A reader writes:
You and bloggy "Presurfer" have been had by a creative movie promotional. This is a viral promotion for the upcoming "Shoot ‘Em Up". Thus the link to the movie with a fake testimonial and the copyright at the bottom of the site.
The film opens September 7th. Just goes to show you, if it’s unreal it probably is. And yes…Monica Bellucci is smoking hot regardless of sexual orientation.
Yang Jianli (R), a Chinese political dissident who has returned to the U.S. recently after he was accused spying for Taiwan and was detained for five years by the Chinese government, speaks as his wife Christina Fu (L) wipes tears during a news conference August 21, 2007 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Yang spoke the first time publicly since his release from China. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.
Larison responds to an Yglesias post:
There is nothing particularly ”far left” about repudiating and deploring wars of aggression, which seem to me to be the kind of war that Greenwald is rejecting … Greenwald is saying that wanton aggression is not the norm, and wars of self-defense and national security are. …He says simply that the default condition for the use of force for most states is self-defense, which seems pretty clearly true.
"No capes!" "The Incredibles."
The ADL head is coming in for criticism over this quote:
"We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against Armenians as massacres and atrocities," Foxman said in a written statement yesterday. But upon reflection, Foxman continued, "the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide."
One blogger is underwhelmed. Jewcy isn’t so sure either:
[Foxman] seems to acknowledge the genocide, without explicitly stating that he does. He says that he’s consulted with those who "acknowledge the consensus," that it was "tantamount to genocide," and "If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide." It would have been nice to see a simple "It was a genocide," but this is certainly a major step forward.
But the rub is that Foxman is trying to placate his critics while maintaining his opposition to the Congressional resolutions that would acknowledge the genocide. My bet: it’s too late for that. And I’m certain that most Armenian-American activists will not be satisfied with this statement.
There are differences between how men and women communicate, but they are not what you might expect, a new study finds:
Participants were categorized as facilitative or nonfacilitative, and results indicated that their conversational partners responded to them in a systematic way regardless of gender. Over time, however, women and men shifted their speech towards gendered patterns. Men’s talk increased, their utterances became longer, and they asked fewer questions of their partners. Women increased their use of minimal responses, reduced the amount they spoke, and asked more questions. Over time, women and men’s language became more clearly differentiated.
Dalian, China, 5 pm.
Thomas Barnett isn’t posturing about Iraq; he’s thinking:
In the end, no one wants partition but the Kurds, hence my call for the 2K solution: draw down and pull back in southern Iraq and move bulk of forces to Kurdistan (where we are small) and Kuwait (where we are already large) and simply wait out the Sunni-Shia fight, which our generals on the ground don’t want because they’d view that path as their operational failure. But frankly, political requirements (i.e., protecting our public’s willingness to stay militarily engaged in the region) should overrule that professional desire. Political leaders don’t tell generals how to fight, but they should–in our system–tell them when our fight has logically concluded.
By releasing the Sunni-Shia dogs of war, we force Saudi Arabia and Iran to fish or cut bait. Whatever they choose, we save our troops’ lives and our political will to remain engaged.
To have unleashed this conflict and then stay to try to put it in slow-motion seems to me the worst of al worlds. Barnett has a point.
"In the middle of a crisis even more dangerous than Vietnam, President George W. Bush sits isolated in the White House, surrounded by a dwindling band of advisers, and continues to talk about winning in Iraq. His supporters in Congress and the media seize every short-term success, in Washington or Iraq, to flog their opponents as defeatists and lay the groundwork for a stab-in-the-back narrative. His critics in Congress and the media clamor for him to admit defeat and begin an immediate withdrawal. Over the course of 2007, the two sides haven’t begun to negotiate the possibility of a compromise; instead, they are driving each other to increasingly bitter resistance. The national tragedy in Iraq is taking place against a political culture personified by the departed Karl Rove: tactically brilliant, strategically blind, polarized into highly partisan bases and orthodoxies endlessly repeated through the mass media. You don’t often hear it mentioned, but this might be one of the most important differences between Vietnam and Iraq," – George Packer, on his New Yorker blog.
It was one of the ten most intense Atlantic hurricanes ever reported. What we can and can’t say for sure.
