Hello. This is my 1st post, so if there are any errors, please forgive me.

Definitly a year in history that will be remembered for a long time: a President of the USA who promotes peace by causing war(?), recession (but finds millions and billions to fight a war), and now SARS (an illness which, with all our technology, is still a myserty to us). In my travels through the world wide web, I came across intresting infomation about SARS, and how people who seem to have defeated the illness are being “re-infected.” Could this be the black plague of the 21st century? Only time will tell…

An article from New York Times: 12 SARS Patients Report Relapses. And here is an interesting article from Newsday: HIV/Aids Infected people resistent to SARS?

Here are a few more on other topics:

US Marine investigated for war crimes after newspaper interview

U.S. Tells Iraq Oil Ministers Not to Act Without Its O.K.

Coca-Cola promotes drink with ’swastika’ robots

Lawyer: FBI agent’s job in jeopardy because she blew the whistle

The Secrets of September 11: The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?

(I am just glad the terrorists are the only ones who hate our freedom.)

Only on the net you find an article like this one… I won’t claim it as fact, but it still is an intresting article: Bush’s “Christian” Blood Cult, Concerns Raised by the Vatican

Well I hope it’s not too much infomation; if it is, please let me know and I will limit the amount of articles I post.

– best way to lie, is by knowing the truth

How fortunate for leaders, that the masses do not think.

– Adolph Hitler

Where the People fear the Government - you have tyranny; Where the Government fears the People - you have rights.

– Thomas Jefferson

It must never be unpatriotic to support your country against your government. It must always be unpatriotic to support your government against your country.

– Stephen T. Byingt

It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

– Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering

A nice opinion piece from Newsday’s Paul Vitello: Iraq 101: What we’ve learned. Nothing new, but a nice summary, brief and to the point.

Got a good one today, in user comments on the Not Tony Blair’s Email page (scroll to the bottom for it; for convenience, here’s a brief excerpt, in violation of my new no-blockquoting rule):

TO TONY BLAIR, !!!!FUCK YOU!!!! YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO LIVE IN POVERTY OR IN DANGER OR IN HELL!!!!!!! SO ME AND GREENPEACE WILL CAUSE WORLD WAR 1 AT YOUR DOOR SEE HOW YOU LIKE WAR THEN. I HOPE YOU KNOW THAT HIS EXCELLENCY MR PRESIDENT BUSH MY UNCLE,YES MY UNCLE IS GOING TO PUT ALL THINGS RIGHT BUT HE WON’T DO IT OVERNIGHT. SO GREENPEACE AND I WILL WREAK HAVOC AND GIVE YOU SUCH A FRIGHT YOU WON’T KNOW WHAT’S COMING OR WHO’S GOING. LET IT BE KNOWN THE WORLD IS IN THE HANDS OF GREENPEACE, SO LET THIS SHIT WAR CEASE AND START LIVING HUMANELY. LIVE IN HAPPINNESS AND HARMONY. MAY GREENPEACE RULE FOR AN ETERNITY!!!!!!

Yeah. Live in peace, Tony Blair, or Dubya’s niece is going to FUCKING KILL YOU!!! Heh.

Another really great one was the one Xkot mentioned the other day, in which a comment on his blog described, in broken English, an act of (non?) cannibalism:

When I in Thailand, the village people and I together steal one baby. The baby is steal away other village who is die when birth. We share to cook it. Actually is not right to calling a human, because it is die when birth. But I tell you taste is something same a hill boar. He have no big smell but sweetness.

So. Do you have any personal favorites? Do share.

Lots of coverage today of Fearless Leader’s grand aircraft carrier event. From the Washington Post, an article describing this as Bush’s opening salvo in the 2004 [re-]election campaign: For Bush, the military is the message for ‘04. We liberal whiners continue to point out that Bush actually pulled strings to stay out of the fighting back when it was his butt on the line, and then went AWOL for a year or so, apparently, when even his cushy National Guard posting became too onerous; see this piece from David Corn in The Nation, for example: Bush’s Top Gun photo op. But I don’t think we can put too much faith in that particular criticism come election day. Bush did, in point of fact, fly planes during the Vietnam War, even if he never left the US, and that’s probably going to be good enough to pass muster with those willing to credit him with having made the world a safer place by killing lots of Afghanis and Iraqis.

