So if you really want to get useful information out of an enemy, you should interrogate them skillfully, getting them to trust you.

Someone should tell Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo. Hell, tell the American people.

Torture is not necessary and not effective.

Geez.

More like "Housecats: just little lions?"
Ours would certainly eat us if she were big and hungry enough. We are only permitted to live because we have hands ans she can't open cans.

"So who won Caption Monkey 17 IT'S BEEN OVER FOUR WEEKS NOW!"?"

@JamesG: many of the documents were considered too shocking or embarrassing for public consumption

Tell! Tell!

I used to suspect that there had been political pressure from the White House to get the shuttle into the air that day in spite of potential risks. Reagan was giving his State of the Union address that night. Certainly he would have loved to make references to "our brave astronauts orbiting the globe" and the first teacher in space.

And obviously NASA would want to keep the White House happy, considering the budget process. But that's simply too cynical an explanation to be true, isn't it?

As it was, Reagan had to postpone the SOTU, and had to talk about their sacrifice.

Sitting at my desk at a stock brokerage firm checking out a client's portfolio on my Quotron.

Quotron would scroll important market news at the top and suddenly "Space Shuttle Challenger has exploded after take-off" came across the top of the screen. All around the office you could hear, "sh*t" and other expletives.

Then immediately the guys began to talk about what stocks to dump. Make profit, or at least minimize loss.

That was when I became certain that job wasn't for me. My initial response to such a major tragedy just wasn't brokerly enough. My clients would always be behind the curve due to my responses or lack thereof.

So it's not Red State/Blue State? It's Brown State/Blue State.

No wonder Rush Limbaugh is portly. It's patriotic!

@Ashley - Thanks for explaining the origin of Clydesdales to me, which I hadn't known before. What is the breeding relationship between Clydesdales and Shires?

My grandmother was always quite proud of her own maternal grandfather, who had driven a six-hitch of Clydesdales as a brewery teamster in Boston for thirty year at the end of the 19th century. Any man who could handle six of those, day in and day out, through clattering city streets in all kinds of weather, must have both stamina and ferocious will.

Mmmmm. Bangers and streaky bacon. You can't get that type of meat very easily in the US.

Is that King Britt's remix of the Edwin Starr classic?

A meditation on the death penalty.

The Roman authorities, mighty superpower of the known world, were absolutely certain that Jesus was a threat to their arrangements and dominance. He was tried in their courts of law, found guilty, and sentenced to be executed.Without an established system of appeals, there was no reason to delay the sentence.

So Jesus was fastened to the wood contraption and killed.

Yes, if he was to be executed today, he would be strapped to a chair instead of to a cross.

How many people are executed today although innocent of any crime? And how many people are executed today for reasons that we are certain are valid but future opinion will consider barbaric.

I only hope that there is not an underground "Church of Saddam" growing in Iraq.

Digger is more than a big horse - he's a proud member of the race of shire horses. The shire horse is the descendant of the medieval Great Horse, which was brought to England in 1066 by William the Conqueror. Their numbers have been on the rise in Great Britain after almost becoming extinct in the 1940s.

Gotta hand it to them - those Brits know how to do bangers.

Here's the scoop on Xenu:

www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuleaf.doc

What? You thought it was a stupid story?

Well, 150 years ago, they called Mormonism a cult, too. Secret revelations, nutty leader, secrets levels, etc. But once they got enough money and power, they became a religion!

So just think of Tom Cruise as Brigham Young.

(Hey, Tom, what have you done to Suri?? What have you done to her eyes, you maniacs!)

Actually, Brady, Hitler was a very devout Christian, according to his own writings and a lot of the propaganda used by the Nazis. ("Gott mit uns", for example.) Athiests were lumped with Communists, Jews, and homosexuals in his litany of those who were destroying wholesome Germany. Of course, his actions don't seem very Christlike, but Hitler described Jesus as a literal fighter and warrior. But you can look it up just by googling "Hitler" and "Christian".

Pointy-smiled clowns. They are the evil ones.

The rest are pathetic and unfunny, but not terrifying.

Acris,

Now it seems that the climate warming skeptics have, for the most part, agreed that humans are contributing to climate change.

They have shifted the debate to whether or not it matters whether humans have affected earth's climates. Something else, they argue, is even more responsible. Sunspots. Natural phenomena. For all we know, the hot breath of angry angels might be responsible.

In any event, there still, according to this argument, is absolutely no reason to change our behavior. Drive! Burn fossil fuels wildly! Tear off the tops of mountains, dump fertilizers and pesticides into the oceans!

Well, there will be change, whether they believe they can affect it or not.