Abandon Mythology

That’s the ratio of spam to total comments since I switched over to WordPress. I don’t know which is more pathetic; the fact that I’ve only received 26 legitimate comments in 6 months, or the fact that two thirds of the time it’s just me and the spam-bots in here, slugging it out. Sigh. I’ve installed a freebie spamulator which seems to have slowed them down a lot, but I still get the occasional “Very useful information” or “Thank you for your blogs.” Spam-bots are always so polite.

I’m trying out a new beer this evening. It’s an ale brewed with ginger (not a ginger ale) by the Left Hand Brewing Company of Longmont, Colorado and it’s called Juju Ginger. My first impression is that it does not suck. I’m guessing the ginger flavor will get old quickly though, but this ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve got Smithwicks in the bullpen to close out the game. (Apparently ginger has the unfortunate side effect of causing mixed metaphors.)

The Juju was an impulse buy based on the label alone. It says the beer is brewed with clean energy provided by Simple Solar Electric Systems. It soothes my liberal angst to get hammered on beer produced without burning fossil fuels. Except for, you know, the ones they burn trucking it around the country to be sold to gomers like me.

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. I remember watching it on television with my parents. I also remember being relatively unimpressed. I would have been almost seven, an age when magic is still not only possible, but routine. A guy on teevee in a space suit couldn’t capture the imagination nearly as well as going outside and catching lightning bugs in a mayonnaise jar.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve heard several different talking heads bemoaning the fact that we stopped going to the moon. They seem to think the space program has been in decline ever since, but the truth is we stopped going to the moon because it just wasn’t a very useful undertaking. It’s like repeatedly climbing Mt. Everest. You’ve only really proven something the first time. After that, you’re just tempting fate (and losing the occasional toe).

It’s also a huge waste of scarce resources. The nimrods beating the drum for more moon shots, or worse yet, a manned mission to Mars, have no idea what it would cost. We’re talking defense budget kind of money to pull it off, and since virtually none of our political leaders are willing to cut the actual defense budget for fear of being called a coward by their political opponents, we’re talking deficit spending and major cuts to every other aspect of government just to prove we can still haul rocks home from faraway places.

Our money would be better spent developing the space elevator or any other cheap, reliable means of getting into near-earth orbit that doesn’t involve strapping astronauts into a tin can and then attaching said can to a giant bottle rocket. We can learn pretty much everything we need to know about our (in)ability to survive in space from just above our own atmosphere.

I’m back in red-soil country again. I spent most of yesterday traveling through the Ozark hills of Misery, listening through the static as I bounced from one public radio station to the next, like stepping on stones to cross a stream full of country music and evangelism. I was hoping for live coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, but all I got was the occasional sound-bite. Still, enough to drive me crazy.

As the veil of secrecy that surrounded pretty much every aspect of the previous administration slowly lifts, and despite Michelle’s husband’s seeming determination to ignore them, some pretty ugly — and illegal — activities are coming to light. For instance:

New information about our program of kidnapping foreign nationals and turning them over to other countries for interrogation extraordinary rendition reveals that many of the victims terrorists were brutally tortured. Some were simply executed.

It’s now obvious that, in pursuit of dubya’s War on Terra, our military and civilian interrogators routinely engaged in techniques that were considered torture for over a hundred years prior to being redefined as “enhanced interrogation” under dubya and darth and company. As a veteran — hell, simply as a citizen — this makes me white-hot with rage. If no one goes to jail over this, then the conservative blowhards on hate radio were right, 9/11 truly did change everything, and not for the better.

Speaking of our former vice-preznit, it turns out he was running his own death squad out of his office. (This fact surprised absolutely no one in the entire world.) It looks like they didn’t actually kill anyone, but that’s probably more a result of their incompetence in finding someone worth killing than any discretion on their part.

And yet.

And yet, conservatives on the Senate Judiciary Committee are openly questioning Sonia Sotomayor’s qualifications for the Supreme Court because she possesses a quality our new preznit refers to as “empathy.” My handy-dandy travel dictionary defines empathy as the ability to identify oneself mentally with, and so understand, a person or thing. Wow. It is a marker of how divergent I and the conservative ideology of my youth have become that I feel empathy should be not only acceptable in a Supreme Court Justice, but a requirement.

The quote of the day comes from Senator Jeff Sessions (Republican from Alafuckingbama and latest entry on my list of people I want to kick in the balls):

“Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another.”

Now I ask you, what sane person thinks like that? Is it me? Did I slip into some alternate, negative-image universe? Come to think of it, I did watch water boil until it froze today.

The headline made me giggle, Thrown pig leads to religious riots in India, but the actual story (small enough to cut and paste the whole thing):

By Harmeet Shah Singh,
CNN

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) –Three people have been killed in religious rioting in southern India between Muslims and Hindus, police said Friday.

Widespread violence broke out in Mysore Thursday after somebody threw a dead pig into the compound of an under-construction mosque, city police commissioner Sunil Agarwal told CNN.

More than a dozen people were injured in the clashes, he said.

Police fired tear gas and used bamboo sticks to break up the rioting, according to Agarwal.

Authorities have, for now, banned assembly of five or more people on the streets of the troubled area, according to the police.

Mysore is a city in Karnataka, India’s only southern state governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

makes me doubt that “civilization” can ever make peace between all our invisible cloud-daddies. It also kinda makes me want to barbecue.