Just Some Guy

Here's this guy who sits in glorious comfort. Sits on a cushy chair at a spacious desk in a well-lit room before a glowing computer screen. Some guy who composes words at his keyboard, some dreary, some not, mostly unread.

Just some guy who types out words while babies starve, while war ravages, while tens upon tens of thousands crawl out from the wreckage of their shattered lives.

While he types, they starve. While he types, the sparks of war erupt and its flames grow hot. While he types, the tens of thousands just need clean water and food to eat. While this guy types in the comfort of his world, the rest of the world is drowning in misery.

Doctors Without Borders

Oxfam International

11:06:41 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Schlafly Smackdown

While reading this phenomenal article on the evolution of vertebrate immune systems and whales (in Carl Zimmer's The Loom), I also read this four-sentence slam by Zimmer of a recent anti-evolution rant by Phyllis Schlafly.

Zimmer leaves no room for misinterpreting his view on her comments:

She has written the most staggering display of buffoonery on the subject that I've read in a long time.

Zimmer then points to an article by Steve Reuland in The Panda's Thumb that mercilously deconstructs Schlafly's argument, sentence by painful sentence. For example,

I think we're seeing a pattern here.  Phyllis Schlafly hasn't the foggiest notion what biologists actually think; she's missed out on every meaningful discovery, every advancement in theory, and every important find for more than a century.  She's nearly 150 years behind on her whale evolution, and even further behind than that on her giraffe evolution.  She is clearly speaking of things she knows nothing about.

But that's her whole point, isn't it? She isn't talking to and she doesn't care about biologists. The folks in her audience don't read Zimmer's Loom and couldn't care less about Reuland's deconstruction.

9:07:56 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Tsunami Eyewitness

From the BBC:

what is more important is not how you manage to survive a 30-second burst of a wave, it's how you manage to survive what comes afterwards, when you see men looking for their wives, when you see mothers looking for their children and screaming their names, when you see people that you have danced the night before away with, not accounted for.

...

Now, I'm drinking a lot. I do not think it helps because right now, I've got a bottle, and it's not helping me - I'm as lucid as ever, I've been lucid since then, and it really doesn't help. What do you do? What do you do?

Good riddance, 2004.

11:28:05 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []