Ever have one of those days where you need a perspective check? On the one hand — OK, so we’re at war and it’s not going like we’d expected and the top leaders seem to be idiots and Iraqis who’d moved away are streaming back into the war zone to fight us and we’re picking […]

The odd duck of the Air Force for the last twenty years has always been the A-10 Thunderbolt II. It’s a fearsome ground attack aircraft — the first the Air Force ever fielded that was specifically designed for the task.  The entire aircraft is actually built around its General Electric GAU-8/A cannon, a colossal Gatling […]

SnapStream offers software that lets you turn your PC (and — intriguingly — your Pocket PC) into a TiVo for practically nothing — $50 for the software alone, or you can get it bundled with TV tuner hardware for less than $150.

Does this new site make Gary Hart the first-ever Presidential candidate with a blog? He denies he’s running yet, but it sure looks that way to me…

The Guardian is running an interesting story on its site describing an emerging consensus in the financial markets that we’re witnessing the beginning of a real decline in American power and influence in the world — the kind of decline that Britain suffered after World War II, the end of an empire. I hate the […]

I’ve had way too many discussions that sounded exactly like this one…

While everybody is focusing on the fighting in southern Iraq, another crisis is brewing — despite warnings from the US and the EU, the Turks appear ready to cross their border with Iraq. While the Turks claim only peaceful intentions, it’s well known that they want to claim Iraqi Kurdistan to keep its people from […]

“The six lessons of 911” is an interesting piece looking at what we should have learned from our first brush with large-scale terrorism, and what we seem to have learned instead.

I’ll admit up front that I don’t know the first thing about cricket, so about 80% of this article reads like gibberish to me, but it’s so damned entertaining I didn’t care!

Fareed Zakaria has an excellent piece in Newsweek examining the underlying reasons for the world’s backlash against our Iraq policy, and how Bush and company have gotten us to where we are today. If you support the war and wonder why so many people around the world don’t — why anyone can have doubts about […]

Well, the “coalition of the willing” has spoken and it looks like 24 hours from now the bombs may be falling on Baghdad. Let’s hope that, if that’s the case, that things play out the way the Wolfowitzes and Perles have been predicting: a short, mostly bloodless conflict that results in a flowering of democracy […]

Kevin Sites is a “sojo” — solo broadcast journalist — who CNN has blogging from the front line between Iraq and Kuwait: We have two birds in our CNN workspace, Anthrax and Smallpox. Parakeets. But for us, canaries in the coal mine. Tiny, organic early warning systems against a chemical or biological attack… Our instructor, […]

Now here’s an interesting idea — StumbleUpon is a “Web site discovery tool” that lets you rate sites you like with a TiVo-style thumbs up or thumbs down, and then it can connect you with new sites that people like you enjoyed. It may sound a little like Alexa, but unlike Alexa, StumbleUpon doesn’t track […]

From the Times of London: Bush Sr. Warning Over Unilateral Action. How pathetic is it that we have to read British newspapers to find out news from our own country?

So somebody explain this to me. I have a friend living out West who was on unemployment for a few months last year. Now she’s doing her taxes, and she’s discovering that — wait for it — she actually owes income tax on the money she received as unemployment benefits! So in other words, if […]

Looks like someone’s beaten the Despair, Inc. boys to the lucrative Federal government motivational-poster contract!

As a kid, I was a member of the Civil Air Patrol, the youth auxiliary of the Air Force. (At the time I thought I was going to grow up to be a fighter pilot… a not-terribly-unusual fantasy for an Air Force brat living in an Air Force town.) After a while I worked up […]

Josh Marshall has an excellent analysis of the seriousness of the recent escalation of the North Korean situation. Meanwhile, John Robb is contemplating the consequences that could spin out if the North decided to take advantage of our focus on Iraq by making a grab for South Korea. In that scenario, all hell breaks loose […]

All you Movable Type users out there should check this out: there’s finally a MT Plugin Directory, pulling together all the various MT add-ons into one place. Great idea!