An interesting article in New York Magazine discusses the development of lying in children. While one might superficially expect truthfulness to be the greater virtue, deception is highlighted as the more advanced behaviour:
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child [...]

Energy Saving Day in the United Kingdom has produced no measurable results. While this is a blow to the “everyone recycle your used Coke cans and we will be fine” form of environmentalism, it is less surprising to people who have a sense of the scale of the climate issue and an awareness of the [...]

Threat: words devoted to fighting it

Climate change: 364
People taking away your guns: 594

Universal access to assault rifles and armour-piercing bullets should help us adapt to a changing climate. Maintaining access to both, with no pesky waiting periods, is something “we have a sacred duty to protect,” after all.

The decision of the British Columbia Attorney General not to prosecute 20 additional murder charges against Robert Pickton seems like a failure to strike the proper balance between the good use of government resources and the pursuit of justice. It has frequently been pointed out that had his victims been less marginalized members of society [...]

The interim version of the Garnaut Review (mentioned earlier) includes a numberless graph illustrating what the principle of contraction and convergence in per capita greenhouse gas emissions would resemble:

A few features are especially notable. The first is the relative trajectories in the opening years. States with very high per capita emissions, like Australia and Canada, [...]

There have been a number of arguments here before about how excess can be justified: specifically, how emitting more greenhouse gasses than is sustainable per-capita based on the present human population can be morally justified. A new logical possibility occurred to me today: it is possible that we are already doomed. By that, I mean [...]