"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." First Corinthians 13:11.

"We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things." President Barack Hussein Obama.

I love good sermons. I appreciate good sermons as high social art. Solo spoken oration is dying out. It still exists in its best sense as a sermon. When you give a sermon you're casting your fate to the wind. There's no middle ground. You either hit the bulls-eye or flail around hoping someone puts you out of your misery. As does the congregation. Giving a sermon takes cojones. It is not for the meek or the easily slighted. Most sermons suck.

The answer of Federal District Court Judge John D. Bates to the Bushies argument for why Karl Rove, Harriet Miers et al. can blow off a subpoena to appear before Congress can be condensed as such:

"The Executive presents a litany of contrary arguments, all of which are unavailing."

Last June, Congress subpoenaed former Bush legal counsel Harriet Miers to answer questions about the political retribution firings of numerous United States Attorneys in the Justice Department. Even though Miers had left the Bush administration and was a private citizen, she said she was told by Bush that she could not testify before Congress. On what grounds? That the President had deciderered that all senior presidential staff have absolute immunity to refuse to testify before Congress -- forevah.

It is not news that U.S. combat soldiers are often not given the equipment they need to fight and survive to fight.

So let me get this straight.

If you point out that combat soldiers are often forced to train and fight without important pieces of equipment that they are supposed to have, this means you don't "support the troops."

But if you call these combat soldiers liars and insist that they have all the equipment they need -- even when they say they don't -- this is a sure sign that you "support the troops."

Many top echelon Justice Dept. officials have resigned since TPM broke the US attorney scandal. All were to a great extent "loyal Bushies."

In contrast, few barnacles are more stubborn than Alberto Gonzales, in his loyal clinging to the side of the Presidential hull.

Why ?

Normal Presidential protocol holds that if an underling becomes a public embarrassment or liability, the underling must resign, since they are no longer "pleasuring" the President satisfactorily.

Alberto Gonzales meets this standard, being described by Jon Stewart as willfully playing the role of a "low-functioning pinhead" in order to pleasure the President.

"Here's something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts."

The above is from a new book called "The Edge of Evolution" by creationist and tenured Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe.

In this new book, Behe claims that because the tiny parasite which causes malaria has such an "exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts" it must have been designed by a Designer ... err ... God ... err ... Someone Big.

Oddly, Mr. Behe asserts the recent appearance of highly drug resistant malaria is not due to the hand of God, but is due to good old Darwinian evolution.

Sean-Paul Kelley's thought piece asks: what happens if everyone in the world aspires to and achieves a material life similar to that of upper middle class United States citizens?

The rub, as suggested by Sean-Paul, is that the Earth lacks the material resources to sustain such an event, ie. sufficient fossil fuels, and the pollution from attempting to burn what fossil fuels exist in order to try to do this will via global warming wreak havoc on the same respiratory system that keeps alive life as we know it on Earth.

1. So all you incensed free speech folks. Would you walk up to a black woman colleague at work, or better yet at a staff meeting, and call her a "nappy headed ho" and a "jigaboo" ? Didn't think so. Why wouldn't you ? If you are a guy, do you regularly call your wife a no good slut at family meals, with the kids and her parents all at the table? Didn't think so. Would your wife be any less displeased after you called her a whore and a no good slut if you informed her that some "black rappers" have used these words on audio recordings ? Didn't think so.

2. The basic rule in life is that you don't say something about someone that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying to their face. Would Don Imus and Bernard McGuirk have called the Rutgers womens basketball team "jiggaboos" and "nappy headed hos" to their face ? Did Imus call them that to their face when he met them in person? Then he's a bigot wimp. The fact that Imus would never say this stuff to these women to their face proves he knew all along this talk is deeply hurtful and wrong. If not, he would have said it to their face when they recently met.

As many of you old people will recall, this country's news media goes in a 10 year cycle of lavishing attention to the destruction of Planet Earth, and then just as quickly forgets about it.

We are now in a brief period when the major news media suddenly ... "cares" ... and now we have the requisite 10 year old recycled stories carrying the moniker of ...

"50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Planet."

Stories recycled straight from the same stale stories written in 1977, 1987 and 1997.

Stories destined to go down the memory hole just as fast as they did in 1977, 1987, and 1997.

Mr. Joshua Marshall sees the forest through the trees regarding U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, the now-fired prosecutor of incarcerated U.S. Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham:

"What people tend to overlook is that for most White House's a US attorney involved in such a politically charged and ground-breaking corruption probe would have been untouchable, even if she'd run her office like a madhouse and was offering free twinkies to every illegal who made it across the border. Indeed, when you view the whole context you see that the idea she was fired for immigration enforcement is just laughable on its face. No decision about her tenure could be made without the main issue being that investigation."

