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“Children are living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

- John W. Whitehead

Dear Babyboomers,

I just wanted to wish you congratulations on your impending retirement. Could you do Generation X, Y, the Millennials, and so forth a favor before you go, and please clean up your $7,000,000,000,000 mess before leaving the workforce?

I hope you enjoyed the roads, national security, law enforcement, regulatory agencies, agricultural subsidies, clean water, social services, generalized scientific research, public schools, consumer protections, and emergency response services America’s $8.5 trillion credit account provided you, not to mention your impending monthly Social Security check and Medicaid benefits, but just because you’re going to die in a few decades doesn’t mean that obligation will go away.

You see, taxes cut while running a national debt are actually taxes deferred. They are passed along to your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. “Grandchild Tax” is far more apropos a descriptor for your decades of irresponsible spending than “National Debt.”

This debt is intergenerational tyranny. Babyboomers are oppressors, levying a tax on their unborn descendents who lack the existence to defend themselves. This is taxation without representation.

This gargantuan debt puts us at China’s mercy, threatens the GDP, and, worst of all, loots American citizens’ futures.

Your parents, the Greatest Generation, sacrificed so much to bring you a better world, but that world was on loan to you and you have a responsibility to pass it along to your progeny in fair condition.

If you will not act responsibly, then history will hold you responsible.

I just wanted to take a moment to direct readers to Just Science 2008 a collection of bloggers who have all agreed to blog only science this week and post at least once a day. There’s some head-spinning technical stuff up there and some very witty writing as well.

I had originally signed up for the event early in January; however, dropped out when I realized this week was Super Tuesday and there was no way I was gonna be able to think about Science while checking the polls every five minutes. I’ve got a couple more political missives coming this week, and then I promise to get back to more thought-provoking stuff… well, thought-provoking on my level, which is like “sniffing glue in the High School Boys Room” kinda thought-provoking.

Barack Obama came out of nowhere, delivering a suprise inspirational speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and writing two books Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, both of which revealed a remarkably intellectual individual who believes in Enlightenment ideals.

In the last four years, Obama has proven himself undefeatable in debate, delivering what youtube fans have dubbed the Obama SmackDown, where Obama refutes his opponents talking points with a finely articulated irrefutable rational response. The man cannot be Swift-Boated. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who simply has too much political history to sour her candidacy, and who cannot unite the country behind her. America has some very tough times ahead, and we need a real uniting force to get us through them.

I’ve loved this passage from Audacity of Hope, where Obama describes a computer monitor showing World Wide Web traffic patterns:

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men–nationality, race, religion, wealth–were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light.

I have been so inspired by Barack Obama’s message and his rationality, that for the first time in my life, I was have donated $100 to a political campaign, Obama needs all the support he can get to edge into the lead for this Super-Tuesday.

Barack Obama understands what the future is about.

Panamanian Golden Frog Photo by Jeff Kubina

Correction: The Panamanian Golden frog has been extinct in the wild for over a year now, the significance of the article is that documentary makers caught the frogs in an elaborate mating dance, a sort of “last wave goodbye,” before extinction… This is what I get for blogging during the superbowl.

The Hall of Fossils

Trilobite Growth Cycle

Walking through the Hall of Fossils is walking through time, from the earliest rocks to modern humans, the extensive collection of original fossils and cast skeletons either makes creationists very silly or god very deceptive.

You can view the complete flickr set here.

Blogging has introduced me lots of wonderfully intelligent, thoughtful people with whom I both agree and disagree. Blogging has also opened me up to the apparent ravings of lunatics as well. Behold, a sample of what ended up in my inbox last month:

First the quakes from global warming, then my “unusually” correct quake predictions providing warning, and then the words of those guilty of these crimes against nature and humanity. I predict unimpeachable earthquakes from global warming because those extremist Republicans and Christian substitute “slide whistles” for “thermometers” and they set about plagiarizing each other for votes, money, organ harvesting, and mass murders. Overlapping with the week of 12/30/07 - 1/5/08, only the predicted choke point of Central America has moved far north to the US/Canada/Pacific region with potential for a major volcanic eruption. (These 3 choke points also correspond to the lobes of tectonics on Mars.) Proving global warming denial is just not an extremist river in Egypt, I present the Prophet Moses and a “red” Nile leaching hidden evil from the Pharaoh to modern Evil Inhofe, Cardinal Pell, and Dr. Dobson exporting evil to Greece

This is maybe 1/10^th of the full e-mail, and it doesn’t get anymore coherent anywhere else. I found fourteen more e-mails just like this in my spam folder a month later, all from Robert J Rhodes, aka. “The Ozonator.”

OzOnatORRRRRRR!!!

My first suspicion was that this was spam-mail language, randomly generated content designed to get around a spam filter; however, not only is this odd-john filling my spam folder with this bizarre, stream-of-consciousness stuff, but he’s blasting it in comments sections all over the web, like here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Strangest of all, there doesn’t seem to be any purpose to it. Everyone in the comments threads ignores it, and all the e-mails after the first automatically went to my spam-folder. “The Ozonator” is putting a fantastic amount of time and energy into composing nonsense and putting it online.

But then I suppose the same could be said of me. : )

OzOnatORRRRRRR!!!