Livin' In Interestin' Times

"I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." -- Rick Blaine, Casablanca

So much is going on that I can't possibly address all of it: so let's focus on something simple for now, like the Supreme Court, and Raw Power Grabbin'.

I was down in the area of the nation's highest court recently, where the Tribunal of Nine made a decision concerning one of the nation's highest religions: O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal (Or, the Good Spirit of the Vegetable Union -- I'll leave it up to Soo to correct me on my Portugese). The nation's Torture Czar took the Vegetable Union to court claiming that these druggies couldn't be taking no controlled substances to see their "God." And what do you know: Mister Roberts came out on the side of the druggies. I believe the strategy at work here is giving the hippies one before we start picking apart Roe v. Wade.

The Takeaway? Taking naturally-occurring drugs to commune with your Maker, Good; taking naturally-occurring drugs to prevent AIDS-wasting and to alleviate the horrible side effects of chemotherapy, Bad (reasoning being -- and I'm no big D.C. lawyer here -- is that the latter is preventing you from your commute to God.) And as far as drugs and Roe go, we wouldn't want to be selling anything that might prevent the Second Big Virgin Birth because that would take all the fun out of executing Him (or Her) by lethal injection later.

The D.C. Metro area is a repulsive piece of real estate. I should know, I lived there for 9 years and encountered more assholes (thanks to DMcG for the link) at my many jobs alone than a busy proctologist. The general rule of thumb is that rude assholes will cut you off driving up here in New York, but it's merely business, when down in D.C. it's almost always personal. You can tell by the wider smiles down there. And people in New York tend to stab you in the front. See, the game in D.C. is Politics, in NYC it's Money. I've never been good at either game but at least the Money game seems to the lesser of two evils with better written rules.

So, now that I've alienated the entire D.C. Metro area and their twisted approximation of Ancient Rome, I do travel down there from time to time for bad Karaoke contests, the company of a few select friends (who oddly enough didn't grow up there), and personalized blunt emotional trauma. I'm kind of like those teenage girls who cut themselves, those scamps.

Speaking of Personal, in the Department of Irony: Our Fearless Leader has threatened to veto any legislation that would block his pet project of allowing a foreign state government-run company own 6 major ports of which I am within Ground Zeroish distance from two. Golly, we can't piss off our allies now can we? We can't piss off our friends unless our friends, or course, have the gall of disagreeing with us over an expensive personal vendetta like a war in Iraq or the Kyoto Accord or something. No, of course not, we can't piss off our friends as long as those friends have some sort of personal vested interest as we do. That's what worries me, not that Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. is "a Great British company" (last I checked that foreign company was not run by a state), but it's about to be owned by a state that was an "important transfer point for shipments of smuggled nuclear components sent to Iran, North Korea and Libya by a Pakistani scientist."

This is not about Security folks, this is about Power. Hey, what does F.L. care? Really. It's not like it's in his back yard.