If you haven’t been following the Disunion series at nytimes.com, you should be. It is the best thing I’ve read in a long time. Disunion is a serialized set of articles starting with the election of 1860 and following through on an almost daily basis of what happened 150 years ago in the lead up [...]
{ 2 comments }
Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War: A History (July 2010) is worth a read if you’re looking for a quick (288 pages) primer. The Korean War (1950-1953) is often referred to as the Forgotten War… and for good reason. There’s not much good to come out of it on the American side (we lost, we helped [...]
{ 2 comments }
Last week one of my Facebook friends posted an article by Al-Jazeera on Israel’s attempt to turn Jordan into the Palestinian homeland. I was reading the article while sipping my coffee and enjoying labors of free speech when suddenly I was thrown back to Jack Ass Land when someone left an insanely ignorant and mis-guided message [...]
{ 0 comments }
General McChrystal may not have been the most politically savvy person in the lot, but at least he had a sense of humor. In the infamous Rolling Stones article that cost McChrystal his job, it was mentioned that some of his team referred to themselves as Team America… Team America being the exhaustingly hilarious movie [...]
{ 0 comments }
It has been an interesting week on the Korean peninsula… with many things happening related to the sinking of the South Korean ship, the Cheonan. On July 9, the UN Security Council released a statement about the sinking, “condemn[ing]” the attack but not placing the blame on North Korea. So, no new sanctions on Kim [...]
{ 1 comment }
I just finished Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I bought this precisely because I wanted a non-sensational account of life in North Korea. I didn’t want to read about nuclear weapons or labor camps. In many respects, the handful of people Demick interviews do lead normal lives. They go to [...]
{ 1 comment }
Ever since I turned 16, I’ve been looking forward to my 30th birthday. I just wanted to be grown up. I wanted to skip dating. I wanted to skip first days of jobs. I wanted to skip high school and college and land in a time when I would be old enough to like people [...]
{ 1 comment }
Obama has decided to drop the missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. I didn’t follow this too closely, but I’m a little shocked that they are completely abandoning it. That being said, it seems like it might be a good thing as no one seemed to actually like the idea (except for Bush). Also, while [...]
{ 1 comment }
One of the pieces I get in my blog reader (almost every day) is the New York Times’ Names of the Dead List. Every time a US military servicemember dies in the Iraq or Afghanistan War, the Times runs a small piece listing their names, age, rank, hometown, and regiment. Today’s paper listed the 799th, [...]
{ 1 comment }
If you live in Connecticut, USA, then you might know that the House (107 – 35) and Senate (23 -12) have both voted to enact universal health care in a bill called SustiNet. It’s now in the hands of the governor to sign it into law or veto it into oblivion. So, here’s my video [...]
{ 0 comments }
