Temporary is permanent, peace is war. We have always been at war with Oceana.

Long long ago, I said that if they could figure out a way to get away with it, this administration would make the "temporary, emergency" QUISLING er, PATRIOT act permanent.

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wisconsin) is leading the charge.

Iconography

Just Because.  Inspired by the icon on this post to engineers (by which, lest there be any misunderstanding, I find myself quite amused).  I'm half-tempted to post this to icons just as wordless commentary on all the mouth-breathers who think resizing and cropping yet another thirty or forty messageless media photos of their current object of commercialized mass-market lust to 100x100 is a masterful act of imagination and creativity.

Hey, folks, the word you're looking for is thumbnail.

I've seen some of these people post "I made another 250 icons today."  Wow, I'm impressed.  What do you do on days when you don't have anything important to do with your time?

UK police make bombing raids, arrest

The BBC reports UK police raided houses in Leeds and Luton, conducted several controlled explosions, and made one arrest related to Thursday's London bombings.  According to the report, four suspects have been identified, three of them from West Yorkshire; all four apparently died in the bombings.

Five of the 52 confirmed killed by the bombs have now been identified.

Srebrenica revisited

Der Spiegel discusses the failure of UN peacekeepers to prevent the Srebrenica atrocity.  Reading this, I can't help but think that the reason they failed is because they knew they had to all practical purposes been abandoned, and would not be supported if they attempted to make a stand.  Had they been, say, 370 US Marines, or 370 of the Aberdeen Regiment, or 370 Gurkhas, it's unthinkable that they would not have made a stand; and, had they been 370 US Marines, near-unthinkable that they would not have been supported in that stand -- and, if necessary, avenged -- by the full might of the US Sixth Fleet if needed.

But they were just 370 UN peacekeepers, left hanging out in the wind by the UN without support ... and as they blew in the wind, so blew 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.

Go figure...

There's a first time for everything.  I just got an apparent crank call from some incoherent old woman with a Mexican-sounding accent, asking "Are you a Jew?  Do you want a million dollars?"  There was more, but that was about all I could understand.