Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- UK government promises immediate, sweeping, pro-liberty reform – Bravo, UK.
- Grading on a curve – As the GOP try to tell the press to go easy on poor n00b Radn Paul, here’s the money graf: “Paul has been running for the Senate for quite a while, and he won a statewide primary this week for an important public office. It’s a ‘tough thing’ for him to talk about his own beliefs? If so, perhaps he’s not quite ready to serve in the United States Senate. Maybe he could start with city council or something and work his way up.”
- Candidates, military service, and tall tales: Steve Benen
- When a walk-back becomes a sprint – Money graf: “It appears that Paul had a choice: defend his deeply held principles and try to convince voters of the merit of his ideas, or abandon those principles when they became politically problematic and put his Senate bid in jeopardy. Paul has obviously made his decision.” So now he comes off as a kook and untrustworthy. Nice.
- Fox News: “Fair and Balanced” – “We report [what we want you to hear], you decide [based on the biased info we give you].”
- Living in denial: Unleashing a lie – opinion – 21 May 2010 – New Scientist – Researching quotations, I find many examples of a quote by a famous people whom “everyone” knows wrote it, but which is nowhere in that person’s known body of work. If it sounds plausible and is catchy, we assume it’s true — throw in ideology, and lies travel faster than the truths to correct them.
- Everything there is to know about domain names (infographic) – Some fun facts.
- Jocelyn Fong: Marine Corps captain rebuts charges that Kagan is “anti-military” – Oh, piffle — don’t let your “facts” and “personal experience” get in the way of Rush Limbaugh’s narrative …
- Old School: Vintage Ads We’re Glad Are Gone – Ah, the “good old days,” full of “wholesome values” that made America great.
- Women to teach boys at primary level – Scandalous!
- Bangkok burns – “Les Miserables” keeps running through my head …
- Jobs, Apple Unlikely to Embrace VP8 – Apple has gotten as bad about open standards as Microsoft ever was (which is saying something).
- Creepiest Christian comment yet – I can intellectually understand the argument that rape/incest exceptions in abortion laws are inconsistent (if it’s killing an innocent child, it’s killing an innocent child). But blithely asserting that (a) rape is not as bad as divorce, (b) rape is not as bad as crucifixion, and (c) good Christian women can just lie back and think of Jesus, and therefore a rape exception to abortion is just taking a cowardly (and “atheistic”) way out is … really obnoxious, to put it far too mildly.
- A child is not a notch on the bedpost – Wow. This really is disturbing (if not disgusting), and certainly a perversion of what I think marriage means. I may write a longer blog post about it, but let me just say — bleh.
- How the kudzu invasion is poisoning the air with ozone [Disaster] – Wow. That’s remarkable. Though the note “threats to the environment don’t always come from humans” is misleading, since kudzu was in fact allowed to spread in the US by bringing it here where there’s no ecological barrier to it growing like, well, kudzu.
- Ask a Physicist: Would a gravitron work in deep space? [Askaphysicist] – “There are others, like artificial gravity, that we know how to make work, and nearly every show and movie gets wrong. There’s simply no excuse. 2001 got it right, and that was over forty years ago. Babylon 5 got it right, and they were broadcast on TNT, for goodness sake.” Huzzah for B5!
- Old-school space playgrounds were awesome and/or death traps [Architecture] – Oh, those were indeed the days. There’s a lot I am envious about in today’s integrated play equipment at parks, but nothing beats a burning-hot-in-the-sun metal space ship for nostalgic goodness.
- Google Font Directory and API – Okay, the more I read about this, the more cool it sounds.
- My last minute entry into Everyone Draw Mohammed Day! – Les makes up in passion what he might have missed in that “We’re looking for people who can draw!” correspondence course.
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