Socializing risk

There is never a penalty for being completely wrong . Failure is never punished. We have spread the consequences of being wrong out among the nation as a whole leading to lack of forward progress. Henry Kissinger has been getting it wrong since before I was born. Now we have the liberal sycophants falling all over themselves to gush over the endorsement of Colin Powell . They are willing to forget that it was this bag of crap that did more than anyone else to legitimize the war crime that is the Iraq invasion. He was the front man for Cheney in committing the largest war crime of this young century. We will never know how many innocent people this man got killed or had their lives destroyed. We went apeshit over three thousand people being killed and a few blocks being destroyed. Powell and his gang of ass clowns destroyed a whole country and we are just supposed to forget it because now he is fawning over the new messiah.
This is a failure of character by the folks on the left. If we are not going to stand up for any principles we do not deserve to govern. This I think explains a lot of why there is such a large undecided cohort in the electorate. People are not always issue oriented but they like consistency and they like confidence. If you do not believe you are right you are not going to convince others and in this land of ours belief is sometimes more important than the facts.

Loss comes to us all

One of my online friends lost her husband recently. I am not going to get into details here. Even though she was one of those people that lived as an exhibitionist some things are private. I would like to be able to send her words of comfort but I have as of yet been unsuccessful in composing that letter.
The pain of loosing your spouse is different for everyone. I can only talk about my own experience with authority and that is of necessity shaped by my understanding of the universe. For me the pain has not gone away, it really has not lessened . At times I can block it out and the periods that I can block it out for have gotten longer but when I stop and reflect the wound is still as raw.
This is not the concept I want to impart to the rest of the world. I do not wish to add to the despair that the human condition unleashes upon the hapless world. I do not wish to deceive though, I do not want to hand out the platitudes and false hope that the religious toss about with such arrogance and callousness. That well meaning people spew without any knowledge of the truth. She is in a better place ,the pain is ended, you will see them again some day. Cruel words that have no meaning.
Cary suffered in life and so they feel this will some how relieve that suffering. What in fact it does is diminish what she went through. Life’s a bitch and then you die is not a very satisfying philosophy but it is what it is. All you can do for a friend is listen when they talk, hold them when they cry, give them their space when they want it and forgive their outbursts. It is about them and their place in the grand scheme and they will muddle through as will we all. Or they wont. That is the realization that is the hardest. Nobody gets out unscathed ,unscarred, unchanged. We go on in our own way and in the end No one gets out alive.

Ignorance and politics

Those of you that are frequent crisis visitors will probably have noted my penchant for bad alliteration.In today's post I am ripping off Strawberry Alarm clocks incense and peppermints. Thought this video here was cool and I spent a big chunk of the day in political junkie mode hence the politics. The ignorance I will explain later but first a little bike related news.
My workouts are going well did 140 miles this week and hit a milestone, 1000 miles on the odometer. Considering it is only a few months old I was impressed. I am planning to ride north again first part of next week. I had wanted to get out sooner but I have a doctor visit Monday and was supposed to be attending camp Obama this weekend but it was canceled. This time I am going all the way to the Oregon border if it takes a week each way.
Today was the Rules and Bylaws committee meeting for the democratic party. Generally a snore but because of the cluster frack of Florida and Michigan there was some actual drama promised and sort of delivered. As usual the Clinton camp acted like asses and Obama showed an amazing amount of class. In a for Democrats pretty organized event they argued and eventually compromised on the seating of delegates from the two rogue states with the only sour note the performance of Harold Ickes a douche of the highest magnitude trying to claim that Hilary Clinton was getting screwed because they did not let her have all the delegates from the illegal primary. He ended his whine reserving the right to take it to the credentials committee before being embarrassed by the speeches of the other members of the committee. This may be a little inside baseball for most of you but Obama had given Clinton what she wanted on Florida and the vote on Michigan was 19 to 8 against her by a group that was supposed to have at least 15 of her supporters on it. The Clinton supporters pretty much made asses of themselves shouting down speakers and yelling out non sequiturs. When all was said and done Obama was still in the lead by an insurmountable number and Hillbilly was vowing to fight on to the bitter end. Not a bad days entertainment all in all.
And now for the ignorance portion of today's program. I was pretty up beat having written the 2nd instalment of A New Obsession an adult story that I posted on my rude blog. Then my friend Mina was shooting some pictures with some of the props I had sent her and I was watching on the Spycams. Then the folks at CNN killed my buzz with more fallout from the latest crazy preacher scandal at Trinity United Church. You know home of the Reverend Wright that wacky spiritual advisor to the Obama family. Turns out that He and Michele were having to quit their church after a visiting preacher gave an insulting little moronic ridicule filled rant about Hilary. Father dipstick made the mistake of making it all about race and the idiots in the pews danced around like, well idiots and Fox news had another weeks programing. If Obama is not the next president we will have the good folks at a little south side church in Chicago to thank for it. I have spoken before about the Ignorance of faith but today I have a slightly different take on the theme. I watched the presser from South Dakota Barack had to explain why he had quit the church and felt genuinely sorry for the guy. He takes this shit seriously and so does his wife so it is really crappy that the news goons have hounded him out of his little social club. Especially when these same dickhead media morons can't seem to be bothered to investigate real stories like say lies about WMD or contractor fraud. Running for president is not supposed to have a religious test, look it up the Constitution prohibits it, look it up.

