Yes, we should all fear the "turf war" occasioned by transferring more intelligence and covert action functions to our military. I mean, the CIA is so completely on the ball:

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.

...

Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list.

But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.

More at The New Editor.

Bush has made some mistakes. One of the biggest was having any sort of faith in the CIA.

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Science:

In a discovery that scientists term "radical," but unexplained by any another theory, Saturn's frozen moon Enceladus is tapping an underground source of liquid water and shooting it like a geyser into space.

If correct, the finding would push Enceladus to the forefront of scientific campaigns to determine if life exists beyond Earth.

"If we're right, we've just hit the ball right out of the park," Carolyn Porco, head of Cassini's imaging team, said in an interview with Discovery News.

The existence of liquid water, along with a heat source and organic chemicals, are considered essential for the existence life as we know it.

Unfortunately, Enceladus' organic chemicals just agreed to go on a hunting expedition with Dick Cheney.

Scientists hope to examine the remains for traces of potential life.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (9)
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To quote Metallica Megadeath, Peace Sells, But Who's Buying? Not these guys:

Word spread quickly through the Quaker congregation that one of their own would not be coming home. Tom Fox's body was found Thursday evening, three days after he didn't appear in a video of Christian activists who had been taken hostage in Iraq. But members of the Hopewell Centre Quaker congregation in Clear Brook said they would not let their sadness overshadow the importance of what Fox was trying to accomplish.

"The important thing is the legacy lives and Tom lives with us," said Paul Slattery, a member of his support group of Langley Hill Friends Meeting.

Fox, 54, was the only American in a group of four Christian Peacemaker Teams members who were taken hostage last year by a previously unknown group, the Swords of Righteousness Brigade.

A video showing the other three hostages — James Loney, 41, of Toronto; Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, a Canadian electrical engineer; and Norman Kember, a 74-year-old retired British professor — was shown Tuesday on Al-Jazeera television.

Fox was found near a west Baghdad railway line with gunshot wounds to his head and chest, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said Saturday. A U.S. military official in Baghdad confirmed that American forces picked up Fox's remains Thursday evening. Falah al-Mohammedawi, an official with the Interior Ministry, which oversees police, said Fox was found with his hands tied and gunshots to his head and chest.

I admire the man's bravery and idealism. He put his life on the line for his beliefs... something Samarra Cindy isn't willing to do.

Still, he just didn't seem to believe the terrorists. They say again and again they want to kill all infidels and polytheists. It's time to maybe begin taking them at their word.

Oops: Yes, I am a heavy-metal posuer. That correction hurt.

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I've often wondered how intensely the majority of the Islamic world really feels about hardcore fundamentalist Islam. In our own country, no politician could ever be elected if he advocated repealing laws against consensual private sodomy, even though almost all of us think such laws are, ahem, pure ass. There's just no constituency willing to openly advocate for such a repeal, so the minority who favor such laws win by default.

It's the idea of falsified preferences again -- people falisfy their true preferences because they believe those preferences to be socially unacceptable or they believe it would be futile to agitate in favor of those preferences (because they believe, erroneously, they are in a decided minority). But a preference cascade -- a swift change in expressed preferences from the falsified one to the true one -- can happen when people finally get angry enough to speak out, letting others know they're not alone.

In other words, sometimes people just go along with silly shit. Until the shit gets too silly.

It's heartening that in Indonesia some people may finally have had it:

Islamic hardliners demanding the introduction of austere sharia-style laws are pushing secular-minded Indonesians too far and risk triggering a backlash and even "slaughter", one of the country's leading intellectuals warned.

The editor of the respected Tempo newsmagazine, Bambang Harymurti, likened the danger to the 1965 anti-communist bloodbath which some say left up to one million people dead.

A fierce debate over sweeping anti-pornography and morality laws that are backed by Islamic parties in the parliament have infuriated the vast majority of moderate Indonesian Muslims.

There have even been threats of secession in mainly-Hindu Bali and Christian-dominated Papua province.

Balinese leaders have warned bikini-clad foreign tourists could be arrested if the laws are enforced.

Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim nation but has largely shunned strict Islamic ways seen in the Middle East.

"People are angry, they are up to the neck, but they are afraid of them because they are militant and they are numbering hundreds, sometimes thousands," Harymurti said of the morality campaigners.

