Five Before Chaos

Why should anyone give a flying fuck about what lying piece-of shit Dick Cheney thinks about anything? It was tear-my-eyeballs-out territory today watching the media spin on it, as though Cheney has any credibility on anything, and somehow treating it as though he’s still in power or something.

Did the MSM not get the message about the GOP losing the election? At this point, I’m sure most of the country would rather hear what a steaming pile of dogshit had to say about something than Cheney.

Stay tuned for more as the date gets closer. This movie’s a real hoot about a group of juvenile delinquents who overrun a school… selling dope, prostitution, bullying, you  name it… until they push one teacher too far, that is. A splendid time is guaranteed for all, and it’s a great deal, a lot cheaper than going out to a bar and listening to some band you probably don’t care about. (click for larger)

…to say the least. There’s bike paths all over the place down here, making the hop from stripmall to gated community and so on quite easy. So I set of and headed north in search of a patch of nature not paved over or artificially irrigated. I turned down a road away from the highway, and was pleasantly surprised to find the Estero Bay Preserve, a bunch of woods and coastal boggy stuff, with over 9 miles of trails for hiking and biking. I headed in a ways, till I got to a part that was a bit mucky for the bike.  Walked in a bit, then suddenly hear some rustling and a rather loud porcine SNORT. I stopped, as that’s not a sound I’m accustomed to hearing in the woods, heard some more snorting, and all of a sudden, four black, wild, hairy pigs came out of the underbrush and headed away from me. Not boars, rather wild pigs that undoubtedly descended from some farm stock several generations ago. Needless to say, knowing nothing whatsoever about the temperment of the feral pig, I turned around and headed out. My curiousity has the best of me, now, however, as I plan on going back soon and trying to see if I can find them (from a distance, of course) and get some pigpics.

Went out to lunch with my dad and his friend for fantastic Mexican food… 4 tacos (shredded pork, a different kind of pork, ham with egg, chicken) as well as a fantastic chicken tamale and 2 cold Negra Modelos. Here’s the interesting part. My dad’s friend works for the State Department in some division that deals with terrorism, in that they are the first on the scene whenever there’s an incident of international terrorism somewhere. He’s also worked with the CIA. So, of course, y’all know me… the 20,000 questions come rolling out, lots of talk, odddly enough about the history of Indonesia.  We hit it off well, he and I are going out to lunch on Friday.  I told him I promised not to waterboard him.

Then an hour in the pool and hot tub, and here I am.  I’m relaxed as all hell.

My ” just fell off the turnip truck” moment…. I don’t have a TV, so even though I’m aware of what goes on in cable tv news land, I’m mercifully not exposed to it to often. No such luck today, as my dad had CNBC on all morning. Holy shit, what a bunch of useless, hypercapitalist bullshit. The spin these people put on the “news” they’re supposedly reporting is simply staggering. In the few hours I saw today, some dumbass Barbie and some cranky old grouchass were decrying Obama’s new CAFE standards, union bashing, arguing against California funding social services because, ready for this, “TAXES MIGHT GO UP FOR SOME PEOPLE”, etc. Not one person who opened their mouth on that channel seemed to value anything other than more wealth creation for the investor class and less regulation. And these douches seemed to end everything with, “well, you know how we feel about that.”

Oh, believe me, I do.

And yes, I know, I need to get out more often, as I suspect everyone of you who see this crap on a regular basis aren’t surprised in the least. Neither am I,  it’s just different to take it all in.

Tomorrow AM, I’m off to visit the parents in SW Florida for almost two weeks. Not t worry, I’ll still be blogging. Expect some tacoblogging, as there’s a huge Mexican community down there. Mmmmm.

Ah, the weekend. Enjoy the hell out of it, people. You deserve it, I’m sure.

Spineless fuckers, the lot of ‘em… yeah, that Obama guy, too. And no, I’m not surprised at all, although it is rather unsettling to see so many examples in my news this morning. I’ll let the links speak for themselves.

Report citing veteran extremism is pulled

Another Cramdown Two-Step on EFCA?

President Obama Reverses Course on Releasing More Detainee Abuse Photographs

Senate Rejects Proposal To Cap Credit Card Interest At 15%

I’m sure there’s a lot more to come. It’s the one thing we seem to be able to count on them for.

There’s an insane, completely-detached-from-any-kind-of-reality post from one of our favorite Vermont nutters out there right now that is sticking in my craw right now (hint: us liberals ‘fear” conservatism so we want to destroy it – no actually, we want to destroy it because of what it does…harm, the GOP lost because it wasn’t conservative, and Rush Limpballs is “mainstream”). I’m not going to link to it, but you can probably guess who it is, so if you want to punish yourself or laugh hysterically you probably know where to find it (Keep it up, nutters!!!! You can stupid your way back to victory!).

