Cartoon from the book “God Wants You Dead” by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg. Merry X-mas to all… I am pretty sure that I came up with this image myself, based purely on random collisions of ideas in my skull, in the mid 1990s – but the urban legend of the “Santa Cross” may be [...]
It’s not that I have never voted. I have gotten myself registered, and made it to the polls on a few rare occasions. But those times have usually been to vote “No” on some particularly heinous ballot proposition, and not because any particular political candidate seemed like a good choice to me. (Unfortunately, they don’t [...]
Last night I attended an event at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) where the writer James Bovard gave a talk entitled “Civil Liberties Under Attack in America.” http://www.fee.org/events/detail.asp?id=6289&page=1&t=0 His talk detailed many of the reductions of our liberties that have occurred under the current Bush administration, as a result of the “War on Terror.” [...]
December 5th is the anniversary of the ratification of the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution which served to repeal the 18th amendment. The 18th amendment, as you probably know, brought the prohibition of Alcohol to the federal level. Previous to the 18th amendment there had been some dry states, but between January 16, 1920 [...]
One of the interesting problems with a new religion like Environmentalism is that it is not yet generally recognized as a religion. This means that some people will not realize that they have to abandon their old religion in order to practice this new one fully. Every collective idea-organism has its traditions that are practiced [...]
I tend to look at the world of ideas a little differently than most people do. I see the ideas that cause people to take group actions (religions, governments, corporations, racial identities, and the like) as closely related ideological organisms. I view them as the equivalent of multicellular lifeforms in idea space, constantly competing with [...]
So the big news of the week from the holy wars is about the “serious issue” of teddy bear idolatry. In September, at a Sudanese grade school, a British teacher name Gillian Gibbons let her 7 year old students name the class teddy bear mascot. They happened to chose the name Muhammad. One thing lead [...]