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Tuesday, Apr 30, 2002

get down with your bad self

"R&B star R Kelly has been hit with a third lawsuit which says he had sex with an underage girl who then became pregnant."

Kelly has been called to the Vatican for a special meeting where he will be presented with this months Cardinal Sin Award which is quite an honor considering the competition these days.


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critical condition

metacritic

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Monday, Apr 29, 2002

hate speech

im all for self hating jews, just as long as they they hate themselves for the right reasons. i can think of a few, not supporting israels incursions is not one of them. and then theres the rebuttal...

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eye for an eye

"The people in the audience, the glosserati of New York publishing, might feel the urge to hate Mr. Remnick for his seemingly effortless stewardship of the industry's literary hope chest. But they are likely to applaud lustily, and even sincerely. His predecessor at The New Yorker, Tina Brown, may have made Eustace Tilley dance, but Mr. Remnick has made the man with the monocle do so without making fans of the old New Yorker grimace."

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youre so cool

miss kittin and the hacker

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rush hour

spoozy reminds me of bis.

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Saturday, Apr 27, 2002

dick tracy

feeling a little naked when you travel?

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Thursday, Apr 25, 2002

here it comes (there it goes)

"When the old Sun bowed out on Jan. 4, 1950, it promised, as newspapers do, that the solution to the crossword puzzle would be published the next day. More than 52 years later, that next day finally came. The new Sun printed the answers yesterday."

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history chunnel

"Research Guide to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" (via booknotes)

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time piece

""Four-twenty"--once an obscure Bay Area term for pot--is showing up nationally in the advertisements and business names of concert promoters, travel agencies, even high-tech companies."

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give me a call

i think we might be able to build a coalition around this op-ed piece. who needs tom friedman when we can build up trust from our mutual hatred of cell phone excess.

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smile for the camera

"Media training one of great delicious experiences of life," wrote Ms. Fielding in a 1998 account published in England’s The Daily Telegraph. "Word ‘scarf’ came up within three minutes …. Suddenly understand why Americans so fluent and sound-bite-esque on TV. Am trained to ‘scope out’ my ‘bullet points’ …. Must, however, not try to be funny but simply decide what going to say; tell them am going to say it, say it, then tell them have said it whilst ignoring interviewer, apart from using interviewer’s name as often as possible and remembering to ‘stay in the moment’ and clenching the buttocks to avoid tense-looking mouth."

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phuket, yo

some abc gum for ya.

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lapdawg

"Lapham once considered himself a centrist, but said the center has moved so far to the right that he's now seen as liberal. Still, he believes the notion of a liberal media is "a canard . . . utterly a straw man as far as I'm concerned."

The right wing wants to "blame the wreckage of the culture on a few university professors," Lapham said. "The people that have (wrecked the culture) -- it's the (Rupert) Murdochs of the world. Those are the people who say, 'Whatever the market will bear.' The market doesn't think. The market isn't a cultivated person. It's a ball bearing. It will go immediately to what sells. That's what wrecks the culture."

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midas well

ny observer columnist michael thomas "retires" to life of golfing gardening and blogging.

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Wednesday, Apr 24, 2002

yellow ruse

nobodys got any dirt on the karen hughes announcement that she would be leaving the administration because her family was homesick. seems highly implausible but stranger things have happened. meanwhile, talking points starts the ari fleischer deathwatch. may it be more successful than those of rumsfeld, o'neill and white.

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bad oman

"MUSCAT, April 22 (PNS): The US has decided to spend £90m to build a new airbase in Oman with runways long enough to handle B52 strategic bombers and heavy-lift transport aircraft."

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taking a break

"WASHINGTON, April 23 — The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners."

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fashion plates

"Since he posted the first installment on Oct. 9 at www.mnftiu.cc, the strip has been a textbook illustration of the viral reach of the Web, spreading by word of e-mail alone, so that in its first two weeks it received five million hits from Web crawlers around the world. "A friend sent it to me," said the gadfly commentator Arianna Huffington, whose taste in language usually runs to more polite combat. She added: "Profanity is often a part of biting political commentary, including what `The Osbournes' is doing right now."

