Comments From The Peanut Gallery: February 2005

Budget Cuts and BSE

According to New Scientist(pg 5, Feb 19 2005), the Bush Adminstration's budget proposal for the next fiscal year will reduce the amount of cattle tested for BSE each year from 220,000 to 40,000: more than an 80% cut. What I have to ask is: Why? What possible sense does that make? With BSE being found in Canada, it seems like the risk of BSE is increasing, not decreasing? So why cut it?

At the bottom line, it's all very well to talk about tax cuts, but this is what it means. Important, life-saving programs cut while pork-barreling and private subsidies remain.

Meanwhile, don't eat any hamburgers in the USA for the next few years, unless you feel like becoming a human vegetable.

The Terminal: Crisis in Krakozhia

I just watched "The Terminal", a movie starring Tom Hanks about a guy who gets trapped in an airport when his country, Krakozhia, is destroyed by warfare. It's a great film, but that's not what this post is about.

There's an extremely poignant scene in the first part of the movie where Tom Hanks is in the airport, and he sees on the televisions distributed around the airport a CNN news broadcast about a "Crisis in Krakozhia". He's shocked, terrified and scared at the pictures of war and terror descending on his country, and nobody around him even gives a glance at the news. Who hasn't changed the channel when the news comes on and it's about some war somewhere?

Imagine this: you're in the international airport in Geneva waiting for your flight back when the news comes on one of the screens: your home country has been invaded. The television shows the Statue of Liberty, or Buckhingham Palace, or the Sydney Harbor Bridge collapsing. A shot of tanks moving down your street. Militants firing in the streets. And everybody else just walks past the television, ignoring it. How do you think you would feel?

There's far too much apathy in our society, and the news is too "clean". After seeing the "clean" pictures of the Iraq war in America and on the commercial networks over here, it was quite a shock to flip to SBS and see dead people in the streets, Coalition troops shooting and killing innocent people who don't even look like a threat, and people climbing through the rubble, searching for their loved ones. That is what happens in war. It's not clean, it's not a video game and it's not a matter of good and evil. Think about how you would feel if your family was killed by a bomb from a plane sent to liberate you. How much freedom is your family worth?

A French Joke

"The American are only interested in being allies when the British are burning Washington"

Western Washington Lawmakers Want to Secede

Give the GOP two more senators, hey? Brilliant plan. The way the American senate is divided up is even more unfair than the electoral college system. Each state gets two senators. (same thing in Oz, except twelve senators to one state)

That means that California has a ration of 1 senator to 16,935,824 people, and Wyoming has a ration of 1 senator to 246,891 people. That's about 1:68 ratio. I understand the need for balance and why two houses are useful in a system of checks and balances. So perhaps it would be better to either divide up the current states into much smaller entities, or weld them together to form about 10 big states? (Props to zompist.com for that idea.)

Human Brutality

Yesterday I saw a guy get beaten up by three guys out on the round pier-thing at Eastern Beach in Geelong. That's just not right. Some people are bastards. There's something wrong when you just go and bash up some guy for getting in your way.

I also feel guilty that I didn't go over and help him, though other people did. I was in shock, really, and I hadn't seen the whole thing: I didn't know if he'd been fighting with them (he hadn't, I found out later).

But in the end, the police came and somebody knew the assailants, so I hope they get caught and pay for their crimes.

A New Kind of Political Correctness

A new kind of political correctness is arising in America... or perhaps I should say has arisen. It's the political correctness that says you can't criticize President Bush, you can't be against the War in Iraq(or else you're not supporting our troops), and in generaly you can't have a viewpoint that deviates from the Official Party Line. The only people who are allowed to deviate are the liberals on shows like Crossfire, and there you must instead disagree with everything in the official party line. There's only two sides of the line. There's only black and white. There's only a liberal viewpoint and a conservative viewpoint, and the conservative viewpoint is always right.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Looks like fun. Does anyone know whether the guy playing Arthur Dent is the same guy who plays Ron's dad in Harry Potter?

CNN.com - NASA budget�would kill Hubble - Feb 7, 2005

CNN.com - NASA budget�would kill Hubble - Feb 7, 2005

Ah, blast it.

Something Awful

Fake Windows Features

Very funny... though some things may offend.

Uh-huh...

I never liked these quizzes(they purport to reduce complex things down to simple factors and try to make subjective things objective), but this test on "What age do you act?" takes the cake. I doubled-backed when I saw "What are your political views?"... what does that have to do with your maturity? I then did a simple test, and discovered that you are apparently more mature if you have conservative views than if you have liberal ones.

Just slightly biased, wouldn't you think?

Canada Stockpiles Antivirals, Fears Bird Flu Epidemic

Link

This makes the bird flu seem much more scary. Even more scary, some people who are visiting us are coming through Bangkok(in Thailand). I hope Australia is also stockpiling the stuff.

STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE CANCELLED!!!!

Help Save the Future!

You can't cancel Star Trek. It's like cancelling the Olympics. Enterprise was a good show. Some people thought it was bad, it had a crappy theme song, and it was a little bit cliched. But it was STAR TREK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!