A culture cannot lie down with dogs and not become utterly infested with fleas. The dogs, in this case, are the mongrel media and the corporate overlords who have grown fat on manufactured controversy and fear mongering.

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that those who see hints of a new class ideology developing around information technology are not necessarily wild-eyed. "Bit-twiddlers" are neither exactly proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They may not own the means of production in the sense that Marx argued, but they certainly do have significantly control over those means, in a more profound way than the term "symbols analysts" or "knowledge workers" captures. As a rough generalization, they value science and technological problem-solving elegance equally at least with profit.

I've rarely gotten a good review in my life, yet, to paraphrase Noel Coward, I am happy to console myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success.

We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

My experience tells me that any time you hear people laughing on a sitcom, it's the writers who happen to be closest to the microphones - not the audience.

If you have to lie, cheat, steal, obstruct and bully to get your point across, it must not be a point capable of surviving on its own merits.

No matter what your political persuasion, you can find a guide that makes it quick, easy and painless to exercise your right to vote. Wanna know what a certain proposition put forth by a cadre of undisclosed billionaires which cuts funding for public education, arts and infrastructure means? Use the voting guide!