"In case of emergency, the parking brake may be used as an adult novelty item."



Let's read the government's lips... and do a little ventriloquism.


Stressed out by government announcements about biological weapons attacks? Read these captions to scare-tactic illustrations from the US government's ready.gov site.



The parking brake one gets the prize for Warning Sign Most Likely To Be Taken Seriously in San Francisco.



Meanwhile, I was waiting in my chiropractor's office this morning and heaved her enormous Vanity Fair onto my lap to bide the time. Flipping through the scary skinny people pages (looking for the article on the Miss World Pageant) I found a gritty article detailing how the US government is using time-honored scare tactics (i.e. a la Stalin) to preempt a strong anti-war movement. I was astonished that such a commercial magazine had tackled such a charged subject -- how US Americans are "sleep-walking" into war. It was too bad the chiropractor was running on time-- I didn't get to read very much. But I did catch the bit about how Sean Penn is playing the part of the "useful idiot" (a Leninism) by the Bush regime, since his three day fact-finding trip to Baghdad. All they have to do is make his life miserable, and his cause laughable, and in the future celebrities will leave the anti-war protesting to the relatively invisible college students in order to keep their day jobs. No messy blacklist. The author (whose name I don't remember) also talks about how the government has neatly tied the hands of academics to keep them from speaking out against the war effort.



I thought it was pretty brave to do such an expose in the current climate. Well, looking for Vanity Fair online, I find that they are not based in the US. Thus their bravery in truth-telling.



It brings to mind that adage "The first casualty of war is truth." I guess the first English source of that quote dates back to the brilliant Dr. Samuel Johnson:


Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

(The Idler, 1758)




What for a truth-lover to do? Read your news about world-wide pro-war media bias at the UK-based Media Workers Against the War website.