Eating Cakes That Can’t Be Kept

I sometimes shake my head at the futility of debating the dedicated faithful.  By that I do not mean those who are serious about their religion and think it through, but those who attached themselves, limpet-like, to a movement and then abandon all introspection and attack all dissent aimed at…

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Attention Sickness

Marty Kaplan describes the symptoms and gives a name to "the very real nausea that culture (to use a kind word for it) can cause":  Attention Sickness.  First the BIG THING was ANNA NICOLE. Then it was WAR FUNDING. Then it was SANJAYA, and vote-for-the-worst sadism. Then it was CANCER, and…

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Book Review: The End of Iraq

Summary: A scathing, informative chronicle of the Bush administration's failures in Iraq, yet one that speaks with compelling plausibility of all the missed opportunities to turn things around. Former U.S. diplomat and ambassador Peter Galbraith has been deeply and personally involved with the affairs of Iraq for over twenty years.…

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Lose your religion for tax purposes

A Jesuit college in St. Louis just won a Missouri Supreme Court case allowing them to get public money, $8 million of it, for their college.  Not being one that believes public money should be spent in support of religion, I was aghast.  "How could that possibly happen?" you might say.  The answer…

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Selective empathy

We’ve had a horrible tragedy back here in the United States.   Thirty-three students are dead at Virginia Tech, with many others wounded. Our papers are going to spill a lot of ink on this story, as they should.  But on the other side of the world, multitudes of innocent civilians…

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