Internal Monologue

Anyone who knows me can probably guess my answer to that question. (For those of you who don't, it's "No". See here , here , here , and here for starters.). Amanda Marcotte has a lengthy post on Pandagon addressing this very issue (in response to this post on Echidne ). Her conclusion is that atheists would be stupid to surrender so powerful a tool as mockery, especially when it is used so effectively by others: I know, it made me cringe to type it, but it’s a very real fact and we have to face the truth. The entire reason that the right wing in America is so powerful today is because they use ridicule so frequently. The jokes don’t even have to be funny to be effective. Believe you and me, I know a lot of wingnuts and when they mock liberals, it’s often a fairly grim exercise. The entire phenomenon of “I’m not a feminist, but” exists strictly because anti-feminists refuse to argue with feminists so much as make jokes that are often more exercises in grim, unfun

I'm sure someone has done this already (and I've done it using Machiavelli), but my last post made me think of what Sun Tzu 's Art of War might tell our current bunch of strategically inept military leaders: II. WAGING WAR 2. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. 3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. 4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue. 6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. 7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the p

Quiddity at uggabugga posts a great exerpt from a Bush interview (which I decline to link to because it's from ABC, who have decided they're going to air right-wing propaganda for free before an important election). In this interview, Bush repeats one of his stupidest reasons for our being in Iraq: The enemy, however, believes that Iraq is a part of the war on terror. Osama bin Laden has called Iraq central to the war on terror. Has it ever ocurred to our willfully ignorant president that Osama bin Laden might have said that precisely to lure the United States into a quagmire? Since when do you let the enemy pick the battlefield? Especially when it's so unfavorable to us? Does Bush really think we should base our military and national security strategy on Al Qaeda propaganda statements? If Kim Jung Il said Madagascar was essential to North Korea's nuclear program, would he believe that and invade there? I have just one thing to say: Mr. Bush, making sure Zachary Drake

I should have posted on this earlier, but the Senate Intelligence Committee report released today (on Friday, of course, to minimize the damage) completely discredits the Saddam-Al Qaeda linkages that Bush put forward in support of the Iraq invasion: WASHINGTON (AP) -- Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a possible ally, a Senate report says, contradicting assertions President Bush has used to build support for the war in Iraq. Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that before the war, Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates. ( AP via Majikthise ). In fact, according to this article, Saddam tried to capture Zarqawi: It said al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad from May until late November 2002. But "postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarq

We could be witnessing a major meltdown at the Disney corporation. Their brand, which is by far their most important asset, is losing its wholesome, family-friendly connotations and coming to be associated with bad right-wing propaganda. MyDD : By contrast, this week, Disney's brand took a massive hit because the company got sloppy and its internal controls were revealed as weak to non-existent. Not only is the film openly fraudulent, but it's apparently really really bad. Like, loser, expensive afterschool special schlock bad, the kind of bad that makes me kind of glad I couldn't get an advance copy. Right-wing death cultists make shitty directors, apparently. And more significantly, Disney's executives were personally embarrassed, their happy little spa-drenched personas chided by no less than Bill Clinton. (I don't know what Stoller is talking about when he says "death cultist"--following the link leads to a story about the director's evangelic

Apparently, there's this bizarre tradition of " Friday Cat Blogging ": Bloggers that would normally never so be so trivial and self-indugent post pictures of their cats (or other pets) on Fridays. I suspect this tradition is some sort of mechanism to confine such things to a single day of the week, lest the blogosphere be overrun by cat pictures all the time. At any rate, I don't expect do engage in this often, but in honor of the tradition and to educate my readers (and I am proud to say that I can, with complete confidence, use the plural here) about this strange subject, I present to you a picture of 4 year old "Kitty" keeping watch at our living room window (at least she doesn't have a sniper rifle ). Just to prove I'm not completely making this tradition up, you can see Atrios doing it here .

This term was not coined by pot-smoking peace activists of the late sixties, but by outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address (as always, Wikipedia has more ). Much has been written on the pernicious effects of Military-industrial complex on society as a whole: urgent social problems and irreseponsible budget defecits go unattended because building a new weapons system is so profitable and Congress is so buyable. But the MIC also has horrible negative effects on the military itself. This MSNBC story (via Taylor Marsh ) illustrates this. It seems as though the army would rather have Raytheon develop an anti-RPG vehicle defense system from scratch than purchase one already available from an Israeli company. The development would take a minimum of five years, the Israeli "Trophy" system is apparently available now. I don't have the expertise to judge the pros and cons of the Trophy system, but whatever its drawbacks it seems it would be more effective