It’s been 25 years since Salman Rushdie published his novel Satanic Verses and Iran’s head of state, the Ayatollah Khomeini, responded by charging him with blasphemy and placing a death sentence upon his head. Not surprisingly, Rushdie went into hiding when he heard the news.  Th

When Senator Diane Feinstein expressed her outrage at Edward Snowden because he’d failed to take his concern about the NSA through the proper channels and reached out to the press,  she was guilty of short term memory loss. In 2001, William Binney, a 30 year-old veteran of the agen

Edward Snowden’s revelations about our government’s indiscriminate spying has rekindled the debate about research and ethics.  Tom Leinster, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland challenges the opinions of some of his colleagues when they insist t

                      (Courtesy of www.theenglightenedconservative.com)

A few day ago, Susan Stoner, author of the Sage Adair Mystery Series, her husband-cameraman husband George Slanina and I met to tape the first 4 videos of our new book series, Just Read It.  Laurelhurst Village Assisted Living served as our host and we were joined by four guests to d

Writer Michael Kingsley thinks one reason print newspapers may be headed for extinction like the dinosaur isn’t because of electronic competition but because of demographics. According to him, the older generation, accustomed to print media, is giving way to younger readers who are

It’s official. Sherlock Holmes no longer belongs to Conan Doyle.  He belongs to the world.  So ruled a federal judge in Chicago last December when the estate of Sir Arthur sued Leslie Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, over copyright violations.  The ruling fol

It’s probably my imagination but  people espousing cruel ideologies seem to be crawling out of the woodwork these days, whether it’s the politician in India who insists that women who are raped should be hanged http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/rape-comments-india-election

“Nothing has ever given us as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12,” observes A. A. Gill in a recent article for Vanity Fair. (“Perfection Anxiety,” by A. A. Gill, Vanity Fair, May 2014 pgs. 120-122.) I would add, that as for the 12 year-old, the link between mon

A Facebook friend shared a poster out of eastern Ukraine, recently, that purported Jews were being required to register their passports and records of property at a makeshift government headquarters in the rebel area of the country. As the language was foreign, I had no idea whether t