Adam Khan’s

Trail

Wednesday 17 June ’09

• Spengler provides the first interesting look at the Iranian presidential election, arguing that the ayatollahs must appear militant to fend off their main true threat: not Israel, not the US, not the Saudis, but the Sunni Taliban in Pakistan.

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Monday 15 June ’09

• Netanyahu placates Obama;
  Administration “welcomes the important step forward”.

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Monday 8 June ’09

• Glick parses Obama’s giving Israel the finger in Cairo.

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Monday 1 June ’09

• At last, someone takes on gay marriage.

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Wednesday 1 April ’09

• The faces of Israel’s new government.

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Tuesday 24 March ’09

• Labor votes to join Likud government, 58% to 42.
  Netanyahu calls Barak to congratulate.

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Thursday 12 March ’09

• “One must make a stand. One simply must.”
  Christopher Hitchens, embroiled in Lebanon.

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Thursday 12 February ’09

• Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear Mr Darwin, 200 today,
  for giving us the Origin of Species, for giving us ourselves.

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Monday 9 February ’09

• Barry Rubin delineates the consensus
  that is the Israeli polity for now.

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Saturday 31 January ’09

• “Thank you, BBC.”
  Michael Palin on the secret origin of the name
  Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

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Thursday 22 January ’09

• On Obama’s first day,
  an impressive boot in the lobbyist revolving door (the text).

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Monday 19 January ’09

• Not Egypt’s government but its Bedouin smugglers seem to hold
  the keys to future Arab-Israeli peace,
  argue Efraim Inbar and Mordechai Kedar.

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Wednesday 14 January ’09

• Demography bore Gunnar Heinsohn argues that neither Islam nor Israel, but
  UNRWA made Gaza into fertile ground for angry young men.

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Tuesday 6 January ’09

• We need real states with real security forces;
  John Bolton, Giora Eiland, Sam Brownback and Daniel Pipes on the three-state solution
  (as mocked at foreignpolicy.com and feared at nytimes.com).

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Monday 29 December ’08

• Dore Gold debunks disproportionate force in Gaza;
  international law defines it not by what the other guy did first
  but by what you’re trying to achieve.

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Tuesday 30 June ’09

• John Podhoretz on Year One: he’s not hugely impressed with this one either, but though I liked it and was glad to see it in the cinema, I guess he’s right.

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Thursday 25 June ’09

• The New York Times reviews the latest revival of Waiting for Godot.

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Tuesday 23 June ’09

• The story of the writing of 1984.

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Monday 22 June ’09

• Old dogs “are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.”

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Sunday 21 June ’09

• David Brooks writes the first beautiful prose on the Iranian protests—see paragraphs 3 and 4. And it stays lyrical as well as wise. Brooks’s best ever?

• I have to say, Tom Friedman’s column on Iran sounds like a presidential speech.

• Tirade against Britain by Iran’s foreign minister, Manoucher Mottaki. The mid-sized Satan?

• Valuable lessons learned in 4 nasty days at Deep Springs College [via Brian]. I was there for 9 months and didn’t get it as clearly as the author does.

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Saturday 20 June ’09

• Withering observations on Obama’s lukewarm reaction to events in Iran by William Kristol (Obama as “resolutely irresolute”) and Fred Barnes (rejecting Obama’s “false choices” meme).

• “Unless Mousavi withdraws and leads his followers in a renewed quietist retreat,” writes Reuel Marc Gerecht, “the Islamic revolution, which shook the Muslim world 30 years ago, will now become either a real laboratory of democracy or a crude and violent dictatorship that might rival the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria in its savagery. Either outcome would be momentous.”

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Thursday 18 June ’09

• “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”. Seriously, why marry, if it’s less stable —as it is in the USA—than not doing so?

• Caddyshack is a Marx Bros movie, Ramis explains.

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Monday 15 June ’09

• Sometimes it just works. Charlie Rose with the Broadway cast of Waiting for Godot: Nathan Lane, John Goodman, Bill Irwin and John Glover.

• Krauthammer tells it like it is on the Obama Cairo speech: cheap condescension, moral abdication and ambivalence towards the country he leads.

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Saturday 13 June ’09

• John Bolton lists Iran’s likely responses to an Israeli attack. Plus: he says “quantum of solace”!

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Thursday 4 June ’09

• The Office, UK vs US.

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Monday 1 June ’09

• Yep, John Podhoretz wasn’t too impressed with Star Trek either.

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Sunday 31 May ’09

• Joe Lieberman points out the unprecedented convergence of concerns about Iran among Arabs and Israelis alike—and that some of the strongest alliances in history have been forged among old antagonists when confronted by a new, common threat.

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Tuesday 19 May ’09

• Cool. Bret’s fluid and languid take on Netanyahu’s visit with Obama—and Bret on Charlie Rose!

• Fred Barnes seems to be growing consistently to the right of Charles Krauthammer in this transcript of their reactions on Fox News’ Special Report to the first Obama/Netanyahu meeting.

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Saturday 9 May ’09

• Big piece on Israel by an Australian.

