Talk of “climate change” no more. No, it’s a new Epoch for the Earth.

From Yahoo News:

Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene.

Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch:

· Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns.

· Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature.

· Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns.

· Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain.

-snip-

Earth's 4.5-billion-year history is divided into major eras, then periods and finally epochs. The Holocene Epoch began after the last Ice Age.

As early as the late 1800s scientists were writing about man's wholesale impact on the planet and the possibility of an "anthropozoic era" having begun, according to Crutzen, who is credited with coining the term Anthropocene (anthropo = human; cene = new) back in 2000. That year, Crutzen and a colleague wrote in the scientific newsletter International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme about some of the dramatic changes:

"Urbanization has ... increased tenfold in the past century. In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years."

Up to half of Earth's land has been transformed by human activity, wrote Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer of the University of Michigan. They also noted the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases and other chemicals and pollutants humans have introduced into global ecosystems.

It appears that even some hardcore Conservatives are coming around to the view that things are changing rapidly, in some very dramatic ways. Yet, there is always going to be that 20 to 30% who believe that this is nothing more than a “liberal plot”. Usually, plots have some sort of goal, like the Bush administration hiding behind “executive privilege”, such that they don’t have to explain any of their underhanded actions to anyone. What the point of this supposed “liberal plot” might be, I have no idea.

Humans, as a species, can be incredibly stupid and short sighted. The Earth, in some form or fashion, will survive. It has through many, many changes in the past, and will no doubt do so in the future. However, whether or not the climate will provide a nice habitat for humans and our society remains to be seen.

Today's 10 Minute History Lesson: World’s Fair, Chicago, 1893.

The years in America after the Civil War and prior to World War I saw a huge change in this country, for the good and the bad. The Gilded Age puts to shame the excesses we are seeing in this country today. But, many good things came out of those times as well.

The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 produced several of these changes, or else set the direction for changes to come. Additionally, it produced just some really interesting and odd things as well.

- Electric power was in its infancy. Two types of electric power were still vying for supremacy; AC (promoted by George Westinghouse, whose design came from the inventions of Nikola Tesla) and DC (promoted by Thomas Edison and the General Electric Corporation). Both bid for the contract to supply power to the fair. AC power won out, unknowingly setting the standard for the rest of the country for the future.

- When the time before the fair’s opening was getting short, the unions working construction for the fair knew they held the upper hand. Many of them went on strike for better pay and working conditions. After some initial resistance, the fair’s management relented and signed a new labor contract. This became the model for future labor/management relations.

- George Ferris’s unveiled his new design, the Ferris Wheel, with the intent of “outdoing” the Eiffel Tower, which was constructed for the World’s Fair in Paris a few years earlier. This first Ferris Wheel stood approximately 300 feet high and carried train carriage sized gondolas high above the fair grounds. Each gondola was equipped with its own small restaurant.

- Elias Disney worked at a laborer at the fair. He and his family were awestruck by the size and magnificence of the fair. Elias’s son, Walt, would later go on to pattern his Magic Kingdom after the Chicago Fair.

- Frank L. Baum visited the Fair and used it as a model for the Emerald City in his later book, The Wizard of Oz.

- Novel products were first offered for sale at the Fair, including Shredded Wheat, Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix, an “oddly flavored” gum called Juicy Fruit, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, a caramel coated popcorn mixture called Cracker Jack.

- New technological advances were introduced to the public, such as an automatic dish washer machine, Edison’s moving pictures, the first zipper for clothing.

It must have been a wonderful thing to see.

Source: “The Devil In The White City”, by Erik Larson. Copyright 2003. Vintage Books, published February 2004.

David Brooks of the New York Times nails the Republican paradigm exactly!

David Brooks is one of those beltway writers that is very pro-Republican and anti-Democrat. They are easy to spot. Brooks is a bit different than some, as he is very well spoken and makes some very good points now and then. He even criticizes his own party at times. However, whenever he does that, you know, with 100% certainty, that he is going to come and whack the Dems even harder. The main thrust of those types of columns seems to be, the Republicans do screw things up now and then, and I am man enough to admit it, but the Dems are even worse! Then he goes and documents, real or fabricated, some offense of the Democrats that make the Republican offense seem trivial. No matter what, the Republicans are always better than the Democrats!

This column is the more of the same. But the charge he makes against the Republicans (before he gets to bashing the Democrats) is exactly spot on. He nailed it. The policy of the Republicans has become to oppose whatever their opponents want.

But then a great tightening occurred. Conservative institutions and interest groups proliferated in Washington. The definition of who was a true conservative narrowed. It became necessary to pass certain purity tests — on immigration, abortion, taxes and Terri Schiavo.

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.

Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed. Moderate Republicans were expelled for squishiness. Millions of coastal suburbanites left the party in disgust.

And still the corset tightened. Many professional conservatives do not regard Mike Huckabee or John McCain as true conservatives. “I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party,” Rush Limbaugh said recently on his radio show. “It’s going to change it forever, be the end of it.”

I truly believe that is what is behind the Republicans turning a blind eye toward the problems of global warming and the coming climate change. They cannot admit that their mortal enemies have a point. They would rather see all these dire predictions about the Earth come true before the can admit that Democrats and liberals (including Al Gore, who is fat, by the way) are actually correct. And anyone who actually strays from the lockstep of the Republicans are tossed out. They aren’t true Conservatives! They are the enemy!

That is a terrible reason for a political party to exist. That pretty much ensures that anything that requires the collective wisdom and willpower of the country to address will not get done! And that is a very sad, stupid way for a country to go down the drain.

My view of American society, in microcosm.

I just returned from a business trip. My flight was very bumpy and not very enjoyable. "Thrown about the sky" comes to mind. But the part of it that I would like to relate is regarding the person sitting in front of me.

I am a rather tall person, 6’3” or so, and therefore have very little legroom in the best of times. The person in front of me, of course, reclined his seat all the way, so the seatback was literally about a foot from my face and gave me absolutely no legroom. After a while, I noticed that he was leaning forward, working on something and was not leaning against his reclined seat at all. I tapped him on the shoulder and, very politely, asked if he might pull up his seat one notch, as I had no legroom. I also had knee surgery not that long ago, and am still having trouble with it. I didn’t tell him that, though.

This guy reacted like I had just asked him the most ridiculous thing in the entire world, something akin to asking if he would give me his brand new Porsche. He just glared at me with this unbelieving look. He did move his seat up after he made his point, but he did so in a very grudging matter and didn’t respond when I thanked him.

I thought that was the end of the matter. About 20 minutes later, when he had finished whatever he was working on, he threw back his seat with all the force he could muster, without warning me at all. Of course, he knew that I was already cramped, but that didn’t matter. Later, when he left his seat and then returned, he sat down with what I thought was as much force as he could muster so that his seat whacked me in the knees.

I was thinking to myself, you certainly are an infantile, petulant bastard…. I got the impression he was just waiting for me to say something. I wasn’t going to, at all. I’m not going to escalate the situation with someone spoiling for a fight.

I am positive that this guy was a hard core conservative Republican. He just had that look to him. The crewcut might have something to do with it. Now, he might have been one of the most liberal Democrats in the entire world, but I would bet $1000 against it. He struck me as one of those people who think that they have absolutely no use for anyone outside his little circle, and being nice or even accommodating to another person is something that just is beneath him. He ignores people when possible, and when they intrude on his own personal universe, do whatever he can do to “show them who’s the boss!”

And that is how I view about 30 to 40 percent of the population of this country. That little temper tantrum, when I asked nicely for something that I would do without a second thought, he had to show me that I couldn’t get away with it, demonstrates perfectly what I believe that a lot of people actually believe. That explains their entire viewpoint of “us vs. them”.

So, if I am correct in my assessment, this guy would never read a blog, much less a liberal blog. He just didn’t seem like the “bloggy” type. But, buddy, if you DO happen to read this, screw you! Grow up! Stop acting like an adolescent George Bush! Jeez.

