Archives for December 2005

Start the year with a

Twelve months later … Oliphant’s New Year cartoon still applies.

“I just read the incredible “And I very much appreciate Doug Ireland’s postscript comments in previously estimated, depending on how events evolve, the potential ranges from 500,000 to 1.8 million people through death or exile. This could be avoided, but if it happens, should those who caused the civil war and who armed its participants […]

“Fisk scolds U.S. journalists” is the way “Telling it like it isn’t,” an op-ed tongue-lashing in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times (which was fairly mild for Fisk). Now have a look at some excerpts from his book, [W]ho are those people? In the taboo-ridden world of Western journalism, every effort continues to be made not only […]

There’s much to be said about John Gray’s essay, “Imperial Grunts” and Michael Mandelbaum’s This left us dumbfounded because, as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and the author of “Liberalism (Concepts in Social Thought),” “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals,” “Heresies.”) William Osborne, who summed up his […]

As a follow-up to Testimony at Nuremberg, April 15, 1946 2) “You know, the Germans say you have a ‘fingertip feel’ — Fingerspitzengefühl — you know how a place smells, how it feels. A strategist who doesn’t have that innate sense about the area he’s working is going to get us in trouble.” — Zalmay […]

We don’t know why we were targeted. cowboy-artist homilies turned up, unbidden, in our e-mail inbox. Maybe it’s just a Hallmark time of year. Love the rocks (y’ gotta

Byron Calame, the public editor of The New York Times, says his interest was piqued. His column on Sunday was headlined We didn’t send him our Dec. 3 item ArtsJournal, or via a link on CREDIT WHERE DUE, AND BONES TO PICK. Calame said nothing, however, about what piqued our interest most: 100 Notable Books […]

Here’s the ‘ganda machine at work, Bullshitter-in-Chief. Although it is cropped, below, as used by The New York Times on its Web site (and downplayed in a secondary position), the full shot appeared huge above the fold on the front page of The Times print edition. ROUGH RIDERS AND TOUGH TALKERS before, when Tucker Carlson […]

toastie postie about the “Mein Kampf” Postscript: Adolf certainly stopped at nothing. His war ‘ganda. Slogans were a specialité de maison: The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very […]

We have led a country to civil war in order to permanently weaken it. We have largely destroyed its cultural patrimony to erase its identity and autonomy. We have set up a potential genocide against our opponents. And now we step aside and claim we can’t control what will happen. Pinter was so dead-on when […]

Revelations of Iraqi torture centers continue. As John Burns reports, the Wolf Brigade of Shiite commandos have hung Sunnis from roof hooks, extracted their fingernails, applied electric shocks to their genitals and burned their bodies with lighted cigarettes. This has outraged American military officers and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. How does that […]

We keep asking: “Isn’t it time to drop religious faith from human belief?” We also keep answering: “The answer is self evident.” (Check out GRAY’S ANATOMY.) So it tickled us to see Yes, it was a promo for his latest book, “The Modern Mind,” a great big tome subtitled “The Intellectual History of the 20th […]

The report in today’s Washington Post, Sunni genocide. Oddly, the WashPost buried this graf very low in the story: Investigators said they found 625 prisoners at the center but declined to give details about them. Most of the detainees found at the secret prison last month were Sunni Arabs who had been picked up by […]

We have to hand it to them. Just in time to miss the cut-off date for choosing the front-page review of Robert Fisk’s “The Controversy of Zion” and other books, the review is lengthy and circumspect and, we might add (not that we take credit), has appeared soon after our And so to the meat […]

Here he is folks, GOP: The Party Leader Speaks!