Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

There’s been a lot of talk over the last twenty years about how the planet Earth seems to have become a great deal smaller. Smaller it may have become, but is that because people can transcend great distances, or is it just because people have become able to ignore them?

A business brochure I happened upon today promised to tell people about “The Future Of Business”. It read, “In this issue, we explore the subject of global change on a local level, drawing our own picture of what the future of business may look like based on conversations with some of the tenants at Centennial Lakes Office Park.”

The brochure was eight pages long.

Can eight pages explore the subject of global change on a local level? What on Earth is global change on a local level?

When people use the word “global” these days, they often just mean “international”. They’ve got business contacts from some foreign countries, sure, but are those contacts truly global? Global is supposed to refer to something that pertains to the whole world, not just a connection between some parts of the globe.

Here’s a test for determining if something is truly global: If it’s not in the Falklands Islands, it’s not global. If it’s not in North Korea, it’s not global.

The cease fire is over. Moqtada al-Sadr has gone from insurgent to government minister to insurgent again.

Whatever you think about al-Sadr, he has been calling for a solution based on diplomatic talks instead of fighting in the streets. Not Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki has been saying that he’s going to fight against al-Sadr “until the end”.

So guess whose side the United States has taken? Al-Maliki’s, of course. He’s the American puppet, after all.

The United States military has joined the Iraqi civil war between Al-Maliki’s militias and Al-Sadr’s militias. The US military is now hurling bombs into Iraqi cities, hoping to kill Iraqis aligned with Al-Sadr.

How is that going to help make Iraq more stable?

The fact that the U.S. military is taking the side of Al-Maliki in this civil war may end up helping Al-Sadr more than Al-Maliki. After all, three-quarters of Iraqis want the American military occupation to end, and want American soldiers out of Iraq. Making it clear that Al-Sadr is the top anti-American fighter may make him stronger, not weaker. Tens of thousands of Iraqi protesters took to the streets this week against Al-Maliki, not against Al-Sadr.

George W. Bush’s strategy in Iraq is as smooth as ever, which is to say, as rough as a mule ride into the Grand Canyon at night in a snowstorm with a saddle made of sandpaper.

Let’s put this plainly: Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius has saved a huge part of the United States from filth.

The air that blows across Kansas eventually blows over most of the continental United States. If Kansas keeps that air clean, then the millions of Americans who live downwind from Kansas. If Kansas spews filth into the air, then the millions of Americans who live downwind from Kansas will breathe that filth.

On Friday, Governor Sebelius vetoed legislation that would have allowed the spewing of filth into America’s air, and into America’s lungs, from new dirty coal-fired power plants that would have been built in Kansas.

Thank you, on behalf of downwind America, to Kathleen Sebelius, for protecting us from this filth.

It’s official. Terror has been identified by the President of the United States as one of the government’s tools in its supposed War on Terror.

Explaining why he vetoed legislation from Congress that would have explicitly outlawed waterboarding and other forms of torture, George W. Bush said that “The bill would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror.” With that statement, President Bush is on the record as saying that torture is regarded by his White House as among the “most valuable tools” against terror.

Americans who know how to think will regard this statement as strange, given that the purpose of torture is to encourage compliance through the creation of terror.

So, the Bush White House is using terror as a tool in the War on Terror. That suggests to me that the War on Terror is not really a war against terror at all. We ought to call it a War For Terror or a War Of Terror instead.

I was deeply disturbed to read this afternoon that Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Houston was an official stop on the Hillary Clinton for President campaign today. Every time I see Joel Osteen, with his insincere smile and gospel of divinely sanctioned wealth, I feel dirty. The man is so slick he fairly drips with snake oil, leaving a trail behind him as he leaves his stadium for Jesus.

Hillary Clinton’s political advisors might want to consider: If you win the Democratic nomination through an appeal to the followers of hucksters like Osteen, you’ll do so without the respect of many Democratic voters outside the Bible Belt. Of course, Democratic politicians have been campaigning on a neglect of Democratic voters for a long time, and getting away with it.

Maybe Clinton’s advisors have calculated that the number of Democrats repulsed by the connection with Osteen will be made up for by the number of evangelical Republicans impressed by it. Within Texas, of course, a Democrat is merely a Republican who has trouble pronouncing the “R” sound, so I suppose the Bible thumping will play well there.

Daniel Gardner of Oberlin, Ohio is cool. George Luna of Atascadero, California is cool. John Bork of Grafton, Iowa is cool.

Is your mayor cool? You can check at Cool Mayors.

A mayor is counted as cool if he or she has committed the municipal government of his or her city or village to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCP) or the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. In other words, these mayors are trying to get around the inaction of the Bush White House in confronting climate change, and working to make things better where they live.

