Okay, I know I’m being bad. But some nonsense is just so nonsensical it just cries out for it. ‘And if the children cry out for rebuke shall we walk on the other side?’ I bet you don’t know what part of the Bible that’s from. Neither do I.

Anyway. They’re schlepping around with their tongues hanging out, begging us to laugh at them. So let’s laugh at them. First let’s laugh at Jesus-sniffing.

You can find candles with just about every fragrance imaginable, from blueberry to ocean mist to hot apple pie. Now there’s a candle that lets you experience the scent of Jesus, and they’ve been selling out by the case…”You can’t see him and you can’t touch

Well. There’s not much to say. I’ll just quote a little. From International Spiegel Online.

Hatin’s crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family’s adopted land. The vivacious 23-year-old beauty, who was raised in Berlin, divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame — the embrace of “corrupt” Western ways.

And because ‘her family’ own her, it’s not enough just to dislike or disapprove of her behavior – they have to turn her into nothing. … Read the rest

I hope you’ve all read the interview with Rebecca Goldstein – because it’s so good, and interesting, and full of ideas. Not my doing, obviously, but Goldstein’s. I’ve been an admirer of her fiction for years – ever since The Mind-Body Problem came out, in fact, I think, which is more than twenty years ago. It’s a brilliant novel. I’ve always thought so, so I was pleased to see Steve Pinker tell her “Your first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, is a classic among people in my field” in that conversation between the two of them I posted in Flashback a few days ago. I hope you’ve also read that, because it’s fascinating. I hadn’t read it before I wrote the … Read the rest

It’s everywhere. Well it would be, wouldn’t it. Tocqueville said as much, and Mill reviewed both volumes of his book, each as it came out, and was as worried as Tocqueville, and wrote On Liberty as a result. But they might as well have saved their breath to cool their corn flakes. Only yesterday I was expressing some reservations about the idea of the of the ‘self-conscious reorganisation and administration of scientific disciplines for democratically chosen goals’ – and here we are again. This time at the Supreme Court, of all places where it doesn’t belong, or shouldn’t belong.

A number of the justices declared–dispositively, as they like to say–that “we are a religious nation.” The implication was that