Today's GOP

Goering's Own Party

Select quote:

"Every person who opens the door -- as long as they're white -- I'll say, 'I'm James Hart. I'm running for Congress. My name will be on the ballot in the Aug. 5 Republican primary. I think white children deserve the same rights as everyone else.'"

This guy is a sick puppy.

Zoinks!

Awfully sorry about the lack of updates this past week.
 
I pulled another marathon week at the old lithography mill. We're doing work for Analog Devices.
 
I think that all I would post has already been said by others far more eloquently than I could ever hope.
 
One new and noteworthy item is that the DNC gave Kerry a far bigger boost in the polls than I would have thought...Actually, I did have that thought :)
 
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The only other item is one of a personal nature. An emailer asked me about my political philosophy.
 
In the interest of full disclosure, here it is:
 
Ideologically, I am an anarchist on the order of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. However, pragmatism trumps ideology in my case. Hence by practice I am somewhere in the liberal/libertarian sphere. This is not the neo-liberalism as evidenced by current trade policies which have done nothing to empower the third world. It can easily be shown that neo-liberal policies have been repressive and in fact have insured that the poor remain so..Or that their situations even worsen.
 
I'll expound on this in the near future.
 
One final note. I was in Boston during the past week, and whilst I noticed a increased police presence, this may be due the fact that I was conditioned to notice their increased presence. The big media tells us what to think about. They tell us what's important to their interests. Security issues are big news events in the post 9-11 world. The media insures that this remains so.
 
Corporate/government media(propaganda?) doesn't always tell us how to think, but they do tell us what to think about. The jump to the manipulation of how we think about issues is easily breached. We are indoctrinated at a young age, and fed a steady diet of half-truths, untruths and other assorted distortions. We are raised to be manipulated.

General Stuff

The Dems Bostonian lovefest begins in earnest today. C-SPAN has the goods. Tonight's scheduled speakers include: Fmr. Pres. Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), Fmr. Pres. Jimmy Carter, and Fmr. Vice Pres. Al Gore.

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The housing market checked in with a surprisingly strong performance. Wall Street isn't impressed. It is almost a certainty that June's report will be the high-water mark for home sales(in this cycle). Last week's dismal report on building permits is the forward looking indicator..and it's not pretty.

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Buy Google at IPO? Is Google worth $39.1 Billion?

I won't be amongst the buyers.

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The newly free Iraqis are displaying oddly autonomous behavior. Don't they know that this is a conditional freedom?

Things are as deadly as ever in Iraq.

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Moore's film is in uncharted territory - for a documentary. $103.5 million and counting.

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Poll de jour

In a show of just how undemocratic the electoral process truly is, USA Today has polled 'battleground states.' You know, the few states that get all the money and attention lavished upon them because these states could go to either candidate.

For what it's worth, Kerry is polling better than Gore did in 2000 in the polled states, except for Florida.

The GOP and Science

It is stupefying that some members of the GOP think that there is a magical place where scientific research and politics meet and flourish.
 
From BioMed Central:

WASHINGTON, DC—Members of a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel yesterday (July 21) challenged senior Bush administration officials over the propriety of asking the political affiliations and policy positions of scientists being considered for federal government advisory committees.

"Is it inappropriate to ask their party affiliation?" John E. Porter, NAS committee chairman, questioned government witnesses yesterday. "There is no specific prohibition against asking it," replied Robert Flaak, senior policy adviser in the General Service Administration, which oversees laws regarding federal advisory committees. "I see no reason why that would be important. [But] there are cases, in a policy-related committee advising the president, where perhaps it could be of interest."

Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, and Standards, told the NAS panel that political viewpoint questions are indeed appropriate because scientific advisory committees represent "the nexus between politics and science."

"Scientists should not consider themselves to be a privileged class that is somehow above politics," said Ehlers, who is also a research physicist. "Scientists must be in touch, even in tune, with the political realities around them. Only by understanding the political process can scientists fully integrate science into decision-making."

But Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee who has issued his own allegations of Bush administration interference with government science, disagreed. "When it comes to scientific advisory committees, I don't think that the politics of the president or the administration should play any role in the selection. It ought to be solely on the basis of the competence of the scientists."

The NAS Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy is seeking ways to encourage greater participation by scientists in government. Yesterday's meeting assumed heavy political overtones, coming amid continuing complaints by research and public interest groups that the Bush administration is politicizing science and science policy. The committee plans to release its recommendations shortly after the November elections.

The Union of Concerned Scientists earlier this month issued a report claiming "new evidence that the Bush administration continues to suppress and distort scientific knowledge and undermine scientific advisory panels." The report cited several instances in which candidates for National Institutes of Health (NIH) councils said they had been asked during interviews if they had voted for President Bush and whether they supported his policies.

