If I were to offer a seminar on the nature of war, I believe the first class session would include a showing of the film Wag the Dog.1 Those who wish to justify the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of total strangers in the name of “good” versus “evil,” or “national honor,” will lik

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

—Albert Einstein

To understand the machinations of a complex world, one must become sensitive to how apparently separate phenomena interconnect to produce unexpected consequences. Otherwise intelligent men and women struggle to make sense of the destructive turbulence that is fast becoming the norm in modern society.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

—T.S Eliot

I don’t know why so many people are getting agitated over the Obama administration’s acknowledged use of a “secret panel” to order the killing of Americans without any judicial due process. The practice is an old American tradition, one particularly resorted to in time of such economic downturns as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like the Obama reinstitution, the earlier model operated in secret and without any legislative authority or judicial supervision.

I continue to receive responses from readers who cannot understand why I do not have a “what can we do?” answer to the problems that beset not only America, but the entire world. There is a sad, childlike quality to many of these e-mails, as though there were some authority figure—be it a politician or a writer—who could offer a magic solution to any difficulty.

In previous years, and on the first day of class, I have given my new students a ballot, indicating that “it is time to elect the leader of a great nation,” and offering them two candidates, A and B.

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

—Tom Paine

Common Sense

GABRIELA: And you believe everything the authorities tell you?

FRANZ KAFKA: Well, I have no reason to doubt.

GABRIELA: They’re authorities! That’s reason enough.

—From the movie Kafka

Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

—George Orwell