That little rant accomplished absolutely nothing, except made me feel a bit better. Which is the entire point of rants, after all.

On a business trip, try back this weekend.

I might have something terribly interesting to say by then.

Or not.

Messenger probes passes Mercury!

More knowledge about the solar system is being added in big chunks as the first spacecraft in some 30 years takes pictures of the planet Mercury.

I find this type of subject so fascinating. Humans, for as long as we have known about the existence of other planets, could only speculate about what they actually looked like in detail. Now we are finding out. I find exploration of space, by orbiting spacecraft, planetary rovers or telescopic observation (visible, x-ray, infrared, etc.) one of the more appealing things about our species. We now have the technology, as well as the will, to find out what our universe actually is.

There is speculation, no proof as of yet, that Mercury might have been a captured primordial body, similar to the one that collided with Earth during its formation and resulted in our Moon, and it did not actually form from accretion as did the other planets.

This is from NASA’s Astronomical Picture of the Day (APOD), a very cool web site indeed.

Two days ago, the MESSENGER spacecraft became only the second spacecraft in human history to swoop past Mercury. The last spacecraft to visit the Sun's closest planet was Mariner 10 over 35 years ago. Mariner 10 was not able to photograph Mercury's entire surface, and the images it did send back raised many questions. Therefore, much about planet Mercury remains unknown. This week's flyby of MESSENGER was only the first of three flybys. Over the next few years MESSENGER will swing past twice more and finally enter Mercury's orbit in 2011. MESSENGER is currently moving too fast to enter orbit around Mercury now. The above image was taken two days ago during MESSENGER's flyby and shows part of Mercury's surface that has never been imaged in detail before. Many more MESSENGER will hopefully help scientists better understand how Mercury's surface was formed, and why it is so dense.

The following text and picture at the top is from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory web site.


Just 21 minutes after MESSENGER’s closest approach to Mercury, the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) took this picture showing a variety of intriguing surface features, including craters as small as about 300 meters (about 300 yards) across. This is one of a set of 68 NAC images showing landscapes near Mercury’s equator on the side of the planet never before imaged by spacecraft. From such highly detailed close-ups, planetary geologists can study the processes that have shaped Mercury’s surface over the past 4 billion years. One of the highest and longest scarps (cliffs) yet seen on Mercury curves from the top center down across the left side of this image. (The Sun is shining low from the right, so the scarp casts a wide shadow.) Great forces in Mercury’s crust have thrust the terrain occupying the right two-thirds of the picture up and over the terrain to the left. An impact crater has subsequently destroyed a small part of the scarp near the bottom of the image.

The Day The Earth Stood Still: Klaatu as a Christ figure?

This idea was suggested to me a number of years ago on another web site I used to frequent quite often, of which all the contributors to this site, along with a couple of reliable readers, are alumni. Anyway, although it’s not quite in the same league as The DaVinci Code, it’s rather interesting for film buffs. These allegories were known the Robert Wise, the director, at the time.

Klaatu comes to Earth with a message of peace, but also a message of terrible retribution if this message of peace isn’t adopted. He is killed by the Powers That Be, who are afraid of his motives and what he might bring about. He is then brought back to life. When questioned about this by Patricia Neils character, Klaatu responds that the power of life and death is reserved only “the Almighty Spirit”. (This message was not intended in the original idea of the film, as it was imposed by a Production Code. They evidently thought that the idea of an all powerful, all knowing race was rather at odds with the idea of God being the only all powerful entity in the universe.) Klaatu, like Christ who cured the lepers and changed water into wine, exhibited extraordinary powers in causing all electricity around the world to stop. Even the name of “Carpenter” that Klaatu assumes while masquerading as a local inhabitant is reminiscent of the message of Christ.

It is difficult to determine just what to make of this allegory. Personally, I have never been too keen on allegory and symbolism. I tend to take things at face value. The Christ connection never occurred to me on my own until someone else pointed it out, just as the message in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Aslan as Christ never occurred to me. I work as an engineer and have training as a scientist. Clarity of information is paramount. Why anyone chooses to give a message by a method that is prone to personal interpretation, I have no idea. When I say this to anyone else, the answer I get back is, “That is the idea. What does it mean to you?” My answer back is, “I don’t know and I really don't care what I think. It’s YOUR story/movie/song. YOU tell ME what you intended. You obviously thought enough about your idea to put a lot of time and effort into it. I want to know what you intended. Why are you asking me to interpret something that you wrote?” To me, that’s just stupid. But then, I have found out that I don’t think like most people I know.

Therefore, it is difficult to reach any conclusions about what this Christ-like connection actually means in a sci-fi film from the 1050’s, when the concern those days was “The Red Menace”, “duck and cover” and building bomb shelters in your back yard. It is probably nothing more than an interesting idea that someone thought would make a compelling story, and as the film progressed, the more muddled it all became by other people in a position of power putting their fingerprints all over it.

My main concern about the message in this film is not the Christ connection. It is about the basic message that Klaatu delivered to Earth. “Become peaceful, or we will destroy you.” Talk about your basic contradictory message. “Do as I say, not as I do.” It just doesn’t really fit in with the concept of promoting peace and brotherly love. It is more of an ultimatum, not unlike that of the approach advocated by George Bush and Dick Cheney. “If we think you are threatening us, or even have the potential of threatening us sometime in the future, we reserve the right to annihilate you and to do so without a second thought.”

That is the message that I really have a problem with, in today’s politics or a sci-fi film.

More about this idea in contained in the IMDB entry for the movie, under “trivia”.

Sitemeter, thoughts regarding.

I added the Sitemeter thing to this site a few weeks ago, just to see how much traffic I was actually getting. After blogger changed to this new interface, commenters to this place sure dried up. I wasn't sure that anyone was actually reading. But then, that isn't really the point of this blog. I am perfectly aware that this is about a fourth or fifth tier blog, and I don't do much (although there are a few posts) in the way of original thinking or reporting. Still, I was interested to see what was actually going on.

I did get a big bump for a while from the New Year's "Best of the bloggers" link from Jon Swift. That was neat to be in a list with some VERY good blogs. That lasted about two weeks. I get all sorts of hits for people obviously searching for something specific. (I was a bit alarmed when I saw that someone in Iran was actually reading my post about the possibility of the U.S. bombing his/her country. Just imagine, they were using me to get some information! Scary....) Fractals remains high on the search list, for some reason. That particular post is not much more than a cool picture.

I am very confused, however, about why 90% of the hits I get register as 0.00 as the time spent on the site. Someone clicks in and decides in less than a second they aren't interested? That's surprising. Jeez, you made the effort to click through. At least, look around for 15 seconds to see what's here. And it doesn't really jive with the overall average time that people spend on the site. So, I don't know how to intrepret that.

But here is the thing that I found amazing. Although I knew this kind of information was available, it took me by surprise about the information I can see immediately about each and every person who looks in. I can see the location. I can see the web access you are using. I can see what kind of operating system you are using and what kind of monitor you have! That's pretty scary. And that's just what is being presented to me, in whatever sorted fashion I would like! I have no idea what else people can get if they do a little digging.

It makes me not want to every look in on anything on the web again. Especially at work.

This is hilarious, in a very ironic and depressing sort of way.

O.K., all that noise from the Bush administration about how, if the telecoms were not given retroactive immunity for all the illegal spying that they did on behalf of the White House, “Americans were going to die”. That was the line. If the Democrats didn’t cave and sign that monstrosity of a FISA bill, “Americans were going to die”. Huh.

And now, today, we have word (via the NYTimes and lots of other blogs) that at least one of the telecom giants stopped their wiretapping activities, which may have well been illegal, not because they have had a change of heart, not because it was against the law, not because they realized their duty to the Constitution of the United States. No. None of those. It was because the FBI didn’t pay the telephone bills.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ''was halted due to untimely payment,'' the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

''We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,'' according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

Well, glad to see that the telecoms treat the government just as they would any other American citizen. No money, no service.

