Colbert's real sin wasn't lese majesty, it was inserting a brief moment of honesty into an event based upon a lie -- one considered socially necessary by the political powers that be, but still, a lie.

Like its upscale sibling, the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the White House Correspondents dinner is a ritual designed, at least implicitly, to showcase the underlying unity of our Beltway elites. It's supposed to demonstrate that no matter how ferocious their battles may appear on the surface, political opponents can still gather in the same room and break bread, with the corporate media acting as the properly neutral host. It's a relic of the good old days of centrism and bipartisan log rolling ("the end of ideology"), visible proof that in the American system, there may be enemies, but there are no mortal enemies. And so last night we had Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame sitting at one table, Karl Rove at another, and no knives were drawn.

Another good analysis, this time by billmon...

The Blog | Billmon: American Nightmarez | The Huffington Post

Microsoft Corp.'s long- awaited release of the upgrade to its flagship Windows operating system will likely be delayed again by at least three months, research group Gartner Inc. said on Tuesday.

Internet News Article | Reuters.co.uk

The White House Correspondents' Association Dinner was televised on C-Span Saturday evening. Featured entertainer Stephen Colbert delivered a biting rebuke of George W. Bush and the lily-livered press corps. He did it to Bush's face, unflinching and unbowed by the audience's muted, humorless response.

Astonishing. Colbert is on fire "delivering truthiness to power" as I heard it described. Honestly, Colbert has brought satire back to a prominence long missed, and he's doing it in an extremely hostile environment here. The press corps and guests are visibly stunned.

Daou's analysis here is worth reading, but watch the video first. There are links scattered about, but if you've got the time and bandwidth, get the high res torrent here : http://www.mininova.org/tor/296239

The Blog | Peter Daou: Ignoring Colbert: A Small Taste of the Media's Power to Choose the News | The Huffington Post

I've taken the existing transcripts I've seen of Stephen Colbert's brilliant monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and the actual footage (complete video available at Democratic Underground), and edited the transcripts (correcting spelling and punctuation, adding mistakenly omitted words, etc.) to produce the following improved transcript. I have now also transcribed all of Colbert's Press Secretary "audition video." Continue below the fold with me.

Daily Kos: Re-Improved Colbert transcript (now with complete text of Colbert-Thomas video!)

Neighbors gawk and children yell, "ghost!" The manager of the restaurant where Panya Boonchun worked simply told her she was fired.

The cream that she applied to her face and neck was supposed to transform her into a white-skinned beauty, the kind she saw on page after page in women's magazines and on television.

But rather than lighten her complexion, the illegally produced lotion she bought in a local grocery store near this village in southeastern Thailand disfigured her skin into an unsightly patchwork of albino pink and dark brown, a condition that doctors say might be irreversible.

At a time when whiter skin is being aggressively marketed across Asia as beautiful and healthy, Panya's case illustrates the lengths that some women will go to change their complexions - and the dangers that this sometimes entails.

What price glamour? A hard lesson in Asia - Health & Science - International Herald Tribune

In the first few moments of the documentary film "Baghdad ER," we see a man dressed in hospital scrubs carrying a bloodied arm that has been amputated above the elbow. He deposits it in a large red plastic bag.

the reality of war whether justified or not
the real reason why, as an instrument of foreign policy, we should use it as a tool of last resort

Warfare as It Really Is - New York Times

Sometimes, if you're lucky as a historian, you find a bit of evidence which illuminates a big idea. That happened to me this week in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative - they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.

The manuscript I found was a ship's journal kept by a 17th Century English sea captain, who had offered to carry some state-of-the-art scientific equipment on a voyage to the west coast of Africa and back - two new pendulum clocks.

nice

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Believe it or not: The battle over certainty

Look no further than the triple bombing this week at the Sinai resort of Dahab, where most of those killed and wounded were Egyptians, to fully appreciate the lie behind Osama bin Laden's latest message that the West is on a crusade against Islam.

If anyone is on a crusade against Muslims it is Al Qaeda itself, whose sympathizers most likely carried out the attack in Dahab, the third in Sinai in 18 months.

Once again, for Muslims, it's 'us versus us' - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

Ever since liberalism emerged in the 18th century, its inevitable conflict with autocracy has helped shape international politics. What James Madison called "the great struggle of the epoch between liberty and despotism" dominated much of the 19th century and most of the 20th, when liberal powers lined up against various forms of autocracy in wars both hot and cold.

Many believed this struggle ended after 1989 with the collapse of communism, the last claimant to "legitimate" autocracy, and was supplanted as the main source of global conflict by ancient religious, ethnic and cultural antipathies, a view seemingly confirmed by Sept. 11, 2001, and the rise of Islamic radicalism.

But the present era may be shaping up as, among other things, yet another round in the conflict between liberalism and autocracy.

nice article but one point the writer misses is that the fight against al-Qaeda is itself a struggle against autocracy for what else is the goal of a pan-Islamic Caliphate than an autocratic political model

League of Dictators?

Jello wrote:

The History of India is an iterative function with the following structure:

char History_of_India(int residents = Dravidians)
{
int intruders;
char Indian_history[ENDLESS];
.
wend{
.
intruders = Hindukush::read_stack();
if (intruders==0,Intruders = British Empire,);
working_their_way_down_the_ganges(intruders);
Indian_history = Squabble(residents,intruders);
.
residents = intruders;
}while t lt END_OF_TIME
.
return Indian_history
}

This function is not the current function as it omits public base class intruder_philosophy with its child members buddhism, islam and democracy-western_secular_empiricism.
Also note Chinese history which works from a similar iterative function of which Chinese historians have been aware for centuries. Smart buggers. Although China seems to treat democracy-western_secular_empiricism as a float rather than an int.

RE: India - Uncyclopedia