Submitted to a Candid World

Tell me, Senator McCain - since you’re profiting off of the conflict - why is Russia’s invasion of Georgia so wrong?
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McCain’s answer - “In the 21st Century, nations don’t invade other nations” - reeks of hypocrisy, and is the sort of amateurishly simple statement [...]

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Every now and then I get a little preachy.  This is one of those times.  The new movie, “House Bunny,” really annoys me.  Aside from celebrating ignorance and entrenching female stereotypes (flighty dumb blonde), I had thought that this genre (sorority girl/frat boy/zany college comedies) was dead, aside from spoofing in Futurama.  Wasn’t it better [...]

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Earlier this week, I urged Obama to call his vacation short and go do something - anything - to help the Russia/Georgia situation, or at least look like he’s trying to do something.  Well, Obama stayed on vacation.  And coverage like this is what happened.  When you’re weak on “experience,” the last thing to do [...]

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We get a lot of negative (and idiotic) comments on how evolution causes the Holocaust, genocide, etcetera, etcetera… but rarely any praise for the animating, positive spirit of science, the profound belief in humanity’s ability to better itself.  Cheers to the New York Times for this unfortunately rare, and profoundly important, praise:
[T]he most important thing [...]

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“Christian education” has fallen from its former medieval grandeur - where Christian research of the classics was the only education - to become little more than a way of training the next generation of culture warriors and attaching the appropriate intellectual blinders, rather than broadening students’ minds (intensely footnoted… starting here).1
The University of California system [...]

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