Category: Current Affairs
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A little over a month ago Wikileaks began to release U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and politicians cried. Previously, Wikileaks had released U.S. Army SIGACT reports, detailing nearly every engagement in Afghanistan since the invasion, and politicians cried. Before that Wikileaks had released the Iraq War logs, before that the Apache attack on Reuters journalists.…
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My immediate reaction to Jesse's piece on the killings in Tucson was to write a story about cow dung. While Wikipedia doesn't acknowledge it, I could swear that my Wren & Martin grammar & composition textbook in high school listed parabola as a figure of speech. There was no reaction to my parable, a counter…
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Lawyers (presumably supporters of Islamist parties) showered Mumtaz Qadri, self-confessed killer of Governor Salman Taseer, with rose petals on his first court appearance. He was also garlanded with a garland of roses. This post can be read in conjunction with this one…the comments on the earlier post are also relevant.
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One Thousand Year Writer’s Block? William Burroughs famously remarked that Islam had hit a one thousand year writer’s block. Is this assessment justified? First things first: obviously we are not talking about all writing or all creative work. Thousands of talented writers have churned out countless works of literature, from the poems of Hafiz and…
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Some news items from 2010 compared, using Google Insights/Trends, for the amount of interest they generated. This is the number of searches in google news for each item, normalized in some unclear way. The biggest story of the year, at least of the ones I checked, is Tiger Woods. Woods beat the World Cup and…
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I hate to say I told you so, but here it is.. And the reason is not that millions of Pakistanis turned out on the streets to protest (only 100 protesters at Zardari house in Karachi…one can get more than that in a protest about goat prices on Eid) but they were enough.. The ruling…
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Our recent discussion of China prompted this post. Just to give people an idea of what China looks like to the military "deep state" in Pakistan. The military leadership is aware of Pakistan's rather precarious image in the rest of the world, but they think they have an ace in the hole….
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An interesting post from the New Republic. Though I think the assertion that globalization has led to "more conflict" since 1950 is empirically false. Armed conflict between great powers has actually declined since world war two . I am not too interested in Strauss or Schmitt, but I do find myself increasingly interested in the…
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Let us imagine Julian Assange is innocent of raping those two women. Let us imagine it’s my job to discredit him. If I were trying to set Assange up, I couldn’t pick many better crimes to charge him with than date-rape. When a government accuses a whistle-blower under dubious circumstances, the natural response is to…
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Surprise! Ron Paul Stands Up for the First Amendment! Ron Paul stands up for the First Amendment, protecting the truth, and supporting the messenger who delivers the truth.
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This was bound to happen.Major Pakistani newspapers have been duped (or "made an offer they could not refuse") into printing headline stories based on false wikileaks cables that are extremely unflattering to India. And I am not surprised that the finest intelligence agency in the world was first with this new form of communication. btw, the…
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Wikileaks is about to leak their latest document horde. Good. The more the merrier. There will be a lot hyperventilating in the US media and "diplomatic community" for a few days, primarily by people who claim to think in terms of real "objective" factors in world affairs but actually have no confidence in their own…
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My apologies for the long note (luckily the long part is below the fold), but Propublica and the Washington Post have just published two articles about the Mumbai attacks.. and Mumbai continues to interest me because I think the cold-blooded intent, the conscious choices, the pleasure taken in the killing, the personal touch, these make Sajid Mir and company more evil…
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