Only with humility tread this road

The second item in this Glenn Greenwald post captures exactly why an individual's military history (or lack of) should carry special weight when considering whether they're fit to influence the deployment of the military. Those lacking in certain experience often can't fully understand the gravity of their actions, and when you're a President, Vice-, SecDef, or Sec of State, that endangers not just individual lives at both ends of the spear, but the degree to which our country exemplifies its values. Here's what he says based on the Murtha situation:

But what incidents of this type do underscore is that wars are not something that are to be routine or casual tools in foreign policy. The outright eagerness and excitement for more and more wars that we see so frequently from some circles is not only unseemly and ugly unto itself -- although it is that -- but it is also so reckless and unfathomably foolish. Every war spawns countless enemies, entails incidents which severely undermine a nation's credibility and moral standing, ensures that the ugliest and most violent actions will be undertaken in the country's name, and, even in the best of cases, wreaks unimaginable human suffering and destruction.

Even Greenwald's description of war being a casual tool falls short; war can not ever be a tool of policy. It must only ever occur due to the complete failure of policy.

Here's another good statement about Murtha from John Cole at Balloon Juice.

Sometimes nothin'...

"...can be a real cool hand."

I was stranded in Chicago after hours of waiting for my flight and shuffling from line to bureaucratically-infuriating line, eventually admitting impotent defeat and spending the night in the airport Hilton. I stumbled onto Cool Hand Luke and was astonished.

It's incredible if you've never seen it how many small things seem so familiar because they've since become part of the fabric of our culture. Even the music from one of the action scenes was used as the theme song for I think channel 7 news in Detroit when I was a kid. It's so full of tidbits that have been picked up and carried downstream that it has nearly achieved the status of archetype, familiar even when experiencing it for the first time, like the underlying tone behind a fable that you recognize even before you've heard it.

Well...

...maybe I've been wrong all this time... maybe there really is a god.  (If so, I hope he's the vengeful, old testament type with a real jones for sucking the marrow from the skulls of white collar criminals.)

Lay, Skilling, Convicted in Enron Collapse

Oriskany, RIP

According to the Navy News, the 888-foot aircraft carrier no longer known as the USS Oriskany took 37 minutes to sink after explosives tore open her hull, to make a new reef 24 miles off Pensacola. The Oriskany was a celebrated ship, serving in Korea, Vietnam, and other operations around the globe for 25 years. It was also the ship that then Lt. Cmdr. John McCain launched from before being shot down during his attack dive, captured, and held in the infamous Hanoi Hilton for five and a half years.

Evidently explosive experts can direct the eventual place of rest and orientation of a ship with placement and timing of explosives, a considerable achievement if you consider how objects can slide in the water as they sink. The Navy worked with the EPA to clean the ship of hazardous materials and to study the scuttling area for over two years. The bottom of the ship lies in 220 feet of water, meaning the flight deck and superstructure will be attainable by recreational divers with special certification. Fish populations are expected to increase due to the sinking within months, and a viable reef should develop within 10 – 20 years; Escambia County in Florida expects to see millions of dollars generated annually by fisherman and divers (a 2004 FSU study estimates $92M, but that seems like a lot of fishing tours).


The first time I saw something underwater that 'shouldn't' have been was a medium sized fishing boat that had sunk in maybe 30 feet of water in Belize. It was completely unthreatening in the bright light and clear water, but its obvious misplacement was still creepy and a little unnerving - the same feeling was evoked looking at the picture of this ship sliding inexorably below the surface into the dark.

Seldom do you see such a win-win...

Dutch zoo-goers were "horrified" to see bears eating a macaque, but if the Detroit Zoo did this, they'd likely boost the number of visitors while reducing the amount of feed necessary, saving oodles of dollars for the faster, bear-avoiding animals.

Yale must be so proud

Amidst all the rhetoric on the immigration flap issue, we need revisit one voice that rang forth with initiative and fortitude:

Officially approved by Bush on Dec. 17 [2004] after extensive bickering in Congress, the National Intelligence Reform Act included the requirement to add 10,000 border patrol agents in the five years beginning with 2006 [2,000 new agents a year for, um, 5 years]. Roughly 80 percent of the agents were to patrol the southern U.S. border from Texas to California, along which thousands of people cross into the United States illegally every year.

Unfortunately, the President's 2006 budget only allows for 210 new border agents.

The White House referred questions about the border agents to the Homeland Security Department.

It's only bait and switch if the switch involves a lie, right?