drat fink
View current page...more recent posts
critical thinking
"March 1, 2002 | As Democrats launch their first criticisms of the Bush administration's war policies, several Republicans and conservative pundits have launched an all-out attack designed to frame virtually any criticism of the war on terrorism as illegitimate."
chalk talk
"The tempest began at the end of September, when Bill O'Reilly invited Mr. Al-Arian on his Fox News show and virtually accused him of being a terrorist. People here in Tampa were horrified to learn of a terrorist in their midst and flooded the university with complaints and a few threats. (Florida has the most pious death threats: a couple of them invoked God and one ended by saying "God Bless!")"
art linkladder
"why google loves weblogs"
al-enron
"No matter which direction the Central Asia natural gas would eventually flow, Enron would profit. Should it go south towards ships waiting on the Pakistan coast, it would be still only a few hundred miles at sea to Dabhol. The trip from the Mediterranean would be farther (and thus more expensive for Enron to buy gas), but it was also the least likely route to be constructed. Estimated costs were almost $1 billion more than the route through Afghanistan, and engineering plans had not even started. No, the only practical route for the Caspian Sea gas was through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the border of India. All that was lacking was the political will to make it happen."
nuclear ward
"Execution of the classified "Continuity of Operations Plan" resulted not from the Cold War threat of intercontinental missiles, the scenario rehearsed for decades, but from heightened fears that the al Qaeda terrorist network might somehow obtain a portable nuclear weapon, according to three officials with firsthand knowledge. U.S. intelligence has no specific knowledge of such a weapon, they said, but the risk is thought great enough to justify the shadow government's disruption and expense."
"A bipartisan commission, headed by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler, concluded that the United States should be spending some $3 billion per year over the next ten years to help Russia control its nuclear weapons and weapon-grade nuclear materials. Rather than spend less than one percent of the current defense budget on dramatically curtailing the potential spread of nuclear weapons and materials to terrorists or unfriendly regimes, the Bush administration is trying to save money in this area. It is spending only one-third of the proposed amount to help Russia safeguard its nuclear weapons and materials and find alternative work for nuclear physicists a woefully inadequate amount if we are truly attempting to quell nuclear proliferation."
me and my shadow
"There's a lesson here that goes well beyond the impact of oil drilling on caribou. Deceptive advertising pervades the administration's effort to sell the nation on its drill-and-burn energy strategy. In fact, those of us following this issue can't see why people made such a fuss about the Pentagon's plan to disseminate false information. How would that differ from current policy?"
knight of the bumblebees
"Koppel Is the Odd Man Out as ABC Woos Letterman"
degree of difficulty
"But Stanley Milgram believed he had solved the problem, or at least made substantial empirical progress, through an ingenious experiment. Milgram (1967) asked "starters," supposedly "randomly" chosen people from psychologically distant locations like Kansas or Nebraska, to send a folder through the mail to a target person in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts or Boston. The starters were given information about the target person and written instructions to send the folder through the mail to someone they knew on a first-name basis who would be more likely to know the target. That person was to send the folder on to someone even closer. Returned tracer postcards tracked the progress of each chain."
probably meets possibly
"WASHINGTON — Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear weapons tests across the globe probably caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in U.S. residents born after 1951, according to data from an unreleased federal study. The study, coupled with findings from previous government investigations, suggests that 20,000 non-fatal cancers — and possibly many more — also can be tied to fallout from aboveground weapons tests."
hedging your bets
"Liberals love to shower Soros with respect, ignoring his Wall Street background, because his motives are so obviously honorable, and the money he is spending so clearly is going to "good" causes. But his life raises some troubling questions about the autonomy of capital in the era of globalization. Make enough money, and you don't have to obey anyone's rules."
battle criers
"The good news is that to beat the Republicans, the Democrats don't have to fight like them. They simply need to remember how to fight like Democrats. The first step is to stop worrying about how their words and actions will play in the establishment media. Bad press is frequently the sign that you're doing something right. If they're serious about beating back Bush, Democrats need to start pulling on all the levers of power available to them, and to stop shrinking away from sounding partisan when the cause is just. Standing up for your Senate leader when he has been attacked is a form of partisanship that the average American can admire. Voters can grasp the moral difference between investigating a politician's private life and investigating how an administration managed to lose $4 trillion of surplus. American voters understand that Enron is no Whitewater."
file under...
"According to the editors, the current thrown-together look of the Web site will soon be tweaked as a long-overdue plan to spruce up its layout is now in an advanced stage. In the coming months and years, Debkafile intends to expand into more fields and languages; increase its specialized staff of reporters, editors, and analysts; and further build its customized base of individual and corporate clients who are willing to pay to receive the publication's reporting, in more detail, before anyone else."
pestilence
"DeWitt's organization has filed suit in US federal court on behalf of 10,000 Ecuadorian peasant farmers and Amazonian Indians charging Lombardi's company with torture, infanticide and wrongful death for its role in the aerial spraying of highly toxic pesticides in the Amazonian jungle, along the border of Ecuador and Colombia. DynCorp's chances of squirming out the suit were dealt a crushing blow in January when federal judge Richard Roberts denied the company's motion to dismiss the case on grounds that their work in Colombia involved matters of national security."
international style
"These cold war assumptions, both ideological and power-political, will have to be dispensed with if we are to develop some means of controlling armed conflict. It is also evident that the US has failed, and will inevitably fail, to impose a new world order (of any kind) by unilateral force, however much power relations are skewed in its favour at present, and even if it is backed by an (inevitably shortlived) alliance. The international system will remain multilateral and its regulation will depend on the ability of several major units to agree with one another, even though one of these states enjoys military predominance."
winning smile
i was busy watching stories of the ancient nefertiti while a modern version was reveling in her own golden moment.