Nat Hentoff points our attention to a recently published New Yorker piece detailing the history of the practice of “extraordinary renditions” — i.e. sending suspects abroad to countries that are less than scrupulous about the use of torture. The New Yorker piece is here.

Kevin Carson posts on the decentralist tradition on the Left as represented by folks like E. F. Schumacher and Kirkpatrick Sale: Today, as much as ever, the good guys on the left and right fringe have more in common with each other than with the bad guys in the corporate center. As I’ve written elsewhere,…

One of the problems with the debate between pacifism and just war theory is that it often strays into a theoretical argument totally untethered from the biblical texts (Camassia’s complaint), or it gets mired in pulling out various bits of Scripture and using them as proof-texts. Proponents of Just War Theory often appeal to John…

Robert Higgs questions the usual rankings of presidential “greatness”: One need not ponder the rankings long, however, to discover a remarkable correlation: all but one of the presidents ranked as Great or Near Great had an intimate association with war, either in office or by reputation before taking office. Of the top-ranking “nine immortals,” five…

Last week I mentioned that philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe condemned President Truman as a war criminal on account of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Historian Ralph Raico has an article today that mentions Anscombe’s critique: Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise in cost-benefit analysis – innocent Japanese lives balanced against…

Cathy Young writes that red-staters aren’t as scary as they’re made out to be, nor does the right have a monopoly on “moral bullying.” Here’s a point that could stand to be made more often: In many ways, the cultural conservatives want to do no more than roll back the clock to a fairly recent…

No, not that GW, the first one, as in “First in War, First in Peace and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen.” UPDATE: William Marina at Liberty & Power questions the characterization of GW as “anti-imperialist.”

Blogger emeritus Peter Nixon in Commonweal: It is hard to escape the conclusion that the distinct voice that Catholics once brought to the public square is gradually being lost. In its place, we see the emergence of two separate Catholic political cultures, each serving the needs of one of the two major parties, and each…

Or, more precisely, in what sense can we say the church “created” the canon of Scripture (since “the church” obviously preceded the NT)? And what does this mean for the Protestant principle of sola scriptura? The age-old debate is revisited at Here We Stand and Pontifications. See here, here, and here. I think all parties…

Go here and find out.