Bill's Bites
Contributed by Bill Faith
The webmaster's blog-within-a-blog. Continuously updated, newest items at the top.
Hiltzik was a bigger name, Greenwald was more gratifying, but this guy takes the prize for most shameless offender. Check out the comments by “sprezzatura” here defending Siegel. Hilarious. ...
Charlotte Knobloch survived Nazi Germany's genocide on Jews to rise to the head of the German Jewish Council. In a disturbing interview with Der Spiegel, Knobloch -- whose personal history gives her the requisite perspective -- states that anti-Semitic attitudes have hit levels not seen in years: ...
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad assured him that Syria would enforce the arms embargo on Hezbollah, and that the Syrian army would patrol the border to ensure that arms traffic ceased:
The very next nine-day wonder of protest is about to break open, as King Banaian notes at SCSU Scholars. The Los Angeles Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education both report on a defunct FBI program that investigated suspected terrorists and accomplices by reviewing data on federal grants for higher education. Not surprisingly, the LA Times gets a significant fact incorrect almost immediately: ...
Credit where credit is due, after all. Were it up to some, we wouldn't have anything close to a missile intercept option in the works. As we learned from Pakistan and perhaps North Korea, non-proliferation is a wonderful concept. But it isn't a reliable strategic defense. ...
Stricter visa requirements, an assimilation-or-deportation policy, even financial incentives to encourage illegals to return home. It all seems so … unfamiliar, actually.
The new crop is not an unusual group. Most soldiers tend to start off like them. They are young High School kids who decided college wasn’t for them, that they wanted something different, that chicks would dig a snazzy uniform. They are incredibly different, and yet all the same. The paradox has a hard time being spelled out; sometimes I hardly believe it myself. These kids all have the dream in their heart, but keep it quiet, because in the military it is a shameful thing to dream this. The dream of being a hero.
The consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom for U.S. forces are being documented by the Defense Department with an exceptional degree of openness and transparency. Its daily and cumulative counts of deaths receive a great deal of publicity. But deaths alone don't indicate the risk for an individual. For this purpose, the number of deaths must be compared with the number of individuals exposed to the risk of death. The Defense Department has supplied us with appropriate data on exposure, and we take advantage of it to provide the first profile of military mortality in Iraq. ...
Continued from Bill's 2006.08.31 Short Shorts
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