“Only” 1,314 Arrests

/ Jim / Leave a comment
Protesters marching in Paris on October 17, 2026
Protesters marching in Paris on October 17, 2026. Photo: Silanoc, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Last Sunday I wrote that Europe looked like it was collapsing and asked whether we were next. That post ran on impressions — fragments of protests and fires caught on weekend news. This one runs on receipts. Yesterday was the second protest Saturday in a row in France and Italy, and this time I waited for the wire reports before writing a word.

So, the rules of this post, stated up front: what follows is what Reuters, AP and AFP reported as of Sunday morning. These are the facts as we know them now. They could change. Some of them may not turn out to be facts at all — the French government and the French unions don’t agree on the most basic number of the day, how many people marched, so where the sources disagree, I’m going to show you both numbers instead of picking one.

Continue reading →

Bubblegum Christianity: Allie Beth Stuckey’s Horror Ban, Taken Apart by Her Own Side

/ Jim / Leave a comment
A jumbled pile of colorful plastic building bricks.

I am an atheist. I make no secret of it; it’s in the banner. So take it from me when I tell you this has been a strange week, because I have spent it nodding along — hard — with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh. Not on everything. On one thing: both of them looked at conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey’s latest pronouncement and said, in public, in their own words, what I would have said. The pronouncement is the problem. And the way it fell apart, inside her own camp, in about forty-eight hours, is the story.

Continue reading →

One Ad, Two Republican Parties

/ Jim / Leave a comment
Vivek Ramaswamy.

I’ve been thinking about commenting on this for several days, and today I just decided to put down a few words about it, real quick. It’s the Ohio governor’s race, of all places — but the ad at the center of it has become a national story, and what happened after the ad is more interesting than the ad itself. Here’s what I think.

A year ago, Vivek Ramaswamy was the Republican future. Trump endorsed him for governor of Ohio, the primary field cleared out, he won the nomination with over eighty percent, and he has lent his own campaign something like thirty-six million dollars to make sure the future arrives on schedule. Ohio is a state Trump carried by eleven points. And this week, Ramaswamy is losing — most fall polls have Dr. Amy Acton, the Democrat, ahead of him, one Fox News poll has it within two points, and the race raters have called it a toss-up since September. The slide started before the ad. The ad is just where it got interesting.

Continue reading →

Atheism Is Not a Light Switch — and Neither Is Christianity

/ Jim / Leave a comment
Photo: BrokenSphere, via Wikimedia Commons.

Back in March of 2018 I wrote a post called Atheism Is Not a Light Switch. The argument was simple: when somebody announces “I used to be an atheist,” the first question to ask is why they became one in the first place. Most of the time, when you hear the answer, you find there was never any disbelief there to lose. They were mad at God. They were mad at church people. They hit a crisis and “atheist” was the word they grabbed for how it felt. Then life changed, the feeling changed, and the label changed back. But atheism isn’t a light switch. You don’t flip it on in a bad year and off in a good one.

Continue reading →