There is your future, right there. These people will run the world. Perhaps only someone who has spent as much time riding the public bus as Your Humble Editors can really see deeply enough into the American psyche to understand how preordained, how cosmically inevitable this is. What do I think, I’m a some kind of Biblical prophet over here, seeing into the future? I don’t like to use those words, but if that’s what it takes to make everybody grovel before me and kiss the hem of my Coat Of Many Colors and take my every word as the Absolute Truth, then, yeah, tough guy, that’s exactly what I am, and you can get down and suck my stone tablets if you don’t like it. The only way – THE ONLY WAY – these people don’t take over the country is if someone even wingnuttier gets there first. We are so fucking doomed.
How’s Obama doing? It’s like this: America is a very, very sick country. The old gal ain’t doing so well right now. Now, we can argue about how she got here and how she might have been achieved her full health potential, but I would hope we should at least agree that the eight years spent undergoing Dr. Dubya’s patented Crack Rock and Drano Enema Therapy, with twice-daily hour-long bullwhippings in the asbetos room administered by Nurse Cheney, may not have been the wisest treatment option. (Regrets, I’ve had a few. And now I recall the advice my sainted mother gave me before she lost her voice at Ypres – “Sonny,” she said – for ‘Sonny’ was the name of the cat she had when she was 9, and my mother liked to drink – “sonny, never trust doctors who only have one name. Even if that name is ‘Feelgood’. And, really, avoid all doctors who have their own Motley Crue song. Just to be on the safe side.”)
So Dr. Obama? Well, there’s not been a miracle recovery, that’s for sure, but I’d argue that the prognosis has improved over the past 12 months. Could he have been move aggressive in his treatment? Perhaps. But I think we would be wise to continue under his care, especially because the only other doctor who will take Grandma America’s case is named Dr. Mengele. Dr. Lucy Furr Hatemeister von Doomenheim Apocolyticon Destruct-O-Matic Mengele, member in good standing of the American Medical and Ritual Devil Worship Murder Association. Who has no face, but merely a skull, a grinning black skull with “666″ carved into the forehead with Satan’s coke nail, and when she speaks no sound comes from her ghastly maw, but instead pour flames and stinking black bile and the skulls of babies and kittens who cry in their tiny baby or kitten voices “Turn back! Turn back now! For the love of all that is not utterly soulless and awful turn back before this monster eats you, too!” And instead of a stethoscope, she carries around her neck a bloody skull, and instead of asprins, she gives you bloody skulls full of poison, and her shadow causes plants and small animals to wither and die and instead of hands she has flaming bloody chainsaws made of skulls, but not in a cool way, and her email address is ‘imtheantichrist1@hotmail.com’ (Scott Stapp got there first). And, I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it, I just kinda have a weird vibe about her. I’m probably a sexist. But it doesn’t matter, because there is no escape. We are completely doomed.
So I saw “Avatar”, which is the first movie I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. I saw it in 3D, on an IMAX screen, and, yes, it was a real IMAX. It sucked. I knew going in that it was essentially Dances With Coneheads, and while most things are improved by decreasing the ASCKCPN quotient (Average Soulful Close-ups of Kevin Costner Per Nanosecond), replacing everyone else in the movie with NBA-caliber Smurfs riding around on fuckdragons will tend to blunt this effect to a certain degree. But, like I said, I knew that going in, so any plot- or character-related discomfort I experienced was pretty much all my own fault.
But the 3-D was supposed to be revolutionary. It’s not. It’s Captain Eo, but pretentious. Everything looks fine until you try to focus on something that appears to be something other than movie-screen-distance away, at which point everything goes out of focus. You have to adopt a sort of slack, vacant zombie stare at middle distance, and not actually pay much attention to anything you are looking at, and if I’m going to do that I might as well be at work. (In 3-D!!!!) It’s is a small improvement over those horrible Magic Eye books where you can sort of see a 3-D purple bunny rabbit or some shit if you cross your eyes until you have an aneurysm, but I don’t recall those books having quite as many different varieties of intergalactic bestiality. Just go dye a bunny rabbit purple if you’re really so hell-bent on seeing at that sort of thing. Take the initiative, man! Bunnies don’t mind, or, at least, they’ve never said anything to me. The point is, save your money for holographic movies, or until James Cameron kisses a girl, whichever comes first.
