No Comment

Doctor Johnson proposed to define the word ‘oats’ thus: ‘A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ And I replied: ‘Aye, and…

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Anyone wanting to know why nearly fifty state attorneys general from around the United States have petitioned the Congress demanding an investigation into the outrageous, politically motivated prosecution of former…

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Harper’s No Comment writer Scott Horton appears tomorrow (Thursday, July 19) on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman to discuss the Bush Administration’s war on journalists and particularly the case of…

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Here at No Comment we deal with current events, politics, foreign policy, pre-Baroque sacred music, philosophy and literature… and we dispense a foolproof cure for those who just can’t manage…

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In Graham Greene’s World War II-era classic, everything starts when the protagonist guesses the correct weight of a cake at a fair and walks off with his prize, not knowing…

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America’s armies have always relied in some way on contractors. However, the dramatic expansion of the role and number of contractors in Iraq is changing the culture of American warfare.…

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We marched comfortably along, through glades and over brooks which I could not remember to have seen before–which puzzled me and made me wonder–and yet we did not come to…

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Today the machinery of justice in America strains under a heavy hand of misdirection coming out of Washington. And now Congress has decided to take up one of the most…

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Just out: Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban provides a polished, probing account of the Bush Administration’s use of torture techniques, and how it bamboozled and coerced medical professionals into disregarding their…

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Word in Washington is that an overwhelming majority of Congressional Republicans are now prepared to turn on the White House over its criminal mismanagement of the Iraq War. They’ve put…

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The old adage was that a society had to choose: guns or butter. You can’t have both. However, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were determined to prove that false. In…

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Q: When does the U.S. Department of Justice, once one of the most highly respected law enforcement organizations in the world, behave like an organized crime family? A: When it’s…

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In the current issue of Harper’s, I described how the Bush Administration has waged a relentless war against the Rule of Law in connection with the Guantánamo detainees—attempting to overturn…

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Before observing his deeds, let us cast a brief glance into his soul and find there the key to his political life… He was no “people person,” because he never…

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Following on No Comment’s “Setting the Stage for the Next War” (June 21, 2007), we hear further murmurings about possible conflict with Iran from across the Atlantic. The international community…

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The great chronicler of the corruption of language, George Orwell, noted in Politics and the English Language (1946) that “political language . . . is designed to make lies sound…

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Today forty-four attorneys general from forty of the fifty states of the Union petition the United States Congress [PDF] demanding a formal inquiry into the prosecution of Don Siegelman, the…

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On July 5, I posted a little piece on Martin Heidegger’s cabin in the woods, located outside of Freiburg, drawing on a wonderful essay written by Leland de la Durantaye,…

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for the Landgrave of Homburg By Friedrich Hölderlin God is near Yet hard to seize. Where there is danger, The rescue grows as well. Eagles live in the darkness, And…

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Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under…

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Back in the mid-seventies I was studying at the University of Munich and attended for pure amusement a seminar given by the remarkable Wolfgang Frühwald, a very talented philologist who…

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This morning’s Sunday Telegraph includes an important breakthrough in the investigation into the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a British citizen who previously had served as a KGB agent and who…

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As literature’s most famous private detective, Sherlock Holmes, reminds us in the Silver Blaze, in evaluating a complex pattern of facts, we must consider not only the established facts but…

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Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost…

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Today U.S. intelligence says that Al Qaeda has rebuilt itself to roughly the same level of capabilities it had before its attack on September 11, 2001—a shocking comment on the…

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Political liberty of the individual citizen is that tranquility of spirit which possesses its own assurance; and to secure that liberty, it is essential that the government permit no citizen…

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Noel Hillman (photo) is a federal judge in Camden, New Jersey appointed to the court by President Bush in the spring of 2006. He gathered the support of New Jersey’s…

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Tomorrow we observe the storming of the Bastille in Paris, which marked the beginning of the French Revolution. It’s a fitting time to remember the most famous of all the…

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