Military 'Stretched Thin'? We keep hearing how the United States military is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain its missions abroad, because there are 'too few' troops available. And General Peter Schoonmaker, Army Chief of Staff, says we need more people and thus a larger military budget to support them. Oh? Answers.com says:

Approximately 1.4 million personnel are currently on active duty in the military with an additional 860,000 personnel in the seven reserve components (456,000 of which are in the Army and Air National Guard). There is currently no conscription. * * *

With a strength of 2.26 million personnel (including reserves), the United States armed forces are the the 2nd largest military in the world [after only Communist China, a nation of 1.3 billion people].

Current deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan total about 150,000. How does that 'dangerously deplete' a military of 2.26 million?
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(I tried to post this yesterday, but Blogger was down. It goes into these endless loops when you try to publish a draft, and does not publish. Then the server couldn't even be found by my browser. I will save to tomorrow what I was going to say today. I wish Blogger would fix this problem. It is very irritating to be stymied by technology.)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,710 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:35 PM

 
New Avignon Captivity? General Schoonmaker. The Pope is still trying to make amends to Moslems for his remarks about violence and Islam. Alas, he made them in French, which is apparently the diplomatic language of the Vatican. Why?
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Many years ago, when I was young, I worked in the typing pool of the United Nations, English section, during a General Assembly. There I met a Franco-Ontarian who was fluently bilingual but worked in the English unit. I got a letter in French that I asked him to translate, and he had to laugh out loud at the deliberate vagueness in the letter. He observed, "That is why French is the language of diplomacy. You can never pin anyone down."
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But diplomacy should be about not evasion but a frank exchange of views to eliminate misunderstanding. French has not been the language of diplomacy in most of the world for decades. Rather, English, the most widely spoken international language, has assumed that role. It's time for the Vatican to come into the 21st Century and employ English in its international communications.
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General Schoonmaker. It seems that a Schoonmaker has become U.S. Army Chief of Staff, and has said the Army needs more money. I had not heard of a Peter Schoonmaker until today, tho I had heard, a few months ago, that there is a General Schoonmaker. I suppose we are very, very remotely related, because the bulk of Schoonmakers in America all derive from the same gent, who moved from Europe to Nieuw Netherland in about 1653.
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I don't know how he pronounces the name. Lou Dobbs on CNN said it the way my family says it, Skúen.maek.er, but a Senator he was interviewing said Skúen.mok.er (which is also the way one of my cousins says it). I think most of us say Skúen.maek.er and hope that General Schoonmaker says it that way. It will make my life a little easier if the name becomes well known so people stop mispronouncing it and I can stop having to spell it all the time.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,708 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:26 PM

 
Still a Hole. I work in Manhattan and sometimes take the Newark PATH train (an interstate subway), from the "World Trade Center" station in Lower Manhattan, which departs from alongside, and looks out upon, the enormous hole in the ground left by the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Last month, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was bitterly criticized for having defended the poor progress in repairing the vast devastation to mile after square mile of his city after one year, when New York still hasn't filled in one big hole in the ground after five years.* But he was right.
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Last nite, the Superdome had a grand reopening, in which the New Orleans Saints trounced the Atlanta Falcons 23-3. Cash-strapped, poor New Orleans managed not only to avoid demolishing the badly damaged Superdome, but even to raise $185 million to repair and reopen the stadium only 13 months after it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. By contrast, New York, capital of capital and focus of vast inpourings of foreign money, has been unable to rebuild a signature tower at the World Trade Center site in five years.
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Not only has the WTC site not been filled in, by anything, but some loud New York media voices want it to remain a hole for years more! Last Friday, the New York Post published an opinion piece by conservative real-estate commentator Nicole Gelinas, "a contributing editor to City Journal" (whatever that is), which contains this recommendation:

The best thing for the Freedom Tower would be for New York, and the Port Authority, to just leave it alone for a while. Perhaps after, say, another three years, when visible development is taking place on Silverstein's towers, rationality would at last prevail at Ground Zero: The new governor and the Port Authority could let the private sector start from scratch on a commercially viable office building — rather than a skyline landmark designed by committee.

And why does she want the gaping hole in Downtown to remain an open sore and continuing reproach? Because, she says, brave New Yorkers are scared sh*tless at the prospect of working in another landmark skyscraper:

The Freedom Tower's fate remains far from certain. Earlier this week, PA Chairman Anthony Coscia made headlines by confirming that he'd resign rather than force Port Authority employees to work in the tower after having experienced the horror of 9/11.

That outburst didn't do much for the tower's prospects — and though the PA's proposal is to line up lease agreements from state and federal agencies instead, it's not clear that those employees will want to work in the tower, either.

