What can you do if the police dig through your garbage without your permission?   You  get even by digging through their garbage.   Willamette Weekly published this article back in 2002. Their idea was both simple and effective.  Whose garbage did they investigate?:

We chose District Attorney Mike Schrunk because his office is the most vocal defender of the proposition that your garbage is up for grabs. We chose Police Chief Mark Kroeker because he runs the bureau. And we chose Mayor Vera Katz because, as police commissioner, she gives the chief his marching orders.

The first two of these three had publicly proclaimed that it was OK for the police to invade a woman’s privacy by digging through her garbage.  This is a well-written piece demonstrating that revenge is, indeed, a dish best served cold.

I’ve been following various articles in my local newspaper and local television “news,” looking for some recognition of the seriousness of the problem with soaring energy prices. This problem is entirely predictable by reference to the simple economic relationship between supply and demand. We’ve got a finite diminishing supply of cheap energy sources on this planet coupled with skyrocketing demand. Most of us refuse, however, to acknowledge that energy prices will keep spiraling up as long as humans keep behaving the way they are behaving.

The energy crisis really has a very simple explanation–it is a basic problem with demand outstripping supply. This is also a problem with no easy solution, at least under the alleged leadership of the Bush administration. This is an Administration that doesn’t have the honesty to suggest that the citizens should cut back energy usage by carpooling or that homebuilders start thinking about building smaller, more energy-efficient homes closer to city centers. It is an administration that won’t take reasonable and necessary steps to ameliorate the current energy crisis, even though this crisis is affecting national security. If he wanted to, this president could lead America from the bully pulpit, but he won’t because he would rather look to be in control than be in control. Most politicians lack the honesty and courage to suggest that we all can and should immediately do such things such as caulk our houses, purchase energy-efficient furnaces, add insulation and otherwise make our homes more efficient so that we preserve our precious dwindling supply of oil. They could propose serious massive funding that could provide meaningful alternatives to burning oil. But our politicians and media outlooks won’t do this, because they lack the courage to tell the citizens that we are having a major league long-term energy crisis that will not just go away.

It’s not only our politicians who are failing in their leadership role. The media is too busy printing happy news, rather than telling us that substantial self-sacrifice lies ahead for Americans. Instead of giving overall meaningful context of the problem (which, admittedly, might cause a panic), my local newspaper offers only puff pieces–interviews with proprietors of local businesses (such as pizza parlors and flower shops) to see how they are getting along in spite of higher gas prices. The only “solutions” offered by my local newspaper is to drive a little less and presumably wait this thing out. Wait it out until something happens, something that will be done by someone. Never is there any indication about how serious this crisis is or that Americans do have it in their power to change things to lessen their future pain. Almost never is it suggested that we already have the knowledge to build new homes and businesses with tiny carbon footprints.

The cause of our energy problem is also found by looking in the mirror. I barely know any people who have voluntarily taken real steps to substantially reduce his or her use of energy, for instance, by bicycling or walking to work instead of driving. We don’t even take Earth Day seriously.

Americans have grown completely complacent. We are facing a dangerous energy crisis, yet very few people act as though there is anything they can do about it. Instead, we chant that the “free market” will save us, as though the “free market” is something with foresight and wisdom, and as though we can’t guide the free market.

Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons (Published with permission)

We are thus getting ever further into a dangerous energy crisis (one that is sending us into a long-term economic depression) most of what we hear that somebody, someday, will think of some new automobile or some new energy source. “They” will take care of us. In the meantime, we only need to surrender to the current circumstances. All we need to do is to hunker down and wait because things will eventually take care of themselves.

It’s like being with the people going down with with the Titanic. We’re standing around, complacently, listening to the band play and rearranging the deck chairs. Except that this need not be like the Titanic.

We’re acting complacently because everyone else is acting complacently. We can do someone about our predicament, if only we had honest and courageous leadership.

I found this link at Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Daily Dish.

Consider, also, this post on Carl Sagan’s point that most religions fail to consider the rest of the universe.

We all know that the media networks helped beat the drums to invade Iraq. It’s clear from these stats: out of the 343 interviews conducted by network news prior to the Iraq invasion, only three involved an antiwar spokesperson.

