Spring is creeping into Oklahomistan. There's a hint of green everywhere you look, taking away some of the drab from the dreary. I'll be snuffling and sneezing soon. Something like 5 weeks left on my stay here. Eternity.

Since depression inevitably leads me to a bookstore, I'm now reading a book that's been on my list for a few years; Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. It's a chronicle of the craziness that is Mormonism. A quarter of the way through, I'm finding it very readable. I'd like to share a paragraph:

But such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by it's very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

For the 10% of us that don't practice mythology, Krakauer is merely stating the obvious, which is why I find myself perpetually amazed at the average American Christian's unwillingness and seeming inability to follow that simple logic. Two or three times a week I get to listen to some scaredy-cat, Christian warmonger proclaiming the existential danger to Amurka presented by radical Islam. Occasionally, (snicker) I offer the opinion that, as an outsider looking in, what with the whole "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" mentality of most Christians, one mythology pretty much looks like the other to me.

My opinion is invariably met with scorn and a little spark of anger that usually burns down to a bizarre mixture of disbelief and condescension and even a little pity. Ironically, in a war between mutually exclusive beliefs about invisible cloud-daddies, it's often the rationalist who gets treated like he might be a little off in the head. But not always. Despite the human mind's immense capacity for self-delusion, that little spark of anger sometimes ignites a thoughtfulness that leads to a genuine exchange of ideas. Growth.

I traveled across the craggy part of Misery today, listening to NPR on the hills and static in the hollers. I managed to catch most of this discussion about our government providing a 30 billion dollar line of credit in order to facilitate one huge investment bank buying another. One of the guests on the program, Harvard Business School investment banking professor Sam Hayes, described the unprecedented government bailout of the failing Bear Stearns as "essential" to prevent a domino effect that would take out additional banks and threaten our entire financial system. I find that shocking.

If the looming failure of one bank requires the federal government to engineer and finance a bailout over the course of a weekend, it can only mean one thing; the rest of the world's investors are beginning to figure out just how much bad paper US banks have been peddling to them. And they are not happy.

So here comes dubya, lurching to the rescue, running the country like he ran those oil companies in Texas back in the '80s. Right into the ground. To prevent a run on US banks, he's showing the world that he's willing to put the power of the US Treasury behind those banks. The same Treasury he already gutted with tax cuts. The one that is currently running hell-for-leather in reverse with insane, deficit, War on Terra spending. We're now covering bad paper with more bad paper. Welcome to the recession of 2008.

Sure I'm just a hillbilly with a smart mouth and a computer, but my gut has been telling me for better than a year now that there are hard times ahead for our economy. Today my gut is telling me those times are here. If I had enough money to worry about, I'd be scared shitless right now.

While I was getting my daily dose of snark over at Sadly No, I followed a link to this rather long Esquire article on Admiral William Fallon. He's been commander of US Central Command and a thorn in our preznit's side for almost a year now, and rumors are flying that he's about to be prematurely put out to pasture for being insufficiently bloodthirsty. His public refusal to pound the drum for war with Iran is making darth Cheney's pacemaker overheat. Check it:

...it's left to Fallon--and apparently Fallon alone--to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict . . . is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

See? That's seriously off message. Fallon is a salty old warrior, but an honorable one. He assesses the threat too honestly, refusing to help the preznit and his neo-con handlers paint Iran as an imminent source of nucular terra that must be dealt with immediately. It's tough to build a sense of urgency for attacking when the man who would be running the attack keeps saying the threat is negligible:

"Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

Admiral Fallon seems to think armies are better for making peace than war. And since dubya likes to claim he listens to his commanders on the ground, Admiral Fallon has got to go, so he can be replaced with a commander that dubya can claim to be listening to when he starts teaching those pesky Iranians a thing or two. They are brown, you know. And Muslim. Evil. Besides, he's not really dubya's kind of guy anyway. He's a thinker:

"What I learned in the Pacific is that after a while the tableau of failed, failing, or dysfunctional states becomes a real burden on the functional countries and a problem for their neighborhood, because they breed unrest and insecurities and attract troublemakers very well. They're like sewers, and they begin to fester. It's bad for business. And when it's bad for business, people tend to start restricting their investments, and they restrict their thinking, and it allows more barriers, so we're back to building walls again instead of breaking them down. If you have to build walls, it means you're moving backward."

If you have to build walls, you are moving backward. A future administration could build it's entire foreign policy around those words and do our country proud. But not this one. This one would insist that in order to keep Amurka safe and support the troops, the preznit needs the authority to award no-bid contracts to build the walls in question. Sigh.