"In all my 24 years with the paper I never saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
--John Hess, veteran reporter for the New York Times.
Is it time to bomb 1 Time Warner Center, New York, NY 10019?:
Time Magazine - which has quite possibly never seen a war that it wasn't one of the first to promote, with
the record to prove it -
bears no small share of the blame for the invasion of Iraq. In the week to week comings and goings of one or another country we must invade, most of their promotional
efforts work as simple mouthbreathing pieces of administrative propaganda, or old fashioned eight minute hates about this or that dictator's
nefarious past. And if it's a slow news day there's always denouncing elected leaders
for volatile oil prices because this or that US-backed coup against them failed. 'He's out, he's back, he's exacerbating the volatility in oil prices, oh no!' There's no treasured human value
they're not willing to stab in the back for the right price.
That's why I appreciate it when Time just let their fangs hang out, like
they haven't had enough fresh blood lately, and publish straight advocacy.
Not just any invasion, either. It's not enough that the country was just hit by a devastating cyclone killing a hundred thousand people - no, Time's editors thought to themselves - rather than watching the ruling SLORC regime enact a US government-like response to a natural disaster a more serious option would be to publish a piece about how the US government should invade Burma. That would surely fix everything.
The disaster of Time Magazine presents Americans with perhaps their most routine moral crisis since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By most reliable estimates, over one million people are dead. Refusals to acknowledge the millions of displaced Iraqis have lead to hundred million dollar shortfalls in basic elementary relief for the victims, the inaccessibility of neighboring countries for asylum and non-existent state of Iraq's infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 5 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll, will, within years, exceed the numbers of any genocide you could name since World War II.
The cold truth is that Time magazine is almost entirely incapable of producing hard news that isn't just soul-sucking warmongering; news meant to produce news; a supply that creates its own demand. With thousands of years of the written record, or our own national history of nearly annual military adventures, or just our most recent episodes in Afghanistan, Somalia, and our universally acclaimed
humanitarian failure in Iraq, apparently the lesson that military force is not a humanitarian enterprise is apparently too complex for some institutions. Instead the lesson is that war improves the quality of our lives by giving us meaning, or at least stale neologisms like "give war a chance".
That's why it's time to consider a more serious option: bombing Time Warner. As its response to the Iraq war proved, the magazine's capacity for promoting violence is limitless, and the only time it ever denounces it seems to be when the subjects of its own media empire become the victims. In an effort to promote peace, then, perhaps it has become necessary to routinely subject them to the opposite.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-05-10 15:09:41 CST |
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shamelessly defending himself...:
Northwestern University == sissies. I suppose the "controversy" piled on top of Rev. Wright might have hindered Henry Beinen's otherwise salutary ability to shamelessly beg for money. I mean, hey, he gets some of mine every year.
Has anybody looked at the qualifications for being a preacher lately? I'm pretty sure "narcissist, egotist, provocateur, and a shameless self-promoter" is at the top of the job description. But we're shocked! Shocked I tell you! How did he get in the pulpit!?
I watched that shit, and yeah, obviously the dude is qualified to do what he did for the past 30 odd years. Go figure. Unlike all these fifth rate hacks in the national press corps who've apparently got nothing better to do than gleefully lie about what anybody can just, like, watch him say. Slow campaign season I guess.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-05-01 17:17:16 CST |
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suckers:
the media's response to the latest reveal of the Pentagon's PR program notes - the only new news seems to be the access to the script - with "retired" Generals is really something, just take Rick Sanchez whining towards the end of this, like he's the poor betrayed mook:
Couple things. Asking "who is your current employer?" and thinking for a second whether there's a conflict of interest between military analysis and an employed defense contractor (ret) isn't what we call a "failure to vet", it's a failure to glance at a resume. These "retired" generals were employed by the firms that would wage the war, how did the interview process work?
CNN Human Resources: Welcome to CNN. It looks like you're applying for the independent military analyst contract we've recently made available. Why don't we sit down and discuss your relevant experience. Tell me about your last position in a military role?
GENERALLY RETIRED: Here's my name, rank, some parentheses, and my letter of recommendation from the Pentagon's public relations department.
CNN HR: Hired!
Nevermind that the networks would announce on air that these guys were at Pentagon "briefings", granting them the inner-sanctum authority of having sat in on a PR bull session with military spokesmen. Had they thought one second about what kind of information they were getting they could have done the legal thing and simply asked the Pentagon to provide an official spokesman.
