Still not making sense

Some random thoughts from the newspapers:

• Bush demanding energy independence by 2025 is Jimmy Carter repeating himself as farce. Remember that Carter’s reaction to the Iranian revolution in 1979 was to set out a concrete programme to get America weaned off Middle Eastern oil: “The moral aquivalent of war”, he called it. Reagan wiped the floor with him. Now Bush says the same thing is desirable. (Technically, he says that it will happen, but we know that’s not true and wouldn’t be true even if he meant it to happen). In its pathetic way, it is a clear admission of the utter bankruptcy of the policies that led them into Iraq.

• Am I alone in thinking that far too much fuss is being made about the hundredth dead British soldier? This is a wicked and stupid war; but a war in which only 100 soldiers are killed over nearly three years is not the worst thing that could happen to the British army.

• Big Guardian reorganisation makes it looks as if there will be another concerted effort to improve the web site, which should be fun, especially since the site is pretty damn good already. There is nothing quite like the smugness of people who used to work on the Independent and now find themselves at the Guardian.

• Small logic problem: Jyllandsposten publishes a cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb for a turban. Muslims so outraged by this caricature that they threaten to bomb the paper. Actually, of course, the story is much more complex and interesting. It is not Danish muslims who are still outraged. They seem to have accepted their apology. It’s not clear to me whether the settlement is on the basis that it is wrong to publish insulting pictures of the prophet, or any pictures at all. Perhaps this is something that has been left unclear.

• If you get the chance to see Richard Thompson on his current acoustic tour, don’t miss it. He was superb in Cambridge on Monday night.

• In all the rude things people have said about wikipedia recently, no one seems to have checked its entry for Mormonism which seems to have been very comprehensively edited by Mormons. The reader would suppose there was a serious dispute about the existence of the angel Moroni.

• The very last word on fellatio — actually, quite a lot of words and if you read to the end you may feel there are too many; when I first wrote this entry I had said entirely work-safe if you’re reading in Lambeth Palace but then I scrolled further down and would like to revise this opinion. Language Log is not normally about tongues in such a literal sense..