Just let it die

“Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too,”

-Michelle Bachmann on Fox News-

John Wayne, I never really liked him; not as an actor and particularly not as something he attempted to portray off the stage: a patriot. No, the only uniform he ever wore came from the costume department at Republic Studios, the folks who got him his 2A draft status during WW II because it would have meant lost profits had he followed so many actors into the military.

But of course by the time the Vietnam war became a tragi-comic opera, he was a Hollywood soldier of long standing, fond of telling many of us we weren't real Americans because we didn't quite see the glory of the whole thing.

So leave it to Michelle Bachmann to claim she's channeling his "spirit" -- whatever that might be. Whether that consists of telling us we're not real Americans because we dare to measure the age of things or don't accept the Biblical nonsense about the "waters" above and below the Earth I don't know, but there are few things that amuse me more than the trolls, public and private, who present their limitations and disabilities and delusions as their strength. Haven't we all had people tell us ungrammatically how stupid we are and spell stupid wrong? Petty irony it is indeed, but then such little moments of irony may provide the most satisfaction one can expect in our kind of times. It costs too much to care any more.

So should we laugh at Michelle for confusing Winterset, Iowa, birthplace of John Wayne (nee Marion Morrison) with Waterloo, Iowa, birthplace of John Wayne Gacy who strangled little boys and buried them in his crawl space? The entire pandemonium of journalists, bloggers and blowhards has been going at it since yesterday morning. Go ahead and join in, but I'm beyond laughter or tears for that matter. When it comes to giving a shit, I don't. I'm all out of givadamn and I'm not shopping for more. As I said, it just costs too much these days.

Father's Day

Things change, everyone gets older. You start to wonder how many more father's days will pass while you still have a father to spend it with. It's good then, to see how some things never change; things like the bitter, miserable, vicious lies that spew from the GOP. Take the current Elmer Fudd of the Party, John McCain, the tortured war hero who didn't have the courage to stand up to the party's support of torture. Take John, who is making this Father's Day so much happier by blaming the Arizona wildfires on illegal immigrants rather than on the drought.

But he has substantial evidence, which he will, no doubt, reveal eventually, or not reveal or simply forget about after the wildfire of hate has got beyond control. Remember when Mexicans were bringing leprosy across the border? Many will long remember Lou Dobbs' accusations but not the lack of evidence and perhaps the wildfire libel will stick long after McCain's slide into dementia becomes all too obvious.

Well thanks John, for all you do and for reminding us of Republican fathers long gone like Joe McCarthy with their vaporous claims of "evidence" and I'm sure your legacy will stink long after you're gone.

War or not a war

"If it looks like a war, it's a war"

said Dennis Kucinich to CNN, but he's wrong. Many things look like wars and many things have been sold to us as wars that aren't wars. Johnson's War on Poverty? The war on Drugs? calling it a war doesn't make it so nor does saying it is when it isn't. The 1968 Democratic convention looked and smelled like a war -- maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.

Of course invoking the War Powers Resolution of 1973 finally gives the dogs something to bark about and they've been looking for impeachment arguments since election day, but is the current hoopla about our support of NATO actions in Syria based on concern for the law or another congressional burlesque show attempt to overturn an election they lost for good reason?

It looks like a war to the Republicans too but then, Birth of a Nation looks like history to them. Reagan's invasion of Granda and Bush's invasion of Panama looked pretty much like wars as well, but although both those presidents did report to Congress under the War Powers Resolution they did so without citing section 4(a)(1) which would require approval to continue after 60 days. In both cases hostilities ceased before the 60 day period even though troops remained in Panama and the question was deemed moot.

The question then hinges on whether American forces and personnel are still involved in hostilities 60 days after the initial air strikes and are still substantially in harms way. Obama argues that they are not, that they are only providing support for an embargo. His opponents disagree, but then they disagree with his presence in office and everything he says or does even when it mirrors their own sentiments. Scandal has been cried more often than Wolf, but while I tend to see the argument in similar light as the White House does, I Wish he could have done what Bush did by taking action when Congress was out of session, but not having had that option, I wish he would simply remove this issue from the spotlight and allow Congress to have their way. If nothing else it would take my Representative Tom "Looney" Rooney off the soapbox and out of my inbox for a while.

I think NATO can do without us and if this is so important to the Arab League, they can use some of that firepower we sold them.

