Going to Hell in a Hambasket, II.

Here's a joke I made up: So a paradox walks into a bar. "What is this," asks the bartender, "some kind of riddle?" * * * * * * * * * ** * * I don't know how the Supreme Court will rule on the death penalty cases it heard this week, but I'm guessing that a significant percent of Americans don't care whether Oklahoma or Texas or Utah pummels death row inmates with baseball bats or pumps their livers full of battery acid just to see what happens. * * * * * * * * * * If gay marriage is ruled the law of the land by the Supreme Court, every natural disaster from now till the year 3000 will be blamed on it by religious right wingers. Getting a head start, one Texas House Representative, Bill Flores, has already gotten a head start on that. He blamed the Baltimore protesting and rioting on gay marriage. * * * * * * * * * * On another gay-related note, a virulently anti-gay North Dakota state representative got outed by the recipient of a dick pic soliciting sex by said representative. So like Andy Rooney might ask, "Why is it that the most homophobic anti-gay guys are so often closeted themselves?" * * * * * * * * The NRA issued a statement this week decrying the lack of guns in Baltimore, Maryland. "Obviously, the lack of guns has been a factor in the terrible news coming from Baltimore. If only President Obama had not confiscated all the weapons in Baltimore. We will be doing everything we can in the next months to get more guns in to the hands of Baltimore's citizens. Guns for business owners, guns in the schools, guns for teachers, guns in parks, guns on buses, guns in the homes, guns for kids, guns, guns, guns." * * * * * * * * Here's another Andy Rooney question for you: "Why is it that when it's police killing citizens, it's a few bad apples; when it's juveniles throwing rocks, they are all painted the same?" * * * * * * * * * The Washington Press Corps had its big wing-ding last week and President Obama told some pretty good jokes: When asked if he had a bucket list, he responded that he had a list that rhymed with bucket. Funny stuff, Mr. President. * * * * * * * * * Finally, it turns out that three states with the worst economic performance, the largest budget deficits, the highest unemployment rates, are the three states where the Koch Brothers have pulled the most strings: Kansas, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. Go figure. * * * * * * * * * The picture is a new painting I just finished for a customer, btw.

Going to Hell in a Hambasket

I'm thinking about the contradictions inherent in Rand Paul's name. Rand, named after atheist, pro-abortionist, anti-government Ayn Rand (who of course drew social security and medicare), and Paul, the apostle, that Christian letter writer to all those Corinthians, and Galatians, and Philippians. Talk about opposing forces. And Rand Paul, exemplifies those forces: the one time libertarian now evangelical Elmer Gantry impersonator Christian embracing government control over women's bodies would have Ayn Rand in an apoplectic fit. The mental gymnastics required to gloss over the contradictions is amazing. The best line, though, I've heard about Rand Paul is that he is a stupid person's idea of a smart person. * * * * * * * * And another thing - I can never remember for sure the correct spelling of whether Hillary is right or Hilary is right. One L or two Ls. One of my facebook friends claimed it must be one L because Lucifer has one L. I don't think that is right. If she's nominated and elected, I'll learn it for sure. * * * * * * * Michelle Bachman (remember her?)is very excited that Barack Obama may be accelerating the coming of the Rapture with his support for gay marriage and health insurance for everyone. Weird. I hope they take her. * * * * * * * Kansas welfare recipients can no longer use welfare checks to pay for Carribean cruises. It's hard for me to believe that was much of a problem. * * * * * ** I saw a news report that Westboro Baptist Church member may go to Iraq to protest against Islam. Good luck with that. Good idea. Bon voyage. Nice knowing you. * * * * * * * Finally, I heard someone say the world is going to hell in a hambasket. Umm, please pass the mustard.

