rc3.org

The Slacktivist writes about the conundrum we face in handling Iraq’s foreign debt (and ongoing reparations to Kuwait).

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Spinsanity has a strange item wherein they criticize various pundits and Presidential candidates for making ad hominem attacks on John Ashcroft. Tarring John Ashcroft is bad if you’re trying to launch a substantive debate about how civil rights are respected by our government, but it’s good if you’re trying to score points against the [...]

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Bruce Sterling: Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die. It’s hard to pick a favorite from the list.

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This is funny. (Via Unqualified Offerings.)

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Jack Shafer wrote a Slate piece today that outdoes all the weblog entries I’ve read on bringing the world up to date on l’affair de Valerie Plame. He also suspects that not much will come of it, in the end.

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Bush supporters who are in disbelief about l’affair de Valerie Plame seem stuck on the revenge motive (also here) as the reason why the unnamed White House staffers did the outing. Revenge clearly was not the motive. The motive, when you look back on the original Novak column, is apparent:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, [...]

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Phil Carter has an interesting post that describes how our invasion of Iraq may have aided al-Qaeda in several ways. First, by alienating foreign governments that could be helping us shut down al-Qaeda’s financial and logistical networks, and second by increasing passive support for the organization and providing them with a new crucible in which [...]

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John Schwartz in the New York Times: The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide, a discussion of the PowerPoint culture. The problem isn’t the tool, it’s the presenters. In college, I attended scads of boring lectures with bad overhead slides. PowerPoint has just made creating bad presentations accessible to everyone. One trend that I [...]

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Juan Cole reports this morning that the United States (as the occupying power in Iraq) is now legally responsible for paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990. Paul Bremer has asked Kuwait’s government to suspend the reparations, but they have refused. There’s probably more to the story, but that looks like serious ingratitude [...]

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Much like the Trent Lott story, which went dormant for awhile after being initially reported and then exploded, the administration leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA agent is becoming big news after going away for a month or so. The Washington Post has gotten an unnamed “senior administration official” to acknowledge that [...]

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