Sunday, March 27, 2005

Things that suck today.

I was going through my usual list of news sites and saw this little bit. It seems that the poverty-stricken country of Mauritania has a little corruption problem. In order to effectively combat the crippling economic obstacles of patronage, bribe-solicitation, influence-peddling and whatever other horrors to be found there,Mauritanian federal ministers just gave themselves a 600% salary increase.
Fighting graft must be pretty thirsty work.

I was reading george bush jr.'s easter message. Comparing himself to god? First writing of "giving his one and only son", then ending with the men and women of the army far from home (that he's "given"). Nice.

On the particularly disturbing news front, the life and death of a Florida woman is being milked for all the right-wing, pseudo-compassionate schadenfreude that born-again hypocrites can muster. It's amazing how much overlap there is in the pro-life, pro-death penalty, and pro-lingering-vegetative-state camps. I wouldn't want to be the one to make the choice, but there are far too many people trying to make it theirs.

Okay, enough gloom and doom. Here's an amazing, mind-boggling thought for the day. Dinosaur researchers have discovered what appears to be intact, unfossilized soft tissue from a 70 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex! Scientists are gushing with the possibility of being able to directly compare dinosaur and bird microstructures to confirm their evolutionary link and possibly recover dinosaur protein. Paleontologists posit that soft tissues could be recovered from other fossil specimens if researchers were willing to break more open (the T-Rex bone was intentionally broken to facilitate its transportation). Traditonally, that is not the way that precious specimens are treated! On the sleazy side of the tracks, creationists claim this evidence as proof that dinosaurs only died out a few thousand years ago.


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