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Thursday, May 13, 2004
depressing read
"While I conceive of this blog as a journal, I have no interest in recounting day to day activities; rather, this is an online space for my thoughts on depression and literature. My hope is that, in assembling an honest account of my depression and by providing relevant excerpts from writers’ autobiographies and psychiatric literature, I can offer readers moments of identification that undermine the loneliness and shame of mental illness. And I suspect that blogs can contribute to the public discourse on depression in ways that more traditional representations of depression can’t; since a blog is continually updated, its representation of depression is less likely to hide or mitigate contradictions and ambiguities, and more likely to challenge practiced wisdom and “pop psychology” simplifications."via large
laugh now
armchair generalists
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Sep. 30, 2002
(flashback)
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
chain gang
"But General Taguba said that he did not conduct his investigation any higher in the chain of command than General Karpinski, leaving open the possibility that responsibility for the failure in leadership went higher than General Karpinski."
Saturday, May 08, 2004
and now for something...
"He's had success against me? You must be smoking Kool-Aid," said Bonds, now 9-for-30 against Leiter. "What success have you been reading? I don't fear no pitcher, dog."
joe schmoe
"This is the sort of subject-changing our parents try to wean us from when we're in grade school. (Okay, I did that. But look what Tommy did!) And of course there's the side-issue that Lieberman is playing to the notion that there's some sort of 'they did this to us and now we did this to them' issue here. And (how many times does it have to be said?) these folks in Abu Ghraib weren't the 9/11 planners.
Nothing Lieberman said is untrue precisely. It does set us apart from fascists and mass-murderers that Americans are outraged by this and that there will be investigations and accountability. But talk about defining deviance down!"
Friday, May 07, 2004
read em and weep
"Bush has other pressing reasons to keep Rumsfeld. Who would replace him? The Pentagon would be thrown into turmoil. By the rules of succession, the deputy secretary of defense would step up as acting secretary. But the deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has even less credibility on Capitol Hill. In fact, Rumsfeld's entire inner circle is tainted—if not by the Abu Ghraib scandal, then by the controversies over the Iraq war and the "stovepiping" of false intelligence that led up to it. Confirmation hearings for a new secretary would be a golden opportunity to revisit each of these controversies in great detail, with an election just months away."(two must reads in slate today. whats wrong with them? kaplan is consistently good.)
stop hitting yourself
"Closely related to this aggressive ignorance is a third feature of Bush's mentality: laziness. Again, this is a lifelong trait. Bush's college grades were mostly Cs (including a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System). At the start of one term, the star of the Yale football team spotted him in the back row during the shopping period for courses. "Hey! George Bush is in this class!" Calvin Hill shouted to his teammates. "This is the one for us!" As governor of Texas, Bush would take a long break in the middle of his short workday for a run followed by a stretch of video golf or computer solitaire."
kostars
"And of course about sex and cars, about the affection in breaking the boredom as well as being young and disco-punk-cool at the Umeå club Elvira in the 1980’s. From a purely scientific point of view, the rescue operation is conducted so that the water level in your hearing system is restored, which occurs as soon as you have modified your CD player with “KoKoMeMeDaDa”. The roar will pass and be replaced by small purling streams of swells and ringing. Thereby, a broader awakening of waterpower also appears that will, in the long run, be able to support more and more liberated amplifiers and music computers.
From the beginning to the end, “KoKoMeMeDaDa” is an angel of mercy of sound. The sound of pop in the cracks of the earthquake."animated video blossom from kokomemedada
balls also to the wall
"The higher ups, on the other hand, appear to have realized fairly quickly that exposing the abuses at Abu Ghraib would draw global attention to the entire system - Gitmo, the prisons in Afghanistan, their entire kinder, gentler gulag archipelago. So it looks like they adopted a strategy of letting the CID investigations run their secret course, while allowing Taguba's report to sit on the bureaucratic shelf.
The photographic evidence, however, couldn't be controlled -- the gang should have seen that from the start -- and somebody (Taguba?) became so angry about the way the report was being buried that they leaked it to Sy Hersh. The stonewall crumbled."