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gated community

"In this fairy tale, Gates and his colleagues are knights in shining armor. They rescue technology from hard-hearted titans like IBM, and their own subsequent toughness is necessary to curb the chaos that would result if actual competition existed in the regime that replaced the big-iron brutes. Hence it is Microsoft's due, and right, to rule as sovereign. Without Microsoft's iron-fisted but simultaneously benevolent rule, the entire technology industry would unravel, and along with it just about everything else."

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Tuesday, Apr 23, 2002

news reels

"But it's the History Channel that must really bother PBS, and not just because the upstart flaunts its illiberal jingoism and paranoia. As its obsession with shocking secrets suggests, the History Channel has much in common with the New York Post—and Oliver Stone. PBS treats making TV shows as if it were noble but tedious missionary work; the History Channel manages to create some comical, intriguing visual rants about "history"—and at the same time attract viewers. If the channel broadcasts downright bunk from time to time, it also curates vast quantities of old—and fascinating—newsreel footage. Sometimes all it takes to make an evocative show is jumpy period film of Antarctic explorers or the angelic-looking Alexei Romanov. With this material available, broadcasting vastly overhyped School of Burns documentaries—wide-angle beauty shots and buttery close-ups of Ivy League professors—begins to seem like a sucker's game."

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rush job

douglas rushkoff joins the weblog universe.

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inter view

"Pelton's blunt appraisals find their way into his travel books too; they focus on skulls and crossbones rather than sandy beaches. He's the author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places," a compendium of key information about how to get into -- and, more important, how to get out of -- various war zones, drug dens and atrocity-ridden enclaves the world over. The book is devoted to far-flung disaster areas like Sierra Leone and Somalia. Not surprisingly, Afghanistan gets a chapter. Pelton has been going there since 1995 to cover both the Taliban regime and the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud's efforts to topple it."

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seti sun

"SETI has accomplished this feat of computational drudgery in just three ordinary years — by persuading some 3.5 million people to allow their personal computers to be yoked into a loose-knit skein called SETI@home. While no alien messages have been discovered yet, the project's success in using the Internet to assemble an impromptu grass-roots supercomputer is inspiring other researchers to turn to the masses for problems requiring more computation than they could otherwise afford."

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Monday, Apr 22, 2002

le phew!

"On Sunday, April 21st, Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extreme-right nationalist, shocked France and the rest of the world by coming in second in the first round of the French Presidential election, eliminating the mainstream Socialist candidate and qualifying for a runoff with the incumbent, President Jacques Chirac. How dangerous is Le Pen? This Profile, from 1997, explores his history, his politics, and his ambitions."

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Sunday, Apr 21, 2002

view from abridged

"In accounts of what happened at the July 2000 Camp David summit and the following months of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, we often hear about Ehud Barak's unprecedented offer and Yasser Arafat's uncompromising no. Israel is said to have made a historic, generous proposal, which the Palestinians, once again seizing the opportunity to miss an opportunity, turned down. In short, the failure to reach a final agreement is attributed, without notable dissent, to Yasser Arafat.

As orthodoxies go, this is a dangerous one. For it has larger ripple effects. Broader conclusions take hold. That there is no peace partner is one. That there is no possible end to the conflict with Arafat is another.

For a process of such complexity, the diagnosis is remarkably shallow. It ignores history, the dynamics of the negotiations, and the relationships among the three parties. In so doing, it fails to capture why what so many viewed as a generous Israeli offer, the Palestinians viewed as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer. Worse, it acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit—Arafat—rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis."

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pal o' mine

"But Israelis themselves are blind to this. In their own eyes they are still a small victim-community, defending themselves with restraint and reluctance against overwhelming odds. Their astonishingly incompetent political leadership has squandered thirty years since the hubris-inducing victory of June 1967. In that time Israelis have built illegal compounds in the occupied territories and grown a carapace of cynicism: toward the Palestinians, whom they regard with contempt, and toward a United States whose erstwhile benevolent disengagement they have manipulated shamelessly."

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haramount concern

"Barak is a highly intelligent but politically maladroit former general whose hobby is taking complicated watches apart and putting them together again; he is both the most decorated soldier in the Israeli army and an accomplished pianist. He should have known that on Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif, the wars of religion continue under a different name. In Jerusalem, hatred has often been another form of prayer and never more so than when the knives are pulled and the bombs are thrown. The religious hatred called odium theologicum has long been an instrument for gaining power and property, whether in local politics or in real estate speculation. Myths of divine promise alternate with myths of Blood and Soil. "History" and "religion" are relentlessly and superstitiously evoked and nowhere more so than on the Haram, or Temple Mount, where Sharon staged his political coup."

