Thinking Out Aloud

This is based on a comment I made here .  When trying to tease out what sorts of policies work and what do not, people often make cross-...

A US former special ops officer argues that ISIS  is just using tactics  ( via ) that al-Qaeda had previously used, which work against Ar...

Two now well-established anti-Israel lines of rhetoric are that the Jewish State is "Nazi-like" (Zionism=Nazism) and the Jewish S...

One of the benefits of reading Ira Lapidus's A History of Islamic Societies   (which I review here and here ) is understanding how muc...

Uttering the cliche that "what Islam needs is a  Reformation " merely shows that the speaker understands neither Islam nor the R...

I recently finished  The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire   by Kent Fl...

A wonderful takedown   ( via ) of Love, Actually (by someone who enjoys the film). The suggestion that the characters are all emotional 15...