And here I thought Haiti’s cruel fate had much to do with the legacy of slavery, colonial rule and the subsequent quasi-imperial interference from regional powers and monied interests. But alas, there is a simpler explanation. Call it, Beelzebub’s Razor, as explained by Pat Robertson (and really, who better to explain Satan’s M.O. than Pat Robertson):
Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, Napoleon III or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you get us free from the French. True story. So the devil said okay it’s a deal, so the Hatians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since then they have been cursed by one thing after another. Desperately poor, the island of Hispanola is one side, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts et cetera, Haiti is in desperate poverty. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, and out of this tragedy. I’m optimistic something good may come, but right now we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.
One wonders how large a percentage of the population would constitute a sufficient quorum when seeking to ink a binding contract with Satan. I mean, it seems awfully unfair to the folks that couldn’t attend the meeting, but who were later informed of their eternal damnation by proxy.
Also, why was Satan involving himself on the side of the enslaved in the first place? Seems like the other side of the ledger would be his preferred milieu, but then, I’m probably just forgetting my Frederick Douglass.
First came news that our Predator drones were pretty easily hacked using off-the-shelf software that goes for roughly $25 a pop on the open market. Today, there are reports of a new and lethal IED fast proliferating on the roads and thruways in Afghanistan. The cutting edge new IED is made out of…wood.
Your deep thinkers and theorists will ponder the ways in which our Ooompa Loompa’s aren’t as fast as theirs, and how we have to better protect the population that we’re only selectively killing off in order to change their level of tolerance for our presence. And for all I know those philosophers might be right about the theory, but diagnosing the problem isn’t the same as fixing it. And in this case, the fix isn’t forthcoming.
These are examples of that old saw that necessity is the mother of invention. And military occupations create a hell of a lot of necessity for the occupied, and a considerable amount less for the easily distracted super powers halfway across the globe. Even all the fancy tech designed to fill in the necessity gap can be circumvented quite frequently by the most basic of countermeasures.
The moral of the story: unless it’s absolutely necessary, don’t go dipping your toes into wooden IED crates in someone else’s backyard.
Was Christmas Day 2009 the same kind of wake-up call for Barack Obama that Sept. 11, 2001, had been for George W. Bush?
The near-miss by a passenger plotting to blow up an American airliner as it flew into Detroit seems to have shocked this president as much as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did the last.
Both presidents had had plenty of warnings in the form of threats and even incidents. But both were caught off guard: Bush reading to a classroom of youngsters; Obama on a family vacation in Hawaii.
I’m speechless. This man is a cancer on our body politic. Believe that.
Congressman Gresham Barrett (R-SC) has announced his intention to reintroduce legislation that would prohibit “the admission of aliens from countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism as well as Yemen to the United States.” The Stop Terrorist Entry Program (STEP) Act, first introduced in 2003, also would have required all persons from these countries on student visas, temporary work visas, exchange and tourist visas to leave the United States within 60 days, despite their legal status in the country. Residents and nationals of Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen would be affected.
The bill makes an exception only in the cases of individuals who are seeking political or religious asylum, or who have immediate emergency medical needs.
Congressman Barrett said his bill came in response to the Fort Hood shooting and the Christmas-day attempt to blow up an airplane over Detroit. “While President Obama may have declared an end to the War on Terror, it is clear our enemies did not get the message. Twice in the past two months, radical Islamic terrorists have attacked our nation and the Administration has failed to adapt its national security and immigration policies to counter the renewed resolve of those who seek to harm our citizens.”
The American Army major and Nigerian alleged to have committed those attacks would not have been affected by the STEP Act.
One imagines that Barrett could come up with a way to amend his legislation to take care of the problems raised in that last paragraph.
The U.S. Army’s top intelligence officer in Afghanistan just took the unusual step of releasing a paper to the public outside the normal Pentagon protocol. And the paper? It’s a doozy. From the artist formerly known as praktike:
The paper rips U.S. intelligence officials in Afghanistan as being “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced … and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers.”
“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan,” Flynn writes, “the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.”
Ricks, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, which published the paper, explains Flynn’s motives thusly:
As I understand it, the paper was released through CNAS because Gen. Flynn wanted to reach beyond his own chain of command and his own community and talk to people such as commanders of deploying infantry units about what kind of intelligence they should be demanding.
One also suspects that Flynn must have conveyed his message to his superiors already, and grew frustrated that he wasn’t gaining any traction. I will say that the timing of the report is slightly unfortunate, coming just after the CIA suffered its worst losses in the field in a quarter century. At the same time, the suicide attack at Forward Operating Base Chapman only serves to underscore the idea that the U.S. intelligence community is out of its depth in Afghanistan.
Feh. Nothing that 30,000 more troops couldn’t solve.
