Archive for May 31st, 2003
My Burgeoning Culinary Skills
Anyone who knows me can testify that I’m a terrible cook. Or actually, it’s much worse than that: I don’t cook. I simply don’t do it.
But things’ve changed. With no TV or Web connection in my apartment, I’ve been forced to find new sources of amusement. Thus, my culinary skills are burgeoning of late. My friend Chris. D., who really knows his way around a kitchen, visited last month and showed me a thing or two. And I’ve been experimenting on my own, as well.
My most recent masterpieces include guacamole; a salad featuing tomatoes and cucumbers and onions and olive oil and balsamic vinagrette; pasta sauce from scratch (shocker: not from a bottle!); a burrito containing rice and beans and green and red peppers and other good stuff; and the other night, I delved into the world of puddings. Believe it. Up next: gardening. And then possibly knitting. I am truly a Twenty-First Century Man.
More on Iraqi WMDs–and Dissent from the US Intelligence Community
The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof writes: “‘The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.,” notes Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. ‘And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things.’”
And this Reuters report says that “a growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.”
Now, of course, the question is this: if these accusations turn out to be true, will the American public even care? With 41% of US citizens saying they think WMDs have already been found in Iraq, or that they’re not sure if they’ve been discovered or not (poll results, in PDF format, here), the point is probably moot.