perfidy

... okay, maybe that's a little harsh. But read this Grammar Police post on our new super-ambassador to Iraq, John "Honduran Death Squads? What Honduran Death Squads?" Negroponte.

How, exactly, will sending a non-Arab-specialist with a big black mark (and a whole bunch of red spatters) on his record into Iraq help things? Is it just because John's a friend of Cheney and Bush the Elder?

See also the Yglesias and Kleiman links Grammar Police has. This is the guy in charge after June 30th? Shit, might as well put John Wayne Gacy in charge of a kid's birthday party.

[wik] It occurs to me that this might just be a trial-balloon rumor, designed to see if people are really against Negroponte like they were against Kissinger and Poindexter. Calpundit points to another possibility:"there's another thing to keep in mind here anyway: who the hell would want this job? Bush's shortlist is probably really short."

True that.

In light of our earlier post about scientologist's secret arrangement with the IRS, I thought I'd throw this one into the ring: A court ordered a prominent critic of the cult to pay $500,000 in damages in a breech of contract dispute.

Superior Court Judge Lynn Duryee issued that order in a breach-of- contract lawsuit against Scientology defector Gerald Armstrong.

The Church of Scientology had sought $10 million from Armstrong, who joined the church in 1969, left the fold in 1981 and later became one of the movement's harshest critics. He was sued by the church in 1984 for allegedly stealing thousands of pages of private papers that shed new light on the movement's mysterious founder, the late L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard, a prolific science-fiction writer and freelance philosopher, founded the Church of Scientology in the 1950s and died in 1986.

During his years in Scientology, Armstrong says he worked as an intelligence officer and communications officer and compiled documents for a church-sponsored biography of Hubbard. He says he has been in Scientology's sights since the church filed its 1984 lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court to get control of Hubbard's private papers.

Judge Paul Breckenridge Jr., who presided over that case, issued a ruling in which he called Hubbard "virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background and achievements." In settling that case in 1986, Armstrong agreed to return the documents. He says that the church paid him $515,000 ($800,000 including his lawyer's fee) and that his attorney at the time persuaded him to sign an agreement promising to "maintain strict confidentiality and silence with respect to his experiences with the Church of Scientology."

That agreement says Armstrong would pay $50,000 for every utterance about Scientology. The church maintains that Armstrong has violated the agreement at least 201 times and owes it just over $10 million.

...Armstrong still vows to never pay a penny to the church.

I'd just like to say that Scientology is weird. Battlefield Earth was a half decent space opera. But the over the top bios in Hubbard's books are a little, well, over the top. I remember reading in one of these that Hubbard was one of the greats of the field, and implied that he was right up there, and good friends with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Which is manifest bullshit. Before Battlefield Earth, I had never heard of him, so he wasn't one of the greats. And I read a lot of sf. If he would lie about something as obviously false as that, in the author bio for a widely published book, well you can only imagine what he'd lie about to his followers. (Go to this site for an outline of the extent of those lies.)

Further evidence that the Bush spin machine is in, well, a tail-spin: What idiot just stuck him out in front of cameras with a small-grain black-check tie? It's called a moire pattern, folks...any experienced media person knows you don't wear one in front of a camera (resolution + digital transmission + other junk == funny rainbow colors).

No serious media person checked the President before he went on TV tonight.
Press Conference, my ass. It's just another speech, so far.

- No mention of short or medium term strategy for Iraq.
- "No brainer" we-support-the-troops crap.

- "No one can predict all the hazards that lie ahead." Well, we should at least try to predict some of them, shouldn't we? Isn't that what all those "highly qualified" people around you are paid to do?

- Sounds like June 30 is the date, no matter what. There may be no functional entity to hand power over to, but we're gonna hand it over anyway. He's cemented the date in stone.

- On the Viet Nam message; there aren't enough parallels (yet) to make that comparison. The press likes the convenience of it, but it doesn't really fit.

- "A year seems like a long time, to the families of the troops, overseas...been really tough for the families, been tough on this administration". Yeah, real tough what with all that golfing you've been doing over the past week.

What the heck is a "must-call"? Sounds like they're reporters that the President has been instructed to call upon, who have, oh, let's say, pre-set questions. Helpful!

- Mr. President, why are you and Vice President Cheney appearing together, instead of separately, as the committee asked? BECAUSE.

- Good God! Which reporter just had the cojones to tell Bush that all his speeches use similar phrases, and sound alike? I mean, the guy's totally right, but to just say it like that, to the President? Damn.

- David Gregory? asked the President what he considered to be his most significant mistake since 9/11. It's my very favorite question in the world! Fellow Perfidians know this already -- if you can't name something you did wrong, you don't know a damn thing. Guess what happened to Bush when he was asked. And guess what happened off-camera, as his assistants apparently panicked. ;)

One word comes to mind, from this speech: BLUSTER. Loud, and clear.

Fareed Zakaria for President!

Dean Esmay has another post on the whole jobs thingy. He excerpts a bit from a New York Times article:

The sharpest contrast can be seen by looking at the Labor Department's household survey, which shows a record high level of total employment. This survey reported an employment level of 138.3 million as of March - 600,000 more working Americans since President Bush took office in 2001.

Since the recession ended in November 2001, the payroll survey has reported 323,000 fewer payroll jobs, but the household survey has found 1.9 million more overall jobs. Common sense tells us that payroll jobs aren't the end-all, be-all of jobs in the new economy. Economists reflexively like payroll data because it has a bigger sample, but quantity doesn't always ensure quality.

An even bigger problem with the payroll survey is the evolution of what constitutes work. We can think of the payroll survey as counting all workers at traditional firms, plus some workers at start-up companies who have payroll records. But the payroll survey doesn't count individuals who are self-employed - despite the fact that their ranks have surged by at least 650,000 in just two years.

To which I would add this bit:

The payroll survey counts jobs, not workers. But counting payroll jobs is a questionable way of measuring America's evolving work force, especially in light of declining job turnover. The payroll survey's biggest problem is that it systematically double counts workers when they change jobs. Since somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent of the work force changes employers every month, payrolls tend to be noisy. The illusion of lost jobs in recent years occurred because job turnover declined after 2000, first with the recession, then even more sharply after 9/11. As a result, 1 million jobs have been artificially "lost" in the payroll survey since 2001.

Despite last month's jobs surge, the payroll survey remains stubbornly out of whack with other economic indicators, even other labor indicators. Unemployment has been very low and is now near what economists call a "natural" rate. Real earnings rose by 3 percent over the last three years. Jobless claims are 10 percent below their historical average, and that's without adjusting for population.

Dean also links to this interesting post from soundfury, who makes the argument that except for the low payroll survey reports, the economy is better in every respect than in 1996, just before the tech bubble started inflating. Something to keep in mind, and bad news for Kerry.

I have been criminally lax in keeping up with Insults Unpunished lately, but today I tried to catch up a little. First I discovered that it is now a group blog. Surprise! Robert invited longtime companion, I mean commenter (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you) to join him. Read his intro piece, it's a good one. Almost as good as Crooked Timber's inaugural post.

But, the point of this post, and it does actually have one, is the counterfactual exercise that Robert linked to (and excerpted) here.

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: washington, april 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."

When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.

When an off-target U.S. bomb killed scores of Afghan civilians who had taken refuge in a mosque, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar announced a global boycott of American products. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the United States, and Washington was forced into the humiliating position of vetoing a Security Council resolution declaring America guilty of "criminal acts of aggression."

Bush justified his attack on Afghanistan, and the detention of 19 men of Arab descent who had entered the country legally, on grounds of intelligence reports suggesting an imminent, devastating attack on the United States. But no such attack ever occurred, leading to widespread ridicule of Bush's claims. Speaking before a special commission created by Congress to investigate Bush's anti-terrorism actions, former national security adviser Rice shocked and horrified listeners when she admitted, "We had no actionable warnings of any specific threat, just good reason to believe something really bad was about to happen."

The president fired Rice immediately after her admission, but this did little to quell public anger regarding the war in Afghanistan. When it was revealed that U.S. special forces were also carrying out attacks against suspected terrorist bases in Indonesia and Pakistan, fury against the United States became universal, with even Israel condemning American action as "totally unjustified."

Speaking briefly to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before a helicopter carried him out of Washington as the first-ever president removed by impeachment, Bush seemed bitter. "I was given bad advice," he insisted. "My advisers told me that unless we took decisive action, thousands of innocent Americans might die. Obviously I should not have listened."

Announcing his candidacy for the 2004 Republican presidential nomination, Senator John McCain said today that "George W. Bush was very foolish and naïve; he didn't realize he was being pushed into this needless conflict by oil interests that wanted to seize Afghanistan to run a pipeline across it." McCain spoke at a campaign rally at the World Trade Center in New York City.

Counterfactual exercises are fascinating to me. This one meets the essential requirements of plausibility, and departure from actual events in one particular. What if Bush had acted in advance of 9/11? The situation is carefully left the same - but the exploration of a different course of events throws the recent claims of many on the left into a very bad light. This is another tack on the post from the Queen of All Evil, that I linked to earlier. We really, really can't have it both ways. You can not simultaneously blame Bush for preemption and not being preemptive.

