The Invisible Library

It’s Official.  There’s absolutely no one running for president who has my vote.  The Republicans are all evil, belligerent Jesus freaks. Hillary is way too Hawkish (and hasn’t met a principle she wouldn’t sell to the highest bidder for a handful of votes), Edwards can’t seem to say anything coherent and Obama becomes less appealing every damn time he opens his mouth. For a while, I had a slim hope in Kucinich, who aside form some silly, off the cuff remark about UFOs, was pretty damn sensible. But then he went and said that, if nominated, he’d pick Ron Paul as his running mate. While either him or Ron Paul winning the nomination is a slim peg to hang your hat on, I’m seriously disappointed that, out of over a dozen candidates, not one of them is sane, sensible or smart enough to not be a total fuckwit.

So, here we are, a year left until the election and I’m already sick of every single one of these circus freaks we have to choose from. Way to go, Democracy.

The latest stunt by Ron Paul’s cultish followers comes to us from Greg Saunders at The Talent Show (and This Modern World). In the form of a blimp:

What planet are these guys from? In 2007, do people descend into a state of reverent awe whenever they see a large gray cylinder flying in the sky? Call my a cynic, I really doubt that the entire nation would collectively pause with wonder to follow the journey of a rented blimp.

Come on Greg, this is fucking genius! It’s big, ponderously slow and full of hot air! It screams “I am so out of touch with reality that I can float around aimlessly propelled by my own hot air!”

Look, I have fond dreams of a New Zeppelin Age, just like any sci-fi geek. Flying around the world on a cruise ship in the clouds… But come on! In the real world, people have better things to do with their time than watch balloons drift slowly by.

This highlights how retrograde Ron Paul’s ideas really are. He and his supporters want to recreate the 1930’s, Zeppelins and all because that was the last time White Male Christians had unchallenged control of the political scene. After World War II,  it wasn’t cool anymore to be antisemitic. By the sixties, you couldn’t be racist and by the seventies, you couldn’t be sexist. But, if we turn the clock back to those good old days when zeppelins roamed the sky, well, anything goes, so long as you’re in possession of a Bible, an X chromosome and enough gold sway back a mule.

But the fun doesn’t end there, no sir. The ad on the Official Ron Paul Blimp site (because every bad idea needs its very own website) compares donating to the Ron Paul Blimp with the Boston Tea Party. That’s right, supporting Ron Paul is just like throwing your money into the harbor.

The modern day Conservative Movement has convinced millions of otherwise smart and sensible Americans that to help their neighbors and fellow citizens is an evil so profound as to be neigh on par with that age old bogeyman, Socialism. Children shouldn’t have health care, the President, a pro-family Christian, told us, because… well, he never really did say why. But he implied that if lower middle class children got used to having ready access to health care, then poor children and even adults would expect to have access to health care that borders on the Universal and well, we all know how bad that is. Just look at France! With their lower infant mortality rates, longer life expectancy and lower rates of obesity and chronic illness, plus all those doctors on call 24/7, why it’s a veritable Hell of Socialized Medicine! It’s a wonder that the French don’t flock across the ocean for our American style, sub par health care with it’s built in hidden fees, byzantine bureaucracy and outrageous prescription costs.

Meanwhile, Bush and his cronies in the Federal Reserve are debating how much money they’re going to use to bail out the banks who are floundering under a wave of defaulted mortgages. I mean, it’s not like they’re sick kids here, these are bankers! And they need our help!
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Over at Making Light, I’ve been taking part in a spirited discussion of the Ron Paul Phenomenon. It’s good to know I’m not the only person baffled by the popularity of this Libertarian Kook (and among otherwise liberal folk, too!) Seriously, do we need another religious nut from Texas with a hard on for an unrestrained Free Market in the White House? Just because he’s ostensibly against the Iraq War doesn’t make him sane. It just makes him the most lucid weirdo in the GOP.*

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China Mieville has a great article over at In These Times about Floating Utopias and the sinister, libertarian shadow, the tax-free micro-nation. It’s a fun read* but the best part is his summation of Libertarianism:

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Libertarians have always struck me as either extremely naive or excessively callous. They don’t want to be part of society if they have to share burdens and responsibilities or contribute (other than goods and services that they get cash money paid for). They want to drop out of society and be like hippies, only they still want to drive Hummers and have that leather couch they’ve always wanted.

