I’d've thought, in 2006, that pretty much all multicellular life had been catalogued, particularly life that’s close enough to the human-survivable biosphere to be visible from, say, standing height.
Nope. Several dozen new marine species have been discovered near Indonesia, including a shark that walks on its fins. (Of course, there’s no such thing as evolution, so this transitional form from fin to foot should be ignored as the heresy it is.)
Life continues to astound.
Unfortunately the US Department of the Interior is planning to drill the site for oil next week.*
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* Not really, but if there was oil there, you know they’d be asshole enough to do it.
…Or, “My god can beat up your god.”
Bush is falling apart in front of the White House press corps now, looking a lot more and more like a three-year-old who’s up past his bedtime and told he can’t have one last cookie before it’s lights out. Spoiled and petulant, the “leader” of the “free world” is no longer capable of coming up with remarks that are not rooted deeply in anger — or, more likely, frustration.
Have you ever had the experience of saying the same thing more than once to someone who doesn’t seem to get it? People like that are truly annoying, aren’t they? How can they be so stupid as to not understand what’s so obviously true…
Well, probably at least half the time, the fault isn’t with the other person; it’s with you. You’re the one incapable of making a cogent case for yourself, you’re the one incapable of bridging the communication gap, you’re the one who might be inflexible and set in your ways.
I don’t think that’s the case with Bush.
I’m pretty sure he’s an idiot. And I’m absolutely certain he’s wrong.
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While I know we’re talking about a lot of lives laid waste here, I can’t offer too much comment about Ford’s announcement that they’re turning another 10,000 employees into job-force Soylent Green, beyond a smug yet grim chuckle.
With gas prices dropping — yet guaranteed to rise once more, and Americans at last beginning to realize that SUVs are shit — it’s hardly surprising that Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Chevrolet are feeling the effects of monumentally piss-poor business decisions.
Ford’s slashing of 10,000 white collar jobs and offers of buyout for all of its 75,000 employees are just the latest moves of retreat that are the direct result of what happens when runaway captialism joins forces with marketing.
Just because “the people” want something does not mean they should get it. (I know that sounds elitist, but only because I’m indisputably correct.)
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A stone tablet has been found that’s around 3,000 years old, inscribed with a writing system heretofore unrecognized. The tablet, unearthed in Veracruz, Mexico, contains symbols that are apparently reminiscent of Olmec. At first, there was little hope for translation of the tablet’s contents.
Experts who have examined the symbols on the stone slab said they would need many more examples before they could hope to decipher them and read what is written. It appeared, they said, that the symbols in the inscription were unrelated to later Mesoamerican scripts, suggesting that this Olmec writing might have been practiced for only a few generations and may never have spread to surrounding cultures.
However, hope came from a quite unexpected source. Using a breastplate and goggles made of gold, a teenaged farm boy named Jose Herrero has claimed he can translate the text, which he says describes the efforts of an angel named “Moron-y” to establish the first Shoney’s south of what would eventually be called the Rio Grande.
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How can that Texan moron claim he’s trying to make the US more secure when even the miliary isn’t on board?
MSNBC passes along the joyous note that the US military had nearly 200 Taliban fighters in their sights in July — and did not strike.
Even though U.S. military officials in Afghanistan had positively identified those gathered as Taliban fighters, including some “high-level Taliban leaders,” they told NBC News they have “no regrets” in refusing to give the order to attack the gathering.
Why? Because, apparently, it’s forbidden to bomb cemeteries for fear of offending religious sensibilites (mysteriously, calling TwoT a “crusade” apparently doesn’t have that effect) or collateral damage.
Yeah, I guess killing dead people would be a no-no, huh?
Meanwhile ex-Sec’y of State Colin Powell has come out against Bush’s plan to handle the people he doesn’t personally like. Bush wants military tribunals for accused terrorists, which are not conducted as regular court trials and can include secret evidence. If that doesn’t sound so bad, consider that our justice system is part of our general constitutional and democratic government; are we willing to sidestep that in the name of these prosecutions? How much of the “moral high ground” do we yield before we sink beyond redemption?
Too goddamned bad it took Powell so long to grow a backbone. He needed that back in 2002.
UPDATE: The bill didn’t pass.
