Life-size blue whale

This is what the internet is for. What did I learn? Whales are big.

A tastelss joke at the expense of a woman who almost certainly doesn't deserve it.

To wit:

I'll bet George McGovern wishes he's thought of this.

Coalition Support Funds

Seems that we've given Pakistan a sizable fortune to be our buddies. How much do you imagine went to the guys who replaced the guys that arranged for the Saudis to pay the 9-11 hijackers? Do not forget that Pakistan was a serious thorn in our side up until 9-11 because we were sactioning their asses over their nuclear weapons program. And you *know* what we do to countries with nuclear weapons programs. Wait! That's right!! We give countries with nuclear weapons programs lots and lots and lots of money. Like Pakistan and India and North Korea. It's the countries that we tell lies about that get bombed into rubble.

Excuse me. I was distracted.

So. Pakistan gets money and they still haven't closed the border with Afghanistan. And there are still those frontier provinces where the Pakistani government is *forbidden by Pakistani law* to go. What is it that we've gotten in exchange for this money? We get to use an old Soviet air base. Which if we'd conquered Afghanistan in the first place instead of poncing off to Iraq, we wouldn't need.

The links between the Pakistani intelligence agencies and the 9-11 hijackers are very, very interesting. And the Pakistani nuclear weapons designer was offering his services to terrorists around the world. I'd say Pakistan is an enemy of the US. And giving them money is giving them comfort, no? Surely to god treason is an impeachable offense?





ITMFA

The Middle East is getting weird again

The Saudis are calling the US occupation of Iraq illegal.* I'm not sure I understand what's going on there. The US occupation of Iraq made the gajioillionaire Saudis into fantasticamajillionaires. And this is the way they repay their long-time partners in crime?

The Bush family has been doing business with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens for generations (see American Dynasty by Kevin Phillips). For the Saudis to condemn the actions of a Bush presidency is...well...weird. Maybe they smell blood in the water.






*This is a NY Times article so you may need to go to www.bugmenot.com and get a Times username and password. The one I used was obscene.

Pollution footprints can get complicated

I'm converting the house over to compact florescent bulbs by an attrition process. I am aware of the mercury problem. I wonder if the statement in the article that the trade-off between the mercury in the bulbs and the mercury put in the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants is favorable is accurate?

Oh, and in further exploration of the crappy writing that is the news on the internet:

"One problem with recycling is that it isn't cheap.

Larry Chalfan, executive director of the Zero Waste Alliance environmental group, said the value of the metal, glass and mercury reclaimed from recycling fails to offset the cost of the process. "Someone has to pay," he said.

Costs can range from 20 cents to 50 cents per bulb -- not a paltry sum when some CFLs sell for less than $2 at Wal-Mart.

But, compared with the overall lifecycle cost of buying and using a bulb, recycling would be less than 1 percent, said Paul Abernathy, executive director of the Association of Lighting & Mercury Recyclers, "a small price to keep the mercury out of the environment.""

1% of what? It never seems to fail that when reporters start talking about percentages, they get confused.

A little paleo-mammalogy for Wednesday morning

The evolution of the reptilian jaw into the mammalian ear is pretty interesting stuff and here's a transitional form that fascinates.

Be sure and read the whole article and then read Comment #8. I laughed out loud. And made a sort of snorting noise.

Why not Kucinich?

I've asked that question before.

Since I didn't get any sort of response, I assume that all 30-something of you that seem to be regular readers are going to vote for Kucinich. Here's one of those consumer decision reinforcement messages.

I just sent Dennis $50. Money is the key to success. Without money in Kucinich's coffers the Democratic nomination will go to either Hillary or Barak. Hillary who will not say her vote for the war was wrong. And Barak who thinks all our problems will be solved if we just hand them over to God. Hillary and Barak who have each voted to continue funding the war.

Flash! Pigs can't swim to Hawaii

Similar to the guys looking at cow DNA to find the origins of the Etruscans, here we have guys looking at pig morphology and DNA to find the origins of the Polynesians.

ITMFA

I know that a lot of you will howl that your Senators and Representative are Republicans. So? Let them know how you feel about the rule of law and their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic...without any mental reservation.

