“It’s 1776 all over again, and now we got a House of Lords up here,” latter day tea-party protester William Temple told NPR in front of the Capitol yesterday.  Temple was wearing Revolutionary war garb at the time, unlike the original Boston Tea Party participants, who dressed (unconvincingly) as Mohawk Indians to conceal their identities […]

As the registration system in Copenhagen broke down yesterday, thousands of delegates to the global warming conference were left shivering in the cold.Reinhold Niebuhr would have liked this; irony was one of his favorite things — God’s commentary on man’s futile striving.But Copenhagen is more than Niebuhrian; in many ways the global warming conference is […]

Just a few selected comments on this weekend’s newspaper reading, as it were.First, in the New York Times “Week in Review” section under the headline “Our Decade of Deluded Thinking,” an unsigned author makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall […]

“Aussie, Chinese Officials urge Pandas to reproduce” ran the headline in this AP story from Down Under.I haven’t talked to the pandas much myself, so I don’t know whether they were paying attention.  The closest I’ve come to an exchange with a panda was at the circus in Shanghai where they had a panda trained […]

Last week, President Obama was living the Twenty-Third Psalm as he gave a well received speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the […]

The global economic crisis is now moving into a new phase.  The first wave saw a series of bankruptcies as a financial panic wreaked havoc across the world’s major financial centers.  The panic was stemmed more or less by central bankers intervening to save some institutions, provide for the orderly or quasi-orderly break-up of others […]

It’s another day of light blogging; for the second Saturday in a row I left the award-winning grounds that surround the stately Mead manor in the Borough of Queens to participate in the Grand Strategy simulation exercise at Yale.The students did pretty well today, we all agreed, although by the end of the day nuclear […]

The Gallup Organization has just released a study of religion and politics showing that for white people anyway, the closer you feel to God the more likely you are to vote Republican.For blacks and Hispanics it doesn’t work that way.  While the African-Americans and Hispanics Gallup identifies as ‘intensely religious’ are slightly more likely to […]

December 7 gets all the publicity; this was the “day that shall live in infamy” when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War Two.12/11 is not so well remembered, but that was the day that Hitler’s Germany declared war on the United States.Historians sometimes wonder about this decision; by declaring […]

Tensions flared Friday at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen as China’s Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei, using unusually blunt language, described U.S. Chief Negotiator Todd Stern as “irresponsible”, according to an AP report. The Chinese official was responding to comments Stern made at the conference yesterday regarding the possibility of Western aid to […]