Crikey.

Somebody's been at sea a little too long.

Australian sailors had sex on the beach, streaked through military buses and pranced naked with rolled-up burning paper stuck between their buttocks in a wild, drunken romp at a US outpost in the Indian Ocean. An investigation by The Weekend Australian has revealed many other complaints of misconduct during the 24-hour shore leave on Diego Garcia – the US base dubbed "Gilligan's Island with guns." Among the allegations were widespread drunkenness among the crews of HMAS Adelaide and HMAS Kanimbla, urinating in public, overt public male-to-male kissing and abuse of foreign military personnel.

Disciplinary action has been taken against just two sailors – one for the so-called "dance of the flamers," where rolled paper inserted between the buttocks was set alight, and another for exposing himself in public. [...] Another drunken shipmate had run naked through an army shuttle bus transporting other foreign military personnel. His identify could not be established.

They never identify the "foreign military personnel," either the ones that were abused or the ones that got the naked, hammered Aussie come barreling through their bus. Or if they're the same bunch and this guy was verbally abusing them as he ran through their bus. It doesn't really seem out of the realm of possibility.

The Dance of the Flamers was performed at a yacht club.
(link via People's Republic of Seabrook)

Without a single shot fired.

What with Iraq sucking up all the headlines these days, it's nice to finally get some good news. Iceland has been liberated!

La-La Land

Los Angeles becomes the world's first city with its own internet domain: http://www.la
doremifaso.la is already taken.

"I won the contest."

From Taegan Goddard's Political Wire:

New Jersey state senate candidate Jim Morrison's involvement in what he calls a "pretty penis contest" has spurred efforts by Democratic party officials to get him to quit the race, the New Jersey Herald reports. The AP quotes an unapologetic Morrison: "If people want to know about it, they should know I won the contest."

Is this required behavior for people named Jim Morrison?

Update (7:48 pm): I forgot to mention this from the end of the AP article: "Morrison, a partner in his parents' law firm, has gotten national attention in the past. He was a runner-up on ABC-TV's reality show 'The Mole' in early 2001. That same year, Morrison was named one of People magazine's '50 Most Eligible Bachelors.'"

Today's Missing Palindromic Headline

From the Volokh Conspiracy: "Strom Morts," suggests reader Jonathan Falk. ("OK, it's not quite English, but it's damn close.")

Sanford Wagner Has an Opinion

I've read this letter to the editor at the Knoxville News Sentinel's website about ten times now and I still cannot, for the life of me, figure out whether he's being tongue in cheek.

You may think you are doing a noble and valuable service by bringing us the intimate details of a purported attack by a University of Tennessee football player on a 16-year-old girl.

Frankly, the people of Knoxville and the surrounding towns are interested in something more important: having a football team with a vastly better record than last year. That 8-5 record included a grand total of two wins against teams with significant ability. You don't think anyone believes that beating Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Kentucky and Mississippi State should actually be counted as wins?

I would like to understand why girls - who should know better and surely should have been taught basic common sense by their parents - go at night to a building occupied by athletic 300-pound men, 6-foot, 4-inch tall, with large muscles? Then, when the oh-so-predictable happens, they cry rape.

We don't need or want to hear the details of these stories dragged out endlessly through the newspaper nor do we want to hear similarly of some half-drunk wise guy who chooses to challenge a large, strong football player in a bar on the Strip and winds up with a broken jaw.

Please, let's concentrate on stories that will give us a winning team. Throwing players off the team because their interest in being a professional football player is greater than their interest in the insipid courses most of them take should not keep them from playing and winning for our university.

Why is pursuing a career as a professional football player not as worthy as becoming a scientist or an engineer or a social worker or a musician? It is certainly more lucrative. If athletes prefer to spend their time honing their skills at what will be their career instead of in study hall, let them be.

Then we will have a football team of which we can be proud.
Sanford Wagner, Knoxville

The Martian Decade

Tomorrow, the latest spacecraft bound for Mars will launch from the Kennedy Space Center, one of the three ground rovers and four satellites that, barring anything unexpected, will converge on the Red Planet by early next year. In the meantime, the satellites currently orbiting Mars are sending back a wealth of information and pictures. If all goes well, the next few years should yield a flood of data about our planetary neighbor.

The Odyssey, which showed the presence of water at Mars' southern pole, has detected much larger amounts of water at the northern pole, greatly increasing the odds of finding microbial traces of Martian life.

"Once the carbon-dioxide layer disappears, we see even more water ice in northern latitudes than Odyssey found last year in southern latitudes," said Odyssey's Dr. Igor Mitrofanov of the Russian Space Research Institute, Moscow, lead author of a paper in the June 27 issue of the journal Science. "In some places, the water-ice content is more than 90 percent by volume." [...] Another report, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, combines measurements from Odyssey and Global Surveyor to provide indications of how densely the winter layer of carbon-dioxide frost or snow is packed at northern latitudes greater than 85 degrees. The Odyssey data are used to estimate the mass of the deposit, which can then be compared with the thickness to obtain a density. The dry ice layer appears to have a fluffy texture, like freshly fallen snow, according to the report by Dr. William Feldman of Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., and 11 co-authors. The study also found once the dry ice disappears, the remaining surface near the pole is composed almost entirely of water ice.

Also, the Global Surveyor satellite has sent back a couple of striking photographs. One is of the tiny Martian moon, Phobos, one of the darkest objects in the solar system and only 0.006 times the size of our moon (17x14x11 miles, 27x22x18 km). The other is a stunningly clear picture of a meteor impact crater clearly showing the presence of layers of sedimentary rock, which may indicate the former presence of a giant lake.

Fascinating...

Meta-interventionism?

Interesting piece - albeit with a horrific misspelling of "surreptitious" - at the Telegraph about the Interventionists, performance artists who physically intervene in existing works of art and have been very busy recently. Because everything eats itself in the end, there have now been interventions into interventionist works which, as the Telegraph article notes, presents some interesting and ironic twists to the philosophy.

It would appear that the art world has gone intervention crazy. You could blame it on Guy Debord and the Situationist International with their fondness for challenging the gallery environment with dynamic interventions. But that's too obvious. As usual, I blame Brian Eno.

[...]

Hopefully the as-yet unnamed 36-year-old from Notting Hill (note to self: doesn't Eno live in Notting Hill? How old is he?) who intervened into Cornelia Parker's The Distance: A Kiss With Added String will find the artist as broad-minded as Tracey Emin. Parker's piece, according to the artist "a comment on the claustrophobic nature of relationships," is nothing more than Rodin's sculpture The Kiss wrapped in a length of twine. The unnamed man, on bail pending further police inquiries, simply cut the rope.

To this humble observer, this intervention is the most eloquent of all those considered here and seems to advance the original piece, bringing to it a sense of completion. Parker's "comment" is at its best obvious and at its worst reductive. It surely invites intervention. If indeed the artist finds relationships claustrophobic, shouldn't she find the cutting of her string, metaphorically at least, a liberation? By freeing The Kiss from its bindings the unnamed Notting Hillian has offered a ray of hope to the artist. There seems little doubt that they should get together for dinner. I'd suggest a bowl of spaghetti.

The most famous/infamous Interventionist work is probably Jake and Dinos Chapman's "rectification" of a set of original prints of Goya's Disasters of War. The brothers purchased the set and then went "very systematically through the entire 80 etchings and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads." This, unsurprisingly, prompted an angry Spaniard to stage his own intervention.

Nicola Hunter, an art history teacher from Oxford who was in the audience, said: "Chapman is a provocative speaker and he was engaging in dialogue with various members of the audience. Suddenly this oddly-dressed man in a red beret and long dark hair sprang up in front of Jake Chapman. He gave a short speech, saying he was Spanish and that Spanish people loved Goya. He then produced a large pot of red gloss paint and threw it over Jake Chapman. Everybody froze. It was a direct hit. It hit him in the face and splattered across the wall and, I think, two of their etchings. You could see Jake was furious."

More on the Sodomy Decision

Some commentary by folks smarter than yours truly:

Jack Balkin examines the implications of grounding the decision on privacy rights rather than equal protection.

Phil Carter discusses the decision's impact on the military's don't-ask-don't-tell policy.

Ana Marie at The Antic Muse swings a satirical wrecking ball at Scalia.

Second of all, could Anthony Scalia be any gayer? Why isn't he posting in the Corner -- he's that gay.

Check out the hissy-fit he throws in his dissent, basically predicting that overturning Bowers will lead to utter chaos, real wrath of God type stuff! Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, and volcanos! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifices, dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

That's right, folks, he just argued that the getting the police out of gay people's bedrooms will lead to pig-fucking. (Or, worse: touching yourself.)

Walter Dellinger and Dahlia Lithwick have a back and forth about several issues implicit in the decision, but mostly about the role of Sandra Day O'Connor in this Court, including this odd figure:

Number of 5-4 opinions: 13. Number of 5-4 opinions in which Justice O'Connor is in the majority: 13. Number of dissenting opinions by Justice O'Connor: 0.

And Kevin Drum reminds us of a post from the beginning of April wherein he posed a question that has gotten overlooked a bit:

But why did a panicky neighbor call? And why did the cops arrest them instead of just slipping away? Like I said, this might be old news to some, but this article is the first one I've read that had a picture of the two men involved. Do you notice anything, um, distinctive about them that might have caught the eye of a nosy neighbor and a couple of Houston cops?

Sodomy Law Struck Down

By a 6-3 margin, the Supreme Court struck a mighty blow (that pun was unintentional but upon re-reading, well, it's staying) for freedom and equal rights in overturning the Texas sodomy law. The Axis Powers - Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas - were predictably in the minority, and Scalia teetered on the edge of apoplexy at the decision, taking the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench. Witness Judge Tony trying to unwad his judicial panties:

Bowers’ conclusion that homosexual sodomy is not a fundamental right “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” is utterly unassailable.

Well, gee, Your Honor, if our nation's history and tradition is the yardstick, then I'll bet you're still pissed that broads can vote and those uppity colored folks count as more than 3/5 of a person.

Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda [...] It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.

Many Americans don't want Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Muslims, Catholics, and/or Jews doing those things either. Not quite a winning point there. Hell, I'd prefer my son not have to encounter evangelical Christians or crypto-fascist justices, but I still recognize the rights of each to indulge their filthy, disgusting habits. Hell, I even support letting them do it in public! And I can't believe that anybody would even need to point this out, but it was a foregone conclusion that the Court was going to take a side in the "culture war" one way or the other as soon as they agreed to hear the case. Neutral observer of the democratic rules of engagement, my ass. Tell it to Al Gore, you pompous hack.

Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals

In fact, some of my best friends are abominations in the eyes of God!

If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct, ante, at 18; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,” ante, at 6; what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution,” ibid.? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case “does not involve” the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court.

Again, that (not in the least entertaining) belief was resoundingly affirmed during the last election, Mr. Justice. So, putting aside the usual rationale for right-wing huffing and puffing over homosexuality, why exactly is Justice Scalia so unduly alarmed at this decision? Because despite the voluminous legal sophistry that permeates his dissent, he's completely right about one thing - this decision does knock down the last legal barriers to same-sex marriage, as Daily Kos explains:

The majority ruled that the Texas sodomy law "furthered no legitimate state interest." That is a "rational interest" standard -- much more lax than "compelling state interest," or "strict scrutiny." [...] Any use of consistency and logic would force the court sanction same-sex marriages, and invalidate any attempt to limit the definition of "marriage" to unions between man and woman.

