Friday musings...

Iran has officially changed the name of the breakfast pastry known to the rest of the sane world as a "Danish" to "Roses of the Prophet Muhammed". Before you make fun of how stupid that is, have a Freedom Fry...

I guess all this whole thing proves is that Mulim Loonies are just as nuts as our own Christian Loonies, only more violent. Dusty Rhoades had a good column about that this week. He points out that the Muslim Loonies need to take a few lessons in agitation tactics from our own All-American Loonies. Don't pillage, burn and riot. Write letters and go on talk shows. Write a book.

Hey, it got people to take this stupid "War on Christmas" thing so seriously that Target actually took down their "Happy Holiday" signs. Letter-writing campaigns by Fundy Xians often succeed in getting craven network execs to yank tv shows off the air. So don't burn embassies- go on Oprah. Or Pat Robertson. I lost the story, but apparently he agrees with you that there ought to be laws against saying anything that causes offense to any religion. As Rhoades suggested, maybe we should send Robertson to Teheran to talk with the mullahs. They are all birds of a feather...

Update: An Islamic cleric in Pakistan has just offered 1 million dollars to whoever kills "the cartoonist" (he doesn't appear to know there were 12) who drew those Muhammed drawings. Now that's the way to get folks to respect your religion- kill them if they don't. Hey, that's what the Crusades and Inquisition were all about. Good track record there. You go, guys.

Genentech/Roche is going to charge lung and breast cancer patients $100,000 a year for their drug "Avastin", a colon-cancer drug they have already made billions from, simply because that's what they figure the market will bear. "As we look at Avastin and Herceptin pricing, right now the health economics hold up, and therefore I don't see any reason to be touching them. The pressure on society to use strong and good products is there." according to a spokesman. Considering that US taxpayers paid about half the development costs of the drug, you might think we would have a say in how it's priced, or at least the chance to use it if we need it to save our lives, but apparently not. Even with insurance, the co-pay cost is estimated at $20,000 a year, out of reach of most patients. And of course the rest of us will end up paying anyway, in the form of higher health insurance premiums. So i guess if you're not rich you can just go and die, simply because Genentech thinks it can make a bigger profit. At least they admit they put profit ahead of lives...

That's more than Yahoo and Google do, with their "we're censoring our content in China because we think it will help free China" crap. Oh please.

Speaking of human rights, the UN came out with a report that says we're running a gulag down in Guantanamo (ever notice how that looks a lot like "guano"?). The US State Dept., as personified very crsiply by Condi Rice, says the UN report is a bunch of hooey; obviously you can't trust the UN, unless they are reporting on Iraq or Iran. But today Tiny Blair said the gula... I mean Guantanamo, was an "anomaly" that would "have to be dealt with". Tiny and Condi better get their stories straight. Or Tiny has to get better briefings before he opens his mouth, or Dik Cheney will be inviting him hunting...

The Greeland glaciers are melting twice as fast as originally thought, due to Global Warming, but let's look on the bright side. As the story points out- "Greenland is probably contributing more and faster to sea level rise than predicted," says glacier expert Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So it's Greenland's fault! And here all those tree-hugging psuedo-science America-hating Democrats have been blaming the US for spewing all those greenhouse-causing gases into the air. We'll it's not our fault. Blame Greenland!!

And have another Freedom Fry.