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Thursday 7 May ’09

• Subways to scale. [via Subtraction]

• JJ Abrahms on Charlie Rose. Charlie at 28:20: “Lost. People that I know love it, love it, love it.”

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Sunday 3 May ’09

• Fascinating, brief, accessible article on bone in nytimes/science. Wish nytimes.com had a donations box.

• Chic, a definition.

• Cool bendy Manhattan map.

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Wednesday 29 April ’09

• Theodore Dalrymple on J. G. Ballard.

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Tuesday 28 April ’09

• Interview with Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new Foreign Minister.

• Spengler’s first as David P Goldman, lamenting what seems the end of Anglo-Saxon dominance.

• Christopher Buckley on losing Mum and Pup.

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Monday 27 April ’09

• Brief recent photo essay of North Korea by the brave Tomas van Houtryve.

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Sunday 26 April ’09

• On the bullying of and subsequent sad decline of the SAT. Yet another story of American self-immolation.

• Mark Steyn isn’t even trying to be funny any more. In “The End of the World as We Know It”= he expresses what I’m thinking and feeling, that we’re in deep trouble because Americans voted impetuously and like spoilt children for a Feelgood o’Balma that’s going to stop feeling good mighty fast as Americans realize that given the choice, and if you can’t have both, it is indeed better to be feared than loved—and in America’s case, better for everyone.

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Saturday 25 April ’09

• Look at these fucking hipsters—fun photoblog.

• Sarzkozy seems to be a failure.

• Unemployment in Spain has reached 17.4%.

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Friday 24 April ’09

• The Atlantic finally realizes that maybe the Palestinians don’t really want a state. But see the weasel-words at the end designed to keep this radical position within the pale of polite society/nonsense.

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Tuesday 21 April ’09

• Shots of Disney’s recycling of Snow White in various subsequent films.

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Sunday 19 April ’09

• Spengler, revealed.

• Apart from his tiresome and overly-revealing reference in every piece to Iraq as a disaster—which, fair enough, most hacks do—John Lancaster’s London Review of Books pieces make a fun collection.

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Friday 17 April ’09

• A “a reticence-free zone”: wow, David Brooks turns his laser vision to Israel, and let me tell you something habibi he is nobody’s frier. Now pass me that Fizzy Bubalech.

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Thursday 16 April ’09

• A tantalizing glimpse into the mindset of the Germans during the Final Solution—this book review rollicks along.

• Dharma Initiative magazine ads circa 1977.

• If we could see as a telescope.

• Lego battleship Yamato.

• Michael Caine easy, free, articulate and enthusiastic on Charlie Rose.

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Monday 13 April ’09

• The title of Krauthammer’s latest, “It’s Your Country Too, Mr President”, seems borderline treasonous. (Not that I don’t agree.)

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Sunday 12 April ’09

• The Telegraph and The Times on Heston Blumenthal’s Little Chef at Popham.

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Thursday 9 April ’09

• James Taranto is on fire today, fisking Roger Cohen

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Sunday 5 April ’09

• Valery Gergiev takes the London Symphony Orchestra on tour to the USA http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/arts/music/01gerg.html?ref=arts Prokofiev.

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Wednesday 1 April ’09

• Watching Watchmen. For: Ebert (wants to see again), Travers. Against, Scott (withering), Podhoretz.

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Sunday 22 March ’09

• “Tough Times in EUtopia”: a pessimistic survey in The Weekly Standard on how Europe is faring up in the financial crisis.

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Saturday 21 March ’09

• Condi Rice, for the hour, on Charlie Rose. What a babe at 54. “The United States is too big a country, too important a country, too gracious a country to have permanent enemies.”

• ““Women and GTD; Is There a Problem?” at GTD Times

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Thursday 19 March ’09

• Nice American migration graphics.

• Don’t keep calm and carry on.

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Wednesday 18 March ’09

• The Times on Tel Aviv’s 100th and no nastiness in sight.

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Sunday 15 March ’09

• Jeremy Clarkson: The Range Rover, quite simply, answers every motoring question that’s ever been posed.

• Indulge in the transcript of the 5-day, 9-hours-a-day “Raiders of the Lost Ark” story conference with Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan.

• Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” by Clay Shirky.

• How Twitter will survive the coming torrent of abuse.

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Friday 13 March ’09

• ThruYou. Kutiman (Israei) mixes YouTube. Savava.

• Great for Lost fans: a compilation of characters saying “What?” Similarly, Fucking Midnight Run (loved the movie but hadn’t remembered the preponderance of the term). Fuck it, see the original post of video collections at the brilliant Waxy. Also, Fucking Pulp Fiction. With this one you can almost follow the plot of the movie!

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Wednesday 11 March ’09

• Nice post at 37signals urging web folks to benefit by utilizing by-products as older industries do. Even though I don’t use their stuff, 37signals really are the bleeding edge.

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Tuesday 10 March ’09

• Stephen Wolfram unstealths Wolfram Alpha. “A new paradigm for using computers and the web. That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!”

• Round-up of Twitter apps including payments and scheduling.

