inkbluesky

The Vatican expands its Ten Commandment franchise
“The Vatican on Tuesday issued a ‘Ten Commandments’ for motorists to keep them on the road to salvation, warning drivers against the sins of road rage, abuse of alcohol or even simple rudeness.”—Associated Press, June 19
Justin Peters adds his own new commandments,

Ten Commandments for Airplane Travelers

—Thou shalt have patience with security personnel, for they art underpaid, and their feet hurt like those of Saul of Tarsus after his escape from Damascus.

—Thou shalt not have to pay $3 for bottled water from a price-gouging airport merchant. Instead, thou should put an empty bottle in thy carry-on and fill it at a water fountain.

More at the link.

Undoing Bush: how to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect By Bill McKibben

One of the best things about the departure of the Bush Administration will be the end of headache-creating cognitive dissonance. It has taken over institutions ostensibly devoted to defending the natural world—the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality—and turned them into organizations devoted to environmental degradation. And it has passed a set of anti-environmental laws that sound like they were dreamed up by wild-eyed nature lovers—the Clear Skies Act turns out to gut the old Clean Air Act, for instance, and the Healthy Forests Initiative has initiated a great deal of unhealthy deforestation. (”No Tree Left Behind,” someone quickly dubbed it.)

Disclaimer: I’m not a populist ( a term that has been denigrated to the point where it is almost meaningless - xenophobic Lou Dobbs for example thinks he’s a populist). So sure when President AWOL talks in bureaucratic doublespeak like a character out of Orwell that’s his fault, but he gets away with saying he’s cleaning up tons of metal particles from the air when he is actually allowing more is just as much the fault of the average Jane and Joe. Their alliance to ignorance and party outweighs their loyalty to truth and justice. We’ve had a few thousand years of lessons in tyranny and yet we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Reagan was Bush-lite leaving a legacy of debt, speaking in circles, corrupt and claiming credit for things accomplished by others. Someone once said that the publics memory of any scandal lasts about two weeks, they may have been right. Can The Decider Guy’s mess be cleaned up, sure, but the problem is the laws of conservation of mass are always in effect - it is much easier to blow things up then it is to rebuild them.

open book 1600×1200 or V for victory and Vendetta if you prefer.