Shinseki wasn't demoted, he was simply allowed to retire at his current rank. He was my division CG at Fort Hood when I was in, and a hell of a guy. I get what you're trying to say, and he was beyond a shadow of a doubt fucked over for doing the right thing, but stating that he was demoted is factually incorrect.

and then you blog about it

Well the irony of that just zoomed over your head.

This from a guy who has been doing drive-by trolling at Salon day in and day out for years now, under countless different aliases, and who shakes his perceptions-of-anti-Semitism thang like a retarded dog with a rag doll. On every thread, every day, at any given hour.

You regularly post more to Salon in a day than most people do in a year; in less than a week, on any given screen name, you've posted more than I have in a decade of reading Salon. Your only recent variant on this schtick is how pissed you are that Greenwald permabanned your worthlessness without regard to your latest screenname, because you're so easy to spot. Oh, the CENSORSHIP!

Yeah--tell us more about the irony, enlightened one.

Kryptogal: Nailed it. I read an overview/review of the recent documentary/book about what would happen if humans were to suddenly vanish from the planet ("The World Without Us")--I believe the author stated that all domestic dogs as we know them would be dead inside of a week, where cats would shrug and move on. Big surprise.

Memorandum: Not all, for sure. I've had women's cat allergies be a dealbreaker, or a major contributor to the dealbreak, on four occasions. I've also seen online dating profiles that explicitly list "no guys that own cats", as apparently you're somehow less of a man for it (insert crude joke about which pussy comes out victorious in that particular conflict here).

Tomreedtoon: What everybody else said. You really ought to consider how the occasionally insightful or good thing you post is massively overwhelmed by the amount of vile crap that you post, and the credibility of the former is swept away by the latter.

Yeah, me. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Stephanie Z. But her popcorn movie reviews are just...I don't know. There's something about them she doesn't get, or isn't able to write about them in a way that connects to me as a reader. I considered posting on O'H's Swamp Thing thread begging that it be him who writes up the Watchmen review. Wish granted!

Very well put. Saw it last night. I think that’s an excellent way of summing up where the movie went right and wrong—extremely faithful to what was drawn, but what was written got short shrift. What made Watchmen great was its multilayered complexity and intensity, and that baby got thrown out with the bathwater here.

Yes, sorry to say, the ‘giant squid’ should have been kept for a multitude of reasons. The least of those would be that it was the true ending of the book. There were far more compelling reasons to keep it—or to come up with something else that had the same meaning and impact if you thought the squid was too over the top. Framing Dr. Manhattan was not it, sorry. I couldn’t believe he even kept the “Outer Limits” reference in there, after the script had totally excised what that was a reference to. WTF.

And the squid being silly, right. That’s somehow silly in a way that stuff like the owlship or Dr. Manhattan’s blue cock aren’t? Please.

Part of me wonders if what amounted to a mass-casualty, terrorist attack on New York that does relatively little physical damage, and is designed to foment goodwill toward the United States…part of me wonders if that original ending was thought to be unacceptable after 9/11, and somebody thought they had to sanitize it for post-9/11 audiences. I can imagine a lot of biting places they could have gone with the original ending, and none of those were explored.

Overall, it was an achievement and a fail on many levels, but the worst of it is this: If I had gone to the movie without reading the book, I’d have left thinking that the book must have been asinine and have had no interest in reading it.

Try this:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/179349, particularly the footnotes at the bottom. Not sure if that's what Sagan was referring to, but I'm sure that'll get you off in the right direction.

Sincere congratulations and thanks for doing what you do. Please don't stop.