This business of killing family members who disobey is all about tribalism.

It's not because he's Muslim per se. Muslims who live as modern individuals don't do this.

It's because in the tribal system, family is everything. Family is the financial system, the employment system, the medical care system, and the social welfare system.

So someone who goes against their own family is almost like a traitor to a country. And traitors can be executed, even in America.

The Muslim religion honors these tribal ways because the religion developed among tribal people living in the desert. The desert is a harsh environment, and tribal practices can be just as harsh.

People want very badly to see this as a matter of abstract ideology. Either politics or theology.

IMO this is really about the tribal world coming up against the modern world where modern individuals do exist.

Modern individuals do not exist in the tribal system. You are a member of your family and you do what the head of your family says until you either die or become the one giving orders.

To her family, the girl was not an individual. She was only defined as a person in the context of her family.

That's why her father thought he had the right to kill her. She was a member of his family and subject to his law, not the law that governs modern individuals.

Modern society recognizes individual rights, including the rights of his daughter. Every individual has a right not to be killed, not even by family.

So he's in big trouble.

He's living in the world of modern individuals and he's going to learn that in spades.

One of my favorite all time movie lines was in Desert Hearts when Helen Shaver threatens to get even with Audra Linley by writing a short about her when she gets back to New York.

I think that's funny when writers get paid to criticize artists who do things for money.

I hope Amy can pull it together. It's up to her. I hope she doesn't die.

Nature is not our victim but an awesome, uncontrollable force.

I think you've got the global warming story backwards.

The problem is not really that we are hurting Nature.

What we're accomplishing by overheating the planet is giving Nature even MORE awesome, uncontrollable power to make life hard for humans.

It's not poor little Nature who will be the victim of global warming.

The victim will be human beings -- and all of our plans and our schemes that involve finding and holding on to habitable real estate as the ocean level rises and the weather patterns shift.

Oh well, she doesn't want to get it. She's a humanities person. She doesn't understand numbers. She doesn't understand the difference between really big and infinite.

The Earth is really big but it's not infinite.

Actually, two of them.

I wonder how the candidates feel about those two major decisions on drug sentencing.

But we're not going to learn about that here, right?

It's true that some people do have an addictive relationship with food.

But anon -- have you ever known an alcoholic really well?

Obesity doesn't make people lie or manipulate or rage or steal or rape or violate boundaries.

The so-called moral implications are in your head.

Salon should be telling us how the candidates feel about the two important drug-related legal decisions that were handed down last week by the Supreme Court and the Sentencing Commission.

Isn't that the real news? Why are you avoiding the real news but covering this?

You have a really strange editorial policy on drugs. You can't cover any real drug news --

like the war brewing down in Northern Mexico

or the Bush administration's proposal to spend $1.4 billion to send Blackwater in to train the Mexican police,

or the amazing science of the cannabinoid receptors,

or the DEA's continued campaign to shut down every marijuana dispensary in California,

OR the end of the crack cocaine/powder cocaine sentencing disparity,

OR what looks like the beginning of the end for mandatory minimum sentencing.

You can't cover any REAL drug news but you CAN cover

Nancy Botwin's butt,

Amy Winehouse's death wish, and

Obama's (cough) adolescence.

So doesn't that make Salon sort of like a National Enquirer for the War on Drugs?

REAL drug stories are in the news this week. REAL drug stories that apparently the candidates do NOT want to discuss.

Instead of acting like they live in an open society where people discuss the issues of the day, these people and Joan Walsh as well have trapped us in a National Enquirer universe where it's all about the scandal quotient.

Fuck you, you destroyers of democracy.

This election campaign is a travesty. It's a comic book -- not smart enough to be a graphic novel.

Maybe we are in the political end times. Maybe this story is a sign of the Political Apocalypse.

What Salon didn't say about the Supreme Court or the Sentencing Commission!

Not when real news gets censored and instead we get THIS.

The voters lose, because their right to make decisions is being controlled by tactics like this.

Hey everyone, let's avoid talking about any REAL drug news, because if we did that, then the candidates would be forced to defend their own drug policies.

We're not going to allow voters to make their decisions based on drug policy.

NO NO NO -- that's not going to be allowed in this campaign!

So let's create a diversion to make any serious discussion of the two major drug policy events of the week absolutely impossible.

And any woman who could put up with Kanye's giant ego for ten years would have earned half his money by then.