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The statement from Ariana Huffington (in bold below) is one of the best examples of the folk theory upon which Critical Discourse Analysis is based - namely that words influence people in certain inevitable ways. It is also a good example of the sources of disaffection with the mainstream debate experienced by US conservatives as…
Read more →Google Reader (1000+) "Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." (Clement Atlee) There is no doubt that pithy aphorisms are an important instrument in the socialisation toolkit (construction inventory) or any group (from couples, groups of friends to political parties, nations and, these days, humanity). To…
Read more →Colbert I. King - Why Obama Stands With His Church - washingtonpost.com This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian." I am a big supporter (including in…
Read more →Nicholas Kristof is puzzled and pleased that the US electorate is keeping two individuals as front runners who are willing to express unpopular opinions: The World’s Worst Panderer - New York Times All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself…
Read more →Lakoff in 'Moral Politics' talks about how competing models of family influence policy and politics debates in the US. This model duality is not only present in a variety of contexts but I would claim is the very foundation of all policy discourse (argument). In other words, whereever you look at a policy controversy you…
Read more →Obama has the smarts, the plans and, yes, the charisma to capably lead and transform a nation that aches for a new direction. Editorials & Opinion | Obama for the Democrats | Seattle Times Newspaper My voice, particularly on this blog, with no readership is of no consequence. I have no vote in American elections…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Male Primogeniture Jenni discusses the law of primogeniture with Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the legality of this centuries old practice, and to royal commentator and author Charles Mosley. BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Primogeniture: Should the…
Read more →Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex. What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as…
Read more →Media Blog on National Review Online What the BBC is telling children about the 9/11 attacks [Tom Gross] Here is what the BBC’s widely-read children’s section of their website (CBBC) is telling kids about the 9/11 attacks, the 6th anniversary of which falls today. It is not quite the al-Qaeda view, but it almost is…
Read more →‘Bourne’ flick is ultimately un-American - Opinion & Editorial - BostonHerald.com I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does. ... As…
Read more →Virtual Economics: Why newspapers are not screwed ...newspapers' core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it's expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn't really matter. There's plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true. The problem with many…
Read more →Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy. This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC…
Read more →Analysis: Military Shows Gains in Iraq Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists —rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that…
Read more →Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights - washingtonpost.com That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell's boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization. Public disapproval of…
Read more →New Statesman - Who is the real Hillary? she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action. But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US power and strength with the reality of being a woman; she must be seen as…
Read more →OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response. That's the deal. It's the real "grand bargain." If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives…
Read more →Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight and it is not the fight Congress authorized. Iraq is at war with itself and…
Read more →Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics All that the Court actually argues is that "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" contains a reference to drug use. Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is not the only one, and dismissing the banner as meaningless ignores its undeniable reference to…
Read more →Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W - washingtonpost.com Writing about Churchill and Chamberlain, I've discovered, is like administering a Rorschach test to one's readers. People see in Churchill and Chamberlain what they want to see. They draw parallels between the 1930s and the events of today according to their own political philosophy. I've received congratulatory…
Read more →Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that âpolitical correctnessâ? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic…
Read more →CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play "Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration" he said. "I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one…
Read more →The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two] However, thanks to a commenter at my place , I see by common definition "trophy wife" is indeed considered to be an insult. All I can say is that I didn't mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where…
