This video has to be one of the best synopsis of the Christian myth and it’s origins. Think of it as the Reader’s Digest version of the history involved. There are other sites putting this video up, but I’ve made a direct link here for convenience.
Dick Cheney has taken the most unconscionable step yet since his reign in office as the Vice President. He’s declared that he is not part of the Executive branch of the government, and therefor not subject to laws governing the Executive branch.
See the full assembly of nonsense here.
The Constitution clearly states that the Vice President is part of the Executive branch. Article II, Section 1 is clear to anyone with even a modicum of reading skills. To claim otherwise is beyond absurd. When it is used to obstruct the law, the law stating that the Executive branch must provide the Information Security Oversight Office when requested, then it is a criminal claim.
The Democrats, as usually, are making a stink about it all, but doing nothing of substance to force the issue. The move to be made is simple: demand that the Vice President submit the required information to the Information Security Oversight Office, or face arrest for obstruction of justice.
Cheney knows full well that he’s lying. When congress requested the names of those involved in Cheney’s energy task force, back in 2001, Cheney respond by stating that the request was out of line, because conversations between the President and Vice President in the Executive branch were not subject to Legislative branch review.
As if this situation in and of itself isn’t crazy enough, President Bush has now come out stating that the Oval Office is not part of the Executive branch and is not required to comply with the Executive orders that Bush himself wrote!
Ladies and gentlemen, if these claims are held unchecked by the Legislative branch, I submit this as the final bit of a long, long line of evidence, which shows that the Constitution has been usurped by criminals, including congress.
As the American Idle are not prone to move to any action, we have finally lost it all. Welcome to the new American empire of the Reich-wing.
UPDATE - 2007-06-27: Cheney’s office was subpoenaed. This at least drags it all into the public sector.
UPDATE - 2007-06-28: The Bush administration has asserted Executive privilege and is denying the subpoena request.
If I have said it once, I’ll say it again: Utards can’t drive.
This week in point… On just a five day commute from home to work and back again, a total of twelve miles one way, or 120 miles total a week - here is the score:
How the hell do these people survive? How is it that Darwin does not take these asshole’s miserable lives out of the picture at rates exceeding WWII combat? Why are we not allowed to shoot these morons on sight?
I guess if I can see any kind of silver lining to this otherwise dark cloud of vehicular mayhem, it’s that I now can qualify for police level defense driving without having to take an actual course on it.
Though I’d love to pontificate on the wonders of spring into summer, this is actually about a near brush with death. I even have photos of the culpret.
This attempted murderer (or more correctly, the connective cable which it was attached to) came within inches of my head.
I was heading into work this Wednesday morning, like any other Wednesday that I head into work. I had packed a bag lunch so that I could eat while working in the office and had just grabbed my motorcycle helmet, with the intent of riding my Goldwing in.
I stepped out into the garage, hitting the power button on the door opener as usual. I suddenly heard the metal break and saw the assembly fly apart, heading pretty much straight for me, when the garage door was but a foot off of the floor. (To the right is the view from where I was standing.)
At first I thought to myself, “My, as old as I am, my reactions are still cat-like!” I had managed to dodge my head to the side, narrowly escaping the peril of hundreds of foot pounds smacking my skull. I even felt the breeze when it passed.
Yeah, right! The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that though I had reacted very quickly, what I had seen was the spring while it was traveling back to where it had been, as it was still attached to another cable. I hadn’t avoided it with my reaction - shear luck had kept my skull intact. As fast as I was, I was no match for this coil of murderous speed. It had shot past me and back again, before I could react.
As the general thoughts which come with near misses of death ground through my skull, I realized that the door was still trying to rise, but not doing so well at it. I went for the power button again. The garage door made it about a third of the way up the travel, but the difference in pull between the two sides caused the door to come askew and even pop apart a few of its wheels. The mostly intact side was partly off the track at the top, while the homicidal side I was on was nearly all off of the track. Worse yet, the metal door itself was buckling in places.
Repair was not an option.
