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Happened to notice a newspaper article about the movement of Pakistani troops to the Indian border in the Saturday paper a few hours ago. I haven't watched the news lately, but I read the headlines on the internet and spent more than an hour watching CSPAN this evening and I had no idea this was happening until just a while ago, which is surprising. Is it just not getting a lot of coverage? Because I'm fairly sure that now that they both have nukes, a Pakistan/India rematch would be pretty much a really bad thing.

Did some more research, and NDTV (an Indian news source) is calling it a bluff to blackmail the west (read: America) into placating them with stuff. Like we can give them anything, our economy the way it is, LOL. They also claim that the Pakistani movements aren't nearly as serious as the media is presenting, and declare that Whatever movement of Indian tanks and troops are noticed in Rajasthan is part of the annual firing exercises that various units conduct in Rajasthan's Lathi, Mahajan and Pokhran ranges in the winter months.

It's like they're saying "yeah, all the media is saying that the Pakistanis are moving troops. But we found out that they're not. So believe us, not. . . you know, everybody else. And while you're doing that, if anybody tells you that we're moving guys around in response, they're wrong. Rather than hold off on our annual firing exercises right next to Pakistan, we're just doing them right on our normal, everyday schedule even though it's liable to escalate this into bringing all manner of shit down on our collective global heads."

This article seriously makes no sense. It doesn't feel like a bad translation in terms of the normal syntactical errors that you'd expect, but the sentences just don't line up:
There are reports all over the media about heavy redeployment of forces along the Line of Control and International Border.
But NDTV has learnt that there is no significant movement of forces towards the Indian border.
Meanwhile, newspaper reports say that thousands of troops have been moved towards the Indian border.

Okay, guys? Let's just stop with the posturing. Neither of you is going to attack the other, because nuclear war is not a fun thing to play with. So why waste your resources like this? Wouldn't it be so much better to just make the other guy look stupid by not showing up? Or just go play a soccer match or something, a la Christmas Day in WWI.


To move on to a totally different topic. I realized I meant to mention: the cover of the Oregon Catholic Press reading book things ("Today's Missal") that we (and tons of Catholic churches around the US) use? They have religious art on the covers, both of the reading book and the music issue that come in pairs but always have different covers. Sometimes you can't really tell it's religious art (last month on the music one, it was this blue and purple cover cut into stained glass-esque rectangular pieces that if you squinted, you could make into a sort of 3d outline of a cross if you were looking for it), but on the reading one this quarter/season/however they divide them is a really nice piece of a Korean Madonna with Child. I was pleased, both because it was kind of pretty and because it's something different. I've always been a fan of multicultural representations of these images that are so often white-breadified. We had this Santa decoration that I think was a set of window clings of Santas in all different ethnicities, and all of them also had little tweaks to the outfit that just subtly reinforced the differentness. It was really cool. Because seriously, if you think about it? Where was Jesus from? Not America, I'll tell you that much, so I find it very highly unlikely that he's as pasty and blue-eyed as often presented.

Edit: Ooh, found ( the picture. )

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Oh, and that whole Madoff thing, and the Ponzi scheme? (I kept referring to it as "that thing that reminds me of Fonzi from Happy Days" because, having never heard of it before, I couldn't ever come up with Ponzi before I actually sat down and read a few articles about it.) Does this system of taking the next guy's money, promising big returns that you can't actually pay out on, and branching out to more and more people as time goes on in a structure that eventually collapses into a pile of economic ruin not remind anyone else of, I don't know, SOCIAL SECURITY?

Edit: Oh, LOL. At the bottom of the Wikipedia article for Ponzi Scheme (because I had to pull it up because I kept wanting to call Madoff 'Maddow') there's a link to an Internet Archive copy of a page from the Social Security Administration entitled "Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?" Guess what they're going to try to tell us? I wonder if that's why the page is (presumably, as the linker had to resort to an archive) no longer up--they realized "Yeah, guys. This is sort of bullshit. We totally are a Ponzi Scheme." /edit

Note to Washington. We gave you a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House, and a Democratic executive. You've been claiming for ages that that's what you need--let's get to fixing this thing, people. (Yeah, I just watched the West Wing episode "Slow News Day", wherein Toby tries to fix SS.)

Am I a bad liberal if I think we should raise the retirement age more? I mean, as much as it sucks for the workers, the argument is absolutely right that we're living ages beyond what we were when the system was enacted, and that it wasn't set up to support people for decades. On the other hand, living longer doesn't mean productive longer, so that's hard to get around--physical jobs you can't stay in for too much longer, and when there's threat of mental decline, that takes out a lot of possibilities like medicine, stuff you've got to be sharp for. Balancing act. I don't think we can raise it to, idk, 75 or anything, but doing the math (which, if it weren't pushing 6am with me still awake, I'd totally do right now) and figuring out how much longer proportionally we're living than we were back in 1935, mixed in with some stat on productive/workable living age (as there's no doubt somebody on one of the sides of the issue did one) should give a good number. And still make it flexible, like it is now--you can retire earlier, but just not draw quite as much.

Not that that'll be anywhere near the amount of fixing it'll take, but still. Also reading the Blagojevich report. Is it just because I'm from Saint Louis, a stone's throw from Illinois, that I can't understand why people can't pronounce "Blagojevich"? I think all the talking heads just sound stupid when they call him "Blahgo".

And I mentioned earlier watching CSPAN today yesterday. Twas because there was nothing good on while I was exercising, plus it was the SCOTUS arguments on that Kennedy v. Louisiana child rape being a capital crime case, which I posted once or twice about in the spring when they heard the arguments and possibly again when they handed down the decision in June. I totally want to be on the Supreme Court. First, because that's pretty much the coolest branch. They've kept a lot of the shrouded mystery and. . . idk, honor that's been killed by all the scandal and such in the other two branches. Plus, it's about a bazillion times better than regular judging, because if they have a question, they just interrupt you. And Scalia made a joke, which made me LOLOL just because. . . I mean, powdered wigs (which I'd totally bring back), and old guys with robes, and heavy cases that go down in history and such; you don't expect one of them to make a funny. That's the other thing though--sure, Congress can make laws, and the President can sign them or not, but only the Supreme Court really gets to send them back with not only the "4srs? bitchplz" of rejection that the President's veto can do, but the establishment of sweeping precedent that governs jurisprudence on levels reaching from the highest courts all the way down to cops reading people Miranda, and remains doing so for centuries. I wrote a couple of things on the Court for polisci that I should throw down here sometime I'm not supposed to be sleeping (I'm not really feeling that tired, but the drastic increase in typing errors killing my backspace key begs to differ), one on the modern court's lack of efficacy reigning in the expanded powers of the Bush administration and one on Justice Stevens and term limits. Because fun.