Author Archives: floegel

Fool Sovereignty

6/3/2004 – 10:40 am

Sometime between now and the June 30th deadline for handing over “full sovereignty” to the new Iraqi government, some American representative will have to walk into the Iraqi desert and count the grains of sand, to make sure they’re all handed over. The unlucky bureaucrat assigned to this task can use neither supercomputer nor statistical […]

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If I Had a Million Dollars

5/27/2004 – 6:32 pm

Ads for the New York State lottery, beamed across Lake Champlain, feature groups of people singing, “If I had a million dollars, I would buy you a house.” The idea, of course, is to convince several million people to buy a lottery ticket. The odds of winning a million-dollar lottery are something on the order […]

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How Far Up? For How Long?

5/20/2004 – 2:33 pm

The two questions that most urgently need answers in the Iraq torture scandal are: How far up and for how long? How far up the chain of command did authorization of torture go and how long has this been sanctioned practice? The trickle of testimony on this subject has become a stream; next week it […]

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The Fuse is Burning

5/13/2004 – 9:55 am

Last year, George W. Bush told us the U.S. had to invade Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction. Later we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the Bush administration had twisted facts to make it seem as if there were. This year, Mr. Bush told us […]

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Hard to Believe

5/6/2004 – 8:44 am

When my friend Lynn was in college, a history professor assigned her to research the Holocaust by reading microfilms of American newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Although many people claimed to have been shocked to discover in the spring of 1945 that Nazi Germany had sent the bulk of Europe’s Jews into a system […]

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Dude, Where’s My Nuke?

4/29/2004 – 10:33 am

I graduated from high school 25 years ago next month. I doubt I’ll go to the reunion, but a quarter-century is an appropriate vantage point for a backward glance. Jimmy Carter was president then, his reputation has traveled several full circles since. Gas cost 80 cents a gallon, the Cold War was still on, the […]

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The Computer Ate My Vote

4/22/2004 – 1:56 am

I’m in Canton, Ohio this week to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting of Diebold, Incorporated, the leading manufacturer of touch-screen voting machines that don’t work. I’m not a shareholder; I’m an unwelcome guest. I’ll explain why shortly. After the fiasco that was the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, […]

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