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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.
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Thursday, March 13, 2003 |
Freedom Rally On Wall Street!
Stocks surged Thursday, with investors betting that a potential war with Iraq will be delayed, pushing the Dow industrials to its best one-day point and percentage gain of 2003.
Our President has at least a Gentleman's MBA from Harvard and certainly, as a studious and disciplined free economy adherent, must believe that markets talk.
Lately, they appear to be speaking with an acid tongue, however, sulking and shrinking when his silly little war gains a technical foothold and exploding with "irrational exuberance" when his convoluted and oft ill-prepared plans for an invasion are pinned to the mat. I wonder if that causes him any philosophical discomfort or induces a state of cognitive dissonance - which, I understand, can greatly hamper one's rational thought processes.
I hope not. As we head into The Greatest American Adventure since the Spanish-American War (which, incidentally, netted us Cuba and The Phillipines, a great source of national pride and hardly any bother at all to maintain), we need for him to remain clear-headed and resolute, hand on the rudder and eye on the horizon. Let us join hands and pray that he has the moral and physical courage to steer his ship straightforward through the mine field, instead of listening to the terrified screams of his shiphands or watching the horrified semaphoric messages from the decks of nearly every other ship still afloat in the same waters.
Keep a steady course, waver not in the face of danger, support our troops, and don't shoot the albatross. Eveerything you need to know, you learned in kindergarten.
Remember, as he promised us during his campaign, he is a Uniter, Not A Divider, and he has delivered by unifying world opinion in a nearly unprecented manner. The best course from here, is to have Congress pass a bill to return the Statue Of Liberty to France (aka, "Free") and let the rest of the world know the deep moral conviction just below the surface of our soft-spoken verbal stance. God may be in the details, but his deepest ponderings are in the yellow highlighting of used textbooks, and written in the margins of Cliff's Notes.
5:20:43 PM 
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Senate approves ‘partial-birth’ ban
Here is another case of absurdity created following the path of least resistance to avoid controversy. Apparently, it is better to conjure grotesque imagery than to hit political hot button like "abortion" or "life-saving procedure". I'm not commenting on the legislation, just on the idiocy that percolates into language when headlines suffer, well, a partial birth.
3:44:31 PM
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Shuttle Team Sought Satellite Assessment of Liftoff Damage
Two or three days after the space shuttle Columbia's liftoff, a group of NASA engineers asked the shuttle program manager to request the aid of United States spy satellites in determining the extent of debris damage to the shuttle's left wing, but the manager declined to do so, a senior NASA official said yesterday.
Okay, my question is simple - what would have been the contingency plan if the team had determined that re-entry was unsafe. I can imagine lots of sci-fi answers, but suspect none of them were options, based on the limited fuel on the shuttle.
Repair in space? With what? Is there sufficient oxygen for the required EVA?
Dock with the international space station? Then what? Pay the Russians for a rescue?
The lack of recovery options in case of potentially fatal structural damage at liftoff could influence the decision-making process at every level. If the least resistance path is to continue as though nothing serious happened and hope for the best, then bureaucracy executed the Columbia astronauts.
Here's an analogy. You are on a long automobile trip with your family. Your oil light comes on in unfamiliar territory and you don't have an extra can in the trunk. Rather than do the "wise", but highly unpopular, action of pulling off the road and calling a tow truck, you risk driving 10 more miles to the next exit. Your engine burns up when you are 8 miles from any exit...you get the idea, it's one of those "for want of a nail" thingies kids used to learn in grade schools before standardized testing abolished thinking.
Seriously, I'm surprised that the contingency plan for the Columbia has not surfaced. Especially since the Challenger showed us that the true root cause was not the defective O-ring as much as it was the decision to launch in temperatures below their specifications.
2:49:41 PM
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"They just redid me..."
Before you consider not acting against the moon, chasing a rabbit, melting an Afghan, or simply saying the word "origami" before you've mastered it, check out the BBC's collection of Donald Rumsfield soundbites. Heed his advice and you'll never catch "the wrong rabbit."
"We do know, of certain knowledge, that he is either in Afghanistan, or some other country, or dead."
"The threat is real and the lethality is multiples of what we've previously experienced."
"Charlie!......The barnyard."
"It's like...you know...stirring for troubled waters."
4:31:19 AM
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