[Quote:]

“So at the lectern in the grand ballroom on Monday, I spoke about hate.  

“There are,” I said, “eighty-five thousand books about the Holocaust.  And none has an honest answer to How could the Germans do it?  The people who gave us Beethoven, the Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, Alle Menshen warden Bruder, all men become brothers.  How could the Germans perpetrate the Holocaust?  This mystery, we’ve got to solve it, or we’ll keep having genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Zaire.  

Well,” I said, “what I report in An Eye for an Eye is Lola” – the heroine, the commandant of a terrible prison in Gliwitz, Germany – “Lola has solved it.  The Jews have solved it.  Because in their agony, their despair, their insanity, if you will, they felt they became like the Germans – the Nazis – themselves.  And if I had been there,” I said, “I’d have become one too, and now I understand why.  

A lot of Jews, understandably, were full of hate in 1945, they were volcanoes full of red-hot hate.  They thought if they spit out the hate at the Germans, then they’d be rid of it.

“No, It doesn’t work that way.  Let’s say I’m in love with someone.  I don’t tell myself, Uh-oh, I’ve got inside of me two pounds of love, and if I love her and love her, then I’ll use all of my love up – I’d be out of love.  

No, I understand and we all understand that love is a paradoxical thing, that the more we send out, the more we’ve got.  So why don’t we understand that about hate?  If we hate, and we act on that hate, we stimulate the saliva glands and we produce a drop and a quarter of it.  If we spit that out, then two drops, three, a teaspoon, tablespoon, a Mount Saint Helens.  The more we send out, the more we’ve got, until we are perpetual-motion machines, sending out hate and hate until you’ve created a holocaust.  

You don’t have to be a German to become like that.  You can be a Serb, a Hutu, a Jew – you can be an American.  We were the ones in the Philippines; we were the ones in Vietnam….We all have it in us to become like the Nazis.  

Hate, as Lola discovered, is a muscle, and if we want to be monsters, all we have to do is exercise it.  To hate the Germans, to hate the Arabs, to hate the Jews.  The longer we exercise it, the bigger it gets, as if every day we curl forty pounds and, far from being worn out, in time we are curling fifty, sixty, we are the Mr. Universe of Hate, the Heinrich Himmler.  We all can be hate-full people, hateful people.  We can destroy the people we hate, maybe, but we will surely destroy ourselves.”

To prove once and for all that George W. Bush is indeed intelligen, his campaign team decides to invite two doctors. The only condition they have for the doctors is that they must do their work whilst 200 Bush supporters are present.

The first doctor is called into the room, and he asks “how much is two times two?”.

Bush goes “hmmm…” for a few seconds… thinks… ponders… thinks some more. And says “Four?”

Immediately, the whole room goes “aww… give him another chance!”

Print out the page and cut the figure into three parts along the solid lines. Now, position the strip onto the other two pieces so that it looks like each jockey is riding a donkey. Folding is not allowed.

[Quote:]

This is beyond awesome. In its current issue, National Geographic — a magazine that sells directly to heartland America — takes on the idiocy of creationism as bluntly as possible. That first picture above? It’s the cover. The second picture? The opening page for the article.

Indeed, that layout has a quality of bait-and-switch that is practically Onion-esque. As Evan Ratliff wrote in a brilliant Wired article last month, a chief goal of modern creationism isn’t really to persuade scientists. It’s merely to be taken seriously by major publications and government figures; if creationists can manage to get invited to comment at a conference or in a magazine article, it allows them to “prove” to their flock that creationism is a serious, scientific rival theory to Darwinism. Merely being in dialogue with the scientific establishment gives them crucial street cred amongst their real audience, Christians.

So one can imagine a creationist spying the magazine and excitedly grabbing it, assuming that a magazine as prestigious as National Georgraphic has now been forced to take creationism seriously. But that deliciously teasing cover line is really just a set-up for the typographically brilliant “NO”. It is not merely a good article; it’s a rhetorical pie in the face to this brand of barking-mad spiritual literalism that is so badly screwing the scientific future of the country.

[Quote:]

“As long as the Army has a single vehicle without armor, we expect that our soldiers will continue to find ways to increase their level of protection.”

– The Department of Defense on 60 minutes

[Quote:]

this one is from the coney island aquarium

electoral-vote.com is one of the most popular election websites in the country. It ranks among the top 1000 websites on the entire Internet and currently pulls in over 650,000 visitors a day.

People have speculated that electoral-vote.com is run by a Clinton administration official, a bored retired statistician and more. Much to the surprise of a lot of people, the elusive Votemaster is none other than Andrew Tanenbaum! Andrew Tanenbaum is one of the Great Names in Computer Science, amongst other things as the author of Minix, a pre-cursor to Linux. He is an American living in the Netherlands, and as part of his “outing” endorses Kerry, for reasons you may not have seen before but are quite logical for americans living outside the USA. And, if you decide to leave the country when you feel the wrong guy won the Election, as part of his “outing” Andrew offers the reader the option of getting a Masters degree in Computer Systems.

[Quote:]

Een 24-jarige automobilist kreeg zondagavond na een opeenstapeling van overtredingen een bekeuring van maar liefst 1500 euro. De man reed met 150 kilometer per uur over de A4 (Amsterdam-Den Haag), waarbij hij bumperkleefde.

Toen agenten de man inhaalden om hem te kunnen aanhouden, zagen zij bovendien dat hij een mobiele telefoon aan zijn oor hield.

Vervolgens deed de man op het politiebureau een blaastest waaruit bleek dat hij een alcoholpromillage van 0,52 had. Alsof dat allemaal nog niet genoeg was, bleek na controle van zijn papieren dat de man, afkomstig uit Equatoriaal-Guinea, geen geldige verblijfsvergunning heeft. Hij is overgedragen aan de vreemdelingenpolitie.

[Quote:]

On the eve of the U.S. election, China laid into what it called the “Bush doctrine,” said the Iraq war has destroyed the global anti-terror coalition and blamed arrogance for the problems dogging the United States worldwide.

The searing article was as close to a position on the U.S. presidential election as China has come, but it made no mention of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s challenger to President Bush in Tuesday’s presidential contest.

The United States was dreaming if it thought the 21st century was the American century, wrote Qian Qichen, one of the main architects of China’s foreign policy, in a commentary in the English-language China Daily newspaper.

“The current U.S. predicament in Iraq serves as another example that when a country’s superiority psychology inflates beyond its real capability, a lot of trouble can be caused,” Qian wrote.

“But the troubles and disasters the United States has met do not stem from the threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance.”

Qian is a former foreign minister credited with breaking China out of diplomatic isolation after the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

[Quote:]

The Internal Revenue Service has informed the NAACP that it is investigating whether the civil rights organization improperly “intervened in a political campaign” when it posted on its website a speech by Chairman Julian Bond that condemned the Bush administration’s policies.

The IRS sent a letter Oct. 8, less than a month before Tuesday’s election, to the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People informing it of the investigation. The group has until Nov. 5 to respond.

“I think what’s at issue is our right to criticize the president of the United States,” Bond said Thursday. “The IRS is saying that because I criticized the president’s education policies, his economic policies and his war policies that somehow I placed the tax exemption for the NAACP at risk.”

Bond, 64, a college professor at the University of Virginia and American University, said the timing of the inquiry raised questions about the administration’s motives.

Tourists and residents make their way through a flooded St. Mark’s Square in Venice, northern Italy, Sunday, Oct. 31, 2004. An exceptional 137-centimeter (54 inch) high tide flooded eighty per cent of the town disrupting public transportation and flooding shops. (AP Photo/Luigi Costantini)