Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

As I write this, I’m standing in the United terminal at the Chicago O’Hare airport, waiting for my suitcase. I’ve been waiting here for 45 minutes, after walking out from behind security, and then going past chain link fences to another terminal from where I arrived, avoiding puddles with suspicious slicks and stinky garbage.

The whole airport seems to be under construction. The thing is that O’Hare has been under construction for years now. It will be ready for renovation when the construction is done, at this pace.

The flight was two hours late, but I wasn’t surprised at that. Flights going into and out of O’Hare are nearly always late.

The seat was cramped, and wouldn’t stay up straight, even though I never pressed the button for it to go back. I could hear the guy in back of me grumbling about it.

I never used to check my bag, but now, out of fear of terrorist attack, I have to choose between traveling without the basics that keep me human and putting my bag below. It seems that I lose either way.

I’ve been waiting for the bag for an hour now, and the conveyor belt upon which my bag is supposed to arrive has just been turned off. It doesn’t seem that anyone from my city will be getting their bags any time soon.

In the background, I can hear the announcement, over and over again, that the Department of Homeland Security has raised the alert level to orange.

Whatever happened to the idea that flying on an airplane is a glamorous thing? I wish I’d taken the train.

Here at the Irregular Times Diaries, many people have been making fun of me for predicting a series of disasters that will destroy humanity. Well, tonight, I’ve been vindicated. ABC News is right now broadcasting a special report entitled Last Days On Earth

In this special report:

“The world’s top scientists, including Stephen Hawking, considered the foremost living theoretical physicist, describe seven riveting scenarios detailing the deadliest threats to humanity.”

We’re talking black holes, asteroids, super volcanoes, super-intelligent robots killing us one by one, and more!

I’m not making this up. This may be your last warning. Would ABC News lie to us all? Could Stephen J. Hawking possibly be wrong? Oh, no! We’re all gonna die!

After thousands of years of testing, it is time for religious people to face the facts about prayer. It doesn’t work. The only power of prayer is the power to keep someone trying something over and over again long after it’s proven to be ineffective.

A case in point: Yesterday, the New York Times detailed the story of the nun who calls herself Sister Mary Pia. The nun has been praying for an end to the power of Hollywood, which she calls “the Babylon of the U.S.A.”, for 56 years.

If prayer had any power to effect the world, then surely a 56 year-long prayer vigil would show some signs of success. Yet, after two generations of anti-Hollywood prayer by Sister Mary Pia, Hollywood is stronger than ever, and the sisterhood to which Mary Pia belongs has grown weaker.

Facts are facts. Sister Mary Pia’s pointless life of sitting around doing nothing but praying is just one example that proves that prayer doesn’t work.

What is this a picture of? Do you think it’s a radar map of the surface of that new, not-a-planet, dwarf planet Pluto thing? We should be so lucky. It’s a picture of disaster, right here on Earth!

This is a radar image of a gigantic crater in Wilkes Land, an area of Antarctica. This crater is 300 miles wide. The meteorite that made it would have had to have been 30 miles wide. Think about that – a 30 mile-wide rock of death hurtling toward your home!

The impact that made this crater destroyed 90 percent of all life on Earth. The rapid expansion of life afterward brought us all the basic forms of life that we now know – creatures with backbones, squids, corals, arthropods, you name it. This time of dramatic evolution was called the Permian Explosion.

Unicellular life evolved into multicellular life during the Permian Explosion. So, what would happen now, if the Earth were hit by another 30 mile wide monster meteor today?

We almost all would die, that’s for sure. 90 percent of life would be incinerated, or poisoned, or frozen, or starved to death. But then what?

Afterwards, if the Permian Explosion is an example, the surviving populations would be transformed through the forces of natural selection into a new order of life, something with a higher level of complexity. Were talking about colonial, collective minds. We’re talking about human individuality being stripped away to be absorbed into a group consciousness that makes each person its slave.

Impact, flaming destruction, then evolution into a planetary organism that cares for us as little as we care for one of our skin cells that sloughs off and dies, unnoticed! That’s what this image shows is in our future!

Tucker Carlson last Wednesday on MSNBC (My Special Neighbor, Bishop Carlson):

It is wrong, blasphemous, and sinful for you to suggest, imply or help other people come to the conclusion that the U.S. government killed 3,000 of its own citizens, because it didn’t!

I am incredibly grateful to Bishop Carlson for his new edict, but in relating it to my friends and neighbors, I need a bit of theological backing. I need to find is the Biblical passage in which dissent against a government identified as blasphemy. I figured Exodus would be the one, or maybe Leviticus, but no luck there. Can you help me in my exegesis?

Today, US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that President George W. Bush violated the Constitution and broke the law when he set up and executed the program to spy on Americans’ telephone calls without a search warrant or the legally required approval of a FISA court.

I’m reading through her ruling to see exactly what she has to say on the case. It’s great reading, in spots, reminding us about what makes this case so important.

Judge Diggs Taylor chose a particular quotation from, written by Justice Earl Warren, in the case U.S. v. Robel in 1967, to conclude her ruling. In doing so, she is sending a clear message to the citizens of the United States of America. Will we listen?

“Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart. . . . It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of . . . those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile.”

The latest silly explanation for why Republican Senator George Allen is calling people of non-European descent macaca monkeys: They say that the term macaca doesn’t refer to a monkey at all, but that macaca is a Republican“neologism”.