Anyone recommend a good (free) RSS Reader?
Currently I’m using SharpReader. I find it acceptable, but nothing to sing praises to high heavens about.
Recommendations for WinXP and MacOS X are both appreciated, as I am sure my iBook will appreciate having an RSS reader of its own.
This book review is long overdue, considering I finished the book several days ago. But then I got mired in my next book (it’s postmodern French philosophy, thus the mired) and never got around to writing the review.
In any case, Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling can hardly be called a book. It’s much more a collection of his op-ed pieces for the New York Times over (mostly) the past 3-4 years, with some snippets back to times as early as 1996/7. For some reason I didn’t get this impression when I was shopping for this book on Amazon.com, and thus it was sort of a disappointment. Not to say that reading the columns wasn’t agreeable or interesting, it’s just that I was expecting coherent book-like thought, not 2-3 page columns with snippets of information.
Krugman is an economist by trade, and most of his columns contain a bent towards looking at the world through the prism of economics. I have no complaint with this. The columns, individually, were interesting. Perhaps this book simply didn’t speak to me as a book — the column format made it a choppy two-sitting read (it’s 400 pages long, so maybe I read it wrong by going start-to-finish in a serial fashion) that didn’t really present a coherent thesis. There were lots of little interesting gems, which I could link you to if you or I had access to NYT’s archives. Essentially the points could be distilled down to some union of the following: Bush’s economic policy (or lack thereof) is bad for the economy, The US is rushing into war, Cheney’s energy task force is clouded in secrecy (ironically this is the news now), this Administration is doing Bad Things and so on so forth. There were few positive points to note, with only the sometime suggestion for how things might be better done. It’s easy to criticize, and much harder to provide concrete advice on how to actually go about fixing problems. All in all, I’d give the book 3 out of 5 stars, but I’ll continue to read Krugman in the NYT, though admittedly his perspective is usually left of mine (though at times, I was in steadfat agreement).100 loans construction commerical ltvloan amortizing75 loan car month$5000 credit loans without checkpayment loan amoritizeaircraft aig loansschedule loans car for amoritaztionafs loan student consolidationsloans dragon 2007 lake boatloans bad personal $5,000.00 credithorse cock movieshorsecum moviesgirl xxx hot moviessex movies huge cockage animated movie iceindian sex moviejapanese movie adultporn japanese movies free Map
This results in the post of March 18, 2004 of which the fifth sentence is (by the way, I write really long sentences): Any insights appreciated.
Make of it what you will.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-arally26apr26,0,4200408.story?coll=sfla-news-sfla
“Look at the pictures, look at the pictures,” shouted abortion opponents, holding up big posters showing a fetus at eight weeks.
“Lies, lies,” marchers shouted back.
I really don’t follow how pictures of fetuses are lies…
It seems to me the abortion “debate” in this country has the two sides arguing about different things. One side wants to protect “a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby” and another side wants to protect “a baby’s right to live.”
I still don’t understand where a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby is violated by a lack of abortion (rape, incest, woman’s life-in-danger situations excluded). There is a choice already at conception, no?
Neither side seems to want to scientifically debate when life starts. If we had a law dictating when life starts (and what constitutes life), this entire debate and the right-to-die debate could be laid to rest.
When did the first abortion take place, anyway? Was it possible to have an abortion in the Middle Ages, for example?medical accredited transcriptionafrican for credit infant american adoptionprogram degree master accreditedcredit alaska union usa fedaccrediting private agenciesfederal credit aedc unionaccredited purchasing practitioneraccredited online bible college Map
Chilling and moving at the same time:
http://photomatt.net/archives/2004/04/07/mosaic/5c nextel 5c 22 22free ringtonesall p107 ringtones saints samsungexposure cherrington indecent alanoh terry 11123 pickerington lanepickerington ln terry 11123 ohaccrington photos arialswingers amateur in nevada yeringtonclayton alfred notice madoc herrington death Map
Very cool poem came off of minstrels. (Yes, I subscribe to a poem-a-day-or-every-so-often mailing list).
“The Uncertainty of the Poet”
I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.
I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.
I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.
A fond poet of ‘I am, I am’-
Very bananas.
Fond of ‘Am I bananas?
Am I?’-a very poet.
Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?
Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a ‘very.’
I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?