Oh, please. New Yorkers have not been scared out of working in skyscrapers by the WTC attack, nor, before that, by the disaster movie The Towering Inferno, nor by any number of actual fires or other problems with high-rises, such as power failures that required them to walk down dozens of floors. I myself have worked various temp spots in both the World Trade Center and Empire State Building. I don't see the Empire State emptying out because it is now the tallest building in the Nation's greatest city, and thus presumptively the biggest target for people like al-Qaeda.
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It is not fear for their lives from New Yorkers, nor New Jersey commuters, that is holding up development of the World Trade Center site.
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Part of the problem is the political power of the survivors of the people who died at that site. Many want the whole world to stop, and have us leave the site undeveloped in perpetuity, as sacred ground. Their mawkish sentimentality has no place in the real world. Lower Manhattan is not a graveyard, and the mere fact that a lot of people died at a particular spot is no reason for us to live forever in sadness. Life goes on, people. Get over it.
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That may seem harsh, but the idea that anyplace anyone dies should be forever thereafter set aside as a memorial and never developed is insane. We are building an Arena for hockey and other events here in Newark. In early August, a workman fell 85 feet to his death from open steelwork. Are we to end the construction of the Arena because that is now sacred ground?
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Many of the greatest building projects in history have entailed the death of workers. Are all to come screeching to a halt because those deaths bar anything but a memorial in that location? I don't think so.
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The Great Wall of China has been called the longest graveyard in the world, given how many people died in its construction. Should all work on the Wall have come to an end, so the barbarians could invade centuries before they finally took over China? (The First Emperor, who forced hundreds of thousands of people to work on the wall under such awful conditions that thousands and thousands died, was a monster, but that's a separate issue, irrelevant to modern construction projects governed by OSHA protections.)
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People die all over the place, in private homes, hotel rooms and apartments, on roadways and ocean liners, and other places of every description. Should all those places be made into permanent memorials that no one else can ever thereafter use for any practical purpose? Of course not. Life goes on.
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The extravagant memorial now planned for the victims of the WTC attack is preposterous. The sponsors want to spend as much as a BILLION dollars, on what is, at end, a gravestone! A billion dollars on the dead! Absurd.
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Are there no better uses for a billion dollars? The dead don't need monuments. Indeed, they don't need anything. But there are now living people all over this planet who will die from things a billion dollars could go very far toward curing.
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Worse, the memorial wants to preserve the "footprints" of the two towers, with the intention of reminding people over and over and over again of the events of that day, like the endless repetition of the collapsing towers we were subjected to by ghouls in media. There are things that should be remembered, and things that should be forgotten.
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Remember the lives. Forget the deaths. Hold onto the good. Let go of the bad.
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It is enuf to remember, in general terms, what happened. But there's a difference between respectful and reverent on the one hand, and morbid on the other.
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Moreover, we need to stop falsifying what happened on 9/11, stop pretending it was an "attack on freedom" and that the people who died were utterly innocent victims, from an angelic country that never did anything to anyone as would warrant any retaliatory violence. The tragic reality is that U.S. policy in the Middle East, decades of injustice to ordinary Arabs, provoked a counterattack by Arabs that killed a tiny fraction of ordinary Americans as the many Arabs the U.S. has killed, directly and thru endless support of every atrocity committed by Israel. Iraq alone has suffered literally uncounted deaths at U.S. hands, in two vicious and unjustified wars and an additional decade of monstrous "sanctions" that may have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children, the elderly, and the poor. Arab innocents died at our hands; our innocents died at their hands.
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Unless a memorial makes us accept our unclean hands and causes us to resolve to end the injustice that fuels this "permanent war" that Zionists and neocons have forced upon us, it is better never built.
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A modest brass plaque or dignified marble wall with the names of the dead engraved thereon would be more than enuf. And it should stand beside the tallest building on Earth, proof that we are not cowards afraid to build high and proud into the sky.
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And when we build it, let us not give it some stupid name like "Freedom Tower", dishonestly to pretend that it is our freedom, rather than our Zionism, that was attacked on 9/11. Let it indeed bear no name that harkens back to 9/11.
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"World Trade Center" was a good name in its time. It both looked outward and claimed for New York a central position in world commerce. I'm sure we can come up with an equally good name for a new tower, as proud and self-referential as "Empire State Building". Something that dedicates us to world diversity, tolerance, justice, and progress.
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Islamist fanaticism seeks to impose narrow-minded conformity and return us to the Middle Ages. We could not do better in renouncing that program than to dedicate the world's tallest building to the future.
____________________

* Exact quote: "That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,705 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:08 PM

 
Ousted from Wikipedia. A few years ago, in Googling my name (in quotes), "Craig Schoonmaker", I discovered that someone had written an article about me for Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Alrite, I thought. That's fine, even tho it was slitely negative. I won't trouble to challenge the negative take on my work, but will let it ride.
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Perhaps a year and a half ago, someone sent me email to alert me to the fact that there was then a discussion underway about removing my entry from the encyclopedia, and gave me the URL to the discussion page. I read thru it and was ticked-off. Some spelling reformer who disagreed with some of my decisions as to spelling simplification spent several hundred words castigating me for my choices, and used that disagreement to say that I should not be recognized as a spelling reformer in Wikipedia.
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Others challenged, without any contrary information whatsoever, my "claim" to have originated, in 1970, the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, when I was a member of the Committee that put together the first March to commemorate the Stonewall Riots that later came to be known as Gay Pride Day/Week/Month (thanks to me).
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I was irritated, and added my own brief comments to say (a) the mere fact that some people may disagree with my views on simplifying the spelling of English in no way diminishes my extensive and well-recognized work on systematic spelling reform (morever, disrespecting that work as unimportant insults spelling reformers generally); (b) my "claim" to have originated the term "Gay Pride" has in fact been recognized, without qualifying language, in various places, including a website in Italy, in Italian; (c) I have been included in Who's Who in American Politics (Bowker, 1987) and am presently in Marquis's Who's Who in America; and (d) a Google (or other search-engine) search will show hundreds of hits for "L. Craig Schoonmaker" (Google: 1,170), and for "Craig Schoonmaker" will show thousands, most of which are indeed for me (there is, however, one other "Craig Schoonmaker" who pops up). I concluded by saying that if I have to choose between Who's Who in America, issued (I did not say expressly but implied) by a publisher that is paid for its content (unlike Wikipedia, which is offered free — "You get what you pay for"?), and Wikipedia, I guess I shall just have to try to content myself with Who's Who in America
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After that reply, someone at Wikipedia apparently did some searches and saw that to be true, and the first challenge to my inclusion in Wikipedia ended.
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My enemies were apparently livid at being defeated and my remaining in Wikipedia, so mounted a second challenge. That, too, was apparently turned back, even tho I didn't hear of it and didn't respond to whatever new objection might have been mounted.
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So, my enemies mounted a THIRD attack, to which even fewer people were alert, probably since they, like me, assumed that the issue had been settled — twice. And this time they succeeded.
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I am "not notable", Wikipedia has ruled, even tho I am mentioned thousands of times on the Internet (not counting porn sites; see below), have been on the Chris Rock Show on cable TV, the Canadian one-hour public-affairs program The Great Debate; have been on Canadian national TV several times; have been the subject of front-page articles in various major newspapers in Canada and the United States, and a half-page feature in "Canada's National Newspaper", The Globe and Mail. I was indeed the subject of an editorial cartoon in The Globe and Mail. Moreover, I have two regularly updated blogs and over 135 webpages that have been accessed by hundreds of thousands of visitors.
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The Wiki managers claim that "the consensus" was to delete the article about me. I suppose that depends upon whether you define "consensus" to mean "majority" or "general agreement". The discussion I looked in on — the THIRD such on deleting me from Wiki — had dissenters. I had NOT been informed of that discussion (even tho they must have had my email address on file) so did not know to challenge it.
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The two main 'justifications' in the discussion about removing the article about me from Wikipedia are (1) I am "not notable" by some undisclosed standard, even tho I have been included in Who's Who in American Politics and Who's Who in America for the past three or four years; and (2) my 'claim' to have originated the term "Gay Pride", which everyone concedes would, if true, warrant my inclusion in Wikipedia, is 'unverified'. One commentator, hiding behind an Internet pseudonym, as all the others hid behind such lie-names (whereas I am always out-front with my real name), "Oh Crap", said, "Many people could equally have claimed to have invented the term gay pride." (That user was immediately thereafter suspended from editing Wikipedia because of an "inappropriate user name", but that does not seem to have prevented his comment from being weighed in the balance to find me wanting.)
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Oh yes, many people might make that claim. But no one has!
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I made the 'claim' to having coined "Gay Pride" for events surrounding the commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, in March 1971. That is 35 years ago. That newsletter went out to a couple of hundred gay organizations across the country at the time, and to several libraries and archives, where it surely resides to this day. On March 3, 2001, I uploaded onto the Internet the April-May 1971 issue of Homosexuals Intransigent! Newsletter, which contains that assertion, in the form of a graphic scan of the relevant passage.
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In the 35 years since I made the claim in print, and 5 1/2 years since I put it onto the Internet, no one on Earth has challenged it. No one on Earth has offered a different name as the person who coined the term. No one on Earth in 35 years.
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How long does an assertion have to be public and uncontested before Wikipedia will accept it as authentic?
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I also discovered, just today, that somehow my name has been intruded into a number of pornographic websites, in nonsense-text, verbiage that does not form actual sentences nor convey sense. How flattering. Alas, they aren't even all gay porn sites.
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So I no longer have an article with my own name in Wikipedia. Boo. Also hoo. Big friggin' deal. I didn't ask to be included, and don't hugely care if I'm included. I do, however, deeply resent any suggestion that I did not coin the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. For 35 years, no one has challenged my claim, but now, when people might think I'm dead, since 1970 is a long time ago, people are mounting a challenge to that credit? How dare they?
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Most of us 'old-timers' have indeed died by now, but a few of us are still around. As I told a friend and fellow old-time activist (whose name I will not mention here, lest another cabal of anonymous snipers act to remove his article from Wikipedia too):