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Norman Spinrad, author of the classic proto-cyberpunk novel, Bug Jack Barron has a new book but you can only read the first third of it online. Apparently, no publisher wants to get behind Osama The Gun. The author explains that he fears it’s for political reasons and having read the first twenty pages or so, I can definitely see how that conclusion could be reached. it’s a great read though. Have a looksee. If enough people read part of it, maybe we can use these tired Internets for good and get this book the publication it deserves.

Via Warren Ellis.

Johann Hari boarded the National Review cruise to see what Neocons say when they think no one else is listening:

Some people go on singles cruises. Some go on ballroom dancing cruises. This is the “The Muslims Are Coming” cruise - drinks included. Because everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. Everyone dreams it.

It’s like a cruise through an alternate reality, where Muslim Hoards are devouring Europe, the founding fathers fought a revolution to escape the tyranny of a king so they could establish a firm and resolute Executive President and we’re not only winning in Iraq but mystically redeeming our loss in Vietnam (due not to the Vietcong but to Liberal Commie appeasement, naturally) and everyone wets themselves in anticipation of bombs falling on Iran. Oh, and a black man thinks the KKK are just upset because they don’t have all the benefits that minorities have.

To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. “You must live near the UN building,” the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. “They should suicide-bomb that place,” he says. They all chuckle gently. How did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds?The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you’re a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she’s visited. Her companion adds, “I went to Paris, and it was so lovely.” Her face darkens: “But then you think - it’s surrounded by Muslims.” The first lady nods: “They’re out there, and they’re coming.”

Link via at Boing Boing.

Crooks and Liars has your patriotic message for this Fourth of July, straight from the mouth of Keith Olberman.

I wasn’t going to post about Scooter and his get out of jail free card but well, damn it, I’m pissed off. No, seriously. I know you can’t tell by my lack of punctuation but there are just not enough capitol letters available on my current keyboard to emphasize how angry I am that this traitorous fucker gets to walk. Wordpress and the Internet does not support thousand point fonts. I suppose I could hop in my crop duster and write “GO TO HELL, SCOOTER” across the sky but it would still only express a fraction of the disgust and contempt I have for Libby, The President* and our governmental system as a whole. Perhaps a laser capable of sawing ten mile wide letters in the moon. Maybe that would express it. Or a gravity pump capable of moving stars, so I can spell out my disgust across the cosmos, so that future generations and civilizations eons hence will know how feverishly displeased I am that this slimy little pig fucker can put on the Benedict Arnold Hat and walk away like it was just some rude e-mail he accidentally sent to everyone in the office instead of just his equally degenerate buddy down the hall.

Many other people have added their piss to the wind but John Rogers wins the Internets for nailing the reason this despicable behavior was no real surprise:

Our representatives — and to a great degree we as a culture — are completely buffaloed by shamelessness. You reveal a man’s corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns. He attempts to escape attention, often to aid in his escape of legal pursuit. Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life. But people who are willing to just do the wrong thing and wait you out, to be publicly guilty … dammmnnnn.

We are faced with utterly shameless men. Cheney and the rest are looking our representatives right in the eye and saying “You don’t have the balls to take down a government. You don’t have the sheer testicular fortitude to call us lying sonuvabitches when we lie, to stop us from kicking the rule of law and the Constitution in the ass. You just don’t. What’s beyond that abyss — what that would do to our government and our identity as a nation — terrifies you too much. So get the fuck out of our way.”

And to a great degree, the White House is right. You peel this back, and you reveal that the greatest country in the world has been run, for the last six and a half years, by men who do not give a shit about the Constitution, or fair play, or honesty. No, not just run by corrupt men, or bribe-takers, or adulterers or whatever, we could handle that –no we’d be admitting It Went Wrong.

