I had lunch yesterday with two of my colleagues at the Mershon Center, John Mueller and Markus Kornprobst. The conversation inevitably turned to the Middle East and the efficacy of US and Israeli policy. As the discussion progressed, I mentioned that when we got back...
I spent today at and around our soon-to-be-not home with my daughter. Revisions to my book manuscript have been moving along nicely, so I thought it would be a good idea to give my wife some relief....
Coalition soldiers have recaptured both towns taken by the Taliban over the weekend.This shouldn't come as much of a surprise When the Taliban can hold towns against combined Afghan and coalition...
From the Washington Post:Michael Golden, spokesman for Schaefer, said the comptroller was speaking "in this sort of verbal shorthand that those of us who have worked with him can understand."...
Because I worry that Haloscan may implode before blogger does, I feel compelled to preserve SteveG's comment on Patrick's ode to his HDTV for digital posterity:It may be a non-standard interpretation, but there are some scholars who consider "alienation from oneself as a species being" to be a mistranslation of "not getting decent reception on channel sechs oder acht." Of course, Marx was writing back in the times when they had rabbit ears...Happy independence day!(I watched the fireworks via rabbit-ear powered NTSC)(For five minutes)(Then I played Katamari Damarcy)(A Japanese game)(About...
After a long struggle with some undisclosed ailment that was producing an occasional greenish tint to the images displayed on it, our old 27" Magnavox standard-definition TV finally gave up the ghost a couple of weeks ago. It was a long, slow death, so there wasn't much mourning -- just a couple of trips to electronics stores and some 'Net browsing to find a replacement. What we quickly learned is that they just don't make decent-quality affordable tube TVs any more, and that those that they do make are both gigantic (read: heavy) and affected by things like "geometry problems" (which are...
[Updated 7.4.06] John Robb peaks into his crystal ball to see what might happen if the US moves forward with a strategic bombing campaign against Iran (discussed in the new issue of the New Yorker by Sy Hersh). He relays some interesting possibilities, although I must say that much of what he talks about was echoed by others in the lead up to the Iraq war, and certainly the reverberations from that conflict have not been as severe as predicted.However, there are certainly significant differences between Iraq 3 years ago and Iran today--particularly when it comes to Iran's capacity to damage...
...a few stories worth your time as you begin your holiday weekend:The Christian Science Monitor has a great article discussing the multiple motives and objectives behind Israel's recent Gaza operations.Great Britain sought the services of the US nuclear deterrent to help protect Hong Kong during the Cold War, recently released documents suggest. What is of interest for me is the recognition that the colony was "strategically irrelevant", but that the British government "decided that it did have a vital symbolic role as the country's sole frontier with the Communist world", coming to the...