For that matter, if you hire a military analyst for military analysis you've aleady introduced an implicit conflict of interest favoring armed conflict: dur, if there's no war Mr. Retired doesn't keep his illustrious media gig. Let's get our roles straight: CNN isn't a welfare program, it's a for-profit propaganda organ.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-24 14:48:29 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-11 02:49:09 CST |
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"If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace":
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-07 09:15:06 CST |
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the etiquette-o-fascists have gone too far:
I hold no more brief against civil discourse than I do archaic double negatives, but sometimes generous language and amiable unagreement can push the capacity of the language to conform to fact past the breaking point:
The defenders of honest mockery and verbatim quotes must unite against the common threat of unfairly polite discourse.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-05 18:02:55 CST |
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Mayor Daley Welcomes You to the City of Chicago:
The city for some reason has been repeatedly declaring my little saturn an "abandoned vehicle" lately. By the letter of the law a car that isn't moved for one week can apparently be declared abandoned, and since I've been taking mass transit downtown on my current contract (and my alderman is all about keeping cars parked) I often leave it parked in one spot for longer stretches than that. That's why we shell out $120 every year for those city stickers, right? So recently I've been removing weekly abanonded vehicle tow notices, moving the car down the block, and trying to figure out who the hell I'm supposed to call to get my car off whatever the hell bizarro list it's on that they keep trying to impound it.
While I'm dealing with that it somehow slips my mind that it's time to renew the registration, as the IL Sec of State never mails me the renewal notice. They don't mail me the renewal notice because my car is late for emissions testing. I never received a notice for the emissions testing - probably because the Secretary of State didn't pass along my address change information to the IL EPA, or didn't process my change of address request to begin with - so it doesn't occur to me to test it. That is, the testing of the emissions it doesn't emit because I barely drive it, for which it's being threatened with impound as an abandoned vehicle. I don't find out it's due for testing until I try to renew my registration and discover the EPA hold: it's news to me that as of a few months ago, no test, no registration. So I go to my car to take it to the testing station and discover it's been towed by the city - right on my birthday, just to add to the general mirth - presumably for being "abandoned". Now it's in the United Road Services city tow lot.
To get the car out of the pound one has to have current registration, to renew the registration one has to pass the emissions test, to pass the emissions test one has to get the car out of the pound. My absent minded deportment has whipped up the perfect bureaucratic spin cycle.
So now what happens? Well, if the city's standard operating procedure is followed, United Road Services will continue charging me $35 daily storage fees - which I'll have to pay if I don't want my already sloppy credit utterly destroyed - until they sell it to a licensed scrap dealer for $125, who will auction it off to somebody else at a fraction of blue book value, who will resell it at blue book value, and some fraction of the proceeds will wind up in Richard M. Daley's treasure chest.
I guess that's one way to make me cough up campaign contributions to the Democratic Party.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-05 13:42:54 CST |
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documenting the watching of documentaries:
I was gonna tell you about what I'm watching this evening, but instead you can just watch it yourself:
Technology truly does make life easier.
This one is about Monsanto, the genetically modified food giant and producer of a militarized herbicide that was lethal to Americans but perfectly safe for Vietnamese: alternatively, when Americans were occasionally exposed over the course of the war in Indochina it could be deadly, but if you live for the next 40 years more or less swimming in the stuff it's like vitamin C.
Of the three concerns: human health, patent monopoly, and threats to biodiversity, it's that last one that bothers me the most. Food with genes from non-food breeding with normal food isn't something that's we can just turn around and contain the impact of. If you want to stop enforcing the patents on African subsistence farmers or just stop eating the stuff altogether, that's easy. But as the small and organic farmers who find themselves forced to pay patent rents to Monsanto know, there's no obvious way to pull the recombinant DNA out of the gene pool once it pollutes it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-04 18:26:23 CST |
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JP Morgan fleeces public schools out of $12 billion in PA alone:
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-04 10:04:18 CST |
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rules schmules:
Without this declassified memo declaring the vigilante prerogative of the executive branch to wantonly torture suspects we could never have gotten Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's confessions to masterminding the Fleischmann and Pons cold fusion hypothesis, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, and the Boston Mooninite Scare.
Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, said yesterday after reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright offensive."
I suppose, skimming through it, that I have to agree. They simply refuse to accept that any law they deign to mention could apply to them. It rather puts this whole "war on terror" concept in a muddier pool. If there were no rules in a time of war then terrorism was legally impossible. On the other hand if terrorism was a violation of the laws of war, and there were no laws of war, a pacifist position that war is then terrorism has its own appeal.
