Apparently, there are people who have become genuinely depressed that the real world is not more like the world depicted in the movie Avatar. They want to live in a world of pristine beauty with a simple way of life… Continue Reading
Plenty of people, myself included, got upset when the Bush Administration reserved for itself the right to unilaterally engage in a warrantless wiretap. I thought it was an affront to the Constitution that the President, acting on his authority alone,… Continue Reading
San Francisco, 1981: Money quote: “It takes two hours at $5.00 per hour to get the newspaper, so the online newspaper isn’t going to be much competition for the twenty-cent version you can buy on the street.” That sentence seems… Continue Reading
In my now-famous post Top Ten Worst Bible Stories, I singled out the Massacre of the Midianites in Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and Numbers 31:1-18 for particular criticism. It is, in fact, a story of genocide, the bloodthirsty and unprovoked annihalation of… Continue Reading
What need have we of the Gods?We have conquered their domainsAs they conquered the Titans. I look about my own landAnd I see the elementsHarnessed, domesticated. Wind and sun are made lightning,A lightning shorn of thunder,Jewels bring it where we… Continue Reading
Amazingly, it appears that a Republican has something of a real shot at winning the interim election to replace the recently-deceased Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. No, really, go back and read that sentence again and think about it. Let that… Continue Reading
A cool map showing where every nuclear explosion has taken place on the planet. There is one additional test site, at sea in the southwestern Indian Ocean, which is likely to have been a joint South African and Israeli test. … Continue Reading
Hey, yeah. How come the decade ends in a year ending in “9” but a century ends in a year ending in “0”?
This description of how the original Declaration of Independence is cared for when it has to be moved about is fascinating. The author does not indicate but I presume that he refers to the actual document that was written in… Continue Reading
LOLCats — annoying the hell out of you since 1929! After Japanese stereoscopic photography was rediscovered, so was the lost art of stop-motion photography, this time by disaffected Spanish college students. Living on a cliff: probably not a good idea… Continue Reading