Thank you, America, for being a bastion of freedom and goodness. Thank you, America, for we would not know what to do without you making the world safe for us. Thank you, America, for working to ensure the dignity of all human beings. Thank you, America, for your kindness and decency. Thank you, America, for believing in more than lip service to your God. Thank you, America, for fighting the good fight and not hitting below the belt. For all you have done, America, the world would like to thank you so very, very much. CNN. Riverbend. The beginning of …

Adam posted a link to this absurdity just the other day. Yes, it seems as if, in this new complicated and heavily economic form of war between “terrorists” and the American government, the US government isn’t paying a hell of a lot of attention to bin Laden and Hussein’s financial workings. Which isn’t too bright. What’s funnier is how closely they’re watching little old Cuba. Ha ha ha. You don’t actually wanna win this war, do you? No, not when you can profitably keep it going.

Here are some links I’ve found in a morning of web-wide wanderings. CIA interest in blogs seems to be rising. Machine Translation is beginning to develop phrase-based systems, supposedly to help eliminate ambiguity. What’s the connection? Both seem to me to open the doors for some pretty scary stuff. The CIA monitoring blog content is one thing, but with the rising rightwing’s neglect of things like, say, civil rights and freedoms, I think the possibility of Chinese-styled censorship is not necessarily a thing only of SF… not in the the mid-range future, anyway. Of course, it needn’t be full-on suppression, …

Yeah, everything’s under control. Sure. I’m wondering what’s in the water being drunk by people who still think this isn’t a madhouse mess.

Yeah, this has to be a joke. I hope. Or they’re doomed.

I realize reading this article, “A Dangerous Surplus of Sons?”, that while I thought I was being negative about the sex-imbalance in Asia—the fact that there are going to be far too many more men than women in places like China and India—I was being a little too optimistic, in fact. One question occurs to me. If skewed sex-selection is going to engender a global epidemic, might it become necessary for families outside of these countries to select female children proactively? Could some kind of immigration system be set up to defuse the situation? This might sound crazy, but after …

John Wendel is great for sending me useful and interesting articles on American news, culture, and politics. The last thing he sent me was an article called Carter’s Crusade, from American Prospect, in which Jimmy Carter takes to task the Christian Right in America for… well, for something that makes a lot of sense: for not actually being very Christian at all. For trying to undo the separation of Church and state. For letting piss-poor interpretations of scripture drive policy. For screwing up, basically, which I think it’s fair and objective to say they have done and are still doing. …

Apologies for typos. My broken finger keeps getting in the way… I don’t know why I looked at his web page, really. Maybe it was just the link on Marvin’s age that drove me to it. It’s been a year or two, so maybe it was just curiosity. I’ve always disagreed with the man on certain points, of course—and my rather well-supported reading of some of his novels based on his own nonfiction writings was enough to drive him into a fit on at least one occasion—but now I simply must say something about one of his political articles. I …

Stavros, at EmptyBottle.org, posts an article titled “New Day Dawning” about the recent elections in Korea. Well worth reading.

How many culture wars do we have going on at any one time as a global civilization? I can think of at least this many: social-conservative vs. social-liberal big-capitalist vs. nation states secular vs. religious/theocratic kleptocracy vs. democracy (and we all know who’s winning) cultural-preservationist vs. postculturalist science vs. traditionalism individualism vs. communalism rights vs. responsibilities The amazing thing about all of this is that nobody seems to notice all of these things have a place in the world. Even I, a rather strong atheist, would never say that religious stances have no place in our world; it’s just that …