Blog
In Slick! Russia’s ambassador to the Persian-Gulf sultanate of Moq’tar points out to Bobby Gatling that while Moq’tar is 3,700 kilometers from Moscow it is 11,000 kilometers distant from Washington. The message: Russia, too, has legitimate geopolitical interests. But today, those interests seem to matter very little. And Russia’s demise as a world power offers…
There’s an old joke: When I graduated from high school, I thought my parents were ignorant and out of touch. When I graduated from college, I was amazed at how much they had learned. I write this because Sunday is Father’s Day. My father, Morris, died on June 18, 1983 at eighty. It was a…
I once read a story about the Holocaust, which may or may not be apocryphal. Not that it matters. Nothing—as well as everything—about the Holocaust is impossible to believe. What’s important is that the story’s conclusion tells us a great deal about humanity’s longing for God. One afternoon, a group of Jewish prisoners engages in…
I just spent four weeks out of the country, most of the time in Israel plus three days in Jordan and a long weekend in London. Based on that, I offer a few observations about this week’s Egyptian presidential first-round election, which produced two finalists—Mohamed Morsi of the Islamic Brotherhood and former Air Force General…
In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian university professor, theorized that in the new television age, everyone would enjoy 15 minutes of fame. The artist Andy Warhol took up that theory. After all, TV was fast becoming a global phenomenon. I remember the coverage of the first manned lunar landing in July 1969 and Richard…
A line piled up at the ATM yesterday afternoon, and I stood behind a man my age wearing a Raiders cap—a rarity in San Francisco. He turned. “Damn banks,” he muttered. “And I’ll tell you what’s worse. Wall Street.” I nodded. He had a point, although the Dow closed above 13000 going into the Easter…
You don’t really need to find out what’s going on You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone Just leave well enough alone, keep your dirty laundry “Dirty Laundry” by Don Henley, released 1982 In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Chip Johnson asks why so many Oaklanders focus on the killing of a…
The murder of sixteen Afghan civilians allegedly by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales has set many Americans to soul searching. The killings were in themselves terrible. They also have caused serious deterioration in the tenuous U.S.-Afghan relationship. But even more is involved concerning something each of us must fear about ourselves. Family and friends portray Bales—now…