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Well, okay, this isn’t really a message from Rick Warren. It’s an imagination of what Rick Warren might say to American liberals duped into thinking that Barack Obama would represent their values… if Rick Warren were an honest man, and not just a self-serving political climber using his religious power as a tool for his ambition.

Back in 2004, the right wing Republicans had a blowout victory. Their win, and their arrogance after their win, set the stage for their defeats in 2006 and 2008.

Many Americans are content to let the story end there. Especially those who want to believe that a President Obama will restore their vision of a united United States of America, with some elements of progressive ideas mixed in with a great deal of the Bush legacy, will now be content to sit back and bask.

Others will not be doing so. The 2008 presidential campaign showed that there are many Americans who are upset by the slightest hint of anything progressive. It isn’t just that they don’t like Barack Obama - personal animosity can be overcome. It’s that they regard Social Security as unacceptably socialist. It’s that they regard any withdrawal of soldiers from Iraq, even after eight years of war there, as a cut-and-run surrender. It’s that they believe that subjecting Guantanamo prisoners to a genuine system of justice will unleash havoc on Earth.

On the progressive side, there is also a growing feeling of discontent with the mushy vision of Obama centrism. The idea that there’s no such thing as red states and blue states in America just doesn’t match up with the reality we see as we travel across America. To say that the people in Wyoming and Wisconsin, South Carolina and Oregon all share a common vision strikes us as an absurd denial of real political conflict.

The fact is that regional divisions in American politics have not been overcome by the 2008 presidential election, just as they were not by the 2004 presidential election or the 2000 election. The divisions remain, and their long roots are continuing to expand the cracks in our nation.

This year, Sarah Palin was mocked for her association with the Alaska secessionist movement. However, of all Palin’s associations, this one had the most sense to it. In 2004, I wrote about the arguments for secession - really, for the formal division of the USA. This map is what I came up with as a first draft proposal.

I’m glad that Barack Obama won this year’s election, but the truth is that I’m not satisfied with his plans for America. Obama’s passion for unity behind his leadership has caused him to embrace some ideas that are reprehensible to me. The newness of Obama, and the cute charm of his family, will keep such grumblings quiet for a while, but even Camelot fell to the forces of division.

Might it not be better to accept the divisions that exist, and to allow the huge scale of broad American vision to be broken up into separate nations that could more closely represent the will of their citizens? The truth is that I’m not convinced that breaking the USA into separate nations is a very good idea at all, but part of me is attracted to it.

I’ve created this new map this year as a thought experiment about what a divided USA might look like. In creating the blue nations and red nations, I’ve relied upon maps of the 2004 and 2008 election results by county, considering not just the state-wide Electoral College votes, but the local differences within each state as well.

The largest physical nation on this map is the red Homeland States of America, but this area is missing many of the largest cities, and is made up of a lot of very sparsely-populated land. I’ve tried to avoid having nations that are not contiguous in some kind of sense, though, with the new red nations of Chesapeake and Mackinac, a shared waterway is what defines the small nationality. The blue nation of Montana is landlocked, but it has a border with Canada so that it is not completely surrounded by Republican red. Hawaii and Alaska are not shown on this map, but as with the 2004 map, they are imagined as independent nations, Hawaii blue and Alaska red.

I just took the Jane Austen personality test, and I discovered that I am a Marianne Dashwood.

I was hoping that I would be an Edward Ferrars, Colonel Brandon, or Captain Wentworth. But no, it appears that I am doomed to twist my ankle and walk around in the rain a lot.

In a suburb of Detroit, Glenn Johnson managed to cross his backyard above-ground swimming pool in just 2.53 seconds, a personal record.

In Kirkland, Washington, Dale Yupree walked to her neighborhood grocery store in just 16 minutes, although she was slowed down when she felt obliged to stop to talk with that strange man at 29 Plum Street.

In Yuma, Arizona, Jackson Rorsch vaulted over a six foot-high fence in order to avoid being spotted by his girlfriend’s father.

In West Memphis, Tennessee, Richard Larsen tossed a lampshade 23 feet into the air in order to get a frisbee out of a sweetgum tree, but his move was disqualified when the lampshade got stuck in the tree.

In Council Bluffs, Iowa, Seth Fobray finally managed to reach the faucet all by himself. He is the youngest of the Fobray family ever to do so.

All of these achievements have at least as much impact on your life as the Olympics in China, if not more.

British publication The Sun says that no one can use the following photograph without their permission, because it presents a uniquely valuable, shocking expose of the life of extraterrestrial fairies visiting the earth.

