“Already bored with all the presents you got for the holidays? Hack them into new-and-improved presents.

Got piles of now-outdated gifts from past festive occasions carefully stashed away because you might need the parts someday? Hack them, too.

Don’t know how to hack or need some inspiration? Get yourself a copy of Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty. It has 576 pages of detailed instructions that will show you how to re-engineer almost every inanimate object in your home or office.” —Wired News

“How Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg responds to flame e-mails [via walker]

Dear Reader:

I received your e-mail message. Sadly, I no longer permit myself the pleasure of personally responding to snide remarks from dissatisfied individuals, as doing so inevitably leads to time-wasting arguments and annoying exchanges of insults. Since such encounters often end with the reader complaining to my boss, it seems that this is what rude writers really want to do all along — to provoke me so they can satisfy some inner schoolyard desire to squeal. You may do so now by e-mailing the editor in chief, Michael Cooke, at mcooke@suntimes.com, though I should point out this is a form letter, so his reaction probably won’t have the sense of fresh outrage you desire.

Otherwise, I would like to point out — since so many fail to grasp this point — that the piece of writing that upset you is a column of opinion, that the opinion being expressed is mine alone, and the fact that you disagree with or were insulted by my opinion really is not important, at least not to me. This is not a dialogue, this is a lecture, and you are supposed to sit in your seat and listen, or leave, not stand up and heckle.

I do not write the column for people who disagree with me, nor am I concerned with trying to convince them of the falsity of their worldview at a one-on-one level. I’ve done that for years, and it’s a waste of time, both mine and theirs, since such readers are not typically open to ideas other than their own, and cannot even entertain the notion that they may be wrong.

Not that I am pleased to have upset you. Believe me, I would have preferred your letter to have been one of praise — most are — but that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

If you have cancelled your subscription, I am sorry for that too, though I am also confident, as you wade through the arid world of the competition and the barren void of television, that you will eventually soften and start reading the Sun-Times again, and would remind you that you can always skip my column; that’s why it always has my name and picture on the top, as a subtle clue.

While I cannot sincerely thank you for writing, I do hope that, as your life progresses, you eventually come to realize just how wrong you were in disagreeing with me in such a rude fashion. If there were a shred of politeness or sense in your e-mail you would not be receiving this letter, but as you are, I would urge you to re-examine your life, and suggest that you reach out to all the people you have no doubt hurt with your brusque and offensive manner and beg their forgiveness. Though utterly indifferent to your taunts, I will myself set a good example by forgiving you now. It can be a terrible world, and I’m sure you have reasons for being the way you are.

Best regards,

Neil Steinberg

“The young pilot walked away from his commitment in 1972 — the same year the U.S. military implemented random drug tests.”

One of the persistent riddles surrounding President Bush’s disappearance from the Texas Air National Guard during 1972 and 1973 is the question of why he walked away. Bush was a fully trained pilot who had undergone a rigorous two-year flight training program that cost the Pentagon nearly $1 million. And he has told reporters how important it was to follow in his father’s footsteps and to become a fighter pilot. Yet in April 1972, George W. Bush climbed out of a military cockpit for the last time. He still had two more years to serve, but Bush’s own discharge papers suggest he never served for the Guard again. —Salon

“Lynn A. D’Andrea, a sleep specialist at the University of Michigan Medical School, explains.” —Scientific American [I’ll ignore all the comments I expect about people snoring because my writing is putting them to sleep…]

Do you like classical music? have a broadband connection? understand Finnish Icelandic and French? (at least I think the site is in Finnish, although it’s not really necessary to know to enjoy it). Fun. —hugi.is

Pity the poor Republicans. Up until now, the twentieth century’s most eulogized fallen Presidents were Democratic liberal heroes FDR and JFK. Especially now, they need a deity of their own and by God they’ll have one:

“The nation’s longest-lived president, Ronald Reagan, will celebrate his 93 birthday on February 6. Sadly, this birthday may be his last. He can no longer speak, feed himself, or recognize family and friends. Nine years after he was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he is in the final stages of the debilitating disease.

When Reagan dies, Americans across the political spectrum will mourn him. But, if his most fervent supporters have their way, his passing will become a factional celebration, not a national commemoration, especially if he dies during the months ahead, while the president who has been hailed as his spiritual son, George W. Bush, is running for re-election. An assortment of former White House staffers, conservative commentators, think tank scholars and direct mail entrepreneurs have been conducting a campaign to make sure that Reagan is remembered in exactly the way that they want: as one of the greatest presidents and also as the prophet of hard-core conservatism.”

The Threatening Record:

So we all know that White House assertions about the Iraqi ‘threat’ were so much smoke and mirrors. This piece is a good compendium of administration assertions of the threat from the public record, just in case they try to backpedal further from those assertions as they appear less and less plausible during the election campaign. Faced with being seen as either gullible dupes of intelligence misinformation or abject liars pursuing a covert agenda by any means, of course the Bush people will try and control the debate by framing its terms as only the former; the current dance about the independent investigation of intelligence failures will clearly have that restricted, defensive scope. We cannot let administration innocence be rammed down our throats. There are encouraging signs of a backlash by the media and, importantly, by the intelligence community. I particularly like the take the State Department’s top intelligence officer, Greg Theilmann, has:

“The main problem [before the war] was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show…They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials.”

The emphasis is added; ‘faith-based intelligence’ is so apt, even though oxymoronic. I have already waxed enthusiastic several times about Seymour Hersh’s detailed analysis several months ago of the pervasive ways in which the Bush people have willfully marginalized intelligence community analysis because it wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear. It is easy to mistrust the CIA, almost axiomatic on the Left to do so. It is important to realize, in the current furor, that they are more believable than their dysadministration bosses.