Cicero on Fox News

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

A horse of the same color

"I believe this because I believe that and I believe that because I'm a believer and believers believe it." If this passes as anything resembling reason I give up and if it's the argument of someone who feels qualified to be the President of the United States in the 21st century I'm getting out. It's not because I believe anything or believe in believing as either a virtue or a way to run a country, but because I'm simply tired of the sanctified madness.

Take Herman Cain -- please. Take him far away from any office that allows him to rule and ruin other people with his beliefs; allows him to substitute his beliefs for law and invent crimes at will. Cain, you see, says that homosexuality is a "choice" and is a sin and he believes it because he believes it and that makes it true.

“I believe homosexuality is a sin because I’m a Bible-believing Christian, I believe it’s a sin,”

he says and yes, that's just the sort of thing Republicans like to pass off as reason and package this fear of retributive and divine bogeymen with fear of communism and common decency like Wall Street packages bad loans.

Sin, Mr. Cain, is not crime, it's a tool used to tyrannize the mind and because the sin of one frame of reference is not the sin of another and because we are a government of laws and not of prophets and because those laws are designed to protect liberty and property and not to protect your tangled web of beliefs or promote them or ennoble them or sanctify them or elevate them to the status of law and permit them to persecute others: and because sir, you are a man like the rest of us, neither better nor worse nor more to be obeyed because of your beliefs, you should save them for Sunday and leave the rest of us the hell alone with your damned arrogant beliefs. No man is elevated by standing on Bibles.



Preacher Cain of course would be a good choice for the GOP at this point -- evidence that they're not really racists and have only set the dogs on that other black man because he's not Christian enough or as concerned with the things God hates like Medicare or the Minimum wage. A different shade of black man and one more easily used as a tool to get things back to the way they used to be when there was a place for everyone and everyone was in his place.

Koching up some trouble

"Good Lord. These are truly evil people"

says The Impolitic and it's hard to disagree. Of course the people that thought it would be a "conservative" thing to do; giving struggling Detroit homeowners fake foreclosure notices, don't think they're being vandals trying to destabilize civilization and built a "conservative" Utopia on the ruins. In fact the Koch brothers who seem to be behind this prank have a vision for the future that more resembles an Orwellian horror with the part of Big Brother played by corporate robber barons like them and the sinister, black menace portrayed by Barack H. Obama. Their lackeys see it otherwise, I'm sure. A step in the final solution of the "colored problem" that the Liberals and do-gooders brought upon Detroit and a reaction to the stunning affront of ACORN having forced a black president on us -- a man nobody voted for, of course. The new North. It's the old South without the sheets.

It's truly hard to describe this sort of thing in the way we describe rational human conduct, because it isn't any more rational than drunken football hooliganism or beer hall riot -- and a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's all the more dangerous for the lack of attention given. CNN.com today provides a bright colorful farrago of sex scandal, new Facebook features, the exploits of rappers and little else. Indeed what else concerns us?

The Sesame Manifesto

It's impossible for me to watch a Fox "panel" chew a story without thinking of an alligator feeding frenzy or a bunch of mean dogs fighting for possession of a bit of rawhide. Actually it's impossible for me to watch Fox News at all, but for those of a tougher breed, here's a prime example of the ruthless war on reality called Fox.

Listen carefully and you'll spot the message that Sesame Street aims at lower income, Urban kids and you'll smell the racism and you'll hear the Republican anthem that the fraction of a cent per taxpayer that this show costs is "on principle" too much and especially because it tries to elevate the underclasses in direct contravention of Divine Law and Ayn Rand, whichever is the more powerful.

Does anyone really believe that Big Bird is a Communist or that Sesame Street is ruining America and the morals of its children? (perhaps Doctor Spock fans can sigh with relief now that they've moved on to a new chew toy.)

Perhaps you do, perhaps you watch Fox anyway. Perhaps you're a malicious idiot with delusions of persecution, but here it is again:

The Horror

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-

________________

I had pretty much made up my mind that I wasn't going to grant Sarah Palin any more free publicity or waste any more stress-filled time reacting to the Idiot's Princess, but like the safety valve on a boiler, I have my set limit. Pop goes the weasel, or at least the blogger.

