The Nature of Things

France, we stand with you.

2015 is not off to a sterling start. Events in France this week confirmed for us once again that there are angry, misguided people in the world who feel persecuted by simply living in a society that protects and indeed encourages freedom of speech, even the most offensive speech.  Goodness knows we have plenty of the thin-skinned in this country, people who take offense at any criticism . Usually, they just shoot off at the mouth (see Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Curt Schilling ), but occasionally the more deluded of them take up arms (see Cliven Bundy, various open carry activists, the Boston Marathon bombers). The most misguided of all imagine that by physically attacking and killing the purveyors of free speech, they can eradicate the speech which they find offensive. They are always wrong. It only causes such speech to metastasize.  Vive la France!

David Sirota of Salon.com has named yesterday's massacre in Colorado for what it is - terrorism. Our media would lead us to believe that terrorism is only the purview of dark-skinned Islamicists, but that is faulty thinking. The country is under siege and at the mercy of domestic terrorists like the Colorado murderer because we refuse to take responsibility for standing up to the NRA and passing and enforcing laws that will inhibit the gun traffic in this country. This will not change until we mature enough as a country to give up our adolescent obsession with guns and violence. Frankly, although it depresses me beyond measure to say it, I see no possibility of that happening. Meanwhile, predictably, a certain segment of our society rushes to the microphones to say that if only there had been someone else in the audience with a gun to take the shooter down, all of this could have been avoided. Never mind that the shooter was wearing full body armor and that the hero would have ha...

The terrible events in Norway yesterday remind us once again, if we needed reminding, that sociopaths with extreme and violent political views exist in all societies, even the most benign and advanced.  The early reporting of those events by news media in this country, as Glenn Greenwald points out in his column in Salon today , reminds us of just how low our journalistic standards have fallen.  The immediate reaction by news outlets here was to assume, without investigation , that Al Qaeda was responsible.  Their stories reflected that slant.  This was true not just of right-wingers but even, as Greenwald shows, of The New York Times , the supposed "newspaper of record."   Greenwald writes: Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn't, even when it's allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist. Of course, before Al Qaeda, nobody ever thought to detonate bombs in government buildings or go on indiscriminate, political...

Rep. Peter King, R-NY, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and former avid supporter of the Irish Republican Army, is very, very concerned about terrorism and the danger it poses to America . He is concerned that American citizens are being radicalized to commit violence against other American citizens and so he convened this investigative hearing of his committee today. But he confined his hearing and his investigation to only Muslim Americans. If Rep. King is truly concerned about radicalization of Americans, I have a few suggestions for his investigations and hearings. How about investigating the militia movement right across the country that is busily arming itself and advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government? Or, in a similar vein, he could investigate all the white supremacist groups which periodically foment violence against Americans who do not meet their rigid racial specifications. How about the evangelical Christian groups who enc...

Politicians and pundits are tripping over each other to pronounce themselves shocked, shocked over the attempted assassination of an elected Member of Congress and the killing and wounding of several of her constituents at a public event in Tucson yesterday. Why should they be shocked? This is just the natural consequence of the irrational hate speech that is the prevalent means of communication in a certain quarter of our political landscape these days. If you are in any doubt as to which quarter I am referring to, it is the far, far right - those people whose heroes are folks like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers who finance and manipulate the tea partiers. When these people constantly urge their followers "don't retreat, reload," or admonish them to take "Second Amendment remedies," or say things like, "If ballots don't work, bullets will!", what exactly did they exp...

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a plane in Detroit on Christmas Day, is only 23 years old. It seems unlikely that he has a very sophisticated view of the world. I can remember - barely - what I was like at 23, and much more recently, what my children were like at 23. While my children were a lot smarter and a lot more knowledgeable about the ways of the world than I was at that age, I think it is fair to say that none of us really understood the workings of the powers that ruled our world. I strongly suspect the same is true of the would-be underpants bomber. He was susceptible to being led and misled and indications are that he was, particularly by an American-born Yemeni radical cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki. This man also allegedly had ties to the 9/11 attacks and to the soldier who shot up Fort Hood last November. Al-Awlaki is now supposedly somewhere in the mountains of Yemen. Abdulmutallab may have an idea as to where he is, and Abdulmutallab se...