There is no question, that absent the horrible fact of the 9/11 attacks, there is really nothing that the current, or any president could have done that would have been adequate to the demands presented by the threat.

"We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger."

Thus reads an ad placed in a local paper in St. Petersburg, Florida by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club. Club Vice President Edna McCall said her club is in direct contact with John Kerry campaign.

"We're all working together."

Conveniently abstracted by Spoons, we have the essentials of the recent testimony before the 9/11 commission of former FBI director Louis Freeh and former (thank God!) Attorney General Janet Reno. Here are the salient points:

• Janet Reno never specifically briefed incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft on the threat posed by al Qaeda;
• In her 8 years in office, General Reno was briefed about al-Qaeda, but was never told (and apparently never asked) the location of al-Qaeda cells in the country;
• Reno "never focused on just al Qaeda," because of the Oklahoma City bombing;
• Clinton's FBI Director, Louis Freeh said that the FBI was not given the resources it needed to fight terrorism;
• Freeh was aware that Bin Laden had issued several fatwas in the 1990s ordering his followers to attack the U.S.;
• Nobody thought investigating terrorism cases was the best response to Al-Qaeda's declared war on the U.S., but it was the best anyone could do "in the absence of invading Afghanistan";
• During Freeh's time in office, "We weren't fighting a real war [against terrror]";
• General Reno testified that the majority of the [Democrat-reviled] Patriot Act has helped counterterrorism efforts.

Again, we need to change the focus from assigning blame and partisan grandstanding to a more fruitful lessons learned analysis. These items indicate that prior to the attack, no one new about the attack. This is not surprising. MoveOn.org's poster in the DC Metro claiming that "Bush Knew" are moonbat fantasy. We need to stay far, far away from that sort of thinking.

What we need is a clear exposition of what policies hindered the collation of intelligence we had; what policies might, if implemented, increase the amount and quality of information we get; and what security measures might be both effective and appropriate for a constitutional republic. I have no idea, of course, what the commission's report will look like. But considering the behavior so far of all the commissioners, I do not think that I will be getting what I am hoping for.

Mac Owens has an excellent and detailed look at the second half of the Vietnam war - the post Tet period. Owens discusses the value of the Combined Action Program or CAP that I mentioned in the comments to several recent posts here, and the progress that had been made in stabilizing South Vietnam in the three years between Tet and the Easter Offensive.

A sample:

Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress."

Most studies of the Vietnam War focus on the years up until 1968. Those studies that examine the period after Tet 1968 emphasize the diplomatic attempts to extricate the U.S. from the conflict, treating the military effort as nothing more than a holding action. But as William Colby observed in a review of Robert McNamara's disgraceful memoir, In Retrospect, by limiting serious consideration of the military situation in Vietnam to the period before mid-1968, historians leave Americans with a record "similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific."

... Far from constituting a mere holding action, the approach followed by the new team constituted a positive strategy for ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. Bunker, Abrams, and Colby "brought different values to their tasks, operated from a different understanding of the nature of the war, and applied different measures of merit and different tactics. They employed diminishing resources in manpower, materiel, money, and time as they raced to render the South Vietnamese capable of defending themselves before the last American forces were withdrawn. They went about that task with sincerity, intelligence, decency, and absolute professionalism, and in the process they came very close to achieving the goal of a viable nation and a lasting peace."

... The Marine Corps approach in Vietnam had three elements, according to Krulak: emphasis on pacification of the coastal areas in which 80 percent of the people lived; degradation of the ability of the North Vietnamese to fight by cutting off supplies before they left Northern ports of entry; and engagement of PAVN and VC main-force units on terms favorable to American forces. The Marines soon came into conflict with Westmoreland over how to fight the war. In his memoir, A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland writes:

During those early months [1965], I was concerned with the tactical methods that General Walt and the Marines employed. They had established beachheads at Chu Lai and Da Nang and were reluctant to go outside them, not through any lack of courage but through a different conception of how to fight an anti-insurgency war. They were assiduously combing the countryside within the beachhead, trying to establish firm control in hamlets and villages, and planning to expand the beachhead up and down the coast.

He believed the Marines "should have been trying to find the enemy's main forces and bring them to battle, thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they posed to the population." Westmoreland, according to Krulak, made the "third point the primary undertaking, even while deemphasizing the need for clearly favorable conditions before engaging the enemy."

Read the whole thing, it's a keeper.

"Nader tells youths to brace for draft."

On my planet, which my people call earth, it is known that we have not had a draft for thirty years and that it would not only be political suicide to reintroduce it, it would destroy the lavishly equipped, intensively trained and stupendously lethal volunteer force we are so very proud of.

Nader needs to stop smoking the crack.

Yet another tedious example of how Bush's "No Child Left Behind" plan is actually designed to further increase, if possible, the basic innumeracy of this nation. Unless...unless Bush himself doesn't understand the difference between a median and an average. Can it be? Can this really be it? Brothers, there is hope! We can still save this economy. All we need to do is find a way to teach Bush about the difference between a median and an average. We must put our best, our brightest teachers, who are paid less than 30k a year, to work on the problem. Perhaps we'll test afterwards, just to make sure.

Kevin Drum has more detail, as usual.

- Kerry says middle class families are worse off and the rich are better off under George Bush.
- George Bush says that's not so: average income has gone up 5.9% in the past three years. Not bad!
- Oops, wait a second. That's "average" income. The right measure is "median" income, since the average is skewed upward by.....the rich being better off.
- Median household income has decreased 3.3% since 2000.
- But wait! If you take into account tax cuts and increased entitlement income, median household income has.....declined 0.6%.

Even flat income for three straight years is disastrous, of course, something the writer of the article seems not to understand. So no matter how you measure it, middle class families are worse off and the rich are better off under George Bush. Just like Kerry said.

There's been some fairly kickass Perfidious discussion recently about Presidential policy and Iraq, and somehow we've managed to suckerentice new commenters to weigh in. Sweet!

Buckethead posted yesterday an excerpt by Rosemary, QOAE that argued that liberals are impossible to please right now. All in all, she is right that many people have knee-jerk responses against every move the President makes. But at the end of the day, that's a straw-man argument that doesn't get at anything terribly important.

[Here comes the first-person perspective!] Even though I'm not a liberal per se (at least not on Tuesdays), I do generally oppose the President's views and treat his actions with overall suspicion. But I think Rosemary is giving me and many others too much credit for our discernment.
Back when Clin-ton was in the White House getting hummers and ordering opportune missile strikes, I second-guessed his every move. I spent 1993 convinced that NAFTA was economic poison (hey... I was in college), and when he launched those rockets in 1998, I was positive that that strike had been ordered to take media heat off his impending blowjob testimony.

All this is simply to say that there's a class of people in this country, probably pretty large, who have a hard time giving any President the benefit of the doubt. The office is held by mortals not gifted with foresight, and they are bound to have human flaws. I for one don't often have the intestinal fortitude to trust them to overcome those flaws.

That all being said, Bush's policies abroad do scare the bejeezus out of me, and I tend to grip at every new development. I'm still not convinced that the libervasion of Iraq-- though undoubtedly and manifestly a good thing-- is the best way to crush international terrorism. Maybe it is. Maybe it ain't. So far the Prudential Center hasn't blown up, so Boston at least has been safe for the last 18 months. Am I willing to give him the benefit of the doubt? Sort of. I'm the guy in the back seat of the car going 120 mph with his hands over his eyes, saying "I hope you know what you're doing!"

Anyway, I had a point here...

Right. Buckethead highlighted another section of Rosemary's post in which she argued that regarding terrorists, we only have two choices: to wait and die; or move now and kill. I disagree. I think that we are actually in the midst of pursuing a third way right now, and that more should be done along these lines. [note to Buckethead: yes, here comes the hearts and minds bullshit again. Pls hold fire until I'm done.] One reason I'd like to see more troops in Iraq, especially specialists rather than fighters, is that the faster and more effectively the general public decide "yes, they're infidels, but the lights work!" the better.

The Marines are as usual way out in front in doing this. Recently they resurrected the "Small Wars Manual", which was written back when the US had actual imperial designs on places like Haiti, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Although a lot of the information is entertainingly outdated, it still contains a great deal of heard-won wisdom on how to make villages accept your presence and work with you. That, in the long run, is the most potent weapon we have in the war on Terrorism. When the recent Sunni Uprising went down, I saw in it an opportunity to demonstrate the power of the Third Way. Smack without mercy anyone who shoots at us, and resolutely resist attempts to draw us into backing down or levelling the place. News out of Iraq is spotty, so I don't know what the hell to think now, but I still hope that my way is a good way out of Iraq's and out current trouble.

One last thought. I've long advocated learning more about the thought processes of terrorists and the populations that spawn them, as a way to stem the future tide of 'splodeydopes and radical jihadists. Some would disagree. They are the Second Option radicals. Others, mostly stinky hippies, think the US deserves what it gets and prefer to celebrate the free and liberal policies of Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro. They are the First Option radicals.

