Where are the anti­war pro­test­ers now that we really need them?.

Anti-war protests in all 50 states and in front of the hated King Bush II”s Texas ranch were a fix­ture in Amer­i­can life and news­pa­pers from 2003 through mid-2008. The protests seem to have dis­ap­peared yet the ills of war remain. Let’s look at what is bad about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

• Amer­i­cans are being killed
• Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers are being improverished
• lim­ited Amer­i­can resources are diverted to unpro­duc­tive activ­i­ties (bomb­ing an opium fac­tory in Afghanistan is not likely to lead to long-term growth the way that build­ing a fac­tory in North Car­olina would)

All three of these things were bad in 2004 when the U.S. was rich and get­ting richer. They are even worse now. We have had a decline in birth rate and pop­u­la­tion growth due to the eco­nomic col­lapse. This makes the death of an Amer­i­can sol­dier if any­thing more costly becuase there are fewer chil­dren grow­ing up to replace him or her. We have less money now, so what­ever it is that we’re spend­ing on our adven­tures amongst the Jihadis is less afford­able (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html shows that spend­ing is higher than ever and con­tin­u­ing to grow).

Given that the cost of the wars in Amer­i­can life and tax­payer funds is less bear­able now than before, how come the anti­war pro­test­ers seem to have melted away?

[Philip Green­spun Weblog]

The answer to that is really obvi­ous: those pro­test­ers were never really anti-war, only anti-a Repub­li­can being the one in charge of the war. Now that a Demo­c­rat is in the White House, the war is fine with them.

Hot­lined. Hot­lined [Pro Lib­er­tate]

Mr. Grigg’s story shows an excel­lent exam­ple of a sort of pre­pared­ness that most peo­ple over­look: what to do if you’re a par­ent and gov­ern­ment thugs threaten to kid­nap your chil­dren. This is a dan­ger that any­one with kids should be ready for, and it’s prob­a­bly even more likely to occur some­day than many of the other things that sen­si­ble peo­ple take pre­cau­tions for, like earth­quakes and fires.

Dogs As Intel­li­gent As Aver­age Two-Year-Old Chil­dren. Ponca City, We love you writes “The Tele­graph reports that researchers using tests orig­i­nally designed to demon­strate the devel­op­ment of lan­guage, pre-language and basic arith­metic in human chil­dren have found that dogs are capa­ble of under­stand­ing up to 250 words and ges­tures, can count up to five and can per­form sim­ple math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions putting them on par with the aver­age two-year-old child. While most dogs under­stand sim­ple com­mands such as sit, fetch and stay, a bor­der col­lie tested by Pro­fes­sor Coren showed a knowl­edge of 200 spo­ken words. ‘Obvi­ously we are not going to be able to sit down and have a con­ver­sa­tion with a dog, but like a two-year-old, they show that they can under­stand words and ges­tures,’ says Pro­fes­sor Stan­ley Coren, a lead­ing expert on canine intel­li­gence at the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia in Van­cou­ver. Dogs can tell that one plus one should equal two and not one or three,’ says Coren, adding that dogs ‘can also delib­er­ately deceive, which is some­thing that young chil­dren only start devel­op­ing later in their life.’ Coren believes cen­turies of selec­tive breed­ing and liv­ing along­side humans has helped to hone the intel­li­gence of dogs. ‘They may not be Ein­steins, but are sure closer to humans than we thought.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

Of course this also means that the aver­age two-year-old child is as stu­pid as a dog, which doesn’t sur­prise me in the slight­est. It’s pretty obvi­ous that humans don’t really become intel­li­gent life forms until well after birth

Cable modem out­ages are really annoy­ing, espe­cially when it’s the mid­dle of the day and you work from home.