If we’re ever together and you just want to piss me off, turn me into Humorless History Girl Who Takes Things Too Seriously, make a surrender-monkey joke about the French. Remind me how we poured French wine down sewers and renamed the fries in the cafeteria Freedom Fries and talked all day long on TV about how the French are pussies who make cheese and run at the first sign of a fight. Go ahead.

I had a dream last night where I approached SF from Sausalito at night on the water. I was in a pick up truck with Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing and as we came over hill I was suddenly in a sea kayak at water level. The sun started hitting the city from the east with a dark sky behind it. The reflected lights off the buildings looked like fireworks. I remember in the dream trying to take a picture with my cell phone and knowing it wouldn’t do justice to the image. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life.

Several years ago a bunch of peace activists were eating in a restaurant in Crawford, Texas, and we noticed George W. Bush. He was actually a cardboard version of George W. Bush like you might get your photo with in front of the White House, but he was almost as lifelike as the real thing. We picked him up and stood him in the corner of the restaurant, facing the corner. We asked him to stay there until he understood what he’d done wrong. For all I know he’s still standing there.

A final hug for our dear friend

One of the most inspiring events thus far at the Veterans For Peace National Convention underway in Miami was a presentation on Thursday by several veterans who have refused to participate in war. Typically, they have done this at the risk of significant time in prison, or worse. In most cases these resisters avoided doing any time. Even when they did go behind bars, they did so with a feeling of liberation.

Next month in Baltimore they’re going to celebrate the War of 1812. That’s what we do with wars. We say they’re the last resort. We say they’re hell. We say they’re for the purpose of eliminating themselves: we fight wars for peace. Although we never keep peace for wars. We claim to wage only wars we have been forced into despite all possible effort to find a better way. And then we celebrate the wars.

Counterterrorism adviser John Brennan spoke at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC on April 30 to mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. It was the first time a high level member of the Obama Administration spoke at length about the U.S. drone strikes that the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command have been carrying out in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

What a bizarre circumstance this is. The irrational Iranians are behaving too reasonably.

President Obama this week declared the war on Iraq to be an honorable success that has given us a brighter future. Are you fired up? Ready to go?

Eric Holder this month explained that it’s legal for a president to kill anyone anywhere, or to imprison them, or to spy on them. I started to get upset about this, but then I remembered that Holder is a Democrat. That made me feel much better.

Leon Panetta told Congress this month that a president can launch a war without Congress and without the United Nations and without any legal restrictions, that a NATO decision to go to war makes a war legal, that a decision by an ad hoc coalition to go to war makes a war legal, and that in fact there’s no way for a war launched by a U.S. president not to be legal.

Is war determined by our genetic makeup? Is war an innate part of humans and subsequently of the human condition? Well respected science writer John Horgan says no, and in turning the matter into one of science rather than morality demonstrates that war is more often avoided than engaged in.