I know who Mrs. Cain was. We don't talk about her or her family much, but things just wouldn't have been paradise without her or them. She was one of the many illegal immigrants in Paradise that did the actual work of tending the Garden of Eden--you know, the hoeing,…
The Bill passed by congress on the detainee and interrogation issue is one of the more frustrating examples of Democratic cowardice and political expedience. It does not substantively change anything. Personally, I feel the only utility in having a law in the first place is to use as a cudgel…
All forms of birth control are immoral, according to many Christian conservatives. We’ve previously written about this absurd position here and here. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a formal conservative effort to prohibit all forms of birth control: Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement's success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal…
Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters. Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:
If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here. Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed. You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.
Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at …
A follow up, answer, another viewpoint…
The title is somewhat rhetorical. Hate–in its undiluted, culturally-disseminated form has only one reason–the perpetuation of local power–for the individual, the power to insist that he/she is right and refuses to countenance criticism, implicit or otherwise; for the state, the power to maintain power in the face of outside insistence on change. . If those against whom the hatred is directed are unfortunate enough not to see how they play into it, then the issue becomes complicated. What we now see in the Middle East and many other parts of the world is a hatred based on local potentates (single rulers, committees, vested interests, or cultural hegemons) desire, need, hunger to maintain a privileged position in their section of the world, something that became more and more untenable int he aftermath of World War ll.
Can that really be? After the decades of beating ourselves (namely, the West, which includes Europe, North America, and certain isolated pockets here and there and may now, paradoxically, include Japan, but certainly includes Australia, and may in time include India…) for our “responsibilities” in causing global problems (such self-recrimination soundly based on the legacies of a colonialist past), maybe it’s time to revisit some of that surplus self-loathing and see where the responsibilities actually lie.
The current exacerbating events of the current mess are all from the same source–the end of the second world war and the onset of the Cold War. Lest we forget, WW ll was …