Hello there, Dr. E. here. We no longer call people ‘crip’ unless a person nicknamed themselves that… we no longer call people ‘that poor crippled person’ … and until we find a better phrase, we say people who need accommodations to have full access to life, ‘people with special needs.’ I’m one of the Commissioners for the first Special Needs District of...

Writing in The Chronicle, Geoff Nunberg kicks off his criticism with a look at publication dates: To take Google’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’s...

Jack Horkheimer, the little guy with the bad toupeé, Chaplinesque voice and strange name… who stood against a green screen while making it look to TV viewers at home that he was standing and broadcasting from outer space…. well Mr Horkheimer, the earthling beloved by many, has died at age 72 from a respiratory illness. He was the creator and host of the PBS show “Star Gazer” and popularized...

Does the United States have a cold war strategy to create an ‘Asian NATO’ to contain China’s military? According to Dai Xu, author of the book C-shaped Encirclement, writing in China’s new flagship state-controlled newspaper, the Global Times, current U.S.-South Korea exercises in the South China and Yellow Seas makes it imperative for Chinese ‘dignity’ to show the Americans...

To those who mindlessly quote the great Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis line that “sunlight is … the best of disinfectants” I reply, if you go outside without sunscreen on you’ll get sunburned. Stay out and you’ll die. Information without context is not knowledge. Sadly, context doesn’t sell newspapers, or drive web traffic or build television and radio audiences....

Anastasia Pantsios, a lifelong journalist, does a great job in Ohio Daily Blog‘s post, “A Disturbing Pattern” with the subject of how the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s primary endorsements for 12 newly-created elected positions read as gender-biased reviews though the motivation seems unintentional. But just because there is no intention does not mean that there is no bias. It should be revealed...

We have all read and heard about the Iranian nuclear program and its possible capability to produce nuclear weapons; about the diplomatic, economic, and other ongoing efforts to get Iran to come clean on its nuclear weapons intentions; and about the threat such a capability would pose to Israel and to world peace. We have also seen reports about the possibility of an Israeli preemptive strike against such Iranian...

On the heels of Michael Hirschorn’s July declaration in the Atlantic that the era of browser dominance is coming to a close — the app model is where it’s at — Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff affirm in Wired that the web is indeed dead. Long live the Internet. Anderson: You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook,...

As the U.S. continues to pull its combat troops by the thousands every week out of Iraq in order to have “only” 50,000 troops in country by the end of the month, officially ending our combat mission there, Iraq faces an uncertain future. A suicide bombing this morning, Baghdad time, killed at least 59 people and injured at least 100 more at an Iraqi army recruitment center in the heart of the capital. After...

Doug Saunders, writing in The Spectator about his new book, Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World, says that in 100 years we will be an entirely urban species: [T]he defining force of this century, almost certainly more significant than war, recession and perhaps even climate change, will be the huge and final shift of human populations from rural areas to cities. It’s a...

Logan’s recent post reminded me to highlight why MPG is a terrible measure that is severely distorting consumer and regulatory behavior. If you had to guess, which do you think saves more gas: going from 20 MPG to 30 MPG, or 30 MPG to 45 MPG? Well the latter is an increase of 15 MPG so you might be tempted to choose that, but they are both 50% increases, so maybe they are the same, right? Well let me...

If you have been following the engineering screw-ups as I have in BP’s efforts to seal the oil blowout permanently, the latest development this Friday the 13th is … is … one gigantic “HUH?” Incident commander retired Adm. Thad Allen announced the BP team will proceed to permanently kill the top capped blowout with the first relief well just feet away about 18,000 below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico...

Last November, I wrote about how I went from being a political blogger, to being a political candidate and then an elected official because I won my race. Alan Rosenblatt and I then worked to compile a list of similar cases and found less than two handfuls. A Politico reporter researched and wrote and Politico published, More Bloggers Throwing Hats in the Ring on Wednesday. It’s got some nice overview...

By taking part in military exercises in the Yellow Sea with its ally South Korea, is the United States ‘deliberately provoking’ China’s people and the People’s Liberation Army? According to this strongly-worded article from the state-controlled Global Times, America needs to learn respect for the feelings of people in other nations, and if it goes ahead with its plans, it will lose out...

Lessons from the Oil Spill by Eugene Robinson Washington Post Writers Group Columnist WASHINGTON — Flying back to Washington from Pensacola, Fla., on June 15, President Obama and the man he put in charge of handling the Gulf oil spill, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, had a come-to-Jesus talk. The administration was getting hammered for a slow and disorganized response to the environmental disaster,...

According to this article from France’s Le Monde praising U.S. lawmakers, the Wall Street reform package recently passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Obama includes elements likely to help people in countries that have great oil and mineral wealth – but equally great corruption – finally reap some of the benefits of mining and oil drilling. For Le Monde, the managing director...

Rep. Paul Ryan has an op-ed in today’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about Paul Krugman’s response to his “Roadmap” budget to eliminate the deficit. Unfortunately, Ryan spends most of his piece criticizing Krugman for misrepresenting his proposed solutions and trying to “win the debate by default” while failing to substantively defend or support the very “solutions”...

After three months of spewing millions of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, it appears that BP’s runaway well has been permanently plugged, albeit both BP and the U.S. government won’t claim victory until the relief well is completed sometime this month. We will not know the short and long-term effects of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history for months, perhaps years. For months,...

I’m someone that puts his brain where his mouth is, meaning that I actively try to work to address problems that I talk about. One of these days I’m going to do comprehensive posts about everything I’m involved with from health care to energy to food production to economic modeling, there may be some other stuff I don’t remember now. I’ve been wanting to do so, but until we’ve...

There’s a new scandal about a government agency that has collected naked images from advanced body scanners at airport security points. Details HERE. No wonder the TSA people were pointing and laughing at me as I approached the inspection area on my second trip from San Diego airport this month. In the future I’ll just turn the other cheek. Now you can follow Joe Gandelman on Twitter.

This is so annoying: Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company’s vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. No surprise there. But how do you think the company is defending itself? In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking...

Google Books aims to catalog and make searchable, scan and digitize, all the books in the world. In order to do that first they have to determine what exactly is a “book?” We’re not going to count what library scientists call “works,” those elusive “distinct intellectual or artistic creations.” It makes sense to consider all editions of “Hamlet” separately, as...

Here in the Pacific Northwest it has been cool this year.  Only four days above 90 in July as opposed to 14 last year.  My electric meter is happy but my tomatoes aren’t.  But in the Midwest and Southeast it’s been a different story.  A dangerous heat wave baked a large swath of the nation Thursday from Texas to New York with high humidity making temperatures feel well over 100....

Updated, 11.41 AM PDT. That’s the message underlying the news that Verizon and Google have reached their own “self regulation” — an agreement that violates the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of net neutrality. Net neutrality is, for the internet, akin to what happens on telephone networks: AT&T can’t treat an incoming call from Verizon any differently than it treats one from...

Bloomberg is reporting that Verizon and Google have reached a deal on how to handle Internet traffic: The compromise as described would restrict Verizon from selectively slowing Internet content that travels over its wires, but wouldn’t apply such limits to Internet use on mobile phones, according to the people, who asked not to be identified before an announcement. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt won’t...