Happy Memorial Day
Today I have a request for anyone who reads this and will pass it on to anyone I speak to. Actually, I have 3 requests for you.
1. Say a prayer for the men and women who have died preserving our freedoms.
2. Call a friend, coworker, family member who served and is still here and thank them.
3. Read
"This We'll Defend" by Major K. and then say another prayer for the people like him who are willingly leaving their families for us. It takes a special kind of person to go somewhere where it is 116 degrees in the shade today; for the explicit purpose of getting shot at for the continued preservation of our safety and freedoms. God Bless them one and all.
If #3 doesn't cause you to give thanks that you were born or got to move here you may want to consult a shrink. You are out of your mind. And I don't care if you disagree with Bush's methods in the GWOT, reading his post should make you thank your lucky stars.
Bear eats car fuel tank
Thanks to
Wizbang for
this pointer. The law of unintended consequences is certainly in play in Connecticut where a bear busted up a man's converted VW Rabbit. When you run biodiesel the car tends to smell like whatever food the oil was used to cook prior to being strained for use in the car. In this case, cheeseburgers and probably fries. Bears, like most animals, hunt by smell as much as by sight. Hilarious!!
Are all theocracies bad?
The
Danes are making the case that whenever the government appoints and directly pays (and/or fires) the folks on the pulpit nothing good comes of it. In Denmark, Lutheran ministers are hired and paid by the government. In the US or any other country where the parishioners ultimately decide what beliefs are acceptable on the pulpit a Lutheran minister who suggested that there is no such thing as a heavenly God would find himself in the unemployment line.
Can bad science lead to your homes destruction?
For about 60,000 Brits per year for the next several years this question is more than a cynical or hypothetical question. According to
this article in the Telegraph there is a proposal to meet the Kyoto protocols by tearing down most of Britain's oldest homes.
Even assuming that there is absolute proof of global warming (which there isn't) and that there is also proof that it is human induced (which is even more shaky), the "plan" is to get rid of Britain's oldest homes rather than upgrade them because "they would eventually be demolished anyway".
This is ludicrous on so many levels that I can hardly contain myself. For my untraveled US readers, bear in mind that what we call old is quite young in most of Europe. What they are talking about getting rid of are not poorly built housing boom relics of the 1970's. What they are implying is that homes, still standing with current residents, 150-400 years old need to be destroyed because they are energy inefficient. The article does not give any specifics but I would guess that we are largely talking about stone and/or brick buildings a couple centuries old. Granted, many of these homes are energy inefficient. They have poorly sealed wooden doors and poorly sealed single pane windows. They have boilers with old fashioned room registers for heat. Upgrading these structures to have double pane windows, well sealed doors and central air heating is a few grand/house. But what happens to their energy efficiency once you do that? They are then more energy efficient than the wooden, fibre glass insulated homes built last year. They are built from stone a foot thick in many cases. To suggest that a house that has 2 inch wooden walls backed by 3 inches of fibre is inherently more energy efficient that a 200 year old house with foot thick stone walls is..... unscientific! But the UK press being even more clueless and even more goal oriented than our own asks none of these questions.
Oops....
Press screw up of the day:
Reporter accidentally kills baby squirrel that is the subject of the piece she was shooting about how said victim of the press was adopted by a family cat after being abandoned by its mother.
More Viagra jokes...
Colorado Conservative tosses out this as one of the first of what will undoubtedly be a long list of the next generation of Viagra jokes.
Blogebrity?
An enormous list of blogs, segregated by somebody I have no way of measuring (HT:
Professor Bainbridge, who is on the C list, making the rating somewhat suspicious to me)
French vote NO on EUhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
President Bush's buddy Jacques Chirac was handed a major defeat by his own countrymen today.
57+ percent of the voters said no to the proposed EU constitution. Is the EU about to fall apart? Who knows. Forward progress is certainly slowed which is probably good for the folks who live there as well as, to a lesser degree, the rest of us.
Update: all of
Powerline and
LGF and
Professor Bainbridge have thoughts on the issue.
Syrian opposition party claims all seats in election
Assuming that they have
actually pulled off what they claim, this will not make Syria happy. They will have lost a lot of face in the Arab/Muslim community. It may be about to get interesting.