I read her garbled soliloquy yesterday, about how the immigrants who built this country up from an agrarian economy to an economic giant had a terribly hard time gaining entrance and getting citizenship and could not favorably be compared to those today who were raised in the USA from infancy, got an education and became part of our society only to be expelled on some error in their parent's papers. She's right, you can't. It took a matter of hours to go through Immigration in the Ellis Island days and if you weren't Chinese, you were all right. No English required, no guaranteed job, no nothin' -- and they came by the millions. Today it takes years, of course, but we're dealing with Sarah Palin, congenitally stupid product of a fourth tier higher educational system and a lifetime of reading nothing. She's dumber than a pre-schooler and she's a Republican front-runner.

My mother read me that Longfellow poem when I was little more than an infant and I don't think any of my contemporaries did not know by early grade school of that somewhat mythological event, but no, not Sarah Palin who seems to think that the famed Boston silversmith was a spokesman for the NRA and a right wing, saber rattling blowhard whose main concern was promoting gun rights in the American wilderness.

“…he who warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and, um, makin’ sure as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free. And we were gonna be armed.” You betcha, gol durn it!

The fact that this perky little peanut brain couldn't graduate 5th grade much less pass a citizenship test -- or even, apparently, read a newspaper isn't just obvious, it's horrifying and what these daily enormities we're subjected to every day say about her is still less horrifying than what this says about America.

You can't have that!

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."

-Daniel Webster-

Every morning's bag of e-mail brings at least one call to arms and sometimes many more. I'm getting tired of the blaring slughorns and fraying pennants, whether or not I support the basic premises.

Take private cars and fuel economy. I got one from NRDC today; that's the Natural Resources Defense Council, a group whose purposes seem reasonably clear from the title. The headline purports to tell me how much I would save by switching to a 60MPG vehicle - one of those hermetically sealed capsules from which I could observe the glory of the ocean and dunes and the beauty of vast natural scenes through tinted windows, darkly. Think of how much money I would save and of course think of how I, an aging superhero, could "go green" and "save the planet!"

Numbers don't lie, people do and when I plugged in my actual figures, it told me I would save about 333 dollars a year. No I wouldn't and whoop-di-do if I did. First of all the cost to all things natural and to me of building another vehicle isn't factored in at all here nor is the possible 60+ year lifespan of my car Vs that of a Japanese post-modernist disposable gumdrop. I 'd have to sell the glorious red 190Mph convertible that may be worth more in my grandchildren's senescence than it is now and buy a rolling toad with those tiny wheels, primitive suspension and a ton of batteries ( which will have to be replaced at a high cost not added to the alleged savings.) Is life and the joy of living worth 300 bucks a year? I could save a fortune by selling the house and moving into a trailer in Central Florida after all. I could choose for myself.

The Modernist movement of the last century brought us the idea of minimalism in architecture; the idea that our homes were machines for living and that living in them made us better and more efficient -- efficient being the key word, I think. The stripped down, unornamented minimalized life of maximum efficiency isn't all that compatible with what most of us would consider a life. Integrating man into the means of production, minimizing private space and emphasizing public and communal areas and mechanizing the whole experience of life doesn't, in the mind of this inefficient life form, make for an existence I would enjoy, to say the least. It hardly allows for experiencing the intense joy of being alive on a minute to minute basis, unless you consider a brief two week packaged vacation from the cubicle to be living.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a machine or a piece of production equipment. My house is not a machine and my preferred transportation would not resemble one of those pneumatic capsules you put your checks and deposit slips into at the drive-through bank.

Send a message urging the government to strengthen pollution and fuel efficiency standards to deliver 60 miles per gallon by 2025!

screams the headline. It doesn't mention that the glut of huge, heavy, clumsy, dangerous hunks of iron now clogging the curves on our roads was the direct result of that same message sent back in the 1970's as a hysterical response to the Arab Oil Embargo. That was a perfect example of the "here's a problem - let's pass a bill" kind of knee-jerk politics that's clogged our arteries for decades and no, we can't hardly pin that on the Republicans.

