The Peninsula

In the room, the women come and go

Talking of Michaelangelo

Now is the winter of my discontent made grievously disgusting by the endless moral indignation running from the open tap I call my television. As Richard lamented,  without an enemy to unite against, peace will defeat us, make it impossible for us to live with ourselves, impossible to be part of any good and glorious thing. In fear of  winning, we cultivate and perpetuate outrage.


I flip on CNN just to check the stock market without having to go upstairs where the computer lives, but all I get from the usual sources is a rice storm.  Yes, yes, Ray Rice (I'd never heard of him until he sucker-punched his fiance) is a jerk who should have been punished and probably would sooner have been if his wife had pressed charges instead of marrying him, but apparently his misdeed is symbolic and therefore not to be let go with his having lost a lucrative career in the only thing he knows how to do. He's a symbol of all the men who ever abused a women and carries all their sins.

 Let the witch hunt begin, let the media shitstorm never end (until the next big thing happens) and let's ignore all the things that "alter and illuminate our times" as Walter Cronkite used to say on his long forgotten show You Are There.  No matter what 24/7 news outlet you frequented yesterday you were only where they wanted you to be and for only one purpose:  pump up the outrage, pump up the outrage, pump up the outrage, to paraphrase the song.  The CNN blond bombshell of the day looked apoplectic, slamming her fist on the desk because the NFL hadn't replied to her question the way she wanted, that question being "why didn't you ask for the video from the Royal Casino Hotel?"  The answer that they fully cooperated with authorities in their ongoing investigation isn't an answer because TMZ asked and got material the police didn't release -- or so she says, avoiding the question I would have asked her: why didn't YOU ask for it?  I would have asked her about why we don't hear about the number of  more horrific crimes against women (and men and children) perpetrated at the same time?

Of course we can't ask her nor can we get her to inform us about any of the truly momentous and earth shaking stories that alter and illuminate our times. Things that will go into the history books. We can only go to MSNBC or Headline News or God forbid Fox to hear the same relentless coverage of the same appeals to righteous indignation about the same thing.  The Fox, of course is typically under fire for being typically   dismissive of the charges since the victim married the man rather than sending him to jail, (therefore the is no crime you see) but nothing about the atrocities in Iraq and Syria, the world menace of  militant Islamic extremists, the invasion of Ukraine by a nuke rattling Russia, the danger to Europe the dangers to the world  from anti-science religious and Republican Americans, the impending breakup of the UK,  and all the other events that alter and illuminate our times.

No, all that's important and exclusively so, is that a very rich and apparently violent man punched a woman and dragged her unconscious from an elevator and wasn't punished quickly enough in a world that is spiraling toward mayhem and barbarism and where we're falling further and further behind.

But wait, there's another option right there on my screen -- Al Jazeera.  No, it isn't pro-Muslim, it isn't noticeably biased and it isn't a group of gigglers and snarkers batting their opinions around like Badminton birds -- it's just the news and a hell of  a lot more of it than I'm used to getting.  Yesterday the only news program not chewing on Rice, the only one discussing the relative dangers of ISIS and the Sovereign Citizen movement, even interviewing a proponent of the latter rather than making gross generalizations and offering selected facts and attempting to blame it on Obama.

That, of course,  and the Arabic name as well is enough to make it unwise to cite Al Jazeera in an essay or to bolster an argument in our polarized world of pre-packaged opinion and store-bought personality, but this morning's article about Bullets and Burgers and the American attitude toward guns on their website is the best and most accurate and least biased thing I've yet read on the subject.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm still offering no hope for a bright American future. We will continue to fight like cats in a pillowcase until we're helpless in a world that has no further use for or tolerance of  our stench. Bang? Whimper?  Not really. More likely a lot of screeching about how a thousand dearly beloved causes are being ignored, this faith or that is being offended, this party or the other is ruining the country and trashing its principles and the latest new gollygeewhiz offering from Apple as we fade into self-absorbed irrelevance and oblivion.

Reading the Trolls

Troll infections seem to come in clusters. Often frustrated trolls will assume multiple identities so that they can get in another word before they're identified and locked out or perhaps they enlist other trolls down at the International Brotherhood of Morons hall to join them, but they do arrive, each one confident and bright-eyed and sure that some totally irrelevant and baseless observation will cause great consternation amongst the 'Libtards.'  Sure that they can get away with posing as wise and informed and superior as a brown shirt in a beer hall.

I used to have a Shi-Tzu; 12 pounds and elderly, he never hesitated to go after pit bulls and dobermans, pawing the ground and snarling, leaving me to sort the matter out with the usually laughing owner of the other dog. He never learned.  He never could. He was a dog and driven by a dog's instincts. Humans could laugh and drag the animals apart.

But that was in the real world.  The blog world exists in the dark where both the bystanders and those who hold the leashes are invisible. Whence cometh our help?  Don't look up, there's nobody there.  So the guy who shows up under some assumed name, thinking himself a political lion, wearing his Tea Party Ghost Shirt and weighing in with a 97 IQ never has the opportunity to feel shame or hear the laughter directed at his idiocy. As far as the dog was concerned he won every "debate."

Even the pathetic 12 year old with a spray can and a backwards hat can, however briefly, see his initials on the boxcar or warehouse wall. The troll doesn't always have that pleasure unless of course we give it to him by making  the mistake of taking him seriously enough to explain why his treasured contribution is wrong. His only purpose is that brief feeling of significance he gets from making you angry. Reply and he wins. Treat him with dignity and respect and you lose. He's a troll.

