Several weeks ago, Tom Cole, a Republican Congressman in Oklahoma spoke to supporters about the upcoming election. “If George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election,” he told them. Later, he said that a vote against Bush was like a vote for Adolf Hitler. These hateful and outrageous remarks –- which neither [...]
A Modest Proposal For the Promotion of World Democracy and Sustainable Free Trade. Let’s face facts. Most countries in the world are simply not ready for democracy. Look at the Haitians, the Iraqis, the Spanish, the Taiwanese, the Venezuelans, etc. They couldn’t spot a democratic election if it hit them in the face. Even if [...]
LanguageHat deconstructs Dr. Language’s list of supposedly “mispronounced” words: … this list is useless, because its few worthwhile nuggets … are easily found elsewhere and are drowned in a sea of natural variants whose subtle difference easily escapes notice…, perfectly normal dialectal forms …, bullshit forms reminiscent of those “Kids say the darndest things!” pseudo-mistakes [...]
I haven’t watched Dennis Miller’s show since I saw him brown-nosing Arnold on his first show back in January. So I was happy to see Eric Alterman say that his ratings are plummeting and even the staff think Miller’s behavior is “unprofessional”: Anyway, what was so weird about it was how professional it seemed until [...]
And the award for the most offensive article this year goes to the NY Times for… This malarial West African dictatorship quashed another coup attempt this month, which is like saying the corner 7-Eleven served up another Slurpee. The runner up prize goes to the BBC for.. We are far above the fray here, a [...]
Charlie Cook, quoted in Donkey Rising, has some important things to say about why we aren’t seeing the creation of new full time jobs in the US: In December, the CEO of a California-based high tech firm told me that “there is no amount of overtime that we will not pay, there is no level [...]
This is an exciting technological development by NASA: they’ve found a way to detect “subvocal” speech! “A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain,” said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA’s Ames [...]
History shows, however, that firm timetables do not reduce conflict and violence, and generally make a situation much worse. Steven Wilkinson, an assistant professor of political science at Duke University, writing in the New Observer last December, draws an useful analogy between the Bush administration’s fixed timetable for withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, and [...]
This is a post for the New Yorkers out there. I’m sure there are similar services for other cities, and I hope people will write about them in the comments. Riding the New York City Subway can be like playing the slot machine. Because of constant construction on the 100 year old system, the trains [...]
A lot of people have asked me if I plan to march this Saturday. The march, entitled “The World Still Says No to War,” is being organized by United for Peace and Justice, the same people who organized the 3-500,000 people anti-war “focus group” that I participated in last year. After thinking about it for [...]