Maybe this helps clarify why the Bush administration's Attorney General is making the serious allegation that - through witting negligence or culpable inefficiency - the Bush administration allowed Al Qaeda to attack us on 9/11. If the attacks themselves weren't illegal they won't need to rely soley on a strong ineptitude defense.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-02 10:12:51 CST |
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Coincidentally, the FBI wants a half billion dollar pay raise. They need help pouring through the massive amounts of your private life they've data mined, I suppose. It can't be easy sorting the fifth columnists who want to destroy America with national health insurance from the fifth columnists who want to destroy America with peace.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-01 10:37:42 CST |
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I don't think PZ Meyers endorsing hateful bigotry slapped haphazardly together by a book-banning free-speech fanatic - get it? - really does much for his cause. What's the idea? Now, to top off our defense of the schools against the recidivism of the young earthers, I and my distinguished colleagues will help kick up a few more asshat clouds of uncomprehending loathing towards strangers with some misdirected venom and whatever anecdotal data we have handy in our underpants, which we too, as patriotic Guardians of the Enlightenment, will hurl.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-30 00:58:20 CST |
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now i'm going down to emmit's fix-it-shop, to fix emmit:
Mrs. Clinton said she would like to cap health insurance premiums at 5 percent to 10 percent of income. The average cost of a family policy bought by an individual in 2006 and 2007 was 10 percent of the median family income ... Some policies cost up 16 percent of median income.
She said it "might be appropriate" to require insurers to spend ... 85 percent of premiums on health care.
Senator Barack Obama has backed that general concept.
Uh huh. What ioz said. If that's the plan, why not just slap a flat 5-10% tax on all income, mail out the insurance cards - hell, we might as well use this one, it'd be just another boost for tourism - and spend 99% of it on care, if that's the brilliant plan?
No more VA, no medicare, no medicaid, no means testing, no levies on our time filling out fucking reams of paperwork to prove to some bureaucrat that we really are sick and poor afterall, no applications, no shopping for a middle man, no enrollment, no legal fees or court costs prosecuting mandate violators, no productivity losses to people fighting it out with private insurers anyway, no underinsuring with cheaper plans and squeezing by the mandate, none of this retarded shit for the simple sake of saving the bacon of the candidates' major campaign contributors.
With her "easy command" of the system, maybe she could tell us how mandating profit margins and operating budgets higher than any other industrialized country tolerates is a better idea.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-29 13:44:07 CST |
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"for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival":
This business of [bombing] human beings ... of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
I mean, I see the distinction, but I don't see the difference everybody else apparently sees. It's OK to bitch about the government, says the Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich Dancing Chorus Line, but take not thy country's name in vain. I get it, really I do: the 1st Commandment supercedes the 1st Amendment. Fine.
The war is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investment accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why ... American ... forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
True "change we can believe in", you might say:
will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
Yeah! I tell you what, that was a great speech. A mere 40 years old and still topical. I wish we had somebody around now who gave great speeches like that.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-28 23:23:35 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-28 15:15:02 CST |
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don't stop believing:
Oh, hai America! Let me ask you a quick question: do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
Are you confused? Or unsure of the correct answer? My goodness! Fourteen percent of us! 42% total, why, that's awfully coincident with the number of young earthers in this illustrious crowd! Those Iraqis better figure their shit out fast or we're leaving! After all we've done for them. Some of that 64% who don't think the war was worth it no doubt believe it wasn't worth it because those Iraqis or whoever lives in that country wherever it is are ingrates.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-24 07:48:13 CST |
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you are in a twisty machine of complex instruments, all alike
:
the New York Times piece today bearing the hysterical title "What Created this Monster?" There is a reference to "complex instruments that lurk in the financial shadows"; "a potential epidemic"; "Wall Street's version of nitroglycerin"; and so on. You get the idea. And yet for all this lurking epidemic in the shadows, there isn't any attempt to explain any of it, almost as if touching it might cause something to detonate. And yes, in another NYT story today there is a reference to 9/11 and the idea that extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.
We are back [to Rumsfeld's] "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", where the past incompetence of the authorities serves to bolster an atmosphere of panic that can be used to dis-enable public scrutiny and the taking of responsibility, and let these same authorities adopt even more drastic and unexamined policies.
I started reading it myself, honest, and when complex shit started lurking I ran away. It was easy, though, because our pockets were lighter.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-24 01:14:30 CST |
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[T]he brain of Muslim men thinks that they could copulate with the 72 virgins in heaven, if they die as martyrs.
[Emph. in the orig. And... "the brain of [plural noun]"?]
