All The Nod This Shit Is Getting From Me

There's nearly as much noise about what a pile of shit the 911gasm is as the 911gasm is making itself. Nearly, but different in tenor and still only nearly in quantity. A little while ago (as I write this), United's number 9, Charlie Davies, scored in the 11th minute of a soccer game. Talkybobbleheads went wild for this bit of insignificant random numerology.

Think for a second about how fucked up in the head someone, individually or collectively, has to be to write this:

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold.

That is a serious contender for the most fucking abysmally retarded thing I've ever read (h/t to Thunder, who linked to this gem of YFWP swill in BFF's comments).

I've never thought that 3,000 people senselessly killed in one day by wackaloons was or is a good thing, and anyone who thinks that the people--American or not--killed in the wars since constitute a good thing is dangerously fucking insane. Apparently, Fred Hiatt disagrees. I'm not going to get all chesty about that part, pretend I'm better because even I can do the pretty simple fucking math here. Nobody of sense or humanity wants fellow citizens murdered. Nobody of sense or humanity wants anyone to die prematurely or needlessly (and I'm not even up for the mental gymnastics of contextifying "needlessly" here). And nobody of sense or humanity could possibly contort the incredibly senseless changes in our national mindset since that day into a good thing, by any measure or in any context. It fails every test of logic, every test of truth, every test of rationality. That's a part I can get chesty about.

But apparently, Fred Hiatt differs, and he thinks I'm wrong. That's why I now call on the President of the United States to use his extraordinary powers--granted by Congress in the past 10 years--to shut Fred Hiatt and Your Fucking Washington Post the fucking fuck up. I'd personally consider that to be an isolated good outcome of 9/11.

Best wishes to you and yours for weathering the next 24 hours; for my part, I dread the afternoon's football games, and the mute button is likely. If you or someone you love lost someone that you or they loved on 9/11, or in the wars we spawned in its name, I am terribly sorry for that, and I respect your right to remember your loss, or theirs, as you see fit. But anyone who tells me that 9/11, or the changes since, are a good thing, and sneers that I'm wrong for thinking otherwise, is certainly a fit motherfucker to be punched.

We Can Has Normal Now?

I may be a lonely minority of one here, and that's okay. I can't remember anything like such an unbridled orgy of bloodlust over the death of a human being. It's kinda disturbing.

Obviously, this means that the PATRIOT Act will be repealed, the troops will come home (except for going all Vaarsuvius on the entire Gadhafi family bloodline, or whatever the fuck they're doing in the Gulf of Sidra), all the people in Gitmo will receive criminal trials, TSA will back the fuck up, and all the people who hate America suddenly don't, because they were having their minds controlled by that guy the SEALs killed.

Oh.

Don't get me wrong. The evidence is pretty clear that the guy was a bad human being. Assuming he's entitled all the credit he's given, it's still a wimpy little body count, compared to all-time great monsters like Hitler and Stalin and Mao, who all tallied in the tens of millions (and I make this morbid comparison only because of the reaction). This guy was responsible, if we accept the reasoning, for mere thousands, the perspective exponentialized by American exceptionalism. He's really more in the...well, in the George Washington range of terrorism, ne c'est pas? Still and all, greater than one, and we sometimes kill, judicially, for that. To be explicit: I got no argument with the fact of the killing.

Let's not even talk about the burial at sea. I'll be laughing too hard to type. Sure, sure, no martyr's gravesite. Uhm...no body, either, for all our President's carefully selected language, and for all...seriously? You dumped the body in the ocean before you showed it to anybody? People seriously think Elvis and Jim Morrison are still alive, people believe aliens came to Roswell, and you dumped the fucking body in the ocean before you showed it to anybody so you could avoid an inconvenient gravesite and say, strictly within the limits of truth, that you respected Islamic tradition with a fast burial (consisting of, hypothetically, dropping the remains from a C-130 from 10,000 feet)? Who manages this shit, a cabal of fucking sophist 12-year-olds? I mean, are those who hate us going to hate us any less than if you actually pissed on the body?

Look at the dancing in Lafayette Park, on the remains of Pennsylvania Avenue (credit where due--the remains of Pennsylvania Avenue are on Tim McVeigh and Bill Clinton). Then tell me again how about the theory that (a) we're a Christian country; and (b) that's a good thing. This death of a man, however justified by his actions, doesn't return any of what our own government used him as the excuse to steal from us. Not for one fucking second. And we dance. We dance.

