I wonder exactly what President Bush is being told in the White House about events in Iraq, which are by all measures getting worse by the day, because he said this yesterday:

My attitude is, don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working — change. Stay the course also means, don’t leave before the job is done. We’re going to get the job done in Iraq.

Let’s break that down because the (lack of) structure is a bit confusing:

My attitude is, don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working — change. If what you’re doing doesn’t work, try something else.

Stay the course also means, don’t leave before the job is done. Don’t stop until you achieve your goals.

We’re going to get the job done in Iraq. Ah… Now here’s the tricky bit. What he’s doing in Iraq clearly isn’t working, but he’s against any change of tactics. This bit contradicts the first thing he said.

There’s a technique in hypnosis and persuasion techniques where you use deliberately confusing sentence structures to occupy the rational mind, and then give it a clear and easy direction immediately afterwards. The conscious mind latches onto the clear instruction and accepts it because it resolves the uncertainty that it was facing before, even if that instruction would usually be rejected. Could it be that this technique is being employed by Bush, either deliberately or subconsciously? Either he’s immensely deluded about the situation in Iraq or there is some very sneaky stuff going on in his language.

EDIT: Or he could simply be an idiot with no clue and a lucky linguistic quirk. I really shouldn’t jump to paranoid conclusions!

Who would have thought it?

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yes indeed, invading Iraq, showing a militaristic and insensitive face of American politics, demonstrating a sense of global imperialism, cultural ignorance, denial of flaws, and absolute lack of self-questioning has made the threat of terrorism worse rather than better for the American public. That’s the conclusion of the largest survey of global terrorism by the American intelligence agencies since 11th September 2001.

For an example of the lack of self-questioning, let’s look at a nice quote from a recent White House report entitled ‘9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges’:

We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.

The Bush administration continues to assert that they are winning ‘the war against terror’ while their own agencies are saying the exact opposite. We’ve all been saying the opposite for a long time now: attacking a country in the middle-east without provocation or legitimate evidence of planned attacks, and without a plan for how to improve the conditions for people in the country after the invasion (by direct order of Donald Rumsfeld) was always going to solidify and justify extremist arguments against America and its allies.

So, invading Iraq has made America and its allies more, rather than less, at risk from terrorism. In other news: jumping off cliffs frequently results in injury. Some might consider that to simply be logic, rather than a revelation, but it appears that sometimes it really is needed that the obvious has to be driven home with a hammer.

Source.

*except if someone wants to misuse them.

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus.

Suddenly pencils and paper look even better, don’t they?