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Notes Readers of LI are urged to check out my friend H.’s new weblog, the Brooding Persian. If there was a truth-in-weblogging titles act, H. would be going by the letter of the law – he is a brooder among brooders, the Leonardo da Vinci of brooding. The first entries have a lot of nice impressions of life in Teheran, the city H. recently returned to – the American action movie, shown on late night tv, that preserves every shotgun blast and censors the shapely gams of an ice skater in a short skirt, the pharmacist who comes up with some wildly inventive geopolitical excuses for not having what H. wants on his shelves. Etc. Of course, right now, H. is all about the earthquake in Bam. Check it out, here .

Bollettino In the past four posts, we have mentioned the Washington Post editorial obsessively. Even to ourselves, LI is beginning to sound like the Spike Jones imitation of Peter Lorre. We return to it one more time, simply to underline another aspect that this editorial, carrying water for a disreputable agency, passes over in silence: the question of what to do about justices who collude in grossly unethical behavior before they become justices. The three men implicated in the verdict in Houston are: Stanley Sporkin, retired, Federal Court, Washington, D.C. D. Lowell Jensen, U.S. district judge, San Francisco Stephen Trott, associate justice, ninth circuit. Who are these vigilantes posing as officials of the U.S. government? A little research turns up three ripe bios. In the last year, the Dems blocked a few of Bush’s appointees, and that became a big deal, at least for the GOP. But if you look at the bios of the people who are already on the court, another qu

Bollettino LI must start out with a disclaimer. Unfortunately, this post is going to have to mention the late Theodore Shackley. Those of you fortunate enough to miss the eighties will not recall that Shackley was at the center of a conspiracy cult in the 80s. The eighties were a time of irrational fads – Reagan’s voodoo economics, satanic cult murders, MTV, and the liberal ghost dance of conspiracy, organized by something called the Christic institute, and dedicated to the proposition that some counter-government, headed by the CIA, or elements in the CIA, had done all the bad stuff: October surprised Carter out of office, killed Kennedy, and invented crack. Messianic movements are usually symptomatic of deeper discontents. In the case of the conspiracy ghost dance, there were two dilemmas facing a good lefty (like myself): how to cope with the evident malignity of the powers that be, i.e. Reagan, and how to transition from Vietnam War era criticisms of the American empire into

Bollettino "If the accused says that she is innocent and falsely accused, and that she wishes to see and hear her accusers, then it is a sign that she is asking to defend herself. But it is an open question whether the Judge is bound to make the deponents known to her and bring them to confront her face to face. For here let the Judge take note that he is not bound either to publish the names of the deponents or to bring them before the accused, unless they themselves should freely and willingly offer to come before the accused and lay their depositions in her presence And it is by reason of the danger incurred by the deponents that the Judge is not bound to do this. For although different Popes have had different opinions on this matter, none of them has ever said that in such a case the Judge is bound to make known to the accused the names of the informers or accusers (but here we are not dealing with the case of an accuser). On the contrary, some have thought that in no case

Bollettino 'But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. – Matthew 6.3 268. Why can't my right hand give my left hand money? -- My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed of gift and my left hand a receipt. -- But the further practical consequences would not be those of a gift. When the left hand has taken the money from the right, etc., we shall ask: "Well, and what of it?" And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private definition of a word; I mean, if he has said the word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation. – Wittgenstein The philosopher treats a question like an illness. – Wittgenstein. The disarmament of Libya is the latest episode in the preposterous policies generated by the bogus classification, “weapons of mass destruction.” The moniker applies, ironically, to weapons that have very rarely been implicated in mass destructio

Bollettino A peace agreement in Sudan was quietly heralded in Western presses this week. The Financial Times reported it like this on Friday: "People would like to go back. So we are waiting now for peace." The speaker is Wol Amuk Guot, acknowledged chief of a sector of Wad al-Bashir, a camp for internally displaced persons outside Khartoum. He comes from southern Sudan, where six of his children live. He has not watched them grow up, and has not seen his mother for 14 years An end to Sudan's 20-year war between the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum and rebels from the mostly animist and Christian south is now tantalisingly close. How many of these long-term refugees will be on the move again nobody can tell. … The war, one of the longest and costliest in African history, is reckoned to have claimed 2m lives and to have uprooted 4m people like these, making Sudan's population of IDPs - or internally displaced persons - the largest in the world. Fighting