• In defence of eggs. I know this innately and sigh when people say eggs aren’t good for you.

• Bad ethics, bad science, and bad politics. The Weekly Standard on Obama’s restoration of federal funding to embryo-based stem cell research is rather different to how I saw the signing covered by the BBC tonight.

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Monday 9 March ’09

• Obama Wikipedia entry whitewashed, WorldNetDaily reports. I feel the creepiness.

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Sunday 8 March ’09

• Charlie Rose and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn bond (minute 27:00) over carrying 3 cellphones: iPhone for web, BlackBerry for email, regular for speaking. I say Nokia N95 for all.

• Matt Labash kills Facebook

• It is the ideology of niceness, the destruction of the punishment/reward balance, that is ravaging the Anglosphere today. To hell with niceness.

• Germaine Greer explores why or whether men are funnier than women.

• It is impossible to begin to imagine the shape of an Internet deprived of the material produced by the newspapers and wire services, writes James V. DeLong.

• Check out the global intifadah: close footage of bad Arab vandalizing Swedish police vans outside the tennis stadium where an Israeli player was competing.

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Saturday 7 March ’09

• Genius blog. Daily Routines—How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.

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Friday 6 March ’09

• Obamanomics. Seems pretty grim to me.

• A modest proposal: Twitter @taxishare.

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Thursday 5 March ’09

• Michael Arrington: It’s Time To Start Thinking of Twitter as a Search Engine.

• Jason Hunter’s mad convoluted theory of the mad convoluted events of Lost.

• Wow, terrific, excellent. How many times at The Jerusalem Post and The Weekly Standard have I fiddled about going to their Print page version because their web pages are so badly designed, the print too small and lacking serifs. Well, now there’s the free browser plug-in Readability. Oh, the human ingenuity.

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Tuesday 3 March ’09

• Adamkhan.net has a color that changes based upon photos, but wow, Dave Shea has taken it a step further in Mezzoblue, which I haven’t looked at for ages, and creates an entire palette from each photo, and it’s stunning. Compare this, this, this and this. The best. One more (green this time): this.

• Khoi Vinh—not just an impressive designer but an impressive writer. I guess that’s because he’s an impressive thinker, which underlies both. His latest musings on nailing RSS step back from product review to reflection on the state of the internet nation.

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Monday 2 March ’09

• This post is on using Twitter at a presentation. Is this going to be an integral part of conferences?

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Saturday 28 February ’09

• Check out the Grimace Project—combined animated facial expressions.

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Friday 27 February ’09

• Free 10-minute international calls at poketalk.com. Works, I tried it.

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Thursday 26 February ’09

• Earth’s sexiest television?

• Bloomberg looks at Netanyahu’s likely economic policies.

• Null Eta, Merlin Mann’s visionary strategic business strategy framework strategy.

• Subtly joining the movement, Elliott Abrams on the 3-state solution. “Now, even the mention of Egyptian and Jordanian involvement will evoke loud protests, not least in Amman and Ramallah,” he writes, “and perhaps U.S. policymakers should think but not speak about such an outcome.”

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Tuesday 24 February ’09

• Great and juicy. Anyone but Brando. Vanity Fair on the making of The Godfather.

• OMGIF. OH MY GOD ANIMATED GIFS. Pleasing to be human.

• Why they love Twitter: Tim O’Reilly, Brits, various responders to Darren Rowse, celebrities and Scoble.

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Monday 23 February ’09

• In Foreign Policy, 13 unexpected consequences of and 20 things that won’t survive the financial crisis.

• Clearleft posts a mockup of the World Wildlife Fund tiger web page. Surely one of the most prestigious web gigs possible.

• Try Wordle. It takes an RSS feed, analyses the word count, and produces a lovely poster text cloud.

• A letter to President Obama imploring him to ask Steve Jobs to lead a combined GM and Chrysler.

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Friday 20 February ’09

• Russell Beattie notes the severe drop over time in how much people use their iPhone apps. I’m not as bullish as everyone else seems to be about mobile for one simple reason: it’s just not a comfortable platform for sustained use.

• Ebert on Siskel, 10 years after his death.

• 37signals introduces Sprockets to preprocess and concatenate JavaScript source files.

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Wednesday 18 February ’09

• Watch Michael Dolan, a David Allen Company coach, begin a $3,000 day of helping Robert Scoble get things done.

• Only minor adjustments await Americans over the next generation, Spengler argues, compared with the great changes affecting its prospective competitors.

• ifixit.com on disassembling the MacBook Pro 17-inch and my own machine, the fabulous MacBook Pro 15-inch.

• How long before people get much more angry over Obama’s oblique non-committal please-everyone legalese than they were of Bush’s straight-talking?

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Tuesday 17 February ’09

• Giora Eiland outlines his land-swap blueprint for improving the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

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Monday 16 February ’09

• I find your lack of pants disturbing.

• What an asshat job posting—see the title and first paragraph.

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Thursday 12 February ’09

• For economic stimulus, a much more profound healing than massive government spending would be for the USA to once again get back to basics and allow massive immigration. Count me in, please!

