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US lawmakers are having a hearing on how to deal with the threat of asteroids, which polished off the dinosaurs and could polish off us. The US is now namby pamby, lacking a manned space program and clueless. Contrast with Russia: Aljazeera English reports on a Russian hearing on dealing with the real threat of […]

My essay, “What Would a Rand Paul Libertarian Foreign Policy Look Like?”, is out at Truthdig Excerpt: “On Saturday, Paul emerged as the winner of the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. Although none of the straw poll winners has gone on to become president, Paul can’t be ruled out […]

ReportingSatire explores St. Patrick’s Day:

Scientists at a conference in Italy have confirmed the discovery of the Higgs Boson, after further experiments performed at the large hadron collider near Geneva in Switzerland, built in the late ’90s by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the cooperation of 10,000 scientists. The Higgs Boson is associated with a field that […]

William deBuys writes at Tomdispatch.com Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having […]

The selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the new pope signals the first time the Roman Catholic Church has been headed by a non-European since St. Gregory III (d. 741), who was what we would today call either a Lebanese or a Syrian. (Of course, the church holds that a Palestinian was […]

Journalist Mark Kukis (Time magazine correspondent in Iraq 2006-2009) writes in a guest piece for Informed Comment Iraqis have a phrase they use to describe the U.S. invasion and early occupation. They call it “the collapse,” and in conversation the term is understood to mean the time covering the fall of Saddam Hussein to roughly […]