The deeper question, for me, at least, is whether we really want a president who so clearly gets off on going to war, and is willing to indulge that desire without thinking too hard about the long-term consequences. Because we, and our children, are going to be living with those consquences for a very long time.

As I mentioned, I recently wrote to years-past lies.com contributor The Web Walker, inviting him to enlighten us once again with his take on current events. True conservative that he is, he (so far) has chosen to pass on this newfangled weblog thing, but he did send along an article that he said I could post on the site. So follow the link below, or scroll down, for the first Web Walker contribution to lies.com since 1996 (!).
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I know immy2g already linked to it, but I feel compelled to comment on that MSNBC piece about the 9/11 report the Bush administration is trying to cover up: The secrets of September 11.

I think it’s pretty obvious why that report is being kept from public view, and the answer isn’t “national security.” It’s just the latest step in the deft tapdance Bush and his handlers have been doing for the past 18 months, as they seek to carry out what has become the prime imperative of the Bush presidency: the deflection of blame for the 9/11 attacks away from the person who was manning the helm at the time they occurred: George W. Bush.

Hey, all you folks loudly proclaiming your elephantine memories of 9/11, along with your willingness to pursue those responsible wherever they may be found: I think you’ve already forgotten too much about the attacks. You’ve certainly displayed a pathetic distractibility when it comes to figuring out whom to blame. Bush keeps linking 9/11 with Saddam Hussein, as he did several times during his aircraft carrier speech yesterday, and you keep swallowing it.

Meanwhile, his team is hard at work making sure the public doesn’t learn about the mistakes that made the events of that day possible. Since, you know, the public knowing the truth might hurt Fearless Leader’s chances in the election. You have to have a sense of priorities about these things.

You know what I call that? I call it dishonoring the dead. Too bad Darryl Worley hasn’t written a country song about it. People might actually get upset in that case.

If we let politicians get away with conducting their business in secret, they will be only too happy to oblige. They will conceal, deny, and redirect the blame for every failure, while basking triumphant in a perpetual sequence of staged photo-op “successes.” That’s just what they do.

Three thousand innocent people died in an attack on US soil. New Yorkers are still traumatized by the memory of sweeping the ashes of dead people from their windowsills and doorways. And now we’re going to let some self-serving politician conceal the facts of those events just to protect his reputation?

That’s pretty fucked up.

From Digby of Digby’s Blog, via The Smirking Chimp, comes this really fabulous piece: Loyalty oath. Among the other wonderful things about it is that I now feel there is no longer any need for me to talk about this, since Digby has said it better than I ever could. So there’s something we can all celebrate. :-)

Okay; I lied. I really wasn’t going to post about it anymore, but then I read this really nice wrap-up from Ken Fireman at Newsday: Hunt goes on for war’s motives. It covers the whole issue really well, even mentioning the “Remember the Maine” and the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. The difference between this case and those earlier two is that in those cases, it took years, even decades, for the truth to be widely recognized. This time, I think the truth is obvious just a few months later. (Well, I think the truth was obvious before the war even started, but now, with the post-war weapons hunt playing out the way it has, it has become really obvious, to the point where those who support the president are reduced to acknowledging the lie, but claiming it didn’t matter.)

On some level it’s sad that this would even be worth mentioning. Normon Solomon, progressive columnist, suggests we try something really outrageous in the 2004 election campaign: telling the truth. Check it out: A different approach for the 2004 campaign.

From hossman comes word of this interesting new site: The Power Vacuum. It’s a Slash site focused on debunking the Great Liberal Conspiracy; I’m hoping the folks behind it will be able to rise above the usual right-wing ranting and actually expose a few lies. Here’s hoping. Anyway, as part of my effort to reach out to those who’ve found my story selection too liberal for their tastes, here’s a place for them to try instead.

Anyone old enough to remember William Bennett’s stints as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education and the nation’s first “drug czar,” and honest enough to have resented the really vicious lies he wielded in those days, will find an extra measure of pleasure in the recent revelation that he is a longtime compulsive gambler. But even those who only know Bennett from his more recent turn as the bestselling author of a string of sanctimonious books on “virtues” can enjoy the news. Anyway, here’s a nice piece by Michael Kinsley on Bennett’s comeuppance: Bad bet by Bill Bennett.

From Warblogging.com comes this excellent rant from George Paine, who is mad as hell about what is going on in this country: Anger.