I do wonder how they are going to justify all those dead Americans, however.

More thoughts about the presidential election season.

None of these items really are developed to the point that I could make a complete post out of any of them. So, I’ll just stuff them in a single one, sort of like sardines in a can.

- Ms. Clinton is being treated very unfairly by the media. They hate her, they have already made up their minds they are going to take her down, and that’s all there is to that. It never crosses their mind that journalists are not supposed to pick the candidates! That is not their job! They are supposed to report and analyze, not demean and bury just because they don’t like someone. When Ms. Clinton gets teary eyed, she’s weak and emotional. When she gets angry or frustrated, she’s strident and shrill. She has breasts. And she’s married to someone else that the media already hates. What could be better? And, as Maha likes to put it, Chris Matthews remains high on the list of people I would like to smack really hard.

- I am not certain that I am enamored with the idea of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. I think she would probably make a good President (excellent, compared to the one we have now, but then, a Hello, Kitty! wall clock would be preferable to what we have now). However, I am probably pretty sure that she would get absolutely ripped to shreds by the Republicans and their attack dogs in the general election. Unlike John Kerry, she would definitely fight back. She’s been through too much already. However, it would be very nasty. The Republicans seem a bit nonplussed that Ms. Clinton has not already been anointed the nominee. But, I think they will get the “wind beneath their sails” as quickly as they adjust to the fact that Mr. Obama might be the nominee, instead of Ms. Clinton. In fact, they will probably have a field day. He’s black, he’s got a funny name that sounds a bit like the name of some lunatic that knocked down the WTC towers, he was born a Muslim…. Wheee!! Did I mention he is black? Still… I am thinking that, even though Ms. Clinton is undoubtedly qualified for the office, I don’t believe the country really needs to endure what will certainly happen if she is the nominee. I also am thinking that some fair minded, right of center Republicans might actually support Mr. Obama, where the mere mention of Hillary Clinton’s name seems to require some primal response from conservatives of all stripes, not unlike Pavlov’s dog. Conservatives, that is. Not Ms. Clinton.

- I very much dislike seeing the Democratic candidates really ripping on each other. I was very unhappy to see Barack Obama parroting Republican talking points in an attempt to trash Ms. Clinton. Likewise, I was very unhappy to see Ms. Clinton repeat that tired old George Bush line (that has been adopted with great gusto by Rudy Giuliani) that, if we dare elect anyone but her, the country will not be safe from terrorists. You would think that the Dems would have had their fill of that kind of crap over the last seven years. That kind of behavior absolutely stinks to high heaven, I don’t care if it is politics.

- I am rather excited by the possibility of having the good ol’ boy U.S. of A. actually electing a black guy as President. There are going to be many, many in this country who will start foaming at the mouth if this looks like it will occur, and I am going to be very fearful of Mr. Obama’s safety for quite some time. But, if we were actually to elect this man to the highest office, boy. What a step forward that would be for this country. He may be short on the specifics of his ideas for policies and how he is going to handle the numerous problems that the Bush administration is going to leave him, but his message is certainly resonating right now. We have heard “vote the bums out!” many times, but usually, the people who replace the ones we threw out were just as bad or much worse.

- If Mr. Obama wins, will all future candidates for high political office start kissing up to Oprah and trying for her endorsement? Oprah = Kingmaker!

- I rather feel for John Edwards. This should have been his time, after what happened in 2004. However, the world is not fair and things rarely work out like they should. I think Mr. Edwards would have made a very, very good President. Yes, he is still carries the label of “serious contender”, but he isn’t going to win the Democratic nomination. I wish both he and his wife the best.

- I am hoping that this cratering of the Republican candidates means the final breakup of the current Republican party, which is run by a bunch of power-mad, Constitution hating, testosterone frenzied freaks. They deserve to become totally irrelevant. However, as I have said before, I think that it is vital that this country have two vibrant political parties. I need not agree with both of them. If that was the case, what is the point of having two? But we just need that checks and balances that two parties can provide. However, and this is a big however, we need both parties to have a moral balance, a sense of fair play and working toward the common good. “Beating the crap out of the other guy” is not a reason for a political party to exist, and neither is cheating, lying and operating outside the law just so they can retain their power and line their own pockets with taxpayer money. That is what the current Republican party is, and it needs to change.

- I have been very fearful of the extreme Fundamentalist Christian right wing of the Republican party really grabbing hold of power and running roughshod over everyone and everything else, including the Constitution. I really believe that these people would like nothing better than to establish a Christian (Southern Baptist, of course) theocratic government, which would also probably produce something along the lines of a police state worthy of Mussolini. However, I see lots of pushback on that now, including some on the Republican side of the aisle. Fundamentalist Christians are supposed to know their place, just supply the votes when required, and then go back home until the next election period. The Republican establishment doesn’t really like this new Huckabee phenomena very much, so they are pushing back as well. I am breathing a bit easier than I was about 8 months ago. However, I think we still need to be very wary.

- Bill O’Reilly is, and will always remain, a unendurable prick who believes the world revolves around him. Unfortunately, a Democratic win in November will just mean that he, once more, has a reason to exist. That is, to attempt to destroy anyone and everyone who disagrees with him.

An emotional rant intended for an American audience only, and only those interested in NCAA football. All others, proceed cautiously while yawning.

The NCAA “National Championship” game was held this week in New Orleans, which, if I am not mistaken, just hosted the Sugar Bowl a little over a week earlier. In summation, LSU won, Ohio State lost again, for the second time in two years, and, outside of the states of Ohio and Louisiana, no one really cared. Big deal. Try telling the University of Southern California or the University of Georgia that LSU has a better football team. Heck, even the University of Missouri. This game really proved nothing. In fact, it was a complete and utter “don’t care”.

Listen up, NCAA. College football is supposed to be over on JANUARY 1st!! Just because you, the major television networks and the “BCS conferences” have figured out that you aren’t competing with yourselves when all the major bowl games were held on New Year’s Day, it doesn’t mean that people really give a flying fig about a game that is held over a week after everyone else has gone home? And on a Monday night? Sheesh. Can you say “anti-climactic”? Or perhaps, “post-coital depression”? If last night’s game really and truly was “for all the marbles”, then why did we all waste our time on those 26 other bowl games, or whatever it was, in the last month? Those meant nothing?

Even the name, “BCS National Championship Game” sounds hokey and totally bereft of any magic at all, when placed next to “The Rose Bowl”, “The Orange Bowl” or “The Sugar Bowl”. Those games have history and pageantry. Their very names invoke a certain mystique. They have an aura about them. The BCS National Championship Game is a cheap invention, “the big con”. It embraces all that is bad about the NFL Super Bowl, and has none of the benefits of being the final game after all the other pretenders to the crown have been dispatched. For your information, HALF of the teams playing in bowl games ended their season by winning their games!

Either make this one way or the other. Either you institute a honest-to-God tournament, like the DII and DIII playoffs (and I refuse to use that utterly insipid name the NCAA has foisted upon them, when even all the television commentators have given up and call them “the divisions that used to be called DII and DIII), or else go back the way it was, where all the bowl games mattered. Don’t pull this lame crap where we should all care about crowning one particular team National Champions, where it is all such a transparent farce.

The NCAA “Bowl Championship Series”. To me, it’s just another demonstration of the ruling class in our society pretending to address what was really an issue for many people (i.e., the lack of a true champion in NCAA DI football), but only coming up with something that just puts more money in the pockets of the people and institutions that already have lots of it already.

Portugal's amazing airport runway

The airport's runway is 2781 meters long, of which 1000 meters of the runway is supported by 180 pillars, each pillar 50 meters height (about 17 floors tall). Surprisingly, the runway is designed to safely handle a Boeing 747.