We keep seeing evidence that in the Middle East in general, and within each country in specific, there are certain cultural differences that make all communication difficult. What comes across and gentlemanly conduct in Oklahoma translates as being a real pussy in Baghdad. The troops on the ground have to learn-- are learning-- how to bridge these divides and make their missions a success. But how can we ensure that the lessons they learn there make their way back up the chain of command and get written into a new edition of the Small Wars Manual? If Rumsfeld and his crew have one failing (and they have many), they seem to cling with evangelical fervor to their ways. Because of that, I'm having a hard time giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Rosemary, I do agree with you that doing nothing and waiting means that more people around the world will die in spectacular and horrifying ways thanks to terrorism. I'm just not convinced that the only other option is to kick all the ass you say we should.

[wik] Via Kathy Kinsley I find this Weekly Standard editorial that comes to the exact opposite conclusion that I have. Funnyguy (sorta) Larry Miller writes some excellent observations about the "end-zone dance' that was the aircraft carrier landing ("Mission Accomplished" my ass!), but then argues this:

Message to the administration: No one in Europe or on the left is ever, ever, ever going to like you from seeing a photograph of a marine handing a bag of groceries to a woman in a burkha. Jacques Chirac is never going to say, "Well, they have built a lot of community centers. Maybe Bush was right."

Win. Stopping building schools. Win. There's plenty of time and need for hospitals, but first . . . Win. Yes, yes, Iraqi girls can be very empowered by seeing a female colonel running an outreach program, and we can all chip in for the posters that say "Take Your Daughters To Mosque Day," but in the meantime, would you please win.

Larry, we are winning. On all fronts. The schools are not for the French, and the hospitals are not for college-age liberals. They are for Iraqis to use, so their country has the institutions that create stability. It would be a terrible thing to win the battle and lose the war, to have a newly free and nominally democratic Iraq elect a radical Islamic government with state legitimacy and lots of tax money to fund terrorists. It would be a terrible thing for Iraq to devolve into regional squabbles, and subdivide into a Balkans-esque set of interlocked ethnic zones. We need to win on all fronts, and bullets will only help with one of them.

The Beeb reports that Canada - you know, the kindler, gentler, greener and morally superior nation to our north - is condemning to death hundreds of thousands of defenseless seals. The government defended the move as more humane - they're gonna shoot the little bastards instead of the traditional club to the head. It appears that crass economic motives are the motivation for this return to senseless animal cruelty, as commercial fish stocks were vanishing, and the cull was important for the local economy during a traditionally slow economic time of the year.

Me, I think them seals is commies.

How can you not club a face like that?

For more info on the mechanics of seal slaughtering, go see the Nuke Baby Seals for Jesus site.

At least, that's what Andy Rooney thinks. That's the actual title of the piece. I never liked the pretentious blowhard much before, but now I really can't stand him. Read this article, and bask in the awesome disregard and complete lack of understanding exhibited therein. Whenever I have seen an interview with troops in the field, they are constantly saying - in complete contradiction to Rooney - how they are proud to fight, knowing that they are preserving the liberties and safety of Americans back home; even of fat condescending fucktards like Rooney. This excrement is a classic example of the worst kind of liberal contempt for, and lack of comprehension of, the military.

For some useful perspective on the recent comments here at Perfidy, Rosemary, the Queen of all Evil gives us this:

The liberal complaints about Iraq and 9/11 are contradictory. You have made it impossible to please you.

Why do we have the 9/11 Commission? The purpose was to figure out what went wrong and fix it, so we NEVER have a 9/11 again. That isn't what it is now, is it? It is now a Witch Hunt. Blame someone (Bush) besides Al Qaeda and burn them at the stake. What did they know and when did they know it??? Blah, blah, blah...

We already hear mumblings from people that want to know why we didn't prevent it. It is a circle of insanity. If the Bush Administration had, by some miracle, been able to prevent 9/11 how would anyone know it? Let's say they had vague info that some time in September, Al Qaeda, would do exactly what they did. What should the Bush Administration have done? Act pre-emptively to stop the attack, right? If they were successful what would the screams and complaints be?

...We all know that they hate us. I don't give a rat's ass why they hate us. They hate us and they want us dead. We have two choices:

1) Respond after we get hit and suffer casualities and fatalities. Of course, then we are back to hearing "What did they know and when did they know it?"

2) We go in kick ass and start taking hyphenated names. I'm all about self-defense. If I saw some punk on the street that said, "I'm gonna kill you", you can bet your ass that I won't wait for him to start. I'm prepared to fight and kill, if necessary, to save myself. That is what our country is doing. It's just a grander scale.

I'm sorry guys, but you can't have it both ways. You can't demand that we prevent the tragedy of 9/11, and then demand that we not act pre-emptively against the bad guys when we think there might be a threat.

That isn't possible. How can you stop people from killing you if you wait until they kill you?

We either kick the ass of the terrorists and terrorist friendly nations or we wait until they attack us. If we wait until they "do something to us" you cannot go back and complain that the government didn't stop it. Actually, you can do that and that is exactly what the Left has been doing.

Back in the day, when I was a Mac user, there was a game that I loved. When I switched to Windows, I thought that I would never play the game again. But a chance encounter in the Safeway led to a reunion... 

I was walking down the frozen foods aisle when I saw a guy wearing a shirt with this logo:

That rang a bell, but for a few seconds I couldn't place it. Then I remembered! 

Escape Velocity! Escape Velocity was a simple, yet addictive game. You start out with a small shuttle, with little cargo space and virtually no combat ability. But, if you're clever, you can make money through sharp dealing and avoid being killed or captured by pirates. You can use the money to upgrade your little shuttle, or save for a new and better spaceship. There were hundreds of planets, the Rebellion and the Confederation, pirates, aliens and bars.

All of what I just described would probably keep you occupied for a few hours. But the beauty of EV was the storylines embedded in an otherwise fairly simple yet wide open trading and fighting game. These kept your interest. It was a near perfect balance between the freedom to do what you want, and good narrative. A very clever game that focused on playability rather than snazzy graphics and eye candy.

For years, Ambrosia software vowed that they just wouldn't make a windows version of the game. But the guy in the shirt informed me that they had a new version, and that it had a windows port. One of the reasons (along with tax preparation) that I did little or no blogging over the weekend was the fact that this game now resides on my computer. So, for a good free (well, shareware) game, go right here and download it. 
 

No not that red. Commie red. Siberian Light links to a slew of articles about Russian space plans. It is, after all, Cosmonaut day in the motherland.

Among the articles he links, we see that a Russian company is claiming that it will put six cosmonauts on Mars by 2009. (2011 according to this AP story.) The articles are sadly lacking in details, but they say that they can do it for $3.5 billion. That would be a significant savings over the proposed NASA plan (anywhere from $30 billion to $1 trillion, depending on who you listen to.) The Russian space officials have declared this nonsense, and based on what I know of the current state of Russian technology and industry, I'd have to agree. They couldn't get to the moon in '69, so I don't see how they could get to Mars in five years now, especially given the economic problems they face.

A researcher at the Central Research Institute for Machine-Building, Russia's premier authority on space equipment design, said it would carry out the project with funding promised by Aerospace Systems, a little-known private Russian company that says it draws no resources from the state budget.

The program envisions six people traveling to Mars and exploring it for several months before returning to Earth. The expedition is designed to last three years in all, and would depend on a fully equipped spacecraft containing its own garden, medical facilities and other amenities.

Absent some idea of how they intend to do it, I will have to remain dubious. Still, more power to them! Maybe the Russkies and Chinese and Indians can force America to actually use its capabilities in a sensible and forward looking way, instead of remaining in a blinkered, stuck-in-the-sixties, bureaucratic mindset.

Robert Novak's written about Generals getting tired of having to tow the Bush line on troop level estimates.

The White House has recently directed its character assassination teams towards Richard Lugar (R) because of his constructive criticisms. Lugar, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (you know, the guys responsible for Congressional oversight of the war in Iraq), has complained publicly that the Administration hasn't shown them a plan for Iraq. I guess it's tough to do your constitutionally-mandated job of oversight if the Executive simply refuses to tell you what's going on, or tell you what they intend to do.

I find Novak's article noteworthy in that he is a pretty heavy-hitting GOP columnist and talk show personality. That this kind of criticism emerges from his pen should put a chill into Bush Loyalists.

The acid test for military involvement in Iraq should be, and should have always been, is this a war worthy of conscription?

There is a large possibility at this point that we're going to replace a very nasty, secular regime with one or two very nasty theocracies.

Let's remember just how accurate Mr. Wolfowitz is: February 2003 DOD Budget Hearings.

Continuous low-level warfare in Iraq has turned a short-term US force into a long-term occupation. From the perspectives of the Iraqis, the US has been there a long time. Prolonging US troop presence in order to bring the population into an uprising, simply by way of elapsed time, has clearly been the strategy of the "Iraq resistance" (a resistance which is likely being guided by Islamic/terrorist elements, at this point).

Makes me wonder something: Who's smarter? The Bush Administration, or the terrorists/Islamics?

They've tried rockets, bombings, assaults, and roadblocks, all chart toppers and def jams to be sure, but now the Iraqi extremists are playing their very first big hit, the 1979 smash titled "Give Us What We Want Or The Hostages Die."

