Everyone knows by now: Old Man Falwell has kicked the bucket. Common courtesy dictates that respect should be shown someone when he died, but Jerry Falwell was neither common nor courteous, so I feel little compulsion to give him anything that isn't warranted, especially something so important as respect. Let's be honest: the man was a douche bag.
...at least that's the impression one gets from President Bush's impending veto of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act that just made it through the House. The bill would add homosexual and transgendered people (and the disabled) to a list of groups federally protected from violent hate crime that includes people of any "race, color, religion, and national origin." How else are we to interpret a veto but that Bush thinks gay people are inferior?
I finally got around to seeing "Osama," a pretty remarkable film. The first to be made in Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban government, it serves as a stark reminder of what we're fighting and fighting for in the War on Terror. I'm not one for cheap sentiment and rah-rah patriotism, but this film's existence underscores why it was so important we invaded and freed Afghanistan.
Why do we entertain moments of silence?
Earth Day, April 22, is nigh upon us once again. Started as a way of raising awareness of environmental issues and highlighting their solutions, this year’s might be seen as a time to celebrate, at least from a PR standpoint. An Inconvenient Truth last summer renewed interest in global warming in an American public still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, and even President Bush has taken the monumental first step of paying lip service to the climate change phenomenon. Lip service! My laws! Yet such victories are, for now, hollow. Denial of global warming, while waning in scope, continues to shape perception and policy, and even those at the forefront for change are proving reluctant to lead the way.
It still feels too early to be writing any of this. Scarcely a day after the blood of so many has finished drying on the walls of West Ambler Johnston and Norris Halls, when we still don’t have a clear idea of what happened, how can we expect to have a reaction that is anything but a reflex? Writing is a fine art, not performance, and is judged not by its spur-of-the-moment inspiration, but by its slow and deliberate crafting and structuring. Yet here I am, opining away; a droplet in a sea of like chatter.
I’ll try not to drown you all.
Towards the end of last year there was a debate over whether the violence in Iraq qualified as a civil war. Such talk was soon pushed aside, though, with the publishing of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group report (and its initial dismissal by the Bush administration), and President Bush’s announced troop surge.
And now this, three months later: the Iraqi parliament, nestled within the Green Zone, the most fortified part of Iraq, has been bombed, on the same day that one of Baghdad’s main bridges, was destroyed. If this doesn’t qualify as civil war, I don’t know what does.
Earlier today, courtesy of Pharyngula, I came across this editorial by a shill for the creationist-in-scientific-clothing Discovery Institute, which condescendingly fawns over the development of a new religion, the “new atheism.”
Excuse the length of the rant, but it’s Easter, and this guy needs to be shot back down to Earth (not that he’s going to read this, but you know).