I managed to hold up the door enough for my wife to back the 4Runner out of the garage and I then carefully set to work to disconnect the brand new garage door opener from the door, before the door had a chance to kill it too. I pulled the cotter pin out of the bolt, pulled the bolt free and the door came crashing down, mostly following the track. Thankfully, even if it had just dropped to the floor, I’m not a complete idiot - I wasn’t standing under the door at the time.
The door was now in a crumpled mess, blocking the doorway itself, still partially in the tracks on each side and preventing my departure on the previously mentioned motorcycle. Now, before someone cries out, “Ha! You should have moved the bike.” There wasn’t enough room in the driveway to move it and the door was already unstable. I didn’t want to risk it falling on me and the bike at the same time. That would have really pissed me off!
I attempted to remove the door completely from its tracks, but the far side was still connected to a now fully extended spring. Not wanting a repeat performance from a few minutes before, I stopped my attempts and started making some phone calls.
After the third or so 24-hour, same day service place told me that the soonest they could arrive was next Monday, I finally gave up in frustration and did what needed to be done: hand off the job to a calmer person. Karen took up the task and reached a place who could at least come out and take a look at the mess and give an estimate.
The guy was very friendly and obviously knew what he was talking about, explaining every detail. That was quite refreshing. (I’ll refrain from giving a recommendation by name until after I see the completed work this Saturday.) I asked if he had the tools needed to cut the cable on the other side, to release the intact spring and allow the door to be removed. He said that he did and would, but we’d better cut it from outside the doorway. He didn’t need to convince me of that one.
To give an idea of the kind of force involved here, to the left is an image of what the far side looked like, after we cut the second spring free and it hit the metal support for the door’s track. That piece of metal used to be intact and straight.
Another place finally did show up to give an estimate of replacing the door, at almost three hundred bucks less than the $1200 this place is charging, but they couldn’t color match to our trim, nor could they get to it on a timely basis. Worse yet, the man I spoke to was not a bright light of intellect and could barely answer the most basic questions with any clarity. That never goes over well with me.
I spent the rest of the afternoon removing anything of real value from our new carport and rehashed the event in my brain. I had come too close to buying the farm that morning.
I realize now that it will be something stupid like this which kills me. It won’t be a horrible motorcycle wreck, or some firearms accident - I’ll be crushed by a crashing airplane while walking to the corner drug store, or I’ll be hit by lightning while changing a flat tire on the truck. Maybe I’ll die from some kind of infection due to a paper cut.
I’ve survived all kinds of accidents in my life, without a scratch. I was even hit on my first motorcycle by a 50 MPH hit-and-run driver, and though I was not even wearing a helmet, I walked away without a bruise. I’ve fallen out of trees, had things explode in my face, literally. No injuries. I’ve never broken a bone. (I did manage a bone chip out of one heel, as I brushed it on the edge getting out of a swimming pool - but that’s just more proof that the minor things are out to get me.)
It’ll be a paper cut. Or a freak accident with a party balloon. Either something utterly mundane, or freakishly odd, is going to be my ticket to a dirt nap. At least, death’s attempts so far seem to point that way.
The ol’ Brothel was feeling a little antiseptic these days, in spite of how much I liked some of the features of HemingwayEx (the previous theme of this site.)
So, I dug around and found this new theme, Greenmagic, from i Web Net, which fit the bill. Though I’ve modified it slightly, the basic look and feel remains the same. Thanks for making this theme GPL licensed, guys!
Since it doesn’t fit in with a brothel theme, I’ve stepped out into the garden for now. It’s good to reinvent yourself a little, now and then.
(The image pictured is from Weird Tales, April, 1934, with the featured story, “Satan’s Garden”.)
Islam is the religion of peace, we are told.
Salman Rushdie has been knighted in Great Britain, and the response from Muslim leaders has been predictable.
From the Guardian, “This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. “The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ’sir’ title.”
Can’t you just feel the love there?
Read the entire article here.
After the publication of the “Satanic Verses”, the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie. This is a holy decree of death sentence against one who has blasphemed against the Islamic faith. It is a sentence of murder, that states directly that it is a duty of any Muslim with the opportunity, to kill Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing a book.
This is love? This is tolerance?
