The government holds a company’s stock price hostage. BP’s share price collapse, at least until its renewed slide this week, was not the worst inflicted on a major international company lately because of government action. Australia’s big ore miners didn’t spill anything but their share prices were slammed overnight when their government floated a new [...]
Archive for June, 2010
Obama vs. BP (and You)
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Energy and Environment on June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Requiem for a Revolution
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
The Iranian Green movement is dead. Suppose that in the days following last year’s fraudulent election in Iran, the U.S. and its Western allies had warned Tehran’s leaders that their repression at home would be met, swiftly and severely, with consequences abroad. For every Neda Soltan shot dead in the street, an Iranian diplomat posted [...]
No sex in court please
Posted in Weird cases on June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Beyond street gangs and drunken upper-class dining clubs, it is generally regarded as wrong for a man to make sexual gestures to a woman he does not know. Where the man is a police officer at a murder trial and the woman is a juror, it would be inexcusable but that is what is alleged [...]
Five Best Books on Curmudgeons
Posted in Literature on June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
These curmudgeonly books will delight even the crankiest readers, says John Derbyshire 1. Gulliver’s Travels By Jonathan Swift 1726 One component of curmudgeonliness is the Cold Eye, seeing humanity plain. Jonathan Swift saw us rather too plain. The “savage indignation” he wrote of in his own epitaph was rooted in the disgust, physical and moral, [...]
No Price to Pay for Torture
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the claims of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian who was sent to Syria to be tortured in 2002, was a bitterly disappointing abdication of its duty to hold officials accountable for illegal acts. The Bush administration sent Mr. Arar to outsourced torment, but it was the Obama administration that [...]
Back From the Beyond
Posted in Literature on June 13, 2010 | Comments Off
The author known for ‘The Call of the Wild’ was a man of protean passions Jack London, born John Griffith Chaney in 1876, grew up a working-class, fatherless boy in Oakland, Calif., and spent his teen years riding the rails, thieving oysters, sailing on a seal-hunting schooner and toiling as what he would later call [...]
A Crack in the Stoic’s Armor
Posted in Living on June 13, 2010 | Comments Off
In a remarkably prescient moment in September, 1965, James B. Stockdale, then a senior Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam, muttered to himself as he parachuted into enemy hands, “Five years down there at least, I’m leaving behind the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.” As a departing graduate student at Stanford, [...]
What Pets Can Teach Us About Marriage
Posted in Living on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Kentaro Tsubaki and Jill Stoll, who have been married for 10 years, with their dog Woody on their porch in New Orleans. Do you greet each other with excitement, overlook each other’s flaws and easily forgive bad behavior? If it’s your pet, the answer is probably yes. But your spouse? Probably not. In an article [...]
Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
Posted in Computers on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Brenda and Kord Campbell, with iPads, at breakfast When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it. Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to [...]
Postulates Of the Pitch
Posted in Other on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Here’s a categorical imperative: Put the ball in the net. In a blissfully funny, vintage Monty Python sketch, there is a soccer game between Germany and Greece in which the players are leading philosophers. The always formidable Germany, captained by “Nobby” Hegel, boasts the world-class attackers Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, while the wily Greeks, captained [...]
His Writers’ Workshop? A Prison Cell
Posted in Literature on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
The life of William Sydney Porter came with a twist at the end. The man who achieved fame under the pen name “O. Henry” had spent more than three years in federal prison on embezzlement charges—a secret that he carried to his grave when he died on June 5, 1910. Not even his daughter knew. [...]
Do You Know, Offhand, Anyone Who Knows Shorthand?
Posted in Living on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
As a Skill Fades, Translators Are in Demand; Ms. Sanders Charges 20.5 Cents a Word The Jefferson County Attorney’s office, 160 miles north of here, handled a humdrum employment case a while ago that had an unusual piece of evidence: a 200-page document handwritten in loops and curls recognizable as some kind of shorthand. “The [...]
Obama Meets Toto
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
With the Gulf oil spill, faith in the omnipotence of government has put us in the land of Oz. Two historic events happened in the Gulf of Mexico this spring: Unimaginable amounts of accidental oil rose from a hole one mile below the water’s surface. Bigger than that, the federal government was exposed as the [...]
No Reservations, No Prisoners
Posted in Living on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Getting the knives out for vegetarians, raw-food enthusiasts and certain celebrity chefs. The black leather jacket and earring are gone. On the cover of Anthony Bourdain’s “Medium Raw,” he is dressed in dark suit and tie, the tie a little loose around the neck, as if he is not quite at ease in it. Seated [...]
