The Flag

The proposed "Flag anti-desecration" amendment to the constitution was defeated in the Senate (only 66 votes for, 67 were needed) the other day. Supporters claim they want to avoid desecration of the flag that our brave servicemen fought and died for. (Oddly enough, those self-same servicemen, including a few who voted against the amendment, thought they were fighting and dying for their country, not a piece of cloth.)

According to the United States Flag Code

§176. Respect for flag
No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America...

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery.




(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.


(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.


(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform.

Can you imagine the consequences of actual passage of such an amendment? No more flag stamps, flag shirts, flag posters, flag hats, little flags attached to the SUV! No more campaign bumper stickers with the flag on them! No more ads for Presidents' Day or Fourth of July sales featuring flags! No more refuges for scoundrels.... The red state bric-a-brac industry and Republican campaign memorabilia industries will be in tatters!

And what would the president sign? (Besides signing statements intended to destroy the constitution's separation of powers and abrogate our civil liberties.)

A Glimmer of Conscience

Finally, someone notices:

A week after the GOP-led Senate rejected an increase to the minimum wage, Senate Democrats on Tuesday vowed to block pay raises for members of Congress until the minimum wage is increased.

"We're going to do anything it takes to stop the congressional pay raise this year, and we're not going to settle for this year alone," Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said at a Capitol news conference.

"They can play all the games the want," Reid said derisively of the Republicans who control the chamber. "They can deal with gay marriage, estate tax, flag burning, all these issues and avoid issues like the prices of gasoline, sending your kid to college. But we're going to do everything to stop the congressional pay raise."

The minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. Democrats want to raise it to $7.25. During the past nine years, as Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to increase the minimum wage, members of Congress have voted to give themselves pay raises -- technically "cost of living increases" -- totaling $31,600, or more than $15 an hour for a 40-hour week, 52 weeks a year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Give 'em hell, Harry, and hit them where it hurts!

Brown Eggs

One of the challenges in pysanka-making is working with brown eggs. Most pysanka-makers use only white eggs (except as an occasional novelty), and have done so traditionally. Brown eggs often don't take dyes as well as white (glossier shell), and the colors can look quite different.

I've been experimenting with brown eggs this year, and have posted photos of some of these pysanky on my website. You can view them here.

Compare and Contrast

If the minimum wage had been raised to keep up with the cost of living, it would stand at over NINE DOLLARS per hour now (as compared to what it was in 1968).

Well, it's nice to know that at least someone is keeping up with inflation:

Busy Day at Work

Knowing Your Enemy

John Murtha in today's Huffington Post writes:

I am appalled that while manning a traffic checkpoint near Baghdad, three of our valiant soldiers were ambushed, one killed on the spot and two kidnapped, tortured and brutally killed. It is essential that we find the circumstances of their deaths. Why were they in such an isolated situation without additional back-up and who is responsible for these heinous acts?

Despite our most strenuous security efforts in the Baghdad area over the past several days, this area continues to be rocked by violent attacks, kidnapping and murderous acts, frequently aimed at our troops.

I continue to be concerned with the fact that our military men and women fighting in Iraq often tell me that they do not know who the enemy is. They do not know who they can trust; they are concerned that their camps have been infiltrated by Iraqis who are plotting to kill them; one day the Iraqis are smiling and waving at them on the streets, the next day the same people are throwing grenades at them.

I read today that Army investigators discovered that two California soldiers had been shot to death by Iraqi Defense officers who were patrolling with them.

We have all read countless stories of Iraqis being kidnapped and killed by Iraqis bearing the identification or uniforms of the official Iraqi Security force.

As I have said before, Iraq is not overrun by foreign terrorists. It is Iraqis fighting Iraqis and Iraqis fighting U.S. and coalition forces. Our troops have become the target.

As General Barry McCaffrey, who at the time of his retirement from the U.S. Army, was the most highly decorated and youngest four star general, recently stated, "the foreign fighters remain a tactical menace, however they are a minor threat to the heavily armed and wary U.S. forces. The al-Qaeda in Iraq is now largely Sunni Iraqi- not foreign fighters."

