I became aware of an interesting news site lately called Newsy.com. This is the first site to present single-story coverage of a given event with that story compiled from multiple news sources. For instance, regarding the D.C. Sniper and Major Nidal Hasan, both of whom I've posted about rece/… Read full post »

Frank Luntz is the master message-smith whose advice to Republicans has largely shaped their anti-health care reform messaging. I'm working on a post about him right now, another installment in my series on propaganda and how Republicans have been using it effectively to kneecap healthcare re… Read full post »

NY bomb plot suspect Najibullah Zazi

Since World War II we have routinely shared intelligence with the British, even co-locating our efforts in some intelligence facilities. U.K. intelligence recently alerted US authorities to a terrorist bomb attack plot, which the Telegraph announced wa… Read full post »

On Friday I wrote a piece about the Ft. Hood shootings. In it I discussed how we have not in fact lost lives to Islamic terrorists since 9/11 (not on American soil, at least), but we have, sadly, lost large numbers of people to mass killings and shootings carried out… Read full post »

HIV virions budding from a cultured lymphocyte

What is an HIV virus that doesn't cause HIV?

It might be the key to medical cures based on genetics.

Since we've decoded the human genome, a tantalizing prospect has loomed before researchers and the medical… Read full post »

It is still too early to know many firm details about Army Major Nidal Hasan's attack on fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood yesterday. It is not too early, though, for anti-Muslim sentiments to be stirred up.

This singular attack has become a Rorschach test of projected motives… Read full post »

There's something I want to delve into over a series of posts, and I thought I'd touch on the tip of that iceberg tonight. Namely: authoritarians, and the toxic impact they are having on democratic values and politics in America.

This is a subject area that… Read full post »

 At the end of September 2009, renowned climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf spoke to an international climate change conference in Oxford, England. Rahmstorf is a respected authority specializing in analysis of ice melt and sea level changes. He and other climate scientists made this startling anno… Read full post »

Well, that didn't take long at all.

Alberto Gonzales gave another interview to the Washington Times September 3, in which he rushed to backtrack on his support for Holder's investigation expressed September 1.

To be fair, he did draw a very (very) fine distinction… Read full post »

Recent comments made by Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales reveal an interesting glimpse into the mindset of an administration that ran roughshod over the Constitution for eight years.

In his repudiation of the government's investigation into CIA interrogation abuses, Cheney expressed incredulity tha… Read full post »

While we are thinking our present economic travails, and how we got there, mark a low point even for us, I came across this relevant quote in the preface of an obscure work at Google Books:

“Not many years ago such an event as the legislative theft of a great franchise… Read full post »

• IBM Social Computing Guidelines

How Technology Transformed Our Enemy into an Underdog We Support

Women at Haft-e Tir Square, Tehran, June 17, 2009. Credit: Hamed Saber

Riveting as the events in Iran have been, there is another story unfolding around it, virtually unnoticed and unremarked upon. It, too, is enabled by… Read full post »

Brooke Greenberg weighs 15 pounds and is 30 inches long.  To look at her, you see a near-toddler who is maybe a year old.  In fact, she is 16 years old.  Brooke is a child who does not age.

This remarkable girl is documented in this ABC news story and video. The reporter/… Read full post »

The voracious 24-hour news cycle of contemporary media strikes again. The death of megastar Michael Jackson has overshadowed other news of note, in particular recent bombshells on the public stage that - were Jackson still alive - would no doubt be seriously dominating the national headlines today. I… Read full post »

Republicans, and neocons in particular, have done a lot of chest thumping about Iran lately. The “Party of No” gets a lot of mileage out of focusing on emotional tone, bandying it about in lieu of substance, straight facts, or deep thought on the issues. This is reflective, perhaps, of… Read full post »

I was easing into my day, gearing up for a lot of writing I need to get done, when I thought, well, I’ll get that netflix movie out of the way while I’m having brunch, so I can send it back today.

That movie was Seven Pounds, featuring Will Smith and… Read full post »

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” quote has been used as the basis of claims that she is racist, or at the very least, that her remarks - if not herself - are racist. Yet a close reading of her full speech shows instead what a distorted… Read full post »

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently critiqued Obama’s Middle East policy vis-a-vis Israel. Among other things, he cited an “imperious” diktat that Israel cease its settlement expansion. As he put it,

"No ‘natural growth’ means strangling to death the… Read full post »

This is not a joke. The weird world of cloning people just leapt more in our face this week:  a renegade doctor is working on cloning humans, has created embryos and implanted them in women who wanted to be pregnant with the clones. Three of the embryos he made were from… Read full post »

In the “science fiction in unexpected places” realm, I wanted to comment on something I came across today.

I think of science fiction as the fiction of “if”. We ask “what if…”, and then see where that premise takes us.  The earliest forms of this kind of wri… Read full post »