brainrow

I’ve been telling friends that I think the Bush Administration planned to spend about 90 days on Iraq. We’d go in, set up Chalabi as our puppet president, and move on. Then we’d attack Syria and Iran and set up puppet governments there, too.

Jonathan Schwarz says on This Modern World that this would be a good time for the Democratic Congress to break out the subpoena powers. Gen. Wesley Clark says the plan was for seven wars:

About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. … He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

And here I thought I was being fairly extreme, saying they were planning three wars. What I suffered was a failure of imagination.

From Corpus Callosum:

Point one: when sanctions were imposed upon Iraq after the first Gulf War, Iraqi children began starving.  But we did not blame ourselves.  After all, it was Mr. Saddam Hussein who chose to spend money on more palaces, rather than on feeding the children….

If funding [for the surge] is cut, the Commander in Chief has a choice to make.  He can leave the troops in harms way, without adequate supplies, or he can bring them home.  

A vote to cut funding for the war is not a vote against the troops, any more than the sanctions against Iraq were a vote against the children of Iraq.

An interesting point, but given what we already know about George W. Bush, isn’t it akin to criminal negligence to trust him to choose wisely?

A little perspective, via A Blog Around The Clock:

From Boing Boing: Nemo has been found.

One more reason not to eat sushi.

I was rolling merrily along, believing I was reasonably healthy for a guy my age. Hah!

I’m sick, sick, sick. I’m sick in ways that didn’t even exist just a few months ago. It’s called scientific progress.

The pharmaceutical companies have set me straight. Every few months, they tell me about another formerly unsuspected way that I might be seriously ill. And fortunately, there’s always a pill for it.

At the end of a long day of hard work, do you sometimes come home tired? Talk to your doctor.

When you’re sitting or lying down, do you ever feel like getting up? There’s a pill for that. When you’re up and about, have you ever wanted to sit or lie down? Pill for that, too. Disappointed that you haven’t done more with your life? Pill.

Now, via Molecule of the Day and Justine Cooper, there’s Havidol, for “When More is Not Enough.”

There are potential side effects, of course. From the FAQ:

It may decrease the patient’s sense of moral responsibility or social conscience. There is little documentation to support this claim other than the observations of those not undertaking treatment with HAVIDOL.

Yeah, there’s always somebody whining about scientific progress. Fortunately, there’s a pill for that. From The Onion:

The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers.

Pfizer executives characterized the FDA’s approval as a “godsend” for sufferers of independent-thinking-related mental-health disorders.

Update: Okay, it turns out Justine Cooper is an artist, not a scientist, and Havidol is really a parody of “lifestyle drug” advertising. And it turns out The Onion is not, as they claim, “America’s Finest News Source,” but a satirical fake newspaper.

Now, I like to laugh as much as the next person, but I’ll take my humor in time-release capsule form, please.

You know what’s missing from the iPod and the iTunes downloadable music store? Pure dumb luck, that’s what.

Listen: one day in 1986 I was in a brick-and-mortar record store, browsing in search of some perfectly ordinary music. Playing in the background was something odd and interesting with an African chorus. Then I recognized Paul Simon’s voice, and I wondered whose record this was, that Simon would lend his voice to it. The more I heard, the more completely the music hooked me, and when I got to the checkout counter, I asked, “What is that?”

It was Graceland, of course — and it wouldn’t be available for sale until the following Tuesday. The next Tuesday I was back at the record store to buy one of the greatest albums of all time.

That wasn’t the only time I found music I love through pure dumb luck, or kismet, or the “x factor.” I discovered Aimee Mann’s solo album Whatever in the same way. And in 1982, that’s how I first heard The Roches. They were singing The Hallelujah Chorus, a capella, in breath-taking three-part harmony. It was a remarkable feat, but I don’t think I was truly hooked until the next song, “Losing True.” I guess I’ve been hooked for about twenty-five years now.

Last night The Roches were here in Columbus, Ohio performing and promoting their new CD, Moonswept, which will not be officially released until March 13th. Their harmonies are still breath-taking. Their songs are witty. Some are funny; some are sad, and some are funny and sad at the same time.

Highly, highly recommended. Lots of free online videos at their website. Music samples on their myspace page.

Three cheers for pure dumb luck.

GrrlScientist asks What’s Wrong with Bush?

Is Bush suffering from presenile dementia? Is this the result of Alzheimer’s Disease or is it the result of brain damage due to excessive drug and alcohol use?

The second video is funny. The first video is scary.

