(click to enlarge)
Another picture from our old cottage. The setting sun mirrored in the stillness of the bay.

From the Associated Press.

>” WATERVILLE, Wash. – A Loomis couple is suing the Okanogan County drug task force over their arrest for mailing a package of catnip.

>Charges were dismissed when a judge ruled that task force agents had insufficient facts for a search warrant.

Methinks that dog had a little feline in him. Our cats go wild over catnip but it doesn’t smell like wacky tabaccy to me.

Boing Boing introduces us to Fraud Frond a site dedicated to exposing the proliferation of cellular towers disguised as trees.

I can’t really say I’ve ever seen one of these but, hell, how would I know?

George W Bush in his own words as presented by The Daily Show.

I’ve been taking it easy on the little guy for a while so let’s get things back to normal.

(From My Stolen Nation)

Are we presently in the midst of World War IV? That’s right, World War IV. What happened to WWIII you ask? This thought-provoking article by Norman Podhoretz looks at the numerous regional “conflicts” since WWII in a broader context and his observations are food for thought.

Speaking about the widening division between the US and Europe, he quotes Robert Kagan who observes:
>“On the all-important question of power—the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power—American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.”

Podhoertz writes: “…we are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play.”

The man is an unabashed Bush supporter but his take on the world since the early 50′s is well presented and more than a bit frightening.

(Thanks to Metafilterfor finding this)

Sir William Osler

>“One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”

Our local hospital is named after this fascinating man.