Good thing Indonesia hasn't discovered "Tort Reform"

So they can still sue when corporate negligence kills their children. Just think, if Dear Leader Bush gets his way, soon, you won't have that option.

Random thoughts regarding reenlistment.

No, dear friends, I have _not_ lost my sanity and decided to reenlist. I want to become a real boy again far too badly to consider such madness. The thought that struck me was that rightwing talking heads like to spin high reenlistment rates in returning units as being a result of high morale and job satisfaction, and a fierce desire to go back to Iraq and fight the good fight. Yet I wonder how many people who are renlisting in the Army are doing so in an effort to _avoid_ deployments. Case in point: In my unit, every single person who reenlisted between August '03 to July '04, immediately PCSed to a non-deployable, 'strategic' unit. A good chunk of the re-enlistees were people who would have been stoplossed and sent back here if they hadn't gone to another post. There was also a suspiciously high number of pregnancies, with resultant chaptering out of the expectant mothers (personally, I think women in deployable units should be required to use birth control, but that's a rant for a different day). Sure as HELL none of those who reenlisted did so because of high job satisfaction; We get treated like the proverbial red-headed step-children back in garrison. In our unit, literally EVERYTHING takes precidence over our MOS training. There were times we got pulled out of language maintenance training to pull weeds and paint sidewalks. As for ideology, well, most of the company voted for Kerry this time... Too tired to continue post. Blah.

New link

I have added Kate's blog to the list at the top of the page. Not only is it well worth reading, but she also sent a box of books over here, which Daniel was kind enough to share.

Random political thought

I used to like the idea of Libertarianism. I have since come to realize that a genuine anarcho-capitalist society would probably look a lot more like Bakunin than Grianne, and that in the real world, a society arranged along Libertarian lines would inevitable collapse into oligarchy and feudalism in short order. Still, it was a lovely pipe dream.

Hobbit update

Because everybody loves Hobbits! Especially when's it's pretty bleepin' obvious that they're not just dwarfed Homo Sapiens. Just think, until recently, 2 (possibly 3, Homo Erectus _may_ have survived alongside Homo Sapiens for a while) different species of humanity lived on the same island chain. I wonder if the Hobbits and Big People ever really coexisted, or did one drive the other to extinction as soon as contact was made? The fact that native Indonesians have always had legends about "little forest people" might be interesting, if only every other culture in the world didn't have the same legends.