From an interview with Greg Palast, where he argues that both the media and congress are missing the real story behind the US attorney scandal: [Monica Goodling] was trying to tell us something important, but the dim bulbs of the U.S. press and the committee dolts wouldn’t listen. She began by accusing her bosses of [...]
A few weeks ago Victor Mair wrote a guest post on Language Log implying that China’s high rates of illiteracy could be cured by reforming the script, replacing difficult to learn characters with phonetic spelling. There is lots of good discussion of this topic on Language Hat, and there was a good post on the [...]
The following quotes and chart were culled from Jason DeParle’s New York Review of Books article, “The American Prison Nightmare.” The issue has been covered here extensively. Here is a Google search of the Keywords archives for the word “prison.” Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites [...]
From Foreign Policy, an article which argues that the same kinds of misleading intelligence which got us into a mess in Iraq, also made a mess of North Korea: Officials in U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration are gingerly walking back from claims that North Korea was secretly building a factory to enrich uranium for [...]
The photo shows a young girl in Maninagar preparing lunch. See my Maninagar photo set on Flickr. Her home was bulldozed on February 8th. It was 8th Feb. 2007. It was 12th time. Municipal Corporation people demolish Nomadic people’s huts in Maninagar Area of Ahmedabad city which going to be a Mega City on the [...]
Below the fold is the entire text of a NY Times editorial listing “things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.” This list only covers the most grievous assaults on civil liberties, the geneva convention, and government secrecy. A fuller list would [...]
Anyone living in Taipei who is interested in learning more about India should try to attend Pankaj Mishra’s talk on March 17th. Here is the description for his talk: Poor but Democratic: Democracy in India in the Age of Globalization Many rulers like to claim democracy only comes after wealth. What about India then? Indian [...]
Worst name for a political party, ever. A newspaper headline from last year. {india}
Juan Cole explodes the “Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006“, the most prevalent one right now being the idea that a “surge” of troops could help us win the war: The US put an extra 15,000 men into Baghdad this past summer, aiming to crush the guerrillas and stop the violence in the capital, and [...]
Steve Benen, who is guest blogging over at Political Animal, quotes John Edwards answering a question as to whether he would give balancing the deficit high priority: I think that, if we’re honest, you cannot it, it’s just common sense in the math, have universal health care, and invest in energy, and make a serious [...]