Public protests or “economic, social, or academic” boycotts against the state of Israel and its settlements are now illegal in Israel after a bill of dubious constitutionality and even more dubious merit passed the Knesset.  Even the staunchly pro-Israel ADL has criticized this piece of legislative overreach.  Critics of the bill, which allows lawsuits and […]

You heard it first here: back in May I wrote that the only way to fix California is to break it up into smaller states.  Yesterday that idea got a small boost from the Riverside County Board of Supervisors,which will convene a meeting on the subject of “South California” in the fall.  Apparently Los Angeles […]

“Al Gore is definitely back,” chirps Bryan Walsh at Time. Everyone watch out, the global head of the green movement really has a strategy this time. He released an iPhone app.He rebranded his campaign, from Alliance for Climate Protection to the Climate Reality Project. And best of all, he’s preparing “a brand new 30 minute multimedia presentation,” a […]

On July 5, 2011, The Boston Globe carried a story by Joanna Weiss with the title “Mormons on center stage”. She felt that we are in a Mormon moment. She may well be right.Mormons are certainly very visible on the political scene. As Republican candidates for the presidency are popping in and out at a […]

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics.  The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of  deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities. Not since the 1960s, when scores of American […]

American drug policy may be on the verge of big changes, but the results won’t be the Stoner Utopia drug activists dream of — and the changes may not do very much for the inner city. I’ve been posting about the inner cities lately and there is one subject that can’t be avoided in dealing […]

Since the September 11 attacks, federal judges have out of necessity plunged into the real-life facts of terrorism’s twilight world of training camps, safe houses, and dry runs, as they review the Guantanamo dossiers of al Qaeda and Taliban suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Even in the view of hard-bitten intelligence types, the federal […]

In my last post, I argued that we need to stop thinking about our inner city problems so heavily in terms of race.  Racial problems in the US contributed to the particular history of the urban underclass and race can never be totally ignored in this country, but the inner city today is haunted by […]

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science focuses on a single topic in each issue. In its July 2011 issue the topic is “Patrimonial Power in the Modern World”, edited by two sociologists, Julia Adams and Mounira Charrad. The topic is interesting in itself, and the several authors provide a vivid […]

Half a lifetime ago, on a hot July afternoon, I sat in the living room of international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone, glued to the screen as Dutch television newscasters announced another dreary episode in the ethnic conflict of the former Yugoslavia. This time it was the capture of a small Bosnian municipality—the obscure town […]