Where’d it go? Yesterday’s blog, you mean? Well, I took it down. I was actively angry at the time, and it was ranty beyond rantfulness, rabid in a way that’s more at home in Wingnutville, but at least with a slant that had a heart in the right place for all its overblown and emotional paranoiac raving. It was not worthy.

Let’s just say "Alito bad, mm-kay?"

(This item may qualify as content-free copy. Use at your own risk.)
Another blog about SotU! No, not really. Didn’t watch it. Why? Well, why should I have? The guy giving the speech is a liar, the whole event is just a staged farce with no real meaning, and I can read all about it the next day, sparing myself the intense, visceral agony of beholding the smirk of smugness of the head of a prick. Sparing myself the strained sounds of that thoroughly folksy-ified voice as it halts and staggers through pre-prepared talking points. An orator, he’s not. He’s not even a good bullshitter.

And look, I saved you from reading more useless "coverage" of the whole shebang and charade. Instead I feed you bloviations on why I'm not writing about a shebang and charade. Woohoo! I so rock.

Wanna define the debate, Dems? Well, try doing stuff! Maybe Democrats can’t control the agenda, but they can exert some control on the debate, at least, can’t they, like, ferchrissake—right? Ya know?

It’s a little sickening to constantly see sensible progressive ideas get smeared or shoved aside or—more often—utterly ignored in the course of our pathetic excuse for a public debate. Whatever biases the crapstream media carries these days, they’re not strong enough to take the whole fall. Democrats haven’t made their ideas clearly heard (as you know already) for a million reasons (that I need not relate).

There’s no time like the present, and with a horde of new online crusaders who recruited for the Alito fight behind them—finally, a progressive force to counter the wingnuts’ formidable screech chorus—this may be the last chance to effectively get through to the people at large before things in this neck of the continent start to get really ugly. And people are waiting to hear a different tune (country really does get really fucking irritating after a while, all those fake drawls and overdone melodramatics and weeping pedal steels…). Dying for it. People know Bush et al suck. A banana on a string could govern more competently. Or a used condom, or a tepid cup of decaf (my benchmark for the Most Useless Thing Ever Dammit). Anyway.

Dems can define themselves by showing loud and clear what they’re for—you know, all those wonderful progressive values that would resonate with the public if they ever got mentioned to the public. And they’re never gonna get mentioned if all the Dems do is react to stuff.

Instead of waiting for the next odious thing to emanate from the GOP Borg, they can do this the old-fashioned way by **gasp** introducing legislation. Write bills that would do all those things we’d love them to do if they had a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing. Give the bills cute names like The Anti-Tyranny Act, or the Law to Stop Forced Childbirth, or The Treaty Abrogation and War Crimes Prevention Initiative, The Let No Child Starve Act and the Security for the Homeland and Internationally Through Peace, Industry and Energy-savings Act of 2006 (SHITPIE Act of ‘06)—OK, not that one. But think of what you could do with bills like these, or better yet, better ones, ones that can be actually introduced into the House and Senate.

Let the GOPers do the reacting. Let the GOPers obstruct, bury, hold up in committee, kill, rider-ize, attach, and otherwise fuck with all this legislation, in public, on the record. That sort of thing could go a ways toward defining the GOPers by making them define themselves—on the Dem’s terms, and the people’s terms, for a fucking change.

Let the GOPers note clearly for the record that, aside from torture, they also stand for forced childbirth, crappy education, starving poor children at home and abroad, atrocities and war criminality… and against peace and security, truth and sanity, sense and sensibility.

Considering the facts, exposing the right and getting the sane and progressive message out really shouldn’t’ve been all that fuh-reaking hard to do all along. Even with the crapstream media. But an utter dearth or leadership, coherence, and opposition—and, increasingly, raison d’être—from the alleged opposition party is just the thing to put the kibosh on all that. Which is just what happened—until the Alito vote. Whether that quixotic but necessary effort was more than a temporary attack of spinefulness, only time will tell.

Won’t take long, I bet, whatever way that goes.

In weather, the scattered shitstorms of the past few days left accumulations of two to three column inches across our region but the main stream sweeping from the major media have been out there ‘round the clock cleaning things up. We’re still under the clod front that’s been parked over our area since 2001, with hot winds out of the far right, gusting up to 40 lies an hour in the red states. If Hurricane Jackoff hits the DC area this year as some forecasters expect, the weather patterns we’ve been experiencing all decade may change. But, for now, the level of pundit bores is at "high", and the crony factor remains at "unhealthful", so children and elderly with ethics problems should remain indoors. And keep those windows closed too, ‘cause it looks like there’s campaign on the way. It’s half past morning in America, partly stupid, 42 degrees. Back to you, blog.

Yeah.

One dissatisfied customer sued over a £100 guarantee offer and won— and the legal concept of the unilateral contract was born. The NS article is good for geeks, freaks, and law students alike.

In their Feedback section, they take on Tom Bearden, inventor of the MEG, a "free energy" devicethe latter-day version of a perpetual motion machine. In other words, a white elephant, crap, BS, and uselessness of the sort that tends to only peddled by the deluded or the fraudulent.

