From the Editor’s Desk I had an interesting thought the other day. It’s not necessarily profound or anything, but it did occur to me that I’ve seeing a lot of articles lately about how China is overtaking us. The People’s Republic is becoming, we suspect, the world’s dominant power, and leaving us in the dust.…

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The other day, I read about the 6th IAA Planetary Defense Conference in Washington, DC. It was one of several gatherings at which scientists get together and asked the question, “What could we do if it looked as if an asteroid was about to impact the earth?” It is, of course, an important querry because…

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So, the other day, I found myself asking Martha, my wife, a very stupid question. That’s not unusual, of course. Stupid questions are among the things I do best. But, my particular question involved Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young and articulate New York Rep. At the time, she had just recently gone back to her old…

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Right now, you’d think that there was no occupation in the world that doens’t  have something to do with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), or, at least, in the business management of such professions. Students everywhere are pressured to STEM-it, particularly young women, for whom a career in STEM is regarded as both as…

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Last month,  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) made the rather hysterically funny comment that the current GOP resembles “‘The Office character Dwight Schrute, a power-hungry, mustard yellow shirt-wearing paper salesman who lives on a beet farm” (to quote Huffpost). Honestly, truth be told and full disclosure…I didn’t get the joke at first. I don’t watch The Office.…

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On the remote chance you haven’t heard about him already, check out Kentucky Fried Chicken’s newest stunt, the virtual colonel. The company has a long history of cleverly lampooning itself, and the world, with advertising that sometimes featured and sometimes mocked its founder, the white suited Colonel Sanders. However, in recent months, KFC has outdone…

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I have been fascinated lately by how easily politics in general, and Right Wing politics in particular, can pervert and destroy language, even reduce the most decent words to something genuinely quite vile. Take “patriot” for instance. To be a patriot is, I think, a good thing. To defend your nation against enemies, and advance…

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LR Net’s home office is (at the moment) in New Mexico. That means we tend to pay lots of attention to border-related stories. One of those that has been in the news lately is that of the ultra-right wing militia group that was patrolling the border and holding “illegal” immigrants (some of whom weren’t illegal…

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Check out this article over on The Atlantic‘s website, The End of the American Century by George Packer. In it, Packer looks at the decline and fall of the American empire. He uses as his vehicle the life and career of the late Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the end of the Bosnian war. For him,…

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From The Editor’s Desk: There have been several interesting articles in the press lately about just how awful it is to be an academic in America these days, particularly if you are an adjunct. Basically, what’s happened in the last forty years or so is that the universities have shifted most teaching tasks to non-tenured…

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