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Exhibit A: Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog. You have to love a blog where they list one of the most frequent search terms as "10. John Gowere swyving a donkey". And don't miss the "internette abbreviaciouns". My fave is "AOMSHJDOTBD: anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death".

Exhibit B: Under Odysseus. A daily journal of one of Odysseus' men on the plain before Troy.

One of the cooler things I've seen done with Google Maps. Enter your address (or another interesting spot) and get a map along with information from the Census for 1-, 3-, and 5-mile radius circles around the spot. Most cool. Riverbend, the Iraqi blogger, brings us this rather startling item. While watching TV with a news crawl across the bottom of the screen, she was astounded to see this:

“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

Ummmmm....oooookay. Yeah. Everything's going just fine over there. No need to worry.

Sometimes, I hate my government for the things it does in my name.

Oh, give me a break. That bastion of the Extreme Right Wing With Counter-Rotating Eyeballs and Screechy Voices, WorldNet Daily, has an article about a new movie produced by "devout Catholics" about satanic imagery in Church art. Grab your tinfoil hats, kids, we're going throoooooough the looking glass on this one!

If the whole premise wasn't bizarre enough, it becomes completely laughable when you look at their "experts". First, there's Wilson Bryan Key, who made a splash back in the 1970's peddling the "Subliminal Seduction" business. Then there's Judith Reisman, who seems to believe that most of the evil in the modern world came from the Kinsey Institute. To say that these two are obsessed with sex is like saying that Michael Jackson is a bit odd.

The movie is called Rape of the Soul (warning: noisy), and the web site doesn't disappoint. It's a monument to bad taste having an acid trip. I don't think even Joe Bob Briggs will be able to sit through this one.

Your government at work(?). The Department of Homeland Security gave a $202,000 grant do Dillingham, AK. What? You've never heard of Dillingham? Why, it's right here! OK, that wasn't optimally useful. Try here. If you have a big monitor, you may be able to spot Anchorage in the upper right corner.

So why did DHS give Dillingham $84.17 per resident? Who knows. But they probably know where all 2400 residents are, because they spent the money on 80 surveillance cameras mounted around town.

Do you feel safer now? I sure do!

Hat tip to Mark Kleiman. "A top adviser to former House Whip Tom DeLay received more than a third of all the money collected by the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit organization the adviser created to promote a pro-family political agenda in Congress, according to the group's accounting records." Further down in the story, we find out that the adviser was DeLay's chief political adviser as well as "...an evangelical minister, [who] also continued to serve as DeLay's spiritual adviser and prayed frequently with him, the former aides said."

I'm not sure if that word in the last sentence should be "prayed" or "preyed", actually.

Literally.

The wonderfully-named "Light of Victory LED Store" at eBay is selling quite a variety of pretty substantial LEDs, like these 10mm jobs. Their intended customers seem to be case modders or people who like the bottom of their cars to glow, but I'm thinking "reading lamp".

First we got the bomb, and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way.
Who's next?   -- Tom Lehrer

From Forbes:

Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear program, with help from Pakistani experts, the German magazine Cicero reported in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.

It says that during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.

I'm sure there will be grave consequences. Heck, they might make the Saudi royals stop visiting the Bush compound. OK, maybe not that grave. And I'm sure there's no chance that nukes in Saudi Arabia would ever fall into the hands of extremists, right? And of course, our "friends" the Pakistanis seem to be behind the whole project. But the most chilling part comes at the end:

The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.

According to some Western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani origin are housed inside the silos.

From an unexpected quarter: Wal-Mart is introducing a new line of organic baby formula. Breast is still best, but if you're going to formula feed, better this than something from Nestlé. Light blogging for the last couple of days - it's fantasy league draft time! With apologies to the Thompson Twins...it's more Downing Street Memos. Five days before Colin Powell's lieapalooza at the UN, Bush was telling Blair that he'd already "penciled in" a date for the bombing to begin. At the time, both Bush and Blair were telling the citizens of the US and the UK that no decision had been made to go to war. Liars. Fat Tony would appear to have given more than adequate reason to recuse himself in Hamdan v Rumsfeld or any related cases about detainees.

During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was "astounded" at the "hypocritical" reaction in Europe to Gitmo. "War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. "Give me a break." Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don't have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: "If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy."

Yeah. "Crazy" is pretty much exactly the word that came to mind as I was reading that.

Of course, Bush would never say it in French. But it's pretty hard not to think of it that way after reading this response from the Department of "Justice" to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Just as one President may not, through signing legislation, eliminate the Executive Branch's inherent constitutional powers, Congress may not renounce inherent presidential authority. The Constitution grants the President the inherent power to protect the nation from foreign attack, and Congress may not impede the President's ability to perform his constitutional duty.“

In other words, all he has to do is claim that whatever he's doing is necessary to "protect the nation from foreign attack", and it's all OK.

It's time. Call your Representative. Ask them if they're supporting John Conyers' House resolution to investigate Bush. If they're not, ask them who the hell they think they are representing.

I can't say how sad this makes me feel. It's bad enough seeing that 15% of my countrymen believe "the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified", but it's even worse seeing that my co-religionists are more likely to say that, at 21%.

Hat tip to CorrenteWire: [a] coalition of nonprofit conservative groups is holding training sessions to enlist Pennsylvania pastors in turning out voters for the November elections. The first training session, on March 6 in Valley Forge, included a videotaped message from a single candidate, Senator Rick [“Man on Dog”] Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican who faces a difficult re-election fight.

How, um, non-partisan of them. Wonder where the IRS is? Why should these people have tax exemptions?

Donald Rumsfeld, February 18 2006:

He said he had not been initially aware of the clandestine program, and ordered it shut down after news outlets published details of it.

