I read the report by Human Rights Watch on the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces action in the refugee camp at Jenin. It’s damning. The government of Israel had a legitimate reason to send troops into the camp, it was a base for attacks on their citizens, and they had every right to go [...]
[ via Boing Boing ] Rumours of broad-based opposition by the Left to cloning and stem cell research are just that. A piece in the NYT left the impression that the Left had aligned with an anti-abortion Republican senator’s bill to ban all research in the field. Several Lefties had signed a petition circulated by [...]
Gary Farber writes about the conflict with which those of us from the Left are grappling. He talks about the 1930s Left who formed the Abraham Lincoln brigades to fight Franco, and the 1960s Left who mobilized to stop a war. We’ve remained in the mode of the 1960s: assuming wars and interventions are wrong. [...]
Thomas Friedman writing on the suicide bomber strategy in the Mid-East conflict. “The Spanish Civil War was the place where the major powers all tested out their new weapons before World War II,” said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. “Well, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today is the Spanish Civil War for the 21st century. A [...]
To the members of the committee: The bill introduced by Senator Hollings of the Commerce committee will have several negative effects: You will further alienate the American people by codifying the notion that we are all guileless thieves who cannot be trusted in our homes. How do you plan to gain the respect and trust [...]
Lawrence Lessig gave a talk on IP and the Commons today at Stanford. I’ve put my notes from the talk on my other website. I missed the first part of the talk because I had to get a Filemaker server back up… grr.
When I first saw the title of this article in MIT’s Technology Review, I first thought of a song from “The Producers“. Richard Muller, of Cal Berkeley’s Physics department, says that an attack on Iraq will happen because Iraq’s been working on an ‘gun style’ bomb, like the one the US used on Hiroshima, and [...]
Related to my exchange with Winn of W6 Daily on Enron, it appears that Global Crossing’s alleged creative accounting is attracting Congress’ attention.
Meanwhile, Phillip Winn’s wondering why we are all so focused on Enron. Aside II:I’ll get his name right given enough iterations. Aside: I got Phillip’s name wrong. And coming back to this entry I realized why: Steve Winwood. My brain must have been listening to “The Low Spark of the High Heeled Boys” when I [...]
[ via John Bartelt ] The Nils Bohr Archive has released, ahead of schedule and on the web, a collection of correspondence between Bohr and Werner Heisenberg pertaining to their 1941 meeting in Copenhagen. At the meeting, dramatized in the play of the same name, it was supposed that Heisenberg convinced Bohr that he wasn’t [...]
[ via the Muted Horn ] US and UK authorities have seized on the September 11 attacks as an excuse to ban or curtail encryption. However, the prime suspects in the case did not use encryption, nor did they hide secret messages in images of naked women.
Today’s text is Genesis 22. You’ll recall the story: G_D asks Abraham (who’s already been through the firebombing of Sodom) to sacrifice his son. I point out this text because of today’s evil toll. G_D stayed Abraham’s hand. If only he had done the same this morning.
PBS’s big fall series will be an eight part show on evolution, and the Nation’s public broadcaster is girding itself against the expected reaction from the offal-throwing chimpanzees of the religious right. Why is PBS worried about a show on what should be a non-controversial subject? After all, Senator Helms doesn’t screech when a narrator [...]
Moira Gunn’s column on the Congress’ religous zeal in banning cloning-related research predated Bush’s so-called compromise by a few days, but it’s still timely. I’m not happy with the way the House has set itself up like a U. S. version of Iran’s “Counsel of Elders”.
This is the paper to which NPR and the NY Times referred in recent stories about the continuing debunking of the myth of over-generous juries in civil litigation. [ pdf ] This article, the first broad-based analysis of punitive damages in judge-tried cases, compares judge and jury performance in awarding punitive damages and in setting [...]