Idiots. The world is a different place than it was in 1979, disco is dead, the Casbah has been Rocked (the jet pilots won), Jimmy Carter is not in the White House, and the USA does not negotiate with terrorists. Not that I know anything about anything, but insiders whisper that a certain somebodies are getting a little desperate!

You'd think that winning a little thing called "The Presidency" would be, I don't know, motivating somehow? Not satisfied with the distinct lack of evidence that he's made any effective decisions since his court-awarded victory, Bush seems to have figured out that he doesn't even have to show up for work, and he'll stillhave defenders who'll be with him no matter what.

This Washington Post story is generally about US casualties, but it notes the following rather astonishing fact:

This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

You'd think that with the general public's uncertainty about his capabilities and thought process, he might balance that with a strong work ethic.

Then again, exactly what in his past would lead us to believe that he has a strong work ethic?

It seems that the number one google search result for the word Jew is a real corker about killing them all and such. That will not do. There's an initiative going around the weblog world to pepper posts with links to the Wikipedia page defining Jew, as I have done twice here, in an effort to googlebomb the judenhass back to their dark little Bavaria of the mind.

Thanks to the beautiful and talented Kathy Kinsley for the pointer.

Opinion8, sees violence from both Sunnis and Shiites, and is tempted to think, "A pox on all their houses," and so adapts an old Dennis Miller line:

Twenty-five million bad people just screw it up for the other eleven.

If Howard's going down, he's going to try to take the President with him. Go check out howardstern.com, and see just how angry Stern is at Bush & Co. over his recent trouble with the FCC.

A lot of people listen to Stern and think bits like "Sphincterine" are funny, me included. If the FCC keeps on keepin' on, Stern will just keep turning his show and website into a full-on Bush bash (except without the lesbians). The more stations that drop him, the more people will be looking for someone to blame. That could be very, very bad for W come election day.

A hint of truth to this can be found in the radio-industry mag Friday Morning Quarterback, who report that WBCN in Boston " has interacted with 8,000 listeners via its "Howard Stern 1st Amendment Line." The result: 93 percent say Stern's highly publicized indecency battle will affect the upcoming Presidential election, and 72 percent indicate they will vote differently as a result of the issue."

This piece has a pretty good analysis of the situation, noting that Stern alone has been the target of fully half the fines levied by the FCC since 1990. There's also a rundown of the legislation currently pending to up those fines drastically. Again, I sincerely doubt this will play in Peoria.

Finally, as a show of solidarity with the King of All Media, here's a gratuitous link to Jenna Jameson's website.

A couple weeks ago, Buckethead posted a nice piece on the Earth's latest near-miss encounter with an asteroid big enough to make forever irrelevant all concerns of who's gonna win The Apprentice.

If you're like me, you like staring into the abyss and playing around with what you find in there. So go check out this Earth Impact simulator. Plug in your desired specs (say, witnessing a 5-mile wide hunk of ice hitting the earth at a 35-degree angle at 200Km/s from fifty miles away), and it spits out a detailed analysis of the armageddon you've wrought, from how loud the blast will be at your chosen distance to the size of the fireball and deadly flying chunkage and probable damage to structures.

We're all gonna die! Sweet!

Go read tacitus on the unfolding clusterfuck in Iraq. Excerpt:

There are a few things to keep in mind as you watch the Shi'a uprising, now spiralling into oneness with the Sunni uprising, in Iraq. First and foremost, whatever spin you might hear, remember that this is pretty bad news indeed. Very, very bad news. Consider that if you are American, there is no open road to Baghdad from any of Iraq's neighboring countries. For the moment, CPA resupply is a triumph of airlift. Something to chew on. It's not the result of any one tragically wrong decision or miscalculation; rather, it's the end result of a year of accumulating bad calls and wishful thinking: disbanding the army plus not confronting Sadr plus giving the Shi'a a veto plus the premature policy of withdrawal from urban centers plus the undermanning of the occupation force (and the concurrent kneecapping of Shinseki) plus the setting of a ludicrously early "sovereignty" date plus the early tolerance of lawlessness and looting plus illusory reconstruction accomplishments plus etc., etc., etc. In short, the failure of the occupation to be an occupation in any sense that history and Arab peoples would recognize. Bad calls of such consistency are the product of a fundamentally bad system. More on that later.

What matters now is crushing the uprising, and figuring out what it portends.

The whole thing is clear, intelligent, and uncompromising. Astute reader will remember that I opposed the libervasion of Iraq mainly because I was not at all reassured by the lack of aprés-tango planning. We are now seeing the sad results of those piecemeal plans and subsequent second-guesses. I'm not saying this to jeer or mock the people in charge. I'm not saying it to score easy points off people more sanguine than I about the immediate prospects for peace in Iraq. I'm just saying it because the whole deal is turning ugly, and I'm very disappointed to see that I was right about the mid-term situation.

Well, whatever the next few days and weeks hold, and whatever the cost, Iraq is our problem now and if we cut and run it'll be much worse for us in the long run than staying could ever be.

[wik] One of Tacitus' commenters asks, "have the American people been properly informed--ever--by this administration of the risks, duration, and gravity of their plans for Iraq?" I don't think we have. I know that in the past, Bush has said things about our long-term commitment in Iraq, but he's said a lot of stuff nobody hears. What we need now is for the President to tell us in specific terms what the hell is going on and what he's having done about it. We need him to SAY it, in BIG words. Classic words, like "Blood, toil, tears and sweat." "Our long national nightmare is over." "Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

So far, W. has just dropped mentions of Iraq's cost and duration into policy speeches as if to defend himself down the road from accusations that he never told the American people what the deal is. Last night I saw dude on the TV smirking about that Sadr dude's uprising. Smirking! He's the president and he's fucking smirking about the war! "Seems to me it's just one guy and his followers," he says, smirking on camera.

Not good enough. We need a serious appraisal, one that underscores for the American people what the importance of Iraq is and why prevailing over the uprising and restoring order to the country needs to be our sober national duty right now. And cut out the goddamned smirking. It gives the impression that he finds his war funny.

That's how Bush keeps this PR moment from becoming his Tet, and could make it his Gettysburg instead.

Murdoc has a good roundup of blog posts on the fighting in Iraq, and some good thoughts of his own here.

Seeing as Perfidy is letting its inner (or not so inner) geek hang out, lets just wallow in it, shall we?

No one, to my knowledge, has come up with a really good role-playing game system. The problem seems to center on the difficulty of modeling skills and the learning process. Other problems (such as combat, physics, various magical or super-technological systems) have been solved with varying degrees of success, usually with an attempt to balance ease of use with verisimilitude. The fact that these systems are used constantly in the game system puts a premium on the ease of use side of the equation, as overly complex games have a limited market, even among nerds and geeks.

However, the problem of character development remains. The game might have a slick way of resolving how successfully you apply your skill at safecracking, orcslaying, or starship piloting. But how does your character gain and improve that skill? The results have always been unsatisfying.

Existing game systems can be plotted on a spectrum ranging from D&D on one end, and original rules Traveler on the other.
D&D had by far the most simplistic advancement scheme. Characters had a class, which gave them a package of skills or attributes. (Well, really it mostly gave them a different table for resolving combat.) As the campaign progressed, gold expropriated from dragons, orcs and Enron translated directly into experience points. At certain thresholds, you would move up a level and all of your skills would simultaneously increase. This is not in any way realistic, though certainly satisfying to the thirteen year old who loves to say he has a 25th level Assassin.* The focus is almost completely on advancement in the game.

On the other end of the scale was the Traveler system. Characters were created using a system that closely resembles what actually happens in real life. You start out at 18, with nothing more than remedial skills. Then, depending on the career track you select, you enlist in the navy, army, marines, interstellar scouts, or go to college. Your pre-game life is divided into four year terms, during which you have an opportunity to gain skills related to your profession. You can keep this up as long as you want balancing your greed for more skills with the realization that you don't want to be having an adventure with a 90-year old alter ego. Once this process ends, you begin the game. Once the game has started, it is exceedingly difficult to gain new skills or even improve old ones. You are stuck with what you have. Again, this is much like real life. The focus here is almost completely on character creation. (GURPS used a different approach, but was similar in that the focus is on character creation.)

Most games fall somewhere in between these two extremes. How do you create a game that allows your character to start with some skills, yet allows skills to be developed in game? How do you create a system that allows character creation in some detail, without predetermining the character’s future existence? How do you design a reward system that isn't based on the easily quantified cash, but isn't based solely on the subjective judgment of the DM? Moreover, how do you find a system that simultaneously isn't completely subjective and doesn't require hours of anal-retentive bookkeeping?

The last campaign I ran before I gave up on gaming completely eliminated most of the game system. The only concession I made to traditional role-playing was to keep a combat system, which I appropriated from White Wolf's Vampire games. And I only did that because the players insisted. Most of the time they were rolling dice just to amuse themselves, though I allowed them to think that the results affected the game.

