Questions And Observations

Knowing how sensitive men are about this subject, even in the privacy of my own home and with no males on th premises, I kept my smile small. Not to add fuel to the fire, we measure the the thickness, not the circumference. Oh yeah, and time well spent.

Rude change of subject, but maybe one of the reasons that crime is increasing is because opportunities to improve one's lot in life are decreasing. Setting new minimum jail sentences isn't going to prevent crime, it will just fill the already overcrowded prisons to overflowing. Why is it, according to their own statistics, that crime goes up after a few years of a Republican administration and down during a Democratic one? Is it because people find it more difficult to feed and clothe their families, send their children to schools that actually teach them something valuable and to plan for the future? Or is it because when you cut taxes, you have to cut services which include fire and police? Or maybe a combination? Just wondering.

Now that is a great question. Why are retired generals allowed to speak out against the Iraq war but members of the individual ready reserve, aren't? We all know that rank has its privileges, but this is a little ridiculous. Especially since it is almost always the enlisted soldier who is dodging, and sometimes catching, the bullets. If they have fought to bring "freedoms" to the Iraqis, then they should be able exercise those freedoms when when they get home. Opposition to the war is not disloyal, letting your fellow soldiers continue to suffer, is.

Does it really need to be said? Okay, well duh! Of course education is going to help overcome racial biases and the better trained the police officer, the less likely to shoot indiscriminately. But the budgets have been squeezed and training has been condensed, you do the math. Besides, pushing a button in a testing situation is different than confronting a suspect in a tense situation. Testosterone gets added to the adrenaline. Not good for intellectual processing.

One of the funny things about war is that amidst all the death and destruction, the ability to create more weapons to inflict death and destruction has a tendency to increase. On both sides. Until there is an an ultimate weapon, and then we start all over. The longer we are at war in Iraq, the more sophisticated their IEDs will become. While the insurgents continue to be viewed as stupid brown people, little better than savages, they continue to learn from our mistakes and are becoming increasingly able to fight back in an extremely effective manner. So far the only thing that the surge has brought us is the highest two month toll of dead soldiers since the war began and it doesn't matter to the dead (or their families) that it took six times as many bombs. Four years after mission accomplished. Imagine that.

Ten years later and we have a new Babylon 5 trailer for the direct to DVD movie but it should be bittersweet to revisit my old friends. No G'Kar or Franklin for obvious reasons but no Garibaldi? Hopefully, there will be a little bit of Vir, who in a previous life was known as Flounder.

I got one of those scam checks in the mail. I knew it wasn't real even though it looked like it. Yes, I have entered some contests but I never win so I make sure they are free entries. Imagine my surprise to find a check for $2,940.30 in my mailbox. No conditions attached. Yeah and I want to buy a bridge with some swampland underneath it. I did some quick research using the Google and voila', I'm on my way to the post office to add to the ongoing mail fraud case. Wishing just won't make that check worth the paper it's printed on.