Uncategorized

My column in Truthdig is out: “Starship Amerika.” Excerpt: ‘President Barack Obama is actually siding with police who want to use GPS devices to track you without a warrant. It always disturbed me when on “Star Trek” the captain asked the ship’s computer where a crew member was and was told the person’s exact location. […]

Pamela Paul includes Informed Comment in her Sunday NYT piece, “Big Blog on Campus.” Favorite line from her interview with me: “Good blogging involves attitude and snark.” Now if only I finally got that sweater with the letter on it. —- PS: It is already a little dated, especially on developments in Egypt, but my […]

Hmm. Somehow I missed this one. The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the US government under George W. Bush regarding surveillance of phone calls made and emails sent overseas by US citizens was reinstated last month by an appeals court. The suit began because of the revelation that the National Security Agency had been […]

Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, has done a computer analysis of certain sounds (phonemes) in about 500 languages, and concludes that all of them likely descended from African tongues. African languages, like African human genetic endowments, are the richest in diversity. A greater diversity of phonemes in African languages and less […]

Misrata, a city of several hundred thousand people about 150 mi. east of the capital of Tripoli, is under, and for weeks has been under siege. Qaddafi’s strategy is to starve it out, deprive it of essentials, and bomb it indiscriminately, as a way of defeating its esprit de corps an allowing a pro-Qaddafi takeover. […]

Mitt Romney Has announced another run for the White House. Here is his 1994 debate with Senator Teddy Kennedy, in which he talked about his deeply held and obviously relatively liberal beliefs. He rejects Reagan-Bush, declines to impose a ban on abortions, etc., etc. Where is that guy? I kind of like that guy.

Wisconsin was not and is not “broke.” Its pension system gets a “gold star” for soundness, and it has no enduring structural shortfall in revenues. Gov. Scott Walker gave business a $500 million tax break and caused the budget deficit thereby, and then claimed that social spending had to be slashed and public unions destroyed […]