The roots of all kinds of problems in America (and, I daresay, in Canada and plenty of other places that use the same educational system), are to be found in the schools? I wouldn’t have come to quite that conclusion on my own, but this essay by Paul Graham, titled Why Nerds are Unpopular, posits that thesis. It’s a wonderful piece of writing that certainly threw light on my own middle-school and high-school experience. By all means, read it for yourself. But especially if you know any young people going through school now, having an obviously hard time of it …

I hesitated about whether to place this under sci/tech or politics in my archives. Regardless of what you think about religion, the move to demand that creationism be taught in schools is bad, bad, bad. The investiture of faith required in science is only to believe that there is a world, the workings of which are explicable and understandable—to some degree—by humans. Meanwhile, creationism is flat-out religious dogma, recently garnished by a ton of pseudoscience. The pseudoscience has done nothing to advance our understanding of the world, of our bodies, of how to survive on this planet. Arguable religion has …

Okay, I have no idea why suing Caterpillar makes any sense, even in context, but this makes me mad. When the Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid attacked home demolitions being conducted by the army, what did his opponents do? They complained that he was comparing the Israeli Army to the Nazis. “The demolition of houses in Rafah must stop,” he said. “It is not humane, not Jewish, and causes us grave damage in the world. At the end of the day, they’ll kick us out of the United Nations, try those responsible in the international court in The Hague, and …

I love smackdowns. Textual ones, anyway. Adam Lipscomb used to excel at them on an online mailing list where I first met him (ah, the sordid little story of that… ah, never mind). Actually, he still excels at them. I take immense pleasure in Adam’s smackdowns because basically, he and I have the same politics. The difference is that in the case of a disagreement with, say, you, I’ll just calmly unpack all the facts and implications that prove you’re an idiot, at length, tirelessly. (Well, tiredly too, sometimes.) Adam, he does things a little differently. Differently like a butcher …

Ha, Fafblog. Ha, say it, brother.

Slinking shamefully through my old subscriptions again. William Gibson long ago linked to this fascinating bit of what-iffery by James Wolcott, dating back to before a slim majority of America screwed up by electing Bush again. What if there had been no insurgency, or one that had been quashed easily, as Bush and company seemed to imagine would happen? Just imagine how different things would have been over the last year, how different they would be now. Bush would have been completely vindicated for invading Iraq, despite the non-discovery of WMDs. His pre-war critics would have been completely discredited, the …

Courtesy of Tedious and Brief, here’s a real beauty. A religious fanatic in the Kansas government is charging a Kansas abortionist with not only operating on patients in a filthy clinic (which, you know, might be possible), but also with eating fetal tissue. Eating babies. Just when did they observe this? Did the abortionist in question hold up his sandwich and point at the meat, saying, “Look at this delicious baby! I find it does wonders for my skin!” I mean, really, on what basis is that charge made? Oh, wait, there’s a bill stalled now, that pushes for strict …

My friend Adam has a way of digging up stories that make me want to give up on America. I mean, okay, it’s possible that this kind of story isn’t crazy, right? Look, a title like Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding, I could take that seriously enough. Or, I used to be able to. Any kid planning an attack on his high school would claim it was a misunderstanding if he were caught before the fact, wouldn’t he? A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday …

Two links via Raed in the Middle: An Iranian telling Bush what he thinks of th blue-tipped finger images from Iraq, and a look at what I think Iraqis will probably remember about the American occupation. (Warning, the images are very graphic, and some of you may regret clicking through. But it’s also reality, and something we’ll need to face up to for a long time, much longer than Bush will be in office.)

via the latest Viridian Note, here’s an interesting look at what happens if you try to disrupt oiltrading in Britain. ‘I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.’?Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: ‘Sod off, Swampy.’ Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. ‘The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims,’?a …