Instead, both for fun and as a distraction for myself from that nuttery, I present you with something nice (although I’m not quite convinced how realistic this is, either  – but at least it doesn’t involve taking seriously the  nasty anti-intellectuals who believe one can be both fascist and socialist or that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth simultaneously).

So, as previously mentioned, I’m going out to Utah in August, quite possibly the worst time to visit, due to the oppressive heat. Here’s the plan so far (which seems to change as I discover more stuff… I really need to stop). You can click on some of these for larger photos.

Day 1: Fly in to Vegas, then drive 6-8 hours across the state to Moab.

Day 2: Hike in Arches National Park:

Then, I go pick up my mountain bike rental that night, and do a practice run for…

Day 3: Bike the famous Slickrock Trail in the morning:

…and then perhaps a beer and a burger in Moab, then down to the Canyonlands Needles district, for an afternoon backpack into Elephant Canyon:

Day 4: Out of the Needles, on the road, as I head up to the Capitol Reef area, probably looking for a real bed that night.

Day 5: Head on over to hike Delano Peak, a 12,173 ft peak, camping somewhere up there, hopefully with the elk and mountain goats:

Day 6: Hike down from Delano, make a quick stop at the mining ghost town of Frisco:

…then head to Bryce Canyon, where on

Day 7: I’ll be hiking through the Amphitheater:

Day 8: If I’m still alive at that point, drive back to Vegas. I have a place right on the strip, so I will attempt to go out, gorge myself at some buffet, then proceed to piss away a bit of money that I don’t have on slots and blackjack.

Day 9: Back to VT, y’all better be waiting at the airport for me, each and every one of you. I’m taking names.

Of course, a violent thunderstorm or two, a broken collarbone, bad taco or flat tire can render some, most, or all of this moot. Hope not. When I can get to a library with internet access, I’ll try to blog a bit. I’ll still write up a bunch of non-time relevant stuff to post at strategic times, so you won’t even know I’m gone. And no,  I won’t be looking for peyote, in case you’re wondering, as with my luck, I’d probably misidentify it and poison myself.

I feel like I could spend way too much time blogging this morning, but considering the huge amount of other things that need to be done before I disappear to Florida next week, here’s just a few quick hits fer ya’ all:

It feels like somebody went out and wrote this book for me (as in, “If I were an author and had the time to do it”). It’s “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free”, by Charles Pierce. It’s all about that subject I lament quite often on here, how so many Americans seem to outright revere stupidity, distrust expertise and competence and rely on the gut. (h/t to PZ) :

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

Y’all probably know I’m quite the history buff, in particular about the Third Reich. So of course, I felt enormous satisfaction to hear that suspected Nazi guard John Demjanjuk, 89, a former guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland, has been deported to Germany to await trial for being an accessory to the deaths of some 29,00 people. He was allegedly one of the guys who spent his days putting people in the gas chambers. It sounds like there’s a solid case against him. One is never too old for justice. More than likely, this will be the last trial of this kind, as many involved in these atrocities have already died.

Although I’m certainly lovin’ it, I still don’t get why the GOP thinks that regularly trotting out people like McCain, Gingrich, and Cheney, who continually remind us how crazy, nasty, out-of-touch, wrong, and full of shit the Republicans are, is somehow a winning strategy. Here’s to hoping they keep it up for a long time.

One thing I often hear, when talking to even nominally religious people about my nonbelief, is “you have to believe in something”. Now, aside from the fact that they never go on to explain exactly why I need to believe in something, there’s always the non-spoken but achingly obvious implication that I must believe in something crazy; It’s not enough to believe in the potential goodness of mankind, or in the process of how rain happens, it has to be something completely unsubstantiated and superstitious. Matt Taibbi’s latest, These God Pundits Can Give You a Splitting Headache, is primarily about the latest attack on reason from Eagleton and Fish. His closing paragraph speaks volumes to me…

But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself. But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we have inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and Fish. They seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death. They’ll tie themselves into knots arguing this, and they’ll probably never stop. It’s really strange.

Unbelief is a lot easier than people think, it doesn’t really require much more than a little critical thinking and some attention to detail.  For me, I’m much more comfortable not knowing (and I don’t think there’s a “why”) than to make up or believe ridiculous stupid shit, much of which created when people were even more staggeringly ignorant than they are today. It’s hardly a “concerted intellectual effort”. I’d find it excruciatingly difficult to believe in some sort of deity, as it would require me to ignore way too much reality. For others, it seems to be very easy.