Scott Horton over at No Comment is one of the more prolific and insightful lefty bloggers on the intertoobz. I sure wish I could keep cranking them out like this guy. He's relentless. I have to make it a point to pop in there regularly, otherwise posts like this one from a couple of days ago get buried by subsequent work and I completely miss them. Horton notes that our vice-preznit is still pushing hard for military action against Iran.

The first fifteen minutes of Cheney’s Iran speech started with a discussion of Iraq, and made the case that the foe Americans were facing in Iraq was already Iran. This contention is nonsense, of course, a pure fable cooked up to push the war cause. The claim that Iranian explosives are being used by insurgents in Iraq is certainly true. But it has to be considered alongside the fact that the insurgents are fueled much more heavily by weapons and money out of Saudi Arabia, a fact that Cheney would rather not mention.

I followed Horton's link to read the full speech Cheney delivered to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy over the weekend. It's pretty much the same blend of fear-mongering and chest-thumping that characterized every speech Darth and dubya gave during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The only difference is in the boogeyman they've chosen to protect us from this time. I couldn't help but chuckle at this bit:

Under their current rulers, the people of Iran live in a climate of fear and intimidation, with secret police, arbitrary detentions, and a hint of violence in the air.

That sound you just heard was irony being clubbed to death like a baby seal. Cheney's speech ends with this:

And as long as America continues to lead -- steady in the face of the adversaries and firm in the defense of freedom -- this young century will be a time of rising hopes, and of advancing peace.

That other sound you're hearing, that muffled whirring noise, is Orwell spinning like a top in his grave. Are we really doing this? Is the richest, most powerful country ever to exist, the world's only superpower, with a military budget greater than all the rest of the world combined, about to invade yet another country, the third in 6 years, in self-defense?

Oh, the things my mind locks onto and frets over. From the November issue of Discover magazine I have learned that a team of scientists, led by Rutgers University biologist Paul Falkowski, has succeeded in reviving ancient bacteria found in Antarctic ice samples. I tried to find the article online for a little cut and paste action, but Discover's website either lags the dead tree version quite a bit or just sucks, so I'll just cut the scary parts out with scissors and tape them here.

As Antarctic ice melts, the bacteria frozen inside may revive and be taken up by microbes in the ocean...
"We are watching gene transfer from land into the ocean, introducing something completely different from the last millions of years," Falkowski says. He points out that humans, through global warming, are subtly bringing about a new phase of evolution.

The team was able to get bacteria frozen for 8 million years to reproduce. And those same bacteria—now proven to still be viable—are entering the Earth's oceans in large quantities as runoff from melting glaciers. We take a lot of our food from those oceans, and since modern man has been around for less than 200,000 years, only our ancient, non-human ancestors could possibly have dealt with these bugs before. Even as powerful as modern science is, we don't have a clue what this may mean for us. As for the oceans, Falkowski notes:

"We are potentially on the cusp of a global revolutionary experiment in the microbial world," he says. "These evolutionary changes could be visible 50 to 100 years from now, showing us new genomes of marine organisms."

Yes, evolution will continue with or without us. For some reason I've always found that comforting.

One of my oldest friends lost his father last week. Don was a good guy, anyone who knew him would tell you so. I attended the memorial where a nice young preacher, who didn't really know him, stood behind an urn holding his cremains and declared Don saved. And then preached him on in to heaven, assuring his widow that she would one day meet up with him there, and they would both be young and vital and together again. For her sake, for her health and well-being, I hope she believes that fully.

I sat in the back to draw lightning away from the women and children and old folks, and thought about death. Around the neck of the urn was a little placard with Don's name and the dates of his birth and death. I noticed he was born the same year as my own father, and even though he outlived my father by 7 years, he still only made it to 65. Retirement age.

With average life expectancy in the US approaching 80, it's easy to feel like both Don and my father got cheated somehow by the vagaries of math, like it's just bad luck that they are part of the half of our population that falls below the average. But the truth is they belonged to the generation of men who pretty much define the lower half of that average. Men of limited education—maybe finished high school—who spent their lives working with their hands and their back, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and eating fried everything. When I was growing up, all my friend's dads were just like them.

Most of them never thought much past next week's paycheck and the kids need shoes and the fridge is on it's last legs. Their goals were simple; get the house paid for, get the kids through school and maybe collect a pension someday if you don't get laid off.

They say we become our parents, and I guess they wouldn't say it if it wasn't mostly true. At the memorial I noticed my friend is as much like his father as I am mine and I was reminded of a line from a John Hiatt song: "It's an old man's dreams that a young man fears." It's true. But we inherit those dreams nonetheless.

Since Flimsy Sanity popped into the comments from my last post - which is going on three weeks old now - asking if I was still alive, I feel obligated to upload something to the mother ship today. So I'm digging through all these unfinished posts looking for anything that's worthy of completion, but it's all mind-numbing dreck that might just as well be scrawled on a cardboard box in crayon.

The problem is that lately I just haven't been able to summon the indignation that has always fueled my rants. I'm numb. I'm numb because I'm a politics junkie and for the last several months I've been watching the great American experiment in democracy fail.

I'm numb because last November the American people, in a concerted We The People effort to end the madness in Iraq, gave control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats and now, almost almost a year later, we have even more troops in Iraq than we did then.

I'm numb because our Congress wastes time passing bullshit resolutions condemning a newspaper advertisement because it had the audacity to question the veracity of General Petraus when he sat before Congress pulling numbers out of his ass in support of The Surge, while repeatedly failing to pass timid and non-binding resolutions suggesting to the preznit that we should maybe start thinking about pulling out of Iraq sometime soon, no hurry though, you're the boss.

I'm numb because my government and my tax dollars are paying for tens of thousands of mercenaries like Blackwater to do in Iraq what mercenaries have always and forever done. And our Congress, caught completely flat-footed by the total lack of accountability, did what they do best. Nothing. From this blog post by P.W. Singer:

Much of the air was taken out of the hearing by the decision made to restrict from discussion the events of September 16th. There was a sensible reason for this: The FBI opened an investigation the day before (coincidentally or not, depending how much of a conspiracy theorist you are). No one wanted to say anything to contaminate an ongoing investigation. But it sure made things less exciting and less important, since September 16th was what had prompted the hearings in the first place.

A new low, holding hearings to discuss something without actually, you know, discussing it. Sigh.

I'm numb because the man who, as a federal judge, ruled that American citizens can be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime is about to breeze through confirmation hearings to become head of our nation's Justice Department. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Michael Mukasey begin today, but the chairman of the committee, Patrick Leahy, has already stated that he expects the nomination to be easily approved. (Yes this is the same Patrick Leahy who said a couple of weeks ago that he wouldn't allow the nomination to go forward until the administration provided documents he requested in the investigation into just how badly Alberto Gonzales fucked up the Justice Department, and no, those documents have not been provided.)

I'm numb because I have finally accepted the obvious. The constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances between the three branches of our government no longer exists. Our country is run by some genuinely evil sons-of-bitches and we the people are powerless to do anything about it. I'm numb because we've lost.