timfluhr.org
May, 2007
Homework 5-24-07
Bush signed this presidential directive on May 9th (my birthday...yay!). It's pretty sweet. This pretty much grants absolute power to the executive during any "Catastrophic Emergency" which is defined as any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.
Scary.
Get your tickets now!!
Important questions of our time.
Does not porcelain look so much cooler when it begins to crack?
p. 29
They were free, free to run, jump, fuck, drink, book a seat on the Tokyo plane. They were free and yet they moved so casually through this precious element that it seemed wasted on them. There was no appreciation of freedom in the way they moved. A man stooped to pull up his socks. A woman rooted through her handbag to make sure she had her keys. A younger woman, glancing at the overcast sky, put up a green umbrella. An old and very ugly woman dried her tears with a scrap of paper. These were their constraints, the signs of their confinement, but there was some naturalness, some unself-consciousness about their imprisonment that he, watching them between the bars, cruelly lacked.
Priorities?
I've been reading a bit today about coalition military casualties in Iraq. I also stumbled upon this article as well. It seems as though the United States is building a 592 million dollar embassy in Iraq. I find this rather troublesome for a few reasons. First I believe that part of the resentment felt towards the United States in the middle east is caused by our occupation of the region. I'm not going to get into specific details about this or why I feel this way, at the moment, since the crux of my writing today is about something else, but nonetheless a permanent embassy of this size and scale bothers me. Second, while reading about coalition casualties here one can see that most of the deaths of soldiers in Iraq have been caused by IEDs. At a surface level one may wonder what deaths caused by IEDs and building of extravagant embassies have in common. I would that there is no correlation in most cases. However, when there are means available to drastically cut casualties of coalition soldiers in Iraq that are not being exercised, while simultaneously money is being wasted on a 104 acre embassy on the Tigris River one has to question where this administration's priorities are.
592 million dollars can buy about 600 armored cougars. Since their deployment to Iraq in 2003 the Cougar and Buffalo vehicles employed with explosive ordnance disposal teams and engineers units have taken about 1,000 IED hits without a loss of life. Something to think about next time you hear a candidate talk about how much he or she supports the troops.
Site Maintenance!!
I've been having some problems with the site over the last day or so due to php needing to use more than 8MB of memory. My host sets php's memory limit to 8MB and gallery is bitching about needing 16MB to run properly. Long story short I have removed gallery and will be rebuilding it when I get some free time. I also need to install my own php5 (I think) to solve the memory problem by bumping memory up to 16MB in php.ini.
The site will probably be up and down over the next week or so until I get this all figured out.
Pigs. I think the cat is out of the bag.
Hey you, whitehouse,
Ha ha charade you are.
You house proud town mouse,
Ha ha charade you are
You're trying to keep our feelings off the street.
You're nearly a real treat,
All tight lips and cold feet
And do you feel abused?
...|...|...|...|...|...
You gotta stem the evil tide,
And keep it all on the inside.
Mary you're nearly a treat,
Mary you're nearly a treat
But you're really a cry.
Bill O'Reilly is an assclown dickface.
According to the giant talking head this is how the media works in America to further a radical Leftist agenda.
To prove that any idiot can make a flowchart...
How the media really works in America. Sorry for the crudeness of the graphic below. I don't have a production team.
it must just be the colors and the kids...
Few things can, in this country, hurt a politician more than saying no to money for the children or for the troops. Seemingly regardless of political affiliation, people, by and large, will offer up their hard earned dollars to these causes. You see, in America we always support the troops and we never forget about the children. In spite of this we are at a point at which both of these sacred demographics of utterly important citizens are being neglected. Earlier today we witnessed the President of the United States veto an emergency appropriations bill. This bill would have provided funding to soldiers currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same bill would have also provided a timetable for an orderly withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
The president vetoed this bill because his Iraq exit strategy is simply to run out the clock.
The congress passed an emergency appropriations bill providing 95.5 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a bill that provided a timetable for an orderly withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and a bill that also included 250 million dollars in milk subsidies, 120 million dollars for shrimp fisherman and a cool 75 million for peanut storage.
The congress added these subsidies because in a week, or two weeks, or whenever this bill is passed, the riding subsidies will still be there. No wartime president refuses to allocate money to his boys with the guns, and no good politician refuses to send a little bit of money back to his or her district.
Your president is burying our soldiers in the ground and your congress is burying our kids in the red.