drat fink
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reposing rip(h)oste
simple voluntary action
left jab
"Note: CounterPunch will be on the road for the next week and will not be updating the website until March 31. But we leave you with a week's worth of extraordinary stories to keep you occupied in the meantime, ranging from a history of James Bond and a tribute to Tammy Wynette to Nobel laureate José Saramago on global capitalism and Edward Said on the ruins of the Oslo Accords. Plus, we offer you a special Easter Week reading treat: Wilhelm Reich on the last hours of Christ and Claud Cockburn on the "horror of it all"."
poker face
"Many years ago, when I was young and still in search of wisdom, I went on a pilgrimage to meet the man I thought was the wisest in the world. I came away wiser, though what I learned was what most pilgrims learn, which is that if you want to become wise you should not go on pilgrimages. I hadn't thought much about the pilgrimage, or the wise man, until the past few months, when a friend sent me a new book that brought it, and him, back to mind."
slouching to the right
today seems to be the day when the national media proclaim that the republicans are looking good for the '02 midterm elections. the democrats are confused while the repugs are focused and resolute. otherwise the focus remains on sharon's intransigence and more sabre-rattling towards uncle saddam. the washington post sure is ready to roll. lastly, this gallup poll takes our collective pulse. spin the numbers which ever way your political wind doth blow, everybody else does.
eggs over medium
"Fear & Favor is FAIR’s annual review of incidents that reflect the range of pressures on reporters to use something other than journalistic judgment in deciding what goes in the news and what gets left out. The year 2001 presented special challenges in this regard. The horrific September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the ensuing declaration by the Bush administration of an open-ended "war on terrorism," meant incredible pressure on the press corps to present U.S. actions and policy in the best light; incidents of outright censorship occurred, and even more self-censorship, as many outlets confused independent inquiry with a lack of patriotism."
skin flint
"The new delivery systems have also allowed major corporations to get a piece of the pie without getting too close to the product itself. While the dirty work of actually making the films is still largely done in the San Fernando Valley, major corporations like AT&T, General Motors and Marriott are sharing the profits by helping get the product to consumers. At the same time, a new generation of entrepreneurs — including dot-com techies and Ivy League business school grads — are bringing ambitious business strategies to the mix."
access and allies
"I asked Haass whether there is a doctrine emerging that is as broad as Kennan's containment. "I think there is," he said. "What you're seeing from this Administration is the emergence of a new principle or body of ideas—I'm not sure it constitutes a doctrine—about what you might call the limits of sovereignty. Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a right of preventive, or peremptory, self-defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have grounds to think it's a question of when, and not if, you're going to be attacked."
booknoted
"The most successful saga in postwar popular culture got off to a conscientious start after breakfast on a tropical morning in Jamaica early in 1952. Ian Fleming, forty-three years old and ten weeks away from his first and last marriage, knocked out about 2,000 words on his Imperial portable claiming (falsely) that he was just passing time while his bride elect, Anne Rothermere, painted landscapes in the garden. In fact Fleming had been planning to write a spy thriller for years and he kept up the regimen of2,000 daily words until, two months later, he was done, with Commander James Bond recovering from a near lethal attack on his testicles from Le Chiffre's carpet beater, Le Chiffre finished off by a Russian, Vesper Lynd dead by her own hand, and a major addition to the world's cultural and political furniture under way."
read ochre
"This small band of early Africans were, a group of scientists excavating the Blombos Cave site believes, thoroughly modern people, capable of abstract thought and probably language. Evidence from their settlement could have important implications for theories about the emergence of modern people."
stinging nettles
"In the gray, matter-of-fact bureaucratese so typical of a government document, the leaked "Israeli Art Student Papers" confirm what we have been saying in this space all along: that an underground apparatus of Israeli covert agents, centered in the southwestern US but extending nationwide, carried out extensive operations in the months prior to 9/11. Their targets were US government offices, including not only the Drug Enforcement Administration (as previously reported), but the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Protective Service, the Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a host of other state and federal courthouses and other buildings, as well as military bases. There is no long any doubt about whether the spy ring existed. Now we are left with the nagging question: what was its purpose?"