…the pix of grinning female US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners as a sign that women aren’t necessarily more “moral” than men after all:

“A uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world….”In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.”

…that the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal is simply the most visible recent symptom of a decades-long decline in U.S. values; a decline driven, he believes, not by sex and liberals but by corporate power-madness and individual greed. Smith quotes urban historian Jane Jacobs:

“A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. . . The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, makes it more likely that others will give way . . . until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.”

Philip Kennicott writes in the Wash. Post that the Iraq torture pix present “A Wretched New Picture Of America”:

“These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. There’s nothing surprising in this. These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.”

…of US “private contractor workers” torturing Iraqi prisoners, the Guardian wonders why U.S. newspapers are so eager to not discuss it.

…claims the US occupation force views Iraqi civilians as “untermenschen, the Nazi expression for ‘subhumans.'”

His allegations have a strong beat. You can dance to them. I’d give him a 92.

No, no, no! The defeat of an unpopular (except among US conservatives) Spanish government is NOT “a victory for terrorists.” It’s a victory for those who’ve got a better idea how to deal with terrorists.

…talks about life in the Pentagon before the Iraq war, particularly the religious zeal with which the war was sold internally. Scary stuff.

I really do. But he voted for the Iraq war resolution, for the Patriot Act, and for the zillionaires’ tax cuts. And, scarier, he’s an alum of the Skull and Bones Society, the same top-secret elite Yale club Bush was in!

FROM A NATION that still has at least a semi-free press, comes a huge CBC investigation into all those 9/11 conspiracy theories. What the Canadian TV team was able to confirm as facts is a tiny piece of the theory pie, but even that’s full of scary stuff about the Bushes, the bin Ladens, the small-town cameraderie of the global oil-political elite, and geopolitical strategems that totally backfire.

…via an MIT online journal, offers a list of “Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die.” I agree with almost everything on his list.

• Nuclear weapons; land mines: Only a GOP-machine politico could like those.
• Coal mines; internal combustion engines: Powerful and nostalgic, but wasteful as all heck and often fatal to their operators.
• Cosmetic implants: Usually dorky-looking.
• Lie detectors: Overrated and way fallible.
• Prisons (not really a “technology” but a social institution): A costly waste of human energy, particularly in the war-on-some-drugs US.
• Manned spaceflight: Now Sterling gets into potentially pissin’ offi some of his own sci-fi fandom. But is there really anything those dozen dead shuttle crewpeople did that a radio-controlled robotic space explorer can’t do?
• DVDs: The miracle movie medium doesn’t impress Sterling one whit. He hates their frailty and their copy-protection schemes. He seems to prefer unprotected digital downloads, but fails to answer how downloaders will conveniently store their acquired data. I happen to feel the discs are still way useful, if that dumb CSS and Macrovision can be gotten rid of.
• Incandescent light bulbs: As long as fluorescents are as irritating as they are, the warmth of the classic Edison bulb will, I say in opposition to Sterling, remain most welcome.

…the Iraq War is already lost.

ROBERT SCHEER believes Bush can be impeachable if he can be proven to have known Iraq didn’t have weapons-O-mass-destrux. That begs the question of whether the Dems would even have the guts to do such a thing.

JOSEPH P. KAHN TRIES TO EXPLAIN the rash of movie and product names starting with the letter “X.” No, it’s not so they’ll be listed first in reverse alphabetical order.

AS IF YOU HAVEN’T GUESSED IT, there’ve apparently been no big mass-destrux weapons caches in Iraq. Saddam really was only a threat to his own people.

THE MAJOR RECORD LABELS are rumored to be commissioning virus-type software programs that’d be posted within, or under the titles of, online music files, in order to instill fear into the hearts of MP3 traders. I’m old enough to vaguely remember when the record co.’s claimed to be rebels, or at least friendly vendors of rebellious attitudes. Today’s music monoliths might market one-dimensional celeb images of bad boys and naughty girls, but that’s no more “rebellious” than the sight of Republican politicians on Harleys.

TODAY WE BEGIN a new occasional photo series, Space Available, depicting some of the once-productive retail and office real estate currently made redundant by today’s economic collapse.

…the recently-ubiquitous “No Iraq War” posters is dead. Morgan Griffin, 66, was a retired Seattle Symphony bassoonist who’d survived several obscure illnesses and had learned to live his life to the fullest. His was a life from which we all could learn a thing or three.