Eric tends to take every pen he can find and empty them and finger paint with the ink. Brian made the mistake of leaving his pens on the nightstand. Brian has to use a pen for his homework. So a slight variation on yesterday's picture tonight. There is no other pen left for me to draw with...Yeah, I know. Autism is such a drag, sometimes...
News, news, news---plus the occasional scattered notion:
There's a lot of talk of us attacking Iraq after we get through with Afghanistan.
Uh-uh. Somalia, Yemen, one of those places that have direct connections with Al-Qaeda, yeah. Not Iraq. There is no proven connection, save for a brief meeting with Muhammed Atta and an Iraqi official, between the secular Saddam Hussein and religious fanatics like Bin Ladin.
If we uncover such links, then we move. Yet we build our cases carefully and completely.
Oh, don't get me wrong. Do I think Hussein sponsors terrorism? You betcha. Do I think he has probably got scads of chemical and biological weapons? You betcha.
Yet let's get the people directly connected with the 9-11 attack first. We've had terrorists for years, but these people, even among terrorists, have a different mindset. A deadly mindset.
If we can prove that Saddam is behind the Anthrax attacks, all bets are off!
Still...
We attack Iraq, and it will look like we're doing a war against Islam, not terrorism....settling all the old scores we haven't taken care of. Let's not act without more proof than we have at present. Get the proof, and then we'll talk!
The founder of the Mary Kay line died recently.
Thank goodness you can't take it with you. Especially pink cadillacs and excessive makeup....
(I'm sorry, I can't think of Mary Kay without thinking of Opus and the attack of the Mary Kay Commandoes in BLOOM COUNTY...)
In other news...some scientists have succeeded in cloning human beings.
Good. (I think this clone-banning law is sheer hysteria.)
I wish they'd bring it full term, so people could see that it's just a twin, not anything odd or inhuman, though...
As long as it's not a clone of Mary Kay...
I just finished reading CAN A DARWINIAN BE A CHRISTIAN by Michael Ruse. In some ways I liked it...it addressed many fundamental concerns, and pointed out the holes in Behe's "irreducible complexity" arguments. I was disappointed it didn't go into the anthropic principle, or point to the oddness of "punctuated evolution" (as revealed by the fossil record) in comparison to what Darwin predicted and expected.
Still, a good book, especially comparing the tenets of sociobiology with religious aspirations, and one of the truly satisfying answers to free will coping with God's foreknowledge of events.
He turned the tables.
God, if He is indeed truly good, without a blemish of evil---then one can say what He will do in any particular circumstance. Yet that does not negate His will to do so...
Similarly, God knows our more troubled and contradictory natures much more intimately---and knows what we will decide. That does not negate our decision to do so.
Foreknowledge and free will---concepts not contradictory, but cohabiting.
Besides, if we really couldn't make decisions---than He couldn't foresee what isn't there....so again, we come to the conclusion...
It works quite well, if you think about it.
Have I gloated yet?
Oh, I guess not...
Yet, despite the headlines, the information about the recount contains the interesting fact that Bush would have won if they had just recounted just select counties the way Gore wanted...
Yet if they recounted the entire state of Florida, Gore would have won.
I suppose both sides can retire with honor. But let's not forget...
If every vote had been counted correctly---- Gore would have won.
It doesn't matter now. Even I have to admit I'm glad Clayton Powell is Secretary of State during this particular crisis, and Rumsfield is Secretary of Defense. We might have been surprised how well Gore might have done, and we might have been vastly disappointed. After all, Gore had a good international reputation...and right now, I don't think Bush is making as much a difference as the experienced Powell and Rumsfield are.
We'll never know.
I'm less pleased that Ashcroft is using this crisis as an excuse to trample over things like attorney-client privilege and military tribunels might be used for non-citizen terrorists...(ahhh, yes, we're all for human rights and due process as long as you're a citizen. If you're not a citizen, you don't count. Is that what we're saying?)
Or that the federal bailouts have tended to give massive federal handouts to Big Business, while screwing the little guy...
It's true what they say. War is hell.