George F. Will: “Saudi Arabia's regime may be changed by reverberations from action against Iraq, particularly if that action is seen to be the prelude to democratization.”

Another article arguing that a side-effect of regime change in Iraq will be regime change in Saudi Arabia, without stating whether this 'side-effect' is indeed an intended effect.

Why "Nice Guys" are often such LOSERS

Well, half of this article is accurate, but the rest is just stereotype. Although I have known a "user" or two. [link from Jenny]

MidasMulligan: “(We didn't know what had happened after the first one, but after the second I knew immediately is not accidental - you know that distinct noise jet engines make when they open the throttle? That motherfucker actually opened it wide - in essence, floored it - in the last couple of seconds before it hit. Sorry about my language - still hard to even think about this).”

Just a quote that I remembered about, earlier today, upon finishing William Langewiesche's part 1 on the collapse of the WTC towers in The Atlantic Monthly's July/August issue. Apparently all three parts (excerpt of part two) will be made into a book, and if the two remaining parts are even half as good as the first, Langewiesche deserves a Pulitzer.

Quote that made me remember the above link, from the Langewiesche piece (part one): “[The plane that struck the South Tower] was minimally loaded that morning for the Boston-To-Los Angeles run, with only sixty-five people aboard and about half of the maximum fuel, and as it approached the building it weighed about 137 tons. It was flying at about 586 mph, which was 150 mph above the airplane's designed limit at low altitude. In the cockpit the overspeed warning must have been warbling loudly.”

Not that the pilots were paying much attention.

Langewiesche has written a lot about airplane accidents, and his piece on the ValuJet crash is especially good, and argues that “"in complex systems some accidents may be 'normal' -- and trying to prevent them all could even make operations more dangerous”.

Maybe it's about time I start a "Favourite Authors List", complete with pronunciation guide for the hard-to-pronounce ones, like Langewiesche.

Martin Amis swings at Stalin and hits his own best friend instead by Anne Applebaum

Christopher Hitchens is one of my favourite authors. Apparently his friend Martin Amis' book about Stalin is crap, which is the point of the above-linked article. Despite what Applebaum writes about Hitchens (and the disagreement I have with much of Hitchens' politics), it doesn't dissuade me from liking Hitchens' rhetorical flair and passionate nonconformity.

Blah, all I wanted to do was brag that I've read three of Hitchens' novella-length books (seen here; too lazy to link each book) and all his recent Vanity Fair and Atlantic Monthly articles and can't get enough of him--er, his writings I mean.

George F. Will: <q cite="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1118-2002Aug9.html"">Unlike the NFL and the NBA, both of which adopted their basic economic arrangements after (and because of) the advent of television, baseball's economic model predates radio. And flight. And the internal combustion engine. Today, as when the National League was founded in 1879, locally generated revenues stay with the local owner.

It's weird that Lying in Ponds gave Will a 100% partisan score (on the side of the Democrats, no less) for mentioning that he was part of the same committee which featured George Mitchell. Interesting: George F. Will advises both the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres, which, in the opinion of one, due to his (Will's) serving on the committee he mentions in the article, constitutes a “remarkable conflict of interest”.