Welcome to the Britannica Blog. As we say on our home page, the site is a place for smart, lively conversations about a broad range of topics. Our aim is to have discussions that are both stimulating and civil. We want to keep the rules simple and few, but we do need some rules, so here they are. They apply to bloggers and commentators alike.No bigotry No profanity No advocating violence or flagrantly immoral conduct No pornography or links thereto No personal attacks. Intellectual argument is fine, but please, nothing ad hominem. Nothing that would offend most reasonable people No purely or primarily commercial messages No spam. As a definition of spam, we like that of blogher.org: nonsense unrelated to the discussion, though we reserve the right, on occasion, to delete even relevant nonsense or irrelevant sense.