You can get a 60 mpg vehicle right now if you want it - a 100 mpg vehicle that costs a thousand dollars. They sell them in several places around this town, you just have to sweat in the heat and get wet when it rains, and you can't go very fast but hey, it's all about efficiency and going green, right? Many people choose that, many enjoy it -- including me, for what it's worth, but it's a choice, not the result of a Federal mandate. Sometimes you feel like a truck, sometimes you don't -- you consider the need and the budget and you makes your choice. But is it "saving the planet" to drive one of those terrifying "smart Cars?" Did anyone stop to notice that the US military is the largest single fossil fuel burner in our country? Is our problem really cars or is it how much we drive. How much of the passion is really that same stale neo-Luddism that nestled into Liberal thought back in the 60's when it was oh so hip to destroy cars in the name of whatever you call it?

Sure Americans waste untold resources driving to work, waste a fortune to drive fashionably military-looking "safety" vehicles that cause 4 times more accidents and have to crawl through maneuvers like airships, but is the answer to regiment us, to furnish us with little steel boxes and proclaim "only this and nothing more?" Maybe it's time to let Dracula out of his coffin and raise the fuel tax! (gasp) Let people work out their personal mathematics by themselves - maybe move closer to work, maybe use a small car to drive to the train station, maybe buy a scooter. Raise the taxes steadily and put the money into high speed rail and local light rail. Eventually our obscene sprawl will contract and the mall to mall crawl may become a trip into town or down the block and people can make choices that suit them and their needs - you know, like free people in a free country. We don't trust you to use that ( insert anything here) wisely, we don't think you need it and therefore, you can't have it. It's the recipe for bad measures indeed.

Sure, I'm strongly convinced that something needs to be done, but I'm strongly convinced that it doesn't require us to become soulless gears and cams in the efficient, regulated machine of commerce and the State, if there's any difference between the two.

I know what you're thinking

My first thought was: I've seen this scenario in some cheesy Tom Cruise infected Sci-Fi movie. Apparently that thought occurred to the Nature.com editorial staff as well. The Department of Homeland Security it would seem, is testing a system to detect malicious thoughts. No really.

They call it Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) because that's what government departments do with their doings, lest clear speech shed clear light. They make up acronyms that disguise the tunnels they dig under the foundations of liberty, but I digress. The technology purports to identify individuals who are planning to blow things up or have "malintent" as they say in the dialect.

Like a more traditional polygraph, FAST measures heart rates, among other things. Heart rates respiration and perspiration go up, after all when you're nervous about the bomb in your shorts or wishing you could throttle some thick-skull TSA twit as he gives you grief over an aspirin in your pants pocket that shows up on a scanner and starts groping you for explosives as you put your hands over your head in abject submission. Hell I'm sure I'd set off all kinds of alarm bells right now just thinking of how I've so often been treated as a felon on his way into the penitentiary instead of a tired traveler trying to get home.

I have no idea about what else this electro-mechanical night club bouncer measures and I'm not sure it invades any privacy that hasn't already been taken away by the cowardly traitors who passed the "Patriot" Act. I'm too lazy and too unwilling to provoke myself into another Lewis Black style tantrum to read the " Privacy Impact Assessment" our bureaucratic brethren at DHS have given us. I'll leave that to you. Besides my loathing of people who seem to exist only for the purpose of inserting that fly-blown and putrid metaphor into every sentence, it was written, most revealingly, by someone any German speaker will recognize as the Devil himself: Hugo Teufel III, Chief Privacy offer at the DHS under George W. Bush.

Does it work any better than the Polygraph does at detecting the evasions of sociopaths? It would have to, since those tend to be the people we're looking to put on no-fly lists and of course we won't have the results interpreted by a seasoned professional, but rather someone who was promoted from K-Mart security officer last week.

No, it's the stuff of B movies or sarcastic Dr. Strangelove sequels or even Orwell novels, but perhaps we've lost the ability even to see what the politics of fear has done to us in our cringing, cowardly new century.

If they're for it, we're against it.

The natural state of men, before they were joined in society, was a war, and not simply, but a war of all against all.

-Libertas, Thomas Hobbes -


Scanning the Facebook page of my congresscritter, Tom Rooney (R-FL) I find the real interest not to be the simplistic banalities and the strained attempts to generate outrage against Barack Obama. It's not the continuing effort by Rooney to portray the assistance being given NATO's actions in Syria as a constitutional violation; it's more about the truly demented calls for impeachment by the people who post there; calls that remain in view without comment by Mr. Rooney, who claims that he maintains the page to be more "in touch" with the sentiments of his constituents rather than as a tool to promote irrational rage for political purposes.

