This isn’t one of Paisley’s best songs—he’s known for his wit and his hooks, but even before LL Cool J’s arrival, “Accidental Racist” is rather prosaic and inert, like a carefully hedged position paper set to music. But it’s also a more interesting artifact than some of its detractors admit—an awkward but earnest song about being “caught between Southern pride and Southern blame,” sung in the voice of a white man who suggests there are good reasons for both.
Having eradicated the teaching of evolution from school classrooms, Kansas now has its sights on another scourge: sustainable development. The following paragraph is NOT from the Onion:
[Kansas’] Committee on Energy and Environment is proposing a law that would ban all state and municipal funds for anything related to sustainable development, which it defines as: “development in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.”
Kansas’s Self-Destruct Button: A Bill to Outlaw Sustainability – Bloomberg via Next Draft
What’s harmful is when you misunderstand the way evolution works and end up worried that because humans didn’t use to do X, we shouldn’t do X now. Almost all traits are a trade-off. Individuals with longer legs might survive better because they can run away from predators. But they might also get colder faster, because they lose more heat through their legs. The advantage or disadvantage depends on the environment you’re in now.
Geoffrey Pullum charges George Orwell’s famous essay on language with silliness and intellectual dishonesty.
Police said Monday an unknown number of culprits made off with 5 metric tons (5.5 tons) of Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread from a parked trailer in the central German town of Bad Hersfeld over the weekend. The gooey loot is worth an estimated 16,000 euros ($20,710).
Born of the worst intentions, Super Mario Bros. was the toxic product of greed, hubris, incompetence, and total condescension to the audience; it was the black swan of early ’90s blockbuster engineering.