October 2011
11 posts
Because That Would Be Monstrous
From Gideon Rose’s How Wars End, on U.S. public opinion toward Japan in 1944:
In response to a December 1944 poll asking “what do you think we sould do with Japan as a country after the war?” 13 percent of Americans wanted to “kill all Japanese” and 33 percent wanted to destroy Japan as a political entity. The poll’s comparable question on Germany did not even...
9 tags
Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr: The weirdest... →
According to Glass, the officer posed a number of questions: Did he plan to super-glue himself to President Obama? What would Glass do if he met the president? After the officer wrapped up his questions, Glass proceeded to his actual visa interview with consular officials. There, too, he was…
9 tags
How Do You Break A Terrorist?
Waterboarding? Stress positions? How about cookies?
The most surprising element of former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan’s memoir, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, is how receptive terrorists are to food. When Soufan takes L’Houssaine Kherchtou, an Al Qaeda fixer, out for pizza, Khertchou tells him he’s “not an Al Qaeda guy...
September 2011
33 posts
4 tags
DC Comics' Epic Fail
Laura Hudson on women in the DC Comics reboot:
This is not about these women wanting things; it’s about men wanting to see them do things, and that takes something that really should be empowering — the idea that women can own their sexuality — and transforms it into yet another male fantasy. It takes away the actual power of the women and turns their “sexual...
It's Not Gender Warfare...It's Math.
annaholmes:
(A shorter version of this piece appears in today’s Washington Post. Photo of Google executive and engineer Marisa Mayer via. Headline via.)
Let’s say I was designing a new piece of software to make my life as a writer a little easier. First, I’d program it count how many characters I’d typed out and in what amount of time, in order to document my productivity on any given day....
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Frenemies List
My last piece for the American Prospect, on Tavis Smiley and Cornel West’s Poverty Tour:
“The black prophetic tradition has been the tradition that has renewed American democracy even given its imperial practice,” West says. “And the sadness of the age of Obama is that there’s an attempt to silence the black prophetic tradition.”
It is this tradition of principled opposition to...
3 tags
“If you remember Star Wars, that ventilation shaft that goes down to into the...”
– FBI Agent William Gawthrop gives his thoughts on Islam.
No U.S. Servicemember Will Have To Do This Ever...
“I had a picture of a girl from back home that I was friends with, and I’d tell people she was my girlfriend. I’d make up stories about when I went out with my friends on the weekends, creating this persona that doesn’t exist, ” Peters says. “I just went to my company commander and explained to him that I happened to be gay and I didn’t want to get...
Reporting Sharia
I have a Google alert on “sharia” naturally, so I was amused when I got an email based on a mention from a local Fox affiliate in Ohio doing a story about a new hospital and saw the reason why:
Fox Toledo’s Sharia Davis explains why medical experts say it’s the first of its kind in our area.
I think maybe when it’s time to go national she may have to go with...
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