Look at the cars parked below the runway.

It rather looks like an aircraft carrier. On land. With really long legs.

(Thanks to my buddy Wolfman for supplying these photos and technical info.)

Update: This post has been getting quite a lot of hits from people searching on the words in the title, such as "Portugal" and "airport". I have to say that these photos look like they were taken by a professional photographer and are probably under copywrite. They are in the state that I got them, without any identification or attribution. If someone were to tell me that they are under copywrite, I would certainly either delete them or post them with an attribution, as I did the pictures of the storm pictures with the ferry.

This is known as "covering one's behind", in case you didn't recognize it.

“I’m for Mike Huckabee, as he is the only true Christian running for president.”

UPDATED BELOW:

I don’t know how many times I have seen a statement similar to this one in print in the last couple of weeks. Mike Huckabee is certainly an interesting phenomenon, and one that might go along way towards splintering the current Republican party into about three pieces. It will be quite interesting to see how this all goes down in the next few years. Yes, the next year prior to the election will be VERY interesting, indeed. However, if Huckabee is indeed the Republican candidate, which is no sure thing, and he loses big time, then the years AFTER the general election will also be very interesting. The uneasy coalition of neocons (who are pretty much only interested in the U.S. throwing its weight around militarily around the world), theocons (who seem to be intent on implementing a theocracy in the U.S.) and the followers of Grover Norquist (who want the U.S. government to essentially go away, and to never pay taxes, ever again) will have shown that it isn’t working anymore. The theocons are wanting everything that the other groups have been promising them for the last 25 years, in order to get their votes.

But that isn’t the point of this post. I am writing about this absolutely insane idea that many Christians seem to hold that, if someone professes to be a good Christian and that Jesus is his main guiding light in everything, including politics, then that person can do no wrong. Never. It’s always the “liberals” and “secular progressives” (the worst thing they can think of to call someone) that are the evil ones, the ones that are the root of all problems. They thought this way with George Bush, even with all the myriad of his obvious faults that have come to light in the last eight years, and they think this way with Mike Huckabee. Even the story that Huckabee freed a serial killer and rapist while governor of Arkansas, just because one of the victims was a distant relative of Bill Clinton and Huckabee was looking to score some political points, and that person went on to rape and kill at least one, maybe two, more people after he was released makes absolutely no difference to the “true believers”.

From Digby:

Which brings us to the genuinely repellent topic of Michael Huckabee. The fact that he won the Iowa caucus chills me to the bone. This is a ruthless, ignorant, and dangerously opportunistic fanatic who is so unqualified for the presidency that no one in the media should have returned his calls. And they still shouldn't.

This is a man so bereft of character he actively worked to free a serial rapist, a seriously deranged sociopath who had also been directly involved in a brutal murder. And why did Huckabee proactively seek Wayne Dumond's freedom? For one reason only: Because his release had become a rightwing cause celebre. Sure enough, soon after Huckabee's efforts succeeded in returning Dumond to the outside world, Dumond raped and murdered at least one, if not two women.

Huckabee's championing of Dumond's release - Huckabee never read the court documents or appeals from Dumond's victims - is enough to demonstrate that he has neither the judgment or moral character to be a dog catcher, let alone president. But since then, Huckabee has made it his business repeatedly to lie about his involvement in Dumond's release - which would never have happened without his efforts. So let's not mince words here:

Huckabee is hardly a better candidate for president than Wayne Dumond himself would be, if he were still alive.

It is said in his defense that Huckabee has only slept with one woman since he married (and for all I know, maybe his whole life). He doesn't drink, and he doesn't smoke and he reads the Bible. In other words, Huckabee meets the minimum standards to be a fundamentalist Christian preacher, even if these qualifications are mostly honored in the breech. But whether one finds such behavior laudable or pathetically stunted, they are irrelevant. They are hardly positive character traits for a US president. Sober judgment, however, is. But Huckabee has none. Integrity is. But Huckabee has none.

Some of the worst crimes against humanity have been carried out by people who were absolutely certain they were carrying out “God’s Will”. I won’t go into all the obvious examples again. I will pull one out of somewhat recent (given the length of human civilization) American history. General Robert E. Lee was in charge of the military of the Confederate States of America. He was, by all accounts, a God fearing person whose motto was “God, Family, and Virginia”. He firmly believed that God was on the side of the CSA and on his side, personally. He prayed constantly, seeking divine guidance in his struggle with the North, otherwise known as the government of the United States of America. Yet, this person was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, and was essentially a traitor to his country. Yet, he was convinced that God was on his side, as were all his followers.

You can see how well that all turned out.

The lesson that is constantly forgotten is that being a Christian does not automatically make you infallible or even “a good person”. The very fact that Christians see other Christians as being infallible make them blind to faults that are obvious to everyone else.

UPDATED: More on Huckabee and Southern Baptists from Frank Schaeffer at HuffPo.

Mike Huckabee wants to be our president. He doesn't know about foreign policy. But he believes every word of the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Bible. Here is what he believes. God is angry with us and has always been. He was pissed off with us from day one. He was so pissed off that He wrestled with making a choice between killing all of us in a flood or saving just one family -- Noah's -- so that later God could sacrifice His only Son to save everyone descended from the one family he didn't kill and/or send them to hell for eternity. God did this because Adam and Eve, not to mention Noah's great, great grandchildren-that's you and me-didn't live up to God's pre-creation expectations. Cheerful, huh?

I was a zealous evangelical back in the 1970s. When you are a zealous anything -- evangelical, Marxist, feminist, capitalist, Democrat, Republican, whatever-you express your zeal by lying. The lie is always the same lie: to say that you're certain about things, that you are right, and others wrong. They are so wrong that they are evil! This is a lie because truth is elusive. Nothing is as simple as any zealot, of any persuasion, thinks it is.

Huckabee represents the half of us who are waiting for Jesus to "rapture" us and believe that the other half are second class citizens that God is just biding His time to gleefully destroy and torture for eternity. Thanks but no thanks Iowa.

This kind of person just makes me physcially ill to my stomach.

Ed Rollins has been in politics for quite some time and best known for running Ronald Regan’s re-election campaign in 1983. He is now running Mike Huckabee’s campaign. Here is a little snippet from Rawstory that illustrates the mentality of these people.


In a testy exchange just after his candidate won Thursday's Iowa caucuses, Mike Huckabee's campaign chairman acknowledged discussing the potential Huckabee would "go negative" in South Carolina and boasting about onetime-frontrunner Rudy Giuliani's foundering campaign.

--snip--

South Carolina could present Rollins with an opportunity to go negative, after Huckabee scuttled a similar plan in Iowa. At a press conference Monday, the affable former Arkansas governor and ordained minister told assembled reporters that he had decided at the last minute not to run an attack ad aimed at Mitt Romney. Huckabee then played the ad for the press -- just to prove he actually made one, he said.

The attack ad, which questioned Romeny's positions on gun control, abortion and the death penalty, was Rollins idea, and the strategist told the Washington Post that he relishes the underbelly of politics.

"To me, hitting somebody, knocking somebody down, is a great feeling," he said. "Firing out a negative ad just feels amazing." (Highlight mine.)

This toad “relishes the underbelly of politics”. He likes to get nasty with other human beings. It gives him “an amazing feeling”.

And this is the party of God and “family values”? Is it any wonder why the country is in such sad shape? People who enjoy destroying other people are running it. Yes, I agree that there are a number of Democrats who have the exact same mindset. However, this kind of behavior has become the norm in the Republican party in the last 12 years or so. They have perfected it. That is how they operate. In fact, they don’t know any other way.

The best line I heard on MSNBC last night about the Iowa caucuses

Tweety (that's Chris Matthews to everyone not in the know, due to his shocking yet thin yellow hair and his big square head) on MSNBC was interviewing one of the campaign people for Obama last night. Tweety was making a point about the fact that younger women went, across the board, for Obama, while the older women seemed to go for Clinton. And Obama's spokesman (sorry, didn't get his name) said something like, "Yes, Obama has broad appeal."