I suspect this just moved up several notches in the rankings of significant issues for the 2004 campaign. Conventional wisdom would say that this is a loser for the Democrats, but that is last century's logic. This is an issue of basic fairness and young people, at least, know it. The economic/libertarian wing of the GOP just wants this issue to go away, because nothing exercises Jesus' shock troops quite like homosexuality, and let's face it: those people put forth an ugly, hateful face for the Republican Party, one far more knuckle-dragging and mouth-breathing than Trent Lott.

Aside from the militant Christers (and Dems have no real shot at their vote anyhow), anti-homosexual hysteria is largely a generational issue. Everybody below the age of 45 has openly gay relatives, friends, co-workers, et cetera, and once you replace the abstracts of the issue with real human beings, it gets much more difficult to keep spitting venom. Scalia is on the wrong side of history, and the histrionics in his dissent show that he knows it.

Spider Sex Gets Even Weirder

A short article at New Scientist about the odd reproductive habits of spiders makes them seem more alien than ever. The gruesome habit of female spiders making a post-coital meal of their male suitors is well-known, but in certain species, the mommy-and-daddy dance is stranger still. While the males of some species try to avoid having their petit morte segue into plain old morte, other species, like the red back spider, actually somersault onto the female's fangs, thereby guaranteeing that, in stark contrast to humans, their first time remains the best panky of their lives. And then there is Argiope aurantia.

Male spiders possess two sexual organs called pedipalps, each of which inflates after inserting into one of a pair of genital openings in the female. In the 55 cases in which a male finished mating by inserting his second pedipalp, the researchers saw that the male immediately became unresponsive and assumed a death posture with legs folded under his body. The male spiders' hearts stopped beating after a few minutes. [apostropher: aside from double genitalia and the cardiac arrest, that still sounds uncomfortably familiar...]

There was no obvious sign that the female was responsible for this lethal effect. And any stealthy way of dealing out death was ruled out by the actions of one confused male that stuck his second pedipalp into a mealworm carcass trapped in the web. This cross-species necrophilia also instantly triggered the male's death, showing female Argiopes are not to blame.

The females do sometimes remove and devour their dead mates. But the researchers do not think the death program evolved to give her a post-sex snack, as the males are too tiny to provide much nutrition. Instead the researchers think the corpses act as a weird chastity belt that blocks the female genitals and discourages other suitors. If so, it appears to be effective. In 11 cases where competing males attempted to dislodge the dead mate, they only succeeded three times. And it was not for lack of trying, Foellmer told New Scientist: "The other males go berserk, bite into the legs and try to pull him off."

Which reminds me:
Why do female spiders bite the heads off their mates after sex?
To stop the snoring before it starts.

Intelligence Centers in Iraq

One must take DEBKA's reports with a grain of salt, but I'd be surprised if this weren't true. Meet the new Mukhabarat, same as the old Mukhabarat. Well, no, not as psychotically violent, but with vastly superior technology and a lot more money.

The Americans are secretly building two giant intelligence facilities in Iraq at a cost of some half a billion dollars, according to an exclusive report received from DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources. US engineering and construction units are setting up what amounts to an "intelligence city" on a site north of the oil city of Mosul in Kurdistan and a second facility in Baghdad’s Saadun district on the east bank of the Tigris. Our military experts infer from the vast dimensions of the two projects and their colossal expense that it is Washington’s intention to retain a large US military presence in Iraq in the long term, for a decade at least.

The new installations will greatly enhance America’s military, intelligence and electronic command and control over Iraq and its neighbors, notably Iran and Syria. The Mosul facility will guard northern Iraq’s oilfields and the pipelines carrying Iraqi gas and oil to Mediterranean terminals. Its instruments will reach into every corner of Iran and Syria, replacing America’s electronic eyes and ears in southern Turkey. This facility will be activated a section at a time according to need. Upon completion at the end of 2005, it will employ an operating staff of around 4,000 American intelligence personnel and electronic engineers.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Middle East sources report that the intelligence center going up near Mosul is causing much nervousness in Damascus and Tehran. Both governments understand that when the first sections are activated in three months time, not a single military or intelligence move of theirs will go unseen by America’s electronic spies – and that goes for terrorist activity as well.

The functions assigned the Baghdad station are different. While the Mosul center will provide early warning against external threats to the US military presence in Iraq, the Baghdad station will stand guard over America’s political and military control of the capital and its satellite towns, including the Sunni enclave cities of Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit.

An "intelligence city?" Sounds like they're settling in for the long haul.

WAITWAITWAIT! DON'T FLUSH!

If you live in Arizona and you can't find your penis, call the water company. They've got one in lost and found.

Go team!

Via uggabugga, I stumbled across The Presidential Prayer Team. And you can join for free! I wonder if I'm still eligible to join if the thing I would pray for a god to give George W. Bush is kidney stones...

Puh-leeze...

Nuke component unearthed in Baghdad back yard

Of course the news channels are breathless about this, but let's take a minute and look at what was actually found. A few parts of a gas centrifuge that dated back to 1991 and had been buried for twelve years. Not a centrifuge, some parts of a centrifuge. It takes hundreds, perhaps thousands, of actual working centrifuges, large-scale facilities in which to operate them, and fissile material to start producing the material that goes into a bomb, then you need the delivery system. You could make this same discovery in almost every country on Earth.

Reinforcing the Analogy

From Yahoo News: "A U.S. Army digger destroys one of several houses in the Iraqi town of Ramadi, some 90 km (55 miles) west of the capital Baghdad June 3, 2003. Soldiers said that U.S. forces stationed nearby came under attack from these houses and it was decided to remove them." (Posting it here rather than just linking because Yahoo links tend to be ephemeral.)

Pictures like this will go a long way toward convincing the Iraqis that we aren't creating New Palestine. I came across this picture at Shock and Awe, where Kynn notes:

Once upon a time, a non-Muslim country won a short war in the Middle East, and set themselves up as military occupiers of the mostly Muslim people. The United Nations was powerless to do much besides pick up the pieces and provide the care for the native population (which the occupier showed little concern for), because the occupying country paid little heed to the U.N.'s opposition. The people of the subjugated country soon became angry at their occupiers, demanding self-rule. Urged on by extremist Muslim clerics, those people began to resort to terrorist suicide bombs, striking at the oppressors. In response to these attacks, the occupying power began demolishing Arab homes, stating military necessity and claiming the homes were being used to stage attacks.

Yes, that does sound terribly familiar. And that photograph will have a resonance across every nation in the region.

Spot the Loony!

Peter Sutcliffe [the Yorkshire Ripper] told police that in 1967, at the age of twenty, he had heard the voice of God speak to him as he worked at Bingley cemetery. He would claim that he had first heard that voice while digging a grave. He stated that the voice had led him to a cross-shaped headstone upon which were written the Polish words JEGO, WEHBY and ECHO. It was this same voice that had ordered him to kill prostitutes.
-crimelibrary.com

Harvey Carignan assured the policemen who arrested him in 1974 for multiple rape, mutilation and murder that they had made a mistake because the person they had arrested - himself - was: "An instrument of God, one who was acting under His personal instructions. Murder, rape and mutilation are all part of a Grand Plan. God is a figure with a large hood and you can’t see his face."
-casebook.org

A devout and obsessive religious upbringing as a child probably influenced the killer Herbert Mullin to start murdering people in the USA in 1972. Voices told him what to do as he shot four young boys to death in a park at Santa Cruz. When his murder count reached thirteen the police caught him and were no doubt highly impressed by his claim that he had received telepathic messages from God, and he was in fact the "saviour of the world" who had just saved the world by shooting people.
-casebook.org

On January 23, 1972 [Joseph Kallinger] branded his oldest daughter for running away. He was arrested for child abuse and found incompetent to stand trial. By mid-1974 he was constantly hearing voices from a floating head that followed him around. God also spoke to him and told him to kill young boys and sever their penises. Eager to comply, Joe enlisted his 13-year-old son, Michael, and proceeded to torture and murder a nine-year-old Puerto Rican youth. Their next victim was one of his own children, Joe Jr., who had previously accused him of abuse.
--Slaughtered in the name of God

During a jailhouse interview last month, [Christopher] Turgeon said he has no regret or remorse and truly believes what he did was right and ordered by God. "I can't question God's methods," he said. "I just obey."
-A Killing in God's Name

"God told me to do it."
-Deanna Laney, on bludgeoning her children to death

"Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers, and especially the Arabian Peninsula where the Ke'ba is."
-Osama bin Laden

"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
-George W. Bush, speaking to Palestinian PM Abu Abbas

Cracks in the dam

Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence

A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today. The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure. By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.

[...]

Mr. Westermann, who is in his mid-40's, has worked as a State Department expert on unconventional weapons for the last several years and is viewed within the department as a careful and respected analyst of intelligence. An administration official said he had served previously as a Navy officer and had not worked for the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies.

Edwards steps to the plate

Due to low polling numbers, lots of folks have written off John Edwards as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. I think that is mighty premature almost a year before the first primary, and when Edwards starts his multi-state ad blitz you'll see a surge in his numbers. Right now, it's in his best interest to let the other candidates (read: Kerry and Dean) keep landing body shots on one another, and I suspect that is his current M.O.

In the meantime, he delivered a speech last week at Georgetown University that was the most cogent and powerful salvo on the economy and budget that any of the candidates have unleashed so far. If this is the tack he's planning on taking - and it does seem to be - then Democrats serious about retaking the White House ought to be paying attention, no matter which candidate they support. There is really too much in there to summarize it effectively, so read the whole thing. I'll excerpt some highlights.

Our great free enterprise system has been rocked by some at the top who put their own fortunes ahead of their company’s future and their employees’ hard work. Our democracy has been wounded by some at the top who put favors for the few ahead of what’s right for the whole nation. Worst of all, the character of our country has been betrayed by some at the top who want the measure of an American to be how much she is worth, not how hard or how well she works.

Here in Washington, some of our most powerful leaders stand accused of letting big campaign contributors write special favors into law. And tonight, a President and Vice President who have doled out special privilege more quickly than any administration ever will begin a two-week sprint to collect, in return, more special-interest money more quickly than any administration ever.

[...]

The President and I agree on one thing: this campaign should be a debate about values. We need to have that debate, because the values of this president and this administration are not the values of mainstream America, the values all of us grew up with – opportunity, responsibility, hard work. There’s a fundamental difference between his vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth. He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure everybody has the chance to be an owner.

For a man who made responsibility the theme of his campaign, this president sure doesn’t seem to value it much in office. We’ve lost 3.1 million private sector jobs. Over $3 trillion in stock market value lost. A $5.6 trillion budget surplus gone, and nearly $5 trillion of red ink in its place. Bill Clinton spent 8 years turning around 12 years of his predecessors’ deficits. George Bush erased it in two years, and this year will break the all-time record.

