For those of you who didn’t grow up (or have small children) in the 80s, the reference at the close of the previous post is to the cartoon Care Bears. The Care Bear Stare was a sort of deus ex machina the magical furballs could employ when faced with some insuperable obstacle: They’d line up […]

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I’m not sure why Ezra Klein thinks it’s especially significant that studies don’t find obvious academic benefits accruing from D.C.’s voucher program in its first year of operation. Yes, the greater flexibility enjoyed by private actors is one part of the argument for choice, but the real core of the argument is about the market […]

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I’m mostly—but not wholly—inclined to agree with McMegatron. Excepting Republican elected officials, the idea that vocal homophobes are motivated by their own latent homosexuality is usually spurious, and it’s unhelpful on numerous levels to act as though “well, I bet you’re a big queer” is an effective response to such people. I stop short of […]

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I am not ordinarily a big player of video games—and so, a fortiori, not a frequent watcher-of-YouTubes in which other people play video games. But the final battle sequence from the surprise-hit Portal is really worth a look. The game itself looks entertaining, and even features (what struck me as) an innovative play mechanism: You […]

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I’m tempted to just let the redesign be a surprise, but it seems silly to deprive myself of the wisdom of people who actually know something about design, if there are any of you out there. So, below the fold (for those of you who prefer surprises) a very, very rough/tentative mockup of what the […]

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Well, this is just depressing. I had expressed puzzlement a few years back when Antony Flew, the British philosopher best known as an articulate defender of atheism, professed conversion to deism for what struck me as rather poor reasons. But hey, people change their minds for dubious reasons all the time, and I didn’t give […]

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I’m getting set to do a redesign and relaunch of this website and blog, and I’m thinking it’s time to bid farewell to “Notes from the Lounge” and rechristen the enterprise with a title more fitted to its content. That’s a sufficiently personal thing that I’ll probably end up having to come up with a […]

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There have been plenty of links over the weekend to this ABC News story, which is generally interpreted as saying that waterboarding was only ever used, very briefly, on three detainees, and that its use was discontinued way back in 2003. (I’m not sure why this is being treated as a novel disclosure: NBC had […]

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Warren Ellis has apparently read (or at least seen) my comics article. For a sense of how cool I find this, recall that I dressed like this a couple Halloweens ago. And I look like an ass with my head shaved.

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If you are not British or being deliberately pseudo-formal (and even this is kind of twee), it just looks silly when you write “whilst” instead of “while.”

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