Some hatin', true.

I'm working on another blog post right now, but I thought I would compile some recent Bush-related articles posted on The Onion*:

Bush Dies Peacefully in His Sleep
Spider Eggs Hatch in Bush's Brain
Single-Engine Cessna Crashes into Bush
Bush's Eyelid Accidentally Nailed to Wall
Bush Dragged Behind Presidential Motorcade For 26 Blocks
Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone
Crocodile Bites Off Bush's Arm
Bush Tumbles Wildly Down Washington Monument Staircase

I forget sometimes that the ills that have been visited upon our country for the past eight years were foreseen by many. Check out this classic Onion article entitled "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over". This was posted January 17, 2001, just three days before Bush took office. A few quotes:

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

Turning to the subject of the environment, Bush said he will do whatever it takes to undo the tremendous damage not done by the Clinton Administration to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He assured citizens that he will follow through on his campaign promise to open the 1.5 million acre refuge's coastal plain to oil drilling. As a sign of his commitment to bringing about a change in the environment, he pointed to his choice of Gale Norton for Secretary of the Interior. Norton, Bush noted, has "extensive experience" fighting environmental causes, working as a lobbyist for lead-paint manufacturers and as an attorney for loggers and miners, in addition to suing the EPA to overturn clean-air standards.

Continued Bush: "John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state."

An overwhelming 49.9 percent of Americans responded enthusiastically to the Bush speech.

"After eight years of relatively sane fiscal policy under the Democrats, we have reached a point where, just a few weeks ago, President Clinton said that the national debt could be paid off by as early as 2012," Rahway, NJ, machinist and father of three Bud Crandall said. "That's not the kind of world I want my children to grow up in."

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

*I in no way wish pain upon Mr. Bush, although I whole-heartedly endorse him going through a war crimes trial.

You haven't lived...

...until you've heard Arnold Schwarzenegger say "Ponzi Schemes." Also, should any governor ever say this?:

Conan's sword could not have cleaved our political system in two as cleanly as our own political parties have done.

The answer is: this should never be a thing that an elected official says. Thankfully, from the audio feed I was receiving it seems that nobody in the room laughed (this was delivered as part of the State of the State Address).

Some life instructions

Picture this. You're driving down a highway and you see a car with a flat tire. Or you come across a car with a dead battery in a parking lot. The owner of the car is Jim Lehrer. You should stop and help him. It's like your prerogative. This is why.

Today our VP Dick was on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. If you've never watched this show, it's a wonderful news program that I don't catch often enough because I don't watch a lot of TV. Strangely enough, KQED plays the Newshour over the radio every afternoon, which is kind of disconcerting since it isn't set up as a radio show and therefore you lose gestures and graphics and such, but that's neither here nor there. Jim Lehrer is an incredibly fair, patient man, and an extremely well-respected newsman.

Lehrer and Cheney discussed a number of things, and ranged into talking about the economy. The following exchange took place (italics are mine duh):

MR. LEHRER in a fair, patient tone of voice: What about - going back to the original question - about seeing this coming? Isn't that part of the stewardship of the president, of the vice president and of his administration - to see these things coming and try to prevent them from coming, rather than to act after they've happened?

VICE PRES. CHENEY in an asshole tone of voice: Did you see it coming, Jim? You're an expert.

MR. LEHRER winning: I'm not the president or the vice president of the United States.

MR. LEHRER: FTW!

Seriously? Does anybody buy this?

I am in the process of writing another post, but I just saw this bit of news. An interview with our VP Dick. He asserts that nobody at the CIA did anything illegal in interrogations. You can argue, from a certain point of view (which I and other, expert, people would not) that torture is the way to get information. You could argue that it's justified to protect the national security or what have you, although I think the ethical questions overrule any kind of other benefit. But to argue that it's LEGAL? Come now, VP, I know that you think we're stupid, but really. The lying has to stop some day.

What I've been reading

I just finished a book, which is getting annoyingly rare these days. I walk an hour plus every day now (I stopped taking the terrible neighborhood bus because it's terrible) plus 20 minutes on the subway per day. Which seems like a lot of time to spend reading except that it's not the easiest thing in the world to walk and read at the same time. Alison made it a little easier since she bought me a nifty reading light for a pre-Christmas gift. It still takes me about a month to read a book unfortunately. This book I just read is The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Alison had heard of these folks before but of course I'm ignorant and had not.

The book started out very slow...the whole beginning of the book was a lesson on the mechanics of evolution (why we evolved, and stuff). It was a strange way to write this book, with a lot of very technical scientific writing mixed in with language pandering to the completely non-scientific. It felt a little trite to the scientist in me, but also a little muddling to the non-geneticist in me.

It got way more interesting toward the end, with a lot of stats about the human ruination of the environment. I think that everybody should at least read the last half of this book to get a better understanding of our impacts, in case you don't already know. It's leading me to greatly reduce my meat intake (not because of my health, or the high price of good meat, or the cow farts, or the fertilizer in the waterway, or even my lovely wife's aversion to it, but rather simply because it turns out to be an incredibly inefficient way to get our food energy, and would make much more sense in terms of sustainability to eat vegetables instead).

My main conclusion drawn from this book is that there is basically no hope for the human race. I have felt this way for awhile to a certain degree, but the way we're headed in this book seals the deal. People, we are screwed.

Next I'm going to read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. I hope this book cheers me up by thinking about what will happen to the world once we've destroyed ourselves. Alison already read this book, and wrote a blog post about it.

It's unfortunate that we as a species have decided that it's our right to do whatever we want to to make us happy at the cost of everything else on this planet, but there it is. It's also unfortunate that when we go down we're going to take with us an unprecedented number of species away from this world. The generalists will survive, cockroaches and rats and such. In a world devoid of lots of the species that usually fill the ecological niches present in this world, at least there should be a species explosion to fill them in rapid (geologically) order, yay!