Things That Trouble Me

Comedy Central's censoring of the latest episode of South Park certainly fits, and I don't have an easy point of view here. The sort of terrorism that led to the censorship is personal. That's a little different from my usual, cold, numbers-based approach to random terror. On the other hand, my view of religion is well-defined; keep yours out of my face, whether it's Jesus-based or Allah-based or Gummi-Bears-based. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have a pretty absolute free speech right here; the terrorists threatening them--or the terrorist wannabe douchebags threatening them in the name of terrorism--are pretty full of shit. On the other hand, Comedy Central ain't the gummint. Stone and Parker have a right to not be afraid. Comedy Central has a business. The Supreme Court of My Head is declining cert and wants to take a long nap.

I do not understand the current vogue for the phrase "epistemic closure," and while I probably have the wherewithal to search out the necessary reading, I certainly don't have the energy, because I know it will just sap whatever energy I have left. It appears to be some massive conflagration involving douchebags, some quite probably from my side. If anyone feels like explaining this in a paragraph or less, I'll be grateful. If not...well, you're not my monkeys. At least those of you aren't Ilse aren't my monkeys.

The Securities and Exchange Commission had 3,962 employees in 2008, according to its budget justification. 33 of them got busted for looking at porn on government computers, some while on work time. That's 0.8 percent. I defy you to find an organization where 0.8 percent of employees aren't looking at, or trying to look at, porn on their work computers. The issue has precisely nothing--possibly even less--to do with financial regulation or the pending legislation thereon. So shut up, Darrell Issa, you lying motherfucker. Of course people should be disciplined for looking at porn on government computers. Pretending that the impact of their behavior on the financial crisis had an impact greater than zero is fucking retarded. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good descriptor for Darrell Issa. Shut up, you lying motherfuckers.

Finally: the hockey. Capitals Insider gives us a brief video of one fan--ONE--staying positive. I've been lucky enough to spend most of my time in the Phone Booth down in the lower bowl this season, where one is a little better insulated from fucktardery. Last night, a kind friend gave me a free ticket (and a lovely date with Purple, with whom I had spent very little time of late) in the upper deck. Section 424 is considerably more proletarian than the lower bowl, and it showed in my neighbors' overall level of cognitive development (so did the amount of beer they had consumed). The appalling lack of knowledge about the rules of the game (no, fucktard, when a guy crosses the line ahead of the puck, it is, in fact, offsides, and a tripping call is not, in fact, appropriate every single time a warrior for the home team falls down on bad ice), its players (Mike Green is a motherfucking Norris Trophy finalist whether or not I think he should win it, you fucking dipshits, and even those have bad games), and reality in general (there are, in fact, more persons of Canadian extraction playing for the Capitals than for Les Mamafuckers du Froggerville, so stop fucking chanting "USA! USA! USA!", you fucking inbred cracker pieces of dysenteric shit), was pretty jawdropping.

The Caps lost to cut their series lead to 3-2, mostly because Les Habs wanted it more, a perfectly understandable, if loathsome, state of affairs. It's no big deal, however much we'd like it to be (I am contemplating the possibility that a depressive mindset that I've always attributed to Terps fandom may in fact be more broadly regional that I've thought, and I may or may not get back to you about that), though I will not be happy if we end up in a Game 7 (uhm, not least because it would coincide with a DCU home game, which I would most assuredly miss). And I really don't like it when objective evidence tends to confirm Steinz' recent assertion (affirmed by Himself, though I now can't find the post, which makes me think I maybe hallucinated that bait--what say you about that, dogma-N?) that Caps fans are teatards.

