War, What Is It Good For

In this morning's Chron, the AP reports

Recruiting Troops Becoming Increasingly Hard;
Schoomaker Says This Year Bad, Next Year Worse

Zo says Good.

Here we (unexpectedly) got the anti-war movement right where it belongs. In the Hearts and Minds of the nation's Cannon Fodder and their families. Ain't gonna study war no more.

See? This is what happens when you are hell bent on public education. Never mind free blogging. Highschool graduates want a rosier prospect than being shot at for George? Whilst underequipped by that clueless old fart Rumsfeld?

Huzzah fuckin' huzzah.

What Do You Know About Mendacity

I've been following Sidney Blumenthal's guardian.uk piece all over the web—It's a fucking novel. He's written a novel, Death of A Prime Minister and Attention Must Be Paid.

Okay, so the saga is morphing into George's Long Day and its sloooow Journey Into Night, but so much the better. Blumenthal has picked us a juicy peach, worth memorizing. Worth clasping to your (figurative) bosom. Tragedy is nothing if not ... compelling.

In his relationship with Bush, Blair apparently misread the outward signs of American culture and interpreted them through British eyes. Bush can be so amiable and informal dressed in blue jeans that his manner can be mistaken for openness and cooperation, when it conceals a particular type of American class superiority and indifference. Bush, after all, seems so friendly compared with the glowering Cheney, who clawed his way upward. It's not easy for someone who's never traveled in America to grasp the evolution of the Bush family from north-east patricians into Texas Tories, and the dissolution of the New England character along the way, especially its sense of responsibility, duty and humility.

Bush's amiability towards Blair merely demonstrates his acceptance of the prime minister into his fraternity, his private club. But even if Blair got Bush exactly right in every nuance, the outcome remains the same. (Gordon Brown and Bush are a car crash waiting to happen.)

I'm sellin' tickets! I'm settin' up lawn chairs. Who wants the soda concession. Hoo boy.

Bush has an instinctive revulsion for serious intellectuals who have little capacity for the locker-room banter that is his mode of condescension.

On the other hand, I don't think you're going to catch George Bush on the same continent with a Gordon Brown. Instinctive terror is more like it.

Love 'n' Marriage

I make it a strict policy not to argue with fools. They only drag you down to their level and then overwhelm you with their greater experience.

My god, I think this woman just described the central tragedy of my life!

YARP

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared at a Pentagon press conference this morning to say that it's time for the media to stop focusing so much attention on the abuse of detainees . . .

Rumsfeld complained that 'two of the country's largest newspapers' have devoted 'more than 80 editorials combined since March of 2004 to Abu Ghraib and detainee issues, often repeating the same erroneous assertions and recycling the same stories . . .

. . . thereby illustrating one of the classic diversionary tactics of the psychopathic liar, whose surroundings do not register upon him as do those of the ordinary, human man.

MAWL.*


link: salon war room

*more on which later

Man This Shit Gets Old

From, where else, another slashdot comment thread

Re: Now is THE Time To be a Mac Developer
by aluminumcube on 8ish

“Or think of it this way; the kind of people who are drawn to the Mac platform are drawn to it precisely because they don't want to fuck around with patches, workarounds and general hackery in order to make their computer run. Here is the test: could you imagine telling your mother to run out, buy a beige box, download some boot hack, install it, then install OS X on top of that?”


Re: I AM your mother
by zo on 3ish

“And I own two G4 Powerbooks, 15 and 17", two partitioned volumes each, running Tiger, max RAM, broadband, wifi/Airport Express, Nokia Bluetooth . . .

Or maybe your grandmother, and what you all need to get is, (who am I talkin' to: dateless geeks) women are not what you think.”

Why Don't I Just Move

‘My name is Gordon Ramsay and I'm here to help. Simplicity has always been at the heart of my cooking and I'm going to show you how you too can become a star in the kitchen by learning how to boil an egg properly . . . Oi, sonny, who the fuck are you? Get out of here. Who? You're my son? Fuck. I didn't recognise you.’

To England. Yes, I know, it's fucked, but it's fucked in such a witty, literate way.


link: I love the Digested Read

Oh Don, Poor Don

Last month, Amnesty International, the human rights group based in London, called the Guantanamo detention center 'the gulag of our time.'

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld characterized the charge as reprehensible.

Have I mentioned . . . broken?

In connection with the mind of Donald Rumsfeld?

I have? Let me mention it again.

In Other Words, Please Shut Up

Foucault's point was that 'sexual liberation'—as manifested in open discussions about sex—is in reality an extension of systems of power and domination that have infiltrated our most private activities. In other words, the more you bring activities previously considered non-verbal under the control of language, the more you're extending mechanisms of social control into those areas.

And we know what that means. Don't we.

link: Yule Heibel’s Post Studio