An...odd...headline

It seems that the AP has something against DNA evidence in criminal cases. They must; why else write a headline that implies that DNA evidence was in error when that was absolutely not the case?

But, it does make you wonder what really happened in the earlier case. But, then again, that's why so often previous conviction are inadmissible as evidence -- to avoid jurors like me saying, "What the hell?!??"

UPDATE: It seems that link up there doesn't take you where I wanted you to go. Try this one. But it doesn't have the peculiar headline, which was "Man Acquitted by DNA evidence guilty."

Why do we put up with the crimes being committed in our name?

We arrested, detained, and then rendered unto Somalis and Ethiopians -- a great pair of models of the rule of law, there -- 80 prisoners captured during our little coup in Somalia, back on the winter. And among those prisoners were babies -- infants. It was essential to the safety of the US that we make prisoners of children? I hate these bastards with every fiber of my being.

Don't kid yourself: these crimes are being committed in your name. YOU are doing these things. And you don't seem to care. I'm becoming pretty pessimistic about the future of the American experiment, myself. And, at the end, it'll be our fault. And you don't seem to care about that either. I mean about the end being a possibility. I guess there were good Germans in 1931 who didn't think things could get any worse for them, either.

It's getting harder and hard to be glib about the shit we're in

A few weeks ago I would have headed this post with something that started like "I'm shocked -- shocked..." Tomorrow I'll probably be back at it but tonight it looks grim and bleak and just terribly, terribly sad.

Seems a French intellectual is laying the blame at the feet of those most responsible: the rich. It seems that the super-rich are the ones destroying this planet. Do they really think that they don't have to live here, too?

"Uhm, I advise you to terminate this investigation of me that's about to start."

A question of legal ethics on Gonzalez's part and a question of taking impeachable action on the part of Dear and Glorious Leader.

Neither of those things come as a shock to anybody and yet we don't storm the federal buildings and the White House. We deserve what we get.

I would say "ITMFA" but nobody seems to have the will to do so. It seems that the Democrats just want to have a bunch of hearings. If I had faith that they are merely building up the list of things the bastards have done wrong, hoping that it will come to a critical mass in the public's consciousness, I guess I could wait but we've have to watch this shit for 6 years. Do you think that anybody is going to get more outraged?

Oh, well.



ITMFA, I guess.

The House makes it clear that they expect the People to be able to look at things they own

With veto proof votes, the House says that the People of the United States have a right to look at documents prepared for and by their employees, the President and Vice President.

What possible non-nefarious reason could Dear and Glorious Leader have for wanting to block the release of presidential papers? I can't think of one and, as far as know, the administration has never really given one, other than that catch-all of "national security."




ITMFA

Clearly Dear and Glorious Leader knows that he's in trouble

I just wish I was as certain that administration troubles over the Attorney General were not going to go away.

But take a look at these paragraphs:

"The White House dispatched presidential counsel Fred Fielding to Capitol Hill to negotiate the terms of any testimony by White House aides in an institutional tug-o-war reminiscent of the Watergate and the Iran Contra scandals

"Fielding is a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, hired by Bush this year to handle just these kinds of demands by the Democratic-controlled Congress."

Just the kind of experience this administration needs to be on the look-out for, no?




ITMFA

The vaunted Canadian health care system is failing this former defence minister

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070228/wl_canada_afp/canadaenvironmentkyoto_070228180440

We live in a science fiction universe #45,876

As my pal Greg remarked, this was less scary when it was just a Philip K. Dick story.

One of my (many) perennial problems when I served my years on the Little Rock School Board was my compulsive need to point out to education PhDs that we know almost nothing about how learning takes place. When the mouse scientists figure out how this drug works, i.e. what chemical process it is interfering with exactly, then it'll be a lot easier to give mice (and then kids) a shot of the good stuff in order to insure that they don't forget things.

Will there be howls of indignation sent up by the right? And the left? And purt' near everbidy else? Oh, yeah. But they won't be able to give a good, coherent argument as to why they're arguing against making children learn. I'm looking forward to it.

No responsible media, no responsible opposition, no responsible citizens

We're pretty pathetic. Seymour Hersch has been reporting about the plans of the administration of the Dear and Glorious Leader for war on Iran for a couple of years and, as Tom Engelhardt points out, nobody seems to give a damn.

