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A Cavalcade of the Clueless

02 Jun

One of the prob­lems about the claim of the US being “the lone super­power” is that the claim is patently false. While it’s true we’ve got a hell of a lot of nukes, what we don’t have is an infra­struc­ture to speak of (focus­ing our entire econ­omy on ser­vice and non­skilled labor for the last decade and a half has pretty well assured that), nor the pos­si­bil­ity of sup­port­ing a long-​​term offen­sive — as any con­ven­tional bat­tle will surely be.

The moronic saber-​​rattling going on between Iran and (hey, let’s face it) the White House — two reli­giously addled idiots bleat­ing at one another over the stren­u­ous objec­tions of pretty much all their fel­low coun­tryper­sons — is one obvi­ous exam­ple of what hap­pens when a cretin is told, over and over again, that the US is a “super­power”. We sim­ply are not. The over­strained mil­i­tary is strug­gling in Afghanistan and Iraq; a war on two fronts is a known pre­cur­sor to dis­as­ter; a third front would leave our national offen­sive (and, by exten­sion, defen­sive) capa­bil­i­ties in tat­ters. Presumably any “Commander in Chief” versed in his­tory no deeper than the Napoleonic wars would know that.

The only thing we had going for us was the “coali­tion of the will­ing” — and that has taken another seri­ous blow this week­end, as Australia’s begun pulling its troops out of Iraq.

Why now? Because Australia just had some elec­tions, and a few die-​​hard Bushies bit the dust, that’s why. It’s anal­o­gous to the US midterm elec­tions that have ter­ri­fied Republicans in recent months. Supporters of Il Duce the Retard are begin­ning to see the head­stones cap­ping their polit­i­cal careers, and — just like most dupes — they end up tak­ing the anony­mous fall with damned lit­tle to speak of for their years of self-​​serving pub­lic “service”.

Best damn thing to hap­pen in a while, I think.

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Posted in General Foolishness, O, Pine With Me

 

A Shriek, a Flash, and a Torn Pantsuit

30 May

With increas­ing like­li­hood, that’s all there may be left to Hillary Clinton’s cam­paign as soon as next week.

In the face of demands from Clinton’s attor­neys that del­e­gates from Michigan and Florida be assigned to the New York Senator’s ail­ing cam­paign, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are urg­ing a final­iz­ing deci­sion after the last round of pri­maries on Tuesday.

The issue with Clinton’s argu­ment about count­ing votes from MI and FL is that she agreed, months ago, that those states’ votes would not count. Now, of course, she des­per­ately wants them to count — in her favor — using tac­tics that would cause Machiavelli him­self to cum in his pantaloons.

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Posted in Electile Dysfunction

 

Sent to Warren Ellis

23 May

just a few min­utes ago.

====

No com­ment at all.

Ascot World, an online com­mu­nity devoted to men and woman in wheelchairs.

http://​www​.ascot​world​.com/

Personals.

http://​www​.ascot​world​.com/​a​s​a​d​p​e​r​.​h​tml

Good? Definitely. But … but what if your kink is a para or quad … and sci­ence, not car­ing at all, just up and refixes the sit­u­a­tion in, say, 2021 or so?

How do you file for divorce? “Your Honor, I loved him … and then the bas­tard got up and walked.”

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Posted in General Foolishness

 

The Difference of Twenty-​​Four Hours

30 Apr

I’d like to take credit for this, but I can’t. Las Vegas didn’t make their smog go away overnight because I advised them to do so yesterday.

Smog gone!

The real cause? Twenty-​​four hours of steady south­west­erly wind, approx­i­mately 20 MPH, with gusts to 40.

It will be back, though.

 
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Posted in General Foolishness

 

Hey Vegas…

29 Apr

…what’s hap­pen­ing there is most cer­tainly not stay­ing there any more.

Vegas smog

This is a doppler image from this morn­ing, show­ing the fug of smog and shit spew­ing out of Sin City. My own locale is com­pletely occulted by the crap. The brown shit in my skies is the result of the filth ooz­ing out of Las Vegas. That cloud of pol­lu­tion is nearly two hun­dred miles in diam­e­ter.

Gasoline can’t hit $8.00/gallon fast enough, as far as I’m concerned.

Oh — check out this loop from the NWS. It’s even more annoying.

 
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Posted in O, Pine With Me, You Must be F***ing Kidding

 

Dumping Pandagon

18 Apr

Ordinarily I don’t men­tion when I un-​​roll another blog, but I thought I should go into why I’m not fol­low­ing Pandagon any more.

The warn­ing signs came a few months ago when Amanda was still push­ing for Edwards. At one point in an entry, she was dis­pens­ing advice on how to affect pri­maries so Edwards would have a stronger show­ing — over­all a good idea, but her pre­sen­ta­tion was some­thing along the lines of, “Here’s what you should do.” In con­text, that should felt con­sid­er­ably more like an order than a sug­ges­tion, and it rubbed wrong.

