Miranda Devine in the Sydney Morning Herald has a good overview of the latest religious craze to hit Australia – visions of the Virgin Mary on a fence at Coogee beach! (The flock of people who have descended there to see the fence has also been provoking some irate locals to vandalize it) 6000 people […]

The Milwaukee County sheriff is under assault from the usual guilty white liberals and “black community leaders” for speaking the truth. The controversy began last month after 24-year-old Lamarr Nash stole a truck and led deputies on a high-speed freeway chase. It ended after the truck collided with a squad car. Mr. Nash gave up […]

Hey, I was checking the Salon website to see if they’re acknowledging that they might close down soon (they didn’t pay their december rent)-and saw personals ad from some brown chick in NYC. She says she is a professor with post-grad ed in her late 20s, and looks to be the “alternative” type (see the […]

On Lew Rockwell, Gene Callahan comes up with a quiz which allegedly shows that religion is not the enemy of scientific progress. That may well be true but did he have to doctor the results to prove it? His first question reads: 1. When Galileo faced the Inquisition, he held that the Earth moved around […]

This long article from The New York Times Magazine is about the confrontation/dialogue between Peter Singer (extreme utilitarian philosopher) and a disabled rights activists. Personally, I think both hold unreasonable extremist positions-Singer’s utilitarianism does not take into account human feeling and frailties, and ironically, nether do disabled right’s activists-who deny that there might be a […]

Fat is the new thin.

Discovering a Secret of Long Life (a gene even). For the record, my maternal grandfather lived until 100 and his aunt lived until 115. {actually not relevant, since the article is about mitochondria-so now you know my secret, I don’t read everything I link….}

Randall Parker has great post on Iraq vs. North Korea-similarities & differences. Update: Also, Check out Randall’s take on cloning. The “Pundit” line of blogs that Randall runs is definately one of the more underappreciated on the net…. Posted by razib at 07:21 PM

Someone just commented on our threads on African-American beauty (scroll down to Terms of Endearment-I couldn’t figure out permlinks-Update, Gwen gave me the permlink, lazy me): Maybe I am too sheltered here in Oakland, but, man, my jaw is hanging down around my knees, and it’s not just one or two old nerds’ club MIT […]

The LA TIMES has a piece on humanities at Cal Tech. Yes, you read that right! This is a funny sample: “The older students get used to it,” said David Armet, 20, a junior sitting at a campus cafe with senior Jay Carlton, 21. Both are mechanical engineering majors. Carlton, who was thumbing through a […]

So you know that the moronic government of Greece has banned public gaming right? Gamers are looking to the EU to help them out. Well, this is part of the problem. Greeks deserve the politicians they elected. The EU might help in this case, but what if the EU had decided to go along with […]

The New York Review of Books has another predictably hostile review of The Blank Slate but at least this time they got a scientist to review it rather than one of those literary intellectuals[1]. GNXP readers – critique away! [1] Pot calling the kettle black you might think? Well in fact as an economist I’m […]

The New York Times has a pretty balanced article on legacies at Middlebury college. Note these facts: While legacies made up 12 percent of the freshman class entering Middlebury in the fall of 1965, they are just 5 percent of the current freshman class. It can be difficult to mount an argument that those admitted […]

Lest you all think I’m an anti-sex crab, I will post an essay about my views on the sexual revolution and free love in about two weeks. Also, I must quibble with our “Darwin’s wolves” motto. The she-wolf is a bit fierce for my sensitive nature. I shall instead be Darwin’s lioness; a sleek, tawney […]

In the review mentioned below, the author mentions Gould’s “spandrel argument” for the occurrence of “by-products” of evolutionary processes–i.e. the ability of humans to play chess is not a gene that has been selected for, it is the by-product of spacial reasoning: “Snails build their shells by winding a tube around an axis of coiling. […]

I want this researchers job.. the guy spends two and a half years hanging around seedy and not-so-seedy places watching people kiss..! On second thoughts, maybe not. Imagine the pent-up frustrations, the high cost of hotel porn..? But that’s not what I found interesting about his research. It was the implication that the less passionate […]

Christ (Muhammed?), I’m going to be labelled a “warblogger” if I don’t shut my mouth up about yogurt-eating Arabs and their falafel loving Jewish cousins…but, anyone notice how it can be argued that all the states of the old Fertile Crescent (Mesopatamia + the Levant) are ruled by ethno-religious minorities? Iraq-Sunni Arabs (25-30% of the […]

Melvin Konner reviews The Blank Slate by Steve Pinker & Darwinian Politics by Paul Rubin. He gives them a fair shake. But a few quibbles with his quibblings I do have…. Unlike race, gender is a valid and significant biological and psychological category, which, despite huge overlaps between male and female, does help us predict […]

John Jay Ray (fellow godless reactionary) issues a corrective toward the soft-tinted view of the Islamic “Golden Age”. A minor quibble or two, many of the translators of Greek learning were in fact Christians fluent in the Hellenic tongue, but they might have spoken Aramaic at home, so let us give credit to the Syrian […]

A Broadband Hookup in Every Home ~ subsidy for downloading porn. Come on, there are real problems with literacy and basic levels of health and well being in this country-let alone Kentucky (the state proposing this). For the majority of people, the difference between broadband & 56 K for activities such as online shopping & […]