Panty-Wetting

Yes, a brown person (presumably--do they have any other kind in Nigeria?), apparently Muslim in nature, tried to blow up an airplane on U.S. soil. Let's review some fundamental and related reality-based principles:

• Most Muslims do not, in fact, hate us so much that they're fucking insane enough to set their balls on fire trying to blow up an airplane.
• It's sort of miraculous that they don't, since we keep bombing their civilians and claiming we killed terrists.
• One guy--a guy who any moron should've noticed shouldn't be on a fucking airplane--slipping through security in Amsterdam is not a reason to impose further violations of common sense on air travel, which is already afflicted with a plethora of common sense violations.
• How many people on the airplane? Maybe 250? Who weren't killed? How many died on International Terrorists Fucked Our Sister Day? 3,000, give or take? Right. How many Iraqi and Afghani civilians have we killed in the last 8 years? Tens of thousands (my estimate is low, to keep the discussion reasonable--if you won't admit to that many, you're just a lying fuckwit)? Right. Shut the fucking fuck up.
• Whoa. Crazy guy who set his balls on fire is the son of a Nigerian banker, and his father turned him in? Wow! Nigerian bankers are scammers, right? Something fishy about this, right? Wrong. Shut the fucking fuck up.
• You're not scared enough about this, right? You need to do something about it, like beat the shit out of anyone on your airplane who's got a blanket or a laptop or needs to take a dump, right? Wrong. Shut the fucking fuck up. Unless someone very nearby your location has actually set their balls on fire, remain calm. Since the statistical incidence of this is something like 1 in every 94 trillion passenger air miles, you'll probably get to remain calm indefinitely.
• This is all related to the fact that Landru smokes, right? Wrong. Shut the fucking fuck up, Purple.

We live in a fear-driven, fascist country. Last year's elections did not, and could not have, changed anything about that.¹ Now, do I advocate standing up and taking action against all that? Fuck no. These crazy Nazi cocksuckers have guns and shit. Do I think it's worth noting? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Calm down and change your fucking panties.

Update: Seriously. Just fucking stop it. Idiots.

Another update: Nate Silver validates my numerology. Generically, I mean. He's not saying, "Look, Landru's numbers are good." He doesn't know that I'm a statistical genius. But yeah, something like one terrorist incident for every 16.5 million departures. One terrorist incident every 11.5 billion miles flown. Calm down and change your fucking panties, you warjunkie fearmongering twats. Just plain shut the fucking fuck up. (Thanks dogma-N.)

One more update: A related point of view. Poor people don't get blowed up by Islamunofascists.

¹ Why yes. Yes, I did fucking tell you so.

Hooray for Fascism!

The news from St. Paul is pretty disheartening. Dig in:

Greenwald on Federal involvement in pre-convention police raids.

Greenwald on today's arrests--280 arrests was the last number I saw.

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman arrested for asking to speak to a police commander about two DN journalists beaten and taken into custody.

The Uptake's coverage, including video of a St. Paul police presser. The most charming quote come at about the 7-minute mark of part 3 of the video, whereat a St. Paul PIO tells us that "Obviously, each of the individuals arrested was involved in some criminal activity."

Niiiiiiiiice.

Some of these independent newsies--certainly the ones I'm linking to--are of a liberal bent. But streaming video doesn't lie. Go fuck yourselves, Twin Cities police agencies. Way to reassure all of us that police ain't pigs.

Wrapped in the Flag

So law enforcement officials in the Twin Cities are raiding homes occupied by people there to protest at the RNC. These are not raids where the police knock on the door and serve a warrant; they're dressed in black (with masks), toting automatic weapons, kicking in doors, "detaining" the people inside (that means making them lay on the floor, handcuffed, in case you're a little weak on the whole euphemism thing), and conducting searches for which they refuse to show warrants until the end of the search. In one case, they "detained" someone for asking to see a warrant.

It also develops that Minnesota law (not yet constitutionally tested, apparently, and rarely if ever used, allows for the detention of criminal suspects without charges for up to 36 hours (not including weekends and holidays). This could keep some detainees in custody until Wednesday afternoon.

Further, Minneapolis housing officials swooped down on one of the raided properties to board it up, 5 hours after the raid (the homeowner is still in custody). The violation tenaciously cited by those officials? A broken back door that the police had kicked in. Just for spice, Minneapolis charges homeowners $6,000 when it boards up their houses for code violations.

(Trusted and beloved local Minions correspondent Swamahari is invited, nay, beseeched to report in the comments.)

It'd be one thing if we could hold the Republicans responsible for this. But they're not the only ones complicit in the creation of the police state.

This is some sick shit. We're all the terrorists, as far as the government is concerned.

Legislative Watch

President Bush today signed into law a provision prohibiting bridge collapses such as the one in Minneapolis last week. The law was passed as a rider to an amendment funding The Troops for next Thursday, August 9. "We just couldn't face the political consequences of hating the troops yet again," said Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Connectilieberman).

