Archives for 2011

Newt Gingrich says he would appoint John Bolton as Secretary of State in order to “reform” the State Department. Bolton is an irascible attorney who is horrible to his subordinates, makes Rod Blagojevich look like a paragon of truthfulness, played a role in inserting the notorious, forged “yellowcake uranium from Niger” assertion in George W. […]

A study by Fairleigh Dickenson University researchers has found that frequent viewers of Fox Cable News are worse informed than people who watch no news at all! It is not that Republicans (more likely to watch Fox) are less informed. The researchers took that possible source of bias into account in their finding. No, it […]

The Secretary-General of the Lebanese Hizbullah party-militia, Sayyid Hasan Nasrullah, made an appearance in largely Shiite South Beirut on Tuesday for the first time since 2008, according to al-Hayat writing in Arabic. Via a giant television screen, he addressed a large crowd of tens of thousands, most of whom could not get very close to […]

Dear earthlings: It doesn’t do you any good to get all excited about finding earth-like planets like Kepler 22-B where the average temperature is 72 degrees F (22 C.), if you are going to turn your own planet into a sweltering tropical swamp. The Durban climate conference about the fate of our own planet has […]

The Pakistani government is forcing the United States to depart the Shamsi Air Base in Baluchistan within two weeks, as one of three steps taken to protest the killing of 24 Pakistani troops by US war planes on 26 November. The incident was probably an example of friendly fire, though what exactly happened and why […]