No time to do anything creative myself today, although I did create a very cool bulletin board at school today: a background made up of hundreds of titles of books, with a central poster that says, “Are you ready for a challenge?”, followed by the mysterious 100 Book Club logo.

Anyway, we’re off to see The Light in the Piazza at the Fox, so I don’t have time to orchestrate anything.

I leave with you instead a small rant.

The Republicans’ latest battle cry is “What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?”

Excuse me?

Continue reading “An incredulous rant (Day 71/365)” →

Before I head off to work on my transition to the recapitulation of “Milky Way,” I have a couple of rants. I’ve been clipping stuff from the paper, thinking I might comment on it, for a couple of weeks now, but today had two quotes that have moved me to the keyboard.

The first is from a story, “Park Service To Emphasize Conservation In New Rules.” Well, first of all, that’s a shocker in itself, because even as recently as one year ago, the Administration Currently In Office was once again allowing industry interests to write public policy, and the snowmobile folk were making sure that the National Park Service’s actually taking care of our public wilderness took a back seat to the next few seasons of recreational profit.

As the paper says, “In this respect, as in many others, including the emphasis on conservation, the final policy echoes the one in effect at the end of the Clinton administration.”

Continue reading “Brief rants” →

Wow. I didn’t think anyone would figure us out, but Chris Mathews nailed it.

So I might as well confess that we liberals are in league with Osama bin Laden, just as Chris Mathews (and now many other Rovian mouthpieces) claim. How else do you think he is still free four years after the Bush administration swore to get him dead or alive? That was me.

It’s also because of me that we attacked Iraq. It’s my fault we have killed over 2,000 American troops and so many Iraqis that even I’ve lost count. But it was Michael who suggested sending not enough troups to actually secure the country, guaranteeing destructive chaos and a rapidly rising insurgency.

I’m the one who set up the insurgent training camps in Iraq where there were none before, and my good friend Jobie ramped up the “ongoing war within our lifetime” meme.

Jill, on the other hand, managed the weakening of the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments, and I think it was Peter who first suggested wasting $20 billion on “reconstruction efforts” and then abandoning the effort. I know it was Peter who first realized the implications of a $300+ billion war effort in terms of domestic programs such as FEMA and that drug program thing. (I don’t know much about our domestic terrorism efforts; that’s a different cell under the direction of a woman they call Counselor Kay.)

Of course, I never heard any of us, not even Peter, suggest that establishing a universal Caliphate was a good idea, nor that attacking civilians in cold blood was a moral action, but perhaps I missed a meeting. Chris Mathews and Pat Buchanan seem convinced that we liberals are equivalent to Osama bin Laden, and who are any of us to disagree?

Because if we’re not responsible for everything I’ve mentioned, then who is?

Here’s my take on the Christmas/Holidays issue: Bah, humbug.

And it is humbug, an artificial, entitled aggrievement of the right, a dangerous division put about by people who want to take what should be a gentle wish of good cheer and turn it into a partisan battering ram.

I make it my personal business not to be offended by other people’s religious beliefs. If someone were to wish me Happy Hannukah or Blessed Kwanzaa or even Super Solstice, that’s great. The more good wishes coming my way, the better, I say.

However, Mr. Bill O’Reilly (the one they call the big, fat liar) has decided to bolster his sagging ratings by inventing some kind of bogus liberal war on Christmas. Rally the troops, he cries, and boycott any business that doesn’t acknowledge this nation’s Christian founding by wishing you a Merry Christmas, damn it.

And there you have it. Shouldn’t he be advising you to avoid churches that refuse to use the C word? No, it’s the businesses who are at fault for not recognizing your deeply held belief in Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.

This is crazy talk. Businesses are in business, and their business is to make money from customers who may or may not be Christian. The crazies cry that anyone who might be offended by a Christian greeting is free to shop elsewhere, but folks, that’s not what this country is about. Separate economic, political, and educational systems for different religious sects is what you get in places like Iraq.

If you want to cling to the idea that this nation was founded by Christians as a Christian nation, you will want to follow that idea to its very roots: the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, they outlawed it. They saw no connection between the birth of Jesus Christ and the licentious feasts and gift-giving of the homeland.

