I am going to ask people, what is the benefit to Israel for them to be nicer to the Palestinians? Good karma? Happy butterflies? An award for nicest person in the Middle East? The problem is that increased kindness does not result in fewer terrorist attacks or less state funding flowing to terrorist groups.

Israel's neighbors would be just as dedicated to destroying it if it were a model of evenhandedness and kindness. Why? because Israel is different and is a convenient nation to scapegoat, and the dictators in the nearby nations exploit the "Us vs. Them" instinct people have in order to prop up their own regimes.

Groups like Hamas and the PLO are proxy armies being funded by nations who only give them money as long as they fight. If Arafat had signed the peace deal in the 90's and honored it the money and weapons would have gone to someone else. The second Intifada would still have happened, but without him leading it. If Hamas recognized Israel and tried to live at peace they would be replaced by a different well-funded group that does not.

Israel has every reason to fight and no reason to play nice. People can complain about walls and mean soldiers, but fewer bombs are going off in Israeli restaurants these days than when the peace deals were going on. If you are a leader which should you value more, the approval of the UN or the lives of your citizens?

Peace between the Israelites and the Palestinians will only be possible when other nations stop funding the groups dedicated to destroying Israel. This isn't going to happen any time soon, so this is a situation that can be mitigated but not solved.

I wish that Israel would stop being so brutal and show more empathy than they do, but I can't give them a logical reason to do so.

The cops would be in deep trouble. If not for the video they would have gotten away with assault.

When iw as going to school in Pittsburgh the campus police would stop black students andforce them to show ID. I was never once stopped. Why did the police grab this student and leave the nearby white kids alone?

The police committed a racially-motivated assault, and I hope they pay for it.

But this and the OJ story belong on people, not Salon. It could have been worse, I suppose, the stories could have been written by Camille Paglia.

While this type of talk is riveting during your freshman year, if you don't have any evidence or solid conclusions, you are dealing in philosophy, not science. When you include ill-considered statements like;

"And virtually all of neuroscience and all of psychology is based on 19th century physics, which is about as up-to-date as the horse and buggy.",

you destroy any credibility you may have had. 19th century physics, like MRIs, PET scans, and such? Modern neurroscience is very sophisticated and has gone a bit beyond the horse and buggy.

If Mr. Wallace wants to call bullshit on science, he needs something more persuasive than personal assertions without any evidence to back them up. Without that, he is simply echoing essays for "Intro to eastern religion 101" while insulting those using real science to explore the mysteries of the mind.

The strange thing is that now, years after the peace process has collapsed, fewer bombs are going off in Israeli Cafe's and busses. Bombings inside Israel were very common up until they took their current hard line, and now the cafes are safe and the busses arrive on time.

Which should be more important to Israel, winning the "Nice guy" award or protecting it's citizens? Their methods are horrible and impossible do defend, but the successful reduction in terrorist attacks is just as hard to deny.

OK, now I am seriously considering dropping Salon Premium. If I wanted to read about the evil "War on Christmas" I could tune into Fox News for free.

Between the OJ stories, the "Buddha on the Brain" attacks on science, and Salon joining in on Fox news's side on the "War on Christmas" my patience is wearing thin. I can only hope that Salon improves in quality by February.

We need well-investigated news, not badly-presented opinion.

I could gripe about my relatives in public too, but I wouldn't charge money for people to read about it.

But it is the "best" option out of a selection of disasters. We are going to lose, and the question now is how much more money do we want to borrow to lose?

We got kicked out of Vietnam, and 30 years later you can go there for tourism and business. It may take 30 years for Iraq to recover, but losing the war wouldn't be the end of the world.

This is the type of story that makes people look down on the left. Aside from the odd bits of filler bragging about cooking skills, I was particularly struck by the passage:

"Whereas Americans are clueless, the Egyptian public "knows everything about the world ... everything," Ahmad claimed assuredly. I thought the widespread belief in absurd 9/11 conspiracies held by this public -- even journalists and intellectuals -- might challenge his assertion, but I held my tongue."

This strikes me as the height of condescension. If this dinner was supposed to be a glorious exchange of ideas, why didn't the author talk bout this issue? I half expected the next sentence to be "You have to expect Arabs to say silly things, just ignore it, as correcting them challenges their beliefs and makes them cranky."