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no message of love in the Islamic religion, it is merely another method of control, by forcing the will of human leaders onto it’s followers under the premise that they are doing the work of God. It is ancient, tribal superstition, founded on ignorant bullshit and lacking any care for anyone outside of its control. No evidence supports its assertions. No evidence supports its claims. Like all other “revealed” religion, it is pure fiction. In this case, a dangerous fiction.
Those who follow this religion and others constantly harp about how we are supposed to “honor all religions”, and the method they want this honor to come is always in the form of obeying the religion’s principals. Well, I’m sorry to say that there is a difference between honoring a religion and obeying it. Like the ignorant morons in this country who thump their Bibles and scream for respect, they are merely painting themselves as the intolerant ones, showing their true colors for all to see. Tolerance and honor to them, is obedience.
The fact of the matter is, these people are receiving tolerance. From the secular, worldly point of view, the pronouncement that one is “Muslim” or “Christian” or whatever revealed religion you want to name, is simply a self-proclamation that one is delusional. I can’t speak for Britain, but I think we’ve been pretty tolerant of these delusional people in this country. After all, where else can you go where it is inscribed in the deepest law of the land that the government cannot interfere with the people’s practice of their delusions?
Religious tolerance does not include having to respect the religion’s belief system. Religious tolerance is allowing those following a religious belief to practice their beliefs, in any way they wish, as long as it is not harming others. Religious tolerance does not include an automatic respect for those beliefs, as if they have intrinsic value. Religious tolerance does not include looking aside when a religion calls for someone’s murder.
While the Islamic world throws a temper tantrum over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, the world should ignore them. Until Islamic leaders stop calling for fatwas and jihads against the things it disagrees with, the world should rightly treat them as the murderous scum they are and fight them every step of the way.
For those who think I’m making up this crap as I go, here’s another fun story about entering the country from Canada…
Benjamin Wittes may be a gun-grabbing fool, but he’s at least an honest one.
“The Second Amendment is one of the clearest statements of right in the Constitution,” Benjamin Wittes, a guest scholar at the center-left Brookings Institution, acknowledged in a discussion Monday. “We’ve had decades of sort of intellectual gymnastics to try to make those words not mean what they say.”
Wittes, who said he has “no particular enthusiasm for the idea of a gun culture,” said that rather than try to limit gun ownership through regulation that potentially violates the Second Amendment, opponents of gun ownership should set their sights on repealing the amendment altogether.
“Rather than debating the meaning of the Second Amendment, I think the appropriate debate is whether we want a Second Amendment,” Wittes said.
Read the full article at CNS News.com.
What Mr. Wittes doesn’t understand is that modern society’s apparent ambivalence toward protecting themselves from our own government (the crux of the Second Amendment) is not universal. It is an East Coast delusion, that aside from California, has no solid backing west of the Appalachians.
The Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States was designed from the beginning to protect the rights of the individual from being overrun by the desires of the many. It wouldn’t matter if there was just one person in the USA who still believed in the right enumerated in the Second Amendment, that is enough - the amendment stands.
Of course, law and reality do not walk hand in hand. It all leads back to rights being null and void if they are not backed up with force. This again, is the primary reason that the Framers of the Constitution put down the Second Amendment, to ensure first of all that the government knew that the People had the tools needed to fight for their rights and to establish a societal foundation of personal arms, so that the Second Amendment and others could not be repealed later down the line. It entrenched the concept of personal ownership of weapons into the culture, putting the final say of power directly in the hands of the People, all to back up what the Bill of Rights was enumerating. Without this possession of force by the People, the Bill of Rights is inconsequential and the rule of law is trivially manipulated by the government. The Founding Fathers of this nation knew this and planned for it.
Is it any wonder that some would love to see this right repealed?
As the creeping fascism in this country grows in power, the Second Amendment is going to be put to the test. What those like Benjamin Wittes are counting on, is the American Idle, sitting back and crying about their guns being taken away: doing nothing of value, while popping open another beer and flipping through the channels, trying to figure out why things went the way they did.
What Wittes and the rest of the statist clan don’t want to think about, are people like me: who are more than willing to take up the arms they have against those who would take them from us. We’re a pretty serious bunch, many of us with military or police background, who know what we’re doing with these weapons, who understand small arms combat tactics and practice such. If a small percentage of unskilled and untrained Iraqi’s are keeping our military pinned down, using crappy AK-47’s and some improvised munitions: try to imagine what kind of force America’s enthusiastic firearms owners, with their highly refined rifles, quality sidearms and US military or para-military training can do…
It is the primary reason that the Soviet Union never attempted an invasion of the States. It is the primary reason that those who work to usurp rightful power from the People to the state, have had to move so very, very slowly and carefully to do so.
Waking up this groggy giant would be a very dangerous thing to do.
I have honestly been disappointed with America’s patriots. We’ve been sitting down and accepting things for far too long now. We’ve watched our rights being whittled away, bit by bit, from both of the major parties and have done nothing. Though Witte and others believe this to be a sign of indifference, I hope that it is instead a sign of lingering faith in the democratic process - a hope that things can be resolved without firing a shot.
However, that inaction will not last. At the rate things are going, soon we will know for certain whether indifference or lingering faith has held America’s patriots from action.
There has been a bit of talk on the edge of all the other crap these days, about manned missions to Mars. Even President Bush has spouted the rhetoric, stating that it is a goal in the USA to set foot on the Red World.
We’ll never see a manned Mars mission in our lifetimes.
Our retiring space fleet, the shuttle, isn’t even qualified to make it to the moon. The shuttle was designed to put things in orbit, nothing more, so there’s no where near enough shielding in the shuttle to handle the radiation levels found beyond the magnetic field of Earth. If we didn’t have a magnetic field on this planet, the sun’s solar winds would have eroded most of the atmosphere away some time ago. 150 million kilometers from the sun is far too close for our own good without this protection.
For a mission to Mars, we’re going to have to have an overall production system designed of many vehicles carrying materials up off of the planet to the systems and people to build a spacecraft in orbit, rather than lifting off in one shot from the ground. The current International Space Station is a mosquito in mass compared to what would be needed for a Mars run.
We aren’t near the technology needed to build a nuclear powered Bussard ramjet, as there are some obstacles in the way. (This link has a nice little rant from a few on the subject.) So this means a conventional rocket, where you need enough fuel to reach there and back - which means additional mass and a whole series of other problems. Not unworkable, but it will require quite a bit of forethought and very, very careful design.
Again, you’ll need heavy shielding, designed for an extended trip outside of the protective magnetic field of Earth and Mars has no magnetic field for protection once we get there. This equates to more mass for the calculations and a lot more material we need to haul to orbit. Not to mention the myriad of issues surrounding the lander and it’s return to the orbiting spacecraft.
At our current progress in manned space flight and manufacturing materials in space, I would guess that as a species we would have a manned mission to Mars by the year 2287 at the very earliest (see below), but I’d realistically guess far longer yet.
Our track record, frankly, sucks. We’ve only been to the moon a few times, most of our efforts never leave orbit. (See table). Our manned missions have been pathetic considering the near half century of the process and the leaps of general technology in the time given. Not to mention the horrible logistics of building large craft in space. Our current space stations are built on Earth and shipped up in pieces. I don’t know that we’d be able to do that for a Mars capable ship. Maybe so, maybe not. There’s a lot of crap floating between here and there that we’d need to shield for, et cetera. The flimsy structure of a typical space station would never survive the trip.
We haven’t even touched on the monetary cost of it all…
To put the trip itself into perspective, the moon is roughly 386,000 kilometers away and stays that way in respect to us. Mars, at it’s closest point on August 27th, 2003 (the closest it had been in 60,000 years) was roughly 56 million kilometers away - but to make it worse, given that the planets are moving in their own orbits, when we launched a series of probes the actual distance needed to travel to get there was 485 million kilometers. That’s a difference of 1,256 times. It’s the difference between driving a kilometer down to the neighborhood convenience store and driving between Los Angeles and Denver. Then you have to get back again. (More here.) For the record, it will be another 280 years before we’re anywhere near that close again, which is why I predict 2287 at the earliest.
Considering all that you would need to take with you to make a colony (that would have to be self-sustained from the very beginning, as trips to the grocery store are not going to be frequent), perhaps we’d have a full colony on Mars by the year 2800 to 3000.
