Small Beds and Large Bears

I admire skepticism. Being cool-headed about empirical situations helps you make informed conclusions, and hence decisions, even as you might labour under the pressure of those situations.
Science constitutes formalized skepticism: strictly so in its theoretical, dehumanized sense; more approximately so in the way that scientists as a whole practice their craft. But science’s skepticism is [...]

There’s a set of animals which, on my journeys home, have a particular quality that I’d describe—if pushed—as eldritch. Horses, deer, barn owls. All of these animals stir some atavistic sense of wonder and fear inside me, and when they fleetingly flash past me I can see how my ancestors thought of them as ghosts, [...]

“It’s funny how the Independent has policies that the general public don’t know about, but press officers all do.”
“Like?”
“Like how they never report anything about Greenpeace, and they’ll only report something about the Royal Family if it’s a marriage or a death. It’s policies like that which make the Independent what it is today, the [...]

… otherwise I can’t understand why he would want their finances, their homes and their very way of live ruined by runaway climate change in the near future.
I’ve met a few people who, despite being reasonably aware of (and fairly comfortable with) the notion of social responsibility and responsibility towards others, still voted for Boris [...]

Via Rachel North, I present the return of the most annoying people ever to grace drinks advertising, the Wassup crowd. Don’t click away: it’s worth watching as far as one of them trying to hang himself:

I envisage a followup video based on the Bud-Weis-Er frogs, with a take-your-pick permutation of high-up Republicans taking [...]

As I posted this originally on a locked LiveJournal, here it is in all its glory:

In typically offensive fashion, b3ta provided its newsletter subscribers with a racist song this week. It’s kind of funny if horrid and amateurish, which is a good strapline for the b3ta site generally. I drop “funny” into there in the hope that nobody will tell me to lighten up when they read what follows.
I wondered [...]

Anton Vowl discusses cryptoracists, and the preferred mode of transport of the people who oppress their common-sense opinions:

Which brings me to the other kind of racist, who is much more loathsome. This kind of racist doesn’t admit he’s racist. He thinks he’s not racist; he thinks he’s just trying to talk about matters in a [...]

Tim Ireland thinks David Cameron is a moron. Normally I’d agree with him (although for “moron” I’d substitute “weird crypto-aristocratic melty-faced greenwashing muffintop of a pointmissing waste of political capital”). But not in this case.
Call Me Dave should never have trusted his bike to a bollard, I admit. But to describe the weird assemblage of [...]

To counteract to a tiny extent the recommendations I keep spotting for the most boring blog in the world—replete as that one is with contributions from intellectual heavyweights such as Mark Lumbering, and quotes from acclaimed novelist Kitchenette Elgin Marbles—I give to you: The Enemies of Reason (via burkesworks).
Here’s a post discussing Liz Jones, who [...]