I repeat that we ought to try to establish, before they/we are all dead, some kind of organization for pre- and circum-Stonewall activists to ensure that our roles are not denied, and to impart to today's benighted youth what we knew then and have learned since. I saw a discussion on PBS (Dennis Wholey's America) last nite in which a black activist from the 60s was saddened more than appalled and indignant, that younger people have forgotten that they stand on the shoulders of giants. You and I are, in gay terms, such giants of the gay-rights and gay-self-esteem movements, and we deserve credit. We have things to teach, still, and there are lots of young gay men who need to learn what we, the writers of Fag Rag, and all kinds of activists from various groups and cities at that time, sorted out fresh then, but which have been forgotten now.

The other offensive assertion is that the Expansionist Party of the United States (XP), which I head, is a 'one-person' political party. XP has never been a "one-person party". I only co-founded it, with (the late) Stanley Hauser, a second gay man in a second boro of New York City, in 1979. I readily and unabashedly concede that XP has not caught on as we had hoped, but our website shows plainly that there's more than one person involved, inasmuch as authors from Canada, Britain, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Taiwan appear there, plus approving comments from other people in various countries, beyond the many XP webpages I have written.
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XP is indeed, to date, a failure as a mass movement. I concede that readily, if unhappily. Its purposes are the devotion, at present, of only a small number of people, scattered among various organizations and websites in a number of different countries, but unified under the umbrella of the alliance "United States International". That website contains full names, addresses, and telephone numbers for coordinators in both the U.S. and Britain. I am offended, for everyone working in all those organizations, by Wikipedia's attack on me as regards my Expansionist activities.
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Will XP ever become a politically significant movement? Who can say? Christianity started as one leader and a measly 12 followers. That leader and one of the followers were dead within a couple of years, but Christianity did not die with them. As Alexander Pope observed in 1733, "Hope springs eternal".
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Whether Wikipedia recognizes me or not is beside the point. The same day I discovered Wikipedia's perfidy, I got an email that included this advice:

Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.

I'm that nut.
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I have, heretofore, often cited to articles in Wikipedia. Never again. If Wikipedia regards me as unworthy of note, then I must regard Wikipedia as unworthy of note. There are many other sources of information on the Internet. There is only one, irreplaceable, L. Craig Schoonmaker. I work on the many things I do for the work: because I have to, not because people praise me (or even recognize me) for them (tho my Newark fotoblog has won a lot of praise recently). There are times when one must be a pachyderm: super-thickskinned. I'm no Republican, but their icon, elephant, has the right idea. Be content in your own strength, do your own work, and let the mosquitoes of envy frustrate themselves in trying to draw blood whereas the worst they can ever do is blunt their snout.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,700 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:18 PM

