Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Here is an interview with a terrorism researcher about the recent terrorist attacks in Belgium. Key paragraph:

Testosterone also has a significant influence here, given the average age of Belgian jihadists. If you remove the beards, the Korans, and the black flags from most ISIS propaganda videos, you are left with something that resembles certain US hip hop videos! Big cars, guns everywhere, gang members posing together. In our globalized world, the violence of ISIS is not that remote from Hollywood movies like Mad Max or Japanese mangas like Hokuto No Ken. ISIS is trying to evoke the Islamic Middle Ages, but the Toyota vehicles and the Nike sneakers tell us something else.

When you combine medieval minds with space-age weaponry, you get savagery on an unprecedented scale. Just wait until ISIS gets nuclear weapons.

It's going to be ever so satisfying to see this man come crawling to Donald Trump. I can't wait.

Boston (1976). One of the greatest albums of all time. Do young people these days even know what an album (i.e., a collection of songs sold together) is?

Here.

Here.

My God. Is this what philosophy has come to? The author is a credentialed philosopher (or rather, professor of philosophy) at a prestigious university, but he can't write and doesn't make sense, at least when writing for a popular audience. The op-ed column reads like a first draft of a thesis-defense paper written by a college sophomore. It's repetitive, rambling, tendentious, and pretentious. Some of it is just plain gibberish (by any standard of effective prose-writing):

Mainly, humanity learns as identities alter to become less aggressive and more open, so that networks can connect individual capacities more effectively and join our resources together.

The author cherry-picks facts that support his thesis (to the extent that there is a thesis) and ignores those that undermine it. He begs all the important questions, such as whether the globe is, in fact, warming, and, if it is, whether human beings are causing all or some of it. He confuses science with technology. He never explains that he means by "good" and "evil." It's not even clear what the point of the column is. Am I missing something?

Have you heard it said that theists (i.e., believers in a personal god) are childish? Supposedly, they're childish because they create a father (in the sky, as it were) who is stern but loving. This they find comforting. But who is really childish? Most atheists I have known disbelieve in God (i.e., believe that there is not a personal god) not because they have evidence against the existence of God (no amount or type of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God) but because they are rebellious. They don't like the idea of having a father (in the sky) to love, instruct, and discipline them, so they rebel by denying the existence of such a being. What could be more childish than that? Either (1) both theists and atheists are childish (albeit in different ways) or (2) neither theists nor atheists are childish.

To the Editor:

I was both shocked and disappointed when Edward O. Wilson, whom I have always greatly admired, held back when addressing the key component in the destruction of biodiversity: human population growth (“The Global Solution to Extinction,” Sunday Review, March 13).

To suggest that 50 percent of the earth’s land and sea could be set aside with a human population projection of 10 billion-plus,with its concomitant demand on natural resources, is naïve if not ludicrous.

When I was born in 1939, the world’s population was about 2.2 billion; today, it exceeds 7.3 billion and is steadily increasing. During my 76 years, more than a third of the birds on the planet have vanished, and we all know what has happened to the world’s fish stocks.

Can anyone truly believe that an additional three billion people will have any less of a harmful effect on all species?

DAVID O. HILL

Memphis

The writer is the founder of Rare.org, an environmental nonprofit.

"I am not a crook."

It's hard to see world-historical events when they're happening and when one is in the midst of them. Donald Trump is reshaping American politics, possibly forever. Climb aboard the Trump bandwagon (as this woman did) while you still can. Let's make America great again—for Americans.