a filter so that any comment that includes “intelligent design” without the scare quotes would be instantly deleted. ) Even more important than the… Read more →
Permanent Damage
So, I read comics. Yes I am an adult, no I don’t read about super-heroes. We can have this tired argument later. The point is that as a reader of comics, I also read a number of online resources about comics. Consistently the best of these, to my taste, is comic writer Steve Grant‘s weekly column, Permanent Damage. Typically the… Read more →
He’s not Bob Geldof
I ran into the Czeslaw Milosz (that’s “Nobel Laureate Miolsz” to you) poem below, in one of this month’s magazines. I avoided typing it in by finding a copy already on the web along with a reading of the poem in it’s original tongue. Song on the End of the World On the day the world ends A bee circles… Read more →
I love Harper’s
What you will find below are sample quotes from Precalculus For Christians, a text book published by that bastion of scientific thought, Bob Jones University, as reported in this month’s Harper’s magazine. Apparently the text is designed to help students “conform their thinking to biblical precepts.” (As an aside, I am stunned to realize I got my first Harper’s subscription… Read more →
So Yesterday
So, let’s talk for a little bit about Scott Westerfeld. I had been hearing his name for some time in regards to his Succession series (well, two books might not officially be a series, so we could just refer to them by title as The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds) which always came up in that Intelligent New… Read more →
‘Economic Armageddon’?
Wow, I thought I was getting close to tinfoil hat territory on the whole currency/economy thing, and along comes Morgan Stanley’s chief economist who makes me look like Pollyanna. Here’s the first few paragraphs, but you’ll want to read the whole thing: Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.… Read more →