• In the last 50 years, the roles of food and sex have reversed. Cute topic but I don’t like her tone; such bland writing does not justify such supercilious attitude.

• This article in The New Scientist, Born believers: How your brain creates God, reads like a parody—taking a topic that philosophers have written on so keenly and producing it in typical newspaper style, rife with quotations by anthropologist X of the University of Y. Makes me feel I’m an idiot for wasting time reading articles on the internet rather than proper books.

• Edward R. Tufte’s Presentation Tips.

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Tuesday 10 February ’09

• Now, streaming ‘70s and ‘80s telly from CBS (US only, but override that with the invaluable and free Hotspot Shield):

  • Beauty and the Beast
  • Beverly Hills 90210
  • Dynasty
  • Family Ties
  • Have Gun – Will Travel
  • Hawaii Five-0
  • The Love Boat
  • MacGyver
  • Melrose Place
  • Perry Mason
  • Star Trek: The Original Series
  • The Twilight Zone
  • Twin Peaks

• Top UK athletes are doing Bikram, the BBC reports. With quotes from little-sister-of-childhood-friend Olga Allon. [via DJS]

• Camera on a Tokyo sushi conveyor belt.

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Friday 6 February ’09

• Looks like the so-called stimulus bill is Obama’s gays-in-the-military on steroids. Krauthammer says it best.

• Buffett’s metric says it’s time to buy stocks now that the total market value equals 70% to 80% of GNP again.

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Thursday 5 February ’09

• Dear Spengler: letters from Baffled in Beijing, Worried in Washington and Jittery in Jerusalem.

• It’s a fine line between R-E-S-P-E-C-T and S-U-B-M-I-S-S-I-O-N.

• I LEGO NY. Coolness.

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Tuesday 3 February ’09

• David Brooks in high Patio Man form discussing the new masters of the universe, the residents of Washington DC’s Ward Three.

• Caroline Glick now endorses the 3-state solution, though writes, interestingly enough, as if she opposes it.

• Peter Berkowitz in The Wall Street Journal:
  Bush hatred and Obama euphoria.
  “Those who, by virtue of their education and professional training,
  would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton’s lesson of moderation
  are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.”

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Sunday 1 February ’09

• Will Iraqis help stabilize Afghanistan? This is the dream come satisfyingly true.

• Excellent summary of the Gaza war by Max Boot. “Once again Hamas will reap a public-relations windfall while Israel will be castigated as a human-rights abuser. The Israeli public seems to have accepted such slander as the price of battling those who would destroy it.”

• On becoming a New Yorker.

• Steve Jobs interview with Rolling Stone from December 2003. The intervening 5 years testify to the clarity and prescience of his answers.

• Russell Beattie: “Even though I love putting my thoughts out there, in the back of my mind it’s almost embarrassing to add to the cacophony of opinions that now flow daily from every orifice of the Internet from people who just haven’t gotten the message that it’s just not cool any more.”

• Terry Teachout wrestles with Israel’s informal ban on Wagner.

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Thursday 29 January ’09

• Tom Friedman gets aboard the 3-state solution (though he calls it 5-state). My only complaint is his notion that Israel withdraw from all settlements in the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem. Why should these areas be Judenrein? This issue, reciprocal minority rights, to me is the real inflection point, not Palestinian right of return.

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Wednesday 28 January ’09

• Israel expels Venezuelan diplomats
  and Chavez’s foreign minister tells Al-Jazeera that “it’s an honor”.

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Tuesday 27 January ’09

• “Islamic supremacists”: first time I’ve seen the term used in the wild after its recent suggestion (I forget by whom). Caroline Glick uses it to discuss Geert Wilders speaking in Jerusalem.

• It’s been a while, but Thomas Friedman writes a piece that can safely be called stupid.

• David Brooks applies the maxim, “Invert, always invert.”

• “If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation.”

• White House photographers discuss their photos of George W. Bush with Errol Morris, director of the McNamara film Fog of War.

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Saturday 24 January ’09

• Krauthammer offers up the only interesting thing I’ve read about Obama’s inauguration speech, noting that he reached back not to King, not to Lincoln but to the slave-tainted time of Washington.

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Friday 23 January ’09

• “It’s all total criminality.” The increasingly nutty Noam Chomsky on Israel.

• Stamp of AdamKhan.net approval for John Gruber’s software setup since it’s so similar to my own.

• For idiots like me: the A380 In-Flight Kitchen diner in central Taipei.

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Thursday 22 January ’09

• “Hollow man”—Spengler on Obama.

• Here’s Dick Morris with a concise and articulate downer on the Obama presidency. [via Drudge]

• Mark Leibovich profiles Robert Gibbs, the new White House Press Secretary.

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Wednesday 21 January ’09

• Back in October, in case you missed it, and even if you didn’t: Charlie Rose discusses the economic crisis with Warren Buffett. How magnificent is an age in which the richest man is also revered as a sage.