If he has some constituents other than me who disagree with the "Oh I just hate, hate him" and "Oh he just makes me sick" and the "he uses the constitution to line his bird cage" swamp dwellers, they must indeed like me, be very reluctant to post comments there under their real names. He's created a milieu quite hostile to reason and reasonable people offering constructive criticism.

Yes, of course there are many questions about the legality of George W. Bush's legacy, some of which -- too much of which -- remains in place, but the War on Obama is not really based on his alleged and often misrepresented constitutional infractions, and we know it because they weren't presented as such during the previous administration and indeed were eagerly supported by the reactionary beasts who hang out on the Rooney page to congratulate themselves and outdo each other on the size of their hate. Indeed, that place is a microcosm of our war against ourselves, a war of all against all.

It's not that I like Senator Rand Paul or his familiar pose of principled outrage, but I am indeed on his side when it comes to addressing the real constitutional outrage of the Patriot Act. I have to smile at what may be the end of his naivete because it isn't the Democrats at war with the Leahy-Paul Amendment, designed to allow greater oversight of ever increasing Government warrantless surveillance powers under that cynically named act. It's the Republicans supporting precisely the kind of power they pretend to oppose while posturing as libertarians to the frothy-mouthed and furious rabble.

“Unfortunately, what we’re finding now is that the Democrats have agreed to allow me to have amendments but my own party is refusing to allow me to debate or present my amendments.”

Said Paul. Imagine that.

But as the man said, the joining of people into a society serves to prevent the chaos of nature, and I have to ask myself whether the effort to portray anything social or designed for the common good as the unqualified evil of Socialism, did not have the promotion of that very bellum omnium contra omnes; everyone at war with everyone and every man for himself as a purpose. Perhaps when everyone is against everyone, such things as consistent viewpoints are illusory as is anything resembling principle. If you're for it, I'm against it may be as close as we can get.

T minus 34 hours and raving

Dies iræ ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla !


Well the End is neigh and a Day neigher than it was yesterday, but the proof is certain, says Harold Camping, even though he formerly had 'proof' 1994 was the big one; the Dies Irae, the End time.

But he has proof that God is allowing us to have gay pride parades and same sex marriage as a set up for the fall and the proof is in something called the Book of Jude, which I'd never heard of, my Bible ending somewhere around the book of Daniel or so and being in various Semitic dialects, not Greek. Anyway Camping says God all gaybashing mighty explains it in Jude 7 which is funny because although the Bible has at least two names for God ( and two versions of the stories to go with them) Jude isn't one of them. The real Tanach doesn't tell us that the elder Yahweh or the somewhat later Elohim wrote it either. That was Moses, it supposes -- nor did the prophets claim to actually be God, but that's a long road I won't go down today, you'll be pleased to hear.

But seriously -- it's important now in these last days before John the Revelator's ( also not God) psychotic episodes come true, to be familiar with the words of God, speaking through Jude and Camping (the least godlike of all) of course, so I looked it up to see just who this fellow was, but although I did find a site that explains it all, I had to stop reading the explanation when the writer accused Theologians ( as to be distinguished from believers) of incompetence.

" This subject is under constant dispute by many theologians. The trouble with them is they can't read English."

Stunning and in the interest of brevity I could quit right here -- but I won't.

I certainly can read English, but I can't claim to be an authority on this questionable early second century book, since I can't read Greek, so score one for The Bible Study Page. I'll even overlook the gaseous certainty that whoever the author claimed to be, he must then be, and the ubiquitous practice of naming anonymous religious texts for long dead prophets. I'm just not in an argumentative mood.

So I'll have to believe them when they say that God himself guarantees that Jude, like James, the Upright, was the brother of Jesus, but as the English language was more than a thousand years away in the future and out of respect for Mrs. Christ, or Miriam as poor old impotent Joseph ( who none the less made other kids with her) called her, let's call them Jehudi and Jacov just like their mother did. Not nice to contradict Jewish mothers, I can tell you -- I mean you want to talk about days of wrath?

So then -- just what does Jude 7 give us as the WORD OF GOD that can't be attributed to Jehudi son of Miriam or some other writer in another country?

"In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire."

