Neurath's Boat

New blog

Somebody has started a new blog devoted to the religious left.  Of course, my personal thinking tends to be the less religion, the better, but politics does require compromise.  If people are going to identify religion with values (and, sadly, I can't force them all to read Euthyphro, much less re-read it until they understand it), it's probably necessary to point out that religion isn't always on the side of the conservatives.

Robo-terrorists

The Medium Lobster is especially disturbing today.  He doesn't sound as much like parody as usual, signalling, of course, the increasing difficulty of being more extreme and sillier than the present administration.

Balancing the federal budget

This is a lot of fun.  With the tax policies that I like, and a few strategic cuts, I was able to get the 2006 budget down to 40 billion even as I doubled spending on a few programs I thought deserved it.  Of course, I have some clue which items are big ticket and which aren't.  I wish some Republicans would play with this game a bit, as by and large they seem confused on that issue, imagining that foreign aid is a big budget item and so forth.

Potter

There may possibly be some kind of extremely subtle spoiler here, though like the author of the post I can't figure out what it could possibly be.  But the feeling I've long had that one of these days I need to get around to finding someone to borrow the Harry Potter books from is getting stronger.

Important news

Have I really gone more than a month without posting?  I knew I'd been bad, but not that bad.  In any event, thanks to Marginal Revolution and Making Light, I have found one of the most disturbing stories about the New Orleans disaster.  I'm sure many of my readers have already encountered the phenomenon of right-wingers blaming people for not evacuating the city when they were told to.  Well, here's a story which suggests some of them simply didn't have the option.