Prove him wrong and his argument false?  That's usually, as the inimitable Arnold would say, a Big Mistake, because of course, you can't refute tags like "Obama is a turd" by any rational means, nor can one convince the Klansman or the village idiot that a spray painted swastika on a synagogue isn't just hilarious.  One can only delete, paint over the grafitti before the troll's friends get to admire the shit stains.

More problematic than the "taggers" are trolls who have bought the little red book, full of slogans and shibboleths, talking points and lies so rank and septic you just can't resist that all too easy seeming shot to the head.  They may appear on the surface to be amenable to an easy and irrefutable proof of their error, but it's a trap because one is, in essence, arguing with a zombie -- a mindless program consisting of  countless IF THEN GOSUB routines (for those of you who remember FORTRAN) which take each unassailable observation, every brass bound QED, every thermonuclear refutation and return some irrelevant reply that steers your argument out into the back alley by the dumpster where the thugs lurk.

"No sir, the Blue Cross policy you buy through the ACA does not have hidden provisions to murder your grandmother and prevent your doctor from removing that infected appendix."  Easy to prove, but suddenly you find yourself  arguing about how denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions is what Jefferson devoutly wished for America and how Hitler used guaranteed access to health care to gas the Jews and how Obama is a Muslim, Communist, illegal alien and you're in a labyrinth where every branch has a thousand branches and a Minotaur at every turn.  Health care reform is the worst thing ever to happen in America and worse than Slavery, and Obama will eat your children. They're hear to shout that and not to argue with you.

Annoyed and frustrated trying to prove that A times B equals B times A to a senile Shi-Tzu with cataracts and poor hearing?  That's what the Tea Party is all about; reading Doctor Suess to Congress and blaming the Democrats for not ignoring the law.  Losing the chess game and turning over the board.  Starting a one legged blind man as quarterback and then kidnapping the referee until he "cooperates" with your "negotiation."

The one reason I enjoy The Swash Zone is the comment section and the regular participants. The reason I want to quit, to move to some remote Caribbean cottage with no internet, is the comment section.

TV shows like The Walking Dead have become the metaphor for the Idiot's Crusade and worse -- at least the zombies are independently devoid of brains and full of destructive rage.  The Republican insurgents are being directed, used, sent out like biological weapons to destroy Democracy for a purpose. It's a zombie apocalypse and there are just too damned many of them and more all the time.  Reading the trolls, writing the same things after all this time, getting nowhere leads me inexorably to that one overwhelming question:  Belize or Dominica?

Apocalypse fer sure

By Capt. Fogg


Well folks, here it is again. The doomsday circus is back in town and guess what's happening in the big top in less than three days - that's right, it's the rapture and we're all gonna die screaming! OK, maybe some of y'all are actually Holy Smoke Church members and won't have to sit here through the tectonic shimmy, the lakes of fire and all the other rides while Jesus, like some Mexican wrestler with a gruesome mask is gonna kick some infidel ass, but not yours, Mr. camo pants. You get to go to the magic kingdom. You'll have to leave the truck behind, of course.

Yes, May 21, 2011 is right around the corner and Doomsday, as it has been countless times before, is almost here. For perhaps the first time however, these prophets have recognized that there are a dozen time zones and so Saturday at 6:00 PM, starting at the International Date Line out in the pacific, the apocalypse will march across the planet at a thousand miles per hour - boy can those horses move! That means we'll get to watch it all on TV as that Titanium robot, or whatever Jesus comes dressed as these days. kicks hell out of Asia and moves on toward Europe. That will give a lot of people her in God's own US of A enough time to convert and yes, you can do it on line through Paypal.

Not me though, It's going to be months before the planet is cleansed of disbelief and animal life and since the righteous will no longer be here, I get to grab their trailers and second hand pickup trucks and ATV's and firearms and stuff and me and the other heretics can shoot guns and barbeque like Ted Nugent. It's gonna be a hell of a party - as long as the beer don't run out before that lake of fire thing.

Anyway, the Rapture should hit the fan at my house at 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight time according to God's infallible plan. That's about the time pious Jews will be ending the Sabbath and I'll be watching it all unfold from poolside and I'll have plenty of ice on hand. Perhaps I'll live blog the whole thing. Stay tuned.

Cities of the plain

By Capt. Fogg

There are people who give Free Speech a bad name; people who use any freedom the government protects to undermine and destabilize and overthrow that government and exploit the population -- and all for personal ( and corporate) gain.

Such are the shadowy, entities behind the multi-headed beast pumped into a frenzy by unaccountable and uncountable millions they get for the purpose: entities like SOCYBERTY.COM whose recent post was sent to me by a breathless Republican eager to impart the secret knowledge that no, President Obama did not give the order to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan because he is a dithering, indecisive coward and the reins of government have been pried from his trembling, black hands. You see, Leon Panetta had to "override" Obama with the help of cabinet members and that eye-rolling Minstrel Show clown is too afraid now to tell the truth. Holdouts like Valerie Jarett aren't telling us either because of the "investigation back in Chicago" but there was a silent coup and Obama is no longer in control.

"What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound."

Of course no news agency; not ABC or NBC or FOX or CNN or BBC or Deutsche Welle or al freakin' Jazeera knows about this, only SOCYBERTY.COM and all the other PAC funded heads of the same hydra who are cutting and pasting and posting these stories. Google it and you'll see. They have secret sources in the cabinet, you know, who will commit treason only for them.

Sure, we can see it as the desperate death throes of a humiliated racist party, a wicked witch melting and hissing on the floor, but I can't forgive it and I can't forgive the people who e-mail it around the country like some titillating photo of some stoned starlet getting out of a limousine in a short skirt. I can't forgive, I can't forget and while old Yahweh was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of ten good citizens, no God worth his scriptures would forgive a country that contained ten such unpunished liars as these.

