"He didn’t give interviews, or write political essays... But he did want to get a school of students to see what he had seen: that Western liberalism led to nihilism, and had undergone a development at the end of which it could no longer define itself or defend itself. A development which took everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings, and made us into dwarf animals. Made us into herd animals—sick little dwarves, satisfied with a dangerous life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted...

Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this..."

The Power of Nightmares

The Economist endorses Kerry

Problems with pebble-bed nuclear reactors

Guantanamo prisoners sue

The New Yorker endorses a Presidential candidate for the first time in its history

Endangered languages (with fewer than 1000 speakers or with very fast decline)

SeatGuru: helps pick the best seat on a given airplane

Don't Buy Your International Tickets Online

"Unlike deregulated domestic USA airfares, international airfares are regulated both by international treaties and by an international airline price-fixing cartel, the International Air Transportation Association (IATA).

It's worth noting that every USA-based airline operating scheduled international passenger flights has voluntarily joined IATA. USA airlines' invocations of "open markets", "free trade", and "open skies" can be dismissed as completely hypocritical and self-serving drivel until such time as they exercise their right to withdraw from IATA, as any of them could at any time. USA airlines are allowed to participate in IATA "traffic conferences" only because of a special exemption granted them from USA anti-trust laws which normally forbid such industry-wide collusion on prices..."

But there's a loophole in the system: travel agents can sell tickets at a discount from the "official" (overinflated) prices. However, electronic ticketing systems like Travelocity can't:

"All official fares are "published" either in hardcopy in the Official Airline Guides (OAG) or the Air Tariff, or electronically in the computerized reservation systems (CRS's) such as Sabre, Apollo, Amadeus, Worldspan, and Gabriel. By the very nature of the IATA price-fixing system, airlines cannot admit any knowledge of the fact that agents are selling tickets for less than the official fares. So only published fares are shown in any CRS."

"The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals, and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority..."

Al Gore's latest attack on Bush

I'm going to school very hard these days

International election observers' pre-election report

World's most expensive cities.

Surrealist techniques

"We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects.

First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives...

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters...

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election."

America as a One Party State

"President Bush and his administration have embarked on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation ... The differences between President Bush and John Kerry with respect to leadership on the economy are wider than in any other presidential election in our experience. President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem... Here, as elsewhere, Bush is dead wrong, and too dogmatic to admit it." --Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and Nobel prize winner

Selective Service System: What happens in a draft

Some PATRIOT Act provisions temporarily defeated in US District court. The ruling is subject to appeal.

Carnival of Chaos: a collection of collages inspired by the violent response of George W Bush to the suicide attacks on the twin towers in New York on September 11th 2001, and his increasingly megalomaniacal behaviour since that event.

Paintings of the Soviet gulags

A word on the artist