I’ve sometimes wondered what insiders think about pre-flight security. Here is a recent account by one pilot:

Before we take off, I would like to apologize on behalf of this and every airline for the hassle you just endured at the security checkpoint. As is patently obvious to any reasonable person, the humiliating shoe removals, liquids ban, and pointy-object confiscations do little to make us safer.

Unfortunately, the government insists that security theater, and not actual security, is in the nation’s best interest. If it makes you feel any better, our crew had to endure the same screening as the passengers. Never mind that the baggage loaders, cleaners, caterers, and refuelers receive only occasional random screening. You can rest easy knowing that I do not have a pair of scissors or an oversize shampoo bottle anywhere in my carry-on luggage.

Do you remember the little recital at the ticket counter prior to 9/11? They were required to ask you if any stranger asked you to carry anything in your luggage. That was back before officials realized that those who bomb planes might be willing to commit suicide in the process. I always thought it was naive to ask people if they were doing something dangerous or illegal. It was akin to a bank greeting its customers at the door: “Are you planning to rob this bank?” They should have, instead, posted a big sign at the security checkpoint with a simple list of do’s and don’ts. Something like this: “Don’t agree to carry anything on the plane for a stranger. It might be a bomb.” It’s as though the TSA hasn’t ever heard of big well-designed signs, though. It seems like most checkpoints still have security people barking the same four or five things over and over (”No big bottles of shampoo or other liquids!” “Take your computer out of its case”). There are better way to communicate simple ideas over and over–how about a video monitor that plays a well-designed security message?

Despite the silliness of some of the restrictions (my favorite was the banning of fingernail clippers), it is possible that the current version of the “security theater” has saved lives. It might intimidate someone who would otherwise try to destroy an aiplane. But are there more efficient ways to get the job done? The TSA is open to suggestions. In fact TSA has recently announced that it is going to

focus airport security more on passenger behavior and to rely less heavily on metal detectors and X-ray machines to find weapons. That reflects TSA’s new thinking that terrorists reveal their intentions through behavior, and an old reality that checkpoint machines can miss a lot of explosives, detonators and other bomb parts.

The flood waters are doing horrific damage in many places in Iowa. Down-river in St. Louis, we are not expected to sustain much damage, but you can see that the flood waters have arrived. The following photo was taken today. It shows two girls and a dog (all of them had the last name of “Vieth”) checking out the flooding of a major street near the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis.

This year’s presidential campaign offers a choice between 72-year old John McCain and 46-year old Barack Obama.  This large difference in age provoked Christopher Beam of Slate to review the scientific literature comparing the function of old brains versus younger brains.  Here are a few things to contemplate, assuming your brain is spry enough to carry out this contemplation:

As everyone with a grandparent knows, certain types of memory are affected by aging. Episodic memory—the ability to remember things that happened to you—declines. Same for prospective memory, or the ability to remember lists or agendas. You could argue these skills are less essential for a president, who has speechwriters to produce anecdotes and handlers to keep his schedule. But age also affects working memory, which we use to process, sort, and recall information on the fly. Mental arithmetic, for example, requires a good working memory. Fortunately, presidents have calculators. But working memory also translates into debating skills—the better your short-term retention, the better you can rebut your opponent’s arguments. Oldsters show fewer deficits in semantic memory, which includes vocabulary and general knowledge.

This straightforward Slate article presents many other effects of aging on the brain.

What are the reasons for voting Republican?  Here are a lot of them:

Listen to these reasons carefully, then remember to go out and vote.

Also consider this diagram of the anatomy of a Republican’s brain.

In 2006, Norman Solomon wrote War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. His book detailed the information tactics the American government uses to launch wars.

War Made Easy has been such an influential book that it has now been made into a movie of the same name. You can view it here or you can order a copy of the DVD here.

I was able to attend a viewing of “War Made Easy” last Saturday night at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis (NCMR2008). This crisply edited movie was narrated by Sean Penn. Much of what keeps this movie engaging are the dozens of carefully chosen news media clips generated during various American wars for the past 50 years, including large numbers of videos clips from the Vietnam war and the Iraq occupation. The magic of “War Made Easy” is that the directors carefully edited and arranged these clips to show us that nothing much has really changed: If an American president has decided that he wants to go to war, the watchdog American media is likely to become a lapdog and we will inevitably go to war.

