hen I'm feeling depressed because I've just spent several hours reading the horrible news from all around our pathetic spinning ball of mud,® I have to make an effort to change my frame of mind or else simply give up and just slit my wrists. Fortunately, the razors in my medicine chest are little plastic disposable ones that can barely shave my face, let alone do anything harmful.
One of the things I can do to brighten my songless black heart is to watch a video by Crystalanne, my former Midnight Therapist, now Retardo Crazybon.
Now while watching Crys can make me feel much more sane in comparison for a short time, she has way better hair and teeth than I do. So, if I'm still feeling that even Crys' love for the whole world and Africa can't end war and famine, I have to selfishly turn my thoughts inward. What can put me in a good mood?
After hours of contemplation, and soul-searching, and painful introspection, I stopped wasting my time. Just by watching the next video, the answer is very clear to me now. Bulky vaginas make me laugh.
Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast states two years ago and then much of the city of New Orleans was dealt the second disaster of a flooded city. Homes and buildings that survived the hurricane winds were destroyed when the levees broke.
Two years after the storm, people are still struggling to recover and resume some sense of the life they led before Katrina hit.
There are pockets of progress and dens of despair in the Big Easy. There are tens of thousands of people who will never be able to return to their homes currently living all over the United States.
There are also rural areas scattered throughout Mississippi and Alabama with small towns that will never recover because the poor and elderly people living there at the time of Katrina's destruction can never come back to their slice of the southern lifestyle. They don't have the financial resources from public or private sources to recover any time soon.
Having personally experienced the hurricane season of 2004 during which three hurricanes swept through my area in about six weeks, I was intensely interested in hurricane Katrina. I remember getting little sleep during that first week. Listed below are some the entries I posted here on Thunderstorms in the Imajica.
I found a comprehensive entry with great Burning Man links at one of the blogs I regularly read, Laughing Squid. I'm feeling lazy tonight and don't really enjoy re-blogging into the digital echo chamber, so I urge you to go there for ongoing Burning Man information. Also, Scott Beale reports that the fire was arson.
If you don't click that arson link, you'll never forgive yourself for missing the weirdest police mugshot since Texas politician Tom Delay got arrested for something ... being a pompous, grinning asshole, I think.
The Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales has resigned. How do I feel about that? I'm not sure. I thought his inability to lie well at congressional hearings was actually fairly entertaining to watch. He is just one of many psychologically dysfunctional men in power from Bushworld that should be in prison.
President Bush continued insulting our intelligence in a speech at the American Legion convention. This time, his speech writers were wise enough to drop the idiotic historical Vietnam references. These speeches are just public relations bullshit gearing up for the Congressional fight when the House and Senate return to Washington.
While I like the slogan, "strategic patience," the neocons are still using the phrase "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here." President Bush is still drumming up support for war with Iran with patriotic proganda slogans and unbelievably quoting the AIPAC Senator Joe Lieberman. Oy vey!
There will be a total lunar eclipse tonight (early Tuesday morning). Set your alarm clock, if you have to do it. There really aren't that many total lunar eclipses during one's lifetime. Sure solar eclipses can be all weird and scary, if you don't know what is happening, but lunar eclipses shouldn't be ignored just because you own a playstation or television. If you have children, I think it would be worth it to wake up the kids and let them watch it. They have all day in school to sleep anyway.
People living in western North America and eastern Australia will have the best viewing opportunity of this eclipse. People living in Europe and Africa will be out of luck. Although, with a global internet, one could watch the eclipse via webcast.
Basically, if you are in an area covered by the darkest orbital bell curve above, you'll be able to see the entire lunar eclipse. For people living in the western United States, the lunar eclipse begins at 01:51 PDT early Tuesday morning and ends at 05:24 PDT. I made the above image by modifying this NASA image by Fred Espenak. The next lunar eclipse in 2008 will favor the eastern U.S, Europe and Africa.
First of all, one thing that has stuck in my craw all night long is, of course, our president George Dumbass Bush. What kind of man can stand in front of an audience of veterans and dare speak to them about Vietnam when his chicken-hawk, neocon war-mongering cronies dodged the draft?
Sure, Bush was occasionally patrolling the skies over Houston when he wasn't drunk during the Vietnam war, but how dare he say, "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'" U.S. News and World Report has a good roundup of reactions to Bush's speech.
The families of the 58,249 dead U.S. military service members probably don't think the legacy of the Vietnam war is that we didn't stay in Vietnam long enough "to win." The Vietnamese people have a different perspective about the cessation of U.S. military operations in their country. What kind of fucktard neocon historical revisionist is writing Bush's speeches now? Oh, I forgot -- the popular right-wing nutbag theory is that it was actually the liberal U.S. media that "lost" the Vietnam war.
Look, if Bush wants to compare Iraq to Vietnam, we can do that, too.
Incredibly mis-informed foreign policy disasters.
Texas governors prolong the war for domestic political purposes and ego.
A fucktard idea has no good resolution.
If the U.S. stays in Iraq, people will die. If the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, people will die. Bush broke Iraq and the U.S. military only has about as much influence in Iraq as any other regional militia. In the north, you have the Kurdish Peshmerga (400,000). In the south, you have Sadr's and SIIC's militias (500,000). In the middle, you have the U.S. military (150,000) trying to protect assets in the Green Zone.
Scattered throughout the country, you have tiny pockets of Saudi Wahabbists and Iranian Qods who have the oil money funding and the motivation to make Iraq a never-ending battleground for their own Muslim sects and for control of the resources within Iraq. And then there are the soldiers of fortune, Blackwater. They certainly don't have any motivation to end their own extremely lucrative contracts in Iraq.
For those of you who are offended by my use of the word fucktard, I totally understand, but I can't apologize for it. I'm angry and it's just the most accurate word I could possibly think to use to describe president Bush. You'll agree with me when the Bush administration repeats another historical mistake and eventually widens the war to include Iran, as happened with Laos and Cambodia. Except this time around, you'll be paying $10 for a gallon of gasoline. Oh, wait. That was the plan all along, wasn't it?
For those of you who think I don't use enough profanity in my writing, I give you:
Now, just so I can calm down ... I found a new candidate for my Digi-Chix list who you might also find entertaining. Megan McArdle writes for the Atlantlic Monthly magazine. I love smart women — but if they also self-describe themselves politically as being libertarian — that is just really hawt.
Her IQ doesn't seem to hinder her sense of humor ... in a geeky way.
Another libertarian quote I recently heard, "Pfft. Yes, marijuana is a gateway drug ... for Dorritos."
