The Two Towers

Where does space begin?

Where does the warm, green-and-blue cradle of our homeworld finally give way, and you are left with no doubt that the hard vacuum, cold equations and sleeting radiation has begun.

It’s kind of an arbitrary altitude – the people that awarded the X-Prize, for example, chose a different distance (100 kilometers) than the boys and girls at JPL use based somewhat on the advertising-friendly smoothness and roundness of that number – but there is no doubt that there exists the Mom’s-kitchen-hospitality of the Green Hills of Earth, the lethality of space, and a boundary you cross when you move from one to the other.

And that once you have crossed over, things are forever changed.

So where does space begin?

Nick Greene, “Your Guide to Space / Astronomy” on this site has an explanation.

...space is the area above the Earth's atmosphere. However, there is no specific boundary because the atmosphere gradually thins as you move away from the Earth and you can find traces of the gasses we breathe over 100 miles above the earth. In contrast, most passenger jets fly around only 30,000 feet (5.7 miles). Even the best military jets rarely climb above 100,000 feet (a little less than 19 miles).

NASA awards astronaut status to anyone who flies above 50 miles in altitude. Others people may have differing ideas based on their own parameters.

Another thing I didn’t know until I looked it up is that the average height of an Iraqi man is just about the same as the average height of an American man. About 5’ 9”.

Currently, the tallest building in the world is Taipai 101, breaking the tape at 1,667 feet – or a little over a third of a mile.

As of yesterday morning, the number of our soldiers killed in Bush’s Folly was 2105.

Stand the honorable men and women we have sacrificed at mute, final attention -- one atop another -- and an altar to George Bush’s arrogance and stupidity two-and-a-third miles high would climb into the sky, dwarfing even the most fevered drawing-board fantasy designs for theoretical skyscrapers.

As a means of comparison, our slain soldiers stand taller than seven Taipai 101’s. Just a little shy of half the height of Mount Everest – the tallest mountain measured from sea level on the face of the Earth.

To our fallen GIs, if you round the total number down to account for the diminutive size of slaughtered women and children, and stood them heel-to-head, the number of civilians killed in Iraq would form a pylon approximately 29 miles high.

American GI’s wounded…an agonizing obelisk 17 miles high on top of that.

Each number rising, so that by the end of this, the Year of our Lord 2005, George Bush will have build a Fifty Mile edifice of misery, death and dismemberment for all the world to see. Fifty miles of pain, bricked with uncountable tons of bone. Mortared together with ruined flesh and a lake of human blood.

Fifty miles of lost lives, blasted hope and crippled futures from base to peak, rising up to touch the rim of space itself and growing like a cancer every single day.

And next to that is another tower.

It’s drier. Less passion-inducing, but terribly important nonetheless. A tower of our treasure, bled into the deserts of Iraq, lost, or simply stolen by the plunderers through which this Administration rules Iraq by proxy. Money which, both now and later, is and will be gleaned directly from the taxed sweat and labor of average Americans.

Resources that could and should have been spent making us smarter, healthier, freer and safer are now gone forever. Pissed away by Bush and his stooges and cronies. By weak men who have always leached a living mooching off the toil and talent of others.

Now for me, a buck is a buck and is certainly money, but a C-Note in my wallet feels like Real Money. And when it comes to laying out the dimensions of money, this web site does a pretty good job of concretizing the abstract.

A stack of $100 bills one-inch high is $25,000.

A lot of families in this country live on that much or less per year. A stack four inches high is $100,000, a pretty good salary for a professional or management position. A million dollars is a stack 40-inches high, a little over three feet tall. A million dollars isn't what it used to be, but if you have it and invest it with a 10% return, it would bring in $100,000 per year.

FYI, in calendar year 2003, the median income for a family of four in my state of Illinois was right around $70,000…or a stack of hundreds less than three inches high.

A sheaf of paper less deep than my thumb is long.

Remember that among the many, many, many lies we were told by this Administration was the cost of this war. We were told that the reconstruction of Iraq “pay for itself”, and that the war surely would not cost more than, say, one billion dollars.

