April 2008 archive

Imagine suffering the attention span and memory capacity of a goldfish.  Imagine that each and every time you hear the news of your son’s death in Iraq, it really is news to you, because you can’t hold onto a memory.  Imagine that your former employers are suing you, because it decided that the settlement your family’s lawyers won from the company that insured the driver of the truck that caused the accident which deprived you of your ability to hold a train of thought more than a minute, really belongs to them, and they are hellbent on getting it no matter how long it takes and no matter how much of what little cash your family has left is eaten up trying to fight this travesty.  Imagine that the Bush-stacked courts have decided that Wal-Mart is always right, and that whatever Wal-Mart wants, it shall get no matter what.

Imagine all this, and then imagine that you are a veteran returning from active service, only to find that your employer won’t give you your job back as prescribed by law.  Yes, Wal-Mart again, its executives laughing their asses off because they know from experience that the DoJ doesn’t do this sort of shit without a plan to make sure that the courts uphold the ability of corporations to shit all over our nation’s veterans — and their mothers.

And the worst part of all this is, this isn’t an April Fool’s day prank.  It’s the sort of bullshit that goes on every single day in this country, and there’s nothing funny about it.

NMSR reports:

NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city [Huntsville] are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature narrowly passed a law Friday [March 28, 2008] redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Bob Riley, who emphasized the Biblical reasons for the change in value, says he will sign it into law on Thursday.

The law took the state’s engineering community by surprise. “It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi,” said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi (p) is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisely defined by mathematics to be “3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate”.

“I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it,” said Lawson. “The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon’s Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass.”

Lawson, the article says, called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing an exact answer could harm students’ self-esteem. “We need to return to some absolutes in our society,” he said, “the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period.”

Governor Riley is expected to have a signing ceremony for the bill on Thursday in Montgomery at which former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore is expected to give an invocation.  Moore’s office today stated that the change in the value of pi to the Biblical value was a good, first, legislative step toward the Rapture, toward making the crooked straight and rough places plane.

Haven’t these people done enough already?  Is nothing sacrosanct?

1. Ever wonder why the Bush administration was leaning on the Maliki government in Iraq to crack down on Sadr’s militia? Well, this may be part of the answer – The Guardian reports Plans to cut UK troops in Iraq put on hold. “The defence secretary, Des Browne, today announced to parliament that planned cuts in British troop numbers in Iraq would be delayed. In a Commons statement, Browne said the decision to put off the proposed withdrawal of 1,600 troops this spring was based on military advice in the wake of the recent surge in fighting in Basra.” Mission “Stir the Hornet’s Nest” Accomplished. The Bush administration’s other goal was to depict Iran as meddlers.

2. The New York Times reports Inside the Black Budget. “The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion… Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare.”

   “Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world” in his book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me. “Mr. Paglen said he found them by touring bases, noting what personnel wore, joining alumni associations, interviewing active and former team members, talking to base historians and filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.”

   Mr. Paglen plans to keep mining the patches and the field of clandestine military activity. “It’s kind of remarkable,” he said. “This stuff is a huge industry, I mean a huge industry. And it’s remarkable that you can develop these projects on an industrial scale, and we don’t know what they are. It’s an astounding feat of social engineering.”

3. Here’s more of where we Americans spend our tax dollars. The Washington Post reports GAO Blasts Weapons Budget. “The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages… The Pentagon has doubled the amount it has committed to new systems, from $790 billion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion last year, according to the 205-page GAO report. Total acquisition costs in 2007 for major defense programs increased 26 percent from first estimates.”

4. The Los Angeles Times reports Border fence will skirt environmental laws. “In an aggressive move to finish building 670 miles of border fence by the end of this year, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it will waive federal environmental laws to meet that goal. The two waivers, which will allow the department to slash through a thicket of environmental and cultural laws, would be the most expansive to date, encompassing land in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas that stretches about 470 miles. The waivers are highly controversial with environmentalists and border communities, which see them as a federal imposition that could damage the land and disrupts wildlife.”

Let’s just get that out of the way right now, because after you finish reading this you’ll be going ‘wow, thanks, moneysmith, this is great. You rock!’ Seriously. You will. Because I have a feeling a lot of us are at the end of our proverbial ropes, which by  now are so frayed they look more like worn-out drawstrings on a pair of ten-year-old sweatpants than the nice, thick, resilient ropes they once were.  

Ready for more? Walk this way (it’s all in the hips, really not that hard) …