Another great, thoughtful piece from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman: Man on horseback (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk login works). Krugman talks about Bush’s carrier-landing photo opportunity, and puts it in the appropriate context. A nice summing up of the issue.

Since everyone has a different opinion of Saddam Hussein being connected to Osama bin Laden, why shouldn’t a judge join the fray?

Judge Harold Baer said the experts “provide a sufficient basis for a reasonable jury to draw inferences which could lead to the conclusion that Iraq provided material support to al Qaeda.”

9/11 victims awarded $104 million

From the LA Times’ Sonni Efron comes an article on how upset the people in the State Department are about the way Rumsfeld and the rest of the Pentagon boys are usurping the conduct of US foreign policy: Diplomats on the defensive (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk login works). It’s a nice piece, including the most extensive discussion I’ve seen yet in a mainstream publication of the idea that Colin Powell might resign.

From Dave Chandler comes this fun rabble rousing: Bush’s big lie. Basically, Chandler makes a case that Bush should be tried for war crimes. I’m not holding my breath, but those of you who think dubya walks on water might want to give it a glance and see what you think of Chandler’s argument.

Two stories that question the quality of contemporary reporting.

Jonathan Foreman in Bad Reporting in Baghdad and Marc Morano in Pro-Marxist Slant Pushed at ABC, Retired Correspondent Claims write about their personal experiences.

Here’s an article that I wouldn’t have seen if it weren’t for the Web Walker’s excellent (outrageous, but excellent) links, and the stuff I come across while exploring out from them. From Fred Barnes, writing in the Wall Street Journal, as posted via The Weekly Standard: President Hillary? Say what you will about the helmet hair, that woman continues to scare the pants off conservatives from sea to shining sea.

Cool.

From memepool.com, via ymatt, another useful site for the country-club set: rent-a-negro.com. Ha! Who says lies.com doesn’t look out for the information needs of conservatives as well as liberals?

From AP, via Janus, comes word of this nifty experiment/performance art: Typing monkeys don’t write Shakespeare. And though it may make no sense to you whatsoever, I really liked Lucy’s comment when Janus mentioned the URL (which included the string ‘britain_monkey_authors’) in the mud: “Even without looking at that article I want it to be about Tommy.” See, it’s funny because Tommy is me in the mud, and I wrote this book with a monkey on the cover and… Oh, never mind. You had to be there.

Clearly partisan, but interesting nevertheless, is this long lament by Dan Kennedy: The GOP attack machine. Kennedy basically argues that Republicans are meanies, and don’t play fair, and counters the inevitable observation that Democrats do the same thing by saying, “yeah, but Republicans are much worse.” I agree with much of what he says, but I disagree with his apparent conclusion that all we can do is whine about it.

There have always been, and always will be, unscrupulous people willing to lie and cheat and steal in their effort to get and retain power. For a while, within a certain limited frame of reference, it may look like they are succeeding.

Don’t let it get you down. This too shall pass, and all that.

A little human-interest piece for your Sunday: the New York Times has revealed that recently-resigned reporter Jayson Blair committed extensive fraud in stories he had written for the paper over the past several months. The Times spills rivers of ink about the story, including an article describing the deception; a detailed list of specific frauds, with corrections; and an editorial mea culpa.

Times-bashers, enjoy!

Since the pro-Bush folks seem to still be in denial about this, I guess I’ll have to keep flogging the WMD story a little longer. Here’s the latest development, as reported in The Independent: US weapons team ends its search with no discovery.

Just to recap, briefly: We invaded another country and overthrew its government, killing thousands of innocent people in the process. We justified this as an act of self-defense, given that the country had (we claimed) lots of banned weapons that it supposedly was likely to hand over to terrorists. No such weapons have been found.

So Bush lied about that, right? And you people who continue to support him as president deal with that issue how, exactly? I’m not trying to bait you; I just really want to know what you think about all this.

Having narrowly won a majority of seats in Congress, the GOP is pursuing a national strategy to widen that majority. But rather than woo voters with the traditional slick advertising and empty promises, the Republican party is going to win seats by redrawing district maps in their favor. (See “gerrymandering“.)

CNN is reporting that 53 Democrats have walked out of the Texas legislature in protest of a bill that would cost them 7 House seats. Apparently this drops the legislature below the minimum number of representatives required for a vote, stalling any action.