• Two more seasons of Mad Men. Who can I pay in gratitude for the fabulosity of this television series? [via Kottke]

• Music from the World of Goo. I bought the game. You should too. [via Kottke]

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Tuesday 20 January ’09

• Well-meaning Israel supporters such as Krauthammer, pushing for a maximalist Gaza assault that takes out Hamas, forget that Israel may benefit from every day that the Palestinian national movement is bifurcated into two feuding regimes.

• Interesting new logo for the New York Philharmonic.

• Quintessential Mark Steyn: outrage via humor.

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Sunday 18 January ’09

• Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Leon Wieseltier and Ed Zwick talk Defiance with Charlie Rose. A much better movie discussion than he usually has; having Wieseltier around helps. Strange that the Americans are so smooth and articulate and the Englishman so tongue-tied.

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Saturday 17 January ’09

• Richard Perle seems transparently disingenuous in claiming that the Iraq invasion was due purely to risk analysis and not also the centerpiece of a larger policy of draining the swamps of Jihad by injecting democracy into Araby.

• Detailed helpful view of Gaza by Haaretz’s Amos Harel.

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Friday 16 January ’09

• Spengler. This time on Obama. Always a worthwhile and disturbing read.

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Wednesday 14 January ’09

• Jiminy, scary. Anti-Israel demonstrators on Kensington High Street roughed up the local Starbucks.

• Britain’s top 10 fish and chip shops.

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Tuesday 13 January ’09

• Winners of the International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest 2008. Lovely to see an underwater Japanese garden.

• On Israel’s situation, Spengler argues that Hamas needs to be killed very dead.

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Monday 12 January ’09

• Bush’s final press conference wherein he first warms up when asked about Israel. Fred Barnes lauds his record as “defiantly doing the right thing.” Mark Steyn’s take.

• He’s driving/flying his parawinged buggy from London to Timbuktu, then putting it into production.

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Sunday 11 January ’09

• The most detailed report I’ve read yet of the streetfighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

• Bush refused Israel use of Iraqi airspace, claiming its covert sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities was a better way than an aerial bombardment. David Sanger tells Charlie Rose the tale.

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Saturday 10 January ’09

• Discover Magazine’s top 100 stories of 2008.

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Friday 9 January ’09

• New! The Manualist plays “Come On Eileen”!

• Sunnis vs and not-so-vs Shiites, Reuel Marc Gerecht breaks it down.

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Thursday 8 January ’09

• It’s a bit of a fadicha but Israelis watch the fighting in Gaza with binoculars and lawn chairs.

• Israel to journalists: “Ask Egypt to let you into the Gaza Strip”.

• Spengler enters the fray of the demography bores.

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Wednesday 7 January ’09

• Den of Geek’s Top 50 movie special effects shots.

• The 6 Most Narcissistic Celebrity Dads.

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Tuesday 6 January ’09

• Airbag is right: Watch the battery video.

• Meet the MacBook Wheel, as reported by The Onion.

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Monday 5 January ’09

• “I’m Merlin [Mann] and I’m making a video every day this week whether you like it or not.”

• Tony “socialist, anti-Zionist, anti-racist” Greenstein has images of child victims of the Gaza bombings that should be viewed.

• Israel’s diplomatic situation is fine, Barry Rubin observes.

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Sunday 4 January ’09

• Michael Lewis tells the tale of the financial crisis while Christopher Caldwell explains the paradoxical way central banks can help. [Via David Brooks]

• Get a 20% discount at my Dad’s online shop Collectorsworld.net by mentioning adamkhan.net.

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Saturday 3 January ’09

• David Horowitz, editor of The Jerusalem Post, provides the best article so far on the Gaza assault, reading like a history.

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Wednesday 31 December ’08

• It arrived just fine, the hardback I bought a few weeks ago for £0.43 plus £2.75 postage via an Amazon reseller. Crazily cheap books are becoming increasingly common.

• Religious people have more self-control because they’ve given their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

• Benny Morris, dean of Zionist history, explicates Israel’s current unease.

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Tuesday 30 December ’08

• Financial crises, like epidemics, kill the unhealthy first, Spengler argues. Iran. Pakistan.

• On the Gaza attacks, Bret Stephens points out that “no ingenious conceit can disguise the fact that war offers no outcome other than victory or defeat.”

• New Israel Defence Forces YouTube channel.

• Krauthammer pleads at length for a gas tax.

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Monday 29 December ’08

• The patents that produced the golden age of electronic games, 1969-1989.

• Michael “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” Pollan for US Secretary of Agriculture.

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Wednesday 24 December ’08

• Josh Silver, physicist at Oxford, aims to get $1 adjustable eyeglasses to everyone in the world who needs them by the year 2020. Isn’t that wonderful?

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Tuesday 23 December ’08

• Are we all out of innovation?

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Saturday 20 December ’08

• Some unusual Bibles.

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Wednesday 17 December ’08

• ‘Switch to another browser,’ says The Guardian. ‘Preferably Firefox. This is by far the best option.’

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Saturday 13 December ’08

• Ecofont saves 20% of your printer ink [via Gizmodo].

