The author's disbelief in the effectiveness of prayer may be a symptom of being alert to those who both believe in prayer and who disagree with her point of view.

I suggest that there are as many pastors who pray for Mr. Obama's long life as who pray for his death. And I suggest that far more pastors on all sides of the political spectrum restrict themselves to prayers for wisdom.

The best method for discrediting a radical minority is to point the camera back at the majority.

I like the suggestion, I really do. But I still have to assume that it happened because Microsoft just doesn't care. They've never really *cared* about consumers -- just the share of pocketbook they can get. This is another entry in that ledger.

I would strongly recommend Matt Taibi's book "The Great Derangement". I read it because I'd run across some of Jones's more appealing and coherent arguments and had started to wonder about the truth behind them.

The big idea of the Great Derangement is that whenever we feel powerless and disconnected, we tend to find people who will tell us that we're right to feel that way and that really what we're experiencing is the fault of other people. He demonstrates this by getting personally involved in groups exploring alternate political realities on both the right and the left.

The result is a call to action -- to remember that people in Iran risked their lives to protest a stolen election where we tuned into CNN and Fox over our TV dinners.

That theory doesn't fly. The pop culture zombies you reference were in production before the banks collapsed. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was already on the shelves. Zombie Fluxx was already flying out of the cases of game stores.

So no, David, it really isn't a reaction to the events of last summer.

If you want to look for psycho-social reasons for the popularity, you have to include pirates and vampires in the analysis. What rises from those three? How about a generation of people faced with an impossible world? In the 1980's it was impossible for kids to keep nuclear holocaust from happening. It was impossible for us to make it to the Wall Street feeding trough. It was impossible to get the Reagan administration to speak of a disease we saw people dying of. It was impossible to get the administration to back away from war.

My theory is that faced with that kind of impossible world, Gen Xers decided to break it. We went to Ren Faires and the Comic Con and midnight movies, collected vinyl and 50's horror relics.

And now we're taking over the culture.

I guess that makes us the zombies we're celebrating.

It's funny to me that none of the journalistic coverage seeks to contextualize the aware in light of the events of the last month. A month ago, the US was poised on the brink of a new nuclear arms race with Russia and was short on options in dealing with Iran's apparent quest for nuclear weapons.

The Obama administrations choice to unilaterally remove the prime irritant with Russia -- "defensive" nukes placed in former Soviet Block countries -- was derided on the right. I remember especially a scathing critique from Sen. John McCain.

Some wondered at the time whether this was part of a bargain with Russia, or what the repayment would be. That became obvious last week when Russia finally came to the table in talks with Iran as our partner instead of Iran's. In the course of a week we had a secret reprocessing plant revealed, Iran agreeing to inspectors, and agreeing to ship material to Russia for reprocessing instead of insisting on doing it internally.

Yes it is true that the Peace prize normally recognizes a lifetime of work for peace and Mr Obama will have a challenge to live up to the example of the other winners and make the rest of his life worthy.

But in terms of an award created by the man who invented TNT in guilt over the destruction his creation wrought, it is appropriate to give this to Mr. Obama to recognize this very real reversal of course.

Isn't it fascinating how quickly what used to be innovative companies become dinosaurs in our day and age? Comcast stopped being a cable company when TiVo debuted -- they just didn't know it yet. They still don't know it. They're an ISP. The sooner they figure that out, and change their pricing menu to reflect that, the better their chances for survival.

I was a girl geek starting in the 70's -- watching Star Trek and Monty Python reruns and learning to use a soldering iron. Cons came later -- they used to be a place where weirdos gathered with a handful of others in an occasional respite from a world that didn't get them. But over the past 10-15 years, pop-culture has discovered the con.

Anime fans are born in droves -- they go to the cons. Ren faire fans make their off-season pilgrimages (in different costumes) at the cons. The hugest children's book series ever brings fans from the midnight bookstore line to the con, then they grow up and discover pirates and vampires. And yes, the con is the place for that.

But it's no longer a minority culture. We are all geeks now. My friend the burlesque queen who loves makeup and glam and all the things I loathe gleefully identifies herself as a "cocktail geek".

For guys who comforted themselves with the fantasy that their loneliness was really a sign of their refined tastes, a wholesale adoption of geek chic only serves as a reminder that they were supposed to be learning about human relationships in those Kurosawa films, not just Japanese phrases they can show off.