Blog sprinkles

The trolls among us.

What it means when we hear that Greenland is melting faster than expected..

Hugh Hefner's girlfriends through the ages.

Stats on the folding of the newspapers.. rather crumpling.

Paleontologists visit the Creation Museum:

"It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.

This makes way too much sense:

The European Union has reached an agreement with all major mobile phone manufacturers to produce a common phone charger. Apart from reducing the frustration of customers juggling incompatible chargers, proponents say the agreement will encourage recycling and reduce electronic waste.

Of course the scientist was a MAN...

Daily sex makes for healthier sperm

Our very own Iraqi death squads. Bush and Cheney should be proud.

OMG:

"The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary."—Michael Scheuer on Glenn Beck's show

Adam Serwer at Tapped:

This is the same Michael Scheuer who, a few months ago, played patriotism police arguing that anyone who didn't support the United States using torture to interrogate terrorist suspects was anti-American...now he's begging for a terrorist attack on the United States. This is a pretty awesome example of how the right conflates their political interests with the interests of the country as a whole. If there's no terrorist attack, then Americans are safe. But Scheuer can't be right if there's no terrorist attack. And Scheuer being right is actually more important than Americans staying alive.

Torture apologists have tiptoed around the edge of this argument without actually saying so for some time, Leon Panetta walked back his observation about Dick Cheney, that "it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point," but as Scheuer and Beck proved yesterday, this is really how some people feel.

This gets to the essential creepiness about Beck's emotional display introducing his whole 9/12 project--the man wasn't weeping because he wished the country was as "unified" as it was after 9/11, he was weeping because the country is no longer in a such a state of petrified fear that it will acquiesce to whatever extreme measures the right deems necessary. Beck wasn't crying for the country, he was crying for himself, crying because people are no longer frightened enough to agree with everything he has to say. Understand, he only wants to hurt you because he loves you.

"Our Islamist enemies do not give a damn about the way we vote, think, or live. "

So says Michael F. Scheuer.

The following is a letter from Michael F. Scheuer, former Chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden Unit, to the editor of Antiwar.com, regarding Congressman Ron Paul’s exchange with Rudy Giuliani about why the al Qaeda network has targeted the United States.

Sir,

In the dozen-plus years I have been active in matters relating to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, I have watched them go from a small Islamist organization to a worldwide insurgent movement, while bin Laden has established himself as the primary source of inspiration and leadership for tens of millions of Muslim Islamists. This process has been made possible by two things: (a) the skill, courage, patience, and ruthlessness of bin Laden and his ilk, and (b) the refusal of the U.S. government to understand the motivation of bin Laden and his allies.

Last week, Representative Paul did all Americans an immense service by simply pointing out the obvious: Our Islamist enemies do not give a damn about the way we vote, think, or live. Though any country they ruled would surely not look like ours, they are motivated by the belief that U.S. foreign policy is an attack on Islam, its lands, and its believers. This, of course, is not to say that America is to blame for the war it is now engaged in, but it is to say that it is foolish – and perhaps fatal – for Americans to believe that are we are being attacked for such ephemera as primary elections, R-rated movies, and gender equality. If our Islamist enemies were motivated by such things their numbers would be minuscule and they would be a sporadic lethal nuisance, not, as they are, the most serious national security threat we face today.

Of the eighteen presidential candidates now in the field from both parties, only Mr. Paul has had the courage to square with the average American voter. We are indeed hated and being warred against because we are “over there,” and not for what we are and how we live. Our failure to recognize the truth spoken by Mr. Paul – and spelled out for us in hundreds of pages of statements by Osama bin Laden since 1996 – is leading America toward military and economic disaster.

At day’s end, Mr. Paul has at least temporarily shaken the pillars of the bipartisan consensus on U.S. foreign policy. Neither party, and none of the candidates, want to discuss the Islamists’ motivation because they would have to deal with energy policy, support for Israel, and the 50-year record of U.S. support and protection for Arab tyrannies. These holy cows of U.S. politics have long been off limits to debate, but Mr. Paul has now accurately identified them as the source of motivation for our Islamist enemies, and implicitly has said that the obsessive interventionism of both parties has inspired al-Qaeda and its allies to kill 7,000-plus U.S. civilians and military personnel since 11 September 2001. The war we are engaged in with the Islamists is a long way from over, but it need end in America’s defeat only if Mr. Paul’s frank statements are ignored.

And no matter how you view Mr. Paul’s words, you can safely take one thing to the bank. The person most shaken by Mr. Paul’s frankness was Osama bin Laden, who knows that the current status quo in U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world is al-Qaeda’s one indispensable ally, and the only glue that provides cohesion between and among the diverse and often fractious Islamist groups that follow its banner.

Respectfully,
Michael F. Scheuer
Falls Church, VA