Grumpy Old Dragon

The founding fathers were truly men of vision and they did their best to setup a system that would endure. They just forgot one thing: stupidity. In their day, people in what would become America were the adventurous, the hardy, the true do-it-yourselfers. They were willing to take risks and be responsible for their actions, live or die by their own choices and not being told how to live by others. This makes for a pretty informed type of voter, especially compared to what elections have become today. They didn’t foresee large numbers of irresponsible sheep with the power to vote.

Fred Kaplan over on Slate was agonizing over America’s image abroad and looked for reader responses on what we Americans can do to fix it. He says most of his responses were from Americans overseas and maybe that implies we stateside Americans don’t care what the rest of the world thinks. I agree that we don’t really care, at least not anymore.

This to my local congresspeople today: I see in the news today that some musicians are trying to rally support to defeat the energy bill, because it includes incentives for nuclear power. Musicians being such huge experts on the energy issues facing our country, I’m so sure we should listen to them. Link to the story here.

Months have gone by and we’ve seen the operative guerilla groups in Palestine and Lebanon push Israel just one step too far, again. They each kidnapped Israeli soldiers and held them. Naturally Israel attacked and stomped thru both areas. When the dust settled, the Lebanese guerillas claimed a victory but I fail to see how getting half your country flattened by the enemy is a victory.

An article talking about an annual challenge asking top game designers to create a game that would win the Nobel Peace Prize reminded me about a discussion I had about allowing children to play MMORG’s. I was talking with people from more or less all over the world in one of Everquest’s world chat channels and the subject of letting your children play was brought up.

I love disaster movies, watching any of them reminds me how fragile our society is. The Hurricane one-two this year highlights it in real life. The Big Easy will certainly never be the same. With National Geographic, Science, and Weather channels all feeding my disaster habit, it becomes glaringly obvious that hurricanes might be the least of our worries.

I’m completely convinced that evolution is a fact. Mankind loves to pretend it’s not part of Nature anymore but in fact we are and we’re subject to Nature’s way of trimming the dross. We aren’t as tied to the whims of weather and climate as wild animals but the distance is smaller than most of us would really like to face. As we evolve and distance ourselves from the so called natural world, it looks like Nature is evolving subtle means of controlling our population, mostly via cultural stupidity.

A Danish cartoon has started an avalanche of stupidity around the world. The cartoons include an image of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse, and another portraying him holding a sword, his eyes covered by a black rectangle. According to Mohammed Bechari. “these pictures that have disturbed us, and that are still hurting the feelings of 1.2 billion Muslims.” I got news for him, Muslims in general hurt my feelings on a daily basis. I find blatant stupidity and barbarism unconscionable. When can I expect my apology? Today it’s cartoons published by nonMuslims, next week they’ll be storming embassies because nonMuslims eat pork and that offends them, too.

While Maureen Dowd is busily questioning whether men are necessary and predicts they will just be ornamental at some point in the future, I’m busily cursing my foolish predecessors for starting the feminist movement. I’m not convinced equality is all it’s cracked up to be, sort of like the Russians who came from Communist Russia for freedom and found out that freedom also means you’re free to lose you home, your car, your job and the government is not paying your bills for you. If we’d not had the feminist movement, men may not have found out just how good we women are.

What is it about nuclear power that makes people go gaga? Every time the NRC says anything publicly, whole packs of idiots chirp up like they’ve had their tails stepped on. Public comment is not meant for people to air their own lack of knowledge, it’s meant for useful discussion, hopefully by people who do have something useful to contribute, like ideas and alternative solutions to the issue under discussion. ‘Shut down the plant!’ is not a useful, or at this point even a feasible, solution. Here’s a tip: The Troma movies were low budget fiction, not documentaries. Here’s another: any movie or tv program that has ever had storyline involving nuclear power was completely laughable in terms of could that really happen, including environmentalist sacred cows like The China Syndrome and Silkwood.