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Folks, the Radical Pessimist is coming to a town near you!  Well, only if you are a member of the effete, sea-urchin eating, iPad for underwear, East Coast power elite in NYC or Washington DC.  But, hey, gotta start somewhere. I’ll be speaking at two events in February related to the release of The Iran Primer: [...]

I was in Washington DC at the Stewart/Colbert Rally.  I went because I live in Baltimore and I was taking my Iranian friend to DC.  I showed up at the National Mall, caught whiffs of lots of doobies, and saw Dr. Rockso the Rock and Roll Clown live and in person.  But the minute I [...]

John McCain walked out of a Senate hearing last Thursday on the subject of financial fraud and abuse in the for-profit higher education industry.  The fact that I am writing the phrase “education industry” says something, doesn’t it?  You shouldn’t be surprised that McCain, from the state of Arizona, isn’t interested in hearing the sordid [...]

Chuck did a great interview with Fred Kaufman on July 10th about his article in Harpers’ magazine on the “food bubble” of 2008.  In the interview, Chuck wondered if the price hikes in basic food commodities in 2007-8 were unprecedented, and much of the interview went into detail about how the newfangled financial products on [...]

Akbar Ganji is one of the most famous Iranian dissidents-in-exile around.  Formerly a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, he became a Greg Palast-style investigative journalist in the 1990s, releasing several tell-all books about the shadowy networks behind the Islamic Republic’s more violent doings.  After several years in jail, along with an 80-day hunger strike [...]

Some of you may not be familiar with the quickly accumulating blooper reel of the new wave of post-Soviet US-tilting democrats.  First, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ate his tie while on camera, spawning various Pythonesque spoofs and ensuring his place in Russian comic mythology (not to mention competing with Werner Herzog for gastronomic freakishness). Not [...]

I generally think Juan Cole is on the money about Middle East politics.  He speaks and reads Arabic and Persian, so he is not bound by the usual “expertise” which the overwhelming number of Middle East commentators are subject to.  Therefore, when he says that the US will be pulling out most of its troops [...]

Smokin’ Joe Stiglitz has a short review in the London Review of Books of Robert Skidelsky’s recent book on Keynes and the Great Recession, but it masks a longer think piece on the sources of the crisis and the proper response.  After a little horn-tooting, Stiglitz makes a good point: the current recession is not [...]

Chicago’s Chris Ware – the shyest cartoonist around – proffered a cover for Fortune Magazine recently.  It is a Ware-ian take on the Great Recession and its discontents. Take a look at the details in the cover up close by zooming into the image – you won’t be surprised that it was rejected.

It is safe to say that for the last thirty years the US left has ceded religious questions, and the concepts therein, to the right.  Liberal paeans to lust (Carter) and sin (Clinton) aside, it is just not discussed as much among activists and thinkers of a progressive bent.  The epitome of this trend is [...]