I dodged the whole question of character development by having the players play themselves in the campaign. If they could do it, their character could do it. This was satisfactory in most respects, but sadly puts a great deal of limitations on the types of game you can play. (Worked great for a present day Cthulhu game, though.) Rewards were largely moot, since the campaign lasted only a few weeks in game time.

I've tried to see through to a way to combine the pristine simplicity of that last game with the requirements of other types of campaigns, but so far without success. The thing is, if you have a group of decent players, the game system is just a framework. The campaign is more important. The problem with adopting the no-system system is that it becomes hard to balance character creation with the needs of the campaign. You can't have the characters that are too powerful. Further, in a long campaign, you have to have some mechanism for rewarding players with improvements to their characters. Gold and wisdom is not enough. This, really, is the only thing that needs to be systematized. Everything else can be done on the fly, given enough background information and some quick thinking. But I haven’t figured it out yet.

GeekLethal's last post prompted a user comment from the Three Armed Man. TAM suggested that the criteria outlined by GL really point to Dork, rather than Nerd. This raises the perennial semantic dilemna, how do we define these terms? Saturday Night Live once had a sketch called, “Geek, Dweeb or Spaz?” Where contestants had to determine which category the panelists fell into. This is the question we need to answer.

The jargon file defines geek thusly:

A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves — and some who are in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite properly) regard ‘hacker’ as a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.

One description accurately if a little breathlessly enumerates “gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts, programmers, nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people who did not go to their high school proms, and many would be offended by the suggestion that they should have even wanted to.”

Originally, a geek was a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens. (In early 20th-century Scotland a ‘geek’ was an immature coley, a type of fish.) Before about 1990 usage of this term was rather negative. Earlier versions of this lexicon defined a computer geek as one who eats (computer) bugs for a living — an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. This is often still the way geeks are regarded by non-geeks, but as the mainstream culture becomes more dependent on technology and technical skill mainstream attitudes have tended to shift towards grudging respect. Correspondingly, there are now ‘geek pride’ festivals (the implied reference to ‘gay pride’ is not accidental).

Nerd is defined in this way:

nerd: n.

1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.

2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950).

Sadly, the file does not have entries for spaz, dweeb or dork. But I think the time has come for a definitive taxonomy of the various subspecies. We can move toward this goal by outlining the salient characteristics of each type:

Nerd: the nerd is base type, from which all the others are derived. Nerds are bright, and lacking in social skills. They have odd interests. They are dilettantes, and usually end up consumed by counterproductive pursuits like the SCA, Star Wars collectables, and Star Trek conventions. Some nerds can achieve purpose in life translating the arcane thoughts of the geeks to the mundane normal people. Nerds are hapless, though they often have a goofy charm.

Geek: the geek is the most competent of the subspecies. Geeks transcend the limitations of the nerd through focus. Geeks have real, and often marketable skills – usually in the tech/computer fields, but in theory these skills could be in almost field. Geeks have social skills, but they are not the natural, inborn manners possessed by most people. Geeks learn to deal with others the same way they attain mastery of any other skill; by observing the humans around them, and deducing rules and patterns, and through experimentation. This sometimes leads to embarrassment when a rule is over generalized, or applied incorrectly. Geeks are often odd, but have an edgy competence about them.

Dork: the dork is the nerd’s dimmer younger brother. Dorks can’t fit in. Unlike nerds, they can’t even get laid at SCA events. Dorks are strange, but without the redeeming semi-charming goofiness of the nerd, or the skills of the geek. The dork’s attempts at humor or charm always come off as vaguely (or, let’s be honest, often extremely) creepy. Dorks are annoying.

Dweeb: the dweeb is the nerd-lite. Not so odd, not so bright, in many respects the dweeb is both a substandard nerd and a substandard normal person. Dweebs don’t fit into the everyday world, but neither are they completely at home in the clannish, ritualized worlds of the nerd. Where a nerd knows that he won’t get picked for kickball, the dweeb will keep trying. Dweebs are misfits.

Spaz: the spaz is the nerd on crack. Your everyday nerd is quiet, sedentary, and overweight. The spaz takes the basic nerd template and cranks it up to 11. The spaz is hyper, annoying and restless. The spaz is the only type more likely than the dweeb to be chosen as the spare.

Hopefully, this tentative classification scheme will be of use.

OK, this topic has been kicking around my head for a bit now. NDR and I talked about it a couple weeks ago, and considering recent blog-age at the Ministry today seems the time to post.

Unable to balance an original or imaginative format against my desire to get this up before lunch, I'll just steal...ummmmm...pay homage... to that redneck joke guy. Thus:

You know you're a nerd if:

-You see real animals and wonder about their hit dice
-You know that d100 and percentile dice are the same thing
-You are unsure of your own alignment
-You are absolutely certain of your own alignment
-You know where in your home there is a multi-sided die
-You keep that die out of nostalgia, with your old character sheets and sketches
-You wish you were half-orc
-You read your old Monster Manuals for a little light reading before bed
-TSR, GDW, and WoTC are not random letters but a way of life
-CNN and the military call it "night vision", but you know it's really infravision
-You own a sword
-Any of the above apply to you but you think you're actually pretty cool

The Ministry's roadie and loyal minion Mapgirl recently asked:

"How angry would we be if a house of worship was blown up here in the States?"

The Geek's answer? Not as much as you might hope, since relatively few of us (compared to the Islamic world) have built our identities around religious affiliation. Or at least, not upset over the fact that it was a church, but something within our own borders that was attacked.

But even when churches abroad are attacked, there's not alot of mainstream outrage about it here: 2 years ago, when Pakistani terrorists blew up and/or shot all those people in a church; more recently, when savages shot their way into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and hid there for weeks while the IDF and Geraldo Rivera laid siege to the place and in fact, peace pricks from Europe and the US traveled there to provide widely publicized succour to the terrorists inside; and ongoing muslim destruction aimed at churches in Kosovo.

There are front pages covering the stories, but nothing like outrage over it. People don't take to the streets in droves and start burning "Palestinian" flags, or rush to their closets to get out that great effigy of al-Sadr they stayed up all night getting just so.

You'll find that media coverage of these and related events will often sympathize with the terrorist perspective, or at the very least choose language to obscure the unalterable fact that it's muslims who are on the rampage and doing the damage.

And shit I didn't even put on my tinfoil hat yet.

AP reports that the FAA has granted the first ever license to a private, manned suborbital rocket. The Federal Aviation administration granted a one-year license to Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites

"This is a big step," FAA spokesman Henry Price said.

And it is. Up til this point, no private space coprporation has ever gotten much help from the government, let alone a license for a manned spacecraft. The government has often harassed companies trying to mount private satellite launch services.

Things like this give me hope that perhaps, just maybe, it will be me rather than my grandchildren that will get an opportunity to go into space.

Spoons, no lover of George W., makes an interesting observation .

Publicola has a good post up on how the 2nd Amendment is treated in the courts, and goes into some good detail on why following precedent is not necessarily conducive to the rule of law or constitutionality. Good post, but sadly no permalinks or post titles, so you might have to scroll down - the post is from 2 April at 4:13pm.

[wik] Be sure also to read this post from the Smallest Minority, which is linked in Publicola's post.

In the comments to our earlier post about the deaths in Fallujah, Geeklethal said,

May I add that it's awfully suspect that the AP happened to be there at the right moment to record all of this.

Laughing Wolf has some more to say about that:

While I am not quite ready to call the hotel that is the home to most media-types in Baghdad the Caravelle, it is getting awfully tempting. The parallels are amazing, and extremely disconcerting. The fact is, the faces you see on the news don’t go out and search Baghdad and surrounding areas for good stories – they depend on others to tell them of the stories and don’t stray out of the hotel grounds that often. To go wandering around is dangerous, and to go where there is trouble and such is very, very dangerous. The safe thing to do, therefore, is to rely on PAO types and native bearers, I mean, native journalists/stringers to go do the searching and filming.

In far too many cases, those natives are the same helpful people that worked for Saddam and were in fact the minders and keepers of the press. They were the people who blocked them from reporting stories that Saddam did not want told, promoted the stories (remember that there is more than one meaning for this word) that he wanted told, and in general worked to block access to the truth. That such are now the main source of news for many of the Old Media speaks volumes and explains a lot of the coverage that comes out through them...

None of this is good, and most of all it is not good for the media, particularly the Old Media. The questions here are being ignored, and will be ignored as long as possible. What I see here is a mockery of journalism, and one of the reasons I am happy to no longer be associated with what passes for journalism today. What I see here is a betrayal of the principles of journalism and of the duties of a Citizen.

I want answers to my questions. I want them now. I want them in public. The media will avoid this unless they are held to the fire, and that is the duty of the New Media, and of the Citizens of the Republic and all other citizens anywhere who believe in life, liberty, and humanity. Most of all, those who are dedicated to a free press, a responsible press, must demand these answers. The reasons why should be obvious.

Read the whole thing, as it's rather devastating.

To follow up on my recent post arguing that downloading isn't what's killing the music business, I point you to this CNN article which notes that 2003 was the worst year for recorded music sales since the advent of the compact disc.

As usual, there's a stunningly ill-informed piece of disinformation in there that calls the entire thing into question.

