The Distant Ocean

Clarification

Actually, accusing people like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson of "dual loyalty" is deeply offensive.  Their loyalty to Israel is second to none.

Memo

TO: Robert Fisk

RE: Your mention of "all the poppycock about Saddam's titanic arsenal"

Robert,

Just wanted to reassure you that I find nothing at all humorous about this phrase.

Soberly,
John

State of the Illusion

For anyone on the left who's tempted to relapse into 2008 euphoria by the president's early-campaign turn to rhetorical populism, this remains as true as it always was: Obama is not your ally who's been co-opted; he's your enemy who is co-opting you.

Nothing else ever has

I'm glad to see that my 2012 resolution to post grudgingly and infrequently until SOPA/PIPA are defeated is finally inspiring other people sit up and take notice of this threat to the continued existence of the Internet.  If you want to do your small part to help free us all from the grasp of pure evil, head on over to EFF and click it up.

LESSER EVIL: A little something for your Democratic friends:

Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet's unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. [...] The newly-opposed Senators are skewed strongly to the Republican side of the aisle. An Ars Technica survey of Senators' positions on PIPA turned up only two Democrats, Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who announced their opposition on Wednesday. The other 11 Senators who announced their opposition on Wednesday were all Republicans.

(This was an early count—later in the day the tally stood at 2 Democrats and 16 Republicans.)

Loose juice

Leon Panetta on the assassination of yet another Iranian nuclear scientist:

"We have some ideas as to who might be involved but we don't know exactly who was involved," [Panetta] said, adding that "we were not involved in any way, in any way, with regards to the assassination that took place there."

In related news, O.J. will find the real killer any day now.

Only off by three years

"We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court," said Romero. "Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today."

We will eventually have assumed control

Living through 1984 was a worthwhile milestone even if it didn't quite live up to the billing, and 1999 was good as far as it went, but even as a kid I'd figured out that I'd have to settle for 2012 as my closest brush with the ultimate year in rock (since the eternal youth treatments that might have given me the extra century are as conspicuously absent as the rocket cars, hyper-intelligent apes, teleportation and rollerball tournaments).  Though it does seem like the elder race of man (is that us?) should be well on its way to destruction by now (oh, right), and maybe someone should start thinking about a charter for that whole Solar Federation thing or at least scoping out a good site for temples at Syrinx, or of Syrinx, or however that works.

Oh well; on the plus side, at least we still have our guitars.

RELATED P.S.: This was always one of my favorite deep B-side selections from the lads in question, and thanks to this posting it's been playing in my brain all day long (and it should explain what the hell I'm talking about if you're not one of the two people who knew right off or the six others who were curious enough to figure it out with Google).

UNRELATED P.S.: On the plus side, this is the last of ten hellish years of having no agreed-upon way to refer to the current decade, followed by two years in pure decadal limbo; thank god that nightmare is nearly over.