Antiwar.com Blog

The rise of the movable type printing press – “the tyrant’s foe and the people’s friend” – curiously coincided with the fall of slavery, and technological progress continues to change politics, from Antiwar.com to Move On’s national video parties. The cutting edge now is the video-gaming industry.

“[Sony] … has just launched the PSX, a home-entertainment device that combines a PlayStation 2 with a DVD recorder, a hard-disk based video recorder, satellite and analogue TV tuners, and photo-album and music playback features. As well as cutting down on spaghetti-like wiring behind the TV, this jack-of-all-trades is the first example of Sony’s new strategy to combine its games consoles with other consumer-electronics devices. By throwing in PlayStation 2 functionality with other devices at a small premium—made easier by Sony’s recent cramming of a PlayStation 2 on to a single chip—it hopes to broaden the market and appeal to people who would not normally dream of buying a stand-alone games console. ‘Once they get it down to a single chip, then economies of scale come in, and the potential for integrated devices becomes very real,’ says Nick Gibson of Games Investor Consulting.”

Where it stops no one knows.

Read more.

Citing the high cost of maintaining their contingent of peacekeepers, Nicaragua warns it may have to pull out of the Iraq coalition.

Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, has 115 troops in Iraq. Most are medical personnel and landmine experts and are protected by a small group of special forces.

“It’s not a political matter. We have already said on previous occasions that the problem is we don’t have the money,” Foreign Minister Norman Caldera told journalists. He said Nicaragua had expected financial help from other countries for a planned rotation of troops in February but had not received any so far.

He did not say which country Nicaragua hoped would help it…read more

Okay, everybody, you have three guesses as to which country is supposed to foot the bill.

The lunatic irony of intervention: How the U.S. government encouraged Iranian mujahedeen to “liberate” Bosnia. We won’t (haven’t) live(d) to regret such policies, I’m sure. What blowback?

Steve Reed sends along the following observations about selective reading at the Ayn Rand Institute:

I saw your Antiwar.com Blog entries from about two weeks back about the Ayn Rand Institute. The slice you’ve captured doesn’t include, however, a particular subtle piece of their mendacity. Continue reading “Follow-Up on Ayn Rand Institute”

Who the hell is Baroness Emma Nicholson, and who made her queen of Romania? This bullying busybody is the archetypal progressive imperialist, a preview of President Hillary (minus the nuclear weapons). After throttling the Romanians into Roma marriage counseling this summer, she’s now on a crusade to stop the adoption of Romania’s plentiful orphans by foreigners. Yeah, God forbid any abandoned babies be taken by loving parents to that hellhole Italy. Don’t you know all the kids smoke there? If it weren’t for Adrian Nastase’s and Silvio Berlusconi’s tireless pimping of Bush foreign policy, their countries would be strong candidates for the Axis of Evil.

The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee has asked the General Accounting Office to expand its probe of falsified credentials to include Pentagon employees after a surprising find at Homeland Security:

The probe began after Linda Callahan, a senior director in the Homeland Security Department’s chief information officer’s office, was put on paid leave over allegations that she had received her degrees from an organization in Wyoming that essentially sold diplomas and required little or no work. Homeland Security Department officials did not respond to inquiries on Thursday.

How about extending the probe to the White House? I hear there’s some subliterate over there who claims to have graduated Yale and Harvard. How could that be?

(Article courtesy of Freedom News Daily.)