The Cynic Express(ed) 3.09: Get Outta My Language, Unca Bill!

     Call me Winston. I read in the New York Times today that Microsoft has christened its own Encarta Dictionary of the whole wide English-speaking world. Great. Microsoft, that great Oceania of the Northwest, has decided that rather haphazardly controlling the desktops of most of the world is not enough; now that Eurasia (America Online) and Eastasia (Sun Microsystems) have allied together in the ever oscillating world of technological commerce warfare, Microsoft must do something to further create proprietary content on everyone's bookshelf and in his or her vocabulary. Maybe I am just cynical (according to the current dictionaries which are probably now obsolete and, at the very least, not taught at the best and most trendy five-hundred- dollars-a-day technological education solutions provider).      Whole column....

Betrayal: How The Clinton Administration Undermined American Security

     "When I want to scare myself to sleep, I do not turn to the works of the fictional grandmasters of horror like John Saul or Stephen King. The crux, or the upside down crux, of many supernatural thrillers is the supernatural powers of unknown origin that descend upon a small town with the power to kill and destroy innocent heroes and heroines at whim. Perhaps I do not have enough imagination or am too much the empirical objectivist to be terrified by accounts of imaginary things that go bump in the night. When I want stark terror that leaves me unable to sleep, I turn to foreign-policy chillers like Bill Gertz's Betrayal: How The Clinton Administration Undermined American Security.Whole review