"But because they've created such bad will for a few years, when suddenly the tables turn, people are more than ready to basically slaughter."

Indonesia's parliament, which contains a large bloc of Islamic-based MPs, is debating whether to amend the criminal code to outlaw anything that could offend decency or "arouse lust" in children.

That includes husbands and wives kissing in public, unmarried couples living together and homosexual sex, along with any flash of thighs, navels, bottoms or breasts, punishable by up to 10 years in jail and fines of more than $A100,000.

There has to be some permissible route to sexual gratification. In most cultures, marriage is pretty much that. If you're married, you're allowed to be sexually active. But parts of Islam appear to see even that as sinful. For crying out loud, some Imams have even issued fatwas against husbands and wives seeing eachother naked during sex. A culture has to allow some route by which people can finally be frickin' left alone, or else there are going to be problems.

Posted by: Ace at 08:35 AM | Comments (13)
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A dictator dies of old age... it's the European/UN plan for tyrants:

Former Serb dictators Slobodan Milosevic’s long-running trial is finally over– without a conviction. Milosevic was found dead in his jail cell in the UN detention center at The Hague, Netherlands. The first reports said he died of natural casues– his health was terrible and failing.

Just after the "star witness" against him commits suicide:

His death comes less than a week after the star witness in his trial, former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, was found dead in the same prison. Babic, who was serving a 13-year prison sentence, committed suicide. He testified against Milosevic in 2002.

Not a wet eye in the house.

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 AM | Comments (12)
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For coronary daredevils only:

The Gateway Grizzlies of the Frontier League promised to create "Baseball's Best Burger" in time for the team's opener in late May. And they appear to have succeeded.

The ballpark sandwich will include a hamburger topped with sharp cheddar cheese and two slices of bacon -- all between a "bun" made of a sliced Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnut.

If you can find a (loop)hole in your cardiologist's advice, calorie counters predict the monster will set you back about 1,000 calories and 45 grams of fat.

"We have had the opportunity to bring in a new concession item for the past two seasons and each of them have been very successful," said Grizzlies general manager Tony Funderburg. He told ESPN.com that he got the idea after reading about Mulligan's in Atlanta, which has a similar sandwich called the Luther Burger.

Funderberg, who has said he has eaten at least 10 of the Grizzlies' new creations as part of a "sampling process," said the team hopes to sell 100 to 200 of them a night at $4.50. He calls it a bargain, considering it is a meal and a dessert in one.

Coming soon: The black-and-brown, which is a pint of Guiness mixed with a chocolate milkshake.

Just as Europe catches up to us in morbid obesity rates, we up the ante again.

We're America. We will not be second best.

Thanks to Michael.

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Intelligence test.
The form will highlight your entry in green when you get it right. Spelling counts.

My hubby and I each got the same score, but he got some answers that I missed, and vice-versa.

Then we filled out all the ones we got together, printed it out, and figured out a few more answers as we were lounging on the porch with cocktails later on.

We ended up getting all but two: # 33 and # 12.
Please help us.
They are probably ridiculously simple, but eluding us anyway.

UPDATE: Our last two remaining riddles have been answered in the comments by the brilliant frickin' geniuses on this blog.

Posted by: LauraW. at 12:30 PM | Comments (68)
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Hollywood's finally made a film about terrorism, after years of avoiding the subject.

Of course, it's pro-terrorism.

The Mad Man In The Mask

The directors of the The Matrix make a movie where the hero is a faceless terrorist trying to blow up London. Yes, you read that right

By LEV GROSSMAN

Is it possible for a major Hollywood studio to make a $50 million movie in which the hero is a terrorist? A terrorist who appears wearing the dynamite waistcoat of a suicide bomber, and who utters the line--from beneath a full-face wooden mask that he never takes off--"Blowing up a building can change the world"? A movie written and produced by the Wachowski brothers, the cyberauteurs who created The Matrix? Starring Natalie Portman, shaved as bald as Demi Moore in G.I. Jane?

These are not rhetorical questions. V for Vendetta, set for release March 17, is that movie, and it is the most bizarre Hollywood production you will see (or refuse to see) this year. It's the kind of film that makes you ask questions like, Who thought this was a good idea?