The headline: Leprechaun-alien snapped.

The Sun explains that the person who took this photograph “swears the image has not been doctored.” Gee, really?

Well, I for one am not going to question what someone else believes. I mean, that would be rude, wouldn’t it? In fact, I want to validate the feelings of the alien leprechaun photographer by sharing a similar experience I had looking at a photograph of John McCain, giving a speech in front of an American flag (because otherwise people might think he’s a Canadian).

Here’s the original photograph:

Now, here’s a closeup of that area of the flag next to John McCain’s elbow:

It’s amazing - and I didn’t doctor this photograph! Well, except for the yellow arrow and the green circle.

That crucifix was clearly placed right next to John McCain to let us all know that McCain is really Jesus returned to Earth to spread the divine gospel of tax cuts! God really works in tricky ways, doesn’t he!

And who would have suspected that John McCain is Jesus, now that he’s shaved his beard? It’s almost as if McCain were waiting until the right moment to reveal himself as the Messiah… and that moment is at hand! Hallelujah! Baptize yourself in the Potomac!

What if the Founding Fathers had decided to take Barack Obama’s approach to liberty, as demonstrated through his support of the FISA Amendments Act? What if they sought to compromise their freedom with King George, as Barack Obama has done with George W. Bush? Here’s how things might have been different:

Patrick Henry:
“Give me liberty, or give me compromise!”

John Paul Jones:
“I have not yet begun to compromise.”

Thomas Paine:
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, compromise. I promise to review the British rule over America after I am elected, and have my Attorney General issue recommendations.”

Benjamin Franklin:
“We must all hang together, per se.”

Benjamin Franklin:
“”They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, will pick up swing voters and get elected.”

Nathan Hale:
“I only regret that I have but one chance to compromise my liberty.”

Thomas Paine:
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, let someone else defend them.”

Israel Putnam:
“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes! Then shoot at the ground!”

George Washington:
“Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of Liberty - that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men. Slavery isn’t all bad, though, if you think about it.”

George Washington:
“The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny mediated against them. Let us therefore give King George whatever he wants.”

Thomas Jefferson:
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, well, what are you going to do about it?”

Jonathan Mayhew:
“No taxation without representation… is an extremist position. We’ll move to the center, and support taxation without representation, but with a court that can observe our money going on the ships back to England.”

You’ve probably heard about the Fitna movie by now. It’s a short movie made by a right wing Dutch legislator who is angry at Islam. Muslims say that the movie is insulting to them, and have demanded that it be censored. Some Muslim extremists have made threats of violence against companies that could possibly have been involved in making a web site for the Fitna movie available online.

Network Solutions has refused to allow anyone to visit the web site developed for the distribution of the Fitna movie. YouTube, and now LiveLeak, have decided to censor anyone who tries to post part of the Fitna movie, because they’re afraid of the threats of Muslim extremists.

Well, I am proud to announce that I have found a copy of a Fitna movie, and can make it available to you right here at Irregular Times. Of course, this isn’t a copy of THE Fitna movie. That’s been censored very effectively. I just can’t find it anywhere.

Not being able to see and judge the original Fitna movie for myself, I went ahead and made my own Fitna movie, which you see here. The text of this new version of the Fitna movie, for those of you who might be afraid to watch it, is as follows:

This is the true story of the Koran, and as such, it may offend some Muslims. So be it. You can’t make everyone happy all the time.

The Koran was not written by the Arabs, as modern day Muslim scholars would have you believe. In fact, the Koran was written on the planet Fitna in the Andromeda Galaxy.

It seems that someone on the planet Fitna had made, and posted on the Internet, a short video about the blahblahs, a species of gigantic interplanetary beings from the nearby Blah Blah Nebula. The video said that the blahblahs were smelly.

When the blahblahs heard about this Internet video, they got very upset, and sent messages to the government of Fitna, saying that if the video was not censored, a big blahblah would come over to the planet Fitna and crush it in its jaws.

Some people on Fitna said that the video needed to come down right away, for the sake of Fitnaland Security. Calmer voices reminded the others that there was such a thing as freedom of speech on Fitna, and that if the video were censored, the people of Fitna would have to live in fear of the blahblahs forever.

So, the video stayed online, and a big blahblah came. The blahblah grabbed the planet Fitna in its jaws and tried to crush it, but nothing happened.

It turns out that the blahblahs didn’t have any teeth.