Waxman is correct. The GOP has one engineer in the House. There are a couple of physicians, and that's all for those trained in 'hard science.'

The only "nexus between politics and science" should be whether to fund research project A or B. The same rules regarding scientists' voting patterns, and or party affiliations should be applied as religion is in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution wherein it states:

...The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

If you're from Michigan, and in Ehlers' district..send him home for the holidays. I think it's a good message to send :)
 
This is an issue that touches all of us. From real, unfettered research on climate change to stem cell work, there is arguably no more an important long term issue confronting us.

Lack of Updates

Sorry about the recent lack of updates. It is not that I have not read much to comment about, but a combination of home improvements(repairs?) and an awful case of some influenza-ish physical malady have left me without time and energy to post much.
 
I'll make an attempt to update tomorrow.

Housing - Down and Out?

I've held the view that this so-called economic recovery has been a lot weaker than the usual suspects have proclaimed.
 
(a quick search using the form in the LH column will give you a few dozen mentions)
 
This morning the Census Bureau released it's June 2004 numbers concerning new housing activity.
 
It's not pretty.
 
I'll give you the highlights as I see them.

• Construction of new homes in the U. S. slowed in June, falling 8.5 percent from May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.802 million.

 

• Starts of new single-family homes declined 9.5 percent in June to 1.489 million seasonally, the lowest level since May 2003.

 

• Building permits, a forward looking indicator, for single-family houses slid 6.2 percent to 1.51 million.

 

• Overall building permits tumbled 8.2 percent to 1.924 million units. It's the sharpest decline in permits in 10 years.

 

• Over the past five months, housing starts have averaged 1.926 million, down from last month's 1.952 million.

The number of homes already in the process of being built remains at high levels, but, and this is a big butt, building permits crashed.
 
As the housing market and consumer spending were the two legs holding this fragile economy together, if these housing start figures prove to be more than an aberration, then this could prove very damaging to the so-called economic recovery.
 
"The recent weak patch of economic news for June, on consumer spending, employment and industrial production, has not dented most economists' view of an economy reaching cruising speed". So reads a snippet of this Reuters' article detailing some poll numbers of economists' expectations for the balance of this year and next.
 
Me, I'm not an economist, but I do watch broad indicators of economic activity. I'd say that the glass is half-full, and someone's treating themself to a quenching drink.
 
The $64,000 question is of course, who is correct? Or are we all wrong?
 
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the University of Michigan's Consumer Confidence Index rose slightly for July. Consumers are slightly more optimistic about the near future than in June, but will they continue to spend? Do they have any more credit with which to continue to spend?
 
Wages have lost money to inflation, and personal debt is at or near all-time record levels. Energy and food costs are way up, and this of course erodes consumers abilities to purchase hard goods - durables.
 
So, I'm less sanguine than the surveyed economists. This is not news. Time will tell if any of us are reading the tea leaves accurately. I use the price of copper as a measure of economic activity. While copper prices remain high, it is off it's peak, and the trend is beginning to turn murky. Copper could go either way at this juncture.
 
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Iran? Show me.
 
So, if some the 9-11 hijackers merely passed through Iran on their way to wherever, that's a lot less aid than the U.S. gave all of them. Now that's ugly.

Town Haller Needs History Lesson

At TownHall.com, where "The Conservative Movement Starts Here"(is conservatism a moving experience?), columnist Paul Jacob opines about Washingtonian hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle(which is really just one side).
 
Unfortunately, Mr. Jacob hits an area that I'm pretty well versed in. The writings of Madison are a special source of intrigue for me, and I know some of his writings quite well.
 
Here's what Jacob claims:

Much of the hypocrisy in Washington politics involves partisanship. It appears that ideas don't matter nearly as much as whether there is an R or a D stitched onto the chest of the idea's advocate.

Partisanship is winning out: Politics has become a football game with a blue team and a red team competing for all the prizes of power and money. The goal is to win the game by staying in office and by getting or keeping your team in the majority - so you as a congressman get the bigger and better slice of perks, pork, privileges, and power.

That's much different than the body of citizen representatives our Founders envisioned - men who would act not as part of the factions so feared by Madison, but as an independent board of directors to run government according to the rules, the Constitution, and for the benefit of us all as shareholders.

But our Founders' dreams are not today's reality. This can be seen in the reckless disregard for principle, and in the routine trivialization of ideas. The issues that so animate the citizenry have become mere objects to be used to win the game by the partisan professional politicians populating the nation's capitol.

