I remember getting one of these “help me build my time machine” spams a year or so ago, and passing it around amongst my friends, but I didn’t think much more about it. Anyway, if you find such things interesting, here’s more detail on it from Wired: Turn back the spam of time.

Here’s another net.kooks entry for your morning. Nausea warning: The photos here are not for the faint of heart. Anyway: Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty Patty XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz XChz. Don’t miss the comments after, which split almost perfectly into two parts: “HAHAHAHA! OMFG! You _RULE_!!!!” and “Good lord, you Americans are a bunch of sick, pathetic, bastards.” And both reactions are 100% accurate.

Fun piece from Slate writer Jack Shafer: Bill O’Reilly wants you to shut up.

Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam explains what’s wrong with the shuttle, and calls for the program to be ended before it takes the entire US manned space program down with it: Not culture but perhaps a cult.

From Jesse at Wage Slave Journal (via Six Different Ways) comes word of this fuzzy math by O’Reilly’s Brit Hume: Fair and balanced mathematics. Seems Hume tried to claim that the current death rate of US soldiers in Iraq is no big deal, since Californians average 6.6 murders per day, while soldiers in Iraq are only averaging 1.7 deaths per day. Yeah, but see, as Jesse points out, “There are about 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and more than 34.5 million people in California. So if we had as many troops in Iraq as there are people in California, and a comparable number were being killed, we would see 385 deaths per day, as opposed to the 6.6 murders in California.”

That seems like a pretty transparent piece of spin, even for Fox, but maybe I’m assuming too much clue on the part of the “math is hard; let’s go invading” set.

Interesting firsthand account from weblogger L.T. Smash of his journey back from Kuwait (where he’d been for the last eight months): The long road home.

From psychologist Oliver James, as printed in the Guardian, comes this fun piece of psychoanalysis: So, George, how do you feel about your mom and dad? It isn’t anything new, but it’s nice to see it mentioned again.

It’s interesting to me that this story is more or less completely absent from TV. If you get your information from there, you’ll never hear about George Bush as the screwed-up, emotionally stunted eldest child of a neglectful, overachieving dad and a vindictive, abusive mom. But it is precisely that fact (that Bush’s failings are essentially invisible when your only source of information is television) that allowed him to “win” the election and assume office.

There’s a symmetry to it. Bush is the first president in the history of this country to have been raised almost exclusively on television, to the point of being functionally illiterate. Which, as long as you were raised on TV yourself, is no big deal. If anything, his inability to speak in complete sentences is comforting. He sounds like one of us. True, he doesn’t actually say anything coherent once you rise above the level of the scripted sound bite, but if you’ve never read much yourself, that doesn’t come off as a failing. You don’t even notice.

But it matters. What it means is that on a fundamental level, the man is incapable of critical thought. He cannot effectively analyze complex issues. He can’t understand subtle interactions. As I’ve written before, that doesn’t make him a bad president all by itself, but it’s a huge handicap. And combined with his other failings, it’s really, really bad.

James Carroll, writing in the Boston Globe, has a terse analysis: The truth about Iraq.

It’s interesting to me how we’ve basically moved on. The WMD discussion is essentially over: They aren’t there, and weren’t there. These days the focus is on the failure of the justification trotted out after that one: that we invaded Iraq in order to transform it from a brutal dictatorship that was a state-sponsor of terrorism into a pro-Israel democracy that would be a beacon of peace in a troubled region.

So, how’s the peaceful beacon thing coming along? Uh huh. About the same as the last justification.

From the Spring 2003 issue of New Witch magazine, courtesy of Popular Science, courtesy of Janus: The real reason your computer keeps crashing.

Thanks to Ymatt, too, for the nice Houdini image for the new category icon.

I like Wendy McClure’s weblog, Pound, a lot. She mentioned having written an item that appeared in Gapers Block recently, so I went and read it, and it’s pretty cool: Elephants and accidents: The truth about Showmen’s Rest.

Another post, another woman talking about memories of dead people. From Baghdad Burning: Have you forgotten?

In an interview with CNN following up on her notorious open-mouthed kiss with Madonna at the MTV Video Music Awards, Britney Spears had some interesting commentary when asked about her position regarding the war in Iraq: “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.”

That’s my little Mouseketeer.

Interesting story being linked to by a number of pro-war blogs: Commentary: Letter from Baghdad. Published in the right-wing Washington Times, it’s an account by Reverend Ken Joseph, Jr., who according to his bio was initially against the war, but changed his mind after seeing pre-war conditions in Iraq.

What makes this interesting to me is that there is pretty much no way to recconcile his rosy account of current conditions in Baghdad with the much-more-grim portrayal being provided by others, including, for example, everyone’s current-favorite Baghdad blogger, Riverbend.

Here’s an excerpt from Joseph’s piece:

Despite the recent bombings, Baghdad looks dramatically different. The stores are full of supplies. The streets are crowded with people and cars. The buses are working and police are on the streets, directing traffic.

At night the streets are full of pedestrians, many families with children. I am at a loss to reconcile what we see on the ground with what is being reported.

The “regular people” are much better off than they were. Security has improved with Iraqi police everywhere, telephones are starting to work, electricity, while off and on, is relatively stable, the stores are full of food, and, little by little, people are getting jobs back.

Pensions have been paid on time. The schools are working and people for the first time have hope and a future.

Now, here’s an excerpt from a recent piece by Riverbend in her Baghdad Burning weblog (Road trip):

Being out in the streets is like being caught in a tornado. You have to be alert and ready for anything every moment. I sat in the backseat, squinting into the sun, trying to determine if a particular face was that of a looter, or abductor or just another angry countryman. I craned my neck looking at the blue SUV, trying to remember if it had been behind us for the last kilometer or longer. I held my breath nervously every time the cousin slowed down the car because of traffic, willing the cars in front of us to get a move on.

I caught site of two men fighting. A crowd was beginning to gather and a few people were caught in the middle, trying to separate them. My cousin clucked angrily and started mumbling about ignorant people and how all we needed, on top of occupation, was hostility. E. told us not to keep staring and anxiously felt for the pistol under his seat.

The ride that took 20 minutes pre-war Iraq, took 45 minutes today. There were major roads completely cut off by tanks. Angry troops stood cutting off access to the roads around the palaces (which were once Saddam’s but are now America’s palaces). The cousin and E. debated alternative routes at every checkpoint or roadblock. I stayed silent because I don’t even know the city anymore. Now, areas are identified as “the one with the crater where the missile exploded”, or “the street with the ravaged houses”, or “the little house next to that one where that family was killed”…

By the time we got to my aunt’s house, every muscle in my body was aching. My eyes were burning with the heat and the strain. E.’s brow was furrowed with the scenes we had left behind us on the street and the cousin’s hands were shaking almost imperceptibly- knuckles still white with tension. My mother said a prayer of gratitude for our safe arrival and the cousin’s wife, T., swore she wasn’t going to leave my aunt’s house for another three days and if we planned to go home today, we could do so without her because God needed to look out for other people today, not just us…

Even a notorious truth-is-what-we-make-it guy like me can’t view these divergent accounts as the normal result of the differences between two observers’ subjective realities. One of these people (at least) is intentionally lying in an effort to mislead us.

Which one is it? Lies.com: We report. You decide.

The good folks at Science News have a little blurb about “two researchers who actually took the time to contemplate” whether or not there was anyway to delay death while falling into a blackhole. Their solution is a Blackhole LIfe Preserver — which would look just like a life preserver you’d find on a boat, except it needs to be the mass of a large asteroid. Assuming you wear this thing arround your waist, and point your feet (or your head) straight at the blackhole while falling, the gravity the life preserve exerts on you will counteract teh forces of the blackhole and prolonging your life a little while (about 0.09 second) — allowing you to fall a little closer to the hole before rips you to pieces. The whole process has the added bonus of making you get shredded faster once you are torn atom from atom, so you will suffer less. Thank goodness for that.

The article doesn’t mention how exactly you are supposed to go about the process of putting on a life preserver that ways as much as an asteroid — so your milage may very.

(Props to my buddy dave who showed me this article durring our commuting)

Check out thes photos of and by Marine Cpl. Brian Taylor during his recent tour of duty in Iraq: Iraq War - Fox Company, 2nd BN, 23rd Marines. Link courtesy of Sgt. Stryker.

Weblogger Matt Welch has a good article in the Columbia Journalism Review on weblogs: Blogworld. I know there’s been a lot of weblog hype lately, but this article is actually really good.

Sometimes these lies.com stories just take on a life of their own. I’ve never even seen Bowling for Columbine, but it keeps showing up here.

Anyway, here’s Spinsanity’s Brendan Nyhan: Moore alters “Bowling” DVD in response to criticism.

Here’s a long, but exceptionally good, article on everyone’s favorite Bullshit-Artist-in-Chief: The post-modern president. It’s by Josh Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

Here’s a very cool article from the LA Weekly’s Adam Davidson: Keepers of the magic kingdom. It’s about those people you may have seen from time to time (well, if you’re a parent of young children, and sometimes visit a Disney theme park) who are really into that whole Happiest Place on Earth thing. Like, a little too much.

From CheesburgerBrown of Kuro5hin comes this thought-provoking piece: Traffic zoology. I’d comment on what it means, except I’m so busy linking to things I don’t have time to actually read them. So go read it for me, and tell me what I think about it, okay? Thanks.

There’s a really interesting article running at the Washington Post that goes into lots of detail about Bush’s going hat-in-hand back to the UN for help in post-war Iraq: Powell and joint chiefs nudged Bush toward UN.

I’m not sure how much faith to put in the account of who did what when in the continuing battle over the president’s tiny little mind; the information is still coming from the same administration insiders, with their same ongoing interest in spinning things one way or another. But it’s interesting to me to see the details emerging after the fact, having witnessed the events being described from the outside over the last couple of months. Now we’re getting the inside story (or at least one version of it), according to which the post-war debacle we’re currently seeing in Iraq has diminished Rumsfeld’s standing, with much of his mojo flowing to Colin Powell and the career-military rational types.

I dunno; it wouldn’t shock me to have this turn out to just be another case of sending Colin out into the international community to try to get what he can, without actually empowering him to make any concessions. Time will tell, I guess.

I know it’s going to really disturb the manly types, but I think Jonathon Schell is making an excellent point: The importance of losing the war. An excerpt:

Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war – a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time (well, of the next few years, anyway).

Kynn at Shock and Awe points out that Snopes, those perennial debunkers of Internet myths and rumors, have been going to some lengths to cover up a recent failure. Specifically, Snopes had said that Michael Moore was lying when he said that a planeload of Saudis, including Osama bin Laden’s relatives, had been allowed to leave the United States in the days following the 9/11 attacks. Well, it now turns out that that assertion was true. But rather than admit their error, the Snopes folks have gone back and edited their original “debunking”, restating the assertion they are countering in order to set up some straw men they can more-easily knock down, and erasing without comment any mention of Michael Moore’s role in spreading the “false” rumor.

Interesting stuff. Anyway: Snopes: Suddenly less credible.

Following up on that reality-distortion field being propagated either by Riverbend (who writes that current conditions in Baghdad are hellish in the extreme) or Ken Joseph (who writes that it’s great in Baghdad; the stores are stocked, the power’s mostly back on, and people are taking relaxed evening strolls with their families), here’s a firsthand account from columnist Rich Miller: Postwar Iraq moves dangerously close to civil disaster. Sounds a lot more like Riverbend’s Baghdad, in which women, especially, are living in near-constant fear, than Joseph’s.

From presidential press conference snub-ee Helen Thomas: Who’s counting the dead in Iraq? Who indeed.

So, why has Bush suddenly chosen to address the nation? And what is he going to say? For the professionals’ take on these questions, here are a couple of decent articles: From the Washington Post: In speech, Bush to ask Americans and allies for teamwork on Iraq. And from the Chicago Tribune, via SunSpot.net: Bush responds to pressure from his own party.

So much for professionals. On to my own amateur assessment.

The why is easy: because his poll numbers suck. Bush’s approval ratings are now flirting with the low numbers he was recording just before the 9/11 attacks. They’ve continued the steep drop I talked about earlier (see “The silk purse president“) that has been going on since the “Mission Accomplished” photo op on the Abraham Lincoln.

On what he’s going to say, that’s pretty clear, too, based on the inherent politics of the situation, and the hints his people have been dropping. He’s going to tell us we need an additional $80 billion for the next year’s reconstruction effort. He’s going to assert that we need more international assistance in order to succeed in that effort. (Wasn’t that exactly what the president’s opponents were saying prior to the war, only to be smeared as spineless girly-men incapable of standing tall, Texas-style?)

Most of all, he’s going to assert that what is happening in Iraq is a key part of his administration’s ongoing progress in fighting the War on Terra. My guess is that tonight will mark the official shifting of the war’s primary justification to what has come to be called the “flypaper” theory: that we’re taking the fight to the terrorists, on their turf, so we won’t be fighting the battle in US cities.

For a couple of interesting takes on that, let’s have a little point/counterpoint. From scary conservative David Horowitz, writing in the Washington Times: How to look at the war on terror. And from Warblogging.com: Bush to address nation.

Since I probably will watch the address, despite knowing that it will make me nauseous, I’m going to make some specific predictions. I’m lousy at crystal-ball gazing, but at least this way I’ll have something fun to do while watching. I’m not much of a drinker, so I won’t be downing a shot for each of these that comes true (or that fails to come true?), but feel free to use the following ten predictions as inspiration for your own Presidential Address to the Nation Drinking Game:

1. Bush will allude directly to the events of 9/11 at least twice.
2. Bush will say “terror” (well, “terra”) at least 6 times.
3. Bush will not say the words “Osama bin Laden”.
4. Bush will not say the words “Saddam Hussein”.
5. Bush will not refer to weapons of mass destruction, or the ongoing hunt for same.
6. Bush will refer to the ongoing effort to build “a democratic and stable Iraq,” but only in the context of assuring listeners that the slow pace of the current “steady” (read, “non-”) progress in achieving that result is nothing he hadn’t anticipated.
7. Bush will explicitly assert that the ongoing conflict in Iraq is serving to protect US cities from terrorist attack.
8. Bush will explicitly state that critics of his Iraq policies are undercutting the men and women of the armed forces currently deployed there, referring to those men and women as “brave”.
9. Bush will not explicitly mention the resignation of Mahmud Abbas, or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
10. Bush will not mention the domestic economy, tax cuts, or evidence of economic recovery.

While the Bullshit-Artist-in-Chief is laying out new and improved rationales for why we invaded Iraq, and soberly telling us about the sacrifices we Americans will have to make to salvage his failed policies, Riverbend offers another powerful story about the price that the people of Baghdad are already paying: Under the palm leaves.

The more I think about the speech Sunday, the more outraged I get at the way Bush is now using the ‘flypaper’ argument to say the war is protecting US cities from terrorism. See, the Iraqi people had nothing to do with 9/11. So why is it that they’re suddenly nominated as the people in whose neighborhoods this war will be fought?

Grr.

Anyway, Paul Krugman has a column that, while it doesn’t focus on that particular point, does do a great job of showing how the speech ties in nicely with Bush’s history of deflecting blame and making others cover for his failures: Other people’s sacrifice.

Those paying close attention will notice that I erred in predicting that Bush would claim during Sunday’s speech that his critics were aiding the terrorists. Apparently that was deemed incompatible with the leader-of-the-free-world stature they were trying to convey. But Bush’s people couldn’t resist making the point anyway; they just had Donald Rumsfeld do it the next day.

Josh Micah Marshall has a nice write-up at Talking Points Memo that looks at Rumsfeld’s statement, as well as a piece by Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online that makes much the same case: Another postcard from the ‘responsibility era’.

Basically, say Rumsfeld and Kurtz, the president’s policies are fine. The problem is all those people who keep criticizing him. Rumsfeld doesn’t complete the thought out loud, but the obvious conclusion of his argument is that the US would be much better off if such criticism were not allowed.