 
Bin Laden, Been Dead? The media were abuzz today with reports that Usama bin Laden might have died on August 23rd of this year from typhoid, in Pakistan. Various commentators tried to throw doubt upon that premise and assert that he was almost certainly still alive. I don't believe it. Any of it. I have long believed he died years ago, in mid- or late 2004 at latest.
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One of the less convincing rationales for believing him still alive was uttered on CNN (I think; I watch so much news from so many sources that unless I write something down or see connected to an item a person I know to be affiliated with a particular news source, I remember only the facts, not the source). An Arab observer suggested that in order to function, al-Qaeda needs to communicate news of events affecting the organization to all members and potential members, and websites are quick to update events because it is important that followers have faith in leaders.
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But if communication among members is so important, why hasn't bin Laden been communicating to his followers regularly all these years? It's nonsense.
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The suggestion is made that he might have been rendered incommunicado by some problem with communications technology, or it might have been too dangerous for him to communicate with the outside world with any regularity. I don't buy it.
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Almost all of us have seen movies of World War II Resistance fighters taking their lives in their hands to send radio messages to London on equipment they had to move from one location to another and/or by sending transmissions so short that German triangulation devices could not home in on the transmission location. Spies find ways to get their messages out from behind enemy lines all the time. Al-Qaeda is supposed to be enormously sophisticated and well-funded. If Usama bin Laden had been alive all this time, he would have been in frequent communication, thumbing his nose at the stupidity, incompetence, and fecklessness of his "Crusader" enemies.
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Instead, all we've had is occasional stiff video performances with questionable sound quality that required days of evaluation to determine their authenticity.
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We have all seen the ease with which fotografs can be falsified, for artistic or satiric effect. There was a huge controversy over the doctoring of fotos of the destruction that this year's Israeli airstrikes produced in Beirut.
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What can be done with fotos can be done with videos and voice.
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Synthesized voices can be made to say anything, and prerecorded bits of actual speech can be put together in natural-sounding phrases that were never uttered by the speaker. Many of us can hear that over the fone when inquiring about our bank or other account balance.
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We've come a long way, technologically speaking, from the day of the 18-minute gap in a Nixon tape that forensic technicians could not restore.
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Bin Laden was said to have had very serious kidney problems as required dialysis. There are no dialysis machines in caves in remote corners of Pakistan. Nor are there operating theaters in caves in which to give bin Laden a kidney transplanted from an eager donor. Men with failing kidneys don't last long in medically backward areas of the Third World, and coaches don't stay silent while their team is being beaten and bloodied into defeat.
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Thus it is that I have believed that bin Laden has been dead for a long time. The world is strange, and thus might be so strange that despite all the reasons there are to believe bin Laden has been dead a long time, he might still be alive. So I'm not betting my life that he's dead. But I would put a fiver on it. One fiver.
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Speaking of sick Moslem extremists, Louis Farrakhan, the present-day voice of Elijah Muhammed's Black Muslim movement, the Nation of Islam, is very ill, and possibly dying. So sad.
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If I were a superstitious Moslem, I might think God is trying to tell us something.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,700 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:27 PM

 
Phony Good News. Sean Hannity, the rightwing member of the conservative-liberal Fox News Channel duo Hannity & Colmes, last nite talked glowingly of the good news that he sees for the Bush Administration, improving poll numbers, declining gas prices, strong employment numbers. All crap.
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The reality is that nothing has changed but gas prices, and Bush had nothing to do with that. Wait until heating season arrives (fortunately, before the November election; unfortunately, the heartland of Republican support, the South, has a mild climate) and see what fuel-oil prices are.
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Bush admitted earlier this year that he couldn't do anything to stop rising gas prices, but is now to claim credit for falling gas prices? I don't think so. There is a natural drop in demand with the end of the summer recreational-driving season, so of course there's a drop in gas prices.
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In like fashion, when kids return to school from summer jobs, and businesses return to work mode after vacation season, there is always an uptick in employment. But what kind of jobs are we creating, and who is filling them? How much do they pay? And are pay rates kept artificially low by the Bush Administration's failure to protect American workers from unfair foreign competition, even in our own country? Just watch any of the news channels often enuf and you will hear lots of foreign accents. American journalists can't even find work on American news channels! Many of the best jobs in this country are being given to foreigners, even in industries, like journalism, in which there is no shortage of qualified workers. Do you really think Fox News and CNN could not find Americans able to sit behind a desk and read the news aloud? Why should there EVER be a foreigner in such a job?
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Not content with offshoring/outsourcing to India, China, and elsewhere a host of jobs once held by Americans — perhaps 18 million over the past ten years, tho we can't really have any hard count, can we, since the U.S. Labor Department can't collect statistics in Asia — U.S. corporations are importing foreigners to take jobs Americans are perfectly willing, able, and even eager to do, from entry-level computer programmers to CEO's. And the Bush Administration pretends that that is in our interest. Perhaps that's because we don't allow foreigners to become President, Senator, or Congressmen — yet.
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These imported workers are glad to work cheap, which puts downward pressure on American wages. Supposed wage gains of as "high" as 2.8% — golly! a whole 2.8% raise in just a single year? wow! — are more than offset by inflation higher than wage gains! So the bulk of American workers are actually losing out in real dollars.
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They are also assailed by outlandishly high interest rates that the Federal Government smiles upon, and falling ever deeper into debt every year going forward. The Administration has done nothing about this even for our "heroes" in the military, who are being victimized by "payday lenders" who are permitted to charge 391% interest, and even more, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission itself! In an article September 6th about attempts to rein in "payday lenders", the website The Hill, says:

Payday loans allow borrowers to take an advance on their next paycheck, with lenders taking upwards of $15 in fees for every $100 lent on a short-term repayment schedule. Expressed as an annual percentage rate, interest rates on typical payday loans range from 400 to 800 percent.

And even if an interest cap (presently contemplated at 36%! which is still outrageous usury) were enacted, offshore lenders would continue to make loans at higher rates, thanks to our precious "globalization". And the Bush Administration won't do a thing to stop it. So this Administration, which relies upon military force more than any other, is content not just to pay its soldiers less than they need to get by — so they have to borrow from someone, and "payday lenders" are it (why can't the Pentagon set up an in-house loan program like an employee credit union?) — but also to let foreigners abuse American service personnel. Astounding.
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This is the Administration we are to endorse in November? Can even Southerners be so stupid and self-despising as to continue to elect the very people who are crushing them? We'll see. Soon.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,693 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:56 PM

 
Pope Sticks to His 'Guns', Sort of. Pope Benedict XVI raised a ruckus by some indignant Moslems around the world in quoting from a fourteenth-century predecessor about some of the teachings of Islam. Protestors objecting to that earlier Pope's characterization of Islam as violent have instead added weight to the accusation, by demonstrating violently and burning churches. Stupid bastards.
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For his own part, the Pope has not issued a formal apology as such.

I trust that after the initial reaction, my words at the university of Regensburg can constitute an impulse and encouragement toward positive, even self-critical dialogue both among religions and between modern reason and Christian faith," he added.