Note, I said “would”. We’re going to run into resource issues on Earth long before we attain the needed technology to travel in such a way on any level of frequency, so I highly doubt we’ll be able to get off world colonies before we’ve essentially wiped out any chance of our species spreading off of Earth.
Our species was born here and we’ll probably die here, never to expand off world at all.
I would hazard a guess that we have 100-200 years left on this planet before our species is extinct by overpopulation and vanished resources. I’ll give a chance of survival for a few, but population levels will drop to a few million at most and until the planet’s ecosystem recovered, there would be no way to sustain larger populations. Give it 1,000 to 10,000 years until nature fixes things up again (this is a hard one to predict, because nature often surprises us.) If our descendants learn from our mistakes, they may be able to try again and plan things out well enough to colonize other solar planets and perhaps one day reach beyond - but only by carefully managing terrestrial resources from a single command control and like controls on human population levels, could this ever occur. I personally think that I’m being optimistic when I guess that such won’t happen for another 4,000 to 10,000 years - if any humans survive, of course.
In other words, if you’re looking for a manned mission to Mars in your lifetime, I wouldn’t hold your breath for it. We’re a long way off from being able to build the ship needed just to reach Mars with humans aboard, (outside of my prediction of Earthly planetary disaster before we achieve this.)
Certainly we can look at our progress of technology over the last 100 years and make a claim that with our accelerated efforts, we could combat the difficulties of such a trip. However, I’m not making the statements I do in terms of time taken alone, but in terms of accomplishments in that time, compared to the ultimate goals.
In the last 50 years of time, our advances in material sciences and especially computer science have gone from infancy to toddler (perhaps even pre-teen in the computer world.) I have a desktop system sitting next to me right now that would blow away the capabilities of many models of Cray’s supercomputers and has graphic generation hardware on a single AGP card which outperforms SGI’s heavy and large Reality-Engine hardware (the first used for movie special effects) by orders of magnitude. Researchers have finally been able to store data on the orbiting electrons of an individual atom. It won’t be long until the computer science industry reaches it’s teen years and on to adulthood.
Our space program, by comparison, has gone from infant, to infant having its diapers changed. Maybe my point of view is skewed from working in computer science, but the space program stagnated after the Cold War propaganda was no longer required, with almost all efforts going into orbiting communication satellites and an “efficient” way to get them into orbit.
This difference is not merely due to a sluggishness of effort, but partly due to the fact that space exploration is very dangerous for people to undertake. Deep sea diving has far less hazards.
As far as I’m concerned, that we are incapable of building spacecraft in orbit, means that space exploration is not even close to being out of diapers yet. Leaving our terrestrial neighborhood (further out than the moon) with manned flight will be our first crawling efforts. We won’t hit our space program teens until we have manned missions leaving the solar system. Distance traveled is the measure I’m using and we’ve gone nowhere in manned flight. The moon - a big deal for a first effort to extend a hand - is nothing compared to the size of the solar system and too tiny to even matter compared to reaching the edge of our solar system, let alone the closest star outside of Sol.
Think of the scale of distances involved here…Jupiter and Saturn have moons which are as far away from them as we are from the sun! Now try to grasp how far away these planets are from us, then envision Pluto’s distance much, much further out and realize that this is a fraction of the way out to reaching the Ort cloud…which isn’t even the end of Sol’s “bubble” of influence.
By my measure, the space program infant is not even crawling yet! It’s still sitting on it’s butt, reaching out to the one toy near it with a very clumsy hand and throwing a wooden block or two out onto the carpet nearby. 386,000 kilometers. Yawn…
At aphelion (the farthest point of it’s elliptical orbit) Pluto is 49.308 AU’s from the sun (49.308 times the distance of the Earth’s orbit) or roughly 7.38 billion kilometers from the sun (4.59 billion miles for those who prefer it.) That’s roughly 19,000 times further out than the moon is from us and that’s just the last planet. As I said, you have to go much further yet to leave the solar system itself, past the Ort cloud - and the nearest star…38 trillion kilometers, or roughly 9,844,560 times the distance to the moon.
