The first act of a bully is to coerce the silence of his victim. The knife at the throat is matched with a hand over the mouth. All that is needed to ensure that cruelty and violence will prevail in human affairs is silence.

There is no sense in trying to appease those whose only desire is to silence all dissent, criticism, or heresy. Feeding the beast of such intolerance only gives it the strength of convention. The public square goes silent or fills with false propriety and fake piety. Soon, no one says what might arouse the approbation of the most brutal institution, whether it be the state, the church, the temple, or the mosque.

Freedom of speech requires us all to defend the right of others to speak offensively, incoherently, selfishly, and even hatefully, because it is better to soothe the offended than to strangle the philosopher, sage, or even the next prophet (as blasphemous as every Muslim must think that concept might be).

Deplore the motives. Raise your own voice in counterpoint. Draw your own cartoons, but do not attack the right to speak, to draw, or to act out of your own motives, or you might be the next victim of censorship, and we will are suffer from your silence.

I 'tuned in' to see what all the fuss was about. Atkinson is right: the show is a piece of crap, and it has nothing to do with its unorthodox views of a bunch of Christians. It's a muddle of people with about 15 or 16 too many issues to be dealt with reasonably in a single dramatic vehicle. In fact, it's a lot like a VW full of clowns -- just when you think there can't possibly be another clown in the car, PLOP, there comes another one.

BTW - I'm an atheist, who was raised Southern Baptist. Keep this guy, Atkinson on the payroll. He offers an interesting perspective that we are often lacking, here, on Salon.

I read this article because of their pictures. They seemed so alive with possibility. Hoping against all better judgment, I thought, "maybe this time there will be something good that comes out of it." But there wasn't anything to peg my hopes on, in the end.

I watch the faces of the dead flash by, after the News Hour, read the names and recite the towns from which they came. "So young," I think, "He was a shy one, but so proud to be in uniform," or "45, his children and his wife must be utterly destroyed by his absence."

How have I become so powerless to make things different? How can these horrors be happening on my watch?

When I used to read about wartime Germany -- the inhumanity of it -- I would always think, "Why didn't the good Germans do anything to stop it? There had to be a lot of good Germans. Why were they so silent?" Now I know how futile compassion can be, how all the marching and protesting and writing letters to congress and the news media can be so utterly useless.

When will it end?

Thanks for reminding me why I stopped writing music reviews 20 years ago.

There are some serious inconsistencies in saying that science is bumping up against fundamental limits, beyond which it cannot progress. First, if there are fundamental limits, then these limits must result from a theoretical context. The theories that imply the limitations will either be testable, and therefore result in tentative confirmations of our knowledge, or they will be untestable, which is itself a tentative circumstance. Since what can be tested today may have been impossible to imagine a hundred years ago, what will be possible to test in the future is likely unimaginable to us, today.

Fundamental limits of knowledge would either be eternal, unchallengeable truths (physical laws, absolute givens, perfect constants) or unfathomable mysteries (irreconcilable paradoxes, quintessential accidents, purely random phenomena). Experience shows that we are poor predictors of such limitations, in either case. What have appeared to be fixed and immutable have flexed and broken with the birth of new conceptions. What have appeared utterly incomprensible by human understanding have suddenly exploded in unpredictable and awesome theoretical insights, such as those of Darwin and Einstein.

To claim that science is capable of defining its own limitations is to misunderstand the very nature of the scientific enterprise. It is not to find solutions to our problems or to tie down the loose ends of our understanding. Rather, it is to dispose of whatever conceptions have become untenable and to provide a means of conceiving and testing new ideas.

Stasis is impossible, unless science is undermined by comfortable superstitions, such as the notion that we are coming to the end of what is knowable. The Big Idea cannot be a single notion. It is the scientific project, itself.

It appears that Bush has pulled a rabbit out of his hat. He has galvanized support in his base and has distracted the fickle main-stream media from his many recent failures. The Senate Republicans, fearful of recent disorder and rancor will surely huddle together, trying to hide their disquiet behind wall of unanimity.

So what should Democrats do? Here is the Democrats' opportunity to play the first card in their 2006 campaign strategy: oppose the nomination mightily. Accuse Bush of packing the court with right-wing zealots (which at least has the virtue of truth), then remind the voters that it is the Republican controlled Senate that is willing to rubber-stamp Bush's erratic, misguided, and ultimately nefarious policies.

All we need to do is run a few adds with machine guns, battered wives, and theocratic crazies, and we can have the Senate back in Democratic hands.