drat fink
View current page...more recent posts
chilly willy
"This is the transcript of an interview between former President Bill Clinton and James Fallows, of The Atlantic Monthly, on October 21, 2002. It occurred at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Clinton was in Fayetteville to deliver a speech on foreign policy honoring his mentor, the late Senator J. William Fulbright. Also present at the interview were two of Clinton's associates from Arkansas, including Rodney Slater, former Secretary of Transportation. Clinton and his group arrived 45 minutes late. Clinton strolled into the interview room and took out a cigar, which he never lit."
sword swallowers
"The Cross-Blog Debate has come to an end, and the responses are in. From here on out, it's freewheeling debate in comments sections, on blogs, in the street, from the rooftops... whatever floats your boat."
genrul dynamix
i posted this elsewhere (as i was needlessly revising someone elses parody) but as usual in my haste i made a mistook.
war is a mainly a manly game
its not just played for fun
its not just waged for fame
its aim is zero sum
our zero hero is saddam
we'll target him with glee
and after he is less than none
we'll head towards galilee.
you cant be serious enough to think
that north koreans will take issue
that syrians will make us blink
that iranians arent made of tissue
and what do we care
with our bombs bursting in air
home of the crossed hair
our rockets red glare
blank stairs
"Pinker takes aim at three targets in his book. He calls them the Blank Slate (the notion that the mind has no inherent structure), the Noble Savage (the notion that man is born innocent and is corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the notion that mind differs from matter). These correspond, at least loosely, to the philosophical traditions of empiricism, Romanticism, and dualism, respectively. Pinker considers all three traditions because he believes they are typically found together. While this seems doubtful (Marxists subscribe to the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage but reject the Ghost in the Machine, while Catholics do the opposite), it doesn't much matter. Pinker ends up attacking what he takes to be the errors of the Blank Slate almost exclusively and the other two targets mostly disappear. "
man hunt
"A new survey of the Lake Mungo site has now revised the date of the burial to 42,000 years ago. Nearby rock flakes, which seem to be human artifacts, occur in a layer of sand dated to 46,000 to 50,000 years ago, according to a report to be published in the journal Nature on Thursday by James M. Bowler of the University of Melbourne and other Australian colleagues.
The revision means that the Lake Mungo remains support rather than contradict the theory that a change occurring only 50,000 years ago endowed human societies with capabilities for travel and exploiting new environments."
nothing to see here
"MOSCOW – When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.
Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.
But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert."
suck face
new ana marie cox weblog -- the antic muse
blogPAC
"So, what if the "grassroots", at least those of us represented by sites like dKos, MyDD, Atrios, Talk Left, DU, and others, were able to pool the resources of their respective readers? Yesterday I pledged $25/month, or $300 a year. If 334 of my readers did the same (my daily readership is in the 6,000 range, Atrios is probably double that), that would be $100,000 in the DNC coffers -- real money. In the GOP, that would make this site a "Pioneer", with special access to GOP decision makers. I would expect the same from the DNC."
i shut em down
"Anti-war coalition leaders, emboldened by the massive turnout at peace rallies in London and around the world, are planning to try to shut Britain down should Tony Blair defy public opinion and go to war without a UN resolution."
digging in
"I believe that the energy and the commitment that brought average people into the streets in rather impressive numbers yesterday was about mistrust of American power in the hands of this administration. Diplomacy by bludgeon, the flatulent public proclamations of “unilateralism” and “benevolent hegemony” and the ham-handed, ever changing rationales for the invasion have served to confirm in many minds that disarming Iraq is merely afirst step in a much larger global agenda. These documented ambitions (which, granted, most people only sense rather than know,) combined with a dubious election, an eccentric if not downright radical foreign policy team and a President whose childlike rhetoric and blindingly obvious lack of qualifications for the job of world leader make America appear to be slightly unstable and potentially threatening. We are the most powerful country on earth and yet something strange and unnerving is going on with our politics. This worries people."