All over the country, studies show that a huge number of jail and prison inmates are functionally illiterate.

Before going to prison they've often never held down a steady job - I guess, come to think of it, that's one similarity with Paris - and when their sentences are up they often find that employers don't want anything to do with them.

Many of these men and women will cycle between jail or prison and short stints of freedom for much of their adult lives.

Maybe once the paparazzi have gotten their pics of Paris, they can hang around a little while longer and actually do some serious journalism on the growing epidemic of incarceration in the US.   more »

>Forty years ago, the world seemed to be singing in tune. On June 1, 1967, in London, The Beatles released their eighth and arguably most influential album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It marked the beginning of the Summer of Love - which, apart from Jimi Hendrix mesmerizing flower-power children in Monterey, California, also had room for the escalation of the Vietnam War and Israel's lightning victory in the Six-Day War.

Today, we have the sublime Patti Smith singing covers of Hendrix and The Beatles, Iraq instead of Vietnam, and Israel - along with elements in the administration of US President George W Bush - mulling an attack on Iran. Call it the summer of hate.   more »

The late 20th Century and beginning of the 21st have been poor for good new ideas.

We flatter ourselves to think that we live in interesting times. In fact, we just live in hectic times. Not the same thing at all.

The sheer lack of fundamental innovation now may explain the tenacity of traditional religion and why contemporary art seems so flat, banal and repetitive.

Apparently our times compare poorly to, for example, 1050-1250AD or 1750-1950AD -periods of real upheaval and intellectual ferment. It is an interesting thesis and one that deserves to be explored on the blog.

Man went into the Renaissance cowed by fatalistic humility and left it striving to perfect himself.

The neologism 'Denaissance' is apt for today's condition.   more »

There is a malignancy rooted deeply in the cadaverous flesh of American society.

We are witnessing the blatant militarization of our culture by the forces of darkness, the machines of misery and death.

The human costs of war that sustain patterns of conspicuous consumption and waste never enter the minds of consumers.

After all we are an exceptional people. The costs are born by others and kept hidden from view.

The glorification of war is nearly ubiquitous in the culture.   more »

1. In order to foil a terrorist plot, you must first find a terrorist plot. This is not easy.

2. Not just anyone can find and then foil a terrorist plot. You must have an incentive. The best incentive is to be an accused felon, looking at a long prison term. Under such circumstances, your lawyer will explain to you, you may be able to reduce your sentence by acting as an informant in a criminal case, preferably one involving terrorists.

3. The fact that you do not know any actual terrorists should not in any way deter you. Necessity is the mother of invention.

If you can find the right raw material -- a sad, sick, lonely, drunk, deranged, disgruntled or just plain anti-American Muslim somewhere in the United States -- you can make your very own terrorist.   more »