Well I guess Jehudi would know, being the half brother of the son of God or maybe the full brother - who the hell knows, but it's funny that neither of the real Gods, Yahweh and the Elohim mentioned this a thousand years and a half earlier and what they did mention didn't need some adopted son to relay the message. I thought it mentioned something about inhospitable treatment of strangers, and condoned tossing your virgin daughter to a crowd to be gang raped, but as the book was likely written quite a long time after these cities disappeared, who the hell could possibly know?

Anyway, since neither Lot nor his daughters were blasted to hell for incest, I think we can dismiss the sex thing entirely, OK? If Mrs. Lot was fossilized for looking over her shoulder, but Lot gets off for free (yes, that's a double entendre - aren't I wicked?) the whole God-hates-perverts thing came right out of Jude's ass and into Camping's mouth.

As far as I can gather from Bereshit, or Genesis, Gay Pride wasn't the problem with the cities of the plain at all, and as far as we know, ancient Greece wasn't blown to hell by a firestorm like Gomorrah, nor was Egypt whose kings made Oedipus look like a prude, but who am I to argue and point out contradictions?

Like the Wrong Reverend Phelps, Camping believes "God hates fags" and is going to kill most of us for allowing them to live in peace like other people, just like he killed the Sodomites and Gomorrans for their gay pride parades and same sex marriages. And he'll find proof somewhere whether it makes sense or not, and since none of his followers are really quite sane, it doesn't matter.

The real proof of Camping's high fecal content will come at the International Date Line ( no, not the phone sex number) on 6:00 PM Saturday when nothing at all happens and the Repo men will begin to pick up all those vans, The leases on the billboards will expire, his followers will stand around like fools looking at them and wonder how they're going to get their property back and the 18 million dollars Camping has raised will likely disappear into various "good works." Perhaps he'll rapture himself to Marbella or Monte Carlo.

Anyway, Even though there are two sets of commandments given in two slightly different settings by Gods with two different names in the Bible, it's obvious to me that God doesn't like having words put in his mouth and for those who believe Jesus was Divine ( no, not the Drag Queen) I think Jesus didn't think much of you putting hate speech or damnation in there either. Of course in my personal religion, God not only speaks through our mouths, he speaks only through our mouths and thus nobody can be certain of what he's all about. Certainly for those like me who escaped out the back door during those weekend religious study classes and actually read it in its entirety, Psalm 77:19 comes to mind.

"Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known. "

Like the Poet said: nobody knows where God is going or where he has been and his wake is long lost in the waves, so stop pretending you know.

Two pathetic losers

Once upon a time the wood shingles on my house caught fire from a spark that came out of the chimney. It was on the surface and I could have put it out with a garden house in seconds, but the fire department insisted that it was in the attic and tore up the ceilings trying to get at something that wasn't there. I wasn't allowed back in the house until they'd done 15 thousand dollars worth of damage - a lot of money in the Early 70's. I was angry but I never called them "fucking traitors" They were after all, trying to keep me safe and perhaps to protect evidence should it prove to be a crime scene.

I loved Easy Rider when it was first released. Hey, I was a young guy with long hair and a motorcycle and it was the first movie with a contemporary sound track. I saw it again a year or so ago and it was unwatchable; a stilted, cliche-ridden and pretentious film that confirmed my belief that as an actor, Peter Fonda was born to play the roll of standing in front of a tobacco shop with a fist full of cigars.

He's still a spoof of himself and every bit as self-important as Hanoi Jane. If I wasn't already aware of his unimportant self, his claim to have sent the President a letter calling him "a fucking traitor" for allowing BP employees and the Coast Guard to keep him and his cameras away from the oil spill clean up site would confirm it. ( I'll bet you were wondering where I was going with this.)

Fonda has an interest in a documentary which he co-produced, so he stands to profit by this adolescent behavior, which gives me even less respect for him. It's almost worse than Ted Nugent's "suck on my machine gun, you piece of shit" anti-Obama rant, because Nugent at least has the excuse of being stoned, drunk, neurotic, demented and full of guilt for dodging the draft by shitting in his pants (after getting a student deferment when he wasn't a student.)

Fonda has far less talent and his desperate efforts at getting attention here are nothing short of pathetic.

Apocalypse fer sure

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 guns 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 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.

I am not an animal

Said the elephant man, and we know what he meant, but of course if we divide all living things between, viruses, plants, bacteria and so on, you'll find that humans, or most of us anyway, are animals. There was no point in our evolution when we suddenly broke the connection with our past and became something other - we're just big brained apes.

