Whenever the madness of massive gun ownership is challenged you can bet one of the first responses will be "How dare you libruls try to stop us enjoying the healthy and natural sport of hunting with our children", or words to that effect. But this is one of those many...

Hardly a day goes by, it seems, without, somewhere in the world, some wild-eyed, or cold-eyed, religious fanatic imposing his (yes, his) will on someone slightly less wild-eyed in the cause of the one true religion worshipping the one true god. And if imposing his will, when it comes to...

I see the Global Financial Crisis is now popularly known by the initials GFC. A little strange (was the 1929 Wall Street Crash called WSC?) but I guess both the acronym and the longer title (itself a shorthand description, though much better than the "meltdown" that was used initially) have...

Why can't I be banned in Oklahoma? Look, I know I haven't actually been invited to give a talk there, but that's not the point.

I've tried to get banned, tried so hard - insulted the religious believers here, insulted creationists there, insulted climate change denialists another day, said that...

As I float like a bee around the internet, here a sip of nectar, there a load of pollen, I seem to acquire, like unwanted hive mites, a swarm of spam emails.

You know the kind of thing. A sender's name consisting of a jumble of computer-generated random letters; a...

In this year of twin Darwin anniversaries, I find myself thinking of the great man (one of the few historical figures I would invite to a dinner party, but would he come, would he come?) even more often than in a normal year. I turn again to the Galapagos Islands,...

I try, from time to time, satisfying idle curiosity, to fathom the mind of the creationists, rather in the way that I might try to understand the thought processes of a tribe from deepest Amazon, or the art of a Pleistocene hunter.

And here is something that came to me,...

I was watching a feel good story the other day in a feel good current affairs program on a feel good television channel (so, no clues there). It was about one of these wonderful people who spend their lives doing good deeds, looking after the poor, the homeless, the alcoholics,...

I picture one of Obama's staff as a kind of ye olde town crier, with one of those ancient rolled up scrolls, a huge one, which is slowly unrolling across the floor as he reads out item after item from a list headed "Bad things done by the Bush administration...

I was trying to think what it reminded me of, seeing Barack and Michelle, Joe and Jill, entering the White House after the inauguration. And then it came to me - "Wind in the Willows". You will recall that Toad Hall has been taken over by the bad stoats, weasels,...

I have in the past, and will again in the future, launch deservedly vicious tirades against the stupid and ignorant, paid and unpaid, energy company denialist stooges in the International Anti Global Warming Conspiracy. But I realize that in addition to these braying idiots there are still a few genuine...

I've always distinguished between Christmas (for family) and New Year (for friends), although as I get older and older the thought of seeing in the new year, at the impossibly late hour of midnight, loses many of the charms it once had when I wore a younger man's clothes. But...

Climate change denialism is falling on hard times, what with the financial crisis and lower fuel prices, it is becoming harder and harder to fund the level of noisy and willfully pig-ignorant denialism in the face of irrefutable evidence that has prevented serious action on global warming all around the...

If you thought that electing Obama was going to lead to action on global warming you might take a look at this week's events in Australia. A year ago the equivalent of the Democratic Party was elected in Australia, replacing the Republican equivalent party of John Howard (George Bush's best...

Saw an item the other day about a school teacher who had been sacked because she had admitted, when asked, that Santa Claus wasn't real. On the other hand I saw another article about a fundamentalist christian school teacher who wasn't sacked even though, in a class supposedly about evolution,...

It has been a failure of all us atheistical Darwinists intent on dragging the world, kicking and screaming, into the 1860s, and out of the clutches of the religion-be-deviled proudly ignorant dark-age-living creationists. A failure of nerve or conviction perhaps, a kind of naive apolitical strictly scientific honest-to-a-fault response to...

I see Ian Fraser, who developed the vaccine against cervical cancer, is now working on one for a form of skin cancer. What next I wondered.

Remember the fuss about the cervical cancer vaccine? The religious fundamentalists were outraged that a scientist was attempting to remove one bit of the...

Much pressure from the Right, insisting that Obama, unlike GWB with his massive wins, has no mandate for any kind of leftwards move on policy. That he MUST not try to implement any "liberal" policies.

A curious view. The logic seems to be that, faced with an issue -- global...

I thought that after the madness of Florida in 2000 -- and the dark deeds of Ohio 2004 -- that the American people would have risen up, taken to the streets, manned the barricades, demanding that they be given an electoral system which matches their democratic ideals. Demanded an electoral...

How many times have you heard, when a politician is confronted with an unfavorable opinion poll, "the only poll that counts is the one on November 4" or whenever? Now pundits usually sneer at this weaseling, and indeed I have been known to sneer myself, but I wonder increasingly whether...