Back from France

After a whole month in France, which happens to be one of the most civilized nations on the planet in spite of the right wing racism of its president and its current governing class, I'm back in the nation of my birth and my citizenship.

A lot can be said for the USA, but you France-haters out there who think that you are sooo fucking superior to the French can baisez mon cul. You really don't know merde about France

Only a couple times, during a whole month of driving from Paris to Verdun to Aix-en-Provence to Nice to Millau and back to Paris did we encounter "assholes", and they were the same kind of assholes you can -- and will -- encounter anywhere.

Right now I am jet-lagged beyond endurance. Give me a few days to get it together again...

Screw It ... I'm Already on Vacation

Even though we are not leaving for France until next week, it's hot, I'm tired, we have a ton of packing -- and repacking -- to do to get ready...

As much as I'd like to rant and rave about some of the meatier items in the news (Grampaw "I'm not a maverick" McCain running off the rails; the mosque-that-isn't-a-mosque-at-ground-zero-that-isn't-ground-zero , etc. etc. etc.) I'm laying myself off until October.

Since I've already been unemployed for 99 weeks, there won't be any unemployment insurance (aka "rocking chair" aka "welfare queen" aka "lazy-ass-motherfuckers-who-don't-want-to-work ") money coming in...

Instead, since I am going to Paris for ten days (followed by 19 days of fairly aimless driving around France in a tiny rental car) with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, there will undoubtedly be a net outgo of beaucoup bucks from the coffers of The House of Farnsworth...

"Chanel!" she says. "Haut couture!" she purrs. "Haut cuisine," she murmurs, licking her lips lasciviously...

Okay, I think I know that last one: "Hot food". Okay I can handle that. A quick infusion of a burger and fries from the American Grill in Paris. Yeah.

Followed, of course, by a visit to the beach. I already have my chiropractor on retainer to fly to the Riviera and adjust my neck, should I throw it out from excess swiveling...

And, since even the bottom of the caves at Lascaux has Internet access, I won't be that far away in case something tweaks me to the degree that I have to issue a diatribe...

But don't count on it. See you in October.

It Is the Will of Allah

You know, I'm getting pretty tired of all these liberals sucking up to the Muslims in this country, saying that their religion is one of peace and brotherhood and all that crap, when everyone knows that Islam is a religion of death and destruction and infanticide and abortion.

Just consider these concepts from their "holy book":

1. "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every women that hath known man by lying with him.” In other words: women that might be pregnant, which clearly is abortion for the fetus.
2. Allah promises to dash to pieces the infants of S___ and the “their women with child shall be ripped up”. Once again Allah kills the unborn, including their pregnant mothers.
3. Allah allows the pregnant women of T____ to be “ripped open”.
4. Allah commands the death of helpless "suckling" infants. This literally means that the children Allah killed were still nursing.
5. Allah commands that infants should be “dashed upon the rocks”.
6. “For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.”
7. Allah gets angry and mercilessly torments and kills everyone, young and old. He even causes women to eat their children.

Pretty shocking, isn't it? Who wouldn't hate a religion whose god commanded all that icky stuff?

Well, I've got a little surprise for you. Go back in that paragraph and substitute "God" for "Allah", and then see this page on the Internets that will give you chapter and verse from the Christian Bible, the so-called Word of God, for each and every one of these quotes.

Yeah, the Muslim world has absolutely nothing to fear from the peace and love and freedom-beating bearing Christian world....

OOO-WEE-OOO! Tinfoil Hat Time

Okay, students. Time to make your own tinfoil hat and settle back to wait for Armageddon:

If I recall correctly, Numerology is one of the "lost science" ideas of the Dark Ages (so called for a reason...), especially so since the advent of easily-available computer time (fellow geeks, do you remember the 70s?).

With a modern computer (I'm talking basic desktop now, not a Cray supercomputer), any hacker geek worth the title can come up with a combination of numbers based on the numerological "sciences" that will ultimately, with enough pushing, come down to...

666!

OMFG, it's the Number of the Beast!!!!!! Henry Kissinger? The Beast. Pepsi Cola? The Beast.

My favorite was, of course, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Ronald = six letters; Wilson = six letters; Reagan = six letters! Put 'em together and whattaya got?

666!!!

The fucking Number of the BEAST, right there in the fucking White House!!!!!!!!!

