Monthly Archives: September 2007

Ric Was Right

At the beginning and end of 2004, I wrote here that it would be the year that determined whether America would remain a democracy. The axis upon which that question turned was whether George Bush would receive a second term in the White House, but there was more to it than that. Through [...]

Stanley Milgram, Call Your Office

In 1961, in response to the “I was just following orders” defense of Holocaust logistician Adolf Eichmann, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram devised a series of experiments in which volunteers were led to believe they were administering progressively stronger electric shocks to a fellow volunteer on the order of an authority figure conducting the experiment. [...]

The Far Side of Apocalypse

This week’s news is dominated by the war debate in Washington, where the president and his generals urge the Congress to pour more lives and money into the Pit of No Progress.
Elsewhere in the news, Russia’s Vladimir Putin fired his prime minister and legislature, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his resignation after months of [...]

Slime of War

If there can be a good war, then World War II was it. It was an unambiguous battle between good and evil and the good guys won. Another bonus was – oddly – the universal draft that pulled men from all walks of life and ranging in age from late teens to early [...]