It never occurred to me that the above oath, so benign and absurd in sound, is actually a corruption of “God’s hooks,” a euphemism for the nails in the cross. Gadzooks indeed!
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act on them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.
Thomas Jefferson
Love this guy taking apart homeopathy. Get in the sack!
Sunset – “Your Eyes Are Mirrors,”
The Glowing City
Wow, this album is great. It’s one of these seamless song-into-song-into-song albums, and the sound is constantly changing, yet remaining identifiable throughout. Bill Baird is the name of the guy behind it, a sort of all-in-one musician with talented friends, not unlike The Microphones’ Phil Elverum (though the music is very different).
Why we must ration health care
Why we must ration health care
A very convincing article by Peter Singer describing the need for health care rationing, although “rationing” is a term which should probably be avoided in debate situations, for obvious reasons.
Essentially, we are already rationing health care by way of cost, and the objections that life has no set value, while true in some ways, are not good policy guides. After all, the million spent to extend one person’s life a year may have extended ten people’s lives by ten years each, if only the money was better spent.
He also gets into the definition of the Quality Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, a unit (life extended by one year, adjusted for quality of said life) for evaluating the efficiency of treatments. At some point, he says (and rightly, I believe), we have to say we are willing to pay no more than X for a QALY, otherwise we end up with… well, the system we’ve got, where costs are astronomical, while expectations and outcomes are no better than countries which spend a fraction as much.
This is going to be a major talking point in the coming years, I’m sure, because if health care really changes, it’s going to need to take some of this into account.
A commenter at Metafilter does bring up a good point, though:
“Regardless of how effective government-run health care might be, it’s not for our society. It’s for societies that pay for things.”
Man, suddenly I really want a shotgun.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
The Psychologist’s Dilemma
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal absolutely nails the Russian doll-like way in which Psychology experiments are often organized. They’re never testing what you think they’re testing, and they always lie.
Amazon puts Orwell e-books in the memory hole
Amazon puts Orwell e-books in the memory hole
Give me a god damn break. This is some serious bullshit. I was going to put this post on TechCrunch but was beaten to the punch by another writer (damn his eyes).
According to the best accounts which I have been able to obtain, this Chimaera was nearly, if not quite, the ugliest and most poisonous creature, and the strangest and unaccountablest, and the hardest to fight with, and the most difficult to run away from, that ever came out of the earth’s inside. It had a tail like a boa-constrictor; its body was like I do not care what; and it had three separate heads, one of which was a lion’s, the second a goat’s, and the third an abominably great snake’s. And a hot blast of fire came flaming out of each of its three mouths! Being an earthly monster, i doubt whether it had any wings; but, wings or no, it ran like a goat and a lion, and wriggled along like a serpent, and thus contrived to make about as much speed as all the three together.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys
It’s a damn ROCKET BIKE
One million yen.