Steve wrote an interesting look at why someone like Pat Buchanan should not be painted with a broad condemnation brush and written-off solely based on his comments related to race. Buchanan gave a very interesting analysis * of the war issue and the larger ideological context in which it resides : [ * - Jeanne Kirkpatrick was a professor of mine at Georgetown University. From 1994-95 I studied in her courses 'Critique of Utopia' and 'Capitalism, Competition, and Democracy' .] I agree with everything Buchanan says in the video but do I agree with everything Buchanan says anywhere else I have heard him? Certainly not but it worries me not an iota because , as Steve mentioned, he is not elected and has no public power to wield over any of us. Nevertheless, as the above video attests, Buchanan has had valid and insightful ideas and analyses for many big questions, not the least of which was a very realpolitik critique of the Iraq war. Even more, his critique was based n...

I usually try to avoid stealing stories from other Delaware blogs, but over at Colossus Hube got me this time with The Smallest Violin , about British families that now live completely on the dole and believe it is their absolute right not to have to work, ever. According to the original story in the Daily Mail : Six million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job and "benefits are a way of life", according to a report by MPs. Shock figures also revealed that 20,000 households in Britain are pocketing more than £30,000 a year in state benefits. With thousands of children growing up in families where their parents and grandparents have never worked, a senior government adviser warned this week of a "terrible legacy" of youngsters who had no expectation of ever getting a job. The quotes from the ten-member McFadden family are so unnerving that even Daily Mail readers (and Hube!) at first thought the piece must be a satire: "I left school at 15 with no...

. . . and why we need to listen to some of the things he says. Dana has a valid point at Delaware Watch that racist observations come out of Pat Buchanan's writing, and he is also arguably a homophobe. I don't want the man to be President or hold any other elected office. I despise his take on domestic politics. That having been said, I'm in agreement with Libertarian Girl , who notes what Buchanan wrote before we invaded Iraq: With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavor at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from his...

I don't think our grandparents had this problem--although they may have had it without knowing it. I am referring to the dramatic expansion of special dietary needs in today's world, and I'll use my family as an example of just how much fun it is to purchase and prepare (let alone budget for) food and meals that my entire family can eat. There are six of us. My wife and youngest daughter (the twelve-year-old sometime blogger) are both rebound hypoglycemics. They cannot have significant amounts of sugar in anything they eat (unless carefully matched against countervailing fat content). All baking recipes that require large amounts of sugar have to be modified with items like concentrated fruit juice (because neither of them can tolerate most chemical sugar substitutes like aspartame, either). My daughter needs to consume a significant amount of milk every day. They are the simplest people to feed. My older daughter is lactose intolerant and has problems digesting meat tha...

For those of you out there in the blogoshpere who felt that perhaps I was being too hard on the dollar and its devaluation, I finally found a picture that represents what is occurring between the dollar and the euro at this moment.... Basically, yes, the Euro is taking the Dollar in well you know...it is self-explanatory. And just as Nicholas Sarkozy has commented this will not be good for the United States and from November until now has risked breaking out into a full blown trade war between the trading partners.... Now that the risk of a trade war is settling into the reality that there is a trade war one can only speculate that currency fluctuations will grow in proportion to the intensity and amount of conflict this causes between the EU and the US. Fred Bergsten said as much in 1997 and at the time, many in the current administration were either not listening to him or not paying attention. At its best today 1.00 U.S. Dollar = 0.6406 Euro. At its worst 1.00 U.S. Dollar = 0.5...

I was going to post something about gay and lesbian rights in Thailand, but, these posts pretty much say it all....from the actual movement toward freedom and rights for lesbian women to the vulgar, these posts really do say it all.... http://www.isiswomen.org/wia/wia398/soc00007.html http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3693/is_199903/ai_n8852028 http://www.mangosauce.com/farang_life/farang_lesbian_lust_thailand.php If you take the time to read through them, you will see I do not have anything to add.

Poverty is not the normal place you would expect to find the well to do. But today thanks largely to a socially minded young man named Marcelo Armstrong who took a few tourists into Rocinha , Rio de Janeiro's largest favela , or shantytown, you find people from all walks of life slumming it. From rap music in the United States, to the development of favela tourism or barrio tourism in Latin America and Asia one finds that being poor, while it has innumerable hardships, is becoming cool. Of course while one must be excessively poor to get a visit from Bono or Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt, the middle class can now revel in their relative affluence, despite their growing minority status. Favela tourism is often called by its critics an form of exploitative practice ; but is it? Many times shanty tourism brings much needed money into the barrio and into the life of the people who need it the most: the poor. When entrepreneurial minded, poverty stricken people become self-taught...