According to this Voice of America piece,
The wife of a Chinese dissident jailed for publishing articles on the Internet says she plans to sue U.S.-based Internet company Yahoo for allegedly helping to put her husband in jail in China.
I hope she wins her case against those unprincipled yahoos, who are resuscitating the old Stalinist claim that capitalists would sell the Soviets the rope with which to hang them. Good on VoA for covering this heroic woman.
American religious broadcaster and all-around wacko Pat Robertson was talking to God recently (or at least stopped taking his meds), when Robertson learned that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was caused by the Vengeance of God. Apparently God is none-too-pleased about the Likud-founder/bolting prime minister
"dividing God's land" .
No word from Robertson yet about why God was OK with Saladin and his little capture of Jerusalem. Maybe God just likes turbans. Or maybe Pat Rober
First, Yahoo! cravenly handed over user records to Chinese auhoritarians authorities. Then, "Don't be Evil" Google promptly complied with Chinese demands to censor results from web searches. What next? The censorship of No-MSG recipes on Epicurious.com? Will the whole internet be forced to kowtow to the brownshirts in Beijing?
Not on Jimbo Wales' watch! Wikipedia, the ultimate source of truthiness on the internet, will not yield to Chinese demands to censor their content. Read the whole s
Thought you might enjoy a photo I took while in Rome this summer. Note the focal point: the Roman Senate building, still standing while the Basilica Julii is in ruins. Yes!
Marius is infamous (perhaps to a degree that is unwarranted) for opening up the ranks of the Roman legions to the landless, propertyless "head-count" of Rome. The result: an army that unquestioningly obeyed its commanding officers, even when the officers threatened to topple the republic (and finally did).
The widely-vaunted alternative to this ever-present threat--in the US, most recently revived by Douglas MacArthur; elsewhere, seen in military coups from Venezuela to Pakistan--is "civili
This was an interesting article, and I'm always very thrilled to see quantitative analyses of Roman history. That said, it seems like the article ignores an important insight gained from the many previous attempts to understand what caused the changes that occurred in the late Roman empire. That insight is that the variables that appear to explain change in one part of empire (e.g., the Western empire) fail to accurately predict what happens in another part of the empire (e.g., the Eastern empi
Los Angeles City Council is mulling whether to ask Uncle Sam for $ 30 million to sponsor Cirque du Soleil. Perhaps LACC will also adopt Panem et Circensis as the official city motto?
In a speech here in Columbus, Barack Obama posed an unusual challenge to McCain's independence: "He hasn't been a maverick. He's been a sidekick. He's like Cato to the Green Lantern."
Don't they teach anything at Harvard Law School? For the record, it's Green Hornet, not Green Lantern.
Today's NYT has an interesting report that claims that the Virginia Tech killer's history of mental illness made his gun purchase illegal. The report is interesting because (1) it challenges the assumption that more gun control laws are needed to prevent future VT-type massacres, (2) it demonstrates the difficulties in enforcing existing legislation, and also (3) it illustrates how small differences in the implementation of federal law at the state level can have devastating repercussions. Fro
Great review in the NY Times. I don't know what is more disheartening: (1) how violently totalitarian Communists--like the lackeys of Stalin--celebrate their resistance to local authoritarian fascists--like the thugs of Franco, or (2) how naively Western liberals buy into #1.
Left-wing Gauls are in an uproar that the leader of the Republic is...jogging. "Le running" is apparently too individualistic and too (say it with disgust) American for some. I guess they'll just have to replace their favorite term of abuse, "creeping Americanism", with "jogging Americanism"!
There's a great response to this fashionable idiocy by that Cato of perfidious Albion, fellow jogger Boris Johnson. (Of course, Cato didn't actually jog, but as a good Stoic, he did walk a lot -- and
I love Steve Pinker. Here he explains how a "thick-witted analogy to Latin" caused our Chief Strict Constructionist to become a judicial activist on behalf of an unconstitutional construction.
From Wired Magazine:
"We've reached an age where egotism is considered too much work. Why discuss your hopes and fears when you can just post the results of online tests, show cartoon versions of yourself and collect "friends"? It's a good thing Anais Nin wasn't a blogger, or instead of a steamy tale of sexual awakening and creative fervor, we'd just know that if she was a Ninja Turtle, she'd be Raphael."
"We are all Greeks," Shelley once wrote, rather exuberantly. It's easy to see why he'd say that. As Rabbi Michael Lerner observed, "Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes."
Only Lerner wasn't giving Hellenism
Although Google has been rightly taken to task for capitulating to Chinese demands to assist in censoring dissidents on the internet, rival Yahoo has been doing vastly worse--actually assisting Chinese authorities in tracking down and imprisoning dissidents. More in today's New York Times. What a shame--now I'm going to have to abandon Yahoo entirely.
Does anybody have a suggestion for a good MyYahoo alternative?
I admit to be a congenital contrarian. I choose Cato over Caesar, Macs over PCs, ancient history over modern, and so on. As John Tierney puts it, "Just because everybody believes something doesn't make it wrong, but that's a good working hypothesis."
Given this penchant, it's probably no surprise that I've been highly skeptical about the CO2 theory of climate change since I first heard about it in 1990, a particularly hot summer in the US. Although I wrote my very first research paper on t
I blogged earlier about the robust health of U.S. Manufacturing, so I was miffed to read that the word hadn't gotten out to the Washington Post, where Harold Meyerson recycles the same old myths in his critique of NAFTA.
The amazing thing about the free-traders' arguments is that they never change. Today's free-trade commentaries make the same points as the pro-NAFTA editorials of 1993-94. Now, as then, bilateral trade is a win-win proposition for the peoples of both signatory nations. It r
I'm constantly stunned by the media's misrepresentation of economic facts. Consider the oft-repeated claim that the US manufacturing sector is "ailing", "hard hit", "dying", and all the rest. Why you'd think it was the Roman republic! Well, it is--strong and healthy, but terribly misunderstood.
Here are the real statisticsabout U.S. manufacturing in 2006:
