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Wednesday, Jan 29, 2003

gut instinct

"What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?"

"Assholes."

ells bells

"NEW YORK -- Daniel Ellsberg has never been a journalist, but he is one of the most important figures in the history of American journalism. His release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 not only sparked a landmark freedom-of-the-press case, it changed journalism forever, ushering in an era of "leaks," whistle-blowers, and general skepticism about official statements."

"His book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, was published to much acclaim last fall. Ellsberg is uniquely qualified to address the issue of the media and war: as a former Marine, a Rand Corp. analyst, and an adviser to Robert McNamara, Clark Clifford, and Henry Kissinger on Vietnam -- not to mention as one of the most famous newspaper sources in history. E&P Editor Greg Mitchell interviewed Ellsberg, who has long lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, last week."

all wet

"But the biggest surprise of all is that they are not even soldiers; they are spies, part of the CIA's rough and ready, supersecret Special Operations Group (SOG). Until fairly recently, the CIA, in an effort to clean up a reputation sullied by botched overseas coups and imperial assassination attempts, had shied away from getting its hands dirty. Until about five years ago, it focused instead on gathering intelligence that could be used by other parts of the government. Before that, traditional CIA officers, often working under cover as U.S. diplomats, got most of their secrets from the embassy cocktail circuit or by bribing foreign officials. Most did not even have weapons training, and they looked down on the few SOG commandos who remained out in the field as knuckle draggers, relics of a bygone era. Now the knuckle draggers are not just back; they are the new hard edge of the CIA, at the forefront of the war on terrorism. And, says a U.S. intelligence official, "they know which end the bullet comes out of."

pain in the arts

"A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's bloody civil war."

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2003

p2 shining p

"The servers are in Denmark. The software is in Estonia. The domain is registered Down Under, the corporation on a tiny island in the South Pacific. The users - 60 million of them - are everywhere around the world. The next Napster? Think bigger. And pity the poor copyright cops trying to pull the plug."

old friends

"Anti-Europeanism is not symmetrical with anti-Americanism. The emotional leitmotifs of anti-Americanism are resentment mingled with envy; those of anti-Europeanism are irritation mixed with contempt. Anti-Americanism is a real obsession for entire countries�notably for France, as Jean-Fran�ois Revel has recently argued.[5] Anti-Europeanism is very far from being an American obsession. In fact, the predominant American popular attitude toward Europe is probably mildly benign indifference, mixed with impressive ignorance. I traveled around Kansas for two days asking people I met: "If I say 'Europe' what do you think of?" Many reacted with a long, stunned silence, sometimes punctuated by giggles. Then they said things like "Well, I guess they don't have much huntin' down there" (Vernon Masqua, a carpenter in McLouth); "Well, it's a long way from home" (Richard Souza, whose parents came from France and Portugal); or, after a very long pause for thought, "Well, it's quite a ways across the pond" (Jack Weishaar, an elderly farmer of German descent). If you said "America" to a farmer or carpenter in even the remotest village of Andalusia or Ruthenia, he would, you may be sure, have a whole lot more to say on the subject."

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