Tag Archives: Featured Stories

I do not follow the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians closely because it is complex, well outside my area of expertise, and deeply depressing.  I find it depressing because I have always believed in a two-state solution, and it has long been difficult watching that goal slip ever further out of reach.  After the barbaric terror attack on Israelis by Hamas and the increasing likelihood of an excessively brutal Israeli response it is worth...

Currently US ally Israel is responding to a massive terrorist invasion. The US response is slightly hampered by the fact that the  United States has “no confirmed ambassadors to Israel, Egypt, Oman, or Kuwait”, also “the counterterrorism envoy position and human rights envoy position as well as the top job at the U.S. Agency for International Development are unfilled. ” ” these nominations … have been held in limbo all these months thanks to...

You know that Hungarian woman who shared this year’s Nobel in Physiology or Medicine? She struggled to get and keep an academic career. Eventually, she was pushed out of her lab at Penn.“That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving...

The myth of markets How is it that a market created by Madison Avenue becomes prescient? Omniscient? It doesn’t. It isn’t; never was. Like capitalism, the primacy of private healthcare and the myth of markets are a big lie.The planet is dying from our burning of fossil fuels, yet we hear ‘news readers’ demand that alternative energy needs to be competitive with fossil fuels. Like hell, it does. Markets may, probably do, have a place in an economy,...

Hah got your attention there. The connection is Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr pionere of Cinematic nudity, Marine drone technology and the anti jamming anti interference technology on which WiFi is based. Notable for the first Hollywood full frontal nudity scene and the concept of an un jammable, uninterceptable, radio controlled torpedo. Lamarr was born in Austria and married a guy who owned a company which made torpedoes. Post WWI when...

Based on a recent article in New York Review of Books, I read the novel “Independent People” by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. The book was originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1955, in part on the strength of this book. Like Moby-Dick, I approached this novel as an obligation. I put it down once, after a few pages, in exasperation with its rambling faux-Norse folklore beginnings,...

Then I really was going to skip today, even as–indeed, because–it is the 50th anniversary of 11 September. The original 11 de Septiembre, that is. Once is history, twice is parody. Feuerbach, as with Marx, was an optimist. Chile took only 17 years to get rid of Pinochet, and they did it at the ballot box. Twenty-two years later, the U.S. is still recovering something, though I’m no longer certain what. Are we trying to avoid torture?...

Today, several folks have posted 9/11 remembrances online. I’m fine with that. We should remember the people who died as a result of the plane crashes, as well as their families and friends. But don’t stop there. Also remember how this tragedy was cynically exploited for political purposes by folks like Rudy Giuliani and George Bush. How it was dishonestly used to justify the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq*, the torture and abuse of...

In 2010 Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Acts (there were 2) from now on called the ACA. One of the aims was to bend the Medicare spending curve and, they hoped (or dreamed) stop the increase in spending per beneficiary. The spending per beneficiary ceased increasing. Oh crap Chrome refuses to upload an image (and says I am offline while also opening other pages. I should have kept my oath). sorry for...

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder first came to my attention in a footnote of an article in The New York Review of Books. The footnote gave a link to a series of 23 online lectures on the history of Ukraine, which I binge-watched over a period of about five days. I also read his books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth.” Snyder also has a subscription-only Substack blog to which I subscribe. Snyder travels frequently to Ukraine these days, and his latest...