Consider these facts:

Very little of the insurgency in Iraq is made up of foreign fighters. Less than 7 percent, and even less are Al Qaeda, maybe 750 to 1,000.

47 percent of Iraqis feel they are justified to kill Americans.

Just a few days ago an aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki was quoted as saying: "There's some sort of preliminary understanding between us and the MNF-I," the U.S.-led Multi-National Force-Iraq, "that there is a patriotic feeling among the Iraqi youth and the belief that those attacks are legitimate acts of resistance and defending their homeland. These people will be pardoned definitely, I believe."

When I retired from the Marine Corp, I was given a plaque that said, "Complete Victory is knowing your enemy."

Iraq's Vice President and President have asked for a scheduled withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq. It's time for the Iraqis to be responsible for their own destiny.

But there is no timetable, because this war never was about al Quaed or Iraqi freedom or even WMD. It always was, and remains, about oil and its control. It's about capitalism, not democracy.

Another military man had this to say many years ago:

I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...
SMEDLEY D. BUTLER, (1881-1940) MAJOR GEN U.S. MARINES

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

2500 dead US servicemen. 30,000 or more crippled for life.

Untold thousands of innocent Iraqis killed. We don't count the Iraqi dead, according to Rumseld. But estimates put the number beyween 50,00 and 100,000 dead, and many more maimed.

And no one is to blame......

World Cup

The US team is out (surprise!) and Ukraine has progressed to the next level. And no one in the USA seems to have noticed.

Minimum Wage

This past week, while the rest of us were hard at work, the Congress took time out of its "busy" schedule to do two things:

Failed to raise the minimum wage from 5.15 per hour
Voted to give themselves a generous pay raise of $3100*

Am I the only one who sees a disconnect here?

______
*Congress has it set up so that they don't actually have to vote for a pay raise for themselves. That would look bad on TV. Instead, there is a commission that recommends what the cost of living increase should be, and then they have to vote for or against NOT implementing that allowance. So voting "NO" means approving the increase.

Of course, we can't expect moral - or any oher sort - of clarity from this bunch.

Just Because

.....it's Sunday, and this is so darned cute!

Bring 'Em Home

Bruce doesn't seem to agree with the Republican strategy of leaving our troops in Iraq indefinitely:

Hitler Cats

Yes, Virginia, there is a web site dedicated to photos of cats that look like Hitler.


Really. Go look.

My Pysanka Site

I've made a lot of changes to my pysanka site (with more to come); go have a look.

Thinking About 9-11

From Dependable Renegade:

Today, President Bush held a press conference in Vienna, Austria as part of a diplomatic visit to Europe. He was asked by a member of the press why approval for his policies, particularly on national security issues, was so low in Europe. Bush explained that Europeans didn’t take the 9/11 attacks seriously. “For Europe, September 11th was a moment. For us, it was a change of thinking.”

85 Europeans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The Mentos Challenge, Part 2

My extended family spent Father's Day together up on Mackinac Island--not the best choice for someone (me) with severe horse allergies, but I didn't plan the event. With plenty of Allegra and oral steroids, I survived.

My Aunt Susie was there with the Mentos, and we had an extra bottle of Diet Coke, so we did what anyone who had seen the videos below would do: we attempted to replicate the Mentos experiments. Having no drills or string, we went for the simplest experiment--dropping Mentos into the Coke bottle. I attempted to form a tube from a piece of paper, but it didn't work as well as it might, and only two or three Mentos actually made it into the bottle.

Still, as the photo with Nick shows, the result was pretty impressive.

Learning English

There is nothing quite so discordant as Bush insisting that all immigrants need to learn to speak English. One only wishes he had.

And why is is that multiculturalism is bad only when it's Hispanic? I haven't seen the Republicans having conniptions over St. Patrick's Day parades or the Sons of Italy celebrating Columbus Day.

And didn't Tom Delay have his farewell supper at DC's most chi-chi French restaurant? (His staff explained that is was an American restaurant that serves French food!)



