Friday, January 28, 2011

Settle Science, Unsettle Planet

I share two links that should not be overlooked:

Warm Water flowing into the Arctic.

Hymalayan glaciers aren't melting, afterall.

So the science is settled.  Marge Atwood could sing it to you to the tune of "Your so Vain".  But the song is actually about her.

There is a slice of people at any time and place in human experience that feels the evils and horrors of the world are directly connected to our moral crimes.  We commit these crimes whenever we stray from that slice's strictures for good living.  As with global warmers this time, inevitably, the bullshit blows up in their face.

This was never a call to guzzle gas or make believe about dinosaur bones.  Only a plea to accept one unforgiving, unrelenting fact of life: change happens.  Islands sink.  Glaciers melt.  Some summers burn a little more than others.  Rain clouds shift.  Rivers carve.  Mountains crumble.  My greasy body, if the timing is perfect and the compression sufficient, will power some future subaru a mile or so.  Or not.

Monday, January 24, 2011

TV Shows and TV Ads (Liberal ones, both)

From Yankeeland, they piped into my tv a preview of the show that will replace Parker-Spitzer on CNN:  Spitzer-Steele.  Michael Steele is unemployed, Kathleen Parker is a dud.  Swap the two and you have the spectacle of too obnoxious men trying to out-obnoxious one another.  That's basically a distillation of the finest moments in the history of reality television.  If CNN didn't realize this before hand, it should by now and their lawyer's should be drafting a contract with Michael Steele's lawyers.

Meanwhile, I got to end my twenty minutes of telly with a couple of anti-Harper ads from the Liberals.  From the gist of the ads, Liberals expect a revolution over fighter jets and corporate tax cuts.  As always, Liberals are charging to defeat before anyone started playing.

Individually, neither of these issues are obvious wins for Liberals.  Fighter jets fly over wide expanses of arctic.  Making the fighter jets an issue plays into Conservative hands by reminding voters that the government is acting on the citizenry's top priorities. While Liberals will look empty-mouthed when it comes to our foreign policy worries.  Meanwhile, giving Canada kick ass corporate tax rates will pull in additional foreign investment and keep a greater portion of our own capital at work here at home.  Liberals, by contesting the corporate tax cuts, look wilfully clueless about the foundations of job creation.

Together, these issues point to another problem.  These two issues are about as stale as bread in a rue Prince Arthur restaurant. Tories have been long-term planning military assets for half a decade now.  The vision to have hyper-competitive corporate tax rates has been in the wind for at least the last three years.  Liberals have to go back into the archives to raise a couple of issues from the dead? 

The ads both end with the question: is this your Canada?  Or Harper's?  My answer, yes. 

Thursday, January 13, 2011

By the pricking of my thumbs, someting Palin this way comes

Our man Tiger has links to Sarah Palin's facebook video.  She posted it yesterday as a "response" to the Arizona political assasination over the weekend.

Tiger may find what she has to say rationally compelling, let me tell you what Tarkwell thinks:

I think Sarah Palin would rip a suckling baby from her breast and bash its brains out if it would make her King.

She scares the be-jeezus out of me. Not because her head is full of scary right-wing ideas; like Tiger, I accept her basic premises and most conclusions.  But words aren't everything.  Timing, delivery, circumstance - the context matters too.  In those things, ambition, lust and greed can be unmasked.

A politician has survived an assasination attempt.  Many bystanders did not.

Just like it is wrong to apportion some guilt from the crazy bastard's acts on Sarah Palin; it is wrong for Sarah Palin to apportion some victim-ness from the crazy bastard's acts.  But that's just what Sarah Palin is doing - using the occasion to point out how mean people have been to HER. 

A weak and prickly person is a weak and prickly president.

Further, one of the sickest displays possible is rehearsed remorse.  There was a chilling roboticism to her address - it was so bad, even Tarkwell Robotico could have looked more sincere.  In the "grieving" half of the speech, Palin gives this weird, non-sequiter smile when she talks about the United States: she's reminding us all that she loves her country the way simple country folk love old and loyal horses.  Victims get a shrug, the United States gets a wink and a nod; real emotion only barely surfaces when Palin finally gets to talking about her favorite subject, Palin.

A robotic and solipsistic person is a robotic and solipsistic president.

Sarah Palin cannot be president.  She is weak, prickly, robotic and solipsistic. 

Her advisors a idiot boobs who, if they had any sense, would have told her to shut up and take the cheap roughing up at the hands of the usual slithering pricks in silence. The adivsors should have told her to stick to grief and maybe say a kind word about the Rep. Giffords.  Look human, they should have shouted!

Instead,she  turned Andrew Sullivan's lunatic ravings about her into prescient forewarnings.