Oh look, I’m back. That is to say, the database is fixed, thanks to its owner, who fixed it, but prefers to remain anonymous, which makes thanking rather abstract, but you get the idea.

Apologies for the dry spell. Never mind. What with folding up the turkey to re-use next year and making wrapping paper hash, you’ve been too busy to read B&W anyway.

But those days are over – it’s shoulders to the wheel now, and no slacking. New Year’s Eve nothing – that kind of thing is for shallow worldly frivolous flower-sniffers, and I don’t hold with it. I expect a ten-page report on my desk by the end of the day.… Read the rest

A bit more on indoctrination. What is wrong with indoctrination?

Guardian readers were upset, David Shariatmadari says, by ‘the idea that a religious group should set about “indoctrinating” children who were intellectually defenceless.’ But just how damaging is this, he asks.

There are a few arguments I can think of, but I’m not completely convinced by them (as always, I’m open to persuasion). The main one is that children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of religious ideas.

No not quite – that puts it too mildly. Children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of any ideas, and that’s why adults should be very economical about imposing ideas on them. Children … Read the rest

Still pretty clear and bright today, so I did the next item on the ‘don’t waste the ideal weather’ list and walked the golf course at Pebble Beach. It must be a closely-guarded secret that one can do this, because walkers are there in the single digits rather than the thousands. (But then there weren’t all that many people at Point Lobos, either. Carmel is always packed to the rafters while Point Lobos is blissfully underpopulated. Funny.) I encountered a guy on my dawn walk this morning, who stopped to greet the dog who was with me; the guy asked if where we were was the Pebble Beach course and I said no, it’s at the far end of … Read the rest

David Shariatmadari is asking what is indoctrination and is it such a bad thing?

Of course, for many, the idea that anyone should spend their whole lives believing something wrong is bad. Those who are convinced of the truth of Christianity, whether they suffer or not, have been convinced of a lie, so the argument goes. But why single out religion? Lots of people believe lots of things that are probably wrong: they cleave to political and social hypotheses whose benefits are hotly contested, and sometimes impossible to test. Most of our working models of the world are based on a very fallible combination of imagination and experience, not scientific truth.

It’s not so much the spending one’s whole life … Read the rest

Well I had good luck with the travel: a big wind blew into California the night before I came down so it was crystal clear – the flyover of San Francisco was absolutely spectacular, and even the shuttle bus trip from San Jose to Monterey was beautiful. And the stars – !

The wind had died down but it was still very clear yesterday so I went to Point Lobos to take advantage of the weather while it lasted. I went to Sea Lion Point and Cypress Grove trail and then I went back on the North Shore trail, where I haven’t been before. It’s very up and down, so you keep arriving at places where you look down sheer … Read the rest