Archive for May, 2004
Police State
What is your definition of a “police state”? How about having one out of every 75 men in prison?
Pop
Forget NASCAR moms, single Dads, disgruntled soccer players and other swing voting blocks. What we want is the “pop” vote! Those who say “soda” seem to be solid Democratic supporters, with the “coke” crowd going Republican (I guess this is shown by their willingness to use a corporate trademark as a generic term), and a […]
Never Again
“If ‘never again’ means anything, then it’s now or never in Darfur”.
More info.
Chalabi
Kevin Drum gives us a comprehensive Chalabi Timeline. Here is his summary:
Bottom line: practically every group that has ever worked with Chalabi has eventually felt betrayed by him. This includes, at a minimum: (1) the Jordanian government, (2) the CIA, (3) the State Department, (4) Paul Bremer and the CPA, (5) the United Nations, […]
Roundup
I don’t often do blog round-ups, but these are all stories I felt worth a mention:
The White House says that Bush’s fall while biking around his ranch was the result of “loose topsoil” due to a recent rain. But Kos shows that it hadn’t rained all week! (More at Crooked Timber.)
Crooked Timber asks: Taking the […]
“Questioners”
The title of this post is in quotes, because that is how it appears in the 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual put out by the CIA.
The manual was used in numerous Latin American countries as an instructional tool by CIA and Green Beret trainers between 1983 and 1987 and became the subject of executive […]
Romney
Kevin Drum points us to a LA Times article on Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, which he boils down to its essence:
Gay marriage opponents are now invoking laws originally designed to make it more difficult for blacks and whites to marry each other. I hope they’re proud of being the modern day heirs of Jim […]
Unknown knowns
That Slavoj Žižek is a funny guy, running around making Lacanian jokes about Rumsfeld, but I have to admit he has a good point (emphasis added):
In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know […]
Vocation
Stanley Fish has an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Why We Built the Ivory Tower” in which he argues that academics should stay out of politics.
Marx famously said that our job is not to interpret the world, but to change it. In the academy, however, it is exactly the reverse: our […]
FTrain
This is a nice illustration about New York’s F-Train. Here is a small sample of the larger picture (click to see the whole thing):
The artist, Danny Gregory, also has a nice blog.
Also, I’ve been meaning to blog this list of “weirdos you meet on the subway” for some time now. Number 8 is one that […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
