Two, to start off the weekend...

Two quick snippets to help us all have a slightly more scary weekend.

First, it was reported today that Michael Mukasey, Attorney General of the United States, says he has two portraits hanging on his office wall.

One is of Robert Jackson, a former Supreme Court Justice and a prosecutor at Nuremberg.

The other is of Eric Arthur Blair, an author of some note, although not by that name. Blair wrote under a pen name. George Orwell.

Yes, according to our Attorney General, one of the two people he felt so connected to that he wanted their portraits up in his office is the author of 1984, with all of its revisionist history and "Big Brother" and double speak.

I can't decide if this is merely quaintly ironic or downright scary.

And if that doesn't just make your weekend, take a gander at this article from the UK's Guardian newspaper.

It reports that five former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands have written a "radical manifesto" for NATO, in which they insist that NATO must be prepared to use pre-emptive nuclear attacks to halt the imminent spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (quoted more or less directly from the article).

Now, read that again. It is not arguing that we need to keep the nuclear option open as retaliation for an extreme attack, nor even that it should be an option when such an attack is imminent. It suggests that we in "the west" should be willing to use nuclear weapons merely to stop other countries from getting nukes and other WMD.

But let's think about this for a bit. We've already seen the government of one country taken down largely over accusations of WMD that turned out not to exist. We've been told that another one is actively seeking a nuclear weapon and may have it any day now, when the experts report that they're likely 10 years away from having such a weapon, and that they don't seem to be trying particularly hard to get one.

So essentially these five geniuses have decided that we should use threat of (and possibly actual) nuclear terror on countries to stop them from doing something we've shown an incredibly poor record of accuracy in detecting.

Remember, we in the United States are the only country ever to drop nukes on anyone. We've lived in fear of nukes for years, with the Cuban Missile crisis and the cold war, and more recently the oft talked about "suitcase bomb" in the hands of a terrorist. But we're the only ones who have ever actually used one against a population.

How much of a bully on the playground do we really want to be, beating up the smaller kids not necessarily for actually doing anything we don't like, but because we've decided they're probably doing something we don't like, even if it's not true?

If this is made part of any country's official doctrine, then it's only a matter of time before some population gets nuked in retalliation for a sin not committed, and we'll become worse by far than the terrorists this action is supposed to combat, to say nothing of sparking the rise of a new generation of anti-American jihadists.

I wasn't alive for the only nuclear war ever to happen on this planet thus far, and I'd really hoped to get out of this life before the next one came along.

Liam.