Saturday Late Night

You'd think that 53 (R) senators could get T**** under control. Hell, Putin can make him crawl with one stern glance.

Last night I dreamed that T****, the two Mike P's (Pence, Pompeo), Moscow Mitch, Booger Barr, Mnuchin, Miller, and a few dozen other (R)s were buried under tons of falling debris when they stopped to watch an abandoned skyscraper being demolished. I woke up wondering if dreams ever came true.

3D Pipes

My first PC was a secondhand Dell laptop running Windows XP. It had a terrific screensaver called 3D Pipes that I found entertaining. When the Dell finally surrendered, my next PC ran Vista, and the screensaver was nowhere to be found. The same was true with PC number three, another laptop now updated with Windows 7. Same boring old screensaver choices as Vista. Dull, dull, dull.

My current computer is an all-in-one desktop with a monitor the size of a small flat-screen TV set. I decided the larger display needed the 3D Pipes screensaver, and thanks to Google, I was able to locate, download and install it. A man reaches a point in life where satisfaction usually comes in small doses.

Expanding an empire

If one blog is wonderful, two must be terrific, and five must be fabulous. When I started writing blogs I didn't expect it to become a favorite hobby, but it did. My second effort was originally called Penetrating Insights, which I shortened to Pensights. One day, on a whim, I changed the title to Convolution. Months passed, and I decided I liked the Pensights title too much to let it go to waste. So about five weeks ago, I opened for business at a new location. Pensights 2.0 uses a new template design, and is strictly for short commentaries that don't fit easily into the older blog formats.

Someday blogspot.com will go out of business, and I'll have to rebuild my empire from scratch at a new host. Change is inevitable --- the problem is, most change is personally inconvenient.

An idea whose time has come

I'm fairly sure this video is intended to be satirical, but I've known people who look, talk, and think like the ones discussing the commercial possibilities of restoring conservatism to Christianity. In other words, this would be funnier if it weren't so true to life.

Chain letter lunacy

This morning I was checking my wife's e-mail for her, and her inbox contained one of those viral internet chain letters. This one was about illegal immigration, and compared the harsh treatment of illegal immigrants in North Korea and Iran to the way we coddle them in the USA. When she asked if she had any new mail, I told her some lunatic sent her a political chain letter. She started to protest my characterization of the forwarder as a lunatic, but I was right the first time ---

When people forward right-wing chain letters to you, they (A) assume you're also a rightwinger who will enjoy the message as much as they do, or (B) know you're NOT a rightwinger and are trying to annoy you, or (C) don't know your political beliefs but think you can be persuaded by a viral internet chain letter.

Regardless of which alternative above applies, the person who forwards the crap is either (A) a conservative lunatic, or (B) a malevolent lunatic, or (C) a socially maladroit lunatic who needs to be schooled in the art of civilized living.

This particular chain letter says that instead of punishing illegal immigrants (like Iran does), we reward them with a driver's license, a Social Security number, welfare, food stamps, and free health care. It happens that I worked in the public welfare bureaucracy until the end of 1998, so I know that illegal immigrants did NOT qualify for welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid at that time. If they do now, it's because a Republican president and Republican majorities in Congress changed the laws after I retired. More likely, the allegations in the chain letter are total fucking bullshit, and the person who sent it to my wife is a fucking lunatic.

The diabolical plot against America

This is a summary of what real Americans are up against these days. Two minutes and 49 seconds of educational video, designed to help us understand the enemy.

Cut 'em off

I was reading the online newspapers this morning, my usual Sunday ritual, and came across references by several conservatives on the opinion pages to Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor and her desire to see all white males castrated. I thought I'd seen everything, but this one was new to me.

Thanks to Google, I was able to check out "sotomayor white male castration" and discovered the origins of this widely circulated right-wing fantasy.

I've reached one conclusion -- castration of some white males would benefit the species by taking their genetic material out of circulation. Yeah, you know which ones I'm talking about.

Today's gripe

This afternoon my sister sent me an e-mail that some unnamed soul had sent to her, apparently one of her friends. The content was a lengthy diatribe by an individual claiming to be David Kaiser, historian, professor, and author of more than a dozen books. Though it was written in a superficially scholarly style (no major errors in grammar or punctuation), the text included enough inflammatory rhetoric to arouse my sister's suspicions concerning its legitimacy. The basic thrust of the piece was to draw a radical parallel between the rise of Barack Obama and the rise of Adolf Hitler, with powerful suggestions that America is headed toward the same destiny as Germany in the 1930s.

Since I have access to Google, it took less than a minute to find what I needed. David Kaiser is a blogger, among his other talents, and has denied writing the screed in question. As I pointed out to my sister in one of several e-mail replies, the "Kaiser" hoax has been discussed on several blogs better than mine.

In the version I skimmed over in the original e-mail, several sentences were highlighted in vivid shades of yellow and violet. Someone apparently wanted to make sure the reader didn't miss those parts. They dealt with the failure of the American public education system, unelected judges legislating from the bench, media bias, the threat of Islam, etc. All of which is simple regurgitation of the same points that Limbaugh, Hannity, and Boortz discuss daily with their pea-brained listeners on AM radio talkfests. The idea that a learned scholar would repeat this bilge in writing he expected would be taken seriously was preposterous. There were also veiled defenses of Wasilla Wondermom, a dead giveaway that this goddamned crap was cranked out by a fucking idiot.

Okay, these viral internet chain letters piss me off. I've written about it before and make no secret of the fact that anybody sending me one is going to hear from me in negative terms. As a rule of thumb, I believe this trash is forwarded by idiots who think the people they're sending it to are idiots. When a fucking idiot treats me like an idiot, it's insulting.

What makes the chain letter in question especially offensive is the implied parallel between Obama and Hitler. I'm no historian, but I'm not buying that. In my opinion, the closest parallels between the U.S. and 1930s Germany occurred from election day 2000 until election day 2008, and Republicans were in charge while it was happening.