First of all, the founders' of this country were indeed professional politicians. Or, at the very least, white men that could afford to take the necessary four months off in order to draft the Constitution and Articles of Amendment. This situation applied to all centralized governmental processes wherein those attending needed to physically meet.
 
Does that sound like the common worker of today, or does it more likely reflect the moneyed and privileged?
 
Madison was very class conscious. When he uses the word 'factions' he is using it as means to differentiate between the gentry - of which he was part - and the proletariat. The founders' - very much a class of ruling elites - wanted to control the political and social processes of the new country. Why else would the electoral have been written into the Constitution?
 
Lest you think I am in error, and that Madison meant something else when he used the term 'factions,' I refer you to the following text from Madison's Federalist Paper number 10:

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Now there you have the real Madison. Far from being a democratically minded product of the enlightenment, Madison was, as he wrote above, supremely conscious of class. He was a member of the ruling elite of the eighteenth century. Madison considered he and his class above the rabble, and together, they structured government in a way that would solidify and perpetuate his conceptions. Read the whole document. Ideologically, Madison had more in common with Marx than he does with the fabricated history that we are taught in school.
 
I'll be emailing Mr. Jacob with the entirety of Federalist Paper No. 10
 
He just might learn some real history :)
 
Before anyone asks me what I was doing at TownHall.com, I sometimes go there to see how much I don't fit into the reactionary cheerleader mold. It can be quite invigorating.
 
Besides, it's my birthday!
 
Birthday Update: Sarah McLachlan will not be performing at my birthday party later today. Something about 'doing her hair.' :)

Unsorted Stuff

First of all, I'd like to wish the folks at Blogger/Pyra/Google success with the new WYSIWYG blog editor. I think it sucks, but it should enable people even less qualified than me to publish their spurious opinions via a blog.
 
Now, on to a couple of news items.
 
I see that Allawi is going to get tough on terrorists. Which terrorists? USA Today reported earlier in the week that 2% of people being held in Iraqi jails and prisons were foreigners.
 
Allawi learned his lessons from the MI6 and the CIA very well. He's establishing a "security service" to deal with the "terrorists." One must keep in mind that Allawi was the teller of the infamous "45 minutes" claim.
 
Of course we don't know how much real support Allawi has amongst the Iraqi populace. Time will tell.
 
Relatedly, the unconflicted U.S. government is scolding the Filipino government for pulling troops out to spare a man's life. The U.S. NEVER negotiates with terrorists.
 
See: 1983 Beirut, Lebanon when another faux cowboy in White House, we did much the same...Nevermind, you're supposed to forget about that.
 
The other thing that caught my otherwise sleep deprived attention this morning was that Martha got 5 months in the joint, and another 5 months of "home detention." I'm sure she'll somehow make it through the 5 months confined to her stately Connecticut manor.
 
Now, we have to look at Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay. If Martha gets 10 months for making what - $20K? - Kenny Boy should get an "Arabian Crew Cut" if convicted :) (yes, I just made that up)
 
This WYSIWYG editor is a real step backwards. *sigh*

Success!!

The blog now renders acceptably well in IE at 800 x 600.

I think I'm done messing with the CSS for a while - okay, maybe a tweak here and there - but that's all.

Once I fill the blog up with topical stuff over the next week or so, I'll be engaging in a link swap drive.

I do have one really interesting item for you(at least I found it interesting). Karen Kwiatkowski was interviewed by Philip Dru back in May. You can D/L and listen to the interview by clicking on → this link ←. Neocon strategy explained by someone that was right there listening. There is a lot of material covered. It's almost an hour and a half, and well worth your time. In my humble opinion. It's a 10MB D/L. If you'd rather listen to the interview in streaming audio, here's a dial-up friendly 16k stream.

Die Wirtschaft

Sorry about my use of German for the entry title(The economy) but I'm reading Marx. I'm concurrently reading Keynes so I'm more than a little confused about economic theory at present :)

No worries though, as real world economics are vibrant and many faceted things that seem bent on confounding theories and rendering equations useless..or else we're all being mislead. Nah. That could never happen.

The state of the U.S. economy seems to be wiltering under the summer heat.

The labor market is loosening, producer prices slipped unexpectedly in June, and the housing market - which has been the bulwark of economic strength all throughout the last four years - is cooling as sure as interest rates are rising.

All told, the stimulus from the Bush tax cuts appear only in the rear-view mirror. The various talking heads that were raving about Bush's economic plan were directly benefitting from it.

For those of you using IE at a resolution of 800 x 600, help is on the way. I have a couple of days to reapply the old template and it'll be right as rain.

