From The Economist -- "Ethiopia and Somalia: The rumbling rumours of war": ... The spectre of a hostile Christian Ethiopia bearing down on Somalia has rallied Somalis behind the Islamists. Somalia's Islamists have spread a similar fear among Ethiopians, giving succour...
 I was reading the July 17 New Yorker & found "The Agent: Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11?" (pdf file here) by Lawrence Wright. It's a long article, so some excerpts follow, starting with the main point: In March, the C.I.A. learned...
According to polls, tens of millions of Americans believe that the government was behind the 9/11 attacks. But 2 more conspiracy theories were pretty well debunked recently. (1) That the government shot down United Flight 93. (2) That the air force was ordered to...
I just finished reading Charlton Heston's autobiography -- one of two he's written, I think -- In the Arena. Unlike some of my friends, I don't mind his guns rights work nor his anti-Ice T Cop Killer agitation. I wanted to know more about two of my favorite dystopian...
Frank Rich notes ("The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq") that the Iraq occupation has been going so badly for so long that Americans are tired of hearing about it: CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 20 of the Israel-Hezbollah war -- now branded...
From "Murky Goings-On" in this week's Economist: WHO provided the early finance for Fininvest, the parent company of Silvio Berlusconi's business empire? Prosecutors hope to find an answer during appeal proceedings that have just begun in Palermo, in a case involving...
 I just finished reading, and recommend, Robert Dreyfuss’s Devil’s Game. Of course I already knew that -- in the words of Cheryl Benard (RAND expert, and Zalmay Khalilzad’s wife) --  in the '80s the CIA, Saudis, and Pakistanis funded the "worst crazies" in...
Excerpts from "Roads to somewhere," The Economist ...[H]ighways began expanding rapidly after President Dwight Eisenhower, 50 years ago this month, signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 which committed the government to invest heavily in a national network of...
President Bush: "The lesson of the Hungarian experience is clear. Liberty can be delayed, but it cannot be denied." Bela Liptak: "In 1956, in Hungary, the Soviets called us terrorists while the West called us freedom fighters. During that Hungarian uprising, the...
Speaking of WMDs that do exist... For some reason or other, a few dozen Nobel prize-winning scientists and other smarty-pantses are concerned that America and Russia still have enough nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert to destroy civilization ("Nobel Laureates say...