— Wendy Cope
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1500.html0.3862 Verizon Ringtone Star WirelessWikipedia Score Encyclopedia 0.3852 Credit Free0.6136 Merchant Account Benefits0.3832 Ringtone Converter Powerful0.381 8300 Mm Ringtone Sanyo0.3808 Customer Authorization Card Credit FormUniversity 0.3737 KaplanWallpaper Ring Tones Custom Downloading 0.37 Creating Map
Just a question: isn’t AIDS the most preventable disease out there?
Theoretically, if we simply educated people about the risks of non-trusted sex then AIDS would go away in a generation on its own. Why promote condoms, which have a risk associated with them and a production cost, as well as encouraging non-trusted sex (which in turn, spreads AIDS), when abstaining from non-trusted intercourse is a cheaper and 100% safe alternative? By non-trusted sex, I mean sex between people who trust each other to be and remain mutually disease free. I acknowledge the need to treat existing AIDS patients, but I cannot help turning my eye to prevention. If AIDS is so preventable, why haven’t we seen an international program to prevent it by educating people simply not to have non-trusted sex?
What point of understanding am I missing?
Where to begin? This book by Ron Suskind, WSJ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning report details the history of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill within the Bush Administration. O’Neill was fired last year because he refused to stay “on message” with a message that was increasingly misleading and not in the “best interest of the American people.” I found the book fascinating because O’Neill is one of the few men at the top who believes in the power of truth. As the last sentence of the tome concludes, “Evidence of what is real–that’s what changes everything.” Unfortunately, O’Neill’s love of truth and of hardcore analysis ran square against the machinery of the Bush Administration, which attempted to simplify everything down to ideological truths. The book paints a stunning picture of Bush, using O’Neill’s interactions with Ford and Nixon as Presidential contrast. Those two presidents would dive into analysis, asking hard-hitting questions and enveloping themselves with understanding. Nixon even asked his staff to prepare briefs that covered all sides of an issue, briefs that frequently ran more than ten pages. If he found out later that they had left a piece of information out, he would berate them to make sure that he was well-informed the next time. Unfortunately, Bush rarely reads memos, and certainly doesn’t dive down into analytical understanding on anything. He is a President guided by ideology, professing such rather unsettling non-statements as “I won’t argue with myself” or “It’s a matter of principle.”
O’Neill struggled to break through to this President, but could not connect. On attempting to explain the challenges facing the country’s economy, Bush would simply give O’Neill a blank stare and not react to anything the Treasury secretary said in his once-a-week face-to-face meetings with the President. He never asked any questions on the spur of the moment, and O’Neill was horrified to discover that cabinet meetings were carefully scripted in advance. Scripted, in the fullest sense of the word, in that members were given little pieces of paper instructing them what to say. Bush would then ask a pre-scripted question, receive a pre-scripted answer and the meeting would arrive at a pre-scripted conclusion. Was this intellectual debate and analysis? Hell no.
Bush isolated himself from the real world, from unscripted experience, as Suskind coins a wonderful phrase for describing reality. Even his father, the Elder Bush, “loved … mixing in with people in China, Russia, the Mideast, seeing what they thought and why, picking up keepsakes, sending notes to keep in touch. His eldest son seemed to move in the opposite direction on this score … That, O’Neill thought, was a shame at a moment like this, with the world on edge and so many people in need. “The war of ideas you win on the ground, walking with the people,” he said later, “not with pronouncements from on high looking down.”"
O’Neill details invading Iraq has been a centerpiece of this Administration, and how 9/11 only provided them with a handy excuse. On January 30, 2001, in a cabinet meeting, an agenda item was focused on how to deal with the threat of Saddam Hussein. A policy memo from Cheney talked about dissuading competitors from building technologies capable of creating WMDs. But O’Neill, retrospectively, contrasted with, “We were never going to dissuade countries from building destructive weapons and maybe aligning against us with just threats and force. We needed a nonmilitary side to our foreign policy, where the U.S. could start treating much of the beleaguered developing world–the source of so many of the threats to our security–in a way that showed we valued and respected them” We needed to do some things that showed measurable good–that the U.S. could be a force for good in people’s lives.” A powerful statement from a wise man. Imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, and instead had invested all of that time, energy and funds into rebuilding Afghanistan, into providing Afghanis with clean, running water systems, with medicine and electricity to run hospitals and to heal a nation torn apart by the ravages of twenty years’ ongoing conflict. Then Osama would have had much less recruiting power and we would be fighting terrorism at its root, treating the disease instead of merely brushing away the symptoms. Afghanistan’s people would gain a respect for America, a respect born out of American justice and American mercy in aiding a troubled nation back to its feet. Instead, we turned our back on a bloodied and broken land and set off a rampage Iraq, an Iraq that was never shown to be in collusion with al Qaeda, an Iraq that had done us no direct harm since 1993, an Iraq that was essentially mollified, with its people starving and medicine less under crushing American sanctions. It shocks me that even today, Kerry doesn’t point out to Bush, “Mr. President, why did we invade Iraq? You led us there on a false threat, of weapons of mass destruction that simply did not exist. No harm would have come if we would have allowed multilateral UN action to continue weapons inspections, rather, many harms that have now come to pass would have been averted. America would be respected as the world leader, not as the world tyrant, bringing about the force of its will through force alone.” Of course, even if Kerry did say that, the Bush propaganda machine would be able to twist and deface Kerry’s credibility — anything they needed to do to avoid that intellectual and honest analytical debate that Bush so hates and that this country so needs.
