Five Things That Made Me Think

The Lives We've Ruined
The Times of London looks at the lives of six ordinary Iraqis. In Iraq street cleaners are collaborators; picking up trash can get you killed. There is a baker who has been hunted by Sunni death squads because most bakers in Iraq are Shi'ite. A barber fears to trim a beard, barbers are frequently murdered for providing such a service in Baghdad. It is a painful read.

They have taken off their Rose Colored Glasses
The neocon analysis of the failures in Iraq in Vanity Fair are remarkably on target. The descriptions of the Bush Administration by the "founders of the feast" that is the Iraq War is devastating. These people who believed that war would bring Utopia to the Middle East have turned on the monster they gave birth to. They may finally be correct that with the manifest failures in Iraq the worst is yet to come. The final words of the author, David Rose:

One of the reasons we are in this mess is that the neocons' gleaming pre-war promises turned out to be wrong. The truly horrifying possibility is that, this time, they may be right.

Kafkaesque
The blogger BitchPhD looks at the confinement of Jose Padilla and recoils in shame. It doesn't matter what Padilla did, or thought about doing. Even the worst of mankind does not deserve such treatment. It should be noted that the prosecution is begging the judge in Padilla's trial to ban any mention of the condition of his three year confinement because it will prejudice any sane jury against the government.

The Chinese Understand Capitalism...
better than we do. I have not seen any Western economist discuss that virtual currency, money that exists only online, will make it infinitely more difficult to control the real money supply, hence control inflation. The Chinese see into the future much more clearly than Westerners who are obsessed with perfecting the past.

The Onion May Save Us
By printing it first, the Onion may have saved us from the spectacle of the state of Kansas outlawing the fact of evolution, not just the teaching of it. You know there was someone in the state, perhaps a senator with presidential ambitions, who was considering it.

Art is "Thinking Aloud in the Museum of Art" by Howard Hodgkin.