The long history and bright future of the end of the world

Prophets are always disappointed dear Nostradamus. That's why new ones are always in the wings updating the catastrophes

-Andre Codrescu-

I remember the late 1970's when the new-agers were petting their pieces of quartz and telling us in solemn reverential tones that Mother Shipton had predicted the end of the world in 1982; although some said 1981.

The world to an end shall come

In nineteen hundred and eighty one.

Such is the malleability and durability of prophecy. Although prophecies said to be from the Yorkshire prophetess born in about 1488 were published in 1641, eighty years after the reported end of her days, they really didn't predict the end of the world but rather a series of catastrophes in the vague idiom of soothsayers and fortune tellers throughout time. In fact it's questionable that she ever lived, much more questionable that she was Satan's daughter, glowed in the dark and was not the fabrication of 17the century writers. Her prediction of the death of Cardinal Wolsey, for instance, was published years after the man died.

In the air men shall be seen,
In white, in black and in green….
Iron in the water shall float,
As easy as a wooden boat.

It wasn't until the mid 19th century in 1862 that Shipton's startling predictions of things like balloons and telegraphy and diving bells and England finally allowing Jews to live there appeared courtesy of Charles Hindley, who wrote it and publicly admitted of having done so. Of course he had predicted eighteen eighty one as the end time, but someone in the wings was happy to update it for the next century's crop of 20th century gulls.

Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Around the world thoughts shall fly
In the twinkling of an eye.

Perhaps not so startling having been written in the age of steam transportation and the telegraph, of iron ships and submarine boats and hydrogen baloons, all of which existed already in Hindley's time. It's almost biblical in having predicting things ex post facto and passing off of current idiom as the dialect of the remote past. Any passing familiarity with late 15th century English should have set off alarms, I should think, but it's no surprise to find such ignorance amongst the hip and eager cognoscenti.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.

-Henry David Thoreau-

Few of the crystal gazers, if any, bothered to risk the delicious feeling of being in the know to the extent of finding out that it was a hoax. Indeed, even today one finds lengthy and utterly fictional web posts about stealing the prophecies of Mother Shipton from secret rooms at secret libraries where the scrolls had been hidden "by the government" so as not to panic the people. Delicious indeed and it seems to fill some human desire for arcana, for ancient wisdom and the cheap high it brings. There is always someone to fill that need whether it be political groups with dire warnings about NATO hiding H bombs under Philadelphia, Obama hiding death panels in his health care reform, Mayan prophecy or some equally ludicrous cataclysm from John of Patmos.

Certainly most things will in time have an end; perhaps time itself, but it's not so much the knowledge of the inevitable that intrigues us, enthralls us, but the idea that the processes of entropy, the chaotic randomness of the universe have something to do with our species and its thoughts and actions and the myths of our more ignorant ancestors. Secret, undetectable energies and entities with the secret hopes and fears are delectable and they distract us from the utterly uncaring, incomprehensible emptiness of existence. They create a universe in which we might mean something, might feel at least temporarily superior to the other lumps of fragile mortality around us and so in twenty one and eighty two, Old Mother Shipton will have predicted yet another end and perhaps the Mayans math will be updated or reinterpreted and mankind reprieved for a hundred years. Jesus' ETA will still be imminent, the hidden Imam about to be revealed and the last days yet at hand. We'll still wave pieces of quartz and utter powerful words and formulae from an invented past. We'll still have some ancient calendar and myth. We'll still follow, as we were meant to

One that would would fain seem wise and learnt, and is but a fool and an ignorant self-conceited gull.

-John Florio-

There will be no final day I hear
While prophets whimper in our ear
of signs and portents in the skies
and issue forth unending lies.

Into the crystal ball we'll gaze
the obvious shall seem a maze
But never mind and never fear
It won't all end until next year.

-Father Fogg-

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Yes, those were the days Archie and Edith Bunker sang about and the man who led us from market crash and credit crunch into full blown depression by blaming the workers instead of the actual causes. Somehow we've forgotten that Archie the lovable, small minded bigot and ignoramus was supposed to be a joke.

I admit it, I went and hid my head in Caribbean sand for a week so I wouldn't have to watch the madness, the hysteria and the lies, or endure the Fox News fits and fables -- or most of all, witness the continuing spectacle of my country eating itself alive out of a desperation to keep doing what always produces everything we're trying to fix. Sooner or later however, and Hurricane Tomas argued for sooner, one has to come back and face the discord.

It isn't easy. It isn't easy to accept that Americans will support politicians that truly are nowhere near as smart as a fifth grader and that Americans will elect politicians who don't think the government has any business interfering with our "right" to abuse and exploit and segregate other Americans or to accept that Americans will just childishly stay home and let some 20% of the voters put a plutocrat affiliated with a billion dollar medicare scam in the Florida Governor's mansion out of contempt for "elitism" and because Obaaaaaaama and the 'Librils' haven't restored the Bush bubble, the Bush soaring debt, the Bush job loss, the Bush expansion of Federal size and power, the Bush redistribution of wealth, the Bush disenfranchisement of voters and infringements upon civil rights soon enough to please them. Yes, that's a hell of a long sentence, but how we sank this low is an even longer story and when it comes to telling it, it's not me whose head is buried in the sand.

