So, Why Truth Matters is published. Jeremy received a copy of it a week ago, and he says the publishers have done a beautiful job. I was all excited, and looked forward to getting a copy too, rushing to the mailbox every day all eager for the treat, then feeling bitterly disappointed when it wasn’t there. By Wednesday I suspected and by yesterday I realized that I wasn’t getting one, so I asked the publishers if I could have one too, and they explained that they had only one and they sent it to Jeremy. They said they were sorry they couldn’t send me one too. Oh.

So I have it only on hearsay that the publishers have done a … Read the rest

And not just threats, but also demands. Like this demand.

British imams have demanded changes in the law and a strengthening of the Press Complaints Commission code to outlaw any possible publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the UK.

That’s quite a demand. Quite a bold, confident, aggressive, demanding demand. I don’t think clerics and priests and rabbis and imams should make demands like that of secular societies.

Yesterday’s event, which involved imams and grassroots figures from throughout England and Scotland, marked the foundation of the Muslim Action Committee (MAC), whose leaders plan a continuous campaign to confront the alleged disparagement of Muslim communities and to call for “global civility”…Faiz Siddiqi, the MAC’s national convenor, said:

Correction, to something in ‘Lesson Time’. I didn’t notice this until well after I’d posted the comment, so I had a good opportunity to feel surprised and irritated at my own befuddlement. It’s like those games where an extra word is inserted in some familiar bit of doggerel, and we don’t notice it because we see what we expect to see. Only not very much like that, because I should have been paying better attention, seeing as how I was arguing with the content. Thanks to sloppy reading I agreed with an absurdity. Allow me to start again.

Even if an artist had failed to find someone to illustrate a children’s book on the Prophet for fear of reprisals, this