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An excerpt from Hubris, a new book about the Iraq war by David Corn and Michael Isikoff:
After the invasion, Dick Cheney's aides desperately sifted through raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify the war. On one occasion they sent the WMD hunters in Iraq a satellite photo that they suspected showed a hiding place for WMDs. But it was only an overhead photo of a watering hole for cows.Mark A, who sent this excerpt, comments: "Mad cow disease. Methane gas bombs. These are WMDs."
Also, I love "after the invasion." Could we somehow put to rest the notion that Cheney is a super-competent bureaucrat? The press still believes this, just as it keeps repeating that the equivocating politician John McCain is a "straight talker." Cheney is a paranoid controller and a vain SOB, but he is not competent. He's a bungler.
"Anthropos Essentia" [4.8 MB .mp3]
The title is copped from A. A. Attanasio's book Centuries, 1997. The A.E. were an earth colony on Mars trying to live "old school"--rejecting ion washes and Simviv (and therefore longevity), growing their own food, and warring with the Cogs (robotic minions of the Silicon Mind). One of the colony members wrote a profound piece of music called the "Datum Surface Raga," which helped the metasapient earthling Rafe von Takawa find spiritual equilibrium, much as the datum surface expresses a kind of average level of the shifting Martian topography. The Anthropos Essentia have a secret that will not be revealed here.
Update: made various edits throughout the song, and it's now shorter in length.
"Bass-o-matic" [mp3 removed]
This is the piece I was describing here, process-wise. All the sounds came from the same model of drum machine, with filtering and other sampler manipulation. Mostly they're my samples, but a few came from a Linplug kit that recorded the same piece of analog gear. One thing I'm happy about is the way the song switches meter several times, getting progressively looser and more "rockin" as it goes along.