No, after 8 years of job stagnation, job loss and declining earnings, all we'll be hearing about is about that 9.6% unemployment Obama created without any help from Bush's tax cuts and wars -- and we won't be remembering the 9.5% unemployment in Reagan's first term. ( nor his tax increases nor the effect they produced) We'll hear the gloating and bragging about the president's low popularity although Reagan's was lower at the same point in his career. We'll hear about profligate spending, but not a word about the payback with interest that tells a different story. We'll keep hearing about the debt, but not the policies that produced it and how it can only be solved by a policy that has produced the largest government sponsored redistribution of wealth in our history without creating a single new private sector job -- a policy that must be maintained for fear of Communism. Like Archie, we'll keep longing for that romanticized version of a Hobbesian hell with every white man for himself, minorities in the minority, stragglers will be shot and no prisoners taken. We'll keep ignoring reality and we'll keep repeating the slogans as we count our beads, fabricating facts and citing false history when we pay attention to history at all.

Meanwhile the sand is warm and the hurricane is moving out to sea. . .

Stop the Universe, I want to get off

So Stephen Hawking tells us there may be a nearly infinite number of universes. I had to wake up in this one, this morning.

Illegal immigrants should be shot on sight, says one Republican. It's like Stopping Hitler, you know -- worth the price.

President Obama looks like a Demon, says Rush.

"And I don't say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look."

Of course there's no separation of Church and State, says Constitutional Scholar and former witchcraft dabbler, Christine O'Donnell, who in spite of her publicist's best efforts, isn't me.

Nancy Pelosi is a puppy killer says the GOP.

O'Donnell isn't a nut job, says John McCain -- because she won the Republican primary.

You know, I'm not even going to comment on all this. Too busy packing my bags.

Bullshit

"The wheels of commerce are greased with bullshit"

I don't know who first said it, but it's been passed down in my family for at least a couple of generations. It's true, of course, and it's doubly true of politics. Americans seem to have more fondness for the substance than an African dung beetle and far more ability to swallow huge quantities of it. Bullshit is perhaps the one thing you can have and eat and you certainly can do both and pass on more. Despite our horror of wealth distribution, we do love to share it.

A local souvenir shop made the papers over the weekend, for a huge display of Obamahate items, including an alleged explanation by the president of why Michelle hates the flag. Of course he never said it and it was long ago exposed as having been invented by the Bullshit machine formerly known as the Republican party. Yet it's too precious to let go and the dung beetles formerly known as Republicans are still eager to rub it all over themselves, smear their own walls with it and share it with you without any concern for facts.

Remember the headless bodies Arizona Governor Jan Brewer talked about - the rising crime rate that necessitated 'special handling' for anyone appearing to be of native American descent?
You guessed it, like Saddam's WMD, it's all bullshit and unlike the perpetrators of that disastrous hoax, she's willing to admit she made the whole damned thing up to get votes. Think that's the end of it? Surely not and the headless Mexicans will be talked about long after Washington Irving's tale of Sleepy Hollow disappears into the past -- and they'll be blamed on Obama. It will all be blamed on Obama and more so because more aliens are being deported than by the previous administration, fewer are getting in and crime associated with illegal immigration is going down. Why drink the watery light beer of fact when that Bullshit brew is so much more filling?

Does it matter that the President is not a Muslim? Not as long as Fox is out there spending millions, contributing millions, to tell you he is and that they are doing it is Obama's fault anyway. Bullshit sells the worse it smells.

Think Climate change has nothing to do with human activity? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but what you think you know about it has much to do with the Oil Tycoon Koch Brothers who spend a fortune fighting the idea and financing the "Tea Party." Why does that tea taste so much like bullshit?

Think those Climategate e-mails were proof of a vast conspiracy? Sure you do and sure you don't care that they were edited and redacted to make them seem to say something they didn't. Rupert Murdoch and his Arab Oil allies spent more millions to produce enough bullshit to roll in to make all the dogs in America happy.

Those incriminating ACORN pimp videos --- smell that warm bullshit! Why give it up just because it was another right wing media hoax? Since Fox never bothered to tell you that, you can pretend it's still true and you can just keep rolling in it.

I could go on, because the bullshit never stops, but I'm tired of the futility of living in a country where "if it feels good, believe it" is the state religion and where people will fight for their beliefs to the death. We don't live in an information age, we live in a bullshit age. We love Bullshit because it fertilizes the egos of the uninformed.

If these are indeed at last the end times, we can be sure it will not all end with floods and it won't be by any divine agency. It will end with bullshit and it will be your own damned fault.

Season of the Witch

The people who hate government, who talk as though we would become something like noble savages in its absence, who insist that all we need are free corporations, crowded jails, a bloated military and kangaroo courts to become a free and prosperous nation will, should that disaster overtake us at last, be entirely responsible for the poverty, chaos and oppression that will inevitably ensue.

Will the process that's been so noticeable since Nixon's retreat result in civil war, or will the collapse of government be as invisible as a black hole in the midst of the raging litigation now being planned by the Republicans to mark their return to power? The legal assault on Bill Clinton, that was retribution for the legal actions taken against felonious Richard Nixon and his corrupt administration, was notable for its attempted parity.

Charge for charge, and almost word for word, the Gingrich gang and its Starr inquisitor attempted to make charges of propositioning a woman payed handsomely to make them, and having asked his secretary not to tell his wife into impeachable treason. That the Democrats have again usurped their perceived mandate of heaven and taken control ( sort of) once again, plans are already being made to cripple Barack Obama as they did Clinton, come November 8th and never mind that Obama seems faithful to his wife -- it doesn't matter.

" Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) – are quietly gearing up for a possible season of subpoenas not seen since the Clinton wars of the late 1990s,"

says Politico today.

"How acrimonious things get really depend on how willing the administration is in accepting our findings [and] responding to our questions,” adds Kurt Bardella, spokesman for the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who refers to his boss as “Questioner-in-Chief.’"