Yet even with all those zeroes, the true cost of the administration’s approach isn’t what they’ve done with our money, it’s what they want to do to our way of life. Their economic vision has one goal: to get rid of taxes on unearned income and shift the tax burden onto people who work. This crowd wants a world where the only people who have to pay taxes are the ones who do the work.

Make no mistake: this is the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago. Like socialism, it corrupts the very nature of our democracy and our free enterprise tradition. It is not a plan to grow the American economy. It is a plan to corrupt the American economy and shrink the winners’ circle.

[...]

This crowd is making a radically different argument. They don’t believe work matters most. They don’t believe in helping working people build wealth. They genuinely believe that the wealth of the wealthy matters most. They are determined to cut taxes on that wealth, year after year, and heap more and more of the burden on people who work.

How do we know this? Because they don’t even try to hide it. The Bush budget proposed tax-free tax shelters for millionaires that are bigger than most Americans’ paychecks for an entire year. And just last week, Bush’s tax guru, Grover Norquist, said their goal is to abolish the capital gains tax, abolish the dividend tax, and let the wealthiest shelter as much as they want tax-free.

Look at the choices they make: They have driven up the share of the tax burden for most working people, and driven down the burden on the richest few. They got rid of even the smallest tax on even the largest inheritances on earth. This past month, in a $350 billion bonanza of tax cuts on wealth, they couldn’t find $3.5 billion to give the child tax credit to poor people who work. Listen to this: They refused to cut taxes for the children of 250,000 American soldiers who are risking their lives for us in Iraq, so they could cut dividend and capital gains taxes for millionaires who were selling stocks short until the war was over.

[...]

First, I will ask Congress to cancel the 2001 and 2003 income, dividend, and estate tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in the upper two brackets. In these times of national sacrifice, we should not be asking less of the most fortunate. I agree with Bill Gates, Sr., the father of the richest man in America, that in a world where taxes must be paid, the people who inherit massive estates ought to pay taxes too. I agree with Warren Buffett, the shrewd investor and another of America’s richest men, who said that something is deeply wrong when a billionaire has a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Second, I will give America a tax code that rewards work, not wealth. Today, middle-class families pay income tax on their earnings at a rate of up to 25%, plus another 7.65% in payroll tax. Yet under the law President Bush just signed, a CEO who pays himself whatever he wants can sell millions of dollars in stock and pay tax at a total rate of 15%.

Let me say that again: Somebody who has worked long hours his whole life to save for his son’s college has to pay taxes at more than twice the rate as his boss. Where I come from, that man’s hard work means at least as much to the future of this country – not half as much – as what his boss does. After the biggest lapse in corporate responsibility in our lifetimes, we shouldn’t be letting a CEO who pays himself hundreds of times more than his workers pay lower taxes than the workers themselves.

Mr. President, I challenge you. Explain why you think a multimillionaire should pay 15% on his next million, while a fireman has to pay over 30% for each extra dollar of overtime. Mr. President, explain how you square that with America’s values.

There is significant hay to be made here. The economy stinks and that stink is starting to permeate every corner of the country. We are spending three billion dollars a month just to pay for the soldiers in Iraq, a figure that doesn't even include any reconstruction costs (like, say, the salaries we will now be paying to Iraqi soldiers and police). Those billions are borrowed from our future, from our children's future. Republican congressmen are openly soliciting bribes for favorable legislation. Everything the national Republican Party does reeks of contempt for average working Americans.

How do they continue to get away with it? Well, luckily for them, the arcana of fiscal and monetary policy are so far over the heads of most people, even well-informed and well-educated ones, that administration flacks don't even bother to try and justify anything in those terms. Not that they could. I meant to link to this Whiskey Bar post a couple of weeks ago, but got sidetracked by my non-online life. The post is one of the clearest, most succinct summations of the reasons why the economy is far, far worse than it seems, and likely to get worse still. It's a must-read. Must.

I used to get frustrated with folks who would argue that the deficit didn't matter, since we just owed that money to ourselves anyhow. That position belies a complete ignorance of monetary policy, but holds a certain seductive illogic all the same. But the truth is that increasingly we don't owe it to ourselves, we owe most of it to investors from other countries, as the article illustrates.

Bush can't run on the economy - it's shot. He can't run on success in Afghanistan - we cut and ran and it's back to a shambles. It's becoming clear that he won't be able to run on success in Iraq either, though he certainly intends to try. All that leaves him is fear, lies, and ginning up another war in time for the election. Make no mistake, that is a powerful combination, and one that could successfully get him another four years to funnel your money to wealthy investors and campaign contributors. But if the Democrats get on message and stay on message, they will take him down, because nothing has changed since 2000. The country is still split right down the middle.

If you are a swing voter, unsure whether you should vote Republican or Democrat, then you have been paying so little attention that you don't deserve to vote. The two parties are further apart than they have been in a century. The options are clear and stark. Bush has run our economy in exactly the same manner as he ran all of his business ventures - to wit, into the ground. He has alienated our allies, stuck our troops indefinitely in one of the most dangerous spots on Earth, and made the world a much more dangerous place for Americans. He has rolled back civil liberties and enshrined secrecy as the prime directive in all government dealings. He has turned the reins of government over to megacorporations while emptying the Treasury. Everything he touches turns to shit, folks.

Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is anybody?

Did the Inca write in 7-bit binary code?

Now this is just fascinating.

Harvard anthropology professor Gary Urton is a leading expert on ancient South American civilizations. One of the biggest, the Inca, stood apart from other major civilizations of the era in having no written language. That is, unless Dr. Urton is correct and the khipu, complicated knotted strings that have long been assumed to be either simply decorative or a sort of "textile abacus" for performing calculations, turn out to actually be a 3-D written language built on 7-bit binary code.

Khipu can be immensely elaborate, composed of a main or primary cord to which are attached several pendant strings. Each pendant can have secondary or subsidiary strings which may in turn carry further subsidiary or tertiary strings, arranged like the branches of a tree. Khipu can be made of cotton or wool, cross-weaved or spun into strings. Different knots tied at various points along the strings give the khipu their distinctive appearance.

Professor Urton's study found there are, theoretically, seven points in the making of a khipu where the maker could make a simple choice between two possibilities, a seven-bit binary code. For instance, he or she could choose between weaving a string made of cotton or of wool, or they could weave in a "spin" or "ply" direction, or hang the pendant from the front of the primary string or from the back. In a strict seven-bit code this would give 128 permutations (two to the power of seven) but Professor Urton said because there were 24 possible colours that could be used in khipu construction, the actual permutations are 1,536 (or two to the power of six, multiplied by 24).

This could mean the code used by the makers allowed them to convey some 1,536 separate units of information, comparable to the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and double the number of signs in the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians and the Maya of Central America.

If Professor Urton is right, it means the Inca not only invented a form of binary code more than 500 years before the invention of the computer, but they used it as part of the only three-dimensional written language. "They could have used it to represent a lot of information," he says. "Each element could have been a name, an identity or an activity as part of telling a story or a myth. It had considerable flexibility. I think a skilled khipu-keeper would have recognised the language. They would have looked and felt and used their store of knowledge in much the way we do when reading words."

There is also some anecdotal evidence that khipu were more than mere knots on a string used for storing calculations. The Spanish recorded capturing one Inca native trying to conceal a khipu which, he said, recorded everything done in his homeland "both the good and the evil". Unfortunately, in this as in many other encounters, the Spanish burnt the khipu and punished the native for having it, a typical response that did not engender an understanding of how the Inca used their khipu. [apostropher: that is one world-class understatement]

But Professor Urton said he had discovered a collection of 32 khipu in a burial site in northern Peru with Incan mummies dating from the time of the Spanish conquest. He hopes to find a khipu that can be matched in some way with a document written in Spanish, a khipu translation. He is working with documents from the same period, indicating that the Spanish worked closely with at least one khipu-keeper. "We have for the first time a set of khipu from a well-preserved and dated archaeological site, and documents that were being drawn up at the same time."

Makes you wonder just how much else our Spanish, French, and British forebears wiped out as they swept across the New (to them) World, doesn't it?

Crow tastes oddly like leather.

Wearing a bowtie makes you "dapper"?

CNN'S dapper Tucker Carlson is gearing up for the worst meal of his life. Carlson has repeatedly asserted on CNN's "Crossfire" that he'll eat his shoes and tie on-air if Hillary Clinton sells a million copies of her memoir and Simon & Schuster recoups its $8 million advance. Clinton has now sold upwards of 600,000 copies and Carlson is reluctantly getting ready to chow down. "I feel a little sick to my stomach just thinking about it," he told the Washington Post. "I'm going to contest the results and demand recounts, but ultimately I'm going to give in and do the right thing." Carlson says he plans to consult fetish Web sites in search of edible footwear, but draws the line at munching his tie: "There's only so much humiliation one man can take."

Eek.

Even the US Postal Service delivers more quickly than this.

Indonesian doctors have removed the skeleton of a fetus that had been stuck in its mother's womb for more than seven years. The mother says she knew she was pregnant in late 1995. But when she failed to deliver a child, she didn't go back to the hospital because she was worried about expensive medical bills. A naval spokesman says the woman went to doctors complaining of stomach pains. Naval surgeons initially thought she had a tumor, but when they operated on her, they discovered the skeleton of a fetus in her womb.

Can somebody please tell me how to make this shudder go away?

Is India the new Africa?

This press release from a group of family planning and reproductive health researchers at Berkeley looks at current HIV epidemiology and changing demographics in India and says it may be soon.

According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, 20 percent of people over 15 in some sub-Saharan African countries are HIV-positive, and 70 percent of them will eventually die from AIDS. Recent estimates indicate the HIV prevalence rate in India, which has a population of 1 billion people, is less than 1 percent, but the low rate belies the looming pandemic on the horizon, according to the paper's authors.

[...]

A report from the CIA's National Intelligence Council projects that the number of people infected with HIV in India will jump to 20-25 million by 2010. There is already evidence that, in some parts of India, HIV infection is moving from the core high-risk groups of prostitutes and intravenous drug users into the general population, the researchers say.

Scary, especially when you consider that India has more people than all of Africa, crammed into about 1/10 of the space. The report makes the expected recommendations: condom distribution, better education, reduced numbers of partners or abstinence, fighting other STDs that increase transmission risk for HIV, and this:

Another avenue of prevention advocated by the researchers is for HIV prevention programs to offer circumcision to Hindu men, who are generally not circumcised. This is based upon increasingly strong evidence that uncircumcised men are at significantly higher risk of becoming infected from an HIV-positive partner compared with circumcised men.

Good advice, but I doubt many adults in the target audience will be lining up for the last one.

Putting the "miss" in "missile defense"

Another test, another failure. But wait, says the Pentagon, just because it failed to hit the only missile fired, the one that couldn't be mistaken for anything else, on a pre-determined flight path, with a tracking sensor on it, that doesn't mean it's a failure.

However, the Missile Defense Agency's spokesman, Chris Taylor, saw the test differently. "I wouldn't call it a failure," he told CNN, "because the intercept was not the primary objective. It's still considered a success, in that we gained great engineering data. We just don't know why it didn't hit."

Oh, it's hard to be a satirist these days.

