The foxhole atheist community is alive and well at Fort Bragg and is getting ready to hold an event on the central parade ground. Rock Beyond Belief, an organization of atheist soldiers, after long bargaining has gotten permission to hold a kind of atheist Woodstock on March 31. “This just might be the turning point […]

The governor of Texas spoke for 13 minutes at a “prayer rally” in a half-empty Texas football stadium, and the New York Times is troubled.  Deeply troubled. In many ways, the rally was unprecedented, even in Texas, where faith and politics have long intersected without much controversy — the governor, as both a private citizen […]

Remember carbon trading, the new ‘market-friendly’ approach to environmental regulation that was going to save the planet and earn money for traders?From the Wall Street Journal: IntercontinentalExchange Inc. told traders Friday that it would shut down its U.S. emissions derivatives platform, a year after acquiring its parent only to suffer sparse trading as the prospects […]

The jobs of the future are already popping up.  Taskrabbit is a San Francisco-based startup, with operations in Boston, LA, and soon, New York, that organizes people to run errands. For a fee, the company’s ‘taskrabbits’ will pick up busy people’s laundry, groceries, set up Ikea furniture, paint your house, and more.There are other start […]

With all the doom and gloom in world financial markets, it’s good to know that some things are still holding their value.  Despite the challenging economic environment and, worse, questions about whether there were enough insects at the right time to fatten up the chicks, prices for grouse shoots are at record levels, chirps the […]

It’s one thing when Russia’s ‘bad cop’ Prime Minister Putin smacks you around.  That’s to be expected.  But now instead of offering us cigarettes and a cup of coffee, President Medvedev,  Russia’s ‘good cop’, is taking out the rubber hose.Read it all in the New York Times. In an interview Friday that was timed to […]

The evidence that glamorous Queens is the best of the boroughs keeps pouring in.  Brooklyn has tribes of vagrants barbecuing the wildlife in its parks; Manhattan’s parks teem with rats; Queens by contrast has the best year round surfing in the regions, and I’m not talking about broadband.From the city to the surf in the […]

What is war good for?  Absolutely nothing, says the Edwin Star song.Increasing numbers of historians and archaeologists beg to differ, according to this NYT report. War may be the mother of civilization, it now appears. [Ancient societies] were shaped by human choice as people sought new forms of cooperation and new institutions for the more […]

There is, of course, no global war on terror.  We are much too evolved and mature for that.  Otherwise there would be some common vision linking the wars the US is currently fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya and goodness knows where else.But if there were such a war, this would be good […]

In Libya as elsewhere, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.  The Dear Loon of Libya, heir-apparent Seif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, used to pose as a modern and western looking liberal.  But ever since the Libyan rebellion broke out, Seif has been following in his father’s bloody and eccentric footsteps.Last spring, he vowed to crush […]