Foxholes

Christina Patterson: Fashion's denial of the skeleton in its closet
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-fashions-denial-of-the-skeleton-in-its-closet-844175.html

An atheist (almost) to the end

Perhaps it's because he looks a bit like the Archbishop of Canterbury, or perhaps it's because, as he very bravely told the world, he's losing his mind (to a truly horrible disease), but the famous atheist Terry Pratchett, near-genius creator of fantasy worlds, has, apparently, succumbed to one himself. "I suddenly knew," he said in an interview this week, "that everything was OK". "On the other side of physics," he added, "there just may be an ordered structure from which everything flows." Well, who knows, there might be – though, as we all know, from Bush, and Blair, and Bin Laden, suddenly "knowing" something is rarely an indication of anything very reliable. Still, I hope it's some consolation. Next up, Richard Dawkins.

A Lack of Excrement

George Bush has expressed regret that his rhetoric in the run-up to the war in Iraq may have created the impression that he was a warmonger.

"I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric," Bush told the Times as he flew across the Atlantic on Air Force One.

The phrases he used to win support for the war such as "bring 'em on" and "dead or alive" he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

Book XXVIII

( XXVIII: Philip K. Dick, Voices from the Street (New York: Tor, 2007) )