This seemed like normal annoying political bullshit until I got to the part that mentions “News reports late Monday quoted leaders of the missing Democrats as saying they are gathered across the state line in Ardmore, Oklahoma, out of reach of Texas Rangers who have been ordered to arrest them and return them to the House chamber.” Does this peg anyone else’s surreal-o-meter? Do the state police usually get involved in Texas politics?

Yet another in the long line of really insightful commentaries by the NYT’s Paul Krugman: The China Syndrome. It’s about the strange paradox whereby the BBC, a government-owned news outlet, has been providing demonstrably more objective coverage of recent events than the large bulk of the private-owned media in the US.

Here’s a nice little commentary comparing Bush with Clinton/Gore on the subject of lying: Bush will say anything — no lie. It’s from E.J. Dionne, Jr., as printed in SFGate.com and pointed to by The Smirking Chimp.

This story bothers me in a couple of different ways, and since it’s too late for me to un-read it, I thought I’d share the pain with all of you: Tongue-splitting trend troubling to some. I mean, I’m all for freedom and personal expression, but yeesh.

The good people at thememoryhole.org are carrying the public (for now) information relating to the 9/11 investigation: Documents from Congress’ joint inquiry into 9/11. Note especially in the transcribed statement from Eleanor Hill, staff director of the investigation committee, the following:

According to the White House and the D.C.I., director of central intelligence, the president’s knowledge of intelligence information relevant to this inquiry remains classified, even when the substance of that intelligence information has been declassified.

See, if it were widely known that Bush had been personally briefed on the danger represented by al Qaeda prior to 9/11, including specific information relating to plans to hijack airliners and plow them into buildings, people might start wondering why he didn’t do more to prevent that, which in turn might hurt his [re-]election prospects.

Fortunately, it has been determined by the White House that [re-]electing Bush is essential to our national security, so any such information can remain classified. Don’t you feel safer?

We seem to be in the thick of a news cycle centering on Bush’s dishonesty with respect to the pursuit of Evil-Doers and Terra-ists. Here are three pieces pointed to this morning by The Smirking Chimp, all of them dealing with this issue in one way or another. First, and most substantially, is this piece from The Guardian: Bush feels the heat after Riyadh bombings. The idea here is that by focusing on the overthrow of those alleged Osama-collaborators in Iraq, Bush let the real al Qaeda off the hook, allowing them to prepare a new round of attacks. A similar, but more-humorously-presented, argument is that advanced by John McFerrin in the Charleston Gazette: Hillbilly in the White House: Bush attack on Iraq ‘handy’.

Finally, from Alan Bisbort in the Hartford Advocate: The dead want the truth. Bisbort argues that we owe those who died in the 9/11 attacks a full disclosure of the intelligence failures that led to those events, and that White House efforts to limit the investigation and classify its results are way hypocritical in the context of the no-holds-barred effort they put into exposing Clinton’s philandering.

There are a lot of programs out there that claim you can “LOSE WEIGHT FAST!” But in these uncertain times, I think it’s best to stick with the reliable, proven diet recipies from Weight Watchers, circa 1974. My favorite is the “Slender Quencher” made from Water, Sherry extract, andBeef Bullion cubes. Mmmmmmmm that’s refreshing.

A buddy of mine mailed me this story, and I can’t really improve on what he had to say about it… Basically, if you happen to have the same first and last name as someone who’s on the secret “suspected terrorist but we have no proof” list, you get harrassed at every airport you go to. And you can’t get removed from the list, and you can’t complain about it to anyone, ’cause no one will admit to creating the list. Anybody else feel funny about this?

Some people seemed to believe that Putin was trying to make Bush squirm by refusing to drop U.N. sanctions without a declaration of the non-existence of WMD’s, in order to win the moral point for all the brave countries that stood up to the US agression. Surprise! This USA Today article sheds light on a possibly more self-interested motive of Mr Putin and his diplomatic cronies.

This just in…….money still makes the world go ’round.

Some interesting things have been happening in the grinding-slow-but-exceedingly-fine investigation into the Columbia shuttle disaster. From Reuters, here’s a story from the other day: ‘Missed signals’ seen at NASA in Columbia probe. The AP version of the same Senate testimony is here: Shuttle probe chief calls on Senate panel.

