The White House Correspondents' Association Dinner was televised on C-Span Saturday evening. Featured entertainer Stephen Colbert delivered a biting rebuke of George W. Bush and the lily-livered press corps. He did it to Bush's face, unflinching and unbowed by the audience's muted, humorless response.

Astonishing. Colbert is on fire "delivering truthiness to power" as I heard it described. Honestly, Colbert has brought satire back to a prominence long missed, and he's doing it in an extremely hostile environment here. The press corps and guests are visibly stunned.

Daou's analysis here is worth reading, but watch the video first. There are links scattered about, but if you've got the time and bandwidth, get the high res torrent here : http://www.mininova.org/tor/296239

The Blog | Peter Daou: Ignoring Colbert: A Small Taste of the Media's Power to Choose the News | The Huffington Post

Neighbors gawk and children yell, "ghost!" The manager of the restaurant where Panya Boonchun worked simply told her she was fired.

The cream that she applied to her face and neck was supposed to transform her into a white-skinned beauty, the kind she saw on page after page in women's magazines and on television.

But rather than lighten her complexion, the illegally produced lotion she bought in a local grocery store near this village in southeastern Thailand disfigured her skin into an unsightly patchwork of albino pink and dark brown, a condition that doctors say might be irreversible.

At a time when whiter skin is being aggressively marketed across Asia as beautiful and healthy, Panya's case illustrates the lengths that some women will go to change their complexions - and the dangers that this sometimes entails.

What price glamour? A hard lesson in Asia - Health & Science - International Herald Tribune

In the first few moments of the documentary film "Baghdad ER," we see a man dressed in hospital scrubs carrying a bloodied arm that has been amputated above the elbow. He deposits it in a large red plastic bag.

the reality of war whether justified or not
the real reason why, as an instrument of foreign policy, we should use it as a tool of last resort

Warfare as It Really Is - New York Times

Sometimes, if you're lucky as a historian, you find a bit of evidence which illuminates a big idea. That happened to me this week in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative - they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.

The manuscript I found was a ship's journal kept by a 17th Century English sea captain, who had offered to carry some state-of-the-art scientific equipment on a voyage to the west coast of Africa and back - two new pendulum clocks.

nice

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Believe it or not: The battle over certainty

Look no further than the triple bombing this week at the Sinai resort of Dahab, where most of those killed and wounded were Egyptians, to fully appreciate the lie behind Osama bin Laden's latest message that the West is on a crusade against Islam.

If anyone is on a crusade against Muslims it is Al Qaeda itself, whose sympathizers most likely carried out the attack in Dahab, the third in Sinai in 18 months.

Once again, for Muslims, it's 'us versus us' - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

Ever since liberalism emerged in the 18th century, its inevitable conflict with autocracy has helped shape international politics. What James Madison called "the great struggle of the epoch between liberty and despotism" dominated much of the 19th century and most of the 20th, when liberal powers lined up against various forms of autocracy in wars both hot and cold.

Many believed this struggle ended after 1989 with the collapse of communism, the last claimant to "legitimate" autocracy, and was supplanted as the main source of global conflict by ancient religious, ethnic and cultural antipathies, a view seemingly confirmed by Sept. 11, 2001, and the rise of Islamic radicalism.

But the present era may be shaping up as, among other things, yet another round in the conflict between liberalism and autocracy.

nice article but one point the writer misses is that the fight against al-Qaeda is itself a struggle against autocracy for what else is the goal of a pan-Islamic Caliphate than an autocratic political model

League of Dictators?

Jello wrote:

The History of India is an iterative function with the following structure:

char History_of_India(int residents = Dravidians)
{
int intruders;
char Indian_history[ENDLESS];
.
wend{
.
intruders = Hindukush::read_stack();
if (intruders==0,Intruders = British Empire,);
working_their_way_down_the_ganges(intruders);
Indian_history = Squabble(residents,intruders);
.
residents = intruders;
}while t lt END_OF_TIME
.
return Indian_history
}

This function is not the current function as it omits public base class intruder_philosophy with its child members buddhism, islam and democracy-western_secular_empiricism.
Also note Chinese history which works from a similar iterative function of which Chinese historians have been aware for centuries. Smart buggers. Although China seems to treat democracy-western_secular_empiricism as a float rather than an int.

RE: India - Uncyclopedia

The "generals' revolt" against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has provoked debate on both sides of the Atlantic about the proper boundaries of military protest. Many people who oppose the Iraq war and deplore Rumsfeld are nonetheless troubled by the notion of senior officers, even retired ones, openly criticizing political leadership.

old max hastings taking a historical perspective

Behind the Revolt

A startling internet video that shows someone spraying graffiti on

President Bush's jet looked so authentic that the Air Force wasn't immediately certain whether the plane had been targeted.

already Rattled

Wired News: Air Force One Graffiti Hoax

It seems clear that Shakespeare was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon 442 years ago, on April 23, the son of a Catholic mother and glovemaker father. He had one sister and three younger brothers.
Shakespeare's eighth-grade education was enough to give him a good grasp of Latin, to help him land work perhaps as a legal assistant (the plays are full of knowledge of the law as well as of gloves), a tutor, a horse-holder and an actor. How many writers have had jobs like these? A lot.

the master

to die (at 52) of what doctors today have speculated was a rare cancer of the tear duct

oh the irony that the too feeling man might have died thus
happy birthday Bill

Shakespeare: The modern Elizabethan - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune