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Tuesday, Feb 12, 2002

oscar mired

and the winner is....

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Monday, Feb 11, 2002

black and tan

"The worst day in Saudi-American relations was Oct. 20, 1973, when Saudi King Faisal joined an Arab oil embargo against the United States. In a matter of days, the global oil market was thrown into chaos. Americans waited in long lines to buy gasoline. Within weeks, the price of oil more than tripled."

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rocket in your pocket

"Typically, it has been left to the French, traditionally suspicious of US global hegemony, to find the best words to describe it. Gigantisme militaire they call it, in a phrase that describes both the scale of America's ambitions and also a pathological condition: an organism grown so large it is sick."

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ever so weekly

weakly standard blog parody

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merry prankster

"George Bush is a careful custodian of his image. It's fine to snap a photo of him without a tie as he works on his ranch, but photographers have been prevented from snapping him with his tie loosened. So the premiere next month at an Austin film festival of a feature-length movie that depicts Governor Bush merrymaking with journalists aboard his presidential campaign plane in the fall of 2000 may not get a thumbs-up from the Commander in Chief."

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Sunday, Feb 10, 2002

pop the question

follow the partnerships...

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the importance of being idle

finally, a theory for the rest of us.

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Saturday, Feb 09, 2002

digital value disc

"While at odds about that, the studios are even more at loggerheads over pricing. One studio, Warner Bros., is crusading to drive down the prices of all DVDs, preferably so low they’ll become an impulse purchase like magazines. Most of its rival studios are aghast. They had counted on years of charging premium prices for the small video disks, which offer viewers a better picture than videotape plus features such as the ability to skip around without rewinding or fast-forwarding. “It’s like we’re in a race to the bottom” in DVD pricing, complains the president of Universal Studios Home Video, Craig Kornblau."

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Friday, Feb 08, 2002

plane truth

"In 1942 my father, George Rarey, a young cartoonist and commercial artist, was drafted into the Army Air Corps. He flew a P-47 before he drove a car. During his service he kept a cartoon journal of the daily life of the fighter pilots. A few weeks after D-Day he was killed in combat over France."

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enduring freedom

"For the first time, the administration is proposing to cross the line from counternarcotics to counterinsurgency," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the foreign operations subcommittee. "This is no longer about stopping drugs, it's about fighting the guerrillas."


"It is clear that they're ordinary criminals, unlike the Taliban, who fought for a cause," said Capt. Harold Cabunoc, commander of the Philippine forces at Basilan's Camp Cabunbata, where about a dozen American Special Operations troops will soon be based (most of the American troops will stay on safer ground off Basilan). "These guys just kidnap for money. They're just common criminals."


"Russian sources report that the US is trying to use the Kurds - who are fighting for their independence in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran - as its main allies in removing the current regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Since the break-up of the USSR, Russia has retained quite a good network of secret services in the areas where Kurds live in these countries. According to sources in Russia's military intelligence services, the US has already recruited leaders of the Kurdish communists, and nearly finished financing projects to restore landing strips in these districts. Weapons produced in the Soviet Union and in Russia, familiar to the Kurds, have now been purchased for them."

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