Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
This week's music alluded to in the novel The Ten Weeks is Santana's "Black Magic Woman," a song that got a good deal of radio play at the time the novel is set. But I'd like to digress a bit and use it to illustrate how academics (and I am one, part time at least) …
Continue reading "Santana: Black Magic Woman, and the Isolation of Academia"
Not Conservative Margaret Thatcher, nor Socialist Francois Mitterand: History comes back to haunt us. Just over 20 years ago, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Britain and western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the Nato communique may sound different, but disregard …
Continue reading "The Hard Truth: Some Didn’t Want the Germans Back Together"
They're at it again with credit: Earlier this month, a congressional oversight panel released its first analysis of the Obama administration’s $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), an effort to keep 4 million families from losing their homes. The analysis shows that the Treasury, in trying to keep people in homes they can’t afford, …
Continue reading "Our Subprime Federal Government, and a Lesson for the Church"
Yes, they do, as was probably the case in the Jundallah bombing on Sunday: This brings us to Saudi Arabia, whose relations with Iran are passing through a period of mutual antipathy bordering on hostility. Tehran has alleged that Iranian hajj pilgrims are being maltreated by Saudi authorities and that Saudi intelligence is accountable for …
Continue reading "The Sunnis put the Squeeze on Shi’ite Iran"
It's not just a road for Hillaire Belloc, either: In a move with potentially sweeping implications for relations between the Catholic church and some 80 million Anglicans worldwide, the Vatican has announced the creation of new ecclesiastical structures to absorb disaffected Anglicans wishing to become Catholics. The structures will allow those Anglicans to hold onto …
Continue reading "Time to Fish or Cut Bait: The Road to Rome Just Got Easier for Anglicans"
More likely in a limited sense, with the Traditional Anglican Communion: There will be a briefing tomorrow (20 October). Featured is the topic of relations of the Holy See with "Anglicans". The main speakers will be the Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith, His Eminence Card. Levada and the fomer Sotto-Segretario of …
Continue reading "Is It Possible? Press Conference 20 October on Anglican and Catholic Unity"
Well, that's what he did in the Huffington Post: But if Obama doesn't weigh in forcefully and say "no" to the hush money for Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America's middle class will get walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other right wing-nut populist will wallop Obama. …
Continue reading "Robert Reich Threatens the World With Sarah Palin"
About two years ago I quoted the French poet Edouard Haraucourt and his line "Partir, c´est mourir un peu" (to leave is to die a little) relative to the Episcopal (or any) church. That quote is what struck me in Charles Rubin's summary of the IRS' rules on Americans who become expatriates: The Code requires …
Continue reading "To Leave is to Die a Little. From the U.S., It’s Expensive."
The flap over Rush Limbaugh's exclusion from a share of the St. Louis Rams is absurd. American football has to be the worst place in our culture for liberals to make a stand like this. It is: Competitive, in a culture where cooperation has been deemed to be the norm. It has winners and losers, …
That's what American Prospect's Mark Schmitt is thinking about in his article "Left Without Labour:" The new progressive coalition follows the lines of the "emerging Democratic majority" that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted in their 2002 book of that name: minority, professional, and younger voters, with help from a large gender gap. This is …
Positive Infinity 