Big brained apes who like sex however, should stay out of Florida, says Southern Fried Science with tongue firmly implanted in Southern cheek, since the language of Florida's latest legislative idiocy Law outlaws sex with or the enjoyment of watching sexual activities of animals would outlaw sex between human animals as well as watching porn, human or animal -- unless you're a veterinarian or horse breeder of course, in which case, saddle up!

"An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices"

Ok, ok, I'm stretching the point, since Florida law does distinguish between human and non human animals and since this one doesn't use the word "person," that Spring Break escapade in Daytona isn't necessarily going to get you locked up, but of course in the Bible belt, evolution never happened in the first place, we're not animals but animated mud and so no foul here. Sorry to have bothered you.

Cities of the plain

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 knock on the door

We've got a hard core Socialist Radical in the White House if you listen to people like the Koch Brothers -- and make no mistake, we do listen to them whether we want to or not and whether the slander comes from their mouths or the thousand mouths that speak their words. Yet the slide toward the right, the slide toward authoritarianism, the slide toward the business of America being war, continues without much popular resistance. Unless you mean the resistance of the voters of course but the voters don't matter since they're drawn along like hyena puppies following their mother, snarling about Socialism and Taxes.

Can we blame Obama, who hasn't done much to stop the wars, close the torture chambers and offshore prisons, end the DADT charade, temper the growing power of the Executive Branch or give us the kind of transparency in government we were promised? Sure we can, but if every naive campaign promise had been acted upon, we'd still have a long way to go to stop that slide.

Even while the Republicans, including my own Representative Tom Rooney, (R-FL) are howling about Obama exceeding his powers by authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya, his party has proposed giving the president even more war powers. The House Armed Services Committee's National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the United States to use military force anywhere there are terrorism suspects, including within the U.S. itself, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Yes, yes, I know, you hate the ACLU Libtards, but I don't suppose you like the idea of a president sending the marines to your neighborhood or invading any country the president suspects may be harboring "terrorists" either. As it stands there was little opposition in the house save for one member of the House Armed Services Committee: Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) who was the sole dissenter. Now let's all raise our right arms and shout "Libtard."

The President didn't ask for this awesome power boost. He didn't suggest that he needed it. He didn't ask for the extra billions in military spending or another extension of the Afghanistan War. It was the smaller government folks. It was the Republican House hissing with a forked tongue from both sides of their smirking mouths.

Yes, we're sliding and it's not toward Socialism but toward a military/police surveillance state. It's the courts, like the Indiana Supreme Court that has handed us a ruling suggesting that Indiana Police no longer need warrants nor to be in hot pursuit nor need they have probable cause to enter and search your home for any reason - and may beat hell out of you with impunity if you "resist."

“A right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,"reads the decision.

And we're babbling about Planned Parenthood and NPR and the ACLU Commies and against right of the government to flood some fields to save millions of people or take poison of the store shelves in violation of sacred property rights. We're fantasizing about being economic secessionists free or restriction or responsibility. We're oozing lofty proclamations about property rights and the government of no government like medieval monks talking about angels and pinheads and hunting for witches and heretics.

Obama can't fix this and all the Republicans can do is offer people like Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann. Maybe we can't fix it either and if you want to know who's to blame, you need look no farther than your bathroom mirror.

Why we need Ron Paul

I rather hope Ron Paul becomes the Republican presidential candidate in the next election. It's true that I agree with some of what he says, some of it quite strongly and it's true that I disagree as well and just as passionately, but if he is Barack Obama's challenger, the nature and tone of the debates and the wider campaign will have to address some fundamental assumptions that always are ignored. One of the many fundamentals that separate the left from the new right is the ranking of rights in our society. Paul asserts what most of his party would rather hide beneath heaps of polemical hyperbole: Property rights are the basis of freedom and being thus fundamental, must not be abridged for the common good.

I'm one of those people, you see, who thinks all ethics, or at least all ethical judgements are situational and that what we like to call fundamentals is an abstract construct, a bit like Euclidean geometry, which is immune from other, perhaps decisive factors. Parallel lines do indeed intersect in a universe with curvature and morally clear decisions become less clear when they have to cope with the purpose of morality and ethics.