"When we heard about it, we said, 'Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing,' " Rumsfeld said Friday during a taped interview on PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show."

Rumsfeld said the contractor, Lincoln Group, and commanders in Iraq were notified of the Pentagon's concerns and ended the propaganda effort.

"They stopped doing that," he said.

March 22, 2006:

An inquiry has found that an American public relations firm did not violate military policy by paying Iraqi news outlets to print positive articles, military officials said Tuesday. The finding leaves to the Defense Department the decision on whether new rules are needed to govern such activities.
...
Officials at the Pentagon and in Iraq said the Lincoln Group's contract remained fully in effect. The group's work, under a contract estimated at several million dollars, has included paying friendly Iraqi journalists stipends for favorable treatment.

Of course, the NY Times article doesn't make any reference to Rumsfeld's earlier remarks. That would have been, you know, work.

Personally, I think of this as just another example of a particularly pernicious sort of lie. Not a lie where you carefully consider the truth and decide to say something else, but a lie where you just don't care what the truth is and say whatever seems useful to you at the time.

More and more, the answer is, well, "no".

Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of Americans. Despite the popularity of the Food Network cooking shows on cable TV, and the burgeoning number of food magazines and gourmet restaurants, today's cooks have fewer kitchen skills than their parents -- or grandparents -- did.

This is pretty scary stuff; my 7-year-old can take a cookbook and make scones. I didn't think we were teaching him a rare skill, but...

At a conference last December, Stephen W. Sanger, chairman and chief executive of General Mills Inc., noted the sad state of culinary affairs and described the kind of e-mails and calls the company gets asking for cooking advice: the person who didn't have any eggs for baking and asked if a peach would do instead, for example; and the man who railed about the fire that resulted when he thought he was following instructions to grease the bottom of the pan -- the outside of the pan.

One of the excuses that has been put forward is that the Bush administration honestly believed that Iraq had WMD. Reality says otherwise.

In the period before the Iraq war, the CIA and the Bush administration erroneously believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding major programs for weapons of mass destruction. Now NBC News has learned that for a short time the CIA had contact with a secret source at the highest levels within Saddam Hussein’s government, who gave them information far more accurate than what they believed. It is a spy story that has never been told before, and raises new questions about prewar intelligence.

What makes the story significant is the high rank of the source. His name, officials tell NBC News, was Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister under Saddam. Although Sabri was in Saddam's inner circle, his cosmopolitan ways also helped him fit into diplomatic circles.
...
But on that very trip, there was also a secret contact made. The contact was brokered by the French intelligence service, sources say. Intelligence sources say that in a New York hotel room, CIA officers met with an intermediary who represented Sabri. All discussions between Sabri and the CIA were conducted through a "cutout," or third party. Through the intermediary, intelligence sources say, the CIA paid Sabri more than $100,000 in what was, essentially, "good-faith money." And for his part, Sabri, again through the intermediary, relayed information about Saddam’s actual capabilities.

They knew. They lied. Tens of thousands of people have died. Impeach them. Somebody finally noticed how frequently Bush uses the "some people say" or "some think" dodge without ever, you know, actually demonstrating that there are any such people. He did it again during the press conference this morning, in fact. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

In five internal reports made public yesterday as part of a lawsuit, New York City police commanders candidly discuss how they had successfully used "proactive arrests," covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend that those approaches be employed at future gatherings.

Among the most effective strategies, one police captain wrote, was the seizure of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue who were described as "obviously potential rioters."

I think we're all "obviously potential rioters" on this bus. Yes. It is. A Kurt Cobain action figure.

I think I'll go and have a lie down now.

People often tell me I should just ignore the likes of Ann Coulter, but I think that's a pretty serious mistake. There's a whole coterie of folks on the right who pretend their whole spiel is an act, just for fun, while they continue to appear on allegedly "serious" news and talk shows. And, unlike the talk of relatively unknown people like, say, Ward Churchill, people hear them. And this is what results:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have been the targets of death threats from the "irrational fringe" of society, people apparently spurred by Republican criticism of the high court.

Ginsburg revealed in a speech in South Africa last month that she and O'Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate "patriotic" killing of the justices.

Should people like Ann Coulter be censored for saying that someone should poison Justice Stevens? Of course not. But neither should they be accepted as someone with something to contribute to civil discourse, and to the extent that they are by the GOP, Fox News, and others on the right, they should be held responsible for sponsoring and exposing these views to the public. The Great Rift Valley in Africa is on its way to becoming an ocean bottom at what, geologically speaking, is a breakneck pace. This is very cool from a geological standpoint, but I have to wonder what the effect will be on people in that part of Africa in the next hundred years or so. It's been three years now; have you kind of lost track? Don't worry, so did the administration. Here's a useful guide to some of the 21 reasons that were given at various times (and who said them), including

• for regime change,
• because of a lack of weapons inspectors in Iraq,
• because Iraq was an imminent threat,
• to conclude the Gulf War of 1991, and
• to preserve peace around the world.

Let me say very clearly that as a long-time rank-and-file Democrat, I'm 1000% behind Russ Feingold's censure resolution. I'm disgusted that the only Democratic Senators with the guts to stand with him are Barbara Boxer and Tom Harkin. Kudos to them. As for my Senators, shame on you, Chuck Schumer. Shame on you, Hillary Clinton. This isn't politics-as-usual. This is abuse of the Constitution on an unprecedented scale (yes, I think they've gone beyond Nixon at this point). It's time to stand up and be counted. I'm back. After having to terminate 18minutegap.com due to a conflict with a (previous) employer, I've decided to come back to blogspot for at least a while. If you've found your way back here, welcome back. If you're a new reader, welcome. Glad to have all of you around.