AWAG
AWAG. No, it doesn’t stand for Atheist With a Gun. It stands for Asshole With a Gun.
Thank You, Jon Stewart
I’ve been a devoted but critical fan of Jon Stewart. For all the laughs, I thought he pulled more punches than he landed, particularly when he’d exchange softball pleasantries with agents of evil like John Yoo and Mike Huckabee. I scratched my head over the “Rally to Restore Sanity” he and Stephen Colbert put on in Washington DC a couple of years […]
Air-Minded: “Mayday, Mayday, Engine Flameout”
Within a few hours of Wednesday’s TransAsia Airways crash in Taiwan something slipped out about the plane losing power on both engines when in fact only one engine had failed, and I thought “Uh oh, they shut down the wrong engine.” Such a thing is not unknown, after all. Now, as more information is coming in, that’s increasingly […]
Holy War
President Obama talks about Islam often, and he never fails to label terrorist attacks as terrorism. He avoids using the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” however, as many on the right demand he do. I’m with Obama on that. Too many Americans have decided the Muslim faith — its prophet, its holy book, its madrassas, its imams, […]
Making Time Fly
A couple of casual observations to start the weekend. ——————– Lately, Rachel Maddow has been asking why Congress isn’t debating President Obama’s military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It’s surely odd that Congress, which interferes with or tries to block everything else the President does, is allowing him free rein to conduct the […]
Friday Bag ‘o Tribalism
Watching NBC and MSNBC reports on the Charlie Hebdo terror killings in Paris, I see very few depictions of the magazine’s cartoons. In print and web-based media, though, the cartoons … even the really offensive ones … are everywhere. You’d have to be a cloistered monk not to have seen them, which makes me wonder why our TV […]
Why Did They Do It? (Updated 12/23/14)
Never mind there should be no debate over torture, any more than there should be a debate over rape or child molestation. There is a debate and it’s heading downhill fast, witness this statement by one of the most powerful men in the land: “I think it is very facile for people to say ‘Oh, torture is terrible,’” […]
Air-Minded: SERE & Torture
People keep saying torture can’t be all that bad … after all, we torture our own aviators and special operations forces at a super-secret training facility so they’ll be able to stand up to it if they’re ever captured by the enemy …. and you don’t hear any of them complaining, do you? The acronym for this specialized training […]