Never thought I’d see this day: Reflecting on queen’s historic meeting with ex-IRA commander

Never thought I’d see this day: Reflecting on queen’s historic meeting with ex-IRA commander

I very much hope that this is the seal upon which a lasting peace will be made.  Exhaustion, not victory, has been the outcome in Northern Ireland, and it's time to draw a line under The Troubles and move on.

Tuesday ADHD linklets

So Orbitz is steering Mac users to pricier hotel rooms? Or something like that? Maybe I can revive my old Micron PC, when next I go shopping for lodging.

June was the bloodiest month so far, in Boko Haram's jihadist attacks on Nigeria's northern Christians. Damn the evil Saudi wahabbists, who exported this murderous militantism to Islamic communities around the world.

Climate scientists are receiving some ugly harassment these days. Via The Week, who provide a pithy synopsis. You don't have to be a civilization-hating greenie to deplore things like this. I myself accept the prevailing scientific consensus, that global warming is real, artificial, growing, and a menace. I tend to trust the power of aggregate knowledge. When researchers in widely separate fields find evidence pointing to the same phenomenon, that's not to be cried down as a conspiracy, human nature doesn't work that way. The much ballyhooed corrections to this or that observation, which are seized upon as evidence of AGW's falsity? They all come from climate scientists, engaging in normal scientific self-scrutiny--not from deniers. I do mistrust leftists, hoping to gain control of the means of economic production via science, which they couldn't via democracy or revolution. But I'll trust the scientists much more than I will them, or the deniers.

Guadalcanal veteran has lost dog tags returned to him by Aussie soldier. What a nice surprise for an old hero.

Loch Ness Monster used by fundamentalist schools as evidence of creationism. Dear God, please make the shtoopid go away. Person for person, fundies are among the most honest, upright, trustworthy, and patriotic people in the country. If only they could be made to understand that the Bible is not God!.

Activists Take Out Frustration on ... Ronald Reagan

Classless...just like the adolescents in Clinton's White House who vandalized the place in advance of handing off to Bush.
Activists Take Out Frustration on ... Ronald Reagan

Gay marriage

There's an air of inevitability about it now, even though it's being imposed by judicial fiat & not by democracy. We're in uncharted waters. What will the future look like, with the former building block of society and transmitter of civilization being joined by multiple forms of unions, whose primary purpose is to gratify the partners' appetites? It's not such a tremendous leap from where we are now, of course, not in these days where a "family" is simply any group of people who share sweet feelings and a refrigerator. Still, this is going to be very new and different.

Creationism in South Korea

Once again, they copy some of our worst attributes...

"South Korea surrenders to creationist demands: Publishers set to remove examples of evolution from high-school textbooks."

Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states1. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science. [...] Even the nation’s leading science institute — the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — has a creation science display on campus. “The exhibition was set up by scientists who believed in creation science back in 1993,” says Gab-duk Jang, a pastor of the campus church. The institute also has a thriving Research Association for Creation Science, run by professors and students, he adds.

Proof that having a thoroughly educated, thoroughly modern, thoroughly First World society is no shield against scientific folly.

China stock market news blocked by Chinese internet censors

Why? Because the results, -64.89, match a search block on Tiananmen Square massacre search terms. 6-4-89...June 4th, 1989. Get it?

Commie tyrants...