I am awaiting an onion-style headline on this one

Because this would be sweet

An earthquake causing weapon?

Why do the accusations of our enemies or their media resemble bad movie plots? And I'm not sure what the Canadians were thinking either (doesn't make any sense that the country was going to be rallied behind Obama because of an earthquake somewhere else. A Canadian paper or whatever should follow our politics at least a little better than Osama bin Laden, you would think).

But basically the really funny part is to look at conspiracy theories, like those, and the amount of thought that goes into forming them, and the amount of stupidity that is required for them to stick around. Which makes the stuff that came out about how to break these things up (the Sunstein approach discussed at the end, or the Bush administration approach to the Iraq war that was left curiously unmentioned) seem incredibly silly. Just let people hang themselves when they say stupid things that aren't grounded in reality or troublesome things like "facts". I guess it's important in other countries to have evidence that Americans are not going around harvesting the organs of orphaned children. But it would seem like in most cases it would be sufficient to simply ask why they would even think we're doing that in the first place (other than that wealthy and famous Americans go around the globe scooping up orphans to adopt).

Other weird news. Apparently we can't have a trial in NYC now for terrorists. I understand precisely zero of the objections to doing this, having trials to begin with or having them in NYC, as sensible. I suspect there is a worldview under which perhaps some of them would make sense, except the people who are on TV all the time advocating this supposed worldview did use civilian trials against terrorism suspects and did have them in NYC (and did get convictions and did not provide convictions or a "stage" for them to spout propaganda). So that whole thing gets sort of weird when you have "thoughts" of your own and start examining the record of this country vis a vis terrorism. The natural reaction I have to the fact that the government appears to be "changing" its mind on this issue and moving the trial is to ask why we thus appear to be taking directions from people whose political and strategic ideas on conducting intelligence and counter-terrorism operations and hence maintaining a system of rule of law closely resembles the system one would get if you allowed it to be run by the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. At least prior to him receiving a brain and the knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem at the end of the film. I might be willing to listen to that combustible and triple-jointed bundle of hay's advice over Cheney's or Rudy Giuliani's at this point anyway.