Perhaps there’s some irony in all of this: The equity firms sold in 2006 to Riverdeep Group of Dublin, a $392 million educational software company (since reincorporated in the Cayman Islands) that was controlled by O’Callaghan, for $3.4 billion. Like Messier, O’Callaghan was on a spree, with other people’s money. He borrowed most of it… Continue reading

John Allen with a nice commentary on the PR disaster the Vatican brought upon itself with the recent lifting of excommunication of 4 traditionalist bishops–at least one of whom makes Pat Buchanan look like Alan Dershowitz.

I just found out one of the panels I’m moderating at the upcoming Boskone week after next, is… on Robert E. Howard. Gulp. I didn’t realize I was going to be the only one running the panel. Time for a crash course on his bio! But I’ll also be on Mike Flynn’s panel, Galileo: Guilty… Continue reading

Larry Moran, another working biologist, becoming exasperated with Richard Dawkins: Natural selection explains adaptation. That’s extremely important and extremely interesting but it’s only a small part of evolution. Random genetic drift, which Darwin does not get credit for, explains much more because more of evolution is due to drift than to adaptation. The contributions of… Continue reading

Jim Manzi, writing on what the stimulus bill could see us living with for a long time: I tried to go quickly through the spending for all categories and crudely map them to the OECD classification system that allows for the comparison of spending across governments in the developed world. The huge categories of spending… Continue reading