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carter centered

"There are two existing factors that offer success to United States persuasion. One is the legal requirement that American weapons are to be used by Israel only for defensive purposes, a premise certainly being violated in the recent destruction of Jenin and other villages. Richard Nixon imposed this requirement to stop Ariel Sharon and Israel's military advance into Egypt in the 1973 war, and I used the same demand to deter Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1979. (A full invasion was launched by Ariel Sharon after I left office). The other persuasive factor is approximately $10 million daily in American aid to Israel. President George Bush Sr. threatened this assistance in 1992 to prevent the building of Israeli settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem."

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dish tv

"But this technological togetherness has not created the human bonds that were promised. In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place. What the media provide is superficial familiarity -- images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn't just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people's lives remain parochial -- in the Arab world and everywhere else, including here."

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monty burns

"After last weekend's shocking events in Venezuela, in which President Chavez was ousted in a free and fair democratic coup, only to be returned to office two days later on what seems to have been little more than the whim of the people, the leaders of the Free World have clearly been forced to reconsider the nature of democracy."

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drugstore

the guardian is on drugs.

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Friday, Apr 19, 2002

organ grinders

"When elements of the Venezuelan military forced president Hugo Chavez from office last week, the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government's lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm."

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wright of way

"In this week's Nation, political scientist Richard Falk contests the standard view that Israel's offer at Camp David was eminently fair. But Falk's argument, embedded in a larger critique of American foreign policy, doesn't get deeply into the nuts and bolts of the issue. If you want to see Camp David from Arafat's point of view, a better place to look is a New York Review of Books piece that appeared back in August and was co-authored by Robert Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration. Malley was at Camp David and found Arafat's behavior there intensely frustrating, but he doesn't buy the interpretation that is favored on the right—that Arafat's rejection of the deal amounts to rejection of a two-state solution."

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duogooders

"SAN FRANCISCO--U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and database billionaire Larry Ellison were named this year's most notorious American violators of personal privacy by leading advocacy groups on Thursday."

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copychatter

"The purpose of this project is to capitalize on the distributed nature of digital information systems to collect, organize and distribute graphic and audio materials associated with music copyright infringement cases in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century on. This documentation, especially for cases over twenty-five years old, is difficult to obtain and has never before been systematically collected or published in print or electronic format. Our goal is to accumulate and publish a complete collection of music copyright infringement opinions, comments about the musical works they consider, and graphic and sound files of relevant portions of these works"

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the answer man

got a question? googles got the answer for a price.

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Thursday, Apr 18, 2002

spies like us

"Imagine a huge $30-billion conglomerate. It operates in one of the few businesses that might genuinely be described as cut-throat. Its competitors have changed dramatically, and so have its products and technologies. But its structure is the same as when it was founded, in 1947. Nobody leads this colossus (there is just an honorary chairman) and everyone exploits it. Demoralised and bureaucratic, it has just endured its biggest-ever loss. The response: the firm has been given even more money, and nobody has been sacked."

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hugos there

"Early on Sunday, April 14th, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela returned to Miraflores, the Presidential palace in Caracas, after having been in military custody for nearly forty-eight hours. A coup against him had failed, in part because other Latin-American leaders refused to grant legitimacy to the businessmen and military leaders who attempted to impose a new government on Venezuela. Chavez, a controversial populist whom the Bush Administration has criticized for "high-handed" tactics and for his friendship with Fidel Castro, was profiled in this article by Jon Lee Anderson in the September 10, 2001, issue of the magazine."

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check mates

"Primates -- the mammals from which humans evolved -- emerged on Earth much earlier than had been thought, originating perhaps 85 million years ago during the age of the dinosaurs, according to a new analysis."

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Wednesday, Apr 17, 2002

inca stinka

"The 500-year-old bodies of more than two thousand men, women, and children were excavated from a large Inca graveyard that may contain as many as 10,000 dead. Above the ground, a few feet over the mummies, thousands of their descendants were going about their daily lives."

