Category: the state
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P.O.V. – The Brooklyn Connection | PBS
The Brooklyn Connection is a wonderful documentary by Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns about an Albanian living in America who equipped the Kosovo Liberation Army out of U. S. gun shops and surplus stores. It really drives home for me the madness of the ‘War on Terror’ namely that we don’t have any conception about what…
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London
Three things about the bombs in the London transportation system:
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O’Connor’s retirement inopportune for moderates
The LA Times is reporting that Justice O’Connor, Supreme Court’s First Woman, Is Retiring. At a time when most eyes were on the Chief Justice, this is a bit of a surprise. It is also a blow to moderates as O’Connor has been a swing vote on many divisive issues during her term. She was…
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Nationalism in Cyberspace
In a story titled “Bush administration annexes internet,” The Register talks about how the U. S. Department of Commerce intends to “retain control over the Internet’s root servers indefinitely.” This is a reversal of previous U. S. and may in some way be a response to U. N. attempts to control the internet. What is…
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“Army recruits shortfall blamed on Iraq war critics”
This is a Yahoo story, which means it will be gone in an hour or so, but the gist of it is that the Pentagon and some Congressmen are blaming people who call the war a mistake, and media types who only show the bad side of the war for the failure of the Army…
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the Presidential address
I’m no longer resentful of the President and his embodiment of a closed-minded xenophobic, neophobic, religiously zealous, segment of the population. I just think he is pathetic. His entire message this evening was that of a shallow, simpleton defending his actions as successful and righteous in the face of overwhelming evidence of their ongoing failure…
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when worlds collide: oil, capitalism, and nationalism
OK, so a company in China is making a bid to buy a company in the United States. Seventy percent of the Chinese company is owned by the Chinese Government. The company in the US produces 167,000 barrels of oil an 1,826 million cubic feet of natural gas per day – both of which sound…
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Baseball, round two
The guy who is in charge of the World Anti-Doping Agency doesn’t like American pro-sports league’s policies on drugs [story here (http://http/slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Baseball/MLB/2005/03/18/965642-ap.html)] [ link broken, no archive ] Why does this guy think that his agency’s rules for amateur athletics matter for professional sports-entertainment? Why do people not understand that the fan experience is more…
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sport, steroids, and the sovereign
Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I’m still trying to figure out how we got here. What is the compelling interest of Congress in the internal efforts of a professional entertainment industry’s attempts to regulate performance enhancement on the part of it’s entertainers? What is it that makes it a Congressional issue? No one…
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pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
As I read through the NY Times this Sunday and it’s full of things about identity and democracy: the want for linking state drivers licenses together into some kind of national database; the fiasco that is consumer information and its relationship to identity theft; the rise of popular representative government in the Middle East; the…