Keith Olbermann's recent Special Comment is a doozy: Mr. President, the war isn’t about you — or golf. At over 12 minutes, it's probably the longest SC I've seen him deliver, and I've never seen Olbermann more passionate. Definitely worth viewing.

(via Cherie)

Wow. Barack Obama is apparently now following my updates on Twitter. To which I say:

Dude, don't you have, like, more important things to be spending your time on?

Although, to say that I'm beyond flattered is an understatement.

And yay for John Edwards for giving his support to Obama. I very much hope that when Obama takes the White House, there will be room for Edwards somewhere. Vice President, hopefully, or Attorney General at the very least.

Oh, and just in case you didn't know:

I'm subscribed to the Dalkey Archive Press mailing list, and waiting in my inbox this morning was this interesting news:

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 has been awarded to the Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen for his novel Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive Press in November 2007. Paul Verhaeghen is the first author to have both written and translated the winning title and has therefore won the full £10,000 prize. The award, a partnership between Arts Council England and the Independent newspaper, was made in association with Champagne Taittinger in the UK. Past winners have included Immortality by Milan Kundera and Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

[...]

Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book's whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and a Holocaust survivor who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist.

Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Paul Verhaeghen will be donating his prize money to the American Civil Liberties Union in protest of US foreign policy.

Verhaeghen's "non-acceptance" speech (in which he accepted the award but donated the prize money) is here in full, and it's a doozy and a half. Some really powerful writing. I won't bother quoting from it, because the whole thing really needs to be read.

He also did an eye-opening interview at Bookslut last November that goes into the book quite a bit; and it reveals that Omega Minor won the Flemish Culture Award for Fiction (Belgium's equivalent of the National Book Award) after its original Dutch publication in 2006, which came with a €12,500 prize, and he did the same thing with donating the prize money instead of accepting it.

So the guy has won two major international prizes for this novel, with a total cash award of ~US$45,000, and he has donated all of that money to the ACLU and Human Rights Watch so that taxes on it wouldn't go to the US Treasury and help fund the war in Iraq. Talk about ballsy.

I was so inspired by this incredibly selfless gesture of war protest that while I was at Orchard Road today, I bought a copy of Omega Minor at Kinokuniya (thankfully, it was in stock, their last copy) for only S$27 (~US$18), which is a fantastic deal for such a huge book (and only slightly higher than the cover price).

If you want your own copy, and want to support a wonderful independent publisher (they've also published Zoran Zivkovic's Hidden Camera, Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, and Rikki Ducornet's Phosphor in Dreamland, among many many others), Dalkey Archive is currently selling Omega Minor at a 20% discount, for only US$12.80. You can't even get two tickets for a movie at that price. A damn steal, I tells ya.

N.B. I realize that Verhaeghen probably could have just opened a bank account in his native Belgium and accepted the prize money in Euros, but as he says, it'll do a lot of good for the ACLU and HRW "in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it." Good on him.

1. Tavis at the Powells blog notes that a film is being made of Aimee Bender's wonderful novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. Bender is an amazing writer, so this is very cool news.

2. Colleen at Chasing Ray has put out a call for bloggers to write about their favorite political books (fiction or non-) during the month of August. I know I'll be blogging about Orwell's 1984, which sits among the top of my list of influential novels, and will probably also talk about the groovy new cover by Shepard Fairey. Mention will also most likely be made of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which just hit bookstores this week.

3. As cmpriest mentioned, if you have signed up for the mailing list at Tor.com, the free e-book this week was her own Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Yay!

4. storySouth just revealed the Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007; i.e. the best online short stories published during 2007. In addition to the attention paid to the short fiction of lots of great writers (matociquala, pgtremblay, ombriel, catrambo, kenscholes, jeffvandermeer, cybermonklives, Paul Jessup, snurri, yhlee, samhenderson, Gavin Grant, timpratt, Jason Stoddard, mevennen, scalzi, lucius_t, and Gene Wolfe, among others), Farrago's Wainscot won the Million Writers Award for best new online magazine or journal. W00t to Darin Bradley and the whole FW krewe!

