Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Shout it from the rooftops
Robert C. Byrd, senior Senator from West Virginia, is no liberal. Yet his voice has been one of the very few in the nation’s most esteemed legislative chamber to speak out forthrightly about the dangerously reckless course on which George W. Bush has sent this nation careening.
Thanks to someone called CTDem2 (I presume this person is a Democrat from Connecticut), posting a comment on the consistently-interesting Daily Kos site, I just read Byrd’s February 12 Senate floor speech, a movingly powerful indictment of two years of Bush administration depredations wreaked upon the world and the country.
So how is the New York Times covering Byrd’s challenge? In the early morning of February 13 (just after midnight Pacific Time), there’s nothing whatsoever on their website. Same with CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, FoxNews, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times. Boy, those “liberal” media sure do jump to cover stories slanted “their” way, don’t they?
Well, at least the Charleston Gazette back home in West Virginia picked up the story…
Today...
...is February 12, 2003.
Exactly 194 years ago today may have been the single most momentous date of birth ever. On this date in 1809, both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born.
Born into a frontier farming family in Hardin County, Kentucky, Lincoln had little or no formal schooling. In his childhood, his family moved to Indiana and Illinois; it was a difficult existence, filled with hard manual labor and family crises. Yet this self-taught, ungainly giant rapidly rose to pre-eminence as an attorney in the state capital of Illinois, briefly held a seat in the US House of Representatives, then ran for President as the American political system was falling apart at the seams. In a four-way race in 1860, he became President as southern states were seceding from the Union over the issues of state versus federal power and our national legacy of human slavery.
For all their brilliance and logic in constructing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers had glossed over these essential inconsistencies in American governance and society. Lincoln guided the national response to secession, bearing up through early military disasters while also presiding over the re-formation of the nation. Under his leadership, the nation finally began the process of working through and overcoming its contradictory flaws, a process that continues to this very day. His eloquence—the power, depth, and clarity of his words—thrills and challenges us to this day. That his life was violently cut short, mere days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, simultaneously cements his status as our great national martyr and opens endless speculation about how our post-Civil War reconstruction into one nation might have turned out had Lincoln’s presidency continued.
The consummate observational scientist, Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. A product of upper-class gentility, he studied for the ministry at Christ’s College, Cambridge after an abortive earlier study of medicine in Edinburgh. Signing on as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, he collected, examined, and studied during the ship’s lengthy explorations. Returning to England in 1836, he spent the next two decades organizing his notes, developing his logical arguments, and writing his masterpiece, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (1859).
Though he could not possibly have known the cellular and genetic mechanisms upon which his observations and inferences rest, and was therefore incorrect in most of the small details, the general principles of his theories—natural selection, random mutation, competition for resources and reproductive advantage—remain powerful and important in contemporary science and in contemporary intellectual investigation of all kinds. The magnitude of his intellect, apparent on every page of The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and other works by Darwin, was coupled with a voluminous knowledge of biological and physical phenomena of the world that he used to demonstrate and exemplify the conclusions to which the evidence led.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Depression, and maybe a small revelation
Everywhere I look, I see little but gloom and doom.
Bush and the monsters who operate him are poisoning our nation’s standing in the world, poisoning our nation’s financial well-being, poisoning our nation’s political equilibrium, poisoning our nation’s water and earth and sky. George Walker Bush is just as much the rigid and dangerous fundamentalist that Osama Bin-Laden is. With the vast power of the United States military behind him, with the self-righteous surety that he is God’s instrument of all things good and pure, with his astonishingly simplistic black-and-white, all-or-nothing belief system, Dubya is far more dangerous to every human being on this planet than Saddam Hussein taken to the Kim Jong Il power.
With every passing day, with every incremental outrage perpetrated by these people who purport to be leading my country, I am convinced that George Walker Bush would use weapons of mass destruction to achieve his ends. He would happily drop a nuke on Baghdad, some time between gleefully permitting states to drop millions of poor people from Medicaid and fixing up a few more six-figure tax breaks for his high-roller friends, then head off to a prayer meeting.
Sunday, February 09, 2003
One quick thought
Here’s a small portion of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN last Wednesday, in which he makes reference to what he says is "a small part of a chemical complex called ‘Al Musayyib’". According to the Secretary, it’s a way-station between chemical weapons factories and field sites.
This photograph of the site taken two months later, in July, shows not only the previous site which is the figure in the middle at the top with the bulldozer sign near it, it shows that this previous site, as well as all of the other sites around the site have been fully bulldozed and graded. The topsoil has been removed. The Iraqis literally removed the crust of the earth from large portions of this site in order to conceal chemical weapons evidence that would be there from years of chemical weapons activity.
Powell implies, or perhaps I merely infer, that inspectors went to that site and obtained samples that did not contain even a trace of the offending chemicals or their byproducts.
If it’s that easy to remove chemical contamination from a site, then why has the United States spent billions and billions of dollars and a couple of decades on trying to clean up and recover Superfund sites?
"Have a magical day..."
Whew…
Got back to Seattle late last night after a week at a convention hotel in Orlando. While the meeting was typical for its genre—we contractors express our frustration with the Feds for their silly rules and/or lack of specificity in describing our required activities, and they shrug their collective shoulders—the setting was so pervasive, so stutifying, so Disney that it’ll take me a little while to settle back into reality-basis. Fighting against that programming is tough!
Thankfully, there were no Disney characters at our hotel. At other Walt Disney World hotels, it seems, you might be confronted by Snow White or Pluto while trying to keep your breakfast down. I’m not sure that even the bar is sufficient refuge at some of them, though the idea of Goofy or Donald bellying up and throwing back a couple of shots of Black Jack does have a certain small appeal. Even without the characters, though, the mind-control and activity-control was ever-present. It was clear that they’ll do everything possible to get you out of your hotel room so that you’ll spend money. The rooms were small and (to be charitable) spartan; all lighting was dim, there were no movies (HBO, Showtime, and such) on the TV, only a few room service items. Even the TV remote was designed to frustrate you, as it had no number pad so that it was constantly necessary to page through all the intervening channels between the ones you wanted.
In addition to the half-dozen channels touting pieces of Disney magic, the TV did have every variation of ESPN under the sun—ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPNews, and maybe more. Lessee now, ESPN is owned by ABC, which is owned by Capital Cities, which is owned by ... Disney, of course.
Two Disney features stand out as particularly odious. One of them is the title of this entry. It’s the constant refrain from the staff—the doorman, the check-in clerk, the restaurant cashier, the telephone operator. The second is the little sign posted next to particular doors, the ones that would say “Employees Only” or “Private” at any other hotel. At a Disney hotel, it reads “Cast Members Only”! Whether they’re waiters or janitors, computer operators or security guards, they’re all mere actors on the Disney stage.
After catching up with the 600 or so email messages that were in my in-box when I returned, I’ll get back into the blog swing. In the meantime, a couple of thoughts on the political mood among the several hundred people at this nationwide meeting:
a) Granted that this is a group consisting largely of do-gooder types (we’re concerned with the quality of care within Medicare), I ran across very few supporters of GWB’s policies and actions.
b) That most definitely includes the federal employees, several of whom are just below the “political appointment” level in their agency. Even those wearing the uniform of the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service were extremely distraught at what the government they participate in has been doing to us and to them.
c) Even the one unabashed Dubya supporter I ran into—he said he was an old buddy, and admirer, of Karl Rove—expressed strong reservations about the anti-Constitutional efforts of John Ashcroft.
Back to the email…
