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George Orwell (http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm) advocates MIL, while Douglas Adams (http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A61345) gently suggests MIF. Make of this what you will.
Milk-first versus tea-first
by Doctor Science One of the traditional British class markers is whether you put milk in your cup before you add tea, or vice versa. For the past 150 years at least, tea-first has been upper-class, milk-first middle class (or lower). I have a theory about this, which is mine. Victoria Moore says...
"Government mandates raise the stakes because they don't allow for that distancing. They force moral dissenters to choose between personally engaging in the activity in which they lost the political fight, or to defy the government and break the law by violating the mandate."
Or, you know, just pay the "I don't want to purchase health care" tax, like the bill says.
Government Mandates And Moral Disagreement
--by Sebastian Now that the Supreme Court has ruled to uphold the PPCA, a fruitful discussion about government mandates should be more possible without immediate worries of whether gettting it 'wrong' hurts your own side or helps the other side of whichever political divide you happen to be on. ...
My old Beagle was a master escape artist. He got quite adept at manipulating things with his snout, including nudging open the latch on the wrought iron gate in our yard to get out and popping the louvers off our ground floor windows to break into the house. He also figured out how to open our sliding glass door if we didn't lock it. We observed him doing each of those multiple times.
Once, he not only broke into the house, he also opened the freezer and pulled out a carton of ice cream, which we discovered him eating under the bed when we got home.
And then, when we later got a second dog, a black Lab, he'd break out and take the Lab with him, then intentionally get the Lab lost and run back home. Somehow, the poor Lab never figured this out or ever managed to learn his own way back home.
Mister Ed open thread
by Doctor Science Pursuant to a dinner-table discussion, I found myself at a Yahoo!Answers discussion of "What is the most intelligent horse breed?". The consensus of the horsey people answering was (a) it depends, but stereotypically (b) Arabians. The discussion was very interesting, and include...
The trend of ignorant apologists contorting reality into crazy shapes to avoid calling a racially-motivated murder what it is continues apace.
Faulkner's past and Trayvon Martin
by Doctor Science "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." -- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun Like almost everyone else, I've been following the Trayvon Martin case. If you've been under a cozy rock, here's a good summary from Think Progress, another from Mother Jones. Ta-Nehisi Coates' ...
How is this any different at all from Dr. Laura's racist tirade? And yet Peretz didn't say the magic n-word, so of course he won't lose his job or any of his Village prestige.
F**k every single one of these media sociopaths.
Polite Conversation
by Eric Martin This is an utterly shocking display of anti-Semitism, especially coming from a major media figure: But, frankly, Jewish life is cheap, most notably to Jews. And among those Jews, there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their b...
Have sanctions ever actually worked to discourage a rogue state from pursuing an action of which the sanctioning group disapproved?
Because so far sanctions haven't stopped Iran or North Korea or Hamas, nor did they stop Milosevic's Serbia. The best I can think of is Iraq, but the sanctions were put in place in the wake of an invasion that completely decapitating the Iraqi military complex and took place alongside regular international inspections of potential weapons sites. Those conditions are not met in any other sanction situation I know of.
But, Hell, I don't know everything, so that's a serious question. If there's a situation where sanctions worked, I'd love to hear about it.
Pieces, in one big chess game
by von And now, from the UN Security Council: WASHINGTON — The White House said Thursday it was confident the UN Security Council would back toughened sanctions on Iran in the next week, despite the furor over Israel's Gaza flotilla raid. Some Middle East observers have warned that the outrage ...
Well, except that I think it's clear that the GOP does actually consider those aspects of the originally-drafted Constitution to be perfect as written.
GOP: Slavery and Disenfranchisement of Women Were Features, Not Bugs
by Eric Martin Via Adam Serwer, here's an interesting tack for the GOP to take in attacking Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan: Kagan quoted from a speech Marshall gave in 1987 in which he said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.” She quoted him as saying the Sup...
My take is that the ruling as regards to what DMCA says is almost certainly correct. It's just that DMCA was a terrible, blatantly anti-consumer law. It's not even a matter of it being outdated so much as being geared to shut down fair use and gut consumer rights from the very start. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Fair use?
by von Gird thy loins for some light law blogging. (Why your loins? Because that's where the law strikes! Ba-da-bing! I'm here all week folks! Be sure to tip your gender-left-unspecified service people.) So here is today's issue: What should be the limits on fair use? It's a question that ...
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