The full 37-minute version of Barack Obama's speech "A More Perfect Union." Extremely well-written and well-delivered, both by the same guy. It's been interesting to see the reactions both to speech and to the news that Obama wrote it himself, that expectations for political discourse are so low that it's truly astonishing when a politician frankly and eloquently talks at length about such an important issue and it wasn't written by a team of staffers first. Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet, it's worth watching.

And here's Jon Stewart's reaction.

During sabbatical week, I talked about experimenting with narrative, that a story doesn't have to be linear, or told by a reliable narrator, or even presented as a narrative. A story can be told through a shopping list, or a multiple-choice test, or a series of encrypted numbers. Experimentation is certainly nothing new, but I think a lot of them had a very standard definition of what "story" is, and it was fun to break them out of that a bit.

Behind the Wainscot no. 13 is now out, and it includes my own experiment-in-form "Phonological Restructuring and Broca's Aphasia as a Function of Cultural Assimilation: An Annotated Bibliography," as well as pieces by Ivan Faute, Samantha Henderson, and Louise Norlie. "Phonological Restructuring . . ." was originally written for an anthology of experimental spec-fic that [redacted] and [redacted] were trying to put together, but it wasn't clear whether the antho would see the light of day, so I withdrew my contribution and Paul Jessup was nice enough to take it for BtW. I'm unclear whether it succeeds as a story (I guess you'll have to make up your own mind about that), but I do hope you'll go take a peek at it. If you don't like it, there's three other stories in the issue, and you might have better luck with one of those.

***

Because teaching at a secondary school pretty much eats up all my free time, I haven't been keeping up with world events as much as I used to. This past week, the term break, was the first time I read a newspaper in months. I read the ol' friends list when I can, but find myself skimming and skimming and skimming, which is starting to make me feel that it's barely necessary to check. The entries that catch my eye, more often than not, are related to politics or civil liberties issues, but there's a lot to skim there too.

I'm trying to avoid getting sucked into the Obama/Hillary/McBush slapfights, because it seems to have devolved into the same old ugly mudslinging that is de rigeur for political elections in the States. My students, who didn't know much about their own political system until I taught the unit in class, have asked who I'd vote for, and most of them rightly assumed I support Barack Obama. We're not even at the general election yet, but teenagers on the other side of the planet know who are duking it out for the Democratic nomination.

And I think it's safe to say (though you may disagree) that if Obama doesn't win the candidacy, there will be no good options for the country. I probably won't even bother to trundle down to the US embassy to vote in that case.

Hillary Clinton, even more than before, has proved through her tactics and her rhetoric that she's no better than the Republicans. I don't think that she'll bomb Iran into dust like McCain wants to, but the feeling I get is that it'll be more of the same for the next four years. More time in Iraq, more domestic surveillance, more people dying because they can't afford to see a doctor, more of a gap between rich and poor, more crumbling infrastructure. Experience means nothing if it isn't coupled with wisdom, and so far, she has not shown herself to be wise in her decisions.

Dammit, I said I didn't want to get sucked in, yet there I go.

I've also been skipping over the news about NY Gov. Spitzer's sex scandal and subsequent resignation. The US media time and again reinforce the idea that illegally invading other countries or spying on your own citizens or kidnapping anyone you want and having them tortured elsewhere is no big thing, but going to a hooker or getting a hummer from your intern is worthy of the utmost condemnation.

The slapfights, the sex scandals, the inordinate focus on celebrities, it's all so much distraction, a grand circus, handwaving of the highest order. More people know the current exploits of Paris Hilton than know that their phone lines and internet traffic are being monitored by the NSA. The major imports that we get in Singapore from the States are TV shows, Hollywood films, and junk food. It's a disturbing trend.

And before the reactions of "why do you hate America?" come flooding into the comments, just think about what has been criticized here: the government, the media, and the political circus. Do these things define the US? Certainly not. There are a lot of things I love and miss about my home country (freedom of speech, a rich literary culture, and a profound optimism and enthusiam, not to mention that most of my family and friends live there), but all this distraction is taking away from what makes the country great.

The US, and the whole world, needs a big change. And I'm becoming increasingly cynical that we're not going to see it anytime soon.

Remember the little incident that happened in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week, where US warships were supposedly threatened by Iranian patrol boats? And that this incident was being used as further justification for attacking Iran? Yeah, well, it seems that events didn't actually go down the way that Dubya's propanganda machine had fed to the media. From IPS News:

Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea", new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.

