ObamaCare

Many have asked me my opinion of the health care bills that have now come to fruition and will probably be negotiated to a complete bill for the President to sign within a week. What better topic for Christmas blogging than the health and well being of our fellow citizens?

Interview for Arabic Freethinkers

A group of UK freethinkers who maintain an Arabic website interviewed me a few months ago. That interview is now online. See tabee3i Interview with Dr. Richard Carrier. In it I discuss (counter-intuitively) why naturalism is a stronger position than mere atheism, how I think closet atheists and doubters under oppressive Islamic regimes should cope with their situation (and how godless parents should raise their kids in comparably oppressive religious societies like America's Bible Belt), and what I would do if I were elected President of the United States (as if we all fell into some bizarre parallel universe where that would be possible). Plus (more briefly) a few other things, including a bit about my life and loves.

Res Gestae Obamae

It's been nearly a year and the common opinion is that President Obama has gotten little done and failed to deliver on any of his promises. Of course it's unrealistic to expect he would in only a year. It took Bush eight years to right and fully screw this country over inside and out. So we should wait for at least Obama's second State of the Union address before assessing him as a president. He has yet even to deliver his first (due this January). So let's not be premature. 

Nevertheless, I was buying into the zeitgeist myself until I read some recent articles that really exposed the lie: most of the mainstream media is outright ignoring dozens of things Obama has accomplished, and downplaying the rest with biased terminology like "dithering" (to sane people, it's called careful deliberation) or with biased depictions of his actions as aloof or accommodating (actions the rest of us rightly call bipartisanship, which all those same people actually claim to want, yet when they get it, they condemn it as "accommodating" or "aloof").