So how high is a billion-dollar stack of $100 bills?

From the same site…

You would be amazed at how many highly educated people answer this question with "twice as high" or "ten times as high," or "as high as the ceiling." A billion is 1000 millions, which works out to be a pile of $100 bills 1 kilometer high (over six tenths of a mile)! Last year Bill Gates doubled his net worth in one year from $25 billion to $50 billion, so his income for that year is a pile of $100 bills over 15 miles high!

And based on the burn rate of our national fortune, by the end of this year the 50-Mile-High Bush Tower of Blood and Misery will have been joined by the Bush USArbusto Bust-out Tower of Lost Treasure.

And at 75 miles high and growing, that formation will punch straight through the mesosphere, heading like a bat out of Hell for Low Earth Orbit and the Van Allen radiation belt.

These are the immutable realities that govern our lives now, and strung across them like dark lights and tinsel is everything else.

The terrorist we are breeding in the cauldron we created. The retreat of the Right into an impenetrable bunker of vitriol, delusion and insanity. The damage done to our public institutions and discourse. Our international reputation, which this President has almost single-handedly managed to sabotage more effectively than any terrorist.

All of it. All of it.

These twin truths have recklessly and radically changed the orbit of the world and the foundations of our democracy for generations to come in ways which we cannot even measure.

Standing in the terrible shadows cast over the Earth by this White House and the Party that installed them in power, it is long past time for some blunt talk about catastrophe that George W. Bush has visited on our country.

Some have been leading the conversation for years now, and some have been slow to rouse themselves for fear of being slandered by the sleazy traitors that now occupy the White House, but the talk has begun…

The About-Face of a Hawkish Democrat


Murtha, With Many Military Connections, Moves From Voting for War to Urging Troop Withdrawal
By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 25, 2005; A02

Of all the Democrats calling for an end to the Iraq war, Rep. John P. Murtha is an anomaly. Unlike Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Russell Feingold (Wis.), he doesn't want to be president. He's no liberal, like his House colleagues Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) and Maxine Waters (Calif.). He's certainly the only one to call Vice President Cheney a friend.

A man of gruff familiarity -- most colleagues find it more natural to call him "Murtha" than "Jack" -- has been representing his Pennsylvania district for 16 terms, rising to become the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations panel's defense subcommittee. For that perch, he became known for his opposition to defense cuts and his willingness to send troops into battle -- and even to draft them, if necessary. He was the first Vietnam veteran elected to Congress, and has fashioned a reputation as the Democrats' soldier-legislator -- a John McCain type without swagger or upward ambition. He generally prefers the shadows of Capitol Hill to the spotlight -- though that changed dramatically in recent days.

Last week, as Congress was preparing to leave town for a two-week Thanksgiving break, Murtha told a gathering of colleagues and, later, reporters that -- although he had voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion -- he now wants American troops withdrawn immediately. "The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily," Murtha said. "It is time to bring them home."
…

And standing in the dreadful twilight of the daily, mounting Iraqi body-count, what was the mindless, whining Republican counterpunch to those who dare to ask hard questions and demand honest answers?

Same as it ever was.

Same as it ever was.

Because beyond stripping this country to the studs and handing it over to the oligarchs and snake-handlers, the modern GOP has never had ideas or policies.

Instead of thoughtful planning and careful strategy, they have always leaned on the resources George W. Bush used to prop himself up his entire life: lots of cash, lots of cronies, an army of rat-fuckers and political assassins to smash anything between Dubya and what Dubya wants, and an endless ocean of bilious and frighteningly stupid followers.

Instead of honest engagement they have loathsome toadie front-men like Scott McClellan (from the same article)

Other Republicans depicted Murtha's call for withdrawal as irresponsible and even dangerous. On Nov. 18, White House spokesman Scott McClellan described Murtha as "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party" and suggested he was advocating a "surrender to the terrorists."

By Spiro Atwater Cheney.

And House Republicans, led by none other than...

