President Bush’s Walkabout – New York Times: The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration’s most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation…. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney’s back is against the wall, and he’s declared war on the Geneva Conventions.
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Informed Comment: former Assistant Secretary of Commerce Linda Bilmes has estimated the cost of five years of the Iraq war at 1 trillion and 372 billion dollars; is the next five years Mr. Krepinevich estimates for his strategy likely to be much cheaper?… Neither do I.Meanwhile, as he points out, not just Arabs or just Muslims but peoples all over the world have come to dislike and fear America and “Indeed, citizens in Canada, France, Germany the Netherlands, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom now hold more favorable views of China than of the United States.”
1 CommentHow to say someone is a murderer without saying it: Abramoff is under investigation by a grand jury in Guam for illegal contracts and money laundering and another grand jury in Fort Lauderdale, Fla…. Abramoff’s business partner Adam Kidan made payments from company funds of $30,000 to one of the killers’ daughters, who performed no services for the company, and $115,000 to a firm the hit man owned.
Leave a CommentA model to the world: when they realised Oleniuk had photographed them hitting looters, they hurled him to the ground, grabbed his two cameras and removed memory cards containing around 350 pictures…. When he asked for his pictures back, the police insulted him and threatened to hit him.
Leave a CommentThe fact that someone is a judge, for example, is a social fact — the authority that attaches to judgeship is attached by everyone agreeing that a certain person has the right to make certain statements — “Court is adjourned”, “I sentence you to 5 years in prison” — that have real force in the world. Those statements are not magic; their force comes from the social apparatus backing them up.Ebay has become trustworthy over time because the social fact of its trustworthiness grew with the number of successful transactions and with its ability to find and rectify bad actors.
1 CommentMultiply that by six and a half billion people, and then stir into that toxic mixture a mindset and an attitude that says its okay to ignore scientific evidence – that we don’t have to take responsibility for the future consequences of present actions – and you get a collision between our civilization and the earth. The refugees that we have seen – I don’t like that word when applied to American citizens in our own country, but the refugees that we have seen could well be the first sip of that bitter cup because sea-level rise in countries around the world will mobilize millions of environmental refugees.
1 CommentNot that insurrection would be out of place here after remarks like those of Barbara Bush (GB 1’s wife): What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas…. Other hotels and bars will be able to hire the musicians at flat rates, paying the wages directly to the the council to fund the living costs of all the residents.
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The city is facing a series of issues–disappearing wetlands that protect from hurricanes, levees that are too low to hold back flood waters, rising water tables, to name a few–that if not addressed soon could have New Orleans suffering the same fate as Atlantis.Dramatic, yes…. “When we get the big hurricane and there are 10,000 people dead, the city government’s been relocated to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, refugee camps have been set up and there $10 billion plus in losses, what then?”
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