Cognitive Conga: a blog

I pulled up alongside a police van – registration CT56 PTF, if I remember correctly – just now, to talk to the officers inside. The reason? There were several drivers breaking the law right next to them. The policemen had noticed this; they just weren’t sure it was worth doing anything about. (more…)

A libertarian might well conclude, from reading or watching Harrison Bergeron, that the solution to the problem of a government that acts to level down its more able citizens’ abilities in order to create an egalitarian society (with government officials excepted) is to reduce entirely, or almost entirely, all power held by governments.
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Compact fluorescent light bulbs (a.k.a. compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs) are becoming de rigeur in the UK now, because incandescent bulbs are being phased out but solid-state lighting (which would otherwise be preferable) is still expensive. As a result, increasingly many people in this country find themselves in the position of having to dispose of compact fluorescent light bulbs when those bulbs stop working. Doing this in an environmentally-friendly way isn’t, however, entirely straightforward, because on the one hand the bulbs contain the toxic element mercury and should therefore not be thrown away with general waste, and on the other hand, recycling points which accept CFLs are still few and far between.
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I first heard of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society many years ago at a London gig by Ignite. I was reminded of them when I bought a Propagandhi single about a year ago, and since then, I've taken a peripheral interest in their activities.

In this article, Margaret Visser says, Our culture divides the world into the public and the private. The public is for business, impersonality, contracts, cold reason, politics, officialdom, money and legal obligation. The private is everything the public is not — warm emotional involvement with family and friends, love, the unofficial, the uncalculating.

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