Vacation Pictures

Here is a link to the pictures of our trip to Israel and Egypt. It was a fantastic time, and I loved spending quality time with my Dad and Bro.

Pictures!

Gracias por todo, Dad. Love you.

Eddie Van Halen Is Talented

PS. Thanks to C.K. Sample III for posting his YouTube embedding help.

What Changed?

"I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular, along the lines of the Baath party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic?"

"I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. It makes no sense at all."

Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush, in 1991 when asked why Operation Desert Storm had stopped short of deposing Saddam Hussein.

More Innocent Times

Compare the tone of this article from the end of Barry Bonds' record-breaking 2001 season to the countless articles written about him in the years since then. Pretty striking. Not a single mention of steroids, drugs, personal trainers, perjury investigations, BALCO, grand juries, Victor Conte, Game of Shadows, or congressional hearings. Even Mark McGuire is mentioned in a positive context.

My stance on Barry Bonds is pretty clear, but I think even the blindest Bonds supporter would have to admit that this quote makes him sound like a cheater trying to feign amazement:

"This was a great, great way to end it with a victory and a home run. You can't ask for anything better," Bonds said after the game. "I never thought I could do it."

Be Careful What You Lobby For

A group of right-wing Christians in Albemarle County ,VA, fought for and won the right to distribute fliers for a Vacation Bible School in county public schools. Soon afterward, a local Pagan church distributed its own fliers in the same school promoting “an educational program for children of all ages (and their adults), where we’ll explore the traditions of December and their origins, followed by a Pagan ritual to celebrate Yule. Come for one or both parts and bring your curiosity.”

Awesome.

To Be Read At My Funeral As Well...

Richard Dawkins posted to his blog an excerpt from Unweaving the Rainbow that he wants read at his funeral. I want it read at mine.

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, 'the present century.' The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century's being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder."

Karma

Please, PLEASE, for the love of God, baseball, and Hank Aaron...

No one sign this man.



UPDATE: The Giants just re-signed him. There is no God.

Worst President Ever

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, says W is the worst President in US history.

In light of the seriousness of its assertion, the article is almost comically short and weak on supporting arguments, but the few points it does make are a good start to the conversation of Bush's legacy.