Wednesday Hodgepodge

June 14, 2006 in Life, the Universe, and Everything | No comments

  • Stars and Stripes tells us that the Iraqi army is hemorrhaging:
    Iraqi soldiers in Al Anbar province are leaving their army in droves, draining much-needed manpower from fledgling Iraqi security forces and preventing U.S. troops from reducing troop strength in the volatile region, U.S. and Iraqi military officials say.

    Lousy living conditions, bad food and failure to receive regular pay are the main reasons behind the exodus, which is running at least several hundred soldiers a month, the officials say.
  • Gretchen Rubin provides tips on losing weight without dieting. (Thanks to Chris Brogan at lifehack.org.)
    8. Don’t eat off other people’s plates. Consider that two swallows of a chocolate milkshake has 72 calories, and four fast-food French fries have 42 calories. It adds up.

    9. Keep a bowl of sliced red and yellow peppers in the fridge.

    10. Know your weaknesses, and avoid them. My weakness is anything in mini form. I wouldn’t dream of eating a whole Tootsie Roll bar, but I’d eat 50 mini-Tootsie Rolls without blinking.
  • Rude Pundit is digging up evidence of repeated plagiarism by Ann Coulter. Raw Story has some info on this, as well. And Gawker has found a Boston Globe column from five years ago suggesting that Coulter has been plagiarizing other writers for quite some time now.
  • Juan Cole reports that according to Our Sainted President, we are near victory in Iraq — just as long as you redefine victory loosely enough:
    Bush tried to define down victory to a general ability of people to go about their lives. He said it was unreasonable to expect to end “all violence.” But Mr. Bush, no one suggested that you end “all violence.” The goal here is to win the guerrilla war.

    During a guerrilla war, people always go about their daily lives, except when a bomb is going off in their specific neighborhood. So if the goal is that Iraqis should be able to buy bread and go to school and drive to work, most of them have that already most of the time. It is just that little problem of some 12,000 people a year being blown up, assassinated, or beheaded and their heads wrapped in cellophane and stored in banana crates along the side of the road that remains.

    In other words, Bush defines the main weapon in the guerrilla war, carbombings, as ineradicable, and declares that he can win that war without actually ending its main weapon. It is a cheap trick of rhetoric, a prestidigitation of the lips. “These are not the ‘droids you’re looking for.”
  • Some excellent satire from fafblog:
    Run for your lives – America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America’s freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the “Blame Atrocities First” crowd will tell you these prisoners were “driven to despair,” that they “had no rights,” that they were “held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice.” But what they won’t tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide! This fiendish attempt to slander the great American institution of the gulag is nothing less than an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States – a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people! – and when faced with a terrorist attack, America must respond. Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast!