a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group
As part of its efforts to counter what it calls "misinformation" in the Iraq media, the US military has been secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories.
[..]

"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it," said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

Tom Regan | csmonitor.com 01.12.05
17 deeper links in story

She'll always be part of Lincoln Financial Field

As security chased after him, Noteboom held out a plastic bag and dumped its contents onto the field while sprinting away from his pursuers.
Philadelphia police released a statement saying that the suspect "spilled a powdery substance from a container onto the field. The substance was that of the defendant's mother's cremated remains."
Once the bag was empty, Noteboom dropped it, made the sign of the cross, fell to his knees, then plopped flat on the ground.

from comments to this article:

"...scripture confirms that the dead don't see the living."
-
"Marmitons Etrangers fous!!!" (tran.)

Arizona Republic
-
"The man who was arrested after spreading his mother's ashes at Lincoln Financial Field during Sunday's Eagles game returned to Arizona yesterday to overwhelming support, the Arizona Republic reported."

Philly.com
-

A newscaster, I think it was CNN's Cavuto but I'm not sure, went right from a clip of this brightly ghoulish event to a viewer poll asking "Where would you like to go?" or something like that I'm not sure what the phrase was, the question being I guess if it was your ashes, where would you like to be scattered etc. No editorial comment other than the default of "Hey, we're okay with that if you are." Not one scrap of recognition that there might be something so thoroughly appalling about that sight that most non-literary viewers of it would find it unspeakable. It's the victory dance of the swine.
Just before or after that, I'm not sure, on a different channel Seymour Hersh was on Hardball essentially saying though not explicitly except that Matthews threw up a quote from Hersh in I think 2003 that said essentially that Cheney and Rove were keeping Bush in a state of religious dementia/megalomania.
In order to manipulate him, and through him, the country.
And just now some kind of panel, I'm not sure what it was called, but the way the guys I heard talk were talking it was some kind of Catholic panel, on C-SPAN, concerned with the now amazing 5 Catholics on the U. S. Supreme Court - first time in history, etc. - and whether this was an event or a non-event.
First the less mediagenic one was saying things about how Earl Warren, a "liberal" and not a Catholic, was the most scripture-quoting judge the S.C. has had yet, or maybe has had yet in modern times, I'm not sure - the idea being I guess that tolerating Earl Warren's scripture-quoting should lead right into tolerating religious delusions in men and women who will shape the country's future more directly and immediately, and for longer, than any elected official will.
The mediagenic one said something to the effect that expecting a man or woman charged with the duties and responsibilities of adjudicating from the highest court in the land to set aside his or her religious beliefs in order to perform as a fair and impartial jurist was not an unreasonable expectation.
That's when I turned it off.
The hypocritical absurdity of saying that - that someone could believe in eternity and the immortality of the soul and Biblical commandments and infallible Papal directives etc. etc. - yet put all that aside because a set of human laws that are less than 250 years old requires it, is nauseating. Almost as nauseating as the deranged smugness behind the superstitious beliefs themselves.
A really great example of that is the lack of concern in the President for the souls he's been releasing into the next world.
"Who cares? We're all immortal! Their problem if they aren't right with God! Yee-haw!"
These three phenomena, the ashes, the President's delusions, the Catholic mumbo-jumbo, are one phenomenon.
And the bogus debates about "evolution" and "I.D.", and the virulent arguments about abortion, and the fascist drug laws, and the bigoted discrimination against gays - they're all part of the same thing.
It will be evil to those it doesn't benefit, and good to those it does.
Evil is like any other form of moral distinction, when there's a war the winners write the new definitions.
And the next conflict takes its form and essence from that. It keeps refining and repeating itself. Cleansing and purging its environment.
And when the valence is the self evil and good are much easier to calibrate than when there's some kind of other, outside the self, at the center of things.
It's that we're trained not to think of these groups and institutions as being capable of selfishness, or of an existence independent from their current memberships.
But of course they are, any sin, any crime, any flaw that individuals can have can be seen in the churches and nations that humans create around themselves to insure their own survival; and they exist through time on a scale human lives can't match.
The illusion persists in the names of the groups and institutions seeming to describe what's there. This allows an invisibility and adaptive rebirth, a shucking of the old shell, casting aside identities that outlive their utility.
Protestantism emerges from the corrupt cess of what was "the Church". Fundamentalisms emerge like larva from the nest of that, and out of them come splinters and sects and amorphous groups whose identities shapeshift as required.
Trying to speak to that is impossibly complex. What kind of morality that doesn't come from outside the system could possibly work?
This may seem arcane and bizarrely tangential but I'll suggest a look at how acceptable the deaths of individuals become when ordered by a centralized human agency like the government or the church militant or any other of the large vague creations of human coming-together. Especially when the deaths themselves are "collateral".
The simpler point is that groups can be as selfish as individuals.
And selfishness is the prime of all evil.
-
It's no wonder evolution is such a disturbing topic. It's what the antagonism against the concept's really about - the struggle for control of the human evolutionary process, itself now entirely, or very nearly, in human hands.
That's an irony that just won't go away for me, that the erstwhile champions of science and reason, stripped of wishful thinking and received fantasy, can never acknowledge that evolution itself has been beaten into submission, that the processes that sculpted our intelligence and adaptive grace, our social cohesion and communicative strengths, have been broken - and replaced by the formative pressures of human agencies.
But then that might involve accidentally waking people up to what's been done to them, and is being done, and then there might still be enough of us left to resist.
The dominance plan won't be as easy to accomplish if people wake up to it.
So keep them thinking there is no truth, no logic behind anything.
Just "scripture" and a vague presence outside the frame - and keep them strung out on timid daily comforts and the steady possibility of gratification - acceptable desires and the needs of the organism.
With a backdrop of eternal joy that can be turned on and off at will, so that immediate human concerns can be exaggerated or trivialized as necessary - the death of a baby in the womb a grotesque criminal nightmare, the death of a child under a rain of white phosphorus the price of "staying the course" and "finishing the job".

Other police chiefs in the news.
-
link Far Outliers

There was a police chief on the news the other day, from the town where the latest "jailbreak" occurred, getting interviewed by one the high-class girls the networks throw up to maintain viewer interest. She was asking those tough questions you know, and at a key moment she actively sneered at him. She said "Unh-huh" in that "Oh yeah, right" tone of voice that's unmistakably a sign of disrespect and superior values.



So I wanted to say something about that, but what?
See? See who you guys were working for the whole time? Can you see it now?
Can you see where the power really is?
I wanted to say that. And I wanted to point out the extraordinary visual presentations these women make. Like Penthouse girls from the mid-70's. And how indistinguishable they are from the network and the news itself - and most seriously from the exercized but invisible will of the men who control the networks.
Kindergarten teachers for the permanently infantilized.
But they're a front, you know. They have nothing to do with the attitudes and moral positions the television as a thing itself displays.
They're "professionals", they're picked and groomed and educated to do what they do, and they're as replaceable as cars and they know it and they're as desperate as you'd expect someone in that position with that much at stake to be.

He becomes the face of our sky...

"After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation.
The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war."

E. L. Doctorow in an otherwise brilliantly reasoned and impassioned condemnation of George Bush as an unfeeling and damaged man who should not have been allowed to become President of the United States.
He glosses over the fundamentalist's view of death as merely a threshold experience, to paint Bush as a sociopath, which a point could be made that the fundamentalist view of death enables, actually should enable a sociopathic tolerance of death and suffering in others, especially those designated inferior and/or "bad". In the same way the prophecies of the Book of Revelation give cheer to certain religious minds and hearts when coupled with news of a catastrophically warming planet. Reconciling Judeo-Christian disdain for life with the clamor for revenge and earthly eye-for-eye justice is beyond the scope of this post.
The business of Neanderthals as prototypes of militant brutality though, is what concerns me. Because the image we have of them is from their murderers I believe, and from the heirs of their murderers, and the stories that have traditionally been told to disguise the crimes of extinction were until recently all we had to go on.
It's too much like the savages and primitive spear-carrying animals that were the default images of aboriginals in the recent past - a lie that was necessary in order that the privileged children wouldn't find out too soon how savage their own ancestry was, so that the illusion of civilization, with its shackles and rewards and thin veneer of gentleness, could be carried forward.
The Neanderthals' brains were roughly ten percent larger than those of modern humans. They buried their dead, they had symbolic figurines and artwork.
They lived successfully.
My guess is they were driven to extinction the same way so many other creatures have been. The story of Cain and Abel comes to mind.
This sentence mirrors exactly the post-Columbian experience of the natives of the "New World":

"The Neanderthals were highly successful over a large region for a substantial period of time, but this situation changed dramatically with the arrival in Europe of the first modern humans, Homo sapiens."
Hominids and hybrids: The place of Neanderthals in human evolution
Tattersall/Schwartz National Academy of Sciences

The pseudo-controversy over whether they were violently eliminated or sexually/genetically absorbed isn't central, both are possible and likely, remnants of the extermination having no choice but assimilation - but their culture, as a distinct alter-human presence, was eliminated and there's nothing in the subsequent behavior of the surviving species to indicate it was anything other than oppressively violent.

Dirge

There was a woman on TV yesterday talking to Wolf Blitzer about how lame it is for people to criticize the "war" and what that criticism does to the brave and valiant young men and women who are suffering the "war" first-hand in Iraq.
She had this thing she did with her forehead that was like a gun kind of, like it was a gun lying on the table in front of her that she would sort of absently put her hand on, like she would put her hand on it now and again, just to let everybody know what was up. A frown with a lot of anger behind it. A warrior's frown. She was a neo-con ninjette.
Meaning it was intimidating, intentionally so - aggressive, with a lot of violence in back of it.
Her thesis, or talking point, or diversion - I don't what to call it because it doesn't matter, there isn't a pejorative for it, it's a release of chemicals, it doesn't have any higher attributes.
This is no longer about truth or morality or any of the old ways of looking at human action - it's only about winning. It's a pig's ethical stance. The last angry screams of the swine. Worse.
Her position was it doesn't matter why American soldiers are killing and being killed in Iraq, it doesn't matter how many lies were told to get them there and keep them there - because they're there and we have to "finish the job" and "honor them".
Prohibition ended after a couple decades of alcohol being illegal. It just stopped one day, because the laws had changed. People had died because of those laws, law enforcement officers had given their lives to enforce them, organized crime was made wealthy and far more powerful than it had been, and then one day it didn't matter anymore. Tuesday a cop was risking his life arresting bootleggers and Wednesday it didn't count. Honoring that sacrifice could have been used as an argument against legalization.
It doesn't matter how many lies they told to get the public to go along with invading Iraq, or how many lies they tell about what's happening there now, it doesn't matter how irrevocably this tears down the possibilities, what might have been and what was - what was still here in some form when I was young. All that matters now is the fire and the dying.
And the gloating thing that rises from it.
-
I tried for a half hour or so to find out who she was but I couldn't get it off the CNN website and I neglected to do so when I snapped the TV off in disgust.
She was herself a weapon in someone's arsenal. Who exactly is never going to be something I'll know for certain, and I've made my peace with that, but whoever it is we're enemies now, for keeps. Forever. There's my line in the sand.
You crossed it, we're done.
You can blow this world straight to hell, I'm a lot less ambivalent about that than I was a month ago, and you seem about to do it anyway; and every day that looks a little better, because it means you'll be going too.

The bombing of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan was followed by a presentation on the normally party-line Tucker Carlson vehicle "The Situation" of Prof. Stephen E. Jones and his wild and somewhat wacky theories on the WTC 9/11 event, his main premise being that the CIA and other traditional shadowy government persons were responsible.
So you have a catastrophe - Jordan - and then you have an easily dismissable theory about the agencies and individuals responsible for another, primal, iconic, catastrophe - 9/11, showing up on a major news outlet right after.
That means anybody saying "Hey, this looks mighty hinky" about the Amman bombings has to sign up with Prof. Stephen E. Jones.
The article linked below presents a lot of pretty reasonable ideas about the bombings.
Notice that not long after the event there was a nearly identical bombing in Iraq, involving a suicide bomber a hotel and dozens of victims, which further diluted the Amman bombings' immediacy.
Nearly everything the media reported as official statement about the Jordanian event stinks of duplicity.
an awkward dilemma:

"Of course, there is nothing to information emanating from 'al-Qaeda' other than websites that could be being run by conceivably anyone. (That such websites are allowed to operate with impunity is clear evidence that they are not what they purport to be. In any case, who has actually seen the webpages in question? I haven't seen anywhere a single link to the website on which al-Qaeda supposedly issued its communiques.) But the alleged al-Qaeda websites are now in the convenient position of being able to confirm everything that the authorities have been saying. This would seem to be a godsend not for 'al-Qaeda' but for the authorities 'investigating' the atrocities, authorities who are no doubt under great pressure at the moment to reach politically acceptable conclusions.
Al-Qaeda's sudden co-operativeness in helping the investigation speed towards a predetermined conclusion is as deeply suspicious as its solicitude for the Israeli Jews staying at the Radisson, who were escorted to safety several hours before the attacks.* (Interestingly, the only Israeli citizen who remained behind was an Israeli Arab.) Who can seriously believe that attacks on three hotels - of which two (including the Radisson) are owned by Palestinians - in an Arab country that killed 'two high-ranking Palestinian security officials, a senior Palestinian banker and the commercial attache at the Palestinian embassy in Cairo' while Israeli Jews were allowed to escape could be anything other than an Israeli terror operation? Especially when the Israeli authorities who evacuated the Israeli hotel guests did not share their concerns with Jordanian or hotel security?"

Some Gulf War vets were on CSPAN yesterday, testifying about nerve-damage and mysterious illnesses and the neglect and mis-diagnosis many of their brothers have suffered under the Veterans Administration - it was another event in the short but growing list of brave Americans turning their strength and courage toward the real enemies of freedom and the people with valor and dignity
and given their testimony
and given the treatment of the poor in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina
and given the cuts in aid programs the Congress is enacting
and given the miasmic rise of Social Darwinism as consumer surpluses contract from the recent Age of Plenty
and given the heartless disregard for the hundreds of thousands of killed and maimed Iraqis that seems to be almost a public trait of the national character now
and given the statistics on imprisonment in the US, especially among young black males
and given all the other signs that point clearly and directly to a willingness and an appetite for the designation and use of populations seen as disposable and inferior by the architects of current social policy
this accusation doesn't seem quite as farfetched and hysterical as it should:

ALERT: EPA TO ALLOW PESTICIDE
TESTING ON ORPHANS & MENTALLY
HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

"a bucket truck, a lamppost, and 5 minutes of installation"
google wi-fi's Mtn. View
-

On the one hand yeah, google wants to own your thoughts; but on the other hand when I was a kid the "phone book" - which was produced and delivered by the "phone company" - was a well-designed tool, with thoughtful extras provided without venal motive.
An atomized telecom industry has devolved the "phone book" into unintuitive spam - it doesn't represent, or rather it does too well.
I think Google should be given AMTRAK.

Whitney Harris, member of the prosecuting team at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, interviewed by Spiegel International on the 60th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial

Harris: It took more than 20 years before I was able to cope with it again. Even nowadays this horrific event in the history of humanity still really affects me. All these gruesome crimes are not exclusively a German phenomenon.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Rather?

Harris: I am totally convinced that Adolf Hitler was only a name that symbolized the absolute and worldwide breakdown of morality in the 20th century. It started in 1914 with World War I when everyone killed everyone and no moral standards remained. Revenge was the order of the day and any excuse was permissible. And afterwards? What did the communists do in Russia? And the Japanese in China?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And nowadays?

Harris: The same problems. You just have to look at terrorism -- nobody knows where it might end. If we want a future for our children, if we want to survive then we desperately need to examine our political and moral attitudes.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In what respect?

Harris: We cannot tolerate war in this world anymore. Wars are not only disastrous for the societies directly involved but also fatal for all of mankind.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is it not an irony of history that of all people it's the USA which fiercely refuses to ratify the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court in The Hague?

Harris: I am a strong advocate of the International Criminal Court and find it completely unacceptable that the US has still not ratified the statute. The US however also took 40 years to sign the United Nations Convention on Genocide. How can you possibly take that long to take a stance against genocide?

Headline: display-size text, usually placed at the top of an article or advertisement, that summarizes the message

Copy protection an experiment in progress
-
Anti-piracy software accused of license violation
-
Sony BMG CDs causing glitches in computers
-

Sony infects more than 500k networks, including military and govt
-
Sony's rootkit uninstaller is *really* dangerous
-
Sony anti-customer technology roundup and time-line
-
Immunize Yourself Against Sony's Dangerous Uninstaller

Four bombings in Trinidad since August.
Trinidad is an island about 20 miles off the coast of Venezuela.
Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, is the man Pat Robertson said the US government might as well go ahead and assassinate instead of wasting time and money messing around with intimidating him.
None of the bombings were fatal.
Trinidad bombings timeline
-
Islamic leader denies involvement in Trinidad bombings

Yasin Abu Bakr, leader of the Jamaat al-Muslimeen group, was released Sunday along with four teenage followers after spending 36 hours in police custody for questioning in Friday's explosion in Trinidad's capital.
The blast, the fourth to rattle Port of Spain in as many months, injured 14 people, including three who were in serious condition.
[...]Police said the device used in Friday's bombing was similar to those used in the three previous attacks. All four explosions went off around the same day of each month.

-
Trinidad police detain Israeli; may be linked to bombings

Trinidadian authorities have detained an Israeli national found living in a remote mountainous area east of the capital, police said, declining to state if he was being questioned in connection with a recent spate of bombings in the Caribbean island nation.
A string of bombings, the latest one occuring last Thursday, have rocked the capital of Port-of-Spain. The bombings have injured 28 people.
Authorities identified the detained man as Dahtang Mik Agarunov, 26. They said he was found living in a wooden shack in Arouca, about 10 miles east of Port-of-Spain. Agarunov was detained on Friday and questioned by Interpol, Trinidadian police and immigration officials.

$100 laptop:
In developing societies children are perceived to have a place in helping the family advance, not in racing ahead and leaving the family behind.

The loss of Bethlehem

The Mayor of Bethlehem arrives in London today (Wednesday 9 November) to declare Bethlehem an open city and announce that his city is to issue a Bethlehem passport, open to anyone in the world.
The initiative is designed to transcend the imprisonment of his city by a combination of the illegal wall and militarised fences, with only two gates to the outside world.
[...]
The current situation is grim. The walls and fences that encircle Bethlehem have turned this 4000 year old city into a prison for its 160,000 citizens. The number of tourists visiting Bethlehem has dropped from nearly 92,000 in 2000 to a mere 7,249 in 2004.

Bethlehem Bloggers

Changing Arctic: Indigenous Perspectives
Chapter 3 (pdf)
ACIA Scientific Report
Arctic Climate Impact Assessment:

Heikki Hirvasvuopio:

"...especially with ground birds, we could be talking about a near extermination when compared to the previous amounts. I used to hunt them quite a lot while reindeer herding, so I have a good idea of the stocks. We cannot even talk now about the same amounts during the same day. This affects especially ptarmigans, capercaillie, and ground birds.
With small singing birds, the same trend is visible. Nowadays it is silent in the forest - they do not sing in the same way anymore. It used to be that your ears would get blocked as the singing was so powerful before.
-
Today we can have almost 30 degrees of variation in temperature in a very small time period. In the olden days the Saami would have considered this almost like an apocalypse if similar drastic changes had taken place so rapidly. Before I spent all of my winters in the forest and was at home for one week at the most. Nowadays the traditional weather forecasting cannot be done anymore as I could before.Too many significant and big changes have taken place. Certainly some predictions can be read from the way a reindeer behaves and this is still a way to look ahead, weatherwise. But for the markers in the sky we look now in vain. Long term predictions cannot be done anymore."

-
Weather, rain, and extreme events
[Olga] Avdeyeva reported that climate variation had been witnessed locally and had caused alarm.

"I would say the climate is warming globally, we have already observed this here. For example the reindeer herders coming out off the tundra have said that last year the bogs and rivers stayed open for a long time and it was hard to gather the reindeer.
If this event was previously due in November, now we have it in December or January. Bogs stay unfrozen for a long time and it is very difficult to try to catch reindeer in such conditions.
The herders say the climate has warmed and everything is a result of that."

Avdeyeva pointed out that change is more than general warming. Extreme events have been seen mostly in the spring time.
"This year we had thunder in May, and usually this occurs in July."

"If they were an Oreck employee before the hurricane they still have a job"
Oreck Corporation:

"Oreck's was the first factory along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to be back in business. Our employees and their families in Long Beach, Mississippi are living at the factory in portable housing powered by generators. We're providing doctors, nurses, food, water and grief management counselors to aid them. We're doing everything humanly possible to help put their lives back together, and they are working hard to bring you the finest vacuum cleaners money can buy.
We have been overwhelmed by the generosity shown to the Gulf Coast communities by the American people, but there's much more to be done. In that spirit, when you purchase any Oreck XL Deluxe vacuum, we will donate an Oreck vacuum to a hurricane survivor. It costs you nothing extra."

Inuit in Global Issues
Sheila Watt-Cloutier/ICC 2003:

"We have begun to appreciate the importance of the wisdom of the land in regaining the health of our families and communities. The land not only teaches the technical skills of aiming a gun or harpoon or skinning a seal, it teaches what is required to survive, giving confidence to our people. It builds the character skills of judgement, courage, patience, strength under pressure, and withstanding stress, which together is the wisdom that will help our young people to change, to choose life over self-destruction.

-

The Arctic: Its People and Climate Change
Sheila Watt-Cloutier/ICC 2005:

"...in the late 1980s reconnaissance research in northern Canada showed that many Inuit women had levels of certain persistent organic pollutants - such as DDT and PCB - in their blood and bodies well above those in women in the South, with worrying public health implications. Studies in Japan, USA and Western Europe showed measurable health effects in people at levels at POPs lower than that found in Inuit.
Used in industry and agriculture and released to the environment in tropical and temperate lands, some POPs were reaching the Arctic sink on air currents. Bioaccumulating and biomagnifying in the food web, particularly the marine food web, Inuit were ingesting POPs by eating seals, whales and walrus. POPs were passed to the unborn through the placenta, and to infants through breast milk.
[...]
Science and traditional knowledge in the Arctic are saying the same things: climate change is happening now, it is getting worse, it is causing environmental change, and northerners are trying to adapt to it already.

Inuit hunters and elders report:

• melting permafrost causing beach slumping and increased coastal erosion;
• longer sea-ice free seasons;
• new species of birds and fish—barn owls, robins, pin-tailed ducks and salmon—invading the region;
• invasion of mosquitoes and blackflies;
• unpredictable sea-ice conditions; and
• melting glaciers creating torrents in place of streams.

We have lost through the sea-ice experienced and seasoned hunters traveling in areas formerly quite safe. It is now much more difficult to "read" the sea-ice. The environment is becoming much more unpredictable.

Mr. Bush says.

President Bush is stepping up his attacks on Democrats in the U.S. Congress who have challenged his handling of crucial evidence prior to the war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took on his critics once again during a speech to military personnel in Alaska.
President Bush stopped at an air force base near Anchorage (Alaska) while traveling to Asia for a week of summitry, speeches, meetings and public appearances in four countries.
He used his last few minutes of the trip on American soil to fire a parting shot at his critics.
"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," Mr. Bush says.

This is framing. Critics are Democrats. The conflict is between the Democrats and the Republicans. The game is preserved as a game, a contest between two teams.
But it's possible to care about these things and not be one or the other.
What's worrisome is the possibility that whatever put Bush in office and fed him the lies that he told us is ready to switch if it has to, to put a Democrat where he is, to continue the work.
By making it seem that this is a much simpler reality, where uniforms and team logos are what they appear to be, the manufacturers of the con can proceed unmolested.
A lot of noise was generated by the "incompetence" of the occupying power, the lack of a "game plan" for the occupation. The breakdown of infrastructure in Iraq, the very real fact that most Iraqis are far less secure now than they were before the invasion, with even basic utilities less available, that's all a result of lack of foresight. Or is it?
The unspoken, and unspeakable, idea - that this was the plan, that the goal all along was a crippled dependent state, hamstrung by factionalism and easily slapped down if it begins to get too coherent - has no place in the public dialog.
So the push is to create a debate where the only participants are already suited up and out on the field with its carefully drawn lines and rules, the stands filled with passive spectators who can only back one side or the other.
Lots of us who believe Bush and his cohort cynically misdirected the public and outright lied to them - his cohort especially including the media, who are collectively more responsible for the public's belief in outright nonsense like Saddam's responsibility for 9/11 than Bush himself is - are not Democrats at all. It's strategically important that we have no voice in this.
-
Howard Dean was on TV talking about withdrawal, Kerry's talking about withdrawal, the man on the street probably is as well.
I'd like to ask everybody what they propose for an attitude, nationally, specifically, officially, for that withdrawal.
"It was a mistake, we're going home now"?
Honor would call for something with more gravity than just withdrawal wouldn't it?
A general or two, maybe Bremer or even Rumsfeld, on their knees in the desert with a sword and a retainer.

...this year the winds were extraordinarily weak and the cold water did not well up in spring as usual. Water temperatures soared to 7C above normal, which delighted bathers but caused the whole delicate system to collapse. The amount of phytoplankton crashed to a quarter of its usual level.
"In 50 years this has never happened," said Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, in Newport, Oregon.
Record numbers of dead seabirds soon washed up on beaches along the coast. There were up to 80 times more dead Brandt's cormorants, a fishing bird, than in previous years.
Tests showed the birds died of starvation. "They are not finding enough food, and so they use up the energy stored in their muscles, liver and body fat," said Hannah Nevins, who investigated similar mass deaths in Monterey Bay.
Many fear the ecological collapse is a portent of things to come, as the world heats up. A Canadian Government report noted that ocean temperatures off British Colombia reached record levels last year as well, blaming "general warming of global lands and oceans".

Geoffrey Lean/Independent UK 13.Nov.05
-
link robotwisdom

The elephant in the room is the strength this news gives the Christian fundamentalists and their handlers. The world is supposed to end in fire. It says so in the book.
Somewhere back in the 70's I had an image come of some MesoAmerican priests, having figured out the cycle of eclipses, using that knowledge to maintain themselves at the apex of their society.
A leg up, by virtue of threatening to darken the sun if the people displeased their proprietary deities.
It wouldn't take much, the common people have an inherent need to understand, or to have things explained to them, and they'll defer that to anyone with confidence and what seems like a logical explanation who can hold their attention.
That holding of attention is what the super-churches are about, television, the bombastic preachers and their vivid oratory.
No earthly power is necessary to darken the sun when it's the shadow of the moon falling on us, regularly, predictably. Prayer doesn't enter into it.
This is different. But how much? What we know about time is like what the people knew about the sun, obvious on the basics, sketchy to non-existent on the whole.
Ignorance and superstition are one thing - understandable, forgivable, expected - but the bigotry and smugness of many of the believers is something I would give much to see erased for good.
What was scary to me was the thought that there was no way to know without dying, if all that they said were true, or just some of it. I could feel the heat coming, but why, and to what end, was and is a mystery.
The rationalist version is incompetence, with a strong element of self-fulfilling prophecy - the set-up being in order to get to heaven you have to want the world to end in fire.
I don't believe the god of Pat Robertson is good or worthy of love or even respect, but I don't necessarily believe he doesn't exist.
What I keep coming back to is the message of the Gospels, not the words but the vibe, the color and tone - love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, inclusion.
Nothing of that is in Revelations or the Old Testament. It makes me wonder.
The world's on fire, this is pretty much irrefutable now.
What happens when people die is still open to discussion.

Mr Bush said.

"While it is perfectly legitimate to criticise my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began.
[...]
"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges,"

-
What we think he means, though it isn't clear from how he says it, is it's "deeply irresponsible" to throw out charges you know are false.
So that if you know Bush and his dark-matter constellation were telling the truth about why the US had to invade and occupy Iraq, and you accuse them of lying, you're being deeply irresponsible.
That's unimpeachable.
But the charges are being made in good faith, the people making them believe Bush and his dark-matter constellation were lying. And that that dishonesty slanders the names and impugns the honor of everyone connected with that invasion and occupation.
His way of saying that is what the younger folks call "weasel words".
Meditating on the whole sorry business, we can begin wondering if those in positions of authority and trust, if they did lie about the reasons for the war, if they would lie about something as serious as that - might they not be lying now? What wouldn't they lie about?
To really answer that we'd need to know why they lied in the first place. But they say they didn't. So here we are.
Another thing we're wondering first thing in the morning this morning - how many lives of far less magnitude and connection than Wilson's and Plame's were ruined by the same reputational death squads? Are we to assume that this was the only time in their collective histories that these men attempted to destroy those who got in their way? That they were never successful?