The whole world pretends to respect Islam, but in fact nobody does — not the Islam of the fanatics, the demonstrators, the fatwa-issuing censors who oppose freedom of speech and thought. No decent person anywhere on Earth respects that version of Islam. No one. Nor should anyone respect a religion that demands unquestioning obedience and cannot examine itself in the lite of reason and morality.
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Islam was spread by the sword, and beats down its adherents thru constant demands that they follow rigid daily rituals, practice a month of daytime fasting, etc., as keeps the mind busy and makes a person think that God is always watching and demands constant subservience. The rituals replace thought — compare obsessive-compulsive behavior that keeps people from thinking about and solving their underlying problems — and merely doing the ritualistic things required substitutes for thinking about ethicality and the deeper meaning, if any, behind their faith.
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My colleague in Northern England says that religions heavy on ritual are "orthopraxic", which apparently means that there is more stress on ritual than philosophy. That is the problem with Islam.
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He has also pointed out that altho the Koran does contain the same kinds of moral teachings as the Ten Commandments of Judaism (if not the Three Commandments of Christianity: Love God with all your heart and soul; Love your neighbor as yourself; and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), those teachings are not in one convenient location for ready reference but scattered throughout the book. It takes some effort to put them together. In between are so many other poetical, and thus imprecise and unclear, messages that all kinds of interpretations can be put to them by different readers (or the same reader at different times and under different conditions). That may explain why Islam seems so weak on morality, so heavy on morally empty ritual.
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Islam needs to clean up its act. It needs to decide if it is violent or antiviolent; if it frees the human mind and spirit or chains both; if it is modern or anti-modern; humane or inhumane; and on, an on. Praying five times a day is no substitute for thinking about the right and wrong of things.
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Islam needs a Pope. It once had one, the caliph ("successor" to Muhammed), then Ottoman Sultan, who was accepted as the ultimate authority on what Islam requires on any given issue. To that extent, perhaps we should indeed restore the Caliphate, not (necessarily) as a political entity but as a community of the faithful who adhere to agreed norms. That way the whole world could know what Islam is and is not.
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Right now, most people outside Islam have only conflicting messages, some from al-Qaeda, some from local firebrands, all too few from esteemed and moderate scholars.
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Islam needs a world convention of imams and scholars to set out for all adherents what Islam does and does not smile upon in morality. Then the world will know how to react.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,691 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:25 PM

 
Syria: Friend or Foe? AOL hilites today a report about the findings of an official inquiry in Canada into the "extraordinary rendition" by the United States of a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was merely passing thru the U.S. when he was stopped by the U.S. Government because the 'Royal' Canadian Mounted Police had erroneously placed him on a terrorist "watch list".
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I saw a broadcast report on this case a couple of weeks ago that detailed high-handed and illegal behavior by U.S. authorities. The man was seized by the U.S. Government, held in jail overnite without being allowed to contact an attorney, then deported not back to Canada, the country of which he is a citizen, but to Syria. It is my understanding that it is illegal to deport a person to a country not his own. It is also illegal to arrest anyone and hold him or question him without access to an attorney.
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The agents involved in that behavior asserted that because he wasn't a citizen of the U.S., the Constitution didn't protect him. That is not the way the Constitution works.
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The Constitution controls the behavior of the Government, not of private persons foreign or domestic. It establishes uniform standards for the behavior of our Government toward anyone, of any nationality, anywhere on Earth. There is no escaping its provisions and protections against Government abuse. But the Bush Administration doesn't approve of constitutional restrictions upon Government power, so evades the Constitution every chance it gets.
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Syria is, we are told over and over, a state sponsor of terrorism involved in the activities of Hezbollah, and an ally and agent of Iran that we should plan war against. But then we ship a Canadian to Syria for torture to get information to fite terrorism! Syria also recently fought off an attack upon the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, with loss of Syrian life.
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So, is Syria The Enemy, or a friend? Does Syria work to harm us or defend us? I'd like to know.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,687 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:45 PM

 
Nonsense on Pluto. Late last month, a meeting of astronomers decided to demote Pluto from planet to "dwarf planet" or "minor planet", another term for objects like asteroids.

The vote involved just 424 astronomers [out of some 10,000 professional astronomers on Earth] who remained for the last day of a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague. * * *

"I'm embarassed for astronomy," said Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "Less than 5 percent of the world's astronomers voted."

"This definition stinks, for technical reasons," Stern told SPACE.com. He expects the astronomy community to overturn the decision.

Pluto has three moons. If an astronomical object is large, but not a star, and has moons, it is absurd to call it anything but a planet.
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The sooner the ridiculous decision made by the remnants of the IAU that hung around Prague to the last minute should be reversed at the earliest possible moment, to restore some credibility to that group and to astronomy as a science.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,686 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:29 PM

 
Secret Agency, Openly Advertised. Have you seen the television commercials the CIA is running to recruit new agents? Never before in my life do I recall having seen such commercials. The voiceover is of a man with a slight foreign accent — Hispanic? I believe he mispronounces one key word, "clandestine", stressing the first syllable when the second actually bears the word's stress. Perhaps the advertising agency left that error as a subtle signal that people whose English is less than perfect can find a place in the CIA (and, by extension, other U.S. intelligence services?), given that the Nation long ago ('round about September 12th, 2001) realized that it didn't have enuf speakers of, for instance, Arabic on hand to serve our present needs. But nobody seemed to know how to recruit more Arab-Americans and other people with the language skills and cultural nuance to spy on, sorry: gather intelligence from, areas of the world now hugely important to us. They apparently now think a good way to reach these new groups is thru advertising on television, including cable television — including Comedy Central, of all places! — home of the 'subversive' Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
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Will new recruits from different cultures change the 'culture' of the CIA? One can only hope.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,682 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:49 PM

 
Testing Their Sincerity. The American Radical Right has been poohpoohing the idea that the U.S. has tortured "terror" suspects, all the evidence from Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret prisons to that effect notwithstanding. I have a challenge to these brave defenders of 'physical pressure' and the other euphemisms they employ for the abuse that the Bush Administration has subjected people to. Let's do a test.
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We will arrest all these Rightwingers and subject them to "rendition" to the secret prisons they think are just dandy, there to be subjected themselves to precisely the kinds of interrogations they defend, for the same lengths of time. The object? To see if we can wring from them a confession that they have committed or are about to commit an act of terrorism against the people of the United States. It doesn't matter what act that might be. We'll leave it up to the individual Rightwing prisoner — oops: "detainee" — to confess to whatever s/he wants, that is if s/he should be so weak-willed a sissy that s/he cannot stand the 'moderate physical pressure' or 'psychological manipulation' or anything else they currently call Bush Administration tactics. But surely they will be able easily to withstand all such gentle measures.
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Since they, unlike our foreign 'guests', have the advantage of knowing that the guidelines, such as they were, (ostensibly) forbade actually killing prison ... detainees, we will amend the rules for our Rightwing guests a tad, to say that interrogators can surprise us. After all, some detainees have indeed died in U.S. custody, as for instance being beaten to death by our brave "heroes" in Iraq. So let's take that risk with the Radical Rightwingers and literally unleash the dogs now and then, and send some current thru those electrical wires connected to their genitalia, to shake the certainty that the U.S. is so deeply concerned about the life of detainees that it would not really risk killing anyone. As things stand now, they assume that our interrogators wouldn't really drown them in "waterboarding", a technique our brave heroes have been proud to use:

