08:09 – Colin and I are preparing for Barbara’s departure tomorrow morning. She’s heading up to the mountains for a few days with her friend Marcy. So, as usual, it’s wild-women-and-parties for Colin and me. Either that, or a Heartland marathon. We’re currently up through episode 12 of series four, so that leaves us with seven episodes in series four, 18 in series five, and one in series six to watch while Barbara’s gone, or roughly 19 hours worth. We may be able to get through those, and maybe even restart on episode 1 of series one. I also need to build more chemistry kits.
Meanwhile, events on the world stage are looking grimmer and grimmer. I’m not exactly expecting Israel to attack Iran next month, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened. Greece is on the brink of a literal civil war, and Spain is very close to fragmenting, with secession sentiment running rampant in the Catalonia and Basque provinces. Spain and Italy are both demanding that Germany pay their bills, but both refuse to accept Germany’s terms. Things are very close to the breaking point. And the US is led by what history will probably regard as its worst president ever. Geez.
The US is being led by what history may regard as its worst President ever, and at this point he apparently has a 50/50 shot at being re-elected. Also, there is more to the Middle East than whether the Israeli’s will attack Iran. There’s the who thing that we are buying into the narrative that the protests are all about a crappy movie. The crappy movie is at best just an excuse. There are reports that the Obama Administration is considering a “transfer” of the blind sheik who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center attack to Egypt. I don’t know how credible the site is, but at this point it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true.
The movie-meme is really strange. It is completely clear that the protests were carefully timed to begin on 9/11. The movie was originally released months ago. The clip that appeared on YouTube was either coincidental timing or else – who knows – put up specifically to justify the violence.
Anyway, so what? Let them protest in the Middle East, burn flags, whatever. Why should anyone give a shit? The best thing that could happen to the Middle East would be for the rest of the world to emit a great yawn whenever this kind of orchestrated “we are so offended” stuff happens…
Okay, how would the grammar experts here interpret the following sign:
NO HOT FOOD
OR DRINKS
Is that “no hot food, no drinks (hot or cold)” or “no hot food, no hot drinks”?
(It turned out to mean no hot food, no hot drinks.)
I’d take it to mean that someone had rearranged the letters.
NO FORDS
OR HOT DOINK
Meaning, only Government Motors cars and no sex. It’s still ambiguous, though: no sex only in the cars, or no sex at all?
(For non-Americans, the US government bailed out two of the Big Three American auto makers a couple years ago, with the result that the USG owns about a quarter of General Motors and Chrysler. Ford is the only one which told the Affirmative Action President to go and get stuffed.)
The thing that most concerns me about our President is that I think that the Prime Minister of Israel has a better grasp of US interests with regard to preventing Iran from getting the bomb than the President of the United States does. Furthermore, I think that The Israeli Prime Minister will do a better job of looking out for US interests in that regard than the President of the United States.
What makes this really bad is that I expect the Israeli PM to be looking out for the interests of the Israeli people, not the people of the United States. So what I’m saying that the PM of Israel is going to do a better job of looking out for our interests as a side effect of looking out for his own country’s interests.
To apply my standard test: If Obama were a Muslim indoctrinated as a
Communist, who hated the United States of America and was bent on
destroying it, what would he be doing differently?
Whether Republican or Democrat is in office, we are only talking about the speed of decline and destruction. Republicans will push the pedal to the metal, as did GW Bush (talk about whether you are better off 4 years later—I know the answer in my case), whereas Democrats take their sweet time to see the sights as they offer no resistance whatever to the Republican push to destroy our civil liberties à la The Patriot Act and the Gestapo tactic added to their legislation to report on your neighbors.
As Bill says: vote early, vote often, and vote Libertarian. Then, if a Republican or Democrat wins, like George Carlin said, you have every right to complain.
And, as Heinlein said, the game is rigged.
The more I think about this, the more I think OFD has a point. Maybe we should all become what Heinlein called “small-mouth anarchists”.
They often shoot back.
I do have a point, indeed, sir, and you have hit upon it nicely, if I may say so. To vote at all in this series of cynical charades is to acquiesce in one’s servitude and subject-hood and to willingly take on the role of serf in this empire and to slough off the tired old role of citizen, where one is required to take responsibility for one’s active participation in representative government, as well as for one’s family and neighbors.
“Voting” “libertarian” solves nothing at all and the act is laughed at, just as the act of “voting” for either half of the War and Money Party is laughable to our overlords and masters.
I am not an anarchist per se but agree with our host that the less government the better, right down to the marrow.
And I would only add here that we are looking, whether we like it or not, at a massive shift in the way everything works in our lives over the next century or so, and I have no idea how it will all come out in the wash in the end, but hope and pray for a loose confederacy here in North America and a limited constitutional and representative government based on our original Articles of Confederation.
We would trade and be friends with those other nations and states that will gladly work with us on a even playing field. Everyone else can go piss up a rope and if they fuck with us we will erase them from the face of the earth permanently.
Yep, OFD was right the first time: we were separated at birth.
I am betting that the same krew of clumsy forgers worked the dates on our birth certificates that also worked on Nosferatu II’s alleged origins on the planet. It’s a krew that gets passed on down through the ages, from our times and Saint Jack’s entrance to Paradise in Dallas, back to who really wrote the Shakspear canon and back even further to Nostrodamus and Prester John. And when Pilate washed his hands to seal His fate.
41 here right now at 10PM, Eastern Leftist Seaboard Time, and dropping; we have us a “frost advisory” tonight. Last night was gale force winds and wild-ass SURF on the shores of Lake Champlain, with breakers hitting the pier and white spray shooting thirty feet in the air. This will be an interesting spot to live, in a house built in 1830 of brick that was taken from the original ballast used in merchant shipping on the lake around that time. This little village was originally, for all intents and purposes, an inland seaport then. Directly southwest of us and across the lake was the Battle of Plattsburgh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plattsburgh
Well, there is no chance at all for change by voting for the two main parties, closely allied as they both are to the military-industrial-Congressional money-sharing and laundering Maschine complex. So I will vote straight Libertarian and urge everyone to do the same.
Been reading some of Emma Goldman’s stuff, and it is interesting to say the least. Makes me think we are living in Fascist times.