Blinks

• A plug for a project several LS-friends are currently involved in: Edu-Factory.og.

• Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir (incidentally also the name of my new cat). Better reading than the debate over Hillary Clinton's allegedly evental tears: The Second Sex.

• OpenDemocracy needs your support, and deserves it because they consistently publish popular-yet-largely-responsible articles such as this one by Tina Beattie: "The end of postmodernism: the 'new atheists' and democracy:"

The most pressing question confronting us lies here: how to respond to the slow death of democracy. The recent confrontation between religion and science is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide behind a convenient and inflated - where not fabricated - myth of religious extremism which masks from us our own complicity in the murder and mayhem by which western global supremacy and our own privileged status within that are now maintained.