Sometimes a rock is just a rock

According to a website I was reading last night, the rocks featured above are Oldowan Tools:

Oldowan tools are the oldest known, appearing first in the Gona and Omo Basins in Ethiopia about 2.4 million years ago. They likely came at the end of a long period of opportunistic tool usage: chimpanzees today use rocks, branches, leaves and twigs as tools.

Further,

The key innovation is the technique of chipping stones to create a chopping or cutting edge. Most Oldowan tools were made by a single blow of one rock against another to create a sharp-edged flake. The best flakes were struck from crystalline stones such as basalt, quartz or chert, and the prevalence of these tools indicates that early humans had learned and could recognize the differences between types of rock.

Yeah, those rocks above, not *just* tools, according to this guy:

While it appears that Australopithecus garhi is associated with the earliest core tools, evidence suggests that Homo rudolfensis/habilis created the first metaphor and sense of self-becoming, the metaphor of core essence as source of sustenance. This is the origin of the concept of primordial essence, source, arche, core, heart, innate form, prima materia and the opus. This was the first metaphor of Self (deep psyche, ontogenesis). It appears to have been represented by the core itself and especially by rhomboids fashioned on cores, and at a later time in this tradition on flakes or laminar stone. Exotic crystals, shells, etc. probably also represented the principle of dynamic form emergent from a core essence or source. Spheroids (hammerstones) and anvils also played a role in this symbol system. Worked stones suggestive of baboon heads, such as that from Olduvai Gorge and later pieces that may also have been used as anvils, also may be seen as part of the system. They would be a further elaboration of the notion of the prima materia and an incipient understanding of human evolution and self-becoming.

In 2001, our world changed. No, not September 11th, although that clearly did change our world. It was announced that “IT” was coming. Initial speculation drove the as-yet-unveiled product to unique levels of excitement.

Steve Jobs claimed that it would be as significant as the personal computer, and John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet. Articles were written in major publications speculating on it being a Stirling engine or antigravity device.

And what revolutionary product was this that brought science fiction to reality, and ushered in a new age? The Segway.

Now, no doubt that the Segway has been very useful. Overweight cops move around with ease, and visitors to DC can be easily identified as they tool around awkwardly at 10 miles a minute while wearing birth control helmets.

This is not to disparage the Segway. Not even a little bit to I have some animus towards the Segway. The Segway has changed my life, just not to the level one would expect given the pre-release hyperbole. For one thing, it has been exceptional for wounded troops. I even got peripherally involved in the debate over Disney World not allowing injured troops to use them in their park. And the inventor has been a real godsend for working for our wounded brothers, as this post I did about Fred Downs showed earlier. So, I appreciate the Segway, but it’s no flying car.

Every couple of years we get some evidence which is initially purported to finally represent the embodiment of proof in Darwinian theory of evolution. Just do a search and see what you come up with. Everyone knows about the Leaky’s and their find of “Lucy” the Australopithecus afarensis specimen found in Ethiopia. It turned everything in the world on it’s head. You know how much of Lucy they found?

Now, I know nothing about this issue, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much there. If scientists tell me it is important, I will take their word for it.

Earlier this year the science world was abuzz about this find:

A newly discovered dinosaur provides a fossil snapshot of the reptiles’ evolution into birds, and neatly fills a troublesome transitional gap.

But while bird wings appear to have developed from the middle three digits of a five-digit hand, theropod forelimbs have just three digits, leaving a double-digit gap in the evolutionary record. Limusaurus inextricabilis, described in a paper published Wednesday in Nature, appears to fill that gap.

It has four digits. The first is shrunken, while the second is enlarged, as if compensating for the dimunition of the first. And though this transitional creature didn’t yet have the feather-like structures found in later proto-bird dinosaurs, it did have a toothless upper and lower jaw — in other words, a beak.

Again, not having any expertise in the subject, I will take your word for it. I have no basis to make a judgment on it.

That brings me to 3 other experts in their field.

First is Geoff Stolen Valor Millard, our good friend. According to his official bio at IVAW:

From 5th grade up to university level SGT Millard has lectured on subjects covering the war in Iraq, the Black Panthers, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Since the Iraq war did not start when he was in the 5th Grade, we can safely make the assumption that his holding forth on subjects at such an early age was probably on the latter 2 topics. And, so in tune was he that (shockingly) when he went to Iraq, he found racism. As our friend Dennis Keohane noted, an interview with Amy Goodman is a perfect microcosm of what Geoff thinks:

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Geoffrey Millard into this conversation…Can you talk from your perspective as a U.S. soldier who has returned, your reaction to this [Mahmudiya] story?