Back on Thursday

I have been on a data recovery crusade..I lost the working template to pure bs - that is, that template that works in the utterly useless IE browser at 800 x 600.

So, I'm using a linked stylesheet to reconstruct the template...essentially reverse engineering the blog template via a stylesheet.

If I could spend a few uninterrutpted hours on the template, I'd have it done. Unfortunately, Thursday July 15 is the soonest I'll be able to work on it.

A Thousand Pardons

If you've come to the site using IE at a resolution of 800 x 600 the left hand column doesn't display properly(scroll down to see what it looks like and contains).

IE using 1024 x 768 doesn't have this issue..Higher resolutions are also okay. When I developed the CSS, it did render properly in IE at 800 x 600. I made a couple of adjustments..Minor, I swear, and now it's just bad.

Gecko engined browsers, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape 6 and newer render it properly at 800 x 600.

I'm terribly sorry for this inconvenience, and will have it rectified by 7/8 early in the PM. I'd work on it now, but due to my working late at night, I must get some shut-eye.

Again, I'm dreadfully sorry.

Todd

Krugman

Today's Krugman piece is pretty good. While it is his opinion of course, there are facts presented to support his(Krugman's) position.

I have held that this 'recovery' has largely passed the vast majority of Americans by. My measure of the robustness of any recovery after a contraction is how does wage growth compare against inflation?

As is likely to become the norm, while corporate profits boom, wages for working people have lost ground to inflation. This is, in no small part due to neo-liberal trade policies. This is commonly referred to as globalization.

No matter who is elected in November, this issue is going to prove to be amongst the toughest economic challenges.

Of course, regular readers of pure bs know that everything is temporal except for the damn environment! This is the one issue that needs to take center stage and stay there until we reach a global environmental homeostasis...Or all die trying. Damn it! Why can't anybody in either of the major political even begin to talk about the one issue that may cause the extinction of the human race if left unchecked? Is this not an important enough issue?

Sorry for the digression.

The best series I have heard on how the money really works, is Smithy's Wizards of Money. It is terrific. The website is new, so it doesn't have all the information about all the episodes. There are 22 episodes, each one indispensable, and often drawing on the subsequent episodes..So, it makes sense to listen to them in order. The old website's URL is: http://www.wizardsofmoney.org/indexold.html, and all the episodes are available for download from the A-infos page here. The A-infos project has a tremendous amount of 'not on CNN' news and programming, but the site is a bit awkward to navigate.

The series starts out with basic money tidbits about how money is created, and progresses all the way to how money interplays with environmental issues such as oil, and why the Hell we haven't signed on to Kyoto, to the future use of our national public lands and how Disney is looking at getting in on the 'eco-tainment' industry.

It's intelligent programming that everyone should be required to have exposure to..Try it. If you don't think it's the best economic series you've ever experienced, I'll give you a full refund!

Important tip: As A-infos is a bit bandwidth choked, it helps the download process tremendously if you use a download manger that splits the files into segments, and then combines them. Justin, at a developer's tale recommends the excellent Internet Download Manager. You'll want this utility even if you have broadband. Pure bs is on a 3mb/sec. connection, and the IDM really helps.

Now, before an astute reader informs me that even the Earth itself is temporal on a 'deep time' scale, I am aware of this fact :)

CSS Loaded - New bs

Tell me what you think?

New CSS stuff in the rh and lh columns..and less clutter.

This begins my crusade for 10 new link exchanges.

If you want to swap links, my email is listed in the lh column under the 'contact' sub-header.

Blogger Still Wonky

Okay. I have tried to update pure bs to v0.5, but Blogger won't allow me to publish my new template today. In preview mode, it looks to be quite an improvement.

Meanwhile, in 'free Iraq' it's still deadly, Mr. al-Sadr may get amnesty from Allawi, while he(al-Sadr) vows to fight on.

Illustrating just how quickly things evolve in 'free Iraq,' The Guardian is reporting that any amnesty announcement has been delayed. Jack Straw, the UK foreign secretary reportedly indicated British support for amnesty..No doubt waiting until after calling across the pond and getting the nod from Washington to make such an announcement.

It's a whacky world.

CSS Complete!

Well, the CSS for the blog is complete and renders properly in IE, Mozilla FireFox, Netscape 6, and the little browser that's bundled with Homesite v5.5

I'd try and publish it today, but a combination of too much sun, beer and the weird behavior of Blogger have lead me to postpone publishing until sobriety and Blogger are once again in harmony.

Once published, I'm going on a link exchange drive. My goal is for ten new links. I think that's readily attainable(I am almost always successful because I set the expectations bar low :).

More Site News and a Post

The new CSS is nearly done, and I'll be plugging it in tomorrow.