• Connect, empower, entertain with Blackbird, the web browser for Black people! How daft.

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Tuesday 9 December ’08

• Spengler: ‘China’s commitment to classical music will have effects that are at once too subtle and too powerful to categorize easily.’

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Saturday 6 December ’08

• Noonan: ‘Homeland is a Nazi-ish word, not an American concept at all.’

• “I like Xenophon,” Theodore Dalrymple quotes a WWI officer. “He is the perfect example of a British gentleman.”

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Friday 28 November ’08

• Star Trek vs Star Wars: The Final Battle!

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Thursday 27 November ’08

• P. J. O’Rourke is funny again: print journalists need a swift infusion of federal aid.

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Wednesday 26 November ’08

• Jeff Bridges’ photos on Making Iron Man on his very cool site.

• On NPR, Brian Eno extolls the benefits of singing.

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Monday 24 November ’08

• How To Be Happy Part 1: Get A Dog.

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Saturday 8 November ’08

• Obama’s first press conference. I found the stills from the hotel room election night rather more inspiring.

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Tuesday 4 November ’08

• “The pseudo-proletariat rhetoric that I think is now so poisonous in Republican ranks, the sean-hannityization of conservatism…” I so love dear David Brooks, here on Charlie Rose!

• Review of the Nokia N96.

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Sunday 2 November ’08

• The lure of the diner in the WSJ.

• Impassioned pleas from Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson to not vote Obama.

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Saturday 1 November ’08

• According to Spengler, the low level of violence in Iraq during the past several months is due mainly to a tacit agreement between Iran and the Bush administration. Is this true?!? Is the surge a sham?

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Thursday 30 October ’08

• Obama as a Nasser-type figure.

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Friday 24 October ’08

• Oh, oh, Scirocco.

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Wednesday 22 October ’08

• Cuddly OS X pillows.

• 37Signals warns us nicely of future creep.

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Monday 20 October ’08

• Hitch jumps ship.

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Friday 17 October ’08

• Melvynn Bragg lauds James Bond, and isn’t it fascinating how weak a writer this public semi-intellectual is compared with modern bloggers.

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Thursday 16 October ’08

• You must read ‘Farmer in Chief’ by the invaluable Michael Pollan of “East food. Not too much. Mostly plants” fame.

• Download iReadFast (Mac only), set it to fullscreen, crank up the speed to the maximum, 950 words/minute, and paste in your latest op-ed fix. Fun way to read?

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Wednesday 15 October ’08

• Betrayed by Dershowitz—Chaim in comment #14 demolishes the great man’s convoluted argument for supporting Obama.

• Tech tips for the basic computer user, like alt-tab and whatnot.

• Talcum powder is now linked to ovarian cancer.

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Monday 13 October ’08

• Scrutinizing the 1960s-era props is part of the fun of watching Mad Men.

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Saturday 11 October ’08

• On his 50-state trip around America, dual-citizen Jewish English gay showbiz “born to play Oscar Wilde” Stephen Fry acknowledges: ‘Yes they have no idea what cheese or bread can be’.

• William Kristol: ‘Viva McCain’.

• Caroline Glick observes that the US believes that the Lebanese government is a credible ally while Israel on the other hand sees the Hizbullah-dominated government as its enemy.

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Friday 10 October ’08

• Why tea, lemon and honey for a cold?

• There’s a new logo for Best Buy, the consumer electronics chain. The old one seemed better as being visible from the highway, whereas the new one seems more inviting if you’re already cruising within a shopping mall.

• Having just had Aaron over for a weekend, this Telegraph piece on the Brits’ tendency to drink too much, as encouraged by the Queen Mother, read especially relevant/poignant/pertinent/[hic].

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Thursday 9 October ’08

• Obama’s plane stinks and the campaign in general mistreats journalists.

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Tuesday 7 October ’08

• The Veep debate, distilled by SNL... and the presidential debate as well.

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Saturday 4 October ’08

• On the set of David Zucker’s new movie An American Carol.

• OJ convicted—how prescient, the saying that in history tragedy comes around again as farce.

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Friday 3 October ’08

• Brooks of the Times then Krauthammer of the Post on the Biden/Palin debate.

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Thursday 2 October ’08

• Slow-mo hi-def video of people getting punched in the face—is this really how our faces deal with the blow? [Via literaryhack.com]

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Sunday 28 September ’08

• Sasha Baron-Cohen crashes the Milan Fashion Festival as Bruno. Video (scroll to end) complete with commentary by the chick filming it. She tells her audience she loves him and tries to explain to the police that he’s legit, a journalist. So easy to forget the Italian things, like how “journalist” is hallowed.

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Saturday 27 September ’08

• Lamenting a bailout.

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Thursday 25 September ’08

• Motley Fool: Buffett swarms in.

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Wednesday 24 September ’08

• IBM on jQuery.

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Tuesday 23 September ’08

• The upcoming Google phone, G1, as reviewed by Walt Mossberg, has both a keyboard and a touchscreen—score!—but is it really a smartphone?

• Palin’s would-be speech on Ahmedinejad.

