Almost 500 years ago, Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.  There’s no doubt that a lot of serious prayers were prayed and good sermons preached in the Castle Church where Luther posted his theses.  But over the years a lot of holy crap had collected […]

Antisemitism is never a great subject to discuss, but there are two good reasons for posting on it today.  One is that the entire internet has been aflame with the feud between Andrew Sullivan and his longtime mentor Leon Wieseltier, and the question of whether Sullivan is an antisemite has gotten half the country’s bloggers […]

The driving force in American politics today is a struggle to restructure and modernize some of our most basic institutions.  It’s only going to get more intense.Back before the global warming mess blew up, I wrote a post about the breakup of the ‘blue social model‘.  Not to regurgitate the whole post, but the mid-twentieth […]

There are two ways of looking at democracy: as a great shining ideal, or as a form of government that with all its many warts is the least bad kind that we know.Americans would like to think about it the first way; we get in trouble, however, if we forget that the second, more prosaic […]

Foreign Policy, another pillar of the American journalistic establishment (and another magazine that publishes my work when it can’t find anything better to print) has come out with a substantial piece on-line that places the blame for the meltdown of public confidence in climate science where it belongs: with bad procedures at the IPCC and […]

It had to happen and today the Associated Press has given the American public at large its first good look at a story that has been old news for weeks in countries where the media is more alert.  The story, by Seth Borenstein doesn’t cover all the angles, but it does a very good job […]

Recently I blogged that the only path forward for American (and indeed world) health care was to harness the power of computers, software and communication technology to create a system that delivered significantly better care at a significantly lower cost.This morning that system has come a little bit closer: Google has announced plans to build […]

Readers of The New York Times learned something this morning that millions of people in the UK have known for some time, not to mention of the millions of Americans following the story on the web.  But they didn’t learn much about it, or learn enough to begin to think through the consequences for American […]

The apparent victory of Viktor Yanukovych in yesterday’s Ukrainian presidential election is yet another setback to the idea that the world is rapidly becoming a more democratic place.  The candidate whose fraudulent claims of victory in 2005 led to the much hailed “Orange Revolution” of 2004.  Losing candidate Yulia Tymoshenko has vowed to challenge the […]

It’s not just the threat of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035.Now another headline grabbing IPCC scare story is melting away.  A report in Sunday’s London Times highlights new humiliations for the IPCC. “The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a […]