The World is Not Enough? - 03 August 2008

[silveradept]

Life is good here. Got to participate in quite a few games yesterday, all of them precursors to the more modern games that we have, some of which were quite interesting. Had lots of fun running about and playing, and apparently being a good person with the other kids that were around and stuff like that. I thought it a bit weird, because I didn't realize I was being kid-friendly or anything like that, but apparently, it was so.

Happy brithday, droewyn, and (I think) a little before that, to greyweirdo, to whom, along with hollygrahm I owe lots of excellent dinners and conversation.

Our lead story tonight - Fred Phelps's garage caught fire. This would normally be unremarkable, excepting for the family it's about, and their claim that it was arson. So the family that freely condemns people to hell finds that they're not so fond of flames. Of course, when it comes to an opportunity like this, Fark joins in.

Internationally, uncovered Nazi bunkers means more artifacts and knowledge about the extent of the Nazi occupation and the life of the soldiers inside the bunkers themselves. Neat stuff.

Our state just instituted a new primary type, where the two top candidates move to the general election, regardless of party affiliation, and the candidates declare their party preferences, so even if one party endorsed one candidate, unless you checked with the party, there's no way of knowing which candidate it is. Mix that with the normal amount of people running for office on nonstandard platforms, and this leads to some interesting candidates and party choices, as Liberal Seagull notes.

More nationally, Is John McCain trying to make Barack Obama out to be an Antichrist? All this Messianic talk about Obama's campaign as well as these latest advertisements, making it out that Senator Obama believes himself a messianic figure, all seem designed to trigger Christian people into thinking that Barack Obama is a false messiah. Will we see zealots trying to attack the Senator's followers as idolaters and followers of false religion? If Unitarians and liberalism in general is enough to get some terrorists to attack them, what happens with a base that firmly believes the that stopping the Senator and his followers at any cost is God's will?

Down in the opinion trenches, the WSJ lambastes the Democratic House for changing the rules to prevent a provision of a law on Medicare spending taking place, because it would apparently require them to take a vote on a proposal from the White House, and this gets in the way of their health care agenda, despite "everyone knowing" that at current levels and growth, Medicare will run rampant over any other federal spending and make itself insolvent. Charles Krauthammer continues to paint the Democrats as unreasonable in their opposition to more domestic drilling, believing that the net effect of America not drilling will be negative as other, less advanced and more corrupt countries take up the slack of the increased demand.

Linda Chavez thinks the Bush administration will be better with historical time, not because of Iraq, but because of all the other things the Bush administration has done in aid to Africa, to education (and taking a dig at teacher's unions, implying that a call for tougher standards is the last thing the unions want), and other places that nobody is looking at, but with time, Iraq will fade (or be seen as a positive accomplishment, even if other ventures aren't going so well) and then all the other good things that have been done will appear. Make sure you smile on camera, citizens, when someone tells you of the great accomplishments of Mr. Bush.

Ah, and then, of course, the requisite painting of antiwar forces as disorganized college kids who only pay lip service to the things they protest, which leads into Burt Prelutsky's continued annoyance that being an anti-war, get out of Iraq (as soon as possible) candidate is helping Senator Obama instead of crushing him, like Prelutsky believes it should.

Austin Cline at the General's notes that conservative, religiously-based anti-homosexual sentiment continually attempts to paint itself as a thing that it is not, to the point that those defending their anti-homosexual sentiment believe it's not about denial of equality to others, but protecting the family and society from falling apart from what they perceive to be the end result of letting homosexuals come out of the closet. If we changed it to people with microcephaly, would the argument still hold up?

Kathleen Parker believes that the blogosphere, more often than not, is a bunch of gossips with binoculars, and the reason why the MSM doesn't pick up more of the buzz of blogs is because most of the scandalous stuff is all rumors and tabloid material - once we get actual facts, she says, then the MSM will pick it up as a story, but until then, the lack of story isn't a conspiracy but good journalism and manners.

Last out of this section, bradhicks wonders if Mr. Ivins believed he was not going to be under suspicion for the antrax attacks, because he was the guy the government was going to turn to to figure out who did the anthrax attacks, taking his inspiration from Glenn Greenwald's wonder as to whether Ivins was also trying to link Islam and anthrax, leaking his attack to the media before it came, and very specifically trying to provide a justification to attack Iraq with, by his own lab saying the anthrax was laced with a compound that it wasn't. Not to mention that not-really Muslim notes that accompanied the anthrax attacks, that look more like an American wrote them than someone from an Arabic-writing country. If all of this ends up as true (and we'll never know, because the prime suspect is now deceased, which opens the possibility of someone silencing the one person who could unravel it all), then someone very high in the government's chemical warfare division committed a terrorist attack against the United States to get them to support a war against another country on even more fraudulent reasons than the other fraudulent reasons trying to tie together Iraq and the plane attacks. And this is without Greenwald's updates that include the ineptness of authorities to find Ivins, his own beliefs in a country governed by Catholic-type beliefs, the media's willingness to believe the Iraq origin spin (along with ABC News's apparent silence about the origins of their information about the Iraqi origin) coupled with a willingness to blame the man now exonerated, Mr. Hatfill, and the potentially worst part - that there has been no evidence yet shown that proves any of this, despite the matter being reported on as closed. Of course the guy did it - he killed himself to escape guilt. What a tangled web we weave in these cases...

In science and technology, supposed dinosaur soft tissue may have been just modern slime, but monsters are washing ashore, which gives us something else to study, assuming it's not a photoshop job. There's also skepticism at the latest conspiracy - this one to light Saturn ablaze as the first step toward eradicating or making all Earth humans submit to the one world government, the world's first double-arm transplant, and the Alien Abduction Lamp. (Hey, we can't be serious all the time.)

Last for tonight - Jingle Babies. Tiny tots screaming carols. Potential for WTF: High. To soothe that thought, Beaker playing Ode to Joy, perhaps as part of the 2008 Classical Summer Games. And a cute kitten.

Comments

[miyarificus.livejournal.com]

I'm pushing to make Jingle Babies our closing music throughout the holidays. The Shags just aren't cutting it on Montrose, but perhaps screaming babies will!

[silveradept]

Perhaps they will. I'm sure it would work even better if you had a live chorus.

[przxqgl.livejournal.com]

to light Saturn ablaze as the first step toward eradicating or making all Earth humans submit to the one world government

somebody must have been reading one of those outrageous rants by Art Kleps, from the Boo Hoo Bible, or something like that...

[silveradept]

No kidding. Homicidal beings that we may be, almost nobody outside of certain fundamentalist religious sects would want to light up the homeworld - and certainly not for some pedestrian purpose like a one world government.

[przxqgl.livejournal.com]

apart from the fact that the fundamentalist "christians" - despite their complaints that they are the persecuted ones - have firm control over the hands whose fingers are on the buttons of the nuclear warheads that will light up the world when the "christians" say it's time.

my impression is that if we don't all decide to change the way we think, that very thing will happen: we'll blow ourselves up in a conflict over who is right and who is wrong. the way i've heard it put is "it doesn't matter so much who is right and who is wrong, what matters is who is right and who is left."

the neo-american church, founded by timothy leary associate arthur kleps, has advocated the destruction of saturn since the late 1960s as a way of instantaneously bring enlightenment to humans on earth. i wonder how many boo hoos are associated with the lucifer project.

[silveradept]

Point made. The Future is scary enough without people who live in the past, rehashing past hatreds with future technologies.

Also, I don't think that lighting up another sun will be very enlightening at all to us humans. It would really be a field test to see whether we could do something that big on earth.