Author: Burt Likko

Of Two Minds At Once

It takes four Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court to bring a case onto the docket. Typically when fewer than four indicate they want to review a case, the case dies a quiet death...

Puts You There Where Things Are Hollow

Today’s question from the good doctor makes me ask a more basic one. Why do people crave fame? Is fame useful for something else? It’s obviously not always a platform to wealth. It’s not always a...

Libyan Spider Hole

The Beeb is reporting that Muammar Quaddafi has captured by Libya’s transitional government, hiding in a spider hole much like Saddam Hussein had been. Or maybe he was killed. (UPDATE: Al-Jazeera and the Gray Lady are...

A Hundred Thousand Words Later…

I just finished A Feast For Crows last night. Now I’m considering whether to drop the extra money on A Dance With Dragons, but of course I know I’m going to. Still, I am taking a...

Jerry Blows The Call

Let’s say you and I are sitting at lunch and you get up to use the restroom. Uninvited, I grab your cell phone and start paging through your text messages and your directory and...

Getting Into Shape For The Election

A reversal of policy like this has to have come from either Holder or Obama. And it hasto be motivated by the fact that November 6, 2012, is less than 400 days away. It’s...

Poway Prohibits Pedagogical Proselytization

A calculus teacher named Bradley Johnson at a public high school in Poway, California decorated his classroom with posters described as: …two large banners, each about seven-feet wide and two feet tall, hung on...

Online Universities

My co-blogger has some excellent thoughts up about online univerisities and non-traditional students. I think it’s front page material. Please take a visit to Not A Potted Plant and give him your thoughts and...

A Lemon Of An Idea In Alabama

If you are convicted of a misdemeanor in Baldwin County, Alabama (that’s on the east side of Mobile Bay, bordering Florida, with a county seat in the I’m-sure-it’s-lovely city of Bay Minette), the judges...

A Work In Progress

The English word “republic” is taken from the Latin phrase “res publica,” a concept which embraced the government, the culture, the community, and the aggregate sum of public acts of citizens. After the meeting...

A Ghastly Price For Success: Krokodil

The war in Afghanistan (remember that one?) clearly is resulting in, at long last, a decrease in the opium poppy trade, and the concomitant decrease in the global supply of recreational heroin. Apparently, heroin...

A Lost Opportunity In San Juan Capistrano

A Lost Opportunity In San Juan Capistrano

The government, and people acting on behalf of the government, may not endorse religion, and may not favor religion over non-religion. By the same token, they may not endorse atheism nor favor non-religion over...

A Decade of Decriminalization

Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized drugs, including “hard” drugs like cocaine and heroin. Since then, drug-related crime is down substantially, addiction is down, and drug-related health problems (i.e., infections from unsterilized heroin needles) are...

Redlining the Declaration

Those who are interested in such things are welcome to persue my annual meditation on the United States’ Declaration of Independence.

Scandinavian Reality Blindness

In Norway, teachers are trained and encouraged to teach non-traditional gender roles to four-year-olds. This includes the use of books that caused tremendous controversy here in the USA, like “King and King.” Generally this...