- I'll try not to comment too much more about the upcoming presidential
election except to say that the outcome will be incredibly
important for the future of the USA and perhaps for all of mankind.
Please make sure that you are registered to vote and do
not fail to vote, even if you live in a non-swing state.
- From Spiro Agnew to Dan Quayle, I'm a bit
disturbed about the willingness of some Republicans
to choose vice presidential candidates so obviously unqualified to
be president. Here is an
informative editorial
and article
from the New York Times about McCain's choice.
And here is a surprising video by Lawrence Lessig comparing Palin's
experience with that of every vice president of the United
States: Palin's
experience in just 12 minutes.
- In my opinion,
Bill Clinton's speech
at this year's Democratic convention set out the issues of this year's
presidential election very well.
- The following is an excellent editorial about one of the Bush
legacies that will take an extremely long time to
undo: "Lock And Load".
- Sorry, I haven't had much to say yet about the presidential
campaign, but here is an excellent editorial by the New York Times,
May 1, 2008: Gas Guzzler, Gambit.
- Good news that Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove have resigned.
Here are the two relevant Times editorials:
"Gonzales Advances
Cause of Justice", and
"Mr. Rove Gets Out of Town".
- Here is Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker on
General Taguba's
report. Here is the final paragraph:
" `From the moment a soldier
enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless
service,' Taguba said. `And yet when we get to the senior-officer
level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be
mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws
of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva
Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of
our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I
believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders
responsible should be held accountable.' "
- The New York Times
editorial, An
Exit Strategy for Guantánamo urges support for Senator Dianne
Feinstein's bill to shut down the Guantánamo Bay military prison: "The
five-year-old military prison at Guantánamo Bay, with its indefinite
detention rules, lack of judicial review and insufficiently regulated
interrogation techniques, is an ugly stain on this country's long
tradition of respect for the rule of law and an endless propaganda
bonanza for America's enemies. Yet it is clear that despite the
good advice of friendly foreign leaders, members of Congress and even
his own cabinet officials, President Bush has no intention of closing
the facility unless Congress forces him to do so."
See also: Gitmo: A
National Disgrace.
- Here is
a perceptive and
relevant Times article about David Halberstam, the great
journalist who died in April, 2007.
- Here is a Talk of
the Town piece in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik
which in my opinion gets it right about recent shootings in this country.
-
- Here is a
New York Times editorial from January 3, 2007, about
preserving
Net Neutrality.
- The National Research Council recently issued a report with recommendations on how to overcome the bias
against women in science, and to encourage more women to become
great scientists. Here
is an excellent interview with Donna Shalala
who chaired the committee that wrote the report.
You can read the whole report on-line
here.
- Here is a New York Times editorial from Sept. 11, 2006,
9-11-06.
Also, Paul Krugman has a good op-ed piece called, "Promises Not
Kept". Since Times Select started, I avoid posting his articles, but
here are a few paragraphs to give you the idea:
"Meanwhile, much of Afghanistan has fallen back under the control of
drug-dealing warlords and of the Taliban, which sheltered Al Qaeda
before it was driven from Kabul. NATO's top commander has appealed
for more troops; the top British commander in Afghanistan has said
that fighting there is fiercer than in Iraq. And the numbers bear him
out: since the beginning of 2006, the NATO force in Afghanistan has
had a higher rate of fatalities than that suffered by coalition troops
in Iraq.
…
"How did it all go so wrong? The diversion of resources into a
gratuitous war in Iraq is certainly a large part of the
story. Although administration officials continue to insist that the
invasion of Iraq somehow made sense as part of a broadly defined war
on terror, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has just
released a report confirming that Saddam Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as
a threat, not an ally; he even made attempts to capture Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi.
"But Iraq doesn't explain it all. Even though the Bush
administration was secretly planning another war in early 2002, it
could still have spared some troops to provide security and allocated
more money to help the Karzai government. As in the case of planning
for postwar Iraq, however, Bush officials apparently refused even to
consider the possibility that things wouldn't go exactly the way
they hoped.
"These days most agonizing about the state of America's foreign
policy is focused, understandably, on the new enemies we've made in
Iraq. But let's not forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 are still
at large, five years later, and that they have re-established a large
safe haven."
- Here's a great article -- "For
Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They're Good at
It" -- by a former New York Times Science Editor that
speaks very well to Larry Summer's stupid and harmful comment that he thinks
the lack of female representation among tenured science professors at
Harvard is the female gender's problem, not Harvard's problem. And here is a great
talk by Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton
University on how to help increase the number of women scientists in academia.
- I recently wrote the entry on Computability
and Complexity in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Here is a profile of George
W. Bush by Ron Suskind. It appeared in the Times Magazine in
October, 2004. It explains, better than anything I have seen before or
since, how the current administration really seems to believe that
truth and facts are simply irrelevant. Here's a quote:
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that
the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications
director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to
Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me
something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I
now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the
reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the
world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that
reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be
left to just study what we do.' "
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