May 15, 2014

Excuse me. I've been spending my time lately with a bunch of Jews, whatever sect was responsible for squirreling away the Qumran scrolls by the Dead Sea somewhere around 2,000 years ago.

How can anyone be anti-Semitic? Those poor guys suffered under the same drippy rulers and laws we waspy Gentiles endure to this day..

"Whoever lays down and sleeps in the general meeting shall be expelled for 30 days and suffer reduced rations ten days."*

Suggesting that their rulers were capable of long, boring, meaningless assemblages  not surpassed until New England Congregationalists got going 17 centuries  later. Or, a little further along yet, about any U.S. congressional committee you care to name.

The sex laws are pretty interesting, too, but, after all, this is a family oriented blog. I limit myself to noting that if you married a woman whom you discovered to be unchaste, you were required to keep your mouth shut about it.

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*It's 4Q66, Fragment 10, quoted p.76, "The Dead Sea Scrolls,"  Michael
Wise et al, 2005, ISBN 978-0-06-07662-7

Junk post

Old Faithful, my  c. 2006 MacBook, has become a slattern. No longer elegant, she's doomed to the scullery of internet  endeavor. In her place comes a sleek Mac Airhead 13-incher.

Apple people are adept at helping you spend your money. I've hardly ever had a quicker or more efficient ordering process, and within a couple-three hours an email announced the new lady had already been dispatched and was due to arrive in eight days  (standard transport, for free).

From Shanghai.


















As the ancient Polynesian sailing chant goes:  Aiiiiiii-eeeeeee! Pray for a west wind.




May 13, 2014

A post to die by

You might as well read it; it's as good a way as any to while away your last moments on tortured Earth, a planet which is, like you, perishing from climate change.

As an added advantage, assuming a Hereafter exits and is blessed with a mass media component, you'll be better prepared to become a media critic in Heaven.

Our text comes from Radio Iowa:

"The looming impacts of climate change on the State of Iowa was the subject of a meeting in Des Moines today."*

That is the lede, the key fact the reporter and editor think you should know.  Of course we all agree with the assumptions it capsulizes:

--Climate change is happening with the unstated subtext that it is your fault and mine.

--Climate change will have an "impact," a much more serious thing than a simple "effect."

--The impact is "looming," again a word of sufficient drama to make us all fall to our knees in repentance for not driving a Volt and subsisting on dandelion greens and  stewed cottonwood bark.

---

The body of the piece is somewhat cute in the same sense that a kitty tangled in Aunt Priscilla's yarn is cute. The analogy breaks down, however, with the realization that little pussy is not contorting in lust for camera, microphone, and above-the-fold headline attention. She is just having fun or, perhaps, trying to  get free.

The story might not have impacted my attention in such a rilly awesome manner if it had stuck with the usual horrific predictions settled scientific facts that logically follow your earth-hating decision to use a reading light this evening. Flooded cities. Continental droughts. Displaced polar bears. Al Gore gasping for a final breath from the unburned hydrocarbons emitted by everything except, of course, his private jets.

But Iowa is not to be constrained by those banalities. I mean, Hell, even the New York Times and Jerry Brown know all about that.

Instead we found some experts with a new take on how you are about to die. Mosquitoes. Vast billions more mosquitoes, bigger, meaner, more dangerous, and loaded with virulent new poisons for which even Merck and Eli Lily have no antidote.

So take heed. Strip off your Spandex and send your power-hungry computer off to a certified recycling center. Make new clothes from sustainable resources, hemp fiber and slabs of birch bark. Gather your tribe and find a remote valley where you can live in harmony with nature on the veggies of the forest and -- absent a PETA chapter nearby -- slugs and snails and lightly boiled mosquitos.


*EDIT: I didn't even notice Radio Iowa reporting the  the "impactS  ...  was." It were not a typo by me.




  














May 9, 2014

Mother's Milk; The Sour Tit

By virtue of of having been an operative for national Republicans, I remain, many years later, on the special sucker lists.  If they categorize it finely, I'm in the Venn overlap as one of the superannuated has-beens who is on record as having given a little money or service to The Stupid Party since leaving Washington.

It generally doesn't bother me because my delete button works well. It is the chore of only a few seconds to whoosh off to never-never land 24 hours worth of come-ons from Viagra peddlers, conspiracy nuts,  commercial sex freaks, and the fund raising arm of the party.

 It is only when I bother to read the stuff that I get disgusted enough to react, usually thusly:

"Look, you guys, if I want my intelligence insulted, I have dozens of local friends, relatives,  and acquaintances I can turn to."

The feeling can be generated by a mere partial reading of the gimme letters, such as today's under the subject line: "Today is Election Day:" -- a patent piece of nonsense followed by, "From this day forward, every day is election day." Spare me.

Then come a few paragraphs of GOP virtues (vastly overstated) and Democrat vices (mostly true, or approximately so). Then the kicker, and you're undoubtedly way ahead of me here:


But the truth is we can’t win without your contribution today. Contribute $14 today to secure historic victories in 2014.

They want fourteen bucks for A.D. twenty-fourteen.

"Get it? Huh? Doyah get it?" 

"Oh yeah. I see.  That's a rilly cool way to write it. At least as clever as Obama's demand for a $10.10 federal minimum wage because 'It's easy to remember'."

---

After substantial salaries and bonuses to the GOP functionaries, particularly those in the fundraising arm, the proceeds will be used to tune up the no'bortion trumpets, fire grape shot from the parapets at lavender-themed weddings; maybe even restore the draft to liberate Sevastopol and bring the sweet light of reason to Nigerian Boko Harams  -- you know, the ones stealing and peddling virgins at twelve bucks per because America doesn't care enough to send them money.

In other words, to buy dull votes for guys like Rick Santorum who are the flip sides of, for instance, Nancy Pelosi and Justice Wisina Latina.

Never mind the problems that could, and may well, kill us.

--Let's start with the unannounced domestic assault on every dime you've managed to save -- the planned c. 2 per cent  annual devaluation.

--Also the notion that it's completely our fault that Islamist thugs kidnap school girls and decapitate reporters and other undesirables.

--And that a federal SWAT team is a perfectly reasonable reaction to some screwball rancher who won't pay his grazing fees. And so on.

Send me a hustle note addressing things like that and I will, without fail, send you your fourteen bucks, probably more.

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Ancient loyalties and current observations compel me to note that the Democrats are worse. Meanwhile, I entertain myself with the probably futile dream that libertarians  may one day get at least a "C-" in Politics 101.