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brownout

whew. the administration is taking a pounding this week. even a little "wag the dog" action in afghanistan aint gonna keep the bad news out of the headlines especially when the headlines are revealing the failures to capture osama. im feeling too lazy to link at the moment but let me say thank you to the fine people of venezuela for making our freedom loving government and our "just the fact, maam" media look like the tyrants and thugs they so long to be. ethel has been following the thread of events on the covert side while talking points has the state department beat. damn, if they cant secure venezuela, how are they going to melt saddam or uproot those pesky iranians? now that we cant muddle our way out of the middle east crisis are we just trying to dig ourselves in deeper. what percentage of the whitehouse is hoping for a wider mideast conflict? perhaps not many as even wolfowitz was booed by the american jews (according to talking points) at their support israel gathering in washington as he was too concilliatory for their taste.

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makings of an ass

dems dream about mccain as their man and again

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taking notes

"In his latest book, "Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives," Gitlin attempts to break down the fast and furious influx of news, music, TV and other mediums. Gitlin recently spoke with Salon from his home in New York about the cluelessness of the TV networks, the Washington Post's love for Ken Starr and why conservative viewpoints thrive on TV and radio."

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record release

the covers project

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net point

"New York's Natural History Museum Pioneers Use of Internet2"

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acid reign

"Power company buys Ohio River village plagued by clouds of acid last summer "

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Sunday, Apr 14, 2002

coup coup catchoo

"MEXICO CITY — When is a coup not a coup? When the United States says so, it seems — especially if the fallen leader is no friend to American interests."

"CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- President Hugo Chavez returned triumphantly to office two days after he was ousted and arrested by Venezuela's military, raising his fist in the air as he greeted supporters and reclaimed the presidential palace Sunday."


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Saturday, Apr 13, 2002

there goes the neighborhood

"To be called NoLIta Place, the 24-hour doorman building will have 65 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments with 19,000 square feet of first-floor retail space. "We think it's a great opportunity for people from downtown and midtown to live in the SoHo-NoLIta market," said Al Troup, the vice president of the Carlyle Group, whose president is Frank C. Carlucci, a former secretary of defense, with former Secretary of State James A. Baker III serving as a partner. (NoLIta is short for North of Little Italy.)"

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Wednesday, Apr 10, 2002

put it on my card

"Nearly a million tenants can use their cards to pay their rent, thanks to an arrangement between Visa and the biggest U.S. property manager, Chicago-based Apartment Investment and Management Co. Visa touts the service as convenient for renters and landlords."

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charitable donation

as the gum turns
pete rose chewed gum now $1200+ on ebay.

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war and fuzzy

"The soldiers then hauled men out of the captured homes, beat them, bound their hands and blindfolded them, stripped them to their underwear, and shipped them off to an Israeli military base for questioning, said the metal worker, who was detained for 24 hours. "They beat my brother - 100 times they hit him with their batons, on his shoulders, his stomach and his back," he said.

They met fierce resistance every step of the way from the Palestinian gunmen hunkering down in narrow alleys, and from the master bomb-makers in the camp, who rigged up an elaborate system of tripwires all over the camp, with exploding houses, skips, sewage covers, and even trees. They also handed out belts of explosives to would-be suicide bombers - Israel's chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, said this week that five Palestinians, including a woman, had blown themselves up while pretending to surrender to the Israeli forces."

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in bloom


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clintonomics

"Not so long ago, Clinton Street on the Lower East Side was a grim, grafitti-ridden streetscape. By night, bags of heroin were sold by brand name, while prostitutes peddled their wares nearby. Things looked even worse, if possible, under daylight, which shone on Clinton Street like fluorescent lights on a hangover."

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Tuesday, Apr 09, 2002

land rover

"This is the Age of Maps. Forget for a moment those 15th-century creations, with their romanticized sea monsters and crudely conceived land masses. More than 99 percent of all maps – ever – were made in the past century. Keep a sharp eye, and maps will start popping up on such things as cereal boxes, bus stops, emergency exits, and license plates."

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blue jeans

"Levi Strauss & Co., the 149-year-old manufacturer of blue jeans, yesterday virtually abandoned its decades-long effort to keep an American icon from becoming just one more foreign import."

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Monday, Apr 08, 2002

kabul spite

"KABUL, Afghanistan, April 7 — Victims of the bombing in Afghanistan handed in petitions from 400 families to the American Embassy here today, part of a growing movement to demand compensation from the United States for the loss of their families and homes."