GEOFFREY MILLARD: Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Amy, it’s not very shocking to me. It surprises me that most Americans are very surprised by this, in that to the American G.I., they are taught from the day that they land in Kuwait and every moment that they move north into Iraq and every moment they’re in Iraq, they’re taught to dehumanize Iraqi people. This term “haji” is very prevalent, and to the Muslim world, the term “haji” is actually a term of endearment for those who have completed that pillar of Islam, who have made the Hajj to Mecca. But to the U.S. military, it’s a term of dehumanization, one that’s used so that the American G.I. can kill without question and who can follow an order to kill someone without question, whether it’s in a gunfight or any other situation.

Lately we’ve been all tied up with Mark Potok and his band of miscreants. (c.f. This post here.) I’ll say this for Mark though, he didn’t even need to leave the country, or have spent a day in the military (or seemingly know anything about the military) to assert that we are just replete with racist right-wingers. (A friend of my Dad’s always used to use the phrase “intermittent” to describe such an environment: “So many they are up your ass and inter your mittens..”)

So in tune with racist sentiment in the army that he can easily ignore errors like a Staff Sergeant in the Military who didn’t even know the proper abbreviation for that rank. And apparently the situation is getting more dire by the day.

Today Greyhawk links to another turd. Last year a woman working for the Human Terrain System program of BAE, Paula Loyd (a Wellesley-educated researcher):

began interviewing villagers about the price of cooking fuel – a key indicator of whether insurgents had hijacked supply lines.
[…]
As part of a new military program that uses social scientists to improve the troops’ understanding of the local population, Loyd began interviewing a gregarious stranger who approached her with a jug of cooking fuel in his hands. He talked for 15 minutes, thanking her profusely in English. But just as her guards motioned it was time to leave, he lit his jug on fire and engulfed the 36-year-old Loyd in flames.

Now, that one hit close to home for me. I think I have mentioned it here before, but I almost joined HTS. I wanted to go back to A-Stan and help the people out. I went through 3 interviews and was offered a position, but got weird vibes from BAE who wanted me to commit when they still had not put anything in writing, and had yet to mention my salary. Then I met Caro and decided I wouldn’t go.

Anyway, back to the turd, blogging at “Open Anthropology”:

Paula Loyd was not just researching, nor was she as brave as someone who travels alone through Afghanistan, without an army. Loyd was most certainly not a humanitarian worker.

I don’t know what people see in that photo above, but I imagine that few would be willing to bet their wages that there is a woman in that photo. I also cannot imagine how she would look like anything other than a soldier to a Taliban attacker, and thus nothing less than a legitimate target, and nothing more.

Let’s finish with an exercise in newspeak turned against itself. Salam was a liberator. He liberated Loyd from a prolonged career of selling her services to militarism, and thus to terrorism. Never again would she be used as a human shield by the American terrorists. However, Salam did not kill everyone on her patrol: that’s because he was protecting them.

Wow is that reprehensible. Seriously, I can’t even come up with words. But, it is what I expect from a guy who credits Ward Churchill as one of his favorite authors.

Dickhead, she was a woman, she was trying to help this country. Call me a racist if that is what this statement is, but I don’t believe in any culture it is acceptable to light a woman on fire. No more so that I found it acceptable to see injured boys filing onto base on Fridays to get treatment from being forced to serve as Catamites the night before. I believe that the mass of people in Afghanistan are like people around the world, they just want their kids to grow up in a safer, and better world than they did, and that was what Paula was trying to help them do.

My larger point is this: people tend to find what they seek. Most often though, they find something open to debate, but for them debate has already been foreclosed by other factors. I believe that Mark Potok and SPLC are indeed happy to have Obama as President, but not for political reasons. They had their mantra in place, and just awaiting such an instance. If, and this is a huge If, but IF Millard actually heard his much repeated “If the Fucking Hadji’s learned to drive” comment, it was certainly a serendipitous eavesdrop. Hell, he’d spent his whole life on the look out for just such a statement. And The Turd can’t express any sympathy for a woman trying to help a forlorn people, the death fits into what he wants the world to look like.

Well, for me, sometimes a rock is just a f’ing rock.   A Segway is another device to make life easier on us.  And as far as I know, every skeleton isn’t a harbinger of the final proof of Darwin’s infallible theory.  The military is not replete with racists any more than it is with angels being led by a heavenly general. America is not venting our racist spleens because of the President’s skin color, it’s because of his inner political bearings, that when it comes to Gov’t, bigger is *indeed* better.

Sometimes, a rock is just a rock.

Category: Politics