Lazy, lazy, lazy

Too lazy to read a real post, just like I am too lazy to write one? Then enjoy these tasty microposts. Scientists say they are less toxic to the brain than buckyballs!

Life on Mars? The apostropher reports that some nerds with telescopes have brought Kim Stanley Robinson's areologist vs. terraformer debates one methane molecule closer to reality. Paris when (but not where) I was born No cell phones, smaller cars. Clothes: just as ugly as today! (Link via here, by way of here) Stick to football Easterbrook:

Now Clarke depicts himself as the one person who knew it all along. Now he also claims that he knew after September 11 it would be a colossal mistake to pursue Al Qaeda and attack Iraq simultaneously. It’s not clear this is correct, but assume it is: Why didn’t he say so at the time?

Reality:

RUSSERT: Did you speak out against the war inside the government?

CLARKE: I had spoken out against the notion of bombing Iraq immediately after September 11th. And the Defense Department, the deputy secretary and the secretary, talked to my bosses in the White House and indicated how unhappy they were with my attitude on Iraq. And, as I say, I had asked to go and become cyberspace security adviser, so I did. And I wasn’t asked about foreign policy in that role.

But when I had spoken out, when I said, “Invading Iraq after 9/11 is like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor,” that didn’t go over well. And I was very quickly sidelined as someone whose opinions were going to be taken into account.

(Meet the Press, 3/28/2004. Transcript.)

UPDATE: Not too lazy to fix the Paris photos link.

Filed under: notes

Magical anti-realism

Reading Tim Dunlop‘s exegesis of the new Clarke book, I was struck by this passage he quotes:

CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitzwas not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled it off by itself, without a state sponsor—Iraq must have been helping them. (Tim’s ellipsis)

Paul Wolfowitz obviously thinks much of himself and his intellect. And he may be smart. But as demonstrated here, whatever raw power his brain may have, it is used in the service of an irrational and pre-scientific mind.

Against the empirical evidence presented (which as Clarke notes already included the names of the hijackers), Wolfowitz balances nothing but mystical assertions.

He makes a classically irrational argument. Untestable premise: “Too sophisticated” (how do you measure that? Is there some magic scale that we can use to measure a heap of sophistication, a platinum sophistication weight stored under glass that is the largest amount of sophistication that a group can muster without calling themselves a government?)—magically produces the very conclusion you wanted anyway: they “must have” had support from Iraq. (Because as well all know, Iraq is the only country in the world capable of helping out a bunch of terrorists when their plans exceed the international non-governmental sophistication standard.) What was the mechanism for the exhange of help? Where is the evidence of it? Never mind the facts: they don’t fit the framework. Why bother looking when you already know what you’ll find? Why bother with proof when you already have a pretty story that explains everything so very, very well?

Wolfowitz, in other words, is no different from any weather-worshipping cave man, tinfoil-hat conspiracy nut, UFO enthusiast, or physics grad student who thinks the CIA is making him crap his pants to keep him from meeting girls. Except that he has the power and will to arrange for wars based on his lunacy. I guess that whole Enlightment thing just hasn’t quite caught on yet. Maybe in a few more centuries.

Filed under: politics/war

Linus is 4

In honor of Linus’s birthday this week, here’s a picture of him from his days as an irresponsible youth.

Baby Linus trivia:

• Size: 1 handful.
• Weight: hardly worth measuring.
• Favorite activity: biting the toes of sleeping humans.

Filed under: cats

I call bullshit

I call bullshit on political psychologist Stanley Renshon who has apparently never heard of the state of Israel:

“The implications of this are fairly staggering,” agreed political psychologist Stanley Renshon of City University of New York. “This is the first time that a terrorist act has influenced a democratic election. ”

Bullshit.

In 1996, then prime minister Shimon Peres lost an election he was expected to win after a series of fatal bus bombings by Hamas that caused many to lose faith in peace with the Palestinians.

Filed under: politics/war

Juxtaposition

Neighbors on the news wires this afternoon:

Chinese Premier Defends 1989 Crackdown

China’s premier on Sunday defended the government’s deadly 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, calling the student-led demonstrations a “very serious political disturbance” that had to be put down.

In a rare, nationally televised news conference, Wen Jiabao cited China’s economic advances since then as evidence the government made the right choice.

White House Defends War As Milestone Nears

Bush administration officials said Sunday they do not regret that America went to war against Iraq even though banned weapons have not been found one year after the U.S.-led invasion.

[] Asked on CNN‘s “Late Edition” if the war was worth the lives of the 564 U.S. soldiers killed, Rumsfeld said, “Oh, my goodness, yes. There’s just no question 25 million people in Iraq are free.”

We may have a trade deficit with China, and we may be exporting jobs there, but we’re sure making up the gap in imported propaganda skills.

Filed under: politics/war

Revealed: new attack ad!

SCRIPT:

(V.O.) I’m Linus the cat, and I approved this message.

