Everyone knows that we can’t have both environmental protections and a healthy economy with plenty of jobs. If we try to save the environment, we’ll end up throwing people out of work: timber loggers can’t log, coal miners can’t mine, oil barons can’t bar, etc. I think we’re only weeks away from hearing someone posit the converse to this theory, the brighter side to the 2.3 million jobs that went missing in the Bush administration: obviously, the environment must have gotten that much better!

So maybe you’ve heard of the flypaper strategy and maybe you haven’t. In a nutshell, it’s the idea that by occupying Iraq, we can redirect terrorists who would normally be killing civilians in America, or say, Spain, into attacking our troops on the ground there, who are better equipped to deal with that kind of thing. Leaving aside the problem that the soldiers in Iraq aren’t really all that well equipped to deal with terror attacks, and ignoring that the flypaper strategy is obviously not working, a radical thought occurred to me the other day:

If a low-intensity American occupation of Iraq is good for drawing terrorists out of their spider-holes, think how amazingly effective all-out civil war in Iraq would be! Rampaging mobs in the streets, sectarian massacres, brutal reprisals — what terrorist wouldn’t want to participate! I’m predicting now that if Iraq turns into a horrible, bloody mess, you’ll hear at least one person try to find the silver lining in this wise.

Okay, my lighthouse keepers, I need you to find something out for me. Why is R. Kelly wearing a mask all the time now? I know he claims to be the “pied piper of R&B” (and isn’t that an unfortunate comparison to be making, Kells?) but that can’t be the whole story. Here’s a guy on trial for various and sundry transgressive acts involving minors — I think that R. Kelly in a Zorro mask is ruling it, but I could see some people finding it a little creepy.

He’s wearing the mask in his video for Step in the name of love [decent midi, ringtone appropriate] and also in the new Cassidy video for Hotel [horrible midi, ringtone length] — both really very good songs. And now we can see that he wore the damn thing to the Grammys. I would seriously like to know the real story behind this. I will keep you posted if I learn more.

I used to read Adbusters, back when it was fashionable, but I haven’t peeked at it for the longest time. There’s only so much bad news I can take. Canadians lecturing me about USAian culture is also a little grating after a while. And the whole cult of asceticism just bothered me. As if the world could be saved if we’d all just view every one of our economic interactions as a moral choice.

This latest thing they’re doing, publishing “a carefully researched list of who appear to be the 50 most influential neocons in the US” and then labeling which ones are Jewish, just smacks of stupidity. Who are they trying to convince, and what are they trying to convince them of?