Quite a

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I’m saddened to read that Lindsay Beyerstein’s father died yesterday, less than a month past his 60th birthday. I actually hadn’t realized they were related: I was only aware of Barry Beyerstein as the best sort of skeptic, casting a critical eye on the grand claims of alternative medicine without ever lapsing into dogmatism—open-minded, as […]

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So, I’m out of sympathy with the sentiment, obviously, but it is pretty damn funny—especially if, like me, you spent your formative geek years in thrall to Moderately-Multiplayer Ontable Role-Playing Games. The person who created this image has actually produced a whole series of Magic-style cards representing various elements of political argument and conflict: philosophers, […]

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So, most periodicals have ethics rules prohibiting reporters from accepting gifts of more than nominal value from any person or organization they’ve written about or might cover in the future. And, formal rules or no, this seems like something of a no-brainer. But it occurred to me today that I’ve attended, gratis, several very nice […]

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Twin defenses of Guantanamo Bay today in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal make the case against closing this delightful vacation spot. The enthusiasm on display here is a bit odd given that the White House itself insists it considers the prison’s closure a priority. (Of course, in politics, everything is a […]

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A New York Times editorial today condemns “three bad rulings” by the Supreme Court. One is the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” decision, which the Times calls a “mangling of sound precedent and the First Amendment.” Another, and the primary target of the editors’ ire, is the Wisconsin Right to Life campaign finance ruling, which “opened […]

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TNR sends a mole on the National Review cruise, and comes back with such an astonishing cargo of crazy that there’s a spit-take lurking in each paragraph. (No word on whether they were following this activity schedule.) At this point, you’d really think it impossible to be surprised anymore by the terrifying self-delusion of conservative […]

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For some reason, I had remembered the Bangles cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” as being much better than it is. I now feel as though someone ought to do a cover as good as I’d imagined it being. In related news, I finally paid enough attention to Wire’s lyrics to realize that R.E.M.’s “Strange” […]

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Solveig Singleton at Tech Liberation Front comments on that Steve Levy column about mash-up artist Girl Talk I linked last week. While she’s certainly right that it seems like a bad idea to riddle copyright law with a tangle of ad-hoc exceptions (is this actually what’s being proposed?) her take seems unfair in a variety […]

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An op-ed in The New York Times argues that the “orthodoxy of privatization — that it’s the government that’s mired by inefficiency and a lack of competition — has been turned on its head in the intelligence industry.” And fair enough, but it’s worth noting that the “orthodox” argument for the superior efficiency of the […]

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