The Crowne Plaza in the Texas Medical Center ate it Sunday morning.
There was a big crowd watching, they served Dynamite Bites; I'm just sorry I missed being on the scene. My wife slept through the boom-boom-boom of the detonation, and all I could see from my living room window was the big cloud of dust that arose and then drifted away to the north.
I spent a weekend in the ballroom of that place doing my est Training in 1984. It had a horrible parking garage, so narrow you could barely make the turns, even in my Plymouth Laser. Later that same year we met my wife's cousin Salomon for dinner there; he was down from Brooklyn for an anesthesiologist's convention.
"The death penalty ... says that to kill in certain circumstances is acceptable, and encourages the doctrine of revenge.
"If we are to break these cycles, we must remove government-sanctioned violence."
-- Desmond Tutu, writing in The Guardian ahead of a vote on a draft resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for a moratorium on executions
The Age of Dinosaurs ended roughly 65 million years ago with the K-T or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, which killed off all dinosaurs save those that became birds, as well as roughly half of all species on the planet, including pterosaurs. The prime suspect in this ancient murder mystery is an asteroid or comet impact, which left a vast crater at Chicxulub on the coast of Mexico.
Another leading culprit is a series of colossal volcanic eruptions that occurred between 63 million to 67 million years ago. These created the gigantic Deccan Traps lava beds in India, whose original extent may have covered as much as 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers), or more than twice the area of Texas.
Arguments over which disaster killed the dinosaurs often revolve around when each happened and whether extinctions followed. Previous work had only narrowed the timing of the Deccan eruptions to within 300,000 to 500,000 years of the extinction event.
Now research suggests the mass extinction happened at or just after the biggest phase of the Deccan eruptions, which spewed 80 percent of the lava found at the Deccan Traps.
Baseball's free-agent supermarket opens for business today, and Astros general manager Ed Wade apparently will be making offers to closer Francisco Cordero, second baseman Luis Castillo, pitcher Randy Wolf and several others.
Wade won't say how much money he has to spend. He'll just say that he has enough to do the things he needs to do.
Hearing this, I wanted to ask if Drayton McLane still owned the Astros. But Wade is new in town, and with us still being on speaking terms and all, I asked if he'd had the special at Irma's.
Besides, they say people can change, and maybe McLane has decided he likes spending money. Or maybe he has decided he doesn't like the way Minute Maid Park looks when it's empty in October.
Some people have called this the “thought crime bill”, and they are not exaggerating ...
This is the first terrorism-related legislation that specifically targets U.S. citizens and the vagueness of the wording is a dangerous threat to the First Amendment and to each of us in ways that have not been attempted before in the United States. The definitions in the bill hold the frightening keys to the undermining of our most basic liberty - to speak freely [bold emphasis is the O.P.'s]:
“VIOLENT RADICALIZATION - The term ‘violent radicalization' means process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."
The difficulties here are that “extremist belief system” means anything the government wants it to mean as does the word “facilitating.”
“HOMEGROWN TERRORISM - The term 'homegrown terrorism' means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
Any variety of citizen activists or organizations could be found in violation if this bill becomes law. Operation Rescue could be prosecuted under this aegis. As could CodePink.
The warning again, and your action item:
It is not extreme to say that unless you want to find out what it was like to live in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin or Italy under Mussolini where any "wrong" thought and word could make a citizen subject to arrest and worse, this bill must be stopped. Write, email, telephone your senators and get everyone you know to do so too. You can easily do that here. It might be prudent too to ask the senators who are running for president how they will vote on this bill.
