short notes:
will brady's ruminations
will brady's ruminations
2007-02-27
bilps + updates
income disparities: The Dreamer ponders how it is that some folks can afford $100,000 entertainment systems while others live in abject poverty. I wonder about this myself.
poverty and wealth: Common Dreams reports that since the coming to power of Bush the Second the number Americans living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high. Since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Income disparities, disproportionate burdens in costs of living foisted atop the poor, and lack of basic services such as health care, only serve to make this picture even grimmer.
Small comfort for us on the eve of what Alan Greenspan says is the beginning of a period of economic turbulence. The Dow dropped 416 points today. [Thanks to Officialssay]
global budgets: An old curmudgeon wonders if Social Security is going bankrupt how can we continue to pay for our military adventures in Iraq?
bible belt geography: The neocons continue to push their agenda to divide the Middle East into a bunch of weakened nations likely easily pushed around by oil companies and natural resource barons. So goes the reporting by researcher Seymour Hersh in the latest edition of the New Yorker.
gay rights: Is Cuba becoming more accepting than USA? From USA Today: "We have to abolish any form of discrimination against those persons," said Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's National Assembly. "We are trying to see how to do that, whether it should be to grant them the right to marry or to have same-sex unions."
Alarcon said he expects Cuba's communist government will soon enact a law to do one or the other. "We have to redefine the concept of marriage," he said. "Socialism should be a society that does not exclude anybody." Unlike, say, a Fundie dominated United States. [Thanks to Towleroad]
flat earth society: Dinosaurs roamed the Earth only 6,000 years ago and apparently, they traveled aboard Noah's Ark. According to Answers in Genesis there is a explanation as to how those huge dinosaurs fit on the Ark. 
income disparities: The Dreamer ponders how it is that some folks can afford $100,000 entertainment systems while others live in abject poverty. I wonder about this myself. poverty and wealth: Common Dreams reports that since the coming to power of Bush the Second the number Americans living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high. Since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Income disparities, disproportionate burdens in costs of living foisted atop the poor, and lack of basic services such as health care, only serve to make this picture even grimmer. Small comfort for us on the eve of what Alan Greenspan says is the beginning of a period of economic turbulence. The Dow dropped 416 points today. [Thanks to Officialssay]
global budgets: An old curmudgeon wonders if Social Security is going bankrupt how can we continue to pay for our military adventures in Iraq?
bible belt geography: The neocons continue to push their agenda to divide the Middle East into a bunch of weakened nations likely easily pushed around by oil companies and natural resource barons. So goes the reporting by researcher Seymour Hersh in the latest edition of the New Yorker. Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” said Shia leader in Lebanon, Nasrallah. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”Newsblog Moon of Alabama notes further that these plans are nothing new and have been promoted and plotted in neo-conservative circles for some time now, including in the Armed Forces Journal. Although commentator Ralph Peters claims that political re-alignment in the Middle-East would be nothing more than moving around borders that had been created by "self-interested Europeans in the 19th and early 20th century. Thank goodness there are no self-interested Americans meddling with borders and boundaries. That would be awful.
gay rights: Is Cuba becoming more accepting than USA? From USA Today: "We have to abolish any form of discrimination against those persons," said Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's National Assembly. "We are trying to see how to do that, whether it should be to grant them the right to marry or to have same-sex unions."Alarcon said he expects Cuba's communist government will soon enact a law to do one or the other. "We have to redefine the concept of marriage," he said. "Socialism should be a society that does not exclude anybody." Unlike, say, a Fundie dominated United States. [Thanks to Towleroad]
flat earth society: Dinosaurs roamed the Earth only 6,000 years ago and apparently, they traveled aboard Noah's Ark. According to Answers in Genesis there is a explanation as to how those huge dinosaurs fit on the Ark. Although there are about 668 names of dinosaurs, there are perhaps only 55 different “kinds” of dinosaurs. Furthermore, not all dinosaurs were huge like the Brachiosaurus, and even those dinosaurs on the Ark were probably “teenagers” or young adults.You decide. [From Conservapedia, a new compendium of information developed by 58 home-schooled geniuses who obviously know more than everybody else.]
Without getting into all the math, the 16,000-plus animals would have occupied much less than half the space in the Ark (even allowing them some moving-around space).
Labels: creationism, Cuba, dinosaurs, gay rights, iraq quagmire, neocons, poverty, wealth
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