It definitely started with a good idea. The man who had it was Alan Moore, probably the greatest writer in the history of comic books. In 1982 Moore--who also wrote Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--began publishing an almost unbearably dark series of comic books set in a dismal, dystopic future Britain ruled by an oppressive Orwellian government. V for Vendetta starred, instead of a superhero, a bitter, brilliant, at least half-insane resistance fighter known only as V, whose face was permanently hidden behind a grinning mask that, if you're English, you recognize as the face of Guy Fawkes. (Who--again, if you're English--you know as the proto-terrorist who tried and failed to blow up Parliament in 1605.)

Moore's London was not, in fact, quite Orwellian, although that is understandable enough shorthand. Orwell, himself a socialist, wrote 1984 as an idictment of socialism and left-wing fascism. Such a cautionary tale for fellow-travellers wasn't the sort of thing Alan Moore wanted to write-- he wanted to write a simple, simplistic indictment of the fascist right-wing Thatcher government. (You remember Thatcher's death-squads rounding up and executing political dissidents, don't you?)

Of course this is the sort of anti-fascist movie Hollywood would make. Not that troublesome 1984 book, whose references to Ingsoc might be misinterpreted by audiences as suggesting there was great peril in giving so much power to the state (first economics, then personal liberty, and finally over a person's sexuality). No, the only fascism Hollywood bothers itself about is right-wing fantasy fascism, a bogeyman that scares them at night when actual Orwellianism, of the left wing kind, is being practiced on college campuses today.

By the way: the comic book itself sucked. The Watchmen itself was greatly overrated -- benefiting immensely from the sudden interest in mature graphic novels due to the amazing Dark Knight Returns -- and V for Vendetta really doesn't even rate being mentioned in the same breath, except that it came out at about the same time.

There were some noncosmetic challenges too--difficult, ideological challenges. V for Vendetta is a movie about a heroic terrorist. However unjust the regime he opposes--and we know it's unjust because it features a pedophile bishop, a jowl-shaking Big Brother figure, a spittle-spewing telepundit, concentration camps, institutionalized racism, religious intolerance and homophobia--V is a guy who goes around blowing up parts of London, and he likes his work. That was repugnant enough back when Moore wrote his comic book, two decades before Sept. 11. It's become even more so since last July, when terrorists actually did bomb three subway trains and a bus in London.

Everybody associated with the productions--Portman, McTeigue, Weaving, Silver--forcefully, insistently stresses that V is an ambiguous, ambivalent figure. They express their hope that the movie will spark debates about the definition of terrorism.

The debates they always seek to spark are about the defensibility of terrorism, rather than its repugnance.

Is there anyone in Hollywood actually brave enough to challenge his own biases and assumptions? It's pretty soft-soap to "challenge" the beliefs of other folks. How about your own once in a while? How about "challenging" the Hollywood community with a truly challenging movie-- one that posits that terrorism is simply evil and abominable?

And in a prestige project, too, not in some crappy low-budget piece-of-shit Thomas Ian Griffith straight-to-video abortion.

Here's another tough question: whether V for Vendetta is the movie that will start that conversation. The kind of delicate ambiguity that Portman talks about is hard to achieve within the narrow constraints of a popcorn movie--morally speaking, they tend to be shot in black and white--and V may come off as a bit too noble for the movie's good. As both the product of violence and its perpetrator, he should be doubly twisted. "What was done to me was monstrous!" V snarls. "And they created a monster," Evey replies. But if V plays as a Phantom of the Opera monster, a Beauty and the Beast monster, a monster with a sweet, sad center, he becomes less than he should be: a mere action hero. Maybe that's a lot of nuance to ask of an action movie, but terrorism is a subject that demands nothing less. Give poor, tortured V back his goodness, and you take away his greatness.

And you know that's precisely what they've done. I doubt there's much ambiguity in the film at all, unless you count the unambiguous message that terrorism is itself an ambiguous moral act. Sometimes, it seems, it's justified to murder civilians.

Why do conservatives get so riled up about Hollywood? Because, as much as we demean it as superficial, vapid, and borderline retarded, we recognize it is an important institution. The German Nazis and Italian Fascists and Russian Soviets recognized the power of fictive cinema to reinforce ideology and so invested heavily in the art form. I'm not comparing Hollywood with those regimes, simply noting that storytelling through moving pictures can have a great impact on how people view the world.

