Dude, where's my Lypton Village??

Today is Veteran's Day, also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, who was the patron saint of a number of things, including both soldiers and conscientious objection to military service.

song i wrote in elementary school

OLD LADY: Oh my happy little puppy! 3x

That's why Happy is your name!

"HAPPY": No i'm not your happy puppy 3x
Wish Birdy was my name
 

no one has one yet left commentttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt on my absurdgibbertishshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhshhh

A British perspective on the craziness going on the States over the past several months.

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarized by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama -- a center-left black man -- as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin. When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view -- to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation -- has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and -- at the same time -- that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 2000 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer." No amount of hard evidence -- here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper -- can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed -- with a straight face -- that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialized country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves -- and just under 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" -- and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 percent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumor that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched somehow to include the disabled. It was flatly untrue -- but the right had their talking point, Palin declared the system "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favor of killing the elderly -- while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Steven Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS." Frank Laffer, the right-wing economist lauded by David Cameron, claimed on CNN that it would be a disaster if the government got its hands on Medicare, the program providing healthcare for the elderly, paid for entirely by... the government.

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy-world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed, as one Republican congressman put it, that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy -- reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution -- could be a useful corrective. But that's not these what so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy, that is only a thin skin covering raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top, this is mere cynical manipulation: one of Bush's former advisors, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe it. They are being cruelly manipulated into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured -- and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

Indeed, if you spend any time with American right-wingers -- as I have, reporting undercover on events like the National Review cruise and the Christian Coalition Solidarity Tour of Israel -- you soon find that your arguments don't center on philosophy. You have to concentrate on correcting basic factual errors about the real world.

They insist Europe has fallen to Islam, since Muslims immigrants are becoming a majority and are imposing sharia law. In reality, Muslims make up 3 percent of the population of Europe, and most of them oppose sharia law. They insist Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression, and should have cut government spending. In reality, whenever he did cut spending -- as he tried periodically throughout the 1930s -- the economy began to tank. But explain this patiently -- with a thousand sources -- and they simply shriek that you are lying, and they know "in their heart" what is true. They insist gay marriage would cause the institution of the family to collapse. In reality, where it has already been introduced in Europe, heterosexual families continue just as before. On the list goes: evolution is a lie, a blastocyst is akin to a baby, torture produces actionable intelligence...

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" -- which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" Australia exists, or fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has tried to conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has shamefully assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma." Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them. His healthcare plan is weaker and harder to explain as a result.

But this kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only by over-ruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people with the maddest fears. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarro-cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan should be -- shrill, baby, shrill.

 

no, i would not consider it.  leave the ghosts alone.  it probably does work sometimes, but it's not something i would try.

Toward another he has gone
to breathe an air beyond his own...

~Patti Smith, "About a Boy", written for Kurt Cobain after he committed suicide

this week i found out that a friend of mine from high school committed suicide.  now we weren't real close friends, but i do recall having some nice, thoughtful conversations with this girl...i don't know why she did this, or what kind of situation she must have been in to want to do this.

 
an owl.  i found an owly half-mask (actually kind of like glasses) and am wearing that w/ brown/tan clothes. hoot-hoooo!

Alexei ("Alyosha") Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazov.  I had a crush on him when i read that in 9th grade.  my parents' copy was (is) illustrated...and he was drawn kinda cute!

i was thinking about "I am Barack Obama" and Fight Club's "I am Joe's Prostate" etc.  so i came up with this:

I am Michelle Obama's arms.
I am Ralph Nader's irrational hissyfit.
I am Sarah Palin's prolific womb.
I am Bobby Kennedy's even more prolific phallus.
I am George Walker Bush's middle finger.
I am Larry Craig's tapping foot.
I am Ronald Reagan's deteriorating brain.
I am Mikhail Gorbachev's birthmark.
...
 

one of my facebook friends status said: "I work and work, day and night and still I am flat broke and can't pay my bills... thank goodness our government is calling me trying to collect more money from me...thanks a lot Mr. President way to take care of the poor people... Dumb Jerk!!!"

