* The Moral Equivalent of War by William James; War Is the Health of the State by Randolph Bourne (HT: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria)
* At "GetReligion" there's a good post on why Spong is not the model to hold up for moderate Muslims (in case you were tempted)!
* Johann Hari notices something about the locations of the London attacks.(HT: GetReligion)
* Volokh asks why people kiss. Well, it's a bit more comfortable than biting....+ For those more interested in the how-to, remember that you live in the Computer Age. You can find instructions about how to kiss on the internet. Indeed, more than you could ever possibly need. And if you clicked any of those, perhaps you should consider this: Maybe you would be having a more enjoyable time if you stopped reading about how to kiss and actually went out and did it.
* "Just as history cannot be rewritten, so we cannot rewrite our anthem to suit current tastes," said Jean-Louis Debre, speaker of the assembly. Somehow the analogy doesn't strike me as a strong one.... (HT: Dappled Things)
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+ The joke raises an interesting point. One possible account of explanation sees the explanandum in such an explanation as contrastive between a fact and a foil. Thus explanation is not of the form "p explains why q is the case" but of the form "p explains why q rather than r is the case." So A wants to know why we kiss rather than not kiss; B responds with an answer that would explain why we kiss rather than bite. Hence the joke; if there weren't this crossing of contrastive explananda, there wouldn't be anything humorous about it. Now you know. [If you like this sort of thing, I recommend Chris's post at "Mixing Memory" on the Cognitive Science of Humor. Good stuff. And there's James Beattie, whom I had almost forgot made a showing, which makes it even better!]
