Any other recent world champions Holland can take apart?
Also, short of beating the Dutch, is there any way that Romania can advance? That would be kinda neat.

Stupider than you can imagine. Evidence, the map over at this fine post from Sadly, No!. Read the whole thing, but as well as introducing the best title for a blog post ever, they’ve caught “Gates Of Vienna” pretending that in the future, Europe will be divided into Islamic states (with incredibly silly names), Russian [...]

From The New York Times, Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the USA:
“Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said.
Then, on the issue of child abuse within the Church (emphasis mine):
For the second day on his first official visit to America, the pope acknowledged the “deep shame” [...]

“All religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practice them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them”(1)
As quoted in Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947, by Christopher Clark, [...]

Karl Marx said that ideology is part of the social superstructure, merely a decorative overlay on the brutal truth of the economic base. Millian liberalism was really just an expression of the pounding steam engines, Jacquard looms and downtrodden apprentices of 1840s Manchester, just as absolutism had been built on the assumption that society would [...]

Osama bin Laden is still at large. This American thinks that is a damn shame.
If you haven’t read 110 Stories, you should.
That is all.

The application of 600 police, intelligence agents and other operatives has resulted in the arrest of three alleged violent Islamic extremists in Germany, as has been reported around the world. Other shoes are starting to drop. As could be expected from an investigation of this magnitude, three arrests were just the beginning, and one of [...]

Physics Today has a very interesting, and refreshing, online article (hat tip Sargasso) on Islam and science that ties in neatly with AFOE’s review of Olivier Roy’s latest book Secularism confronts Islam. The article is written by Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physics professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. As usual, I shall give our [...]

Though creationism does rear its ugly head from time to time in Europe, it is largely a fringe phenomenon. Unlike in America, even most religious Europeans accept evolution as an obvious fact, viewing the biblical creation stories (yes, there’s more than one) as, at most, poetic metaphor. So it’s easy for us over here to [...]

Germany has tossed a Holocaust denier into prison, and the American Christianist right is all outraged about it. Or so PZ Myers tells me; it’s telling that I had to learn about this from him, as this hasn’t been a big story here at all.
As you probably know, it is illegal in Germany to deny [...]