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America is reeling from President Biden’s chaotic abandonment of American citizens, our Afghan allies, and religious minorities in Afghanistan. Twenty years ago this very week, America was also reeling when two jetliners smashed into the World Trade Center, a third slammed into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania as its valiant passengers overpowered their Islamist captors.

Read it all: Missing the Signs: The Religious Motivations of the 9/11 Attackers

On Vox, at least:

What policymakers can aim for is not a total end to Covid-19 but a balancing act. On one side of that scale is containing Covid-19 with restrictions and precautions. On the other is resuming normal, pre-pandemic life. Vaccines have changed the balance by giving us the ability to contain Covid-19’s worst outcomes — hospitalization and death — with less weight on the side of restrictions. But vaccines alone can’t drive hospitalizations and deaths to zero if all the weight on the restriction side is removed.

In part, that was the point of my piece Teaching Secular Blasphemy. Given the fact that we are continually “behind the curve” in suppressing the virus, and the natural uncertainties built into processes like this, eliminating COVID altogether in a short time frame was a fool’s errand from the start. But our leaders–and that includes those in the public health community–played on Americans’ obsession with the “perfect life” concept. (And the Aussies have done that on steroids.) No one would admit that there were trade-offs in this whole process.

Perhaps this is a sign that a reality check is underway. Perhaps.

In October 1980, the colourful trade union leader Clive Jenkins took to the podium at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Blackpool with a simple message: the British public had been deceived in the referendum on European membership held in 1975. Far from the economic uplands promised by those who campaigned to remain, British industry…

When Labour believed in Brexit

Two decades before he landed in Australia, Captain James Cook was at sea facing a desperate matter of life and death. The problem was scurvy, a deadly illness caused by Vitamin C deficiency and which had been the curse of sailors for centuries. By the time that Capt Cook set sail for the South Pacific…

Life is one big status game

For those appalled by the potential of widespread Christian persecution in Afghanistan, I have bad news: the persecution imposed during the era of Taliban rule beginning in the 1990s never stopped. The Taliban’s ouster in 2001 did little to change societal norms that are anti-Christian and anti-religious minority generally. Let’s take a look back at the situation shortly after the new Afghan government was elected (November 2005) and at cases of blasphemy and apostasy, and then we’ll fast forward to conditions on the ground in 2020…

How did we get here? Religious freedom never took off in Afghanistan

This is by Eric Patterson, Executive Vice President, Religious Freedom Institute. Also about Dr. Patterson: Book Review: Eric Patterson’s Just American Wars: Ethical Dilemmas in U.S. Military History.