And you know what? They were right. There is no connection. We celebrate two entirely separate holidays on December 25. One is a religious commemoration of deep significance to a majority of believers in this country. The other is a great social festival that has become vital to the economy of retailers everywhere. They happen to have the same name, but they have nothing to do with each other, unless you count the tenuous connection of “peace” and “good will.”

So the next time you manage to get yourself all offended because a place of commerce hasn’t acknowledged your religious beliefs, you need to ask yourself: exactly where are you worshipping?

Merry Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago I was stuck at home with pneumonia, and one afternoon, after one part or other of the Lord of the Rings trilogy finished, I found myself face to face with Maury Povich. Merciful heavens. I have never seen a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, and I ran a community theatre for over twenty years.

It was almost enough to make one abandon one’s belief in Intelligent Design. I mean, really, who could think that an intelligent force would design creatures capable of those kinds of choices? In one sitting, I saw a woman fail a lie detector test and thus be proven a multiple adulterer; a woman confess to her fiancé that she was having an affair with her female neighbor; and a woman dying of colon cancer confess to her boyfriend that she’d been unfaithful more than 100 times and couldn’t be sure that their two children were his. I missed the segment where a man confessed to his wife that he made pocket money as a male prostitute, but that’s probably just as well.

There ain’t nothing intelligent in the incredibly untidy lives these people have lived, nor in their insane compulsion to confess their missteps, nor to do so on national television. If one were looking for patterns that betrayed the presence of an Intelligent Designer, one would not find it on Maury Povich. Quite the contrary.

I suppose that if one examines the tenets of Intelligent Design, no one is making the claim that this Force (whoever she is) is necessarily benevolent, and I know there will be those who take refuge in the old shibboleth of Free Will, but if I’m going to invent an all-powerful Intelligence who can operate outside the laws of the physical universe, I would hope I at least had the sense to make sure that He/She/It had our best interests at heart.

That got me thinking, in my fevered, antibiotic-induced way, about other particular shibboleths of the IDers. One of their favorites is the eye: how remarkable, how complex it is; surely it couldn’t have just evolved, could it?

Oddly, I remember thinking in 4th grade, as we studied the structure of the eye, that something was screwy with its design. I mean, the cones and rods are backwards, aren’t they? Shouldn’t they face toward the incoming light in order to be most efficient? And what’s up with the blind spot? Why would you run all your cabling out through the middle of your CRT?

And then I thought… testicles. Testicles. If there were ever any fleshy bit that just screams out “random selection,” surely it’s testicles. What kind of Intelligence would design something as stupid as testicles? Let’s face it, guys, any one of us could come up with better ideas on how to stow those puppies in a better place.

For one thing, we might have decided to make sperm a little tougher so that they could survive at 98.6° instead of having to be stored in little dangly pouches outside the body. We could have snuggled them up there somewhere and encased them in protective cartilage or something. Could have made that a pretty useful kind of thing, too, sort of a built-in implant kind of thingie.

But no. There they are, all wrinkly and silly, just waiting to be whacked by a teammate or opponent, or a lover, or even an excited 18-month-old. What’s intelligent about that? Not much, in my opinion.

Discernible purpose in the design? I suppose you could make a case for pleasure, that they’re awfully fun to play with, if not to look at, but I don’t imagine that’s the kind of case that most Intelligent Designers are willing to make in public. So what kind of Intelligent Force would design such a thing?

And then it occurred to me, in a flash of inspiration. If one is willing, as that President Bush has recently said, to explore all sides of the controversy, then the answer is pretty obvious: testicles are clearly the product of the fiendish Intelligence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Isn’t it obvious, guys? We were made in his image, right down to the noodly appendage. This is the only possible explanation that fits in with the agenda of the IDers: Testicles are a testament to the FSM’s almighty power, not to mention his sense of humor, and are a daily reminder to half the population of his presence, or at least of his impetus.

So there you have it: either we can think that testicles are the result of one too many random switches being thrown, an evolutionary path that hung a right instead of a left (sorry…) a long time ago, or we can recognize the overwhelming Intelligence behind their design. Seems an easy choice to me.