The new information that appears to contradict the original version of the incident includes the revelation that U.S. officials spliced the audio recording of an alleged Iranian threat onto to a videotape of the incident. That suggests that the threatening message may not have come in immediately after the initial warning to Iranian boats from a U.S. warship, as appears to do on the video.

Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former U.S. naval officer that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats and testimony from the commander of the U.S. 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the U.S. warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them.

Further undermining the U.S. version of the incident is a video released by Iran Thursday showing an Iranian naval officer on a small boat hailing one of three ships.

Link (via Truthout). As soon as I first heard this report, it reeked of trumped-up nonsense. The Bush administration wants to go to war with Iran so badly that they'll take any encounters with the country's navy or government and blow it out of proportion. Molehill becomes mountain. Facts become distorted and skewed, and rationales get invented out of nothing, all so the worst president in US history can play war one more time before he gets kicked out of the White House in November. Don't let them get away with it.

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. Holidays, and then starting at the new job last week, where I can tell right now I am going to be kept very busy for the forseeable future. I haven't even made mention of the cowardly and utterly reprehensible assassination of Benazir Bhutto (may her killer never ever escape the lower hell realms), or the elections in Thailand, or the election violence in Kenya, but people smarter than me are doing so, so my slack is being picked up somewhere by someone. I'm not even making any New Year's resolutions this year, except to survive the new job, and hopefully find a new flat (we went driving around the Yishun area today).

Induction Day 1 was last Thursday at Hwa Chong, and lasted for eight hours. Getting us newbies (58 of us) acquainted with the school, impressing upon us its reputation and goals for the future, making me feel both prettygoshdarn special that I was brought on as permanent faculty (because they only hire the best) and intimidated because the standards are so high. It's a very different atmosphere and schedule than I'm used to (teaching at a high school every day of the week, just to pubescent boys, as well as mentoring 8 others, and supervising extra-curricular activities in Publications), but the administration also made it very clear that they are absolutely committed to supporting the teachers and encouraging them throughout their teaching careers; my boss and principal, Mr Hon, wanted to make sure I'd still be able to find time to write if I took the job, since a big reason I was hired (in addition to my previous experience) was because of my bibliography. It's the first place I've been where the faculty is treated so well (I'm being paid more there than if I'd taught full-time at any of my previous schools; it's also probably more than any other job I've had outside of academia) and really thought of as being there for an entire career. I talked to several people last week who had been there for more than a decade, and this didn't seem unusual at all.

(Somewhat related, the Ministry of Education also sees immense value in Singapore's teachers. A nice change from the attitude of the Bush administration, who have continually cut funding for education in US schools and have perpetuated anti-intellectualism to the extreme.)

I am also, apparently, the very first (and so far, only) American to be hired at Hwa Chong in the school's 89-year history; there are other white teachers, mostly from the UK and Australia, but I'm the first from the US. Eep.

There were meetings on Friday for CSE (the Centre for Scholastic Excellence, a brand new program to cater to the school's cream of the crop) and the English department, where I found out a little more about what I'll be teaching, and what the expectations are; I also moved in to my desk/cubicle in the high school staff room. Tomorrow is a large staff meeting that will last all morning and well into the afternoon. And then school officially starts on Wednesday (although classes don't begin until the following Monday), when I have Day 2 of my induction; then more workshops and such on Thursday and Friday.

I was starting to panic a bit on Friday, because it's so close to the beginning of the school year, and I feel much less prepared than I would normally like (I still don't have my schedule of classes yet, but I should get that tomorrow), but I'm having to be zen about it. The biggest adjustment I'm having to make is the way that the classes are structured; I'm used to a college schedule, where I know exactly what I'm teaching every week (if not every day), but I'm discovering that secondary school is much more loose in this regard; there's certainly a curriculum and syllabus to follow, but it's a much more holistic experience with the other classes that the students are taking. Hard to explain, but I'm having to realign a lot of my assumptions about the job.

Anyway, wish me luck. This gig is going to be one of the biggest challenges I've faced in my teaching career, and though I'm a bit apprehensive, I'm also eager to get started.

Al Gore* has just won the Nobel Peace Prize! W00t! Go Al!