Following the screening of “War Made Easy,” I attended a discussion of the movie led by media critic Norman Solomon and the co-director and producer of the movie, Loretta Alper. The following morning, Ms. Alper granted me the opportunity to interview her further regarding the making of “War Made Easy.”

Whenever we Americans go to war, we get there through a well-documented series of stages. As I watched “War Made Easy,” I saw better than ever that these stages are entirely predictable in the context of America’s warmongering ways.

Perhaps this characterization of America sounds too shrill, but just look around. The evidence is everywhere that war is a sport in America just as sports are warlike. Our TV shows and movies overflow with violence as a first-rate method of dealing with conflict. The toys we foist on our boys extol violence as the most obvious way of settling disputes. We challenge each other with statements like “support the troops,” no matter what those troops are doing (and see here ). We are all too ready to invoke the word “war,” because that word triggers a ready-made conceptual frame for freely and guiltlessly expressing ourselves with bullets, bombs and blood. In America, this frame of war is such an incredibly effective filter that we proceed to consider only the “benefits” of war and we ignore the massive damages inflicted on both war-zone civilians and upon millions of Americans (and see here).

For most Americans, it is difficult to see that we are truly a nation of warmongers. After all, we are so absolutely used to being the way we are that even the most obvious things have become difficult to see. As George Orwell once noted, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Before seeing “War Made Easy,” I was already familiar with the FAIR study documenting the manner in which our media rolled over rather than risk being accused of being unpatriotic. How much does the media roll over? So much so, that Americans see only an extremely filtered set of images representing the war. We see pictures of happy soldiers shipping out to “do their duty.” Pictures of dismembered civilian children are much too inconvenient for American patriotism, however.

Yes, Americans have become warriors looking for wars. America is a place where the thinnest of excuses will get the whole war machine revved. It is one of the points made by “War Made Easy” that America is gasoline needing only a small spark of an excuse to get us exploding off to war. Almost any excuse will do, it seems, and it doesn’t matter whether that excuse entirely false. In the 1960s, all it would took was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an incident which never actually happened at all (based upon a recently declassified NSA document and other evidence). Nonetheless, the claim of the Gulf of Tonkin incident opened the floodgates to the American military buildup in Vietnam.

In 1993, all it took was a few well-placed public officials to stir up worries about “weapons of mass destruction” that didn’t exist. At that point, the confirmation bias and the herd instinct take over. How warped has our national perspective become? Whatever any perceived outsider does, we will see in the worst possible light and we will make damned sure that every other American becomes equally xenophobic. When this level of dysfunction occurs in an individual, we call that individual mentally ill. When it occurs nationwide, we call it “patriotism.”

The above observations are necessary prelude to my understanding of “War Made Easy.” I needed to consider these issues because of a question I had trouble getting past: Why isn’t going to war easy for most countries other than the United States? One obvious answer is that most other countries have not invested in a massive military infrastructure. The U.S. is physically able go to war at the push of a button, while most other would first require a long-term military buildup. The next obvious question, though, is why most other countries have not invested in their military might to the same extent as the United States. My unfortunate conclusion is that the U.S. has a warmonger mentality. When the President of the U.S. says we need to go to war, the citizens are already half-primed to agree. This would not be the case with, for example, the Prime Minister of Norway.

“War Made Easy” is an illustration of the predictable steps that will occur as soon as the spark of a false threat hits the gasoline of American militaristic exceptionalism. We see this same pattern over and over. Here are some of the predictable steps that occur when an American president presses for war. All of these are well substantiated by “War Made Easy.”

I. Public dialogue becomes simplistic. Consider Pat Buchanan’s warning that “When the war begins, the debate ends.” The media clips offered by “War Made Easy” substantiate the claim that once war is under way, there is no more media coverage for the rationale for the war, but only for the progress of the war. Once war is under way, it is produced like a TV show. The information from the war zone is tightly controlled by the government. The media does not protest this tight control, because it desperately craves the access and the market share. Therefore, whatever labels the government gives to a battle or a war (e.g., “Shock and Awe”), the media readily embraces it.

II. The President’s case for war is always built upon deception; the official story is false or it omits numerous key facts. Instead, the case is made primarily upon spin.

III. Americans are portrayed as “reluctant fighters.” We’d rather not go to war, but circumstances are allegedly forcing our hand. (more…)

Let’s do a simple thought experiment. Let’s imagine you are the CEO of a company and you need to hire a manager to supervise some segment of your business. To keep things simple, let’s assume only two people apply for the job and that you interview both of them.