The President launched an impassioned defense of the provision in his remarks accompanying the signing. "America is under threat from these terrist river crossings," stammered the President. "This legislation gives the government the power it needs to bomb bridges that conspire to buckle and collapse as a means of carrying out their terrist agenda. They threaten everything we hold dear, including fetuses and nucular families. We will never cave in to their aggression, and will not allow them to hate us for the things that make us great."

The new law gives the President the power to wiretap bridges to determine whether they plan to collapse, to incarcerate rogue bridges for interrogation without criminal charges, and to invade Iowa. Leading Congressional figures were highly supportive. Senator Joseph Lieberman (Self-Mars) exulted, "The President's cock tastes very good. I think I'll have another helping of it." Vice-President Dick Cheney, asked for comment, looked a television reporter in the eye and said, "Go fuck yourself."

No bridges have collapsed since the President signed the legislation this afternoon; media analysts called this a clear showing that the President's policy was an unqualified success and suggested that the powers of the executive branch be further broadened. Respected pundit David Broder said that "peoples' use of language that I find unpleasant clearly militates in favor of giving the President unlimited power." Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was willing to waive his usual six-month waiting period; "The President's cock tastes very good. I think I'll have another helping of it," he wrote.

Terrorist news network Al Jazeera posted a video purportedly made by Osama bin Laden mocking the measure. "Even the bridges will cry jihad against your evil ways," said an unidentified narrator of the video, who could not be positively identified as bin Laden. Intelligence analysts were working to establish the validity of the report.

Presumptive President-Elect Fred Thompson was supportive. "The President's cock tastes very good. I think I'll have another helping of it," he rumbled before feeling up his pneumatic and bubbly wife for the cameras.

Tipping Update

It occurred to me that I might need to do a little preemptive splaining after this morning's post about the governing apparati of the city of Boston becoming totally unhinged by a bunch of Lite-Brites.

Knocking out the most simplistic stuff first: no, moron, I'm not in favor of terrorism, I didn't say I was, and I didn't advocate being in favor of it. I'm not advocating rolling over for it. I'm not advocating being a dumbass when you see a brown paper package wrapped in twine ticking away in the airport lounge. I'm not advocating cutting funding to local and federal law enforcement. Or not increasing it.

I'm advocating having a fucking brain in your head. The only reason the war in Iraq is about terrorism is because having a large, but too-small body of troops in a country undergoing a civil war (one we precipitated--not that I advocate having left Sadaam Hussein in power, since we went all that way to kick his ass and stuff) is, in fact, an invitation to terrorism. The original reasons for invading had nothing to do with terrorism, and leaving Iraq now would neither alter that country's strife-ridden path to a government that may or may not like us nor bring more terrorists to our shores.

It's like leaving your laptop on a park bench and boggling when someone steals it. It's like putting wooden barrels of gasoline in an old, dried-out barn filled with straw, and leaving matches strewn about, and expecting no one to burn it down.

I'm also not disrespecting the 3,000 or so mostly Americans who died on 9/11. Your view may be that the math disrespects them--they were, after all, only 3,000 of the 150,000 or so people who died of unnecessarily violent causes in 2001. But that would not be a real objective view, and it would be pretty disrespectful to the other 147,000 or so victims of violence.

And I am most assuredly not suggesting that terrorism deaths are unpreventable. I'm just suggesting that they should be viewed in the appropriate risk context. The rationale for preventing terrorism is the rationale for preventing any unnecessary deaths. AIDS kills far fewer people than cancer. Compare the amount spent on research into each. It's exactly the same thing. Exactly the same.

I saw the video of the two accused, wherein they would only entertain questions about 70s hairstyles. I think they've got it just about exactly right. They are effectively charged with giving the city of Boston an opportunity to look really, really stupid. Their attitude is what it should be.

The howls from the right are not as loud as I might have thought, although they're just as mean. And the howls that try to sound like sensible howling are real knee-slappers. I heard a Fox correspondent guest-bloviating on my local pound-news-up-your-ass radio station today; her take was that the Feds believe Boston did the right thing. When asked how that reflected on the other nine cities that managed not to panic over Lite-Brites, she took a trip to the Waffle House, but tried to edge in an assertion that the Feds thought Boston was right and nine other cities were head-up-ass.

Uhm...wrong.

