A strange anniversary...

Cory Doctory, on his wonderful blog BoingBoing!, notes that he's coming up on his fifth anniversary and that he and his cohorts have posted a total of 17,000 or so articles.

Curious, I went and looked up how old my own blogging activities were, and was surprised to note that I'd missed the anniversary of my debut by about a week. October 21st, 1989, was the date I made my first open post, rather than responding to someone else; I have been blogging on one site or another for fifteen years, and have myself posted over 20,000 articles.

Eek. I wonder if I've ever said anything useful or interesting?

Shrillological analysis...

The MP3 player is obviously on to something. Vision Thing pokes fun at Bush, Sr.'s famous fatuous phrase.

By now, you must have seen Bush's "victory salute" to the camera when he thought the video wasn't rolling. If not, well, it's exactly what you think it is.

But what scares me more is the revelation that the first thing Bush reads every morning is Oswald Chamber's "My Utmost for His Highest," a collection of 365 daily homilies. I read parts of it in high school, but didn't recall much of it until Robert Wright reminded me (NYT registration required) of its contents.

Beware when you want to 'confer with flesh and blood' or even your own thoughts, insights, or understandings - anything that is not based on your personal relationship with God. These are all things that compete with and hinder obedience to God.

Life without war is impossible in the natural or the supernatural realm.

And this sunday, God will remind George Bush:

God frequently has to knock the bottom out of your experience as his saint to get you in direct contact with himself.

On the one hand, we can only hope that that portends that his role in America's pulpit will come to a crashing halt November 2nd. On the other hand, it explains a lot: Bush never admits he's wrong because he simply cannot do wrong; no matter what happens, no matter how much evidence mounts against him and his objectives, it's all for the greater good.

Halloween Ideas!

Last minute costume ideas, courtesy The Stranger.

The paranoids are right:

From Congressional Quarterly:

Eight months before the White House appointed him the Homeland Security Department's top intelligence official, retired U.S. Army Gen. Patrick M. Hughes told a public forum at Harvard last year that the government would have to "abridge individual rights" and take domestic security measures "not in accordance with our values and traditions" to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States.

"What I'm about to say is very arrogant -- arrogant to a fault," said Hughes, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in previously unreported remarks at a March 2003 Harvard University forum on "Future Conditions: The Character and Conduct of War, 2010 and 2020."

"Set aside what the mass of people think. Some things are so bad for them that you cannot allow them to have them. One of them is war in the context of terrorism in the United States," Hughes said, according to a transcript obtained by CQ Homeland Security.

"Therefore, we have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause," said Hughes.

"Things are changing, and this change is happening because things can be brought to us that we cannot afford to absorb. We can't deal with them, so we're going to reach out and do something ahead of time to preclude them.

"Is that going to change your lives?" Hughes asked rhetorically. "It already has."

Neither the department nor Hughes would comment for the record on whether Hughes stood by his comments in the year he has held the senior DHS intelligence post.

At the time of his remarks, Hughes was a private consultant whose clients included the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DIA, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, Science Applications International Corp., SRI International, Anteon, Boeing, Rand Corp., and others, according to the Web site for his company, PMH Enterprises, LLC.