The back and forth reported between the retired admiral heading up the investigation and Sen. John McCain was interesting, with the investigator claiming the process whereby engineers’ concerns were ignored by higher-ups was “nobody’s fault,” and McCain getting pissed at the idea that seven astronauts could be killed due to a string of human errors in which, magically, no humans were actually responsible.

Chiming in on the obvious deja vu qualities in all this, USA Today has the following editorial: Same problems haunt NASA 17 years after Challenger loss. And if you want to really get into the nitty gritty of what went wrong, and if you haven’t seen it already, check out this interesting discussion from visual-display-of-information maven Edward Tufte. Nice detail on the contribution that some really yucky Powerpoint bullet slides made to the tragedy.

I just can’t seem to sync up with this Private Jessica plotline. I somehow got sidetracked into feeling all maudlin and sympathetic toward Private Shoshana Johnson, and when the first soft-focus pieces about Jessica appeared I gave them a pass. Joined the Army to get out of her West Virginia poverty, just saving up money for college, wanted to be a kindergarten teacher; it was just a little too hard-sell for me. Nothing against her personally; she seemed like a great person. I just wasn’t interested in that particular story at that particular time.

Then, when the Big Daring Rescue happened, I was anchored in a little cove off a more or less desert island with no net, no news at all, really. So I missed that story.

Then when I saw the stories floating around from the foreign papers that were pointing out that the facts of the case didn’t quite match the Hollywood storyline that the Pentagon and their mouthpieces at Fox News were putting out, I dunno; I think I was just tired of the whole thing. And I was right in the thick of my reaching-out-to-the-conservatives impulse, and it just didn’t seem right to hit them over the head by harping on the Jessica story.

But anyway, there’s a new piece in Salon about it, and it’s pretty funny, and I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention this along with all the other lies witih which the Iraq war was sold to the American people. So go thou and fill thine eyes with the gritty, messy reality that is the Private Jessica story, for reals: Saving Pvt. Lynch: The made-for-TV movie. (It’s worth enduring the anti-Web clickthrough ad for the Well that gets you the 1-day pass.)

Update: Lies.com reader Pilar sent this helpful link, with more on the truth behind the Jessica story: The real ‘Saving Pte. Lynch’.

Another day, another perfect Paul Krugman column in the New York Times: Paths of glory. It looks at the mismatch between Bush’s presidential style (big, flashy, production numbers; lame follow-through) and the actual needs of the War on Terror. I know the conventional wisdom, at least in Republican circles, is that Bush rules the roost when it comes to security issues, but I’m not so sure.

I’m a little late with the link, but it’s good stuff. From David Corn, writing in The Nation: Now they tell us.

From essayist Douglas Herman, a depressing, if more or less apt, question: Achtung! Are we the new Nazis? As usual, thanks to The Smirking Chimp for the great link.

Here’s the last in my current shock-and-awe link blitz, I promise. From Salon, another one worth getting the 1-day pass for: a brief piece on Democratic somewhere-near-the-front-runner John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz (or maybe it’s Teresa Heinz Kerry — though that’s kind of the point of the story, or rather, the point is that Heinz/Kerry was willing to get herself quoted in Elle magazine saying she didn’t “give a shit” about the whole name thing).

I like this. A lot. I’m leaning more and more Kerry’s way all the time, personally, and the fact that he’s got an uppity, outspoken, strong, intelligent wife who makes no bones about her Botox injections makes me happy in all kinds of ways.

According to this analysis from the Washington Post, most of the US population, and virtually all the Democrats in Congress, have decided that the Iraq war was a great success, even if it turns out Bush lied shamelessly about the Iraqi WMD threat: No weapons, no problem for Bush.

I wonder how many of the people who believe the war was justified even without Iraqi WMDs also believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

From the New York Times comes this really interesting story about the team of people who make sure Bush looks good on TV: Keepers of Bush image lift stagecraft to new heights. I’m not sure how you counter this. Maybe you don’t.

Here’s a really interesting story from the Observer, as reprinted at Guardian Unlimited: US rivals turn on each other as weapons search draws a blank. It describes the activities of “The Cabal,” a shadowy group of intelligence analysts that is part of the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence-gathering body set up in the Defense Department by Donald Rumsfeld in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. According to the article, Rumsfeld didn’t like the intelligence he was getting from traditional sources like the CIA, so he set up the OSP to produce intelligence more to his liking. The OSP apparently was the source for much of the now-exposed-as-fallacious “intelligence” about the Iraqi WMD program.