And speaking of contradictions in terms, where is poor George Tenet in this mess? Some responses to his February 5th speech highlight his bold admission that the CIA never told the administration there was an imminent threat and see him as a courageous hero. Yet Bush does not seem embarrassed or threatened enough to find a way to oust him, although I predict we will see Tenet resigning “for personal reasons” “to spend more time with his family” and “go into the private sector” in the not too distant future (before the election, probably, once Karl Rove has thought up a spin on it that would stop Democratic jibes in their tracks). Others, like the former career CIA analyst commenting here (also at tompaine.com), find him (no surprise!) a master of disingenuousness. He points out another way in which the administration framing of the terms of the debate obscures the real issue. Regardless of what intelligence assessments of the Iraqi theret were or were not made, and how the White House did or did not use them, there is ample evidence that the Bush minions had long since decided to invade Iraq.

Steven Rosenfeld’s tompaine.com essay is a depiction of the bitter schism in the 750,000-member Sierra Club, where an insurgent group wants to focus the organization’s efforts on curbing immigration to the U.S. as a means of reducing the nation’s disproportionate use of the globe’s ‘carrying capacity’. The current board of directors election is provoking unprecedented outside attention and advocacy by non-environmental groups with political agendas including, on one hand, the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose Morris Dees is running for the board, he says, to prevent the “greening of hate;” and on the other, groups which the SPLC identifies as right-wing hate groups. A major figure among the insurgents is the former co-founder of Greenpeace, Paul Watson, whose animal rights activism is another source of opposition to the takeover bid from pro-hunting constituencies. Watson denies there is a conspiracy to take over the Club but critics offer documentation that he has bragged about engineering exactly such a coup.

It strikes me that the case is not being made so much for anti-immigration policy as the time-honored environmentalist position of limiting population growth. The stated platforms of the three Sierra Club Directors allied with the controversial candidates speak in terms of population policy instead of immigration policy — probably because there is no question that a racially divisive stand on immigration would attract the American would-be ethnic cleansers and their ilk and is not the only, or even the best, way to reduce the obscene impact of American profligacy on the rest of the world. The insurgents who do speak more directly of immigration curbs, according to past presidents of the Sierra Club, are outsiders who have no prior history of environmental activism but prominent positions with anti-immigration groups and have taken money from right-wing benefactors. Is slippage from concerns with environment and population to activism around immigration reforms — and race — inevitable?

When asked in an e-mail if it was possible to frame population issues so charges of racism did not arise, Gov. Lamm replied, “Every nation in the world that takes immigrants (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) has similar policies and doesn’t get charged with racism. Of course there is no guarantee, because some people can and will say anything. So the charge will be made, but it can be made non-credible. Our family marched in Selma (Alabama) and I believe good-hearted people must raise this issue.

So why do environmental groups have such a hard time with population issues? The former governor replied, “Political correctness reigns.”

Stephen K. Medvic, assistant professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College, writes at tompaine.com that it is time the Democratic contenders start to position themselves for the general election. He argues for a culturally inclusive, reformist populism attentive to the national security concerns that Bush will talk about ad nauseum. He suggests ways the nominee can take the best from each of his Democratic rivals’ campaigns (even Dean’s). To avoid becomeing irrelevant, the Democratic party must be rebuilt on a principled basis and not rely on a cult of personality as the successes under Clinton did in the ’90’s. [Little chance of a cult of personality behind Kerry! — FmH]

‘Ladies and gentlemen — I know Jesse Jackson… and you’re no Jesse Jackson: “Sharpton opposed the war on Iraq, the death penalty and Bush’s tax cuts, and he demands universal health care. This appeals to many moderate white Democrats. But his message gets hacked up, lost, distorted or ignored when the messenger is perceived as irresponsible and an opportunist, or both. The majority of black Democratic elected officials, and Jesse Jackson, have endorsed Kerry, Edwards or Dean, or have publicly sung their praises. They have been mostly silent on Sharpton.

Meanwhile, the greatest unease about Sharpton has come from Jackson. Though he is careful not to criticize Sharpton by name, he obliquely chided him before the South Carolina primary when he noted that no Democrat could be effective without a real message, money and a campaign infrastructure. Sharpton has made little apparent effort to develop any of Jackson’s requisites for a successful campaign. He has built his campaign on appearances on TV talk shows, at campaign debates, at showpiece protest rallies, and by tossing out well-timed media barbs.” —AlterNet

An End to Evil: “Before Sept. 11, 2001, it would have been difficult to speak meaningfully about a ”neoconservative foreign policy.” While there was a group of intellectuals and policy experts who were identified — sometimes self-identified — by the neoconservative label, they did not agree on foreign policy. Today a cardinal feature of neoconservative foreign policy is the aggressive use of American power to dislodge dictators and promote democracy. But the founding father of the movement, Irving Kristol, shunned this approach, speaking in the more cautious tones of realpolitik. Throughout the 1990’s, Charles Krauthammer, a leading neoconservative commentator, was deeply suspicious of the use of American power against dictators in the Balkans, Africa and the Caribbean, while others, like Richard Perle and William Kristol, were far more sympathetic. Neoconservative foreign policy during that decade lacked a central theme.

Sept. 11 changed all that. It is now possible to describe a neoconservative foreign policy, and David Frum and Richard Perle’s new book, ”An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,” is a useful guide to it. There have been many books written by neoconservatives on aspects of the war on terror, but because of the identity of the authors, the scope of the book and the vigor of argumentation, this one deserves special attention.” —New York Times book review