The first candidate believes you have a fantastic company with great resources, and is eager to do outstanding work that will improve the reputation of your company as well as the overall standard of living of everyone it serves.

The second candidate believes your company is a plague upon society, and is eager to dismantle and destroy as much of your company as possible.

Which candidate would you hire?

If you think this is a stupid question, because the correct answer is so clearly obvious, then let me point out that many Republican political candidates seek political office based on the beliefs of the second of the above two candidates. Many Republican candidates believe government is a plague upon society, and they are eager to dismantle and destroy as much of it as possible.

Is it any supririse, then, that when Republicans are elected to political office, failed government programs almost certainly follow? If you hire a candidate who is determined to prove your company is a failure, it should be no surprise that your company becomes one — not because your company inherently is a failure, but because you’ve hired the wrong person to manage it. Likewise, if you hire someone who believes your government can be a force for good, you will greatly increase the odds that your goverment will be a force for good; hire someone who believes your government is an evil plague, and you greatly increase the odds that your government will be an evil plague.

Bottom line: if you want your government to be a force for good, then you should not vote for people who believe your government is a plague upon society. If you do, they will surely make it one.

Every barrel of oil taken out of our planet has a cost associated with its extraction. This cost-per-barrel varies for different oil fields and also varies over time for a given oil field, which means some barrels are costlier to extract than others. When the market price for a given barrel of oil exceeds its extraction cost, that barrel becomes profitable to extract from the ground and sell. Naturally, as the price of oil increases, barrels that were profitable to extract at a previous lower price will remain profitable (in fact, will become more profitable), while other barrels that were previously unprofitable to extract at a lower price will become profitable. Thus, a higher market price for oil will increase the number of barrels that are profitable to extract, and oil companies will extract these barrels and sell them. Indeed, in some cases, entire oil fields have been shut down because the profitable barrels have already been extracted, and the additional barrels that remain in the ground are merely waiting for the day when a higher market price (or improved technology) will make those barrels profitable. All of this is basic economics and probably obvious to you.

So, why do I mention it? Because I have been hearing Bush and some Republican members of Congress this week once again calling for approval to allow oil companies to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). While it is true that oil in ANWR might (or might not) be profitable to extract at the current market price for oil, it is also true that known oil resources, in existing and fallow oil fields, have now become profitable due to the higher market price for oil. Extraction of this oil can thus commence, whether or not oil companies are allowed to drill in ANWR. Thus, the argument that higher market prices should justify drilling in ANWR is essentially invalid: high oil prices will make more known oil resources profitable, so there is no real need to drill in ANWR. The Bushites and their Big Oil pals know this, but are merely trying to exploit consumer frustration at the pump to ruin yet another wildlife area for the sake of short-term oil company profits.

I’ll admit that I’ve become obsessed with clouds lately.

We’ve had an incredibly intense season of thunderstorms in the Midwest. An hour of sunshine has become simply a chance for nature to take a breather before erupting with yet another thunderstorm.

Then again, take a look at the detailed things you can find among the clouds. Not just shapes, but all kinds of animals and people and ghosts. I can’t deny it, because I saw them.

We are living in a giant kaleidoscope, it seems. I know that I’ve already foisted cloud photos on you. Perhaps you’ve had enough of “my” clouds. I was ready to move on too, but then I found these new cloud menageries outside my window as the small jet in which I was flying traveled around a massive storm rather than through it. We were returning from Minneapolis after an intense weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform. After a weekend of intellectual endeavors, it was time for a spiritual experience. This is a different kind of memorable experience than I had on the trip to Minneapolis.

A fellow passenger and I were stunned by what we saw outside of the plane. We were 30,000 feet in the air and I started taking these photos through my tiny scratched airplane window.

As I looked, mesmerized, I started seeing all kinds of animals in the clouds, including my deceased dog “Puccini” in the scene below (or is that your deceased dog?). You can click on any of these photos to bring out the details. I can assure you that this will be worth your while, unless you are the unusual kind of person who already takes the time to stare at the clouds. Even if you do like clouds, these were special clouds, even for those of you who like to look at clouds while flying. These photos are not PhotoShopped; this is exactly how these scenes looked to my eyes during my flight.

There were dozens of animals to be seen, and people too. For the modest ticket price of a few hundred dollars, the plane was functioning as a time machine, transporting us back to our childhoods, to a time when we were allowed to look for things in the clouds for long periods, without being made self-conscious that we were “wasting” time.

