Hurricanes galore have been hitting the Caribbean and around the Gulf of Mexico, over and over again. The newest is a Cat-4 hurricane named Ike, and it’s going to ravage all those already-rocked spots that the last two just did (they’re coming so fast and furious I can’t even remember their damn names!). This will probably get Bob talking about the IPCC, but rest assured folks, just because climate change is definitely happening, and lots of scientists predicted it a long time ago, nobody could ever have predicted it and should it turn out that it was anthropogenic, nobody could have predicted that either. Sigh. Just suck it up and weather it. The human race will live through this, undoubtedly, and any massive shift in climate will likely spur evolution in a number of ways through a number of species, even our own.
In a nice bit of justice, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, just won the presidency of Pakistan, after the tin-pot asshat Musharraf (does this mean his ass is a tin pot?) resigned to avoid an impeachment in much the same way as Nixon dodged that particular bullet. There is a modicum of decency left in the world.
In the meantime, John McTimebomb chose Sarah Palin as his veep pick, without evidently first vetting her at all. Their campaign is being rocked by her incessant lying to the point where they’ve decided to curtail her access to the press in much the same way that McCain’s been restricted in his press access and cell phone use, to keep them from going off-message (read: making “gaffes”), and to keep people from possibly discovering what they, and pretty much this generation of Republicans, are all about. Not that media access would really matter, given that right now (and for the past good while) McCain’s down in the polls so all the talking heads are all but bending over backward to fellate the man in an effort to tighten up this race.
On the homefront, I had a debate with someone (at work, no less — shame on me) involving abortion. I of course took the position that pro-life is anti-women, and that nobody who holds the pro-life position is truly pro-life. I say “of course” because I can’t rightly think of any other way to argue this point, given that my views are roughly that a human life is not truly viable as a potential human being until they’re at least two years old (not that I’d ever advocate “aborting” after childbirth, but I definitely don’t personally consider a 1-year-old child any more viable than a three-cell blastocyst). Once they escape the spectre of SIDS, then they’re potentially going to be an adult. And I’m sure this is going to spark some controversy, so feel free to call me a monster in the comments.
Oh, and finally, as any good conservative knows, welfare for the poor is abhorrent, but welfare for the rich who go bankrupt is apparently perfectly justified. Far as I’m concerned, if you want to live by the sword, you should die by the sword. Don’t make it seem like helping those that are less fortunate is robbing them of the opportunity to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and without missing a beat immediately turn around and give a failing business a golden parachute. If life is supposed to be hard and hard work is the only virtue, then let life be hard equally for those that have power once in a goddamn while.
I’ve got two posts planned, one for the Canadian election that’s coming up (and you can probably guess what I’ve got to say about Harper’s massive ad campaigns and massive last-second spending on military), and another hopefully relatively funny one about Darwin pareidolia, which has been covered recently by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy and The Onion recently.