Tuesday, August 30, 2005

The President Buffs Up

George W. Bush is fiercely riding his trail bike through red state after red state, determined to lose those unsightly love handles. I can easily relate to this, since I am faced with the same corporeal situation. It takes a lot of exercise to buff up/slim down. And I have reaffirmed yet again that ice cream is definitely not a substitute for exercise. Ahhh, would that it were.
Consider, please; if the president is all pudged up, how can he woo all those Iraq war widows whose husbands he sent off to die. How can a fat president convince the dead soldier's families that they died for a really truly honestly good reason? Whichever reason that may be, this week?
Oddly, in his remarks on the disastrous Katrina, he emphasised his desire to 'save lives'. He seems to talk a lot about 'culture of life', 'valuing life', 'saving lives', but every action he takes appears to be aimed at the taking of life. Making the world a far more dangerous place.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Intelligent Design?

There must be some Intelligent Design around here somewhere. Or that is what presidential wannabe Bill Frist says now( Frist Backs 'Intelligent Design' Teaching).

Bill Frist
First, he put himself outside the herd by advocating for embryonic stem cell research, hoping to look more intelligent than the President. Now he seems to be taking that back, and wants to look as intelligent as Mr. Bush.
In all of the foofarahw, it appears that the most basic tenet of scientific inquiry appears to have been banned from mention in this quasi-pseudo-debate. A hypothesis is a scientific theory if-and-only-if it is testable. Merely asserting a desire to be intelligently designed fails this test. Totally. Completely. C'mon Mr. Frist; describe for me the experiment you contemplate to test your "Intelligent Design" hypothesis. No? Don't have one? Then shut up about the "theory", and let rhetoric about ID (hah!) be confined to the philosophy department and the debate society. Keep it out of medical school for God's Sake!
And quit pandering to the boobocracy, despite that its the natural constituency of the Grand Old Nineteenth-Century-And-Holding Party.
Oh; And tell your president to think of an Intelligent Reason to keep killing people in Iraq, or get out of there.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

A Special Day In June

Question: What was special about June 29 2005?
Answer: It is the only day so far this year when no American soldier was killed in Iraq.

Here is the Casualty Count;

Here is the day by day list

Of course, that's just numbers. Nice and convenient. Nice and sanitary.

Here are their pictures

My God they look young! And not a one of them a relative of the warhawks who sent them to Iraq to do... What? What are they dying for? Please remind me, if you can remember, Mr. President.

Monday, August 08, 2005

God Said...

"Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth...
... and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so." And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. (Gen. 1:29-31)
Sorry; I saw this on a childs sampler in a local church, and I just couldn't resist!
I wonder if God will be unhappy if we disdain HIS/HER gifts?

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Littleboy turns 60

August 6, 1945. Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber flew over Hiroshima Japan and dropped the first Atom Bomb, the first of only two (so far) in war. To this day debate goes on as to the necessity of this attack, the morality of this attack, what the ultimate result will be in terms of future wars.

The event was, blessedly, before my time, but the debate seems likely to span a lot of generations. I'm going to duck out on the issues themselves, and instead just say that Things Have Changed since then. And a good thing, too. Something often not mentioned in the debates/arguments surrounding this event is that in 1945 it was acceptable to bomb cities. Cities full of people. Cities full of noncombatants, women, children, babies! Today, that is no longer an acceptable tactic. Unfortunately we still do it, those of us who have bombs and airplanes to drop them from, but we say we don't. We use terms like Surgical Strike, and Selective Targeting. We claim that our ordnance is now smart enough to tell the difference between a terrorist and a child. Now if only we could just keep those photographers from taking pictures of the dead children, maybe we could get on with our war.
In any event, despite the hypocrisy, total wars are more restrained than they formerly were, and the death toll is consequently less.
Before I got sidetracked, the point I was trying to make is that when the arguments pro/con/middle/decline-to-state/whatever are made, the fact that bombing civilians was, at that time and place, a normal tactic. The rightness or wrongness wasn't part of the decision to drop the bomb.
One hopes it is part of the decision today.

(1) Tail Cone (2) Stabilizing Tail Fins (3) Air Pressure Detonater (4) Air Inlet Tubes (5) Altimeter/Pressure Sensors (6) Lead Shield Container (7) Detonating Head 8) Conventional Explosive Charge (9) Packing (10) Uranium (U-235) (11) Neutron Deflector (U-238) (12) Telemetry Monitoring Probes (13) Receptacle for U-235 upon detonation to facilitate supercritical mass (14) Fuses (inserted to arm bomb)

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Now This Is Important!

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress isn't through with Rafael Palmeiro.


    A House committee will investigate whether the Baltimore Orioles slugger committed perjury by testifying under oath that he never took performance-enhancing drugs.


Yet another splinter group of drug warriors is trying to stamp out abuse of its own particular favorite devil's brew. Surely, if only professional athletes (and their emulators, and people with obsessions to look/play/feel better) would just stop using this one kind of chemical, we'd all be better off. We could relax with a beer or six and watch major league baseball on the TeeVee, secure in the knowledge that nobody was 'cheating' us out of our pollyanna belief in the virtue of the 'American Game'. Unless of course you prefer football (no, not real football, American Football), in which case I leave it to you to believe that those 400 pounders did it all with hard work and a full training table.
Meanwhile, while we pretend we're stopping our pure innocent young men from following professional athletes down the road of chemical degradation, we're preparing to send them to Iraq, to be killed or wounded for no achievable goal. Except to stoke the fancies of a reality-challenged president.
Thanks Congress. Thanks Congressman Tom Davis.