Obama and the Trouble With Voting ‘Present’
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Weak and radical, the president looks more like Jimmy Carter all the time. When Barack Obama announced he was running for president in February 2007, Nathan Gonzales of the Rothenberg Political Report wrote “Obama’s history of voting ‘present’” in Springfield, Ill.—even on some of the most controversial and politically explosive issues . . . raises [...]
Sweet land of… conformity?
Posted in Living on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Americans aren’t the rugged individuals we think we are Americans like to see themselves as rugged individualists, a nation defined by the idea that people should set their own course through life. Think of Clint Eastwood rendering justice, rule-bound superiors be damned. Think of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” The idea that personal liberty defines [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged June 6 2010 on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Daughters make you Republican Some studies have found that having more daughters makes people more liberal. The theory is that parents perceive conservative policies as constraining the freedom of women. A new analysis by sociologists at New York University contests this finding. Controlling for gender, religion, age, education, and marital status, the analysis indicated that [...]
Redlined
Posted in The Word, tagged June 6 2010 on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Correction isn’t the most important thing For schoolchildren, the red pen has long been a fearsome weapon, blazoning the marks of failure on once pristine writing assignments. And in recent years, many teachers have turned down the volume, switching from red’s loud rebuke to gentler purple pens. Now research has illuminated another aspect of the [...]
Braking the law
Posted in Weird cases on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
During 1890s, at the outset of motoring, it was easy for the police to judge if a motorist was speeding. The speed limit was 2mph so if an officer needed to walk quickly to catch up with the car, the motorist could be fined. Today, it is difficult to judge the speed of vehicles so [...]
Having a degree in law will open all sorts of doors to you
Posted in Law on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
A law degree is the most versatile of academic qualifications. There is really just one career for a graduate of dental surgery but for law graduates there are multifarious paths to success. Many law graduates proceed to become solicitors or barristers but, equally, many others use the qualification to become successful in commercial life, academic [...]
‘We Are Totally Unprepared’
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Nine years after 9/11, a chilling complacency about WMD attacks. The most important overlooked story of the past few weeks was overlooked because it was not surprising. Also because no one really wants to notice it. The weight of 9/11 and all its implications is so much on our minds that it’s never on our [...]
The Gulf Spill and the Limits of Science
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Other on June 12, 2010 | Comments Off
TV has fueled unrealistic expectations of a quick fix. My old editor used to say that no matter what people’s views might otherwise be, when the aliens land, everyone will call for the scientists. The continuing oil spill in the Gulf is a case in point. As the world watches the crude gushing relentlessly, everyone [...]
Immersed and Confused
Posted in Computers on June 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Jaw-dropping graphics, engrossing action and . . . vapid storytelling. Tom Bissell has purchased four Xbox 360 videogame consoles in the past five years. And he has given away three. In an attempt to kick his videogame habit, Mr. Bissell would bestow each recently acquired console on a friend or family member, only to run [...]
I’m a Traveler, You’re a Tourist: Please Go Away
Posted in Living on June 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Social networking has been all the rage in the world of travel. People consult the online ratings that other tourists give hotels and restaurants. A recent issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine featured an article, “Tweet Me in Miami” on how to discover a city by friending the locals electronically. But new networking tools are [...]
Romancing the Phone
Posted in Living on June 11, 2010 | Comments Off
According to recent reports, more and more people own cell phones but fewer and fewer folks are using them for talking. Texting, emailing and Web browsing are the preferred activities. And when people do make calls, their conversations are shorter than they used to be. My first reaction to this news was bafflement. My second—reflexive—was [...]
Israel and Its Liberal ‘Friends’
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Why don’t they apply the same tough love to the Palestinians? Questions for liberals: What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What does it mean to be a friend of the Palestinians? And should the same standards of friendship apply to Israelis and Palestinians alike, or is there a double standard here [...]
The Future of Our Illusions
Posted in Other on June 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Sometimes, the reason you don’t discuss the gorilla in the room is that you never notice it’s there. That, literally, is what cognitive neuroscientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons discovered at Harvard a decade ago, using an ingeniously simple approach. First, they created a short film of students passing a basketball to one another. The [...]
A Classical Education: Back to the Future
Posted in Living on June 11, 2010 | Comments Off
I wore my high school ring for more than 40 years. It became black and misshapen and I finally took it off. But now I have a new one, courtesy of the organizing committee of my 55th high school reunion, which I attended over the Memorial Day weekend. I wore the ring (and will wear [...]
The myth of Iran’s ‘isolation’
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 11, 2010 | Comments Off
In announcing the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran, President Obama stressed not once but twice Iran’s increasing “isolation” from the world. This claim is not surprising considering that after 16 months of an “extended hand” policy, in response to which Iran accelerated its nuclear program — more centrifuges, more [...]
The Alien in the White House
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 9, 2010 | Comments Off
The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed. The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president’s earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the [...]