Amazing as it is, trillions of tiny water molecules, each one the same as each other, can assume dramatic macroscopic shapes when gently stirred by heat and wind. How is it that large intricate patterns emerge? Why not just a big smear of misty air across the window? Order for free, Stuart Kauffman might say. Kauffman might remind us that we were witnessing a rather simple application of the subject matter of complexity. He would point out that it is actually common for billions of identical parts to self-organize, almost magically, into shapes and functions that are intensely surprising and compelling.

Finding a collection of ghosts living in the sky, or any other unpredictable scene, is thus quite predictable.

These particular ghosts seemed to be calling out to the passengers on the plane. Maybe they were trying to say that we needed to take the time to slow down our lives enough to appreciate the complex adaptive systems that humans are too. You see, humans are also self-assembled bits of common materials, just like these cloud people. The human miracle is in the exquisite manner in which trillions of relatively simple molecules are assembled. But who could have predicted that lots of water and some phosphorus, calcium, iron could turn into beings like us?

Carl Sagan wrote that we are made of “star stuff.” True enough, and this is a thought that is deep enough and powerful enough that that this single thought should be enough to compel us to stop long enough and ponder deeply enough to stop killing each other and to start honoring each others’ existence and sentience. But somehow, Sagan’s realization isn’t enough for to bring us peace.

We’re not only stardust, we are also water beings (we’re mostly water), so we have a lot more in common with these cloud creatures than we might realize. This is my anti-war idea, then: all of us need to look at the clouds more often.

As the plane finished moving around the storm, we spotted this vast fluffy flat landscape leading up to distant “mountain range,” all of it made entirely of tiny water drops 30,000 feet in the air.

That was it for cloud photography. Time to move on to other things, right? Not so fast . . . (more…)

There was no mistake, no inadvertence, no miscue, no stumbling about it. Bush and his cronies lied. And thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died because of those lies. It is truly shameful and incredible that George W. Bush still occupies the White House and is still threatening to kill more soldiers based on more lies (regarding Iran), but there he still sits.

What do we call someone who intentionally causes one death? A murderer.

Here’s Arianna Huffington’s summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 200-page “Phase II” report on how the Bush administration used — and abused — pre-war intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq:

A statement released by committee chairman Jay Rockefeller makes it clear that the administration “on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq…in making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

The report doesn’t use the word, but we all know what it’s called when someone presents something as fact that’s directly contradicted by the evidence. A lie. Not a mistake. A lie.

The conclusions of the Report are not surprising, but we have an extremely low bar for Congress these days, so it was with relief that we can now see these clear and direct conclusions in writing by a Senate sub-committee.

Here are some of the conclusions of committee chairman Jay Rockefeller’s statement regarding the Report (with Huffington’s emphasis):

In his earlier post, Erich pointed out the justifiable contempt we should all have for guys like McClellan & Powell, who repeatedly lied to the American people about the Iraq threat and helped lead our nation into an unnecessary and horribly costly invasion. However, I believe McClellan’s revelations expose a much deeper problem. McClellan was a fellow Texan and long-time friend of George Bush. We now know that he is a morally bankrupt liar. So here’s my question: how would a morally bankrupt liar like Scott McClellan remain such a good friend to George Bush if Bush were not also a morally bankrupt liar? Certainly we cannot always judge a person by the company he keeps, but when we see the long line of dishonest people coming out of Bush’s administration, we really should wonder how far into the Bush White House the moral bankruptcy reaches. Birds of a feather often do flock together. The takeaway: given all the corruption we know about in the Bush Administration, how many more things exist that we don’t (yet) know about?

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.

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.

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.

What do you do about all of those college students who have no business being in college? If you’re a conscientious English teacher, you flunk them. And when you get incredibly frustrated that you really must flunk so many of them, as did “Professor X,” you write about your dilemma in The Atlantic.

The following excerpt is from the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic:

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

Here’s a recent example of an incredibly bizarre habit of the mainstream media. As you can see from this video, the reporter introduces George Bush as the “The Leader of the Free World.”

They need to stop using this title because George Bush has proven that he is not the “Leader of the Free World.” Rather he is a menace and a disruption to the free world. There is no other country in the world that considers George W. Bush to be their Leader.