Cool.

Republican politics in Washington D.C. brings us this polluted equation:

40 billion dollars of profits for ExxonMobil in 2008 plus record oil prices plus ever escalating economic damage due to fossil-fuel-fueled climate change equals continued tax breaks for ExxonMobil

This is no joke. It’s what’s really going on. We’re getting another record-breaking federal budget next year, but ExxonMobil won’t be paying its share.

The Republicans in DC are nothing but an oil slick across America’s pocketbook.

In his latest eruption of idiocy, Bill Clinton says of his wife Hillary, “She and John McCain are very close. They always laugh that if they wind up being the nominees of their parties, it would be the most civilized election in American history and probably put the voters to sleep.”

Ha. Ha. Ha… What?!?

Since when would it be a good thing to put the voters to sleep?

This statement by Bill Clinton is doing Hillary Clinton no favors. It exhibits everything that’s wrong with the Hillary Clinton campaign. As a senator, Hillary Clinton has made cozy allegiances with Republicans, and voted along with them to advance their agenda.

Hillary Clinton has become “very close” with John McCain, and will be civilized if she runs against him for President, but she treats Barack Obama like a dog, with robocalls that slur “Barack Hussein Obama”.

Why the hell would Democrats want a presidential nominee who treats Republicans with kid gloves, but attacks fellow Democrats with savagery?

Bill Clinton’s comment is also a not very subtle warning to the activist progressive Democratic grassroots: The Clintons will run a “civilized” campaign, which means that the backbone gets thrown out the window. Uppity grassroots Democrats who demand strong action against the Republicans will not be tolerated. Progressives will be shut out of the process. This confirms my suspicion that Bill Clinton is determined to keep new Democratic voters out of power.

Hey, if you want a Democratic presidential nominee who will go soft on the Republican agenda, and follow the Joseph Lieberman path of giving a big hug John McCain and his plans for an American presence in Iraq of 50 years, then Hillary Clinton is a good pick for you.

If you want a Democratic presidential nominee who will actually represent Democrats, then you’ll need to vote for someone else.

As for myself, let me make this clear, Bill Clinton: This Democrat will not go to sleep.

I’ve got a theory about Bill Clinton’s obnoxious behavior, coming up with inaccurate and crude slurs against Barack Obama. I think he knows that he looks like a jerk, and I think he knows that it disgusts voters, and I think that’s exactly what he wants.

The Hillary Clinton for President campaign has never sought to build a real network of grassroots support - not of the kind we saw developing in 2004. They know too that Barack Obama is attracting new voters to the presidential primaries, and that new voters are those who are the most likely to lose their resolve and not show up to vote when they become discouraged.

Hillary Clinton’s support, on the other hand, tends to come from the institutional Democratic Party and its extensions at the state and local level. Longtime Democrats who have been regular voters are more likely to support a candidate who reminds them of Democrats in the past, rather than someone who challenges Democrats to break with the past.

If voters are getting turned off by Bill Clinton’s smarmy attacks against Barack Obama, and want to stop participating in the 2008 presidential primary elections, it’s more likely that those who walk away in disgust will be Barack Obama’s supporters. I think that Bill Clinton knows that, and is purposefully trying to create low voter turnout in the Super Tuesday primaries, so that Hillary Clinton can win.

Consider how, every time that one of Bill Clinton’s stupid comments gets publicity in the news, he doesn’t apologize and back off. He comes out the next day and says something even more outrageous. Bill Clinton knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s trying to drive everyone out of the Democratic primaries except for the people who are supporters of the establishment Clinton machine, and will put up with anything that Bill Clinton does.

Inhabit, an eco-design blog, turned me on this morning to the Solar Ark, a building in Japan covered in reclaimed photovoltaic cells retinkered after a manufacturing error by the Solar Ark’s sponsor company, Sanyo. The Solar Ark contains a museum dedicated to solar energy, and generates more than 500,000 Kilowatts of electricity every year.

Good for Sanyo for building the Solar Ark, and good for Inhabit for reporting on it.

Now, where is the Solar Ark for the United States?

I’m rolling my eyes at the headline in the New York Times today that reads: “Calls Grow for Bloomberg to Make Up His Mind”.

Where? Where are these calls growing for Michael Bloomberg to make up his mind about whether he’s going to run for President or not?

I haven’t heard any such calls. No one I know is growing impatient, longing to hear what Mike Bloomberg will decide to do in 2008. There never has been any clamor for Michael Bloomberg to do anything among the people I know.

It seems to me that the only people who are calling for Michael Bloomberg to do anything are a bunch of Bloomberg’s fellow media tycoons and power brokers. Maybe they’re calling each other in a heated fury of anxiety, wondering if their favorite billionaire will represent their interests as President. I don’t know. I don’t have their telephone numbers.