Read more →Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return. But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop…
Read more →Malfunctioning fax machine prints out bomb ClipArt, forces evacuation of area - Engadget In any normal town across America there are countless faxes sent and received which feature poorly chosen ClipArt: why then must a promotional fax like the one pictured above fail to print out correctly -- leaving only a picture of a bomb…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Secrets & Lies" (May 4, 2007) BOB GARFIELD: The issue in question was Saddam's aluminum tubes and whether they were meant for centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel. If, as you say, the administration briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was uncertain about those tubes but then hid that uncertainty…
Read more →Comparison To Clinton Is Dismissed - washingtonpost.com Tom Ingram, who was an adviser to Fred D. Thompson 's 1994 Senate campaign and has talked to him about a potential 2008 presidential run, said that he thought the Royal race might be good for Republicans, but not because of gender or any similarity Royal had to…
Read more →RealClearPolitics - Articles - Is the War on Terror Over? Do we still need to fight a war on terror? The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11. The…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Me is for Media" (April 20, 2007) BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't want to diminish the horrific experience that those people went through, but it did seem at times as if they were reading lines from a script, almost as if they'd been through all this before. THOMAS de ZENGOTITA…
Read more →The following segment from the Wikipedia entry on suicide attack is a good example of how the restrictions on mapping in conceptual integration can be negotiated even "against the grain" of the "logic" of some of the basic propositional structures behind the conceptual frame. So, the argument against 'homicide bombing' correctly points out that the…
Read more →Imus's last outrage? - The Boston Globe Imus apologized for his latest remark and was suspended for two weeks. But this time, his job could be on the line, said John DePetro, a radio talk show host who was fired by WRKO after calling gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross a "fat lesbian." "As much as mine…
Read more →Nancy Pelosi, Respectfully Maintaining Her Own Image - washingtonpost.com There are few images more discomforting than public figures thrust into foreign cultures and required to wear the host's traditional attire. Almost without exception the visitors tend to look smaller and more vulnerable. They evoke the uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent…
Read more →Think Progress » Gingrich: When I Said âLanguage Of Living In The Ghetto,â I Meant Hebrew (Or Maybe Yiddish) Newt Gingrich said this past weekend that the U.S. should abolish bilingual education so that people arenât speaking âthe language of living in a ghetto.â? But last night on Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich claimed his statement…
Read more →Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME Brooksâs distinction is between two different conceptions of the word âpolitical.â? Or rather, like most nice clear distinctions, there actually is a spectrum of meaning. US Attorneys are supposed to be political in the sense that in performing their duties they reflect the policies of…
Read more →Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News McDonald's Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word "McJob" removed from dictionaries -- and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary. " Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons…
Read more →MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics Roger Ailes: "And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" [...]Obama is a terrorist. Ha ha ha. Ailes is clearly upset that his brand is being…
Read more →Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note…
Read more →Eugene Robinson - An Inarticulate Kickoff - washingtonpost.com What is it, exactly, that white people mean when they call a black person "articulate"? ... Biden explained Obama's appeal as a presidential candidate by calling him "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." ... It's interesting that Obama's…
Read more →Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough…
Read more →Was 9/11 really that bad? - Los Angeles Times Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?…
Read more →BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims 'more political' Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested. Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange…
Read more →The Politico But it wasn't revealing because she was suggesting her husband is "evil and bad." It was revealing because -- asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden -- her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It's absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth…
Read more →iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard…
Read more →Hawking says climate change poses greater threat to humanity than terrorism - International Herald Tribune LONDON: Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism. The interesting thing here is not so much that this clearly illogical comparison is being given any credence but that none of the…
