Her roots are showing

The gray roots on the old gray lady's head are wildly out of control. It's Egypt. They're drowning the best story in years with torrents of words, organized in a large volume of stories, that will be packaged, sold in a book and offered for prizes.

To me, it's a lot like a child's fingerpainting that's overworked so it looks like a brown swirl.

And so, the lady's search for easy answers continues.

The Times explained in more depth just who Gene Sharp is, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself. He's the academic in Boston, whose work is guiding the demonstrations, the Times said the other day. This story says he doesn't look dangerous but "for the world's despots, his ideas can be fatal."

All I want to say is that the Egyptian people didn't need a professor in Boston to tell them what to do, to teach them and lead them.

Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution

It also lets us know that the White House was on the case as early as August, when Obama "ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world."

I don't get what the point of all the detail is. Is this a bad thing? A good thing? Are we suggesting that officials thought about this in August? Is that bad? Should they have been prepared for exactly what happened? That might be a good thing, eh? Do we mean they should have manipulated it?

Again, I don't think the people of Egypt were waiting for the U.S. to take care of Mubarak, nor was Mubarak waiting for Washington to tell him how to hang on. I rather think neither one of them like us much.

Critics of America like to ascribe the power to control everything in the world to the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon. Paranoids like to blame them for every ugly turn in the world. This story winks at those groups and slyly suggests something. In this case, I'm not even sure what it is.

Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings

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It is the job of politicians to say things that they think will help them be elected/re-elected. Intently listening and processing all these words are not very helpful in the real world. Making symbols out of them is hollow.

And so we have a piece on the top level of the web page -- at least in the morning -- about the war of words between those two teams, the Republicans and the Democrats.

We are all biased. Some of us are more biased than others; some of us pretend to be more unbiased than others. I say that both teams are lying, but the Republicans are lying more. They are more blatant about talking out of both sides of their mouths. Their words push off the problems to the future without so much as a shrug.

Your mother used to tell you to look at what people did, and not what they said. Well, both sides have just agreed to huge taxes cuts, mostly for the rich, without addressing any fundamental fiscal issues.

Sure Recipe for Decline: Neglect and Gluttony

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No, No, No!

Stop the hype already!

IBM's Watson is not "akin to the one on Star Trek that can understand questions posed in natural language, and answer them."

Star Trek is fiction, and its anonymous computer does a hell of a lot more than play Jeopardy.

The authors quote Ed Feigenbaum, a pioneer of A.I., as saying now that such a machine as Watson was unthinkable 20 years ago. Bull. The practitioners of A.I. in the 1960s began building rudimentary machines that operated on toy programs, and they predicted fabulous successes 10 and 20 years in the future -- a future expected before 1984, and a future that would have computers that make Watson look like a retard -- or at best an idiot savant. That was 50 years years ago, and still we have a really huge machine that does one thing. It plays Jeopardy. And another one that plays chess. That's something but not what the NYT thinks.

On ‘Jeopardy,’ Watson’s a Natural

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