drat fink

weapons of mass distraction

"American military chiefs are developing plans to use Valium as a potential weapon against enemy forces and to control hostile populations, according to official documents seen by The Observer."

"The Pentagon has also asked scientists to evaluate proposals to use genetically modified bugs that 'eat' the enemy's fuel and ammunition supplies without harming humans."

mayor mcjesus

"The Full Rudy: The Man, the Mayor, the Myth"

not for sale

"Roddick is the founder of the Body Shop, the notable socially-responsible health-and-beauty store chain. She resigned as co-chair of the company this February to dedicate herself to activism full-time. Roddick has lots to say (she recently edited a book called Take it Personally, it's out now from Harper Collins) and she keeps a politically oriented "blog" (or Web log). Driving major traffic to one's site is almost impossible without advertising or good search engine placement, as bloggers know. Roddick advertised on the popular Google engine -- or did until they took exception to what she had to say."

show off

maxspeaks annotated bennett v. chomsky tete a tete on cnn.

barak2barak

Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)

Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to Ehud Barak)

not butter?

But what Fleischer does, for the most part, is not really spin. It's a system of disinformation--blunter, more aggressive, and, in its own way, more impressive than spin. Much of the time Fleischer does not engage with the logic of a question at all. He simply denies its premises--or refuses to answer it on the grounds that it conflicts with a Byzantine set of rules governing what questions he deems appropriate. Fleischer has broken new ground in the dark art of flackdom: Rather than respond tendentiously to questions, he negates them altogether.

mission creep

"the life and death of pablo escobar"

now hear this

more fucking phone repair nonsense. my expedited service call time between 8 and 10 am came and went. apparently, they came by twice but did not follow the instructions for gaining access to my apartment. that my building has no buzzer makes it difficult but hardly impossible. that they had explicit directions to call my cellphone (the guy on tuesday had no difficulty with these instructions) should have made the task manageable for anyone with a functioning brain. now i realize that isnt a prerequisite condition for the job of telephone repairman. the most ludicrous excuse that the mci rep gave me was that the repairmen 'are not required to call' a customer. so the telephone company wont use the phone to call a customer in order to facilitate a repair even if that is the only way to get at the repair. the guy on the phone kept asking me if they could access the box with a ladder. so they are willing to risk injury and jump through hoops to get to the roof when all they had to do was pick up the phone, which is their fucking business! but they are not obligated to do so. to make matters worse, the rep said that since the service was for an mci customer but the repairman worked for verizon, the verizon subcontractor would not go out of their way to get the job done, but it was the verizon repairman that fucked the line up to begin with. its not my line thats broken (but the roof access is through my apartment), its my upstairs neighbors line, which was fine until the repairman came to fix my line on tuesday. now im forced to wait possibly until six pm. how much do you want to bet this guy fucks something else up, if he even shows at all?

the great uncle

"Saddam is a loner by nature, and power increases isolation. A young man without power or money is completely free. He has nothing, but he also has everything. He can travel, he can drift. He can make new acquaintances every day, and try to soak up the infinite variety of life. He can seduce and be seduced, start an enterprise and abandon it, join an army or flee a nation, fight to preserve an existing system or plot a revolution. He can reinvent himself daily, according to the discoveries he makes about the world and himself. But if he prospers through the choices he makes, if he acquires a wife, children, wealth, land, and power, his options gradually and inevitably diminish. Responsibility and commitment limit his moves. One might think that the most powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the fewest. Too much depends on his every move. The tyrant's choices are the narrowest of all. His life—the nation!—hangs in the balance. He can no longer drift or explore, join or flee. He cannot reinvent himself, because so many others depend on him—and he, in turn, must depend on so many others. He stops learning, because he is walled in by fortresses and palaces, by generals and ministers who rarely dare to tell him what he doesn't wish to hear. Power gradually shuts the tyrant off from the world. Everything comes to him second or third hand. He is deceived daily. He becomes ignorant of his land, his people, even his own family. He exists, finally, only to preserve his wealth and power, to build his legacy. Survival becomes his one overriding passion. So he regulates his diet, tests his food for poison, exercises behind well-patrolled walls, trusts no one, and tries to control everything."

brother, can you spare a dime?

i love this blogstory, lets call it "Spare Change, Spare Time."