Read more →Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech [Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words. ... Today, teens aren't…
Read more →OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay. ... But this raises a fundamental question: What are…
Read more →Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind . People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and 'professional' psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist…
Read more →Amazon Online Reader : Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage p. 82 The sexual double standard was so completely accepted by Romans that the educator Quintilian used the notion of a sexual single standard as the perfect illustration of an illogical proposition : "If a relationship between a mistress…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Today - 20006 Vote The Hunting Act with 52.8% Dangerous Dogs Act: 1.6% Serious Organised Crime and Police Act : 6.2% Human Rights Act: 6.1% European Communities Act : 29.7% The Act of Settlement: 3.6% Radio 4 is listened to by British political and cultural elites and could be thought…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Has Love Conquered Marriage? For the first time ever, married-couple households are in the minority both in the UK and the US, outnumbered by single-person households and cohabiting couples. Whilst many blame the stresses of modern life and the failure of couples to invest enough time in their relationships…
Read more →TIME.com: Time's Person of the Year: You -- Dec. 25, 2006 -- Page 1 America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working…
Read more →A Renaissance of the Commons | Nick Lewis: The Blog Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding…
Read more →Left Behind Games The storyline in the game begins just after the Rapture has occurred â when all adult Christians, all infants, and many children were instantly swept home to Heaven and off the Earth by God. The remaining population â those who were left behind â are then poised to make a decision at…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Paper Wait" (December 1, 2006) BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why not then stick to âsectarian violenceâ?? What changed? BILL KELLER: You know, itâs kind of emerged as an issue, and then last Sunday we ran a story about one of our reporters in Baghdad, Ed Wong, who surveyed a number of…
Read more →YouTube - Team America Finale Speech PhatGun (3 months ago) HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA SO TRUE!!! Tomster22 (19 hours ago) Neo-Cons = Dicks, Peacenicks = Pussies, Islamo-Fascists = Assholes AerisRocks (2 months ago) lol! Thats a great metaphor they used...assholes want us to shit on everything and dicks fuck assholes lmfao, great scene. This post has been brewing…
Read more →Evening News 24 - Cyclist attacked by An N&N spokesman said: âAccording to sources this gang has been doing this for a while - stopping people at the bridge and demanding money to get across. âBut this was the first time they have actually attacked anyone and he has been not only harmed, but also…
Read more →On The Media-- The War in Iraq = Iraqi Civil War ETHAN BRONNER: Our policy is not to label it a civil war. We recognize and describe elements of civil war in what's going on in Iraq. We tend to call it sectarian conflict, sectarian violence. Civil war, to us, feels like a stage of…
Read more →Czech lobby in Washington takes a second seat to Poland - 22-05-2006 - Radio Prague There are three criteria that countries must fulfil in order to qualify for the proposed amendment to the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. The first is membership in the European Union; secondly, they must be allies in the war in Iraq…
Read more →Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. When Fukuyama was toying with the Hegelian notion of the…
Read more →CBC Radio | Quirks & Quarks | April 8, 2006 Heading into the 21st Century, our planet is undergoing rapid change. Species are disappearing daily, and along with them human languages and cultures. Terry Glavin, a conservationist and writer, set out to document these changes in his new book, Waiting for the Macaws. Along the…
Read more →I was just listening to the UK Prime Minister's Question Time. I don't do it very often, because the questions and answers are predictable in content and not particularly informative, but maybe I should tune in more often to get a sense of the tone of the exchange. As I was listening, I was struck…
Read more →January 13, 2006, Science Friday = Franklin at 300 Franklin as inventor, socialite and statesman, and take a look at the Tercentenary Exhibition in his honor, now open in Philadelphia. America is often said to be an experiment in new national identity (or something along those lines). However, any closer examination of American national identity…
Read more →ABC News: Sharon Reportedly Moves One of His Hands The headline is the only thing of interest here. It is an example of several things. On the one hand, it shows how easily a person's personal tragedy can be abstracted away from the larger symbolism (Terry Shiavo last year and Charles Kennedy this are other…
Read more →ABC News: Sharon Reportedly Moves One of His Hands One headline, two blog posts. What value! There seems to be a fine line between what is in the public interest and what the public is interested in. Personally, I find every mention of the story compelling but its information content is of no consequence to…
