Bush to Earth: F*** You.

Apparently, at his final G8 environmental summit this summer, Bush said to the Prime Minister of England "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter" as he staunchly upheld his belief that America should not do anything to combat global climate change.

He then punched the air while grinning widely, which stunned BPM Gordon Brown and French President Sarkozy, who had overheard the Bush comment.

I think I voted for this guy the first time around. That's really embarassing, in retrospect, to think that I had some good reason, like "my dad told me to" for voting for a total crank who never learned a single thing while in office.
What really, really amazes me is that even now, in the twilight of the Bush Presidency, he is still making jackass decisions and "sticking to his guns" over things that only someone completely insane wouldn't admit were mistakes. I mean that, there are two groups of people who won't admit their obvious mistakes: lunatics and Presidents.

Just to show President Bush how to do it, I'll use myself as an example: I was wrong to vote for Bush. In 2004 when I voted libertarian, that was wrong too. I should have voted for John Kerry to express my disgust at Bush.


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Smart moves

Read this. It's a heartwarming story. I am glad that many collegiate football players are gifted athletes (otherwise it'd be boring to watch), but when they leave college without a diploma for a short, most likely uneventful stay in the NFL, then what? They don't have a degree to help them get a job. Many former NFL stars wind up selling cars, tending a bar, or building homes.
There are many, many bright young athletes amongst the 100+ NCAA schools, but the American culture has promoted a "get quick fast" philosophy where highly-paid athletes are hero-worshipped, and when they become over-paid crybabies, no one seems to care. And when they leave the NFL, they are instantly no longer worth mention. Unless they kill their wife or something.

Evolution didn't make us brilliant athletes as a species (compared to other animals). It's neat to see a quarterback throw a ball 60 yards to a receiver who catches the ball with arms outstretched while sprinting full speed. But neater yet is the Large Hadron Collider, and the Theory of Relativity, and open-heart surgery, and all the accomplishments of the human mind.

There was a time when collegiate sports were no more than a method to help young people afford college via scholarships. For most sports, like track and field, that is still true. But a few sports, like football and basketball, have become a playground for irresponsibility, and it is a disservice to these young impressionable men and women to tell them it's a good idea to quit school early and play ball.


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Tony Dungy Retires

Tony Dungy, head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, retired effective today. Dungy led the Colts to several extremely successful seasons, including a Superbowl win couple years ago. Dungy, 53, wants to spend more time with his kids.

Dungy is of course "retiring" now while he's still young enough to come out of retirement in a couple years when a deal gets sweet enough.

Am I the only one who thinks the word "retire" doesn't mean what it should? "I stopped working at my job because I got tired again?" When were you tired the first time, and why didn't you quit your job then?

Anyway, don't be surprised if Tony Dungy is back on the sidelines in another city by 2012.


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This will all seem unimportant when a volcano kills us all.

Not to prey on the reader's emotions and fear-monger, but there is a pretty good chance a global holocaust will soon occur. Although either the assassination of Obama or the Israel-Gaza conflict escalating into a global war may seem like two more likely scenarios, the global apocalypse that I think we need to address is the coming volcopalypse when the Yellowstone Caldera erupts again.

The Yellowstone Caldera is a giant supervolcano that sits underneath most of Yellowstone National Park in the northwest corner of Wyoming. The caldera is composed of unusually light, hot magma that sits very near the surface. Almost like clockwork, the caldera has massively erupted every 700,000 years or so. The last eruption was approximately 680,000 years ago. Do you see where I am going with this?

One good way geologists have of predicting how soon a volcano will erupt is to track the frequency of the earthquakes near or in the volcano. In the case of Yellowstone, thousands of small to intense earthquakes have been recorded since the 50's. It is believed the intensity of these earthquakes is increasing (3000+ earthquakes in 1985).

Another good way geologists try to predict how soon a volcano may erupt is they track the elevation of the plug...the plug being the solid rock that is sealing the opening of the volcano. As the pressure builds, the volcano will slowly push the plug upwards until it is sufficiently loose and the volcano blows it off. The height of the plug at Yellowstone Caldera is rising, and the rate of rise is also rising. That is, the plug is accelerating upwards.

So just how devastating will it be when Yellowstone explodes again? Well, nuclear winter is a good way to put it. It might cool the temperature of the earth by 2 degrees or so, causing an extended, devastating winter in many parts of the world. It would cause acid rain to fall on much of the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada, devastating forests and farmland. Ash from the explosion would reach China, and Russia. The sun would not appear in some parts of the world for many, many days.

Anyway, just a spot of great news to cheer up your week!


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America to Duggars: Stop Breeding. Yesterday.

Springdale, Ark. January 12, 2089:

With the Duggar clan now well past its 60,000th member, Joshua Duggar (son of the famous Jim Bob Duggar) is lobbying for Congress to declare Duggaropolis an independent state, citing Constitutional clauses requireing 60,000 willing persons to petition for statehood. Jim Bob, featured on a TLC show at the turn of the century "17 kids and counting" set a precedent in his family for offensively high numbers of children, a trait he proudly passed on to his 18 children. Each of his 11 sons went on to marry, and raise equally large families of their own. His daughters also raised large families as well, but in the strict "Quiverfull" traditionalism of the Duggar clan, the daughters were all required to take their husbands' surname, though all descendents of the first Duggars, Jim Bob and Michelle, are taking part in the statehood petition.

