Have you guys heard about the case of Alexis Debat?
A consultant/source/reporter for ABC news, Debat has also written exclusive interviews with Alan Greenspan, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates and most recently Barack Obama for a French magazine
Which is where the trouble started: The Obama interview never took place, which appears to be the case with most of the other exclusives.
Debat’s explanation: He paid reporter Rob Sherman (no relation) to interview Obama, then signed his own name to it, so all he’s really guilty of is being conned by Sherman—well, and not actually doing the work himself.
Only it turns out Sherman, a supposed Chicago Tribune reporter, is as fictitious as the interview (there’s a Chicago radio host of that name, but he didn’t write the interview either).
Speaking as a journalist, printing these interviews as his own work would be unethical of Debat, even if they’d been real. Having them published with no attempt to verify them (in Debat’s story, Sherman met him at a party and told him he could get the Obama interview but Debat made no attempt to confirm this or check it out) would be incompetent.
And Debat blaming his ghost-writer for fraud is no excuse. Put your name on a ghost-written work and it becomes yours, the same way that a politician has to take responsibility for their speech, even though it was written by someone on their staff. If Debat published lies on his own name, they’re his lies and he’ll have to take the heat.
Debat has apparently already been canned by ABC due to his failure to turn up any record that he has the doctorate he claims to have received from the Sorbonne. I hope they’ll go over his stories with a fine tooth comb and see if any of them can be trusted, much as other news organizations have had to do when journalists were proven as frauds.
Debat should also be discredited from any job that requires anything he says to be taken seriously, but Washington being Washington I won’t be surprised if his career as an “expert” keeps running.

Even though it is sometimes inconvenient to carry my stuff around in both a backpack and a computer satchel, my laptop is way too heavy for me to add it to my backpack for convenience. My back was not happy.

Republicans love to talk about how anyone criticizing the war is sending the “wrong message.” For example, Fred Thompson, the new contender for the Republican nomination, said recently that Democrats in Congress are sending a “mixed message” by criticizing Bush and “if we look weak and divided in this country, we’re going to pay a heavy price for it in the future.”
In the first place, if Thompson objects to mixed messages, why isn’t he criticizing the president who announced he was going to take down Osama bin Laden, then let that slide so we could invade Iraq? What could be a more mixed message than that?
In the second place, why is it that the only unmixed message war supporters can conceive of is staying in Iraq? Can’t they imagine some alternative message that would be plain and unmixed?
Here, I’ll help: “We’re withdrawing from Iraq rather than wasting our military resources in a war that has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Bin Laden will no longer be able to use our occupation as a fund-raising and a recruiting tool, or to make it look as if we’re fighting Islam rather than terrorism.
“We’re going to rebuild the power we’ve used over there and reconstitute our military so that if another terrorist attack comes down, we have the military resources to use if force, rather than law-enforcement, is the appropriate response. And no-one, inside our outside the country, will distract or weaken us by convincing us to fight a needless, gratuitous war ever again.”

A recent Daily News article on copper thefts has me wondering what happens if there’s not enough stuff to go around.
From what I’ve read, the reason why copper has become worth stealing — whether it’s taken from construction sites or by ripping the wires out of a house under construction — is that with China and India industrializing, there’s now a huge demand for that stuff, so there’s profit to be made in theft.
That makes me wonder about the future, given that the industrializing of China has barely begun, so their need for copper—and oil, and other materials—will inevitably grow. And what if other parts of the world now in a pre-industrial stage start to move ahead as well?
Right now, the U.S. and western Europe are the apex of the economic pyramid, living at a level the vast majority of humankind doesn’t come close to (houses, cars, personal computers, air-conditioning and central heating, a steady supply of food, etc.). What I’m asking is, are there enough raw materials for everyone in the world to move up the pyramid? And what effect will it have when they try?
Take oil, for instance: What happens if China (or some other nation down the road) begins outbidding us for the oil that now flows into our economy? Will we try to make a go on less oil? Or pay more to keep the spigot turned on, even if China’s bidding pushes the price through the roof? Or following the longstanding doctrine that Mideast oil is a vital American resource, would we use force to maintain the supply as is?
The same questions apply to copper, or any other resource that might become scarce in the future: Is there enough to go around? And if not, how will we cope if our share is threatened? Because someday, it probably will be.
I’ve no particular answer, but I wanted to raise the question.

•A book that made you cry: The Incredible Journey. Lost pets, what can I say?
•A book that scared you: Ramsey Campbell’s horror novel, The Incarnate
•A book that made you laugh: Fish Preferred by PG Wodehouse; Time Trap by Keith Laumer (a classic comic SF).
•A book that disgusted you: Any romance novel that tries to convince me rape is sexy.
•A book you loved in elementary school: Any of the Jennings books, British school stories by Anthony Buckeridge.
•A book you loved in middle school: Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey.
•A book you loved in high school: The Last Unicorn.
•A book you hated in high school: The Great Gatsby. It’s grown on me since.
•A book you loved in college: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by
Stephen R. Donaldson.
•A book that challenged your identity: I’m not sure one has, but the short story “You’re All Alone,” by Fritz Leiber (which assumes almost everyone in the world is a kind of automaton) would have done it if I’d read it a few years younger than I did (I mean—how could I prove it wasn’t true?).
•A series that you love: Doc Savage, Elric, John Carter of Mars, the Cenotaph Road. To name four.
•Your favorite horror book: HP Lovecraft’s collected work.
•Your favorite science fiction book: Hard to pick, but I’ll go with Earth by David Brin. Brilliant piece of near future SF.
•Your favorite fantasy book: Last Call by Tim Powers. A quest for the Holy Grail set in Las Vegas. Marvellous.
•Your favorite mystery book: The collected Sherlock Holmes. It’s surprising how often I quote them to myself.
•Your favorite biography: Tarzan Alive by Philip Jose Farmer. The mock biography of the “real” person Burroughs based the Tarzan legend on. Other Powers, a biography of 19th-century presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, is probably the best true biography.
•Your favorite “coming-of-age” book: The Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander. Chronicles a young farm boy’s growth from a kid dreaming of heroism to a man tackling the real thing.
•Your favorite book not on this list: Any of Stephen Jay Gould’s science histories, Keep Watching the Skies by Bill Warren, Alice in Wonderland, Tarzan of the Apes, Superfolks

Military Times reported this week that a B-52 bomber flew from North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana with a payload of cruise missiles. The cruise missiles weren’t supposed to be nuclear, but five nuclear-warheaded missiles were included by mistake.

Can you imagine if the plane had been headed into combat? “Mr. President, I’m afraid we’ve just started a nuclear war—honest, sir, we thought it was just a regular missile!”

In all seriousness, confusing a nuclear and a non-nuclear warhead is a seriously bad thing to do. Does it happen often, and this is the first time we’ve heard about it? Was it a one-time, inept screw-up? How can it be prevented? The military is investigating, and I hope the investigators do a good job.

I have a short story out online at allegoryezine.com. Title: “Everybody’s Doing It.” It’s the story of a man who finds that “Do as I say, not as I do” no longer works for him … and what happens next.
I keep going to the allegory Web site and looking at my name in print, because I just get such a kick out of it.