I'm assuming Obama won't readily accede to the inevitably trumped up and specious charges, but you never know, judging from his restraint in bringing up the GOP's singular failures, gross misrepresentations, war crimes and constitutional infractions, but acrimonious? That's as close to real humor as a Republican has ever come.

There are no angels in this dogfight, but the Republicans have an undeniable record of unrestrained, immoderate and rabidly vicious assault on all fronts when they're defeated and more so when that defeat is so clearly merited. They don't like rules except when the rules protect them. They love secrecy but decry it in others. They don't like taking responsibility for their failures, but find fault with anything and everything in their opposition and they don't give a damn if they're right or wrong as long as they gain power.

The November elections are only two months away, but the pyre is already under construction waiting only for the witch hunt to begin. It doesn't matter what Obama does or whether he succeeds or fails. I doesn't matter if he picks up every stitch, it's still going to be the season of the witch.

The ownership society

So now it's "Obama's Mosque" and why the hell not, since there appears to be no bottom at the deep end. All the hysteria about the "most far left liberal politician since Trotsky" has all the traction of a bald tire on a wet road as Obama panders to the right, the Birther blowhard, Orly Taitz, would up in contempt of our most conservative high court and the legion of dire prediction demons has failed to infect anyone but the swine. We didn't fall into a deep depression and slowly, most things are getting better. Half the TARP funds have been repaid at interest. No army has poured across our weakened borders into the arms of Obama, the flow of illegal aliens has diminished and deportations are up substantially despite all the howling. Obama isn't rounding up Republicans, we haven't turned the army over to the UN, and yes, his ratings although they've fallen since he was elected, are still better than Ronald Reagan's.

Of course the predictions of recession that were denounced as treasonous by the right wing chorus during the previous administration did come true, the reasons for the most expensive war in our history were false and the benefit of the radical tax cuts not only failed to materialize but produced no new private sector jobs and earned us a 8 trillion dollar loss. But enough of that liberal America hating treason -- it's Obama's fault for bailing out US business, even though Bush asked for more money and less oversight. It's Obama's fault and the Mosque that isn't actually a Mosque located in what isn't the World Trade Crater in a neighborhood with a substantial Muslim population and where there's already a Mosque must be shown to belong to Barack Hussein Obama.

And why not? They're already snickering that he isn't Jesus Christ and if he were, I'm sure they'd make sure the analogy was perfect. It's Obama's Mosque and when that blows over, there will be some other idiotic calumny and on and on, while there continues to be nothing useful and nothing that hasn't been debunked or proven disastrous coming out of the racist right wing rabble of hare brained hooligans posing as patriots.

So now it's Obama's Mosque as if his predecessor hadn't spent far more time in them, praising (to his credit) Islam and Muslims as a religion of peace and peaceful people and good Americans. It's Obama's fault and they'll take back America: xenophobic, imperialist, feudal, monopolistic, theocratic, undereducated, over opinionated, 'we're number' one America where Beethoven is a dog, Michelangelo is a virus and a Mosque that isn't a Mosque is Obama's and a recession that isn't Obama's is.

Have a little tea with Ted.

Ted Nugent; where do I begin? Where does it end?

Obama is not only spitting on the constitution, but the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, he says It's hard to see the evidence and it's hard to know why he was silent about the unprecedented abuses during the Bush administration, unless we conclude that he's either psychotic, or a lying son of a bitch. The former seems certain, but of course much of it could also be attributable to ignorance. That he believes all Americans are commanded to worship Yahweh alone and keep a Kosher household and that the government is remiss in not enforcing this, can only be attributed to insanity - if indeed he believes or is even aware of anything he says.

I confess that I can't find any way to fit that old Golden Rule thing into the equation but for the fact that he's treating our basic institutions with extreme contempt while asking for something different than a government of laws and not of mobs for himself and his fellow tea heads. He certainly can't be saying that we shouldn't invade other countries or bomb civilians or overthrow elected governments because we don't want it done to us, because his favorite presidents are as famous for it as he is in being silent about them. Again, only rank insanity balances that equation.

"With the Mao Zedong fan club in the White House, a clueless, rookie president hellbent on spending like a maniac as unprecedented debt piles up all around him, and every other imaginable indicator of an America turned upside-down, it comes as no surprise that this insane level of madness has metastasized into a Supreme Court wherethe Bill of Rights is being trashed by clueless, dangerously insulated old people intentionally disconnected from the real world"

he says to Insanity Hannity about the dissenting vote on the Chicago handgun ban. I suppose he thinks Obama appointed those judges and that this hasn't been a contentious issue for a lifetime or two. But who knows what he thinks or if he thinks when he wraps himself in the flag and spews his tea at us. Surely it isn't often or deeply since he claims that Martin Luther King is his mentor and yet he's fond of shooting machine guns in his back yard.

Certainly it's more than hyperbole and more than just ignorance to call the administration a Mao Zedong fan club, certainly it's more than mere hypocrisy to blame Obama for trying to do what FDR did to ease the Depression and to ignore the fact that each and every Republican administration, at least from Reagan onwards, has set new levels of government size, expense, corruption, spending and borrowing while the Democrats haven't. But this is Ted speaking: Ted the flag waving teabagger who claimed to have been clean and sober all his life when talking to the Fox mob but to have dodged the draft by smoking Meth when talking to Rolling Stone -- and then tells us that he was lying to them but telling us the truth.

This is Ted blaming Obama for going after his massive arsenal of weapons when he didn't and the Court for banning them when it didn't. This is Ted telling us he is the will of the people, free elections and a majority vote to the contrary. This is the devil in a cowboy hat. This is horseshit wrapped up in a flag like some foul taco. This is just the failure they warned our founding fathers about.

