This interesting piece on Islam tries to compare its influence with other religions and governments. According to the article, this is a futile exercise because of the inherent dogmatic basis of Islam. This is definitely a must-read to begin to understand relations between “The West” and Islamic nations, convoluted as they might be.

W made a speech on Wall Street yesterday on corporate accountability and ethics in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals. However, it has been suggested that the “new” standards that are supposed to be enforced by an FBI “corporate SWAT team” would have landed both W and Vice President Cheney in jail for accounting practices of the companies they headed, Harken Energy and Halliburton, respectively. I wonder how long it will take the American press to get a whiff of the blatant duplicity of W’s new “hard” stance on corporate accountability, which is by no means coincidental to the upcoming elections.

Update: Apparently, W’s ploy of appearing as a regular guy fighting corporate fraud has not gone unnoticed: the New York Times has a piece that has some more details of W’s financial dealings with Harken and the kinds of “creative accounting” they used, not unlike WorldCom and Enron, come to think of it.

Logophilia is a site “devoted to recently coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older words that are being used in new ways.” It’s definitely a cool way to expand your vocabulary, even if a lot of the words and phrases are a bit faddish.