O’Neill concludes, after having been fired by Bush, “Sitting there, I thought about how I expected to find a bigger market for truth [in Washington], but it didn’t turn out to be right. Even friends in the media were more interested in small conflicts than in what was right or wrong, more interested in the push and shove of personalities than in the real conflict over ideologies that was going on inside the administration.” As for the title of the book, “Loyalty and inquiry are inseparable to me,” [says O'Neill] … Bush demands a standard of loyalty–loyalty to an individual, no matter what–that O’Neill could never swallow. “That’s a false kind of loyalty, loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that’s the opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and telling someone what you really thing and feel–your best estimation of the truth instead of what they want to hear.” It’s refreshing to know that my own beliefs that “truth is the answer” and that “honesty is the best policy” are not entirely childish idealism. Reading this book about O’Neill has given me affirmed my conduct of life in a truthful, honest, mask less way, being who I am and asking for honest critique and analysis. It’s a shame that Washington is so caught up in games of politics that the real issues are lost, and this leads to the loss of young American’s lives in a needless conflict that could have been stayed a million times over, save for the ideological machinations of the President’s propaganda machine. Overall, The Price of Loyalty is an excellent book, written in a style that is gripping, making it feel more like a novel than an account of history. A highly recommended read, and would that there is a way for every American to read this book before the elections in November. But unfortunately most Americans don’t have the luxury of time to read — their real life concerns press down upon them so hard as they struggle to make ends meet. They gain their political perspective from sound bites on CNN or on the thirty-second campaign ads that flood the airwaves. Honest discourse cannot be compartmentalized, intellectual debate cannot be summed up in a sound bite, alas. It remains to be seen how our culture and our government will evolve in these next critical few years.
Over the course of Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke paints a picture of American efforts against terrorism from the very beginning of the modern terrorist movement in the late 1970s. Walking the reader through his years at the Reagan, First Bush, Clinton and Second Bush administration, Clarke provides valuable insights into how the different presidents operated, how they viewed the world, and how they responded to threats. The title of the book comes from the pledge the President takes at Inauguration, which says “to preserve, protect, defend the Constitution of the United States of American, Against All Enemies…â€
Clarke’s analysis of the Bush Administration, while perhaps occupying no more than a half of the book (a good chunk of the book is given to going over Clinton’s treatment of the emerging Al Qaeda, along with descriptions of the FBI and CIA’s relative naiveté about the terrorist threat), is thoroughly damning. Clarke shows that the Bush Administration downgraded terror from the high priority it was in the Clinton Administration and instead focused on Cold War issues such as the ABM treaty (essentially the Administration changed little from 1992 to 2001).
Perhaps the part of the book I found most insightful was Clarke’s treatment of the Afghan/Taliban, Saudi, Israeli, Iraqi, Iranian and Pakistani governments and peoples. While leading the reader through the history of the past twenty years, in terms of American involvement in the Middle East and Southwestern Asia, Clarke provides a perspective into the relative stability of each of those countries and their perspectives on terrorism.
Clarke wraps up the book with the conclusion that September 11th could have possibly been prevented (indeed, massive parallel attacks on the Millennium were prevented under the Clinton Administration) but had it been, then the necessary changes in FBI/CIA psyche would not have taken place. Most damning of all, Clarke points out that, considering the role of Islam in the Middle East, our invasion of Iraq played right into Osama bin Laden’s hands. Before we invaded, Osama’s propaganda painted a picture of an imperialistic America, set upon a Modern Crusade against Islam. Osama said that we would invade an Islamic country that had done us no wrong – and we did. Iraq had done no terrorist acts against the United States since 1993 (when its assassination attempt on the First Bush failed). Now, of course, Iraqi terrorism is at all-time high, thanks to the destabilization of the country that this Administration has mismanaged to bring about.
