Take your eye off Western Civilization for just a moment and it will be swinging from the rafters with its own belt around its neck...
-- Bruce Charlton

Self-control is the control and rightful-ordering of desires and passions by the rational self. Liberation, as promoted by liberals, socialists, and other libertarians, is the setting-free of desires and passions from the command of the rational self, the thraldom of the latter to the former, and the manipulation and control of the desires and ( Read more... )

Today, TOF presents for your delight a Quote of the Day, a Science! Marches On!, and a Statistical Puzzle for you to solve, among the usual sundry miscellany.

"For historians looking back, the sign of a dark age is the lack of comprehensive, consistent and canonical records. The actual history that unfolds may be marked by progress or decline. The European Middle Ages, once known as the Dark Ages, are now widely regarded as a period of widespread cultural development. It just wasn’t of the Greco-Roman ( Read more... )

Odds and ends

On the TOFSpot

The desecration of this feast [Nativity of John the Baptist] in Quebec began around the time of the uprising in 1837. It developed into the, by now, commonplace modern story of the appropriation by nationalists of what never had belonged to them. By increments it became what it is there today - the fully secularized “Fête nationale du Québec,” ( Read more... )

At the TOFSpot, a collection of pithy quotes gradually saved on Notepad.

The essence of what Jerry Pournelle calls 'the voodoo sciences' is pithily encapsulated in this bon mot:

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/05/quote-of-day-models-and-turism.html