Link roundup for 10 October 2009

Utah leads the nation in internet-porn consumption (found via Oliver Willis) -- it's Satan's doing, apparently.

Middle of Nowhere has some fun odds and ends, including a Republican calendar.

Limbaugh has a new gig.

I'll skip this adopt-a-liberal program, thanks.

Маяковский looks at Russian characters in American comics (found via Mendip).

The perpetually-offended people.....are offended.

Bill Maher comments on France (found via Prash).

I think I've found yet another book I need to read (and the author, Ilkka Pyysiäinen, must have some pretty advanced academic credentials just to be able to spell his own name).

The Portland Police Bureau has a video challenging the culture of silence on crime.

It's not only insurance companies that kill sick people -- religious quackery gets the job done too.

I can't be bothered to have an opinion about Obama's Nobel Prize, but here's a comment thread (read this too).

Olbermann lays the real issues on health-care reform on the line (found via Politics Plus). More on the horrors of our current system here.

There's a big difference between a free market and "corporate Communism".

Andrew Sullivan has some reminders of the mentality we're up against. On a related note, this is obviously cherry-picking -- I could easily answer all the questions, and most people I know could answer most of them -- but these people do exist.

While the conservative (by European standards) governments of France and Poland have protested against Polanski's arrest in Switzerland, Britain's leftist Guardian newspaper (and most of its commenters) have a different view (found via Middle of Nowhere).

On the celebrities downplaying Polanski's child-rape seemingly on the grounds that artists should be exempt from normal moral rules, I wrote a comment on Elizabeth's post above saying that "eventually the Polanski defenders will cut out the baloney and just declare that rape is an art form." Well, read this. And why don't those celebrities do something useful?

Here are some highlights from the Atheist Alliance International convention. More next year, in Australia.

Politics Plus and Middle of Nowhere look at that Conservapedia project for a new right-wing version of the Bible.

The arrest of a jihadist in France suggests that religious terrorists may be targeting the nuclear industry.

Here are some links on the Muslim-Nazi connection.

This could be a useful insight into cancer, but the main thing that struck me about it that there is such a thing as the Journal of Fish Disease. Truly there's a magazine for every interest!

The real bigfoot was French.

British scientists are making progress on brain-computer interfacing (found via Mendip).