Glenn Greenwald has now shown the incredible extent to which the corporate media executives snuffed out stories critical of President George W. Bush or critical of the Iraq invasion. Greenwald’s post is a must-read for anyone who has the stomach to try to understand how bad things got and how bad things still are regarding the corporate media.

Perhaps these should also be heady times for media reformers. We’ve waited a long time for the knowledgeable media insiders to have the guts to speak up, but they have finally started singing. Scott McClellan has dropped his bomb yesterday and other high profile media personalities are now starting to come out of the woodwork. Greenwald focuses on these recent statements by CNN’s Jessica Yellin:

I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives — and I was not at this network at the time — but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.

Here’s Greenwald’s take on Yellin’s accusations:

Jessica Yellin’s admission is but the latest in a growing mountain of evidence demonstrating that corporate executives forced their news reporters to propagandize in favor of the Bush administration and the war, and censored stories that were critical of the Government.

Ouch! The serious study of philosophy or neuroscience might make you less moral. That’s my take-away from a recent article: “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,” by Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler. This particular article by Vohs and Schooler purports to find a direct link between exposure to articles criticizing free will and self-centered conduct.

I suspect that the conclusions of the article by Vohs and Schooler tap into the concerns of many conservatives, that too much intellectual activity (too much science and free-thinking philosophy) can cause a person to become self-centered and immoral (or, at least, amoral). I don’t agree with that assessment as a general rule. Based on my experience, many intellectuals, as a result of their wide-ranging studies, actually expand their realm of moral concern well beyond the narrowly-defined types of in-groups honored by many conservatives. Obviously, there are free-thinkers of all stripes and I need to be careful to not over-generalize. Also, I’m not suggesting that my personal opinions and anecdotes could possibly serve as a counter-balance to a carefully controlled study.

The authors of this particular study recognized that belief in a free will is strong and pervasive. On the other hand, they also recognize the view of many scientists “that genes, underlying personality dispositions, brain mechanisms, or features of the environment cause behavior.” The authors’ hypothesis was that “cheating would increase after persuading participants that free will does not exist.”

Although some have speculated about the possible societal risks that might result from adopting a viewpoint that denies personal responsibility for actions, empirical exploration of this hypothesis has been absent. In two experiments, we manipulated beliefs related to free will and measured their influence on morality as manifested in cheating behavior. We hypothesized that manipulations of lay beliefs about free will would affect cheating behavior, such that participants induced to believe that human behavior is under the control of scientifically predetermined forces would cheat more than would participants not led to believe that behavior is technically predetermined. The results of two experiments supported this hypothesis.

The authors manipulated the subjects’ belief that free will is an illusion and that free will is a side effect of the architecture of the mind by exposing them to arguments criticizing the belief in free will. The subjects who were exposed to these anti-free-will arguments tended to act in more self-centered” ways on subsequent tasks. The conclusions of the authors:

The present findings raise the genuine concern that widespread encouragement of a deterministic worldview may have the inadvertent consequence of encouraging cheating behavior.

The Vohs and Schooler experiments involved only about 30 subjects, although the statistical significance of their most outcomes was p<.01.

I’m not entirely convinced by the conclusions of this study, for the reasons I set forth above. I suspect that there is something else that might combine with a free-thinking intellect that can (and does) often lead conduct less responsive to one’s most salient in-groups. If this study indeed shows what it purports to show, however, it has highlighted “free will” as a highly useful falsehood. I suspect that all of us cling to many such useful falsehoods.

Full disclosure: I have strongly criticized the notion of “free will.” Perhaps that belief taints my opinion on this study.

There’s a lot of bad information floating around on the Internet.  For instance, many conservatives blame environmental regulations, but this argument is way off base.   Why?  Because 75% of the cost of gasoline is in the cost of the crude oil, not in the refining.

At Salon.com, Andrew Leonard spells it all out succinctly:

But questions about refinery capacity, environmental regulations and Balkanization of the overall market shrivel when compared with the real force responsible for the dramatic rise in gas prices over the past eight years. Far and away, the largest factor contributing to the total price of a gallon of gasoline in California (and anywhere else in the United States) is the cost of crude oil.

Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner

Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune

Parker, Florida Today

Pavel Constantin, Romania

Parker, Florida Today

I started thinking about the the “reductionist attitude” in presenting science when I read Erich’s Post To deal with “arrogant” scientists we need to move beyond reductionism and break the “Galilean Spell” (from May 7, 2008). Curricula seem to begin with biology, work through chemistry, and finally introduce physics. If English were taught categorically as science is now, students would go through phases in this order:

• Elementary English: Analysis of Literature (done orally)
• Intermediate English: Sentence structure, paragraphs, and essays (done graphically)
• Advanced English: Introduction to the Alphabet and Spelling Lessons

The alphabet of science is made up of basic natural “laws” as discovered by Newton, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Heisenberg, and so on. Sentences and paragraphs are like molecules and chemical syntheses. And finally you have enough structure to begin to see how biology works from cells (essays) through organisms (stories) and populations (novels).

One could be taught holistic science, building to the grand ideas from the simple ones. By constructing the ideas instead of breaking them down, the interrelationship and the interactions of the parts can be seen, as well as the nature and function of the parts themselves. A whole is never the sum of the parts; it is the sum of the interactions between the parts set on a foundation of the parts themselves. This becomes obvious when building, but is obscured when deconstructing.

No wonder Americans doubt the “theory of evolution”. Schools try to teach this advanced and universal concept without any foundation. By the time the basic laws of nature (whose interaction supports this conclusion) are introduced, the theory has been mentally discarded.

Why is it done this way? (more…)

There’s a new book out on cannibalism, in case you’re interested.  And, yes, you are interested.  It’s called “Among the Cannibals: Adventures on the Trail of Man’s Darkest Ritual” (Smithsonian Books, 278 pages. $25.95), by Paul Raffaele.  Here’s a short summary by Malcolm Ritter.

Here’s an eerie thought: In a world where we worry about the detrimental impact of raising big farm animals to eat, we’re throwing away a lot of perfectly edible humans.   I’m not suggesting that we eat other humans . . .

Scott McClellan was the White House Press Secretary from 2003-2006. He has now published a new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, a book indicating that the Bush Administration was filled with corrupt and dishonest sons of bitches.

Nice try, Scott, but it’s all too late. I know that your friends and relatives have kept asking you why you did what you did, working so hard to put up a pretty facade on such an dishonorable operation. In fact, people you respect have been thinking that there was a certain stench about you and your efforts to promote a military action that killed thousands of Americans. You didn’t like this criticism at all, so you thought that you could cure this problem with a self-serving book published several years after the fact.

Sorry, pal. You could have helped your cause back when you had control of the podium in the White House Press Room. You could have proudly stood up there and said something like this:

Ladies and gentlemen: This will be my last day on the job. I can no longer work for such crooks, liars and thieves. George W. Bush has misled you on Iraq and hundred of other things. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Therefore, I hereby resign, and I will join the feckless mainstream media to try to somehow remedy some of the damage that I’ve been causing by serving as Spokesperson for the Bush Administration.

But no, you didn’t have the balls to do what needed to be done when it needed to be done. Scott, the horse is way out of the barn. It’s too late for you to be a hero. You are merely another one of the rats jumping off the sinking ship. That’s how history will remember you. Your official words had consequences, Scott. You weren’t merely serving as a spokesperson. You were up there perpetuating lies. And back then you didn’t give a damn that they were lies. That’s the bottom line.

And while I’m having fantasies about what prominent Bushies should have done, what about Colin Powell addressing the U.N. during the run-up to the Iraq invasion? Remember him telling the U.N. that the U.S. needed to invade Iraq? Remember the no-miss satellite evidence that turned out to be absolutely worthless? Powell’s been going around these days telling people that he was trying to stop the invasion. For example, see this 2007 statement by Powell:

And so, could I have stopped it by quitting? I assure you that would not have done it. And to quit while it was underway was not my way of doing business in serving in the administration.

[Read especially pp. 26-28 if you want to see Powell at his delusional best].

But just imaging what might have happened had Powell told the U.N. something like this:

George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have asked me to tell you that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. For me to say that, however, would be a lie. I can no longer be part of such a corrupt and destructive enterprise. Instead of standing up here and lying to you, I’m going to take this opportunity to resign from the Bush Administration. I’m going to start a new career advocating for more open and honest forms of government.

