Permissive Action Links, or PALs, are on our nuclear missiles to ensure that no one can, um, shoot 'em just fer fun.

Comes now Monster, in wonkish mode, with a link to a really scary story.

Here's an excerpt:

Last month I asked Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, what he believed back in the 1960s was the status of technical locks on the Minuteman intercontinental missiles. These long-range nuclear-tipped missiles first came on line during the Cuban missile crisis and grew to a force of 1,000 during the McNamara years — the backbone of the U.S. strategic deterrent through the late 1960s. McNamara replied, in his trade-mark, assertively confident manner that he personally saw to it that these special locks (known to wonks as “Permissive Action Links”) were installed on the Minuteman force, and that he regarded them as essential to strict central control and preventing unauthorized launch.

When the history of the nuclear cold war is finally comprehensively written, this McNamara vignette will be one of a long litany of items pointing to the ignorance of presidents and defense secretaries and other nuclear security officials about the true state of nuclear affairs during their time in the saddle. What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

Breathe deeply. And again. It'll be okay. I hope.

Here.

His bizarro word rhythm and gleeful disregard for punctuation makes even his most banal utterances sound dramatic. At the grocery store, he stared at a plump tomato and then put it back. ''I DON'T. Buy the tomatoes with. The stems. On them. They don't. Degrade. They go. Down the sink. And into the WATER. Then. They get lodged in the throats of little. OTTERS.''

Awesome.

Last night at the Fillmore, during the Yo La Tengo show, I sent the same text message to (nearly) every cell phone in my address book:

tell me why.
seriously.

I'm not a big texter, first of all, and I haven't talked to many of these people in a while, so this message almost certainly didn't continue some previous conversation. I have, however, on more than a few occasions, sent other random messages. I can't seem to resist.

Without any context, would anyone take the message seriously, or would my past behavior tip them off that this was the same old bullshit? Would two lines of text out of the blue cause them to dig up and reanalyze a forgotten bone of contention between us? Or prompt some level of self-questioning based on an old conversation?

The first message went out at 10:55pm. Here are the responses I received.

---

ALLY at 10:55pm:

You dont get to know

This is meaningless. Ally is my roommate; she sniffed out my attempt at contextless communication and replied perfectly in kind. Bah! A gold star for her.

Extra points for being really, really quick to respond.

---

DOM at 10:56pm:

Please resend message with area code. Your message to [omitted] could not be delivered.

I get these sometimes. It seems to be the response my phone gives me for a couple of different transgressions, including, but not limited to, sending text messages to 415 area-code cell numbers without the 415 prefix. Sigh. This took Dom out of the game, as well as Maria and Susan.

---

MARA calls at 11:00pm.

I obviously have no transcript of what was said, but it was something like this:

E: [plugging opposite ear at show to enable phone conversation] Hi.
M: Tell you what?!
E: I'll call you back. It was a meaningless message.
M: OK.

---

MICAH at 11:12pm:

oddly enough, i'm in d.c., it's 1am, and the message ringer just scared the crap out of the four of us sleeping. :D talk to you some (cont.)

MICAH at 11:12pm:

other time. -m

Well. Micah, an old friend of mine, just totally ignored the question posed in the message, gave a friendly status update (he's apparently taken to "group sleeping"), and dismisses me. Why do you ignore the pointed question I messaged you, Micah? Is it because you can't take the heat? Is it because of your sinful, sinful ways? Or is it because you were in apparently in a state of blissful, sweaty post-group-coital slumber?

Shit, I gotta remember to do this earlier for the midwesterners and east-coast peeps.

---

JEN at 11:30pm:

Just because baby

Jen gives a flippant, Ally-esque answer, even though I tried to grab her once (unsuccessfully) in a bar. There is therefore ample opportunity for her to interpret my text message in a serious way, yet she totally refuses to be drawn in. A gold star for her.

---

MATT K at 11:32pm:

what do you mean? Seriously...

