The news from Iraq over the past several days has been bad and getting worse. So I turn, as usual, to Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment, hoping Dr. Cole can help sort out what's going on: A contingent of the Army of the Mahdi clashed with a US patrol in al-Showla. US helicopters strafed the militiamen and the headquarters of Muqtada al-Sadr. There were further demonstrations, in the Sank and Bab Sharqi neighborhoods of Baghdad, Militiamen assaulted a number of... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 43-45 Rayford, Christopher and Hattie were the last three off the 747. Christopher, you may remember, was Rayford’s first officer on the flight. Up until now he’s played little part in the story beyond handling the controls while Rayford talked to Hattie and wandered the plane. But we’re about to learn that Christopher Smith is a villain — at least according to the code of Left Behind — and therefore he is doomed. … The bus driver... Read more
The news has been full of reports this week about how many former special forces soldiers go on to work for private security contractors. Some also choose to work in the relatively tranquil and far safer field of private security here in the U.S. I spent a year writing corporate training materials for one such company. They supply unarmed security officers to office buildings and shopping malls. We offered access control and loss prevention — not mercenaries. About once a... Read more
"It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes." — Secretary of State Colin Powell, reminding the U.N. Security Council of the perils of VX Gas on Feb. 5, 2003 It's not clear that we'll ever know if Iraq's four tons of VX nerve agent really existed, or if so what happened to them. If you're looking... Read more
Mark Kleiman points us to this essay by Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic. Wieseltier makes what Kleiman calls, "a religious person's argument against having 'under God' in the Pledge to the Flag — and, more tellingly, against the silly arguments that have to be used to try to keep 'under God' in the Pledge in the face of the Establishment Clause." As another "religious person," I want to second Wieseltier's argument. He highlights the strange role reversal that took... Read more
Reading David Edelstein's review of Stephen Chow's martial-arts/sports flick Shaolin Soccer reminds me, on this Opening Day, of another deliriously funny tale of Eastern arts meeting Western sports: George Plimpton's 1985 April Fool's masterpiece, "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch." The New York Mets, Plimpton reported, had built a separate, secret facility at their spring training complex, where a mysterious French-horn maestro was demonstrating the secrets he had learned from Himalayan monks who had taught him "the art of the... Read more
This will be either the fourth or the fifth time I've posted this excerpt from Pascal's Pensees, but allow me to cite again this passage from my favorite, No. 72: For, in fact, what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in... Read more
I work in Delaware. Manufactured homes provide the majority of housing for low- and moderate-income households in lower Delaware. Below the canal (the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal that slices across the northernmost New Castle County) Delaware remains largely rural. In such areas, apartments and rental properties are scarce. I live in an apartment. If I lived in lower Delaware, I might well live in a trailer. People who live in manufactured homes are in a vulnerable situation. They own their... Read more
The delightfully strange Medium Lobster from the Fafblog observes the chaos and violence in Iraq's Sunni Triangle and concludes that there can be only one credible response: If the United States is to have any chance of success in Iraq, it must retaliate, swiftly and surely, with full-scale invasion of North Korea. Sometimes the most direct solution — throwing water on a fire, pulling a weed out by the roots, eliminating a terrorist organization by hunting down that terrorist organization... Read more
I missed this Philadelphia Inquirer account of the GOP primary debate for the 13th Congressional District race. One of the candidates in this debate is Melissa Brown, an opthalmologist from Flourtown, Pa., whose losing bid for the 13th seat in 2002 is often delicately referred to as "controversial." All three candidates for the Republican nomination favor reforming and curtailing the Section 8 program that provides low-income families with housing assistance. Yet, despite this broad agreement, the debate on this issue... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In