And the calls for him to change his mind about running for President in 2008 grow stronger...

I know that his life would be absolute hell for the months leading up to the election next year, but, dude, I would so vote for him.


*Gore actually shares the award with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It appears that the death toll in Myanmar is higher, much higher, than has been previously reported, with thousands of Buddhist monks and protesters executed and their bodies dumped in the jungle.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/hints-of-a-vast-grim-toll-in-burma/index.html?hp
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484903
http://uscampaignforburma.org
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2007/10/mass-slaughter-in-burma-hundreds-maybe.html
http://niknayman.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post_01.html
http://rockthetruth.blogspot.com/2007/09/massacre-in-myanmar.html
http://johnsville.blogspot.com/2007/10/burma-report-october-1-2007.html
http://www.norwaypost.no/cgi-bin/norwaypost/imaker?id=104499
http://jotman.blogspot.com/2007/10/burma-bodies-can-be-counted-in-several.html

Gavin passes along a petition that may be able put pressure on the junta to halt the violence; maybe or not, but at least it's something.

Dear friends,

The worst is happening -- over the last few days, Burma’s generals have unleashed terror on the peaceful monks and protesters: shooting and beating many to death, and taking others away to torture chambers where at this moment they must be enduring the unbearable.

We can stop this horror. Burma’s powerful sponsor China can halt the killing, if it believes that its international reputation and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing depend on it. To convince the Chinese government, Avaaz is launching a major global and Asian ad campaign on Tuesday that will deliver our message and the number of signers. Our petition has exploded to over 200,000 signers in just 72 hours, but we need 1 million voices to be the global roar that will get China’s attention. If every one of us forwards this email to just 20 friends, we’ll reach our target in the next 72 hours. Please sign the petition at the link below -- if you haven’t already -- and forward this email to everyone you care about:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/p.php

The petition will also be delivered to the UN Secretary-General, and we will broadcast the news of our effort over radio to Burma’s people, telling them not to lose hope, that the world is with them.

The Burmese people are showing incredible courage in the face of horror. The fate of many brave and good people is in our hands, we must help them -- and we have hours, not days, to do it. Please sign the petition and forward this email to at least 20 friends right now.

With hope and determination,

Ricken, Paul, Pascal, Graziela, Galit, Ben, Milena and the whole Avaaz Team

PS: if you would like to join in the massive wave of demonstrations happening around the world at Burmese and Chinese embassies, scroll down our petition page for details of times and events.

Blackwater USA, a private security firm (read: mercenaries) operating in Iraq, has been banned from the country by the Iraqi interior ministry after a shootout that killed eight people and wounded 13 others, most of which were bystanders:

Thousands of private security guards [as many as 20,000 contractors] are employed in lawless Iraq.

They are often heavily armed, but critics say some are not properly trained and are not accountable except to their employers.

The interior ministry's director of operations, Maj Gen Abdul Karim Khalaf, said authorities would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force.

"We have opened a criminal investigation against the group who committed the crime," he told the Agence France-Presse news agency.

All Blackwater personnel have been told to leave Iraq immediately, with the exception of the men involved in the incident on Sunday.

They will have to remain the country and stand trial, the ministry said.

BBC Link (via Kathryn Cramer).

Like Kathryn, I'm astonished that something like this hasn't happened sooner.

1. "The Great Plastic Bag Plague" by Tara Lohan at AlterNet. We are drowning in a sea of plastic bags, and some of the statistics here are just mindboggling: "The Algalita Marine Research Foundation learned that 'broken, degraded plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the central North Pacific by a factor of 6-1. That means six pounds of plastic for every single pound of zooplankton.' Which means, when birds and sea animals or looking for food -- more often, they are finding plastic."

2. the_flea_king introduces us to Dr. Julius T. Roundbottom at the exquisite new site Clockpunk.com (syndicated at dr_roundbottom). Jeremy has outdone himself once again with the presentation and content here, whish is just amazing, and pushes all of my geeksquee buttons.

3. "It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both" by Robert Newman at Guardian Unlimited (via willshetterly). This opinion piece is over a year old, but still an interesting and timely read. You'll have to decide for yourself if he's right.

