The Japanese Earthquake & Anti-Nuclear Hysteria
Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl
Several Plant Workers Are Ill, but Radiation Risk in Japan Is Seen as Low for Now
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Tag Archives: politics
Monday Night Irish Class, February 28, 2011
Shrinking Glaciers
Fifty-two years. Less than one human lifetime. And that’s all its taken to turn one of nature’s most spectacular, imposing presences into a shrunken shell of its former self. Although it’s large enough that it’s not in danger of disappearing anytime soon, it’s still an alarming change.
And it’s happening all over the world.
Politics and the AntiVaccination Movement
From Why the ‘Prius Driving, Composting’ Set Fears Vaccines
I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, “No, really, I’m not joking.” It’s those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people.
The Long Divergence
IN 2002 a group of Arab scholars produced a brave report, under the auspices of the United Nations, on the Arab world’s twin deficits, in freedom and knowledge. A salutary debate ensued. Now Timur Kuran, a Turkish-American economist based at Duke University, has written an equally brave book on “how Islamic law held back the Middle East”. One can only hope that the result will be an equally salutary debate.
Ayn Rand in old age
From Monastic Musings:
I was surprised to read about Ayn Rand’s old age at Gruntled Center. In the face of the cost of treatments for lung cancer, she signed up for Social Security and Medicare using her legal name, Ann O’Connor.
This would not bother me in the least, had she written or said anything to retract her condemnation of those programs. But – in spite of her many tirades against hypocrisy – she quietly accepted government funding while continuing to condemn both the programs and the people who accepted the funding.
The Irish Bail-out
From the Financial Times via Memex and BoingBoing
MLK and SF
Sarah Palin
Political Violence and the American Left
An ex-Weather Underground radical on the Tucson shootings and political violence
….the Weather Underground believed in the absolute necessity of bombs to address actual moral grievances such as the Vietnam War and racism….
Via Ann Althouse
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 