I don't really have any doubts that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear weapons. In their place, who wouldn't? Iraq gets invaded but North Korea gets a pass. The difference? A million man army is a big deal but nukes that can be flung at Japan are bigger. I believe that I would be working very damned hard to get nukes I could fling at Israel in order to protect myself from invasion by the Great Satan.

I don't really have any doubts that the Iranians are assisting insurgents in Iraq. Why shouldn't they? Their closest neighbor, inhabited by co-religionists, is under occupation by a nation that has declared undying enmity to Iran. I'd be trying to get the occupiers to go home, too.

But, does the "threat" posed by Iran to the US justify getting in bed with the very people that attacked the World Trade Centers? Make no mistake: we are assisting the terrorists that attacked us. Let me repeat that in capital letters: WE ARE ASSISTING THE SAME KIND OF TERRORISTS THAT ATTACKED US. And I don't mean the same kind in the sense that they're terrorists and they will use terror tactics. I mean the same kind as in they got their educations in the same madrassases and they trained in the same training camps and they get the same support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and they believe in exactly the same thing: the US is a thieving tool of Shaitan and deserves to reap the whirlwind.

The Global War on Terror is a farce. Iran is no threat to the US. Iran is, however, a threat to Iraqi Sunnis and to Saudi Arabia. The Bush family can tolerate no threat to their business partners, the Saudi royal family and the, uhm, what is that name? Oh, yeah! The bin Ladens. So to protect the business interests of his friends and family, Dear and Glorious Leader will ally with anybody, even Sunni extremists, who are allied with al Qaida itself.

And this isn't a secret. Seymour Hersch has been telling us at the top of his lungs. And nobody cares. These are not just impeachable offenses, they're treason. Bush and Co. shouldn't just be removed from office, they should be put in prison. Or worse. Think of the lives wasted in Iraq. Think of the lives that are going to be wasted in our wars against Iran and Syria and Yemen and Indonesia and against the Philippine rebels. And against the Chinese when the sucking sound of "no more oil" starts drowning out diplomacy. Eye for an eye is rough justice but it's justice, none the less.

And treason is a capital offense.




ITMFA and then try him for treason and let the chips fall where they may

I thought we were all over this "rock is a tool of Satan"

But apparently Pope Benedict XVI believes otherwise. He has criticized John Paul II for deciding to appear with Bob Dylan in 1997 at one of those "youth events" John Paul was always doing. Benedict believes rock music is the work of Satan and canceled the annual Christmas pop concert at The Vatican last year. Benedict has a new book _John Paul II, My Beloved Predecessor_, and he says, "There was a reason to be skeptical and I was. Indeed in a certain sense I still am today. I have doubts to this day whether it was right to let this kind of so-called prophet take the stage (in front of John Paul II)."

Ah, religion.

I am shocked -- shocked -- to find out that this was news to anybody

It always comes as a big surprise to people to find out that most people don't have the same income they have. Oh, they know it intellectually but they always, on some level, imagine that everybody in the US has the same standard of living because they don't know anybody that's doesn't.

Sigh.

An excellent resource for the doin's of Congress

This is a whole helluva lot easier to use than Congress's own sites.

I don't think they're brazen

I think they think we're morons. And, of course, they are correct.

Seems that Halliburton is moving to Dubai.

Without further comment

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/06/milosevic_staked/

The SF Book Club's Most Significant List

I've put the ones I've read in bold.

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

There is a non-theist in Congress

Well, one who will admit to it.

When the Secular Coalition of America started looking for elected athiests, I had already lost my most recent re-election campaign.

My god, we're smart monkeys. But mice are smart, too

Seems that there's still more stuff that other mammals can do that we once thought was strictly the province of herman beans.

Mice can make decisions about how much they know.

This is how they support the troops

Keep in mind that the vast majority of the armed forces are from the classes of people that this administration habitually rapes. They can't break their habits.

From Salon:

The Army is ordering injured troops to go to Iraq

At Fort Benning, soldiers who were classified as medically unfit to fight are now being sent to war. Is this an isolated incident or a trend?

By Mark Benjamin

Photo: Reuters/Jason Reed

George W. Bush greets troops and their families on the tarmac before his departure from Fort Benning, Ga., on Jan. 11, 2007.