4. MonkeyBrain Books is having a September two-for-one sale. "Buy any book direct from us through www.monkeybrainbooks.com at the regular price, and receive another book of equal or lesser value free of charge." And they take PayPal. The new Hal Duncan novella, Escape From Hell! is looking mighty tempting...

5. Keepon, the squashy yellow dancing robot, dances to Spoon's "Don't You Evah." Awesome. Cute dancing robots and music by Spoon; what more do you need?

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern at Alternet, "Do We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran?":

There they go again, those bureaucrats at the International Atomic Energy Agency. On Aug. 28, the very day Bush was playing up the dangers from Iran, the IAEA released a note of understanding between the IAEA and Iran on the key issue of inspection. The IAEA announced: "The agency has been able to verify the nondiversion of the declared nuclear materials at the enrichment facilities in Iran and has therefore concluded that it remains in peaceful use."

The IAEA deputy director said the plan just agreed to by the IAEA and Iran will enable the two to reach closure by December on the nuclear issues that the IAEA began investigating in 2003. Other IAEA officials now express confidence that they will be able to detect any military diversion or any uranium enrichment above a low grade, as long as the Iran-IAEA safeguard agreement remains intact.

Shades of the preliminary findings of the U.N. inspections -- unprecedented in their intrusiveness -- that were conducted in Iraq in early 2003 before the United States abruptly warned the United Nations in mid-March to pull out its inspectors, lest they find themselves among those to be shocked and awed.

[...]

Recent U.S. actions, like arresting Iranian officials in Iraq -- eight were abruptly kidnapped and held briefly in Baghdad on Aug. 28, the day Bush addressed the American Legion -- suggest an intention to provoke Iran into some kind of action that would justify U.S. "retaliation." The evolving rhetoric suggests that the most likely immediate targets at this point would be training facilities inside Iran, some 20 targets that are within range of U.S. cruise missiles already in place.

Iranian retaliation would be inevitable and escalation very likely. It strikes me as shamelessly ironic that the likes of our current ambassador at the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the architects of U.S. policy toward the area, are now warning publicly that the current upheaval in the Middle East could bring another world war.

Link to the full article.

From the Times Online:

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

(via Ed)

Alberto Gonzalez has just resigned. Here's Glenn Greenwald's take.

Michael Chertoff will probably get his job, but still. A moment of yay.

Three years ago, a nuclear power plant near the Tennessee/North Carolina border apparently spilled uranium all over the place, and the event was hushed up in the name of national security. From the Houston Chronicle:

A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant — including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

The leak turned out to be one of nine violations or test failures since 2005 at privately owned Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., a longtime supplier of fuel to the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet.

The public was never told about the problems when they happened. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed them for the first time last month when it released an order demanding improvements at the company, but no fine.

[...]

Some 35 liters, or just over 9 gallons, of highly enriched uranium solution leaked from a transfer line into a protected glovebox and spilled onto the floor. The leak was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid "running into a hallway" from under a door, according to one document.

The commission said there were two areas, the glovebox and an old elevator shaft, where the solution potentially could have collected in such a way to cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

"It is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death," the agency wrote.

"We don't want any security information out there that's going to help a terrorist," agency Commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said in a newly released transcript from a closed commission meeting May 30. But "that's entirely separate" from dealing with an event that could have killed a worker at the plant.

"The pendulum maybe swung too far," agreed Luis Reyes, the commission's executive director for operations. "We want to make sure we don't go the other way, but we need to come back to some reasonable middle point."

Link (via Grist).

Digby presents a Google-cached article from conservative group Family Security Matters (cached because they're apparently scrubbing their website of incriminating content) called "Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy." Money shot:

When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

Link. Unbelievable.

Another dick post, this one a quote from Philip K.:

"Leadership in this society here would naturally fall to the paranoids...But you see, with paranoids establishing the ideology, the dominant emotional theme would be hate. Actually hate going in two directions; the leadership would hate everyone outside its enclave, and also would take for granted that everyone hated it in return. Therefore their entire so-called foreign policy would be to establish mechanisms by which this supposed hatred directed at them could be fought. And this would involve the entire society in an illusory struggle, a battle against foes that didn't exist for a victory over nothing."

--Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

(via JeffF)

Speaking of dicks, here's the Veep admitting that invading Baghdad would create a quagmire in Iraq . . . in 1994.