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Monday 22 September ’08

• Why Constellation preferred Warren Buffett to $35 a share.

• Profile of Stuff White People Like guy.

• Gruber gets it just right on the recent Windows ads.

• John F. Burns, doyen of American journalists in Iraq and now stationed in London, sums up the state of play regarding the prime minister’s political struggle.

• Replacing Heathrow with a 24-hour artificial island-based airport in the Thames Estuary.

• Limit your kids’ cellphone use.

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Sunday 21 September ’08

• ‘Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails.’ ‘And I’m Dot Net.’

• McCartney on Yesterday: I woke up one morning and I had this tune in my head and I spent the next week asking people what it was and nobody could define what it was.

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Monday 15 September ’08

• Orange Pekoe is the perfect complement to a British fry-up breakfast. The writer wins me over with his disdain for the teabag and the sports section.

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Saturday 13 September ’08

• jQuery UI demos.

• The Alaska state budget.

• If I were in New York I’d definitely go to Sushi Azabu.

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Friday 12 September ’08

• How Digg Works.

• Those frothing against Palin fail to distinguish between “common” and “the common touch.”

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Thursday 11 September ’08

• In a funk, is Biden next under the bus?

• Does Palin believe in dinosaurs? Matt Damon really wants to know.

• The touch-screen quandary is solved—for people like us who love QWERTY at any rate. By the genius behind T9.

• Alex Payne’s rules for computing happiness though #4 is wacky.

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Wednesday 10 September ’08

• Delicious rant against the Palin pick by Leon Wieseltier, author of Kaddish.

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Monday 8 September ’08

• Spengler mercilessly skewers Obama on the Biden choice.

• NiiMe: use the accelerometer in your phone to control things on your computer (Windows only).

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Saturday 6 September ’08

• Zeldman walks to work.

• First impressions of the Nokia N96.

• For everything you needed to know about the Republican National Convention, here’s David Brooks, totally sharp, and Charles Krauthammer, dependably wise.

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Friday 5 September ’08

• Despite being a supporter I agree with this scathing review of McCain’s acceptance speech.

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Thursday 4 September ’08

• A letter from someone who has known Sarah Palin since 1992 and is about 70% anti (again via DJ Sanders). My opinion of Palin: a seductive rattlesnake who will help get McCain elected and be far less popular than him by the end of his term.

• Lowdown on the Israel-Georgian relationship. Turns out the Georgian defence minister is a former Israeli.

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Wednesday 3 September ’08

• This needs to be on the cover of Time Magazine (via DJ Sanders).

• The website is down—the best short film (10 mins) I’ve seen on the internet.

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Monday 1 September ’08

• Yves Rossy, rocket man.

• Fourth of four posts on how Symbian S60 and Apple’s OS X play together.

• Upload data to many-eyes.com and display it in various ways.

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Sunday 31 August ’08

• Amotz Asa-El annoints Israel’s next leader, Avishay Braverman.

• Barry Rubin gropes towards an overarching Middle Easy strategy.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers

• Bill Ayers, the next Rev Wrightgate.

• Glick on Biden on Iran.

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Saturday 30 August ’08

• Who is the Chancellor of the Exchequor?

• A first look at the Nokia n85.

• Fred Barnes on Sarah Palin.

• Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol then Karl Rove on Obama’s acceptance speech.

• National Review likes the Palin pick and so does the Weekly Standard.

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Friday 29 August ’08

• David Brooks gives Obama’s nomination speech.

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Thursday 28 August ’08

• From Iran, a conversation with the President of Iran.

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Wednesday 27 August ’08

• More Spengler on Russia: Invading Georgia was a demography-driven necessity.

• Peace was the word, and the Voice of Peace was the station, 24 hours a day. Abie Nathan, 81.

• A return to Symbian from iPhone.

• Armed forces of the world, ranked. Incredibly, Israel is 4th after the USA, China and India!

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Tuesday 26 August ’08

• For Russia, to dominate is to be.

• The American dream of happiness might be a nightmare. What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins.

• Is it every David Brooks column I link to? Advice to Obama at the Convention.

• Nice, high-falutin’ piece on the web site profession at ALA.

• Another Anglo miracle: solar-powered aircraft flies indefinitely.

.....

Sunday 24 August ’08

• Zadie Smith, whom I admire but don’t much like, on E. M. Forster, whose Passage to India just gets increasingly spectacular.

.....

Saturday 23 August ’08

• Returning Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan is the only feasible peacable outcome of the Israel-Palestinian conflict; is there a Saudi plan on the table?

• Some best buys.

• David Brooks tells us who Joe Biden is.

• Krauthammer: The fate of far more than Georgia is at stake.

• The WSJ likes Coogan’s new Hamlet 2 but judging by the videoclip on the page, his phony American accent grates even more than it’s designed to.

.....

Friday 22 August ’08

• Photo album by an AP reporter of Bush at the Olympics.

• A case for AAPL.

.....

Thursday 21 August ’08

• Op-ed by the author of The Case Against Barak Obama, who I believe lost the election when Russia invaded Georgia, and this book’s the icing.

