The Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, pronounced jay-sock by members of the US armed forces, carries with it a mystique. The press, JSOC’s promoters and its critics, as well as the entertainment media, have all contributed to its mystique; and that mystique is promoted my the military because it functions as [...]

DISTRIBUTE WIDELY… please I don’t generally engage in reaction-blogging, but I just now finished watching a live town-hall meeting in Florida with the prez, wherein the last person called upon asked Obama why he hadn’t fulfilled his campaign promise to abolish the military’s homophobic policy of don’t-ask-don’t-tell. Obama meandered on for a few moments about [...]

Well, we need to have the discussion. There’s a lot to unpack on this grotesque Supreme Court decision; and a lot of people are going to be talking about it for quite a long while. When something is being chattered about like this is, and will be, then some of the most powerfully held and [...]

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.” In 2008, [...]

I’ll be lazy and just grab three feature articles from a mainstream “left” site for now. I figure most readers know the outline of the story, but wanted to acknowledge it publicly anyway. The consensus is true enough: the death toll in Haiti’s recent severe earthquake was far higher than it would have been in [...]

Politics, said Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Yet we are living in a time when politics as widely practised is quite the reverse: the art and worship of the Impossible, namely of the impossible dream of fostering infinite greed, infinite accumulation, infinite “growth,” on a finite planet; of fighting infinite war to control [...]

Part 2 of Kathy Miriam’s brilliant essay on the oxymoron of liberal-feminism. PART ONE LINK One Dimensional Feminism, Part 2 Where have all the flowers gone? A Tale of a (Lost) Passion Oscar Wilde, writing in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, said, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not [...]

The virtual host where Feral Scholar lives will be taken down tonight (Pacific Time) for some overdue maintenance. Do not be alarmed if you are unable to see Feral Scholar for an hour or two, during the late-shift tonight (Monday Jan 11 PST, may be wee-hours Tues for more Easterly folks). There should be no [...]

I live on a moderate-sized sailboat. It reduces my carbon footprint to inhabit about 300 square feet instead of the 1100 I enjoyed in my house on land. (Actually, I confess that I also “inhabit” a storage unit — but it isn’t heated — and I do sometimes take a bath — sweet luxury — [...]