MarteyDodoo.com

What with the lack of real diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran, a significant portion of what I have read in the past couple of months about Iran has focused on the hostage crisis. Back in January, I stumbled across Mark Bowden's article in the May 2006 issue of The Atlantic about Operation [...]

Lately, I have been experiencing synchronicity related to countries. For a while in February, it seems like everywhere I went, people were talking about Australia. An op-ed in the New York Times about the accidental Swiss invasion of Lichtenstein was the beginning of a similar occurrence with Switzerland. Suddenly, I was stumbling across stories about [...]

I review Jet Li's latest film, Fearless, and compare it to the last Jet Li movie I saw, Hero.

A 750 word review of Thomas Kinsella's The Tain, a compilation from the Táin Bó Cúailnge and other tales from the Ulster Cycle.

A confession: I read my news out of order. Yesterday, I read the letter that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent to President George W. Bush. What with all its talk of monotheism, I did not like it:
Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts [...]

Gnome developer Miguel de Icaza pointed to Howard Zinn's editorial on war in next month's issue of The Progressive. In it, Zinn posits that the conflict in Iraq might be the last war that the United States takes part in. He claims that war is not the natural state of humanity, and armed conflict only [...]

Although I spent most of yesterday asleep, I have spent most of my waking hours reading and thinking about Hiroshima, which was attacked by a nuclear bomb 60 years ago. Over the past two weeks, the British newspaper The Guardian has released a number of articles about the blast, including edited versions of the interviews [...]

The second result in a Google search for 'gibraltar' is the CIA World Factbook's entry. As you can see, the page's description is "Good summary information, some glaring errors (water supply)." If only Wikipedia entries had such useful descriptions!

This letter to the International Herald Tribune by an official from the "Embassy of the Union of Myanmar" really annoyed me with its criticism of a Human Rights Watch report on the persecution of ethnic minorities by the military, especially with its suggestion that "The International Herald Tribune needs to be sensitive to the real [...]

This International Herald Tribune article lambasts Musharraf and the Pakistani government, claiming that Pakistani liberals face a "mullah-military alliance" intent on restricting civil liberties and freedom of expression:
Democracy, human rights and meaningful civil liberties are anathema to a hypermilitarized state. Pakistan's voters consistently vote overwhelmingly for moderate, secular-oriented parties and reject religious extremists, so the [...]

It seems increasingly likely that Bolivia will not collapse into chaos, a real possibility as recently as two days ago. Diez, the conservative President of the Senate, decided not to accept the presidency. After suggesting that the military could be used to suppress protest by indigenous Bolivians, most of the country considered him an unpalatable [...]

Via Slashdot comes a CNN article which states the South Korean MSN website (located at www.msn.co.kr) was compromised earlier this week, possibly allowing users' login information to be stolen. As with some many other Windows security problems, the culprit seems to have been an unpatched operating system:
The Korean site, unlike U.S. versions, was operated by [...]

From Boing Boing comes Loic Le Meur's post on the official French word for blog: bloc-notes, or bloc for short. I am not sure how useful creating different words for already-established terms is for the preservation of the French language, though. For example, I doubt that Le Monde will change the name of its Blogs [...]

Given Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker about US Special Forces operating in Iran (as they operated in Iraq and Afghanistan before the countries' respective invasions), I found this typo (or perhaps, Freudian slip) in this New York Times article about Congressional concerns about the use of military intelligence units disturbing:
In general, Democrats and [...]

Sanby Lee's article from last Tuesday's Crimson takes an interesting view of last week's election results - that the fact Bush won is not as important as the various problems of the Third World, including poverty, genocide, and the general repression of freedoms. I partially agree (Americans all too often ignore economic and social problems [...]

George from Pathetic Earthlings suggests that George W. Bush is the intellectual heir to Wilsonian foreign policy.
Wilsonians, or those who claimed to be so, include FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan and George W. Bush. Even Nixon (according to this writer the President closest to the TR worldview) kept a portrait of Wilson in his cabinet room. [...]

