News and opinion commentary
by Thomas Nephew

This is my blogchalk:
United States, Maryland, Takoma Park, -, English, German.

Who the heck is Thomas Nephew?
I was born in 1958 in Schweinfurt, Germany. My mother is German, and I grew up speaking German -- first just a few words, then somewhat more fluently following a summer's worth of at-home schooling, followed by a trip to see my relatives in "Franken," in North Bavaria. All of this by way of explaining the frequent entries about Germany. For the most part, I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; I've also lived in Jülich and Tübingen, Germany, St. Louis, MO, Davis and Oakland in California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. My home is now Takoma Park, MD.

I have a Master's degree in Public Policy from the University of Michigan. Before that, I studied biology at Washington University in St. Louis and the Universität Tübingen (year abroad program), and then genetics at U.C. Davis.  I got "sidetracked" while at U.C. Davis, and worked for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign there and then later in Oakland, California.  Following that I worked at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley.

I'm married to the lovely and talented Cricket Dadian, and we have a beautiful girl named Madeleine (Maddie).

What rules are there about commenting?
Just be polite with eachother, and to some extent with me. I reserve the right to take action about a comment if I think it is too impolite or offensive, or for any other reason I see fit, particularly including

1) being off-topic (including but not limited to commercial spam),
2) way too long, or
3) from an IP source known or reasonably suspected to be, um, truth- or candor-challenged.

When necessary, I will either...

1) delete the comment,
2) block the IP address of the commenter,
3) or both.

I don't mean to cut off or chill normal discussion, which can get heated now and then. Also, I'll hold comments about me to a lower standard than comments about other readers. This is mainly about foul language, racist language, or sexist language. All are out of bounds.

Hey-- what happened to my comments from a while back?
I messed up at one point and lost comments from my old commenting service, BlogBack Plus, which went out of service a short while later. I had backed up a bunch of the old Blogback comments, and hope to add them to the archived Haloscan comments at some point and hook that all up again. But some (roughly from early June 2005-September 2005) are gone for good. I'm sorry.

E-mail
I welcome e-mail correspondence; you can e-mail me at thomasn528 at prodigy dot net. You'll need to replace the " at " and " dot " with "@" and "." (Sorry for the inconvenience. I'm hoping this keeps spammers' computers from getting my e-mail address by hunting through my web site.) When your correspondence is about a blog post or an issue you'd like to see discussed, please indicate whether you mind being quoted, and if not under what name (true, pseudonym, anonymous) you'd prefer to be quoted.

However, e-mails sent about posts in the "newsrack" blog or the blog in general will be published at my discretion, with your name attached, if I consider them to be abusive.

Incidentally, you can use HTML or text format e-mail, I don't care. I will try to answer all serious e-mail, or explain why I can't do so on the blog.

What kind of HTML can I use in comments?
You can use simple HTML to enhance comments you add to the site:
1) To italicize the word "wonderful", type "<I>wonderful</I>".
2) Likewise, to bold a word, put <B></B> codes around the word.
3) Underline and strikeout (U, STRIKE) codes don't work, though.
4) To add a link leading the reader to another web site, say "http://highclearing.com/", type

<A HREF="http://highclearing.com/">Jim Henley's blog</A>

When you preview or publish your comment, that will result in this:

Jim Henley's blog.

As a spam prevention measure, you're limited to 3 links per comment.
5) You can also add images and "smileys"; click on the "?" next to the "Comment:" header for help with that.

What are your blog policies?  Or do you just do whatever you want?
I sometimes go back and tinker with my posts after I publish them to the web. I usually add "EDIT:" or "UPDATE:" comments within the post when I do so.

If I link to a site, that does not imply I approve of the site or any specific opinions expressed there.

Yes, I do pretty much whatever I want.