Michael Moore did an interview in Japan. It comes off more as though it was from another planet. This stuff is, as Jonah pointed out the other day, not just figuratively childish, but literally childish.

Q: What do you think is the reason for the war?

The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich. The U.S. government claims to bring democracy to Iraq; however, no country in the world takes such an assertion seriously. It is an illusion.

Q: What do you think of Bush?

He is simply a puppet. Behind him, neo-conservative aides such as Rumsfeld or Cheney are controlling him. They are imitating what the Reagan administration did under the campaign of building a “Strong America.”

Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. It’s almost self fisking.

Michael Moore did an interview in Japan. It comes off more as though it was from another planet. This stuff is, as Jonah pointed out the other day, not just figuratively childish, but literally childish.

Q: What do you think is the reason for the war?

The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich. The U.S. government claims to bring democracy to Iraq; however, no country in the world takes such an assertion seriously. It is an illusion.

Q: What do you think of Bush?

He is simply a puppet. Behind him, neo-conservative aides such as Rumsfeld or Cheney are controlling him. They are imitating what the Reagan administration did under the campaign of building a “Strong America.”

Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. It’s almost self fisking.

Nope. Not really.

Reader Charles Grimm emails with a question regarding passengers in spacecraft:

I read the writeup on Rutan’s vehicle in AvLeak, and had a
question: Rutan can take no paying customers in his craft, but private
aircraft owners can share costs of a flight (fuel, oil, I’m not sure whatever
else) with passengers even if they’re not allowed to take paying customers. I
can reimburse a friend for the cost of gas when he flies his plane to keep his
hours up. Could a prospective passenger fork over the cost of the rocket fuel,
to help defray Rutan’s expenses?

Yes, probably, but you couldn’t make a business out of that. Fuel will be a small part of the total expenses. If he just wants to give people rides, he can do so (assuming he gets a launch license), but he’d never make any money at it, and in fact he (or whoever hired him to build it) would lose money.

The Germans are starting to notice that their leaders and media got everything wrong about the Iraq war. Even more amazing, it’s being reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

They don’t yet seem to have developed a taste for crow, though.

Reporters have largely failed to obtain mea culpas from the rejectionists, though the Green Party’s Beer said meekly in a brief statement, “Our assessment was based on information we received from aid organizations.”

Yes, and we all know how infallible and true-blue aid organizations are, right?

Television’s role in molding public opinion was underscored by a recent survey of youngsters at a Meunster high school who had taken part in anti-American peace marches.

None knew where Iraq is located geographically. Nor did any of them know anything about Hussein’s brutal regime. All said they got their information about “the American barbarity” from German media reports — chiefly those of ARD and ZDF.

One of Germany’s great literary figures, author- playwright Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 73, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “The great compassion shown by the media for the relatively few victims of the Iraq war stands in bizarre contrast to its lack of interest for the victims of 30 other and often far crueler wars currently being fought all over the world.”

Enzensberger also had bitter words for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched against the war chanting “No blood for oil.” It came, he said, “from the mouths of people who greatly value their automobiles, their heating systems and their vacation trips, and whose indignation would quickly find another target if the gas stations would be empty, the thermostat below freezing and all flights to…Mallorca were canceled.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

The government used false testimony in the case against Tim McVeigh, and covered it up in order prevent any delay in his execution.

I’ve always wondered what their hurry was in carrying out his sentence. The apparent rush seemed unprecedented in modern times, and made it look like they were more interested in getting him out of the way than in dispensing justice. I’m convinced that there’s much more to this case than meets the eye, or has been widely reported.

The government used false testimony in the case against Tim McVeigh, and covered it up in order prevent any delay in his execution.

I’ve always wondered what their hurry was in carrying out his sentence. The apparent rush seemed unprecedented in modern times, and made it look like they were more interested in getting him out of the way than in dispensing justice. I’m convinced that there’s much more to this case than meets the eye, or has been widely reported.

The government used false testimony in the case against Tim McVeigh, and covered it up in order prevent any delay in his execution.

I’ve always wondered what their hurry was in carrying out his sentence. The apparent rush seemed unprecedented in modern times, and made it look like they were more interested in getting him out of the way than in dispensing justice. I’m convinced that there’s much more to this case than meets the eye, or has been widely reported.

Not to mention science and science fiction writer, and all-around renaissance man.

Dr. Robert Forward, who died last September, started to write his autobiography when he learned that he had terminal cancer. He didn’t have time to finish it, but what he did complete has been put on line.

There apparently were some. Really.