Halberstam

David Halberstam is dead. Killed in a car accident at the age of 73. Over at the Commentary magazine blog Contentions, Gabriel Schoenfeld has a post that dwells on Halberstam’s anguish over the thought of America pulling out of Vietnam.
Quoting Halberstam via Schoenfeld:
[T]hose Vietnamese who committed themselves fully to the United States will suffer the [...]

“Brothers in Humanity and in Pursuing Knowledge.”

Students at Baghdad’s Technology University know something about the horrors of random violence. Concrete barriers ring the campus to keep suicide bombers out. Students are searched when they enter campus. Cell phones are banned because they can be used to trigger explosives remotely. Across Iraq, more than 200 university professors have been killed in the [...]

Kate-tastrophe Watch

I have had no need to wax pontifical on current events of late, as I have been engaged in mortal blogbat with my charming and delightful colleague, Kate of The Anterior Commissure. (She named her blog after part of the brain that you’d need to be a neuroscience Phd candidate like her to have [...]

Bombshell

I am a bit late to this item from today’s New York Times (please understand, where I work it has been Virginia Tech massacre around the clock) , but Warren Hoge dropped a bombshell with a leaked confidential UN report – (I wonder if the US leaked it?) – that contains visual evidence that the [...]

The Limits of Imagination

Everyone is rightfully horrified by what transpired on the Virginia Tech campus earlier this week. The shootings there have understandably dominated American media. But please consider that buried underneath the latest revelations about  Cho Seung-Hui a series of bombings tore through Baghdad today killing at least 146 people (predominantly Shiites).
It is crude to compare tragedies. [...]

American Indifference

Since Sunday night PBS has treated viewers to a stunning series of documentary films that examine big themes and ideas that define our post-9/11 world. Last night featured a documentary titled “The Case for War” and the premise was that we would go along with Richard Perle as he travelled from Washington to Kabul to [...]

The World Breathes a Sigh of Relief…

LJT is HIV-free.

Catastrophe Watch

“Warming Predicted to Take Severe Toll on U.S.”
-Headline from The Washington Post.
So here’s an example of what irritates me about reporting on global warming. The ur-narrative in the global warming story, in case you’ve been on some other planet in the last few years that isn’t doomed (doomed!) by its human inhabitants, is that the [...]

Trenchant Political Commentary

‘Mr. Bush has said he will veto any bill that has a withdrawal date. He also prodded Congress anew today to remove spending items he regards as frivolous — “peanut storage,” for instance.“I haven’t analyzed the peanut-storage issue,” he said, to accompanying laughter from relatives of servicemen gathering around him in the East Room of [...]

“She’s not my special lady, she’s my fucking lady friend”

“I made a mistake, for which I am sorry.”
-World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, apologizing for intervening to give girlfriend and World Bank employee Shaha Riza a raise.
One wonders whether Wolfowitz would be willing to say the same regarding the following:
“There has been a good deal of comment – some of it quite outlandish – about [...]