March 11, 2007 | COLUMBUS, Ga. -- "This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

The 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade is now leaving for Iraq for a third time in a steady stream. In fact, some of the troops with medical conditions interviewed by Salon last week are already gone. Others are slated to fly out within a week, but are fighting against their chain of command, holding out hope that because of their ills they will ultimately not be forced to go. Jenkins, who is still in Georgia, thinks doctors are helping to send hurt soldiers like him to Iraq to make units going there appear to be at full strength. "This is about the numbers," he said flatly.

That is what worries Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, who has long been concerned that the military was pressing injured troops into Iraq. "Did they send anybody down range that cannot wear a helmet, that cannot wear body armor?" Robinson asked rhetorically. "Well that is wrong. It is a war zone." Robinson thinks that the possibility that physical profiles may have been altered improperly has the makings of a scandal. "My concerns are that this needs serious investigation. You cannot just look at somebody and tell that they were fit," he said. "It smacks of an overstretched military that is in crisis mode to get people onto the battlefield."

Eight soldiers who were at the Feb. 15 meeting say they were summoned to the troop medical clinic at 6:30 in the morning and lined up to meet with division surgeon Lt. Col. George Appenzeller, who had arrived from Fort Stewart, Ga., and Capt. Aaron K. Starbuck, brigade surgeon at Fort Benning. The soldiers described having a cursory discussion of their profiles, with no physical exam or extensive review of medical files. They say Appenzeller and Starbuck seemed focused on downplaying their physical problems. "This guy was changing people's profiles left and right," said a captain who injured his back during his last tour in Iraq and was ordered to Iraq after the Feb. 15 review.

Appenzeller said the review of 75 soldiers with profiles was an effort to make sure they were as accurate as possible prior to deployment. "As the division surgeon and the senior medical officer in the division, I wanted to ensure that all the patients with profiles were fully evaluated with clear limitations that commanders could use to make the decision whether they could deploy, and if they did deploy, what their limitations would be while there," he said in a telephone interview from Fort Stewart. He said he changed less than one-third of those profiles -- even making some more restrictive -- in order to "bring them into accordance with regulations."

In direct contradiction to the account given by the soldiers, Appenzeller said physical examinations were conducted and that he had a robust medical team there working with him, which is how they managed to complete 75 reviews in one day. Appenzeller denied that the plan was to find more warm bodies for the surge into Baghdad, as did Col. Wayne W. Grigsby Jr., the brigade commander. Grigsby said he is under "no pressure" to find soldiers, regardless of health, to make his unit look fit. The health and welfare of his soldiers are a top priority, said Grigsby, because [the soldiers] are "our most important resource, perhaps the most important resource we have in this country."

Grigsby said he does not know how many injured soldiers are in his ranks. But he insisted that it is not unusual to deploy troops with physical limitations so long as he can place them in safe jobs when they get there. "They can be productive and safe in Iraq," Grigsby said.

The injured soldiers interviewed by Salon, however, expressed considerable worry about going to Iraq with physical deficits because it could endanger them or their fellow soldiers. Some were injured on previous combat tours. Some of their ills are painful conditions from training accidents or, among relatively older troops, degenerative problems like back injuries or blown-out knees. Some of the soldiers have been in the Army for decades.

And while Grigsby, the brigade commander, says he is under no pressure to find troops, it is hard to imagine there is not some desperation behind the decision to deploy some of the sick soldiers. Master Sgt. Jenkins, 42, has a degenerative spine problem and a long scar down the back of his neck where three of his vertebrae were fused during surgery. He takes a cornucopia of potent pain pills. His medical records say he is "at significantly increased risk of re-injury during deployment where he will be wearing Kevlar, body armor and traveling through rough terrain." Late last year, those medical records show, a doctor recommended that Jenkins be referred to an Army board that handles retirements when injuries are permanent and severe.

A copy of Jenkins' profile written after that Feb. 15 meeting and signed by Capt. Starbuck, the brigade surgeon, shows a healthier soldier than the profile of Jenkins written by another doctor just late last year, though Jenkins says his condition is unchanged. Other soldiers' documents show the same pattern.

