Down to Chinatown

When the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) labels your country a security threat, you will probably sit up and take notice. The Global Times published the results of a pulse survey where 90% of the respondents indicated that China's security was threatened by India.

The Butchers of Corleone

The Mafia were constantly in my thoughts as we travelled around Sicily. This may have had something to do with the book I was reading at the time, John Follain's The Last Godfathers, which was so cram-packed with gruesome murder and body disposal methodology that I was finding it hard to look at an oil barrel without calculating its remains-dissolving acid capacity in litres.

Delaware's Art of Judging

Richard Posner should have been a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Over the years, the legend of Posner, now 70, as the best legal mind of his generation has only grown, while the test for the Supreme Court had veered, Scalia aside, toward the Stepfordian.

ActiveCampaign Offers 1-2-All Email Marketing Software

The software developer ActiveCampaign offers 1-2-All, email marketing software that can be used to create, manage and send email to thousands of customers and prospective leads.

Student Loans Are Evil

While President Obama's new plan claims to cut out the middlemen banks, they are still wedged firmly in between. What is most important, however is the continued, astonishing lack of consumer protections that gone unaddressed, will continue to enable massive tuition inflation, and a rapidly growing number of citizens for whom, due to student loan debt, going to college was the worst decision they have ever made.

Sotomayor’s Newfound Fidelity

During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sonia Sotomayor seemingly dispelled many of her critics with her statement regarding her judicial philosophy: "[It is] simple: fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make law -- it is to apply the law. And it is clear, I believe, that my record ... reflects my rigorous commitment to interpreting the Constitution according to its terms; interpreting statutes according to their terms and Congress's intent; and hewing faithfully to precedents established by the Supreme Court and by my Circuit Court. In each case I have heard, I have applied the law to the facts at hand."

Mortgage Lenders Abandon Foreclosures, Too Expensive

Mortgage lenders have made a calculated decision to abandon completing the foreclosure process because it is too expensive. Once mortgage lenders consider the expenses involved in foreclosing the property and the fees needed to resale the home, many lenders decide it far cheaper to not take legal possession of the home.

The End of Overeating

David Kessler's new book The End of Overeating contains an extremely polite but brutal assessment of the role of the modern corporate food machine in promoting obesity in America. How do corporations make us fat? By hiring food scientists to discover precisely the optimal combination of salt, sugar and fat to add to our foods.

RFID Chips Enable Hackers to Sniff Passports

The Los Angeles Times has a story about a security researcher named Chris Paget, who went cruising around the streets of San Francisco in his car, looking for electronic US passport cards (PASS cards), which have embedded RFID chips. Within an hour of driving around Fisherman's Wharf, using a scanner built from readily available parts, he had successfully captured the serial numbers of six pedestrians' passport cards -- without their knowledge.

Victory in Afghanistan Means What Again?

It is difficult to look at Afghanistan and not be reminded of another battle, a conflict with an insurgent force in Vietnam. It sounds ridiculous that a nation like the U.S. could not successfully wipe out any given enemy, especially when you consider our military budget. I bet the Soviets thought that as well when they were there.