The wagons are a-circlin’: “A Who’s Who of Republican heavy hitters and Bush administration supporters are lending their names to help raise $5 million for the defense of Vice President Cheney’s former top aide in his criminal trial.”
Month: February 2006
Whole Lotta Links.
Another Murphy enters the blogosphere — My sister-in-law Lotta has just begun her own blogg for Allehanda, a Swedish newspaper. Check it out! (particularly if you speak or understand Swedish.)
“Axis” & Allies.
“The bigger problem is that U.S. funding will discredit the very people we seek to encourage. Many Iranians, perhaps even a majority, despise their rulers. They yearn for democracy. To a degree unmatched in any other Middle Eastern nation besides Israel, they even like the United States. However, as anyone who knows anything about Iran’s history would emphasize, these same Iranians deeply distrust outsiders — including American ones — who try to interfere in their domestic affairs…By openly calling for regime change and backing it up with money (however trifling a sum), the Bush administration is playing into Ahmadinejad’s hands.” Slate‘s Fred Kaplan assesses the Dubya administration’s new Iran strategy, and finds that they’re repeating the same amateurish tone-deafness that helped propel Ahmadinejad into office in the first place. (Perhaps Dubya might get it if someone reminded him of the Guardian‘s experiment in Ohio in 2004.)
Dance Dance Evolution.
“‘People are born to dance,’ Ebstein told Discovery News. ‘They have (other) genes that partially contribute to musical talent, such as coordination, sense of rhythm. However, the genes we studied are more related to the emotional side of dancing — the need and ability to communicate with other people and a spiritual side to their natures that not only enable them to feel the music, but to communicate that feeling to others via dance.” Looks like the Red Shoes are just a placebo — According to recent research at Hebrew University’s Scheinfeld Center for Genetic Studies, some people are just hardwired to dance. Now if only they could figure out why some people start conga lines or insist on breaking into the Electric Slide. (Via Dangerous Meta.)
St. Francis of Assisti?
As expected, the Knicks have pushed the panic button, acquiring Steve Francis for Trevor Ariza and Penny Hardaway’s contract. Well, we’re not giving up much other than cap flexibility (I like Ariza — he’s a hustle player — but he also makes bad decisions, and hasn’t been gelling under Larry Brown.) Still, how is a backcourt of Marbury and Francis (backed up by Jalen Rose, Jamal Crawford and Nate Robinson) going to work? They’re like five iterations of the same offensively talented, defensively deficient player (5.5 if you count Quentin Richardson), and every one of them needs the ball in their hands to be productive. At any rate, there’s a good bet that the Knicks haven’t finished yet, with Crawford for Theo Ratliff or Darius Miles a distinct possibility. “Crawford even polled the team’s beat writers after Wednesday morning’s shootaround to ask them where they believed he would be headed.“
Where the livin’ is hardest.
“The problem with Bob Marley in white America is one of perspective. Many of Marley’s songs are about resistance and violent revolution. The threat implicit in the lines ‘Them belly full but we hungry/ A hungry mob is an angry mob’ or the song ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’‘ isn’t too far from the surface. But lyrics about armed resistance make America’s secular-progressive middle classes — those most responsible for the cult of Marley as a cuddly ‘One Love‘ Rastafarian — uneasy.” Contending that “[l]istening to Legend to understand Marley is like reading Bridget Jones’s Diary to get Jane Austen.,” Slate‘s Field Mahoney argues the merits of Bob Marley’s back catalog, and suggests that US fans tend to overemphasize the stoner and underemphasize the revolutionary.
Summers’ lease hath had all too long a date.
With another no-confidence vote on the way, Larry Summers announces his resignation as president of Harvard, effective at the end of the school year. Between running Cornel out of town and arguing women can’t do science, Summers long ago lost any truck with me. He was an embarrassment to the University, and it’s past time for him to go.
Whitewash at the Archives.
“The stuff they pulled should never have been removed…Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous.” As recently uncovered by intelligence historian Matthew Aid, the National Archives has been re-classifying thousands of once publicly available documents at the behest of unknown (re: still-classified) government agencies since 1999. “While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago. One reclassified document in Mr. Aid’s files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.’s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was ‘not probable in 1950.’ Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.” Aid posted his account of the sordid tale today at the National Security Archive.
Ashes to Asteroids, Dust to Dusk.
“It broadens the market, which is important to us because our whole business plan is about getting more people access to space…Space needs to be affordable for all in some way.” For a small fee, a number of fledgling private space companies will soon send your remains (or personal mementos) into the cosmos, including Space Services, Inc., Beyond-Earth Enterprises, and ZeroG Aerospace. Families paid $995 to $5,300 to have their loved ones’ ashes aboard SS, Inc’s maiden flight next month, which sounds eminently reasonable to me given the usual financial costs of bereavement.
The Dems Redeploy.
According to the Globe, the Dems are beginning to coalesce around a plan of “strategic redeployment” in Iraq. According to the plan, co-authored by Reagan assistant Defense secretary Lawrence Korb, “all reservists and National Guard members would come home this year. Most of the other troops would be redeployed to other key areas — Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and the Horn of Africa — with large, quick-strike forces placed in Kuwait, where they could respond to crises in neighboring Iraq.“