- 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
Tag Archives: media
Auguration
Far be it from me to try and predict how the Obama presidency will turn out. Many of us had a feeling the Bush years would be bad, but did any of us dream it would turn out as disastrous as it did?
I saw a teaser today at the New York Times saying that David [...]
Covered
Many folks were bothered by the recent New Yorker cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. Presumably he had been elected president (!), but he’s wearing Muslim garb (?). And his wife looks a lot like Angela Davis, replete with an AK-47 (??). Oh, and there’s a portrait of Osama bin Laden [...]
Litvinenko
I’ve been a little slow in posting this update to l’affaire Litvinenko. Back in May the Independent ran a follow-up, tallying up 18 months later what we know and still don’t know about how Alexander Litvinenko died.
That article pointed to a piece by Edward Jay Epstein in the New York Sun from March of this [...]
Pseudoregrets
Another year, another anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and another dreary round of self-justifications from so-called liberals for having supported it. Glenn Greenwald discusses the drivel that came out of a Slate series of articles by the usual pundits and comes to a sad conclusion:
[N]ot a single one of them appears to have learned the [...]
Forsooth
Larry Derfner, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, asks a rhetorical question you won’t find anywhere in the US media:
How long are Israel and its lobby in Washington going to go on living this ridiculous, transparent lie? How long are they going to hock the world about the Holocaust while acting as Turkey’s number two [...]
Etude
I stumbled across a review of a book called Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, and given how I admire concision (or say I do, at any rate), I just had to take a look. The title in French, Nouvelles en trois lignes, is actually a pun: nouvelles can be taken as either “novellas” [...]
Turkophilia
The Armenian genocide resolution (H.Res. 106) is due for a committee vote today. Last week the Turkish government took out a full-page ad in section A of the Washington Post in an attempt to throw sand in everyone’s eyes, and today the Post again dished out its Realpolitik garbage in support of its good friend [...]
Fleshification
Every time I watch The Simpsons, I think: “This stuff is brilliant!” And yet I don’t watch the show religiously. I figure I’ll see every episode eventually. Why rush things?
The writing is fantastically good. It captures so much of the America of the 90s and 00s it’s uncanny. But the voices—unforgettable. So what a treat [...]
Hoaxed
The devoted reader of this blog will know why its proprietor won’t be concocting his own April Fools’ Day joke. (Besides, his team just got slaughtered in softball, so cut him some slack.) He did manage to find a nifty site that lists 100 classic AFD hoaxes. So enjoy that, and the rest of April, [...]

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