Freyburg

…while waving around a book by Noam Chomsky, no less! Gold! Not quite Kruschev slapping his shoe on the table, but some fine diplomatic comedy nonetheless.

Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is an incredibly rich, relatively open city that probably gives Osama the willies with its Westernized, anything for a buck decadence. It isn’t quite the desert fairyland it’s made out to be, according to this interesting tale in Der Speigel, but it sure sounds like an interesting place.

These lists are ultimately a space-filler used by magazines to provoke argument and distract people from the fact that some interview fell through. And by no means do I agree with any list that calls Sgt. Peppers one of the worst things to happen to music. But that doesn’t make this mish-mash from Blender any less entertaining to read.

There was a time not so long ago when the United States opposed incursions into the Middle East. Witness the 1956 collusion between Israel, Britain and France to retake the Suez Canal. Then President Eisenhower went ape when he found out about the plan, and refused to have anything to do with it. Quite a refreshing change from the current crop of Republicans running the show, though the lessons of Suez can be seen in the Iraq fiasco today.

By the way, I just watched an excellent documentary called “Why We Fight,” all about Eisenhower’s speech warning of the coming military-industrial complex, and how his predictions have come all too true. Check it out, it’s a really good film.

An article in the Washington Post gives details of how during the selection process of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the entity in charge of Iraq from 2003 to 2004, loyalty to the Bush administration counted for far more than any real skill. Kind of indicative of why the place is such a shambles now.

The New Yorker is the stage for a debate between journalists Seymour Hersh, John Lee Anderson and George Packer as to what, if any progress has been made in five years of supposed terrah-fightin’. It’s not a reassuring read, but it is worth looking at.

PC World has a summary of the crappiest sites on the net, past and present. Some fine invective, and I completely agree with their choice for first place.

As part of Participatory Culture’s “sheeps” week, where the online video organization releases a tool, rant or bit of advice every day, Nicholas Reville has written an essay about the future of online video. It’s pretty interesting, and it points towards how video can become as widespread and democratic as blogs, or end up collected on big corporate sites. I think it’ll be a combination of the two, but read it for yourself.

Paul Wolfowitz, neoconservative intellectual and one of the main forces behind the Iraq War, has been running the show at the World Bank for more than a year. To his credit, his main policy is ferreting out corruption in third world countries, and he’s doing it by withholding loans to nations who won’t step up and get all honest-like. But his methodology, much like his “they’ll greet us with flowers and waving and..insurgenwha?” approach to Iraq, is running up against that pesky thing called “reality.” He’s also running into serious bureaucractic struggles, as the business-as-usual crowd at the World Bank wrestle with someone who, for better or for worse, wants to change things.

The results speak for themselves. Via Valleywag.