ELSEWHERE

All this furore about same-sex marriages seems a storm in a teacup to me. Marriage arose as basically a reproductive contract so a homosexual union can NEVER be a real marriage no matter how often you call it that, as far as I can see. But Jeff Jacoby has an argument against homosexual “marriages” that does make at least some sense.

I was amused by the picture of authentic Basque culture on the Jennings blog. Apparently Michael has been to Spain recently.

A good bit of sarcasm from the WSJ: “As many as 50 Shiite Muslims are dead after a Friday terrorist attack on a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan, the Associated Press reports. Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports a pair of suicide bombers murdered at least 13 people at an open-air rock concert in Moscow Saturday.... Boy, it's lucky for the Pakistanis and the Russians that they opposed the liberation of Iraq, or the terrorists would have been really mad at them”.

A fightback against traffic cameras: “A clear spray called Photoblocker can be applied to license plates to make them hyper-reflective and unreadable when the camera flashes."

"The European Commission and the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris) are reprimanding and threatening several low tax countries with blacklisting or other sanctions because of their LOW taxes! Lowering taxes is “unfair” according to these insane bureaucrats

A strange one from Chris Brand: MARITAL CHOICE. In a dramatic breakthrough for the concept of ‘families of choice’ an American businessman began to offer wives for a rent of around $50,000 annually. Both parties sign a contract setting out terms on which they insist, and men are presented with a variety of women from nymphomaniancs through bluestockings to homemakers.

Writing on his other blog, China Hand has a good comment on the uselessness of many university degrees. The article in The Economist that he is referring to is here. Excerpt: “On average, Arts degrees show a negative return. In other words, those graduates earned less than if they hadn't done their degree at all.”

In my academic posting here (or here) I look at the Leftist theory that people who express approval of conventional authority are prone to behaving in an aggressive, domineering way. I show that there is in fact no relationship between such attitudes and such behaviour.

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