Best term ever for modern greenie-paganism: ‘fluffwicca’.

About the pagan roots of Easter.

About the push to have a UN treaty banning “defamation” of religion.

Indian sceptic challenges Tantric master to kill him and lives.

Concern about Saudi Arabia pouring huge sums into Islamist groups in the Balkans ( Read more... )

Don’t kiss a boxer. But it might work as a soccer tactic.

About the dancing boys of Afghanistan: intense cultural misogyny results in the eroticisation of boys.

A founder of Exodus talks about parents abandoning their children because they were gay.

Colin Farrell talks about the hell his gay brother went through at school in Belfast ( Read more... )

The siege of Cadiz as central in the defeat of Napoleon.

Newsreel of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. (The Allied signatories in order are Macarthur as Allied Supreme Commander, the US, China, UK, USSR, Australia, Canada, France, Netherlands, New Zealand.)

Looking at the nuclear alertness issue. A shortage of Helium3 is ( Read more... )

A Venn-diagram that helpfully distinguishes between nerds, dweebs, dorks and geeks.

A very useful term: squick.

About Oscar the hospice cat.

Do the Libertarian Purity Test. I scored 47 “your libertarian credentials are obvious”.

Making a statement: not entirely sure which one.

Nice story about being patient with people who may have an entire ( Read more... )

Oz has signed its biggest ever export deal: supplying coal to China. With lots of associated infrastructure.

But TAbb seems to be doing good things for the Coalition’s polling.

Farmer Peter Spencer has ended his hunger strike. It was about who owns property. Talking to Peter Spencer and what it was about.

The Brumby Government has decided to ( Read more... )

Benny Bowers on Bible-based marriage.

Having fun with the risqué bits in the Bible:
Not even the most devout can afford to interpret the Bible too literally-selective reading is inevitable. Yet many people still think that without the Bible (and religion in general), we’d all be morally adrift in a sea of licentious barbarism. Judging from many a ( Read more... )

A divorced bride auctioned off in Pakistan.

Nice graphic of the instability among the top 25 corporations (pdf) 1999 to 2009. Non-profits showed far more stability.
Seven out of the top ten non-profits not only stayed in the top ten but increased their share of the market during the decade. So much for competition! And according to Jed Emerson and ( Read more... )

Amazing push bikery.

A visual elegy to abandoned caravans.

Visualising the decline of colonial empires.

Suggesting how the industrial revolution could have started in Rome.

Hezbollah wants a textbook pulled from Lebanese schools because it has extracts from the Diary of Ann Frank.

Two Chinese commentators on (in effect) the universality of ( Read more... )

Photo of his ID papers suggests the President of Iran may have been born Jewish. Or maybe not. Pity, it made such a great story.

About what is wrong with blasphemy laws.

The Catholic Church gameplaying the Anglican Church over women bishops. More. The Catholic Primate in England is keen. Suggesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury is too much ( Read more... )

The UN will be teaching Gazan school children about the Holocaust.

The wars on women in Afghanistan and Congo:
Democratizing Afghanistan would require something else, something far deeper and, frankly, more dangerous and more threatening: a revolution in intimate relations ( Read more... )