drat fink

cigars anyone?

couldnt have happened to a nicer guy.

about to oil

"Fortunately, Michael Klare, our preeminent expert on "resource wars," has come out with his new book, Blood and Oil, The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum, in the nick of time. If you want to grasp the geopolitics of oil, or the future oil wars we're heading for, or what reaching American oil "autonomy" (Klare's more modest term for it) and unwinding ourselves from despotic regimes like the Saudis might actually involve, don't miss this indispensable book. Below he describes how, under the pressure of Bush administration energy geopolitics (and under the guise of anti-terrorism), the U.S. military is being remolded into an oil-protection force."

(re)gifting

i bought someone a canvasser for their birthday.

vote or die

to call certain rethugs shameless would be a gross understatement. their efforts to subvert our democratic process are breathtaking. so a hale and hearty fuck you to our infantile breatheren. im really starting to hope there is a hell. my only concern is that we already may be there.

paternity leave

just watching the yankees - redsox game now. another tivo success story. had to comment on the "whos your daddy?" chant reverberating through the bronx which i thought was clever (yaknow, for yankee fans. could it turn my stomach more to see pataki at ringside?). its a reference to a pedro martinez quote where he laments his recent performances versus the yankees. pedro wasnt pitching tonight but it was apt nonetheless. me, im rooting for boston. but i think part of the allure of boston is that theyre forever coming up just short. if they win, theyll just be a bunch of guys paid to represent a city that is known for its chowder and for a very expensive hole in the ground.

security blanket statement

security scholars for a sensible foreign policy

prehensile dementia

amateur neurology is the new black!

pan-a-che

havent seen the movie and i dont have an opinion about guevara but that wont be stopping me from calling someone(s) an idiot. i just wont say who.

rit of assurance

"The answer to the first point is that Blix and his team of inspectors were saddled with a complicated list of "cluster issues", ironically assembled by Duelfer during his tenure as head of the UN weapons inspectors, that would have needed to be rectified for any finding of compliance to be made. These "clusters" postulated the need for Iraq to prove the negative, something that is virtually impossible to do. We now know that Iraq's WMD were destroyed in 1991. The problem wasn't the weapons, but verification of Iraq's declarations. The standards of verification set by Duelfer-Blix were impossible for Iraq to meet, thus making closure on the "cluster" issues also an unattainable goal. This situation answers the second point as well. Since the inspection process was pre-programmed to fail, there would be no way the US or the UK would accept any finding of compliance from the UN weapons inspectors. The inspection process was rigged to create uncertainty regarding Iraq's WMD, which was used by the US and the UK to bolster their case for war."

anti anti

""The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie 'mirror' of ordinary matter -- in future weapons," the San Francisco Chronicle reports."