There is endless evidence that Bush is a horrible leader. Here are some examples:

• Bush ordered a preemptive invasion of Iraq based upon delusions and lies.
• Bush has continuously lied that there has been “progress” in Iraq. And see here
• Bush approved of torture.
• He has allowed his administration to overrule the careful findings of scientists on topics as diverse as global warming, the destruction of the environment, pollution, energy issues, dangerous chemicals and medical issues.
• Bush has spied on Americans and lied about it.
• Bush has worked hard to keep Americans from choosing how and when they will have babies.
• Bush is incapable of stopping himself from lying.

I am not aware of a single way in which any other country of the free world looks up to George W. Bush as its “leader.” It’s time to stop calling Mr. Bush the “Leader of the Free World.”

Instead, it’s time to throw him in prison for the damage he has irresponsibly caused.

Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow is on tour promoting her new book, Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times. Amy co-authored this book was with her brother David Goodman. I had the opportunity to hear Amy speak last week while she was in St. Louis.

Amy’s asked a simple question: “What would happen if we freely published the images from Iraq for one week in our mainstream newspapers?” I agree with that the outcome is quite predictable. There would be a public outcry, the politicians would finally “get it,” the American occupation of Iraq would quickly wind down. Unfortunately, we don’t have a mainstream news media that has the guts to publish those photos, certainly not in prominent places. It’s surreal that the public is not being kept up to date on the results of a project on which such vast amounts of money are being spent. Instead of seeing everyday photos of what’s on the street, we hear specious claims that everything is going well.

You know, if everything were going that well, let’s have a big parade right through the middle of Baghdad (not the Green Zone). George Bush should lead that parade, to celebrate how well we’ve stabilized Iraq. After this big celebration winds through the main streets and Americans see how well things are going, perhaps we’ll have a national consensus about whether the United States is intellectually and morally qualified to attempt to improve Iranian culture and politics.

The first chapter of Goodman’s book is called “We will not be silent.” This quote quote comes from the fourth leaflet distributed by Sophie Scholl and Kurt Huber, before they were captured by the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.

In that first chapter, the Goodmans quote a warning (variously attributed to Sinclair Lewis and Louisiana governor Huey Long): “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the American flag.” These are harsh words, but Goodman’s new book contains the disturbing substantiating evidence. For instance, we have a news media that readily manufacturers consent for going to war, rather than exploring whether it is necessary to go to war.

Goodman points to a survey that determined that out of the 343 interviews conducted by network news prior to the Iraq invasion, only three involved an antiwar spokesperson. What we have, then, is a news media that gladly beats the drums for war (as they are now doing with Iran). The news media has become “a conveyor belt for the government.” Goodman points out that what we have “is not a mainstream media. We’ve got to take it back.”

In her book (and at her talk) Goodman described the incredible story of a Connecticut librarian named George Christian, who was handed a national security letter (NSL) demanding subscriber information, billing information and access of any person that had used computers in any of 27 public libraries on one afternoon in February, 2005. The letter indicated that the information was sought “to protect against international terrorism.” (more…)

Our President just can’t stop himself. Here are two of his recent bald-faced lies:

1) He can’t use email while he’s President “for security reasons.”

2) He gave up golf after UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed in Iraq.

I know that no one cares anymore. It wouldn’t do any good to impeach him because an equally prolific liar, Dick Cheney, would then officially take over. How many more days until the next President is sworn in?

Back in February, I posted a quote from The Gods Must Be Crazy about the needless complexity of modern life. The quote has made me stew on the topic ever since. We live in a world awash in technologies designed to make life easier, but that often only bog us down. An air conditioning unit may cool your brow and make you happier and more productive in the summer months, but only if you don’t spend seven months attempting to get your evasive landlord to either have the cursed, broken thing fixed or replaced entirely. Not that I would know. A computer makes it easier to write and send documents- unless it freezes, or the printer jams, or the email server has gone down, or you can’t get a decent wireless connection, or the power goes out. I hear, at least, that can prove extremely frustrating.

More technology spells more helplessness when that technology fails. If only I had just suffered through the heat, and adjusted to it; if only I had elected to write a letter by candle light! Instead, I became attached to the convenience of modern goodies. But technology is not the first or only huge complicator in our lives. No, today I’d like to focus on stuff. Things, junk.

