Good buddy ymatt was willing to have another crack at the update of the Jap… You’re Next! poster, so here you go. My intention with the redone version was to be both more direct and more subtle, in the interest of encouraging both pros and antis to embrace the image as representative of their own particular point of view. Sort of like those sex-crazed frat boys at protestwarrior.com do with their counter-protest signs.

Or something. Mostly, though, I just really like the image, and wanted an excuse to float it past you all again. And, with stories like this in today’s SFGate.com (Bush warns Syria not to harbor top Iraqi fugitives), it seems like it remains timely.

Click on it for a larger version. C’mon, people; share it with the world! I want to hear about it being on the wall of Rumsfeld’s office.

I’m not sure how it came about, but both these stories ended up in front of me at the same time, and they seem to share a certain ineffable something, so I’m posting them together. So there.

First, from Janus: the Reuters Oddly Enough story of “The Great Sasuke”: Masked wrestler wins Japan assembly seat. Good stuff, especially the part about how “the wrestler said he now hopes to demonstrate his ‘superabundant power’ outside of the ring as well as in it.”

Because who could hear about a Japanese wrestler-turned-politican wielding his “superabundant power” without immediately thinking of realultimatepower.net, the ninja-tribute site created by faux-12-year-old Robert Hamburger. I previously posted a lies.com item about the site; that item continues to be one of the top comment-getters here.

Including the recent comment from reader Jeremy, who pointed to a really excellent piece from Studio 360, the public radio show, featuring an interview with the site’s creator. It’s actually worth enduring the suck of Realplayer to listen to it; that guy Robert (the real Robert, not his 12-year-old alter ego) is so cool it makes my pee pee hurt.

Update: Be sure to check out http://www.internetmammogram.net/, which appears to be the work of the same subversive character. Thanks to Beck for the link.

Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian-born historian whose War documentary series should be required viewing for any boy-soldier lacking actual military experience who wants to play commander in chief, has written the following informative column: White House hubris will end with the domino effect of Iraq war. He talks about the imminent danger of Turkey and Iran being pulled into fighting against or on behalf of Iraq’s Kurdish and Shiite populations, respectively, then continues:

Above all, there is the fact that the United States, abetted by Britain and Australia, has launched an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state. That is why most other governments are deeply worried: The American attack on Iraq could be used as a precedent, using exactly the same arguments as President Bush, to justify an Indian attack on Pakistan or a North Korean attack on South Korea. The U.S. action in Iraq has fundamentally challenged the rule of law in the world, which is a problem no matter how happy most Iraqis are at the moment — and Washington clearly meant to do just that.

Columnist and self-described “liberal iconoclast” Harley Sorensen has this nice little historical summing up in today’s SFGate.com: Occupational hazard. A sample:

We won the war, but will we win the peace? If you believe George W. Bush, who is saying all the right things, we will. Bush is saying that Iraq’s wealth belongs to Iraqis. And, he says, the U.S. will stay in Iraq “not a day longer than necessary,” these words spoken by Bush’s puppy dog, Tony Blair.

Unfortunately, Bush himself sometimes seems a bit dyslexic in his public statements. If he says Iraq’s wealth belongs to Iraqis, what he really means is, the Iraqis will get what’s left after we skim what we want. As for when we leave Iraq, “not a day longer than necessary” means, in Bush-speak, when hell freezes over.

Something I’d noticed myself wincing at lately, but hadn’t seen mentioned as bothersome by anyone else, is the jaunty little salute Bush likes to give the uniformed military folk when getting on and off his helicopter. Well, it turns out it does bother someone else. Specifically, it bothers Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs, who has the following op/ed piece running in today’s New York Times: A senseless salute.