Schmidt in war of words

Rookie lawmaker's 'coward' remarks ricochet

By Malia Rulon
Enquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Three days after Rep. Jean Schmidt was booed off the House floor for saying that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do," the Ohioan she quoted disputed the comments.

Lawmakers were in the midst of a passionate debate Friday over whether to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, an issue pushed to a vote by Republicans after public comments from Murtha.

Schmidt - decked out in a red-white-and-blue suit that resembled the U.S. flag - went to the floor and quoted from a telephone conversation with Bubp: "He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course.

"He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: That cowards cut and run, Marines never do."
…

Unfortunately for this lying slice of Republican GOP slunkmeat from Ohio (same article)...

…
Danny Bubp, a freshman state representative who is a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, told The Enquirer that he never mentioned Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., by name when talking with Schmidt, and he would never call a fellow Marine a coward.
"The unfortunate thing about all of that is that her choice of words on the floor of the House - I don't know, she's a freshman, she had one minute.

"Unfortunately, they came out wrong," said Bubp, R-West Union.
…

Bubp, who has served in the Marine Corps Reserve for 27 years, including three years of active duty, said he called Schmidt on Friday afternoon to discuss the resolution that called for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq - not to talk about Murtha.

The House nonbinding resolution failed by a 403-3 vote.
"There was no discussion of him personally being a coward or about any person being a coward," Bubp said.
…

Oops. So repudiated by her "source", what do the folks back home have to say (same article)?

"How dare this idiot call John Murtha, a war hero, a coward. I am ashamed to be from her district," Gregory Moore, a 39-year-old lawyer from Batavia, said in an e-mail.

Chris Finney, a Cincinnati lawyer who led an anti-tax group in opposing Schmidt during her recent special election, said the politics of negativity and name-calling should be a thing of the past.

"People want someone who can get things done," Finney said. "She's an embarrassment to this district."

And what did Schmidt herself say about her own tactics just a month before?

Several bloggers called on Schmidt and Bubp to apologize and resign their offices. Others compared her remarks with a statement she made minutes after she was sworn in on Sept. 6.

"I pledge to walk in the shoes of my colleagues and refrain from name-calling or the questioning of character," Schmidt said then. "It is easy to quickly sink to the lowest form of political debate. Harsh words often lead to headlines, but walking this path is not a victimless crime. This great House pays the price."
…

Bwahaha!

No, Mr. Bubp, she did not misunderstand.

What she said “did not come out wrong.”

She lied.

She pulled some slander out of her ass and attributed it to another Marine so it would stick and deliberately went out of her way to knife Congressman Murtha in the back in a way that would be especially spiteful and damaging.

So what else is new?

Just another scripture-spouting shrike. Another halfwit pustule on the ass of the Party of God.

In other words, just another lying Republican.

And, yes, in the last few days the rhetoric has cooled somewhat, but why?

Certainly not just because it was dishonest and despicable – any Administration that keeps a lizard like Rove on the payroll and lets him run the country on the days when Cheney is hot-tubbing in the blood of virgins obviously has no qualms about "despicable".

The bile was dialed down only because it wasn’t working.

Remember these are the people who stood atop a pile of Bibles high enough to blot out the towers of blood and treasure the Bush Regime has already wasted in Iraq and screamed their moral superiority to the Heavens.

These are the Christopath flying monkeys that took power by riding the wake of their impeachment of a smart, compassionate President for lying about a consensual sexual relationship.

These are the people who think smart is “elitist”, and so put their entire stock into whether or not a man is a “straight shooter” and a “Good Christian.” In other words, can he use the Gospels to "disassemble" with a straight face.

Well Bush and his junta have never been either honest or Christain for five minutes at a stretch, and now, in just five short years under the Bush regime, “mendacious, sleazebag Republican” has become a completely redundant phrase.

So take a bow, Moderates.

Stand up and take a bow, because to win at the ballot box you shook hands with the Devil, and for the unforgivable sins your Party has committed, the crimes, the hypocrisy and ruin it has brought down on all our heads you have only yourselves to blame.