Monthly Archives: May 2011

Good for you, sir. Much of this debate is a definitional one: whether any or all of these methods constitute torture. I believe some of them do, especially waterboarding, which is a mock execution and thus an exquisite form of … Continue reading →

A couple of dismal recent articles point up how little academic achievement actually correlates with financial success or job security. First, William Deresiewicz, who teaches at Yale, has a long piece at The Nation about the awful prospects for newly-minted … Continue reading →

While everybody was rejoicing over the well-deserved face-shooting of Bin Laden, the U.S. government was quietly trying for a deuce by setting the drones on Anwar Al-Awlaki. The Times has the story: A missile strike from an American military drone … Continue reading →

Not what some pilots seem to think: Two Muslim clerics traveling to a religious conference were kicked off a Delta Air Lines flight Friday morning at Memphis International Airport, on orders from a pilot. Imam Mohamed Zaghloul of the Masjid … Continue reading →

A couple of interesting items in The Economist recently. First, a gloomy survey of America’s transportation infrastructure. Pages and pages of bad news, but a couple of paragraphs will do well enough as a representative sample: The Congressional Budget Office … Continue reading →

Paul says what we all know: the number of people interested in doing heroin is not going to be radically greater if we decriminalize it, especially on the federal level. And here is a long video with a number of … Continue reading →

Wired‘s Danger Room has a great new piece by Richard Wheeler about a 2009 paper by a couple of UCLA geography professors that tried to predict Bin Laden’s most likely hiding spot based on, among other things, a theory called … Continue reading →

If we celebrated the death of Bin Laden, what about Mubarak? CNN has the story: In his first television interview since taking office, the new justice minister said last week that Egyptian courts would not shy away from sentencing Mubarak … Continue reading →

I meant to post this over the weekend, but, obviously, some stuff happened. Anyway, the Daily Mail last week published a longish article on Donald Trump’s birtherism and the resulting abandonment of his Celebrity Apprentice show by liberal viewers. And … Continue reading →

The Huffington Post has been running a surprisingly good investigative series on the debate in Congress over debit and credit card “swipe fees” — the amount the credit card companies charge merchants every time you use your card. These fees … Continue reading →