Gleanings from the blogosphere, Sept. 23

Weekend Fisher has a great post on the shortcomings of pop spirituality. It's so nice to hear someone saying out loud what I've been thinking for a long time.

David Akin, on his blog On the Hill, has been commenting quite a bit on Tom Flanagan's new book Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power. This, from Flanagan's "Ten Commandments of Conservative Campaigning" caught my eye:

4. Incrementalism: We have to be willing to make progress in small practical steps. Sweeping visions have a place in intellectual discussions, but they are toxic in practical politics.

I am so glad to see someone on the Canadian right finally articulating this. History teaches us that sweeping changes tend to get rapidly swept out the door. People resist large-scale change, viscerally and actively, unless their present reality is so dire they want out. Many good ideologies make no headway because their proponents perceive accepting incremental change as moral compromise. All or nothing usually leads to nothing.

Talk talk talk has on-the-fly notes about the Ontario political leaders' debate. Seeing as I missed it, this was helpful to me. A strong anti-McGuinty bias is quite obvious but I guess I can live with that. ;o)

Technorati tags: Tom Flanagan, Pop Spirituality, Ontario Election

Really cool science news

For all you geeks and geek-wannabes (I guess I fit into the second category) with too little time to sift through the mountains of news coming out of the labs of the world, I have the perfect solution.

Hassenpfeffer.

Edward Willett is a writer who wears many hats, among them science columnist. And he regularly shares his best findings on his blog. The latest offering: a laser thruster that could shorten a trip to Mars to under seven days. If it pans out, travel within the solar system suddenly becomes much more doable and our children will be telling their wide-eyed offspring, "When I was your age, there was no such thing as week-end trips to the Moon." (Mine were aghast to learn that I grew up without videos or microwaves, but that's another story.)

I thought I'd one-upped Ed a few days ago when I forwarded him a very cool story about the possibility of using seawater for fuel, but no. He'd seen the story and thought the technology was just too iffy at this point to post it. Ah well. Another day.

So check out his blog and subscribe if you like tales of the weird and the wonderful.