The article appears to be a follow-on to this earlier New Yorker article by Seymour M. Hersch: Selective intelligence. For a counter-spin, see this piece from Jack Shafer in Slate: The leading indicator that WMD will be found: Seymour M. Hersh says they won’t.

Edward Tufte is cool: Pioneer space plaque redesign.

Here’s an interesting commentary on a New York Times piece that just barely didn’t reach my personal postability threshhold, but which, with the addition of Scott Rosenberg’s criticism, now qualifies. The original piece was Bill Keller’s God and George W. Bush; the followup critique is Bush and God, church and state.

Here’s something really special: An interesting day: President Bush’s movements and actions on 9/11. Using published sources, the authors go into detail on what Bush knew and what he did when on that awful day.

Since we’re apparently not going to be allowed to see the results of the government investigation into the events of that day, I guess we citizens will have to piece it together on our own.

Janus was making fun of my circa-1997 dropshadowed-text logo, and Ymatt was willing to do some pro-bono design work, so shazam! Lies.com is new and improved. Please let me know if you notice anything broken, and thanks much to Janus for the incentive, and (especially) to Ymatt for the sweat equity.

A lot of people have contributed time and energy to lies.com over the years. Follow the link below, or scroll down, to learn more about some of them.
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Someone mentioned this story in my presence the other day, but I was caught up in some heavy deadline pressure and failed to follow up on it. Better late than never, though: Bush press secretary Fleischer resigns. Thanks to The Power Vacuum for reminding me.

I’m going to miss Ari.

Thought I’d take a break from all the Bush and War postings momentarily for a story that briefly popped up regarding the winning jockey from the recent Kentucky Derby. Just a good reminder that in today’s world, often the initial reports of a story that is breathlessly rushed out by the media is often lacking in accuracy. At the expense of innocent people.

As the Boston Globe points out, our age of instant information can likely be instant misinformation.

Sorry. This has nothing really to do with lies exactly, but this story just bothered me! There is a time and a place for everything, but a commencement speech is not the forum for a guest speaker to get on his soapbox regarding a divisive issue such as the war in Iraq and subject an unwitting audience to his political views! Freedom of speech still comes with a responsibility to have some respect and sensitivity to your audience and the occasion you are a part of. The parents and grandparents in attendance were rightly expecting a moment of pride and happiness for the accomplishments of their child or grandchild. Not an attack on their Country and Government! College is the time for open thinking and debate. But this event wasn’t a session of Political Science 101.

And yes, I would have thought it to be equally inappropriate if the speaker decided to focus his speech on deriding and discrediting all those who protested the war or who felt it was immoral.

An additional story about this incident provides a few more quotes from those involved. Hedges’ speech had absolutely no context or mention of the reason for this gathering: a college graduation! How arrogant do you have to be to agree to be the guest speaker at a commencement and refuse to even make a passing reference to the event, let alone gear your comments around it! He even makes a condesending remark afterwards in this article in which he infers that commencement-type of speeches are essentially beneath him! In another story I’ve read on this issue, it appears both the College President and Hedges are acknowledging what should have happened in the first place. Hedges says he would have directly told the school what he planned to say, and the President would have sought out a speaker with a less volatile topic. I’ve also seen mentioned that the New York Times may be looking to see if Hedges violated some aspect of a company ethics policy (just what the Times needs right now).

I still come back to the fact that, in the proper setting (of which there are many), this speech would be fine. I probably would even agree, to a point, with the general idea of how war affects people’s attitudes, group thinking and belief systems.

People are bombarded with strident messages on controversial topics all the time. No one will be any worse off by hearing one congratulatory/inspirational message on their graduation day! It was simply the wrong type of speech for the wrong occasion.

From newssanfrancisco.com’s Vicki Gray comes this to-the-barricades call: Where are all the Democrats? Gray argues that those who oppose Bush should rally behind Howard Dean.

Maybe. We certainly need someone willing to stand up to Bush and expose the lies with which he is being packaged and sold to the electorate. Dean would make people like me ecstatic — but I’m not exactly a mainstream swing voter. I guess it’s cynical to buy into the DLC position that only a “centrist” Democrat can win; one example (Clinton) does not necessarily prove the point. But there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy involved. If enough of the middle-of-the-country (ideologically, I mean, not necessarily physically) swing voters believe it, it becomes true, at least in terms of the presidential election’s outcome.

