I was surprised to find that Goldwater gave in to the trademark fear-mongering of modern conservatives. We're always reminded by liberals about "good conservatives", and Goldwater is commonly described as one. Perhaps Eisenhower should be the new example of a good conservative. He was the last Republican president to work within a liberal consensus (FDR's), he used his VP, Nixon, to neutralize the right-wing, and he was a dove compared to both the Democrats and the Republican right-wing. He effectively kept the Cold War cold, and warned against a politically-active military industrial complex in his farewell to the nation. He also said this in his farewell, which made me tear up a little when reading it because it made me think of 9/11 and something that Bush, or anyone, should have said to a grieving nation:

"Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment. "

Regarding your conversation with Jane Hamsher, and the decision to postpone primary challenges until 2010, I was pretty disappointed. Ideally, if Accountability Now is a long term project, shouldn't we have really started in on the challenges back in the spring? This would have gotten our name out there in order to scare more incumbents, and it would have depleted incumbent war chests. After all, the first attempt at depleting someone's war chest is no good unless there's a second or even a third attempt. I mean, we've got to build a reputation for tenacity. Besides, this year would have been an excellent opportunity to go after a horrible Republican with an accountable populist or libertarian, given that Republicans are going to be in the minority. Another advantage to that is that we would start building a bipartisan reputation. Hell, it's not too late to fund some third party candidates or good Republicans (if you can find em') in general elections against a bad Democrat! Get creative and spend some money!

I don't know about anyone else, but my government's inability to function democratically or rationally is really stunting my ability to swallow orthodoxy. I mean, who am I to deny that the HIV virus was engineered to kill black people? Why not? Because it killed gay people first?

That was a joke, by the way. A little icebreaker -- dark comedy for dark times. The crux of this crisis of confidence we face is this: Commoners like myself cannot be relied upon to trust the version of history handed down to us by elites who act like children. I refer especially to Washington. We cannot and should not trust a craven press that is run by fewer and fewer corporations, is laying off investigative journalists (is there any other type?), is dependent on government leaks for "stories", and in the most reckless examples, regurgitates raw, toxic government propaganda. We cannot and should not trust a Congress that refuses to exercise its sovereign authority to check the President on the most serious problems facing the nation. Finally, it is self-evident that we cannot and should not trust this bumbling, inept, corrupt, lawless, unaccountable, unapologetic, lame, crass, cringe-inducing President.

So where does that leave us? Academia, I suppose. However, elites have corrupted this institution as well. The cynical, hollow politics of resentment that Nixon perfected has transformed dormant anti-intellectualism into an absurd faux-populist check against addressing any problems that science has deemed necessary to correct. And, is it any coincidence or surprise, at all, that Congress is not holding hearings, with actual economists, to come up with its own solution to this credit crisis? No -- for the same reason we don't have a plan to deal with global warming.

Why do we lose people to the din of conspiracy theories and junk science? Maybe they have given up trying to understand this crazy world. Maybe the world of misinformation is their balm, their drug of choice, their National Enquirer. Maybe we don't teach enough critical thinking in schools. Maybe, just maybe, we should all elect a third party to the presidency this year. Any will do -- Libertarian, Green, Greenwald, Socialist Worker's, Mickey Mouse (No? Too corporate?), Sharpton-Jackson, Colbert-Stewart (and where the hell is Law and Order's Jack McCoy and his Unity Ticket!). Maybe politicians need to know that we're capable of purely cathartic political action en masse in order to take us seriously. Maybe if we knew we had that sort of control, if we knew this was a true democracy, we would start acting like rational, responsible citizens.

Hey thanks Jim,

Okay, so does anthrax dried with silica produce antistatic properties? I have a rough idea of how spores surrounded by bentonite clays are antistatic: the outward face of the clay particles hold a charge, and they repel like charges from other spore-bentonite clumps that happen to float nearby. But what's silica supposed to do? Is it even possible to make glass or quartz particles small enough to stay airborne, indoors?