silveradept | Quick hits

After this entry, I’ll be taking off for the Land of No-Net, so everyone gets a mid-day update as... consolation?

Remember - Towel Day. Carry yours with you and introduce the work of Douglas Adams to all those who ask why you’re carrying one today.

Democrats cave in, give Bush the money he wants to play in the sandbox more. As part of that agreement, there are also minimum wage increases and additional domestic spending. Liberal Beagle offers his take on this that the domestic spending is good, but it won’t offset the money and lives just spent in Iraq.

bradhicks takes from the public record and offers up all the names of the people who voted to continue to fund the war, including both of the senators and some of the representatives from my state. BAGNewNotes offers a pictoral definition of "quagmire", which he says describes the situation in Iraq. With reports coming back that say delays due to bureaucracy have been stopping urgently-needed gear from arriving, you can pin the blame wherever you like, on the people who appeared not to have planned for the long-term, or the people you believe are posturing and holding up necessary monies. Either way, people die.

Regardless of your political orientations, though,

amenquohi offers a talk from her own personal files - she has her father's sargeant, a man who died in Vietnam, to thank that her father is home today, because that man’s death meant that her father could get on the trip home. Such is the difficulty of war. Peggy Noonan, in the Wall street Journal’s OpinionJournal, would rather have you think about immigration reforms and rethinking what America wants from immigrants instead. That piece starts well about how immigrants make the country strong, and then flops in the middle and does a crash-and-burn to the end in the suggestions of how to stem the tide of immigrants. Rich Lowry finds it appaling that while warfare is a popular programming topic, history deparmtents do not have military/war specialists in their faculties, and that there is an intellectual hostility to military history and the study of war. Considering who tends to get sacked first and take the longest to rebuild in war, I suspect that hostility among intellectuals is pretty justified.

One last fear-inducing thing, and then we’re done - the Pentagon will release a report on what they say is increasing Chinese military power. So that when we’re done being afraid of Iraq and Iran, we can go back to being afraid of China. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

Even with higher gasoline prices, demand for sport-utility vehicles is on the rise again. After two years of falling sales, they’re back up again. If people are buying them to use them for the cargo space and what they were designed to be, then I suppose I can be okay with it, and hope that they buy fuel-efficient ones. But if it’s a compensation tool or just something for someone to feel safe on the road for, a smaller, more fuel-efficient, and likely less expensive car would be in order.

Of course, as with all persons commentating or reporting on events, be sure to know what slant they’re putting on the matter. As an example, Fallout Central offers a survey wondering why the media reports "Man apologizes for racial attack" when the article was about the attack and sentencing of the perpetrator. As I said, try and figure out where your reporter is coming from - there may be more there than appears.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has an idea for poor (parents?) in his city - if they can meet some benchmarks in health, education, and work, he'll reward them with up to $5,000 U.S. per year. For those living near the federal poverty line, that additional income could be a life-saver. In fact, that much might be sufficient to cover insurances and other costs that are often difficult to obtain while poor. The opinion piece is light on the details, so if a fuller plan is unveiled, it would be nice to study to see what sort of benchmarks and incentives are being offered.

The Buddhist Geeks have a reader-contributed piece about knowing the difference between your needs and strategies - needs are not bad in themselves, and trying to detach from them isn’t good for you. Strategies to meet those needs, though, should not garner attachments, so that it’s not the end of the world when you can’t have an ice cream cone to meet your need for sustenance.

A clash of the titans - after swallowing an alligator, a snake couldn't take it and burst. Wow. Both that the snake could swallow the gator, and that the gator might have managed to kill the snake from the inside. So the cartoons where the snake just gobbles up the person aren’t wholly off their rocker, I’d say. I just hope I don’t run into a snake that could do such a thing. Giving some monkey business, the United States National Institutes of Health have said they will stop breeding chimpanzees to do research on, finalizing what was a moratorium set in 1995. The NIH cited financial reasons for the decision.

For those possibly needing random digits for one reason or another, rather than using a pseudorandom number generator, HotBits claims to offer genuine random numbers by timing radioactive decays in materials. Which apparently doesn’t

The last before we go is this potentially frightening image of a mother using a Segway to take her child for a stroll in the stroller.