I’m very skeptical about the recent “discovery” of the “tomb of Jesus”. The evidence seems worse than thin — more a fantasy than a discovery. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The makers of a new TV documentary claim to have uncovered the biggest archaeological story of the century – the tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. But several archaeologists and biblical scholars challenge the evidence. One calls it “much ado about nothing much.” …

If the evidence proved convincing, it would represent a challenge to the New Testament and the foundations of Christianity.

Really?

Catholic League President William Donohue thinks the claims are an assault on Christianity:

Not a Lenten season goes by without some author or TV program seeking to cast doubt on the divinity of Jesus and/or the Resurrection.

Brent Bozell’s conservative CNS News writes:

For Christians around the world, the claims in the documentary threaten the foundation of their faith system. If the documentary’s claims are true, the evidence undermines the core tenets of Christian faith, most notably that Jesus was resurrected three days after his crucifixion and later ascended into Heaven.

“As a born-again Christian, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is an immovable foundation of what I know is true,” Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families, said in a statement.

Does he really mean to say that the foundation of his faith is so feeble that the discovery an ancient tomb might cause the whole thing to collapse?

Please, take a few moments and read the Sermon on the Mount. Or take a little longer, and read all four Gospels.

Do the fundamentalists really believe the Sermon and all the teachings in the Gospels are worthless unless Jesus bodily ascended into the heavens? Is their faith truly so fragile?

Via Stranger Fruit: It seems to me you’d have to kinda know what you were doing to navigate this flight path.

While we’re on the subject of flow charts, here’s one, via Boing Boing, from WellingtonGrey.net: W.W.G.W.B.D.?

Now we can understand how the Decider decides.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I don’t have a cell phone, so I don’t need a customized ring tone.

This blog, however, is thoroughly cutting-edge. So when I heard about these eight distinctive short MP3s, I thought, “Oh, the young kids today, they love this stuff. They can use it for their ringy-dingy thingys.” From Wired.com:

Last year, Americans spent an estimated $600 million on ringtones, thanks to the popularity of realtones — those 10- to 30-second snippets of popular songs. But with tinny sound and abrupt edits, they’re a sorry substitute for the real thing. Now preeminent indie rockers They Might Be Giants have embraced the ringtone as a stand-alone medium. The Brooklyn-based band, which was an early short-form innovator with “Dial-a-Song” – an answering machine that played a different tune each day for callers – has started composing original songlettes as an alternative to the canned loop. “We take a little sketch of a lyric or idea and make it as intense as possible,” says singer-songwriter John Flansburgh. “These songs are built for repeated listens.” To prove it, TMBG composed several original “snacktones” just for Wired readers.

They’re free downloads.

From Dr. Charles, The Cure for Loneliness.

One of my most-awaited TV series is finally being released on DVD: WKRP in Cincinnati.

According to Amazon.com, the first season will be released on April 24. I’m ready!

In two blog entries (one and two) Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel discusses the difference between scientific and non-scientific thinking.

First, here’s the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion:

Believing something doesn’t make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned with what a person believes about the world but instead with what one can establish about the world, usually on the basis of empirical evidence.

The second drawing is based on the late Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science.

Popper didn’t see the problem of induction — that inductive inferences drawn from limited data could go wrong — as something that could be “solved”. However, he thought that the methodology of science avoided the problem by not identifying conclusions arrived at through inductive inference as “knowledge” in the strong sense of “there is no way this could fail to be true”. Here’s Popper’s picture of the process of building scientific knowledge:

Notice that Popper doesn’t think it matters all that much where your hypothesis P comes from. Maybe it comes from lots of poking around and observing your phenomena. Maybe it comes from that recurring nightmare of the snake biting his own tail. It’s not important. The thing that can make P a respectable scientific claim is that it is tested in the right kind of way.

In an earlier discussion of Popper, Stemwedel wrote:

The big difference Popper identifies between science and pseudo-science is a difference in attitude. While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications.

No wonder some politicians are at war with science. A big bag of hot air might not carry you very high if you keep looking for ways to poke holes in it.

I’m reading a programming book called Perl Best Practices. There’s some good stuff in it, though most of it is fairly technical. My favorite things are the short quotes that begin each chapter. Most of them are pretty nerdy, but a few of them speak to all of us:

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. –Charles Babbage

This is why everyone should learn at least a little bit of computer programming. There is no magic inside the computer, but it can certainly seem like magic until you get in and poke around a bit for yourself.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. –Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life

Advice is what you ignore when you already know the answer and think it might magically change.

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. –Albert Einstein

Haven’t you heard? That emboldens the other fools.