November Madness

Here we are in mid-November, and we're getting some of the best weather of the year in Phoenix. The days are sunny and clear, with temps in the mid- to high-seventies and the nights get delightfully chilly. Most evenings you can go outside and smell the aroma of fireplaces in the still air. Everyone is gearing up for the imminent holiday season, the time when a bit of childish silliness is permitted and our inner child is encouraged to come out and have fun. But instead of gentle, good-spirited playfulness we get wave after wave of batshit-craziness, as we have had all year long. It seems that even the approaching Christmas season can't flush out all the entrenched idiots in Congress and beyond.

The remnants of the health care reform bill limp tragically along through Congress, with everyone and their mother taking pot shots at it, hoping to put it out of its misery. The Republicans, as they always do, are goose-stepping along in perfect lockstep with each other, united in their mindless addiction to the lobbying money of the health care industry. And the Democrats, as they always do, are proving to be their own worst enemy with the "Blue Dog" Democrats siding with the Republicans in critical votes. And to no one's surprise, abortion - which by the way still happens to be a right guaranteed by the Supreme Court - has to be dragged into the fray as a cultural wedge issue. The only surprise was that a vile, loathsome amendment blocking ANY coverage for abortion under truly outrageous, restrictive conditions was introduced by a Democrat, Rep. Bart Stupak from Michigan. You would never see a Republican representative defying their leadership like that - slavish, robotic devotion to an ideology does have its advantages.

And what are we to do with Sarah Palin, who continues to be a giant infected pimple on the butt of America? Now she is getting on a big bus, not for the one-way trip to Oblivion that she so richly deserves, but for a cross-country March of Stupidity to flog her ridiculous book. Amazingly, the book is something like 413 pages long. Palin has not had 413 pages of coherent thoughts in her whole life. What did she do, document every single trip she made to the Wasilla Walmart? The only thing more incomprehensible than her writing this colossal waste of paper is anyone spending money on it and God forbid, actually reading it. There is absolutely nothing Palin could say in her book that would interest me in the slightest, although there were some unintentional moments of comedy as excerpts trickled out. In the campaign last year, Palin got a lot of flak from the $150,000 spent on her wardrobe. Her book documents that she got upset because in her mind, it made her family "look like a herd of hillbillies that were living high off the hog!" HAHAHA! She actually said that! In another stunning example of her total lack of self-awareness, she doesn't realize that her family LOOKS like a herd of hillbillies because they ARE a herd of hillbillies! They come from Wasilla, Alaska for God's sake! They can't help but look like a herd of hillbillies! That was such a hilarious thing for her to say, I can't tell you how much that made me laugh. I really believe that anyone who reads her book will suffer a loss of at least 10 I.Q. points, and the vast majority of conservatives in this country simply cannot sustain such a huge drop in their brainpower.

As another example of the dumbing of America I submit the recent premiere of a movie called 2012, a high-budget, special-effects laden disaster movie. Movie-goers love their disaster flicks, maybe because after watching the destruction of the planet their own weirdly pathetic lives don't look so bad after all. And there's all kinds of ways that humanity can meet its end, whether through ecological disasters such as The Day After Tomorrow, or alien invasions as in Independence Day or War of the Worlds, but this latest shake-and-bake epic is triggered by the ending of the Mayan calendar, which runs out on December 21, 2012. What they don't bother to tell you is that the Mayan calendar is made up of a series of epochs called "long counts," and what is going to happen on 12/21/2012 is that the current long count will end and the NEXT ONE WILL START right after it! It's just like when your current calendar runs out on December 31. The world doesn't come to an end, does it? Of course not, you just start a new year with a new calendar! Well that's what's going to happen with the Mayan calendar. Anyhow the movie says that neutrinos from solar flares microwave the Earth's core and cause massive seismic disruption. These flares come from the Sun lining up with the center of the galaxy as it does EVERY DAMNED YEAR in December when the Sun moves through the constellation Sagittarius!! The movie shows crustal buckling in Los Angeles and part of California falling into the ocean. Such things do happen, but in geological time scales involving millions of years, not twenty minutes of movie time. There are just so many things preposterously wrong with this movie that I can't even start, so I'm just going to go along with it and treat it like the escapist fantasy diversion it really is, much like Congress would be if it wasn't so stupifyingly evil and destructive in real life.

After all, the complete annihilation of the planet would be a day at Disneyland compared to the Palins living in the White House.