Overall, Clarke’s book is enlightening, and one can feel the frustration of a man who for tried for months to alert the Bush Administration of the coming threat but was turned away time and time again. It’s a shame that no one in the Bush Administration has written their own account of the time around 9/11, as it would be an interesting read to balance Clarke’s perspective, which while not partisan in the traditional sense, is certainly very fed up with Bush and company. If only there was a way to have all Americans read and understand this book prior to voting in November… but I fear that the party system and the Bush Money Machine will continue spreading its own propaganda. As Clarke writes, it’s likely that the November chant will be: “A Republican Vote is a Vote Against Terrorism.â€
Just finished reading Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. Brzezinski was National Security Adviser in the Carter administration. In this book he examines the post-9/11 world political climate, with an especial concentration on American policy. He emphasizes that America cannot act unilaterally, for as he puts it so eloquently: “A fortress on a hill can only stand alone, casting a menacing shadow over all beneath. As such, America would become the focus of global hatred. A city on a hill, by contrast, could illuminate the world with the hope of human progress–but only in an environment in which that progress is both the focus of a vision and an attainable reality for all.” Unfortunately, as last night’s pathetic Bush press conference only reinforced, the current Administration has its heart set on an arrogant, unilateralist path. When a reporter asked President Bush, “How long can we anticipate to stay in Iraq?” the President’s content-less reply of “As long as is necessary” said absolutely nothing. Will we still be in Iraq in 2014? According to President Bush, yes, if that will be necessary. Necessary for what? That question the President failed to answer, or even pay attention to.
America is on the dangerous path to global hegemony, towards the mixed fear and hate that all empires acquire with time. As a European observer, quoted in Brzezinski’s book, said with foresight before September 11th: “World powers without rivals are a class unto themselves. They do not accept anyone as equal, and are quick to call loyal followers friends, or amicus populi Romani. They no longer know any foes, just rebels, terrorists, and rogue states. They no longer fight, merely punish. They no longer wage wars but merely create peace. They are honestly outraged when vassals fail to act like vassals.” (One is tempted to add, they do not invade other countries, they only liberate).
Brzezinski points out that America does not have the economic base with which to sustain continued unilateral military deployments across the globe. Our military is already overextended with its engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, engagements which have no clear end or exit strategy in sight. By spurning the aid and advice of our well-financed allies in Europe, we are setting ourselves up for an anti-American, anti-globalization movement with America in the crosshairs. America must make strident steps towards become a global leader, in the fullest sense of the world. Nations already look to America for culture, democracy and guidance. American power reaches to every corner of the globe and no other nation can fight and win a war anywhere on this sphere. Brzezinski urges that America work together with Europe to find a solution to the Middle East peace problem, solve the Israeli-Palestinian situation by working with Europe to architect a pathway to peace, and build Iraq into a free, democratic country not by imposing democracy, but by guiding its people towards democracy. Perhaps most strikingly, Brzezinski points out that the anti-American hatred that our citizens are beginning to notice worldwide is not only out of envy for our land of plenty. It is also a direct consequence of an American foreign policy that claims to seek equality for all nations, then sidesteps issues that America finds not in its interest, even if they are in the world’s best interests. Cases in point include the Kyoto Protocol, the Ballistic Missile Agreement and the landmine ban. Is it such a leap of logic to think that Islamic extremists bombed the towers not because of a senseless hate but rather because of a very directed hate at the nation they saw as one-sidedly propping up Israel without having an ear for Arab concerns? Brzezinski points out that if we work together with Europe, which, though militarily impotent compared to America, has similar economic power, we can accomplish much good in the world. Europe traditionally is sympathetic to the PLO whereas America has favored Israel. Together a semi-unbiased view can emerge.
Brzezinski goes into many more details, including the explosion of population in the Middle East/Asia, as well as the growing power of China, Japan and the North Korean problem. All of his insights are backed up with data, and he writes in a rather non-partisan tone. He never outright blasts the Bush Administration, instead allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. Overall, the book proved to be an insightful, powerful read that led me to look at the world in a much more complex light than the good-and-evil dichotomy that the Bush Administration has been attempting to sell us.gay movies windows player mediagallery xxx moviebinaries movies altblowjob movies asianmovie streaming samples free bdsmsamples blow movie jobblue ride bus a to moviechris not teen evans another movie Map