Good. God.
Insanity.
Posted by Brian Bell at May 1, 2005 05:29 PMDr. Strangelove is especially appropriate here because one of the steps toward disaster in that movie is the passage of a bill (Plan R) allowing lower echelon commanders to initiate nuclear strikes, presumably with presidential OK - but Gen. Ripper didn't need an OK to start his planes flying.
Wth tw crmnlly nsn rgms, brnng wth htrd fr th S nw swggrng vr th nclr thrshld, t's srvvl's mprtv t mntn nnscnd fngr n th prtnts trggr.
[Editor: ignore=off]Criminally insane regine so perfectly describes the Bu$h administration. May I cite fomenting an illegal war in Iraq, killing thousands of innocents, breach of the Geneva Conventions against torture, and continually threatening and bullying the rest of the international community. Add in having a paranoid schizophrenic as commander in chief, and you,ve got a very dangerous and criminaly insane regime. America
Posted by Oaklander at May 1, 2005 06:15 PMMy fear is that Bush wants to be the President who fullfills the prophesy of the Book of Revelations.
In God's name, is there anything we can do to stop this insanity? We are in very dangerous times, and we have this blustering idiot sitting in the WH with the ability to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. This man is insane. How do we stop this?
Posted by Judith at May 1, 2005 06:16 PMWith two criminally insane regimes. . .
Correction -- make that three.
Posted by Donnie at May 1, 2005 06:17 PMIf memory serves me, in the movie On The Beach, no one survived.
Posted by Judith at May 1, 2005 06:22 PMTime to take to the streets and demand Bush/Cheney's impeachment.
Posted by Judith at May 1, 2005 06:24 PMWhich of these meanings goes best with trigger, Bendito?
Today's Word - Yesterday's Word - Previous Words - Mailing List - Help
Word of the Day for Saturday May 6, 2000
portentous \por-TEN-tus\, adjective:
1. Foreboding; foreshadowing, especially foreshadowing ill; ominous.
2. Marvelous; prodigious; wonderful; as, a beast of portentous size.
3. Pompous.
"This victory is without doubt a very special and portentous gift of the gods," she said, "for I believe that there now stands before you the one leader who is the single most qualified to lead us to the peace we long for."
--Seth Mydans, "Wounded Sri Lankan Sees 'Gift of Gods' in Re-election." New York Times, December 23, 1999
"Death of a Salesman" has been debunked as a didactic commentary on the bankruptcy of the American dream of success, while Miller has been dismissed as an epigone of Ibsenism, a preachy, pompous and, yes, portentous writer who belongs, like Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman, to a middlebrow, pre-modernist past.
--Michiko Kakutani, " 'Death of a Salesman': A Salesman Who Transcends Time." New York Times, February 7, 1999
Portentous is from Latin portentosus, from portendere, to stretch out before or into the future, to predict, from por- (variant of pro-), before + tendere, to stretch out.
Synonyms: ominous, premonitory, foreboding; find more at Thesaurus.com.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for portentous
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It seems to me that as long as we have an irrational fear of WMDs we will be subject to irrational response to their threat. While it is true that a place like Halabja suffered horrible destruction from a chemical weapons attack, that attack was a sustained one involving several hours and multiple sorties. In that instance, the chemical weapons were dropped all through the night. Can we really imagine a terrorist force or a hostile country bombing us from the domestic skies with impunity? Moreover, with as much dread as their is about chemical/biological weapons, do we really have a notion about how to defend ourselves against them? Can the average American even name the three most deadly chemical weapons and how to tell if they have suffered exposure?
No, and the reason may be that the threat simply all that real. Our military knows that chemical/biological weapons are not all that deadly relative to other conventional weapons in modern warfare. For instance, it takes over a ton of very expensive weaponized nerve agent to cause a single casualty because it is so easily dispersed into the air. Most of the threat of biological warfare are purely theoretical. Although, biological warfare has been around since the middle ages when dead lifestock were placed in the water supply of seiged villages, diseased corpsed were catapulted into fortresses, or even in the American West when blankets infected with smallpox were distributed to Apache tribes. The reason that this type of warfare is rare is unfortunately not that it is morally repugnant, but rather it has never proven very decisive.
The only real WMD it seems are nuclear weapons. A tremendous debate was carried on for decades with voices like Einstein, Sakharov, and many others stating firmly that the use of such weapons is inhumane and irresponsible. No matter what the yield ratio, no matter what the context or justification, maintaining a first strike option with our accrued knowledge of what thermonuclear warfare represents is repugnant. Such a pursuit debases our humanity and mocks the integrity of those who may still think of us as civilized.
If facts are ever allowed to seep into the highly-charged, emotive matrix of the media, we will maybe begin to wean ourselves from irrationalism and begin practicing sound threat/response scenarios, but not as long as raw fear is the mother's milk our government gives the feeble minded mainstream.
Posted by obelus at May 1, 2005 08:39 PMBendito… Bendito… Bendito… ¡Cojones compadre! Since few can deny that “what’s good for the goose…” has its definite merits (and is a sort of mantra widely known and followed by nutty honchos all over creation if the bloody going gets a bit more tough than previously envisioned), don’t you think, oh Guru of the portentous trigger, that such nifty notion would also be used by any other “criminally insane regimes” bent on destroying this poor earth of ours?
After all, even if visionaries like yourself would rather think otherwise (or not think about it one iota), “survival” happens to be as “imperative” a notion for the haves as it is for the have not, and if “swaggers” like you are happy to blast all the way to hell the already shaky nuclear threshold, then the rest should not be so hard to imagine. Indeed, that perhaps the human race must be about as close to disappear from the cosmos as one would hate to dread.
Which, naturally, leads me to these other questions. Do you have children? Grandchildren? Does the sense and true meaning on non-proliferation ring any bell in that nutty lil’ tete you seem to possess? Do you actually give a shit about anything else than posting crap?
BTW, every time I see your nick and then read your revolting comments I can’t help but think how unfitting it seems to be. How about changing it to Maldito? Yeah, if for no other thing, then in order to make some sense of your apparent lunatic zest for warfare regardless of the consequences.
Anyway, PAZ amigo,
Quídam
Imagine if this had been an option prior to our unwarranted invasion of Iraq. That should be enough warning that this is a really bad idea.
Posted by ann at May 2, 2005 03:38 AMIs it my imagination, or is somebody just NOT going to be happy unless he too gets to irradiate a city?
And it ain't Kim I'm talkin' about.
Posted by idiosynchronic at May 2, 2005 04:39 AMI don't see what the big deal is. The only thing that matters is the afterlife anyway (unless of course you are Terry Schiavo), right?
We know that we are going to heaven and our enemies are going to hell, because we are good and they are evil. So if we strike first and kill them, we are just speeding their journey to the fiery pit.
Posted by the professor at May 2, 2005 04:42 AMHey...when the preacher at NASCAR yesterday made reference to Armegeddon...you know something is up.
Posted by jillian at May 2, 2005 06:14 AMBush wants another attack on U.S. soil so he has a reason to nuke somebody. Otherwise why would he not be doing everything in his power to protect our borders?
Posted by Right Coaster at May 2, 2005 07:18 AMWith our troops bogged down in Iraq, how else is insane Bush going to envade Iran? Just nuke 'em.
Posted by Judith at May 2, 2005 02:25 PMHow is this different than 1945? The president always has and always will have the final say on who, what, when and where to nuke! That is why his official title is Commander in Chief. Why does this surprise anyone?
Posted by bigdog at May 2, 2005 04:01 PM