The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

And now another result of the war in Iraq.

Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues

Panic engulfed thousands of Shiites marching across a bridge in a religious procession Wednesday after rumors spread that a suicide bomber was about to attack, triggering a stampede that killed at least 695 people.

I see our efforts at providing security in Iraq are working. Yes, yes, sarcasm is not appreciated in times of tragedy. I feel horrible for the Iraqis, but will be surprised if they stop trying to blow us up during my lifetime.

This was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. The piper is only starting to warm up and we can look forward to payments in installments for a very long time to come.

695 Dead, 180 Hurt in Iraq Bridge Stampede

At a drug store on Canal Street just outside the French Quarter, two police officers with pump shotguns stood guard as workers from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel across the street loaded large laundry bins full of medications, snack foods and bottled water.

"This is for the sick," Officer Jeff Jacob said. "We can commandeer whatever we see fit, whatever is necessary to maintain law."

Another office, D.J. Butler, told the crowd standing around that they would be out of the way as soon as they got the necessities.

"I'm not saying you're welcome to it," the officer said. "This is the situation we're in. We have to make the best of it."

Wow. Even the cops are giving it a pass.

Looting Takes Place in View of La. Police

That means the reassigned project could take months longer at a time when delays already come at a high price. With the price of oil topping $60 a barrel, the Iraqi government is losing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue from the dilapidated wells.

I disagree. Assuming the project EVER starts shipping oil again, it may be just in time to start sending it out at... $120 a barrel? More?

Iraqi State Company to Repair Oil Wells

The charter is vague to the point of vacuousness in its most basic proclamations. Article 2 reads:

Islam is the official religion of state and a fundamental source for legislation.
(a) No law may contravene the essential verities of Islamic law.
(b) No law may contravene the principles of democracy.
(c) No law may contravene the rights and basic liberties enumerated in this constitution.

Actually, by the rules as listed here, they're trying to build a government which is proscribed from doing anything. Weimar Republic anyone?

Articles of Consternation - Iraq's infuriatingly vague constitution. By Fred Kaplan

The U.N. nuclear watchdog expressed "serious concern" Thursday over
Iran's resumption of activities that could lead to an atomic bomb, and diplomats said Tehran has a Sept. 3 deadline to stop or face another possible referral to the Security Council.

Oh no, I'm sure they're just shaking over this. Not because the UN in impotent (the UN dropping Iraq level economic sanctions on Iran would do very bad things to them) but because they know two things. One, military action is not going to happen. The UN, more specifically, the US, doesn't have anyone to send. Two, they won't be looking at Iraq level sanctions because they didn't invade any of their neighbors.

Having watched the reports on this, the decision about restarting their nuclear program was made before the new administration went in, the new guys are perfectly happy to stay that course, so blaming this on the new group is misleading at best.

The Iranians are going to go through with this. Why? Because they are looking at their oil reserves dwindle, and want a long term option. They're not making a good choice in going with the nuclear option, that's a secondary point, but the options that have been presented to them by us and the EU are ones that would make them dependent on someone else for their energy. They're not going to do that. They also see that North Korea was able to join the nuclear club with opposition, but no military action and think they can do they same.

What can we actually get? We can probably get them to accept IAEA paid watchdogs to keep an eye on their uranium stocks to try to make sure that they aren't using it to build bombs, and try to prevent MUF's, but that's about it. They're going to do it and the only way to stop it is invade. Well, we already shot our wad in Iraq.

By my count this makes the US, Russia (and maybe Ukraine and Georgia as well out of the former USSR), Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea all nuclear capable right now, with Germany, Japan, and soon Iran, all able, but probably without bombs. I'm still curious about South Africa, I haven't seen any reports on what happened with their capability, but they were suspected to have the ability 20 years ago. Where that sits now I have no idea.

Here's another question, how will the Israeli's react to Iran, which has been supporting Hamas and Hizbollah all these years, moving into a position to counter Israel's nuclear trump? When Iraq was moving that direction in the 80's, they bombed their reactor. That doesn't seem to be an option here because of logistics.

Envoys: Iran Faces Sept. Deadline on Nukes

A dirndl is a traditional costume worn by women in Bavaria and Austria. It is characterised by a generally rather revealing décolleté and consists of a dress and apron with a tight, low-cut top whose figure enhancing effect is accentuated by a short white blouse. Bavarian barmaids typically dress in dirndls. However, under the European Union’s Optical Radiation Directive, which is to be voted in the European Parliament next month, employers face heavy fines if they fail to protect their employees against the risk of sunburn.

Say it ain't so! Although I guess compliance would be pretty easy, a bottle of SPF30 should take care of that, but then you run into the guys who are worried about making sure that their employees have proper coverage and insist on making sure their staff has properly used that lotion... I smell a sexual harassment lawsuit, or some bad porn being written, about this.

Brussels Ban on Bavarian Bosoms | The Brussels Journal

Someone said to me today, "If you can't see the difference between the administration and Al Qaeda then there's something (and my memory slips on the exact word used to finish the sentence, but it was any of a number of synonyms for wrong, and may have even been wrong, but I digress)."

So I thought about this question for all of about a third of a second and replied that the administation had a much higher body count.

I remember watching the morning that led to the hell of the past four years, and I can't begin to describe my feelings about it. What I can describe is what I have felt about it since then, and it comes down to only a few things.

Rage, outrage and disgust.

The first is primarily directed towards the perpetrators. This was a crime of unprecedented proportion. We have ways to deal with criminals, in this case it would probably be best to simply take bin Laden out back and just shoot him, but that's a separate point.

