#250: Department of the Exterior

OK, it's full moon these days, so I'm a little further out on The Edge than usual, and that's usually pretty far as some would say. In any event, I was watching a Glenn Beck dvd last night with Audiovisualman and ITGuy and Glenn mentioned the Department of the Interior having to deal with offshore drilling and polar bears. Has anyone noticed that ALL the stuff the DOI deals with is OUTSIDE???!!! I looked at the website for the DOI today and here's some of the stuff they do: manage offshore drilling, manage 500 million acres of land, deal with floods, conservation, earthquakes, hurricanes, protect 1,267 endangered species (notice babies in the womb are NOT part of that list!!), wild horse and burro adoption, forests, and Indian trusts. Maybe we should redesignate it the Department of the EXTERIOR!! ;p

Then I got to thinking...We now have the Department of Defense since 1949, not the Department of War as it was originally called back for most of our history. Does that indicate a deep seated psychological change in our thinking? Wikipedia says "However, in the aftermath of the carnage of WW II, governments came to the conclusion that the use of the word “war” added, if not assumed, a bellicose attitude towards military preparedness. Thus, the late 1940s and 1950s witnessed the renaming from “War” to “Defense” in most countries around the globe." In other words, it would appear EVERYBODY decided to sugar coat the reality of their Machiavellian machinations to fool at least the public of their own lands if not the leadership of fellow bellicose land grabbers!! I believe it's Isaiah 5:20 that says, "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil." See any connection to word-changing that might be appropriate in a post-Reformational Zen Buddhist sort of way?

Awww...I gotta go plant some grass seed...outside, of course, in my own department of the interior.