The events in Iran, or should we say Persia, bring home most painfully the ironies of the United States’ posturing about individual freedom, honest elections, and the wickedness and absurdity of state abuse and oppression of the people.

In the streets of Teheran and elsewhere, people who have known no other regime than that of the mullahs are rising up to reject and repudiate a presidential election managed by the forces of theocracy, who control media and academia to a stultifying degree. They risk imprisonment and death as they defy a state obsessed with its own security from perceived outside enemies - or even as they just try to go about their lives. Sounds a bit like the US, doesn’t it?

» Continue reading “Pot and Kettle”

One can sympathize with John Boehner, Minority Leader in the US House of Representatives. Despite EPA muzzling in-house reports by people who think they’re scientists instead of political operatives, the word is out: watermelon solutions to perceived environmental crises are bad ideas. Based on fairy tales and outright lies, they hurt prosperity, the only actual means of getting people to make their natural surroundings cleaner and more beautiful.

» Continue reading “The Compost Heap”

Voodoo “science” a la CSI tops our list today, with a reminder how little actual science is involved in the sending of innocent people to prison or death.

As adult stem cells are already helping people, the politically-driven pursuit of fetal stem cell therapies is killing them.

And speaking of politically-driven lunacy, we have the sci-fi body scanners that used to be symbols of a dystopia we’d never want to live in.

» Continue reading “Some more interesting bits”

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s 1984, and we have an aggregation of links redolent of Newspeak and the Memory Hole. Why on Earth, one is moved to ask, is Cindy Sheehan still protesting in Crawford, Texas, instead of Rezko Acres or Pennsylvania Avenue?

» Continue reading “Down the Memory Hole”

For regular readers, apologies; Horatius has not been posting.  High standards of content have become an obstacle to production.  In other words, the excellent has become the enemy of the good for your (more or less) humble correspondent.

» Continue reading “Enemy of the Good”