In the nine months since Sept. 11, George W. Bush has put the United States on a course that is so bleak that few analysts have – as the saying goes – connected the dots. If they had, they would see an outline of a future that mixes constant war overseas with abridgment of constitutional freedoms at home, a picture drawn by a politician who once joked, "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier – so long as I'm the dictator."

The trouble is that systems of authority are widely known to abuse their powers. As long ago as 1690 John Locke took note of the danger, as did Alexander Hamilton in his defense of John Peter Zenger. Abuse of official power has traditionally been viewed as an especially serious evil indeed. As a result, the US social system generally embraces the presumption of transparency, that in general the people have a "right to know," and that a basic function of the press is to check abuses of power. In fact, this "checking function" is built into the First Amendment; and, except in times of war, it has held sway for over a century. Nevertheless, much important information never reaches the general public. Compounding the problem, US leaders frequently work with a compliant legislative branch to tighten access and negate the appropriate role of journalists.

Yiddish is the caring, authoritative inscrutability of your elders. It has rules, but they're mainly inherited from the tributary languages. It's inconsistent in a way that shows it doesn't matter. It sounds like a beautiful mess (which, considering its mainly Germanic origins, is quite an achievement). Well, it sounds beautiful to me, anyway. Others think it's just a mess - there's a famous National Lampoon "Teach Yourself Yiddish" piece that recommends you make up vaguely German/Russian-sounding words that start with "sch" and just string them together.

Daily we provide new information about ourselves, when shopping, travelling, communicating on the Internet or telephone, or even when we are simply eating out at a local restaurant. The collection of information is a constant in our lives, with the commercial sector profiling every aspect of our behaviour, from the insurance policies we purchase to the beer we drink. Much of this data is gathered without consumers being aware of the extent to which their privacy and anonymity are being compromised. Whilst the criminal fraternity may also wish to misuse our personal information for fraud or theft, the motives of the largest agencies collating this data are much less obvious or transparent. A recent series of reports to the European Parliament has identified the emergence of new technologies of political control. Such technology can watch and listen to our every move, this is not fiction, although the key player, the US National Security Agency is the same secretive organisation that features in the movie, 'Enemy of the State'. The technology now exists to industrialise such surveillance procedures, with the NSA base at Menwith Hill (UK) having the capability to tap an estimated 2 million phone calls, faxes and emails per hour. Once analysed using artificial intelligence systems such as Memex, this information can be used to build a massive machinery of political supervision with little political oversight or accountability.

A brief look at the historical development of this concept is instructive. Twenty years ago, the British Society for Social Responsibility of Scientists (BSSRS) warned about the dangers of a new technology of political control. BSSRS defined this technology as "a new type of weaponry"..."It is the product of the application of science and technology to the problem of neutralising the state's internal enemies. It is mainly directed at civilian populations, and is not intended to kill (and only rarely does). It is aimed as much at hearts and minds as at bodies." For these scientists, "This new weaponry ranges from means of monitoring internal dissent to devices for controlling demonstrations; from new techniques of interrogation to methods of prisoner control. The intended and actual effects of these new technological aids are both broader and more complex than the more lethal weaponry they complement."

We now know that fairy rings are actually produced by fungi - see panel - but this was not always the case. As the common name for the phenomenon implies, they were widely explained as the result of a gathering of fairies that ended with a circular dance. Such was the energy used in their dancing that the ground was permanently marked.

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

Punctuation absorbs more of my thought than seems healthy for a man who pretends to be well adjusted. The subject is naturally attractive to all with character structures of the sort Freud dubbed anal, and I readily confess to belong to that sect. We anal folk keep neat houses, are always on time, and know all the do's and don't's, including those of punctuation. Good punctuation, we feel, makes for clean thought. A mania for punctuation is also an occupational hazard for almost any teacher, as hundreds of our hours are given over to correcting the vagrant punctuation of our students.

The most significant test of any system is how it handles unanticipated situations. A well-designed and implemented system is one which can continue to operate correctly (i.e. one which continues to embody its design principles and function according to its specifications) in a situation which was not considered in its creation. A system which does not must be considered flawed, either in design or implementation.

While those of here who are scientists and engineers use this principle of evaluation daily in our work, it's likely that few of us (and probably even fewer in the general population) have applied this principle to the State(s) in which we live. Since the United States, in its current form, is over two hundred years old (and one of its designers, Thomas Jefferson himself, advocated such a review every twenty years), a public review of how well it has proceeded is long overdue.

One need only look at a map of Central Asia and thrust push-pins in every location where US troops are deployed. The US currently has bases in Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Afghanistan, the Kandahar Airport is covered, as is the Bagram Air Base. Mazar-i-Sharif Airport, in Kabul, and five US aircraft carriers and warships in the Arabian Sea have also been set into play.

In 1887, Anton Chekhov said in a letter to Maria Kiselyova that the writer "should . . . acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones." Such strength of stomach is not shared by the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees the tests that every New York public-school student must pass in order to graduate.

Like many of his contemporaries, Chekhov put a good deal of effort into eluding the censor. It was always uncertain what would manage to slip through and what would be prohibited. Almost a century has passed since Chekhov's death, and it is surprising that many of these early masterpieces have not been translated into English. As Chekhov specialist Julie de Sherbinin has pointed out: "The gaps in English translation of his early work can be attributed to various factors: these stories were long considered products of an 'immature' writer, they are rich in colloquialisms and wordplay and thus are hard to translate, and they often depend on cultural context for their humour."

The present Kashmir crisis feels like a déjà vu replay of the last one. Three years ago a weak Indian coalition government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party had just lost a confidence vote in India's Parliament and was nervously awaiting a general election. At once it began to beat the war drums over Kashmir. Now another coalition government, still led by the B.J.P. and deeply tainted by B.J.P. supporters' involvement in the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat State, may be about to lose another general election. So here goes the government again, talking up a Kashmiri war and asking India to stand firm behind its leadership.

And here Buchanan makes a serious mistake. He accepts the Weekly Standard (and his critics') view that America's choice is between being a "blood and soil" ethnic nation or a "creedal" nation based on certain liberal political principles in the Declaration of Independence, notably liberty and political equality. Once he has done that, he has lost an argument vital to his larger case. For America, being composed of immigrants from all over the world like the other great settler nations, Canada and Australia, is plainly not an ethnic nation rooted in blood and soil. Given enough time, enough intermarriage, and much lower levels of immigration, it might eventually become such a nation. But it is plainly not one now. That being so, America must be a "creedal" nation. And such a nation can assimilate an infinite number of immigrants provided that they can readily assent to the creed.

As the history of religion shows, however, creedal assent does not mean that someone is prepared for martyrdom. Otherwise, intellectuals would be renowned as the most fearless of warriors. If patriotism is to be able to inspire mass self-sacrifice--as it may need to do--it must rest upon deeper and more powerful loyalties than political opinion. A creedal nation that forgets that fact risks blithely admitting millions of potential traitors (or at least disinterested onlookers) without making any serious attempt to convert them into patriots.

(there's more)