Freewriting about freewriting while watching the rain

So I attended a creative writing and art workshop this weekend in the hills north of Omaha. We were to write without stopping for a period of time. I chose to free write about free writing. I was sitting in the large and high living room of a beautiful home in the hills of Hummel Park looking out the large bank of windows to the north east: A guided writing project with no punctuation with a free writing aspect in a room with fifteen other creative and talented people. I could start with a phrase - "It was hot that afternoon when...it was cold that morning when...I saw the barest glimpse of a shoulder as she walked away".... One word at a time, one thought cascading upon another. How to consider this? Like Sir Hillary climbing Mt. Everest? Like Thor Heyerdahl on the Pacific? Like don Quixote on his magnificent quest? I'm looking through a wall of windows at flowering trees and bare branches whose silhouettes pose like the sculpted bronze dancing girl on the baby grand piano. I'm looking at stuffed owls on the mantel with a flock of painted birds in flight above. I'm looking at a Loess Hills horizon through the bare trees miles away across the Missouri River. Or perhaps I should look at this as a sojourner on foot moving one step at a time, one word at a time, one word after the other, one foot after the other until a destination is reached. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step although it is still a very long walk. Through that high glass wall I see green grass and tilled earth wet from the morning rain. A word helps construct a metaphor of this writing adventure. The mind attaches words to thoughts as analogies of meaning with both secret and public places. I see a large empty space in the room with furniture grounded and the sky limited. I see the occasional concentric circle of rain drops landing on the deck on a plastic covered planter which has collected a small pool. Capturing a moment is an interesting phrase - one can capture a moment only in the imagination. Moments are not bounded by anything other than ourselves; moments are continuous without boundaries. Like rain drops falling from the sky to become the river or the pond or a puddle, discrete moments fall from time and become memories merged large and small. I walk away for a moment to sharpen my pencil and my thoughts and hear rain drops hitting the roof, the deck floors, the tabletops outdoors. I hear the scratching of pencils on paper with the occasional tap as the pencils dot i's and cross t's. I cannot bring myself to use no punctuation. It's an involuntary response like sneezing. I can no more not use punctuation than Byron or Keats or Ferlinghetti or Ginsberg or my friend Greg when he writes his wonderful poems. A rainstorm is like a poem with its rhythms and cadence. Each rain drop makes a different sound. Some land on wood, some on leaves, some on plastic chairs. Or perhaps rain is like a symphony with rain trumpets and rain clarinets and rain saxophones with the occasional lightning blast of the cymbals. And the thunder of the tympani. Sometimes rain is gentle; sometimes rain is ferocious. I just used a semicolon. Rain sometimes begins quietly and builds to a soggy finale. Sometimes rain begins like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, dah dah dah duh. Big and loud. It's all good, though. We need the rain; we need the lightning, too, as it does something with ozone that makes the grass greener than it would be otherwise. Maybe we need the thunder, too, as a reminder of the lightning. I hear the rain drops and I hear the pencil points and each of these creates a new word in this downpour of thoughts. "Don't rain on my parade," we say. "April showers bring May flowers," we say. Like the waning rain, my thoughts are wandering and coming fewer and farther between. I wonder if it's ever possible to see and catch the last rain drop. To catch it and look at it and maybe send it back up into the sky. Sometimes we wish a word could be sent back to whence it came. I wrote a blog about semicolons once. The rain is steady right now and I can no longer see the horizon of hills to the northeast. I am reminded of a line from a movie - "All those moments are lost in time, like tears in the rain."

Oh God, it's the Presidential Campaign Season Again

As far as I can determine right now, the Republican platform for 2016 is to declare war on Iran, eliminate every government program since the New Deal, create a new Federal Department of Vaginas, replace the US Constitution with the Ten Commandments, deport the parents of millions of Mexican American children, take away rights from LGBTs, women, working people, union workers, non-Christians, eliminate public schools, colleges, and universities, take away people's health insurance, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and mortgage assistance, privatize Social Security, take food and medicine away from children, sell the National Parks, bring back polluted water and air, ban all talk about climate change, increase the budget deficit, give billionaires more tax breaks, and raise taxes on 99% of all Americans. I could be wrong, but I think that's out of step with the thinking of most of us. * * * * * * * * Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Elmer Gantry impersonator, part-time libertarian, full-time con man, and presidential wannabe, today called for the elimination of all government regulatory agencies and all government regulations, to be replaced by a single new agency, the Joint Federal Department of Vaginas and Religious Freedom, to monitor compliance with right-wing Christian religious orthodoxy and women's private parts. "We need to get government out of business board rooms and back into women's private parts where it belongs," he said. * * * * * * * * * * And I have a special message for Rand Paul and Ted Cruz about their conversations with the press: You two guys have said tons of stupid sh**, so don't act so surprised when people ask you about it. * * * * * * * * * On another matter, the nation was shocked that a white cop who killed an unarmed black man is charged with murder. "How can this happen in America?" people asked. Like Bill O'Reilly said the other day, "It's open season on white men." * * * * * * * * Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio are now running for President: Fact checking groups like Politifact, Media-matters, Fact-check, Snopes, and others are gearing up for the 2016 Presidential campaigns. "We have realized very quickly that with our current technology we will not be able to keep up with the Republican fibs. It's so ingrained with these guys, we wonder sometimes if they no longer realize how far they have wandered from the factual world. With Ted Cruz' announcement that he was running, we immediately reached our capacity to fact check. His announcement speech at Liberty University nearly crashed our computers. We counted over one million lies in that two hour speech alone. Smoke was billowing out of the fronts of our mainframes and servers. With Rand Paul and Marco Rubio entering the race, and God forbid, that crazy f****** brain surgeon, Ben Carson, or Huckabee, we are planning to add over a thousand Cray Supercomputers with a million billion trillion quadrillion terragooglebytes of cloud computing power just to keep up. Our worst case scenario is that Bobby Jindahl, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker also enter the race. We would be totally overwhelmed; there is just no way to design a system to fact check that much mendacity. Our only hope is that, like Rick Perry, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker, several more of these prevaricating wackos will face criminal investigations and/or felony indictments."