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the fixer

"In substance, "Sharon has not changed his position. What he is offering at the end of this is his original proposal of an interim peace agreement," Benn concludes. "In any case, he is not prepared to give Arafat any chance whatsoever. His characterizations of Arafat were unusually harsh in the Knesset speech."

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american star power

"The debate that is missing in the US is not one between Americans who want Israel to survive and those-a marginal minority-who want Israel to be destroyed. The US should support Israel's right to exist within internationally-recognised borders and to defend itself against threats. What is needed is a debate between those who want to link US support for Israel to Israeli behaviour, in the light of America's own strategic goals and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no linkage. For the American Israel lobby, Tony Smith observes in his authoritative study, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Harvard), "to be a 'friend of Israel' or 'pro-Israel' apparently means something quite simple: that Israel alone should decide the terms of its relations with its Arab neighbours and that the US should endorse these terms, whatever they may be."

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Sunday, Apr 07, 2002

star power

"No, the greatest danger to the Jewish people is spiritual and ethical: that we will stand by quietly and passively as we watch the country that calls itself "the state of the Jewish people" act in ways that are cruel and oppressive toward an entire people whom it has occupied and denied self-determination for the past 35 years. In this last week, Israel's occupation has gone from obnoxious to criminal, and the people involved will be remembered in Jewish history as betrayers of the Jewish people and its highest moral and spiritual traditions. Jews did not climb out of the gas chambers of Europe to be oppressors of another people. The deepest values of our people have been shaped by the history of our own oppression; yet in the past weeks we've become brutalizers without constraints, without historical memory, without moral or spiritual moorings. Fifty years from now people will be studying this period and asking themselves: "How did people alive at this time allow themselves to go along passively with this terrible distortion in Jewish life?"

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remaindered

electronic intifada

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a drain on leadership

"So it's alarming that, in the "root cause" department, Bush is doing roughly what Sharon is doing: dodging the issue. Of course, both men talk the talk. Sharon acknowledges the Palestinians' aspirations of statehood—it's just that it's never a good time to actually discuss them. When the Arab states unveiled their peace proposal—a vague and imperfect idea, but a major step forward—Sharon changed the subject, using the Passover bombing as the occasion to launch his massive incursion. (This seems to have pleased the bombing's sponsor, Hamas, which shares Sharon's aversion to the Arabs' two-state solution). Bush, similarly, says we need to address the sources of Islamic discontent, including poverty; but when it came time to open American textile markets to Pakistan—which Gen. Musharraf had requested in exchange for his courageous alliance with America—Bush balked. (He did so for crass domestic political reasons, as Franklin Foer has shown in the New Republic.)"

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starry eyed

"It has been a long time since Santayana's maxim about forgetting history and repeating history could be cited without irony. The sentence--which first appeared in 1905 in a chapter on "Reason and Common Sense" in Santayana's book The Life of Reason--has been so often and oppressively quoted that it has itself become the very symbol of cliché, the most common way of teaching a platitude by example. Those who do not remember Santayana's maxim, you might say, are condemned to repeat it. But there is at least one precinct of American life in which the famous admonition still has the power to sting: the American government, and particularly the institutions of American foreign policy."

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shed your grace

understanding america

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pass the peas

red hot jazz archive

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Saturday, Apr 06, 2002

cloner

"ROME, Italy -- A maverick fertility specialist is reported to have claimed that a patient is pregnant with the world's first cloned baby."

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(re)making it

"Mary Tyler Moore Reunion Leads TV Nostalgia Wave"

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real player

"During the last year or so technological realism has claimed its greatest triumph yet, as three major game systems made their debuts. Lives there an 8 to 18-year-old — or an adult guiltily aspiring to that state of mind — who has not yet heard about the technological accomplishments of Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube? Elaborate textures and sounds make earlier games seem like playthings. The humble controller that once maneuvered a diminutive and plump plumber named Mario across a television screen, allowing him to jump, bop and run, has now been pumped up like Lara Croft's bodice; the bloated Xbox controller has eight buttons, two triggers, three toggling switches and untapped possibilities. And the promise and threat of these systems caused sales of video game systems and games to jump 42 percent last year to $9.4 billion."

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Friday, Apr 05, 2002

chew toy

"A wad of Bazooka bubble gum supposedly spit out by Luis Gonzalez of the Arizona Diamondbacks during a spring training game has been up for bid on "www.nocontraction.com" for a week."

