omfg

This is really sort of like comic relief. I got this story from Josh and you can read about it here.

You may have read about it, but the short version is that the communications director for Montana Representative Denny Rehberg has been fired after he got caught trying to hire someone to break into his college's computer system and improve his grade point average.

The funny thing, though, is that you can go online and read the emails between this guy and the people he was soliciting to do this illegal act, including repeated demands that he provide photographs of pigeons and squirrels to prove his bona fides.

As I say, since it is the holidays, if you're interested in a chuckle, take a look.

WTF, Harry?

Can someone explain to me why a single Democrat should be giving Bush cover for his new bogus plan for Iraq? He created the problem, he owns it, and he  and his Republican friends should be stuck with it.

So what was Harry Reid doing backing him up today on  ABC?

"If it's for a surge, that is, for two or three months and it's part of a program to get us out of there as indicated by this time next year, then, sure, I'll go along with it," Reid, who will become the majority leader when Democrats take control of the Senate next month, told ABC's "This Week" program.

How bogus is this? It's so bogus that Colin Powell not only knows it, he's willing to say so.

"There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops."

. . .

The "active Army is about broken," Powell said.

Josh is absolutely right about this. Bush is wrong on the war and the public knows it. Almost three quarters of the public are opposed to the war, so where is the payoff in lining up behind Bush?

Human evolution

Biology may be the science that I am least interested in, but I found this story from the Times the other day quite interesting. It turns out that humans developed the ability to digest milk in adulthood incredibly recently, like thre thousand years ago. Also, we can tell that this trait was evolved in response to the cultural practice of keeping domestic cattle and using their milk for food.

Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart is no longer needed. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

You have to wonder, though, don't you: why wasn't this trait intelligently designed by our all-knowing, infinitely benevolent creator?

RICHER THAN YOU THINK?

This is just a post to introduce you to the new link over there on the right: the Global Rich List. Give it a try and see how your income compares to the rest of the world.