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Wednesday, Feb 26, 2003

communication breakdown

reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, or some such line. having telephony difficulties over here at df central. thatll learn me not to pay my bill on time. currently operating on a hand-cranked machine. hope to be back up to speed in the next few day, or a few days after that, or sometime later on past that point. should be any time now. *drums fingers on desk* *smiles wanely* *itches scalp* *itches beard* *itches nose* *sniffs* *clears throat* *types slowly* *yawn* hey, did the war start yet?

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Friday, Feb 21, 2003

behind the green door

i missed this frontline The War Behind Closed Doors but it will be available online on tuesday.

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Thursday, Feb 20, 2003

ethelene gaseousness

ethel is back. and despite the tidal wave of new left bloggers to wade through, hes still a top shelf muckraker.

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"The Israelis are building a wall in Bethlehem to separate the Arabs from the Jewish part of town, just one more wall in a catacomb of walls and checkpoints trapping Palestinians in, well...

Ghettos

And I mean that in the sense of the Warsaw Ghetto."

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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."

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Wednesday, Feb 19, 2003

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."

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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

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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. "

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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."

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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."

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