With the fairly recent decision by the FDA to provisionally allow distribution of the “Plan B” pill and the attendant noise from (what are increasingly known as) anti-choice activists, it’s easy to see why the subject of abortion specifically, and conception control in general, is on my mind. I’m hardly unique, after all.
(As an aside, the “Plan B” type pills were approved without fuss in many other nations which had already settled their abortion issues. The US is lagging in this, quite badly.)
The history of Plan B is painful. Initially the pill was to be freely available over the counter to pretty much anyone who asked for it, but FDA approval was stalled. Minimum age requirements were then put in place, but approval was still stalled. This continued for several cycles until the minimum age was set to 18, at which point the pill passed the FDA review board.
The thing is that there is no clinical or medical reason to keep the pills out of the hands of anyone under the age of 18. Thus, there must have been social reasons, which aren’t usually the best things upon which to predicate decisions that affect the health and well-being of humans.
It comes back, by long and discursive means that include boogeymen such as teenagers having sex (What? Never!) and the desire by at least some men to have control over women, to abortion.
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The post-Bush pep talk backlash appears to be leaving veep Dick unfazed, as well as “senior” Republican shills morons congressmen. Even though the sane two-thirds of the nation is protesting it, the Washington Post tells us that Il Duce’s wiretapping bill is being manipulated just as he wanted.
The bill, set for Judiciary Committee consideration today, would have forced the administration to seek a warrant for surveillance within 60 days and bolstered consultations with Congress on the program. But last-minute changes pushed by senior Republicans may allow warrantless surveillance to largely continue without those controls.
Maybe senile is what the Post meant to write.
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Oops.
REGENSBURG, Germany - Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday called for harmony in his diverse and sometimes fractious church, saying that like a church organ it needed to remain in tune.
Do we really want to be drawing attention to misbehaving organs in the Catholic church?
Here’s something that would almost be funny in an alternate universe or a comedy about the dangers of hubris. The NY times is telling us that Iraq is asking for help with its security — from Iran.
“We had a good discussion with Mr. Ahmadinejad,” [Iraqi Prime Minister] Maliki said at a news conference in Tehran, the Iranian capital, after the two met. “Even in security issues, there is no barrier in the way of cooperation.”
The bedfellowship appears to be mutual, as
Mr. Ahmadinejad said that “Iran will give its assistance to establish complete security in Iraq because Iraq’s security is Iran’s security.”
But wait … isn’t Iran supposed to be a bad guy for working on uranium enrichment and making nukes and bla bla bla?
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Duh-bya is so clearly out of ideas that it’s obvious he never actually had any.
From the moment he was told that two planes had hit the WTC, he only seemed to have one thought on his tiny little brain. Iraq. I can blame Iraq for this!
Well, he might not have thought of it in quite that way. I suspect it was more like, Gee, I guess I should have paid more attention to that briefing in August, and maybe those Clinton folks had it right — and I bet somehow Iraq was involved too.
See, despite my loathing for Bush, which is genuine, I still don’t want to believe the absolute worst of him.*
(This is a courtesy I do not extend to Dick or Rummy, both of whom I believe to be cynical and vile manipulators of public will. I simply don’t believe Bush is bright enough for that level of scheming.)
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The first and only legitimately targeted nation in the “war” on “terror” is sliding deeper into turmoil even as Cheney blats more partei slogans.
The “liberal” media is once more pointing out some problems with the Bush camp’s handling of … of reality. The state of affairs in Afghanistan has been steadily declining for a while now; MSNBC, the Washington Post and doubtless a few other sources are reporting a suicide bombing in Afghanistan that took place over the weekend — at a funeral for a governor there who had been killed by a suicide bomber.
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Today we’re going to be beset by images, speeches, an embarrassment of flags and other grim reminders of something that some people can’t forget, something that others don’t want us to forget.
Just like everyone else with any awareness that day, I remember the smoke, the plane hits, the overwhelming moments of total devastation, the sense of unreality and the genuine concern that what I was seeing was only the beginning, that within a few weeks — depending on the coordination of the enemy/perpetrators/whomever — the entire nation might be driven into collapse and ruin.
I don’t need to be reminded of what happened on that day. I don’t think anyone does. But it’s going to happen. We’re going to be reminded whether we want to be or not, and I find that troubling.
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