Theater genes
If you ever get a chance to see “Au Revoir Parapluie,” I strongly urge you to do so. The work is impossible to describe, although this NY Times review (and this post of mine) try. It’s playing at the Brooklyn … Continue reading →
neo
Whom do you trust? (or, how the NIE learned to stop worrying and love…)
The best analyses of the new NIE report on the Iranian “now we see it, now we don’t” bomb can be found at Richard Fernandez’s Belmont Club. Please take a look at any and/or all of them: this, this, and … Continue reading →
How the Democrats can co-opt the surge
Here’s some reasonable advice for the Democrats on Iraq. It’s from Michael O’Hanlon, one of their number who first had the temerity to write that the surge was showing some positive effects in Iraq. The gist of it? Take credit … Continue reading →
Don’t tie yourself into knots
I have a question for all you techies out there: how (and why) do the cords of earbuds for cellphones spontaneously tie themselves into knots in a single instant? And I don’t mean modest knots, either. I mean large tangled … Continue reading →
The best laid schemes….
o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley… Any opportunity to quote and link to one of my favorite poems, “Of Mice and Men” by Robert Burns, can’t be all bad (I’m in a hurry and couldn’t find an annotated version … Continue reading →
Big Story, non-story?
Pity the poor Nation. The magazine, that is, not the country. The Nation’s editors must ache from bending over backwards to prove there’s nothing especially good about the good news in Iraq. The editors feel it’s their duty to make … Continue reading →
Sanity Squad twofer
Join Siggy, Dr. Sanity, Shrink, and me at Blog Talk Radio as the Sanity Squad analyzes Sunday’s election results from Venezuela and Russia.
Continue reading →Venezuela: the loser (and the winner) is—Chavez!
My first thought late last night on hearing the news of Chavez’s defeat in yesterday’s referendum was, “Great (and surprising)!” My second thought was a more cynical one: “How bad must the defeat really have been for Chavez to announce … Continue reading →
Annapolis: for better, or for worse?
I haven’t written at length about Annapolis, and I probably won’t do so now; I’ll leave that to others. There is hardly an issue more controversial, more heated, and more designed to get the metaphorical blood flowing in the comments … Continue reading →
My late bloomer
I don’t have much of a green thumb with houseplants. There are some varieties I gave up on long ago—the Boston fern, for instance. A fern in the dry heat of a northeastern home in winter requires a degree of … Continue reading →
Chavez: what a guy
That man of the people, Hugo Chavez, is up to his old/new tricks in Venezuela: using the democratic process to subvert the safeguards built into it (see this for my discussion of the perils involved). An upcoming referendum will let … Continue reading →
Hierarchies of responsibility: picking and choosing in the blame game
Commenter bunkerbuster speculated recently about the possible aftermath of a US troop withdrawal in Iraq: How many people would die in such a withdrawal? There is indeed a risk that fighting could escalate, though predictions of mass killing of the … Continue reading →