Yes, but then it's also hard to laugh at this once you consider just how many dollars have been spent already to get us to the point where we can fire missiles at missiles and miss them, except in the very most controlled, unrealistic scenarios. Nine billion dollars this year, ten billion next year, and we had already spent over $120 billion when Bush came into office. All this money for a system that every expert not on the payroll agrees doesn't work and probably won't ever.

But damn the torpedos, says Bush and the ventriloquist making his mouth move (some call him Cheney). Come hell or high water, they are going to have these babies installed in Alaska next September. Why would anybody be in a giant rush to install a system by then that nobody thinks will be ready for deployment? Oh right, a presidential election. Is there any depth of shamelessness which the Republican Party would consider beneath them? No, as it turns out, there is not.

[Rumsfeld's] staffers have been phoning city officials, including some in Orange County, and strongly urging them to structure Fourth of July celebrations around the war in Iraq. "I got the impression that they had a list of every city in the nation that had applied for a pyrotechnics permit, and were calling them to persuade them to be part of the program," said one OC city official.

Bullets for everyone! Step right up...

...or don't bother - we'll come to you.

Remember the restaurant we bombed because intelligence said Saddam might be there? There still exists no estimate of how many innocent diners died from that bit of indiscrimate fire. Well, now we have a new, much more dangerous situation. The strike on the Iraqi convoy near the Syrian border has been widely covered, with DoD and intelligence officials crossing their fingers and hoping that Saddam and his sons may have been in some of the vehicles. But now there's a new twist on it.

Turns out that American troops were pursuing the convoy toward the Syrian border. With our whooping, war-painted president and his posse having delivered more than a few unsubtle threats toward Syria, nobody would be surprised if Syrian border guards were a little jumpy when American armor starts rolling at them.

It was unclear who shot first, but American forces engaged in a firefight with Syrian border guards and several guards were hit, one senior Pentagon official said on condition of anonymity. The guards were given medical treatment by U.S. forces on the Iraqi side of the border, and it was unclear how many were wounded and whether any had died, he said.

Two officials said they had no reason yet to believe that Saddam or his sons were among the fugitives. They didn't comment on whether Saddam was the intended target in the strike.

So it's "unclear" who shot first, how many Syrians we injured, or whether we killed any. No matter what the answers turn out to be once this "clears up," this is not good. I can hear the war-apologist bloggers now: well, what did they expect, defending their borders against an advancing army as if they were border guards or something? A bull in a china shop is no longer an apt metaphor for the United States. We're now up to fire-breathing dragon in an ammo dump.

Confederacy of Dunces

I started to get all depressed over the fact that 22% of Americans in a recent poll believe that Iraq used weapons of mass destruction during this last conflict. But then I found this post by Bob Harris at thismodernworld.com which helps to put that number in perspective by running through some other recent poll results. Turns out that 22% is roughly the same percentage of Americans who approve of the way the Catholic Church has handled the pedophilia scandals or believe that civilian deaths in Vietnam were relatively rare. And it is only twice as many as those who wish Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was their personal physician. Bob's other trenchant observation about the numbers: "About the same number of people who think it's an advantage to be a woman in America would eat a rat on live TV."

So remember: you can get a quarter of the country to agree with just about anydamnthing.

A Crime Against God and Man

I don't much kinder to the Jeremy Rifkins or Pope John Pauls of the world. I see no real problem with human cloning, support voluntary euthanasia, and am pretty sanguine about genetically modified foods. Wait, scratch the last one there, because this is deeply, horribly wrong.

Coffee plants that produce much reduced levels of caffeine have been created by genetic engineers. Hiroshi Sano and colleagues at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan used a technique called RNA interference to silence a key gene for making caffeine in coffee plants. This technique cut caffeine in young coffee plants by up to 70 per cent. They now hope to develop this technology in the world's most popular Arabica coffee.

Aiyeee! Look, people, play God with sheep, cows, and humans all you like. But keep your stinking paws off my coffee, you damn dirty apes! When these strains start cross-pollinating and the caffeine levels in coffee plants drop world wide, I promise I will go all Ted Kaczynski on the lot of you. That is, just as soon as the pounding headaches fade and I muster the energy to drag myself out of my mountain shack.

The horror, the horror...

Filling the dreaded gap

To the bewilderment of most of my friends, I am just this side of obsessed with professional football (the American flavor, that is). One of the highlights of the NFL season is Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on espn.com (tagline: "Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is believed to be the first Brookings scholar ever to write a pro football column."). With a month and a half to go before the NFL starts its preseason, there is precious little football news to dissect and mock, so his latest column shoots arrows all over the topical map. Two non-football-related highlights include one bit on monkeypox and the notes to one about media consolidation.

Imagine the Gambians, As They Carry the Giant Pouched Rats Down to the Dock, Thinking to Themselves, "America Is the Greatest Country in the World, and Yet They Pay Us to Ship Them Rats": Researchers think the monkeypox outbreak was triggered by prairie dogs that came into contact with an infected Gambian giant pouched rat. Forget how this chain of events could be figured out in such a short time, while science is still unable to determine why women are wide awake after sex, and men want to sleep. The real question is: What caused innocent, trusting little prairie dogs to come into contact with Gambian giant pouched rats?

According to this story in the New York Times ("All the News That Might Be True"), the rats "are imported as pets." People are importing rats? Don't they realize that a large supply of locally produced rats is already available free of charge? But these days no one wants a domestic rat. Oh no. It's got to be an imported rat!

[...]

Random House, Which is Owned by Bertelsmann, Will Publish TMQ's Next Book and the Excerpts Will Run in Time Magazine, Which Is Owned by AOL Time Warner. Watch for Details on ABC Primetime, Which Is Owned by Disney

* NOTE 1: NBC, which is owned by General Electric, is a competitor of ABC, which is owned by Disney, which owns ESPN; NBC is a partner with Microsoft in MSNBC, which has a sports news division, and Microsoft is a partner with ESPN.com; Microsoft recently signed an agreement to cooperate with AOL, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, which owns cable companies that show NBC, ABC and ESPN, and owns Sports Illustrated, which competes with ESPN The Magazine, which is published on Earth The Planet; AOL Time Warner cable channels carry CBS, MTV and Nickelodeon, all of which are owned by Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures, which competes with Disney's Miramax and Touchstone movie studios, and also owns Simon & Schuster, which published the Hillary Clinton book that was excerpted in AOL Time Warner's Time magazine and featured in a Barbara Walters special on Disney-owned ABC. So don't worry about media consolidation, and please support Michael Powell!

** NOTE 2: FX, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, also owns Fox, which competes with Disney's ABC, General Electric's NBC and Viacom's CBS, and owns Fox News, which competes with CNN, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, and owns Fox Sports Net, which competes with ESPN, and owns HarperCollins books, which competes with Simon & Schuster and with Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, which owns BMG Music, which is negotiating to combine operations with the Warner music label owned by AOL Time Warner. Really, don't worry about media consolidation!

*** NOTE 3. "Lethal Weapon" movies are produced by Warner Brothers, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, which competes with the 20th Century Fox studio owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation,**** which competes with Paramount Pictures, which is owned by ... oh, forget it.

With this year's NBA Finals vying for the title of least aesthetically pleasing championship ever, the coming six weeks seem all the duller. Maybe I'll actually get all these damn boxes unpacked...

The Mass Graves Mantra

Now that the WMD defense is rapidly unravelling, war supporters seem to have settled on a new mantra to chant. Post a comment anywhere questioning the wisdom of the war and hear the chorus rise: "massgravesmassgravesmassgravesmassgraves." This again avoids the basic point which is, of course, the issue of an imminent threat to the United States that would justify a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign country. Mass graves are unsettling, but don't really threaten you or I.

Jude Wanniski is an archconservative supply-side republican with something of a reputation as a crank even in those circles, but he makes an interesting point about the mass graves being discovered across Iraq.

The very first report, as I recall, was of mass graves that turned out to be cemeteries. But because the news accounts on CNN repeated incessantly that they were "mass graves," it simply confirmed the public's predisposition to believe that Saddam Hussein was a genocidal maniac. Ever since, the Times has been reporting on bodies being turned up by the hundreds or thousands in one place or another, and in each instance the dispatch suggests that these were the result of Saddam's brutality.

My caution is the result of having consulted experts in the history of Iraq, who tell me there are most certainly mass graves all over the country, because it has been at war since 1958 [...] when the monarchy fell. I'm advised that most of the slaughter that occurred over this period was in these early years of civil war, when there really were men and families lined up along ditches, machine-gunned or in other ways executed. There are also stories of "mass graves" that followed the 1991 Gulf War, when the USA urged the Shi'ites in the South and Kurds in the North of Iraq to take up arms against the Baghdad regime. I think even Human Rights Watch would have to say that "rebels" who are trying to kill "loyalists" should expect to either succeed or pay the consequences, as they did when the USA was nowhere around to back them up.

And let's not forget that in the south of Iraq, some of those mass graves were created by Americans during the first Gulf War.

Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

A thinner line of trenches on Moreno's left flank was attacked by the 1st Brigade commanded by Col. Lon Maggart. He estimated his troops buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers. Darkness halted the attack on the Iraqi trench line. By the next day, the 3rd Brigade joined in the grisly innovation. "A lot of people were killed,"' said Col. David Weisman, the unit commander.

One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.

I agree that was Saddam was a bad man with a thirst for blood, but the presence of mass graves puts us no closer to justifying this invasion. Hell, liberal groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were the only ones shouting about them back when Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand and Reagan was funnelling him support and weapons. I guess they just weren't as awful back then.

Well, I'll be.

Two unrelated headless corpse stories within three minutes of one another. What are the odds?

Reuters: Headless Naked Corpse Found by Castle Frankenstein Wed June 18, 2003 08:22 AM

Reuters: Head Cut Off Corpse in Chapel Desecration Wed June 18, 2003 08:19 AM

2:06 am

In acknowledgement of the time of this entry, I'll mention this story. Japanese researchers at Akita University School of Medicine published a study indicating that viewing computer monitors at night, particularly bright ones, produces physiological changes that could disrupt the sleep cycle. Interesting enough, if not particularly surprising. But what caught my eye was only mentioned in passing. They had the subjects doing exciting (a shooting game) and boring (addition) tasks on bright and dim displays and collected a range of measurements during the tasks.

Rectal temperature was recorded at two-minute intervals during each task. [...] The rectal temperature decreased during the night in all conditions. The rectal temperature was higher during the exciting task than during the boring one and significantly higher during the tasks with a BD than during the tasks with a DD in the latter half of each task.

Now, I'm not really a gamer; you get much past left, right, fire, and hyperspace and I start to panic. I can add numbers in my head pretty easily. But I have to think my ability at either would be greatly diminished by the distraction of 11 rectal temperature readings in a twenty minute span.

You break it, you buy it.

Way back at the beginning of April, I linked to a couple of posts by Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos about the misplaced confidence of Americans regarding the Iraq War. He basically argued that toppling Saddam was not the end of the problem, but only the catalyst for an entirely new set of even worse problems with which America was unprepared to deal. A month and a half has passed since then, and with that span's observations in mind, both posts are well worth a re-read.

