Frozen Toothpaste

I had an inkling that I was in for trouble when I saw the provocative title of this 2006 film. I decided to give it a look anyway. I was rather certain I wouldn’t like it when I saw that this documentary was made by an outfit which calls itself the Guerrilla News Network, which […]

On today’s “Other People’s Words,” John F. Burns’s — former Baghdad Bureau chief for the New York Times — on the way forward in Iraq. This quote is from an absolutely excellent conversation he had Monday with Charlie Rose. If you have the time (and bandwidth), I would recommend that you watch the entire thing.
I can understand why there […]

Increasingly, I hear something I never thought I would. People are lamenting — yes, lamenting — that this generation of Americans doesn’t engage in enough disorderly and disruptive protests. Something has leached into the cultural zeitgeist that has convinced some of the more liberal powers-that-be that people of my generation are too reserved and too quiet.
I first heard about […]

I’m fairly certain that the most dangerous people in the world are those that nihilistically believe that their group — especially one they find essential to their identity — is under attack. Many relatively powerless people with such fears, rational or otherwise, resort to terrorism. Having no ability to defend their group through conventional warfare, they strike anything and […]

Maslow’s hierarchy is neither incredibly new nor incredibly novel. If Wikipedia’s to be believed, the idea was originally published in 1943 in a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Further, it’s an idea that, once known, seems to have been all but self-evident the whole time.
Maslow’s basic idea is that certain needs always take […]