Category: Government Studies
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Government Abuse of the Filter Bubble
The FBI needs a warrant from a judge to search your laptop. But if you use Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail for your e-mail, you ‘lose your constitutional protections immediately…’ Ideas worth re-visiting from Eli Pariser’s 2009 The Filter Bubble. This third installment looks at how governments might abuse Internet personalization. “The FBI needs a…
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About Mohamed
Every year this time my thoughts turn to Mohamed (his story is here). I had reason to conjure his story this fall and found the image below. Pictured is the American Library, Kabul, circa 1958. Is this the building where Mohamed learned to love the United States? Where he read American authors and watched American movies?…
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Gandhi at 150
It’s been 150 years since Gandhi’s birth, initiating a circle that goes round today. This year Gandhi Jayanti falls on the fourth day of Navratri, and so we’ve made his iconic ashram part of our annual display. It’s nearly finished, this replica of his simple home on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Gujarat.…
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Cube Farm
BOGIE, or Why I Wrote Patchworks My second novel addresses gun violence in America. It didn’t start out that way. Patchworks‘ protagonist, a millennial grad student interning for peanuts within a government bureaucracy, didn’t appear until several months into writing. And, angry as I felt to see America shredded over and over again by episodes of massive…
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War Novels and the War on Terror
More than 16 years ago, standing beneath a massive banner, George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq: “Mission Accomplished.” What followed this publicity stunt—he arrived on an aircraft carrier off California’s coast riding in a Navy jet—were years of insurgency and bloodshed in pursuit of a Dick Cheney figment: Saddam…
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Ground Control to Chandrayaan
To India’s space scientists today: Keep your eyes toward the heavens… Your efforts these last eight years, culminating in a profound silence from Lunar Lander Vikram moments before touchdown, share a vast and spirited company. Brave adventurers have gone before you and not returned. Their sacrifices line our memories. Their endeavors fire our imagination. Your vision gives…
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Again
While we sit idly by No longer dumbfounded Just dumb Numb Gunman kills 7 in a rampage that started with a West Texas traffic stop
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Sold Out at In-N-Out
Must applaud the good fortune visited upon author Ted Gup this week in the form of free advertising for his former best-seller The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. Published almost two decades ago, Gup’s book found renewed celebrity when it appeared on the front page of New York’s gift to…
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Fly America, Call the Philippines (pt II)
When your official government itinerary on U.S.-flag contract carrier United Airlines is thrown into disarray because of concerns about flying over Iranian air space… …and the United agents can’t confirm the final leg of your trip (which includes traveling on Air Canada, Germany’s Lufthansa, and Air India) for 24 hours… …so that after two hours on…
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Jon Voight’s IOU
Well, gee, is anyone surprised by Jon Voight’s absurd words of support addressed to the people of the Republican Party? Is anyone surprised to see the actor who portrayed Milo Minderbinder, Joseph Heller’s brilliant rendering of a profiteering con artist in Catch-22, praise the most notorious and corrupt corporate scoundrel America has ever produced? Sure,…
Ben East Books 