We are stuck with Iraq now. No country is lining up to offer money or soldiers to help and one could hardly blame them. The dismissive arrogance shown to the United Nations and most of its member states is predictably being returned in kind. The most important leg of the Powell Doctrine, a clear exit strategy, was ignored, I suspect over Colin Powell's private objections. There never was an exit strategy and the point at which we'd no longer have 100,000+ troops stationed there seems ever more remote. But then, as Fred Kaplan notes in this excellent Slate article, while we spend a great deal of time, money, and mental energy on how to start and wage wars, we don't spend anywhere near that amount on how to end them. Kaplan cites a memo circulated by influential retired Brigadier General Wass de Czege after he observed US military war games last year.

These sorts of war games "tend to devote more attention to successful campaign-beginnings than to successful conclusions," he wrote. "War games usually conclude when victory seems inevitable to us (not necessarily to the enemy), at about the point operational superiority has been achieved and tactical control of strategically significant forces and places appears to be a matter of time."

Winning a war, he noted, doesn't mean simply defeating the enemy on the battlefield. It means achieving the strategic goals for which we've gone to war in the first place. In both war games, he wrote, the question of how to achieve those strategic goals couldn't be answered because the war game ended too soon.

This is unfortunate, he went on, because, important though it is to understand the early stages of a military campaign, "it is just as important to know how to follow through to the resolution of such conflicts." He added that, if the game managers did follow through the next time they play, they would learn that they - and, by extension, U.S. military commanders generally - have underestimated "the difficulties of 'regime change' and the magnitude of the effort required to achieve strategic objectives."

Well, General Shinseki at least was closer to reality regarding the number of troops such an endeavor might require, but wouldn't you just know it, he retired. And in what could only have been an intentional middle finger to Donald Rumsfeld, thanked almost the entire military structure and Congress by name without mentioning the Secretary of Defense. Then again, at this point I doubt there is any number of troops we could put in Iraq that would pacify the place. Baghdad blogger/journalist Salam Pax illustrates the level of anger and desperation we are facing in recounting a recent experience with a taxi driver.

I was trying to get a taxi at 10:30pm last night (which is a stupid and dumb thing to do in the first place - curfew is still at 11:00pm) so this car stops and we agree on a 2000 dinar fare. The moment I sit in the car he starts cursing and swearing at "them". Suddenly he stops in mid sentence turns to me and asks angrily

- are you a muslim? *he has a muslim looking beard, is angry and I defiantly don't want to start a theological discussion with him* - yes, alhamdulillah I am a muslim. - are you working with "them"? *oh dear this is not going anywhere good* - No! of course not. Why should I? Pause. - so do you think if I hide a hand grenade under the dash board they would be able to find it? *shitshitshit* - listen I really think you should be careful they have equipment which is able to detect these things, you really shouldn't carry a hand grnade around. - aha! So you know what equipment they use *fuck* - no,no, I said they might have this sort of equipment.

just then we pass a US patrol; one humvee and a couple of soldiers on foot. He slows down and looks intensely at them. They are on my side and he leans on me to look out of the window. This is the point when I start wondering whether I will die from the explosion after the this crazyfuck throws the grenade or from the retaliation fire. He decides to shout stuff and whizzes off.

I think I was in a car with a loony-suicide-fucker last night. I wanted to ask why he wanted to hide a hand grenade in his car but I was really really scared. He just might decide to stick the hand grenade down my throat, because it is Halal to kill those who are agents of the infidel occupier. What do you do when you are in a car with someone who asks you about the best place to hide a hand grenade?

Now you might say that he is part of that movement which calls itself al-Auda [the return] and is planning attacks here and there (I wish people would stop calling them sporadic but I will get to that in a moment). What makes this guy even more dangerous is that he is not part of the Ba'athi underground plot to re-emerge. He is one of the loonies who have taken the call to Jihad issued by the Imam of the abu-Hanifa mosque seriously. And these people just play so easily into the hands of the Auda.

Our raids to "root out resistance" are only making the situation more volatile and dangerous. Sooner rather than later, many Americans who supported the war are going to start wondering why we still have soldiers getting killed and maimed on a daily basis long after Bush strutted down the aircarft carrier and declared "Mission Accomplished." Welcome to guerrilla warfare, Mr. Bush, where the mission is never fully accomplished. We can't bring order to Afghanistan, we can't bring order to Iraq, and now they're considering putting troops in Gaza and the West Bank to take on Hamas? This is surreal. Unless you're in the armed services, in which case I imagine it's quite horribly real.

He's a uniter, not a divider.

I marvelled during the run-up to the Iraq invasion that Bush was the only leader who could possibly have driven France, Germany, and Russia into an alliance. That was no mean feat, given the little matter of twentieth century history. Well now he's managed to one-up even that accomplishment.

The administration's fevered alarums about links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda were incredibly ridiculous to anybody with even a passing understanding of Middle Eastern politics. Despite adopting some of the trappings of Islam over the past decade in order to stay in power, few non-Israeli leaders in the Middle East have been more consistently and vehemently hostile towards Islamicists than Hussein. I have no hard figures to back this up (because nobody does), but it's no secret that folks of that mindset make up a good number of the skeletons being exhumed from the mass graves.

Saddam didn't much put up with anybody who could pose a threat to his rule, and the Al-Qaeda would-be theocrats had nothing but revulsion for the heathen Ba'athist socialists. Just for evidence of their wildly divergent worldviews, remember that the Islamic fundies do not allow representations of the human form, like say, statues. And if we know anything about Saddam, we know that he was more fond of pictures and statues of himself than just about anybody in the region.

With all that in mind, how disturbing is this article?

American officers waging a major counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq say that the murky identity of their attackers is slowly coming into focus, and what they see is troubling. The continuing anti-U.S. violence in the central part of the country, they say, appears to be the work of an unlikely but deepening alliance between two of Iraq's most mutually antagonistic subcultures: secular Baath Party militants and Islamic extremists united only by a burning hatred of America.

[...]

And in an ominous new twist to the armed resistance in the country, Iraqi guerrillas for the first time appear to be attacking local officials and institutions that are collaborating with occupation forces. On Monday night, gunmen in cars tossed grenades at Fallujah's courthouse and mayor's office, the focus of U.S. reconstruction efforts in the hostile town. There were no reports of casualties.

"The standard wisdom is that the attackers are die-hard Baathists who have reorganized and formed underground cells," said Maj. Joffery Watson, the intelligence officer for the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, which is policing Fallujah. "But the fundamentalists are gaining influence. [...] The Baathists offer their military skills, but the mosques are the rallying point. They're the staging grounds for the attacks."

Or this, from Pakistan's Daily Times?

A shadowy group of Saddam Hussein loyalists calling itself al Awda, meaning "the Return," is forming an alliance with Islamist militants linked to Al Qaeda for a full-scale uprising against the US-led occupation in mid-July. The information comes from leaflets circulating in Baghdad, as well as a series of extended interviews with a former official in Saddam’s security services who held the rank of brigadier general. Al Awda is aiming for a spectacular attack and uprising on or about July 17 to mark the anniversary of the Ba’athist revolution in 1968, the former general said.

The Islamists have indicated they are willing to join forces to battle the Americans, even though they dislike Saddam and his secular Ba’ath Party ideology. A leaflet by Jaish Mohammed, one of two Islamist groups operating in Iraq, said it was willing to work with the Ba’athists despite Saddam’s repression of Islamic fundamentalism. The leaflet, obtained by The Washington Times, makes a direct appeal for former intelligence officers, security personnel, Fedayeen Saddam members, Republican Guard troops and Ba’ath Party members to join forces.

"The first act will be spectacular, possibly smashing an oil refinery near Baghdad," said the former general, who has been urged by al Awda to join the leadership of the planned anti-coalition front. The former officer said the effort goes well beyond the sporadic shootings in the past three weeks that have left at least 10 Americans dead. Al Awda is well financed, he said. It uses money stashed away by Saddam and his supporters well before the coalition’s invasion, and its funds are enhanced by bank robberies and the removal of huge quantities of cash from the central bank early in the conflict.

Or this, from the British news source, OutlookIndia.com?

A stream of jehadi volunteers from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon and other countries have started moving into Iraq to join what is promised as the mother of all jehads against the USA. Before the occupation, there was no evidence of any links between the Saddam Hussein regime and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and International Islamic Front (IIF), despite apparently fabricated US evidence to the contrary. After the occupation, there are increasing reports of attempts to bring the dregs of Al Qaeda and the IIF from Afghanistan and Pakistan and of Saddam Hussein's Army and Baath Party together for what is described as a new jehad, the like of which the world has not seen before.

Initial meetings in this regard have already been held in Al Qaeda and IIF hide-outs in Pakistan. There are claims, as yet unsubstantiated, of Saddam being alive and of he and bin Laden soon issuing a joint fatwa against the US and the UK. More American troops are reported to have been killed in the two months since the occupation of Baghdad in April than during a similar period after the Americans entered Afghanistan in October, 2001.

Saddam, if still alive, remains as elusive in Iraq as bin Laden in the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal belt. The massive use of US military power, including helicopter gunships and tanks, have not so far been able to overcome the resistance, which shows as yet no signs of relenting.

Driving the Ba'athists and the Islamicists into each other's arms is more impressive than uniting NARAL and Operation Rescue, or PETA and the National Beef Council, or NAMBLA and the US Council of Catholic Bishops (okay, so that's a bad example). The man is indeed a uniter of the first stripe. Right now, he is uniting the country in the belief that joining the National Guard would be a singularly bad idea.

Be back soon...

Whew. Moving during a North Carolina summer is somewhere to the left of enjoyable. And if you think you want one of those fold-out sleeper sofas, may I recommend that you postpone that purchase until you are certain you will never move again. My heartiest thanks to Rick, Liz, Dave, Jody, Elena, and Roberta, without whom I would have just set the old place on fire and started anew with the insurance money. You guys are the best.

So anyhow, cleaning the old and unpacking in the new still awaits, consuming nearly every free moment I can scrounge. But soon - very soon - I'll be apostrophizing in this space again. See you then. In the meantime, it's not exactly the Boston Tea Party...

The Missing Link Appears

After painstakingly cleaning and reassembling hundreds of fragments pulled from 200 meter stretch of an Ethiopian riverbank, an international team of archeologists have assembled three full skulls. Because they were buried with volcanic rocks between layers of ash, geologist can confidently date them at around 160,000 years old, the oldest fully human fossils ever found.

There are good human fossils from 100,000 years ago, he adds, but from then back to 300,000 years ago the remains are either highly fragmented, poorly dated or both. In contrast, the newly revealed skulls have precise dates thanks to the fragments of volcanic rocks found with the fossils. When rocks cool, they begin to accumulate argon gas from the decay of a potassium isotope. Analysing the gas gives the rock's age, in this case 154,000 to 160,000 years old.

The anthropological implications:
1. It lays to rest any lingering notions that we evolved from Neanderthals. They were a competing branch on the tree.
2. It pretty much ends any debate: we evolved once in Africa, not in multiple places around the globe.

Also of interest, these fossils show that the earliest humans were quite large and seem to have already developed ritualistic mortuary practices.

