Pat Buchanan: “Whoever fed Bush those lines, or did not argue against his delivering them, disserved the president. For that speech has blown our coalition against terror to smithereens.” TownHall [thanks again, David!]

The Idler interviews Sam Vaknin on the relevance of pathological narcissism to the W-o-T®; interesting fellow:

former economic advisor to the President of Macedonia, and frequent contributor to The Idler on international affairs, is also the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited, owner of the Narcissistic Abuse Study List, and webmaster of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder Topic in Suite101. He is an economic and political analyst for United Press International (UPI).

I had a scurrilous thought, while reading this, that his characterization of the terrorists sounds alarmingly like us webloggers:

The terrorist and serial killer regulate their sense of self esteem and self worth by feeding slavishly on the reactions to their heinous deeds. Their cosmic significance is daily enhanced by newspaper headlines, ever increasing bounties, admiring imitators, successful acts of blackmail, the strength and size of their opponents, and the devastation of human life and property.

Seriously, though, read the interview. The concept of pathological narcissism is an undercurrent through late-20th century civilization and its discontents.

An Estimate of the Type, Quantity, and Value of Munitions Dropped on Afghanistan, October 7 – December 10, 2001 Dack

Predicting America’s Next Attack Against Terrorism Dack

Going down: “Tuvalu, a nation of nine islands – specks in the South Pacific – is in danger of vanishing, a victim of global warming. As their homeland is battered by ferocious cyclones and slowly submerges under the encroaching sea, what will become of the islanders?” Guardian UK

Ashcroft Invokes Religion In U.S. War on Terrorism; I thought the Bush administration worshipped only at the altar of the War Machine these days, but evidently I’m wrong. The official state religion they’re setting up is multifaceted; as well as Might making Right, there’s apparently an Almighty behind our superiority too. Washington Post Tom Tomorrow, from whence this blink arises, comments, in part:

Think about this: the Attorney General of the United States of America has publicly declared that the freedom of our nation is not derived from the Constitution, the work of that group of Deists and freethinkers who gathered one sweltering Philadelphia summer to lay the cornerstone of a government based on the rule of law –but is, rather, a miraculous blessing bestowed upon us by some supernatural entity.

In a sane world, that statement alone would be grounds for impeachment.

Beyond Survival: Slavery is a matter of caste and race in Mauritania; activists say “twisted notions of Islamic scripture” have been used to justify blacks’ servitude to their Moorish masters for centuries. This Village Voice essayist interviews a Mauritanian refugee from enslavement, now in Brooklyn’s ‘Little Mauritania’, about his life there and the fight for those who remain behind. As you might expect, despite a 1996 US congressional resolution decrying the persistence of “chattel slavery, with an estimated tens of thousands of black Mauritanians considered property of their masters and performing unpaid labor, …despite its legal abolition in 1980”, the Shrub Administration has turned its back on advocacy on the issue because Mauritania’s repressive chief of state Maaouya Ould Sidi Ahmad Taya, who came to power in a coup d’etat in 1984, is an important W-o-T® ally. Taya has taken the world’s preoccupation with the terrorist attacks as an opportunity to ban the Mauritanian anti-slavery opposition party.

The Enron Voice Mail System, 2002 WitCity [thanks, Pam]

at your digital watch: it’s 2002 2002 2002 (20:02, 20/02/2002). A symmetrical moment like this hasn’t occurred for 1,001 years and will never repeat itself…

This is where Chuck tells you to go if you don’t like his opinions on Looka!, I just noticed…

MGM becomes the first of the big seven Hollywood studios to offer film distribution to consumers by download, through a concern called CinemaNow!.

AmazonScan.com — “a program that scans different products on Amazon.com and records their sales ranking over time.” In related Amazon news, Dean Kamen is auctioning off three limited-edition Segway Human Transporters there. Current bids are over $60,000; bidding closes on March 28th.

Not All Asian E-Mail Is Spam: “Anti-spam activists confirm that a growing number of beleaguered systems administrators are now blocking all e-mail originating from Asia from their systems, in an attempt to choke off a flood of spam from China, Taiwan and Korea, an action that has upset non-spamming Asian e-mailers.” Wired

Games Elevate Hate to Next Level:

“Hate groups are increasingly using racist and anti-Semitic computer games to recruit young people, the Anti-Defamation League charged in a report released Tuesday.

Ethnic Cleansing, Shoot the Blacks and Concentration Camp Rat Hunt were some of the titles studied by the group. The objective of these first-person shooters are predictably similar — to kill as many non-whites, Jews and everyone else they hate as possible.” Wired

Why blacks love Bill Clinton

In her now-famous defense of a scandal-plagued Bill Clinton, Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison, went so far as to call him “our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” “Clinton,” Morrison wrote in the 1998 New Yorker essay, “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

I remember reading Morrison’s essay and choking. Morrison’s estimation of Clinton’s blackness seemed shallow, offensive and beside the point. At the time, I wasn’t the only one unnerved, and I’m sure many people still have problems with calling Clinton “the first black president,” no matter how Morrison intended it. Yet, in retrospect, I realize that my sharp reaction had something to do with age: I was pretty young when Reagan and Bush were in office. Like most white people, I didn’t understand how Clinton related to the African-American community; I also had a limited memory of how other presidents treated blacks. Salon