Conjuror and skeptic supreme James Randi has taken on this chap many times before, and gets a shout out from the NS folks to boot--but no URL for his site: www.randi.org . Run this search string, minus the brackets [ bearden site:randi.org ] on Google and see just how often Randi has had to drop da bomb on this guy. 48 results!

Then you go here (or click his big blue link... wait, that sounds wrong...) to find out just what this "IMMORTALITY DEVICE" is. They're little magnetic Eternal Life Rings. If those aren't eternal enough for ya, you can back them up with magnetic Eternal Life Foot Braces. Slap those suckers on your appendages and just wait around to not die. Easy!

Price too steep? Make them yourself! He posts plans: http://www.alexchiu.com/eternallife/makerin2.htm

Certainly a generous gift to mankind! And the height of fashion: http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2001-01-10/news/nightcrawler.1.gif

Get the personal 411 from the horse's mouth on his bio page: http://alexchiu.com/eternallife/backgrnd.htm

And yes, I really like the word "lambaste". It’s almost as fun as the antagonistic phrase, "at loggerheads." WTF is a "loggerhead" anyway?* Anyway...

I’m sure Pizzo, Holland and others were saying these things long before I did. I ain't no egotistical jerkface over here. It's that this is just the first time I saw these (accurate, to my mind) viewpoints expressed in the media.

It was almost as joyous an occasion as when, quite recently, we began to see The "I" Word appear in the MSM, even if dismissively.

It’s like binge drinking and trying not to urinate. Once you go—once you "break the seal"—you’re going to be pissing all night. Then everyone's gonna start going, and there'll be a line.

Eventually, even the Howlin’ Foxoids on your boob tube may have to force themselves to utter the most feared trisyllabic word in the English language to those forces of obfuscation standing to the right of sense and reality: impeachment.

Or, am I running a fever? They'll probably call it The Liberal Plot to Destroy America, or something even less catchy.

With a mainstream media awash in viewpoints to the right of common sense, and in which "liberals" are all center-right, it’s easy to think one’s all alone with one’s opinion. You hear the same tripe over and over, and it starts to almost seem true. (The Big Lie technique is so effective for this reason.) So it’s great to see the same conclusions reached independently. Makes one feel a little less wacky and a little more hopeful. Warm fuzzies.

Either that or they’ve been reading my stuff and going "yeah, right on!" (Take my memes, please!)

The part of the piece I’d like to focus on myself for a moment, however, is the described roadside bomb attack. A platoon had gone to visit a sheik in order to ask him for some information:

"It was horrible," [Capt. Matt] Bartlett said. "We had to pick up body parts 200 meters away." The Humvee was "ripped in half and shredded," he said, by a monster bomb later found to contain 1,000 pounds of explosives and two antitank mines, with a 155mm artillery round on top.

The attack left the platoon outraged.

"I felt so angry and violated," said [First Sgt. Robert] Goudy, of Clarksville, Tenn. "We all wanted to go out and tear up the city, kick down the doors, shoot the civilians, blow up the mosque." Goudy and others were convinced Iraqis living nearby knew about the bomb but did nothing to warn them.

Not merely "did nothing to warn them"—that sounds something like active participation by the locals to me. Like Tall Afar. Hard to blame on foreign insurgents, no?

Now, I can sure understand that being bombed will piss one off quite a bit. A railroad and a double-cross, even. Nasty. War is hell. My countrymen being blown to bits is not a good thing. But there’s a real big who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are element to all this.

Hmm. I seem to remember that we dropped bombs on Iraqis first. I’m sure pissed them off. Outraged them, even.

We invaded their country under false pretenses. I’m sure they felt just a little bit violated by that.

And the charming sentiment: "we all wanted to" go out and commit, well, atrocities. Lovely. A human reaction, perhaps, and nothing they followed through on, but that lands squarely in the "I’m Surprised You Said That" category. (And I’m sure the Pentagon wishes he hadn’t.)

Many ordinary and patriotic Iraqis hate the al-Qaida types, who are using the Iraqis every bit as much as we are. But far from welcoming us as liberators in most of the country, Iraqis also hate the American occupiers and want to them to leave or be killed.

Americans were much the same way when occupied by England. And now they’re complaining that the Iraqis should have told them where the bombs were? Should Paul Revere have helped the Redcoats instead of warning Boston? I mean, COME ON, for fuck’s sake.

And now we’re in another country on another’s streets driving down the wrong side of the road and fire warning shots at civilians driving legally on their roads in their own country. Priceless.

I’m sure most soldiers do the best they can to fulfill their missions properly and be respectful of the locals. I can see the self-preservation aspects of this behavior. But when you look at the objective big picture—in which we ARE the aggressor and the occupier, simple undeniable facts—then you can see how it is that we’re looking like some of the biggest assholes ever. This is no way to win hearts and minds. And that’s the only way anything like a "win" for both Americans and Iraqis can come out of this deadly fiasco.