Indeed, where do we begin with the Ted Nugent story when Ted Nugent himself says he's a liar and an addict and doesn't know MLK from Chuck Manson or Mao Zedong from a wishy washy middle of the road conservative? I don't know. I don't know where the teabag story ends either but it certainly doesn't end in a free, democratic country.

Absalom

But, oh! for Absalom,--

For his estranged, misguided Absalom,--

-Nathaniel Parker Willis-

What could be more fun that spending a sunny 73 degree Saturday at the County Fairgrounds with hundreds of fellow Hams, looking at equipment, attending seminars on ionospheric science and space weather and browsing the flea market? Perhaps a day free of Obama Derangement Syndrome; a day without having to hear that the roads are so bad in Chicago because "that's where Obama's from." I'd like to be able to discuss APRS without hearing that "Obama turned off Loran-C in order to make us all helpless so that the USSR will have an easier time taking over and making us all Communists. Obama, O-BAHma, OOOOH-Baaaaahma; the braying of asses in the Florida sun.

I'm tired of hearing that Shirtless Joe from Snakeshit Junction doesn't feel safe from Pelosi and the Gummint Gungrabbers with only 10,000 rounds of .223 in his house in the swamp or that "if taxes get any higher we're gonna have to have another revolution." Joe's actually getting a tax break this year, but I guess he's worried to distraction about how Warren Buffet is going to like the extra 2%. He never said a peep about the three trillion dollar war because he supported the troops. He'll never in his life make enough to approach that bracket.

I'm tired of the daily delivery of e-mail lies about health care reform and how everything from the Postal Service to the Pentagon is not only dysfunctional, but Maoist, Trotzkyite, Marxist COMMINISM! I'm fed up with hearing about Obaaaaaaaaaaaahma's plan to import and support illegal aliens at public expense, make Capitalism illegal, turn the schools into brainwashing centers and do away with private property.

Two years ago I watched my mother die, her brain eaten away by disease until she was unrecognizable and recognized no one, and I feel the same way watching my country turn into a pit of bloody, barking dogs tearing themselves apart. Unwilling to be governed and unwilling to participate in government, demanding the lawless freedom of the wild animal and total protection from all harm and all at no cost we howl at the moon. Suspicious and angry of everything and everyone; we're not the patriots who founded a secular, democratic republic and we don't even remember our real history as we brag endlessly about freedom.

No, Jesus was mocked, abused and scorned once again in the streets of Ohio as he's so often been and by the same kind of people -- whether it was in Salem or Selma or Jerusalem or Birmingham, and nobody cares. We brag endlessly and lie constantly about "Christian" values none the less; force Christian oaths on ourselves and demand the tyranny of Natural Biblical law instead of Democracy and we call the radical treason "conservative."

What does one do, powerless to stop the mortal decay of our closest kin, whether it's a mother, a father, a son or a country, yet unable to bear the sight of it?

. . . misguided Absalom,--

The proud bright being who had burst away

In all his princely beauty to defy

The heart that cherished him--for him he poured

In agony that would not be controlled.

It's not true

Nothing is true, all things are permitted
- Hassan i Sabah -

No, I didn't watch the State of the Union Address Wednesday and I haven't read the transcript and I don't care what it says because it doesn't matter. As Justice Alito said, "It's not true." Nothing is true, at least nothing that the opposition, the enemy says and we're all the opposition and we're all the enemy, listening only to ourselves and the prophets who repeat what we want to hear. We're all the majority of course; silent or otherwise and if we're also the persecuted minority, vide supra. The other guy is always Guy Fawkes, plotting to destroy order, even though order itself is the enemy and war is the goal and peace is for the weak.

As the persecuted minority, anything we do is permitted; anything even if it means selling our country to global robber barons and promoting 'every man for himself' anarchy and if we fall down, if chaos comes, we will just deny it and chant the doctrine of less government or more government or whatever it is, because nothing is true and all things are justified.

No, frankly my dear reader, I don't give a damn. I was foolish to hope that the dogs of the fallen regime wouldn't bring down the next one and that the cancer it planted in the court wouldn't aid them in setting the stage for our next Republican president, our first wholly owned president and a subsidiary of Exxon or Humana or KBR or Halliburton or the People's Bank of China. It's a small world after all and there are a lot of hungry giants.

Yes, they failed to privatize Social Security, they only partially succeeded in privatizing the military, but the goal of privatizing The Legislative and Executive branches is about to follow the privatizing of the Court. Behold the United States of America, inc - or GmbH or SA or Ltd or whatever floats the global boat. But it's not true, as the judge said. You never really wanted reform, did you? No, it never happened and this isn't happening and it's all going to be all right -- just look at the light.

Considering the Source

As you may have noticed, I'm ambivalent about global warming and reluctant to argue for or against it. Whether or not it's an ongoing process subject to random variations lasting a decade or a century or many, many centuries; whether burning fossil fuels and deforestation are a major factor in any trend or whether or not much can be done about it are moot questions once one realizes that the human race won't do any more about its behavior and its environment than yeast fermenting in a vat will do to prevent the alcohol it excretes from poisoning it. We won't do a damned thing until we have massive famine and drought and huge uncontrollable migrations and bloody wars to stop it. Even then we will not spend any money on change because there will be " a war on" and we won't allow ourselves to afford it.

If, in 200 years, we're all baking and the tundra is a rain forest and Kansas covered with sand dunes, the "conservatives" will find or invent some scapegoat, invoke some hoax or alternative explanation. On the other hand, if things haven't changed much, change, like Armageddon will still be a dire threat, just around the corner, lurking in new technology and demanding that we go back to riding horses, living in the dark and taking cold showers once a week.

