Interpreting interpretations.

"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology," Dobson said, adding that Obama is "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter." (CNN)

Ah, I was expecting someone would step into the mess, but I thought it would be someone more radical. Not that Dobson is not a radical.

It is amazing how much the Religious Right want. Take this quote from Dobson: "Evangelicals are people who take Bible interpretation very seriously, and the sort of speech he gave shows that he is worlds away in the views of evangelicals."

Interpretations? If you are going to interpret the Bible, shouldn't you actually read and understand the whole book and not just selected sections or passages that say what you think they should say?

The Religious Right has been trying for years to dictate their view of morality on the population of the United States. And if Obama will not come out and say it, let me. The Emperor Has No Clothes. That goes for Mr. Dobson and the rest of those who follow his leanings.

You want to evacuate what?

Over the last two weeks, the metro Washington area has had some foul weather roll through. Heavy winds, power outages, downed trees. I have discussed this in relation to personal preparation, but now I want to discuss regional response.

Metro Washington practices, like most regions, a form of evacuation almost every day. It is called rush hour. But when you add in scattered power outages and associated debris, it becomes a rather interesting mess. Reports of traveling a few feet per minute are not unusual, but it tends to break free, but spending time logged in fractions of an hour to go a few yards is absurd, yet, it happens, more often than not and over the past few weeks it has been the norm. And that is with all major forms of transportation fully functional. Imagine the chaos if one of the forms of transportation is unavailable.

Yet the regional plan is to evacuate the area. With buses. After one finishes laughing about the mythical buses, one has to have a sobering drink to begin to absorb the real impact that any sort of disaster could do to this region if this is what a summer storm can do.

Who needs terrorists?

terrorism /0ˈtɛrərɪz(ə)m/ noun. [ORIGIN French terrorisme, from Latin terror: see terror, -ism.] Terrorist principles and practices; the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims; the fact of terrorizing or being terrorized. [Oxford Dictionary]

Terrorism, of course, has two end results. The first is usually death or at least serious injury for a large number of disinterested or uninvolved people. The second is chaos and disorder.

Over the past couple of weeks here in Washington, DC, a city that has been identified by those that know better as one of the hot spots for potential terrorism, we have been going through our out level of chaos and disorder, brought on, not by Al-Queda, but by our own human frailties and general mismanagement of resources.

Over the past week, we have had massive storms, which have included micro-bursts and tornadoes, high, oppressive heat and humidity, resulting in temperatures around 100 degrees and a minor train derailment. All of these factors have lead to a week of long commutes in an area where commuting is a contact sport and people spend far too much time doing it, as well as scattered power outages across a while swath of the region. Sadly, many of the problems, resulting from this round of natural and man-made incidents could have easily been prevented with a little forethought.

For example. In the DC area, most of the wires that supply everything from power to Internet connections are above ground, surrounded by trees. As the first round of storms (and in fact the flooding rains we had last month) have show, trees fall down when subjected to sustained foul weather, whether that is rain or wind or both. When they fall, they tend to ignore everything that may be in their path between vertical and the ground, so as a result, they bring down power lines, many of which are secured to poles with little more than staples. Live power line on the ground cause injury and death and when they are severed, they case blackouts and failures. Sometimes this is to a house, a block or the city, depending on the grid and size of the outage. We also saw that trees, planted along the Metro (subway) lines (above ground) fell across the tracks, blocking train travel. In the name of cost savings, we continue to do it to ourselves.

If the last few weeks have proven anything, it is that Al-Queda really would not have to work all that hard to bring the Nations Capital to its collective knees. Whether that is a reflection on our shortsightedness or just our own hubris is yet to be seen.