The Tipping Point

We all experience the accumulation of idiocy in various forms, affecting various aspects of our lives, many of them trivial, some of them less so. I decided a while back that the genus of idiocy relating to politics and worldviews was one I no longer wanted to significantly engage in this blog. The thoroughgoing blindness and pervasive dishonesty of the other side just saps my soul. Should somebody engage them? Sure, somebody should, but I'm mostly not going to, and in so deciding, I forgo the right to an opinion on who should.

Yesterday's little dustup in Boston, though, is not possible for me to ignore; it is the tipping point of my rage on this issue. The "war" on terrorism is unadulterated bullshit. If you are not a law enforcement or intelligence official and you go around worrying about terrorism, you are either a complete fucking idiot, you are seeking an excuse to impose your brand of fascism on our country, or you are psychologically disturbed and should seek some help. Multiple choice is plausible.

Let me be abundantly clear about this: if you see a small electronic sign, one with blinking lights in a pattern that appears to be flipping you off, and your first thought is that you are looking at an explosive device? You need competent medical help. Seriously. It is not possible for a sane and rational person to look at this:

and think, "I am looking at a terrorist bomb." It's just not possible.

It would be easy to write this off to the stick up Boston's ass. We are talking about the descendants of the folks who brought you the Salem Witch Trials. Today's news bears this out; the two poor bastards hired by Turner Broadcasting to carry out its nefarious plot of using art installations as advertising are facing arraignment in Boston-area courts this morning, and city officials are acting like the company--and its temporary starving-artist hires--are actual agents of Al Qaida.

Let's set the terrorism thing straight: you, personally, are not going to die of terrorism. It ain't gonna happen. Let's take a look at the things that will kill you.

The World Health Organization estimates (and by the way, I worked on the book pictured on the linked page, there) that, in 2002 (the most recent year for which WHO has published data), there were about 291 million people in the United States (please forgive my national chauvinism if you're one of Minions' 0.135 non-U.S. readers). A little over 24 million of them died. That's about .08 percent of Americans. Eight tenths of one percent, eight out of every one thousand Americans, died that year (the actual figure is 831.7 deaths per hundred thousand population--I'm even willing to put the worst possible face on it and call it a whole nine out of a thousand).

That's a slim chance of dying to begin with, on the low side of the middle of the spectrum, around 80th in the world (191 countries are listed), a death rate most similar to that of, oddly enough, France. Our national death rate in 2002 was not very far from the global death rate of 918.5 deaths per hundred thousand population.

Various countries in Africa approach or exceed a death rate that triples ours. Stop. Think. Triples. Around 2.7 percent of the denizens of Sierra Leone (not a particularly safe country for humans, I grant) died in 2002.

So, when it comes to dying (at all--we haven't even gotten to terrorism yet), you have a middling advantage in that you are an American. You would do a bit better in any of a number of countries--including, interestingly enough, Israel and Syria--and significantly better in a handful of countries, all of them (with the exception of Brunei) oil-rich countries that border Saudi Arabia.

Why did people die in 2002? WHO classifies deaths by cause. Globally, about 26 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to infectious diseases of various sorts, 12 percent to cancers, a whopping 29 percent to cardiovascular diseases, and smatterings of 4 and 5 percent attributable to various other causes; 58 percent of deaths owed to causes classified as noncommunicable diseases, which subsumes everything not infectious or injurious.

Only 9 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to injuries, and of those, two-thirds were accidental in nature--traffic accidents, falls, drownings, and the like. Another 17 percent of injury-caused deaths were from self-inflicted injuries, meaning suicide. Only 1 percent of deaths (and it's almost exactly 1 percent) resulted from violence or war.

As a citizen of the world, you had less than a 1-percent chance of dying in 2002. If you died, there was only a 1-percent chance that you died from any violent cause--including terrorism.

As an American, your advantage here really kicks in, unless you're me. 87.5 percent of U.S. deaths in 2002 were caused by noncommunicable diseases--23 percent by cancers, 38 percent by cardiovascular diseases, with smatterings attributable to other disease-based causes. In the U.S., only 6.3 percent of deaths were attributable to injury, and of those, around 70 percent were accidental.

Roughly 157,000 Americans died of violence-related causes in 2002, less than six-tenths of one percent of all deaths. In 2002, you were seven times more likely to die from an accidental cause--itself not all that likely--than from any violent cause, including terrorism. Even if we take a liberty with the numbers and add in 5,000 terrorism-related deaths from 2001 into the totals, the incidences don't change significantly.