They collected more than 600 stone tools, including hand axes. But they never uncovered the lower jaws to the skulls or any parts of the skeletons. Anthropologists suspect that the skulls had been deliberately removed from the bodies as part of some ancient mortuary practice. Close inspection revealed parallel incisions around the perimeter of one skull, more cut marks on the other two. Similar modifications have been observed by anthropologists in societies, including some in New Guinea, in which the skulls of ancestors are preserved and worshiped.

The three skulls, all missing the lower jaws, were excavated a few hundred feet from one another. The most complete one, probably that of an adult male, especially impressed scientists with its humanlike size and shape, very nearly modern. So the discoverers decided the specimen belonged in the same genus and species as modern humans, Homo sapiens. But there were just enough differences, the scientists concluded, that the fossils were probably a subspecies, Homo sapiens idàltu, to differentiate them from fully modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens. Idàltu is a word meaning "elder" in the local Afar language.

As of yet, there is still no comment from the standard bearers of creationism.

Crumbling Edifices

In Scotland's Sunday Herald, Neil Mackay identifies the actual British program that was designed to produce slanted intelligence on Iraq.

Britain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down.

The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer. He knew members of the Operation Rockingham team and described the unit as 'dangerous', but insisted they were not 'rogue agents' acting without government backing. 'This policy was coming from the very highest levels,' he added. 'Rockingham was spinning reports and emphasising reports that showed non-compliance (by Iraq with UN inspections) and quashing those which showed compliance. It was cherry-picking intelligence.'

Ritter and other intelligence sources say Operation Rockingham and MI6 were supplying skewed information to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which, Tony Blair has told the Commons, was behind the intelligence dossiers that the government published to convince the parliament and the people of the necessity of war against Iraq. Sources in both the British and US intelligence community are now equating the JIC with the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the US Pentagon. The OSP was set up by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to gather intelligence which would prove the case for war. In a staggering attack on the OSP, former CIA officer Larry Johnson told the Sunday Herald the OSP was 'dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace', adding that it 'lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam'.

He added: 'It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.' Johnson said that to describe Saddam as an 'imminent threat' to the West was 'laughable and idiotic'. He said many CIA officers were in 'great distress' over the way intelligence had been treated. 'We've entered the world of George Orwell,' Johnson added. 'I'm disgusted. The truth has to be told. We can't allow our leaders to use bogus information to justify war.'

It looks like the problems are starting to pile up for Tony Blair. I'm not sufficiently familiar with British Labour politics to know whether a viable candidate exists that could threaten Blair's leadership of the party (British readers: who would these candidates be?), but if this brings down Blair, it will be difficult to keep that momentum from seriously damaging Bush heading into the elections. Last week, John Dean, former counsel to Richard Nixon and as such man who knows a thing or two about impeachable offenses, published a column on findlaw.com that broached the impeachment question.

Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose." [emphasis mine]

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

How have we, in a country with a nominally free and scandal-hungry press, managed to reach this junction? Nearly fifty years after his death, this H.L. Mencken's quote has a trenchancy it never achieved during his life:

"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury." (thanks for the quote, tengu)

America's "ferine fury" is subsiding as evidenced by the TV news spotlight turning away from the slow drip of Americans returning home from Iraq in bodybags and refocusing on Martha Stewart's indictment, two men kissing onstage at the Tony Awards, and Barry Manilow's broken nose. Perhaps a sober and honest examination of the veracity of Bush's justifications for this invasion can begin. And if he was doing the misleading rather than being misled, which seems more likely with each passing day, it will be time to seat a grand jury.

Do you feel safer yet?

Doesn't anybody do background checks any more?

Laura Callahan, the deputy CIO of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was placed on paid administrative leave last week after questions surfaced about her academic qualifications, a DHS spokeswoman confirmed. The move came after members of Congress contacted department officials demanding answers to questions about her academic background, as well as about the department's policy on background checks.

On her resume, Callahan, who was appointed to the position on April 1, said she received her academic degrees, including a doctorate in computer information systems, from Hamilton University in Evanston, Wyo. However, the congressmen, including Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), contend that according to published reports, Hamilton isn't licensed by that state, nor is the school accredited by the U.S. Department of Education. The congressmen said Hamilton is a "diploma mill."

I wondered how something like this could have slipped through until I got to the end of the article, where it all started to make more sense. Apparently, during her tenure as White House webmaster for the Clinton administration, she demonstrated the very sort of skills most in demand by the current administration.

In March 2000, she was one of two White House officials accused of threatening Northrop Grumman Corp. workers with jail unless they kept quiet about the disappearance of thousands of White House e-mails, according to press reports at the time. Callahan was the White House webmaster under the Clinton administration, and Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman ran the White House computer system at the time.

The e-mails in question had been subpoenaed during congressional and judicial criminal inquiries that included investigations into campaign finance abuse during the 1996 presidential campaign. Callahan testified under oath at a congressional hearing that she never threatened anyone over the e-mails. The outcome of the investigation couldn't be determined.

Worthless degree notwithstanding, she sounds like the ideal Bush appointee.

(thanks for the tip, Donald)

History found

Last fall, Senate staffers were cleaning out a room in a sub-basement of the Capitol building, when they came across stacks of old, dusty books. Looking closer, they realized they had stumbled across "the long-lost official payroll and expense register for the Senate's first 90 years [1790-1881], the one-of-a-kind record of every dollar paid to senators in wages and travel reimbursement." Smithsonian Magazine has a short piece about the discovery.

The first ledger chronicles spending in the Senate from the time it had 26 members representing the 13 states until it had 76 from 38 states. To historians, its raw data promise a lode of information and insights to be coaxed and tweaked, teased and winkled from its pages. After only a cursory examination, for instance, Baker found notations accompanying entries for Senate stipends during a special session on March 4, 1801, which revealed that the world's greatest deliberative body advised and consented to the appointment of President John Adams? entire cabinet in a single day.

The ledger also shows that senators were paid $6 per day when the legislature was in session. Travel was reimbursed at 30 cents a mile for up to 20 miles a day, the federal government's first per diem perk. (Two centuries later, senators are reimbursed at only 6 cents more a mile for road trips.) In an early instance of paid sick leave, "Mr. [Richard] Potts [of Maryland] was detained last January on the road by sickness" and received $49 more for his pains.

The ledger also reveals that Congress raised a senator's pay in 1816 from the $6 per diem to $1,500 a year - only to see some incumbents voted out by constituents angry over the raise. (Today a senator earns $154,700 a year and a per diem of $165 when traveling.) But the ledger also indicates that senators did pitch in financially during the Civil War. The newfound records prove what historians had suspected but had not been able to prove: every senator paid the 5 percent "war tax" imposed on top-bracket salaries.

Even innocuous-seeming entries in the ledger may prove rich to historians. The book, for instance, includes a rather mundane dunning letter from the presidentially appointed comptroller of the Treasury, Joseph Anderson, to Walter Lowrie, secretary of the Senate, stating that the Senate had claimed too many expenses in 1832 and thus owed $5,845.20. But, in fact, Baker believes, this letter was a salvo in a bitter battle between President Andrew Jackson and the Senate over the national banking system. It appears to be political payback for the Senate's failure to do the president's bidding. Later, the Senate would vote to "censure" Jackson.

Update: Trailers of Death

"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." -George W. Bush

Mmm, not so fast. Seems the jury's still very much out on this.

The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons. Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon. Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank. [...] The skeptics noted further that the mobile plants had a means of easily extracting gas. Iraqi scientists have said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.

[...]

In interviews, the intelligence analysts disputing its conclusions focused on the lack of steam sterilization gear for the central processing tank, which the white paper calls a fermenter for germ multiplication. In theory, the dissenting analysts added, the Iraqis could have sterilized the tank with harsh chemicals rather than steam. But they said that would require a heavy wash afterward with sterile water to remove any chemical residue - a feat judged difficult for a mobile unit presumably situated somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the germ warfare program that Washington renounced in 1969, said the lack of steam sterilization had caused him to question the germ-plant theory that he had once tentatively endorsed. "That's a huge minus," he said. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically."

[...]

One skeptic questioned the practicality of some of the conjectural steps the Iraqis are envisioned as having taken to adapt the trailers to the job of making deadly germs. "It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," he said of the central tank. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can."

Guardian: "Mea culpa."

After a detailed explanation of what transpired with the Wolfowitz "sea of oil" quote, The Guardian apologizes.

There is no total satisfaction in these situations. The story should not have run. In view of the significance of the statements attributed to Mr Wolfowitz, rigorous checking should have taken place. The hazard of translating remarks from German back into the English in which they were originally made should have been apparent.

It concluded a week in which the Guardian apologised to the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, for locating him at a meeting he did not attend. It has not been the best of weeks.

Too bad you don't see more of this owning up in the major media. The entire episode was, however, a fascinating example of blogs leading the biggies.

I smell blood.

And Tom DeLay's most especially.

Could this be the beginning of subpoena season? Democratic National Committee head Terry McAuliffe and consumer advocacy group Public Citizen have requested that the Justice Department seize the records of fundraising groups associated with Majority Leader DeLay and three other Republican congressmen (Barton-TX, Tauzin-LA, and in the Senate, Shelby-AL) over allegations of bribery involving energy company Westar.

Westar put the e-mails on its Web site as part of a much larger disclosure of an internal investigation into allegedly corrupt practices at the company. The company has acknowledged that it is under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Topeka, Kan., and by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among the e-mails is one from May 20, 2002, in which Westar Vice President Douglas Lawrence wrote to Douglas T. Lake, an executive vice president, and said:

"We are working on getting our grandfather provision on PUHCA repeal into the Senate version of the energy bill. It requires working with the Conference committee . . . . We have a plan for participation to get a seat at the table, which has been approved by David [Wittig, then Westar's chief executive], the total of the package will be $31,500 in hard money (individual), and $25,000 in soft money (corporate)." (Washington Post)

My, my, that is very, what's the word, specific, now isn't it? The law the corporation was trying to circumvent is the Public Utility Holding Company Act. Westar wanted to split off its regulated public utilities from its other companies. Once they had two companies they could then transfer all the different companies' $3 billion debt to the utility and then pay for all that debt with rate hikes on a captive customer population. And just as icing, all the non-utility companies would then be free of regulatory oversight, which would make swindles like these decidedly easier the next go-round. Classy, huh?

Kansas, unsurprisingly, said you will do no such thing. Feh, said Westar, we'll see what the federal government has to say about that. Their quest to get around the Kansas law got tangled, though, because part of Bush's energy plan was the PUHCA, which was intended to protect shareholders and ratepayers from just this very sort of maneuver. Dammit. So they went to the Great Oracle of Corporate Wrongdoing, the House Republican Caucus, and pined, "If only there were some magical means to get an exemption just for us." And behold, magical means didst appear.

The documents show at least one Westar executive questioned why he was contributing to GOP candidates he did not know. The answer, according to the documents: DeLay, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin, Rep. Joe Barton and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby were needed for their help on the exemption and had asked that donations be directed, not to their own campaigns, but to those of fellow Republicans in tight races in 2002. Among the beneficiaries were a DeLay fund-raising committee that got $25,000; Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., who got $1,000 from a Westar executive; and Tom Young, Shelby's former chief of staff, whose unsuccessful run for Congress attracted $1,700 in Westar executives' donations.

