The Council Has Spoken!

"You know, sometimes I honestly despair."

So says the Sundries Shack, this weeks Council Winner.

	I listened this morning to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal - to the call-in portion of the show. I heard caller after caller after caller spouting absolute drivel until I finally had to turn it off. It actually made me angry. My hands were shaking. That bothered me because I’m not a man given to physical displays of anger.
	What made me so angry was not that those callers were in possession of the facts and drew a different conclusion than I. It was that their facts were so wrong. Not just that, but they were wrong about things that any elementary-school kid who can use Google could find out. They were wrong about facts that were so easy to verify, if they had only put forth a basic amount of effort.
	It was like listening to people condemning the voyage of the Queen Mary because they just knew it would fall off the edge of the world.

He’s right. It’s willful ignorance and unless we can change that, we’ll end up surrendering.


Non-Council Winner was The Winds of Change. By now, many of you have seen Al Queda Attacks: A Flash Presentation. Stuck as I am with a dial-up modem, even I let it load up the first time I saw mention of it. If you've got a neanderthal connection, too, just let it load while you go do something else. It’s worth waiting for:

The purpose of the presentation is to graphically demonstrate al Qaeda’s ability to conduct mass casualty assaults on a global scale. This presentation by no means documents every single al Qaeda attack. For example, the murders of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and USAID executive Lawrence Foley in Jordan were excluded, as have smaller impact suicide attacks and beheadings by al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere. al Qaeda's butchery in Iraq can fill a presentation of its own. Also, planned or foiled chemical attacks against Jordan, France and England, the assassination attempts on President Musharraf of Pakistan and numerous other incidents throughout the world have not been documented.

The background music is Cat Stevens’ work.


Meanwhile, the rest of us participants are all over at the Watcher’s post here.