The US defence department is setting up a new branch aimed at 'influencing' the media.....Donald 'goebels' Rumsfeld claims that the negative publicity that the US receives is due to terrorist manipulation of the press! This he claims keeps him up at night.....poor fellow. Funny that people don't believe them?

Man of his words, maestro of the tongue george W. has found a new war and has described the propaganda department as: 'the war of ideas'.

The department also aims to affect new media, such as blogging........

I ask if he wrote a different kind of song when he was drinking. He thinks about this for an instant, then says, 'No. I don't think so. I mean, one is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That's one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they're afraid to find out that it was the liquor talking all along.'

For a while, Waits had that fear himself, the fear that when he finally dried out the songs would dry up, too. He worked through it, though. 'I was trying to prove something to myself, too,' he says, revealingly. 'It was like, "Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?" All the big questions come up when you get sober. "What am I made of? What's left when you drain the pool?"'

Not one thing, but everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false.
(De Quincey, 1857)

According to a secret intelligence report, the CIA offered to let Germany have access to one of its citizens, an al-Qaida suspect being held in a Moroccan cell. But the US secret agents demanded that in return, Berlin should cooperate and "avert pressure from EU" over human rights abuses in the north African country. The report describes Morocco as a "valuable partner in the fight against terrorism".

CIA pilots, sometimes using false identities and whose planes regularly passed through Britain, ran up huge bills in luxury hotels after flying terrorist suspects to secret locations where they were tortured. But they revealed their whereabouts and identities by indiscreet use of mobile phones and allowed outsiders to track their aircraft's flights.

"What the hell is going on here? I can't say it was terribly shocking to see Fox's Bill O'Reilly repeatedly mislabel Mark Foley as a Democrat... three times. Wishful thinking can be a powerful motivator.

Then AP mislabeled Foley that very same day. Curious... verrrrrry curious."

Putin praises sexual prowess of Israeli president -"He turned out to be a strong man, raped 10 women," the Russian president was quoted by Russian media as saying at a meeting in Moscow with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. "I never would have expected it of him. He has surprised us all, we all envy him!"

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

enjoy this

Thickets three metres (10ft) high readily absorb heat, making them hard to penetrate with thermal devices, said Gen Rick Hillier in a speech in Ottawa.

"You really have to be careful the Taleban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he added.

Burning them is not an option as they are laden with water, the general said.

"We tried burning [the marijuana forests] with white phosphorous - it didn't work," said Gen Hillier.

"We tried burning them with diesel - it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now... that we simply couldn't burn them."

He noted that a couple of brown plants on the edges of some of the forests had caught fire but this had posed yet another problem.

"A section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," he said, speaking dryly, according to Reuters.

One soldier had told him:

"Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."

Nothing To Be Said
Philip Larkin

For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.

So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slow dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,

Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.

Dirty university leftists...

As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The deaths from all causes—violent and non-violent—are over and above the estimated 143,000 deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to the March 2003 invasion.

...team up with lancet [pdf link] commies!

They hate our freedom! They kidnapped/tortured/shot themselves! Obviously!