Speaking to Chris Matthews last week, Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) declared that he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- not because he's a racist, and to be sure he says he would have desegregated government institutions like schools, but because the rights of property owners are fundamental to our basic freedoms; freedoms that our constitution implies, are rights inherently and independently fundamental as they stand. Is he insisting that those with no property have fewer or no rights? That's up to him to clarify and I expect he would like the oportunity.

“I believe that property rights should be protected,”

says the man from Texas. Who would disagree when presented in the abstract. But life isn't an abstract thing and may I defend building a nuclear waste dump next to Manhattan because of that declared axiom? Are property rights part of a constellation of rights all designed by humans to make human life free of certain abuses? Are rights, like Newton's laws, fundamental or descriptive? If they are things invented by the people and for the people, to what purpose were they invented; to protect the one against the many or the many against the one or both? Do they apply equally at all points on the long curve or are only around the middle where we experience things?

I'm sure Paul would have to admit with liberals, that there are limits to "fundamental" rights, but just what those are and for what reason those limits are put there needs to be dragged out of the cave and into the light. Do rights exist for the benefit of people and if so does the right of one man always trump the right of every man? Are we here for the law or is the law here for us? Do the rights of all really flow from the rights of an individual or are individual rights sometimes an impediment? If there is an impediment to that road to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, must 300 million of us endure it so that the abstract right of one may be protected? Yes, that's extreme, but as with Newton's laws, it's the extremes that absolutes are shown not to be so. In short, can Libertarian theory produce a country that any of us will want to live in - in whole or in part?

(Of course if I were to debate him, I would, in my quasi-deconstructionist way ask him what he means by property and whether that question isn't more fundamental because without asking that, defending property rights can defend slavery or rape and some slightly worse things.)

We need to talk about it. We've been stuck at this point for too long. These concerns aren't new and they aren't going away and we all need to rethink our opinions at a fundamental level as a regular practice. I think Paul and Obama are both well qualified to do it and will do it -- and if we have to endure another hysterical fugue about flag pins and death panels and birth certificates and Communism aimed at the stupidest elements of the population; lies and slander and tactical statements of opinion that a moment may reverse - - well let's just say that the civil war doesn't need to be fought this way again.

I am not an animal

Said the elephant man, and we know what he meant, but of course if we divide all living things between, viruses, plants, bacteria and so on, you'll find that humans, or most of us anyway, are animals. There was no point in our evolution when we suddenly broke the connection with our past and became something other - we're just big brained apes.

Big brained apes who like sex however, should stay out of Florida, says Southern Fried Science with tongue firmly implanted in Southern cheek, since the language of Florida's latest legislative idiocy Law outlaws sex with or the enjoyment of watching sexual activities of animals would outlaw sex between human animals as well as watching porn, human or animal -- unless you're a veterinarian or horse breeder of course, in which case, saddle up!

"An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices"

Ok, ok, I'm stretching the point, since Florida law does distinguish between human and non human animals and since this one doesn't use the word "person," that Spring Break escapade in Daytona isn't necessarily going to get you locked up, but of course in the Bible belt, evolution never happened in the first place, we're not animals but animated mud and so no foul here. Sorry to have bothered you.

Freedom is slavery

A mind is a terrible thing to make up, uncertainty being a fundamental building block of nature, but I've come close to making up my mind that a mind is, unlike all other things, not really subject to change and so those who spend their time trying to change minds damn themselves to a great deal of suffering.

So then, I'm not going to try to convince you that Rand Paul is having another one of his captious fallacy fests by trying to convince us all that if one believes that Americans have a right to have a certain degree of health care, one believes, ipso facto, in slavery.

Why try to go through his tortuous logical progressions and attempt to refute them as factually or logically false? Why indeed, since humanity runs on a blend of unconscious bias and packaged rationalizations. Who would read the list of ingredients on a pack of cigarettes anyway and who bothers to question politicians who mock people you don't agree with? We just inhale and we like it and we come back for another pack.

So, to reiterate the claim that freedom from untimely death is slavery will be enough for me this sunny morning when I should be enjoying life instead of following the lives of celebrity idiots. I'll just leave it to you. You may think of Orwell and smile, you may dream of being the only man in the world and growl in approval, you may jump off a cliff, you may do as you please. I've got mine and screw all y'all, as it says on the Tea Bag and if my wake upsets your boat, or you're thrashing about in the water, screw you twice, loser -- I'm nobody's slave.