One female soldier with psychiatric issues and a spine problem has been in the Army for nearly 20 years. "My [health] is deteriorating," she said over dinner at a restaurant near Fort Benning. "My spine is separating. I can't carry gear." Her medical records include the note "unable to deploy overseas." Her status was also reviewed on Feb. 15. And she has been ordered to Iraq this week.

The captain interviewed by Salon also requested anonymity because he fears retribution. He suffered a back injury during a previous deployment to Iraq as an infantry platoon leader. A Humvee accident "corkscrewed my spine," he explained. Like the female soldier, he is unable to wear his protective gear, and like her he too was ordered to Iraq after his meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon on Feb. 15. He is still at Fort Benning and is fighting the decision to send him to Baghdad. "It is a numbers issue with this whole troop surge," he claimed. "They are just trying to get those numbers."

Another soldier contacted Salon by telephone last week expressed considerable anxiety, in a frightened tone, about deploying to Iraq in her current condition. (She also wanted to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.) An incident during training several years ago injured her back, forcing doctors to remove part of her fractured coccyx. She suffers from degenerative disk disease and has two ruptured disks and a bulging disk in her back. While she said she loves the Army and would like to deploy after back surgery, her current injuries would limit her ability to wear her full protective gear. She deployed to Iraq last week, the day after calling Salon.

Her husband, who has served three combat tours in the infantry in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he is worried sick because his wife's protective vest alone exceeds the maximum amount she is allowed to lift. "I have been over there three times. I know what it is like," he told me during lunch at a restaurant here. He predicted that by deploying people like his wife, the brigade leaders are "going to get somebody killed over there." He said there is "no way" Grigsby is going to keep all of the injured soldiers in safe jobs. "All of these people that deploy with these profiles, they are scared," he said. He railed at the command: "They are saying they don't care about your health. This is pathetic. It is bad."

His wife's physical profile was among those reevaluated on Feb. 15. A copy of her profile from late last year showed her health problems were so severe they "prevent deployment" and recommended she be medically retired from the Army. Her profile at that time showed she was unable to wear a protective mask and chemical defense equipment, and had limitations on doing pushups, walking, biking and swimming. It said she can only carry 15 pounds.

Though she says that her condition has not changed since then, almost all of those findings were reversed in a copy of her physical profile dated Feb. 15. The new profile says nothing about a medical retirement, but suggests that she limit wearing a helmet to "one hour at a time."

Spc. Lincoln Smith, meanwhile, developed sleep apnea after he returned from his first deployment to Iraq. The condition is so severe that he now suffers from narcolepsy because of a lack of sleep. He almost nodded off mid-conversation while talking to Salon as he sat in a T-shirt on a sofa in his girlfriend's apartment near Fort Benning.

Smith is trained by the Army to be a truck driver. But since he is in constant danger of falling asleep, military doctors have listed "No driving of military vehicles" on his physical profile. Smith was supposed to fly to Iraq March 9. But he told me on March 8 that he won't go. Nobody has retrained Smith to do anything else besides drive trucks. Plus, because of his condition he was unable to train properly with the unit when the brigade rehearsed for Iraq in January, so he does not feel ready.

Smith needs to sleep with a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine pumping air into his mouth and nose. "Otherwise," he says, "I could die." But based on his last tour, he is not convinced he will be able to be in places with constant electricity or will be able to fix or replace his CPAP machine should it fail.

He told me last week he would refuse to deploy to Iraq, unsure of what he will be asked to do there and afraid that he will not be taken care of. Since he won't be a truck driver, "I would be going basically as a number," says Smith, who is 32. "They don't have enough people," he says. But he is not going to be one of those numbers until they train him to do something else. "I'm going to go to the airport, and I'm going to tell them I'm not going to go. They are going to give me a weapon. I am going to say, 'It is not a good idea for you to give me a weapon right now.'"

The Pentagon was notified of the reclassification of the Fort Benning soldiers as soon as it happened, according to Master Sgt. Jenkins. He showed Salon an e-mail describing the situation that he says he sent to Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley. Jenkins agreed to speak to Salon because he hopes public attention will help other soldiers, particularly younger ones in a similar predicament. "I can't sit back and let this happen to me or other soldiers in my position." But he expects reprisals from the Army.