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt. According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last over two minutes before begging to confess. "The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

But what if we said it would be alrite to risk the death of an occasional detainee (for instance, Bill O'Reilly). What better way to put pressure on other detainees than to show that we are 'dead' serious? Oh, we could try not to kill them, but if we miscalculate, where's the harm?
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So, let us interrogate these Rightwingers in the very same "dark prisons" or "black sites" that the Bush Administration has shunted people off to in order to prevent American lawyers and courts from stepping in to protect their rights, for the same periods of time as "terror" suspects, then incarcerate them at Guantanamo for years at a time. After four years, we can then bring these Rightwingers home to tell us all that such treatment passes constitutional muster and does not violate civilized standards on human rights. Well, those who survive can tell us that. Don't worry. Almost all will survive their 'interrogations'. Almost.
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Human Rights Watch discusses some other American interrogation techniques, as used in one secret prison in Afghanistan.

The detainees said U.S. interrogators slapped or punched them during interrogations. They described being held in complete darkness for weeks on end, shackled to rings bolted into the walls of their cells, with loud music or other sounds played continuously. Some detainees said they were shackled in a manner that made it impossible to lie down or sleep, with restraints that caused their hands and wrists to swell up or bruise. The detainees said they were deprived of food for days at a time, and given only filthy water to drink.

I'm sure none of that would bother Bill O'Reilly, one of the most steadfast defenders of U.S. interrogation techniques, nor the brave woman talk-show host(ess) he had on tonite's program who was equally adamant that U.S. interrogations are not torture. Surely they won't mind testing that theory in the real world. After all, O'Reilly explicitly made fun of the fact that music by the band Red Hot Chili Peppers was among the noises blasted at prisoners day and nite at high volume. Let's see how much O'Reilly enjoys a little music from that band, Eminem, Dr. Dre, and the other artists used to influence people to cooperate. Perhaps O'Reilly won't be such a music lover on his return. If he returns.
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One of the key practical arguments against torture is that it wrings out false confessions and fraudulent information. But I'm sure that Bill O'Reilly and that blond bit... woman will not utter so much as a syllable that isn't God's honest truth, no matter what the CIA or its lackeys in foreign countries might do to them, no matter how long it goes on, and no matter how many years they are held in Guantanamo without access to lawyers or courts, due process, their families, their jobs, their homes, their kids — whatever. Nothing the U.S. has done is intolerable. All is permissible against enemies of the United States, right?
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Well, I regard Bill O'Reilly, that bitch, and every other defender of torture by the Bush Administration as enemies of the United States and everything this country stands for. I want them treated the way they want our other enemies treated. How can they object? Surely they subscribe to the Christian standard "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", which of course mandates the reverse: joyfully embrace having done to you what you do to others. So, by all means let the defenders of Bush Administration 'pressure' tactics experience them first-hand, as "investigative reports", in order that they might thereafter give us vivid accounts of how gentle and humane our treatment of our 'enemies' has been. Bill O'Reilly said today,

The truth is that America has been restrained in its response to the savagery of Al Qaeda and others.

Surely he and the other defenders of the Bush Administration's non-torturous interrogations will say precisely the same thing after they, themselves, personally experience many weeks of exactly that kind of interrogation and four years of detention without charges, thousands of miles from their homes.
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I look forward to hearing their first-hand reports. Gee, Bill, tell us, what was it like?
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Until I hear such first-hand reports from the likes of Bill O'Reilly, I will have to rely upon common sense and my own human ability to put myself in another person's place, an ability the Radical Right does not have, because they aren't fully human.
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Maybe a few weeks of sleep deprivation in a dark, cold room, being slapped around and told to confess, then held incommunicado for a few short years will give them the gift of humanity. I'm willing to take the chance — with their lives. Aren't you?




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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,672 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:44 PM

