Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

I’m looking for a little quick help in identifying this mushroom.

It’s in the eastern United States, second growth maple-beech-pine forest with some birch and black cherry, along with tulip poplar trees.

Is it edible?

Are modern pirates still bucklers of swashes?

Roger and Gallet Paris, which is actually headquartered not in Paris, but in Monmouth, New Jersey, produces a “gentle nature shampoo”.

Where in nature are the shampoos found? I could save some money by going to get some there, maybe, if it’s somewhere near me.

I’d hate to contribute to an ecological crisis, though, by taking too much shampoo out of its natural environment.

According to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society, jackrabbits have suddenly disappeared from the area around Yellowstone National Park. They disappeared so quickly that no one even noticed that the jackrabbits were in decline until they were all gone.

Scientists say that they have no idea what actually caused the sudden disappearance of rabbits from Yellowstone. All they have to offer is a bunch of guesses: Disease, maybe. Predation, maybe. Weather events, maybe.

In the face of this ecological calamity, wouldn’t you rather have certainty? It’s time to turn to religion.

I say that Jesus is the explanation. It’s clear to me that the rabbits of Yellowstone have experienced the first wave of Rapture. Isn’t it just as the End Times prophets have predicted, that all of a sudden, people would turn around and notice that all the rabbits had disappeared?

The only proof I need is the Bible. Did you know that the Bible never once mentions rabbits? Just like there are no rabbits anymore in Yellowstone? It is as if God himself told the ancient Israelites that the Rapture of jackrabbits from Yellowstone would be a sign of the imminent return of Jesus.

The time is at hand! Prepare ye for the coming of the Lord! Greet him with carrots!

There’s an interesting story about people seeing lights in the sky in Texas. Some say that they’re alien space ships. Others say that they saw military jets chasing the lights.

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, is on the scene, “investigating”. Helpfully, Kenneth Cherry, the leader of the Texas chapter of MUFON, announced to reporters that “We believe there is some sort of phenomenon in action here.”

What an expert opinion. A phenomenon? A phenomenon in action?

You mean that something happened?

Thanks for the insight, MUFON. We none of us could have figured that out. Keep up the good work.

Thanks to the Associated Press too, for reporting that essential insight.

Here at Irregular Times, we aim for substance over style.

Just this once, however, I couldn’t resist. Seeing the photo of Matt Stoller with Mitt Romney over at Open Left, I found the answer to a question that has been dogging many a political junkie this year: How does Mitt Romney keep his helmet hair just so?

Now it can be told: Hair gel. Just look at that shine. It looks like an entire tube of hair glop goes into Romney’s hair at least twice a week.

After all, what does a little thing like logical incoherence on energy policy matter to the American public, when compared to hair?

It makes Romney “Reaganesque”, see.

Since when is Reaganesque a good thing?

Since Mitt Romney is running for the United States of Hair?

Oh, the folly of follicles. Evolutionarily, we should have gone past the point of using hair as a good indication of adaptability.

Oooh. Bumper sticker idea: Mitt is Maladaptive

I am mesmerised by Rosati’s approach to architecture. By multiplying windows times doors the occupant achieves more possibilities for entrance, exit and ventilation than the sum of component portals.

How this is actually achieved is a mystery to me. But perhaps a mystery is intended, hence the “Rosati window” aka the “Italian Rose Window” hence the Vatican connection in worship of time, space, and the creation of dimensions permitting unlimited multiplication.

Scientists have discovered a clam that is over 400 years old, pulled it up from the depths of the cold ocean near Iceland, and killed it. Why?

It turns out that the ancient clam, enigmatically described as a “quahog”, had a lot of information. That information, it seems, could threaten to reveal a centuries old conspiracy.

Just consider what professor Chris Richardson, of the School of Ocean Sciences at “Bangor University” has to say about clams like the one that was dredged up: “They are like tiny tape-recorders, in effect, sitting on the sea-bed and integrating signals.”

Stop and consider that for just a moment. Clams, operating as tiny tape recorders, spread across the Atlantic Ocean, listening for centuries, and integrating their signals into a gigantic intelligence network.

It’s clear to me that these clams are spying on us. But for who?

The answer comes again from the experts at the so-called “Bangor University”. They’ve determined that the clam they discovered, the oldest of them all, was planted in the ocean when Elizabeth I was Queen of the British Empire. The British, as is well known, had just conquered the Spanish, and had recovered from the economic drain of the Crusades.

The Crusades had brought many interesting… artifacts, let us say… to the European continent from the Middle East, where Islamic scholars had been holding the secrets of the five thousand year-old Egyptian empire. Some of those artifacts have been described as “lost at sea”?

What if they were not lost? What if they were left in the sea on purpose?

A British royal family that keeps its secrets. The mysterious death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The unexpected defeat of the Spanish Armada. The Bermuda Triangle – a British holding. Posh Spice’s arrival in Los Angeles. And now, a four hundred year-old clam threatens to reveal the string connecting them all.

The British Superpower is not dead after all. It has merely been sleeping, in the form of a secret society ringing the Atlantic Ocean, waiting, and listening to us… with its tape recorder clams.

Thanks to John Stracke for bringing to my attention today’s news that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has gained new powers to rush through death penalty cases to quick execution even when the quality of justice is sacrificed in the practice.

It’s a bald-faced grab for power. Executing terrorists fast has no benefit to domestic security (or Homeland Security, as the new politics of fear tells me I’m supposed to say). In fact, quickly executing people who may be able to give valuable information hurts security, as the too-quick execution of Timothy McVeigh showed. Too many secrets about the people behind the Oklahoma City bombings died with McVeigh.

The new death penalty powers come right on the heels of Alberto Gonzales getting powers to force Americans to participate in huge electronic spying programs against their fellow citizens, in what looks more and more like the old Total Information Awareness project.

Those who have read the new law that gives those powers, the Protect America Act, know that there is only one other person in the federal government who shares the power with Alberto Gonzales to run its Internet and telephone spying programs: The Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell.

Michael McConnell also was caught in a grab for power today. It seems that Director McConnell has pushed through yet another dramatic new program to spy against Americans. Domestic law enforcement agencies now have the power to use military spy satellites that were designed to spy against the Soviet Union to peer down at the United States, and see what people are are doing here – no terrorist threat required for the spying.

This is a dramatic consolidation of power in the hands of just two men in the federal government – Gonzales and McConnell. Why the power grab now? What do they plan to do with that power that they weren’t doing before?

I’m speaking to the small segment of Americans who is paying attention and cares about preserving the liberty that is the foundation of American government. Something very big is going on, right before your eyes.

Keep an eye to the skies… and wave hello to McConnell and Gonzales.

Yesterday I talked to an old friend back east who was about to lose a home through foreclosure. Today the foreclosure has been forestalled, and my friend is relieved.

Today my neighbor was talking about the number of SNL’s (?) (small mortgage companies) that have gone bankrupt. The neighbor’s usual topic of conversation is boobs.

Sometime during the afternoon a big “for sale” sign appeared nailed to the tree in my front yard.

I give up. What’s going on with the real estate market?