As long as the culture and news media of the United States continues to consider being smart as an aberrant "geeky" thing on par with halitosis, this country is in deep trouble. How would one turn the culture around? Hitting bottom somehow might do it, but it's the long way around. -- Raja March 8, 2007 - 7:37am

Raja asks a very important question. One response is this:

Don't treat intelligence like halitosis.

Or, treat the lack of intelligence the way we treat halitosis.

Or here's another concept.

Treating intelligence like a disease is the way American society has treated all young girls in the United States since the country's inception.

There is no value in being stupid. Illiteracy bears no dividends. Then why does America worship illiteracy and cringe from intelligence like a barefoot maiden attacked by a sadistic field mouse?

Bill Gates, whose charitable foundation has given away more than $3 billion since 1999 for educational programs and scholarships, noted that about 30 percent of U.S. ninth-graders fail to graduate on time. "As a nation, we should start with this goal: Every child in the United States graduating from high school," he said.

A federal study released last month showed about a third of high schoolers fail to take a standard-level curriculum, which is defined as including at least four credits of English and three credits each of social studies, math and science.

"We simply cannot sustain an economy based on innovation unless our citizens are educated in math, science and engineering," Gates said.

As long as the culture and news media of the United States continues to consider being smart as an aberrant "geeky" thing on par with halitosis, this country is in deep trouble.

This country celebrates non-intelligent people who deliberately choose to not be intelligent. Hence, Dear Leader.

There is no difference between global warming deniers and evolution deniers. If only because they are usually the same people. Like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, for instance.

As a matter of introduction, I won all of my school's science fairs in middle school, junior high school and high school. Being very crappy at calculus, I majored in English in college rather than physics.

It disturbs me greatly when science is abused; when I observe scientific illiteracy run rampant in the United States; and when I watch large corporations manipulate people due to their scientific illiteracy.

If you wish to study the phenomenon of scientific illiteracy up close, talk to someone who declares themself a global warming "skeptic" or "denier."

"He replied, that I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not. (For they have no Word in their language to express Lying or Falsehood)."
-- A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Jonathan Swift.

Lemuel Gulliver, please meet Lt. General Kevin Kiley, U.S. Army Surgeon General, the man responsible for the care of wounded U.S. soldiers at Building 18 of the Walter Reed Medical Center, Washington, D.C. who told Judy Woodruff of PBS this week:

Oh, I think the repairs are going to be done by the end of the week, with the exception of one thing, which is a leaky roof, which we need to wait for the roof to dry. The contractors have already told us we'll get that sealed up. ... I guarantee you that the health care here is of the very highest order and has been. The issues, as you've heard in several press conferences, have been about the quality of life, specifically some of the issues in Building 18, and then the bureaucracy, which is not a function of letting soldiers languish.

Michael Hirsh of Newsweek:

The U.S. Army has also stopped pretending that Iraqis—who have failed to build a credible government, military or police force on their own—are in the lead when it comes to kicking down doors and keeping the peace. And that means the future of Iraq depends on the long-term presence of U.S. forces in a way it did not just a few months ago. “We’re putting down roots,” says Philip Carter, a former U.S. Army captain who returned last summer from a year of policing and training in the hot zone around Baquba. “The Americans are no longer willing to accept failure in order to put Iraqis in the lead. You can’t let the mission fail just for the sake of diplomacy.”

Our journalist friends from France briefly explain why solar and cosmic radiation make manned space travel to Mars or beyond not feasible -- unless you want to die quickly.

A theorised solution would be to generate a huge magnetic or electrostatic shield around the ship to repel the particles, although the energy expenditure would be huge and the solution itself may pose hazards to health.

Cost alone is likely to make these ideas unfeasible, leaving mission deciders with the nightmarish task of determining what is an acceptable level of risk for the men and women who will go to Mars.

Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner moves closer to Venezuela, dismisses U.S. efforts to isolate Chavez.

During his visit to Venezuela, Mr Kirchner said his country along with Venezuela and Brazil had to build a space in South America that guaranteed dignity and justice.

Argentina would gladly join a Bank of the South proposed by Mr Chavez to finance regional projects, he said.

"It cannot be that it bothers anyone that our nations become integrated," Mr Kirchner said.

"Much has been said recently that... in [Brazilian] President Lula's case or in my case that we had to contain President Chavez - an absolute error."

