- Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.—Gravity’s Rainbow
‘Is it about a bicycle?’ he asked.—The Third Policeman
Category Archives: Agora
Flakes
I can’t let December pass without recalling fondly the seventeen inches of snow that suddenly showed up. The snowfall of Saturday, December 19 (and a bit on Sunday), broke a bunch of records, the most easily remembered one being “the most snowfall in Washington in a single day in December,” something like that. For me it [...]
Escalator
Exactly a month ago, while drawing up Obama’s first-quarter report card, I wrote: “Still to be scored is his approach to Afghanistan—he is currently deliberating, and the hope arises he will ditch the simpleminded bellicosity displayed in his campaign and find a saner solution to that mess.”
During the 2008 campaign Obama trashed the Bush administration [...]
Threads
Picking up a few loose ones …
Armenia
Back in August we heard about the incipient rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey that was to culminate in an imminent restoration of diplomatic relations. On October 10, after a last-minute dispute over wording was resolved with input (shall we say) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the two countries [...]
Posted in Agora Tagged Armenia, Cleveland, cycling, ecology, Iraq, politics, Turkey, Washington DC 2 Comments
Detente
The news arrives today that Armenia and Turkey have decided to establish diplomatic relations.
It is typical of this dysfunctional relationship that no date has been set for such relations to actually kick in, and none of the thorny issues dividing the two countries (the genocide, Nagorno-Karabagh, etc.) are close to being resolved. But it’s as [...]
Caught
The New York Times reported today that Google is being threatened with sanctions in Germany over its Street View feature, which allows users to “stroll” along streets in areas that are covered by the service, taking in the buildings, scenery, vehicles, pedestrians, etc., in a 360-degree view. The “data protection regulator” for the city-state of [...]
Posted in Agora Tagged daily life, Germany, Great Britain, New York, privacy, technology, Washington DC Leave a comment
Won’t
Jacob Weisberg has offered an early, tentative assessment of Barack Obama as president. The first “theme” he isolates is that Obama “sees the middle ground as the high ground.”
Candidates who talk about bringing people together or changing the tone in Washington are usually blowing happy smoke. But Obama’s focus on reconciliation is clearly more than [...]
Chrysostom
We all knew, from the day he burst on the scene, that Barack Obama is a great talker. And great talk can sometimes accomplish a lot. But there’s a reason why we talk about “walking the walk.” And, for better or worse (mostly worse), George Bush appears to be the better walker. (Maybe Obama could [...]
Kindling
Some quick impressions of the Kindle reading device after two days of use:
It’s smaller than I expected. The screen is larger than those on several PDAs I’ve used heavily to read on in the past, but not as large as even a small-format paperback. The small size is good and bad, of course. It’s incredibly [...]
Wasabi
I was looking forward to “crazy” on Tuesday, but didn’t expect so much of teh stupid.
Up until late Monday, Laura and I planned to head down to the Mall at a not-too-unreasonable hour and see what we could see of the swearing-in. We are, after all, just ordinary folk. But a former neighbor (and extraordinary [...]
Riddance