Eva von Dassow, a professor of classical and Near Eastern studies, spoke at a recent public forum of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.
According to an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed, the video of her talk is inspiring many of her colleagues at Minnesota and elsewhere, many of them fed up with what [...]
Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, “Death By Gadget,” describes how “[a]n ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.” Our digital [...]
At a conference of scholars (mostly historians) on the Oldest State of the South. . .
Uniformity. Unlike MLA meetings where blue jeans or black on black on black (with black Euro eyewear) prevails, the uniform of the day is the blue blazer and khaki pants (mostly men, but sometimes unisex). Depicted below, my uniformity: blue [...]
According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll:
Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class . . . The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, [...]
Well, Sarah, that “hopey, changey thing” is looking pretty good to me. Looking much better than that “nopey, dopey thing” that you, the Tea Baggers, the Tea Baggers’ punditry, and the Tea Baggers’ paramours, the Republican Party, have going on.
In one week (after a year’s work, of course): Health care reform (not perfect but the [...]
Time for the Democratic majority in Congress to govern. Now. Time for the Democratic Party to mobilize support for what most Americans want and need. Now. Time for the Democrats to discover, whatever the political price later, that atrophied muscle: courage. Now.
The Republican Party has made it clear that they are working to defeat health reform simply [...]
In 2008 I left the Commonwealth of Virginia (my ancestral home, where I had lived and worked for most of my adult life) to move to Connecticut. News from the Old Dominion (reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education) confirms my decision to leave:
Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with [...]
I am the product of 20 years of Catholic education (grade school, prep school, college, seminary), of which I am proud and for which I am grateful. During the 1980s I was a Roman Catholic priest. Over 20 years ago, I left the priesthood and the Church. In the words of the Jewish Passover Seder [...]
Telehypocrite Pat Robertson has announced today that the Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment for Haitians’ making a pact with Satan 200 years ago when they struggled for liberation from the French. (I’m not making this up.) The following prayer is offered for the relief of Haitians and all humanity from this pestilent beast.
(To be prayed [...]
Google, the online data monopoly that drew ire of human rights activists when it decided several years ago to agree to filter Chinese searches in order to strike a deal with the government of the Republic of China (a totalitarian political system), has now threatened to withdraw from China after Google’s email systems were hacked [...]
Since the Christmas Day airline terrorist attempt, much has been made about the failure of government authorities to “connect the dots”; all the data were known (the dots) but not all parties knew or interepreted the data (connecting).
In an attempt to encourage our guardians, I offer the following policy guidance videos.
Connecting the dots: It’s not just for [...]
David Brooks invites us to turn off the TV (or turn off the iPhone, the Wii, the iPod, YouTube, &c.) in order to read a long-form published essay, in his annual Sidney Awards.
Among the topics healthcare leads the list, but also American (in)justice, local DC politics (in the person of Marion Barry) and Afghanistan.
Sphere: Related [...]
One of the early signs of dementia is the loss of short-term memory, forgetting what you recentlydid or said.
So it is with great concern that I note the Republican leadership’s recent criticism of the Democratic majority in the Senate. Republican minority leadership has condemned Democrats’ procedural management of the Senate healthcare reform bill, including strict roll [...]
In an NY Times op-ed jeremiad about East Coast ignorance of the West Coast, Timothy Egan’s “Clueless in Costco” observes:
These are all minor annoyances, mind you, in a world with daily reminders that an embittered, small-hearted senator from Connecticut can hold up health care for millions, or some people would rather read a “book” by Hulk Hogan [...]
The Times announces that Comcast has purchased NBC Universal from General Electronic (”We Bring Good Things to Life” . . . including parts for nuclear bombs), thus “Reshaping the TV Industry.” Whatever that means.
Before G.E. could sell its controlling stake in the media company, it had to buy out the stake of Vivendi, the French media [...]
As any social scientist knows, the responses you receive from survey participants depend in part on how you phrase the question.
The New York Times now reports (“Does the Public Care About the Public Option?” by Katharine Q. Seelye) on several surveys indicating that a majority of Americans favor the provision of government supported health insurance [...]
Two front-page articles in a recent edition of the Sunday New York Times (15 November 2009) caught my eye.
Robert Pear’s ”In House Record, Many Spoke With One Voice: The Lobbyists” observes that, “In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that [...]
The Obama Administration has announced the end of another W. Bush-era boondoggle: A missile system that didn’t work, for a military threat that did not exist.
The anti-missile-missile system to be deployed in Poland the Czech Republic didn’t work. (Think we could move the savings into healthcare?) The alleged threat was Iranian ICBMs . . . [...]
“Who is the liar . . .?” queries the First Epistle of John, which came to mind last night during President Obama’s speech to both houses of Congress and to the nation, when it was interrupted by at one point by House Republican from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, who shouted quite audibly, “You lie!”
Ah, South [...]
In this video, Canadian physicians and nurses describe the real Canadian healthcare system to Americans (not the cartoon Canadian health care portrayed some American media and public discourse).
American viewers, accustomed to American bombast, hyperbolic rhetoric, rants, and apocalyptic jeremiads will have to adjust their TV sets accordingly in order to view the modest understatements of [...]
He’s big. He’s obnoxious. He’s Barney.
No, I’m not talking about the PBS children’s TV icon who sings, “I love you, you love me, we’re just one big family.”
I’m talking about the congressman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, who, when confronted by a anti-healthcare-reform right-wingnut at a Dartmouth town hall meeting, gave better than he got.
The healthcare [...]
So much for Sarah Palin’s fictive “death panels” (though I would like to convene one in order to put her out of our misery).
As reported by the Associated Press, a study funded by the National Cancer Institute and published in the respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), in which 322 terminally ill patients [...]
Thank God the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are on watch looking out for your physical and spiritual health. Its Committee on Doctrine, chaired by William Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, CT, has published “Guidelines for Evaluating for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy.”
Reiki (an alternative touch therapy used in many hospitals as a complement to [...]
According to press reports in the Hartford (CT) Courant , The Stamford Advocate, and on line in the Huffington Post, the Stamford (CT) Marriott Hotel and Spa is defending itself from a negligence suit (brought by a woman who was raped in the hotel garage while the rapist pointed a gun at her two children) by [...]
Two quotes included in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker (“Cocksure: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence”) disclose the cluttered psychosexual landscape of Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns, a firm that was sued (unsuccessfully) by an investor for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.
According to the cocksure Cayne:
Their lead [...]
