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 […]

Evil Twitter, Saintly Dogs

I’m souring on Twitter. It’s still of use as a check on breaking news, but god, so many assholes piling on other assholes. It’s not just #gamergate: the other day I read a long series of tweets that seemed to be accusing actor Rainn Wilson of being a rapist. That was news to me, so I Googled it: apparently Wilson […]

Strategery

Over the span of my life, Islam has been a consistently destructive force. Sure, religious fanatics in other parts of the world have started wars, but for pure hate-driven evil nothing tops the Muslims. Islam turns much of its destructive force inward against fellow Muslims; still, it has plenty left over to direct against Israel, and with the 9/11 terror attacks in the USA and subsequent […]

An Unfashionable Position (Updated)

Over the past two days my sympathies with regard to Israel and Palestine, which were initially with the Gazans, have started moving back in a pro-Israel direction. I keep asking myself what my country would do in similar circumstances. I hate what’s happening, but I can’t bring myself to condemn Israel. Moreover, some European pro-Palestine […]