Of Beetles and Men:
Let us pause for a moment and think about the confused flour beetle. Left to its own devices, the confused flour beetle will survive on flour and by cannibalizing its own kind. The benefits of cannibalization are many for the confused flour beetle. Primary among them is the assurance of survival of the species. As entomologists have discovered, if there is no cannibalism among the confused flour beetles, then they proliferate exponentially, to the point where there is no way for the colony to survive on the food supply at hand – usually a nice bag of flour. So sustainability being instinctual, the confused flour beetle, having no access to contraception, simply eats other confused flour beetles. Call it eugenics by proxy, if you want. Or self-Darwinism. Either way, the idea is eat or be eaten. Eat each other or risk extinction. It’s a brutal, but somehow logical, world that the confused flour beetle inhabits.
Yesterday, the Republican-run House Appropriations Subcommittee denied a Bush administration request for tens of millions of dollars to fund “research” into low-yield and “bunker-buster” nuclear weapons. The fear was, it seems, that such “small” nuclear weapons (although still six times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-Bomb, that pussy firecracker) would make their use more likely. Last month, the Republican-run House International Relations Committee blocked a Bush administration plan to loosen restrictions on what weapons systems Britain and Australia may buy from the U.S. Briefly returning to his Dr. Jekyll state, the usually evil Henry Hyde signed off on the committee’s report which stated the Bushkovik proposal “seems unhinged from U.S. counterterrorism and nonproliferation policy.”
The confused flour beetle, which is very similar in look and behavior to the red flour beetle, would clearly understand what’s going on.
(Just a short one today, as Blogger has been down all fuckin’ morning. But, hey, as we remember the Gipper, have a read of his testimony before the House Un-Americans Activities Committee in 1947 when, as President of the Screen Actors’ Guild, Reagan outed as Communist members of his own union. And check out this ultra-paranoid speech from 1957. Ya gotta give a guy props for consistency.)
