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Friday, Dec 17, 2004
"Fighting to Send Old People Out to Sea on Ice Floes for Seventy Years" Was Too Wordy
Digby made me do it.
In flight reading
I pretty much hate air travel. There's entirely too much sharing of the meat space. Constantly bumping into, pressing against, sharing air with, eating next to, sharing the loo with, listening to and interacting with other people in a noisy, uncomfortable, poorly ventilated aluminum tube -- for hours on end.
So I read. Voraciously. Three newspapers. A paper and two magazines. Trade press, local papers, national/regional press, national/international news magazines. In-flight magazine. Sky Mall. Anything.
So here are some things I read.
The Economist, a right of center, fiscally conservative news magazine mentioned evolutionary facts in matter of fact tone in three different news articles about science and technology. For example: The line of flies, mosquitos, etc., and the line of moths split 310 million years ago. Another example: Recently excavated hominid remains found in southeast Asia possibly represent another advanced hominid species that coexisted with modern humans tens of thousands of years ago. This information is presented without fanfare and without illogical muttering about the value of teaching diety-based cosmology. Why is it that British conservatives aren't insane? Did they send all their crazies to the colonies?
An article, perhaps in the Dallas Morning News, spoke of the Army placing value on first-person shooter war-fantasy games as training for military action. The Army, just like X-Box, only your jaw is crushed, your eyes are gouged out with searing hot shrapnel and your arms are turned into bloody, charred stumps of lacerated meat and shattered bones. Sign up today!
The Dallas Morning News devoted about 20% of their editorial, op ed and letters pages to advocacy of diety-based cosmology. Apparently, some prominent athiest dude came out in favor of deism, because, you know, quarks and rhibosomes are like really complicated n stuff (which by extrapolation justifies government sponsored evangelical fundamentalism). Okay, the last part was silent.
The evidence for a Social Security Crisis is as solid as the evidence for WMDs in Iraq.
Even Kristol is a Rumsfeld basher, but that's just to try to maintain some "not entirely insane" cred.
The military hasn't tested its fabulous anti-missle technology in two years. (Last time, they needed a homing beacon in the target.) They had a test all planned, but couldn't do it because the weather was bad. Say, what? The weather was bad?! Wouldn't that be a good time to see if this thing is real or utter bullshit against a ballistic missile? Anyway, the weather cleared up, and the anti-missile-missile failed to fire. They can't even get the rocket motor to work, and that's not the tricky part.