O.K., now I know what he meant and it's a little sexist to purposely misread that statement. But I laughed through my nose when I heard that one. Someone needs to be just a tad more careful picking their adjectives.

The top ten things about this presidential election season about which I am absolutely gobsmacked.

1. We actually have people running for president of the United States who believe that the Constitution is subordinate to their belief in God, and no one in the press is really making an issue of this.

2. We actually have a black man and a woman running for president, both of whom have a very good chance of pulling it off, and nobody has rioted or burned down part of a major city.

3. The top GOP candidates, except for Ron Paul (who isn’t necessarily a “top candidate”), are all promising to maintain or even bolster the policies, if they can really be called that, of George W. Bush, who 70% of the country disagrees with.

4. The Republican candidates would rather beat their chests about how tough each of them will be on terrorists, Muslims, illegal immigrants, and generally any person who doesn’t look, act and sound just like us, but would rather not mention the incredibly pressing and important issues, such as global warming/climate change, the healthcare crisis, the widening gap between the top 5% of the wage earners in this country and everyone else, abundant corruption in government, and the undermining of the Constitution of the United States.

5. Iowa and New Hampshire are the center of the political universe, at least for four or five months, and can truly affect the outcome of an entire presidential election, and will disappear from all public discourse after that.

6. No mention, none whatsoever, is being made in the press about the elections for the Senate and House, in which the Dems will most likely clean the floor with the Republicans. There is a distinct possibility of the Democrats getting a veto-proof majority, and I haven’t seen one whisper of that in the press.

7. Oil has now reached $100 a barrel, when it was under $10 a barrel at the start of George Bush’s presidency. Yet, no one is making much noise about this fact.

8. There hasn’t been a “straight laced, family values” Republican in this country exposed for kinky sex (legal or illegal, gay or straight) in the last three months.

9. John Edwards’ haircut is STILL an issue in the mind of some.

10. And finally, I am absolutely dumbfounded that some people in this country can get so worked up about someone else “showing disrespect” to the flag of the United States of America, such that they feel that we need to amend the Constitution of the United States to protect said flag, and yet, these same people could care less that George Bush thinks that the Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper!” and uses it to wipe his butt every chance he gets. That “piece of paper”, which is the beacon, the guiding light, that this country has used since its inception, is apparently meaningless to those in power. Yet, the flag is so important that we need to amend the Constitution, that selfsame document which we don’t seem to give a flying fig about?

Color me gobsmacked.

I wish political reporters were as hard hitting with their interviews as sportscasters.

On New Year’s Day, during all the bowl games, I saw two interviews with incoming new head coaches (Rich Rodriguez with Michigan and Rick Neuheisel with UCLA). Rodriguez, ex-head coach at West Virginia, was asked what was different about being offered the head coaching job at Alabama last year and turning it down, and being offered the head coaching job at Michigan this year and accepting it. He somewhat skillfully avoided answering the question. He was also asked if West Virginia had been in the national championship game this year (which could have easily happened), would he have left WVU. Again, he didn’t answer. Neuheisel was asked about his rather checkered past at Colorado and Washington, which included a rather overblown gambling scandal, where he was involved in betting on the NCAA basketball tournament. To his credit, he said that he made mistakes in his past, they were his mistakes, and he wouldn’t make them in his upcoming job. Whether that is true remains to be seen. I wish him luck. (I met him several years ago, as he is a friend of my brother. It was a bit awkward, as he had just lost his job at Washington. I think I said something like, "Sorry about how the Husky thing turned out." He replied, "Yeah, me too." What a lame thing to say on my part....)

My point is this. Those are very pointed, potentially very embarrassing questions being asked of college football coaches on live national television. I suppose that, because of their visibility and large salaries paid for by state taxes, those are fair questions.

I wish, oh how I wish, that our national political media would be as hard hitting and probing with our politicians. Specifically, why do they let George Bush and his minions get away with breaking the laws, subverting the Constitution, stacking the Dept. of Justice with political cronies and ideologues, such that the DOJ became an arm of the Republican party, and let them get away with it without calling them on the carpet when they get a chance? Don't the people who run our nation, who have shown that they consider themselves to be above the law, deserve at least as much scrutiny as football coaches?

The top seven things I would like to ask Fundamentalist Christians.

Everyone seems to make lists at the end of the year. I am not sure why this is. Maybe it just puts some sort of order onto chaos. Maybe it’s just a tradition. Anyway, here is my entry on the plethora of lists at this time of the year. Here is my list of questions about which I would like to have answers from Fundamentalist Christians who believe that every single word of the Bible is true, and only true to their particular interpretation, including that the Earth is only around 6000 years old.

1. Fundamentalist Christians put mankind at the center of the universe, it seems. Everything revolves around us, just as humans would have believed 2000 years ago when we had no idea of what the universe we live in actually looks like. Yet, if you take a look at what we know of the universe now, even the galaxy we live is in just a speck in the vastness, and it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, over 100,000 years to get from one side of that one speck to the other. There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. There are billions of observable galaxies in the universe. Why would God bother with making such an immense and scarcely comprehensible universe, and at the same time, be concerned with every single individual and whether or not we believe in Him? This just seems so incredibly petty and small of a God that could create such a universe.

2. If, as you maintain, every single word of the Bible is “God’s Truth”, how do you explain the numerous contradictions and other inexplicable actions taken both by God and by his faithful? There are very obvious examples. Did Noah take two beasts of each kind? Or, was it “clean beasts thou shalt take to thee seven and seven, the male and his female”(Genesis 7.2)? It can’t be both, can it? Or, the famous question of, who was Cain’s wife and where did she come from, if Cain and Able were the only people in the world after Adam and Eve? Cain built an entire city and populated it only with his offspring? An entire city? Sounds pretty doubtful. I find the story of Joshua destroying the city of Jericho very cruel and bloodthirsty. Because Jehovah (God by another name) “gave” the city to Joshua (Joshua 6.1), it was acceptable then to destroy the city and either kill or expel all the city’s inhabitants, who had done nothing wrong in the least? That is a terrible, terrible thing to do to innocent people. Likewise, God commanding Abraham to kill his son, just to see if he would do it, seems like a terrible thing for God to do (Genesis 22.10). I would call that the ultimate “no win” situation. The Bible contains many requirements for burnt offerings, killing of those who are unlike you, etc. I want to hear how the Fundamentalist Christians explain all these very troubling and contradictory passages in God’s Truth.

3. Was the physical nature of the universe actually different than it is today? Having the sun rise in the west and set in the east is a physical impossibility and one, if it were actually to occur, would cause a catastrophe that would essentially destroy the Earth. Did this really occur, the Earth rotate in the opposite direction? Was the refraction of light impossible prior to the Great Flood? The Bible (Genesis 9.14) states that the rainbow is God’s promise that He will not destroy the Earth again by floods. Did the physics of light and refraction change? And, just as an aside, where did all the water go that was used to cover up all the surface of the Earth such that no dry land remained?

4. Much has been made about the animals that Noah took with him on his Ark. Fundamentalists have been forced to accept the existence of dinosaurs, since there is overwhelming evidence that they existed. The Bible never mentions them, but they must have existed. Therefore, fundamentalists, rather than try to work out how the Bible might be incorrect about time scales, just incorporated them into their own version of “The Truth”. That is, Noah took all the dinosaurs on the Ark with him. No further thought is required for this improbable hypothesis, it seems, but leaves unanswered the huge size of the beasts involved and the sheer numbers involved. It would be absolutely impossible to house even two of each kind of the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other animals that we know existed, given the Ark’s stated size (Genesis 6.15). Besides, maybe dinosaurs were “clean beasts”.