Simply flipping the question around isn't completely elegant, but the critical message is conveyed: I know that you are totally full of shit, and though I am mocking your pathetic attempt to incite me, I'm also willing to aid this bullshit endeavor. Two gold stars -- the extra one is for inviting a response.

---

MATT B at 11:55pm:

Probably because u r gay

This cocksure bitchslap earns highest marks.

---

MICHELLE at 12:40am:

Nothing better 2 do. Grad school would strangle me

We've got a winner! Michelle thinks that the message is really saying "For the love of fuck, why are you going to law school?" But Michelle and I haven't discussed the law school thing in a while; thus the contextless message reveals the crux of the matter! Behold!

By the way, Michelle: don't go to law school.

---

ANDREA at 4:43am:

are u up

Sister Andrea texts, ominously, at 4:43am -- in a time zone two hours later than PST -- asking if I'm conscious. Yow, Andrea, what were you doing? Don't answer that.

A hundred work-hours later, Salto's back and will be more frequently updated with non-porn items.

Monster has been banished again.

That is all.

What a hero!

This reminds me of the David Cross bit on friendly fire.

A: Well, [mother of soldier], there's good news and bad news.
B: *sob* What's the bad news?
A: Your son has been killed.
B: *louder sob* What's the good news?
A: He was killed by "friendly" fire! So.

normaly hated . todya it is not. just today tho.

Something is wrong here. Are they autistic or something?

Childless couple told to try sex

A German couple who went to a fertility clinic after eight years of marriage have found out why they are still childless - they weren't having sex.

The University Clinic of Lubek said they had never heard of a case like it after examining the couple who went to see them last month for fertility tests.

Doctors subjected them to a series of examinations and found they were both apparently fertile, and should have had no trouble conceiving.

A clinic spokesman said: "When we asked them how often they had had sex, they looked blank, and said: "What do you mean?".

"We are not talking retarded people here, but a couple who were brought up in a religious environment who were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate."

The 30-year-old wife and her 36-year-old husband are now being given sex therapy lessons while the university clinic undertakes a study to try to find out if there are more couples with a similar lack of sex education.

I'd give a dollar to know in which "religious environment" they were "brought up."

Monster is taking over for a day or two while I get my wits about me.

Play nice.

The band's name is the Coral. The record is called Magic and Medicine.

Reviews here.

The only other thing that even comes close lately would be the new Of Montreal record, Satanic Panic in the Attic.

Hey gang of four! Bad news and good news:

The bad news is that E was traveling over the weekend and is now back home, slavin' for the man, so Salto will totally suck for a few days. "Suck" is here a relative term; if you prefer Salto to remain content-free (as some undoubtedly do) (you know who you are) then it won't suck at all.

The good news is that I've decided to explode Salto into an all-purpose blog with a bunch of politics crap thrown in. I've arrived at this decision because (a) I'm bored with the blog and (b) it's fucking boring to read.

Eclectic content! Coming soon!

That is all.

I would like to take this time to tell all four of my regular readers that I have really been enjoying Steve Gilliard's blog. He writes a lot, with heart, and I always feel refreshed afterwards.

He's a little obsessed with food, but I even read that stuff with great pleasure.

...(I think Billmon is really, really good too, though different.)

Read!

I do wonder what honest supporters of the war are telling themselves now. There was no threat. There was no planning for the occupation. We are hated by the people who we professed to liberate and we have destroyed our reputation in the Arab world we were pretending to teach a lesson about democracy. The Arab-Israeli peace process is in tatters and we are reduced to begging the very same United Nations we treated so contemptuously to bail us out of the mess we’ve created. In the meantime, Americans are in the hundreds are being killed a year after the president proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” and we have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to make neither ourselves nor the rest of the world any safer.

He goes on to call for Rummy's trial on the basis of, at least, criminal negligence.

Hot stuff.

No internet from work and Salto is gettin' killed by the hours he's puttin' in.

A must-read.

Ouch.

It makes me a little sad to see the disco-era contortions the right is making to defend their sad little President and his sad little war.