Colin, if you wanted to have stopped the invasion, giving a speech promoting the invasion wasn’t going to accomplish anything. Do you really not understand this?

Scott an Colin are both claiming that there was nothing that they could do to stop the carnage, stop the insanity. Isn’t it amazing that two highly educated men who were allowed to stand up to a microphone on the world’s stage are claiming that there is nothing they could have done. The sad truth is that they would rather keep their paychecks coming than speak a few words of truth into a microphone. They could have been heroes, but they both blew it. The books and the protest of innocence don’t cure their great crimes.

Scott, maybe you could call Colin and form a little club of guys who missed the boat but who want to pretend that they are nonetheless good guys.

Good luck with those book signings, Scott. I hope you make a lot of money. Maybe you could donate it to the families of some of those dead soldiers.

The title to this post is a teaser, of course. After a certain point, having more stuff does not make people happier.

In his new book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and a Durable Future (2007), Bill McKibben asks why having more stuff usually doesn’t make us happier. He considers several reasons.

You could argue, for instance, that we’ve simply began to run out of useful or fun new things-that despite vast numbers of patents, there’s not much we can buy that really runs much chance of making us happier. Those who fly frequently (a good slice of the most affluent) will be familiar, for example, with the ubiquitous SkyMall catalog …

If satiation isn’t what has cast a pall over our satisfaction, then perhaps the pall is the effect of all that economic buildup: if growth has filled the field behind your house with mega-mansions and you can see the horizon anymore, maybe that loss cancels out the effect of the flat screen TV. Or maybe the pall is cast by the fact that more of us have had to sit work more hours to afford all that new stuff. Or perhaps were worried about keeping thieves from taking our stuff-or, more likely, wondering how we’ll be able to hold on to it as an increasingly insecure old age looms. Most of all, perhaps the very act of acquiring so much stuff has turned us evermore into individuals and ever less and to members of a community, isolating us in a way that runs contrary to our most basic instincts.

For the moment, however, the why is less important than the simple fact. We’re richer, but were not happier.

In fact, the more we study the question, the less important affluence seems to be to human happiness. In one open-ended British questionnaire, people were asked about the factors that make up “quality of life.” They named everything from “family and home life” to “equality and justice,” and when the results were tallied up, 71% of the answers were non-materialistic. The best predictor of happiness was health, followed by factors like being married. Income seems not to matter at all in France, Holland or England…

[Pages 37-38]

I was leaving comments on other blogs this morning, and I had a thought. The Blogosphere is not just a platform for pundits, but a release valve for all the potential unabombers and other crazies. So here I am: One of the crazies. As one who comments much more often than I post, I had to feel that the backbone of the blog world is really the commentators.

That’s it. A pun from a cell-phone sel-fportrait.

If you’re looking for a thoughtful and balanced introductory documentary on the life and writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, here’s a good one. This video was produced by the BBC for television in 1999 and it’s entitled Human All Too Human. You’ll find a lot of information carefully packed into one hour.

Given the complexity of Nietzsche’s writings, this video can only serve only as an introduction. As an introduction, though, it does a good job.

When I was an philosophy undergrad in 1977, I took a course on Nietzsche and it turned me inside out. That course focused on one of Nietzsche’s later works: The Gay Science (1882), translated by Walter Kaufmann. Since that time, there has been at least one additional excellent translation of The Gay Science.

Nietzsche was a prolific writer, though, and there are numerous other Nietzsche works to explore.  To beginners, they will seem to be written by a man who was, in equal parts, severely emotionally scarred and an absolute genius. To a veteran reader they will still seem this way.   Highly recommended for anyone who is not afraid to risk wiping out many of assumptions that you currently rely upon as existential salve.

I stumbled onto this fellow as a respondent on other blogs or the subject in yet others. Herman Cummings is an active proponent of Biblical truth over Scientific Inquiry. Why don’t I just say “Creationism”? Because Herman argues against them, as well. He has nothing good to say about “Intelligent Design”.