What a week! Iran, Indiana, and Bobby Jindahl

What a week. Iran. Indiana. * * * * * * * * The US military/industrial complex crapped its pants upon learning the US and six other nations signed a historic agreement with Iran to dramatically slow its nuclear weapons program. "We've got fiduciary responsibility to our stockholders who have been counting on a major war with Iran. What are we going to tell them? We've spent millions and millions bribing Congress to spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of $$$ on weapons that haven't even been invented yet, and this is what we get? Peace? No way. What are we supposed to do with all this inventory. There's only so many bombs we can drop on ISIS. And besides, we've got over 20,000 nukes and we sure as heck don't want Iran getting one," a spokesperson said. "I mean, what right do sovereign nations have to produce nuclear weapons, anyway?" Andy Borowitz said it all this way taking a shot at John McCain: "Peace with Iran Could Limit Ability to Bomb It, Warns McCain." And I would add, a majority of Republicans who have no idea what a centrifuge is oppose the agreement. * * * * * * * * About Indiana - In a stunning reversal, Leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, denounced Indiana Governor Mike Pence today for bowing to the forces of the infidels and sodomists. Just days ago he had defended embattled Indiana Governor Mike Pence. "We have a similar law in Iran which works very well against homosexuals, Christians, Jews, atheists and many other infidels. If we read this new law correctly, Muslim shop owners will now be able to refuse service to Jews and Christians. Your liberal media is over-reacting. Indiana's tiny steps towards Sharia law should be applauded. In fact, we have invited Governor Pence to visit Iran at his earliest opportunity, perhaps to help us celebrate opening our first Hobby Lobby franchise." However, in a press release issued today, Leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said, "The dramatic changes to the bill which originally allowed discrimination to now prohibiting discrimination against LGBTs, including new language which prohibits businesses from using the new law “to refuse service to anyone on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or a range of other classifications, including race and religion,” are shocking and disappointing and we can no longer support Indiana's Governor. Just days ago, Indiana seemed to be on the path to theocracy like the great nation of Iran, and now........not so much. We are reconsidering whether to allow a Hobby Lobby franchise. And our talks with Chic fil A are cancelled for sure." * ** * * * * * Significantly, it wasn't until Indiana and Arkansas lost Walmart and NASCAR that they realized they had a problem. * * * * * * * * * Finally, regarding fact checking and the Republican candidates: Fact checking groups like Politifact, Media-matters, Fact-check, Snopes, and others are gearing up for the 2016 Presidential campaigns. "We have realized very quickly that with our current technology we will not be able to keep up with the Republican fibs. It's so ingrained with these guys, we wonder sometimes if they no longer realize how far they have wandered from the factual world. With Ted Cruz' announcement that he was running, we immediately reached our capacity to fact check. His announcement speech at Liberty University nearly crashed our computers. We counted over one million lies in that two hour speech alone. Smoke was billowing out of the fronts of our mainframes and servers. With the prospect of Rand Paul and Jeb Bush entering the race, and God forbid, that crazy f****** brain surgeon, Ben Carson, or Huckabee, or Rubio, we are planning to add over a thousand Cray Supercomputers with a million billion trillion quadrillion terragooglebytes of cloud computing power just to keep up. Our worst case scenario is that Bobby Jindahl, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker also enter the race. We would be totally overwhelmed; there is just no way to design a system to fact check that much mendacity. Our only hope is that, like Rick Perry, several more of these prevaricating wackos will face criminal investigations and felony indictments."