Other soldiers slated to leave for Iraq with injuries said they wonder whether the same thing is happening in other units in the Army. "You have to ask where else this might be happening and who is dictating it," one female soldier told me. "How high does it go?"

New look

I'm not sure I like it.

I've got to figure out how to get the picture of the thorns back.

Okay, I got the thorns back.

I'm liking it better the more I fool with it.

How -- epic? -- can hypocracy get?

Gingrich might as well have said, "Yeah, well, I didn't lie about it. I just didn't bring it up."

Biofuels -- BAD!

I've been preaching this for quite some time now. Very bad idea, to convert food production to fuel production or to put more land to the torch and plow.

Seems the Democrats may be willing to go after Cheney

I would certainly hope so. I just wonder why we're in the second week of March before we get to it.




ITMFA

Yes, we're smart monkeys...

...but this much information can't be good for our monkey brains.

I have no doubt that the rise in the incidence of mental illness and learning disability will be shown one day to be a product of the truly staggering increase in the amount of information we're called on to process everyday. Our brains just can't cope with it. A brain that evolved to hunt small mammals and run from big mammals can do lots of other, ancillary stuff, but there comes a limit.

And walking around with an ear-mounted telephone so that you have someone yammering at you the entire time you're conscious can't possibly be positive. And the absolute necessity of iPods or similar devices so kids can listen to a constant stream of music? And the difference in the way movies and television is recorded, filled as it is with frenetic jump cuts, doesn't give the brain as much chance to parse what it just saw.

Why, in my day...

You kids get out of my yard!!

Yes, yes, yes, they can sterilize the planet but it would cost money to look for them...

...and, you know, that would mean less money spent on making the super rich super richer.

We're some pretty damned smart monkeys, aren't we?

Geology is science and science is cool.

A plea to those that are passionate about human spaceflight

Call your Congressional delegation. Call the presidential candidates. Call the White House.

Oh, those wacky astronauts!

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/ap_070303_exp14_wasabi.html

Oh, you say "It's only fundamentalist Protestants and Muslims that are crazy."

The sooner mankind outgrows religion the better.

It seems that the Catholic Church is beginning to draw up a profile of the Anti-Christ so they'll know him when they see him.

Do you think Jerry Falwell has ever read a book?

It seems that he's an expert on environmental science. But then, I can't think of a subject on which he's not an expert.

No good will come of this

Seems that the new Sanhedrin (which I told some of you about a few years ago) is going to do some sort of Bronze Age, sun-god worshiping ritual at the site of the Temple. I don't imagine that their neighbors, the Medieval, moon-goddess worshipers will much care for it.

The sooner mankind outgrows religion the better.

Perhaps I'm too fascinated by the $100 laptop

But the graphical interface sounds neat.

Swiss Army knives need little GPSs in them

I know they're neutral and all that but "no ammunition"? That's just....dumb.

Are free weeklies the only real newspapers left?

I can't envision a regular daily paper coming out against a new auto plant.

I've always thought these corporate welfare schemes were wrong and I'm just enough of a nationalist to think they're really wrong when they go to foreign corporations.

Need an uplifting, cheery tale of a child's struggles against authoritarian governments?

Then you're shit out of luck because there's nothing good in this story of the US detaining an Iranian couple and their Canadian son after an emergency landing of a non-stop Guyana to Toronto flight in Puerto Rico.

It was a bad day...

...to be a Malaysian company trying to sue a branch of the Chinese government and not wanting another branch of the Chinese government to be trying the case.

But the SCOTUS unanimously says it ain't any business of the US federal judiciary. And, in my completely unlawyered opinion, they got it right.

I wonder if MLK and Malcom X are spinning in opposite directions?

A group of blacks want to be "legally" Cherokees? The majority of Cherokees said that if they weren't descended from Cherokees then they aren't Cherokees? Charges of racism are being flung around. Citizenship for minorities is a pretty slippery issue. Do you think that the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution would have survived popular vote at all times since 1870? Would they now?

"possible torso"??

Read the second paragraph. Do they not teach journalists how to write anymore? I'm pretty sure that I could identify a hunk of meat as a human torso. I also know what the 'graph is supposed to be saying but the argument that the meaning is clear is the argument made by people that don't know how to write copy.