Eeeeeeeee-owwwwwwwwww! No no no no no no no no!!!!!!!!!!

Obama "Born a Muslim"?

I don't quite get how that happens, but no less an authority than Franklin Graham (no doubt still smarting from his exclusion from the Pentagon party) claims that Barack Obama was "born a Muslim" and that Muslimness (Muslimosity?) somehow is in the DNA of the father and if that "tainted seed" gets implanted in fertile Christian soil (i.e., his mother's virgin womb) and any issue from that implantation will be Muslim...

I am not making this up. See it here.

[Note to Franklin G: I think you would profit greatly from auditing a basic class in biology at your local community college.]

Fuck sake, no wonder so many of the Moron-American voting bloc think Obama's Muslim...

Not that any of that should fucking matter to begin with. It's really nobody's business what religion a leader professes to follow -- just as long, of course, as that religion doesn't have a god who is nudging him to push The Button (are you listening, Pat Robertson?).

Just Answer the Question, Boner!

Here's senate minority "leader" John Boehner, wiggling like a frog caught on a spike, in front of David Gregory last weekend on Meet the Press:

Can't the Rethugs find a single spokesperson that can have that "conversation" that Boner is talking about? Especially when he can't (won't) give a straight answer to a pretty simple question.

Just answer the fucking question, Boner!

Sweet Victory

The primary election in Washington State was held on Tuesday of this week, but I had to wait until late yesterday to get the results of the most local of races, that for Precinct Committee Officer.

You may recall that I decided to run for the office this year, only to find that I had competition for a race that is usually a slam-dunk since most candidates run unopposed.

But with some adroit footwork and some campaign schmoozing, I was able to win the race by a 60-40 percent landslide.

Now the real work begins, getting out the Democratic vote for the general election in November. This will be somewhat complicated for me since I will be out of the country the whole month of September.

But thanks to a little idea that I like to call "The Internets", nowhere is truly out of reach these days. Not even France...

Hangin' With the Stars

I did manage to take some time out of my busy politickin' to attend a "listener forum" thrown by KPTK 1090 AM, the Seattle liberal talk radio station.

Here I am with some of the most talented -- and funniest -- liberal talk radio hosts: L to R, Norman Goldman, Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, Stephanie Miller, me, and Ron Reagan.

[Note that VIP badge I'm wearing around my neck - Woot!!]

I had already met Randi and Thom on the Air America cruise in 2008, but it was great to see them again, and really terrific to meet the others. And this was pretty much an informal chat session, where they all got to kind of let their hair down, and man-oh-man was that gang funny! They had us rolling in the aisles. Well, actually, rolling on the ice, since it was held in the hockey and ice-show center. Fortunately they had covered up the ice so geezers like me wouldn't slip on it.

Note that Thom Hartmann and Stephanie Miller seem kind of hors de combat, what with the leg cast and the arm sling. I asked them if they got mugged when they got off the plane, but they assured me that it was due to totally separate issues.

Coincidentally, this was the day after Stephanie "came out" on her radio show, and I told her that she had managed in about five seconds to break the hearts of literally millions of men in this country.

She's a good sport, of course, and laughed at the comment. At least I think she was laughing at the comment, and not at me...

Randi made what I thought was one of the pithest and most memorable comments of the evening: "When someone tells you that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims, shoot back that not all White Christians are KKK, but all KKK are White Christians."

Busy this Week

This is the last week before Washington's primary election, so I am going to busy politicking all week long. Posts, if any, will be few and far between.

Being active politically takes up a LOT of time...

Welcome to Trailer Park: The Series

Jeez, I swear I never saw this coming.

Turns out that the whole thing would make for a great redneck country song -- or a "reality" tv show.

First the teenagers Levi and Bristol were "in love" and, inexplicably, without even the most readily available form of contraception on the planet (I mean really, you can't go into the bathroom in any bar without seeing The Machine) when their horny teenage reproductive genes kicked into high gear and they started grappling like wolverines in heat.

So she gets pregnant, and Boy Teenager suddenly finds himself trapped in the national spotlight when Granny Mooselini got herself, again inexplicably, on the ticket for VP. So it was almost a shotgun wedding, and then he made a zillion bucks on the quasi-celebrity circuit trash-talkin' Granny, and then it turned out the shotgun wasn't loaded and he dodged the whole trailer-trash-redneck-marriage thing.
But wait! There's more: Our boy Levi it turns out was off on a "hunting trip" (jeez, couldn't he come up with something original? That's such a fucking cliché!) when he was really hunting pussy and porking some California jailbait, who is now the mommy of Baby #2.

