Cajun Moon
In the days before YouTube I once mentioned this, but I didn't have the means to back up my recommendation. Now I do. Take four minutes of your day and listen to Ricky Skaggs singing 'Cajun Moon'. It's a great song, generally, but you should pay particular attention from just before 3 minutes in, when the fiddles get to be upfront and lead things out, gloriously. Yaay-yeee. If it don't set you up a treat, I'm a bricolated branflake.

Affiliation and belief
Josh Marshall begins a post by asking:Do our beliefs form the basis of our partisan and ideological affiliations? Or is it vice versa?As the rest of the post shows, he's interested in emphasizing the sociological influences on belief, the way in which group associations affect our openness to evidence and argument that might tell against the viewpoints we favour. That there are these influences is not to be doubted; but they don't answer his own questions, those with which he begins: how strong is the influence from belief to affiliation, and

Frozen mistake?
An email from a reader, posted with permission:I am afraid I think you are wrong about the settlement freeze issue. This is not about what is reasonable but about what works. Such a freeze has never been a precondition for holding talks - not under Rabin, Barak, Sharon or Netanyahu. The route to peace requires Israeli public opinion to back a peace agreement which will leave the settlers isolated, making it possible to deal with them. In the absence of an actual agreement it is not possible to really confront the settlement issue. This is particularly true for Netanyahu who cannot be expe

To end an epidemic of violence
Here's an initiative to 'make ending violence against women a high priority and an integral component of American foreign policy'.

Grounding moral value
James Garvey offers two views - presented to him in the pub - about the basis of moral judgement. One is that... ... atheists have no way to ground moral value. Something transcendental is required - a plan or purpose or creator of objective value - if we are to have good reasons to help one another. You can go on about the good will or pleasure or happiness, but there's no reason to prefer one or the other of these. Only with religion do you get a proper moral code.This is not persuasive - not if what you want are actually good reasons to do what you do. A course of action said t