Hollywood can't have it both ways. They can't, every Oscars show, celebrate themselves for having such a profound effect on American culture and politics, and then claim that pro-terrorist agitprop is "just a movie" that really shouldn't be taken so seriously.

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The New York Times devotes "investigative journalist" resources to ferretting out Wal-Mart's sending tips to bloggers, but apparently it's not very interested in Hillary!'s long-standing association with the corporate giant:

NEW YORK - With retail giant Wal-Mart under fire to improve its labor and health care policies, one Democrat with deep ties to the company — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — has started feeling her share of the political heat.

Clinton served on Wal-Mart's board of directors for six years when her husband was governor of Arkansas. And the Rose Law Firm, where she was a partner, handled many of the Arkansas-based company's legal affairs.

Clinton had kind words for Wal-Mart as recently as 2004, when she told an audience at the convention of the National Retail Federation that her time on the board "was a great experience in every respect."

But in recent months, as the company has become a target for Democratic activists, she has largely steered clear of any mention of Wal-Mart. And late last year, Clinton's re-election campaign returned a $5,000 contribution from Wal-Mart, citing "serious differences with current company practices."

As Clinton sheds her Arkansas past and looks ahead to a possible 2008 presidential run, the Wal-Mart issue presents an exquisite dilemma: how to reconcile the political demands she faces today with her history at a company many American consumers depend upon but many Democratic activists revile.

...

The Clintons also benefited financially from Wal-Mart. Hillary Clinton was paid $18,000 each year she served on the board, plus $1,500 for each meeting she attended. By 1993 she had accumulated at least $100,000 in Wal-Mart stock, according to Bill Clinton's federal financial disclosure that year. The Clintons also flew for free on Wal-Mart corporate planes 14 times in 1990 and 1991 in preparation for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential bid.

And not only that-- a Wal-Mart lobbyist offered them each a free tour of Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters! Whoo-hoo!!!!

Thanks to Bill.

New Yorkers Won't Support Hillary! For President: Oh, well, New York isn't a particularly liberal state anyway, just like Boston isn't a big college town.*

Six in 10 New York voters believe Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is planning to run for president in 2008, but only about a third of her home-state voters say they would back her if she did so, a statewide poll reported Thursday.

Almost half of New York voters, including three of every 10 Democrats, said they would not vote for her for president, according to the poll from Siena College's Research Institute.

Hillary! spokeshack Harold Wolfson commented, "New York's electoral votes can easily be made up by simply winning Texas. And Utah, and maybe Oklahoma. And we're pretty sure those states are in-play. We've got a Zogby poll that says so."

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*tuk* *tuk* *tuk* *tuk*

Hiring gained ground in February with employers adding 243,000 jobs, the most in three months. Brighter job prospects sent people streaming into the labor market, however, pushing the unemployment rate up marginally to 4.8 percent.

The employment report issued Friday by the Labor Department showed that payroll gains were fairly broad-based and suggested job creation is gaining momentum. Workers' wages went up, too.

"American workers are defying the pessimists," President Bush told a Washington meeting of the National Newspaper Association. "Our economy is strong."

...

The unemployment rate inched up to 4.8 percent from a 4 1/2 year low of 4.7 percent in January. The bump-up in the jobless rate came as people -- feeling better about job prospects -- applied for work in droves.

"You are seeing a large number of people coming out of the woodwork because there are jobs to be found. People are now looking for jobs because it is now worth looking," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock.

The end of the "discouraged worker" whine?

...

The performance in payrolls in February exceeded analysts' expectations. Before the report was released they were forecasting jobs to grow by 210,000. But they were expecting the unemployment rate to hold steady.

...

The report also showed that employees' average hourly earnings rose to $16.47 in February, a modest 0.3 percent increase from January. That was in line with economists' expectations.

However, compared with February of last year, average hourly earnings increased by 3.5 percent -- the most since September 2001.

The end of "stagnant wage growth" whining?

In sad news, Princeton economics professor & political hack Paul Krugman just stuck his head in an oven. He tried to turn on the gas, but his arms were too short and he had to content himself with dirtying his beard on the grills.

Click pic for "Cowbell Theme,"
courtesy of Blaster's Blog

She's back... more...

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