Ironic, isn’t it? According to Rumsfeld and Kurtz, the only way we will be able to create a free, democratic society in Iraq is if we first replace the system of freedom and democracy we have in this country with something that looks a lot more like… dictatorship.

From AP, via Yahoo, via Janus: FBI probes man who shipped self to Dallas.

From Daypop comes word of a cool new batch of optical illusions: The latest works.

Fun item from The Onion: Relations break down between U.S. and Them. Thanks to badass Hiro for the link.

This is the moment. This is the point in time when Bush either wins or loses the next presidential election. If he waits much longer than this to put his strategy in motion, it won’t matter; he won’t have time to move enough voters into his column. And big strategies take time to implement. If Karl Rove thinks an October, 2004, invasion of Syria, say, is what it will take to get swing voters to vote for Bush, then the preparation for that needs to start now.

Given that fact, I keep coming back to Sunday’s speech, and what it says about Bush’s overall strategy. Say what you will about Rove, you can’t accuse him of thinking small. Everyone’s interpreting the shift in rationale (”Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror”) as a defensive move, a ploy to shore up eroding support in the face of the missing Iraqi WMDs. But maybe it’s actually an offensive move, the first step in expanding the “war on terror” beyond Iraq.

Gwynne Dyer talked about this back in early August, in a piece I linked to then, but which has since disappeared (with a new, unrelated item appearing in its place, thanks to the extremely Web-challenged information architects behind the Jordan Times’ site). Anyway, the piece is still available, thanks to those clueful folks at al-Jazeerah: Welcome to Iraq-Nam. Here’s a key passage:

It [the guerilla war in Iraq] will escalate, and by this time next year the Bush reelection bid will be in serious trouble — so serious only another brief and victorious war against alleged ‘terrorists’ may be able to save it. Washington is already blaming ‘foreign terrorists’ for the non-Baathist resistance in Iraq, and Syria and Iran are going to find themselves filling the same rhetorical role that the Ho Chi Minh trail did in the earlier war. Since Syria is a much softer target than Iran, it is quite likely to be invaded and occupied by American forces before November, 2004 . If there is another major terrorist attack on American soil, that likelihood becomes a near certainty.

That last part is interesting. As things stand today, I don’t think Bush could credibly invade Syria; it would be too transparent a ploy to secure his (re-)election. If you look at the latest update of Pollkatz’s Bush-approval graph, you can see that that steep decline in his post-flight-suit numbers has continued unabated. That’s the thing about people; they just won’t stay fooled. Not enough of them, anyway. And each time you fool them, they get un-fooled faster.

There’s an interesting new poll from ABC News: Was It Worth It? Poll: More Americans Think Iraq War Raises Risk of Anti-U.S. Terror. If you look at those numbers, you get a picture of people getting wise to the reality of Bush’s maneuvers. Republicans by-and-large still think he’s doing great in Iraq, Democrats by-and-large think he’s failing, but it’s those Independents who tell the story. They’re the ones who decide presidential elections, and they’re shifting steadily into the anti-Bush column.

Besides the transparency of the ploy, there’s also that pesky issue of funding. Between the big tax cuts for the rich (and the modest ones for us middle-classers with kids), and his penchant for playing with life-sized army men, Bush has pretty much maxed out his credit cards.

So taken together, this means he’d have a really hard time successfully mounting an election-securing invasion of Syria. At least, he would if he tried to do it today.

But that’s the beauty of it. He doesn’t have to do it today. Today, in fact, would be much too early. He has a whole year to prepare.

So; what form might those preparations take? Well, as Dyer mentioned, another terrorist attack on US soil would do nicely. Would Bush intentionally allow such a thing to happen, to help his own political fortunes? Hopefully not. But I’d certainly believe him capable of engineering a reasonable facsimile without the high body count; a near-miss, maybe, dramatic enough to be really scary in its implications.

Or not; again, the transparency of his motivations in creating such a Reichstag fire would make it risky. If too many of his fingerprints were on it, it could end up being counter-productive.