There's an old joke:

What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks many langauges?
Multilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks one language?
An American.

Hurt

Amazing!

Just watch this.

Cute Overload

One of my favorite websites, Cute Overload, seems to be down. It has exceeded its bandwith for the month (not a problem I can identiy with).

If you need your daily cute fix, perhaps this will help:

Spelling IS Important

From a television interview with a vandal; Groth and his friend had vandalized a Catholic spiritual retreat with satanic symbols and other graffiti. (Trevey is the reporter.)

Trevey: "Are you religious?
Groth: "No."
Trevey: "Do you have a problem with people who are?"
Groth: "No."

Trevey asked him why he sprayed satanic graffiti on these holy shrines.

Groth said, "'cause I'm a punk - that's what I do."

Groth thanked the Christians who have prayed for him. But said he doesn't feel bad about what he did...

And as if desecrating church grounds wasn't bad enough, Trevey asked the self proclaimed punk about another mistake he made.

Trevey: "Do you know you spelled Satan wrong?"
Groth: "No - I'm not aware of that."
Trevey: "You spelled it satin - like the fabric."
Groth: "See - if I was big into the devil, I would have spelled it right."
Trevey: "Do you think that's funny?"
Groth: "That I spelled it wrong? No - I'm a bad speller."

Which proves, that if you want to get your message across, you really need to learn to spell properly.

BTW, and FYI: Groth is not a punk. He's an idiot and a thug. But let him not defame the good name of punks, like myself, everywhere.


Anarchy, yes!


Revolution, yes!


Defacing religious statues that can't fight back - wusses!


Gabba Gabba, Hey!

Blood for Oil?

Apparently, we had it wrong in the run-up to the War in Iraq – it wasn't blood for oil that Bush wanted, it was blood for no oil. According to Greg Palast,

We were screaming in the streets: no blood for oil, which, of course, you know, most Americans consider a bargain – blood for oil, as long as it’s not their blood, right? But in fact, it wasn’t blood for oil. It was blood for no oil. It was blood to make sure that not too much oil would flow and bust the market. Oil had been down under Bill Clinton to eighteen bucks a barrel. Now it’s over $70 a barrel.

And it worked. Oil company profits are at record levels. The oil company executives are earning bonuses greater than the GNP of some countries.


Lee Raymond, of Exxon Mobil, just retired with a $400 million retirement package, $300 million of which he earned in the last least.

And all thanks to Bushco.

I'm sure W and Dick will be properly thanked by their friends in the oil business (and at Halliburton) when they leave office.

Read the entire interview with Greg Palast here.

Happy Birthday, Beth!!!!!

My friend Beth and I share the same birthday, although I will admit that she is much younger. (365 days, to be exact!)

Happy birthday, Beth!

Here's some cake for you

and a song



The graphics aren't the best, but it's the sentiments that count:

Happy Happy Birthday
by the Arrogant Worms

Once a year we celebrate,
With stupid hats and plastic plates,
The fact that you were able to make
Another trip around the sun.
And the whole clan gathers ‘round,
And gifts and laughter do abound.
And we let out a joyful sound
And sing that stupid song.

Happy birthday!
Now you’re one year older.
Happy birthday!
Your life still isn’t over.
Happy birthday!
You did not accomplish much.
But you didn’t die this year, I guess that’s good enough.

So let’s drink to your fading health,
And hope you don’t remind yourself,
Your chance of finding fame and wealth,
Decrease with every year.
‘Cause if you feel you’re doing laps,
And eating food and taking naps,
And hoping that someday perhaps
Your life may hold some cheer.

Happy birthday!
What have you done that matters?
Happy birthday!
You’re starting to get fatter.
Happy birthday!
It’s downhill from now on.
Try not to remind yourself your best years are all gone.

If cryogenics were all free,
Then you could live like Walt Disney.
And live for all eternity,
inside a block of ice.
But instead your time is set.
This is the only life you get.
And though it hasn’t ended yet,
Sometimes you wish it might.