Going back to my car analogy, and switching to English measure, so the metric disabled among us can get a picture of things: claiming victory because our car traversed just one foot to the moon as an absolutely amazing and tremendous accomplishment, is ridiculous. I’m looking at the 3.62 miles left to go just to get outside of the neighborhood. To get to the next neighborhood, we’ve got 1,864.5 miles ahead of us.
Space is just a little bigger than people like to give it credit for.
Air travel is going to take a turn for the even worse when it comes to foreign flights leaving the USA.
According to this article in the Guardian, passengers traveling from the US will have to be fingerprinted to be allowed on any flight.
It’s enough to make you vomit. Read the article here.
Personally, unless there simply is no other way, I stopped flying after 9-11; not because of any fear of terrorism, but because I don’t like being treated like dirt.
It’s not just air travel, however. I went on a motorcycle tour through western Canada in 2004, trying, but failing to get to Alaska. (Wildfires kept closing the ALCAN.) Since the terrorist hype was going full bore less than three years after the World Trade Center attack, I thought it best to get a passport before crossing the border. This was before the current requirement to have a passport to return from Canada existed, but I was smart in predicting a paranoid and over-reactive government.
Crossing over to Canada was a breeze. As I drove in, there were three small buildings with drive up windows, each occupied by a Canadian official. Being the dimwit I am, I didn’t notice if they were Mounties, or some other group. There were no barricades, no armed guards, no sense of distress in the body language of anyone there. I pulled up to the window, where a cute blond gal was sitting, perhaps a little bored. I killed the bike engine.
I stated who I was, told her I was there on vacation, making my way to Alaska and showed her my drivers license and passport. The gal there didn’t even bother to stamp the passport, took a brief glance at the drivers license and then warned me that I might have trouble getting through all of the uncontrolled wildfires in British Columbia and the Yukon Territories. I thanked her for the information and motored on.
That was it.
Coming back into the US, was a far different story.
I pulled up toward the border, where several armed men shuffled about, all with the body language of paranoid watch dogs. After filing through a carefully controlled gate system, I was finally stopped under a security camera and told to kill my engine. (Note, I was not asked this on the way into Canada, I had killed the engine on my own - and would have done the same here in just a few moments.) One of the armed guards came up to me and asked where I was going. I replied that I was heading home and handed him my drivers license and passport. I can’t claim that this is an exact dialog, but it’s accurate enough…
“Where are you from?”
“Originally, or now?”
“Now.”
“Just like the drivers license says, Utah.”
“Lived there long?”
“A few years.”
“How many years?”
“Since April, ‘99.”
“Where did you live before that?”
“Indiana.”
“Why did you move to Utah?”
“Why do you care?” This was a mistake and I knew it as soon as I was done speaking.
“Why did you move to Utah, sir.” His tone was now a little tense.
“I work at the University of Utah. It was a good job offer that I couldn’t pass up.”
“So, you’re from Indiana originally?”
“No. I lived there for about 11 years. I moved there from Minnesota, where I grew up.”
“You don’t sound like you have an Indiana accent.”
“I told you, I grew up in Minnesota.”
“You don’t sound Minnesotan.” (As if this guy would know what a Minnesotan native sounds like.)
“Minnesotan’s don’t have accents, unless they live in the northern part of the state. No accent at all. That’s why we all become news announcers.” I smiled. The joke fell flat.
“Why were you in Canada?”
“I’m on vacation.”
“Where are you heading now?”
“As I’ve already stated, back home. Are we through, officer?”
“Are you carrying any food, alcohol, cigarettes or other tobacco products?”
“No.”
“Anything to declare?”
“No.”
He walked back into his armored hut, talked for a bit with another guy behind bullet proof glass, going over my drivers license and passport like I was Saddam with a shave - being sure to look up and give me the accusative glance ever few moments of talk. Finally, after deliberately wasting time for about five minutes, he came back with my ID and told me that I was “allowed” back in.
I motored back into my native country and actually wondered why I was coming back.
Our country is being converted right under our noses, into a police state. Under the guise of anti-terrorism, our liberties are being stripped, our rights are being denied and we are being assumed guilty until proven innocent.
It’s only going to get worse.