He is heir to a higher truth. He knows “The Observations of Moses” that are revealed in a book called “Moses Didn’t Write About Creation!” that was written by … Herman Cummings. In every blog response I can find by him, he cites this book as the final authority. He won’t deign to respond to any direct arguments unless it is predicated by an affidavit of of having read his book.

Here are some Cummings Quotes:

• My name is Herman Cummings. I am the foremost terrestrial authority on the book of Genesis.
• I am the only person I know or ever heard of presently on this Earth that is qualified to teach Biblical Creation. Many school districts are grappling with the doctrine of “Intelligent Design”. Unfortunately, “ID” is an inept and shallow doctrine that merely says that life on Earth is too complex to have developed by chance.
• I’ve already written the governor and members of the education committees of every state legislature. I have hope that officials will introduce legislation that will free the public schools to teach all viable theories of origins, and explanations of the ancient history of life on Earth, removing the threat of (atheist) lawsuits.

Why is this guy different than the folks at the Discovery Institute? Because he takes as his authoritative text, the root of all his arguments, a book that he himself wrote. At least the DI ID’ers claim to have external evidence, although they never produce any when asked. Also, Herman is a columnist for theConservativeVoice.com, home of other luminaries such as Ann Coulter.

Another name to watch out for.

Today, my daughters and I had the opportunity to observe two male langurs fighting and then reconciling at the St. Louis Zoo today. First of all, here’s the fight (this is the tale end of a rough play session that turned noticeably unpleasant–the entire episode lasted about 3 minutes):

About 2 minutes after these langurs ceased fighting, I saw what clearly appeared to be a reconcilation. Here’s the progression. For most of the two minutes immediately following the fight, one of the langurs parked himself about 3 inches from me (separated by plexiglass). I wondered whether he was pouting or, maybe, whether he was a bit hurt. He looked to be checking out his foot.

After 2 minutes, he hopped up to a outcropping to join the other langur, where the two fighting langurs hugged for about 60 seconds.

I not certain I know how to interpret what happened next, but here’s the photo. It appeared to be of a sexual nature or, perhaps, grooming.

Langurs are marvelously athletic creatures. They bounce around in their enclosure, sometimes causing themselves to bounce off of the Plexiglas. They can jump up cliffs and grab ropes and swing without any apparent fear or effort. Check out the toes of the langur, which are much longer then the langur’s fingers.

I found this fight/reconcile exchange to be fascinating, especially in light of Frans de Waal’s discovery that primates often reconcile. He noted that these reconciliations often involve an expression of sexuality. I assume that this is what happened today.

I know that pre-written store-bought greeting cards are not the cause of America’s current downfall, but they are a symptom of America’s cultural, moral and educational decline. Really. I know that many of you are thinking that I’m way off base here, but let me give you a few examples based on today’s trip to my local grocery store (the name of the St. Louis grocery chain is “Schnucks”).

First of all, I just don’t get why we need to segregate “boy” cards from “girl” cards. Take a look at these cards for boys and you won’t be surprised at the themes. There are lots of superhero cards and other action/adventure characters and themes.

Now compare the “boys” cards to the “girls” cards, where you’ll find princesses and other characters much more concerned about their looks than with their accomplishments.

As if girls don’t enjoy superhero stories (my daughters certainly do) or anything other than trying to look pretty. This greeting card sexual segregation reminds me of this recent post on America’s rampant sexualization of young girls.

There are also cards for men and cards for women, of course, and they too are segregated. Why do we use greeting cards to instill a message into our girls and women that they should be interested in their own looks and body image to the exclusion of their accomplishments? This destructive message should be stopped immediately, especially when so many girls are getting messed up by this message, which causes them to stop taking their education seriously when they hit puberty.

There are other problems on the greeting card aisle. Consider the sympathy cards.

If someone close to me were to die, the last thing in the world that I would want from anybody would be a store-bought greeting card with a campy message.

