The ideas factory: “You might not know much about the films, but you probably recognise the titles – and storylines – of a slate of forthcoming releases: Charlotte Gray, About a Boy, Killing Me Softly. Why the sudden rash of British bestsellers hitting our screens?” Guardian UK

One man’s explanation of the report of the Times’ scrubbing the 9-9 bin Laden warning article. [pointer from Rebecca Blood]

The Secret Life of Numbers: “The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.”

Blah, Blah, Blah and Blog — blogging gets mentioned on NPR, and Wired covers it. I’m warning you, I’m going to get nervous if blogging goes much further mainstream…

Public Financing Is Key…: “If you want a government by the people and for the people, then the people have to pay the bill. Otherwise, the favors will flow right back to those who’ve actually picked up the tab.”Newsday Most cynicism about campaign finance reform cites the loopholes that will remain to be exploited, the likely cash flow from state party coffers to the national organizations, or the replacement of ‘soft money’ by ‘hard money’ at double the limit. Public financing will solve some or all of this but I think it misses the boat. We have to focus not on where the money comes from but where it goes. A political system in which campaign finance goes to hire consultants to tell the candidates how to read the public’s desires and then buy TV time to present themselves as that flavor-of-the-day is what’s bankrupt, however the money is raised. Oh, and an endlesly gullible electorate that eats it up uncritically no matter how much evidence there is that they’re being fooled again and again by the unreality industry.

To Protect Top Bureaucrats, NY Times SCRUBS Its OWN Osama Bin Laden Warning That It Published on 9-9-01

On 9-9-01 – just two days before Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the US – the NY Times published a lengthy and chilling article about Osama Bin Laden by reporter John Burns. Some time after 9-11, the Times SCRUBBED this article, replacing it with a completely different article that Burns wrote on 9-12. Both articles discuss a 2-hour videotape by Bin Laden that intelligence agencies first saw in June 2001, but ignored until September. Why was the 9-9 article scrubbed? Read it yourself – we’ve UNSCRUBBED it. We believe it demonstrates the GROSS NEGLIGENCE of the CIA, NSA, Justice Department, and the White House in the events leading to 9-11. These agencies had MANY warnings, but the people at the top IGNORED them, at a cost of over 3,000 lives and billions of dollars. ALL OF THESE SCREWUPS REMAIN IN THEIR JOBS!!! We demand a Blue Ribbon Commission on 9-11 and a thorough housecleaning – not a Congressional Coverup! democrats.com

State Department rejects portions of MTV profile of Powell “that depicts him as the sole dove and moderate in an administration of unreasonable hard-line unilateralist hawks”, reports Yahoo! . But was it that the Administration wants to persuade the public that there are other moderates?? Noooo, it appears rather that they wanted to make it clear that Powell is in line with the rest of the unreasonable hawks instead…

W-o-T® Me Worry? According to a report in a Lebanese daily as related by Ha’aretz, CIA director George Tenet reportedly asked President Mubarak not to oppose a US attack on Iraq, reportedly stating during his visit to Egypt Saturday that the US has already decided to take this next step. The scenario reportedly involves the US demanding that Iraq allow the return of arms inspectors, fully expecting Iraq to defy the ultimatum and open itself to a massive attack The Guardian ‘But former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes that Iraq has already called Bush’s bluff, by showing a willingness to discuss the issue of inspectors, and raising the question as to whether a U.S. call for them “has been merely rhetorical”.’ CommonDreams [via Cursor, as are many of these links] The New York Times yesterday had Colin Powell rejecting Iraqi assurances on arms inspectors as, well, rhetoric.

“…let’s find Osama bin Laden, together. If alive, he is certainly not in Baghdad,” Michael Naumann, former German Minister of Culture and editor of Die Zeit, writes in a NY Times op-ed piece. Why Europe Is Wary of War in Iraq:

“…While American patriotism proudly celebrates its armed forces’ power and victories, Europe’s diverse loyalties and identities are formed by a war-weary pessimism thoroughly grounded in our history: Wars can be just, certainly those fought in self- defense can; but they can be bloody useless, too. This pessimism may shade, potentially, into appeasement, yet its roots are real. They explain European reluctance to intervene quickly in Bosnia — a deplorable reluctance, in hindsight — and the present refusal to join arms with the United States against Iraq.

This time, however, the powder keg is not the Balkans but the highly armed, explosive Mideast. Too many guns are drawn, too many fingers are on the triggers, and some of them could be on nuclear bombs. This should be the hour of forceful diplomacy, not to be mistaken for appeasement.