 
What People Cannot Do. Implicit in the conviction of the general public that human activity must be responsible for "global warming" is the assumption that people are so powerful that they can control everything — even tho we know full well that we have no such power. Still, if the planet is getting warmer, we must be responsible, right?
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Forget about all those Ice Ages and warmer periods between, going back into the most remote parts of our planetary past, all of which happened when there weren't any people on the planet at all, or when people could not have had any impact of consequence whatsoever, for not being very numerous nor widespread, nor sending millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Some other mechanism might have worked then, but not now? Hm.
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Let's talk about what people cannot do, and then ask if we are really so powerful that we can alter the climate of a planet that is 8,000 miles in diameter, on which we are not so thick as the slimmest film of mold on an orange.
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Let's start with climate, and its day-to-day version, weather. We can't end droughts by making rain, even when there are clouds in the sky. We can't make clouds appear over deserts, and even if we could, we couldn't get them to send down rain.
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We can't prevent tornadoes, nor stop them once they start.
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We can't prevent hurricanes, cyclones, or typhoons, nor even tropical depressions, nor stop them once they start.
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We can't stop snowstorms or thunderstorms, rainstorms nor even the gentlest of drizzles.
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We can't end heat waves or windstorms. We can't make wind where there is none.
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In short, we can't affect anything in weather whatsoever. Weather is the little brother, the moment-in-time of climate. If we can't change weather in the tiniest degree, why would we even think we could change climate?
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What else can't science and technology, and all the industries and daily activities of all human beings put together do?
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We can't make fleas, mosquitos, tsetse flies, cockroaches, nor any other insect pest go extinct. Every year, insects kill tens of millions of people and animals directly, by draining them of so much blood that tiny kittens die from anemia, or indirectly, thru the diseases they carry, which have no other way of moving from one animal host to another than thru an insect "vector".
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We can't eradicate the boll weevil, Japanese beetle, corn borer, aphid, spider mite, apple worm, or any of dozens of other agricultural and garden insect pests.
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We can't eliminate the liver fluke, heartworm, tapeworm, flatworm, roundworm, mange, rabies, or any of dozens of other ravagers of pets and wildlife.
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We can't render extinct the microorganisms that kill elm trees and wither, or create destructive or merely unsightly scaly patches on citrus and other crops.
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We can't cure a host of individual diseases nor that built-in cell wilding we call "cancer". Reports of new medical marvels are hugely exaggerated when it comes to cancer, as we keep discovering when this rich celebrity gets ovarian cancer and vows to beat it, or that fabulously wealthy celebrity develops pancreatic cancer and swears he'll triumph — then dies despite the best medical treatment millions of dollars can buy.
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We can't alter the genetic makeup of anything as to build in sterility as to eradicate the species, be it a microbe, an insect, or a larger pest (such as wild rats).
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We can't make life from scratch, and the instant anything dies — really dies — we can't bring it back to life, even one tenth of a second later.
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We can't deliberately trigger small seismic events to foreclose catastrophic earthquakes. We can't even predict earthquakes reliably.
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Speaking of things we can't do reliably, we can't even detect lies 100% or the time — hell, 80% of the time — as to give us reliable verdicts in criminal or even civil trials.
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To this short list of things in nature that we can't do, I'm sure other people can add entire categories of things I haven't mentioned, plus more examples of the types of thing I have mentioned.
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Let's get back to climate change. In saying the Earth was 8,000 miles across, I rounded up a tiny bit. The actual diameter is 'only' 7,926.41 miles around the equator or 7,901 miles pole to pole. Let's put that in context. The Empire State Building (my favorite building in all the world) is 1,472 feet tall, including the broadcast antenna. The Earth is, on average, 7,913 miles in diameter. That is 41,780,640 feet. Dividing by 1,472 yields a 'height' for the Earth of 28,383 Empire State Buildings. And the Empire State Building is a lot taller than people are.
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Let us assume, generously, that the average height of human beings is 6 feet. In actuality, most people are closer to 5 feet tall, even most women in the First World. In many parts of the great world, such as the high Andes, a typical adult male is at best 5 feet tall, and an adult female might be closer to 4 feet tall. There are few human populations in which the average stature is greater than 6  feet. Let's just use 6 feet as a measure for average male height (and understand that that is a slite overstatement).
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The Earth is 41,780,640 feet in diameter. Divide that by 6 and you find that the Earth is 6,963,440 times as deep as people are tall. Ah, but, you might reply, what matters is not the depth of the Earth entire but only of its atmosphere, which is where global warming takes place.
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OK. Let's measure the atmosphere.

The troposphere is the layer closest to the Earth, approximately 11km high. Weather occurs only in the troposphere because it is this layer that contains most of the water vapour. Weather is the way water changes in the air, and so without water there would be no clouds, rain, snow or other weather features. [There would, of course, still be winds.]

11 kilometers is 36,089 feet. Divide that by 6 and you see that people are 1/6,015th the height of the troposphere.
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We are, in short, utterly and absolutely insignificant as compared to the atmosphere.
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Moreover, 71% of the planet is covered by oceans, where not a single human being resides, much less large populations living a First World existence of profligate energy usage fueled by consumption of fossil fuels and resultant output of large quantities of greenhouse gases.
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Other large portions of this planet's surface are occupied by deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and other natural features in which human beings are either totally or largely absent. The habitable portion of the Earth is in fact only about 12.5%! Moreover, much of the Third World is living in a pre-industrial condition, contributing little to the planetary output of greenhouse gases. So we'd have to reduce, for greenhouse-gas purposes, at least another 2% of the planet's surface.
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So an infinitesimally small coating of human population upon less than 1/10th of the planet's surface is changing the entire planet's climate?!? What kind of power would that take?
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Consider the relative energy of nature as against man.

A hurricane generates the same energy every second as a small hydrogen bomb[.]

A website called "Plausible Futures", in considering what we might be able to do in the way of altering weather as a weapon, says:

The quantities of energy involved in weather systems exceed by a substantial margin the quantity of energy under man’s direct control. * * *

For instance, the typical amount of energy expended in a single tornado funnel is equivalent to about fifty kilotons of explosives; a single thunderstorm tower exchanges about ten times this much energy during its lifetime; an Atlantic hurricane of moderate size may draw from the sea more than 1,000 megatons of energy.

To put that in context,

By chaining together numerous stages with increasing amounts of fusion fuel, thermonuclear weapons can be made to an almost arbitrary yield; the largest ever detonated (the Tsar Bomba of the USSR) released an energy equivalent to over 50 million tons (megatons) of TNT, though most modern weapons are nowhere near that large.

The Plausible Futures webpage points out something else we cannot do: suppress lightning. It also discusses willful climate modification, more than weather modification.

In considering whether or not climate modification is possible, it is useful to examine climate variations under natural conditions. Firm geological evidence exists of a long sequence of Ice Ages, in the relatively recent past, which shows that the world’s climate has been in a state of slow evolution. There is also good geological, archaeological and historical evidence for a pattern of smaller, more rapid fluctuations superimposed on the slow evolutionary change. For example, in Europe the climate of the early period following the last Ice Age was continental, with hot summers and cold winters. In the sixth millennium B.C. [5,000 to 6,000 B.C.; prehistory], there was a change to a warm humid climate with a mean temperature of 5ºF higher than at present and a heavy rainfall that caused considerable growth of peat. This period, known as a climatic optimum, was accentuated in Scandinavia by a land subsidence which permitted a greater influx of warm Atlantic water into the large Baltic Sea.

The climatic optimum was peculiar. While on the whole there was a very gradual decrease of rainfall, the decrease was interrupted by long droughts during which the surface peat dried. This fluctuation occurred several times, the main dry periods being from 2000 to 1900, 1200 to 1000 and 700 to 500 B.C. The last, a dry heat wave lasting approximately 200 years, was the best developed. The drought, though not sufficiently intense to interrupt the steady development of forests, did cause extensive migrations of peoples from drier to wetter regions.

A change to colder and wetter conditions occurred in Europe about 500 B.C. and was by far the greatest and most abrupt alteration in climate since the end of the last Ice Age. It had a catastrophic effect on the early civilization of Europe: large areas of forest were killed by the rapid growth of peat and the levels of the Alpine lakes rose suddenly, flooding many of the lake settlements. This climatic change did not last long [in geological terms: only 500 years!]; by the beginning of the Christian era, conditions did not differ greatly from current ones. Since then climatic variations have continued to occur and although none has been as dramatic as that of 500 B.C. a perturbation known as the little ice age of the seventeenth century is a recent noteworthy example. The cause of these historical changes in climate remains shrouded in mystery[.]

