Over and above a recent brush with the dreaded Blogger Archive Bug, my archives have been fubar for some time. I finally got fed up and decided to fix them, but of course, I had no idea how to do it.

I discovered that my archive template had somehow gotten trashed. I have no clue what goes into an archive template, but Blogger has a whole bunch of them. So I created a temporary second blog and copied the archive template from that to the Cognocentric archive template.

It didn't work. Reference to my archives was eliminated altogether.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I copied the blog template from the temp to Cognocentric, too.

Lo and behold: Archives, in all their splendor

One drawback: Site meter is gone. Well, come to think of it, that's probably just as well. My numbers were just above seriously depressing.

So I am going to celebrate my newfound archives by linking to an old post about the beast.

Why that one? Because I have art!

This:



has become this



and this

 
The professor notes several bloggers (Robert Schwartz and Porphyrogenitus) who say that the looting of the National Museum in Iraq is a little fishy.

No one seems to have tried to tie in the fact that Saddam apparently turned the electricity off in Baghdad:

The city was experiencing the first widespread power outage of the war. Bombs rocked the city before the blackout, but U.S. military officials said they had not targeted Baghdad's power grid.

The AP story quoted above was on April 4 (Friday) about the loss of power the day before.

 
Poker, anyone?

I have got to get a deck of these cards.



Two questions:

How long will it take for them to show up on Ebay?

And

If Saddam is the ace of spades, who is the joker, and who is relegated to the card displaying the ranks of poker hands?

Via CNN.

 
An interesting open letter (with a small addition from a little noted but very astute blogger ... AHEM!) from Andy on the WorldWide Rant.

The same also appears at the Command Post, if you prefer.

More than a hundred comments so far, but no signers.

I think he hit a nerve.

Betcha no one signs it.

Via Stephen Green.

 
Hanoi Jane on what it means to win a war:

"What it's going to mean for (America's) stability as a nation, for terrorism, for the economy - I can't imagine,'' Fonda said Tuesday.

The admission that she has no clue somehow fails to prevent her from expressing her opinion, however.

"I think the entire world is going to be united against us.''

Her uninformed opinion has consequences, too:

That frightens her, she said, but she isn't sure what Americans can do about it.

"I don't know if a country where the people are so ignorant of reality and of history, if you can call that a free world,'' she said.

Just free enough for you to tell us you can't imagine what will happen, followed immediately by you telling us what will happen, Jane.

Speaking of ignorance of history and reality, do you think Jane has looked at the history and reality in Southeast Asia, recently? (At any time since, say, 1976?) I was against the war in Vietnam, too. Not to put too fine a point on it, my actions, along with those of millions of others useful idiots, prevented the US from winning that conflict, and that entitled millions of Vietnamese to death, starvation and "re-education", and other social benefits available in that peculiar workers paradise. Would the US have won in the absence of the massive protests? Maybe not, given the strategy being employed. But neither Jane nor I helped the situation.

The difference between us is that I now realize what my error cost (despite being American and thus totally ignorant of reality and history). She doesn't.

 
It's taken 10,000 years, but look how far we've come. All the way from the Assyrians and Sumerians to the bliss that is modern day Iraq.

From CNN:

Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said postwar Iraq would continue to stay under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, and the coalition forces would be gone.

"We will chase them and go after them as war criminals," he said, adding that the "United States will no longer be a super power and its demise will be very quick" after the invasion of Iraq fails.

Sahaf warned that the war would bring nothing "except humiliation and defeat" to the coalition forces.

"Iraq will stay. Its civilization is 10,000 years old and it will not change by villains like those British and American villains," he said.

I suppose the UN would give them another few thousand years to see if they can get representative democracy right. I don't think either we or the current population of Iraq can afford that luxury.

 
DoD has weighed in with their choice of name for Saddam International: Baghdad International. BOR-ING! Even worse than Liberation. They get extra credit, though, for having captured the place to begin with.

 
OK, we control the airport. It's time to stop calling it Saddam International. We need a naming contest. My entry:

Liberation International.

Dull but accurate.

All entries received by email at careygage-at-yahoo-dot-com (you know what to do with the dashes) will be posted here.

 
Who, exactly, does he thinks believes this crap?

From CNN:
Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf called reports of coalition forces on the outskirts of Baghdad "an illusion."

"They're not even [within] 100 miles," he said. "They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion. ... They are trying to sell to the others an illusion."

This is with our people at the damn airport twelve miles away! You think maybe we could time the final offensive so that a Pfc from 3rd Infantry could walk in and make a guest appearance during the next news conference this fool holds?

 
This is a scathing attack?

Via Drudge.

Funnyman Robin Williams has launched a scathing attack on President George W. Bush and his decision to go ahead with war on Iraq.

The "One Hour Photo" actor also criticizes what he sees as his country's mixed messages when it comes to national security.

He says, "America is broke, basically, but Bush wants to wage a war that costs pretty much a billion dollars a month.

America is broke? Well, I agree that this economy is not the one we had in 1998, but it is hardly the Great Depression. In 1932, we were broke. Now? No. Certainly we are in better economic shape than we were at the beginning of World War II. And Williams' proposed alternative is ... Well, he doesn't say. He says we can't afford the war, but doesn't discuss the cost of not replacing Hussein. He doesn't say what we should do, only that we can't afford to do what we are doing.

"We have a president for whom English is a second language.

The gibe about Bush's oratory has become commonplace. The man is no Reagan, when it comes to public speaking. But then, Reagan needed a script. Did you ever see him answer questions at a press conference? It was awful, with a few exceptional one liners, like "I'm paying for this microphone." Clinton was a far better speaker, in both scripted and especially contemporaneous situations. But being a good speaker doesn't mean the proposals you are speaking about are automatically good. Come on, Robin, if you want us to agree with you, give us something besides old and irrelevant sarcastic comments.

He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself.

Just how is Bush a "pretty much" a dictator? Can we have some specifics, please? Is Williams a candidate for the plastic shredder? Is the FBI about to arrest him for dissing Dubya? And, by the way, does Williams not want to "get rid of dictators"?

"In America, we have orange alert, but what the hell does that mean? We're supposed to be afraid of Krishna? Of orange sorbet?

I'm no fan of the color coding, either, but I haven't heard any suggestions concerning what should be done to keep the nation aware of the likelihood of another terrorist attack, either instead of or in addition to instead of the existing system. Williams certainly provides no guidance on the matter.

Then it's like, 'You can't go out and shop, it's too dangerous out there,' but if that happens then the economy falls.

Only two or three paragraphs ago, we were told that the economy had already failed. We're broke, remember? And of course, I haven't heard any Bush administration representative say it was too dangerous to go out and shop, much less Bush himself.

"The message is so mixed: 'Be afraid, but not too afraid.'"

Actually, I think the message from the beginning of the color coded threat level system has been "Be alert, but don't be afraid." In announcing the system, the press release stated, "At all Threat Conditions, we must remain vigilant, prepared, and ready to deter terrorist attacks." And while I don't know how much help it will be to have 300 million Americans being "alert," I certainly don't think it will do any harm.

I like Robin Williams. I find him hilarious, and I have for years. I think he is an excellent "serious" actor, as well. But, if this "scathing attack" was intended to be funny, I have to tell you, it didn't even make me crack a smile, much less laugh. And if it was intended to be a serious criticism of the Bush administration, then Williams seems to be completely out of ideas for solving the problems he is complaining about. And that is not funny, either.

I think I made the right choice when I stopped taking political advice from show biz types, and that was when Jane Fonda went to Hanoi.