On December 31st, 1999, National Public Radio interviewed the futurist and science fiction genius Arthur C. Clarke. Since the author had forecast so many of the 20th Century's most fundamental developments, the NPR correspondent asked Clarke if anything had happened in the preceding 100 years that he never could have...

When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak visited Washington for a summit with President Barack Obama on June 16th, the United States reaffirmed its "commitment of extended deterrence" to Seoul, "including the U.S. nuclear umbrella." In response, on June 25th, the 59th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, North...

Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. "The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence." If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course...

This piece appears as the cover story for the July 17th issue of the LA CITY BEAT.

I once asked a journalist friend, who had been chained inside the courtroom every single day of the O.J. Simpson trial, the obvious question. "Did he do it?"...

Try an experiment today.

Go into a Starbucks (or better yet, some locally owned alternative), and see if you can chat with 100 people waiting in line. There are always people waiting in line at these places. Tell them that forty years ago today, on July 1, 1968, in...

Most of the country was captivated on Tuesday night, June 3, by the apparent nomination for the first time of someone other than a European-American man as a major party presidential candidate. Here in Los Angeles, however, we had a very consequential and quite captivating election of our own taking...

"Why can't we have them when they can?" That, for the "nuclear have nots," has long been the essence of what some call the nuclear double standard, what others call nuclear narcissism, what others still call America's nuclear hypocrisy.

The bitterness about that double standard has steadily intensified for...

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush," said Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago during the second quarter of the 20th Century, creator of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and chair of an audacious undertaking in 1947 called...

"I'd rather vote for what I want, and not get it," said Eugene Debs, "than vote for what I don't want, and get it." Debs, of course, ran for president several times, never came close to winning, but put forth insistent ideas on labor rights, civil liberties, economic justice, and...

Blowing up ten airliners simultaneously over the Atlantic. That's so junior varsity.

Unfortunately, the varsity squad may have worse in the works.

On Thursday, August 10th, British authorities arrested more than twenty individuals suspected of plotting to annihilate as many as ten passenger jets, in mid-flight over the Atlantic, on...