The people of Fitna celebrated, and decided to write a new epic romance novel. That is the true story of how the Koran came to be. If you don’t believe me, that’s your business. I won’t send a blahblah over to bite you.

Free speech activists, given the online media blackout of the Fitna movie, we may not be able to view the original Fitna movie, but we can still make ourselves heard on the issue of censorship of unpopular ideas. That’s why I encourage anyone who has the inclination and the resources necessary to create and post their own Fitna movie online in protest of the restriction of free expression by religious extremists and cowardly media corporations.

No, you don’t have to make a hateful Fitna movie to make your point. Just make a movie that in some way talks about the Koran and has the name Fitna in it. Maybe you could make an advertisement for Mohammed’s Fitna and Yoga Studio. Just have fun, and above all, don’t be part of the silence!

We’re busy checking all systems on here Irregular Times, after our server-transfer experience gone awry. While Irregular Times has been down, of course, we’ve been busy working on our peripheral sites, including Irregular Books, where the following cartoon video will appear tomorrow. You get a sneak preview tonight.

It’s the first in what may, or may not, become a series: Nibbles the cat reads Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.

When it comes to dealing with endangered species, there are two basic approaches:

First, there’s the progressive approach of supporting scientific research into the status of endangered species, coming up with fact-based plans for recovery, and working with local human populations to come up with a plan that is socially sustainable.

Second, there’s the laissez-faire plan that the right wingers promote: Don’t do anything, and see what happens under free market conditions. If species go extinct, that’s okay, because the free market is inherently wise, and so those species must have been undesirable to start with.

The sun bear has been dealing with an excess of the second approach, as market forces have reduced its habitat to unsustainable size and have encouraged hunting even of its scarce numbers. Before this year, it was not really known whether sun bears were endangered. However, the first progressive step of scientific research resulted in the sun bear being placed on the World Conservation Union’s list of threatened species.

In 2008, we need to put a President in the White House who will ensure that the next progressive step is taken toward finding a solution to the sun bear crisis.

(Source: The Guardian, November 13, 2007)

Post Script:Following in the footsteps of J.Clifford’s search for his daemon, I visited the web site of the Golden Compass movie, and discovered that my daemon is a tiger named Amantha:

Responding to F.G. Fitzer’s idea of integrating daemons from The Golden Compass into the Irregular Times vision of political analysis, I decided to go on over to the website for the Golden Compass movie, and use the software there to discover my daemon, my outward psychological manifestation in animal form, and bring it back here.

According to the web site, I’ve got a gibbon named Aurora as a daemon. Meet Aurora:

In the imagined world of The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, everyone has a daemon, a kind of projected psychological animal companion that reflects their essential nature.

I thought, given the current controversy over Christian attempts to squelch and scare people away from the movie version of The Golden Compass, to be shown in theaters nationwide on December 7, that it might be culturally relevant to consider the idea of daemons as a means of reflecting on the essential natures of the 2008 presidential candidates.

Let’s start out with Fred Thompson, one of the Republican candidates. One of the first things you learn, in reading The Golden Compass, is that servants always have dogs for daemons.

Fred Thompson has spent his life as a servant - to Republican power elites. Thompson’s career got its start as he served President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate hearings, leaking information to the Nixon White House that enabled Nixon to erase vital information from audio tapes of conversations in the Oval Office. From there, Thompson went on to a career serving corrupt corporate clients as a lobbyist, representing the interests of coal mining companies that wanted to avoid safety rules, asbestos companies that didn’t want to be responsible for the harm they caused to people’s lungs, and Republican Party interests that wanted extremist right wing judges put in high court positions.

For being a lackey of right wing power elites for so many years, Fred Thompson definitely qualifies for a dog as a daemon.

I see from an advertisement on Reuters that the History Channel is running a 2-hour special event entitled, The Lost Book of Nostradamus. As the History Channel, they love to telecast speculative ramblings of aspiring prophets.

There can be no better time to announce that I, too, am in possession of a lost book of Nostradamus. In fact, I have two lost books of Nostradamus.

One, entitled How To Pick Up Women, Nostradamus lost while playing miniature golf in Orlando, Florida. Someone asked him what he thought the weather would be like the following Friday, and he lost his concentration. His ball bounced off of one of the blades of a windmill just as it was about to go through the tunnel to the 13th hole. Bending down to place his ball next to the flamingo once more, the book slipped out of Nostradamus’s coat pocket, to lie amongst the plastic tulips until it was discovered by an associate of a book collector I have known since childhood.

