Thursday March 11, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Thursday March 11, 2010)
(1)- FINDING SADDAM -- In a five-part series that begins today, it is exlained how a handful of innovative American soldiers used the same theories that underpin Facebook to hunt down Saddam Hussein.

(2)- COLD WAR -- The standoff between the West and the Soviet Union and its satellites has taken on an institutionalized, ritualized quality that posed no danger of giving way to the catastrophe of total war. But...

(3)- THAT EXILE -- Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, co-editors of The Exile, a subversive English-language newspaper in Moscow, whose decadelong run came to an end in 2008. It was an unlikely life and sudden death of Russia’s angriest newspaper.

(4)- MUSIC -- For Plato, music was something that could be judged in the same moral terms we judge one another, and that the terms in question denoted virtues and vices such as like nobility, dignity, temperance, sensuality, and belligerence.

(5)- EVOLUTIONARY WOES -- Humans evolved strong tastes for fats and sweets, tastes that conferred a reproductive advantage in the days when starvation was common. But these tastes nowadays produce Type 2 diabetes.

(6)- NO MORE ORCA SHOWS -- Alexander Cockburn: Orca whales ‘in the wild’ do not attack humans. But in aquariums, it is more common than we think. All the SeaWorld shows should be shut down, as should all kindred exhibits.

(7)- FRAUD -- Four men accused of using a network of computers and automated software to buy up online tickets to concerts and sporting events and selling them at a profit were indicted on fraud, conspiracy, and computer hacking charges.

(8)- ASPIRIN -- Medical experts say some people who are taking aspirin on a regular basis should think about stopping. Public-health officials are scaling back official recommendations for the painkiller to target a narrower group.

(9)- JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -- Rousseau was born in Switzerland. Discourses on the Origins of Inequality (1754) made his name: he denounced civilized society and postulated the paradox of the superiority of the ‘noble savage’.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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