Wikipedia defines meme thus: The term “meme“, coined in 1976 by the zoologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. The term is used regularly [...]

I got an e-mail from a friend who lives just inside the Beltway – he can walk out anytime he wants….really – and in the midst of a good discussion of the relationship between American internal politics and external realities like Iraq he wrote: I don’t think Iraq is a failed state-yet. For me that [...]

Oh dear, Lizard is discovering some of the more contemporary ways of coping with the New Year – and let’s face it – life itself.

Many have observed that the war in Iraq will be won or lost on the home front. I noticed Betsy’s Page discussing a Fox News poll that adresses some of the key issues. She cites these results to the question: Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed? …………………..Yes [...]

I’ve been watching the reaction to Hillary’s announcement that she is running for president. I see her through the eyes of an older centrist Democrat in the Harry Truman, JFK tradition. In terms of today’s Democrats that means I’m a Lieberman Democrat and I support the President on the war. I certainly don’t see defeating [...]

A reader called attention to my link in a previous post to this article by Michael J Totten as the kind of thing they would like to see more of in the press. Totten’s article is about Sayyed Mohammad Ali El Husseini, a genuinely moderate Shite cleric in Lebanon. That sounds like an oxymoron because [...]

Lizard got a bit mixed up, but never fear, he survived this approach to coping with the New Year.

When Donald Rumsfeld complained that we were losing the Information War and told Bob Woodward in State of Denial that he was trying to fight a 21st century war with a 20th century military I think he was, in part, showing an awareness of the gap between what we can now do with the Internet [...]

At the recent Herzilya conference Michael J Totten was interviewed by Dave of IsraeliCool. To my surprise he named only two other bloggers who are actively reporting from the Middle East – Michael Yon and Bill Roggio. The rest of us are…well…guys in Pajamas. In terms of the Middle East, there are two really important [...]

The Herzilya conference in December raised the idea of the media as a theater of war directly: The conference addresses a dual phenomenon that became especially clear in the Lebanon War (Summer 2006). On the one hand, the ways in which the Arab/Muslim media systematically use ‘the news’ as a weapon of war, and on [...]