Truth? Satire? Who can tell anymore?

BAGHDAD, IRAQ -- Baghdad resident Taha Sabri, killed Monday in a U.S. air strike on his city, would have loved the eventual liberation of Iraq and establishment of democracy, had he lived to see it, his grieving widow said.

"Taha was a wonderful man, a man of peace," his wife Sawssan said. "I just know he would have been happy to see free elections here in Iraq, had that satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missile not strayed off course and hit our home."

from The Onion's Special Coverage: The War on Iraq


On the more serious side, regarding falsified documents supplied by the US to the UN to "prove" Iraq was trying to develop atomic weapons:

"It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that 'they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.'

"The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger's 'yellow cake' comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. 'Five hundred tons can’t be siphoned off without anyone noticing,' another I.A.E.A. official told me."

From the New Yorker, "Who lied to whom?: Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?"

Question for the day.

My friends and I used to have a saying: "You'll get over it, or it'll bother you for a long, long time."

The underlying message of that is: since we live in an imperfect world, at some point moral conviction must give way to expedient pragmatism.

If this is true, what good are moral convictions in the first place?

People have been "turning on, tuning in, dropping out" since the Cynics declared that social institutions were inherently morally bankrupt. They lived in a world where the Hellenistic social order was decaying and giving way to the high pragmatism of the Roman Empire. There are many parallels to the world situation today: the nation-state as a political unit is more unstable than at any point since the days of mercantilism, incredibly wealthy robber barons do what they want when they want it throughout most of the world -- and then ship the products to the industrialized nations at incredible profit. Many shrug and anesthetize themselves to their personal lack of power with TV, carbohydrates, drugs, sex, or video games (or all five).

The disconnect -- the ultimate inability to live up to moral convictions -- makes anyone of conscience wind up in the end feeling like a fool, and like a co-conspirator unable to wash away the karma.

Yesterday I wrote passionate objections to the war and did my shopping at Wal-Mart, refusing to think of the implications of participating in the capitalistic status-quo that dictated the US-Iraq war.

The attitude I expressed in my posts yesterday could have come from ancient Cynic or Stoic rhetoric. To write off social institutions and rely solely on one's self is to attempt to make pragmatism its own kind of moral conviction.

(no subject)

Darn those Democrats and their crippling regulations on small business!

Sweet Tea May Be the Law in Georgia

ATLANTA - For some Georgia lawmakers, a meal wouldn't be complete without sweet tea. Now they could put that into law.

Rep. John Noel, D-Atlanta, and four co-sponsors filed a bill Tuesday that would make it a misdemeanor "of a high and aggravated nature" not to offer sweet tea in any Georgia restaurant that serves iced tea.

Noel acknowledged the bill was an attempt to bring a little humor to the Legislature. But he said he wouldn't mind if it became law. Under the bill, restaurants could still serve unsweetened tea, but must serve sweet tea as well. The proposed bill specifies the tea must be sweetened when it is brewed. Misdemeanors can carry a sentence of up to 12 months in jail.

Noel got the idea when he wasn't able to order sweet tea at a restaurant in Chicago. It wasn't on the menu.