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Integrity: Something Catholic Schools *Shouldn’t* Teach?
Sometimes, I read something that’s really quite awesome, like a bunch of High School kids protesting against the firing of the Assistant Principal of their school. Why was he fired? Because he was gay. I think that it’s a credit to those kids that they felt they should stand up against an injustice and a…
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A Secret Confession
I have a secret to confess. This isn’t the kind of thing that’s likely to be popular with atheists (or skeptics in general), but I have to get it off my chest: I think Ken Ham is amazing. I think that he’s the best thing to happen to religious-secular dialog ever. Before you shut the browser tab/window,…
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Equality of Outcome
One of the tensions in the economic arguments about the world is whether we should focus on equality of outcome, or equality of opportunity. The short version of each reads as follows: Equality of Outcome: It describes a state in which people have approximately the same material wealth or in which the general economic conditions…
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Playing the Piano
I’ve recently been thinking about relearning to play the piano, so I’ll be blogging about that a bit. If you have no interest in that, the posts in this series (they’ll have a ‘piano’ tag up top) are easily skipped.
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Why Do People Vote Against Their Own Self-Interest?
As part of a discussion I had a few days ago, the question was asked: why do you people vote against their own self-interest? Seems like a simple question, pointing out the weirdness that is people voting in politicians who support policies that are clearly at odds with their own situation. It’s blatantly ridiculous, and these…
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Astrology, Bullshit Raised to an Art-Form
Generally speaking, I stay away from the main Skeptic topics. Mostly because they are so obviously wrong, and also because the topic is well-addressed by people who don’t have an additional interest in economics and social reform (the main topics I address on this blog). But scammer-extraordinaire Matthew Currie has decided to loudly object to…
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Our Brain is a Car
I’m going to try to lay out what my personal ‘Philosophy of Mind ‘ is. Most of this has been hacked together from a mix of Psychology and Philosophy classes, years of reading articles, and my own subjective experience. As such, it’s going to be fairly light on links and references. On the other hand,…
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47 Ronin and Appropriation
I was at the movies last night, and in the trailers I was subjected to a preview of “47 Ronin”. It seems like a pretty amazing movie, right? I mean minus that we have a white guy ‘saving’ a bunch of Japanese people (yes, yes, the character is “half-Japanese”. Which is simply an expression of…
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A Gold-Based Currency
A gold-backed currency. Hard currency, where the value of ‘a dollar’ (or ‘a euro’) is tied to a specific quantity of a specific commodity. Like gold, one of the most (if not the most) chemically inert solid elements. I think this is a great idea, with minimal downsides.
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Your Food Is Killing You!!!
Sometimes terrible things (for a certain value of ‘terrible’) make their way onto your Facebook feed, and sometimes it’s important to dissect them, to display their entirely non-functional innards to the world. To proclaim “Really? I mean, really? You believed this?” In a transparent attempt to latch on to the general list-mania that Buzzfeed and others use…