For instance, this:

The righteous indignation over the behavior of our military personnel … please!!! These people were previously subjected to god only knows how much worse! So fucking what if there are a few pictures circulating where these POWs are wearing women’s underwear on their faces. So what?!! I did worse to my younger brother when he was little,{yes, there are pictures of my then 5 year old brother wearing a bra with tennis balls, a dress [mine], high heels} ~ my younger brother was humiliated more than these POWs. As far as wearing a leash and being led/dragged around?

Yeah… cry me a river, I went through worse just pledging my college sorority. And they were forced to pose naked, with other men. These are men that are culturally/fanatically religiously raised to aspire to sex with 72 different women!! Let’s not pretend that deviant behavior is something the US has single-handedly introduced to the Mid-East. Whatever pictures of these men were taken, they could have been worse, they could have been men on fire dangling from bridges.

Now in all fairness… while I would never grasp so far as to think that Rumsfeld ought to be fired, I don’t think George W. Bush is entitled to his shock and abject {uhm… do you think he’d know that word?} disgust. After all, might young Ms. England have thought that pictures like that to be ok? Do the names Uday & Qusay conjure up any disturbing and morbid images? I’m not saying I had a problem with the pictures of them dead, far from it actually, I’m simply saying that GWB set a precedent. And the pictures of the Brothers Grimm were far worse. And guess what? That sure as hell wouldn’t have entitled American Arabs to start killing non-Arab people so tough if the Iraqis get incited. 5 guys wearing leashes is a down payment on the electricity, water and democracy you’ll have when we leave.

Lovely, huh?

One conclusion that could be drawn is that sorority girls shouldn't be allowed near computers.

Yeah, cheap, I know.

...watch out for this, too:

Be on the lookout for the Bush administration to start fudging things regarding the abuses at the Abu Gharib prison. Specifically, watch for them to slyly insinuate that the abuses happened in a context in which Americans were being killed and defiled like the civilian contractors killed in Fallujah.

Read the whole thing!

Are you fucking serious?

Rumsfeld did not describe the photos, but U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

Do not underestimate the influence of the prisoner-abuse scandal.

In Baghdad, Shiite followers of Mr. Sadr held a rare joint Friday Prayers service with Sunni Muslims at the hard-line Abu Hanifa Mosque in the Adhamiya neighborhood, once a stronghold of Saddam Hussein and the scene of fierce battles involving American soldiers last month. Organizers said the cooperation showed that Iraqis were united against prisoner abuse.

Not good.

Digital cameras (and apparent criminal behavior) further endanger the Bush administration's misadventure in Iraq; the resulting photos enrage Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

For many units serving in Iraq, digital cameras are pervasive and yet another example of how technology has transformed the way troops communicate with relatives back home. From Basra to Baghdad, they e-mail pictures home. Some soldiers, including those in the 372nd, even packed video cameras along with their rifles and Kevlar helmets.

Bill Lawson, whose nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is one of the soldiers charged in the incident, said that Frederick sent home pictures from Iraq on a few occasions. They were "just ordinary photos, like a tourist would take" and nothing showing prisoner abuse, he said.

"I would say that's something that's very common that's going on in Iraq because it's so convenient and easy to do," Lawson said of troops sending pictures home. He added that his nephew also mailed videocassettes "of him talking into a camcorder to [his wife] when he was going on his rounds."

But in the case of prisoner abuse, the ubiquity of digital cameras has created a far more combustible international scandal that would have been sparked only by the release of Taguba's searing written report. Since the "60 Minutes II" broadcast, pictures of abuse have been posted on the Internet and shown on television stations worldwide.

Here.

This is outrageous.

Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.

"Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn't mean I listened to him," Mr. Emanuel said. "He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that's why he didn't want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn't want a Disney company involved."

Did I mention that the 4/19 press gaggle is still gone?

Which one was that?

Oh yeah.

That was the one where all of the stuff about Bush conspiring with a foreign power to influence the election was talked about.

Haven't heard much about that lately. But I have heard that Kerry's wife's finances are really important.

Strange.

Looks like it's gonna be fun.