Let me add - and there's so much one could add - to Cosma's complaints. We should all be very tired of this nonsense about "72 virgins": the unenumerated huri - be they wide-eyed virgins, modest companions of the opposite sex, one's loved ones, a symbolic representation of the indescribable physical joys of the afterlife, or merely white grapes - are promised to every follower of Islam, not just martyrs. Whatever it is that is indicated in the verses as the reward, the rewards are nevertheless promised indiscriminately to every God-fearing Muslim. No suicidal immolation at the center of a barrage of shrapnel or death in valiant battle against the crusaders is necessary.
And this is little different from the sister-faith I was raised in, in which in addition to beatific vision of god's essence - shared in the dual paradises of Islam - the rather more earthly joys are guaranteed after the final judgement and my disembodied soul shall be recombined in purified glory with my earthly vessel and I - as my mother used to promise - shall be rejoined with my deceased grandfather, dead dog, and one half dozen pet hamsters. Later in life, with sexual and spiritual maturity, this marketing impression is modified appropriately to become "your spouse will be hot again". And it remains, after all, a tempting offer.
Which is to say, Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa's distillation of the conventional wisdom into a series of categorical and bigoted smears is really one of the finest displays of nastiness I've seen in some time. That such a masterpiece can make it through peer-review in 2007 rather speaks for itself. It almost makes it impossible to criticize presidential candidates when they carelessly hawk insane wars with the same exoticized mythologies about ordinary mythologies.
Now, one can consider that perhaps such promises of an eternal Christian paradise lessened Loula Abboud's qualms about death as much as any other, but I have to say that after reading and listening to stupid shit like this for the past seven years the promise of a sexless but nevertheless quiet non-existence certainly makes up a lot of lost ground in its relative appeal.
Maybe all those godless suicide bombers were willing to volunteer their very lives for a cause for the same reason as any religious fanatic: escapism.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-23 18:36:22 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-23 13:58:53 CST |
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documenting the watching of documentaries:
I was gonna tell you about what I'm watching this evening, but instead you can just watch it yourself:
Guess that makes my life easier.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-21 19:32:09 CST |
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To call this sermon "anti-American" is... anti-American:
via, somebody's finally been plastering youtube with full sermons by this Rev. Wright fellow. Here's a good chunk of The Chicken Sermon (orig. title "The Day of Jerusalem"s Fall"?) shortly after 9/11:
Now, I certainly don't believe in your invisible sky god(s), but I think that's pretty good stuff.
Wright references an appearance by, apparently, Edward Peck on FOX, who was once our ambassador to Iraq, who was making the media rounds at the time responding to allegations that 9/11 was the work of Saddam Hussein. I'm a little surprised here, I have to admit, because I have no recollection of the PR campaign for the Iraq war starting so quickly. We weren't even bombing people vaguely associated with the attacks yet, and we were already on the Kevin Bacon warpath. Peck was saying stuff like:
So we will mercilessly, viciously, effectively attack and destroy all kinds of symptoms. When the rubble has settled and the dust is gone, the disease is still going to be out there untouched. Because we don't want to look at why, why it is that all of these people hate us. It's not because of freedom. It's not because Brittney Spears has a belly button or because we export hamburgers. They hate us because of things they see us doing to their part of the world that they definitely do not like.
Which, obviously, nobody wants to hear that now anymore than they did then. Then again, they'll probably dislike it even more when it's gutted of context and thrown around as a three second soundbyte. But sticking your head up your own ass and pretending it's bright as day does not qualify as patriotic service to one's countrymen.
Sally A. Brown, Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Princeton, calls the sermon an example of "critical-prophetic lament", and whatever that actually means, I'm willing to entertain the idea that there was in fact something prophetic about Wright's choice from psalms.
update: And the 'God Damn America' Sermon, in which he spreads it around generously. Now, when he says "God damn America - that's in the Gospel - for killing innocent people", is the beef that this god character wouldn't damn the killing of innocent people? I don't think said god is consistent on the matter - see the above referenced psalm for a clear example to the contrary - but hey, I'm not the one with my panties in a bundle here, just the rest of the internets.
More of Rev. Wrights' sermons are up the tubes, and, I know this is a crazy idea, maybe the church can defend itself. It's a little silly me giving a shit and all but I have friends who've attended in the past and thought it was a great service. The willful incomprehension of what Trinity's all about has been more than a little insulting, and the smear campaign against them sad and depressing.
Insults should stand upon the merits. For starters I'd suggest this "three food groups" sermon: I can tell you from personal experience that wine, bread, and spirits are no basis for a healthy diet, they're the basis for jaundice and a beer gut. I will not rest until these cults of poor nutrition eat their vegetables, or at least start taking their vitamins.