The distance between Europe’s leaders and the Bush administration continues to grow. The existence of a new threat — global terrorism — is undisputed. But Washington’s unilateralism, from here, looks like simply a form of America’s longstanding isolationism, which is to say that the distance is created by America, not by Europe. Perhaps North Atlantic Treaty Organization members should not whine so much about being left out of Pentagon planning sessions. But the United States might benefit from recalling the late Senator J. William Fulbright’s diatribes against “arrogance of power.” Europe’s liberal and conservative pundits already are.”

However, what this argument does not explain is why the US after Vietnam should not be as war-weary and -wary as Europe. A European FmH reader wrote to suggest that this is because wars have been fought on European but not US soil; could that really be the difference, when most of the living European adult population is as remote in time from the last pan-European ground war in 1945 as the US is in space? I’m convinced one has to turn instead to temperamental differences. The cowboy strain in American psychology — both rugged individualism and cocky adventurism — born of having had a frontier to push against for most of our history, has been an important difference, especially when the yahoos off the ranch are the same people managing the interests of Big Oil.

Indeed, European warnings about the rift in the Atlantic alliance that would be caused by an attack on Iraq don’t seem to give Dubya pause. Neither does criticism of an Afghan-style intervention by even a key Iraqi resistance leader, reports the Christian Science Monitor. In fact, ‘President Bush and his top aides now seem to welcome, even to egg on, the sharp differences prompted by Mr. Bush’s determination to expand his battle against what he calls “evil” regimes’, suggested yesterday’s New York Times. Bush relishes his dark, struggle-against-evil worldview, says this Washington Post foreign policy analyst who found that Bush had picked the brains of grim foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan months before 9-11.

‘Many Republicans criticized the Clinton administration for entering peacekeeping operations without having an exit strategy. It’s ironic, perhaps, that this administration seems to be waging war without any exit strategy other than moving to the next battlefield. The war could become, as in the Orwell novel 1984, a permanent state of being. “War is Peace,” the Ministry of Truth slogan read in the novel.

Or, as Kaplan has argued, war becomes a condition no longer distinctly separate from peace. Bush has embraced that view, at least for now. As he declared in his State of Union address, “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather.” He has seen a grim landscape, to paraphrase Kaplan, and seems determined to confront it.’

The administration jackasses are so enamored of their grandiose anti-axis-of-evil mission that a set of new campaign ads will suggest, in essence, that supporting Democrats aids the terrorists. ABC via MetaFilter

Meanwhile, David Corn asks in The Nation, US mis-strikes: mistakes or war crimes?

That’s a provocative question, the sort of query that few, if any, reporters at the Pentagon briefing room are going to toss at Rummy. Nevertheless, it’s a question that may bear consideration as new details emerge about the latest US mis-strikes.

Over the past week, two US military operations originally touted as successes have turned into PR nightmares for the Defense Department and the CIA First, the Pentagon had to acknowledge (sort of) that a January 24 commando raid that attacked two small compounds in Hazar Qadam–resulting in the deaths of 21 or so Afghans and the capture of 27 others–had been a mistake. Those people killed or grabbed were not, as the Pentagon first announced, Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters, but troops and local officials loyal to the current government. Then The Washington Post reported on Monday that the three men killed on February 4 in the remote village of Zhawar by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone were not Al Qaeda leaders, as the Pentagon had suggested. They were Afghan peasants foraging for scrap metal, and the group did not include Osama bin Laden. Media reports following the attack raised the possibility the Al Qaeda chief had been one of the dead.

Corn and others in the progressive/alternative press have, of course, been raising such questions all along. But now the mainstream press, as well, is revisiting ‘collateral damage’ as war coverage takes a negative turn, reports the Washington Post

“I was screaming inside my helmet…” Skeleton Plunges Face-First Back Into Winter Games —

“Picture riding the lid of a turkey roaster pan down a roller coaster rail after an ice storm.

Picture it at almost 80 miles an hour, with wicked turns, at G-forces so powerful that you cannot raise your helmet from the ice, which glitters just an inch away.

Now picture making that ride face first.” NY Times

Taliban Minister Predicts Revival of His Movement: “A senior member of Afghanistan’s defeated Taliban derided the interim government Monday for failing to stem rising lawlessness and said the people would soon demand the return of his hard-line movement.

Mullah Abdul Razzak, fugitive Taliban interior minister and a former key military commander in northern Afghanistan, told Reuters in an interview that supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was still in Afghanistan but he did not know where.” Reuters via Yahoo!