I swear to god you can't make this shit up. Now CBS is in negotiations with the Palin family to bring their weekly "reality show" to television this fall.

Need I remind everyone that these are national-spotlight representatives of the Party of Family Values? No, I didn't think so...

Would You Do It?

One of my favorite aphorisms is that good people will pretty much always do good; it takes religion to really fuck things up.

Think about this the next time one of those crazy-assed Fundos starts yapping about this country being founded on and based on "Judeo-Christian" morality, blah blah blah.

One of my favorite blogs, Defaithed posits a very simple question for those True Believers in the morality dictated by the One True God:

How do we get "morality" from a God who orders his followers again and again to execute people for things we don't even consider crimes (homosexuality, adultery, disrespect to parents, etc.); to slaughter cities full of people including women, children, and infants (except for virgin girls, who are to be saved for rape); to keep slaves; etc. etc.? How can the believers claim "Biblical morality", when they themselves knowingly refuse to follow such commandments?
I think the common response will be, "Well, that was the Old Testament; it was appropriate for those people then, but doesn't apply to us. Jesus changed all that... (yadda yadda)". In your experience, is that the usual response?
If so, here's what I'd love to ask in reply:
We may not be living under Old Testament law, but let's say we were. If you were one of the "chosen people" back in Old Testament days, and God commanded you to butcher the women and children of the neighboring city, and rape the tribe's virgins, and burn alive the priests of another god, and slit your firstborn's throat as a test of faith.... would you do those things?
It's not a purely imagined question. A challenge like "Would you start nuclear war if God told you to?" could be brushed off as unrealistic: "God would never ask such a thing". But not the above atrocities; according to the believers, God did demand those very things! And with his ways all mysterious and unknowable, he could surprise us all and demand them again - maybe even tomorrow. Either way, I ask the believers: Would you do it?
I'm really curious as to how they'd respond, as any answer is a loser. To say "No, I wouldn't do it" is to utterly reject "Biblical morality"; it's to admit that God's commandments are themselves immoral. Whereas to say "Yes, I'd do it" is to reveal one's self as a despicable monster with no claim to any morality whatsoever. (Meanwhile, the atheist easily stands on moral bedrock with a reply of "God or no God, of course I'd never do it!".)

He's right. These are not merely academic debating points, not just the innocuous topics of college dorm bullshit sessions. The Xian god, time after time, ordered the wholesale slaughter of the innocents, the total genocidal obliteration of whole peoples, and his followers actually did it! Willingly and blindly.

Remember when Pat Robertson made his abortive run at the presidency a number of years back? He actually said something to the effect that if god willed that he win the office, he would, if god ordered it, push the nuclear button and bring on Armageddon.

And that in itself is one of the biggest, strongest and most persuasive arguments I can think of for ensuring that we maintain the total separation of church and state in this country.

Running for Office

All politics is local. And in Washington State you can't get any more local than Precinct Committee Officer for one of the major political parties.

Which is why in early June I fearlessly nominated myself for election to the prestigious office of Democratic Party Precinct Committee Officer for the precinct in which I live.

The primary ballots were mailed out last week, but because I was gone for most of the weekend, I didn't get a chance to see my name on a ballot until today.

But, when I went to the mailbox and found the official envelope from the county auditor, ripped it open and saw my name as a candidate for office, I did cartwheels all the way back to the house.

Well, okay, not really. After all, I am a disabled veteran on Social Security and Medicare... But nevertheless, there was something ... empowering ... seeing my name on the same ballot with such political superstars as mom-in-tennis-shoes US Senator Patty Murray.

But all of the news is not good. There are several hundred precincts in my county, and all but two of them have either no candidates for PCO, or else no opposition for the declared candidates.

Mine, unfortunately, is one of the two. I have an opponent in the race for Democratic Party Precinct Committee Officer.

Which means what I originally thought would be a slam-dunk election now has turned into a horse race.

