The Curse

It's a goldmine, I tell ya', a regular cornucopia of wisdom, a deep well of knowledge.

Who needs commentary? Maybe Becca, who has often expressed her own bafflement at this phenomenom, can explain why the Arizona Republican continues to select items like this for regular publication, without correction, without even a decent explanation. It's just there, like something on the ground that you wouldn't want to step in.

"When my 14-year-old son asked me why any American would print something obviously placing Americans at risk, I repeated what the Times said: "It is interesting."

He replied, "It is interesting to know the method to make a nuclear bomb; will they be printing that soon?"

I guess they never got the news. I should be more fair. Maybe dad was too young to remember that this was done back in '79, when Blondie went platinum. It does seem like a long time ago when you put it that way.

"Knoll concludes: We are publishing this article for two important reasons.6 First, we want to show that there is no secret to building an H-bomb. The basic principles of H-Bomb construction are in undergraduate physics texts,7 encyclopedias,8 and documents declassified by the U.S. government.9 Second, we want to show that the key to building an H-bomb is not in discovering the key physical principles (since they are available in the public literature) but rather in developing the hardware, technology and technicians needed to produce an H-bomb. You can’t write the H-bomb secret on a napkin and go into your garage and build one. Building an H-bomb requires box loads of technical printouts. Only governments with vast amounts of technology, manpower, and resources can make an H-bomb. We must dispel the naive notion that no one will figure out how to build an H-bomb if only we keep some documents classified. France, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union and China all built an H-bomb without our help. Yet the cult of top-secrecy was used by the government during the McCarthy Era to conduct politically motivated spy scares and witch-hunts and even today to stifle a national debate about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The key to making the world safer from nuclear disaster is not to try to keep secrets; rather, the key is to force governments to stop building more and bigger bombs."

This issue hasn't gone away. There are still way too many nuclear weapons lying around on this planet, and it's not good for the children. And Bush has revived McCarthyism in a way undreamt-of by its original witch-hunting progenitors.

One more little thing:

"Our successes breed new challenges. As the formal and informal financial sectors become increasingly inhospitable to financiers of terrorism, we have witnessed an increasing reliance by al Qaida and terrorist groups on cash couriers. The movement of money via cash couriers is now one of the principal methods that terrorists use to move funds."

Snipped from here:

Testimony of
Stuart A. Levey, Under Secretary
Terrorism and Financial Intelligence
U.S. Department of the Treasury

Before the House Financial Services Committee

So in essence, and oft repeated in the leftist blogosphere (that is to say, The Real News,), the Gray Lady didn't tell the terrorists anything that they didn't already know. The 2004 report cited above says that not only was the Administration already monitoring the banking habits of practically the entire world, but that terrorists had already changed their financial methods in response to said monitoring.

That was back in 2004, the year of the return of the Curse of Blondie.

Surely dad remambers that.