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Tuesday 19 August ’08

• We must reject the Russian fairy tale that aid to Russia’s neighbors is a threat to Russia.

• British children suffer from a system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism.

.....

Monday 18 August ’08

• Victory jig (via DJ Sanders).

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Sunday 17 August ’08

• None of this would have happened if he had been medicated.

• Both McCain and Obama do well answering questions from a pastor. Update: Now that I’ve heard some of the audio, sounds like McCain trounced Obama.

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Saturday 16 August ’08

• Dennis Miller presents Shofar accompaniments.

• Spengler says Georgia never should have been an ally in the first place.

• The most important foodstuff to buy organic is butter; next priority would be meats.

• It’s a long but heartfelt rumination on being an unhappy youth at Rome.

• The lesson of Georgia.

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Thursday 14 August ’08

• The US is already running circles around Russia Russia in the wake of Georgia.

• Bush saved us, now on to the next boom.

• Face is the place.

• The future is here as Boeing introduces its air-to-surface laser (via Instapundit).

• After cancelling elections, Gordon Brown’s second fatal own goal was abandoning Basra.

• Latte art.

• My new guru Tim Ferriss finally learns to swim.

• Charles Murray undermines the BA.

.....

Wednesday 13 August ’08

• Let’s do the Time Warp again, again!

• The pill messes up women’s sense of smell in men.

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Tuesday 12 August ’08

• America is slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

• Design is born of constraints.

• Tufte presents iPhone: For clarity, do detail.

• Once again, George W. Bush is a great president on things both big and small.

• David Brooks interprets the Olympic Games opening ceremony.

• Is Turkey a liability?

• Groups of rollerbladers through Tel Aviv: I was as usual ahead of my time.

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Monday 11 August ’08

• Georgia, the geographic and historical crucible where Russia meets the Turkic and Persian Near East.

• It’s 1982. You need no longer stop at the end of the line for a carriage return.

• The tyranny of clocks, Socrates’ distrust of writing, yada yada: The Atlantic worries about the web.

• Denmark is a model nation—that’s energy independence not Lego.

• Israel has two dogs in the Russian-Georgian conflict.

.....

Saturday 9 August ’08

• As a proud owner of “wireless headphones from Finland”, I’m among the skewered by David Brooks.

.....

Friday 8 August ’08

• The Starbucks effect comes to smartphones as Apple yanks iPhone wireless modem app—Nokia should rally around this.

.....

Thursday 7 August ’08

• Israel threatens Russia that its S-300 anti-missile system will be neutralized if sold to Iran.

• Aircraft carriers are heading towards Iran. Is this it?

• A strong show at the Republican convention next month is McCain’s biggest chance, says Karl Rove.

• More good news from Iraq: Moqtada al-Sadr has laid down his weapons.

.....

Wednesday 6 August ’08

• “I’m Paris Hilton and I approve this message because I think it’s totally hot.” Via Drudge.

• See Lileks back skillfully into his Solzhenitsyn eulogy then relate his daughter’s birthday outing, both in the same piece.

• The first step in a campaign calling for a mandatory death penalty for terrorist murderers would be to conduct a poll.

• Bolton notes Iran’s progress in both its nuke program and its deterrence against attacking that program.

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Tuesday 5 August ’08

• At 46, Douglas “Gen X” Coupland ponders aging.

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Monday 4 August ’08

• Our concept of the state begins with our understanding of God.

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Saturday 2 August ’08

• Deep inside 7/7.

• To overcome globosclerosis David Brooks supports McCain’s League of Democracies.

• Is Iran training for an EMP attack on America?

• How to address copy-editors over a wrongly omitted “a”.

• The Tale of Gore-Al.

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Friday 1 August ’08

• David’s Horowitz’s sentences are gaining stature.

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Thursday 31 July ’08

• “A myth to Himself. Has to be,” Sun Ra says of God.

.....

Tuesday 29 July ’08

• “A very peculiar restless thing of the British, isn’t it,” relates travel writer Eric Newby’s widow.

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Monday 28 July ’08

• Today’s top absurdity.

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Wednesday 23 July ’08

• The BatSignal as W in the sky.

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Monday 21 July ’08

• A New York Timesman walks Tel Aviv from the Hilton beach down to Jaffa.

• It was indeed unnerving that the Istanbul Hilton had an airport-style metal detector at the entrance to the lobby; Turkey could fall, Spengler laments.

• The US military will be an agent both for destruction and creation, Lt. General William Caldwell tells Charlie Rose.

• “My father was a Minister of the Church who learned Hebrew and had a deep and life long affection for Israel,” Gordon Brown tells the Knesset as PM.

.....

Sunday 20 July ’08

• Kimberly Kagan reports on progress in Iraq though admittedly she’s one of the Surge’s architects.

.....

Saturday 23 January ’99

• Let’s go to Test Take Control

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Sources

• David Brooks
• Caroline Glick
• The Jerusalem Post
• The Atlantic
• Spengler
• James Lileks
• The Wall Street Journal