Walking on the Moon

Rich and I were blogging back and forth a little about the flu and I realized I hadn’t put up this link, which epitomizes my concerns about this whole hubub. I do think that there are reasons to be concerned about the possible sudden spread of an infectious disease, like the flu – though I think Ebola’s more theatrical – and we should be taking reasonable steps to be prepared for it.  But the whole thing is still very speculative, and we have real problems that are much less speculative.  There are going to be more hurricanes this year, whether you believe in global warming or not, and I think those are a more pressing concern that the flu.

But the issue of the link is also pressing – opportunists will be taking their best shot at using this to further their own agenda.  I’ve heard Bush call for the same kind of martial law.  All this about a disease that has killled <100 people in 5 years.  Shouldn't we be more concerned with the continuing suck-ass distribution of AIDS assistance to Africa?  I mean there's a disease with a track record of killing people in large numbers.  30,000 people are going to die this year of other flu strains in America.  That's a factor of  1200 more (America's 1/4 the world population).  More than that will die of car accidents.  Hell, more have been struck by lightning. Yes, being unprepared for bird flu could lead to a lot of deaths, but the hype is way out of proportion to the assesable threat.  And a bird flu pandemic is not the only bad thing that could happen.

The end times are truely upon us.  A cat has died in Germany.

Typical.

I know that’s not news, but the thing that made me realize this today was walking through Manhattan Beach with friends and hearing a fellow playing with his cell phone. It was beeping out short and long beeps like: … – – … . You may be way ahead of me here, but the fellow had rigged his phone to spell out SMS in morse code when someone texted him.

Now, it’s geeky enough to figure that out. What disturbed me was that I didn’t work at it, I just reacted to it.
It disturbed me even more that my next reaction was “I’m so blogging this.”

I learned many things this weekend, and what’s a blog for if not to share trivia:

• One should not try to rip CDs with a cat tapping you on the forehead
• Restoring all my mp3s by loading them from my iriver takes about 50 minutes
• Some people are confused about “don’t ask, don’t tell”
• Timing and an understanding of public opinion are not required to be on the Supreme Court.
• ekr‘s working a strange audience in his food reviews

Rod loves new phone toys, but I doubt he wants this one.

I’ve heard of controllers clearing 2 planes to use the same runway, but clearing 3 to be on there at the same time is really impressive.

Ah, Rod, what would I do without you?

How could I live without knowing that toilet paper was available with astronomy facts in Japanese on each sheet. It is certainly a fascinating world.

I was listening to KCRW’s To The Point broadcast about Guantanamo Bay in which a senior naval appointee’s views on how torturing people is antithetical to American values, and the fellow arguning the opposite position immediately began throwing up straw men and splitting legal hairs.

You know who does that?  Guilty people.

Torturing people does go against American values.  More than that, if you want to talk about those values being better than the rest of the world’s values – and I’d really like to – you have to hoild yourself to that higher standard.   And that means sometimes you do things not only the hard way, but the hardest way.

The basic truth is this: torturing people is always wrong.  There may be times that it’s the lesser of two evils, but it’s always wrong.  Any discussion of torture needs to start there.  After that we can weasel-word around about “lawful combatants” and exactly what penalties are appropriate.  The point is that if you’ve tortured someone or, worse yet, made someone to do it for you, you’ve done something that’s wrong – something that’s against the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.  And you really need to admit that.

Then come issues of legality and punishment.

From jtw:

“Failure is not an option.”