Total sales of singles, including cassettes and vinyl, which have dipped significantly since the Internet file-sharing and CD-burning craze began in the late 1990s, fell 18.7 percent in value terms between 2002 and 2003.

What? This line, which was undoubtedly fed to some stringer by an industry flack, seems to suggest that the decline in the singles market was the result of cannibalization of single sales by downloading. Well, guess what? Labels have been phasing out the single for years, and sales are down for two reasons: there's few singles out there to buy; and consumers are out of the habit of buying singles because-- ungh!-- there's few singles out there to buy. Downloading doesn't enter into it! Now, if singles had taken a dive after 2001, when Napster broke big, there'd be something to this. But when I went into the industry in early 2000, singles were less than an afterthought already. And trust me, the labels have many better things to bitch about then limp singles sales.

If CNN can't even get its facts straight about simple matters of causality and chronology, then they're no better than Drudge, who scoops the hell out of them daily anyway.

[wik] If I have time in the next day or two, I have a couple brilliant ideas as to why the music industry is in a tailspin, and it's probably not what you think.

Here is a PhotoJournal of Chernobyl. It's rather striking, and the timing of finding it is odd -- I heard an interview on NPR a few days ago with an author who had written a history of Three Mile Island. He described the state of the containment core when the reactor was finally cracked apart, and how the investigators were shocked to discover that the interior had melted. That meant that the reactor was dramatically more dangerous than most had thought, and was close to being a disaster.

Nuclear is dangerous business. It can be managed, but the consequences of screwing it up are pretty terrifying.

As if the first effort didn't give me a full-body papercut and throw me in a deep pit of lemon juice, a group of soulless miscreants has decided that making a sequel would be a fantastic idea.

What movie, you ask? Why, it's Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. From the Movie Web:

The Story: A small group of troopers who find themselves taking refuge in an abandoned outpost as they attempt to fight against the encroaching arachnids-not realizing that a much graver danger is actually infiltrating their unit.

But that doesn't begin to describe the horror. Notice this little tidbit:

Release Date: June 1st, 2004 (Straight To Video)

Starring a group of people you've never heard of, and directed by a special effects expert, you know this is going to be great, character-focused drama. Your hopes will be confirmed when you realize that the genius screenwriter from the first Starship Troopers has returned!

From some movie blog, guy goes to panel to listen to discussion of the abomination, I mean, movie:

Sammon kicked things off with a simple slide-show, and an outline of the movie's basic plot. The first analogy he came up with was that if Starship Troopers had been like World War II (with Gestapo like Psi-officers and a fascist, Aryan-friendly government) then ST2 is like the Korean War. The human-bug conflict has been raging for five years as the flick opens, and humanity is losing the battle - although through all-pervasive, pro-war propaganda, the majority of humanity doesn't know that.

Ross, sounds like an alegory for what's happening right now, doesn't it?

Then screenwriter Ed Neumeier shows up. I have never met the man, but I am certain that he is a sleazy, no-talent assclown. Our virgil in this hell describes the scene:

The other big question asked by Heinlein fans who still feel cheated is about power armour, and whether it'll appear in ST2. It was fairly obvious to me given the budget that it wouldn't, but Ed Neumeier confirmed that was the case... Inexplicably, Ed Neumeier blames himself for the lack of power armour in the first film, saying that it ultimately came down to a 'believable bugs or power armour' argument, and the bugs won. As he pointed out "Some people hate me for that movie," referring to some of the more extreme Heinlein fans out there (some of whom were present in the audience).

Really, why might that be? Aside from the fact that you based your first screenplay on a glance at the book cover and a cursory reading of the publisher's blurb? Jackass.

Fans of the original's sarcastic take on war propaganda will be pleased to know it's going to return for the second flick also, and that Ed Neumeier wouldn't have it any other way.

You mean someone actually was a fan of that clumsy, overreaching satire of something that wasn't even in the book? Great, we need more! Jackass.

I remember that HBO had a "Making of" special before the release of the first nightmare. In it, Veorhoven (or however you spell his retarded Dutch name) and Neumeier went on and on that their movie was an homage to the dean of sf writers. I thought ST1 was bad. It is bad. But now this collection of human trash has to go and make another movie even further removed from the original novel.

I need to go brush my teeth.

Today the army had to blow up a mosque that a few dozen Iraqi thugs were holed up in. That's sort of been a big taboo so far that said thugs have been able to exploit, so I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later. Wonder what's going to happen next, cuz this could bounce either way.

Like a speed user searching for an ever greater high, this White House just can't believe what they can do, and not get called onto the carpet by responsible members of their own party. White House withholds Rice speech.

They've declared this speech to be secret. Never mind that she was scheduled to give it in public on September 11, or that parts of the text have already been leaked to the newspapers. Somehow, now, it's in the realm of the Secret Bush World.

Somebody please explain to me how this is anything other than a naked political move. And before you trot out the very tired "the commission is a partisan political entity" crap, feel free to be specific. Which commissioners are the partisans? Bush picked them all. As far as I can tell, it's pretty balanced. Everything they do is on the official 9/11 commission site. Point out the partisan bits, please!

Bushie whining about the "partisan commission" is pretty flat, given the fact that they've produced no alternative plan and they picked the entire commission.

Tacitus asks the question that's been on my mind recently: Can any one really argue that the occupation [of Iraq] is not badly undermanned?

Furthermore, Kevin Drum reminds me of something I've been wondering about. Given that there have been many months of sniping between Defense and State, not to mention the NSC, FBI, and CIA, when is Bush going to do the responsible managerial thing he learned to do from his expensive Harvard Business School education and start managing his managers? Infighting weakens organizations, and when that organization is concerned with nationbuilding (I didn't say empire!), you can't afford to have that happen.

More and more often these days I find myself asking just what the flying hell is wrong with this country? There seems to be a new timidity, a new spinelessness that cuts across ideological lines and geographic regions.

No, I'm not talking about the dumbass Red/Blue thing.

I'm not talking about The Queering of America (or, if you will, the pussification of the American Male), nor the duToitification of the American Conservative.

I'm not talking about abortion, spending habits, class rage, or antiwar agitation.

I'm talking about this new puritianism that's all the rage these days, except it's puritanism with the fun parts removed. The actual Puritans, once you got past their Calvinist, Manichean Great Chain of Being City On a Hill bullplop, liked to drink and screw as much as the rest of us, as long as everyone was up for church in the A.M. and none of the Commandments got broken.

No, now you can't drink. You can't screw. You can't screw. You can't screw. You can't show a boobie on TV, unless the boobies in question are paid for by beer companies or football teams. It was a nice boobie. You can't say stupid shit on the radio without the government fining your ass from here to Tuesday. Chilling effects? You bet! A California college investigated a student for murder, and expelled him, for writing a crudely violent fiction piece in a creative writing class. The professor was eventually fired for teaching the David Foster Wallace story "Girl With Curious Hair." Ohio has mandated that "intelligent design" be taught in science class. Tommy Chong is in prison for selling bongs (and still terrorists run free!)

So sex drugs and violence are on the outs, especially the sex part. But what's the proximate cause of my dismay? The Attorney General-- and it is John Ashcroft behind it this time, really, for real, seriously-- has declared a fatwa against paw-naw-gra-phy, that insidious disease which "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."

Right. A Playboy Home Invasion, just forcing itself on you. Now, I don't know about John Ashcroft, but I had to pay for every lapdance I ever got.

Everyone is talking about this today, from blogmother Kathy to instahack. Instapundit, in fact, points to an extended and loving takedown of the entire anti-sex trend at classicalvalues.com which you should read if you think I'm being paranoid. His plea: "But I thought we were at war -- with the enemies of sexual freedom who declared war on us. While I know that we're not there yet, I hate to see the United States moving in the direction of developing its own anti-sex mutawein like the damned Saudis."

Exactly. I cannot-- CANNOT-- vote for Bush if he's going to let this stuff happen on his watch. Terrorism is a threat from outside. This is a threat from within. Both threaten my way of life. What to do?

[wik] An addendum to my esteemed colleague Buckethead, who is juuuust about to comment: yes, dear, the terrorists will kill me if they get the chance and the moralists won't. But life has to be worth living!!

[alsø wik] I know I post this same phrase every couple weeks, but it's like a tic now so here we go again...... "So Glad They Took Care Of The Important Stuff Like Terrorism First!"

[alsø alsø wik] Jeff Jarvis has a long collection of reactions and analysis. Many points for the title "The Daily Stern: This slope slippery with KY."

No, this isn't that kind of post. No great danes, no leather, and get your filthy mind out of the gutter. Jerry over at Commonsense and Wonder links to an article in the Telegraph about a new book examining the root causes, if you will, of Germany's relative decline over the last few decades. Germany: Decline of a Superstar has become a bestseller in a Germany. Its author, Gabor Steingart, is a political journalist and Berlin bureau chief for the widely read newsmagazine Der Spiegel. So this criticism is not coming from the fringes.

"The GDP of both the British and French is higher than the Germans' and this is a shocking discovery for us. In the 1970s, Britain's GDP was only half of ours."

