Category Archives: Uncategorized

So I was calling a friend to see if she knew any Chinese demographers, and she said, “I’m just riffling through my email, and I see that _incomplete_ statistics show there were 200 executions in China — in the two … Continue reading → Continue reading →

It’s often remarked that to be “pro-life” in the US context correlates quite strongly, among voters, with support for the death penalty. LIfe, it would appear, is sacred from conception until birth. But there is also a curious symmetry between … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This is an argument both sinister and persuasive. In essence, he says that Israel once attracted the Left because of its egalitarian ideals. Now it is attractive to the right precisely because it seems to have become a militarist, aggressive … Continue reading → Continue reading →

There are, -apparently-, papers in the USA which refuse to run the Doonesbury strip this week because BD, when he finds his lower left leg blown off, cries ‘ Son of a bitch’. Compare and contrast the Guardian’s op-ed cartoon … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Though horrendously frightening. bq. One story doing the rounds in my neighborhood was of a small girl who was abducted on the way back from school. A telephone call was made to her parents informing them that they had 10 … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Transcribing the Benny Morris interview, I stumble over a name. It is “Henry ?Pullen”, a Cambridge historian, under whom he did a PhD. So to Google, where eventually the name of Henry Pelling turns up in the context of a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

If there is one piece of technology that has most improved my life in the last year, it is these speakers: actually, I have a slightly less grand set, with only two satellites and not four, but that seems to … Continue reading → Continue reading →

How does meaning emerge in the world? How can it? How did it? What new forms might arise? Continue reading →

The latest developer build of OOo is slithering out: it has, I hope, integrated python scripting, along with a number of bug fixes that I don’ t understand. I have merely downloaded it, and not played with it at all, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and engaged in sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not … Continue reading → Continue reading →