Face it, not only are we thoroughly irrational, self centered and dishonest apes who love our opinions above all else; not only are we not very smart, but we simply can't deal with the immensity of time and the transience of our species. We've all got to go sometime and we all will -- and if you're one of those people who likes to talk about our planet as a living entity that needs to be saved, perhaps the sooner, the better.

I have too much respect for science to indulge in the certainties and partisan bravado both sides have barricaded themselves behind. Nobody is completely right and all projections become blurry as they are extrapolated or trimmed to fit the opinion and it's all very obvious that the certainties seem to swarm most heavily around those with no background whatever in atmospheric or Earth sciences. Why this should be such a political dispute, I do not know. I remember well the Geological dispute between Static isostasy and plate tectonics but I doubt it ever came up on the Senate floor or that Joe the anything had any awareness much less a militantly expressed opinion -- even though it was heavily disputed and careers began and ended over it. It was settled, in the end, by irrefutable data, not by politics or by gyrating TV pundits bellowing like blue-assed baboons about conspiracies.

My inner suspicion is that the apparent lack of facts, the apparent contradictions and the apparent conspiracies appear sharpest through the glass called "I don't want it to be true" but I know full well that cataclysmic predictions have had a very, very poor record of accuracy.

While other popular disputes can be better understood by looking at the demographics; the viral etiology of AIDS, for instance. The origin of species through natural selection, the great age of the Earth: these things after all are threatening to some religious certainties. Climate change may be more independent and may even fit into apocalyptic molds. I'd venture to speculate however, that those who become most irate at the suggestion that the post industrial revolution climate has been altered by that human factor are those who fear government itself -- and that those who feel an imminent threat and want something done right now are those whose fear of industry and the political power of industry feeds an opposite attraction to government action.

None of us can really handle the truth, nor do we want to. What we do instead is to vilify, to deny, to attack. Is Christopher Monckton, one of the loudest UK naysayers indulging in neurotic denialism or are his opinions driven by rigorous scientific investigation? Does the fact that he also thinks we should round up all HIV positive people and imprison them for life argue for his intellligence? Does his comparison of those who find evidence of man-made climate change to Nazis really inspire confidence in his objectivity? Then again do the kids carrying signs and painting themselves green really have any background making their opinions worth listening to -- or do they just believe what is fun to believe, what people of their social class believe and is useful for picking up girls of like opinions?

One thing that I'm pretty certain of and the evidence supports, is that environmental change drives biological evolution. It also drives cultural evolution and technological evolution. If anything now alive has massive potential for opportunism, for adaptability, for evolution, it's us -- some of us.

The climate is going to change over time -- a very big change. Something will fall on us from space, vulcanism will come and go, the Earth's magnetic field absolutely will fail and then slowly reverse with potentially dire but unknown consequences, a gamma ray pulse may blow away the ionosphere, the continental ice sheets will eat up most of North America and Europe once again. None of these things depend on our politics and prejudices or prayers. Our adaptability and survival however does depend on abandoning the ape-like tribalism, the ape-like confidence in things we have no business being confident in and the ape-like resort to chest thumping, shit flinging and hooting that are more likely to accompany the end of the world than any whimper.

Elsewhere

Ok, I give up. It's impossible to win an argument with someone as totally dishonest as Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or as stupid as their followers. The relentless, rabid and utterly false accusations of forced euthanasia, "death panels" and health care rationing continue despite the fact that the most rigorous reading of HR 3200 reveals nothing of the sort - and indeed nothing of the other sorts of lies they're telling. You could go look, but you won't and if you're a Republican you'll read one thing and swear you saw another, just as I could roll up the president's birth certificate and shove it up your nose and you'd go on asking for it, insisting it wasn't there, you flat-Earth bozo with too few dendrites to make a synapse.

So go ahead you demented, perverted self-righteously dishonest enemies of everything good and true. Go ahead; sit in your mother's basement with the spiders and watch Fox lies. E-mail everyone you know and assure them Obama's going to murder your kids and eat your grandmother and take away your guns too because Beck says so. I don't give a shit. A country with ten people like you in it wouldn't be worth saving anyway. Take it all you deranged psychotic cretins - whatever's left. You deserve the kind of shithole country you are making this into and you can have it.

Sayonara, assholes! I'm elsewhere.

Hypocrisy house

Republicans deal with the almost daily revelations of sexual scandal in the "family Values" party by reminding us that there are Democrats who cheat as well. Of course the Democrats aren't the ones claiming that government should be more intrusive into the private sex lives of private citizens and they haven't made that nebulous phrase part of every party platform for decades, nor do they seem to be so brazenly promiscuous. So I'm sure that the latest evidence that the Family valuers may be running a veritable school for scoundrels on 133 C Street SE in Washington DC won't have any more effect than Larry Craig's wide stance on their claim to moral authority.

The house in question is owned by a shadowy "Christian" group called The Fellowship, one of those insisting that we are a Christian Nation and should have "Christian Values" without of course giving us any idea what those might be or why they might be different from non-Christian values. They assert that our leaders should be led by God rather than by the will of the electorate which is shockingly reminiscent of the government our founding fathers found to be anathema, and of course it's their God as interpreted by them.

But it's a rooming house as well as a lobbying and indoctrination center and Congressmen board there and claim to find it a place to study the Bible and the commands of Faith-based lobbyists. Moral pillars of the community who have resided at the house on C Street, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford and Chip Pickering are and have been involved in extramarital affairs. Need I point out that three out of five is a considerable majority? It would be enlightening to compare the rent they pay with similar rents on that street of elegant brownstones - and of course interesting to entities such as the IRS. Is there quid pro quo or votes for rent?

