Highlighted by indiemaps
— Christopher Hitchens, If you want to read a serious book about the intervention in Iraq, try War and Decision. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine ¶“There is more of value in any chapter of this archive than in any of the ramblings of McClellan. As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review. An article on his book, written by the excellent James Risen for the news pages of the New York Times, has not run. This all might seem less questionable if it were not for the still-ballooning acreage awarded to Scott McClellan.”
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— Christopher Hitchens, People who prefer Saddam Hussein to Halliburton. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine ¶“It was for the sake of real oil and for the grim-faced Saudis that Saddam Hussein was kept as a favorite by Washington during the 1980s and saved from overthrow in 1991. It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque.”
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— Christopher Hitchens, People who prefer Saddam Hussein to Halliburton. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine ¶“But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam’s fires should be allowed to burn out of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras.”
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— Eric Rodenbeck, Map fetishist goes round the world and back - The INQUIRER ¶“A typical project, he says, takes one to three months to build. “A month to figure out what to do, a month to build it, and a month to make it good.””
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— Christopher Hitchens (on Palestine), Cover story: 'Christopher Hitchens' by Alexander Linklater | Prospect Magazine May 2008 issue 146 ¶““Their cause has been compromised and cheapened,” he says. “I’m still with them. But the Palestinians used to produce democrats and campaigning journalists, people in the Bahrain parliament calling for women’s rights. No more. They’ve lent themselves to Hamas and Syria and Hizbullah, and identified themselves with the most rotten dictatorships in the region.””
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— Christopher Hitchens, Can Israel survive for another 60 years? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine ¶“I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes.”
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— Christopher Hitchens, Cover story: 'Christopher Hitchens' by Alexander Linklater | Prospect Magazine May 2008 issue 146 ¶“But I did notice that those who do think they’ve got a critique of capitalism turn out to be reactionaries. They prefer feudalism or agrarianism; they’re pre-capitalists. Marxism at least has a theory of development and innovation. And global capitalism now seems to be the only thing that is revolutionary. That’s my Marxist way of looking at it.”
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— Sean Gorman, Off the Map - Official Blog of FortiusOne ¶“In a GeoWeb where self publication is a key innovation the model of having a full time metadata guru is antiquated. A specification with 335 elements is antiquated. The mantra that “certainly if there is no pain, there will likely be no gain” when it comes to metadata is antiquated. The end result of these draconian approaches to metadata is about a zero likelihood the GeoWeb will adopt them.”
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— Jerry Seinfeld, Motivation: Jerry Seinfeld's Productivity Secret ¶“[ He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day ] After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
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— William Saletan, The lessons of Iraq. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine ¶“Everything Bush wrongly attributed to Iraq turns out to be true of Iran. But we can’t confront Iran with the force it probably requires, because we wasted our resources in Iraq. Americans, having been suckered in Iraq, won’t accept evidence of Iran’s nuclear program. Countries that might have supported us in a strike on Iran won’t do so now, since we led them astray. Our coffers have been emptied to pay for the Iraq occupation. Our troops are physically and spiritually exhausted. In the name of strength, Bush has made us weak.”
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— Christopher Hitchens, What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine ¶“The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.”
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— Kanan Makiya, What was the moral alternative to removing Saddam Hussein? - By Kanan Makiya - Slate Magazine ¶“I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003 war, but, in spite of everything, I still do not know how to regret wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”
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— Steve Duenes, Steve Duenes -- Talk to the Newsroom -- The New York Times -- Reader Questions and Answers - New York Times ¶“But we’ve heard comments about the interactive piece like — all that data is nice, but why don’t you draw some conclusions? It’s a fair point. The paper prevents us from showing all the data, so we try to edit intelligently and make points. On the Web, the temptation exists to publish more data simply because we have it. While we think readers will often find it interesting to explore a large set of data, we try to make it easily navigable. And lately, we’ve been paying close attention to the interactive device that sits on top of that large set of data. Often, it looks a lot like a newspaper graphic.”
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— Steve Duenes, Steve Duenes -- Talk to the Newsroom -- The New York Times -- Reader Questions and Answers - New York Times ¶“There are about 30 of us, and we mostly do the same thing, but we specialize in different ways. There are graphics people here who have degrees or advanced degrees in cartography, statistics, graphic design and journalism, and you can probably guess how their work is focused.”
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— Stephanie Gray, Strange Maps ¶“[On ‘Area Codes’ by Ludacris…] I’m a female and a feminist. I dislike the usage of the word ‘ho’. However, as a geography major, I find this song hilarious, and had to map it.”
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— Arthur Robinson, indiemaps.com | the web site of cartographer zachary forest johnson ¶“The act of mapping was as profound as the invention of a number system. The use of a reduced, substitute space for that of reality, even when both can be seen, is an impressive act in itself; but the really awesome event was the similar representation of distant, out of sight, features. The combination of the reduction of reality and the construction of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed, for it enables one to discover structures that would remain unknown if not mapped.”