And that’s the country we now live in. It’s not that the Cheney gang was so stupid that they never thought they’d get caught. It’s just that they didn’t care. They realized they could exploit the system and come out on top because that system is based on human decency and the innate Homo Sapien pack contract that if you fuck up, you slink away for a bit until you’re forgiven, then work your way back up the ladder. But you can short circuit that, so long as you smother that part of your heart that feels shame and self respect. Once you’ve killed the fear, you can do anything, so long as you don’t blink.

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*And by President I mean Cheney. I’m still not entirely sure George W. understands half the shit that comes out of his mouth. All he knows is that he gets fifteen minutes on the X-Box every time he makes it through a whole speech without mispronouncing more than three words in a row. I’ve heard a lot of people lately wonder out loud, “how does that poor bastard live with himself knowing what he has done?” You’re assuming A) he knows what he’s done and B) that he cares. Sociopaths have no empathy. Other people’s feelings are as alien to him as they are to any Doctor Who villain. A Dalek cannot feel sorry, because feeling is something only tangentially related to his experience. He was the one who chose to shed his skin and live inside a can and make “EXTERMINATE!” a way of life, not just a catchy thing to say on a Saturday night. If you can’t see the beauty of that lifestyle, well, you’re just some emotional alien with two bleeding hearts and a sense of justice and self control.

Has it ever seemed to you like the folks over at Homeland Security think they live in a science fiction universe, where water can be made to explode and a nut with a home made shoe bomb is a credible threat? This is the reason why:

Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described “deviant” thinkers: science-fiction writers.

“We spend our entire careers living in the future,” says author Arlan Andrews, one of a handful of writers the government brought to Washington this month to attend a Homeland Security conference on science and technology.

Those responsible for keeping the nation safe from devastating attacks realize that in addition to border agents, police and airport screeners, they “need people to think of crazy ideas,” Andrews says.

The writers make up a group called Sigma, which Andrews put together 15 years ago to advise government officials. The last time the group gathered was in the late 1990s, when members met with government scientists to discuss what a post-nuclear age might look like, says group member Greg Bear. He has written 30 sci-fi books, including the best seller Darwin’s Radio.

Now, the Homeland Security Department is calling on the group to help with the government’s latest top mission of combating terrorism.

I’m as much a fan of Science Fiction as the next geek, but these guys write futuristic war porn. Plug any one of their names into Amazon and you’ll find a bibliography of wingnuttery. These are the guys who think worldwide wars with tactical nukes are a good idea. And now the TSA and OHS want them coming up with fantasy scenarios that they think terrorists will use against us. Because we don’t have enough of those.

Terrorists will not be stealing a super secret experimental rail gun that fires sub light speed pellets of Einsteinium. They will not be hijacking the MIT Centrifuge in order to try and create a rogue black hole. Any would-be terrorist is going to use the easiest, dirtiest and most effective way to cause a Black Swan Event. That means hijacking airplanes to use as missiles (which, now that it’s been done is predictable and therefore, a worthless tactic). They’ll build homemade explosives, stuff them in a backpack and then blow themselves up on the New York Subway. Maybe. More than likely though, as we recently discovered, they’ll be so scared by an undercover FBI agent trying to get them to preform an ill-advised raid on Fort Dix, that they’ll call the police on themselves.

It’s this sort of sci-fi nonsensical thinking that has got US citizens afraid, and willing to turn over their rights, in the hopes that Jack Bauer will save them from terrorists with fantasy super weapons. Perhaps we’ve seen too many James Bond films but so long as we’re distracting ourselves looking for Dr. Evil and his sharks with laser beams, we’ll overlook the real threat, which of course is the point of all this terror theater: keep people distracted with elaborate scenarios and maybe they won’t notice that there’s nothing practical we can do to predict who the next disgruntled guy with a grudge and an IED or a cache of weapons will be.

Link via Boing Boing.