Sending a card instead of writing me a note (or in e-mail) tells me that you would rather spend four dollars to let a stranger write a message then taking the time to communicate something meaningful. I suspect that many people will think that greeting cards are perfectly OK because many customers are not professional writers and they are, therefore, and incapable of precisely expressing themselves on emotional occasions. I think this argument is absolute garbage. The purpose of a note should be to take some time to attempt to express one’s own thoughts. If people are unwilling to take the time to write notes of their own, it’s better that they said nothing at all.  Just send a $4.00 gift certificate. It will accomplish as much or more. (more…)

Hero of the Beach
RJ Matson, The New York Observer

Classical Gas
John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

Press and Money
Ares, Caglecartoons.com

Energy Domino Effect
Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria

The Boss
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

[All cartoons published with the permission of Cagle Cartoons]

At Alternet, Tana Ganeva reports on Gigi Durham’s new book, concerning the corporate media’s sexual objectification of girls. Durham characterizes the overall problem as the “The Lolita Effect,” which is the media’s sexual objectification of young girls. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2006, the retail chain Tesco launched the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a play set designed to help young girls “unleash the sex kitten inside.”

Perturbed parents, voicing concern that their 5-year-olds might be too young to engage in sex work, lobbied to have the product pulled. Tesco removed the play set from the toy section but kept it on the market.

As M. Gigi Durham points out in The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It, Tesco’s attempt to sell stripper gear to kids is just one instance of the sexual objectification of young girls in the media and marketplace. Some of the many other examples include a push-up bra for preteens, thongs for 10-year-olds bearing slogans like “eye candy,” and underwear geared toward teens with “Who needs credit cards … ?” written across the crotch.

Perhaps it’s because I have two young daughters, but this issue has been strongly on my radar for a few years. I truly can’t believe what I see in mainstream stores and on the streets. I’ve previously addressed some of these issues here , here and here.

Ganeva’s article includes an interview of Durham.

Durham was asked what is driving this movement to sexualize young girls, she blames parents for not leveling with and protecting their daughters, but she also focuses on corporate profit-seeking. It’s the

marketers’ realization that they could cultivate cradle-to-grave consumers by targeting very young kids by getting them to buy into the frames that older women have been persuaded to buy into for a long time, such as trying to achieve unattainable bodies and present themselves as highly desirable to men.

What kind of conversations should parents have with their daughters to nullify the harmful effect of the media?  Here’s Durham’s answer:

The media are for-profit enterprises, and we need to recognize that from the start. Whatever they do to represent any aspect of human experience, it’s going to be connected to generating revenue. When they represent sex and sexuality, very obviously it’s going to have a commercial motivation behind it… [A]ny adult can start a conversation with their kids, even when they are really, really young, even as young as 2, which is what I’ve done with my kids. Not even specifically about sex, but about the selling intent behind advertising and comparing what goes on in real life compared to fiction and helping them sort out facts. You can start getting them to be critical of the media when they’re very young.

I’m not qualified to comment on the technical skills or artistry, but this “popper” performance was fun/bizarre/engaging/memorable.  Quite an unusual dance, to say the least.

If you want to know more about the performer, Robert Muraine, you can visit his Myspace page.

This is a most unusual opening to a dance, involving precision moves.

Senator Jim Webb appears to be a thoughtful man with a plan. He’s getting a lot of press these days as Barack Obama’s possible choice for Vice-President.

I enjoyed the photos and commentary at this site. The blogger found a 1977 J.C.Penney catalog and had some fun.  The post could have been subtitled:  “How to get your ass kicked . . .”

David Rees has it about right regarding Hillary’s dramatic public display of her overactive id.

Hillary Clinton is remarkable for her willingness to make her argument to elect her because, if Barack Obama is elected, he won’t be able to stay alive long enough to make it worth our while.

I’m about ready to start a public referendum to deport Hillary Clinton to some completely uncivilized place where she’ll fit in better.

Here’s the bottom line, as reported on Yahoo:

The Pentagon cannot account for nearly 15 billion dollars in payments for goods and services in Iraq, according to an internal audit which members of Congress blasted Friday as a “shocking” accountability failure.

Why didn’t a government accountant catch the problem?  Good question.

The lack of accountability of the funds, intended for purchases of weapons, vehicles, construction equipment and security services, amounted to a 95 percent failure rate in basic accounting standards, according to the report.

This is a fascinating video, which I learned of at Daily Kos.

Now that we’ve dragged some of those wacko preachers out into the limelight, maybe it’s time to focus those cameras on the bigots.  Sunshine is great disinfectant.