The first reports that I read about the recent theft in Norway of two of Edward Munch's paintings concentrated only on "The Scream." As a result, my only thoughts on the matter were, "How sad. I hope they find it." Then, later on, I read Boing Boing's account of the theft, which included pictures of [...]

It occurred to me that I ran across references to the region of Sichuan three times yesterday. First, while reading a New York Times article about crowded Chinese beaches which described three young interns' from Sichuan's first time at the beach:
"There are plenty of people in Sichuan," he said. "We can see a lot of [...]

From an interview at Talking Points Memo:
So if I say, if there's ten people in the room and there's a guy out in the hall screaming and he's bothering us and I say “We ought to stop that guy. We ought to stop that guy.” And everyone says, “Oh no, no. This guy's a bad [...]

This Reuters article describes how Afghan forces beheaded four Taliban guerillas as a reprisal of the beheading of an Afghan soldier and an interpreter. Hopefully, this will not spread to the conflict in Iraq, especially after the handover at the end of this month, when Iraqi government forces are supposed to be in charge of [...]

The UK newspaper The Telegraph reports on how Governor Schwarzenegger's role as a Turkish sultan in the film Around the World in Eighty Days may re-raise public images of him as a lecher. While this is possible, I suspect that like past California governors, Schwarzenegger's political personality is made of Teflon.
One thing that struck me [...]

This article from the Harvard Gazette details Niall Ferguson's speech to seniors during the Phi Beta Kappa exercises. He talked about the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, and the possibility that the influence of our shared heritage might be coming to an end:
Moreover, in its essential outlook and national character, [...]

Not "Gandhi 2: No More Mr. Passive Resistance, nor a movie with an actor who was better when he played Gandhi, but Sonia Gandhi, almost the new prime minister of India.
For the last year or so, most of the news coming out of India that has not dealt with outsourcing has focused on the growing [...]

One day, I too will have female bodyguards who wear blue camoflague.
Seriously though, what is the point of blue camoflague (other that to match with your dashing blue robes)? The only place it would possibly come of service would be 1,000 feet in the air or underneath the sea. In both places, I [...]

I hope that all those who claim there is something inherently violent in Islam read this New York Times article about the growth of Islam after the Rwandan genocide:
Muslim leaders credit the gains to their ability during the 1994 massacres to shield most Muslims, and many other Rwandans, from certain death. "The Muslims handled themselves [...]

I think the American government's investigating whether Aristide is guilty of corruption after they *ahem* "suggested" he leave is a bit sketchy. Even stranger is the idea that no investigation into the terms of Aristide's exile is necessary. Saith Colin Powell in response to this:
"I don't think any purpose would be served by [...]

From Pathetic Earthlings comes a story about a possible union between Canada and the small Caribbean nation of Turks and Caicos. While my Canadian roommate is not currently available to comment, I think it is a good idea. Maybe the Canadian government can teach the islanders how to make a better website. [...]

Two parts "Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels." One part "Pulp Fiction." Mix well. The similarities are almost too strange to be true: armed robbery of a man growing marijuana at home, and a samurai sword saving the day. Of course, the prison sentence of eight years for manslaughter never appeared [...]

If I ever have to be shot, I hope it goes down like this. The idea that nobody in the crowd seemed to notice the shots or the President's bleeding seems utterly incomprehensible. Of course, here in America, we have had three successful assassinations, and a number of attempts (although none in recent [...]

From the Guardian comes this article about Disney's production of C. S. Lewis' Narnia series. Apparently, the success of the secular Lord of the Rings series has made such the potential profit of such a venture extremely high.

This photograph from Le Monde reminded me of the case of Samantha Marson. While I realize that this is besides the point, the September 11 hijackers did not even use bombs. More tellingly, they were not European college students.
Either way, it is nice to know that if I want to get arrested, I [...]

This article from the New York Times talks about how virtually all Khmer Rouge leaders have not been convicted for the crimes they committed during their reign.