5. I want to know where Neanderthals fit into the picture. Neanderthals are just like dinosaurs. There is undeniable evidence that they existed in Europe and the Middle East, for over 100,000 years. Yet, Fundamentalist Christians ignore all this evidence, as it is just too difficult to work into their accepted biblical narrative. Neanderthals were definitely humans (not monkeys or apes) but not homo sapiens, either. They used tools. They buried their dead. Like the dinosaurs, did Noah carry Neanderthals on his Ark? Fundamentalist Christians like to make much of the hoax of the Piltdown Man (conveniently forgetting that scientists were the ones who uncovered the hoax, not Christians), but are totally silent on the subject of the Neanderthals.

6. How do all the heavily cratered objects in our solar system, such as the Moon, Mercury, and all the various moons of the gas giants, fit in with the theory that the Earth is only 6000 years old? Were all these other bodies already present, such that they reached their heavily cratered state (craters inside of older craters inside of older craters) prior to the Earth being created? It is not possible that these bodies were bombarded with millions of objects during their formation and the Earth was not. 6000 years is not enough time for even such as a geologically and meteorologically active place such as our Earth to fully erase the evidence of such bombardment. Where did all these bodies that impacted the major bodies in our solar system go, and why aren’t we hit every week or month by such an object?

7. There is ample geological evidence, which is visible to the naked eye and takes no formal training to understand, that discounts the notion of a very young Earth. How do Fundamentalist Christians explain things like the Hawaiian Islands, where the land building mechanism is easily observable? 6000 years is obviously not enough time for a volcanic “hot spot” in the crust of the earth create the chain of islands, each of which rises hundreds of thousands of feet from the ocean floor. Did God create all these islands and then just happen to create what just looks like geological evidence that would explain their creation? How are there fossils of forests and animals in Antarctica? Why are there places in Colorado which have dinosaur prints fossilized in solid rock, but are inclined at almost 90 degrees perpendicular to the surface of the Earth? How does the Bible explain plate tectonics and continental drift? Mountain ranges like the Himalayas just happened to be placed at the junction of these plates that are pushing against each other?

All attempts at explanations that the Bible seems to hold so dear seems to me to be an attempt my man who had very little knowledge of the actual world he inhabited. I can’t see any reason why I should take the story of Noah any more literally than I would a story from the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. They have a legend about the time when Whale fought with Bear, and much was destroyed. After putting many varying pieces of information together, it appears that this story was an attempt at explaining a very large earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which also inundated the coastline of Japan in the 1600’s or 1700’s, I am not sure which. The Native Americans of that time were attempting to explain something that they had no explanation for. Why is it not likely that the miracles and odd happenings in the Old Testament are along the same line? I cannot see that the inherent nature of our earth or our universe, or the fundamental laws of physics, changed since biblical times. So, why is what is in the Bible any more compelling than the legends of all the other religions?

I suppose religion is an individual’s way to try to get a handle on the universe, the uncertainty of our society, and, the ultimate question, what happens when we die. Obviously, our species has an inherent need for those kinds of explanations. We do not like uncertainty. But if you consult Occam’s Razor, the explanations that are coming from science, even though they are very, very strange (such as, how can an electron be a particle AND a wave at the same time), seem to make more sense to me that postulating a benevolent being that created the entire universe but seems to care about whether or not we believe in Him, on an individual basis.

We are entering the last year of the reign of George W. Bush. What’s next?

My title isn’t really 100% truthful, as Chimpy will still be in place for a few weeks in January of 2009. However, we will know who will be replacing him. I’m just beginning to wonder what comes next? Are we going to get Nero after Caligula? (For those not fully up on your Roman Empire similes, although Caligula was pretty bad, Nero was far worse.)

I, personally, think that Hillary Clinton would make a very good president. By all accounts, she has been a very good senator. Although it is by no means a given that she will get the Democratic nod, I am thinking that the odds of her being the Dem nominee are running about 3 to 1. I would really like it to be John Edwards or Chris Dodd, but I am thinking that isn’t going to happen.

There are two things that can come of Hillary being the Democratic nominee. The first is that she wins, and the next 4 or 8 years are pure hell for her, and a lot of the country, because the Republicans and all their attack dogs in politics AND the media see it as their duty to try to rip to shreds any Democrat that becomes too prominent. This happened to both Al Gore and John Kerry, they tried to do it to Nancy Pelosi with limited success. It won’t matter who is the next Democratic president. However, if it is Hillary, then I foresee all the attack dogs getting rabies and going all frothy at the mouth. Bill O’Reilly and everyone like him will all go nuts, blaming everything that has ever happened on President Clinton (her, not him, well, probably both, actually) and forget that Bush had eight years in the White House and the Republicans had a lock on both houses for I don’t know how long. All that will be forgotten. And all the Republican members of the House and Senate will do everything they can to bring the Democratic agenda to a grinding halt. They have already succeeded in doing that, of course, and they will continue with their obstructionist ways. I don’t really see a veto-proof Democratic majority. Maybe, but I still think that, between the 30% Republican base of this country and whatever dirty tricks that they can conjure up on election day will probably prevent a Democratic veto-proof majority.

The other possibility, of course, is that Hillary will turn out to be so polarizing that whatever advantage the “Republican Party” has given the Dems over the last eight years won’t matter, and the Republican nominee will be elected. Now, this possibility scares me a great deal, as there are some truly insane people over on the Republican side. The only one that I truly think might come close to doing a good job is John McCain, even though he is a long way from his “Straight Talk Express” days. These other people, well… Gulliani would be a continuation of the Bush’s administration, only amped up, like George Bush after four or five Red Bulls in the morning. In other words, a total disaster for this country. We really could end up with a fascist government after eight years of him. It’s hard to tell what might happen with Romney, as he says whatever comes into his mind that he thinks the people who will elect him want to hear. So, it’s really hard to tell what he might actually do if he becomes President. He may not even know himself, other than appoint a bunch of conservative judges. Huckabee… Same thing. I know I am very concerned about his overt religiosity. I don’t particularly want another person in the White House that thinks he is doing “God’s Will”.

I haven’t even begun to touch anything that might happen with domestic and foreign policy. I just believe that any Republican will continue on the path set by George Bush to make the United States a pariah in the eyes of the rest of the world. The current definition of Republican thinking seems to include the firm belief that the other countries of the world only exist to somehow benefit the United States. That kind of thinking will eventually get this country in deep, deep trouble. I can’t see anyone really starting a preemptive war on us, just because they are worried what we might do to them in the future. But I can see Europe banding together with Russia and other countries around the world to freeze the U.S. out. Once our economy is no longer the juggernaut that drives the world’s economy, there really won’t be a pressing reason for them to play ball with us. And this is another road the U.S. seems determined to go down.

I suppose my conclusion is that, even though I think it is imperative that a Democrat is the next president (unless somehow Chuck Hagel would run as an independent), there is no way that I think we are going to enjoy the next few years even if we do manage to get a Dem elected. It is going to take twenty to thirty years to repair all the damage that Bush and the mass conglomeration of conservative media outlets has done to this country. And the Dems may not be given that chance.

Prophesizing is a risky business. I just hope the next ten years aren’t what I am thinking they might be.

Sorry to have been away for so long.

My computer picked up a spyware monster and totally hosed it up. Not being one who gets along with computers, I had to take it into the shop. Computerless for a number of days, and I started to go through withdrawal.

A front row seat to a cosmic game of billiards?

Man, this could be a very interesting show. From the LA Times, via the Everett Herald.

An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars sometime in the next few weeks, scientists said.

Researchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Objects Program, who like to call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid for days.

The scientists, based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet at about 1 in 300. That's better odds than any known asteroid has ever had of hitting Earth, except for the Siberian strike, the scientists said.

The unnamed asteroid is about 160 feet across, which puts it in the range of the famous Siberian rock. The largest impact event in recent history, that explosion felled 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles.

