catbirdseat

Last time I got a look at the Matterhorn up close, I wasn't a climber. Considering they built that thing back in the 1950's or 60's, they did a pretty good job of it. One thing about California is that they really know their concrete.

I think that people haven't been able to get a handle yet on government that says on thing and does another. For the past 20-30 years we have had a government that more or less did what it said. Many of the people who voted this year have not read Orwell's 1984. In a word, they are gullible- not stupid, but gullible.

Scary times we are in. Here's a choice tidbit: "These are punitive people. One of the ways - one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way."

That first pic is a classic. Looks like ca. early 1980's Neon Chic, but the pro could be even older. The dude looks a little like Uncle Trickey. I saw this image on the Devil's Tower thread and decided to steal it.

I watched the pilot starring Rob Morrow, of Northern Exposure fame. It was actually pretty entertaining. Finally a drama for us geeks. It's funny they put it on Friday night at 10 pm. I guess they figure geeks won't be on the town with their wives or girlfriends like everyone else. Blurb

Stephen Ambrose wrote a book called Undaunted Courage about Lewis and Clark who have been dead for two centuries. It is arguably the best book ever written on the explorers. The idea that an author can't write about dead people and make a valuable contribution to literature is laughable.

Ask JGowans.

I think we should all take advice from Jack Sprat and his wife. If you are fat, carry carbohydrates. If you are lean, carry fat.

Ain't the Internet great? I am truly inspired. If a dumbass can figure out some like that, then anyone can.

Hey, they put it in quotes. Automobile analogies are the best way to communicate with the American public.

If hydrogen is ever to become the answer for transportation, my guess it will be as part of a system that combines a reformer which converts something easily stored, like methanol, into hydrogen as needed to run fuel cells. Right now no one can make a fuel cell that is affordable, let alone the reformer. Where does the methanol come from? Probably natural gas, but it also could be made from any carbon source if hydrogen were available.

Getting back to why George Bush is bad. He's bad because he is driven by a religious dogma. His values were not acquired through a process of personal growth, but, rather were fed to him on a silver spoon, and they are the values of a minority. He chooses to ignore the half of the nation that don't share his views. He is not interested in compromise or in even respecting those who think differently than he. Because he believes that what he knows comes from God and must therefore be correct, anyone who thinks differently must not be Godly and therefore must be wrong. It makes it very easy to disregard them.

I find that rather hard to believe. Low-pressure sodium vapor lamps are incredibly efficient. LED's certainly could produce a more pleasant spectrum of light, but I don't know that they'll beat the efficiency of LPSV.

Man, we need some sort of astonishing technological development to bail us out, like fusion, or it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Rising oil prices is definitely a positive thing, fostering such things as windmill farms and hybrid vehicles.

I'd be interested to read up on what it is that makes people need religion. There has got to be some innate aspect of the human brain that requires us to create an orthodoxy. The closest I can get to explaining it is that as we evolved big brains and weak bodies in the African savannah, it became important that groups bonded with each other for mutual protection. The need for an orthodoxy helps ensure that individuals don't leave the group and thereby weaken it. My definition of religion versus philosophy is that religion is something that desires to pull people into a group by making them all think alike. A philosophy is a way of thinking that encourages personal exploration. "Good" philosophies encourage individuals to think for themselves, while at the same time encouraging them to consider the needs of others.

Yep. We are all related.

If you want to read a good book, go read A Brief History of Just About Everything, by Bill Bryson. It is a whirlwind tour of the history of scientific discovery. He doesn't spend too much time on any one subject, always moving on. One thing I like is how he mentions all discoverers who were first but got cheated by history because they weren't good self-promoters. For example, Louis Agassiz of Harvard usually gets credit for the theory of Ice Ages, but it was in fact two other men, Carpentier and Schimper who came up with the idea before him. Also, I read how a poor janitor, James Croll, at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow was the first to explain how cycles of the Earth's orbit could explain why ice ages ocurred. This and other stories may have provided inspiration for the movie Goodwill Hunting.

Story

Nope, it wasn't Dru, it was Iain and the mom didn't hire a stripper, she WAS the stripper.

This is not the first time this sort of thing has made the news. In the last one that I recall, the mom hired a stripper for the boy's birthday party. It may, in fact, have been posted here by Dru.

I heard that some UW students were hassling two Army recruiters who were on campus. I may be liberal and anti-Bush, but I think that sort of thing is total bullshit. Our military personell are supposed to do exactly as our elected official order them to do. To hold them responsible for politicians you don't like is stupid. Rally and protest against the politicians, not our servicemen. We should be proud that we have a military that keeps itself apart from politics. Other countries like Pakistan have militaries that do get involved and that is why they have the dictator Musharrif.

What is so frustrating, as Ricardo mentioned, is that so many people just parrot the sound bites they are fed in political TV commercials. Nobody bothers to read the news anymore or understand what is going on in the world, let alone the US.

Come on, you can do better than that! An answer might be, "I think that America will be safer because Bush pushed through the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, and beefed up the number of Border Patrol Agents". A negative answer might be something like, "Bush is making us less safe by supporting Israel unconditionally and by antagonizing Islamic peoples around the world". Of course there are no absolutes, but a person who thinks at least can make a reasoned argument.

Laguna Beach! My home town.

Remember "tolerance" is a BAD WORD. We shouldn't teach it to our children. They need to taught by us who to hate and who not to hate. God forbid they decide for themselves.