JeremyStangroom.Com

Photographs from my recent trip to Algonquin Park.

From this article. “We are vulnerable to new bugs such as swine flu precisely because the body needs to have encountered a bug at least once in order to be able to mount a good defence against it. Getting flu is evidence that your immune system is working, not that it isn’t.” First sentence good. Second sentence – total logic failure. Getting flu isn’t evidence of anything except that you don’t have immunity to it. The fact that you don’t have immunity to flu doesn’t – in and of itself - tell you anything general about your immune system. The only thing is that  is true is that sometimes a violent immune response can exacerbate the symptoms of flu. Scarily imprecise stuff for a science writer.

A photograph I took is featuring on the New Humanist blog.

There’s a fairly hilarious review of Does God Hate Women? here. I haven’t read it carefully, but I think it’s safe to say the fella isn’t keen!

No doubt I need a pedant bypass operation, but am I wrong in thinking the first of the posters produced by the Socialist Workers Party, featured here, is a mess? Surely it only makes sense if the thing which Blears is claiming doesn’t make her a corrupt politician does make her a corrupt politician. But in this case, it doesn’t. There’s nothing corrupt about saying that avoiding tax on a second home is within the rules, it’s the non-payment of the tax that constitutes the corruption (if it is indeed corruption, which I make no judgement about).

Yes Phil, the best solution to the egregious reporting of the flu outbreak by the British press is to bring the media into public ownership. Because state owned media has a long and glorious history of fair, accurate and balanced reporting. Oh right, no it doesn’t…

I know I shouldn’t laugh at socialists, but… this post contains what I think must be the most absurd example of Marxist ‘economic determinism’ I’ve ever read: “the police officer who comes to your home in response to a burglary or an incident of vandalism with a sympathetic ear and a commitment to your needs at that particular moment, is the same police officer who when deployed at a demonstration against the very institutions responsible for people losing their homes is ready, able, and willing to put a baton over your head…Social being determines consciousness, and the primary role of the police in any capitalist society is that of a weapon in the hands of a state controlled by the few at the expense of the many.” This is then followed by a commentator earnestly commanding that nobody forget “the guy whose name I’ve sadly forgotten” (I kid you not)!

Over at Socialist Disunity, Andy Newman has posted George Galloway claiming almost 2000 people for his web cast to Toronto last night. Well, when I had a look, it didn’t seem anything like that number, and the Toronto Star is reporting ‘more than 600’. Hmmm!

Benjamin Libet, eat your heart out.

We’re breeding a generation of narcissists.