The second goes two places, some of towards Al Q, the majority of it towards the administration. Towards Al Q, it is because they chose to strike out against people who had little of nothing to do with any problem they think they have. While I would be angry about them taking their aggression out on other targets, which they had done in the past (the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole) those are arms of the government. Lower Manhattan was not.

Towards the administration it comes from a huge number of sources. First, the utter failure to find the one person most responsible. "I don't really think about him.....I'm not really concerned about him" GW Bush on 3/13/2003 referring to bin Ladin. Either everything that has been said about bin Ladin is a lie and the black helicopter nutjobs are right that it was actually our own government that took out New York (which I don't believe) or the sitting President is both an idiot and one of the most callous bastards to ever walk around in the oval office, which is what I do think.

The second disaster is Iraq. I am not going to say Saddam was a nice guy or that he shouldn't be whacked, but the route taken is possibly the worst of all possible worlds. They lied to get the war. They lied about the WMDs. They lied about the connections to Al Q. They lied about any threat he posed to anyone outside Iraq. They lied about what the resistance would be like. They lied about what the government of Iraq would be like after.

What did that get us? So far, 1800+ dead soldiers, 40,000+ wounded or mentally ill, an unknown number of US civilian casualties, and 100,000+ dead Iraqis. It got us an active terrorist training ground directed against us along with the best recruiting tool they've ever had. No one disputes any of this.

What will it gets us in the future? What is probably now the best case scenario is a full blown Iraqi civil war that we have managed to pull our troops out of. The Sunni and Shi'a there hate each othe... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

I remember why I don't do the whole forum thing. I'm too lazy to type an opinion -- if you don't know why I think it's your loss.

However, since I've gotten started:

Have some faith in the kids, man. It's not like just because some teacher proclaims ID as a creation theory they'll make the connection that this is a indirect attack on science and, as a result, abandon their belief that sceince must be supported by evidence. In fact, if they're intelligent they'll consider the facts and just decide that ID is bunk.

Personally I grew up in a Christian home, was homeschooled two years, went to a private, Christian, middle school, and wasn't exposed to evolution as anything except wacked out heresy[0] until my junior year in high school (I think). That being said, and so that my bias is known, I'm a creationist (in the classical, Genesis is literal, sense [1]).

Oh, and yea, this doesn't belong in public schools -- I'm not arguing that point... I'm just saying kids aren't stupid and teaching ID doesn't destroy the scientific foundations we're trying to instill. Tangentially, if you're worried about teaching the skills they need ID doesn't seem the biggest threat - for me the lack of basic math and problem solving skills or the inability to interact without resorting to profanity and violence coupled with intolerence of others are our big winners.

Anyway, just my two cents -- it's probably best ignored as I quit caring a long time ago about the science of creation... and I think theres at least one person here that will vouch for my lack-of-blinding-stupidity.

[0] - maybe not those exact terms, but those are more fun.
[1] - My opinion is faith is something that is supposed to transcend evidence -- what good is faith if you have hard evidence, ya know? I mean, faith is belief in something that cannot be seen and as long as we're beliving in something that can't be seen it seems somewhat... fake to twist it into something that is eaiser to swallow.

I think we have agreement. :) Here's why having this in schools worries me. The foundation for science at its most basic level is "question everything." I think that concept is incompatible the foundation of religion which is "belief." One asks questions, the other does not. Are they mutually exclusive? I wouldn't go that far, but I don't have a place for "God" in the natural world, anymore than I have room for science in the spiritual.

ID and creationism are places where one group's belief is intruding on nature, and I find that ANY intrusion of the spritual into the natural is a problem. Science is not going to show up one morning with God's phone number. It will also never satisfy the desire to hope that there is something more to this world than what we can see. That's really what defines the spiritual world. I can't see it, have no way to prove it, but believe it is there anyway.

What I AM worried about is when religion interjects into science, it does so to the purpose of stopping the questions. ID says "This is what happened. End of Story." Creationism says the same thing. Both of those stifle growth.

Genesis may well be the word of god, but it was copied down by us dumb humans, and you know what, as demonstrated in one of the othere memes popular on here right now (English as she is spoke) we're really bad at that sort of thing.

RE: CNN.com - Bush: Schools should teach 'intelligent design' - Aug 2, 2005

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

This whole "we should teach different ideas" is retarded. There are ideas that life spawns from rotten meat. There are ideas that the US forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor because of an oil embargo. There are ideas that the earth is hollow.

The point is there are ideas for everything, and we don't teach them all. We have some criteria that concepts have to meet to be taught. In science classes, that criteria is the scientific method.

I quote the Intelligent Design article on Wikipedia:

Critics call ID religious dogma repackaged in an effort to return creationism into public school science classrooms and note that ID features notably as part of the campaign known as Teach the Controversy. The National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education assert that ID is not science, but creationism. While the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection has observable and repeatable facts to support it such as the process of mutations, gene flow, genetic drift, adaptation and speciation through natural selection, the "Intelligent Designer" in ID is neither observable nor repeatable. This violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability. ID violates Occam's Razor by postulating an entity or entities to explain something that may have a simpler and scientifically supportable explanation not involving unobservable help.

ID is *not* science. It should not be taught in a *science* class. Doing so undermines the entire point of science. Bush's complete misunderstanding of this is beyond excuse.

That sound you hear is future doctors and engineers turning into ditch diggers in Mexico beacause our education system isn't up to teaching the skills they need.

CNN.com - Bush: Schools should teach 'intelligent design' - Aug 2, 2005