From Castle Keep – You find me degenerate, perhaps even French…
BTW – the movie’s about the most interesting take on a war movie I’ve ever seen… Gotta love AMC.
Improved medical insurance coverage for reservists. The first provision covers members and their families for up to 90 days before being called to active duty. The second provision extends coverage for members and their families for up to half a year after being released from active duty (I got 120 contingiency days back in May, though my employer’s coverage picked back up as soon as I started working again, but only because I had several years on active duty)
Lastly, and the most interesting to me: The third provision temporarily extends Tricare medical benefits to Reserve component sponsors and family members who are either unemployed or employed but not eligible for employer-provided health coverage.
Sounds like a page out of Starship Troopers.
To garner ire from everyone on the porch, I’ll use Reeder’s pet peeve: I would have avoided posting this, ‘cept for the fact it comes out of the London Guardian, which can hardly have been considered a pro-war or pro-Bush rag:
Money illicitly siphoned from the UN oil-for-food programme by Saddam Hussein was used to finance anti-sanctions campaigns run by British politicians, according to documents that have surfaced in Baghdad.…Our investigations in Iraq, New York, Paris, Moscow and London indicate the new British-related documents are authentic, although their meaning is not always clear.
…Mr Galloway (Vocal anti-war Member of Parliment) said he was unaware that his financial sponsors were getting oil cash from the UN programme. But he accepts that he knew his supporters had links with Saddam’s regime, and regarded that as an inevitable price to pay.
The WSJ’s Best of the Web Today from yesterday ran this as ‘Antiwar’ is Pro-Sadaam. I think that’s excessive; I don’t doubt that many protestors were truly and committedly anti-war. (As a general principle, I’m anti-war, much in the same way I’m anti-poverty) But Saddam, apparently, saw them as useful idiots.
PS – I came across the last link googling for a source that cited Lenin (not Lennon – Yoko, you broke up the band!) as the source for “Useful Idiots”. The site’s pretty interesting – libertarian bordering on anarchic (Makes me feel like a facist), with a few conspiracy theories thrown in for leavening.
Another cool interactive animation site called Letterscapes which pulls up 25 letters and has a different animation for each.
Getting off taxes & politics for a minute… we all know JRO enjoyed ‘The Passion’ at BNAT. I’m looking forward to seeing it, too, if I get to it (just saw Two Towers for the first time last night). But I’ve seen Mel Gibson in a couple of interview blurbs looking a little psycho. Here’s an article on Salon about his conspiracy theories and whether or not he’s (1) a brilliant marketer, or maybe (2) a little ‘off’.
What happens if you make 100 generation copies of a CD? You and I can easily answer that question (or at least I can, you I’m not so sure of), but this guy decided to put the question to a test. A very unscientific test. On top of attempting to defy the common sense of copying CDs, he puts together what is possibly worse than most second grade science fair projects.
In the tradition of Charlie Brown, Mutts is a generally unoffensive but somehow still clever comic strip. A few times a week it makes me chuckle out loud.
