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Monday, Mar 03, 2003

blog virus

"The Project Blogger network of personal sites was created to connect our clients with individuals like you who would be willing to help advance their marketing efforts. Sometimes these clients want to pick your brain through a survey. Other times, they want to take advantage of your site traffic to launch products like cell phones or new drinks. For your efforts, you get advance access to these products, cool free stuff, and yes, even hundreds of dollars in compensation."

postcards from the edge

"The Democratic candidates who seek to unseat President Bush in 2004 now know they must not only convince a skeptical public that they can lead the United States through its current crises but that they can lead the country better than Bush. FOREIGN POLICY magazine asked four Democratic presidential hopefuls to articulate their vision of the United States� role in the world."

deter detour

"The belief that Saddam�s past behavior shows he cannot be contained rests on distorted history and faulty logic. In fact, the historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively�even if Saddam has nuclear weapons�just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Regardless of whether Iraq complies with U.N. inspections or what the inspectors find, the campaign to wage war against Iraq rests on a flimsy foundation."

future sounds

"No one knows what will happen when Saddam Hussein's death grip on his country is finally broken. Prediction is a dangerous business in politics generally, but in the case of Iraq, where since 1968 the only political activity that won't get you killed is unambiguous loyalty to the Baath Party, the future is especially opaque. For the past several months the country has been crawling with foreign journalists, yet the security apparatus is so extensive and terror so deeply internalized that most of what we know about Iraqis' unofficial thoughts is confined to facial expressions and buried meanings. When Makiya and two other Iraqis were invited to the Oval Office in January, he told President Bush that invading American troops would be greeted with ''sweets and flowers.'' More fancifully, Prof. Fouad Ajami, a Middle East scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, predicts ''kites and boom boxes.'"

choke hold

unqualified offerings dismantles recent pollack oped.

appeal me off another one

"Bashman, an appellate lawyer with Philadelphia's Buchanan Ingersoll, presides over "How Appealing," the pre-eminent blog for the appellate court community, the primus inter pares of all legal blogs, the undeniable Marbury v. Madison of the genre."

espirito beneficiente

"The Centro Espirito Beneficiente Unaio do Vegetal (UDV) is a Brazilian church combining Christian beliefs with a practice copied from certain Amazonian Indians: ritual use of a psychoactive sacrament brewed from two Amazonian plants. The church and its sacraments are legal in Brazil. Its small American branch, which has both US and Brazilian nationals as members, sued the federal government, claiming the right to pursue its worship here in the face of the drug laws, after a shipment of the sacramental mixture was seized in 1999."

Sunday, Mar 02, 2003

friedman flashback

"Nothing is local anymore. It's all global because the Internet makes everything local, which is the same as everything being global, because nothing has to be local when everything's global. Especially the local. For instance, I was talking to the guy who cleaned the toilets in my suite at the Bombay Hilton, and he told me, "If only I had a computer! You see, toilet-scrubbing in Bombay is really a local business, but with a laptop and a modem, I could maybe branch out into e-commerce services."

lesson up

"Blast from the past: Politicians on both sides of the argument over Iraq have been busy rummaging through the history books. The pro-war camp constantly warn against repeating the mistakes of appeasement. The antis claim we are heading for another Suez. But which is the more plausible parallel? Matt Seaton asked a dozen leading historians (what they think)."

youre such a cut-up

"A man's body - from which a lung and the heart and liver had been neatly extracted - was found in an abandoned North Philadelphia rowhouse yesterday afternoon by a man who had been foraging for scrap metal."

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