Think of the children!
update: I suppose this was kind of inevitable, wasn't it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-21 15:34:00 CST |
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now with extra words in somebody else's mouth:
That wacky President is at it again, claiming Iran has "declared" that it wants nuclear weapons - he did this last August and corrected himself - followed up shortly with his press secretary defending that lie by lying about Iran's declared policy on Israel. To put it another way:
I prefer to think of it as a Reese’s peanut butter cup moment: "Hey, you got your lie about Iran wanting to wipe out Israel in my lie about Iran saying it wants nuclear weapons!" "Hey, you got your lie about Iran saying it wants nuclear weapons into my lie about Iran wanting to wipe out Israel!"
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-21 13:39:56 CST |
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strange double standards:
Why is this strange double standard being developed and perpetuated by the Obama campaign? Is it OK to talk about "typical white people", and not "typical black people"?
What Obama said:
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person."
Can you imagine what would happen to race relations in America if we were to "develop and perpetuate" this as a uniform standard, such as with the following?
A typical black person does not harbor any racial animosity.
I don't think that's sufficient to understand the kind of poisonous, divisive logic that's at work here. We need to take such heinous standards to their own absurd ends, to see the rotten core of racial bigotry and prejudice stripped naked and revealed to us all. You may want to shut your eyes, however, because I'm going to go all Klu Klux Klan on your ass and thereby expose this sickening phenomenon for what it is. Here:
A typical black person would be a good neighbor.
I know, I know! The double standard! It's like I'm channelling Cosmo Kramer and Margaret Sanger simultaneously! Somebody stop me before I inadvertently deepen the racial divide again!
Liberals are weird.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-21 11:54:27 CST |
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I too recall fondly our glorious invasion and occupation of the Warsaw Pact:
"I regarded 1989 as almost eternal proof of the notion that the walls of tyranny could fall if we had the will to bring them down and the gumption to use military power when we could."
The US Military: Everywhere You Ever Imagined It.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-21 10:47:49 CST |
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one day ready:
I wasn't gonna say anything the first time, or the second time, but:
I should, you know, make it a point when I raise the matter of widespread public stupidity to complain about elite ignorance. The obvious ramification is that we should be the world's policeman and spread our way of life around the globe at spear point, so that others can share in our blissful cluelessness.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-20 17:01:28 CST |
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it takes an ivy league:
In a working paper already getting press Radha Iyengar and Jonathan Monten have proven beyond all doubt what we've known all along to be true, the media is soley responsible for 5-10% of our momentous success in Iraq. I'm being too generous, perhaps: I mean, who could have ever looked at the occupation of Iraq and thought "insurgent groups are not devoid of reason and unresponsive to outside pressures and stimuli"? It's crazy talk! Why does the press love the insurgency? Why this hate for America? The contradictions are clear: to preserve our freedom and way of life we must abolish our freedom and way of life. Now is the time not for caveats! Now is the time for victory abroad so that we may defeat the existential threat of our own freedom! Etc.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-19 23:36:28 CST |
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understatement of the academic year:
Daniel Drezner reads the tea leaves and discovers wide public support for a "realist foreign policy", however loosely defined. He studiously cautions:
Grossmisconceptions about reality, however, do not "pose serious challenges to the arguments presented here", he argues, because such misconceptions "have been consistent over a long period of time".
Brilliant.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-18 21:54:18 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-18 14:13:32 CST |
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Q7. Which of the following have you personally seen or experienced since the invasion of Iraq in 2003?:
The channel 4 poll of Iraqis finds that 70% of Iraqis want us to leave, 60% want us out within a year or sooner, a number no different from responses to the same question in the Spring of 2004, when our welcome with anybody you could name was worn out for good. Remember when we were all talking about exporting democracy? Man that was awesome.
Anyway, to the above question, Iraqis reported experiencing:
The kidnapping of a friend or a colleague: 7%.
The kidnapping of a member of your family/relative: 11%.
Fighting involving MNF troops: 7%.
Militia violence: 9%.
A car or suicide bomb: 9%
The murder of a friend or a colleague: 12%.
The murder of a member of your family/relative: 24%.
The average family size in Iraq is 6, or about 4 million families, 24% of that number would be the same as the best epidemiological estimates we have of excess mortality since the invasion of around 1 million, assuming no more than one family member was killed. That number, by the way, is about the same as last year's. Then again, polls and epidemiological surveys don't get responses from the millions of Iraqis who have fled the hellfire of death and destruction created by the invasion, so maybe I'm being a little over optimistic.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-03-18 12:30:41 CST |
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