The other book, Nostradamus wrote himself. This lost book of Nostradamus has been kept by my family for generations, as we have carefully guarded its secrets. I, the last steward of the book, have agreed to release its contents only because the History Channel’s program presents an incomplete and distorted picture of the truth of Nostradamus.

Among the prophecies in this second lost book of Nostradamus are the following warnings:

“At dawn, a lizard shall emerge from its burrow, and it shall devour for its breakfast two flies, one green, and one blue. For the rest of the day the lizard shall rest in its burrow, digesting its meal, preparing for the night to come.”

“A man shall enter a restaurant and order a dinner for himself, and for a false friend who will never arrive. The name of that false friend shall be Julius, meaning ‘extraordinary gardener’. After two courses of Atlantic salmon, sliced thin with a mild horseradish garnish on the side, the man shall arise, and the nations of the Earth shall not continue as before.”

“A fence shall be painted, yet scuffed soon afterwards by a young boy leading a dog on its leash. No paint shall be placed over that mark, which shall lead to rot in the fence. The boy, afterwards, will grow to become a man.”

“Two horses, in a wild herd, in search of food, will face the snows of winter, and only afterwards eat the bloom of field garlic.”

“A great nation will arise in the East, and soon afterwards, will reconsider, deciding to take a short nap. When the sun is high, it shall rise again, and then trip on its own bathrobe, hitting its head on a door frame. Once again, this mighty people will rise, but then get a call from the office saying that it is fired for being late again.”

A thought for those people who get itchy at the idea of writing. National Novel Writing Month is coming soon.

Every November, for several years running now, large numbers of people have registered online to participate in the project. There’s no cost, unless you want to make a donation to the organization to facilitate the event.

At midnight, on the turn from Halloween to November 1, participants from around the world sit down at their computers and begin writing, with the goal of having 50,000 words written by the end of the month. They send their documents in to the NaNoWriMo web site every now and then, and the documents are checked for the number of words written, but not read. People can, in this way, show their quantitative progress on the site.

Everybody who reaches the goal wins. Everyone who tries is congratulated. There is no promise that any of the works written in the month will be published, or any guarantee that any of the results will be much good. The benefit seems to be in the experience, a kind of endurance run for people who want to prove that they can get words down on a page.

At a time when being entertained is increasingly the dominant American past time, I think that it’s worthwhile to spend one month each year trying to create something for oneself, by oneself.

If the idea of trying to write a short novel in one month awakens something perky inside you, give it a shot. You’ve got nothing to lose but sleep.

World Without Oil: Alternative Reality News, Week Ten

With gasoline prices high above six dollars now, a threatening kind of quiet has settled in around Cato. Here in Conquest, and up in Victory, we try our best to go into Cato as little as possible now. Hardly anyone is out on the streets there anymore, and everyone is quiet.

There have been more arrests by the new “deputies” over the last week, and not everyone is being held in the jail. A barn is serving as an extra facility for now. People have lost count at the number of arrests. Is it 30, 40 or 50? The mayor claims to have found a stash of stolen gasoline, and has taken the accused hoarders into custody, though there’s been no criminal charges. Shortly afterwards, the homes of some of the accused were burned to the ground in the middle of the night. No one knows who did it.

Many of the houses are empty, as people leave town to go to Syracuse, Rochester, or further, to stay with relatives elsewhere. The people wjp remain are mostly afraid to talk out in public, and don’t even want to be seen outside their houses, except if they have a specific, plausible task. So, communication is taking place through quick, “accidental” meetings. They say that the telephones are tapped by the mayor and his cronies. I wonder how they know if that’s true or not.

The word is that that car stopped on the pulloff on 370 headed toward Wolcott is checking the license plates of every car passing on the highway in that direction, and that there’s another checkpoint on every road in and out of town. People say that the mayor wants to know who is going out of town to buy gasoline. Not driving myself any more, I have no way to confirm that this is true. There are lots of strange rumors going around, after all.

The common understanding among those people who remain is to keep to yourself, and mind your own business. The hope is that those who don’t rock the boat won’t join those in the prisoners’ barn.

No one seems much interested in what’s happening on the national scale, or even outside our general area. People are just trying to live simply, as they can, and get through the crisis with their lives intact.

This article is a part of the project World Without Oil. It describes fictional events in an alternative reality imagined collectively by project participants. In this alternative reality, the world faces an unexpected oil shortage. These events are not actually taking place. They are part of a collective fiction experiment.

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