We all have too many pieces of stuff lying around our homes, all designed to make life easier. I often suspect these handy doohickeys waste more space and money than their limited “uses” justify. I’ll take some examples from my own apartment:

The banana hook, a simple fruit-bearing tool. Few kitchen objects have such absurd specialization as this, barring the grapefruit spoon. Not even a devout fruitarian could really rationalize the space devoted to dangling a single, specific food product. Imagine if we required a special hook for every kind of produce in the house- my small kitchen couldn’t bear it, and I wager few could. Fortunately, we don’t need hooks for all our fruits. We don’t even need them for bananas. Don’t believe the shrewd marketing- a humble bowl will do. But at least I didn’t invest in the even more absurd banana hammock, right?
(more…)

We all understand that Bush’s ‘economic stimulus’ check is nothing more than an excuse for Washington politicians to try to buy your vote, just as Bush did so effectively in his 2000 campaign. The ’stimulus’ has received bipartisan support, likely because incumbents on both sides of the aisle are concerned about joining the ranks of the unemployed next January unless the economy begins to look better by the November election. We also all understand that this ’stimulus’ is nothing more than yet another excuse for the Bush Administration to tap the federal credit card on your behalf — to dig a bigger debt hole for your grandchildren so you can enjoy having more stuff today.

Be that as it may, the checks are coming, so our job now is to do something smart with them. ‘Smart’ as in investing the money in something that will give you a positive return. Of course, you could fund an IRA, pay down your mortgage, save for a child’s college fund, etc., but assuming you already have all those things in satisfactory condition, one smart thing you could do with the money (or encourage your friends, neighbors and relatives to do with it) would be to buy a bicycle. In these days of high gas prices, growing waist lines, and concerns that the money we pay for oil might be helping to fund the next Islamic terrorist attack against us, buying — and then riding — a bicycle would be a great way to invest your stimulus check in something that would yield many positive returns. Not only is cycling great exercise, it is also a great way to trim your gasoline bill — by doing short errands or even commuting to work. Even if you have a long or treacherous commute, you might consider driving part-way and then biking the rest. In any case, you’ll be amazed by how much gas you can save by using a bicycle for short trips of, say, five miles or less.

Economic Stimulus Checks
Keefe, The Denver Post

Stimulus Checks
Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

Addict
Manny Francisco, Manila, The Phillippines

Neptune’s Toilet
Parker, Florida Today

[All cartoons reprinted with the permission of Cagle Cartoons]

DemocracyNow has reported on “Winter Soldier,” a March, 2008 gathering of US veterans in Maryland to testify regarding atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These accounts were almost entirely ignored by the American corporate media.  Here are two excerpts:

Jason Hurd went on to describe his time in Iraq. In 2004, he was deployed to central Baghdad with Tennessee’s 278th Regimental Combat Team

We had our interpreter with us, and our interpreter threw up his hand and said “Salaam aleikum,” which is their greeting in Iraq. It means “Peace of God be with you.” And he translated back to us what she said. She said, “No. No peace of God be with you.” She was angry, and she was frustrated. And so, we stopped, and our interpreter said, “Well, what’s the matter? Why are you so angry? We’re here protecting you. We’re here to ensure your safety.”

And that woman began to tell us a story. Just a few months prior to this, her husband had been shot and killed by a United States convoy, because he got too close to their convoy. He was not an insurgent; he was not a terrorist. He was merely a working man trying to make a living for his family. To make matters worse, a few weeks later, there was a Special Forces team who operated in the Kindi area. And as you know, Special Forces do clandestine operations. And so, even though this was my unit’s area of operation, we didn’t know what the Special Forces teams were actually doing there. They holed up in a building there in the Kindi Street area and made a compound out of it. A few weeks after this man died, the Special Forces team got some intelligence that this woman was supporting the insurgency. And so, they conducted a raid on her home, zip-tied her and her two children, threw them on the floor. And I guess her son was old enough to be perceived as a possible threat, so they detained him and took him away. For the next two weeks, this woman had no idea whether her son was alive, dead or worse. At the end of that two weeks, the Special Forces team rolled up, dropped her son off and, without so much as an apology, drove off. It turns out they had found they had acted on bad intelligence. Ladies and gentleman, things like that happen every day in Iraq. We’re harassing these people, we’re disrupting their lives.