"DeLay is the House Majority Leader" and "his agreement is necessary before the House Conferees can push the language we have in place in the House bill," one Westar executive wrote in an e-mail encouraging the donations. "Shimkus is a close associate of Billy Tauzin and Joe Barton, who are key House Conferees on our legislation. They have made this request in lieu of contributions made to their own campaigns." The same e-mail added: "Tom Young is Sen. Shelby's Chief of Staff who is running for the House in Alabama" and Shelby "made a substantial request of us for supporting Young's campaign." (Kansas City Star)

So the money was sent, and Westar got its own special exemption - in the House and the Senate - to do the very thing both state and federal law expressly forbade it to do. And you might never have heard anything about it, except that soon after this, their CEO got indicted and Westar found themselves the target of all kinds of investigations into their bookkeeping. Of course, once the federal grand jury was seated, both chambers removed the exemption, but it's a little late for covering their tracks on this, which is about as open-and-shut a case of bribery as you're likely to encounter.

A two-pronged defense strategy from the accused legislators seems to be emerging. Part one consists of loudly proclaiming: "Why, the nerve of you to accuse me of such a thing!" Part two consists of loudly proclaiming: "Terry McAuliffe is a dick." As to the second prong, well yes, that's not exactly a secret. However, it's a little beside the point. And to the first, yes, you. Tell it to the judge.

No wonder Cheney wants to keep those notes from the energy policy task force secret.

UPDATE (2:45 pm): I see Joe Conason reported on this yesterday.

Much of the self-dealing by the Westar management will be all too familiar to anyone who has read about Enron, Tyco, and the other sinkholes of business morality. These Midwestern fatcats reportedly awarded themselves gigantic bonuses, built themselves a $6.6 million executive suite, flew themselves and their families around the country in the corporate jet without reimbursement, falsified records to cover their tracks. And if their own notations are to be believed, several of them participated in a scheme to bribe House Majority Leader Tom "the Hammer" DeLay and other prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill.

[...]

This remarkable peek at the way the world really works raises three immediate questions: How will federal prosecutors in Wichita handle this blatant bribery scheme? Will any of the Westar suits roll over and talk about the company's friends on Capitol Hill? And will any of the Congressional Democrats - or for that matter, honest Republicans - muster the courage to file complaints against Tauzin, Barton, Shelby and especially DeLay with the so-called ethics committees of their respective chambers? (Maybe you should ask them.)

Noseworthy

Google News shows over eighty news articles at the moment detailing the vitally important story that schmaltz singer Barry Manilow sleepily walked into a wall Monday night and broke his nose.

This is news?

Juan Cole

Now that the news media is drawing down its forces in Iraq, in-depth reports of the situation on the ground there are growing scarce. One of the best sites I have found out there for good, balanced analyses of events on the ground there, particularly as pertains to the influences of competing religious factions (which is the story), is University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment. Huge helpings of much-needed context to be gleaned there, and while he opposed our unilateral military action, his recent article in Tikkun makes clear he's anything but an apologist for the Ba'ath regime or the anti-war movement.

The Baath regime has killed hundreds of thousands. The anti-war movement must find some practical way of addressing the genocides like those of Saddam and the use of weapons of mass destruction if it is to attain credibility. Simply halting a Great-Power war against regimes like the Baath—even if it could be done—simply ensures that they will survive to kill again. Non-military means such as boycotts failed to unseat the Iraqi government, in part because Iraq's petroleum was easily smuggled, and the regime's massive corps of secret police informers deterred coups.

Iraqi Kurds and Shiites are bitter that the volunteers who earlier went to Iraq serving as human shields to protect Baghdad against the United States had never done anything to stop the Baath from massacring them. It is not only imperialist wars that are wrong. Ironically, the best way to forestall further unilateral action by governments like that of George W. Bush might be to insist that the Security Council and NATO intervene earlier and more effectively to stop the war-mongering of regional dictators when they first inaugurate their killing fields.

Journalists and bloggers have written many pages about the role of Shi'a Islam in Iraq during and after Saddam, but (and I indict myself on this charge as well) often with scant knowledge to back those words. Spend some time wandering through Professor Cole's archives. If you're at all like me, you'll be amazed at just how much you didn't know. Invaluable.

Start the Presses!

So, the Wolfowitz quote in the post below was translated poorly. The Department of Defense transcript puts it thusly: "Look, the primary difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil."

That's not quite the same thing. But, all the same, I think the original poor translation is closer to the truth of the situation than the actual quote. This post still holds true, in my never very humble opinion, as to the reasons for invasion: welfare for some big American corporations (paid for by Iraqi oil) and permanent use of Iraq as a military staging ground. I really was floored that Wolfowitz would have said so bluntly what we all know to be true (hence the title of the post), so I'm not terribly surprised to discover that he didn't. He's not an idiot, after all.

The North Korea comparison is interesting, though. It's not clear that we really have much economic leverage over them either, given that the leadership seems perfectly willing to allow mass starvation within its borders. And, of course, they have (or claim to have) nuclear weapons and the capacity to wreak havoc all over the Korean peninsula and beyond. North Korea is a situation unlike any other around the globe, as American power projection goes, owing mostly to the extreme isolation they have willingly assumed. As opposed to most of the rest of the world, the NK leadership really is pretty unpredictable.

Stop the Presses!

Paul Wolfowitz tells the truth.

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil. The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Just for comparison:
“This is not about oil; this is about a tyrant, a dictator, who is developing weapons of mass destruction to use against the Arab populations."
-Colin Powell, November 21, 2002

I suspect that Dick Cheney is typing Wolfowitz's resignation letter for him this very minute.

Dim-ocracy

I keep seeing a phrase bandied about in the media, most recently here, that we "brought democracy" to Iraq. Okay, so maybe I'm overly concerned with linguistic accuracy and political science categories, but isn't the defining feature of democracy, well, voting?

What say we table this ridiculous meme until there's actually an election of some sort held in Iraq? Being occupied by the military forces of a (nominally) democratic country is not the same thing as practicing democracy.

From The Scotsman:

British forces in the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr yesterday cancelled what would have been the first democratic elections in post-war Iraq. Amid disorder at polling booths, allegations of rampant corruption in the choosing of candidates, and locals barely aware of a vote taking place, the elections have been "postponed indefinitely."

The Washington Post:

Iraqi political leaders lashed out today at a plan by the top U.S. civilian administrator here to appoint an interim advisory council instead of convening a national conference to choose a transitional government, saying that U.S. officials had reneged on earlier assurances and that many Iraqis would regard the decision as unpalatable.

The New York Times:

The new council was to be headed not by an Iraqi but by Brig. Adrian Bradshaw, who commands the Seventh Armored Division, which is in charge of Basra. Ole Wohlers Olsen, a Danish diplomat who is the Basra representative for the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, was to play a major role as well. The Iraqi participants were to be technocrats selected by the military: a water specialist, an engineer with the power company, a health official, a banker and the like.

The body was supposed to shield itself from politics and focus instead on the area's many woes. But at the opening meeting today, the carefully laid plans began to fall apart. Several thousand protesters denounced the new setup as antidemocratic. They were not assuaged by the military's creation of a separate civic forum to allow those interested in local issues to hold discussions without any decision-making authority.

I'm not saying something good can't or won't come out of this, but the current situation in Iraq cannot in any sense be called democracy.

Senate to investigate

Congress has finally been shamed into doing their constitutional duty regarding war. It would have been more appropriate to have done it before the war, but at this late date I’ll take what I can get. The Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will be conducting investigations on the use and possible abuse of intelligence information on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now we’ll see if the Senate Republicans can be trusted to honestly investigate the government or if they are merely readying the whitewash.

There has not been much public interest among Americans over the issue as yet, but that is likely to change. Once senior people start to appear in front of these committees - and invitations could potentially be sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others - there is likely to be more interest. Some of these hearings will be held in public and televised. There will be a lot of interest in seeing the administration, really for the first time, having to defend itself in public against the charge that it misused information and, in the extreme, made things up.

The makeup of the committees is interesting.

Armed Services Committee
REPUBLICANS John Warner, VA - Chair John McCain, AZ James M. Inhofe, OK Pat Roberts, KS Wayne Allard, CO Jeff Sessions, AL Susan M. Collins, ME John Ensign, NV James M. Talent, MO Saxby Chambliss, GA Lindsey O. Graham, SC Elizabeth Dole, NC John Cornyn, TX	DEMOCRATS Carl Levin, MI Edward Kennedy, MA Robert Byrd, WV Joseph Lieberman, CT Jack Reed, RI Daniel Akaka, HI Bill Nelson, FL Ben Nelson, NE Mark Dayton, MN Evan Bayh, IN Hillary Clinton, NY Mark Pryor, AR

The big news here, of course, is Robert Byrd, who has been the loudest and most persistent critic of the war. His presence on the committee should make it very interesting all by itself. Clinton and Lieberman probably stand out to most people, but both have been fairly supportive of Bush on Iraq and despite their ambitions, I doubt this is the forum where they start attacking. But you never know what can happen when a politician gets near a microphone.

On the Republican side, John McCain is a wild card. Obviously, he is strongly pro-military and carries big credentials in military matters, but he also has a long-running antipathy toward Bush and if he comes to feel that military lives were put at risk on the basis of fraudulent intelligence, it's unlikely he would collaborate in a whitewash.

Select Committee on Intelligence
REPUBLICANS Pat Roberts, KS - Chair Orrin Hatch, UT Mike Dewine, OH Christopher Bond, MO Trent Lott, MS Olympia Snowe, ME Chuck Hagel, NE Saxby Chambliss, GA John Warner, VA	DEMOCRATS John Rockefeller IV, WV Carl Levin, MI Dianne Feinstein, CA Ron Wyden, OR Richard Durbin, IL Evan Bayh, IN John Edwards, NC Barbara Mikulski, MD

Presidential candidate John Edwards needs press and this could be the golden goose. He supported the invasion, but has a good platform here to make waves over abuse of intelligence. Notable on the other side is Trent Lott, who, after being hung out to dry by the Bush administration, probably doesn't feel much inclination to help pull their chestnuts out of the fire, should it come to that.

The Democrats only need to stay united and peel off one Republican to prevail in these committees. In addition to McCain and Lott, each of Maine's "liberal" Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, sit on one of the committees. Senators from both parties on each committee have been critical of the post-war reconstruction effort and seem to be experiencing pangs of buyer's regret. Especially if the situation on the ground in Iraq continues to deteriorate, these investigations could surprise people and actually uncover some truth.

Maybe the worm is starting to turn.

What a story.

It is now verified and certain that Baghdad blogger Salam Pax (who will soon be writing a bi-weekly column for the Guardian) is real. How do we know? A-list journalist Peter Maass, recently back from Baghdad, just put two and two together and realized Salam - his real first name, by the way - was his interpreter while he was there. It's a great read, as is the Guardian link above.

Wanna come upstairs and see my dialectic?

Josh Chafetz of OxBlog is procrastinating on his finals by putting out an open call for the worst philosophy/political theory pick up lines (with the caveat that the philosopher/theorist must be at least moderately well-known). He's taking submissions by email rather than comments, so none of the entries so far are visible, though Kevin Drum weighed in with "Hey, babe, life is nasty, brutish, and short. But where it counts, I'm only nasty and brutish." Two points. Best I could come up with was "Oooh baby, you just made my Bertrand rustle."