But that's fine, and that's what democracy is all about. I managed to finagle the list of voters in my precinct from my local Democratic Party and went through it line by line. All of the voters who were listed as "strong Democrats" and who had voted in each of the last three primary and general elections (yes, they do know this about you...) received from me a personal appeal in the form of a postcard (no letters in envelopes -- they are too easy to toss away unopened) listing my qualifications and past record as a party stalwart:

• Lifelong Democrat, strongly dedicated to the enduring values of the Democratic Party, including Equal Rights for everyone
• County Resident 25 Yrs, 18 yrs in this precinct
• 30-year Member of AFSCME; retired state employee
• 2004 Washington State Veterans for Kerry Steering Committee member
• Delegate to County Democratic Conventions 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010
• Delegate to Washington State Democratic Conventions 2008, 2010; pledged Barack Obama delegate 2008
• Disabled Vietnam veteran*

When the bell rings we'll come out slugging, and may the winner emerge victorious.

[* Details slightly edited to maintain my quasi-anonymity... It's easy enough for smart people -- i.e., liberals, to figure out who I really am, but the knuckledraggers just don't seem to have a clue...must be due to that commie-socialist public education that liberals got, as opposed to the home-schoolin' with which a lot of the opposition seems to have been burdened.]

Book of the Month

Time for a new Book of the Week. But it appears I was a little ambitious in thinking I could actually get a new review out every week. I guess it's more of a Book of the Month now.

So, that said, I noted over my holiday that there is a new Pentagon Papers exposé in the wind.

By an interesting coincidence, when this news broke, had I just finished reading Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Daniel Ellsberg, for those of you too young to recall, is one of the most important patriots of the 20th Century, who went from conservative Cold Warrior to anti-war activist while working with super-secret documents both at the State Department and the Defense Department and also with the think-tank Rand Corporation.

This eminently readable and totally gripping account shows the steps in that process, and illustrates why a member of the Nixon White House called him "the most dangerous man in America". Had Ellsberg not released those thousands of documents that were the "smoking gun" proving that an ignoble succession of five presidents had consistently lied to the American people about their goals in Vietnam, then the infamous White House "Plumbers" would not have been formed and there would have been no Watergate burglary and consequently no resignation of Richard Nixon.

And while it's easy to look back and play "What If?", I'm not crazy enough to want to find out what an unfettered by domestic problems Richard Nixon would have done to SE Asia -- after all, there was a lot of loose talk about so-called "tactical nuclear weapons" with battlefield control in the early Nixon Administration.

So we have Daniel Ellsberg to thank for changing the course of history. The least we can do in return is to buy his book, an insider's account of historical events and decisions that we were involved in as unwilling participants -- victims, even -- that ought to be required reading in every high school civics* history class.
Highly recommended!

[* Sorry, nobody learns "civics" any more...]

Afghanistan America's Longest War?

It's Afghanistan, if you believe the media. I guess it all depends on when you start counting and when you stop.

Officially it's still the Vietnam War, which began with Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 and ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. That's the period of time the Veterans Administration considers when determining "Vietnam Era Service".

But by rights that war really started with the fall of the French colonial empire in Indochina in 1954, immediately after which we stepped in to take up the slack because we could not stand it if Vietnamese people were given a vote in their own government.

Because, surprise, they would have voted overwhelmingly for Ho Chi Minh.

But I digress, sort of. It appears that the media is counting Vietnam as ending in 1973 when the last combat troops left. But, as this article points out, the first casualty of the Vietnam War (if you don't count the WWII Flying Tiger John Donovan, shot down in 1942) was Richard Fitzgibbon in 1956, and the last were twoMarine embassy guards, Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge, who both died on April 29, 1975.

And that makes the Vietnam War very nearly 40 years long. But it doesn't make for good headlines and news-crawl alerts, nor does it make for snappy End the War in Vietnamistan signs that proclaim Afghanistan as the new "longest war".

What do I care, anyway. I'm just one of those pushy sticklers for historical accuracy, which appear to be a dying breed...

Going Dark

I have grandchildren coming to visit for a week, so they'll undoubtedly be absorbing pretty much all of my spare time.

See you in a week or so, and thanks for reading.

--The F Man

The Homo Devil Machine

The Neo-Luddites are really hard at it these days:


I mean really, does it really not matter that Alan Turing's work essentially won WWII in Europe, and that his work with the earliest computers saved untold thousands -- maybe millions -- of lives? Really?

