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.