democrats on energy

i certainly hope for change in the next election (if not sooner)

sandbag?

no, windbag.

...Like all posturing politicians who have always proven all too ready to exploit a scene of natural disaster and personal tragedy for the benefit of their politics, Senator Obama with over 100 members of the media his secret service staff as well as his own campaign staff, and visited a flood zone in Quincy, Illinois on Saturday. Senator Obama distracted the effort by pretending to help locals fill sandbags to place on the banks of the Mississippi river while the massive press and politcal staff stood by passing out campaign buttons and bumper stickers to those who had recently lost all of their belongings in the flood. Senator Obama has vowed to push for state and federal aid to help victims of the floods, which is almost entirely guaranteed and unopposed by all elements of both the state and federal government. Locals who were on the scene during the "campaign circus" were heard to ask the candidate if he would allow the Army Corps of Engineer to dredge the river or repair the levees, so that this sort of disaster wouldnt happen in the future. In response, the candidate and his staff was heard to laugh to themselves as he retreated into their SUV convoy and drove to the next fundraiser.



It should be noted that while Senator Obama has raised over 100 million dollars in campaign funding in the last few months and breaking all records for fundrasing in the process, he has yet to offer to donate any of these "windfall" funds to the towns in his home state who have been affected by this disaster.

evolution in the clutch

these incredibly long odds must surely be a strain on the blind faith of the darwinists...

i'm back

we cut the time on the road for vacation a little short, but we still saw basically everything we had planned. more details may become available when i've recovered from the 4200 miles in 11 days...

on the road again

as alluded to before, i'm going on vacation for a couple of weeks. expect no posts until friday 27, since i'm wireless (in the luddite sense, not the way them dang whippersnappers use it these days...)

out of the basement

Lileks on the annual ice cream social:

It’s a pleasantly archaic concept, and draws much of its goodwill from the old-timey name. You expect men with handlebar moustaches and waxed hats, kids rolling hoops with sticks, women covered nape to sole in smothering fabric, an amateur band in the town gazebo uttering bovine oompahs. It’s not like that at all, but the mood is the same – kids running around, games of chance, hot dogs whose contents would still horrify Upton Sinclair, music wafting over the broad lawn. But no secretive teens forming cliques at the margins of the park...

We only have kids under 13. Or, the teens find the entire thing lame beyond description, and had retired to a basement to text each other while listening to some emo-thrash fusion band that laid bare the essential loneliness and emotional wasteland of life. Meanwhile, everyone else walked around outside and talked and laughed. This would frustrate the ungrateful teen immensely.

unfortunately, i ended up staying in "the basement" long after i left my parents' house. fortunately, someone put in an elevator when i discovered there were no stairs. <\symbolism>

a mish mash of thoughts

some things on sackofcatfood's mind today:

• I think a nice complement to "String Theory" would be "Cat Theory" which posits that any experimental evidence contradicting String Theory is actually caused by subatomic cats pouncing on the strings.
• Why is "<--Tear Here-->" the most consistently indestructible part of cheese packets?
• I think the most awesome defense against an advancing zombie horde would be an oil slick. HILARIOUS.
• Ctrl/alt/shift keys should be replaced by pedals underneath your computer, so when you type it's more like playing on an organ.
• Selective perceptive rationalization: I believe the reason that I am not at this very moment entertaining a throng of sexy babes is because they feel threatened by my awesome. Perhaps if I get fat and neglect to shave I will finally bring myself down to where I will be overwhelmingly popular with the ladies.
• Doing your diary in bulletpoints is way cooler than writing self-directed narratives. If I ever write an autobiography, it will be exactly like this.

no more "amarillo by morning"s for me

update: links fixed - thanks wry mouth for catching the broken ones

since early 2007, i've made a number of weekend trips from dfw to amarillo (approximate route), first visiting mom while she was sick, then helping dad get the house clean & packed so he could move near his grandkids. this weekend was the last of those trips - dad's in his new house, and the old house is now empty (and already sold, thankfully).

all that said, he's not going to be "settled in" any time soon. we are going to tour of the northeast. starting next weekend, we intend to visit (in a not yet entirely decided order):

old rhinebeck
yankee stadium
the empire state building
nearfest - (dad may skip this one...)
monticello
and whatever else he wants to see.

it's only fair

via dustbury, a letter to the perpetually aggrieved islamofascists:

Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student’s Association. The e-mail was in response to the students’ protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were ‘hate speech.’ Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:

Dear Muslim Association,

As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest inTurkey), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called ‘whores’ in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris, France. This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Muslims to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile ‘protests.’ If you do not like the values of the West - see the 1st Amendment - you are free to leave. I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially,
I. S. Wichman
Professor of Mechanical Engineering

As you can imagine, the Muslim group at the university didn’t like this too well. They’re demanding that Wichman be reprimanded and the university impose mandatory diversity training for faculty and mandate a seminar on hate and discrimination for all freshmen. Now the local chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn’t believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion. For its part, the university is standing its ground in support of Professor Wichman, saying the e-mail was private, and they don’t intend to publicly condemn his remarks.

it's true

unreasonable search and seizure

the u.k. has it backwards:

"senior officers admitted that there was a potential to uncover a massive range of “ill-gotten gains” stored at the depots"

remember folks, only governments are allowed to have ill-gotten gains.

"Members of the public who have innocently and legally stored their valuables were “inevitably” going to get swept up in the disruption, it was predicted. Police said they could use a freephone number - 0800 030 4613 - to claim back their goods."

they have that whole "innocent until proven guilty" backwards as well.

homeschooling

one more good reason

what's in a name?

that which we call a democratic presidential candidate by any other name would smell as smarmy.

opposition to religion

orson scott card doesn't seem to believe in any of them...

he's against the cult of gaia,

against both creationism and darwinism,

and he doesn't like hillary or obama either.

the list of what he's actually for is pretty good too, as far as it goes.

for the kids

maybe divorce isn't such a great idea after all...

invitation to obama

scott ott hopes for change that obama can believe in