A post on Fistful of Euros contains this little gem from the Vatican:
“The Holy See has reiterated on many occasions that the right to freedom of expression … is subject to just limits, in particular when the exercise of this right would offend the religious sentiments of believers,” the Vatican said.
If that makes you feel a little worried, you may need to reread this.
I’m working with a few others on a new non-profit to re-engage people with politics. As our first bit of work, we are trying to work up a set of axes to use in describing users’ political profiles. To create a map of opinions and axes, I’ve set up a small quiz, in the format “if someone thinks X, where would you place them on a scale Y to Z”.
Take it here.
Link: Good Riddance.
Poland.pl – a government website, has an excellent collection of historical artefacts online.
Not Government blather, but at least political blather. A Tory hopeful’s husband has sent round a racist email joke from her email account (BBC). Her response:
“It was forwarded on by my husband, who took it in the form that he thought it was sent and that was a light-hearted view, which, again, anybody broadly thinking would not have made anything out of it, as has been made to be at this present time.”
Did you hear the story about red wine cancelling out the effects of fatty foods? Yes? But did you hear that to get that effect you’d have to drink 750 to 1,500 bottles of wine a day? Thought not.
Philip Cowley writes an excellent rebuttal of Simon Jenkins’s ludicrous hyperbole on Parliament. Why anyone takes Jenkins seriously, I cannot imagine. One of the quintessential sounds of the English morning is a distant Jenkins, barking up the wrong tree.
A collection of common English idioms explained for speakers of English as a second language.
“I don’t like saying, “You’re a punk and you’re not.”
There was a record out there called “Ca Plane pour Moi” by Plastic Bertrand, right? And I guarantee you if I had to play it for you right now you’d go, “Right! That is rockin!”
Now, if you were to say to any sort of purist punk, “This is a good punk record,” they’d get completely enraged. But Plastic Bertrand, whoever he was, compressed into that three minutes a bloody good record that will get any comatose person toe-tapping, you know what I mean?
By purist rules, it’s not allowed to even mention Plastic Bertrand. Yet, this record was probably a lot better than a lot of so-called punk records.”
(via)
There is a detailed, and important, and terrifying article on Ars Technica, explaining how easy it is to hack the electronic voting machines increasingly being used in the US. Example (with my emphasis):
In order to use a supervisor card to access the AccuVote, you must first enter a four-digit PIN. In version of the machine that was in use as late as 2003, the exact same supervisor PIN was hard-coded into every single AccuVote TS shipped nationwide. That PIN was 1111. (I am not making this up.) This is still the default PIN for these machines, although the county can change it on a machine-by-machine basis if they have the workers and the time.