Sixty years ago the United States dropped a uranium fission bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000. Three days later the U.S. dropped a plutonium fission bomb on Nagasaki, killing 80,000 more. Both bombs spread significant radioactive fallout, leading to the premature deaths of many more. These are round numbers currently accepted, but are guesses and generalizations. As such, they obscure the individuals killed: a complete listing would fill four of our Vietnam Wall monuments, and make the point much more emphatically than numbers alone could ever do.

Book: Siva Vaidhyanathan: The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004, Basic Books).

A couple of weeks ago we had a major ice storm here in Kansas. The atmosphere was sandwiched, with cold air at the surface, warm and wet above. It rained steadily for a whole day, the drops freezing on contact with the chilled surfaces, encasing every branch, leaf, needle, and blade of grass in ice.

I live in the bruised blue bullseye in the heart of Kansas. If you draw a circle with a three-mile radius centered on the intersection of Broadway and Douglas in downtown Wichita, you'd delimit a solidly Democratic urban area. Few houses in that area were built after 1950, and not many houses beyond that line were built before 1950.

Yesterday a school in Wichita KS was blown up. From the looks of it, it could have been caused by a nearby car bomb -- the whole side of one building was blown out, with nothing but broken beams and rubble visible -- but it wasn't terrorism. It was just good old-fashioned American incompetence: a gas leak, probably from a science lab that was under construction.

Colin Powell's resignation as Secretary of State is good riddance, even if his successor is likely to be even less principled and even more inept. My home town paper's editorial page toasted Powell today under the heading "Moderate": "His moderate, multinational, pragmatic views were routinely rejected in the Bush team's squabbles on nuclear nonproliferation, Iraq, the Middle East and other major challenges abroad."

In recent years Yassir Arafat has most commonly been described as the Symbol of the Palestinian People. That may in fact be the one thing most Palestinians, most Israelis, and most others agree on. What they don't agree on, and may never have agreed on, is what his symbolhood stood for. For most Israelis in most times Arafat was a symbol of an implacable Palestine that would always be the sworn enemy of Israel. For most Palestinians in most times, Arafat was the symbol of resistance against Israel and the stubborn search for justice.

John Kerry campaigned using the slogan, "help is on the way." George W. Bush's first act now that he's got his mandate was to launch a major ground assault on Falluja in Iraq, following a few months of intensive aerial bombardment. This has evidently been planned quite a while, but they delayed launching it until the votes had been counted and the voters safely put back to sleep. A more revealing campaign slogan for Bush would be, "hell is on the way."

The post-debacle analyses have fingered many possible problems with the Democrats presidential campaign, one of which was John Kerry himself. I don't think there's a lot of value picking over Kerry's bones here, but this reminds me of a basic question, which is how the hell did he get the nomination in the first place?

From the moment George W. Bush became President of the United States I was convinced that he'd be dispensed with after one term. He had lucked out as the relatively unknown and tragically misunderstood beneficiary of Al Gore's lacklustre campaign, but as President he was in deep over his head and his backers were battling against the major trends of recent history. None of his polls convinced me otherwise. Even on top he was rotten to the core, and I clung to a residual faith that the American people would never deliberately do something so foolish as to re-elect him.