Now let's talk about preventable deaths. Well over half of cancer and cardiovascular deaths can be prevented. Compare the amount spent on preventing deaths from noncommunicable diseases to the amount spent on the so-called war on terror. No rational person can look at these proportions and think them appropriate.

Like I said, if you're scared of terrorism, you're either stupid, lying, or deeply troubled. If you're deeply troubled, I truly hope you can get some help for that--it's not surprising that, given the government's propaganda campaign of the last five years, people's heads are twisted by this issue. But if you're stupid or lying--and if you have a fear of terrorism for any reason other than some psychological disorder, you're one or both--just shut the fucking fuck up and consider a fact or two.

More News for the Squeamish

Every so often, it comes to the attention of the Minions editorial staff me--sorry, I forgot about that whole referring-to-oneself-in-the-third-person thing--that we are I am--sorry, really--just so darned rude that I should just crawl under a rock and assuage my bitter, horrible, unreasonable, partisan anger with some milk and cookies. And that perhaps I'll be better able to hugandkiss unabashed fascists, just like Jesus wants me to do, once I've done that. This is, of course, absolutely and incontrovertibly true, an unassailable position that cannot be dug out from its fortress of mighteousness.

So I think we should return to the safe place to which we usually retreat during these difficult times of stress, turmoil, and opinionation, and I present to you another edition of:

News for the Squeamish

Terror Alert

The holidays are coming up, and you know what that means! Yes, the Brown People are going to gaily wrap themselves in bombs and ammunition belts and try to disrupt the sacrament of your holiday shopping! It's uncomfortable that these killjoys want to blacken the spirit of Christmas and deny your right to worship the Baby Jesus by purchasing the Laura Ingraham Barbie for your precious Snookums, but we all have a responsibility to remain alert to protect the Homeland! Some tips:

-Carry your shotgun to the mall when you go out to do your holiday shopping. The Second Amendment guarantees that, if you're carrying a firearm, you are a member of the militia.

-If you see Brown People, open fire. The Fourth Amendment restricts their right to search you and seize your hard-earned holiday bounty!

-Sneak up on Brown People who look larger than normal people. They're probably wearing bombs under their coats. Make each shot count!

-Don't donate to Toys for Tots and similar terrorist organizations. Studies have shown that, when given any toy, a poor child will always pretend it is a gun.


War Is Peace

A rigorous scientific study by the Krovecheni School of Government has proved that war is peace! By making war in countries that promote non-Americanism, we actually make the world a more peaceful place! Support Our Troops by supporting our wars! I mean, our peace!


Bad People Are Bad

A recent Fox News poll showed that, by an overwhelming margin, the American People believe that bad people are bad. Significantly, bad people enjoyed more support among less American Persons. The proportion of Brown People who believed that bad people were not bad was close to 100 percent.

This concludes our latest presentation of News for the Squeamish. More news when it becomes available.

A Bim

What an awful day for the most recent protracted topic of this blog. I'm still shaking a bit from the proximity of it all; the bus explosion near Russell Square occurred in a block I've walked many times, one which Ilse and I visited twice during our trip to London last week.

The City has occupied my thoughts at some level for the entire day. I was panicked, badly, when I first heard the news, and settled a bit when all of my London friends had checked in safe within about an hour of my arrival at the office. A beloved friend of mine, and of many of yours, is visiting there now for an extended stay, and of course my good friend Doctor Death, now beloved of you all, lives there.

Those who would tell me that wondering why people plant bombs is the equivalent of offering terrorists therapy are not welcome on my planet. It is apparent to anyone with a brain and a heart that no one perpetrates this sort of organized aggression without some provocation. It is a fool who does not wonder how his actions cause or affect the actions of others. And actions like blowing up a thousand presumptively more-or-less innocent persons--one of whom could easily have been a good friend or more, given only slight variations in chaos--it seems obvious to me that it is one's duty to wonder what motivates that.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't shoot a terrorist, given a gun and a clean shot. I mean a real terrorist, one who detonated a bomb without blowing up himself/herself. I just can't honestly say that I wouldn't. I'm disturbed by that. But I can only seek comfort in knowing that elevates me above Karl Rove. I wish I could imagine that counts for something beyond soul food.