To me, the question of whether religious conviction is a marker for moral hypocrisy and turpitude is less important than the fact that at least 5 Senators and Representatives may being subsidized by a lobbying group posing as a Church. The Fellowship, which has been criticized for supporting such tyrants as Suharto, is run by the Coe family who take down large salaries. David Coe, the presumptive heir to the throne, has suggested that members of The Family are here to learn how to rule the world.

Of course it's only my opinion, but I'm convinced that the constant howling about socialism and Marxism and Liberalism and secularism from the Right is a smokescreen for organizations like this who are declared enemies of democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion and are runningMadrassas teaching revolution, one congressman at a time.

Not with a bang. . .

. . . But a twitter.

An e-mail from my Senator Bill Nelson (D. FL) informs me today that he will begin twittering and NASA has announced that Astronaut in training Mike Massimino will be doing the same. They're drawing a line that I will not cross.

I mean, I still have some pride in being adult and being able to read without moving my lips and able to follow something longer than 140 words without my thoughts wandering toward the need for iPodal noise injection and wiggling in my seat. What's next, the congressional record spelled out letter by letter on alphabet blocks by a fuzzy, green sock puppet? Three body orbital mechanics brought to you by the letter N?

Sure I'm interested in what Nelson has to say and I am interested in space technology -- but. Haven't we had 8 years of the dumbing down of everything already? OK, so maybe it's not quite how the world ends, but it sure looks like the way adulthood ends and as far as I'm concerned, NASA and Nelson and all the other bird brains can twitter this, for all I care.

Odds and endings

Sometimes I'm overwhelmed with despair. Sometimes I don't believe the United States of America has any future in any way similar to what was envisioned in 1776. Sometimes I think civilization itself has reached the top of its arc and has begun to accelerate downward.

I was scanning around 20 meters yesterday afternoon, hoping to work KC4USV at McMurdo Station in Antarctica who was reported to be at 14.243 -- and as you might expect in this period between sunspot cycle 23 and 24, I couldn't hear a whisper from Ross Island. I did catch one Midwestern ham telling another that he'd heard thatBarak Obama had gone "over there" and told "the Muslims" that he thought it was patriotic for them to fight against infidels. " If any of that is true, this country is doomed" said the man whose call I won't repeat. Tempted as I was to have words with him, I just shut the rig down and found other things to do. Of course, none of that is or was or likely ever will be true. But this is America. Over where? What Muslims? Failure to ask is failure to think. Failure to think and the hunger to believe fills the endless cornucopia of American political dialog.

My New York Bureau chief informs me that Alabama, in the name of protecting academic freedom and science itself, has passed legislation allowing teachers to teach religious mythology or apparently, any idiotic fairy tale they damn well please about the origin of species. The Bible is now called science in Alabama. And we fought a bloody war to keep them part of our country: and we dare to talk about optimism. How can we even say the word hope.

The end of the world makes strange bedfellows though. I stumbled into Coulterwatch this morning after reading that the shrieking harpy herself has become the subject of a formal probe by Connecticut’s Elections Enforcement Commission; moving her closer to being charged with felony fraud. Can she slither out of this one as she did in Palm Beach by having one of her familiars intimidate a Commissioner into dropping the charges? Probably, but the existence of bloggers calling themselves Conservative and yet actually dedicated to bringing about justice for Ann Coulter is heartwarming.

Coulterwatch.com blogger Dan Borchers has filed a formal complaint in Connecticut.

“For over 10 years, Ann Coulter has gotten away with illegal, immoral and unethical behavior, ranging from plagiarism to defamation, perjury to voter fraud,”

says Borcher. No, it's not a glimmer of hope. He and I may disagree on most things, but at least it's comforting to think we might all hold hands for a brief moment as the ship sinks into the abyss.

Death and Foxes

There's often some good to be found in our increasingly entropic economy -- like a pearl in a tainted oyster. I take comfort in the cosmic joke that is our mortal life; knowing that Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney and everyone at Fox News will go the way of Pol Pot, Nicolae Chaucescu and Madman Muntz in due time. But even before all the chips are cashed, it's good to know that News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire and the parent company of Fox, is down by the bow and taking on water; nearly six and a half billion dollars worth of water, that is.

Blaming the grim economic situation, the obvious precursors of which the Fox fabricators have been denying for years whilst mocking the "Libs" for their warnings, Murdoch told the International Herald Tribune:

"While we anticipated a weakening, the downturn is more severe and likely longer-lasting than previously thought."

Who could have foreseen that? Well I for one and other, better prognosticators heard only dimly through the angry roar of the Fox filibusterers. Remember when Fox claimed that the robust economy was being "talked down" by "the Liberal Media" and offered statistics showing the "proof" in the fact that there was more bad economic news than good?

"We are implementing rigorous cost-cutting across all operations and reducing head count where appropriate."

said Murdoch, and of course I have a list of candidates for decapitation, but before we get to feeling smug, the bad news in the good news in the bad news, is that amidst the general Murdoch meltdown, Fox News itself reported income of $428 million, which is up $91 million from the previous year. Fox News increased its operating income by 32 percent. Is this also a reflection of a desperate America's increased thirst for lies, damn lies and hysterical hatred? I'm sure that when the statisticians stop chewing on the news, we'll find that alcohol consumption has risen by a similar amount.

In any event, I'm sure that the global meltdown will some day fade into redacted and ill remembered history, but I'm not so sure about the United States of America as we know it. America is failing, Fox News is why.

Et evasi ego solus ut nuntiarem tibi.