Read more →Another great interview on onthemedia.org. This one dealing with the reliability of expert predictions (in the media and in general). On The Media-- THE GUESSING GAME PHILIP TETLOCK: When an expert has very, very strong opinions on an issue, when the expert places a high value on simplicity and has little patience with contradictions or…
Read more →The Video Game Revolution: "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked" by Henry Jenkins | PBS The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again David Cameron promised to tackle the lack of women MPs from his party. What can he do? Audio here An interesting discussion of three conservative MPs each arguing a different position. 1. women shortlists are necessary, 2. more older women (of non-child bearing age) should be…
Read more →On The Media-- OFF-YEAR COVERAGE The President gave a major speech on Wednesday, and TV news reacted. For every story there's a formula, whether earthquake, missing child, sex scandal or State of the Union, but this event was none of those. So the anchors reached into their bags and pulled out the mode that fit…
Read more →One article, two thoughts . Good going! TPM Online Article One of the things you notice, both as a skeptic and as an American in the UK , is that according to the British media â and a lot of non-media folks, too, I might add â pretty much all foolishness comes from the US…
Read more →How we should judge torture - Los Angeles Times Naturally, human rights groups are appalled by the suggestion that harsh treatment is ever justified. Similarly, blogger Andrew Sullivan dismisses the ticking time bomb as a "red herring" and argues that "you cannot raise or lower the moral status of mass murderers with respect to torture…
Read more →Universal preschool's big payoff - Los Angeles Times IT HAS LONG been an American article of faith that early schooling for poor children can work wonders. A word-rich classroom gives poor 3 and 4-year-old kids the basic tools for learning and for sharpening their talents for solving problems. A nurturing environment teaches children, many of…
Read more →BBC NEWS | UK | 'Gay weddings' become law in UK Hundreds of gay couples are preparing to form civil partnerships in the coming weeks as the law changes after decades of campaigning. Finally! But a discussion on the Today programme, well, today, was interesting in its focus on the word marriage. It turns out…
Read more →World News Article | Reuters.co.uk Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev won re-election by a landslide on Monday, official preliminary results showed, but the opposition in the former Soviet republic alleged vote-rigging. The result means Nazarbayev will rule for another seven years in the vast Central Asian state, a reassuring signal to big oil investors in the…
Read more →iDNES.cz - Nový zákon pÅesnÄ urÄ?uje, co je sexuálnà obtÄžovánà Nový trestnà zákon, který pÅijali poslanci tento týden, zavádà trestný Ä?in, který pÅesnÄ definuje sexuálnà obtÄžovánÃ. Od ledna 2007 bude za sexuálnà obtÄžovánà bude hrozit od 6 mÄsÃců do 8 let vÄzenÃ. ... New law outlines clearer guidelines for the police and prosecutors and introduces…
Read more →A Man's Right to Choose - New York Times NOBODY is arguing that we should let my friend who impregnated his girlfriend off the hook. If you play, you must pay. But if you pay, you should get some say. If a father is willing to legally commit to supporting and raising the child himself…
Read more →Nature or nurture? - The Boston Globe Well, it turns out that the more you believe homosexuality is innate, the more accepting you are of gay rights. A full 79 percent of people who think human beings are born with a sexual orientation support gay rights, including civil unions or marriage equality. But only 22…
Read more →Conservative U. -- in cyberspace - Los Angeles Times FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, conservatives saw a country that was split about 50-50 between the left and the right, as it is today and will continue to be for a long time. But the country's main cultural institutions were nearly all liberal — making conservatives rage and…
Read more →Death penalty: Time to rethink? :: The Daily Herald, Provo Utah Capital punishment does send a message that society will not tolerate brutal murders. Some killers, certainly, would kill again if given the chance. Even in prison, many sociopaths pose a threat to others. Death may be the only way to ensure that their criminal…
Read more →BBC - Thought for the Day, 29 November 2005 Should the aid workers [recently kidnapped] still have been in Iraq? I was struck yesterday by the different perspective of those commenting on the kidnapping. The spokesman for Care International, another aid agency, was quite clear. For him, the answer was "No". His priority in a…
Read more →A column about labor relations and automotive job losses. Labor's Lost Story Almost everybody right of center sees the job losses as inevitable, the result of the American auto industry's failure to meet foreign competition and the "excessively" generous wages, health benefits and, especially, retirement programs negotiated by Reuther's union. The believers in inevitability inevitably…
Read more →Terror's stealth weapon: women - Los Angeles Times The stereotype exploited by terrorists is that women are gentle, submissive and nonviolent. Women evade most terrorist profiles because they are perceived as wives and mothers, victims of war-torn societies, not bombers. But terrorist organizations are increasingly employing women to carry out the most deadly attacks. Based…
