Administrivia

All these links, save the movie reviews, blatanly stol...er, "discovered" on Plastic.

1. Cheney admitted he lost an argument, because, after all, first one to swear loses.

2. Brief indication that the administration has "banned" it's employees from going to see Fahrenheit 9/11.
Wilmington (Chicago Tribune) gives it 4 stars; Ebert (Sun Times) gives it 3.5 stars

3. Jon Carroll on the administration in the SF Chronicle:

And, like the most petty schoolyard narcissists, they want to be right all the time. They want to be above criticism. They don't have regrets; they have excuses. The dog ate my country.

Child process spawned

A hearty tip of the Hatblog to reader and dear friend Don, who along with his wife Sally are expecting their first youngin' in January. This finally gives me a reason to buy something from this page. I'm sure Don has already done the required mutations. The staff here at Hatblog offers its best wishes and congratulations.

Bush Bits

1. According to this analysis, Bush is an agent of Iran.

2. More spin on the 9/11 Commission's finding that no Iraq-al Qaeda link existed, this time from Condi. As I said in the recent Plastic story, "just because somebody comes evangelizing their religion comes to my door, doesn't mean I've converted. That's about the level of "link" between al-Qaeda & Iraq." And that is not what the Bush administration was saying pre-war, and it's good to see the Commission stand by it.

3. Bush2004.com is owned by a Bush hater, and he's not selling. The article also discusess other political cybersquatters.

There and Back Again

SpaceShip One made its successful test flight, into "space" (i.e. an altitude of 62.5 mi) and returning safely, this morning. I'm sure there will be info all over /. and cnn and everywhere else, so no links.

Terry Jones, Concerned Parent

He knows his son's "not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy", but he can't figure out where he goes in the evenings. Thankfully, Donald Rumsfeld is there to rescue him.

Bush Cult

Just on a fit of pure facetiousness, I decided to take this list of "Is it a cult?" questions (found linked in a recent Plastic entry on recent setbacks to Scientology) and see if it applied to Bush-supporting Republicans. Not all Republicans; just the dittoheads and stereotypical Fox News crowd.
The group is focused on a leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.

Here we go:

The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

I suppose so, but what political party isn't? No positive indicator.

The group is preoccupied with making money.

Absolutely. Well, if you count "each making for himself." Not classic cult behaviour, but I'm not feeling generous, so we'll count this one.

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

"If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists." Check.

Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

Does repeating the same lies and exaggeration over and over again count? That sounds like a chant after a while.

The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).

Ashcroft would like to, but to be fair, they're not doing this. Of course, why I'm worried about being fair when I'm comparing them to a cult is sure locking the door on an empty barn.

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).

This one's pretty close. Point for cult.

The group has a polarized us- versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.

Do I even need to comment here?

The group's leader is not accountable to any authorities (as are, for example, military commanders and ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream denominations).

As seen (by me) on Goatdogblog, the memo justifing torture and asserting that the President, in his Commander-in-Chief duties, is not bound by law or the Constitution.

The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group (for example: collecting money for bogus charities).

It's not clear. I suppose some lawyer in the DoJ may not have believed torture to be justified before being asked to contribute to the memory. This one scores as Not Enough Information.

The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.

Again, if you're not with them you're for the terrorists. This is getting disturbing.

Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.

No. Ashcroft still gets to have his irrational superstitions about calico cats. (Anybody know if these are actually true and not trumped-up rumor?)

Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.

Ehh...not more so than I would expect any staunch politcal supporters.

Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members

As long as they're members of the opposite sex, I guess...



In conclusion of this patently ridiculous exercise, we should watch Bush supporters closely. There's some borderline cultlike behavior here but not enough to sound the alarm just yet.

O.J. Simpson, Ten Years Later

Odd space to see a social retrospective, but ESPN.com's Bill Simmons has a column about the O.J. Simpson trial, 10 years later. I would consider this just a sensationalist look back except for this portion:

If the trial happened in 2004 instead of 1995, Simpson and his gravity-defying noggin probably would be rotting away in prison right now. He couldn't have survived the overwhelming DNA evidence. Thanks to the startling popularity of "CSI" and "CSI: Miami," forensic science doesn't seem nearly as complicated today as it did in the mid-'90s, when doctors wasted entire days of the trial simply explaining the basics of DNA evidence to the jurors. Of course, those efforts were completely wasted, as evidenced by the words of one juror after the trial:

"I didn't understand the DNA stuff at all. To me, it was just a waste of time. It was way out there and carried no weight with me."

...

But this was 10 years ago. Only educated people understood the ramifications of the DNA evidence ... and educated people have a way of being bounced off juries."

I remember at the time being startled that one would think of taking so long to explain DNA evidence and its reliability. But then, even as an undergraduate, I was clearly an educated person. It stunned me that when someone testified, under oath, that there was a 1-in-a-very-large number chance of the blood not being the defendant's, that they could just dismiss this out of hand.

Are juries more educated these days, do you think? Could CSI and the Discovery Channel and A&E actually be mainstreaming scientific police work?

Amazingly, CNN stills seems to have an archive up.

You are likely to be eaten by a grüe

IKEA Walkthrough.

Broken already

At the moment, posting comments seems to be broken. They assure me they're working on it. Of course it worked when I was testing it earlier this week. Figures there'd be a high murphion flux about.

UPDATE: And true to the nature of the Murphy force, as soon as I post that it seems to work again.

I scream, you scream

Forget crude oil prices. I've got the real outrage for you right here--the Chicago Tribune* today is reporting that ice cream prices are rising, driven by increasing milk prices. Oh, the humanity. However will we survive this summer?

And don't anyone tell me "eat less ice cream." I can not drive to conserve gas. I'll be damned if I'm forgoing a bowl of sweet sweet vanilla.

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