But “Calls Grow for Bloomberg to Make Up His Mind”? Give me a break, New York Times.

I know that Bloomberg’s people have been planting little seeds in the ears of reporters, trying to create the impression that the “right” people are backing Bloomberg, but when it comes to the nearly 300 million of the rest of us who are not the “right” people, Michael Bloomberg could move to Antarctica and study penguins for all we care.

Here’s a great indication of the difference between the current state of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party: During the Iowa caucuses, the web site of the Iowa Democratic Party is running smooth and fast. The web site of the Republican Party of Iowa, however, is running as slow as slugs, taking minutes to load, when it loads at all.

Take note, voters, of which political party is better able to execute a plan.

Mitt Romney is so obviously a phony that even Republicans admit that his political speeches are nothing but a load of bull. Check out what Mike Huckabee had to say about Mitt Romney: “What Gov. Romney has said is off the charts in terms of being inaccurate and not just inaccurate, but being blatantly untrue.”

Well, if even the infamously corrupt Mike Huckabee can see the dishonesty of fellow Republican Mitt Romney, why should any of the rest of us trust him?

Deep down in the most patriotic bones of my body, I feel betrayed by God tonight. I thought, as George W. Bush said, that God was on our side in the struggle against evildoers. Now I can see that God is nothing more than another Islamofascist!

I was reading my Holy Bible, which all American patriots must do, when I found a disturbing, anti-American verse in the book of Leviticus. Take a look at what it says:

“These are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle..”

God is saying that eagles are abominations! As Stephen Colbert has rightly showed us all, anyone who loves the American bald eagle is a good, patriotic citizen. It logically follows that if someone does not love the American bald eagle is anti-patriotic and anti-American.

Here is Biblical proof that God hates all eagles! He calls them an abomination!

George W. Bush spoke the truth when he said, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us!” We see that God hates eagles, and therefore stands against America.

We all know who stands against America. It’s the evildoers - in other words, the Islamofascists! Thus, I have arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that God is an Islamofascist!

Why did God attack America on September 11, 2001? Why does God hate America?

Over on the Irregular Times main page, Peregrin Wood has rightfully heaped disdain on the military’s claim that it is immoral for soldiers merely to use web sites that are inclusive of gay people. He referenced a USA Today article on the story.

What stood out to me from that article was one absurd sentence: “Betty Huang of Community Connect says the military services, through private ad agencies, bought Monster’s ‘diversity and inclusion package’, which includes posts on her company’s niche websites for Asian-Americans, blacks, Latinos, and gays.”

Memo to Community Connect: Diversity and inclusion cannot be sold to the military in a package. Targeting people for exploitative military recruiting advertisements certainly doesn’t fit under my definition of inclusion and diversity.

GOP members of the United States Senate left the Senate chamber in a near stampede yesterday, when Senator Larry Craig returned to caucus with them. “Call my wife and let her know I didn’t let him touch me,” one GOP senator was overheard to say into his cell phone.

“It is outrageous,” said another Republican senator to PNN news service, “that Harry Reid refused to allow us to hold a vote on whether to take a special emergency cootie recess. The American people deserve an up or down vote on immoral sexuality in the Senate. Up or down!”

Mitt Romney’s campaign issues a press release explaining that, in protest of the return of Romney’s former ally to the Senate, the Romney for President campaign would refuse to even mention the word “Senate” for as long as Craig was in the Senate.

“Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” asked Romney’s campaign manager.

What kind of Republican values are these, that when one Republican brings out a valid criticism of another Republican, the critical Republican gets censored?

This week, a web site critical of Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign was shut down, so as to avoid upsetting the Republican orthodoxy. Apparently, Republican Party leaders did not want to allow any criticism of Fred Thompson, even valid criticism, on the off chance that Fred Thompson could become the Republican presidential nominee.

PhoneyFred.org, created by a Republican, pointed out the obvious: Fred Thompson’s record of one and half terms in the United States Senator was sadly mediocre. The site’s creator wrote, “You’re probably in the same boat: You can’t get the theme to ‘Law and Order’ out of your head, but can you name one thing that Fred did during his eight years in the United States Senate?”

Fred Thompson was not competent enough to do much in the Senate, and he isn’t competent to serve as President of the United States. Unfortunately, the Republican Party wants its followers to pretend not to see this obvious truth. They’re willing to sacrifice honesty for the sake of power.

PhoneyFred.org is now offline. The truth is still the truth.

I was looking for information about cuttlefish this morning when I came across the following three videos, each of which purports to show a cuttlefish attack.