Read more →The Very Foundation of Conservatism - New York Times The Olin Foundation's leaders understood that success is often unplanned, and so they focused on creating the conditions for success rather than thrusting a set of detailed agendas and goals upon grant recipients. Nobody, for example, expected that Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" would…
Read more →There's no 'good' divorce - The Boston Globe Many experts and parents embrace the idea, confident that it's not divorce itself that harms children but simply the way that parents divorce. If divorced parents stay involved with their child and don't fight with each other, they say, then children will be fine. There's only one…
Read more →www.lidovky.cz - Intelektuálnà obrana xenofobie Podle Huntingtona dezinterpretovali liberálnà multikulturalisté 70. a 80. let povahu Ameriky, když ji lÃÄ?ili jako kulturnÄ otevÅený prostor vymezený pouze univerzálnÃmi zásadami lidských práv a demokracie. Na rozdÃl od identit evropských národů, které jsou uzavÅeným dÄdictvÃm minulosti, byla podle nich identita Ameriky otevÅená do budoucnosti - mÄla totiž povstávat ze…
Read more →Replant the American Dream When I lived abroad, Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday. It was a chance to scrounge up a turkey, gather foreign and American friends, and celebrate what America represented to the world. I liked to give a sentimental toast when the turkey arrived at the table, and more than once I…
Read more →They Held Their Noses, and Ate - New York Times Proper notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated in gardens and orchards. Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Politics | 'A third of pubs' to open longer About one-third of all the pubs, clubs and shops in England and Wales licensed to sell alcohol are to get longer opening hours, BBC research suggests. Now, this news is really interesting because of the folk-models of social causality that get employed on…
Read more →Turning academia into a cafeteria - Los Angeles Times DECADES AGO, I clutched an official New York state examination booklet as a proctor threatened me and hundreds of my nervous schoolmates with a felony conviction if we cheated. We dutifully signed a statement that declared we would not. Students still sign declarations on examination booklets…
Read more →Bring Democracy to Congress Perhaps we should redeploy the democracy experts we have sent to the Middle East and ask them to work on our Congress. The past few days have confirmed that our national government is dysfunctional. ... Which brings us back to those democracy experts we are sending around the world. Let's bring…
Read more →Senators are blowing smoke on gas - Los Angeles Times Unless they can repeal the law of supply and demand, they can't do a thing about prices. ... Gas, like everything else, has its price set by supply and demand. No company charges what it thinks is fair. They charge as much as they can…
Read more →Here's definitely a podcast worth listening to ! Niles Eldredge and Edward J. Larson discuss the upcoming Darwin exhibit and Darwin's legacy. Particularly their discussion of Darwin's contribution of the mechanism of 'natural selection' to an existing idea of 'evolution' is illuminating. As an essentially social scientist, it reminded me (again) of Engels' words at…
Read more →A Library for The New World Digitized, instant communication is the great technological revolution of our time. It has streamlined business and delivered more information more quickly to more people than ever. And it has accelerated basic and applied research. Both the problems and the researchers who work on them are scattered around the world…
Read more →BBC NEWS | In Depth | The Thatcher years in statistics It is 15 years since Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister. Use this graphical guide to see how life in Britain changed during her time in power. A great interactive toy to contrast certain trends during Thatcher's reign. I found particularly the interpolation of…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Politics | Thatcher's role for women Patricia Hewitt, a minister Tony Blair's Cabinet, told the BBC News website: "Margaret Thatcher broke through the glass ceiling in politics. But it is a tragedy that, having become the UK's first women prime minister, she did so much to undermine the position of women in…
Read more →Access Holy Wood - On the Media BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ah, Watergate, the gift that keeps on giving. But aside from Woodward's access to well-placed anonymous sources, there's little resemblance between Watergate Bob and White House Bob. Watergate Bob used disgruntled mid-level bureaucrats to tunnel his way into the bowels of a White House scandal. White…
Read more →It's hard to avoid the comparison between the country [Bosnia] deemed a quagmire in the 1990s and the one where the United States is bogged down today. Start with the U.S. and other NATO troops who began arriving in Bosnia shortly before Christmas 1995. There were 60,000 of them at first in a country of…
Read more →The fall of Bob Woodward - The Boston Globe The free press is an absolute value not only because the unfettered flow of information is essential to the republican system, nor only because the fourth estate serves as a check on the power of the other three, but because public expression is necessary for the…
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