Friday No-Cat Blogging

That's right, no cats. And there won't be any, either, until and unless I figure out how to post pix. Getting the hang of HTML is challenging enough.

Information Abhors A Vacuum

Love or hate it, the book "Imperial Hubris"by "Anonymous", a CIA agent who was chief of the CIA Counterterrorist Center's bi Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, was a thought-provoking piece of work. Michael Scheuer, the analyst who wrote it, finally resigned yesterday after 22 years with the agency, saying:

"...I have concluded that there has not been adequate national debate over the nature of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the forces he leads and inspires, and the nature and dimensions of intelligence reform needed to address that threat."

Basically he is leaving so he can continue to prod the country into talking about subjects the Bush administration has been muzzling with charges of treason since it began revving up its war engines in 2001. His book is well worth reading, whether one agrees with everything he says, and hopefully he'll be getting a wider forum now.

AARP Gets A Clue?

Meanwhile, over at AARP there appears to be an ideological rift developing between those who want to call Bush's Social Security plan what it is--privatization and a drain-off of the funds that currently support it--and those who want to further the Bush propaganda that it's not ("doesn't poll well"). Remember it was AARP who helped position the last social net debacle, the new and improved Medicare, by flakking it to their members for Bushco. After the dementia wore off and they woke up to what all the critics had been warning about, they did a one-eighty and publicly wrung their collective hands, as if the information on how elders would be screwed by Big Pharma hadn't been out there for all to see months before it happened. Now I guess some in the organization are a little wiser.

But isn't that what getting older is supposed to be about?

Encephalitis Up 33 Points, Rabies Down 1, Plague Holds Steady

And finally, over at one of my favorite websites, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly,you can read all about the progression of scientific victory over the many little organisms that get us down, as charted over the years.

Now if we could only figure out how to extend that progress to the diseases eating away at the body politic.