Additionally, the com­menters on Pandagon often seem to have extremely low tol­er­ance for those who don’t line up pre­cisely with their views, which is ironic in any pop­u­la­tion that styles itself lib­eral.

Finally, though, she linked — with favor­able com­ment — to an arti­cle from the Village Voice that starts out by launch­ing low­brow and narrow-​​minded (as well as humor­less) cri­tiques at another blog which, frankly, I value much more highly than hers. I didn’t read past the first page. Willingness to appre­ci­ate diver­sity in voices mat­ters, and she seems to have lost sight of that fact.

If the lib­eral front is begin­ning to lose its sense of humor — some­thing that almost always hap­pens when­ever a sub­group begins to take itself too seri­ously, begins to get a lit­tle taste of power — I promise you that in a decade it will look pre­cisely like the con­ser­v­a­tive front does now: Angry, out of touch, and foam­ing with rage when things don’t go pre­cisely as desired.

Life is too short to waste on that kind of anger.

 
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Posted in General Foolishness

 

Kids’ Day 2008

09 Apr

The hos­pi­tal here has an annual health fair called Kids’ Day, some­thing attended by about 800+ kids and their fam­i­lies. There are inter­est­ing exhibits, lots of infor­ma­tion from health ven­dors, and the kids can get their hear­ing and vision checked, as well as puppy shots. Given the rural set­ting, odds are pretty good that this is about the only expo­sure some of them get to med­ical treat­ment all year.

On the upside, there’s the col­lat­eral mate­r­ial pro­mot­ing the event. This year’s poster was much more solidly col­or­ful than last year’s was:

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Posted in Advertising Matters, Dot and Lionel

 

Of COURSE it Won’t Work

01 Apr

Because it already didn’t hap­pen.

A West Coast sci­en­tist who believes it may be pos­si­ble to trans­mit infor­ma­tion back­wards through time has been funded by indi­vid­ual dona­tions after estab­lished mad-​​scientist groups refused to cough up.

Um … um … estab­lished mad-​​scientist groups?

Oh right, them.

ANYway, if we could send a mes­sage back in time, we could stop, oh I don’t know, maybe the last fire at Alexandria (“Don’t light the match!”) or the stu­pid­ity that was most of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury (“Avoid Hitler, look out for chick­ens with a cough, and fuck pretty much every­thing you hear from 1946 onward”), or gee, I don’t know, recent years (“It wasn’t iraq, you fuck­ing god­damn use­less wannabe Texan inbred retard, fuck you and your piss­ing con­test with your dad, you both suck, and his­tory will have a really fuck­ing hard time decid­ing who was the shit­ti­est pres­i­dent ever — ha ha, no, lie, it’s you, duh-​​bya, you’re worth­less and we, the denizens of the future, wish you had choked on that pretzel”).

Seriously. If we could send a mes­sage back through time, what could pos­si­bly explain the fuster­cluck that has been, gee, every­thing we’ve ever expe­ri­enced ever, in history?

So it’s obvi­ous that this guy’s time travel thing never worked, just like every­one else’s never will have. It’s cute fan­tasy, espe­cially when it includes David Tennant — a cute fan­tasy indeed — but it just. never. happened.

If it had, we’d have noth­ing to discuss.

Jeez, don’t you love Apriil Fools’ Day jokes?

Well, I do, if I have a chance to post images like this one, and espe­cially link to them twice in the same article.

 
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Posted in General Foolishness

 

A Pair of Dishgloves

09 Mar

As I’ve men­tioned ear­lier, I’m work­ing toward licen­sure to fost/​adopt par­ent — I want to be a dad. Things seem to be going well with the new agency. During the home­s­tudy inter­view my con­tact kept look­ing though the paper­work for any­thing amiss, at me to see if I was furtively hid­ing dis­mem­bered body parts or what­ever in ran­dom clos­ets, and even­tu­ally adopted a kind of “what the hell” expres­sion — as in “why did they boot you from the game at the five yard line?”

Not sure, and not really rel­e­vant; it’s just back­ground. A few months back, hang­ing out at the locally owned café, I made the acquain­tance of the week­end dish­washer, a teen kid with whom I con­nected, entirely and totally, after about nine to eleven sec­onds of con­ver­sa­tion. The inter­dig­i­ta­tion was strong and a lit­tle eerie in its depth.* He’s how I hope my future son will be, very bright, very sweet and just a good kid all around.

Where he works there isn’t a pair of dish­gloves that fit him — the set there is too small. So when he takes them off at the end of his shift, they wrin­kle and fold back on them­selves, and end up in a dis­or­dered heap on the rack, in a way cer­tain to irri­tate the store’s owner. He can’t help it, and being a teen is a bit scat­ter­brained, so he tends to for­get the state of the gloves.

