“The US government put together <a href=”http://www.ready.gov/

“>a website to prepare people in case of an attack on the country. However, the graphics they use are pretty ambiguous, and don’t really make a lot of sense on their own, so caption some!!” [thanks, Jim!] ROFL, really ROFL!

Asylum for Bush [via wood s lot]

Now it’s official: most Americans are idiots.

So why do these pinheads think such a thing? —Ted Rall, Yahoo! op-ed

Lisa Walsh Thomas: “She’s the nightmare that’s been clawing at your sleep lately, George W, and she’s … coming to get you!

(…)You can stop her for awhile with 800 missiles and a couple of MOABs, and you can stop her again with nuclear weapons that can turn a Garden of Eden into hell, and you can poison her and her family and her neighbors with your own endless and illegal chemical weapons. You can tear out her tongue and rape and pillage and steal everything she holds dear. You can tear her country wide apart and bury thousands in each explosion that rips through her heart.

But you cannot kill her.” America Held Hostile

The constitutional challenge to the Texas “homosexual conduct” law that the Supreme Court will take up next week has galvanized not only traditional gay rights and civil rights organizations, but also libertarian groups that see the case as a chance to deliver their own message to the justices.

The message is one of freedom from government control over private choices, economic as well as sexual. NY Times

Although planning is better than it was a year ago, when few crisis managers even realized that children had different needs, the experts said, actual preparedness is hardly better than it was before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Pediatric doses of medicines to counter nerve gas, anthrax or a dirty bomb’s radiation are not even standardized yet, much less distributed. Paramedics who could be called to a gassed school or a bombed bus do not routinely receive specialized training in things like finding smaller veins or using smaller tracheotomy tubes in children thrashing around in fear or in steeling themselves against the shock of having to treat a room full of dying children. NY Times

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning

to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door”…
…And I throw away the key.

Human rights and immigrant advocates Tuesday condemned a new policy from the Department of Homeland Security that calls for extended detention of individuals from mainly Muslim countries who are seeking political asylum in the United States.

Amnesty International called the policy “Orwellian.”

The detention order is part of Operation Liberty Shield, a series of domestic security measures announced Monday by the Department of Homeland Security intended to make it harder for terrorists to strike here in reprisal for any U.S. attack on Iraq. LA Times

Thinking about the terror that Bush Jr. is about to unleash on the world tonight and the doomsday scenarios that may follow, I wondered — don’t laugh — whether the cautionary capacity to envision a radically different world, either post-apocalyptic or at least post-American, that seems so lacking in current strategic planning might bear some relationship to early exposure to speculative fiction. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller, Neville Shute’s On the Beach, Brave New World and 1984 of course, Asimov’s Foundation and, decades later, Delaney, Brunner, Zelazny are some of the formative things that come to mind for me. I’m sure you have your own list…

I’m pretty sure that Bush, since his intellectual limitations begin with — although are probably not limited to — dyslexia, never read any science fiction, but might we correlate the nature of the global vision of other U.S. Presidents or world leaders to their embrace of literature considering alternative futures? Does any reader have a clue about which 20th century Presidents might have read science fiction and related genres, if any? (It might be broadly inimical to choosing a career in politics and, arguably, American foreign policy decision making is largely not shaped by global vision at all…) Who might have had a close relationship with a science fiction writer, if any? (I know the reactionary Jerry Pournelle fancies himself a Presidential advisor, I mean other than him…)

For that matter, which American presidents or world leaders were shaped by serious literary pursuits, which might be expected to bear some relationship with ‘thinking outisde the box’, at all? Which did more than lip service to the influence of poetry?

Window Lights for Peace: “Around the world, thousands of us are putting lights in our windows to keep the light of reason and hope burning, to let others know that they are not alone, and to show the way home to the young men and women who are on their way to Iraq. Join us in sending this message of hope and peace by signing below…”