One Utah

It may have been the ugliest part of the presidential campaign so far. Just before the Texas primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran a fearful TV ad. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Clinton can save them. Like similar Republican appeals to fear, it worked. Texans who [...]

Recently, I’ve been doing some reading into game theory.  Classic game theory works on the premise that each person is a rational actor (as in classic economic theory) and will act to maximize the benefit to themselves.  Contemporary game theory however holds that how people perceive self-interest is different than traditional game theory holds; people [...]

I hope that we have learned something from the most barbaric century in history — the twentieth. I would like to see us overcome our tribal factions, and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization.
Arthur C. Clarke

There’s a presidential primary campaign, complete with dirty tricks (let’s run the video clips of that crazy black preacher one more time!) –and the news media have largely forgotten that American soldiers are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even CNN’s excellent Saturday report “This Week at War” with Tom Foreman has been renamed [...]

Easter this year is the earliest easter since 1913.  Easter won’t be this early again for something like two centuries.  What that means is that we are nearing the end of Holy Week.  Holy Week is not an easy journey; it is a journey from Palm Sunday into the Passion; a journey from celebration to brutality [...]

The New York Times reports on March 19 that whereas the Bush administration sold the Iraq war to the congress as a $50 billion investment, the actual costs are more like–
1.) ultra-conservative Pentagon estimate: $600 billion and counting
(note: this Honest Abe estimate categorically excludes “extras” such as operations in the war zone, [...]

I’m currently reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map.  Johnson is doing social history of Victorian London, focusing on a very specific incident (a cholera outbreak) and it’s impact on how we manage our cities (in terms of waste management).  However, it’s impossible to do any Victorian history without coming into contact with the paradox of Victorianism. 

I am the first to admit, I have finally lost my marbles over the idiocy of the male gender of (my gender) our species. To wit, Bush and the few millions of U.S educated - supposedly - Americans.
Sign the damn petition if only to show these criminally stupid people that WE are many more [...]

There, I said it. This country can’t afford a President McCain. Hillary Clinton claims that McCain would be a better commander in chief than Barack Obama. She couldn’t be more wrong.

Josh Marshall today has a superb take-down of McCain’s CINC credentials, after yesterday’s gaffe provided a small opening for such criticism. [...]

There’s no better way to say it than by borrowing FDR’s famous phrase. March 20, 2003 is a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America launched its first (and we hope, last) 21st Century war of aggression. This has turned into the second longest war in U.S. history, [...]

When you sleep you dream. When you dream, your brain sends messages to your body saying “Don’t move.” The phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis. What happens (apparently a lot) is that people will wake from a dream, their body is still paralyzed.  In those waking moments the brain is still in an altered state [...]

In the interest of management, I’ve closed the discussion below the “Dear Dwight” post - not because the discussion should stop but because it’s about to be pushed off the front page and the thread has gotten rather long and quite frankly I’m feeling pretty lazy.
Each of us brings a set of assumptions, experiences, ideas, and [...]