Assistant Village Idiot

David Post over at Volokh had a discussion about blue states subsidisng red ones at the federal level.   There is a lot that he leaves ...

Bethany calls it the Tim Tebow Fallacy , and she has a point. “The tendency to increase the strength of a belief based on an incorrect perce...

I caught a thread which asked "Would Donald Trump stage a terrorist attack to keep power?" or something like that.  The consensus ...

I have posts, but I am still sick so going to bed. In the meantime, my son sent along these precinct-level maps of the last few presidential...

The mouse has likely been with us for 15K years .  6000 years ago, the PIE word for the creature is reconstructed as mus . So it is also one...

Related to my Critical Thinking post (and to my Commenting post, Toxoplasma link - heck probably about 20% of everything I've posted) i...

Excellent article at First Things about the Moral Minority, contrasting three books about what Christians should do going forward to answe...

Biography is interesting because a variety of narratives can be drawn from the same set of facts.  I don't mean that writers are (necess...

Comments underneath posts are notoriously bad, and the more popular the website, the more absolutely infuriating commenters it attracts.  Mo...

This came up in an email discussion and I thought I would remind everyone of the essay The Toxoplasma of Rage. It's one of the best es...

The point-of-view will not be unfamiliar to readers here.  Critical thinking is not being taught to college students. Rob Jenkins has a bit ...

I always thought Barack Obama was bad enough just as he stood, with no need to invent worse things about him.  Nonetheless many of his oppon...

The little Adsense blurb on my Blogger page has increased its estimate of what I could make a month from $12 to $13/month.  This changes eve...

This is a simple enough phrase, but not one that everyone who is anti-vaccine could have arrived it independently.  It must be a phrase that...

A friend pointed out that I give an impression that the people I work with are not only consistently liberal, but have an extremist streak. ...

Following McWhorter's comment about the changing meaning of words in a particular speech in "Hamlet," I went to the scene in q...

I am only at work about two days a week now.  Two people, a part-time psychiatrist about my age and a psychiatric nurse in her thirties, bot...

I never much liked him while studying him in college.  Shaw was considered second only to Shakespeare, but he always bothered me.  I was gra...

Oh yeah, I went there on my road trip.   I should mention it just in case you plan to go.   It’s fine.   Like many museums, in its effo...