The thing is, looking at the videos, I don’t really know if I see any attacks. In one cuttlefish video, I see nothing more than a cuttlefish swimming in murky water, with a lot of divers circling around it. In another video, I see a cuttlefish come up to a diver, and then for a second swim quickly toward the diver before darting away. Is that an attack?

In a third video, the caption says that the cuttlefish “hit” his mask, put its tentacles on his regulator hose, and then chased him for ten minutes. However, the caption shows no such attack - or, if the video shows what it’s like to be chased by a cuttlefish, then it seems that only the slowest of swimmers would have anything to worry about. It isn’t exactly a James Bond chase scene.

The lesson I take from these videos is that, when there’s room for interpretation, people like to believe that they’ve been attacked - even by cuttlefish. We seem to prefer that things are out to get us, even if they’re really just taking a look and saying hello.

I’m not saying that cuttlefish don’t behave aggressively toward divers, occassionally. There is another, short video which clearly shows a cuttlefish in something like an attack, though brief, against a camera:

Another video showing such an attack, however, makes me wonder about the context of this kind of aggressive cuttlefish behavior. In this video, two divers are following a cuttlefish, which seems to adopt a warning stance before it briefly rushes at one of the divers. It’s a lesson to divers: When swimming with intelligent animals, don’t chase, or you’ll be told to back off.

That lesson is reinforced by the following video, showing two divers harassing a cuttlefish:

This year, it’s difficult to appreciate the Democrats, what with their failure to follow through on the promises of the 2006 congressional election. I can, however, say this much:

While looking through the transcript of this morning’s Democratic presidential debate, I suddenly felt very thankful that, with all the shortcomings of these candidates, at least Joseph Lieberman is not amongst those running this time around.

It practically makes me want to go put on a hat with a belt buckle on it and shoot a turkey.

Let’s all celebrate the healing power of faith in our lives! Let’s give testimony to the example provided by Ronald Marquez of Phoenix, Arizona, a God-fearing man if ever there was one!

Ronald Marquez was in the process of expelling demons from his 3 year-old granddaughter, grabbing her by the throat and choking them out of her, good man, while her devoted mother sat in the corner, chanting prayers, covered with blood from her own struggle with the demons.

Some demon-inspired neighbor called the police to try to stop Mr. Marquez. The police burst in, and tried to stop Marquez from choking the demons in his granddaughter by blasting him with a stun gun. Still, Marquez was determined to force the demons out of his granddaughter’s body, so he held on, and only released his hands from around his granddaughter’s throat when he was hit with the stun gun again and he lost consciousness.

That’s the power of faith! We can expect to see this story written up in the religion section of the local newspaper soon, I’m sure.

Sadly, the police interrupted the exorcism, and the 3 year-old girl, now in the hospital, is still possessed by demons. If only her grandfather had been able to keep on strangling her body, I’m sure that would have saved her, in the name of Jesus.

There’s been a big deal made out of the Pope’s recent declaration that Roman Catholic churches would once again have the option to use the traditional Latin prayers, including a Good Friday prayer that urges God to compel “the Heretics”, “Schismatics”, “the Jews”, and “the Heathen” to submit to the authority of the Catholic Church and worship Jesus as the Pope tells them to.

A lot of people are shocked and offended at this move by the Pope. I can understand why people are offended at a call by the Pope for all Catholics to pray for a universal submission to the authority of one church. It’s a nasty, megalomaniacal, theocratic attitude that leads the Pope to insist upon such worldwide obedience.

I can’t understand, however, why anyone would be shocked at the Pope and his church issuing such a call. There’s a long history of Catholic arrogance and insane claims to power from the Pope.

Pope Benedict, or Mr. Ratzinger, or whatever his name is supposed to be these days, believes that he is the earthly representative of the omnipotent supernatural creator of the entire universe, after all. He claims to be absolutely infallible.

That kind of perspective would make anyone’s psychological train run off the tracks. So, the Catholic Church has gone and issued another edict in which the Pope stamps his foot and demands that he be everyone’s master. I’m not shocked. The Pope has always been out of touch and a bit crazy.

It beats me why anyone would follow the Pope, other than to satisfy some immature need to have someone in authority take care of all of the deep thinking required by adult life.

Peregrin Wood wrote about how the Southern Baptist Convention declared skepticism of a human role in global warming - even though the Southern Baptist Convention has no special scientific expertise with which to make an accurate decision in the matter.

The decisions of the Southern Baptist Convention are all based on faith - what the Baptists want to believe is true, rather than what what the facts suggest is true.

So, it really shouldn’t be surprising that the Southern Baptists decided to hush up an investigation into allegations that the number of Southern Baptists has been purposefully overblown. The Southern Baptist Convention decided not to examine the complaints that church leaders have been exaggerating the number of people in their churches in order to gain power fo