...more recent posts
Here is the smoking gun:
"C [Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
It is not surprising on the face of it that Bush had decided on the Iraq war by summer of 2002. It it is notable that Dearlove noticed a change in views on the subject from earlier visits. By summer of 2002, the Afghanistan war had wound down and al-Qaeda was on the run, so Bush no longer felt vulnerable and was ready to go forward with his long-cherished project of an Iraq War. What is notable is that all this was not what Bush was telling us.
[....]
Goldsmith's hands trembled as he reached out for the chainsaw rig. He saw himself and the others sitting in the Hague, one day, facing the same judges that Milosevic harangued. Charged. But it is a long way from Crawford to the Hague. The man from Connecticut with the cowboy boots and the fake twang would get away with it. They would all get away with it. But people would know they had lied.
-juan cole
could you hold this leash for a sec. thanks. click. (?!)
According to my calendar, someone's got a birthday today!
Spring Is Now!
May Day, 2005
Prospect Park
Double-crested Cormorant
Great Egret
Black-crowned Night-Heron
Canada Goose
Mute Swan
Mallard
Osprey (5pm flyover.)
Red-tailed Hawk
Solitary Sandpiper (Upper Pool.)
Spotted Sandpiper (A few.)
Laughing Gull
Ring-billed Gull
Herring Gull
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
Belted Kingfisher
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Ravine.)
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Eastern Kingbird (Nethermead, S of Arches.)
Blue-headed Vireo
Warbling Vireo
Blue Jay
American Crow
Fish Crow
Tree Swallow
Northern Rough-winged Swallow
Bank Swallow (Lake.)
Barn Swallow
Tufted Titmouse
House Wren (Sullivan Hill.)
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
Veery (Ambergill.)
Gray-cheeked Thrush (1 certain; 1 red-tinged bird maybe Bicknell's... Nelly's Lawn/Vale; south of Rose Garden.)
Hermit Thrush
Wood Thrush (Peninsula.)
American Robin
Gray Catbird
Northern Mockingbird
European Starling
Blue-winged Warbler (Seen on Quaker Hill; a few heard around.)
Northern Parula (Several.)
Yellow Warbler (Good numbers throughout.)
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Black-throated Green Warbler (Lookout Hill.)
Blackburnian Warbler (Lookout Hill.)
Pine Warbler (Bright male, Breeze Hill.)
Prairie Warbler
Palm Warbler
Black-and-white Warbler
American Redstart (A few.)
Prothonotary Warbler (1st spring male, Ravine, moving down the stream from the waterfall.)
Ovenbird (Several.)
Northern Waterthrush
Louisiana Waterthrush (1 at waterside south of Breeze Hill.)
Common Yellowthroat
Hooded Warbler (Ravine, singing along the stream.)
Eastern Towhee (Several.)
Chipping Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Northern Cardinal
Rose-breasted Grosbeak (Several moving around Lookout Hill.)
Red-winged Blackbird
Common Grackle
Brown-headed Cowbird
Baltimore Oriole (Several.)
House Finch
American Goldfinch
House Sparrow
Bird News, Good and Bad
The confirmation of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas is pretty amazing. I remember the “probably extinct” designation from childhood field guides, and dutifully skeptical ornithologists have been discounting supposed sightings for decades. Most of those probably were phantoms, and now it turns out that much of the searching was in the wrong place, but it’s still hard to believe that such a large bird could go undetected for 60 years. Of course if you’ve ever tried to find a purportedly “conspicuous” bird, even in a relatively small area like Central Park, you’d know how inconspicuous they can be when they want. The reappearance of the Ivory-billed is an index of the success of conservation and consciousness-change over the past century, as the once vast bottomland forests of the south recover from the wholesale logging of old.
If the Ivory-billed is a tragedy in reverse, our local Red-tailed Hawk saga has taken a turn for the worse, though their prospects are probably still better than the woodpeckers’. It now seems clear that the 5th Ave. nest has failed, as the female has been sitting on it for over 45 days with no sign of hatchlings. This is sad, but not totally unexpected. There were failures in 1993 and 94, both years when the nest was newly constructed. It’s probable that a second year’s accumulation of twigs is necessary to properly cushion the eggs in this location, and it’s likely that the birds will try again next year, with a better chance for success.
