Today has been a busy news day. Samuel Alito was confirmed, and will officially replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In case you were curious, the vote was 58-42, with four Democrats (Byrd, WI; Nelson, NE; Johnson, SD; Conrad, ND) and one Republican (Chaffee, RI) crossing the aisle (and Jeffords, the independent, voting with [...]

Now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections, it seems that Israel and the West are faced with a terrible dilemma: How can a foreign power support a government and yet oppose those who control that government? Keep in mind that the Palestinian Authority is a peculiar creation, because it was created by treaty [...]

I recently caught an excellent documentary on AMC entitled Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, that looked at various Hollywood portrayals of the Holocaust and the controversy that those portrayals caused. According to the documentary, some of the first serious Hollywood portrayals of the Holocaust (a TV mini-series Holocaust, Sophie’s Choice, etc.) were controversial [...]

Perhaps the oddest thing about the Iraq War is that no one is really sure, as far as I can tell, exactly why we are fighting it. Most wars that the United States fights have a pretty clear purpose and objective. Most of our 20th century wars (The first Persian Gulf War, the [...]

One of the key tenets of the scientific method is reproducibility. Any experiment, in order to be scientifically valid, ought to be reproducible. In theory, the write-up of a scientific experiment ought to look something like a recipe: take a dash of salt, 3/4 of a cup of uranium, apply Einstein’s laws, and [...]

Check out this article by Joel Stein. To summarize, Stein argues that those who are against the Iraq war (as am I) should stop claiming to support our troops, for four reasons:
1) Hawks (and many others) are likely to misunderstand your comments and parades as actually being pro-war instead of pro-soldier, anti-war.
2) Most of [...]

My time in Australia will soon come to an end, and I’ve greatly enjoyed it. Sydney is a beautiful city; I highly recommend it. I thought I might spend a moment commenting on the cultural differences that I’ve noticed during my month here.
I think the most prominent of them, is that Australians [...]

Northerners are un-Christian, liberal, tree-hugging elitists. Southerners are gun-loving, ignorant, Bible-thumping racists. You’ve heard the stereotypes before, and maybe even said one of them. I know I have. But it’s time for us to bridge the North/South divide and start talking about our neighbors with respect.

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
— Benjamin Franklin
One of the apparent goals of the Bush Administration has been to convince the American people that there is a natural conflict between a people’s liberty and a nation’s security, and that [...]

I’ve often thought that the response (or lack thereof) by the Religious Right to the various prisoner abuse, wiretapping, and corruption scandals pouring out of the White House and Congress lately were a sign of pure hypocrisy. After all, these are the same groups that revelled in exposing the Clinton shenanigans. Pat Robertson, [...]