~ here is a million dollar idea for google or some capable programmers out there: let us have a site that scans every piece of reporting and journalism and editorial in order to track the increased appearance of certain words, namely words that appear in over 10,000 articles each month after not appearing in a total ten articles over the past five years. here are some to get you started: vetted, parsed, wonk.

~ from cnn:

“Shortly after his disappearance, Hassoun’s family was notified he was missing, but there was no public announcement, the Pentagon official said, because the military did not want to signal insurgents that a Marine might be out in the countryside unprotected.”

…or the military was hoping that he already had been killed quietly and anonymously somewhere, so that he wouldn’t show up on television with a bunch of insurgents behind him who are threatening to cut off his head, thereby presenting the american public with more unpleasantries on the eve of the ‘reign’ of freedom in iraq.

~ few things could interest us less than the prospect of a televised trial for saddam hussein. watching a rerun of the 1978 superbowl would probably have a bigger surprise of an ending.

~ we are mystified by that ‘let freedom reign!’ tag that gwb left on condi rice’s note. is he deliberately being cynical, or is he truly that naive? does he believe that americans have been duped into thinking that there is participatory democracy in iraq, or are his handlers still letting gwb believe it himself? strange!

~ fear not, we are not abandoning this project. despite our declaration that there will be no more posts – long time readers know how likely that is to be true – we still intend to maintain a presence here. we have spent the past five years in a schizophrenic state, as we have never reached an agreement on the purpose of this site. to make a cat move forward, you pull back its tail; we have found that we move in whichever direction our tail is pulled, such as the expense of a week on building a database for the work images only to cast it aside and write instead some snide remark about how shitty police officers are. this incongruity has arrested our development.

lately, our internet time is taken up with sophisticating sisyphean.com [w] and a new enterprise that is in development. we hope that a new structure will allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff, the style from the content, and allow all endeavours to blossom unhindered. there is no consensus on the content of the future, but we have learnt its nature; while we still intend to bring you features such as the '’history of atlanta', our goal is the return of the angry and the red to 'the angry red planet'.

~ opensecrets.org [w]

~ what’s the big deal about the d-day anniversary? we doubt that this nation of consumers, who have no purpose in life but to choose the one of the five colors of mini ipods that best represents their identities or, when they fail to shed their obesity, file lawsuits against people who offer diet plans, who are watching this week’s romantic and pompous d-day flash animations on the news, pieced between jennifer lopez’s third marriage to a wealthy celebrity and the list of who might get ‘whacked’ on the season finale of ‘the sopranos’, really know the difference between pointe-du-hoc and pegasus bridge.

our country is now involved in a war that is based upon a foundation of dubious moral certitude; it is a war that we chose to begin, full of self-righteousness and disregard of our neighbors’ skepticism and wariness. In order for Amercians to be kept in line and to keep their faith, we need to believe that the united states is a beacon of justice, equality, and freedom. Unfortunately, when americans seek to reassure themselves of this notion, we apparently can not find any contemporary evidence of its veracity; we are forced to look sixty years into the past to find an example of this country’s ability to triumph over an enormous danger and to do so with a magnanimity that proves us to be a ‘good’ people. Regardless of political persuasions, americans occasionally must pay solemn yet treacly lip service to its veterans, in the belief that some connection with them will build credibility for the nation today.

while the fortitude and valor of the men who rushed from the sea or leapt from the skies into france of 1944 is indisputable, it is crucial that americans realize that the accomplishments of those men are three and four generations in the past. The flags that are waving today over suburban homes, mcdonald’s parking lots, and cable talking heads represent more than just that single accomplishment . The flag symbolizes every moment of the nation’s history, both the glory and the stains: every racist cop that has shot an unarmed kid in new york, every family without health care in ohio, every man or woman sleeping in a box under a bridge in atlanta, every my lai and wounded knee and abu ghirab. A few moments of victory does not outshine the multitude of failures. if americans want that flag to be worthy of respect in the future, and if they want to honestly claim an inheritance of the heroism of its past, they should try summoning the titanic forces of toil and ingenuity of the young men, including my grandfather, who charged through fascist steel and flame 60 years ago, and apply them to the injustices and inequities of today. There is no reason that our descendants should not be able to look at today with the same awe and respect for peaceful accomplishments that we lavish on our ancestors for their accomplishments in war.

Otherwise, Regardless of what we can buy or what we drive, our lives are so empty and our claim to democracy so tenuous that we must derive a vicarious honor by repeatedly making grasps at the only movement in our nation’s history that is universally accepted as unquestionably noble. To you well fed fucks, this is our last post.