Assistant Village Idiot

Catching the tone of genuine warmth in the radio voice saying the words "Mother Earth" this afternoon, I have to wonder if half of...

It has been amusing for this conservative to watch Democrats fall upon each other like jackals, and in particular to sense their anger at ha...

It is always amusing to watch something that was so perfectly in step with the times in its day, but is now dated. If we lived through the ...

"Accusing a scientist of playing God is obviously stupid," (biologist Richard) Dawkins said, "but what is not obviously stupi...

Fausta's Blog weighs in on the criticism by online conservatives of public feminists, who they accuse of ignoring Muslim oppression of ...

Daniel J Flynn's subtitle to the book is "How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas." I'm keeping it more as ...

I used my Obama joke too often - that we should have him run a golf tournament or something before we let him run the country. A coworker, ...

Only 20% of Democratic voters in South Carolina considered the War in Iraq to be the most important issue. The general War on Terror doesn...

Fifth in a series Are They Really That Bad? Introduction, Scandal #1 Scandal #2. I am uncertain whether this is my strongest argument or ...

I think this will be the last post on this at present. I had a graduate-school textbook on personality development in 1979. It was a supple...

I leapt to a conclusion in preparation for another post, and thought my few readers might be interested not only in the case, but my interna...

This post contains some graphic and distressing sexual material. Really. Don’t read it if that will bother you. On the sexual response of l...

So what do I know? Nuttin', but just to show it can be done: the leading indicators, like the stock market, are at bottom or pretty ne...

If you would have told me in mid-October that my New England teams would go 52-6 over the next 100 days I would have called you overoptimist...

Part of the continuing series Are They Really That Bad? Everyone accepts now that Bill Clinton is a skirt-chaser, and as a country, we’ve de...

Loyalty is one of those conditional virtues, like courage. It is generally agreed to be a good thing, but if applied to an evil cause, incr...

In response to the New York Times easily-refutable series on how violent returning Iraqi vets are (they have half the crime rate of the civi...

Commenters all over the political kaleidescope like to make arguments about what nations should do based on what people should do. This u...

New England plays San Diego in the AFC championship. Green Bay plays New York in the NFC. Change AFC/NFC to AFL/NFL, and it's the mid-...

Comments on 3 ½ books recently received. I though the “little” in EH Gombrich’s A Little History Of The World meant “brief.” It is brief,...