h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On the news tonight: McCain had to make clear to one of his supporters, a racist old woman, that Obama wasn't an arab, as she claimed.

Plus (unrelated)an Alaskan enquiry has just concluded and found Palin guilty of misusing her power as Governor to get an official fired for refusing to fire a state trooper who had broken up with one of her daughters/sisters/relatives of some kind. Firing someone who'd done nothing wrong? And she lies all the time. Good person?


Jab

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/odd/a132410/osama-mix-up-affects-us-ballot-papers.html

Prof, I was certain you were joking! Republican dirty tricks are back with us again, folks......good people?

But the old woman did say 'Obama'.

Jab

I saw it on the news t'other day and bust outthinking Brown could do with it

There's a disconnect between McCain and some of his most rabid supporters. If McCain doesn't believe Obama is a terrorist, he's not going to base his campaign on it. In this way, McCain's integrity may lose him some votes, which I consider sad. I really do believe that he's a good man, caught in a horrendous situation. He wasn't to blame for the evaporation of trillions of dollars of stock value in just the last week, but millions of people will refuse to vote for him on the grounds that the Bush administration people who apparently bungled the managing of the economy will likely find jobs in McCain's administration, and continue mismanaging things. So, they will opt to let the Democrats mismanage things instead, figuring that they can't do any worse, and might do better.

To the extent that Obama works within the system, and submits to the rule of law, he is not a terrorist. You can't make him a terrorist by calling him one.

You can't even make it a proposition worth considering, surely! It's like you can't make the Pope a Baptist just by calling him one. Too obvious to bother with.

And of course McCain wouldn't base his campaign on calling Obama a terrorist - although Palin resorted to gutter smear politics by linking him to a former student radical American who did something or other when Obama was eight, in tghe 60's, and who has met him in recent years because he's now a professor - calling it 'palling around with a terrorist'![She didn't give the details of course].

Jab

The sky, of course, really *is* falling. There's a lot of anger right now, as people fear the ripples from the collapse of gigantic securities companies that everybody assumed were too big to fail, or too well-managed to go into default. Most of us never saw us coming, either, which makes us feel powerless. Not a good mix of emotions, surely!

Herbert Hoover was blamed for the Great Depression (some feel that the blame was not deserved), and it's too soon to know what George W. Bush will be blamed for. The other day, Bush said that everything would work out, and the markets responded by tumbling further. It's sad to show up for your job every day and be shown that nobody has any confidence in anything you say. As a lame duck President, Bush is forgotten but not gone.

But enough of politics and the economic situation. I feel guilty for this topic drift in a thread about CERN. So let me ask this question, and see if anyone has an answer: if money becomes extremely tight, will the CERN project be put into mothballs?

of again
if when they get up and running and smash things togetherapart from the light detectors, how can they say what a "particle" is, if they can't save/catch it ? and could there be something found to fill the odd gaps in the periodic table ??

There are periodicals on my table, and yes, there are some odd gaps.
There isn't a particle of hope that I will ever really understand what the CERN folks are doing, but I think there ought to be enough room in that underground track for plenty of homeless people.

the money spent would have fed loads

So would the money spent on certain recent wars.

if all the people in the world, who had assets of over £10 million, gave £1 million for food/water/housing - not one person on the planet would die of thirst or starvation

Do any of these peaople with 10 million pounds own farms or food processing plants? Chances are, they would make a profit on the food, so it would benefit them.

the problem is,life is far cheaper than money/profit and until that is addressed nothing will change. So on that count the impossible can never happen

heading for the pillow Paul, catch you later mate

They let you have pillows where you are?

The supermarket where I shop always has huge displays of high-fat corn chips in the front of the store where everyone can't avoid seeing them. (But to be fair, I have to admit that the fresh fruits and vegetables are right there next to them) Anyway, I can't help thinking about the incongruity of having 13-year-old kids who weigh 300 pounds and feel they have to go to Mexico to have gastric bypass surgery, while local food pantries can't keep enough food on hand for the people who are hungry.

Another incongruity: it is said that the amount of corn required to make enough ethanol to fill the tank of an SUV would feed a Third-world person for a year. I hope that that Third-world person can have some beans and salsa to go wuith his/her corn...

I hope, so too, because I'm hungry, and I can see his house from here.

Ask him to set a place for me, too, and I'll bring a casserole.

Sounds great, but I can't promise to bring my cayennes peppers marmalade, since all of the hot chile peppers except one atrocity of a crinkly little orange thing from Central America that gives one agonizing gas and other gastrointestinal problems have been neutered to remove the capsicin by means of application of recombinant DNA technology pursuant the capricious whims of some megalomaniac #!*+ who disapproves for religious reasons of condiments. Scary isn't it?

Or maybe the idea is to support monopolistic weaponization with pepper sprays.

You can still find condiments in the condiments aisle in Riverton, Wyoming. If you can't change it, you have to stand it....