Out of town
February 3rd, 2010Going to be out of town for a few days visiting family in Dallas. The fun side of the family tree. Gonna throw out a long post here with hopefully good stuff in it.
First things first – these are totally awesome.
Not really a cake and not really strawberries
And the same site has these. I loved leg warmers back when. And I could have used some arm warmers at work this winter.
Go visit some A-list blogs while I’m gone and comment a lot there. Attention Whore month may be over, but the sentiment remains!
From Daphne at Jaded Haven comes a very good reason to get out of Afghanistan. I happen to agree that it is time to stop wasting lives while those in charge dither and are fundamentally dishonest about what we are doing there and how to accomplish it.
I’m ready to bring our people home. I see no indication that our government is serious about addressing this fundamental problem on any level, eliminating the terrorists with clear impunity or of fostering a functioning society of protective law in Afghanistan. The State Department’s warped agenda of demented craftsmanship is still running this war and I’m done supporting those delusional Faustians.
The One Armed Man pointed me to some links that I had intended to espouse upon but lacking the time, here they are – you are smart enough to form your own opinions about them without my 2 cents.
Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cells. Might be interesting to pick up the book although I’m less interested in the squabbling of the modern day family of Ms. Lacks than I am in what it says overall about science and how law keeps up or fails to keep up with advances in medicine.
In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line’s impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.
Among these crosscurrents, my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands.
Not that decline is always a choice. Britain’s decline after World War II was foretold, as indeed was that of Europe, which had been the dominant global force of the preceding centuries. The civilizational suicide that was the two world wars, and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion, made continued dominance impossible and decline inevitable.
The corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We–whom Lincoln once called God’s “almost chosen people”–did not save Europe twice in order to emerge from the ashes as the world’s co-hegemon. We went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. Our dominance after World War II was not sought. Nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. We are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon–and now, after a near-decade of strenuous post-9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.
In a press conference, Walesa commented on an America that seemingly apologizes for everything these days, cajoles rather than confronts the thugs of the world and is embarked on a path to shackle beyond redemption the free economy that led the Free World to victory.
He no longer thinks we are the last best hope for mankind.
“The United States is only one superpower. Today they lead the world. Nobody has doubts about it, militarily,” the Polish leader said. “They also lead economically, but they’re getting weak.
“But they don’t lead morally and politically anymore. The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations. There was the hope, whenever something was going wrong, one could count on the United States. Today, we lost that hope.”
See y’all Monday evening or Tuesday. Have a good weekend!