It's not terrorism if we do it.

ABC News' website is now carrying a weird, poorly written story about Iran weapons in Iraq that does not contain a single reference or source outside of U.S. military sources. The story, not surprisingly, stenographically repeats and parrots the recent admin. propaganda line.

This, in Journalism 101, is called a "one-source story." It is the apex of journalistic incompetence. See also this morning's front page Boston Globe story.

According to the front page of the Monday Boston Globe, one doesn't need evidence to have "evidence."

Military offers evidence of Iran arming Iraqi militants
Sees high-level Tehran role
By John Donnelly and Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | February 12, 2007

WASHINGTON -- US military officials in Baghdad, presenting long-awaited evidence that Iran has been providing weaponry to Iraqi militants, said yesterday that Iranian security forces linked to the "highest levels" of the Iranian government have been smuggling explosives into Iraq for at least the past two years.

The officials , who refused to be identified at the press conference, said the Iranian-supplied munitions had killed more than 170 coalition troops and wounded more than 620 others.

The rest of the story, however, never again mentions or discusses the above "evidence" -- what it is, why it is "evidence", who says it is evidence, and if anyone except these anonymous military people actually believe the "evidence" is "evidence."

This has to be one of the worst-written news stories I have ever seen in my life.

The UK Guardian reports that the Exxon-funded American Enterprise Institute is offering $10 G to any person with a science degree willing to say that gravity is a hoax, the Earth is flat, global warming is a bucket of warm spit.

My July, 1968 edition of National Geographic magazine contains a gatefold (2 page) ad from Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Esso), later Exxon, now Exxon Mobil, which reads in part:

"The smog problem is the first order of business. What causes it? What does the sun do to the hundreds of compounds in the air? What turns leaves brown? What irritates our eyes? And finally, the big question. Since nature itself contaminates the air -- what exactly is healthy air?"

The token Il Duce fan at the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby, warns us on Feb. 4th 2007 that:

"It is tougher to keep a sustained focus on human beings who share certain beliefs, a form of surveillance from which most Americans instinctively recoil. Ideological and religious profiling goes against our civil-liberties grain. Infiltrating Islamic groups, keeping tabs on mosques, applying heightened scrutiny to Muslims in order to track the extremists among them -- we find such activities highly distasteful, awkward, even un-American.

From today's Boston Globe:

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When your city and unimpeachably flawless news media have become the laughing stock of the United States, how do you respond, as the city's "newspaper of record" ?

Blame it all on post-modernism.

The Globe intones: "Guerrilla marketing assumes that American culture is uniformly ironic."

No. It assumes people can differentiate between a lite brite sign that has been on display for two weeks and a sophisticated and deadly, top secret Al Qaeda bombing mission.

Not surprisingly, Boston Mass. news media have given themselves outstanding marks for their hysterical coverage of a non-event that shut down the city in an H.G. Welles "War of the Worlds" moment on Jan. 31, 2007.

The mutual self-back slaps were administered through a Feb. 1, 2007 story in the Boston Globe, which specializes in "covering" its own news coverage, and then surprisingly, giving itself very high marks for itself. Boston Globe stylebooks forbid the explicit use of the term "circle jerk" in stories of this type in part because readers can fill in the blanks.

The story opens:

I just had to provide these bon mots from http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24239

"What disturbs me the most about all of this is that it's just another example of "anything goes" in our current culture. From disgusting reality shows (switch spouses, marry a millionaire, dirty jobs, unfortunates paraded like medical freaks, etc.) to active participation with enemies of the country (Democratic Senators and ex-Presidents meeting with terrorists and enemy foreign governments to denigrate and work around the policies of the people's chosen CIC., etc.) to selective enforcement of our laws (illegals, Sandy Berger, criminal politicians getting light or no sentences, etc.) to shock advertising campaigns (including spring break wild-a-thons sponsored by beer companies.) This campaign was intended to cause shock, in a crude middle-finger way. If you don't watch cartoons, you would have no idea the image was harmless.

Early this decade, magicians and comedians Penn & Teller concocted a television program on the Showtime cable network called “Bullshit!”

Its first episodes were a very funny and astute debunking of hapless psychics and spoon benders.

A few episodes later, P&T shifted from rightly ridiculing pseudoscience to attacking real, hard peer-reviewed science — as if the two were the same thing.

P&T devoted much of one program to stating that global warming is bullshit.

By doing so, P&T said that the work of thousands of scientists was as false and dumb as the goofy guesses of a small town carnival fortune teller.