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The Wrong Title
Let’s put it this way: a day always starts off a good one when it takes me this long to get around to the blog. The blog is always what I do last, after I do the work somebody is going to pay me for, and when that work gets difficult and conflicted, I tend…
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Racial Profiling
So here we are again, at my local news, because over the week-end we had something of a story. Around about Sunday, a couple of hikers came across a vehicle obviously abandoned on the side of a popular hiking trail. What’s more, the vehicle stank to high heaven, and the stink was–well, the hikers thought…
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Cultures, Relative
For something like the last five days, while most of the rest of the world has been worrying about royal babies and George Zimmerman playing Good Samaritan and I don’t know what else, I’ve been following a story about a Norwegian woman who was arrested in Dubai for having “illegal sex” after she called the…
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Evolution Wars, Evolving
Not all the books I’ve been unearthing in my office have been light and shiny ones like the one on Piero della Francesca I talked about yesterday. I read a lot of books about policy, and some of those have come to the surface, too. One of those is a thing called The Tower of…
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Sunday, Sunday
Every once in a while, I have thi s fantasy that I will one day be able to establish a personal schedule that will never have to change. Part of that schedule would be what I think of as Sacrosanct Sunday Mornings, a time when I would have to do absolutely nothing but listen to…
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Heroes, Victims, and Heroic Victims
I thought about starting this blog post by pointing out that what we usual call a True Believer is much more likely to be a Sadist than a Masochist. But I think that, right now, I’m going to take that as read, and go back to Socrates, or at least the Socrates of our imagination.…
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Sadists, Masochists, and Proofs of the Existence of God
So, it’s just past the middle of July, and my left eye has done its usual trick for the summer. I don’t know what it is, but I get some kind of allergic reaction thing in it. I would go into the details, but they get fairly disgusting, so just leave it at the fact…
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Mea Maxima Culpa
From my sophomore year, I attended a private Catholic girls school some miles from my home. It was a place run by nuns still in full habit (the “change” wouldn’t come until graduation week my senior year) and filled with girls who were trying to be good. I can remember how odd I thought that…
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Optical Illusions
Okay, I’m going to try something of a tricky maneuver here. It’s tricky mostly because I want to start in what is probably going to seem like left field, make an enormous loop around a couple of millennia of history, and end up–well, we’ll end up where we end up. Let’s start with this …
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Presumed Innocent
The title of t his post is also the title of a very good book by Scott Turow, and I personally think you should all go read it if you haven’t yet. It’s good enough so that I read it, in spite of the fact that it’s a novel about somebody falsely accused, which is…