Scientists marvel not only at the fertility of the Duggar clan, but at their amazing ability to not grasp the simple fundamentals of global overpopulation. "In poor countries, women have this many children, but because of malnutrition and disease, many children die," stated Dr. James Archin, a biochemist from University of California, Berkeley. "The women in the Third World have to have 13 children in order to ensure that a few may survive. In the case of the Duggars, all their children survived, all their grandchildren survived, and so on and so forth, and the family has really upset the balance of nature."

All told, Jim Bob Duggar had 18 children, 288 grandchildren, 4896 great-grandchildren, and 86,124 great-great-grandchildren. At this rate, approximately 240 Duggars are born each day in Arkansas (medical records showed 251 Duggars born the day before this printing). Joshua Duggar is arguing that the state of Arkansas can no longer suppor the infrastructure needed for the Duggar clan; only a new state run by the Duggars with all civic positions filled by the Duggars could do so effectively. "We'll run the state the way God tells us, just like how we have sex all the time and then marvel that God that got us pregnant...again..." Joshua Duggar said in an interview with the AP.

The average birth rate in the United States has declined since the turn of the century, and now stands at about 2.2 children per household. That differs from the Duggar clan, who estimate that since Jim Bob had his original 18 kids, the average Duggar has 16.9 children per household, seven times the national average.

Dr. Archin continues: "Unfortunately, the Duggars face a real threat of not being able to find spouses outside their own family to marry; when you need 88,000 spouses, that's hard to find. Especially if you don't travel much, as the Duggars don't." When asked if the Duggars could marry one another, Dr. Archin replied "They don't already?" Dr. Archin estimated that at their current rate, the Duggar clan will grow to 442 million in the next 40 years. By this time next century there will be 126 trillion Duggars. "That would imply the entire surface of all the land on earth is covered with Duggars standing shoulder to shoulder, stacked three Duggars high. The massive spread of Duggars on this planet would pose a greater threat than any other man-made cause in the last 200 years."

When asked to comment, Joshua Duggar smiled broadly, looked to the sky and replied "What a blessing from God that would be, for the Duggar family and for the world."


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Lobster Freedom

In weird animal news, a NYC restaurant has agreed to release "George", a 140-year-old lobster, back into the wild rather than serving him for someone's dinner.

In future news, George the lobster has been eaten by a Cod.

But seriously, was anyone aware that lobsters live to be over 100 quite regularly? I somehow missed that episode of the Blue Planet (narrated by Richard Attenborough). Apparently, lobsters exhibit something known as "negligible senescence" which is basically that they never grow old. The idea is that every time a lobster molts, it sloughs off all the unhealthy cells and starts fresh, giving it a vitality boost.

Note to self: molt more often.


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Vaccines (and pharmaceuticals) continued

Although I was planning to write today about how evil alternative medicine (specifically Mannatech) is because Wellsy mentioned it in the comments, instead I am going to continue yesterday's rant a little, thanks to an interesting discussion I had with my brother-in-law concerning vaccines, safety, and the drug industry.

Chris: "The medical industry is a business. Whether people decide to view it as such or not does not change the fact that they are tyring to make money."

Chris makes a great point. I often argue that cures don't make money, only treatments do. I have to wonder: is there no cure for cancer because cancer is a strange, complex disease that we know little or nothing about, or is there no cure for cancer because if we cured cancer nobody would need chemotherapy anymore?

Isn't the most likely case a combination of the above? That the pharmaceutical companies are nowhere close to a cure for many diseases like cancer, and it doesn't make much sense for them to do research to get any closer?

In a related note, astronomers and physicists long believed the universe formed during the Big Bang, in a massive expansion that would eventually slow and reverse, leading to an event they dubbed "The Big Crunch." Recently, however, astronomers announced that the universal expansion is not slowing, it is in fact accelerating, and at an alarming rate! But trust us, we're experts. Because gravity causes large objects to move towards each other, there must be a force, the physicists surmised, that is pushing the heavens farther apart. They named this force "Dark Energy" and then concluded that the only way there could be Dark Energy is if there is Dark Matter. By calculating the amount of mass in the universe required to explain the acceleration, the physicists surmised that 96% of the matter and energy in the universe is Dark.
Unfortunately, they cannot locate or explain either dark matter or dark energy. But trust us, we're experts!
Now scientists are broadening their scope:

Recently researchers using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe -- rapidly becoming the favorite spacecraft of TMQ, owing to its string of puzzling findings -- proposed "dark flow." Distant galaxy clusters exhibit "a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," according to lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: "The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion." Kashlinsky and fellow researchers speculate they have found the footprint of some force that lies entirely outside the universe, dubbing this new power "dark flow."

If dark flow is real, then we cannot measure nor account for 98% of the universe. I suspect that humanity is very, very early in its quest for knowledge. If we cannot account for 98% of the universe, if we cannot explain why three of the four fundamental forces of physics work together but gravity doesn't, then we very possibly have a long, long way to go until we really know as much as some arrogantly think we know.

I am not saying this to make fun of astronomers, or physicists. I am saying that if we only know like, one percent of all the stuff there is to know in the universe, we must fund research and we must do so on a massive scale.

The same is true for medical research. It's more than likely that - despite all our advances and CT scanners and open-heart surgeries - that we are still basically bumbling through the dark in terms of our knowledge of the human body. We must, if we truly are committed to improving the human condition, fund medical research and fund as aggressively as we can.

Someday, maybe our progeny will laugh at their dinosauric ancestors who used crude "needles" to "innoculate" themselves against "viruses", but we will not get there without research. My concern is that people see the lack of knowledge in the medical industry, and rather than seeing it as a challenge to overcome, instead they turn away from modern medicine and turn to voodoo therapies that they see on infomercials and hear about through pyramid schemes.


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