It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Irregular Prediction

We here at Irregular Times have been known to avoid making predictions, given the near impossibility of making predictions that are consistently accurate. We generally prefer on-target observations to predictions of the future course of current events, but we know a sure thing when we hear about it, and so we are making the following prediction:

After the Democratic Convention, Republican Kingpin Karl Rove will begin a dirty whisper campaign using private innuendo and commercially-funded fake "push polls" designed to impugn the character of Democratic nominee Howard Dean.

Together Karl Rove and George W. Bush have conducted such smear campaigns too often during elections in the past to doubt that they will do it again. Watch for the Rove-Bush rumor mongers to be at it again starting in May or June of 2004, when you'll start to read comments about unsubstantiated concerns about Howard Dean. Remember, you heard about it first here on Irregular Times.

Although the better parts of the mainstream press will report on the role of Karl Rove and George W. Bush in this smear campaign, the story will not be given top billing, buried beyond page 11 in most newspapers. Most of the American public will only learn of the Republicans' dirty and fundamentally false techniques months or years after the election is over, if they ever learn of them of all.

Will you be among those Americans? As for ourselves, we here at Irregular Times intend to pay attention, and as soon as Karl Rove gets up to the dirty tricks he used in the 2000 Bush campaign, we'll let you know what we find.

Irregular Times was online before Bush knew what online was, and we'll be here long after he fades to fiddling on his dude ranch in Crawford, Texas. We're no fortune tellers, but we can tell a deep bucket of slime when we see one. We'll be around as long as the times are irregular, and that should prove to be a very long time indeed.

Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 7:38 AM. # (permalink)  




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