What do you call a man who says one thing and does another?
What do you call a religion that preaches one thing but does another?
What if that religion preached peace, but endorsed war?
May 23, 2009
Insincere
Insincere
May 11, 2009
An important lesson in civics
An important lesson in civics
Confused by all the terms for political inclinations? “Left”, “Right”, “Liberal”, “Conservative”, “Centrist”? Communist, capitalist, socialist (the last three are all ways of dealing with money, not brands of politics.)
Can’t understand why Congress could find money to bail out the mortgage holders, but not the mortgagees? Can’t figure out why the former President would send highly motivated, but lightly armed, young men and women out to deal with IEDs capable of blowing their vehicles into tin-foil and the soldiers themselves into pink spray? Not yet certain what possible “weapons of mass destruction” Saddam Hussein was amassing and can’t, for the life of you, figure out why they haven’t been found yet?
After all, it’s not like the military hasn’t looked for them and it’s not like there haven’t been enough soldiers deployed to make a thorough search. As countries go, Iraq just isn’t all that big – only slightly larger than California.
Well, you’re not alone. Precious few Americans could give the name of their form of government and far fewer still could explain what that name means. So here is a ten minute and 36 second refresher course on the form of government that America’s founding fathers bequeathed to it.
May 10, 2009
Silence is not certainty
Silence is not certainty
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227063.800-swine-flu-the-predictable-pandemic.html
Have you bought into the (lack of) news in re: swine flu yet? Lots of people have. They’re calling the people who expressed fears about its scope ‘hysterical’.
Now that a Democrat is president, we aren’t hearing about the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq like we were before, either. So what stopped … the dying or the reporting?
May 6, 2009
Catholic Church takes firm action (almost)
Catholic Church takes firm action (almost)
This article, from the LA Times, says that the Catholics are considering excommunicating Mexican drug dealers.
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-vatican-mexico13-2009jan13,0,6338435.story
This might work if it became automatic at the first hint of involvement with the drug trade, if the Catholic Church continues to have relevancy to the individuals getting involved and if the excommunication took the form of ‘shunning’ as practiced by fundamentalist Protestant religions such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mennonites.
May 2, 2009
Just going on record …
Just going on record …
EU Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou has said a possible swine flu global epidemic, or pandemic, would not necessarily cause widespread deaths. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8027043.stm
I can’t help but be stricken by an uncanny feeling that what we are seeing now is what the Spanish Flu pandemic would have looked like if it had been as thoroughly reported in its early days as H1N1-A.
It would appear that the avian flu has made a key mutation, mixing with the swine flu virus and the human flu virus. It has used the pigs as ‘test tubes’ to develop / mutate and is using the human genomes to effect the transmission rates that were previously denied bird flu alone. Now, the ultimate death toll hinges on the outcome of a race between the mutation of the virus and the development of the vaccine.
Right now, H1N1-A is only killing a few of its human hosts. But, it was only a few months ago that it could barely infect us at all. Now that that is settled and out of the way, it needs to make just a few more changes to become reliably lethal.