The Obama administration is using its brass knuckles to support Latin American thugs. If the Obama administration were a flotilla of ships, it might be sending out an SOS right about now. ObamaCare has hit the political equivalent of an iceberg. And last week the president’s international prestige was broadsided by the Scots, who set [...]
Archive for August, 2009
Obama vs. Honduran Democracy
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
Current congressional proposals would significantly change your relationship with your doctor. In recent town-hall meetings, President Barack Obama has called for a national debate on health-care reform based on facts. It is fact that more than 40 million Americans lack coverage and spiraling costs are a burden on individuals, families and our economy. There is [...]
Israel, Iran and Obama
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
Conflict is inevitable unless the West moves quickly to stop a nuclear Tehran. The International Atomic Energy Agency has produced another alarming report on Iran’s nuclear programs, though it hasn’t released it publicly, only to governments that would also rather not disclose more details of Iran’s progress toward becoming a nuclear theocracy. Meanwhile, Iran intends [...]
Diplomacy in the Age of No Secrets
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
Today’s quiet deal could be tomorrow’s headline. To the list of industries undermined by the Internet, from music to the Yellow Pages, we can add another: diplomacy. By all appearances, the early release of the Libyan convicted of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland was part of a program of quiet diplomacy [...]
Society Meets The Sixties
Posted in Living on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
The aristos flock to a party. The brownies are spiked with hashish. Anyone who has seen “Gosford Park” (2001) knows that Julian Fellowes, the movie’s screenwriter, has a knack for mocking the foibles of the British upper crust. In his novel “Snobs” (2005) he skewered the inhabitants of the same milieu even more savagely. “Past [...]
Japan Throws the Bums Out
Posted in Politics on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
But does the new crowd have better ideas? It was inevitable that even the Japanese would eventually get fed up with patronage politics, governance gaffes and decades of economic drift. Yesterday’s election victory of the Democratic Party of Japan and party leader Yukio Hatoyama is no small thing. It undermines nearly 54 years of Liberal [...]
Why Oil Still Has a Future
Posted in Energy and Environment on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
Demand in the developing world trumps new technology. On Aug. 28, 1859, in the backwoods of northwest Pennsylvania, the first successful oil well went into production in the United States, ushering in an energy revolution that would make whale oil obsolete and eventually transform the industrial world. Yet 150 years later, even as demand increases [...]
Health Care and the Democratic Soul
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
It’s time for Obama to channel Harry Truman. What is at stake in the debate over health care is more than the mere crafting of policy. The issue is now the identity of the Democratic Party. By now we know that Democrats can bail out traditional Republican constituencies like Wall Street, but it remains to [...]
Early dinner
Posted in Living on August 31, 2009 | Comments Off
For a lower-middle class boy from Liverpool, a plate of egg and chips at five o’clock was not the done thing, recalls Laurie Taylor in his weekly column. It was the egg and chips which first made me realise that Jim lived in a different world. We’d gone back to his terrace house in Bootle [...]
Interrogating the CIA
Posted in Conflicts and wars on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
A clever, streetwise classmate of mine at the Central Intelligence Agency’s junior officer training program—a former Delta Force officer—quickly and rudely discovered that counterterrorism in the much-vaunted Reagan years wasn’t a serious endeavor at Langley. He had original and provocative ideas on using physical force to scare the bejesus out of terrorist suspects who had [...]
Germany Recalls Myth That Created the Nation
Posted in History on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
In September 9 AD, Germanic tribesmen slaughtered three Roman legions in a battle that marked the “big bang” of the German nation and created its first hero — Hermann. The country is marking the 2,000th anniversary with restraint because the myth of Hermann remains tainted by the militant nationalism that would later be associated with [...]
Inside a Creepy Global Body Parts Business
Posted in Economy and business, Health on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
The German company Tutogen’s business in body parts is as secretive as it is lucrative. It extracts bones from corpses in Ukraine to manufacture medical products, as part of a global market worth billions that is centered in the United States. Anatoly Korzhak, a pensioner and former engineer, died in Kiev on August 5, 2004. [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged August 30 2009 on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
The deficit of women in math Explaining the gender gap in math achievement is one of the hotter issues in social science. It’s even credited with helping to bring down a president of Harvard. Adding to the debate is a new paper by economists at MIT suggesting that the gender gap may be more than [...]
The curious appeal of miscellanea
Posted in Living on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
Or, why we’ll pay for information, but only if it’s completely irrelevant Facts are fun, though it is not obvious why this should be so. Every day, the newspaper brings new unhappy facts to the door: Tap water in Greenville, Miss., is brown; more than 100 instances of misconduct have been alleged in the Afghan [...]
No waiting
Posted in Health on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
A simple prescription that could dramatically improve hospitals — and American health care Cincinnati Children’s Hospital estimates efficiency measures will allow the hospital to generate an additional $137m in revenue this year from treating more children with the same staffing levels. The modern hospital is a storehouse of technology and training unmatched in human society. [...]
