Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Snow Comes To Duluth… Finally

It’s finally snowed in Duluth — a couple days too late for a white Christmas, though. From the look of the Allete Lake Cam, it’s snowing tonight too.

Gerald Ford

Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq – washingtonpost.com
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.

What a shame that, unlike the venerable Jimmy Carter, Ford couldn’t find the courage to publicly condemn the Iraq invasion. If more ex-president’s had come forward to criticize Bush’s unjust war, we might not be finding ourselves in our current situation: stuck in the middle of a civil war.

Rare Exports from Finland

Gay Parents

The empty case against Mary Cheney. – By William Saletan – Slate Magazine
It’s true that two parents are better than one. It’s also true that married parents are better than unmarried ones. But those aren’t arguments against gay parenthood. They’re arguments for gay marriage.

This slate.com article is pretty much a rehash of all the same points I’ve been making over the past couple years, but you might enjoy the fresh verbiage. Plus, the author includes a link to James Dobson’s recent piece, Two Mommies Is One Too Many.

“Necessity”

This Modern World » Blog Archive » Merry stereotypical dictator Christmas!
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.”
—William Pitt, House of Commons, November 18, 1783

This quote was attached to a post about the late Augusto Pinochet on This Modern World, but it’s so appropriate for some of the abuses that have come out of the Bush White House in the past few years, that I just couldn’t resist bringing it to your attention. Bush is bad but he’s no Pinochet, of course. Still, it’s not 2009 yet…

It’s time for a re-post of the Bush Countdown Clock, methinks…

Au Train, Christmas Eve

John McCain is a Jerk… and More on Hillary Clinton

Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary
John McCain once got a lot of laughs cracking this joke: “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” Chelsea was still in high school at the time.

What a complete asshole. I had never heard that before. What a pig. No, calling him a pig is an insult to our porcine friends. I guess I’ll have to stick with asshole. (Though that’s an insult to a very useful bit of anatomy.) Anyway. Any good thoughts I might have once had about John McCain are hereby rescinded. What kind of creep says such a mean thing about a kid? That’s really low.

It’s certainly something I’ll keep in mind.

Anyway, this article on the Mother Jones site is really pretty interesting and it fits right in with what I was writing about Hillary Clinton’s scariness factor.

Hillary herself once said she had become some kind of Rorschach blot in which Americans see many things.

Heh… isn’t that the truth. It’s not all confabulation, though. Somewhere in there is a real Hillary Clinton. She just seems kind of hard to pin down — and that’s not always a good thing.

No Snow

As you can see, there’s no snow on the ground up at Dana’s. From the look of the snowdepth map, there’s not much snow anywhere in the UP. The same is true in Minnesota. There’s no snow in Duluth. There’s only three inches on the ground in Ely. It’s really depressing. And it’s hard on the plants and animals that depend upon the insulating effect of a heavy snowfall. It it because of global warming?

Black or Female? What’s Scarier?

Eugene Robinson – Two for a Breakthrough – washingtonpost.com
For the moment let’s assume that we’ve come far enough to seriously consider electing the first U.S. president who can be described without using both the adjectives “white” and “male.” Who has the better chance of breaking through, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama? Is “white” the qualification that people are less willing to forgo, or is it “male”?

I think people are less willing to forgo “male”. It’s stupid and, yes, it’s sexist but I really get the impression that Hillary Clinton “bothers” a lot of people — even people who are politically and otherwise socially liberal. It’s really not so much her politics. I feel pretty confident that the same ideas, coming from a man, would be more palatable. It’s her sex. Her sex combined with her strong personality. She’s not “womanly” enough. She’s not soft or compliant enough.

Barack Obama may be black but he’s a fairly “white” black guy. Compare him to…oh…Jesse Jackson. Jesse’s a “black” black guy. Barack’s a “whitish” black guy. So, Barack doesn’t scare white people in quite the same way Jesse Jackson might scare them.

Am I crazy? Or am I just putting words to something a lot of white liberals really feel but just don’t talk about?

Look, I’m not saying any of these feelings we have are good or right. I’m just saying that I think they’re there and they’re going to affect how people vote.

Gut Bugs

Gut Bacteria Tied to Weight Gain, Study Finds – washingtonpost.com
“This is very exciting,” said Barbara Corkey, an obesity researcher at Boston University. “We don’t know why the obesity epidemic is happening. People say it’s because of gluttony and sloth. I think there must be something else. It’s exciting to see some work being done on alternative explanations.”

Here’s an interesting story that ties in with that slate.com thing I was writing about yesterday. (Yesterday?) The idea is that people who are obese have a larger number of a certain kind of microorganism in their guts that make them extract fat and calories from food more efficiently. This would be a wonderful thing for a starving person. Not so good for someone who’s already fat. Now, because I’m a skeptical sort of person and — I hope — a person whose mind works in a scientific way, my first thought is: How do they know the gut organisms cause the obesity and not the other way around? Maybe being obese comes first. Maybe there’s something about being obese itself that leads this particular kind of microbe to set up shop in greater numbers.

Sing along with me, folks! You know the tune!

Correlation is not causation! Correlation is not causation!

Still, either way it’s pretty interesting.

This story fits in, too, with another post I made a few months ago about how MUCH of the functioning of our bodies on all levels depends upon the bacteria and other microbes that live within us. It’s pretty cool. It reminds me also of how our very atoms and their constituent parts are really constantly interacting and mingling and switching parts with all of the other atoms around us and throughout the universe.

Have I written this here before?

We’re lumps in a big atomic soup.