9
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
I somehow missed reading anything by Kurt Vonnegut in high school. I’ve wanted to since then, but my fiction reading is rather lackluster (there’s too much real information to learn to be bothered fake stuff), so I only just now got around to it. Overall, it was a decent book, but nothing too […]

Man, this “weekend” sucked.
Also, Geddy Lee’s voice is no longer causing me to want to gouge out my eyes with a rusty spoon. I haven’t decided if that’s a good or bad thing yet.

I…wow. There’s nothing to say.

Some Imam in Pennsylvania:
“She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death,” said ElBayly, who came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1976.
…
Although ElBayly believes a death sentence is […]

8
All The Shah’s Men
by Stephen Kinzer
This book tells the story of America’s first coup: overthrowing Mohammed Mossedegh and a struggling democracy and putting into place the autocratic Shah of Iran. The coup has had an undeniable impact on the history of the Middle East and American foreign policy. The book lives up to its subject […]

Foreigners, too many guns, too few guns, evolution, original sin, atheism, an uncaring capitalist society…
I realize we all want to explain why something so horrible happened, but are we really getting anywhere by simply blaming it on a political hobbyhorse? I thought not.
UPDATE: Better stated:
As with every American tragedy, we are about to learn all […]

This weekend a local church is putting on a “creation science” conference (PDF), featuring the illustrious Institute for Creation Research. That’s right, we’re going to be in the company of such luminaries as Henry Morris and Duane Gish for a weekend.
I’m very tempted to head over for the Friday night sessions with Morris and Gish. […]

Here, courtesy of some silly college kid.
Can you beat attacking MySpace and encouraging people to take better care of the environment? I think not.

David Lynch, whose movies I enjoy quite a bit, spouts debunked New Age nonsense in the Independent:
Indy: You’re talking about Transcendental Meditation?
Lynch: Yes. Transcendental Meditation is a mental technique—it’s not a religion, it’s not against any religion, it’s not a cult, it’s not a sect. It’s a mental technique and an ancient form of […]

The Secret is apparently quite popular now, but I think the Amazon page is perfect. The two spotlight reviews both give it one star. The second one is particularly entertaining. The movie is apparently so stupid it produces rational thoughts from left-wing conspiracy theorists. Now that’s bad.