I have an article on the apostasy controversy at Religion Dispatches entitled "Who's smearing Obama?" Here's the first paragraph: It started when the Grey Lady ran an Op-Ed entitled “President Apostate?” on the 12th of May. The instantaneously controversial opinion piece by military historian and security analyst Edward N. Luttwak argued that, due to a technicality of Shari'a, Democratic nominee Barack Obama would be automatically and inexorably viewed as an infidel by Muslims everywhere, and thus targeted for elimination. President... Read more

It's 3 AM on a Saturday night, the bars have vomited their patrons, I have to a paper to finish urgently, and the only feasible venue to such activities that's still open in this small town is the trusty IHOP. I'm surrounded by foul mouthed, inebriated students at the moment. Someone shoot me. I'd forgotten how trite and incredibly boring drunken college student antics were. Time to invest in broadband at home. Read more

On this Memorial Day let us ponder a scandal which ought to drive war mongering, free market zealots on the Right and Pseudo Left to commit hari kari to salvage the little honor they have left. VA confirms 18 vets commit suicide every day In a stunning admission, top officials at the Veterans Health Administration confirmed that the agency’s own statistics show that an average of 126 veterans per week — 6,552 veterans per year — commit suicide, according to... Read more

Not sure what happened with the titles of the last few posts. Maybe there's a bug in the latest release of  ScribeFire. Read more

Rebecca Walker, the daughter of feminist icon and author of The Color Purple Alice Walker, has publicly denounced her mother and her brand of feminism as hypocritical in a blistering and thought provoking article that, as if that's not enough to get attention, is also packed with dirty laundry. This really goes for the jugular. Some might retort that this article is more a personal attack than a critique. It's certainly personal and polemical–and I'm not trying to endorse anything... Read more

Just thought I share with you sci-fi heads a stimulating observation I just came across on a Scandinavian blog concerning Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Haven't read them in forever, so I have no idea whether this charge holds true against the s-f polymath (who's written on just about everything, though I've heard the claim that his encyclopedic knowledge of everything was marred by a conventional interpretative approach; being a pedestrian polymath is a problem this prematurely senile man would like... Read more

…you find your Mormon neighbors' attitudes towards dating overly liberal." A few weeks before we set off for Oklahoma from Georgia, we had dinner with a nice Mormon family that lived in the other cul de sac of our development. We were swapping complaints about the permissiveness of American society and how popular culture relentlessly sexualizes children, when the father declared in outrage, "There'll be no children dating in our house! Nothing of the sort before she's 14. Not a... Read more