This is kinda interesting but less than surprising is you’ve read Lawrence Wright

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”

These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.

[From Daily Kos: State of the Nation]

Of course, if true, the very uncomfortable part is that this implicates both Bush / Cheney and Clinton. Not that that is such a surprise as it was mostly under Clinton’s watch that half a million Iraqi kids were sanctioned, with Saddam taking a fairly hefty portion of the blame too, to an early grave.

Madness, just complete madness…and the Islamic nutters are worse how?

Fascinating piece on the decline of the monolith from Redmond:

Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

[From Daring Fireball: Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline]

Can Windows 7 halt the decline, does anyone care about Office 2010? The answer to both those questions seems to be s fairly strong no (and I’m writing this on a Mac, but think the iPhone is a pretty toy when put next to a Blackberry or a Pre so I’m no iDisciple).