Christmassy, me?

PETER CANISIUS [1521 -1597], teacher, doctor, catechist and spy, is the Saint of the day.

'CONTRARY to an oft repeated tale, however, the Summa Theologiae was not placed on the altar alongside the Bible during meetings of the Council' . [Haldane, J. Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical, p. 5]

BEST INTENTIONS - The story of Tanzania's people's national park... "One fisherman said in slow and emphatic tones: “The marine park is no good. It is going to kill us through hunger.”

THE BLUNKETT FILES - Prof. John Gardner's celebration of the wit and wisdom of our recently-departed Home Secretary. "It's only a shame (but not a surprise) that Blunkett was brought down by a trivial personal intervention in a visa application ('no favours but slightly quicker'), and not by his abhorrent policies on crime, immigration, and 'security'."
In this connection, here's the full text of the recent House of Lords ruling regarding the detention without trial of nine noncitizens.

Wangari Maathai

POSSIBLY the most important social security measure in all Kenya's history...

WANGARI Maathai's Nobel Prize lecture.

SO now you know:
"We can cease speculating about what Sherlock Holmes was up to between 1891 and 1894 ("A four-pipe poseur", December 4). In 1989 I was a guest of the Copenhagen Sherlockian Club. One of the members presented me with a pamphlet which incontrovertibly demonstrated that Holmes was, of course, working with Engels on Volume IV of Capital (Theories of Surplus Value). Unfortunately Engels died in 1894 and Holmes returned to Baker Street and his former occupation, leaving the work unfinished. Naturally, considering the class from which most of his clientele was drawn, Holmes himself kept quiet about this."

-Julian Rathbone,Thorney Hill, Dorset-

deep in essay-crisis land without a map

SIMON BLACKBURN on Heidegger.

SIMON BLACKBURN on Eco.

JERRY FODOR on Christopher Hughes on Kripke.

LEFT2RIGHT: Quite possibly the most impressive collection of (leftish) clever people on the web. [Appiah, Cohen, Velleman, Railton, MacMahan, Darwall, Lichtenberg]

STUART HAMPSHIRE on John Rawls.

NIMU's new website is here.

"Who you gonna' call?"

Oh you look so beautiful tonight/In the city of blinding lights
the new U2 album is here. And it's [heresy!] not quite as good as it should be. They just sound a little unfresh and a bit reaching for nostalgia, but hey, sub-tremendous U2 is others' brilliant. Reviews (and how) : Rolling Stone, Observer, Guardian (alexis petridis actually likes it), Christianity Today, the Onion, Metacritic, MTV and Atu2.

randomly, Bono's other job at DATA.

IRAQ,
or when philosophers strike back. Professor McMahan's lucid and convincing demolition of the moral case for the war in Iraq is here. [Via the Leiter report]. He also a much longer draft of a paper on Just War theory here.
Incidentally, John Haldane's new book, is out. It's a collection of essays, reviewed here and elsewhere. Should be well worth the effort.

PLAINTIFF,
to his horror, discovered that the house he had recently contracted to purchase was widely reputed to be possessed by poltergeists... [Via alexander]