Time will tell, obviously. In the meantime, I think we who are opposed to Bush need to support a Democratic primary process that focuses on Bush’s failures, countering some of the shock-and-awe image-building the White House is doing. I’m personally not that concerned at this point with Who Is Most Ideologically Pure. I think any of the Democratic contenders would be better than Bush. I’d like to see those contenders conspiring with each other to send the same message to the electorate, rather than beating each other up.

But I’m still okay with people like Vicki Gray working to rouse the rabble. Passion = good. Apathy = bad. Woo! Go passion!

Howard Goodman, a columnist based in Palm Beach, FL, comments on how the Bush image-crafting team goes showman-extraordinaire Ronald Reagan one better: For Bush, as with the Gipper, it’s on with the show. It’s mostly a recapitulation of that New York Times article from the other day, but I liked the Reagan story in the lead enough to post it.

Extremely-rich person Warren Buffet has written an interesting analysis of Bush’s obsessively-pursued elimination of the tax on dividends: Dividend voodoo. Cool stuff.

Assertively-rational conservative Bill Whittle has posted an essay that is getting lots of attention lately, at least according to Daypop: Magic. It’s entertainingly written, which is good, because it’s also fairly long-winded, and takes quite a while to get to the main point, which is that Whittle doesn’t like the way Michael Moore staged fictional scenes and asserted untrue things in Bowling for Columbine.

There’s extensive discussion of people’s love of magical thinking, illustrated by gleeful debunkings of Roswell and Loch Ness. Whittle invokes Carl Sagan, citing him as an influence and hailing his writing as “refined genius of the highest degree” (though apparently Sagan wasn’t able to actually apply the principles of clear thinking that Whittle praises so highly, since Sagan’s own views on political questions, at least, were diametrically opposed to Whittle’s).

There’s also a mention of misdirection, the illusionist’s hand-waving that distracts the audience while handkerchief is replaced by rabbit. Which is fun, given that Whittle’s logical argument itself is pretty much just a grand piece of misdirection.

I am always distrustful of self-styled skeptics who seem driven more by an emotional need to prove others wrong than by the desire to get closer to the underlying reality that mocks our simplistic, abstract perceptions. Whittle provides a great example of that, decrying the magical thinking on the part of those he disagrees with, while engaging in his own version of the same thing. His denial of the essential magic and mystery of the world, his repeated assertions that he possesses firmly-grounded Truths that his political opponents myopically overlook, is itself magical thinking, just on a slightly higher plane.

The constancy of the speed of light as a natural speed limit has been so thoroughly and completely tested and vindicated that these aliens must have learned to harness the power of entire galaxies to bore wormholes through spacetime, which would be necessary to have these infinitely fast, staggeringly maneuverable, gravity-defying, super-hardened space-metal saucers in the skies over our planet.

Sweet!

Heh. No one who really grasped the essence of what Sagan wrote about human knowledge and science could make a statement like that. Not because it’s particularly likely that aliens crashed a foil-wrapped spaceship into New Mexico in 1946, but because anyone defending a scientific principle as having been “so thoroughly and completely tested and vindicated” is just begging to have his frame of reference pulled from under him by new, unanticipated data.

The Whittle who saw a leprechaun at the age of nine was, in my view, a better scientist than the Whittle of today. It saddens me to see how the emotional traumas of growing up can do that to people, closing them off from the world, isolating them within protective walls of rational certainty, loudly proclaiming the correctness of their views and attacking anything that threatens to make a chink in that armor.

There is magic in the world still, real magic, way down deep. Children know that. Too many adults have forgotten.

British inventor and vacuum-cleaner magnate James Dyson has created a really cool illusion as part of the annual Chelsea Flower Show. The beeb has the story: How does Dyson make water go uphill?

If you read the story, it’s actually not quite clear who should get credit for “inventing” the effect. Dyson gets most of the ink in the article, though “Dyson engineer” Derek Phillips seems to be the person who actually created it. I’m not sure where the actual design came from.

But I don’t care. I so want one of these.

Still yet again even more commentary on the missing Iraq WMDs, and what their absence means: First up, an op/ed piece from Melvin A. Goodman: