Life, The Universe and Everything: Reflections and Rants

  • Democrats ‘win’ by 10,000 votes

    Looking at the results from the US mid-terms on Wednesday, it seemed that the Democrats were going to win the Senate by the thinnest of margins – about 10,000 votes determined the result in the key polls in Montana and Virginia – but did they really win?

  • They made Boylan say B*%%$*&t!

    I was surprised to hear a clip of Sean Boylan using dressing room language on the radio this morning with respect to issues in the compromise rules series – as one of the longest serving football managers in the GAA, he has a reputation for being one of the nicest and most polite

  • Let’s not hang Saddam…

    Even apart from the moral issue – the death penalty is simply wrong – there are many pragmatic reasons who sentencing Saddam Hussein to death by hanging is wrong.

  • Current Goverment is not the State

    Expelling rogue states from the UN is a bad idea, but it has popped up again today in Nick Cohen’s piece in the Guardian with respect to Sudan.

  • Moodling on..

    The web seems to hate me today, but the screencam movie showing my students how to sign on to my course sites on moodle is finally up on the web at http://www.ucc.ie/academic/history/files/signup.wmv It is 5.5 mb, which will be fine on the campus network but too big for dialup, and while I haven’t been able…

  • Write yourself into existence

    “….students learn when they are allowed the freedom to use their blogs in order to write themselves into existence as individuals.” Wow. Pure genius from Konrad Glogowski on his ‘Blog of Proximal Developement’

  • Disaster in Darfur

    It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Darfur is well on the way to becoming another disaster of Rwandan proportions. The difference in this case is that although in this case everyone is willing to use the ‘G’ word, no one will actually act on it.

  • Nannystate meets Minority Report

    No matter how deeply ‘New Labour’ buys into the Thatcherite free market legacy, if you scratch a bit, you’ll always find the residue of Gosplan hanging about. Tony Blair has thrown out a remarkable speech about targetting future problem children prior to birth.

  • Divorced from reality and owing alimony

    Only a politician could be so far removed from the reality the rest of us live in to suggest, as Israeli justice minister Haim Ramon did, that the world supports his governments actions in Lebanon. It does raise questions about the language of diplomacy though.

  • Boots and bodybags

    Yesterday’s fighting in Bint Jbeil has brought home a harsh truth about boots on the ground in war – they come with a quota of bodybags attached.


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