Want something interesting to watch? How about Michael Shermer's talk about TED. That definitely counts. 

The government wants to raise the school leaving age to 18. I really don't like that idea. One of the best things about the last two years of school was that the people who really didn't want to be there had left. 

Want to see another little problem with the drug war? These paramilitary nutcases are busting down innocent people's doors and basically acting like thugs in blue. This video will hopefully shake off any respect that you might have for the police. 

Reason's Hit & Run and Virginia Postrel are having a good giggle at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's "Knives Steal Lives" posters - that infuriatingly stupid poster is something I see every day in London. Personally, knives allow me to open my mail, cut slices of bread, prepare vegetables, slice up paper and quite a lot of other things. I'm sure this brigadier has had his life "stolen" - but it's more by the evil bureaucracy that thinks he's a major criminal for carrying a 5cm blade on to the Eurostar with him than any kind of marauding knife-wielder. 

Richard Dawkins has a response to the "I'm an atheist, but..." type questions he gets. 

Ophelia is discussing "the ever-popular 'define atheism as any old thing you feel like and then triumphantly explain why that atheism is all wrong and silly and besides it's a "faith" itself so ha' trick". I can play the same game - religion is basically a lemon-flavoured weasel from Mars. Isn't that just ridiculous, darling? 

Then again, do you honestly think that someone saying the usual theistic things that about atheism wouldn't be anything but ridiculous? That kind of shit flies in the United States (PZ has found a great example of this), but not here, where you have to come up with straw men when arguing against atheism. 

Shawn Anthony has an excellent blog post about the failure of liberal Christianity's interpretative methods: "Liberal Christianity¹s approach to Biblical interpretation is misguided and inherently self-contradictory. It is a house of cards, to put it mildly. Liberal Biblical interpretation can not be limited to Reader Response Theory and its subsequent reliance upon a postmodernistic self-experience, and, at the same time, cite divergent interpretive methods and approaches as detrimental and/or wrong". But, so they go. It would seem that people would rather accept extremely contradictory beliefs than they would accept that religion is fantasy. Hermenetics is a field which just shows this problem at it's most intellectual.