What is wrong with these people? Would anyone want to try to live without the contributions of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, or Robert Hooke? (All probably gay; you could look it up.)

It is truly astounding -- no, appalling -- that this mindset exists.

I'm surprised that Fred Phelps hasn't picked up the banner for this one.

Actually, no, I am not really surprised, since old Feeble Freddy relies too much on his computer to get out the word and especially to get to the stupid homophobic members of the Moron-American Voting Bloc so they can contribute their loose dollars, which would otherwise be squandered on Satan's Media (cable television) and the Devil's Brew (Coors Lite), to his whole "god hates fags" campaign. Wouldn't want to go all 19th Century and strangle that cash cow, would we?

Fucking hypocrites.

President Palin???!!!

After making my "Farnsworth is going to hell" church sign, I started wondering about other roll-your-own sign pages. Turns out there are a lot of them. Check out Sign Generator, a compendium of a bunch of digital sign-making websites.

That's where I came across this gem, which is based on one of my absolute favorite paintings, Edvard Munch's great 1893 Expressionist painting The Scream.

As troubled as I was by vandalizing, even temporarily and digitally, Munch's painting, I just couldn't help myself...

Slaves of Satan

I can remember back in the day, when only a certain gang of so-called "one percenters" -- i.e., outlaw motorcyclists -- were Satan's Slaves.

Now it appears that I'm going to have get my own set of gang colors since I am, according to the Fundo Baptists, officially a slave of Satan:





I'm not certain that these are legitimate, but they appear to be. They don't look like they came from the Church Sign Maker site:

Free to Be ... You and Me? Uh, Not So Much

Jeez, I just love the Teabaggers. They are a never-ending source of humor and amazement to me.

Take this recent example:

One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We're great because we created a place and space where people can be free. And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful. They can worship, and they find their way to the Lord. And -- or some of them don't. We sure want them all to, but some of them don't.
Part of that freedom -- when you take a government and you impose, and take away all your choices. One of the choices you take away is to find the Lord. And to find your savior.
And that's one of the things that's most destructive about the growth of government. It's this taking away of that freedom. The freedom -- the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.
And I think that's one of the things that we have to be very, very aware of. That the Obama Administration and Congressman Carnahan are doing to us.

The speaker? A dickwad graduate of Glenn Beck U. named Ed Martin, who is running, as a Republican (never saw that coming, did you?), for the US House in Missouri's Third District.

Martin goes out of his way to try to erect a "wall of separation" between himself and the GOP, though. "I'm not running to be a Republican in Congress, I'm running to be in Congress," he said. His campaign website featured teabaggers carrying signs calling Obama the usual litany of names, including Marxist and Dictator.

TPM has the whole story.

[HT to Teaparty Jesus for the story.]

Should the American Flag be Banned in Schools?

I get a lot of bullshit from the few far-righty wingnuts who are still willing to say that they know me, so it didn't really surprise me today when I got an email from my old Army acquaintance, Billy-Bob:

Fox is running a poll about whether the flag should be banned in schools in order not to inflame Hispanic students. The poll is being sandbagged by SEIU (California union of service workers) and we should mount a counter action if you agree with me that the flag should be taken down for no one.
Moveon.org, Organizing for America, and SEIU have been twittering today to go to this Fox Poll and vote to ban the Flag ....
SHOW THEM WHAT TRUE PATRIOTS BELIEVE!!! Let's flip those numbers and show that we love our flag and it should be proudly flown in schools and everywhere! ....flip the numbers now-FLIP THE HOUSE in November!

Leave it to Clusterfox News. Since this is the first I've heard of it, I don't know the background on this but I am willing to bet good money that it is NOT what the Foxfuckers are claiming it is.

Here's the text of their poll:

Should the American Flag be Banned -- in America?
o No. This is a lame decision. Teach the kids what the flag means, instead of banning it.
o Yes. The safety of students comes first.
o Not sure, but of all things to ban, the American flag would seem the least 'incendiary.'
o Other (post a comment)

Down at the bottom they feel the need to tell us that this "not a scientific poll"... Jeez, ya think?

Feel free to drop by and skew the results yourself. All of us over here in Commie-Nazi-Fascist-Socialist-Obamacare land where we are in lockstep koolaid-sucking mode with MoveOn.org, Organizing for America and the Service Employees Union will appreciate it.