The Iconoclast
“Yes, Mr Dennett, qualia are unscientific… and real”
by Paul Austin Murphy (December 2015) [Others] note that my “avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters” often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard […]
Is it Safe to Fly?
by Jerry Gordon with Amb. R. James Woolsey and Lisa Benson (December 2015) Saturday morning, October 31st, 2015 Flight 9268 a Metrojet Airbus A321 with 224 largely Russian tourists, and […]
As if and Adam Smith
by G. Murphy Donovan (December 2015) “… every man must be supposed a knave.” – David Hume Adam Smith (1723-90) is memorable for things he was not. He wasn’t […]
Jacob Riis – The Story of America’s Most Famous Immigrant of the 19th Century
Stranger than a Hans Christian Andersen Fairytale by Norman Berdichevsky (December 2015) Jacob A. Riis became the most celebrated European immigrant to the United States in the period of mass […]
Population and the True Number of Converts to Islam
by Ibn Warraq (December 2015) Immediately after 9/11, many journalists in the United States, and Europe, came out with several glib generalisations that I found, and still find, irritating, because […]
“No War Against ISIS Without the Kurds”: an interview with US Army Brig. Gen. (ret.) Ernie Audino
by Jerry Gordon (December 2015) On the morning of November 13, 2015 combined Peshmerga and Yazidi forces, with US Special operators and USAF tactical support, successfully cut off the occupied […]
The West and the Rest: Agnostics vs Believers
by G. Murphy Donovan (December 2015) “Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.” – M. Albom Political leaders, East and West, are […]
Thinking the Worst: An Inglorious Survival Posture for Israel
by Louis René Beres (December 2015) Sometimes, especially in humankind’s most urgent matters of life and death, truth may emerge through paradox. In this connection, one may usefully recall the […]
Plato, Relevant Still: The Concept of the Uniquely Appropriate
by Samuel Hux (December 2015) Back when I was a socialist, a card-carrying member first of DSOC (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) and then its successor DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and […]
And Death Shall Have Its Dominion
by Theodore Dalrymple (December 2015) For the first time in my life I feel the approach of death not as a certainty in the abstract but (if I may be […]
The Lancaster Plan
by John M. Joyce (December 2015) I don’t get invited to that many formal evening parties – maybe ten or twelve in a year – so when an invitation to […]
Is Turkey collaborating with the Islamic State (ISIS)?
David L. Phillips writes in The Washington Post on August 12, 2014: “Most of the fighters who joined us in the beginning of the war came via Turkey, and so […]
Molenbeek. Time to declare it an Islamic Republic?
On my last visit but one to Brussels, my hosts asked me what I would like to see. “Molenbeek,’ I replied, for I had heard that much of it was […]
The United Nations General Assembly: Prejudice without Pride
The UN General Assembly has the tiresome habit of almost always being wrong. No one expected the 193-member international organization to be the pinnacle of political wisdom, but few had […]
Evidence Paris attack weapons shipped from Germany
From
The Golden Age of Unctuousness
We live in a golden age of unctuousness, at least if the covers of the Lancet, one of the most important medical journals in the world, are anything to go […]