"Accepted usage" is a real problem for me. I hear people claiming that languages grow and evolve and that we don't talk like Chaucer did and that there shouldn't be a problem with changes in usage. There's a flaw in that argument: we're a literate society. Once the majority of people in a particular language group can read and write, the rules should become pretty inflexible, I would think (and hope).

As to the article, the authorities are charging him with disinterment? I'm not sure where that charge is coming from unless he buried her himself and then dug her up and it hardly seems fair to charge him for that.

I think the glowing rabbit crossed some kind of line...

...but doing stuff to bacteria or your own cells is utterly and completely ethical. And I realize that eating meat and objecting to the rabbit is hypocritical. I've been working on my animal rights issues for a long time and I just keep coming back to the status of homo sapiens as a top predator. This is probably just selfishness and egocentricity and I'm still working on it.

This also returns to my observation that when you start messing with genes (cloning or insertion of "alien" genetic material into organisms or etc), the media assumes the stance that there is an ethical controversy. I've yet to get anyone to offer a reasoned explanation of what is wrong with these kinds of activities. Why is reproductive cloning assumed, a priori, to be wrong? Further, without the media creating the controversy, I suspect that public opinion polls would reflect a giant shrug and an "I dunno and I don't really care" on the part of the American people when asked their opinions on these kinds of subjects.

I hate it that the federal prosecutors were fired

Particularly since they were fired for political reasons. But that this is where the Democratic leadership has decided to start their investigations of the Administration just points to the cowardice of the leadership. This is one where they will investigate and bellow and bluster and then shrug.

And the shrug is where this one should start. The prosecutors are tools of the Executive as the Executive carries out its law enforcement duties. The check on the power of federal prosecutors is the federal judiciary, not the Congress. That the federal judges are mostly Republican appointees is just the way it worked out this time. Next time it might be different.

While the Founders didn't anticipate political parties, they did anticipate regional factions and they expected that from time to time different factions would control different branches and they thought, rightly, that would be a good thing.

I say "rightly" under the assumption that any given political faction is acting for the good of the country. Of course, the faction that Dear and Glorious Leader represents is acting for the good of corporate American and consciously and directly against the good of the American people. But an informed, involved electorate and an active, courageous opposition party can correct all that.

The Democratic leadership needs to be gearing up for impeachment of the president and the veep, not just nibbling around the edges of things that are within the president's rightful Constitutional powers.



ITMFA

So, why not Kucinich?

Read this. It's short and focused on just the war.

Now.

Tell me why you wouldn't support Kucinich for president.

The health insurance industry is just one more thing that we endure without outrage that I can't comprehend

This guy's essay is fairly innocuous in execution but pretty deep in implication. If the American people want a publicly administered health insurance program, then it's really only a short step to the American people wanting a publicly administered health care program. But, before we even take that first step, the lobbies will swing into action and the media will begin to tell the American people that they don't want socialized medicine. I mean, just look at the problems they have with it Canada and Europe.

Of course, the fact that they don't have any problems in Canada and Europe won't matter. The fact that we have the worst health care in the industrialized world will be hidden under a rhetoric proclaiming the exact opposite: that we have the finest health care in the world *because* of our health care for profit model.

I'm 44 years old and in pretty good physical health but I believe that in my lifetime a combination of ecological and economic factors will create situations where the American health care system will collapse. It will really only take one good nation-wide flu epidemic. And, when we put it back together, if we push hard enough, we can get a health care system that is designed to care for people instead of profits.

That is provided that there isn't a big enough die off to cause societal collapse.

Pretty damned nervy thing for a officer to do

Even an inactive one. That oath they take is for life and you just know how Dear and Glorious Leader interprets it.

Of course the way it reads makes refusing orders to attack Iran exactly the thing to do:

"I (insert name), having been appointed a (insert rank) in the U.S. Army under the conditions indicated in this document, do accept such appointment and do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God."

That "all enemies foreign and domestic" pretty much means to me that they need to be trying to arrest Dear and Glorious Leader and his cohorts as they seem to me to be pretty serious enemies of the Constituion of the United States. Hell, they even brag about it.




ITMFA