Wednesday's Big Lie
Thomas L. Knapp at Rational Review - Wishes, horses, small men and big lies - More on the false victory in Iraq. [smith2004]
It is certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that the U.S. troops will, sooner or later, pack their gear, board their ships and sail from the ports of Kuwait. It is becoming more and more likely that, as they evacuate the government complex in Baghdad, the old tenants will return and take up right where they left off. Given the U.S. war aims, that eventuality will constitute U.S. defeat under any reasonable criteria of what "victory" and "defeat" mean.
Something in the American psyche died on 9/11. That something seems to have been the natural, necessary skepticism which has always permeated the American relationship with government, rather than the false sense of safety that such skepticism served to mitigate.
Jerry Seper at The Washington Times - Portable roadblocks can aid troops' checkpoint security - sounds like a useful thing to know how to make. Wanna guess how long it will be before we start seeing these things deployed by cops in the U.S.? [rrnd]
Matt Wheeland at AlterNet - War Tax Resistance Made Simple - some pointers on stiffing the i.r.s. to prevent your money from funding the endless war. [rrnd]
Alexander Cockburn at Working for Change - We said it would be a nightmare: And yes, that's exactly what it is - some Iraqis appear to be happy about their "liberation". Others, many others, have been liberated from their health, or their bodies (the civilian body count crossed 1000 a couple of days back). It ain't pretty over there, and it ain't gonna be pretty any time soon. [lew]
The Apache Jakarta Project - Welcome to POI - pure Java libraries for reading and writing Microsft Word and Excel files. The Jakarta Project has grown quite a bit since I last looked at it. Good work Apache crew! [cafe]
Opera 7.10 for Windows is available. Some new features that I don't care about, but they fixed a rendering bug that caused Opera to crash on one or two spam messages a day. Yay!