amphichon

Earlier this week, the Chicago Tribune posted an article discussing Rahm Emanuel’s critique of the Bush administration’s fiscal responsibiltiy in general, and specifically paying $100k a year for a “White House Director of Lessons Learned”.
His remarks were entirely appropriate, I thought, but I was angered to see that there was one comment posted in response:
I [...]

Here is a well reasoned and thought-provoking piece by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) on the future of organic foods in the light of Wal-Mart’s announced decision to “go organic” by encouraging suppliers to provide organic alternatives and offering them at only a marginal markup over their conventional equivalents. Superficially this is [...]

It wasn’t enough that Bush had to have his own Vietnam. Now he’s got his own My Lai massacre as well.

The proposal for an ”.xxx” top-level domain was officially rejected by ICANN yesterday, and the word on the net is that ultimately it was pressure from the conservative and religious elements in the US and allies that sank it. The most ironic thing about the situation though is that, were this TLD to be [...]

This is… just sickening, when you think about it.
The bottom line of the article – right here in my adopted hometown, one of the most liberal cities in the country, the military – either by accident or by design – courted, tested, recruited, and then repeatedly defended the enlistment of a “moderately to severely autistic” [...]

Another good piece on censorship in China, and the complicity of American tech companies, appears here in the International Herald Tribune.
Google won’t stop it because Yahoo and Microsoft have complied, and they can’t afford to lose the market. Yahoo won’t stop it because Google and Microsoft have complied, and they can’t afford to lose [...]

Need any more reasons to dislike Microsoft? Here’s one – they cheerfully assented to a request from Chinese authorities to delete the blog of perhaps China’s most well known blogger, journalist Zhao Jing.
It was bad enough last fall when Yahoo handed the identity of Chinese journalist Shi Tao to authorities on request, resulting in [...]

usa extends patriot act
usa threatens to derail UN climate change summit

A bit of irony, via Professor Pollkatz.

Sorry, I’ve been avoiding politics (well, discussing or writing about politics) for quite a while, but I’m breaking my vow of silence on Bushco for now. I promise I’ll try to keep the rhetoric level low.
This struck me as too interesting not to post, anyway. The comparison was new to me, [...]