The CIA has issued its final report: There were no WMDs in Iraq.
From the article:
“After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” wrote Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the final report he issued last fall.
“As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible.”
I still remember when all this started. I remember driving through Wellington Circle (Rt. 16 & the Fellsway) on my way back from Target, and tuning in to NPR to hear Rumsfeld's live address about how we couldn't wait for a "smoking gun". I still remember my shock at hearing the NYTimes reporter relate Condileeza telling him, "Don't waste your reporting on the inspections; Iraq has already been decided" more than half a year before the end of the inspections. I still remember consciously deciding to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Now, almost two years and almost 2000 American lives later, I have learned my lesson.
I guess that you can argue the Machievellian angle on this: it's fine for the government to tell the citizens whatever it needs to, in order to sway public opinion so they can do the Right Thing. Who knows what level of wheeling and dealing had to take place behind the scenes with our allies to get them to agree to feed the WMD cock-and-bull story to their public and their constituencies. At the end of the day, though, one has to ask: is this approach right? I don't see how it can be, in a government of the people and by the people.
Open government will always have its liabilities. But, to paraphrase the Israeli Supreme Court, "Although a democracy must fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand."
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0418-21.htm
In a letter to Joseph Milligan on April 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson explicitly suggested that if individuals became so rich that their wealth could influence or challenge government, then their wealth should be decreased upon their death. He wrote, "If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree..."
In this, he was making the same argument that the Framers of Pennsylvania tried to make when writing their constitution in 1776. As Kevin Phillips notes in his masterpiece book "Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich," a Sixteenth Article to the Pennsylvania Bill of Rights (that was only "narrowly defeated") declared: "an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind, and, therefore, every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property."
Well, there are a lot of stories to tell, but the reason that blogs existed, like mammals after the fall of dinosaurs, is nimbleness. The bloggers delivered the content that dotcoms promised without the massive overhead.
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/01/fundraising-its-really-begging-but-im.html
This is from fark; for some reason, the page is headlined "Liberal-friendly quotes". I'm not sure what makes these particularly friendly to liberals, except perhaps that they talk about science and man's limited knowledge, and praise the intellect.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Quotes-science.htm
National Geographic has an article about the prevalence of homosexuality in animals ranging from penguins and monkees to birds and sheep and even beetles.
Then again, given that National Geographic is a mouthpiece for the anti-Christian, multiculturalist liberal elite, it's only to be expected that they would paint such a perverted, gay-friendly picture of a world we know God intended to be strictly hetero.
(Well, except for asexual nematodes and paramecia.)
(But paramecia are a creation of the left-wing agenda, since the Bible doesn't mention anything about them.)
In the context of social interactions, a person's level of control over himself is analogous to mass or momentum in a physics context. The more self-control a person has, the less someone else can exert their power over him; the more self-control a person has, the more they influence those around them. Ultimately, all power and all control are just extensions of self-control. This is something people intuitively know, but few think of it in those terms.
A person's level of self-control is derived from self-respect. Since all true respect comes from knowledge (though sometimes fear is mistaken for respect), a person's self-respect is derived from self-knowledge.
This is not an intellectual, factual sort of knowledge, although psychology and neuroscience can certainly shed light on some things. Self-knowledge is an understanding of both how you feel, and why you feel that way. Greater self-knowledge extends to understand why you think the thoughts you're thinking.
Since no language can express the full richness of a human being's experiences, and since knowledge of a person's experience is crucial to achieving knowledge of that individual, understanding oneself is a journey that each person must undertake on their own.
This is why Krishnamurti said, "Truth is a pathless land." Whether you make that journey in a vehicle of established religion, or whether you take every step and misstep your own, the ultimate aims are always the same: understanding the self.
Any spiritual or religious doctrine that is orthogonal or runs counter to this goal is merely an exercise in control.
I just had a cynical revelation about abstinence-only sex education programs: they are *not* designed to prevent unwanted pregnancies. They cannot be. No serious proposal for solving any problem ever relies on telling kids not to do something, unless the goal is to get them to do something. Telling kids not to have sex is about as effective as telling them not to touch a hot stove. So here is the realization: the whole point of abstinence-only sex education is to *build* the population base in fervently conservative, evangelical communities. Abstinence-only sex education is bound to increase unwanted pregnancies, and those babies are going to either grow up in (1) a single-parent environment with strong influence from their evangelical grandparents, or (2) a two-parent environment where the parents married out of guilt and parental pressure. Both cultures are ripe for raising evangelical kids.
Everyone knows that young teenagers have sex. (For the last several hundred years it was institutionalized as marriage.) This is something that GOD has designed them to do. Secular liberals did not engineer puberty into the human genome; this is something that is part of nature. There are many legitimate reasons that we can and should give to teenagers for *not* having sex, but if those reasons are not enough, we should at least make sure they are safe.