Happy birthday!
You wish you had more money.
Happy birthday!
Your life’s so sad it’s funny.
Happy birthday!
How much more can you take?
But your friends are hungry, so just cut the stupid cake.

Happy birthday!
Happy birthday!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Dear… BETH

From a Child's Hand

I've posted our video about the UCARE Hearts for Art project to Google video. The quality is not the best (resolution is diminished in the posting process), but you can have a look at it here:

(Warning: Ukrainian pop music and really cute kids throughout)

Auschwitz: It's all about the German Catholics

I ran across a really interesting analysis of the Pope's recent speech at Auschwitz on the blog Is That Legal. (Shorter version of the speech: German people good, small band of Nazis bad. They misled us. Besides, they were trying to wipe out Christianity, so we are all victims.)

I, like the blogger, was amazed that the Catholic church would choose a former member of Hitler Youth to head it. One would expect from a future pope exemplary bravery, not sheepish compliance. I mean, the pope is supposed to be a leader, God's representative on earth. (Maybe God likes genocide, and that's why there is so much of it?)

Just because he didn't man the ovens at Treblinka, doesn't make his participation in Hitler's Grand Experiment acceptable. There were many Germans who fought the evil that was Nazism, and many of them died doing so. That Ratzinger felt it was more important to get a Hitler Youth funded scholarship to go to seminary, rather than fight the greatest evil of the twentieth century, says a lot about this character.

Or, perhaps, like Cheney and the chickenhawk neocons, he just had other priorities.

And, from another website, a commenter had this to say:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then I came to Auschwitz
and I spoke about how mean
they were to Catholics.

Which pretty much sums up this Pope's actions.

Jesus Christ: The Musical

Am I a bad person because I find this very, very funny?

Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!

No, unfortunately, not Ann Coulter. Although she is truly a witch, having gone on national TV recently to promote her most recent book, in which she claims that the 9/11 widows are "self obsessed" and celebrity-seeking "broads" who are "enjoying" their husbands' deaths "so much." She also refers to the widows as "witches" and asks, "how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?" and suggests they pose in Playboy as soon as they can, before their looks go.

No, it's Zarqawi, the bogeyman of Iraq. If he didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. Which, actually, we sort of did. While the US was in control of Northern Iraq, he lived and operated in our zone (not in Saddam's). He was an al Qaeda wanna-be, no more. The US had several opportunities to take him out, but didn't, as it would have undermined the Bush administration's rationale for war. So he was allowed to exist.

How many lives could have been saved if we had taken him out in 2002? But it was not politically expedient. So thousands had to die, and Bush got his war.

And now it won't make much of a difference. Why?

First of all, al Qaeda is not a top-down organization. It is cells that vaguely cooperate towards a common goal. Killing one member, even if the titular leader, won't make much of a difference, as Israel learned with Hamas. If anything, it will urge them on to greater violence.

Second, most of the fighting and killing in Iraq is not being done by al Qaeda, but by home grown militias and death squads (Thank You, Mr. Negroponte). This will not affect their plans or action the least bit.

Just like the killing of Saddam's sons.

Just like the capture of Saddam.

It's like chopping the head off of the hydra.

The Good Old Days

From Bartcop:

When Bill Clinton was president, we had peace.
When Bill Clinton was president, we still had a Bill of Rights.
When Bill Clinton was president, people smiled when they thought about the future.
When Bill Clinton was president, criminal trials were open to the public
When Bill Clinton was president, we worried about his sex life...

Don't you miss the good old days?

The Mentos Challenge

For years, my Aunt Susie has been handing out Mentos to her various grandchildren and other small relatives. They love her for it.

More recently, it has been discovered, by young people with way too much time on their hands, that Mentos interact with Diet Coke in a spectacularly impressive manner. This first video demonstrates some of the early experiments.



Further research by the leading lights in the Mentos research community have yielded the following spectacular results--a recreation of the Bellagio fountains in Diet Coke fizz:



BTW, I learned all about this while listening to NPR (Public Radio) yesterday. Who says radio can't be educational.

And, DO try this at home--it looks like a lot of fun!

