This week’s visit to Pravda gives us this discussion of certain, ahem, physical problems encountered by cosmonauts during and after lengthy space missions. I am reminded somewhat of the brilliant “In space, no one can hear you cream” by Ayn Clouter, IIRC both on her own eponymous blog and on The American Street (where you can check out my own contributions each Saturday, which this week, relate to Arthur Miller and Eason Jordan). Back to the subject at hand (or not… as it were…), the weightlessness of space impacts… muscles and… potency. The concept of weightless sexual intercourse is also...

In this most amusing op-ed from Murdoch’s Times of London (a new addition to our sidebar, btw), we get this lament about the big problem with Britain’s Tories: the Conservative Party wants to be just like the New Labour Party!. The context of the piece is a critique of a BBC documentary on the opposition party in Britain, noting its tepidness, and jealousy of the means and methods of the party in power. (Key line: “No man is a hero to his valet.”) The author’s suggested course for the Tories is that they be an actual opposition party: fire in...

It’s that time again, when Congress insists on dragging out its nearly annual ritual of attempting to bayonet the sick, unemployed, divorced or merely unlucky, by repealing one of nation’s most important laws guaranteeing that entrepreneurial risk and spirit will remain strong, and that people don’t die in the streets, our bankruptcy protections. I have commented on the subject before, noting that Bill Clinton’s finest hour was in vetoing a prior version of “bankruptcy reform” (meaning, ostensibly, repeal: forcing debtors with no means of paying back outrageously high interest rate consumer debt… to pay it back). As regular readers know,...

The Cold Heaven by William Butler Yeats Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting Heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago; And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason, Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro, Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken, Confusion of...

Tough talk a Bruxelles today from Secretaire d’Etat Incompetentalleezza Rice, at a NATO meeting, where she more or less said Iran remains a bone of contention between the United States and Europe, according to this from Le Monde. Watching “Dr. Rice” even without the sound as I did this morning in a midtown coffee shop is disconcerting enough; had I had the sound on and listened to the same kind of drumbeat now sounding vis a vis our coming war with Iran that we heard with respect to our last war with Iraq would be… depressing. Hence, I’d much rather...

That would specifically be a so-called “working group on situations” where Cuba and Zimbabwe would join the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Hungary in a committee that will plan and coordinate details of next months’ meeting of the entire 53 nation United Nations human rights commission, which is most amusingly chaired by Libyan leader Col. Moamar Qaddaffi IIRC (by whatever spelling!) The United States noted that becasue Saudi Arabia is conducting (men only) village scale elections, its dictatorial theocratic regime (elements of which sponsored the 9-11 attacks and which on occasion orders school girls back into burning buildings to their deaths...

In this case, the Republicans are the victor, and the spoils are in the President’s “austerity” budget, which will slash and burn over 150 programs while still making the deficit worse. Spoils you say? Remember: the voters said that punishing people for being poor is just standing for good old Christian values. At least, that’s what somebody in the White House seems to think the voters said. Of course– simply freezing spending for one year and reversing the President’s tax cuts— in their entirety– as Howard Dean proposed (and was duly attacked and ridiculed by John Kerry, among others)– would...

A brief stop by to Beijing’s People’s Daily gives us this cryptic read of the even more cryptic article recently coauthored by former Republican Secretaries of State Henry “10 Most Evil Men of the Twentieth Century TM” Kissinger and George “Yes, I’m on the Board of Bechtel and you don’t want to know where else” Schultz. Their analysis: the United States as opened a big can o’ woop’ass in Iraq, and must decide between the wonderful rhetoric of “democracy” and “freedom”, or the less wonderful reality that the aforementioned will result in a pro-Iran, Shiite dominated Shiite axis from Tehran...

This pleasant reminder from our friend Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey writing in Pravda, who gives us this from East Asia about the United Nation’s World Health Organization telling us that avian flu jumping over to humans is now at an emergency state. For those wondering, the last time something like that happened on a grand scale (right after World War I), something like 20 to 30 million people died (let’s just say that given the then smaller world population at the time, a comparable pandemic would kill over 100,000,000 people these days… and since a lot of them would be White Americans…...

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, widely acknowledged as one of the principle architects of the underlying neo-conservative dogma that supplied the phisosophical underpinnings for “the end justifies the means and the means are lying, lying, lying” entry into the Iraq war, denied that that the insurgency represented some “nationalist” movement. The evidence of this, according to Wolfowitz, is the high turnout in the national elections on Sunday, which “proves” widespread popular support for the new Iraqi government. This, of course, is a yes-but situation. Yes, the turnout was very high– higher than American turnouts as percentages of registered voters– but...