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41% still think 9/11 & Saddam were connected

Jeez. 41% of Americans polled still think there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the events of 9/11.

That link was declared false long ago. The president once said there was no link; but, he actively spread the lie of the 9/11-Saddam myth.

Also, he lied repeatedly about it on the campaign trail.

Of course, the American media, with the exception of Knight Ridder, aided and abetted in the deception by utterly failing to challenge any of the Bush Administration's false claims made during the run-up to the invasion. (Bill Moyer's Buying Into the War documentary--which you can view here--deftly highlights this horrible dereliction of duty by American media.)

The Bush Administration benefited from Americans associating Saddam or Iraq with 9/11 or al-Qaeda. (This made as much sense as associating President Fox or Mexico with 9/11 or al-Qaeda.)

William Gibson

From "Now romancer," Dennis Lim's interview of William Gibson, author of Spook Country.

Our present has become so unutterably brief and ever-changing that we have no ground upon which we can stand and project a future historical arc as H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein were able to. The short form of that is, none of us know what the hell is going to happen next.

As a New York resident of 10 years, I find that this next observation rings particularly true...

I used to worry that there was no more territory in which bohemias could grow, but now I think they grow best on the Web. You don't need a physical neighborhood where everybody's into the same outfit and drug of choice. You can't really do that anymore because it gets marketed back to you as soon as you try it, but on the Web I think you still can.

Often true: "Magazines are by definition aggregators of novelty."

Publishers give into their fear of religious radicals

According to Editor & Publisher, some newspapers won't publish two Opus cartoons because they might offend Muslim sensibilities.

by the way, the E&P article gets the story wrong about the Danish cartoons. Fear-mongering fundamentalist Muslim liars circulated a whole packet in the Muslim world also including doctored images and unrelated but offensive (to them) cartoons to stir up the protests and incite violence against the West. (More on that in a future post.)

Well, I'll publish the Opus cartoons. They aren't offensive. Here's the first of the two. (Click to enlarge.)

Bill the Polled Cat

(Click to enlarge.)

I've missed Bloom County terribly over the years. Its creator has brought back the old Bloom crew in Opus, the penguin without happy feet.

A good thought: you can do good w/o waiting

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank

Just 28 cents a day: DefCon and the NCSE

Are you willing to give just $2 a week to these two great efforts below--roughly $.28 a day for a year (that's not much)--to help secure the blessings of liberty and defend science education against the rising tide of the Religious Right?

Please consider making a $52 contribution to each organization today. Mark your calendar, and contribute again in 2008!

DefCon - contribute

NCSE - join or contribute

Beltway press corp: Parroting instead of analyzing sources

Good observation from Glenn Greenwald:

Beltway reporters spend so much time speaking with government officials and political operatives that they actually see and understand the world through the spectrum of the simplistic, meaningless political slogans they are constantly fed.

Observe, for instance, when reporters speak of the NSA scandal how frequently they will use manipulative phrases like "listening in when Osama calls" or how often they depict the dispute as "whether we should be eavesdropping on terrorists." One of the principal functions of political reporters ought to be to dissect and dispense with misleading political sloganeering, but instead, they fulfill the opposite function: they are the most enthusiastic and effective disseminators of these cliches.

Alaska's scandal-ridden Republicans

An interesting article on Salon.com, "What's wrong with Alaska?"

Sen. Ted Stevens, Republican State Party head Randy Reudrich, the Murkowski father-daughter tag team of Gov. Frank and Sen. Lisa (he appointed his own daughter to become Senator.... Jeez.), and Rep. Don Young.

Get this, "Some of the [corruption-]implicated Republicans [in the Alaska state legislature], meanwhile, had hats printed up that read 'CBC,' for 'Corrupt Bastards Club.'" Corrupt and proud of it.

And the voters of Alaska permit this?

The voters of Alaska have some serious cleaning-up to do.

Grandeur beyond what any holy book reveals

(Photo: The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies; credit: Jim Misti, Misti Mountain Observatory. "Each of the fuzzy blobs in the above picture is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster.... It takes light roughly 300 million years to get here from this region of the Universe, so we see this cluster as it existed before the age of the dinosaurs.")

The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how may stars that means…It’s something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.

- Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience. The Penguin Press, 2006, p.27. (The author's 1985 Gifford lectures.)

An unsurprising result

You Belong in the UK

Blimey! A little proper, a little saucy. You're so witty and charming... No one notices your curry breath

What English Speaking Country Are You?