This website contains a handy timeline of the Bush Administration's lies...er, propaganda campaign...to push America into an unnecessary, disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Today is also known as Evolution Sunday.   Many church congregations celebrate the genius of Charles Darwin today. 

I celebrated Darwin by going to the St. Louis Zoo with my six-year old daughter. The zoo has a terrific ape exhibition area.  We focused on gorillas, and they put on a great show.   The scenary inside, including the murals on the wall might fool you into thinking the photos were taken outdoors–they were not. 

I brought a Canon S1-IS camera with me and captured some wonderful images.  For camera buffs, I didn’t do anything fancy.  I just turned off the flash and braced myself against walls, shooting through thick plexiglass.

I’m dedicating these photos to today’s army of Creationists, those intrepid souls who bravely dare to assume that the overwhelming phenotypic and genetic similarities of human animals and gorillas result from the piddling of a Creator, i.e., that these similarities are mere accidents.  Such a strange bunch, those Creationists who disparage fruitful “accidents” only when attributed to the systematic ratcheting effect of natural selection, not when when they have no rigorous explanatory basis at all!

But, I digress.

I was in awe at these marvelous creatures today.  I’m posting these photos here with the hope that they will inspire you, too.

After Gerald Ford died, we had non-stop ceremonies, processions, rituals and headlines.  Except for his family and close friends, though, most of us didn’t really know him.

What did Gerald Ford’s death mean?  A few days before the funeral, a state worker told me that a former president died and that “everybody gets the day off.”  I suspect that there was very little mourning done by state workers on this day off. 

The social vultures smelled the national spotlight, though, and they descended to partake.  After all, did you ever hear of anyone overdosing on notoriety?

Almost nobody discussed Gerald Ford in the months and years before he died. He was ignored until he died.  There is no logical reason why Ford’s death should make his life interesting. If his accomplishments were worthy of discussion at all, they would have been compelling topics while he was alive.  My suggestion:  The nonstop public rituals following Ford’s death were not really about Ford.  They were opportunities to gather together in Machiavellian fashion to pursue our own needs and wants.

I know that this sounds counter-intuitive, but please hear me out.  Almost every time you see tremendous energy being put into rituals or festivities, it’s not about the thing that people claim that it is about.  Whenever you see such great social energy being poured into anything, it’s about relationships among the living.  It’s not the thing on the stage.   We feed off of corpses, especially famous corpses, whether they be Gerald Ford, …