Thursday, May 5, 2005

Happy National Day of Prayer! It would be remiss of me not to mention that today is National Prayer Day. For a rundown on the national holiday, see my post from last year. This year's NDP chairperson Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, explains the signficance of this year's motto, "God Shed His Grace on Thee": [A]s sinners saved by grace we must realize not only that we don't deserve God's favor, but that we do deserve His wrath! The miracle of God's grace is that He extends mercy to us in spite of our wickedness and rebellion against Him. Put another way, "mercy" is not getting what we deserve, and "grace" is getting what we don't deserve. We need not look very far to see that our country stands in desperate need of God's healing touch. We have killed over 40 million babies since 1973, and saturated ourselves and our children with pornography and filth. We have numbed ourselves with drugs and alcohol, and taught our kids that premarital sex is a good thing if it is simply done right. We have pursued materialism and false security, while ignoring the Architect of our souls. As a nation, we have rebelled against the Creator. Our culture is steeped in immorality and self-sufficiency and is growing increasingly hostile toward religious expression. ... So hostile, in fact, that President Bush celebrated the holiday with Mrs. Dobson in the White House and joined her in declaring "our dependence on the Almighty." 6:33:58 PM    comment [] Delusions of Grandeur From the profile of David Horowitz in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education: If he were a liberal, he contends, he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at Harvard University. And his life story would have already been told on the big screen. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, his autobiography, has been out for eight years. "Someone would have made a film out of it if I was a leftist," he says bitterly. 5:56:20 PM    comment [] UFOs and the Military-Industrial Complex The SF Bay Guardian reports on Berkeley geography Ph.D. student Trevor Paglen's research into secret military bases such as Area 51. When foreign friends of mine asked me why Americans were especially, even uniquely, susceptible to UFO experiences, I responded that it was a combination of Cold War paranoia and observations of actual, hi-tech military aircraft. The article mentions CIA documents that seem to support my hypothesis: Declassified CIA documents, Paglen notes, suggest Langley fomented UFO rumors during the 1950s and '60s as a way to deflect attention from the very real flights of experimental aircraft, including the U-2 and A-12 Blackbird spy planes. As for those who hung their hat on Bob Lazar's stories of back-engineering alien spacecraft held at Area 51, his credibility has run into problems: Lazar wasn't, as he alleged, a physicist. And there were no records of him attending the schools he claimed to have graduated from, Caltech and MIT. Lazar couldn't even keep himself out of trouble with the Vegas cops, who busted him in 1990 for his role in a prostitution ring. The article also notes that the DoD's budget for top-secret military projects has skyrocketed in recent years and become practically impossible to decipher, nullifying Congress's oversight role. "It's certainly a testament to Rummy's ability ot keep a secret -- that they've been able to spend this money without anybody noticing," [GlobalSecurity.org's John] Pike says. And they're spending plenty. The black budget is blimping out to new dimensions. Estimates by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, another nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank, put the total spending for classified weapons programs at $26.9 billion for 2005; for 2006 the Department of Defense has asked for $28 billion. That's up from a comparatively paltry $11.7 billion a decade ago. No doubt Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists is right to speculate that the money is probably going towards Palpatine's Rummy's space forces. [Via CoasttocoastAM] Postscript: For a hilarious take on a Lawrence Livermore-esque experiment gone horribly wrong, I recommend PKD's Eye in the Sky. 10:42:11 AM    comment []

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