Concerns about another strike on Earth led to the creation of the Near-Earth Objects Program and the pursuit of research into possible ways of deflecting a killer asteroid.

Scientists say it's unclear what the effects of such an impact on Mars would be. The Martian atmosphere is so thin that an asteroid would likely plummet all the way to the surface instead of breaking up above ground, as happened in the Siberian event.

Once it hit, it would probably create a large crater and send plumes of dust high into the atmosphere, scientists said. Depending on where it hit, the plume could be visible through telescopes on Earth.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently mapping the planet, would have a front-row seat. NASA's two JPL-built rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, might also be able to take pictures from the ground of the impact's effects.

So, don’t tell me that we aren’t moving toward a fascist police state in the U.S.

Here is an absolutely horrifying story (via Digby at Hullabaloo), about a 24-year-old woman from Iceland who was subjected to some truly outrageous crap, just because she overstayed her visitor’s visa by three weeks, back in the mid-90’s! THIS is a reason to put someone who obviously is not a threat into handcuffs and leg irons, parade them through the airport, and subject then to pretty harsh conditions that you wouldn’t normally think of outside a maximum security prison?!?

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties. A detailed interrogation session ensued.

[...]

I was exhausted, tired and hungry. I didn't understand the officials' conduct, for they were treating me like a very dangerous criminal. Soon thereafter I was removed from the cubicle and two armed guards placed me up against a wall. A chain was fastened around my waist and I was handcuffed to the chain. Then my legs were placed in chains. I asked for permission to make a telephone call but they refused. So secured, I was taken from the airport terminal in full sight of everybody. I have seldom felt so bad, so humiliated and all because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law.

They would not tell me where they were taking me. The trip took close to one hour and although I couldn't see clearly outside the vehicle I knew that we had crossed over into New Jersey. We ended up in front of a jail. I could hardly believe that this was happening. Was I really about to be jailed? I was led inside in the chains and there yet another interrogation session ensued. I was fingerprinted once again and photographed. I was made to undergo a medical examnination, I was searched and then I was placed in a jail cell. I was asked absurd questions such as: When did you have your last period? What do you believe in? Have you ever tried to commit suicide?

I was completely exhausted, tired and cold. Fourteen hours after I had landed I had something to eat and drink for the first time. I was given porridge and bread. But it did not help much. I was afraid and the attitude of all who handled me was abysmal to say the least. They did not speak to me as much as snap at me. Once again I asked to make a telephone call and this time the answer was positive. I was relieved but the relief was short-lived. For the telephone was setup for collect calls only and it was not possible to make overseas calls. The jailguard held my cell phone in his hand. I explained to him that I could not make a call from the jail telephone and asked to be allowed to make one call from my own phone. That was out of the question. I spent the next 9 hours in a small, dirty cell. The only thing in there was a narrow steel board which extended out from the wall, a sink and toilet. I wish I never experience again in my life the feeling of confinement and helplessness which I experienced there.

I was hugely relieved when, at last, I was told that I was to be taken to the airport, that is to say until I was again handcuffed and chained. Then I could take no more and broke down and cried. I begged them at least to leave out the leg chains but my request was ignored. When we arrived at the airport, another jail guard took pity on me and removed the leg chains. Even so I was led through a full airport terminal handcuffed and escorted by armed men. I felt terrible. On seeing this, people must think that there goes a very dangerous criminal...

I just cannot express enough outrage about this kind of crap from our government. What POSSIBLY justifies this kind of action? And this is only just one incident. There are many, many more that I have read about. What kind of country are we turning into?

I am truly sick about this. And having these feelings during the Christmas season only heightens them. All the festive lights and, supposedly, everyone is full of “good will toward men”. Yeah, only if you are white and have your papers in order.

Today’s 10 minute history lesson: Railroad tracks.

UPDATED BELOW:

Here’s a question (maybe not a particularly interesting question on the face of it, but a question nevertheless) that you probably have never considered before. Why are the rails on American railroads such an odd distance apart (4 ft, 8 ½ inches or 1435 millimeters)? That seems a very unusual number. Why couldn’t whoever came up with that use a more round number? If nothing else, it would seem that a round number for the track gauge would make it easier for people to remember and to more easily set measuring tools.

You have probably guessed that I would not ask such an odd question without being ready to divulge the answer. So, here it is.

- The American railroad system has its origins in the English railroad system and, therefore, each use the same gauge of track.

- The English railroad system, when in its infancy, didn’t have a large manufacturing base ready to churn out larges amounts of railroad equipment. It was much easier to adapt other equipment that was readily obtainable. These were, of course, the horse-drawn wagons and coaches of the day, and those wagons and carriages had this odd standard for their wheel measurements. The early English manufacturers of railroad equipment just kept the wheel gauge the same, as it was far easier that way. They only had to remove the wagon wheels and install flanged railroad wheels on the same axle system. This became the standard wheel gauge for early English railroads.

- The wheel measurements on the wagons and carriages came from the fact that many of the roads in England were paved in stones. After long periods of use, the stone paving starts to exhibit wear patterns in the form of groves in which the wagon wheels fit. Thus, it became the standard to make wagons and carriages with this measurement so that they would easily fit into the groves worn into the roads. Anything else besides that distance between the wagon wheels would have made a wagon almost unusable on heavily traveled paved roads.

- A very large number of wagons in England were imported from Rome, during the Roman occupation of England (approximately 40 A.D. to 400 A.D.). This was the standard for the Roman army, and later became the standard for civilian wagons and carriages in early England. The Romans, of course, brought to England the same types of carriages and wagons they used in Italy and the rest of their empire.

Thus, the inescapable conclusion of this historical trail is that American railroads use a very odd standard for the gauge for their tracks is because ancient Roman wagons and chariots were built with that gauge. Ben Hur to the Union Pacific.

Huh...

UPDATE: From the comments, Wolfman (good buddy that he is) pointed out that I missed the last link in the logical chain. The width of Roman wagons and chariots was set not by some ancient craftsman just picked that width because he liked it. No, the width of the Roman wagons was set because that's the width of two horses butts, standing side by side. Now, THAT'S history.

So, apparently the Rapture is not happening anytime in the near future.

Jerry B. Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind series of books, is also an owner of the Phoenix Mustangs, which, I take it, is a minor league hockey team. This guy is so confident that the End Times Are Near!, he is talking with local officials about building a $40 million hockey area (for minor league hockey?) and an adjacent hotel. Yep, that certainly sounds like a person who is all ready to be raptured away. Maybe he just doesn’t know what do to with all the money he has raked in and is being philanthropic toward that highly abused and underreported group, Canadians Possessing No Other Employable Skills.

This story is done with a little more snark at Whiskeyfire.

Huckabee, President for the Moronic Apocalypse. The Moracopalypse. Dumbageddon. And the worst part is that I agree with HTMLM -- this is the best the GOP has to offer: a fan of the Left Behind books. Wheeee.

UPDATE: Just thinking, the guy made millions from books that explicate his sincere idea that the world is going to end in a couple of years. Fine. OK. But then he goes and invests millions in a hockey arena.

This clearly suggests that according to the Bible, the only sport that will survive the Apocalypse is ice hockey. Quick, everyone, grow mullets and forecheck, and ride that Zamboni to your Eternal Reward!

My annual post of Postmodernism Christmas confusion.

I don’t “get” Christmas.

Oh, I “understand” Christmas on about three different levels. There is the obvious Christian tradition of celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, even though there is ample evidence that Jesus wasn’t born anywhere near December 25. Rather, the holiday was moved to the end of the calendar year to supplant the older, pagan holiday celebrations (such as Saturnalia) centered around the Winter solstice. And there is, of course, the orgy of consumerism, where everyone in the entire country is bombarded with advertisements about how you must buy gifts, of ever increasing value, for everyone you know, or else you will be branded as a bad and uncaring person. And then there is the end of the year aspect, where most people believe that, after working all year long, we all need a party, a break, something to celebrate, a reason to really cut loose and no one will look at you askance for doing it. Christmas (and its tag-along poorer cousins, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day) serves all those purposes well.

