More God-damned Links

They say diversity is the devil's workshop and so if you'd like an utterly non-partisan look at The Best Page in the Universe's rhetorical fantasmagoria entitled "Looking for a safe stance on abortion? Me neither." The teddy bear-like quality of concern for citizens is the source of my new favourite poster: Civil Disobedience Is Still Disobedience gem.

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The High Cost of Not Being American seems to hit home in many of the lucky Third World countries when it comes to the basics, like slow starvation and the systematic stoicism of corporate genocide:

"Eighty percent of the rice imported by Haiti comes from the United States, chiefly Arkansas, Louisiana and California - more than 300,000 tons in 2003. American rice is the most expensive in the world, Ms. St.-Lot said. "The problem is serious," she said. "The price on the international market is growing every day."

American and global stocks of rice are down, driving prices up, in some part because of American military and foreign policies"

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Wondering when the Olympic Torch is coming to a village near you? The 35-day journey, covering more than 46,800 miles, will bring the Olympic flame to South America and Africa for the first time.

Perhaps it would be more interesting to cover the 46,800 miles in dollar bills dipped in crude oil, or see how far the corpses of the Invasion of Iraq can cover the route.

If this War on Terrorism is really like World War II, like President Jesus Bush Says It Is then why don't the Great Libarators just cancel the Olympics altogether, like they did in 1940 and 1944?

"The best way to protect America is to stay on the offensive," President Jesus Bush said at a graduation ceremony at the U.S. Air Force Academy yesterday. "We will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy."

This sounds an awful lot like President Jesus Bush is harkening back to his days as a college cheerleader

But never fear, even if America's President is suffering some sort of psychological relapse, it's not as though the latest asphalt parking lot of civilisation isn't capable of protecting Democracy and freedom-loving athletes around the world.

"Rifle-toting police stood guard as Chief 2004 organizer Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki promised, 'As this torch travels around the world, the people of Greece will continue their hard work' to prepare for the Aug. 13-29 games."

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Looks like I am
Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

via Search Blog

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Yeah, me too:

I've decided to be happy because it's healthy

Certainly healthier than living in the universe of We Are Fucked, isn't it then?

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Lockhart Steele announces that Curb Is Launched and contains an interesting blurb about The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin:


Chatwin was a traveler his entire life, and his notebooks are full of thoughts on transience, which to him was a necessity on par with breathing. The first entry in the Songlines Notebooks is a quote from Pascal: "Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death." Soon after, Baudelaire: "I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul."

Some of us however, just travel for the single malts, as Desultory Turgescence just did this past week at the Feis Ile in Islay where a site all about hangovers.

via The Whole Wide World of Fat Buddha.

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It looks as though Last Call has passed out for the last month or so. Hopefully, more will be on its way, like a literary car bomb.

"She was wearing a xanthous dress that clung to her knees and thighs, thought nothing of tugging at it, smoothing it out, flattening it, bunching it up as though a sculpture of catchpenny silk busts before moving up to her hair, the brunette languishing in her whilst a blonde was dying to get out."

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With all the D-Day this and D-Day that in the media pipeline leading up to the 60th anniversary, it might be useless but interesting to add The Wartime Columns of Ernie Pyle.

These are a good collection of writing that paints the soldier's life with great flourish. From The God-damned Infantry:

"All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.

On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.

They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.

In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory - there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men."

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A yes, and for something a little less heavy, there's always Highly Attractive Women still wasting Time and Money on Education, according to The Spoof.