Once again I've availed myself of the largish CD collection at one of the local public libraries in my area, and, once again, I've stumbled across some pleasantly surprising discoveries, to wit:

• I'd never gotten around to picking up Jackson Browne's 1986 album Lives in the Balance, but listening to it now has been a bit startling and depressing, ( Read more... )

The "Did they or didn't they?" non-story of the Israeli commando raid and air strike upon a Syrian nuclear weapons lab just keeps chugging along, and the U.S. media keeps treating it as little better than a Loch Ness Monster sighting.

The New York Times reported yesterday (Sunday, 14 October) that "Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was ( Read more... )

NOTE: x-posted to pro_war_liberal

The current issue of Newsweek (the 1 October 2007 issue) has an article by Dan Ephron and Mark Hosenball titled "Israel's Raid on Syria: Prelude to a Nuke Crisis?" (the title displays as "The Whispers of War," until you go to print it; once you have the printable view, the title changes to "Israel's Raid on Syria: Prelude to a ( Read more... )

NOTE: x-posted to pro_war_liberal

Well, looks like it's official:

The Sunday Times (UK) is reporting in their 23 September edition that "sources in Washington and Jerusalem" have confirmed that "Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month" with U.S ( Read more... )

I've been re-reading bits of Barbara W. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the run-up to and the first deadly month of World War I, The Guns of August (1962): partly because I stumbled across it in my storage unit whilst looking for other books, and partly out of boredom with all other reading matter I had at hand. (And also partly ( Read more... )

The rush to war with Iran just keeps comin' on.

This past Sunday (16 September), France's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said that "the world should brace for war against Tehran over its controversial nuclear programme" (remarks which did not exactly thrill Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as one might well expect, although he's dismissed ( Read more... )

Last September I noted that Harper's Magazine ran a piece by Daniel Ellsberg (he of The Pentagon Papers fame) citing Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official writing in The American Conservative in 2005 that:

"..Vice President Cheney's office had directed contingency planning for 'a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and ( Read more... )

Well, deep down, most of us Tiger fans, whether current or once-and-former, knew it had to happen ( Read more... )

For the past couple of years, the real debate over the U.S.'s Iraq policy can be summed up with a paraphrase of a Clash song: should we stay or should we go ( Read more... )

The New Yorker got a bit of serendipitous synchronicity of the type that editors can only fantasize about last week: hot on the heels of Ben McGrath's article about YouTube ("It Should Happen to You: The Anxieties of YouTube Fame;" issue of 16 October 2006, published on Monday, 9 October 2006), in which he looked at the fledgling (ten-months-old) ( Read more... )