Blog comments policy

I will periodically repost my comments policy for those who recently started visiting this site.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
[Read more…]

I am also in the Epstein files

To be named in the Epstein files is now a mark of shame, carrying with it a presumption that one is tainted by association with him and may have engaged in some truly odious practices.

(Non Sequitur)

Like the character in the cartoon, I would have thought that there was no way that my name would appear in the Epstein files but I was surprised to find that it actually does. How I discovered this was that there are many scientists and other well known academics mentioned in the news reports about the Epstein files so I went to the department of justice website that has a searchable database of the files released so far to check on names at random. It quickly got boring searching for well-known names, so on a whim I entered my own name and was stunned when it returned that my name was in this file.
[Read more…]

A lapsed atheist’s journey back to faith

Christopher Beha has a long essay titled Losing Faith in Atheism wherein he describes his personal journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back again. As one who had a journey from religious belief to non-belief but have never had any reason to go back, I am always curious about what makes others revert and so I read his essay with interest.

The first part describes how he lost his faith and he describes reading the well-known books by the so-called New Atheists that I am sure many readers would be familiar with, such as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. But he says he could not find anywhere in them an answer to the question “How am I to live?”.

To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

He says that he started reading the modern philosophers, searching for answers. He says that there were two schools of thought that purported to provide answers: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.
[Read more…]

The grooming of Virginia Roberts Giuffre

The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
[Read more…]

The arrest of Andrew, the man formerly known as prince

(I wrote this post during the time when the blog was down so it is slightly dated but here it is anyway.)

The Jeffrey Epstein fallout continues with Peter Mandelson, a Labour Party bigshot and former UK ambassador to the US, being arrested.

But the big shocker occurred when British police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, King Charles’s brother on “suspicion of misconduct in public office”. What that misconduct consisted of was not made clear (there is no indication as yet of it being part of Epstein story) but there are many possibilities because Andrew is a long-time sleazy grifter who took advantage of his privileged position to enrich himself while also cavorting with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. So there is a lot for the police to look into.
[Read more…]

The madness of the attack on Iran

If there was any doubt that the US and Israel are rogue, lawless states joined at the hip who are determined to create vast amounts of suffering to people all over the globe to advance their narrow personal interests, their joint attack on Iran should put those doubts to rest.

When you put a person like Trump with a child’s mentality in charge of the world’s largest military, and then pair him with a manipulative genocidal leader like Netanyahu, you have a recipe for unleashing mayhem

We do not where this will lead. All we can be sure of is that once mopre, many, many innocent people will suffer and die.

Neil Sedaka (1939-2026)

This prolific singer-songwriter, who was behind so many hit songs of my adolescence, many written for other artists, has died.

Here is one of my favorites Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen.

His songs were usually cheerful and upbeat, reflecting a more innocent time in pop culture. Sadly, in the post-Jeffrey Epstein era, this song about teenage love now has creepy connotations.

But I thought that it might momentarily take people’s minds off today’s truly depressing news that Trump and Netanyahu have launched a war with Iran with who knows what consequences.

Well, that’s disappointing

I follow sporting events only cursorily, just checking the headlines as they appear on the front pages of various news sites. When it comes to the Olympics, for the summer games I check out just the track and field events. For the winter Olympics, I follow them even less but if anyone asks me what my favorite event is, I have no hesitation is answering ‘curling’.

I know almost nothing about this sport other than that one has to send something known as a ‘stone’ down the ice to get as close as possible to a target, with teammates using brooms to help guide the stone to its destination. In addition to looking quaintly weird, what I like most about it is its reputation for having very high standards of sportsmanship, something I value highly.

So I was upset to read that the current games have had a major curling controversy, involving people being accused of cheating by subtly touching the stone with their fingers, which is a major no-no apparently.

You can read the whole complicated controversy here.

Well hell’s bells, who knew the ice could get so hot? The Olympic curling community is still all in a twist about everything that’s gone on in the sport since a row broke out between the Sweden and Canada sides on Friday. “The whole spirit of curling is dead,” Canada’s Marc Kennedy said on Monday night after his team’s 8-2 victory against Czech Republic, which felt like a bold take coming from the man who started this entire farrago by repeatedly telling his Swedish opponent Oskar Eriksson to “fuck off” after Eriksson accused him of making an illegal double‑touch.
…

The row has turned out to be the biggest thing to happen to it since it was brought back into the Olympic programme in 1998. The slow-motion footage of Kennedy brushing the stone with his forefinger has gone viral, and the internet is overflowing with sloppy AI skits of Kennedy nudging ice hockey pucks and knocking over figure skaters at the ice rink.

Is nothing sacred anymore?