A few weeks back I was in the café, and there were the gloves, disheveled and hope­less in a rub­bery heap where he’d left them the night before. I smiled to see them, think­ing of the bun­dle of energy and life that had touched them last, think­ing of noth­ing else in par­tic­u­lar, and then real­ized that what I was see­ing was a deep les­son — that a rum­pled pair of gloves would be mean­ing­less, anony­mous, just a bit of noise to most observers; but they meant some­thing to me — they were a cipher whose code I could read — and that the world is actu­ally full of this noise.

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Posted in O, Pine With Me, Yoshi

 

Traffic Woes and Light Derailments

23 Feb

A Drama in Two Acts

Act the First: Two PERSONS and a GODBOY in an elevator.

Person 1: The other day I was stuck in traf­fic for nearly two hours. Sheesh!

Person 2: Yeah, it’s a real night­mare since the con­struc­tion began.

GodBoy: When I’m stuck in traf­fic I like to pray to Jesus!

Person 1: I won­der if the plans they have for light rail will help.

Person 2: Can you imag­ine the con­struc­tion issues with that?

GodBoy: I can’t wait for light rail! Then I’ll be able to sit and read the Bible instead of hav­ing to drive!

Person 1: Actually I’d like to see more bike paths.

Person 2: No joke! Less traf­fic con­ges­tion, less pol­lu­tion, and a health­ier pop­u­la­tion. Wins all around.

GodBoy: When I ride my bike I lis­ten to ChristGasm on my iPod!

Person 1: Hey, man, do you have to turn every­thing we talk about into some kind of God or Jesus issue?

Person 2: Yeah. This one-​​track-​​mind thing of yours gets pretty fuckin’ old. It’s like reli­gion has fried your capac­ity to carry on a ratio­nal dis­cus­sion about any­thing else.

GodBoy: …I’m going to pray for you.

[Exit.]

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Posted in O, Pine With Me, Reality Trumps 'God'

 

The Value of Hopelessness

21 Feb

In the last few months my med­i­ta­tion prac­tice has deep­ened con­sid­er­ably. In November, dur­ing a day-​​long at-​​home retreat I decided to stop pin­ing for a prac­tice group here in this lit­tle town I live in, and actu­ally inau­gu­rate one. The result, Sangha, has had mixed atten­dance. Some Sundays I have one or two peo­ple. Some Sundays I have none. (Those are what I call slow days.) Attendance is by peo­ple new to med­i­ta­tion, expe­ri­enced med­i­ta­tors with lit­tle or no Buddhist back­ground, and prac­tic­ing Buddhists.

Lately I’ve been ret­ro­spect­ing on my prac­tice, how it’s changed me, and what parts of it I accept now that I didn’t used to — and what parts I feel much more con­fi­dent about reject­ing. A big shift for me took place in about 2002, when I finally gave up on the notion of hav­ing a soul. That was sur­pris­ingly painful, given that I was an avowed athe­ist by then, and had been for half a decade or so. It was strange to see the illu­sion, the cling­ing to a notion, and to watch it evap­o­rate as I let it go.

It wasn’t that I felt I was slid­ing into a nihilis­tic point­less life; to the con­trary, I was find­ing all sorts of new ground to explore and expe­ri­ence. It was sim­ply the idea that I missed, a sense of los­ing some­thing I’d always taken to be there, a con­stant com­pan­ion. I felt much the same way when Carl Sagan died, and again with Douglas Adams, and even Jim Henson. These peo­ple had done things that mat­tered to me, and though I’d never met them I still felt I’d lost some­thing impor­tant when their minds were at last deliquesced.

Hope is a strange thing. We talk about it, we claim to have it, we put energy into it — but I don’t know how thor­oughly we actu­ally ana­lyze it. When some­one we know is sick, we say, “I hope you get well soon” — but do we, really? Or is it more likely that, thirty sec­onds later, I’ve for­got­ten all about Sylvia and her cold? How is this an expres­sion of hope for her recovery?

And is it really even much of a hope? Colds are not, by and large, fatal; gen­er­ally they’re lit­tle more than incon­ve­niences. (Though the two-​​week marathon rhi­novi­ral infec­tion I just got over, which included seven full days of full sinus con­cretiza­tion, seemed a hell of a lot more than that when I was in the mid­dle of it.) So when we express the “hope” that some­one will recover soon from a cold, what are we doing apart from spout­ing vain platitudes?

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Posted in Electile Dysfunction, O, Pine With Me

 

Postergasm II: Assorted Nerdery

22 Jan

The sequel to Postergasm I, here I drop var­i­ous images of var­i­ous things for var­i­ous pur­poses. As with the first post the high-​​res ver­sions are opti­mized to print on an 11 x 17 sheet — not exactly movie-​​poster size, but large enough to be noticeable.

After the fold, mis­cel­la­neous posters along with descrip­tions. Enjoy!

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Posted in One Thousand Words, Yoshi

 
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