Submitted to a Candid World

On December 21, 2008, Iranian police stormed Shirin Ebadi’s home-office, shutting down her Center for the Defense of Human Rights. On December 29 police confiscated client files and computer hard-drives with the lame justification that the center owes taxes (though Ebadi has never earned income from the Center in 15 years).
On January 1, 2009, a [...]

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“Them” being investment bankers, many now unemployed, who are looking at their life courses in a new light, deciding to follow the dreams they suppressed many moons ago, when cramming for the GMAT and whooping it up at wine & cheese mixers at Wharton.
That’s right. What they really want to do is write … or [...]

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Not because it’s often silly to use a phone to send a message, the typing of which takes longer than a phone call to convey same verbally … or because old people like me find it difficult to coordinate their thumbs …
We should stop texting because we are tired of being bent over a barrel. [...]

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Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has a particular schtick. Every year he exposes gratuitously wasteful earmark spending by the federal government because, apparently, nickle-and-diming is the best way to balance and shrink the federal budget. In his 2008 report, he singles out the Fort Collins, Colorado bike library’s receipt of a $66,000 federal grant. The bike [...]

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One means man using his intelligence to design a cleaner, healthier world with efficient use of resources and a reliance on scientific inquiry and experiment to effect it, then count me in: I am an ID convert.
Earlier this month J. Craig Venter, the biologist who, with his private (former) company, mapped the human genome separate [...]

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Sit down. It ain’t your turn … DUN-dun-DUN-dun-DUN-doh …
I do not want Caroline Kennedy to be my senator, filling Hillary Clinton’s seat. I do not want Andrew Cuomo either, but I will take the latter over the former based on their substantive intellectual and professional contributions to political discourse. Kennedy and Cuomo are doing relatively [...]

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Overloaded with the commercial, sectarian, and familial demands of the holiday season? Well, chill out to some silliness and find your alter-ego in Obama’s Administration.
David Axelrod. Pisces. You’re like Greg Maddox. You look like an accountant, but you’re a first-ballot hall-of-famer with a wicked skill at strategizing and delivering results. No one could pick you [...]

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Besides not existing, that is.

The photo (from NY Times) shows a house in Tennessee that is buried by fly ash, a sludgy waste byproduct of coal incineration. Approximately 500 million gallons or 1.7 million cubic yards broke out and covered a big chunk of eastern Tennessee on Monday.
Clean-coal lobbyists are going to have to use [...]

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Apparently, Rick Warren posts regular video diaries on his church’s website, updating congregants of goings on and whatnot. His post yesterday isn’t what I would call well advised. In it he says the media get it wrong (00:43); bloggers need to get lives (01:52), and marriage has been universally recognized as between a man and [...]

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Obama delivered a slew of nominee announcements over the last week, so many it is impossible for me to give my usual attention to each, researching and weighing the nominees’ records on salient issues. Instead, armed with the New York Times, my gut, and a willingness to speculate wildly, I am offering a brief synopsis [...]

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