He is concerned that Germans are unwilling to confront the issue: "It has not been politically correct until now to admit that we're in decline, that the Deutschland Modell is the wrong one."

Mr Steingart says a key reason for the problems lie in what he calls his "core-crust" theory.

The "core" consists of the innovators, the producers and the service providers, while the "crust" are those who contribute nothing to the economy.

At present the crust consists of the two thirds of Germans who are not in work. Germany, the land that produced people such as Einstein and Daimler and inventions such as aspirin, has for the first time been having to buy patents from abroad because it is insufficiently inventive.

That is an incredible percentage - and looking at the demographics, it can only get worse as the German population gets increasingly concentrated in the upper age brackets. If we think we have a problem getting politicians to think about the Social Security and Medicare problems lurking in the not to distant future, its nothing compared to the problems that the Germans and other Europeans face.

"Since 1945 there has never been as small a core and as big a crust as there is today," Mr Steingart says.

According to the Federal Office of Statistics, the average German now spends only 13 per cent of his or her life in paid employment, while men devote 18 per cent to sport, television and visits to the pub and women 12 per cent to eating and personal hygiene. Britons work 250 hours more per year than Germans, Americans 350 hours more.

It is for this reason that Germany is haemorrhaging jobs abroad at a rate comparable with no other industrial land. According to the Institute for Economic Research around 2.6 million jobs have been relocated. This week it was announced that the electronics giant Siemens was on the verge of moving 10,000 jobs to eastern Europe.

Not to be all alarmist and everything, but unless the nations of Western Europe change their course, they could be laying the foundations for some truly bad times.

Just think - an aging population grasping desperately at welfare benefits that simply cannot be supported. Low and declining productivity, and a relative decline in power, prestige and international standing as a result of backward economic policies. A ready supply of foriegn scapegoats - however, the new potential scapegoats are not Jews eager to assimilate but intransigant and increasingly militant Muslims. A pan-European bureaucratic superstate being constructed; one that will write into its constitution the very welfare benefits that will destroy the European economy, that has little if any provision for individual rights, and will give power to unelected bureacrats who have a demonstrated desire to rule, rather than serve, the public.

If fundamental reforms aren't made, I don't see how the Europeans can avoid dire economic problems. And we know what happened last time Europe had a depression.

I've been thinking. For all that I read, the book title thing just wan't jelling for me. So, movies crams:

• Cheaper by the Dirty Dozen - a group of hardened criminals must lead unruly children into enemy territory.
• Enter Pete's Dragon Cute singing Dragon defeats small lonely boy in brutal martial arts duel to the death.
• -or- Pete's Dragonslayer - Lonely boy finds friendship with cute dragon, only to see dragon killed by smelly medieval knight.
• 28 Days a Week - the Beatles go into rehab, leading to psychadelic hijinks and musical numbers.
• -or- 28 Days of the Condor - After all of his coworkers are killed, Robert Redford gains sobreity while outwitting duplicitous CIA officials in rehab.
• 2001 Dalmations Lots of cute puppies go to Jupiter and become superbeings. Many are killed en route by a malevolent computer.
• Threefer: Planet of the Apes of Wrath Intelligent apes fight Bugs Bunny in a dust bowl landscape of existential despair.

I won't even start with the porn titles.

Maybe this is only funny to me, but if you have any idea what the following words or phrases mean-- Thac0, Mind Flayer, Vorpal Blade, Mordenkainen, Rust Monster-- I order you to check out SomethingAwful.com's loving tribute to your lost teenage years.

Bring on the funny!

Ralph Peters' analysis of the recent clashes and rioting in Iraq is right on the money.

SEVEN American soldiers died in Baghdad on Sunday because we failed to respond to last week's Fallujah attacks. Whatever our motives, we looked weak and indecisive. Additional enemies believed their moment had come.

In the Middle East, appearances are all.

Intelligence personnel are routinely warned to avoid mirror-imaging, assigning our values and psychology to an opponent. Imagining that our enemies think like us has cost us dearly in Iraq. The bill will go still higher.

Combined with the administration's folly of trying to occupy Iraq with too few troops, our notion that patience and persuasion are more effective than displays of power has made the country deadlier for our soldiers, more dangerous for Iraqis and far less likely to achieve internal peace.

Americans value compromise; our enemies view it as weakness. We're reluctant to use force. The terrorists and insurgents read that as cowardice.

When U.S. forces arrive in a troubled country, they create an initial window of fear. It's essential to act decisively while the local population is still disoriented. Each day of delay makes our power seem more hollow. You have to do the dirty work at the start. The price for postponing it comes due with compound interest...

On the day of the ambush and mutilations in Fallujah, we made another inexcusable mistake. The Marines, who expected to control a major city with a single battalion, failed to respond immediately. The generals up above seconded the decision. The chain of command was concerned about possible ambushes and wanted to let the situation burn itself out. The generals in Baghdad proclaimed, in mild voices, that we'd respond at the time and in a manner of our choosing.

In a textbook military sense, it was the correct response. On a practical level, it was the worst possible decision.

We viewed our non-response as disciplined - rejecting instant emotional gratification. But the insurgents, the terrorists and the mob read matters differently: Our failure to send every possible Marine and soldier, along with Paul Bremer's personal bodyguard and a squad of armed janitors, into the streets of Fallujah to impose a draconian clampdown created the impression - not entirely unfounded - that we were scared.

We broke a basic rule: Never show fear. No matter how we may rationalize our inaction, that is what we did.

Instead of demonstrating our strength and resolve, we have encouraged more attacks and further brutality - while global journalists revel in Mogadishu-lite.

Of course, we're not going to flee Iraq as President Bill Clinton ran from Somalia. But our hesitation to respond to atrocities against Americans has renewed our enemies' hope that, if only they kill enough of us, as graphically as possible, they still can triumph over a "godless" superpower.

To possess the strength to do what is necessary, but to refuse to do it, is appeasement. Since Baghdad fell, our occupation has sought to appease our enemies - while slighting our Kurdish allies. Our attempts to find a compromise with a single man - the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - have empowered him immensely, while encouraging intransigence in others.

Weakness, not strength, emboldens opponents - and creates added terrorist recruits.

We came to Iraq faced with the problems Saddam created. Increasingly, we face problems we ourselves created or compounded.

The cardinal rule is, show mercy after you've won. To do it before makes winning a lot harder.

Back when I worked in the music biz, we used to joke when times got desperate. Toward the end of my time at one company, when it was clear that the revenue stream had become a brackish drip, the marketing people came up with a bunch of naked pleas we thought would be funny to use as marketing taglines: "Wave/Particle Records: Catalog Sales Are Down." "Wave/Particle Records: Hey... We Gotta Eat Too."

The companies I worked for were not, and never will be, big-time labels with multiple chart topping releases. When the entire music industry suffered at the dawn of the new millennium, we suffered too. Broadly speaking, when industry-wide sales were off 11% one year to another, we could count on a dip too. It never seemed right to me to blame downloading for our woes. It stands to reason that the most-downloaded tracks, and therefore the albums most ostensibly affected by the loss of revenue that downloading might suggest, are blockbusters, not critical darlings or cult hits selling fewer than 50,000 copies (that's three orders of MAGNITUDE lower than a big #1 hit record sells). The records I worked were obscurities, not teenybopper rages, and even if they were being downloaded, it was not at any appreciable clip. And yet, everyone's sales dipped in lockstep.

(Interesting side note... it's actually a little disheartening to log on to KaZaA looking to see if anyone is sharing copies of the record you just spent six months working on, only to find that nobody is.)

Now there's actual Facts and Research to back up my gut hunch about downloads. A new working paper from two professors of business, titled "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales,' has concluded that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates."

Professors Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer-Gee took a 17-week sampling of downloads made from the major filesharing networks, corrected for a galaxy of variables, and mapped the popularity of downloads to the Billboard sales charts and SoundScan data for a given week. Their findings: in the worst cases, downloading may cannibalize one in every 500 record sales, and for most releases it's more like 1 in 5000. Not exactly the stuff of industry holocausts.Although I'm not much of econometrician, and can't speak to the math, their conclusions are sound and reasonable based on the methods they used.

Predictibly, the RIAA is firing back (see this NY Times piece). Unfortunately for them, they're bad shots, pooh-poohing the notion that statistical sampling can be an accurate indicator of an entire population. Unfortunately for us, most people don't know or understand that.

Amy Weiss, an industry spokeswoman, expressed incredulity at what she deemed an "incomprehensible" study, and she ridiculed the notion that a relatively small sample of downloads could shed light on the universe of activity.

The industry response, titled "Downloading Hurts Sales," concludes: "If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?"

Critics of the industry's stance have long suggested that other factors might be contributing to the drop in sales, including a slow economy, fewer new releases and a consolidation of radio networks that has resulted in less variety on the airwaves. Some market experts have also suggested that record sales in the 1990's might have been abnormally high as people bought CD's to replace their vinyl record collections.

That last bit there is the nut of the matter. The 1990s were the decade in which the first and possibly the last generation to treat recorded music as a major entertainment commodity went back to buy all the Beatles and Stones albums on CD. While they were at the store, maybe they stuck around to pick up the Stone Roses too. Those days are gone, and the that one change, along with other certain structural changes in how records are distributed, have hosed the deal for good.

