Life Calderic

This is what happens when you watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and then spend the next day hiking in the Valles Caldera:

I am substantially uncool.

Good news and bad news

Let's start with the bad. Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, and suspended the constitution, as well as taken all non-government stations off of television. Sound like some sort of Military Dictatorship? Wikipedia agrees. Now, our government has an expressed interest in turning dictatorships into democracies, yet we are staunch allies of Pakistan. Sounds awfully two-faced. Some of our other allies: India, Thailand, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Russia, and Morocco. Some other spots that are not free: Sudan, Chad, China, Vietnam, Russia, and others. We don't do much about situations about these other countries. I assume this is because they are either too large, or they don't have any oil.

The good news is that I got all around Albuquerque yesterday without using a vehicle. Alison went to work, and I decided to take the bus to lunch. I took my $1 and my LG Chocolate and hopped on the #5 that runs from Downtown to the east side of town. It takes just about an hour to get out there, so I did some reading on evaporation and stable isotopes. Once I got off the bus (finally) I stopped at the Subway to get myself lunch, and the Pizza Hut to get some for Alison. We ate lunch outside of her office, then I headed back down to Montgomery to get back on the bus. This time the ride was pretty short. Also, the bus was very quiet because it's one of the new CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) buses. Go Abq! Importantly, the Target and the Wild Oats are both along the route, so I can do pretty much all of my shopping and wife-visiting on this single bus route. The drop off is probably about half a mile from our house, so it will be kind of an annoying slog carrying groceries home, but oh well. These are the sacrifices we have to make to live with minimal impact. Later last night, Alison and I walked downtown to the theater (a 3-mile roundtrip walk) to see The Darjeeling Limited, a Wes Anderson movie. It was a pretty good movie, and I liked the fact that there were no truly likable characters. Go see it and decide for yourself. Another nice thing is that all of the previews before the movie consisted of seemingly intelligent movies; no Fred Claus, or Saw IV, or Spongebob movies, etc. People didn't talk much during the movie either (except for me - I have this annoying habit of having to whisper something to Alison every like 10 minutes).

Why are people so terrible?

Let's start out with this: I am against the war in Iraq, and I always have been. It is a politically motivated exercise that seeks to secure our access to Middle Eastern oil in the future. Now I believe that the $465 BILLION that we've spent on the war could have been better applied to improve security and, gosh, I don't know, research some alternative energy sources. I thought there would be a big uproar back in September of 2006 when the death toll in Iraq passed that of the number that died on September 11, 2001 (not sure how CNN calculated the 9/11 casualties (Iraq is now up to 3,157 combat casualties), whether it includes people who have developed health problems due to rescue work, and their likely early deaths). That came and went fairly quietly, with few holding it up as an example of the uselessness of our time there (sorry, friends of mine who have been there).

I realize that my personal opinion has no weight on what will happen, but I surely hope that the opinion of over half of America should count for something, and that we should get out ASAP (it is depressing to note that, according to that poll, while almost half of Americans want our troops out in less than a year, only 10% believe that they actually will be out that quickly; the largest bin is 2 to 5 years).

Having ranted that, I am not against our troops. Except the bad eggs, which I hope are the exceptions. They're doing the job they are told to do, and I would certainly be afraid in their situation. Nearly everybody supports the troops, except for a few whackjobs. And those whackjobs are all super leftist liberals, right? Wrong.

In case you missed the news today, a federal jury awarded a Maryland man $10.9 million in damages in his suit against the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. This group protests outside of soldiers' funerals. Their reasoning? Not disgust at the concept of war, or the futility of the exercise, or anything that actually has anything to do with Iraq, our military, the War on Terrah®, or our general security policies. No, they're protesting a completely unrelated (to anybody sane) governmental stance. Not our slipping liberties; our worsening human rights record; this administration's terrible environmental record; the unsatisfactory response to Hurricane Katrina; etc.

No, the group is protesting at funerals because it believes that the war is punishment for this country's supposedly lax treatment of homosexuals. This being the same country where gay people are obviously held in disdain by most of the populace. The same country where gay people can't get married because it destroys the idea of a family (I think our 50% divorce rate does a fine job of that, thanks). The same country that voted with Iran on an anti-LGBT bill in the U.N. (at least we have a starting point for negotiations with Iran now - hatin' queers!). How much less lax can it get? Worse than treating these people as second-class citizens? Didn't we learn our lesson with black people (and don't give me the "you can't choose to be black, you can choose to be gay" claptrap, Michael Jackson proves you wrong)? I wonder if it is comforting to gay people everywhere that they can rest assured that, one day, they will be accepted by our society, or if it is terrifying that it took black people pretty much an entire century from the abolishment of slavery to an actual governmental approach to make them equals, and that the same may very well apply to the LGBT community.

In any event, the news today was refreshing. I hope that this suit bankrupts the church and their apparent ability to travel around the country at will to disrupt one of three events that should never, ever be interrupted (the other being births and weddings) by undue scrutiny. I just tried to get on their website (www.godhatesfags.com), but it seems to be down. I hope it got flamed. Hate is a terribly strong word to throw around, and my personal conception of God provides no room for it. Nor should a purportedly Christian heart.