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Thursday, Apr 04, 2002

genuwine concern

bush read a reasonably good speech today, considering his point of view, outlining at least some american position on the middle east conflict. maybe theyve accepted that if they can broker a peace it would actually be a major foreign policy victory for bush. i would accept him as the reluctant peacemaker even if he was forced to confront the problem because of his desire to "get saddam". theres little downside for bush to get involved at this point as his lack of resolve is beginning to hurt him in the polls and he aint invading iraq without some arab acquiescence.

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absolutely nothing

“Why should I go to kill and to be killed — for what?” says Ron, one of about 400 Israeli soldiers refusing to join the fight in the West Bank and Gaza.

“This is a war that we have no chance to win,” he says.

Lt. Itai Ryb got the call to serve on Friday. But this week he decided to pack not for war, but for jail, joining other refuseniks who have signed a letter saying they’d rather go to prison than serve in the military campaign.

“This war is not acceptable to me,” he says. “I can’t take part in it.”

The Israeli action in the West Bank is wrong, he says, because “it’s occupation, it’s illegal; mostly it harms the well-being of Israel. The sooner we end the occupation, the sooner we’re going to have peace in this country."

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here i go again

"SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Actress Tawny Kitaen, wife of Cleveland Indians pitcher Chuck Finley, was charged Wednesday with spousal abuse and battery for allegedly attacking her husband." (this was especially linkable because it lets me say, "dude...isnt that the chick from the whitesnake video?")

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Wednesday, Apr 03, 2002

shotgun mic

"The International Federation of Journalists today launched a global solidarity appeal for Palestinian media staff under siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and an "end to targeting of journalists" by Israel in its military intervention in the West Bank."

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Tuesday, Apr 02, 2002

uk is smoking

"The last political obstacle to the relaxation of Britain's cannabis laws will be cleared this month when the Commons home affairs select committee backs plans by the home secretary, David Blunkett, to downgrade the classification of the drug, the Guardian has learned"

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plane facts

"A bizarre book claiming that the plane that ploughed into the Pentagon on September 11 never existed, and that the US establishment itself was at the heart of the New York and Washington attacks, has shot to the top of the French bestseller lists to indignation on both sides of the Atlantic."

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flow down

americas most endangered rivers in 2002

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flash forward

headlines wed like to see.

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Monday, Apr 01, 2002

spin recycling

thus far, the mid-east conflict is a no-spin zone in washington as neither the dems nor repubs can conceive of any political advantage, at least, that is what The Note is divining from this mornings op-eds.

however, the bushies will engage in poll driven nation building photo-ops from afghanistan for purely domestic political reasons, which is why Queen Oprah declined her invitation to tour the newly opened schools in afghanistan. some academic on c-span yesterday claimed the school program wouldnt even have been had not laura bush advocated for it.

next up for the bush pr machine -- poppy with poppies!!


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see salts

"Little is known about the drug, salvia divinorum, or how it works on the brain and what its longterm effects might be. But word of its existence is spreading through e-mail chains and Web sites praising its potential, which has caught the attention of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA has included it on its list of "Drugs and Chemicals of Concern" and is considering whether to add the herb to its list of controlled substances."

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advise and dissent

"Growing up in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s while strongly supporting the just struggle of African Americans for civil rights, I was brainwashed at school as well as by the mainstream news media and popular culture to be just as pro-Israel as everyone else in America. Then came the 1967 Middle East War. At that time, my assessment of the situation was that Israel had attacked these Arab countries first, stolen their lands, and then driven out their respective peoples from their homes. I then realized that everything I had been told about Israel was "The Big Lie." Israel was Goliath, not David."

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equal rites

"Why a Palestinian girl now wants to be a suicide bomber"

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superman is dead

"The death of God was announced by a madman entering a marketplace, carrying a lantern in the morning light, in Nietzsche's book "The Gay Science," published in 1882. The moment for such an announcement was already late: Darwin had published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, and even that pivotal work had only given the imprimatur of science to a rationalist culture that had been predicting God's demise for decades. Nietzsche's announcement was far less remarkable than the shattering drama with which it was made, and the fact that a man so clearly imbued with faith was making it."

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Sunday, Mar 31, 2002

beach blanket bingo

"How much spring break can anyone stand?"

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hubba bubba

newsweeks cover story takes a look at citizen clinton while time fronts for arafat.

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jihad review

"Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia"

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