Partial list of Arianna Huffington's "celebrity bloggers" (here's the NYT background story if you don't know what this is about.)
fake or foto
unrelated quote of the day --
"I wonder if identifying Tom Arnold as an "actor" wasn't another subtle insertion of LA Times deadpan humor. Arnold does something on screen in The Stupids, McHale's Navy, and Soul Plane, but I'm not sure it could be characterized by even the most charitable as "acting."" - james wolcott
arianna's kvetching post v. tpmcafe
Major League Baseball signs deal with Six Apart to produce MLBlogs.
[....]
Maybe in a hundred years, assuming there's anybody left around, people will be amused at their great-grandparents' failure to grasp the self-evident idea that what was called literature was a niche-marketed intellectual property, and that the war between the outlaws and the canonicals was another dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians. (Half a dozen people with a taste for the recherché will even get the allusion.) You can already see the borders getting porous. Final quiz: where do you put A) Mary Gaitskill, B) Nicholson Baker, C) Neal Stephenson, D) Jonathan Lethem? Canonicals or alt.canonicals? Or should we call them, along with Foer, Wallace and so on, postcanonicals? (Just plain ''writers'' would put the taxonomists out of business.) ''Don't join too many gangs,'' Robert Frost advised us back in 1936, but for the past 50 years or so, writers haven't had much choice: who you hang out with, and who watches your back, defines what you are. ''The Outlaw Bible'' still posits a literary East L.A., with palefaces and redskins tagging and throwing up signs. With a little luck, we won't have to live here much longer.
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
alex mentioned thats hes got like 200 or so unread comments on the tree. sounds like he got some pretty screwed up priorities. too much working and hanging out in the park. so if youd like to say something to alex that hell never read, comment here.
laine Scarry
For the past year, we have spoken unceasingly about the events of September 11, 2001 . But one aspect of that day has not yet been the topic of open discussion: the difficulty we had as a country defending ourselves; as it happened, the only successful defense was carried out not by our professional defense apparatus but by the passengers on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania . The purpose of this essay is to examine that difficulty, and the one success, and ask if they suggest that something in our defense arrangements needs to be changed. Whatever the ultimate answer to that question, we at least need to ask it since defending the country is an obligation we all share.
continue...
"saint phil"
Benjamen Walker talks with authors Jonathan Lethem and Josh Glenn about the Science Fiction genius Philip K Dick. He also gets the cover of the book UBIK tattooed on his arm. LISTEN
from a book thread
mello kitty
toys in the attic
this scruffy guy has been coming around for food lately. he (i suppose he could very well be a she, but i've taken to calling him claude) climbs up the tree in the back of the house and comes onto the deck. mike started feeding him, so he's only got himself to blame if we soon have two cats again. i haven't been able to get near him yet, he's very skittish, but i'd like to somehow get him to a vet. anyone need a mouser?
Spent last weekend in Seattle, the Public Library was one of the hightlights. Amazing, worth the trip from Portland. Roaming the deep red undulations of the Meeting Floor reminded me of hours spend as a kid walking through the giant heart exhibitat the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Darwin, The expression of the emotions in man and animals, London, John Murray, 1872
if google maps (now with satellite photos) is accurate, then its possible that if i left my apartment and went perfectly northward for 20 miles, i might nearly pass directly through the house i grew up in. definitely within a half-mile.
The "architectural eyesore of the month" guy has a blog .
This is a debka link, so salt to taste, but I found this article very interesting
The most signal achievement of Brzezhinski’s career was predetermined a year before he took office by one of his last experiences as an academic. In 1976, a Polish Archbishop, Karol Wojtyla, came to Harvard to deliver a lecture. So impressed was Professor Brzezinski, a churchgoer, that he invited the visitor for tea, during which they found much in common. The regular correspondence they embarked on, in Polish, continued for years after Wojtyla’s investiture as Pope John Paul II on October 22, 1978.