A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
Writing my Top Companies profile of GlaxoSmithKline, I came across congressional testimony about the acts that animal rights knuckleheads have committed against GSK employees.
Yesterday, working on Roche‘s profile, I came across some moonbats who think that the avian flu is a hoax meant to enrich Donald Rumsfeld.
I, on the other hand, still think SARS was just a cover-up for the T-virus.
The weather’s pretty grotesque here in NJ/NY today, so we’re going to pass on the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. Someday I’ll get to see it. . .
Till then, enjoy a parade of cats that look like Hitler.
The Official VM Wife thinks Gatorade missed a major chance in its Big Head TV campaign
when they didn’t use Giada De Laurentiis
Think of how much money they could have saved on special effects!
Here’s an entertaining fashion article in the Washington Post on the meltdown that is Britney:
During the “Dateline” interview, Spears tearfully implored the paparazzi to leave her alone. Her pleas were reasonable and tugged at the heart. One came close to forgetting that she had encouraged the attention with her provocative videos, snake-charming stage performance, open-mouthed Madonna-kissing, 15-minute marriage, grotesquely narcissistic reality show and second husband known for displaying the tawdry, laconic demeanor of a pimp on weed.
I posted my Fenway pix at Flickr. I’ll try to post my little commentary about the place, the team, and the fans this weekend.
My tigerlilies are finally blooming! (fortunately, we got the deer to stop eating the buds by spraying some sorta cinnamon oil concoction on them)
Here’s a neat post at the Cato Institute’s blog-group, about the scandals of former (and now late) Irish PM Charles Haughey:
[W]as Ireland better off with a corrupt prime minister who kick-started economic growth than it would have been with an honest socialist who kept Ireland in poverty?
Back to work!
Blogging’s going to be pretty light for the next few days, while I write my annual Top Pharma profiles. I’ll try to get my Fenway photos and observations up by the weekend.
BLDGBLOG posted a link to this flickr photoset today. They’re patterns raked into sand, with photos taken by a camera mounted on a kite.
Enjoy.
In the Washington Post yesterday, Charles Krauthammer had a column on the poor Palestinian family that got blown up on a beach in Gaza. After explaining that the explosion could not have been due to an Israeli shell fired in response to nearby rocket launches into Israeli neighborhoods, he writes,
Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the question of whether it was an errant Israeli shell remains unresolved. But the obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel — and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?
Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic — attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists — and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested — it’s a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it’s another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel’s preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic “Israeli massacre” picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.
Krauthammer then goes on to ask exactly why terrorists in Gaza are bothering to launch rockets into Israel, since, y’know, Israel pulled out of Gaza and withdrew behind pre-1967 borders. He sums it up as the same mindset that I always ascribed to Arafat: it’s a lot easier to be a terrorist/victim than a statesman.
In my opinion, one of the key functions of the Israel’s withdrawal from the territories and construction of a wall — besides keeping Palestinians from homicide-bombing inside Israel’s new borders — is to force the Palestinian people to look at themselves as citizens of their own state. Quite early in the withdrawal, we began hearing stories that Palestinians were not happy that Yasser’s cousins had all the good jobs.
My buddy Mitch Prothero commented in a recent article that the foreign press isn’t interested in covering the civil war going on in Palestinian society. He doesn’t say explicitly that this is because it goes against the accepted narrative of the Palestinians as the oppressed victims of the Zionist conspiracy, but I think that’s a big part of it (another big part is that journalists don’t want to get shot at).
Just as Brendan O’Neill has brought up some very-difficult-to-stomach aspects of the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan in his recent columns, there are parts of every story that we gloss over to keep from facing the messiness of reality, or to keep from sullying the purity of our outrage.