But still, I don’t “get” Christmas. There are just too many contradictions for me to deal with comfortably, and I am not talking about the fact that I am not a Christian and do not for a minute believe that Jesus was the Son of God. No, I am talking about things like the fact that huge amounts of people put up Christmas trees to celebrate the holiday, when, in actual, people have no idea what that means. Why do it? Is putting sparkly things on a tree, real or artificial, somehow honoring the memory or ideal of Christ? On the contrary, the origins of Christmas trees rather murky, but seems to be derived from a pagan symbol of fertility. But that seems to matter to no one. It’s the Here-And-Now that matters. It’s the “done thing”, regardless of its origins.

I don’t get why people feel so pressured to go out shopping at 4 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving to get a jump on their shopping. Of course, retailers know that this is a huge shopping day, so they are not going to be too inclined to give shoppers a break on the prices. No, they are going to charge the maximum the market will bear, as they know they have a motivated crowd of customers. I don’t get why people work themselves into a frenzy, just so they can keep with all the demands of the season; holiday cards, gifts, decorations, baking, visiting. A post-coital letdown in the middle of January is inevitable. Then everything is forgotten until October and the gradual buildup into another season of excess.

I don’t “get” Christmas. Thank God, however, I have all my cards mailed and gifts purchased. I just need to get a FEW more things for the Christmas stockings...

One reason I like blogs that include lots of links to other blogs.

You never quite know what you are going to find. There is some very good, very snarky stuff out there. This is from a blog named Kung Fu Monkey, where the issue of the constant use of fear and terrorism by the right wing power mongers is discussed. This is a paraphrase of similar confrontations with evil from our country’s past.



FDR: Oh, I'm sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we're coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How's that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We'll be in the pub, flipping you off. I'm slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I'm sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike ... NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

Kung Fu Monkey now earns an honored place in my blog roll.

And why is high speed internet so damned important, again?

I have high speed internet at my work station, and I am not able to load many of the blogs that I used to like. Huffington Post now partially loads and then freezes. The Washington Post is the same way, except it also tries to pop up a new page at the end, which always fails my web browser. Therefore, I must hit the Escape key BEFORE this new page tries to pop up but AFTER the entire text of the page I want to read has been loaded. And every web site that has advertisements up on the top make absolutely certain that the ads load first, regardless of how long that might take, how much animation is involved, etc. etc. Gotta get that money up front, make sure these viewers see the ads. Americablog takes forever to load.

Crap, money has, once again, taken the fun out of something that used to be easy. I don’t even bother looking at some of these sites anymore. Which rather defeats the point of web sites, don’t you think?

And what exactly are the requirements for being a Presidential Press Secretary?

Oh, yeah. Complete and utter toady, willing to say anything and stonewall, even in the face of looking completely ridiculous. However, they really shouldn’t make it this easy.


Appearing on National Public Radio's light-hearted quiz show "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me," which aired over the weekend, (Dana) Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and she didn't know what it was.

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

So she consulted her best source. "I came home and I asked my husband," she recalled. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "


Yes, making light of the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about one of THE most important events of the entire Cold War. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure." Yep, now THAT’S a stretch of the imagination. Nothing really important. She really wants to get back to her day job of ridiculing reporters for asking what she thinks are impertinent questions.

At least Tony Snow knew what the heck he was talking about. Ms. Perino seems sadly out of her league. Actually, I just had a thought. Reporters should start throwing in historical bits into their questions, just to see if she knows what they are talking about. “Dana, would you care to compare Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in their willingness to threaten other nations with nuclear weapons?”

O.K., that’s one damn big bug.

From the Discovery channel web site.

This was a bug you couldn't swat and definitely couldn't step on. British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever.

How big? Bigger than you, and at 8 feet long as big as some Smart cars.
The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study's three authors.

"This is an amazing discovery," he said Tuesday.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were," he said.

The research found a type of sea scorpion that was almost half a yard longer than previous estimates and the largest one ever to have evolved.


I am refraining from making all sorts of comments about those 50’s giant bug movies. Well, I would make a comment, if I could come up with one that was really funny. Let’s just say that those weren’t all that farfetched. “AAAAA!!! THEM!!”

It’s time for another political post, I suppose.

I don’t suppose anyone has noticed that this blog has been full of really trivial stuff lately. Rather interesting at times, but really trivial. It’s difficult writing the political stuff for several reasons. One is that I am not even editorializing. I’m just bitching and moaning, in a somewhat readable manner. Another is that I am not doing a lot in the way of research and digging around. I just see a topic that upsets me and I take off on it. Other people do it much better than I do, and usually quicker. (Although Atrios, who seems to enjoy a very fine reputation as a insightful blogger, usually posts one liners that say “Wanker”, “Wheeee!!” or something along those lines. Jeez, I can do that.) So, it seems rather futile to get all worked up about a subject where I just read something by someone else who just wrote about it in a much better way than I ever could.

But here’s the real deal. There is just too much bad crap out there. It’s not even every day, it’s every flippin’ hour some new revelation comes up that just astounds me. Or else doesn’t astound me, just because they are coming fast and furious as part of an easily discernable pattern. I am just overwhelmed and am truly depressed about the state of this country and its inhabitants. It’s not just how truly despicable that the Bush administration has turned out to be. It’s also that the “conservatives” of this country refuse to see it and continually try to blame the Democrats and liberals for anything and everything that happens. If something really bad happens that they can’t duck, then they just pretend it doesn’t exist and manufacture another “crisis” (e.g., the MoveOn.org “General Betrayus” ad, “let’s have a Congressional committee investigate, shall we?”) in order to deflect the attention from the truly embarrassing crap that they have just gotten caught doing.

Here we have the President of the United States trying, once again, to manufacture a crisis from a situation that, yes, does need attention but is nowhere near a problem that demands a THIRD WAR at a time that the first two aren’t going exactly well, to make a huge understatement. And now, of course, the Republicans in Congress are all up in arms because the NIE on Iran states that they have mothballed their nuke weapons program years ago. Did they get all frothing at the mouth mad when all the books were cooked to stampede this country into an unnecessary war in Iraq? No. No one gave a flying fig about that. But boy, if we get a report that undermines the right’s bloodlust and desire to kill thousands of more innocent people, then it’s Katy, bar the door! How DARE 16 intelligence agencies come up with intelligence (you know, the stuff that intelligence agencies are supposed to produce) that goes against the wishes of the Bush administration, at the same time Bush has the lowest approval ratings for a President for the longest period of time, ever. No, it’s obviously the intelligence agencies fault. Bush and Cheney obviously know more than they do. (Which brings up the question, if they are disbelieving everything all 16 agencies are saying, just where are they getting all this information about Iran anyway? Another “Curveball” that helped Bush make a case for war in Iraq?)

It’s all so transparent, and yet, many in this country cannot see it. They have been so brainwashed that their actual enemies are the citizens of the United States who disagree with them, they just cannot fathom that they are being outright manipulated or are so dishonest that they know exactly what they are doing but feel no remorse when doing it. Three quarters of the national media have taken sides with the Republican party, and there isn’t even any pretext of them fulfilling their investigative responsibilities. They now see their job as mouthpieces for the government. It’s much more interesting, in their eyes, to make an issue out of John Edward’s $400 haircut or Hillary’s boobs. Real reporting? Naw. That’s too damn hard. Plus, it wouldn’t allow many of them, like Lou Dobbs or the entire Fox Network, to pursue their agenda of promoting their own ideas.

This is not freedom we have here. This is the pre-pubescent version of Mussolini’s Italy. It isn’t there yet, but you can see where it is headed.

That’s why I post trivial pictures of car wrecks and Lego Escher. How we have come to this point, I just cannot begin to understand.