The Wolfowitz Matter is fairly enthralling. The level of narcissism and self-absorbtion that must be involved rivets the attention.

Wolfowitz effectively blamed Riza for his predicament as well, saying that her “intractable position” in demanding a salary increase as compensation for her career disruption forced him to grant one to pre-empt a lawsuit…The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said some board members hope a strong statement of dissatisfaction would persuade the Bush administration to withdraw support for Wolfowitz. But the White House views the stakes as larger than control of the World Bank, said a senior administration official, with U.S. resolve and power on the line — in particular the longstanding

There’s some funny stuff in this piece by Anthony Gottlieb on the new atheist books.

In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps…Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of

Joan Smith considers the Shambo question.

The temple has been served with a notice insisting that he be put down, prompting outrage among representatives of the country’s Hindus, who consider cattle sacred and claim that slaughtering the infected animal would be an affront to their religion. “It strikes at the very core of our beliefs,” said Ramesh Kallidai, the secretary general of the Hindu Forum of Britain…[I]n 1935, when a voluntary testing scheme was introduced for cattle, 50,000 new cases of human TB were recorded annually in this country and 2,500 people died from a form of the disease passed on through cow’s milk. That’s why testing was made compulsory in 1950, along with a raft of other measures

Nick Cohen takes a critical look at sectarianism.

The old sectarian leaders [Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley] looked like a pair of exhausted warlords, who, after 30 years of a pointless conflict, were content to settle for a division of the spoils. There was no hint of a common political culture, no shared understanding of the principles of secular democracy, just a truce between bosses in which each left the other free to run his fiefdom and the quangos and ministries which went with it. A bus ride through Belfast should convince doubters that the Good Friday Agreement created partition and called it peace. The walls that went up to separate Catholics from Protestants in the Seventies have not

Good.

The South Asia Media Commission has condemned the harassment of Tasneem Khalil, an investigative journalist in Bangladesh, and sought an explanation and apology from the authorities…The four men took Khalil, 26, to the Sangsad Bhavan army camp, outside the parliament building in Dhaka. He was released on Friday night after more than a daylong grilling…“We are very much worried about Tasneem Khalil’s safety. He is being harassed too often,” N Ram, the chairman, and Najam Sethi, the secretary general of the commission, said in a statement welcoming Khalil’s release. “The Bangladeshi military should desist from such arbitrary actions which are being closely watched by the outside world,” they said in the statement issued by SAMC coordinator Husain Naqi.

I saw a few minutes of a Bill Moyers tv thing last night that included some chat with a fresh-faced young person who had just graduated from something called (unpleasantly) ‘Regent University’ – it’s apparently run by Pat Robertson, and includes John Ashcroft on its faculty. The fresh-faced young person told the camera that she believes in Absolute Truth. ‘Not grey, not relative, Absolute Truth, which is God’s truth.’

Nothing surprising there, of course, but all the same I wondered (as I often do) how she knows. How does she know? How does she know what God’s truth is?

She doesn’t, of course, but that’s what’s interesting, because she thinks she does. Why does she think that?

Largely or entirely … Read the rest