Mark Kleiman

Last week, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, in arguing against the idea that marriage equality conferred freedom on gay and lesbian people to marry, offered a definition of “freedom” straight from the Newspeak Dictionary: freedom is doing what the Church tells you you ought to want to do. This week, arguing in the same […]

Maggie Gallegher threatens a rain of fire and brimstone on New York Republicans for having had the temerity to allow a majority vote on marriage equality. “Consequences to be continued,” she snarls, in her best Godfather style. I wish I believed her. More likely, the plutocrats who call the shots in the GOP will figure […]

The Washington Post takes a look at the fundamental trend driving American political, social, and economic life: the growing wealth, power, and social isolation of a tiny slice of the population. The whole right-wing shtick about “elites” is designed as a distraction from the fact that a plutocratic elite is chewing up more and more […]

After Texas secedes, will Rick Perry still be eligible to be President? Seriously, though: if a Democrat had said – and repeated – something that earth-shatteringly stupid and unpatriotic, none of the Serious People would take him seriously as a candidate, and therefore he would never become a serious candidate. But as far as I […]

The Pakistani security forces – both the Army and the ISI secret police – are among the purest expressions in the world of absolute evil: tyrants, kleptocrats, torturers, religious fanatics, supporters of terrorism. The U.S. decision, back when Nehru was playing footsie with Moscow, to ally with Pakistan, made us the paymasters of the security […]

Roland Griffiths and his colleagues at Hopkins have been studying what happens when you take a screened group of people with spiritual interests who have never taken any of the hallucinogenic (aka psychedelic, aka entheogenic) drugs and give them a few hours of preparation followed by a supervised experience with psilocybin, the active agent in […]

The governor of Texas: I think we’re going through those difficult economic times for a purpose, to bring us back to those Biblical principles of you know, you don’t spend all the money. You work hard for those six years and you put up that seventh year in the warehouse to take you through the […]

Life expectancies increase over time. That’s pretty much a law of nature. Absent an epidemic, seeing them move in the wrong direction is a strong diagnostic of social dislocation (e.g., Russian male death rates before and after Gorbachev). So this graphic from the LA Times, showing declining female life expectancy in some U.S. counties over […]

The Red bloggers’ complaint that the Blue team always attributes anti-Obama sentiment to racism would be more worthy of attention if Red Blogistan ever called out the flat-out racism of the official organ of the Teapublican party, Fox News. When an African chief of state visits the White House, and Fox refers to his “having […]

Jim Leitzel of the University of Chicago has done what most proponents of drug legalization refuse to do: admit the likely increase in drug abuse as a result of legalization, and think in concrete and practical terms about policies to limit that increase, such as requiring each user to pass a basic-knowledge test for each […]