Lukacs compares Bush with previous wartime presidents, including former generals who made a point of losing the trappings of their wartime service when performing the (nominally higher, in the constitution’s view of things) civilian role of president. Apparently that changed with Ronald Reagan; beginning with him, all our presidents have gone in for the snappy salute delivered back to men and women in uniform (a salute that is, according to military etiquette, thoroughly wrong, since salutes even by people officially part of the military are to be delivered only when in uniform). Lukacs speculates about the motivations underlying this more visible tying of the civilian presidency to its military role, and concludes :

When the Roman republic gave way to empire, the new supreme ruler, Augustus chose to name himself not “rex,” king, but “imperator,” from which our words emperor and empire derive, even though its original meaning was more like commander in chief. Thereafter Roman emperors came to depend increasingly on their military. Will our future presidents? Let us doubt it. And yet . . .

Some scary research into reported-vs.-actual handwashing behavior has been conducted by the American Society of Microbiology; you can check it out at http:///www.washup.org. In particular, see the Executive Summary:

• There is a huge gap between self-reported handwashing behavior after using public restrooms and actual handwashing behavior – people are less likely to wash their hands after using public restrooms than they say they are. This is consistent with trend data collected four years ago.
  • More than nine in ten (95%) say they always wash their hands after using public restrooms. However, only slightly more than two-thirds (67%) are observed washing their hands after using public facilities.

• Among males, nine in ten (92%) report that they always wash their hands after using public restrooms, but only 58% of those observed actually did. This represents a gap of 34%.
  • Interestingly, compared to actual handwashing behavior in 1996, men nowadays are significantly less likely to wash their hands after using public restrooms (58% actually washed their hands in Aug. 2000 vs. 61% in Aug. 1996).

• Nearly all women (97%) surveyed report that they always wash their hands after using public restrooms, but only 75% observed actually did. This represents a gap of 22%.

• Similar to 1996, women continue to be significantly more likely than men to say that they always wash their hands after using public facilities (97% vs. 92%).

Link courtesy of gnat’s journal at Use Perl.

I’d passed over this the first time I saw it, but I guess lies.com reader Will has a point; it deserves a mention on the site. So, without further ado: Information Clearing House’s Tale of Two Photos.

Ramzi Kysia, a member of the Iraq Peace Team currently in Amman, Jordon, has a really nice piece at Electronic Iraq: Where now, America? It’s a heartfelt look at what the war means, and where those opposed to war go next, in the big-picture sense. Highly recommended. From his conclusion:

If there is any hope at all, then we ourselves must overcome the institutions within our own society which further violence. We must overcome our own militarism, and the materialism that drives it. We must stop paying taxes, we must risk arrest, we must shut down a government in Washington D.C. that is illegitimate and absolutely out-of-control.

And we must overcome our anger at the mass killers of the world, the Saddam Husseins and George Bushes, even as we overcome their tyrannies. That anger is playing itself out today in the streets of Iraq – further wrecking lives already crushed by violence.

Please God, we must learn how to heal ourselves of all our delusions.

The Independent’s Andrew Gumbel has a nice wrap-up on the current state of the Great Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction Hunt: America targeted 14,000 sites. So where are the weapons of mass destruction? The upshot: the WMDs aren’t there. Breathless newsbreaks from Bush’s Ministers of Information at Fox notwithstanding, there are no signs yet of anything other than the scattered debris of the pre-Gulf War I weapons program.

With rumors having surfaced (apparently courtesy the straight shooters in the Israeli intelligence community) that the WMDs have in fact been spirited away to Syria, Gumbel wonders how long it will be before this is trotted out as the justification for the next invasion:

Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.

But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock’s films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.

If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.

I guess it’s a good thing my tiny little mind couldn’t keep track of what our actual stated reason for going to war was during those tumultuous days leading up to the invasion. Because if I had been able to keep track of that, I’d probably be getting pretty annoyed by now, as it becomes increasingly clear that the whole war was predicated on a lie.

I’m a sucker for sites like www.re-code.com. Not because I particularly want to go to the trouble of printing out bogus barcodes and then surreptitiously slapping them on similar but higher-priced items at the local Vons, but because I love it when a site takes pains to adopt a tone and appearance that leads you to believe it’s something that it isn’t. Or is it?

