- As from now you can keep up with my thoughts on various things at my new blog, Obscene Desserts.
- Crazy Diamonds. Syd Barrett, RIP. (With something here for quiet contemplation). This is also priceless.
- The next war? Seymour Hersh on Bush adminisration plans for Iran. 'Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides "really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary"...'. Sound familiar?
- The inherent contradictions of conservatism. 'Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.' Quite. Alan Wolfe in the Washington Monthly.
- Savagery. J. G. Ballard's review of David Cronenberg's brutal masterpiece, A History of Violence.
- Even more stupidity. James Downard's detailed rebuttal of Ann Coulter's ridiculous attacks on evolutionary theory in her brain-dead book Godless. Part 1 is here.
- Who's really screwing America. A few 'snippets of fragments of excerpts of sample sections' from Jack Huberman's book.
- Love and marriage. A sober and differentiated look at the marriage 'crisis', from Reason magazine.
- The end of the world. A Japanese animation showing - in lengthy, thorough, terrifying detail - what a collision of the Earth with a large meteorite would really mean. Oh yes, give me more of that 'rock vapour'!
- Life in an age of unreason. The Root of All Evil?, a film by Richard Dawkins on religion and reason. (Via YouTube, requires a fairly fast connection and perhaps some patience.)
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
- The Virus of Faith, the second film by Dawkins on faith and its follies.
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
- Part 4
- Part 5
- Part 6
- Monumentalism. Unrealised Moscow: a collection of architectural drawings of buildings which - for better or for worse - were never realised.
- Fantasy. A collection of images from Cornell University.
- A fine line between love and hate. Henry Rollins's video love letter to Ann Coulter. (Not safe for work, children or over-sensitive Republicans.)
- Terror and Liberalism. An interview with Paul Berman
- Inequality. Distributions of family income, worldwide for 2004.
- Catastrophes. "Disasters Waiting to Happen" by Jared Diamond in the Guardian.
- Irrationality. The introduction to Creationism's Trojan Horse By Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross.
- Exploitation. "Inside the Leviathan", a review of Wal-Mart America from the the New York Review of Books
- Hypocrisy. "The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience" from Christianity Today.
- Belief. Questions and some interesting answers from Edge Magazine (reprinted in the Guardian).
- Science fiction and history. An interview with Neal Stephenson, from the Guardian.
- Environmentalism. A searing indictment of the modern environmental movement (in .pdf format). Or, perhaps not.
- Memory. How we remember what we remember. From Scientific American.
- Hard Times. A review of a history of failure in America (from the Washington Post).
- Unwelcome guests. A review of Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman, by James Sharpe.
- Pledging Allegiance. On the history of American nationalism. From the New York Review of Books.
- One nation...indivisible. On godless constitutionalism.
::Return::
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