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Brad DeLong was cited on Salon.com yesterday. Part of his post here was picked up by Salon.

"Is George W. Bush responsible for the fact that the employment situation is lousy? No. The economy is an ocean liner, but the president is not its captain. Presidents influence the economy. They don't control it."

"But are he and his administration responsible for the fact that the employment situation is as lousy as it is? Yes. He sold his tax cuts as employment-generating stimulus programs, while in fact they got only about half as much employment bang for the deficit buck as a reasonable program would have. Think of it this way: Suppose your insurance agent tells you you ought to get homeowner's insurance. You give your insurance agent $4,000 to buy homeowner's insurance. You then have a small fire. And your insurance agent then tells you that you're only getting half of the damage covered--that he only used half the money to buy insurance, and spent the rest buying his friends large flat-screen TVs. That's the situation were in: sold as jobs programs, the Bush tax cuts got us only about half as much insurance against a lousy labor market as a real job-promoting stimulus that cost the same in deficit terms would have generated."

That's how it's now shaping up - the 'recovery' has been great for corporate profits, while creating far fewer jobs than other 'recoveries,' and wages are losing ground to inflation.

The wage issue isn't likely to go away. Corporate America has but one goal: to increase shareholder value. All the rest is way down the list.

When the Fortune 500 can dangle the carrot of jobs here at third-world wages versus the stick of moving those jobs to an already third-world country, you bite the bullet. Neither prospect is palatable. It's almost a stick and stick approach. And that's if you're even given the option.

Then, once your job is 'outsourced' the same unaccountable corporate power will use the same techniques to further their profits and produce a whole series of labor forces vying for ever depressed wages.

Here's a snippet from the linked article:

It's unlikely that employees will get raises that outpace inflation over the next five to 10 years, said William A. Niskanen, former acting chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the Ronald Reagan administration.

"I don't see any substantial increase in average real wages for some time," said Niskanen, who is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a Washington research group. Niskanen and other economists cite global competition, which forces companies to keep costs down, shrinking union clout and continuing slack in a labor market with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, up from 4.2 percent when the last recession began in March 2001.

The disparity between pay and prices may keep President Bush from fully capitalizing on the economy's addition of 1.2 million jobs this year, the best five months of job growth since 2000, as he runs for re-election, said political analysts including Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"The stagnation in wages leaves open a big target" for Democratic challenger John Kerry, Mann said. In terms of pay, "a lot of Americans have been left behind," he said. "Kerry now has an opportunity to ask, 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?' "

After accounting for inflation, wages and salaries have been growing less than a third as fast as they did after previous recessions, Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York, said in a note to clients this week. The rise in pay this time is "far short of the nearly 10 percent gains that occurred in the first 29 months of the preceding six cyclical recoveries," Roach wrote. "This translates into a shortfall of $280 billion in 'missing' real personal income."

If you want to find out what's really going on, read the business press(that was from a Bloomberg piece).

Sure, there are cheerleaders in the business press, but you're far more likely to get at least some reporters with integrity. Remember, their constituency is doing very, very well.

Krugman on Pundits, Moore

I haven't been reading Paul Krugman lately.

In today's NYT, he states the obvious about the Punditocracy's fawning over Bush, and the other standard used to criticize Moore over his latest.

...There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?...

Why indeed? It's abundantly clear that the pundits are echoing the sentiments of their paymasters.

The various sets of standards that pundits ascribe to their wide range of interests simply add more credence to the now all too obvious fact that the 'liberal media' is at best a myth. Pundits are - with a few notable exceptions - owned wholly by corporate giants. Thus, we consumers of media are fed a steady diet of opinion ranging from far-right to a sort of chewy-centered, smarmy moderate-right that is supposed to represent the loyal opposition.

I should point out that I'm not a fan of Michael Moore's. I am however, less a fan of those applying differing standards if 'circumstances' dictate.

Poland Claims WMD Buy Thwarted

Oddly, the U.S. claims the warheads impotent.

Not every U.S. citizen makes shit up to justify their actions after the fact.

..."the US military said that while two of the rockets tested positive for sarin, traces of the agent were so small and deteriorated as to be virtually harmless."

The U.S. military gets the pure bs Truthteller of the Day award.

Site stuff

Copygodd left a comment about "peak oil" after reading this entry.

His comment has moved me to make what is turning into a long entry. An expanded version of the linked-to-entry will be up either tomorrow or Sunday.

In addition, I am reworking the site's CSS. I have the right hand column finished, and am working on the LH column.

Again, expect that to be posted by no later than Sunday.

If you have any ideas as to how to make the site more user friendly, leave a comment.