In the fight against global poverty, "the right plan is to have no plan."

The book review is balanced, so it's not as much fun as a hatchet job, but it's still worth a look.

Instapundit:

I'm afraid that it's going to come to open military action against Iran, sooner rather than later.

But I hope he's wrong and Barry R. Posen is right.

William Safire has a funny piece about political slogans.

Andrew Sullivan knows who can fix the crisis in Iraq.

I didn't think the existence and health of society was controversial, but Justin Webb apparently believes that with the Left out of power, no one believes that society exists. Note the past tense:

There was a belief that there was such a thing as society, and its ills could and should be tackled.

The article is worth reading for the bumper sticker quotes, though.

"Scholarship is politics by other means." I hope not. Are the comments of Larry Summers more offensive than the comments of Ward Churchill?

Robert Samuelson says the United States is not falling behind in science.

Big decision to make? Don't think about it.

I'm skeptical.

A step forward for the hydrogen economy.

Technology may not help you as much as you would like, either at home or at work.

I know who I'm not getting to do my taxes.

Apparently at least one Dutch politician is serious about using abortion to reduce crime. Not too long ago someone in the United States suggested something similar, but he was not serious, as the next words out of his mouth illustrate:

That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.

But he still got in a lot of trouble. Will Marianne van den Anker get in trouble?

Alan Dershowitz and William Bennett on the same byline? The apocalypse is upon us.

Josh Marshall asks a funny question.

Europe, it seems, is not as egalitarian as we thought.

Apparently waving your hands does help.

You get more nutritional value out of your food if you enjoy it. On the other hand, my colleague points out that corn syrup is unhealthy, even though I seem to enjoy it.

Another review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. This one gives the book a hammering.

Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.
[...]
All of Dennett's splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and ''generating further testable hypotheses'' notwithstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.

For some reason I seem to have done quite a bit of previous writing about Dennett.

It may be true that we're experiencing more diseases these days, but Mark Woolhouse is being a little vague about it.

So it seems there is something special about modern times - these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population.

"Something special," huh. Could you be more specific? What can we do about it?

From above, below, or beyond; where did life come from?

What's even more interesting than the content of this article is the fact that a PhD astronomer uses the word "bazillions".

Businesses are becoming more environmentally friendly.

Perhaps you too suspect that companies are making nice with greens only for the good P.R. And perhaps you suspect that they only make changes when there’s a profit to be made. If so, you are almost completely right.

Tony Long's column about technology causing the decline of English is at least fun to read, even if I hear echoes of stone age chisel scribes complaining that the speed and convenience of papyrus and ink makes writers sloppy.

From today's science beat: Private groups are smarter than Nasa, babies are smarter than we thought, you're smarter when you're asleep, and dropouts may end up smarter than the rest of us when we end up in nursing homes.

Men and women in science. On even-numbered days I believe this kind of "innate difference" stuff and on odd-numbered days I resist it.

Wiretapping in Europe.

I saw Al Sharpton speak last night. I'll restrict myself to one comment.

Sharpton criticized George Bush Senior's remarks at the funeral of Coretta Scott King; apparently Bush said that he had never experienced anything like that service. Sharpton commented that it was remarkable for a former president of the United States to be so out of touch with minorities that he had never been to a black church service.

The University of Colorado crowd clapped and cheered when Sharpton made this comment. How many of those who cheered have ever been to a black church service? Ten percent? Maybe twenty?

Stanley Fish expresses the other side of the cartoon controversy in the clearest and most convincing way I've heard.

One way to respond to BHL's letter to the American Left might be to point out that the European Left has been a failure.

The best ad in the Super Bowl was the Disney ad. Don't argue, it's been proven scientifically.

Communicating by email can be tricky.

The European and North American Expensive Sports Festival begins today.

This is what happens when you fire your professors for being Catholic.

Keith Devlin discusses cryptography and hash functions. It's one of his better columns. Excerpt:

Advances in computing speed and power will rapidly render useless all the hashing algorithms currently in use. Not today - the experts assure us that our ATM transactions are secure for now. But soon.

Another reason to skip class, if you needed one.

I'll admit I haven't read the book, but I still think Adam Kirsch's review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell is brilliant.

Mr. Dennett believes that explaining religion in evolutionary terms will make it less real; that is the whole purpose of his book. But this is like saying that because water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, it is not really wet; or because the color red represents a certain frequency of light, it is not really red.

Another excerpt:

Because Mr. Dennett ignores it, treating religion instead as at best a pastime for dimwits, at worst a holding cell for fanatics, he never really encounters the thing he believes he is writing about.

I've commented about Dennett and his book before.

Don't get me wrong, I think finding life on Mars would be exciting, but I'm skeptical of this report of evidence for life in a Martian meteorite. The BBC says

The research team includes scientists who brought evidence for microbial life in another Martian meteorite, ALH84001, to the world's attention in 1998.

without noting that the evidence in the 1998 rock was badly flawed.

A possible breakthrough in treating HIV.

Christopher Hitchens:

The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time [...] show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

Meanwhile, megachurches in the US expand, but are not as politically conservative or racially monochromatic as commonly believed; Alternet sees foreign evangelism as a terrible threat; and my church divests itself from companies that are seen as hurting Palestinians.

Boys are in trouble in schools. And so are girls. At least give the Boston Globe points for balance.

We now know more about viruses, specifically what they look like.

I like ethanol, though I'm nervous about a plan to "simply create a federal standard..."

The Mohammed cartoon story is still worth following. Instapundit has a bunch of interesting (if rightward-leaning) links, and you can find a good chronology here. Also note how this controversy compares to similar ones involving Christians and Jews.

Anatole Kaletsky talks about Europe, America, and the advantages of bad government. Which apparently means small government. And that means good government. It's confusing.

Matt Prescott has an easy way to slow global warming.

James Q. Wilson discusses how polarized the US political scene has become.

Notes about the "religious left" in The Washington Post and Alternet. The Alternet piece unintentionally points out part of the problem with this kind of thing:

While there was a lot of policy talk going on, the church meeting felt no different than a nonreligious advocacy group.

This also caught my eye:

Sojourners asked groups to create a list of "moral priorities," but this is the kind of speak that most liberal and progressive folks are unfamiliar with, and ultimately not very good at.

Those liberals, just no good at making moral judgments.

Andrew Sullivan gets it right:

But notice also the creepy alliance between the Islamic far right and the post-modern sensitivity police on the far left. The only extremist religious groups the far left won't find an excuse for are the nutty Christianists.

Background on the Muhammad cartoon controversy is here.

Rather than add my comments about the State of the Union Address, I'll let you read it yourself. And on a funnier but still related note, take a look at the worst idea I've heard all week.

The language we speak affects the way we see. Or half of what we see, anyway.