Four things are worthy of note here. First, a temperature of 5ºF warmer than today is regarded as a "climatic optimum": ideal. So if global warming is occurring, hooray! We're heading toward the optimum.
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Second, very substantial changes in climate have occurred in relatively recent times (the past 2,500 years) without any human input whatsoever.
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Third, we don't know, even with the benefit of hindsight and historical distance, what caused these earlier changes. Thus it is very likely that we don't know the cause(s) of any present trend, and to say we do is arrogant (not to say "nonsense").
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And fourth, altering climate would require knowledge of things we don't yet understand and expenditure of huge quantities of energy we don't control.
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That site does speculate about one far-fetched means to cool much of the planet and freeze temperate-zone, oceanfront countries, but not to heat the planet. The only countries that could profit from such a plan are in the interior of equatorial regions, and all such countries are backward and poor, utterly incapable of taking the actions such a plan would require.
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In short, we could not produce climate change if we tried to, at least not in the short term. Why would we think we could do so long-term, without even intending to?
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Is it all arrogance? Silliness? Or is there an element of Christian guilt-gathering? Good people never think themselves good enuf. The advanced world is almost wholly Christian, and it is in Christian countries that frantic worry about "global warming" is worst. Surely we can't enjoy so many good things, when so much of the world is starving and otherwise suffering, without having to pay a moral price, can we? Surely we can't have so many material goods without doing harm, can we? Surely we are living on borrowed time or off someone else's labors. Surely divine justice will get us in the end, and global warming is the way. No, surely not.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,667 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:20 PM

 
Public Business, Private Profit. The Bush Administration is stealing from the Government to move public moneys into private pockets, by farming out collections from the Internal Revenue Service to three private companies. The report I saw on CNN yesterday said that analysts believe the IRS could do the job cheaper, and the Government would keep everything collected, whereas these private companies will keep as much as 24% of the take! USA Today confirms that:

IRS officials say the plan involves smaller cases that federal agents wouldn't otherwise have time to pursue. The profit potential is large. The collection companies will keep up to 24% of what they recover. That amounts to as much as $336 million of the $1.4 billion the IRS projects the program will recover during the next decade.

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Think about that. The Bush Administration is privatizing something the Government could do better for less!
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Moreover, people's tax information is being shipped to private companies, with all the risks of disclosure and identity theft that such release entails.
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These private companies will not be restrained from abusive practices the way the IRS has been of late, when enormous numbers of complaints caused Congress to rein in abuse.
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Even worse, observers think there is huge potential for fraud, as con artists pose as Government-authorized collection agencies for tax delinquencies!
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There is just so much wrong with this that it's hard to understand how it could happen. Are all the Nation's consumer protection agency and groups like the National Taxpayers Union asleep at the switch? I just checked the NTU's website and saw no mention of this story.
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Privatization is supposed to save taxpayers money, not cost us more money. Nor is it supposed to allow abuses we finally got stopped to resume under different entities. Where is the indignation — no, rage?
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I heard about this privatization a couple of weeks ago when I had to send the IRS some money and found that if I paid by credit or debit card, I would have to deal with a private company and pay a fee! Pay a fee to a private company to pay the IRS?!? That's insane.
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This story was very prominent on CNN yesterday, but I couldn't find it on CNN.com nor NYTimes.com today. Why is that? Media should be watchdogs on Government wrongdoing, and this is an astoundingly brazen act of theft from the public coffers and abuse of the public by the Bush Administration. If the media won't protect us, the Democrats should make a huge issue of it for the November election. The Republicans are stealing from the IRS to give to private business! If the Democrats can't make hay with this, they should just hang up their hat and go the way of the Whigs.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,657 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:55 PM

 
Stupidity Kills. Steve Irwin, an Australian celebrity who became famous for taking preposterous risks with his life — and that of others — took one risk too many this week, and was killed by a stingray in his native country. He was 44 years old.
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I had despised the guy ever since he put his infant son near a crocodile for the sake of a TV show, and had been looking forward to his demise from his own stupidity, hoping, however, that he would take no one with him. I got my wish.
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The stupid bastard, who apparently believed that nothing could kill him, so he could take inexcusable chances, finally met up with a risk greater even than his stupidity. He's dead now. Good. Will any other reckess fool learn from his example? Probably not. The idiots who risk their lives in "extreme sports" and other pointless exercises in willfulness and stupidity will continue to believe that they live charmed lives and will never suffer catastrophic injury or death from their stupidity.
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Every time I hear of some idiot dying from arrogant stupidity, I am delited. Foolhardy fools might themselves never learn, but sensible people seeing their fate might.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:03 PM

 
Angry About the Cold. It is three weeks before the end of summer, and we have just emerged from the coldest August I can recall. Remember that I'm 61 (and a half) years old. It's bad enuf that it is 69 degrees, dark, windy, and threatening two more days of rain on top of several we've already had in the past week, but I just opened my weekly emailed gardening newsletter from P. Allen Smith and read:

Although the weather is decidedly milder, the sweltering temperatures of the past few months are still on my mind. The Green movement could not ask for a better endorsement than the message Mother Nature put forth this summer. The extreme heat put a pretty bright spot light on our ever growing energy consumption. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel pretty vulnerable.

Listen, buddy, it may have been "sweltering" in Arkansas, but aside from two heat waves, it has been cold as a witch's, um, heart around here.
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Moreover, solar heat yields solar power, so to the extent your area actually might be warmer, it also receives more energy with which to power fans and air-conditioners. And please stop using the tired, despicable formulation "Mother Nature". If Nature is a mother, her name is "Medea".
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Mr. Smith makes the natural assumption that his weather reflects the Nation's, but he's wrong. No one area reflects the entire Nation, much less the world. Everybody except New York-based media assumes that their own weather is indicative of larger trends. But here, Tristate, where it has been subnormally cold much of the past year (and longer), media still pound out the "global warming" propaganda, even as we had to close up our houses and turn on electric heaters in August! While we're doing that, and putting on sweaters and thinking about even wearing a coat if we'll be out of the house for several hours into the nite — in August and now the first of September! — we have to keep hearing about how hot the world is getting? It's intolerable.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,642 — for Israel.)
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Please consider making a small donation thru the Amazon Honor System to contribute to my work.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:04 PM