There are other actors in this drama, though, who might be willing to help out. Ariel Sharon, for example. Sharon has a very powerful interest in helping Bush get elected, and he might well be able to create enough mischief (invading Lebanon? a bombing campaign in Syria?) to give Bush a pretext for an invasion somewhere.

And then there’s Osama bin Laden. I realize this is going to make right-wingers start talking about tin-foil hats, but I think the leader of al Qaeda might very well decide that the best thing for continuing his plans to foment an all-encompassing war between Islam and the West would be to return George Bush to office. So far, Bush has been a perfect accomplice. Throughout the Islamic world, anti-American sentiment is up, recruiting is up, and the hated secular regime in Iraq has been overthrown, paving the way for a rise of Islamic fundamentalism there.

Which brings me back to Sunday’s speech. Maybe the shift in rationale goes beyond trying to float a new justification for the war. Maybe the president’s latest taunting (”We’ve taken the fight to the enemy! Our cities are safe because the people being blown to little bloody bits are on their turf, not ours!”) is intended, on some level, to encourage another attack on the US. Maybe Bush is intentionally baiting bin Laden and his followers, as with his earlier “Bring ‘em on!” statement. Maybe the whole thing is part of a grand design for electoral victory.

I don’t know. Bush is a mean-spirited man, with a hard, twisted little heart, and Karl Rove is famously willing to do anything in pursuit of victory. But still. I guess if you strapped me down in a Guantanamo interrogation facility and injected me with truth serum I’d have to admit that I doubt Bush is pursuing such a strategy consciously. But then again, Bush doesn’t have to be conscious of the strategy in order for it to work. Maybe Bush is just “being himself,” talking tough without any clear idea of the response he might provoke, consulting his gut rather than his head, doing what feels right to his perpetually chip-on-the-shoulder inner child. Bush is absurdly unsubtle, completely lacking in insight into his own motivations. He’s oblivious to the fact that he’s engaged in a dance of ever-escalating violence with a partner who is equally focused on achieving an apocalyptic outcome, each side convinced that “his” God will see to it that, in the end, his own side prevails. Emotionally, Bush wants this fight, and is incapable of backing away from it.

But Rove is a different story. As much as anyone in the Bush administration, Rove is a pragmatist. He knows what the strategy is, with all its emotional baggage stripped away. It would be really interesting to get Karl Rove in that interrogation chamber for a few hours and see what emerged of his unfiltered thinking. Scary, but interesting.

From Hiro comes word of this scary story: Border breach? It describes how ABC News, preparing an exposé on lax port security, shipped some depleted uranium from Jakarta to LA, easily avoiding detection by the people allegedly safeguarding us from smuggled dirty bombs. Which is a little scary, I guess.

But it’s the second half of the article that is really scary. It describes how, faced with the fact that they’d been made to look bad by the journalists, the government turned around and started hassling them (showing up unannounced at participants’ residences, misidentifying themselves as FBI agents, attempting to obtain taped footage of the incidents, threatening heavy legal sanctions, and so on).

No, I’m not bitching about life in a police state; it sounds like none of the stuff that authorities did to the ABC people was really all that awful. Except for what it says about the administration’s overall approach to homeland security: What? Someone found chinks in our armor? Well then; we’ll just use some of our post-9/11 police powers in an attempt to intimidate the messenger and cover up the problem.

This is, of course, consistent with the Bush administration’s behavior in other areas. And it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Not in a moral sense (well, it’s wrong that way, too), but in a practical sense. It’s like the mid-level NASA managers trying to ignore the chatter about safety risks bubbling up from the engineers. Yes, acknowledging problems might make someone look bad, and correcting them might cost some time, effort, and money. Guess what? That’s called “accountability,” and if you don’t have it, well, you’ve got even bigger problems than you realize.

This is so wrong. Gah.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman has another good op-end piece, this one on the unfortunate fact that Osama bin Laden is probably pleased as punch at the way the initial campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan morphed step by step into an assault on the heart of Islam proper, in Iraq: bin Laden’s wish granted.

This isn’t really news, but it provides a good summing up of a sad situation. From the New York Times: Foreign views of US darken since 9/11.