FADE IN IMAGE

My opponent wants to wake you up at night by yowling in your ear nine hundred billion times.

And he won’t drink any water that isn’t flowing from a faucet.

Wasting America’s most precious natural resource.

The Professor. Wrong on yowling. Wrong on water.

Linus: Biting Other Cats, Not You. Usually.

Paid for by the Linus the Cat for #1 Cat in the Cat House Campaign 2004

Filed under: cats

The Bush Lexicon

“Deeply Irresponsible”

• Sponsoring a Senate bill that would the slow growth of spending by Defense and the intelligence agencies by $1.5 billion over 5 years.

“Steady Leadership”

• Trying to increase the amount of arsenic in our drinking water.
• Cutting funding for programs that keep raw sewage out of our drinking water by $800 million.
• Taking more vacation than any President ever.
• Blowing off at least 6 months of your Guard commitment and lying about it.
• Turning $200 billion per year of surplus into $500 billion per year in deficits.
• Lying to congress about the cost of your Medicare drugs plan.
• Failing to fund your own education program.
• Crafting tax cuts with sunset provisions to fit the cost into an artificial framework, then decrying those sunset provisions and demanding they be repealed.
• Only projecting budgets 5 years out because years 6–10 look so bad.
• Not including hundreds of billions of dollars of known costs in those projections.
• Publishing job growth projections so laughable that you have to publicly disown them within two weeks.
• Publishing job growth projections that are off by almost one million jobs on the day the ink hits paper.
• Having your Labor Secretary lie about whether you signed that job projection report.
• Promising that you can take $1 trillion out of Social Security without decreasing benefits or increasing premiums.
• Promising that you won’t touch the Social Security trust fund, then raiding every last dime to pay for tax cuts for millionaires.
• Accusing Senate Democrats—the people who proposed the Department of Homeland Security and forced you to accept it—of not caring about the security of the nation because they wanted DHS workers to have the same labor protections as other federal employees.
• Leaking the identity of a covert agent to the press for petty political gain.
• Putting the same guys who ran our Latin America policy in the 80s—a policy distinguished by death squads, disappearances, coups, and Iran-Contra—in charge of the same policy area today.
• Moving military and intelligence resources away from the fight against the people who did attack us, in order to fight someone who didn’t.
• Misleading the country about the magnitude and immediacy of the threat posed by Iraq in order to accumulate political support for a war you planned well in advance of the event you claim changed everything and forced the war upon us.
• Sending our soldiers to war with insufficient equipment, insufficient support, and no real plan for getting them out.
• Ignoring the best advice of the military about how many boots on the ground would be required to secure Iraq.
• Letting bin Laden get away because you didn’t have enough boots on the ground in Afghanistan either.

Filed under: politics/2004

Comments disabled

Comments are now disabled, due to incessant comment spam. One of these days I’ll install SCode or MTBlacklist and the comments will make their triumphant return. Unless, like MacArthur, they simply fade away.

UPDATE: Comments are re-enabled. Now we just sit back and watch the dollars roll in.

Filed under: notes

Kind of blue

White balance? What’s that?

Filed under: cats

Taking offense

Some of the more reasonable voices on the left are not offended by George Bush’s ads featuring images from 9/11.

I am. Here’s why.

Of course Bush must talk about 9/11. But these ads do not constitute Bush talking about 9/11. They constitute his using 9/11 for political gain.

Bush speaks of 9/11 as an act of war. Which it was. But he acts as if he was presented on that day with not a tragedy, not an atrocity, but an opportunity. He has never missed a chance to use those 2700 deaths to further his own ideological ends, from tax cuts to ANWR drilling to the Iraq war. Now he wants to use them to gain votes for his re-election.

To Bush—maybe not in his mind, though certainly in his actions—the horror of 9/11 is a tool. And yeah, I find that pretty offensive.

Filed under: politics/2004

It's time

Kerry will be the nominee. He may not be your first choice. He wasn’t mine. But he now affords our nation its best—its only—chance to step back from the brink of financial ruin and amoral imperialism. The time for nitpicking and toe sucking is over.

Bush’s quarter-billion-dollar disinformation campaign begins tomorrow. His informal smear, slime, and lie campaign began long ago. This is likely to be the nastiest election in memory. Bush is willing to say or do anything to win. He has more money than God. The press is not on our side; apparently, they think that giving long-winded speeches, looking like Lurch, and eating sandwiches like Miss Daisy are all probative of unfitness for office, while squandering the nation’s future to buy tax cuts for your rich pals while sending our soldiers to die in the sand for nothing are minor flaws easily offset by a pleasant demeanor and the flinging about of nicknames.

Nonetheless, this is a fight that we can win. But don’t think that it will be enough if you just show up in November.

Find your wallet. Give the man some money. Then do it again next month. Think of it as buying yourself a country you don’t have to be ashamed of on the installment plan.

Filed under: politics/2004