From the House of Eratosthenes to the blogroll

Morgan Freeberg is an intriguing guy.

He says he's a liberal.  He disagrees with Republicans about all kinds of things.  He links the Hooters girls with the war on terror.  And he writes with flair.

He's also had some keen things to say here and here in the last couple of days and even defended me over at his place in a post he called wingman:

As the critics and apologists of the New York Times circle each other over this whole SWIFT dealy-doo, the ensuing conflict reminds me of that scene. Rhetorical questions bumptiously posed, which in turn seem to have only a nodding acquaintance, if any acquaintance at all, with the point that is supposed to be made by posing them. Relatively simple matters, made more complicated, not to flesh out obscure points that would otherwise pass by forgotten, but instead to deceive and distract.

Brutally Honest, which is already listed in the sidebar, came up with a couple more of the anti-war posters photoshopped from the World War II days to more directly address the New York Times' speaking-truth-to-power, or seditious-indiscretion, depending on your point of view. The post went up a week ago. For this, the blogger earned the enmity of one of his commentators, who said the blogger was "crazy-ass," "freakazoid," and "sinking into fascist territory real fast."

Unlike the Rashomon duelists, the Brutally blogger preserved his dignity by refusing to engage. I, of course, am not that dignified.

Now, some will assert, I expect, that there's nothing wrong with what the commentator said. Others with a slightly more healthy fixture to the plane of reality, will recognize the commentator is arriving at whatever haphazard conclusions he wants to in order to advance an agenda, neglecting completely to show how these conclusions can be logically supported by anything that was said, or anything that actually happened -- but then go on to assert this is an isolated case.

Well, it isn't an isolated case. People, just like the Brutally blogger, articulate the entirely sensible notion -- the entirely sustainable notion, might I add -- that the Times made a publishing decision running heavy on the peril to our national security, and much more lightly on the value of the revealed information to the public-at-large. For this, and/or for photoshopping some posters, the people who advance this simple observation are called "right-wing nutjobs," "freakazoids," and "neo-cons." The notion that too much information might get some people killed, is summarily pronounced to be delusive, extravagant, half-assed, crazy, and to be nothing more than a reverberation of a cock-and-bull talk-radio talking-point.

Even though, in times past, our government prosecuted people for doing the same thing. This is just a simple fact. If it's okay to do, now, what decades ago was unanimously recognized as treasonous, something must have changed. Has the nature of war changed? Can it be that information is less valuable to our enemies...now that we've jettisoned the moorings of the industrial age, and ventured headlong into the information age? If that's the case, how can this be?

How can it be indeed.

Morgan asks great questions and answers others with style, flair, reason and wit. 

On the blogroll he goes.  Make him a part of your regular blogospheric reading. 

I certainly will.