My favorite part about re-code.com is the way they scrupulously avoid the use of the word theft to describe the activity they are allegedly enabling. Instead, they couch the descriptions in the language of responsible consumerism. Like this:

Re-Code.com is built on two unique concepts known as Preshopping and Postshopping. Preshopping refers to visiting the Re-code.com website first finding a store in your area with prices that you want to pay. Many of our codes are from generic items which could easily be used to re-code brand name items. At stores which rely heavily on the barcode for your bill total, printed bar code stickers from this site could be used to relabel and re-code expensive products with cheaper prices. Rather than our competitors that allow you to compare apples to apples, we allow you the consumer to relabel dvd’s with apple prices. You compare products based on packaging material and price. Postshopping is what makes Re-code.com a consumer’s community. After purchasing items at their actual prices, we ask you to return to Re-code.com to upload information about the product including price and UPC number of legitimit purchases. Through Preshopping and Postshopping, you can help yourself and other’s pay the prices you determine for the products you want!

Gee, thanks, Re-code.com!

They lessen the impact somewhat with the following disclaimer, which appears at the bottom of every page. But it’s still fun.

* We in no way endorse the theft of products or services. Re-code.com was created as satire. We intend only to make aware the prevelance of barcodes and begin a critical discussion about what their pervasiveness means. This is not a product designed to be used in any malicious or illegal manner. Any such use is strictly prohibited. You should not use any of the barcodes available from this site for any illegal activity. They are here for your amusement only.

Link courtesy of Daypop.

Update: And now, just that fast, it’s down, replaced by a copy of the nastygram sent to them by the lawyers for WalMart, or somesuch. Oh, well.

Later update: Oh, hey. The site is still there; you just have to click on the nastygram, and then click through a disclaimer, to get there. Cool. Dumb on their part, but still cool.

A little wise-ass knavery for your Saturday, courtesy of our good friends in Chile (as reported by Ananova, via Dave Barry’s blog): Kermit rolls a joint in joke email.

Update: Still haven’t been able to find a copy of the actual movie, dangit, but Hiro found this, which gets pretty close: Rana Gustavo. Hm. And now that I think of it, I wonder if that sequence of images actually is the “animated clip” that the Ananova article refers to. But whatever.

I caught some of the Defense Department briefing today, and boy, Rumsfeld was ready to snap. It’s not every day that you see someone at that level of government laying on the sarcasm, openly mocking the reporters looking for his response to the (actually quite real, by all accounts) chaos in Baghdad.

The Reuters account of the briefing described it this way:

In Washington on Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied Iraq was falling into chaos, saying television images of isolated acts of looting and violence were being played “over and over again” for sensational effect.

“It’s untidy. And freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” stormed Rumsfeld, his hand chopping the air for emphasis in response to reporters’ questions at a Pentagon briefing.

“It is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over and over and over again of some boy walking out (of a building) with a vase and say ‘Oh my goodness you didn’t have a plan’ — That’s nonsense,” he told reporters.

Here’s how the BBC’s Nick Childs put it in their reporters’ weblog:

It was an extraordinary combative performance by Donald Rumsfeld at the latest Pentagon briefing. Clearly exasperated by the new criticisms of US-led forces, the American defence secretary suggested that media reports of chaos and lawlessness in Iraq were exaggerated.

He agreed that US forces did have an obligation to help provide security and said that they were doing what they could to curb the looting where they saw it.

Mr Rumsfeld said no one condoned looting, but according to him much of the lawlessness was a natural pent up response by people to the end of a repressive regime. Any such transition was inevitably untidy, he said.

I find it interesting that even when the press was piling on Rumsfeld a week or so into the invasion, when he was getting all that criticism about the inadquate war plan, he wasn’t this feisty. I guess he was confident then that subsequent events would vindicate him, which, in all honesty, they have, at least with respect to his having put sufficient forces in place to topple Saddam.

