Live from the Nuke Free Zone

People have a tendency to view regions of the world in dramatically oversimplified terms. This is probably partly a kind of survival tactic; cognitive dissonance in dealing with very foreign areas is dealt with more easily by painting them in some sort of black and white, rigid context that’s easy to understand. Of course, this […]

If you remember, I’ve mentioned that I’m a student in the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley.
This morning, I received an interesting email on the list for all SIMS students from a fellow student and friend of mine, Joseph Hall. And here’s what’s up. […]

Hooray for the exam crunch, which partly explains why I’ve been so silent lately. I’m sitting on a couple entries about Mid-East democratization (and democratization in general) and some thoughts on the activist movements these days that I really intend on writing soon dammit seriously mean it gonna gonna unslack really for sure send nags […]

Via Philosawyer on Plastic, a significant story about Iraq that is easy to overlook.
I’ve been one of many people criticizing, and even condemning, the United States’ failure to have a plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. It turns out, now, that the United States did have a plan. The Department of State had started work […]

Yesterday, the People’s Republic of China made history. Not that you’d really know much about it if you paid attention to the Western news.
At about 8pm or so MDT last night - or 9am Wednesday morning in Inner Mongolia - the Chinese did what they’ve been saying they’d do for the last two […]

I hate having to do this, and I know we’re not a well-read blog (and I’m honestly not sure how to change that, probably updating more often than once a week would be a good thing, but alas…), but I’ve banned a few IPs belonging to known spammers. If this affects your ability to […]

Alright, so two months of sheer madness in California will finally be over tomorrow night. I have no idea how my fellow Californians on the blog (Warrior Tang and jrenken) intend to vote on the recall, but this is the way I see it, and have pretty much seen it since this whole mess […]

From the “Holy #!@%” department…
Have the right wing no shame? Nor sense? Certainly they have no loyalty to this country, as shown by the actions (and inactions) taken by so-called conservatives regarding the intentional undermining of the United States’ security by the Bush White House.
Now Novak, having apparently not learned that subverting your own country’s […]

There have been some recent polls with absolutely crazy results. Literally crazy, like 20% think Iraq nuked U.S. troops in the field during the recent invasion, or 70% think Saddam Hussein had something to do with the September 11 attacks.
The University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes identified three major misperceptions (aka falsehoods) that […]

The far right wing doesn’t want anybody to be concerned about the Wilson leak scandal, so they’ve been tossing a few lies and fallacies at the press, hoping they’ll go away. Here are some of the more obvious ones.
The “Coffee is supposed to be hot!” defense
This attempts to paint the Wilson leak as a trivial […]