Well, i can sympathize with his financial situation, but the guy who wrote this probably doesn't care that much about the poor, seeing as he argued our state shouldn't raise the minimum wage cus that would bring more poor people in and supposedly that would raise the crime rate...but i'm not gonna comment in his status about that, cus i'm tired of being the target of "conservative" wrathbullets from people like him.

GUANTANAMOBABE's LJ HAS BEEN DELETED.

I feel like a mouse burrowing ever deeper into its burrow in the woodchips.
Yelling at me when i'm crying and practically cowering under the table doesn't help.

I just love listening to Michael on the radio.  like i am right now.  first time.  signing off tho. :(  oh well, it's about bedtime--for me anyways

watched "It Might Get Loud" at the theatre w/ my parents tongiht.

we were inspired. and i wanna listen to the White Stripes , which i haven't done much before.

arrrghh i just saw some pictures of Michael with some girl at the homecoming dance last night.

"In the course of my Travels in Diverse Lands," Gulliver said, "I came once upon a Race of perfectly Enlightened Beings who looked like Horses and talked like G. I. Gurdjieff. When they inquired of me regarding the Laws and Customs and Manners of my people, concerning which I was at some pains to Inform them correctly and fully, they expressed great Astonishment and keen Horror, saying that they never heard of such a Tribe of Conscienceless Rascals and Filthy Scoundrels in all of creation. This estimate of the Human Race, as you can well imagine, dismayed me no little bit, and I endeavour'd to defend our species-"

"Yes, yes," Dashwood said, "but I'm in a hurry, you understand. ..."

"These equine Philosophers," Gulliver went on as if he had not heard, "were not impressed by any of my Words and said plainly to me that if our Theologians were not the worst Lunatics in creation, then certainly our Lawyers were the worst Thieves. They averred further that if what I told them of our Doctors were true, we were wiser to resort to Plumbers or Blacksmiths, who are no more Ignorant and a great deal less Greedy, Avaricious, and Rapacious."

Dashwood was stung by these words. "It takes a long time and a lot of money invested to get through medical school," he said angrily.

"I explained that to my equine Philosophers," Gulliver replied, "but they did not accept it as a Valid Argument; for they asserted, any Thief or Scoundrel when apprehended will give you Justifications in Plenty for his Misdeeds, but the Judicious are not Fool'd by such Rationalizations, and-they said further-those who prey not upon any chance Passerby, but upon the Sick and the Disabled and the Dying are, without doubt, the most Rapacious and Rascally of the Yahoo Tribe (for such was their Name for our Species)."

"Your friends sound like a bunch of damned Communists," Dashwood said.

"Nay," Gulliver protested. "They live in the State of Nature, without Bureaucrats or Commissars of any kind. And, I might add, Sir, their Opinion of our Doctors was based on my showing them an ordinary Medical Bill, at which they inquir'd of me the Average Income of the Doctors who present these Bills and the Average Income of the Unfortunate Patients who must pay them or be left without Treatment to Die in the Streets. Their comments on this were of such Disgust and Anger that I dared not show them a Psychiatrist's Bill, lest their opinion of our Species, already Low, should sink Lower than Whaleburger, which is, as you may know, at the bottom of the Ocean."

Riley would fast and pray on Good Friday and Holy Saturday (the two days before Easter) every year.  Usually he would have some hunger pains on Saturday.    When Nora first heard him say he was having some hunger pains, it was during the period when she was crazy in love with him, and it hurt her a little bit to think that the man she loved was in pain.

got a job!!!!
at Waldenbooks' calendar store...starts next week.   (they'll phone me again to let me no more specifically)

intuition
froth and smoke
micawber
sniggle
exile
circumvent
eviscerate
nefarious
lugubrious
lascivious
genesis
polarized
similarity
plethora
acceptance
abundance
sin
love
justice
contemplation
gratitude
staying centered
ignoring ignoramuses
staying on your own path
courage
perseverence
eclipse
diversity
change
awesome
orgasm
evolution
crimson
diablerie
harridan
empyrean
epistemology
alpenglow
lust
desire
need
awakening
discovery
healer
cartwheel
hugs

i think the paparazzi and co. shouldn't be so nosy.