Go see Keith at the Invisible Library to learn about J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, just purchased by Amazon.com for £1,950,000 [about $3.9 million].

There is a lot of misinformation winging around the ‘Tubes about the Baptists and I would like to clear a few things up because I know something about the situation.

I attended a Baptist university, Colgate in Hamilton, New York [yes, same as the toothpaste because when the Colgate family owned the Colgate Soap and Candle Company, they donated a lot of money]. I learned later that a distant relative was one of the founders of the institution in 1819 to train Baptist ministers.

In the middle of the 19th century the Baptists split into two factions on the issue of slavery and the Southern Baptists became a separate group. Each of the two main groups, the American and Southern Baptists have spun off smaller groups over various points of dogma.

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This is not what you want to read if you live in an area that depends on tourism – from the Associated Press: Iceland complains about treatment of tourist

REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Iceland’s government has asked the U.S. ambassador to explain the treatment of an Icelandic tourist who says she was held in shackles before being deported from the United States.

The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, 33, was arrested Sunday when she arrived at JFK airport in New York because she had overstayed a U.S. visa more than 10 years earlier.

Lillendahl, 33, had planned to shop and sightsee with friends, but endured instead what she has claimed was the most humiliating experience of her life.

What is the point? She overstayed her visa, but she obviously left the US. She comes back to the US to spend money, and they put her chains and ship her out. This is how they spend our tax dollars, by protecting us from tourists‽ Great, another country that hates us.

Update: From comments a link to the Icelandic site of Vidar Eggertsson, with an English translation of Ms. Lillendahl’s own description of her experience.

The CBS headline gets it right [for a change]: Republicans Stop Bill To Ban Waterboarding

(CBS/AP) Senate Republicans blocked a bill Friday that would restrict the interrogation methods the CIA can use against terrorism suspects.

The bill would require the CIA to adhere to the Army’s field manual on interrogation, which bans waterboarding, mock executions and other harsh interrogation methods.
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