Month: February 2016

By Selwyn Duke While a Pakistani city was busy banningValentine’s Day, Mother Nature put her own chill on the holiday closer to home: Low-temperature records were shattered in parts of the Northeast, with one area in New York registering a wind chill of minus 114 degrees Fahrenheit. The Big Apple felt the freeze, setting a…

By Selwyn Duke “It doesn’t matter, freedom of speech. Someone was offended, that’s against the law.” These words were actually uttered by a University of Texas at Austin police officer on Tuesday, as he was issuing a citation to a street preacher for “disorderly conduct.” The kicker? The preacher, an intern with Campus Ministry USA identified only…

By Selwyn Duke “This is the end of marriage, capitalism and God. Finally!” triumphantly reads a recent Salon title. It’s not exactly an original sentiment. The sickly but self-deifying Friedrich Nietzsche announced in 1882 already that “God is dead”; of course, now, Nietzsche is dead (perhaps eternally?). God? Not so much. The Salon author is…

By Selwyn Duke George W. Bush and others have often emphasized that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Others view Islam as a "religion of the sword," and they include traditionalist-minded Muslims and mosques. This is evident after the French government recently raided Muslim houses of worship in the country and found “one third of…

By Selwyn Duke Some might say it was the handiwork of low-info entertainers. Others could wonder if there’s any other kind. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, the singer and songwriter who professionally goes by only her first name, scored a Super Bowl first on Sunday: She put on a racially charged half-time performance paying homage to the Black…

By Selwyn Duke We certainly associate propaganda and media control with a German government — just not the contemporary one. But this idea may have to reconsidered in light of an admission by a major German ex-media figure that as far as media reportage goes, “The topics about which are reported are laid down by…

By Selwyn Duke One school system is arming its teachers, and not even the most passionate anti-gun zealot could say it isn’t Okay. The town of Okay in rural Wagoner County, Oklahoma, is becoming one of the first in the state to take the aforementioned action in the wake of a new law allowing certain…

By Selwyn Duke A student is punished for refusing to “stomp on Jesus,” a Christian bakerfaces a year in jail for refusing to cater faux marriages, two men are arrested for reading the Bible aloud near a government building, a school “purges” Christian works from its library. Critics asserting the existence of an institutional anti-Christian…

By Selwyn Duke The Obama administration is obsessed with race and sex. Many know about the administration’s scheme to collect information on the racial composition of American communities in an effort to force neighborhoods to “diversify.” Now the government is applying the same philosophy to businesses in order to “equalize” wages. It’s an effort, critics…

By Selwyn Duke As they circle the drain, Western societies increasingly start to seem like parodies of real civilizations. It’s as if, to twist Shakespeare’s famous line, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players in a really bad comedy that won’t get past its first season. The latest chapter…