But as time went on and the absurdity of war set in, they started taking things too far. Individuals from my unit indiscriminately and unnecessarily opened fire on innocent civilians as they’re driving down the road on their own streets. My unit—individuals from my platoon would fire into the grills of these cars and then come back in the evenings after missions were done and brag about it. They would say, “Hey, did you guys see that car I shot at? It spewed radiator fluid all over the ground. Wasn’t that cool?” I remember thinking back on that and how appalled I was that we were bragging about these things, that we were laughing, but that’s what you do in a combat zone. That is your reality. That is how you deal with that predicament.

JON MICHAEL TURNER - former Marine with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines.

House raids—because we were a grunt battalion, we were responsible for going on several patrols. A lot of the raids and patrols we did were at night around 3:00 in the morning, around there. And what we would do is just kick in the doors and terrorize the families. That was an image taken around 3:00 in the morning through night vision goggles. And that is the segregation of the women and children and the men. If the men of the household were giving us problems, we’d go ahead and take care of them anyway we felt necessary, whether it be choking them or slamming their head against the walls. If you go back to that one picture, that was one man that wasn’t taking—that was taken care of in a very bad way, because of all the wiring that he had. We considered it IED-making material.

On my wrist, there’s Arabic for “F you.” I got that put on my wrist just two weeks before we went to Iraq, because that was my choking hand, and any time I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead and use it. (more…)

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

Reprinted with permission

Earlier this week, George Bush had a press conference to discuss the problem of high gasoline prices in the U.S. Amazingly, or predictably depending on how you look at it, Bush blamed the (Democrat-controlled) U.S. Congress. Topping his list of idiotic suggestions was that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be opened to oil exploration, followed by the notion that Congress is to blame for the fact that no new oil refineries have been built in America in the past 30 years. Conspicuously omitted from his speech, and also from the press questions that followed, was the fact that Bush’s White Elephant (i.e., his invasion and seemingly perpetual occupation of Iraq) has torpedoed the value of the U.S. dollar, significantly increasing the number of dollars that Americans must spend to buy imported oil.

After listening to Bush’s speech, I could not help but notice how much time Bush spends rearranging the deck chairs of the U.S. economy, while ignoring the giant hole he has blown in the side of the ship.

Imagine you were to come home from work one day and discover an inch of standing water in your living room — soaking your carpeting and staining all your furniture. Would you calmly stand there sifting through your mail, or would you stop whatever you were doing and try to stop the flood in your house? I suspect you would do the latter.

Likewise, imagine you were at home one day and your child came running into the house with blood gushing from a large cut in her head. Would you continue baking cookies, or would you immediately call 9-1-1? Again, I bet you would do the latter.

Serious problems demand urgent actions, right?

Well, not according to the Bible. According to the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve fell from grace by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, thereby corrupting their relationship with the god-of-the-Bible, not only for themselves, but for every one of their descendants: the entire human race. And what did the god-of-the-Bible do in response to this terrible event? Did He drop whatever He was doing and rush to find a solution? No, the god-of-the-Bible hummed and hawed for THOUSANDS OF YEARS before finally sending his son to fix the problem.

Excuse me, but why didn’t the god-of-the-Bible fix this awful problem sooner? Why didn’t the god-of-the-Bible send his son to EDEN, where the problem first began, to have a chat with ADAM and EVE? Why did the god-of-the-Bible delay for dozens of generations, waste time with the Ten Commandments (which He knew were doomed to fail), make the Jews wander in the desert for four decades, etc.? Why didn’t the god-of-the-Bible take urgent action to fix the urgent problem, right then and there in the garden of Eden? Why didn’t EVE mother the Son of God? If it was so critically important for the god-of-the-Bible to heal the rift that Adam and Eve had created, then why didn’t the god-of-the-Bible take more urgent action?

Apparently, the god-of-the-Bible so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son…he just wasn’t in any hurry to get around to doing it.

Bush sure has a talent for driving up the retail price of oil (and, thus, oil company profits). This week, with gasoline hitting all-time high prices, Bush directed the U.S. DoE’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to *buy* gasoline — a move that enriches oil companies both directly (i.e., by making long-range purchases when prices are peaking) and indirectly (i.e., by increasing demand during a tight supply, thereby forcing prices higher). This week also saw increased levels of sabre-rattling with Iran — for example, a U.S.-contracted cargo ship firing warning shots at approaching vessels believed to be from Iran.

Based on Bush’s past behavior, we should probably expect the remainder of his term to consist largely of taking whatever action is in the best immediate interest of Big Oil…which means get ready to open your wallet even wider when you stop at the pump.