The Terrorist Media and Rattling of Sabres

So they found a car bomb in London. It was packed with ‘petrol, nails, and gas’. Start panicking.

Where do I start? First of all, petrol and gas are the same damn thing. So now the car has gasoline and nails. Reports I read indicated that there was about 50 gallons of gas in individual containers, all around some sort of igniting device. Puh-lease!

This goes in a long line of vaguely threatening plots that are thought up by completely inept people. Add to that a local authority saying something like “The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable” or, “It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been significant injury or loss of life,” and you get something greater, much greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, I have begun to wonder just how much ‘terror’ these ‘terrorists’ actually have to foment in order for the world media to pick up these stories and cause more terror than 1000 Bin Ladens. As with the shoe bomber , the liquid terror , the Liberty City 7, the Fort Dix six, and even more laughably, the Blowtorch Guy , this is just another example of plots that qualify as terror only because the media pays any attention at all to these ass clowns.

Basically, Al Queda needs to do nothing. It seems that all you need is a suspected terror cell, add a drug addled FBI informant, have said informant suggest all manner of cockamamie schemes, mix in some surveillance footage, cook until politically expedient, and Voila’! Terror Plot a la mode!

Sad, really. Really sad.

Also, I have been reading that the US is sending another carrier group to the Persian Gulf. I think that gives us about 1800 cruise missiles (we shot something like 300in the first Iraq war) to rain down on the innocent civilians. Interestingly, Defense News was reporting back in April that the Enterprise carrier group was to be sent to the Persian gulf to replace the Eisenhower group, but it now appears that they will both remain there.

And oh, yeah.  Impeach Cheney!

If I hurry up and post this, it might not go stale.

As if…

So she didn’t know her tit was going to be exposed to millions of people, but she just happened to adorn her nipple…for comfort?

Evidently, between Prince’s shadow masturbation, and the blatantly homophobic Snickers ad, this Super bowl earned over 150 complaints to the FCC.

What strikes me about these issue is that the media went bonkers over JJ’s blinged-out titty, but I heard not one word about Prince virtually stroking his giant surreal cock. Is that sexism, or too trivial to even take the time to upload these pics?

BTW – if you are the political type, or just think we may need a bit more accountability in government, go sign this petition to start investigating the White House:

 Wexler Wants Hearings!

Just go and sign it already!

It’s tinfoil hat time!

Here is my first installment of things that I think about and probably shouldn’t share.

With Evan Almighty coming out, I thought it would be a good time to trot out one of my favorite exercises in Logical Leaps of Faith. Consider Noah’s Ark.

The great flood is a cross cultural story. Whether this is owing to one tale that spread out in ancient times to be included in many cultures, or that there actually was some great deluge in our past is debatable, so we won’t waste our time with that.

What I’d like to propose is that the story of Noah’s Ark is the story of humans moving through the solar system. I know, I’ve probaly lost all 3 of my readers by now, but I’ll soldier on.

Venus is a planet that compares to the Earth in several ways. It is similar in size (95% of Earth’s diameter, 80% of Earth’s mass) and in composition (similar chemical makeup, dense iron core). Both planets have few craters, indicating young surfaces.

But unlike earth (so far), Venus is completely covered in greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide makes up most of its atmosphere. See where this is going?

So imagine with me, if you will, that the Garden of Eden was on Venus. The whole planet is a tropical rain forest with robust plants capable of converting the increased sunlight (owing to Venus’s proximity to the sun) into oxygen. But there is trouble afoot. There are these little cancerous monkeys running around, ‘adapting’ the planet to themselves. Doing what humans do, which includes wanton polluting of the environment. So the humans pollute the planet so bad that the plants start to die of, which causes a snowball effect increasing the tempreature and CO2 levels exponentially. Eventually, it starts to rain and doesn’t stop (until it is too hot for liquids to exist), owing to the massive environmental challenges. And to top it off, the rain is terribly acidic, due to the sulphuric acid content of the clouds. So one clever group of humans decides to get while the gettin’s good.

They sail their little spaceship ‘for forty days and forty nights’ and land on some mountain in the Middle East. And the colonization of Earth begins.

So there are some obvious problems with this situation. The atmosphere of Venus is 90 times more dense than the Earth’s, or roughly equivalent to being one kilometer underwater. I have not found a way to rationalize this ‘fact’ away. Venus rotates very slowly. I mean really slowly. Like it takes 243 Earth days for Venus to spin around just once. In fact, a day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus (Go figure). This might figure into Moses being hundreds of ‘years’ old, but I’m not smart enough for that calculus.

Venus also doesn’t appear to have tectonic plates, but this may be due to the fact that the surface can reach 750 K (890 degrees F) during the day, or hot enough to melt lead. This would lead to the breakdown of anything that humans may have left behind, so that works in my favor.

So there you have it. A morsel to chew on. Do I believe it? No, but it is fun to think about.

And that concludes the first installment of Tinfoil Hat Time, otherwise known as Where Does He Come Up with This Shit?

Aid and Comfort

How have we come to this point? The constitution was written to be unassailable, yet it is being shredded piece by piece by the current administration, aided and abetted by the Keystone Kops-like ministrations in our Legislative Branch. Most interesting to me is the prevalence of pre-fascist mentalities seeping into our government like the sewer backing up through your toilet and slowly turning the hall carpet doo-doo brown.

Glenn Greenwald is so much more of a heavyweight on this I must defer to his take on Holy Joe. And this is just one (albeit extra-slimy) senator. It is a common refrain in our political discourse to attack anyone critical of this administration as ‘traitors’ and ‘un-patriotic’. What really chaps my hide is the fact that this rhetoric does double duty:

• It affords the supporters of this disastrous policy cover while the decisions are being made
• It plants the seeds of discontent (in a war that many of us recognized as unwinnable from the first place) that will flourish once the inevitable occurs. Like Vietnam, the neo-cons and hawks will not blame whatever fallout befalls us on bad policies, but on the lack of ‘backbone’ and ‘sticktoitiveness’ that the anti-war Left displayed to the detriment of the Wise Leaders.

At the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law in my First Evar post, here I go. This is the exact kind of attitude that gave the Nazi party traction in the late 20’s and early 30’s, as well most anywhere else fascism has taken hold. If you saddle the voices of peace with failure that is actually your own fault, you send a clear message about where you’d like the Nation-State to go :

“Peace? What did peace bring our Great Nation? We lost the War thanks to those peace-loving hippies! What we need is a strong military! A strong Leader! Never again will we let those peace-niks endanger our Great Nation!”

Take it away, Herr Goering…

That’s my two cents for now. Hardly uncharted territory, but, hey, I’m new.

BTW- What is it with the authoritarian/GOP set that seems like they live in Bizarro World? Everything they say they intend to do, they achieve the opposite.  Less Terrorism?  Hello Iraqi Terrorist Incubator!  Less Debt?  Hello staggering cash outlays!  Homeland Security?  Hello ineffective boondoggle and porous borders!  Hate gays?  Hello closet!

Progosphere!

I am officially coining the phrase ‘Progosphere’. That is all.

Nun Bun!