The Times article makes another good point. Each album downloaded doesn't necessarily represent a lost sale. The burns I have in my collection are of records that I wasn't going to buy anyway, at any price.

Go read the paper-- it's long and mathy, but I can't find much to complain about. The numbers are there. Downloading represents a continued consumer interest in music, and if the labels cannot understand the difference between paying $0 for an album and paying $18, tough. The RIAA are a bunch of dupes, and it's too bad for them they, and the labels they purport to represent, can't understand that demand is not a given, profits are not a right, and that if they shit their own bed, it's they who have to sleep there.

See, it works better when the books are incongruous. Kundera and Sartre are just kind of a bread sandwich made with bread in the middle and garnished with dense, depressing bread. Black bread made with sawdust.

Anyway, I just wanted to apologize to our three and a half readers for slacking off my usual feverish pace of posting. I'm not stupid; I know that most of you come here for Buckethead's right-wing eggheadery and outer-space knowledge, Ross' dyspeptic erudition and GeekLethal's trenchant milblogging rather than for my ill-informed centrist handwringing and music wonkery. But even so, sorry. "Real life" intrudes.

Like you want to hear what a 29 year old white college administrator has to say about the deployment of image in rap music, anyway.

The folks at CT have hit the farking mother lode! Via several other people, they have hit upon the pastime of cramming together two book titles into one odious-- I mean, glorious-- über-concept. Witness:

The Joy Luck Fight Club: Chinese American daughters and mothers bond over fist fights, family history, dim sum and bouts of anarchy.

Heart of Darkness at Noon: English explorer misreads map, winds up in gulag.

The Way The Things They Carried Work: Children’s pictorial guide to the functioning of Vietnam era military hardware.

Tropic of Cancer Ward: More sex than you’d expect.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars My Destination: Five struggling artists share a studio and discuss teleportation, rape, tattooing and synaesthesia.

Remains of the Longest Day An old-style English butler is drafted to cater the invasion of Normandy.

Goodnight Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: Goodnight penal colony on the moon. Goodnight earth controlling the penal colony on the moon. Goodnight supercomputer named Mike.

Mason & Moby Dixon: Explorers cross the plains in search of giant mechanical white duck.

Moby Dick Tracy: Call me Ishmael…on your wrist radio!

The Sum of All Fears and Loathings in Las Vegas: A nuclear bomb is planted on American soil in the midst of an escalation in tension with the Soviet Union in an attempt to rekindle cold war animosity and prevent reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Then the ether kicks in…

I have proven to be singularly inept at such tomfoolery, and as such my paltry contributions are so far not worth sharing. Don't let that stop you from trying.

[wik] I'm just not very good at this...

The Wonder Boys of Summer: The sentimental tale of a past-his-prime Brooklyn novelist and the talented rookie who reminds him of his faded glory. A dog is shot, a car is stolen.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E Vanya: Retired secret agents sit around the samovar griping about lost love, old age, and declining property values.

Ham On Catcher In The Rye: Charles Bukowski’s autobiographical memoir about youth, prep school, existential anomie, and banging prostitutes.

Now we have our own near-Clueless-length post on the matter. Observe:

Phil linked to Dawn's, uh, statement? on her self-described "moderate" views.

Let's go find the most amusing sentences. Well, maybe those that are most amusing to us crazy-ass secularists.

"This is a typical tactic of secularists, angry leftists, libertarians, and others who attempt to use their own sense of moral superiority against those who take a principled moral stand. "
Our lead-off is this remarkable example of self-parody. I am reasonably confident she has no idea what she's just said.

"He takes the most far-out, "God Hates Fags"-type counterdemonstrators, and parades them as though everyone who opposes homosexual marriage must be like them."
Yeah, and the right would NEVER do this. ;)

"In fact, a recent poll showed that 20 percent of white evangelicals support civil unions"
Holy Cow! A whole 20%? Feel the love, everyone. At least from the 20%. The other 80%, maybe not.

"I personally would not oppose civil unions for homosexuals. Morally, I object to them very strongly. However, I am willing to allow them because I believe it is impossible at this point in time to turn back the tide of homosexuals wanting certain legal rights. "
No other reason? Just that one? You're just goin' with the tide? I can't be sure of what Christ would say about that, but there's gotta be something, somewhere.

"Marriage is society's model for the highest form of a human relationship—the two-parent family. Were the government to sanction any kind of "marriage" other than that between one man and one woman, it would send the message that marriage is only about with whom or with what one has sex."
The highest form. Wow. Didn't know that. Um, so why exactly? What part of regular, plain-ole straight marriage makes it the highest form? The parenting bit? This tells us what Dawn is really thinking, see? She doesn't feel that there is anything to a homosexual relationship other than sex. She said it. Right there.

"There's a reason why murder is a crime even when the person murdered is not a productive member of society. "
Even when? But it's almost not a crime? Me for the not understanding! Me not understand!

"Two men plot a murder and, just in case they get caught, they get "married" first. "
Oh, please. It's called the Fifth Amendment; go look it up. At least until we have Patriot Act III, and we lose it, on account uh terrur.

"Note also the hatred in Dennison's language, his reference to "the good Jesus People." Again, he's using the timeworn secularist tactic of painting anyone who disagrees with him as being hate-filled, while he is a kind and loving person who only has righteous anger. "
Allow me to further qualify precisely how we actually dofeel, Dawn! We do not think you are filled with evil. Rather, we recognize that you are filled with a gooey, Walmartish sort of self-righteousness, the kind that is most often found amongst those who have succeeded in surrounding themselves with large numbers of sufficiently like-minded persons, and have therefore not been challenged by intolerance, or often even had it pointed out to them. But maybe Dawn has a gay friend! Cluckity cluck -- too bad for him. She's trying to save a country here, dammit!

""Pray Until Something Happens."
Too good to pass up! Make up your own caption. ;)

"People like Phil Dennison—and I'm only singling him out because he put his views out there for all to see—subscribe to a relativist rationale, where liberty means pleasure to the exclusion of responsibility and truth. That is exactly the philosophy against which our Constitution was created to protect us."
Boy, do you ever not get America, babe. Liberty means that I get to decide, for myself, what pleasure and responsibility and truth are. We don't take Judeo-Christian (pick a denomination, any denomination) fundamentalist mores and hold them up as an ideal.

My ideal American is someone who keeps his religion to himself, carefully considers his actions when those actions impact others, takes political positions based on an honest balance of fact and opinion, and has at least a vague sense of why those who sacrificed themselves to create a country and society where individual freedom is paramount, and happiness (pleasure, if you will) is to be pursued.

Here is the great truth that Dawn just doesn't get, and why the tyranny of the majority is something responsible citizens must protected everyone against: Only 3% of the population of this country is gay. Just leave them alone. Stop your demonstrations, stop your hate, stop your attempts at "conversion", at "fixing", at all that crap. Just stop. Go away and find something else to do.

I think that a religious conservative's lack of respect for personal dignity and responsibility stems from their conviction that no such safe haven exists; that God judges all, and that judgement extends through individual actions to the judging of society.

You either believe in equality or you don't. Dawn believes in equality where it benefits her, or is convenient for her belief system, then reserves the right to draw whatever moral lines she pleases. That insidious self-righteousness is precisely one of the evils that the constitution is intended to protect us against; it becomes particularly and overtly dangerous when it seeks enforcement through law.

I can't help but feel that with a large percentage of the population out there being ready and willing to impose their morality on a small, hunted minority we must find a way to take power from the federal level and put it back in the states, where it belongs. We can't have nut cases pushing for homogenizing, hateful crap like the FMA. There has to be a safe haven, a place for people to go, where like-minded people can live in tolerance. It's a big country.

FMA people, please go live in your red states. Make all the draconian laws you want. Moralize amongst yourselves; pretend that God thinks what you think he thinks.

"Defense of Marriage"? Bullshit. It's "Attack the Fags". How about Dawn, or some other "Christian" (I use the term loosely because I know some real Christians, who live the teachings), tells us when she asks a "God Hates Fags-type counterdemonstrator" to leave the, uh, counterdemonstration. Or maybe ask them to wear a special T-shirt. Sometimes it gets hard to tell you-all apart.

A great many people are taking dKos to task for this statement

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

A lot of bandwidth has been wasted on finding just the right adjective for Kos in the wake of this stunningly rectrocranial eructation: "Cuban-style Socialist," "heartless" and so on.

Gentlemen, gentlemen, let's not bicker! Let's just all agree that one word sums up the Daily Kos on this day: "dickhead."

I left the coffee shop this morning; my coffee didn't have a lid. Raindrops wanted to be coffee drops; they made little splashes as they bullied plain old water molecules out of the cup.

This morning I have questions.

What percentage of music industry revenues actually ends up with artists, overall?

How much money is the US military spending on private security contracts in Iraq, right now?

Does joking about "perception is reality" make it so?

Is the strength of a democracy proportional to the freedom its citizens enjoy, their active participation/monitoring of their government, neither, or both?

3am is no time to fall asleep.