From The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker comes this troubling analysis: Another fine mess. According to Whitaker, who cites a new report from academic peacenik Paul Rogers, Bush’s “War on Terror” is failing to have any particular impact on the identified enemy.

I’m not sure I go all the way with the spin on this one. The Guardian is pretty famously one-sided in its view of things; sort of a Fox News-lite of the left. But even shading the conclusions with that in mind, it’s still a damning datapoint. By the particular measurements the report employed, at least, the Bush administration’s anti-terror campaign really isn’t achieving much good at all. And it’s certainly achieving plenty of bad.

I’m going to quote Vincent Vega again: “It’s the little differences.” Like the way European airports apparently have a thing about embossing make-believe insect “targets” onto the urinals in their airports: The urinals of Amsterdam airport Schiphol.

Don’t stop there, though; check out the entire pantheon of world urinals that is urinal.net.

Whoa; this is freaky. I’m in the process of posting this item, having mentioned it in Ishar, the mud where I’m fortunate enough to spend my days hanging out with assorted gods and heroes, and lo and behold, Hiro mentions that actually, that site (urinal.net) is hosted on the machine maintained by none other than Ishar deity Danthar.

Weird. Since I didn’t hear about the site from Danthar, but from the (as far as I can tell entirely unrelated) Geekfun links. So. Small world, and all that. At least as long as you’re willing to limit the pool of subject matter to things like, um, urinal-obsessed website creators.

At first I wasn’t going to run a link to this, since it’s kinda, I dunno, dirty or something. But then I thought, fuck it.

Anyway, from the fine people at cosmo7.com: Recording artists safety guide to the beach.

Paul Krugman looks at the Bush team’s track record, and their current situation, and draws what looks to me like an inescapable conclusion: the 2004 presidential campaign will be sordid and ugly, even by modern presidential-campaign standards. Which is saying a lot. Exploiting the atrocity.

Yes, I didn’t do any self-absorbed commentary on the anniversary yesterday; just more of my usual self-absorbtion. But here’s something that I think expresses a worthwhile sentiment: On rising above fear to make a better world.

George Paine of Warblogging, in ranting about Bush’s speech two days ago calling for setting aside the Fourth Amendment, channels Joseph Welch, the attorney who famously asked Sentator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no decency, sir?”: Exploiting September 11.

Buzzflash has a good interview: Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Author of “The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century”.

…then it’s just fun — er … wait a minute … acctually this doesn’t sound fun at all, this sounds seriously messed up: “A man was hospitalised with torn intestines after a friend, attempting a practical joke, pressed an air compressor to his…” Ouch.

Here’s a fun little item from Counterpunch’s Gary Leupp: The matrix of ignorance. It features the following pop quiz:

Which of the following best indicates the relationship between Arabs and Muslims?

1. All Muslims are Arabs.
   
2. All Arabs are Muslims.
   
3. Most Muslims aren’t Arabs.
   
4. Most Muslims are Arabs.
   

In which Muslim countries do Christian churches and Jewish synagogues operate legally, as well as mosques?

1. Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq.
   
2. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Somalia.
   
3. Pakistan, Sudan, United Arab Emirates.
   
4. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan.
   

According to the U.S. government (which may or may not be accurate in its report), the nineteen 9-11 hijackers were of what nationalities?

1. 15 Saudis, 4 Iraqis.
   
2. 14 Iraqis, 3 Saudis, 2 Yemenis.
   
3. 15 Saudis, 1 Egyptian, 1 Lebanese, 2 from union of Arab Emirates.
   
4. 14 Iranians, 2 Afghans, 2 Lebanese, 1 Iraqi.
   

Scroll down, or follow the link below, or just see the whole Counterpunch article at the link above, for the answers. (Note me smirking smarmily at my 3-for-3. See? That Poli Sci degree and the obsessive news-junkie behavior was good for something.)
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Good lord; Dick Cheney’s Sunday appearance on Meet the Press was really shameless. Josh Micah Marshall discusses it in detail: Apparently he can’t help himself.