But now, he’s really sounding stressed. I don’t think he anticipated this: that having won this great victory, he would immediately get all this flak about the war’s aftermath. And honestly, I don’t think he has an answer. Which is a pretty scary notion, especially if you live in Iraq.

Here’s a short piece from Arab News with another street-level view of what it’s like in Baghdad these days: ‘We came, we saw, we conquered’. An excerpt:

The Marines appear to be very edgy, even terrified, following the human bombing on Thursday. And there are also those among them who are plain arrogant. When one discovered a bag of raisins in this reporter’s carry-bag while conducting a body search, and was offered some of them, he replied: “If I want them, I’ll take the whole bag. We came, we saw, we conquered.”

A brief digression: I’m not posting this to be critical of the Marines. I actually buy into that whole “support the troops” stuff, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go as far as some would like to take it. Or maybe it’s that I actually take it farther than some would like it taken.

These young men and women are wholly honorable. They are sacrificing their freedom, and in many cases their mental and physical health, even their lives, to defend this country, including me and my loved ones.

Marines don’t have the luxury of questioning the motives and judgement of their leaders. They have to believe that their chain of command, all the way up to the commander in chief, is wise, thoughtful, and just. They have to believe that they are being sent in harm’s way for the best of reasons, that their sacrifice is justified, that they are not having their lives thrown away for stupid reasons. They have to believe, because otherwise they couldn’t do the things they do. And anyway, they have willingly surrendered that kind of questioning; that’s not their job.

But it is the citizen’s job. The people who founded this country knew that greedy, evil people, people without honor, would inevitably try to usurp the power of the military. It is the duty of every citizen to guard against that.

The Marines in Baghdad are paying a terrible price. They are paying that price willingly, out of a sense of honor and duty. In return, I owe them this: To play my own part, as a citizen, to make sure that this country’s civilian leadership honors their commitment and sacrifice. To make sure we have leaders who will spend the lives of brave young men and women only when the nation is in the utmost need, when all other options have been exhausted. Leaders who will go to war reluctantly, somberly, after careful reflection, doing everything in their power to minimize the attendant horrors that war always brings.

In other words, leaders who are pretty much the opposite of George Bush.

A really nice editorial from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman today: Conquest and neglect. A sample:

One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don’t worry about breaking the rules. This technique brought them victory in the Florida recount battle, the passage of the 2001 tax cut, the fall of Kabul, victory in the midterm elections, and the fall of Baghdad.

But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they’ve won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot.

The piece goes on to tie together the Bush record on foreign adventures with his record on fixing the economy at home, and finds an identical pattern. Krugman’s conclusion:

The scary thing is that this slash-and-burn approach to governing may continue to work for Mr. Bush’s people because the initial triumphs get all the headlines. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has to live in the wreckage they leave behind.

Here are a couple of on-the-ground reports from Baghdad to file alongside the administration back-thumping and high fives. From Cathy Breen, of the Iraq Peace Team: There will be no victors in this war. And from the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough: Descent into a charnel-house hospital hell. From the latter:

The traffic to and from the morgue is pitiable. Hospital orderlies wheel the dead in and families bring makeshift coffins to take the dead out.

And when a group of foreign cameraman moves in to film the scene, the four men charged with moving the bodies in and out of the morgue react badly, angrily chasing them away.

“Why are you taking photos? For Bush?” one of them yells, waving his arms. “Tell him to go to hell.”

Here’s an interesting artice by Steve Gilliard, writing for Daily Kos: How Iraq could devolve into civil war. This is the sort of stuff I love getting from the Web. It’s thoughtful, informed, and unmediated. Maybe it’s BS, but it makes sense to me. I’ll take it over the predigested viewpoint of mainstream media any day. Well, actually, I’ll take both, so I can compare the messages I receive from each of them.

Mark Twain pointed out that a man with one watch knows exactly what time it is, while a man with two is never sure. The subtext, of course, is that neither of them really knows, but one of them has a much better idea of the limits of his own knowledge.

The Web is our second watch.

A nice summing-up of the current near-complete lack of information about how many Iraqis, armed or otherwise, we’ve killed and wounded so far is given in this piece from the Financial Times: Civilian casualty figures cause concern. Coming at the same issue from another perspective is this story from the same paper, giving a street-level view of some US marines’ rules of engagement as applied in fighting today in Baghdad: Eyewitness: “The marines shot anything they considered a threat”. An excerpt from the latter article:

We heard screaming from the alley. None of the US troops moved. If it had not been for Mohammed Fatnan, an Iraqi translator with the UK’s Channel 4 News, the Americans would not have treated the casualties. Mr Fatnan crossed the road outside the palace under the guns of two marine armoured fighting vehicles and came back carrying a young girl, Zahra Abdel-Samii’, bleeding from the head.

In the alley, a man who had run on to his balcony upon hearing gunfire had been shot dead. Men wailing “There is no God but God” were hauling him into the back seat of a car in a blanket.

Minutes later, the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade thundered through the palace garden, then came bursts of heavy gunfire.

A white Mitsubishi van roared along the main road that runs beside the palace wall, the driver slumped over the wheel, unconscious or already dead. The van veered off the road into a wall.

Mr Fatnan and two marines ran across the road to help a woman injured in the arm and foot and a young man, her son, shot in the head.

The dead driver had not understood the warning shots meant to tell him to stop.

The marines had had enough of journalists filming. We walked slowly along the road outside the palace back to our van.

Here’s a wacky story. As pointed out by the fine people at Daily Kos: Robbins-Sarandon anti-war talk leads Hall to cancel celebration. Baseball Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey, a former Reagan administration official, has apparently chosen to cancel a scheduled tribute to the movie Bull Durham, because the tribute would have involved participation by those dangerous peaceniks Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. The story quotes from the letter Petroskey sent to Robbins announcing the cancellation:

“In a free country such as ours, every American has the right to his or her own opinions, and to express them. Public figures, such as you, have platforms much larger than the average American’s, which provides you an extraordinary opportunity to have your views heard — and an equally large obligation to act and speak responsibly,” Petroskey wrote.

“We believe your very public criticism of President Bush at this important — and sensitive — time in our nation’s history helps undermine the U.S. position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger. As an institution, we stand behind our President and our troops in this conflict.”

The story quotes Robbins as replying that he didn’t realize baseball was “a Republican sport.” The story goes on to quote the following from Robbins’ letter of reply:

“You invoke patriotism and use words like ‘freedom’ in an attempt to intimidate and bully. In doing so, you dishonor the words ‘patriotism’ and ‘freedom’ and dishonor the men and women who have fought wars to keep this nation a place where one can freely express their opinions without fear of reprisal or punishment.”

Right on.

The latest depressing fun from Get Your War On is up as of yesterday. Favorite quote: “I AM WITHOLDING MY ANALYSIS UNTIL I HEAR FROM THE IRAQI INFORMATION MINISTER.”

I’m relieved at the thought that the open-warfare stage of the conflict is over, at least in Baghdad. But I can’t celebrate along with the pro-war types; I don’t see this as a particularly worthwhile achievement, and fear that the costs of the operation will end up far outweighing any good that we’ve achieved.

Also, the part about this that sickens me the most isn’t even close to over. I can’t shake the mental image of the hundreds of horribly injured Iraqi children spilling out of their hospitals, the thousands more destined to die in the weeks and months ahead in the aftermath of this stupid dick-size contest.

Anyway, for more on the less-pleasant aspects of our glorious achievement, here are summaries of recent reports by the UN: Humanitarian crisis looms in Iraq because of breakdown of law and order, and by the Red Cross: Humanitarian situation has dramatically worsened.