A propaganda lesson

The war in Iraq has been a study in propaganda in its most pernicious form. I was listening to the archivist and folk singer Utah Phillips the other day in an interview recorded before his death and he pointed out that before the Nazi party the word had a much more benign meaning. It was the conveying of information to support a position. In other words making an argument based on facts that supported your side. Goebbels corrupted that idea to mean making up the facts to support your side and the folks in the White House today have adopted this use of the word as their model. In making the case for the invasion it was not incumbent upon those that took the position that we had to invade to put forth the facts that did not favor their argument. In the market place of ideas that is the responsibility of the opposition. We can get to the failure of said opposition in another debate but the current administration new that the facts they were asserting were untrue. That is why they should be prosecuted as traitors and war criminals. When Dick Cheney went on television and said they knew the location of the WMD he knew that the fact he was asserting was a fabrication. The center for public integrity documented the 100’s of instances of this so I will move on to the present and the need for this little exercise in propaganda as it was originally defined.
The idea that John McCain is a teller of truths in the language of Bill Clinton is a fairytale. Let me provide a few examples. When the good Senator visited Iraq in 2007 in an effort to garner support for the ill-conceived war he visited an open air market. He then went on television to tell us that his visit proved that we winning the war because he could walk around and shop. One of his companions compared it to a farmers market in Indiana. Not having been to Indiana in a few years I can’t say that you do not need armed guards to shop there but here is the truth about Baghdad. For the Senator to walk around this safe secure marketplace he had to strap on a bullet proof vest, surround himself with 100 of our finest young soldiers and put 4 helicopters overhead to circle the area. A few weeks later this same market was closed by suicide bombings but as I stated before that is not his responsibility to bring out. Just don’t lie about your trip that’s all I ask. Did he forget that the cameras were running as Hilary Clinton did in Bosnia or was he counting on his pals in the mainstream media to go along with his lie as they had with the Bush folks.
McCain is pushing the, “the surge is working” meme so hard he make Sisyphus look like a piker. He quips in his speeches that General Petraeus drove around in an unarmored Humvee.The pentagon was denying this nonsense the moment they heard it and again McCain was forced to admit he, “misspoke” but in the same breath he uses the lie to support his bigger lie.
For those that try to advance the idea that we are winning in Iraq the phrase that our troops are doing everything we ask them to brilliantly tumbles from their mouths with ease. They deify the generals and when anyone dares to question their wisdom or competence that questioner is called un-American and traitor. I have one but one question for those folks. If they have done everything they have been asked and the surge strategy was so brilliantly designed to win why are they not on their way home to a well deserved victory parade?

