Something seems to be wrong with Blogger. My last entry didn't get added to the published page for some reason.

NB: Ah, now it's working ...

Now here's a question: did Homo Erectus have a soul? Did Australopithecus Afarensis? If not, when did our ancestors begin to have souls?

I only raise these questions because I all too often hear that "science and religion are not (or at least, need not be) in conflict," a notion that the recently deceased Stephen Jay Gould was fond of advancing, and one that I find disingenuous in the extreme. At best, such a statement is true only with a sort of religion so anodyne and content-free as to be worthless to most people. It certainly seems to be true that one cannot believe in any of the major religions of the world while believing in the findings of modern science.

I've recently begun re-reading Proust. Reading through "Swann in Love," what can I say, other than that Proust is right? "Love" (using the ironic phrasing of which Charles Swann was so fond) makes us ridiculous, drags us into preposterous situations, and is best to be avoided if at all possible.

I am Gregor Samsa.

Often it takes a spell of adversity for one to appreciate the true value one holds in other's eyes. As the saying goes, "Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan," or to call upon yet another trite phrase (and a true one, for all its' triteness), "laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone." It is all too easy to buy into the sentimental notion that one can count on one's family if not on anything else in the world. Strangers are typically indifferent to our fates, while sometimes those who least wish us well are those to whom we are tied by blood.

"Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard." - Ecclesiastes 9:16.

A study suggests that passive smoking can damage the IQ of children, even when the level of exposure is minute. Now, I am all for giving people the freedom to ingest whatever substances they desire without the interference of governments, but nobody should have the right to damage the health and prospects of a child in doing so. Children are not the personal property of their parents in the way that cars, homes and electrical devices are - they are individuals in their own right, with certain unconditional rights that no irresponsible "parents" should be free to ignore (by which I mean those individuals who think nothing of lighting up cigarettes in the presence of their offspring.)

As far as Pim Fortuyn's politics went, British foreign secretary Jack Straw, hardly a man of the right, apparently agrees with me when he says that Fortuyn was not "another Le Pen or Haider." If only the BBC staff could be as objective in their statements!

I don't want to say too much about Pim Fortuyn's murder, as a lot of other people (the usual suspects ...) have said a great deal already, but whether or not one agrees with the policies he advocated, it is only to fair to say that he was not to be placed amongst the likes of Le Pen, Filip De Winter or Jörg Haider. In fact, one might say that it wasn't so much what Fortuyn had to say as how he said it that gave cause for shock.


One can't help but feel that if in the Netherlands a man with such mildly unorthodox views should have been assassinated for them, the Dutch must have very little room in their politics for differences of opinion.

Well, what do you know? The exit polls proved to be surprisingly accurate! Still, that nearly 1 in 5 French voters support a man like Le Pen is enough to give one pause.

I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by the scale of Jacques Chirac's victory over Jean-Marie Le Pen in the French presidential election. I'd expected the results to be much closer, with Le Pen obtaining upwards of 25 percent of the vote. Such an outcome would have been in keeping with my cynicism about human nature, as it seemed a certainty that many would-be backers of Le Pen would have lied to pollers, making his apparent support seem less than it really is. In any case, we only have the exit poll results at present, so I may yet be proven right in my pessimism.

Alone we come into the world, and alone we leave it. It is no more than an illusion to imagine that any such thing as a meeting of minds can exist between two people, other than on a rudimentary level; at best, such a state of affairs can occur when the two parties have little in the way of minds to begin with. Sensitivity and reflectiveness constitute impregnable barriers to mutual understanding.