This is so cool. You may remember the earlier lies.com item on the strange tale of Terrifica vs. Fantastico. Well, there’s a new real-world superhero in the news: Angle-Grinder Man, who wears a blue leotard and gold boots while he patrols the streets of Kent and London, removing wheel clamps from the cars of those victimized (er, victimised) by an oppressive government.

I remember the August, 1977, issue of Analog magazine. I read it in my bedroom, upstairs at the back of my father and stepmother’s condo, the same room where I listened to Bad Company’s Running with the Pack and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis. I remember that issue for just one reason: it contained a really cool short story called “Ender’s Game” by a first-time author named Orson Scott Card.

Wow, I thought. This guy is awesome.

He’s still awesome: MP3s are not the devil (part 1).

I know this is going to bug some people. Actually, I think it bugs me, on some level. But I think I have to link to it anyway: Fetopia. Thanks (I think) to Tuesday of This Girl Thinks for bringing it to my attention.

I recently finished the #1 nonfiction bestseller in America: Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (Salon excerpt, Oliver Willis’ review). And the book is awesome. It’s funny, honest, and well-researched. I’m sure it will come in for a coordinated smear campaign from the right, though the pre-emptive strike by Fox only seems to have helped sales, so maybe they’ll figure out that ignoring it would be a better policy. Heh. Which I’m sure will drive some people (like Bill O’Reilly) crazy.

But anyway, it’s a great book. I’m going to fair-use some of the conclusion, because it sums up the book’s underlying message nicely, and ties in with something I wanted to say:

Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m proud of it. It’s a term we need to reclaim. Because I believe most Americans are liberals just like me. Most Americans believe in helping people. And most Americans believe that the government has a role to play — to create opportunity, to protect the environment, to provide for the common good.

We are the country, but they control it. Only 7 percent of Americans say they want to weaken environmental regulations. But the 7 percent are in charge.

How do we get it back? We have to fight. But we can’t fight like they do. People say that Rush and Fox and their ilk are popular because they’re entertaining. And if you can stomach that stuff, I suppose they are. But a part of their entertainment value comes from their willingness to lie and distort. They fight with lies.

We can’t do that. We have to fight them with the truth. Our added entertainment value will have to come from being funny and attractive. And passionate. And idealistic. But also smart. And not milquetoast-y. We’ve got to be willing to throw their lies in their face.

He’s right. If we don’t, the liars will be happy to take as much slack as we’re willing to give them. Like Ann Coulter’s comment the other day, mentioned by Adam with the link text Scheming psychotic monster. Or like Dick Cheney on Meet the Press last Sunday (nicely debunked by this article from the Boston Globe: Cheney link of Iraq, 9/11 challenged).

We have to be willing to call them on it. And we have to play fair — but we don’t have to let them use our willingness to be open-minded against us. For example, we don’t always have to adhere to self-imposed “fairness” guidelines involving equal time and civil discourse that the other side routinely violates. Sure, we should be polite when it’s warranted. And not when it’s not. But we decide who deserves which kind of treatment, and how much of it.

I’ve been thinking about this in connection with some of the responses I’ve received to a comment I made on Donald Sensing’s One Hand Clapping weblog (see the original post, Osama bin Laden’s strategic plan, and my comments here, here, and here).

Donald Sensing had a distinguished career as an Army officer, and is now an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. He’s informed, articulate, and under normal circumstances he displays a high degree of honor and integrity. But if he posts bullshit, I’m going to call him on it. And I kinda think he did in this case. Maybe I’m wrong. If it turns out I am, I’ll apologize. But by my standards, the tone I’ve used is appropriate.

Update: Heh. New record for the elapsed time between my asserting a willingness to apologize if something occurs, and my issuing said apology. Well, not quite that apology, but close enough. Later update: Subsequent post by Donald Sensing, and ensuing discussion, including an apology for reals.

Rumsfeld denies knowledge of Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and any direct involvement by Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Film at 11:00. Defense chief sees no link between Iraq and al-Qaida’s Sept. 11 attacks

Martin Kelley at Nonviolence.org posted an item on September 11 that I didn’t notice at the time, but am very glad I noticed now: Big lies & mass hysteria. He sums things up very nicely. Truly, we’re living in a land ruled by myths and nutjobs.