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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, June 30, 2005

It's BAAACK!! 

...while I've been swearing, flinging things around the room, and sweating over the desperate race to see whether I could get a new Blogger template up and running (to replace the mess that Blogger's little update left me) before my lack of html skills made the whole thing just...disappear, Bryan over at Why Now? has actually been engaging in a productive effort to track the problem and report on updated fixes, including the one that finally worked for me...

...I don't know if the replacement was better or worse that this original template, but I finally decided that this is what I started with so this is what I'm going back to, dammit. Of course, I did save the other template...just in case....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:02 PM 0 comments

That's IT!! NOW We Invade Iran!! 

...OK, now this one has me just a little bit perplexed. Several Americans held as hostages after the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, are positive that the newly elected president of that country, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was one of the hostage-takers. Scotty Mac says, after this revelation, that the White House is addressing the allegations seriously and is "looking into them to better understand the facts"...

What on earth for?

...I vividly remember the taking of the hostages, the downright righteous anger that bubbled just near the surface, and the wholely comfortable desire to see that entire worthless dunghole of a country bombed back to a previous millenium unless we got our hostages back. I honor the sacrifice that our 52 hostages made for the pain and brutality they endured for over a year just as much now as I did back then. For what it's worth, I strongly believe it was just simply wrong for the State Department to intervene against the former hostages suing Iranian assets for damages because of their imprisonment. "Violate the agreements that freed the hostages"?!!? HELLO!!! Can a fella get a shout-out for the Antiballistic Missile Treaty here? Since when did these folks start to suddenly have a passion for upholding bilateral agreements?

...for the life of me, however, I can't really see what difference it makes that the President-elect of Iran may have been one of their captors. One of the for-sure leaders of the hostage-taking is now a reformer and an advocate of just exactly the sort of changes our government would love to see transpire in Iran; I'm not confident we would refuse to do business with him - were he to come to power - over revelations of involvement of the storming of the Embassy. On other fronts, Gee Dub's soul mate Vladdy Putin used to spy on us for the purpose of finding weaknesses that might help the Soviet Union defeat us. On yet other fronts, our once good friend and proxy in our covert war to keep Iran from gaining regional dominance is now prancing around in some undisclosed, secret hidden cell-block in his tighty-whities somewhere near Baghdad. Things change...

...it's not likely that we are going to embrace Iran and it's new president-elect in any sort of warm fuzzy bear hug anytime soon in any case, regardless of whether we consider Ahmadinejad the president or a terrorist. As far as the Bushies are concerned, we already have some big Iranian fish to fry over their nuclear ambitions. But in general terms, I'm just not sure how the question of whether Ahmadinejad was a hostage taker or not really plays into how we handle Iran. Who knows, maybe this is the nugget, that one final piece that the "bring democracy to the Middle East" boys at PNAC were looking for to finally justify that push-off to an upcoming Iranian invasion. Somehow I don't think so, but - barring that - I can't come up with a good reason why this should matter as much as it seems to...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:25 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

The Leadership of The Unclued 

...it’s pretty obvious that Gee Dub doesn’t get it when it comes to the subject of embryonic stem cell research. The constant source of amazement is how aggressively he works at not getting it, which speaks volumes to the power that one particular interest group can appear to wield when you have little else to anchor to as a base. A building movement exists in both the US House and Senate to expand his rules of a couple of four years ago and provide greater, more flexible federal funding for this research, even though Gee Dub has scratched a big thick line in the dirt with his veto threat. Orrin Hatch has been a long-time proponent of embryonic stem cell research even as he opposes abortion; Orrin gets it. Even my own winger-in-sheeps’-clothing alleged moderate Republican Senator, Gordon Smith of Oregon, gets it and supports this research; he understands - if only as a political point and not from some root core intellectual level - that the ‘sanctity of life’ argument gets thrown into the incinerator at the same unceremonious moment as those left-over embryos out back behind the fertility clinic...

...it’s so mind-numbingly frustrating to witness this spectacle as the parent of a child who could benefit some day from discoveries deriving from this research. The idea that anyone could single-handedly restrict or deny that opportunity, not only for my loved one but for millions of other people’s loved ones afflicted with a variety of diseases, can make a person get a little unfocused and angry. George W. Bush has nothing even vaguely resembling the sort of track record to suggest that he comes by this gift of compassion honestly. Were he to have something like that, he would have spent more than a handful of minutes on the case reviews of the one hundred and thirty-some men and women that he consigned to execution in Texas. Were he to have something like that, we would expect to see some sort of policy in Iraq that seemed to be actually intent on getting that country up and running as soon as possible to allow our troops to leave. More to the point, we would have seen all along an effort put forth to try to bring security with an appropriate amount of troops to prevent the ongoing constant drumbeat of needless casualties instead of whole-hearted support for this Rumsfeldian experiment in reforming the military that has only demonstrated that we are capable of using an insufficient number of troops to chase off the battlefield a second-rate army not much interested in fighting but not capable of bringing any sort of safety, security, or order to the sprawling, teeming mess left behind after our overthrow of the existing government. I’m comfortable enough, I suppose, with the President of the United States not caring much about what happens to me and mine, but in the bargain it would be greatly appreciated if he wouldn’t stand directly in the way of our hopeful journey down a path toward some potential happy ending. Gee Dub doesn’t get it, or doesn’t want to get it, and in the end - barring veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress - it all really becomes the same thing. And we still have three and a half years of this nonsense left to go....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:26 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 27, 2005

War of the HTML Worlds 

...I don't know what happened. At this point, I not even terrible curious anymore. I do know that the template I was using went south, creating wierd formatting issues and large green spaces, which are fine in a metropolitan setting but not so much in the presentation of the written word. Long story short, I found another template(yer lookin' at it, Sparky) that did seem to work and over the space of the last couple of days have applied my quit inconsiderable html coding skills to recreating this baby. It's all a rolicking good time because I have absolutely no idea how I actually get stuff to work right, nor do I have any idea why things suddenly stack up in long skinny vertical columns when I - apparently - do something wrong. Next up: Jack goes on a journey of discovery wherein he experiments with changing colors...

...what the heck, I was getting tired of the old look anyway...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:57 PM 1 comments

Sunday, June 26, 2005

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM 

...for reasons that I don't understand and can't even begin to fix, there is now a huge gap appearing in whatever the hell is my most current post. I've been fighting with this for a couple of days now, discovering in the process that the basic template - without all of my additional stuff like the counter and the Haloscan and the other stuff - does the same thing. Sooo right now I'm exploring plugging in another template with all the attendant issues of trying to get Haloscan to work (Blogger has comments but you need to have a blog profile to enter that dark world). Boy, this takes me back to those bad ol' days when Ruminate This broke down...

...I think I'll have another beer and pout for awhile...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:16 PM 0 comments

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