Any others?

Like you care...

As of this morning, I was the 70th richest investor (of 6896) in the BlogShares fantasy stock market, having turned my initial virtual five hundred dollars into over twenty million. Taking out the upgraded Premium Players, who are not restricted to 20 transactions a day, I'm number 16 of 6566.

Correlation to my actual savings account: zero.

Space Restrictions

Via DefenseTech, I came across this EE Times article that just makes me shake my head. This administration really does seem to believe that having allies is a national weakness.

The nation's largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time—not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.

At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide "persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters." If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have "no veto power."

Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets. The program will include two components: the Counter Communication System, designed to disrupt other nations' communication networks from space; and the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System, formed to prevent other countries from using advanced intelligence-gathering technology in air or space.

This is why we are hated around the world (and don't kid yourself - we are, more than ever). The level of imperious arrogance implicit in this proposal is the same as if we had declared ourselves the only country allowed to use the oceans. To nobody's surprise, the notion of "negation" in regards to space seems to have originated with Donald Rumsfeld, who apparently believes that formulating foreign policy is his prerogative and his alone.

Let's Get Small

"I'm on drugs. You know what I'm talking about ... I like to get small ... It's very dangerous for kids, because they get reeeally small ... I know I shouldn't get small when I'm driving, but I was drivin' around the other day and a cop pulls me over ... says, 'Hey, are you small?' I say, 'No, I'm tall, man, I'm tall.' He says, 'I'm gonna have to measure you.' They give you a little test with a balloon. If you can get inside it, they know you're small ... and they can't put you in a regular cell either, 'cause you walk right out."
-Steve Martin

Speaking of getting really small, collaborating teams of British and Russian scientists have developed a tape that could allow people to climb walls à la Spiderman with two palmfuls of the material that mimics the microscopic surface of gecko feet.

The soles of the gecko's feet are coated with millions of microscopic hairs. Each creates tiny forces of molecular attraction when in contact with a solid surface.

When all the hairs of its feet make contact, the combined adhesive force is stronger than many man-made glues, with the added benefit that its feet can be peeled away from the surface at any time to allow it to move one leg at a time. Professor Andre Geim, director of Manchester University's Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology, used the principle to make reusable adhesive tape in collaboration with the Institute for Microelectronics Technology in Chemogolovka, Russia.

A 2mm-square segment of the tape was strong enough in one test to support a Spiderman toy - 15cm high and weighing 40g - by one hand from a glass ceiling. This means that covering the two palms of a man with the tape would enable his full weight to be supported, the scientists report in the journal Nature Materials.

Not small enough for you? Okay, how about flourescent lights 1000 times smaller than a red blood cell?

_{Credit: Bioimaging Resource/Cornell University}

Tiny blood vessels, viewed beneath a mouse's skin with a newly developed application of multiphoton microscopy, appear so bright and vivid in high-resolution images that researchers can see the vessel walls ripple with each heartbeat -- 640 times a minute. The capillaries are illuminated in unprecedented detail using fluorescence imaging labels, which are molecule-size nanocrystals called quantum dots circulating through the bloodstream. Quantum dots are microscopic metal or semiconductor boxes (in this case cadmium selenide-zinc sulfide) that hold a certain number of electrons and, thus, have a wide number of potential applications in electronics and photonics.

[...]

Webb explains that the laser scanning microscope used in multiphoton microscopy is particularly adept at producing high-resolution, three-dimensional images inside living tissue because it combines the energies of two photons, striking a molecule at the same time, with an additive effect. Under the conditions used, this only occurs at the focus of the laser, so only at that point is the molecule excited to a state that results in fluorescence emission. This excitation is the same as if it arose from the absorption of a single photon of higher energy, but it is three-dimensionally localized since it is only occurring at the beam focus. The scanning microscope moves the laser beam across the area being imaged at a precise depth. When repeated scans at different planes of focus are "stacked," the result is a brightly lit and vividly detailed three-dimensional image -- and video that takes a viewer inside a living organism.

What? That's still not small enough for you? Okay, but you're begging for an intervention. For now, I will go no smaller than this: a free-running perpetual motion motor made out of DNA. You can follow the link for the details, but the grossly oversimplified version is that researchers at Oxford and Lucent Technologies figured out a way to keep a small strand of DNA zipping and unzipping without having to feed it new strands. The excerpted implications:

The free-running DNA motor could eventually power microscopic machines capable of constructing and transporting chemicals and materials molecule by molecule. [...] "These [researchers] have put together a system that will, in principle, allow for a free-running machine." Such a machine could provide power for devices like nanorobots and nanomechanical computers, Seeman said. [...] The DNA motor could eventually power nanomachines for use in medicine, chemistry and materials science. [...] Eventually it may be possible to coax DNA to assemble into much more complicated structures, including molecular-scale electronic circuits.

Now that's small. Hey, quit nano-bogartin' the microjuana!

The land of the free.

We recently became the world leader in imprisoning our own citizens. Now there's a rallying point for civic pride.

With a record-setting 2 million people now locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country.

[...]

[I]n the last few years, Russian authorities have carried out large-scale amnesties to ease overcrowding in disease-infested prisons, and the United States has emerged unchallenged into first place, at 702 prisoners per 100,000 population. Russia now has 665 prisoners per 100,000.

United States imprisons at a far greater rate than developed Western nations and many impoverished and authoritarian countries. On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany.

Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton University, says sentencing policies have had a glaringly disproportionate impact on black men. The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with 1 in 63 white men. The chance of a black man going to prison in his lifetime is one in three, the department says.

Perhaps we aren't the ideal country to "bring freedom" to Iraq. So, we're establishing multiple, long-term, large-scale military placements around the globe and locking up a higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world - two policies that remove millions at a time from the labor force. Yet the economy is still bleeding jobs.

Not promising.

Mars Or Bust

Here we come!

If all survive - hardly a sure thing, given the planet's reputation as a graveyard for probes - four satellites and three ground-based robots will be sifting the planet for secrets by late January, the greatest concentration of scientific hardware ever assembled on another planet.

[...]

First off the pad will be a quirky, budget-built British robot scheduled for launch tomorrow in Kazakstan. Trailing its fumes will be a pair of NASA rovers departing separately from Cape Canaveral. Instrument-laden European and Japanese orbiters are also aiming to converge on the planet early next year.

2003 NASA budget: $6.1 billion
2003 US Defense Budget (not including Iraq war costs): $379 billion

Just think what we could be doing.

Screw you guys, I'm buying a home.

Posting could be sporadic over the next month, as I undertake the task of putting everything I own, along with the myriad objects I have never owned and yet seem to permanently be in my house, into boxes. I'm going to move all of it about seven and a half miles that way (jerking thumb over shoulder). Then comes removing it all again, putting it all away neatly, and gradually over the next few weeks buying duplicates of everything I own because I can't figure out where I stowed the original. And I have to re-acquaint myself with the finer details of home ownership, besides. Speaking of firemen, I spent my childhood as a Rusty.

On a completely unrelated note (as opposed to the barely related ones of the previous paragraph), I watch very little television these days, and as the NBA tournament draws to a close another precipitous drop looms. Accordingly, I realize this is probably very old news to everybody but me and my grandparents, but today was the first I'd heard of it. Snoop Dogg has a variety show on MTV called "Doggy Fizzle Televizzle." (Turkish take here. shrug.)

I say this without one iota of sarcasm: God, but I love America.

Bonus Special Features!

Unused Audio Commentary By Dinesh D'Souza & Ann Coulter, Recorded Spring 2003, for Aliens Special Red-State Edition DVD, Part One and Part Two.

Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition) DVD, Part One and Part Two.

Gullible isn't in the dictionary...

...but the dictionary did predict the winner of American Idol and that Philip Morris would beat earnings expectations by four cents a share.

As you may or may not be aware, some on the more, shall we say, imaginative wing of fundamentalist (I can see the fun, I can see the damn, but I just can't see the mental) Christianity have taken a shine to something they call the Bible Code. Really, go read some of their discovered "hidden messages" and remember: there are no laws preventing these people from owning forks, much to the dismay of their foreheads. Book sales on the topic are in the tens of millions, but as Michael Shermer needles in Scientific American, the joke's on them.

According to proponents of the Bible Code--itself a subset of the genre of biblical numerology and Kabbalistic mysticism popular since the Middle Ages--the Hebrew Pentateuch can be decoded through an equidistant-letter-sequencing software program. The idea is to take every nth letter, where n equals whatever number you wish: 7, 19, 3,027. Print out that string of letters in a block of type, then search left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, and diagonally in any direction for any interesting patterns. Seek and ye shall find.

Predictably, in 1997 Drosnin "discovered" such current events as Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu's election, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's collision with Jupiter, Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, and, of course, the end of the world in 2000. Because the world did not end and current events dated his first book, Drosnin continued the search and learned--lo and behold--that the Bible predicted the Bill and Monica tryst, the Bush-Gore election debacle and, of course, the World Trade Center cataclysm.

Just like the prophecies of soothsayers past and present, all such predictions are actually postdictions (note that not one psychic or astrologer forewarned us about 9/11). To be tested scientifically, Bible codes would need to predict events before they happen. They won't, because they can't--as Danish physicist Niels Bohr averred, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. Instead, in 1997 Drosnin proposed this test of his thesis: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them."

Australian mathematician Brendan McKay did just that, locating no fewer than nine political assassinations secreted in the great novel, along with additional discoveries in War and Peace and other tomes (see cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html). American physicist David E. Thomas predicted the Chicago Bulls's NBA championship in 1998 from his code search of Leo Tolstoy's novel. He also recently unearthed "the Bible code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax" from Bible Code II (see www.nmsr.org/biblecod.htm).

Hey, maybe there is something there.

It's like they think we're retarded.

Bush is now strutting around Europe, flatly stating that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." This is, predictably, a blatant lie. The two trailers they have found are not weapons, nor is there a shred of proof that they were used for bioweapons production. In fact, the accumulated evidence suggests that they almost certainly were not.

As grasped straws go, this one is so weak it's comical. Or it would be if we hadn't just killed several thousand people over these two terrifying, rusting TrailersOfDeath™. However, the award for the most bizarre justification of the WMD lies comes from Undersecretary of State John Bolton:

"The most fundamental, most important thing that was not destroyed [by international weapons inspectors] was the intellectual capacity in Iraq to recreate systems of weapons of mass destruction."

Bolton said U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors "could have inspected for years and years and years and probably never would have found weapons-grade plutonium or weapons-grade uranium." [apostropher: and the most likely reason for that is...]

"But right in front of them was the continued existence of what Saddam Hussein called the 'nuclear mujahadeen,' the thousand or so scientists, technicians, people who have in their own heads and in their files the intellectual property necessary at an appropriate time - to recreate a nuclear weapons program."

Bolton said the United States was justified in attacking Iraq because of that alleged capacity.

Just so I understand, the new threshold is that we can attack any country we want if they have scientists? Did a sober adult actually just make this argument?