Link Banana

For a limited time only, you can Google like it’s January 2001. Andy Baio points to a few drastically different searches:

9/11, YouTube, Sarah Palin, or this [his] blog

World opinion diverges enough to shock Blake Houshnell. While the greatest number of people appear to believe that it was Al Qaeda, Israel and America also won big votes. Israel was most often blamed by Arabs, with Egypt showing 43%, Jordon 31, and Palestine a (mere) 19.

Curiously, Mexicans were the second most likely — at 30% of those polled — to blame the United States. Turkey (36%) was the first, Palestine third at 27, and Germany fourth at 23.

Well not really. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, widely called “the mastermind of 9/11,” is refusing to take a lawyer because the United States allows same-sex marriage. He explained:

I will not accept anybody, even if he is Muslim, if he swears to the American Constitution,” he said, vowing to follow Islamic shariya and scorning the U.S. Constitution “because it allows for same sexual marriage.”

(via Passport)

David Bromwich’s piece in the New York Review of Books feels like the extension of the argument made by Ed Ruggerio about My Lai. His — decidedly anti-Bush — conclusion:

Yet nothing so much as language supplies our memory of things that came before today; and, to an astounding degree, the Bush and Cheney administration has succeeded in persuading the most powerful and (at one time) the best-informed country in the world that history began on September 12, 2001. The effect has been to tranquilize our self-doubts and externalize all the evils we dare to think of. In this sense, the changes of usage and the corruptions of sense that have followed the global war on terrorism are inseparable from the destructive acts of that war.

The Economist’s got a rather interesting infographic today, about the continued strength of conspiracy theories. Unsurprisingly, the “9/11 conspiracy” was the most often found by Google, but I was rather surprised that Area 51 and Elvis are more popular than the more salacious stories of JFK or Diana.

Three interesting editorials were in the NY Times yesterday.

• America’s favorite anthropologist/geographer, Jared Diamond, wrote “What’s Your Consumption Factor?”
• Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton wrote a stinging rebuke of the CIA’s noncompliance during their work on the 9/11 commission, which led (perhaps forced) the Justice Department to open an investigation.
• And the Ed Board wrote this nice paragraph in a rebuke of Bush’s economic record.

Hoping for the best is facile if not paired with preparation for the worst. Perhaps more than anything, a lack of preparation makes it hard to believe Mr. Bush’s assurances that all will be well. The administration has operated in a state of economic denial for years: conducting wars while cutting taxes, piling up debt, neglecting to regulate the financial sector even as it went on a lending binge, and ignoring the pain that was sure to come when consumers, bankers and investors sobered up.