Stromatolites in the News

One of the things that has been a constant in my many visits to Australia is stromatolites. I've managed to find some almost everywhere I've traveled in West Australia.

They captured my imagination on my first visit to WA. Fossilized microbes. The world's oldest living organism. Who wouldn't be excited? Well, most normal people, I suppose. But Christobel and I were excited by the prospect.

The WA Parks factsheet describes them thusly:

The stromatolites...look like rocky lumps strewn around the beach but are actually built by living organisms too small for the human eye to see. Within the structures are communities of diverse inhabitants with population densities of 3000 million individuals per square metre! The organisms use sediment and organic material to build stromatolites up to 1.5 metres high - up to 10 million times their size. Because they grow very slowly, a metre-high stromatolite could be about 2000 years old.

When the Shark Bay stromatolites were discovered by scientists in 1956, they were the first growing examples ever recorded of structures, found fossilised in very old rocks, that had puzzled geologists for more than a century. The living microbes that built the stromatolites are similar to those found in 3500 million year old rocks, which are the earliest record of life on Earth.

According to a friend of Christobel's who does research in the field, several new stromatolite colonies have been discovered recently in WA.

This is what the Shark Bay stromatolites look like:

Here is a photo of Tom standing near a small pool with stromatolites. They're not as impressive, but they are stromatolites all the same.



Stromatolites are in the news today. According to the Chicago Tribune,

This microscopic branch of life — called archaea — likely has been thriving for about 3.4 billion years, according to new research from a team of Australian scientists. Writing in the journal Nature, they argue that miles of oddly shaped mounds of layered sedimentary rock found in Western Australia are not geologic features but the earliest fossil evidence of life on Earth.

The rocks, they say, are remnants of thriving microbial communities that dominated the world in the days when the young planet roiled with boiling oceans and the atmosphere was rich in ammonia and methane. Those conditions, while toxic to plants and animals, can nurture archaeans.

If the scientists are right, life arose on Earth within a billion years of its formation — very quickly in geologic time.

The findings are relevant to NASA's search for signs of life on Mars and other planets where conditions could support similar organisms.

"I think that these rocks are telling us that life probably arose ... rather quickly, which means that life only needs a short period of 'habitable' conditions on a planet in order to gain a foothold," said the study's lead author, Abigail Allwood of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney.

"The study gives me much more optimism that life could have gained a foothold early in the history of Mars, even if it were only briefly habitable."

The Australians note that while most stromatolite colonies are just fossilized remains, some of those in WA are growing, and contain live bacteria.

Living fossils. Just like the Coelacanth.

But not as pretty.

Save the Internets

Watch this cute video about a serious subject--internet freedom. If the big telecoms have their way, they will soon be able to regulate the internet the way they now do cable televison, deciding what you can see and which web sites you can visit. Do we really want to give this sort of power to the folks who sold us out to the NSA?

Nebraska: Cultural Capital of America

....or so the Department of Homeland Security would have you think. Recent cuts in the homeland security budget (after all, we have to pay for those new tax cuts for Paris Hilton somehow) have prompted big cuts in monies allocated to New York city and Washington, DC.

Mr. Chertoff and Mr. Bush only want what's best for ALL Americans, after all. And, well, it's not like there's anything of cultural significance there, is there?



Better to spend the money to protect the Corn Palace



Carhenge



and the World's Largest Kool-Aid Stand!


I mean, really, if you were a terrorist, which would you want to blow up:

this



or this?

Adding Red to the Map

I'm back home and working on the yard, after a lovely trip to the UP (well, except for the 90 degree heat and the black flies.....) I had a chance to visit with old friends, watch Kara graduate, do a bit of birding, and eat the infamous rum raisin brownie made by the Byzantine monks of the Copper Country.

I will try to retro post a bit later this week.

Meanwhile, a cool new feature I found on the web--interactive maps where you can plot the states you've visited. My map is pretty impressive (even if a few of the states were merely driven through on the way from one place to another):



create your own visited states map


The world map needs a bit of work, though:



create your own visited countries map