Random thoughts on the Ides of March

I had one of my stories picked up by an online paper so that was cool. I spent some time Googeling Radmul to see if I was beginning to get anywhere and I have gone from zero to something like the youtube channel, 5 subscribers is not much but as I get out I get more hits.
Signed up for twitter after Mina began there and it seems to have some potential to find some interesting things. As a voyeur if find it fun but will it turn out to be like Myspace, people hawking and hyping gets tiresome.
Dragon’s Justice is up at the free site I have begun serializing my book for your reading pleasure. I will keep that site updated but I am shifting my effort to the google blog as it seems to be getting the bigger following. Learning the ins and outs of so many different systems has been sucking some of the enjoyment out of blogging but finding an audience in a community that has everyone speaking and few listening is not easy. I have two reasons for posting it, first to get some objective feedback. Second to put pressure on myself to write more of the story.
Finally I will try to get off the politics and get back to telling stories in the blog, on the blog? One of these days I will either learn grammer or find an editor but as anyone that reads me can attest not knowing something going in has never stopped me from screwing with something.

The Ignorance of Faith

Why are we letting the insane ramblings of the dumbest segment of American society hold so much sway over our elections? In the 21st century why are we listening to charlatans that peddle false hope to the weak and vulnerable?
This round of political discourse was probably doomed from the start as Mormonism and Islam dominated early in the campaign. I think that a Romney presidency would be a disaster with his tax cuts make the flowers grow and the birds sing economics but when Mike “lets make it gods constitution” Huckabee (http://www.politicstv.com/blog/?cat=185) started talking about Mormons worshiping Satan as the brother of Jesus in his best preacher’s wink and nod I was disgusted. I reached the exploding head point when Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber try to get Barack Obama in some sort of anti Semitic gotcha with Louis Farrakhan. We are a nation at war on two fronts on the brink of economic collapse and what are we talking to the democratic parties possible nominee? Are you against saying mean things about Jews? Lets parse the words reject and denounce.
And the beat rolls on with one wacky preacher after another being trotted out to embarrass the candidates and distract from the real issues facing a troubled nation. I thought John McCain got it right back in 2000 when he denounced the likes of Pat Robertson and the religious hate wing of the party but he lost and has now has begun pandering to god squad in efforts to appease them in some messianic belief that only he can keep our nation safe. Now when questioned about people like Hagge he thanks them for supporting his ideas.
When the news cycle spent a day debating Hillary Clintons non denial denial that Obama is a Muslim how can we hope to deal with something as complicated as regulating securities schemes, derivatives, the mortgage crisis and sovereign wealth funds that are taking us into a depression the likes of which we have not seen since the 30’s.
The second part of my argument will get me labeled another blame America first liberal America hater and to that charge I respond that I am an honorably discharged disabled veteran of the United States Air Force and that my late wife died from a service connected disability. We sacrificed for our first amendment rights as well as for those at faux news so I will exercise mine on occasion without fear. This argument is another consequence of the ignorance of faith. When you are unwilling to confront hate and question authority you will never improve the nation. If our actions as a people do not stand up to scrutiny it is not the fault of the observer no matter what Heisenberg says about collapsing the wave.
Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell among other preachers pontificated about the godless gays and secular humanists brining on god’s wrath and now he is McCain’s go to god guy. This Hagee (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qNi7tPanUA) spews forth a hate filled diatribe against gays and explains god destroyed the gulf coast cause to many men were kissing and McCain thanks him for his support. Then we have Jeremiah Wright (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080314/ap_on_el_pr/obama_pastor) and God Damn America. Same sentiment but this time the target is not the drag queens and the fornicators but the criminal foreign policy that breads hatred for America. The Iranians don’t hate freedom, they hate the fact that we toppled the only democracy they ever had and that we threw them to the mercy of a savage dictator. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html)
I have listened to several long clips of the sermons of Jeremiah Wright what scares me is not what the man was saying but what the talking news heads are saying about it. Why is Hardball’s Chris Mathews convinced America is afraid of an angry black man? Why do the people at fox news conflate holding the government to account on morals grounds with hating America? The type of attacks the man was leveling is hard for the privileged to hear but I am still waiting to hear what in his rant was untrue.
Jesse Ventura spoke his mind (http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/10/03/ventura/index.html) and was crushed unmercifully for it so I am not surprised that Senator Obama took the tack he did at the Huffpo (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barack-obama/on-my-faith-and-my-church_b_91623.html) but I wish we lived in an America where the facts actually mattered and superstition was left to the sports arena.