Month: February 2007

more from comments

Ever notice how the rightwingers don’t allow comments unless they are heavily skewed moderated? The other side? Totally OK with letting people speak their minds: perhaps their readers have minds to speak?

elevated from comments:

Bin Laden wasn’t trying to defeat the United States any more than someone who sets off a car bomb in Baghdad is trying to defeat the US armed forces. It was an attack, calculated to cause maximum damage for minimum expenditure. Hell, they didn’t even have to buy the explosives or delivery vehicles. It cost them less than the US paid for one of the four helicopters shot down in Iraq last month. And because of it, the US has directly blown a half a trillion dollars in Iraq.

and almost 6,000 lives (including the WTC victims and the war dead), tens of thousands of long-term wounded, just in the US, not to mention the Iraqis.

scapegoats in waiting

From comments on the brain trust assembled by General Petraeus: some see a repeat of McNamara’s Whiz Kids — long on education, short on real experience — while others see them as scapegoats in waiting:

Oh, great: what better strategy than to say, “don’t call Bush dumb–we sent SEVEN PhDs into Iraq and THEY couldn’t solve it either! So there, you hissy-pissy Bush Bashers!”

It could be spun as, “of course it failed–you had THINKERS and FEELERS in there, instead of solid-steel airtight military minds!”

What better way to further discredit the idea that education is useful for things. “PhDs–hah! They couldn’t win the war in Iraq with PhDs. Don’t gimme any PhD crap. Shoulda turned em into glass in 2003. The PhDs LOST this war! Burn the universities–they’re to blame!”

you couldn’t make it up

Let Science Be Science:

“All of us have a right to our own opinions as to the seriousness of global warming,” [Congressman Henry] Waxman said. “We don’t have the right to our own science.”

Maybe there already is a dystopian novel about a civilization that literally destroyed its own world: isn’t this what we’re doing? We don’t know what the final outcome will be but it’s appalling to see these “think tanks” (what thinking can really be going on?) doing their utmost to undermine these reports, all for their patrons.

<cue Rod Serling voiceover> “Imagine, if you will, a planet where technology is the new god, where all worship at the altar of the electronic gadget, but the byproducts of the power generated to fuel this lifestyle, free from care, are silently but inexorably wiping out whole nations with floods and super-cyclones. These people, entranced by blinking lights and instant gratification, are about to enter — the Twilight Zone.”

I could be exaggerating, but I really don’t know. My kids might one day know but what will they think of me and those of us who could have stopped it?

Oh, and the definition of dystopia in my computer’s dictionary?

an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. [emphasis added]

links for 2007-02-03