December 4, 2006
Brown is for colon cancer
So, you want jewelry to support a cause? Well we have causes for you. For every color. Pearl?
July 25, 2006
For some reason these two articles worked well together
Okay, maybe it seems weird, but here goes:
- How Jell-O(R) killed the dinosaurs.
- Body parts found in nude dancer's apartment.
- And I'm going to go ahead and add in one additional link. Hypoxic devices may be restricted in sports.
May 22, 2006
Rep. Jefferson
What a charming individual. He used the National Guard to evacuate his house during Katrina. And now accepting $100k in cash to bribe Nigerian businessmen. I see some prison time for him along with good old Duke Cunningham.
March 20, 2006
Welcome to the brain of the Don
The Donald Rumsfeld that is. Plastic has an excellent resume of web links from his halcyon days in the Nixon and Ford administrations to leading two failed wars (see what sort of freedom and democracy has brought to Afghanistan?) for Dubya.
Read his own words, justifying what has been accomplished in the past three years in Iraq. Believe any of it? Like Rummy's $50 billion dollar and 5 week estimates of the war costs and length? And what's up with his comparisons of very and sundries with Hitler? Do we really fear that a 1000 year Venezualan Reich is right around the corner? Or is he projecting a bit?
Going back to the resume, we have to reflect on his successful running of the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon and his back-room efforts to help get the US out of the Vietnam War. For that he was shuffled off to be NATO ambassador. Then triumph as chief of staff and defense secretary under Ford, fighting against the whole nastiness of detante. Off to the private sector until Dubya decides to bring the Nixon crowd all back to the White House. The epic Shinseki-Rumsfeld fight seems now to be a footnote in the story, but certainly marked part of the White House team's decent into unreality.
Afghanistan. Iraq. Some investigations into what Rumsfeld has wrought.
February 27, 2006
February 16, 2006
November 29, 2005
The real reason Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera
Horribly blatent age discrimination! Dubya stands by people of age.
November 22, 2005
November 1, 2005
October 24, 2005
And now, spam blogs
Splog? What an awful term. Anything to increase your Google ranking I suppose...
September 26, 2005
September 17, 2005
August 23, 2005
Religion and science in America today
The continuing story of how we define this country. Whose country? Whose ideas? Which freedoms? Which path? The BBC reporting on the growing number of scientists concerned about the anti-science being pushed by the religious leaders of the US. There's so much back material to this. What happens when I mention that I do physics for example. Comments of "I did badly in math" or the like are really the most typical connection. Add in a virulently anti-modernist agenda from the right-wing theocrats-in-waiting, and you have the current situation in the States. (Don't believe that the Intelligent Design and related attacks are a planned afront to rationalism? Read their own "Wedge Plan.")
Does it make sense to quote the "founding fathers?" Of course one could find rival quotation I suppose.
"It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law, and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man. They are still so in many countries and even in some of these United States. Even in 1783, we doubted the stability of our recent measures for reducing them to the footing of other useful callings. It now appears that our means were effectual." - Thomas Jefferson, 1800
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." - James Madison, 1785
"As I have now given you my reasons for believing that the Bible is not the Word of God, that it is a falsehood, I have a right to ask you your reasons for believing the contrary; but I know you can give me none, except that you were educated to believe the Bible; and as the Turks give the same reason for believing the Koran, it is evident that education makes all the difference, and that reason and truth have nothing to do in the case. You believe in the Bible from the accident of birth, and the Turks believe in the Koran from the same accident, and each calls the other infidel. But leaving the prejudice of education out of the case, the unprejudiced truth is, that all are infidels who believe falsely of God, whether they draw their creed from the Bible, or from the Koran, from the Old Testament, or from the New." [...] "It is often said in the Bible that God spake unto Moses, but how do you know that God spake unto Moses? Because, you will say, the Bible says so. The Koran says, that God spake unto Mahomet, do you believe that too? No. Why not? Because, you will say, you do not believe it; and so because you do, and because you don't is all the reason you can give for believing or disbelieving except that you will say that Mahomet was an impostor. And how do you know Moses was not an impostor?" - Thomas Paine, 1797
July 17, 2005
July 7, 2005
June 20, 2005
Saddam misses Ronald Reagan
Who sent him guns. He also relates an amusing episode of Uday and three hookers...
June 10, 2005
More crazy coffins
From a daily blog of web items as picked by Der Spiegel.
Be all you can be!
The army lowers the qualifications to be an officer.
May 31, 2005
Wi-Fi in church
Write email, surf the web, and IM that pretty young thing over across the aisle. While being saved!
May 26, 2005
May 11, 2005
Ooops! Flying over the wrong white house
Guess these folks got a bit lost. Seems as though the security folks were on the case. After all, a Cessna can travel, what, like 170 miles per hour? (Hmmm...was just looking at a car review for the 300C SRT which can go over 170mph as well. Though there are crash barriers...) And only one Cessna has ever been crashed into the White House.
April 28, 2005
When in doubt, don't bribe the police officer
Or your ticket could turn into a raft of felonies.
April 18, 2005
Police recommend against lying in the road
Even if you want to catch their attention. It could be dangerous.
April 13, 2005
April 7, 2005
Two NYT articles on grim situations
The last surviving single, older male residents upstairs from a trendy NYC bar and gallery. Watching their old neighborhood turn into Yuppiedom.
Honoring the dead pope, while ignoring the deaths in Darfur? Genocide. I could have sworn that the rallying cry was never again. Cambodia? East Timor? Bosnia? Rwanda? Sudan?
March 27, 2005
Just for Easter...
I know everyone saw the peep diaramas in the Pioneer Press. But have you seen, drum roll please, Peep Library Research? Run in fear.
March 21, 2005
Park where you're told to, and have your scooter blown up
Why isn't there a good video of this online?
March 8, 2005
Live grenade, on the counter, in Miami, aka The Continuing Crisis
Why would you do this? If you have a grenade, surely there's a better use for it?
March 7, 2005
Smelly people banned from the library
Garlic breath? Too much perfume? Or the homeless? Who is to be removed from the library? Inquiring minds want to know.
March 4, 2005
A new Judas Priest album!
With a 13 minute song devoted to the Loch Ness monster! The late 1970s have returned!
February 24, 2005
When the rapture comes...
...wouldn't it be good if you could send email from heaven and let the doomed sinners know what you are thinking? Email with a dead-man switch.
February 17, 2005
CNN nuclear plant pictures...was that Iran or North Korea?
Turns out that the photos of the Iranian and North Korean reactors are the same picture. Seems the government sources of the pictures aren't sure where this reactor is. The replacement picture has snow, so that probably is from Idaho or North Korea.
February 16, 2005
Mercury isn't as dangerous as people say says the power industry, I mean Congress
Bush's EPA will be raising limits on mercury in the environment. To pave the way, industry lobbyists had Congress read their theories into the Congressional Record.