"The surge is working." And so it's not until page A6 of the New York Times today that we find out that "3 U.S. Marines and More than 30 Die in 2 Bomb Attacks," yesterday in Anbar Province, just west of Baghdad. The story is illustrated with a photograph of a stunned Iraqi boy, watching as American soldiers with giant machine guns surround him, "searching for weapons and militants." "The surge is working." And so we will only hear 2 minutes of news about the Iraq war on all the major news stations this week, according to a recent study. 2 minutes per week. "The surge is working." An editorial in the New York Times today talks about how "Your Brain Lies to You." It's really about propaganda, how we come to accept falsehood as truth. "The surge is working."

And speaking of propaganda: A "Sixty Minutes" reporter, Lara Logan, who publicly criticized the lack of coverage of the war, and lack of truth in the coverage, was suddenly "promoted" out of her Iraq post to foreign affair correspondent in Washington. And then suddenly she was on the cover of the New York Post, being branded a homewrecker. "Sexty Minutes," said the headline.

Meanwhile, Greenland is melting. The polar caps are melting. It's all too real. And the bees are dying. Albert Einstein reportedly said that if the bees go, the human race has about four years left. Bye bye bees, bye bye pollination. Bye bye food. Bye bye, humans. Yet while the U.S. government can manage to find 635 billion of our taxpayers' dollars to fund military spending (the '08 budget), it can only scrounge up $780,000 to study colony collapse.

Great going, Republicans---Bush I and II---who denied the existence of global warming for all those many long years we could have been doing something about it. And what are we doing now? Next to nada. The New York Times also informs us today that the U.S. government has shut down spending on the development of solar power---pending further study!

Some mornings you really want to just lie in bed and say what the hell, it's over. It's all over. Maybe Amy Winehouse has the right idea—at least she's going out with a bang.

And speaking of such nihilistic endings, everybody should see Gonzo, the new documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, directed by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney. It's a fitting tribute, made dazzling by all the footage of the often self-promoting Thompson shooting guns, riding motorcycles and otherwise macho-fying. Thompson had guts. He knew what mattered politically. He was a fantastic stylist. And he was one of the first people in public life to predict that 9/11 would be used by the Bush administration to remake the world in its own image, and it would be an image of hell. He was the first reporter---one of the only reporters----to publicly say that the media did not do its job in reporting the story of 9/11. And he was right. When he killed himself in 2005, it was a very dark day. (My own dad and brother also died that year.) It felt like, ah shit, the world was coming to an end. This was really it.

But that didn't mean I was going to be quiet about it....