More than friends
Posted in The Word, tagged August 30 2009 on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
What it means to be ‘an item’ In the era of spill-it-all social networking, can we still describe a possibly amorous couple as an item, or is such discreetly winking terminology out of date? Chuck Eisenhardt of Arlington, after using the label in a Facebook posting several months ago, wrote to ask whether it was [...]
The C.I.A. in Double Jeopardy
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
EARLY in 2002, Eric Holder, then a former deputy attorney general, said on CNN that the detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay were “not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” particularly “given the way in which they have conducted themselves.” Six years later, declaring that “Guantánamo Bay is an international [...]
No ‘Hero’s Welcome’ in Libya
Posted in Politics on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
CONTRARY to reports in the Western press, there was no “hero’s welcome” for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi when he returned to Libya earlier this month. There was not in fact any official reception for the return of Mr. Megrahi, who had been convicted and imprisoned in Scotland for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The strong reactions [...]
A Libyan Lesson In Tehran
Posted in Politics on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
Moammar Gaddafi leaned across the couch and surprised me with the question he posed, squinting as he searched my face for reaction: “Why do you drink poison?” I could guess where the Libyan dictator was headed but asked him to explain. During a news conference, we had just engaged in a verbal confrontation over terrorism, [...]
The vote nobody won
Posted in Politics on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
Helping build a credible government is as important as fighting the Taliban IT IS a measure of how bleak prospects look in Afghanistan that America and its allies have been scrambling to present the presidential election held there on August 20th as a great success. “A bad day for the Taliban and a good day [...]
The price and privilege of beefcake The way to hook the ladies? WHY are men’s muscles so much bigger than women’s? Partly, of course, because men do the fighting and hunting. But also, perhaps, because women like men who can do these things well, and are thus attracted to muscular men. Both phenomena—competing with members [...]
Legal case against God dismissed
Posted in Strange but true on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
The plaintiff argued an omniscient God would know of the lawsuit A US judge has thrown out a case against God, ruling that because the defendant has no address, legal papers cannot be served. The suit was launched by Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers, who said he might appeal against the ruling. He sought a [...]
The evidence from Portugal since 2001 is that decriminalisation of drug use and possession has benefits and no harmful side-effects IN 2001 newspapers around the world carried graphic reports of addicts injecting heroin in the grimy streets of a Lisbon slum. The place was dubbed Europe’s “most shameful neighbourhood” and its “worst drugs ghetto”. The [...]
Today in History – August 30
Posted in This day in history, tagged August 30 on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
Today is Sunday, Aug. 30, the 242nd day of 2009. There are 123 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History On Aug. 30, 1983, Guion S. Bluford Jr. became the first black American astronaut to travel in space as he blasted off aboard the Challenger. On this date In 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, [...]
Clunkers
Posted in On Language, tagged August 30 2009 on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
The Associated Press has just informed its clients “to note the use of the uppercase in the name of the program.” No longer is the federal plan — which ended last week — that subjected old vehicles to the scrapheap to be described as merely a “cash-for-clunkers” notion; it is now upgraded to capitalization: “Cash [...]
Freud’s Adirondack Vacation
Posted in Health on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
SIGMUND Freud arrived in Hoboken, N.J., 100 years ago today on his first and only visit to the United States. He came to lecture on psychoanalysis and to receive an honorary degree from Clark University, in Worcester, Mass. It was, he said, “an honorable call,” a mark of his academic success. Freud was then 53 [...]
Smart Birds
Posted in Animals on August 30, 2009 | Comments Off
When she set out to write about the crow — the black sheep of the avian world — the naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt didn’t relish the task. “I never meant to watch crows especially,” she admits in her curiously personal and thought-provoking meditation, “Crow Planet.” “Whenever I ask someone about chickadees or robins or flickers [...]
Defying Experts, Rogue Computer Code Still Lurks
Posted in Computers on August 29, 2009 | Comments Off
It is still out there. Like a ghost ship, a rogue software program that glided onto the Internet last November has confounded the efforts of top security experts to eradicate the program and trace its origins and purpose, exposing serious weaknesses in the world’s digital infrastructure. The program, known as Conficker, uses flaws in Windows [...]
Guilt and Atonement on the Path to Adulthood
Posted in Living on August 29, 2009 | Comments Off
Here is an experiment you don’t want to try at home. Show a toy — a doll, say, or a model boat — to a toddler and explain that it it’s something special you’ve had since you were little. Ask the child to be “very careful” with it. Hand over the toy, which appears to [...]
Rare Photo of Snow Leopard in Afghanistan
Posted in Animals on August 29, 2009 | Comments Off
Wildlife Dot Earth likes a good animal photo as much as the next blog, particularly when the animal is beautiful and endangered. So we’re pleased to present a photograph of a snow leopard, taken by a camera trap in the Wakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan. (Here’s more on camera traps and Afghanistan’s elusive wildlife.) Camera [...]
