Food rights illustrate personal expression

A few years ago I stumbled across an Islamic fundamentalist execution video. Unfortunately, where there's one execution video, there tends to be links to many others. Morbid curiosity led me down perhaps the darkest road of the Internet: a long thread of graphic execution videos — all from either Eastern ...

Despite safeguards, state still affects religion

It seems like the rest of the Western world has answered the question of religion. England, Italy, Germany and France, themselves the ancient seats of one brand of Christianity or another, had slaughtered each other under the auspice of religion for nearly 10 centuries. Though an old statistic, it is ...

Party could spark GOP identity crisis

news media in general birthed the Tea Party movement with its extensive exposure of the anti-Obama protests in early 2009, we have witnessed the movement’s awkward adolescence and rapid maturation into something that has the appearance of a distinct political identity. Any press is still good press, and whatever ...

Stewart’s speech focuses on media

Up until the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive happened last Saturday afternoon, which drew a crowd of 215,000-plus to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., nobody was really sure if or how its execution would reflect what Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" had ...

Justice system has flaws, but still works

Saturday night in the Fort, I happened by a scene on 17th and Laurel, just a bit above that annoying four-way stop above Nero's and Fort Sanders Yacht Club: Two huge, shirtless white males were stomping around in what was hopefully an artificially induced rage, demanding any passing group ...

Smartphone effects on kids raise concerns

The unforeseen consequences of powerful technology have given humanity a pretty hard time. The massive troop charges into machine guns in World War I seem to be an appropriate poster child for our collective inability to comprehend the most obvious effects of technological advancement, symbolizing how much physical suffering and ...

Tea Party focuses on emotion, not objectivity

The Tea Party movement, having evolved into a kind of en rouge conservative zeitgeist more than a group of people representing a set of ideals, seems to have swept aside the potential for any meaningful conservative dissent.

The resonance with the voting base is simply too strong. Republicans know that ...

Stewart proves balanced objectivity possible

In the last few weeks, it has become fashionable by political bloggers to scrutinize Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show.” The anomaly is, it seems to be, in every case, by intelligent chaps on the mid-to-mid-far left. Dissent, an online political magazine of “independent-minded radicals,” launched a recent article (http ...

Game industry yet to embrace full potential

The video game industry is doing well. Since 2002, annual product line receipts for the entertainment software publishing industry have increased more than 130 percent, from about $4 to $9 billion in the last eight years. At real annual growth rates of around 17 percent from 2005 to 2008, the ...

Smartphones change how brain works

I envision a holographic future. One day, everything will be accessible from a holographic interface that materializes before us at will. Every intangible thing about our lives will reside before us in the ether — every form of organization, communication, recreation. 

Being creatures naturally motivated by intangible forces, forcing the abstract ...

Google’s growth threatens net neutrality

We human beings are so gosh-darned adaptive; no one can really say when the Internet morphed from a novelty with some convenient functions into a permanent element of our society that has replaced virtually all information technology. It just kind of appeared, and we happily went along with it and ...