SemiConscious Dot Org

Dark days are upon us. No doubt you all, as good, God-fearing conservative Republican Christians, were shocked by the recent release of a medical study which concludes that not only does prayer not help sick patients, the prayed-for actually fared worse after surgery. While we are certain that the study’s results are both false and entirely due to the researchers all being devil-worshipping godless secularist humanists, the news did still royally bum us out.

Nevertheless, God’s People™ are both numerous and strong here in ‘Murrica. Read the following stories and reaffirm the awesome power of faith:

Remember the woman who, when pulled over by the cops for driving solo in the carpool lane, claimed her unborn fetus as a passenger? Well, the Culture of Life won’t take her court loss lying down! Say hello to The National Right to Ride Carpool Coalition, dedicated to securing zygotes their inalienable rights as rush hour commuters! (After this worthy goal is attained, their next project will be to secure tax breaks for fetuses who purchase SUV’s.)

Many of you may be under the sad illusion (propogated, once again, by Godless secular humanists) that the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church were caused by outdated rules prohibiting priests from marrying or by coverups in church hierarchy. Balderdash! Documentary maker Michael Calace exposes the real cause of priests molesting little boys: subliminal Satanic imagery in church art! Phew, glad we settled that issue!

Our next nominee, South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli, assures us that some rape victims will still be able to get abortions under his state’s new law – along as they’re religious and were virgins before being raped! And when pressed to explain South Dakota’s abnormally high infant mortality rate, he blames the Indians! Huzzah, Senator; smokescreen accomplished! We foresee big things for you in God’s Own Party! (link via the surpassingly heterosexual Jesus’ General. )

Oh yes, and let’s not forget the artist who, in tribute to the glories of traditional motherhood and the pro-lfe movement, sculpted Britney Spears nekkid on all fours on a bearskin rug.

So, there you have it: four exceedingly strong candidates for December’s illustrious award. However, as we all know, there can be only one Craaazy Christian™ winner. Who shall advance to the finals from this group? Let the voting commence! Glory!

Why do retired command sergeants major of the U.S. Army and founding members of Delta Force, the military’s elite covert counter-terrorist unit, hate America?

Yet another objectively pro-terrorist war hero is criticizing Dear Leader! It is time for his personal Republican Guard, the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, to rally to his defense as never before! May your cheeto-stained fingers fly across the keys and your verbal feces soar majestically through cyberspace! ATTACK!

(link via some commie penguin )

Gravity’s Rainbow has long been one of my favorite novels. I certainly wouldn’t claim to have encyclopedic knowledge of the book (it is very long, and the incredibly dense prose style often forces multiple rereadings of passages before meaning starts to emerge) but I have read it several times, and it’s one of the few books from which I can pull something new every time through.

It’s also an incredibly visual book, with literally every page producing striking imagery. Since the first time I read it, I’ve had my own personal conception of what an illustrated version of this novel would look like. And I’m obviously not the only one, because some guy came along and illustrated every single one of the mammoth book’s 768 pages. (link via Reality Carnival)

You know, snarking is a hard job, people. Especially these days. It’s become an actual physical challenge to sift through the day-to-day detritus of the dumbest, most corrupt, most hideously incompetent presidential administration in the history of the United States of America and find stuff to laugh at. When confronted with a group of people fanatically determined to drive their own country right off a cliff, how do you keep laughing?

At times, the Bush junta’s mockery of all human hope becomes so disgusting that snark fails utterly. The last time it happened for me was August 29th, 2005. It took awhile, but over the intervening months, the natural tendency (common to all intelligent beings) to make fun of idiots in power returned in full force. The snark flowed fast and free.

And then I read this story.

President Bush said Tuesday the decision about when to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq will fall to future presidents and Iraqi leaders, suggesting that U.S. involvement will continue at least through 2008.

I would really, really like to find a way to humorously mock this latest outrage on the part of Dear Leader. But this one sentence is such a crystal-clear summation of his presidential administration, and indeed his entire adult life, that any snark by me would be redundant.

Here we have the pampered scion of an utterly unprincipled Old Money political family, a barely literate submoron with a room-temperature IQ, whose entire life has been spent in blissful ignorance of the disastrous fallout of his uncountable fuckups. He has never, not once, had to face the consequences of his actions. Whether it was his daddy pulling strings to get him into Yale and the National Guard during Vietnam and covering for him when he went AWOL, the local cops who shushed up his DUI’s in Kennebunkport, or the money men who bailed out the companies he ran into the ground, someone has always been around to clean up his messes for him.

So why should it be any different now?

Bush will not end this disaster now. He will not do it next year. He will never do it all. He doesn’t have the guts or the character or the morality. He will leave it to someone else. And then, when someone smarter and braver and more responsible than him finally makes the hard decisions that this stupid and dishonest war requires, Bush will annoyingly criticize those decisions from his boozy hideaway in Crawford, all the while claiming he is above criticism of people smarter and braver and more responsible than him.

(snip)

This is a guy who calls himself a “War Preznit”. This is a guy who’s supporters have worshipped him as a decisive “leader”. This is a guy who says he makes decisions in the Oval Office with War on his mind. And this is a guy who has “led” the country into two wars and not even had the decency to give up a single month long vacation to even try to win either of them.

And after two thousand dead Americans, 17000 horribly wounded ones, after 300 billion taxpayer dollars, for a war his administration campaigned for and he campaigned on, he says, well, whatever happens in Iraq is really someone else’s responsibility.

That’s leadership.

We shouldn’t be making fun of DubYa for his stunning admission. After all, it’s probably the first honest public statement he’s made in his entire adult life. He’s basically admitted that, once again, someone else will have to clean up his mess. We can all only hope and pray that this means he is following his usual pattern of getting bored and giving up on a task when it gets difficult. Perhaps this means that, for the last three years of his atrocious reign, he actually will do what he insists he’s been doing all along, and let the generals on the ground run the war.

Given his track record of unmitigated failure at everything he’s ever tried, having DubYa ignore Iraq for the next 34 months is about the best outcome we can hope for. If recent history shows us anything, the times he’s paying attention are the times we should be worried.

Since the three year anniversary of Mr. Bush’s War passed on Monday, I have been struggling to write and rewrite a post that would adequately convey my feelings on the topic. I gave up when I realized that, as usual, this guy summed up my feelings perfectly, and far more eloquently than I myself could:

But through it all, through your life for the past 1,100 days like an undercurrent of cold black blood, like an unshakable stench deep in your nostrils, like a disturbing stain you simply cannot get off your shirt, our country has been at war. Endless, raw, insidious, interminable.

Body bags filling up every single day. Death tolls rising. Hundreds of billions of your tax dollars hurled into a gaping sewer of death and destruction. Thousands of dead American kids, many more on the way. Corruption and scandal and gross war profiteering, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and Lockheed Martin and the insidious dumbing down of military recruitment standards (because we’re running out of disposable soldiers) to go along with Donald Rumsfeld’s black-eyed sneer. Endless.

The baby is three, and unfortunately, the murderous little bastard can look forward to a long, brutal life. It’s Mr. Bush’s baby, but it’s also ours too. Whether due to fear or gullibility or bloodlust or apathy, we all allowed it to be born, and it’s far, far too late to strangle the little monster in its crib.

Hail the majesty and wonder of the humble tuna! This unassuming fish, so long scorned as “icky” and “gross” by generations of low-income grade school students, has lately revealed long unsuspected latent powers! For, in addition to being delicious when mixed with mayo and celery and a dash of paprika, it is also a powerful anti-viral wonderdrug!

Over the weekend, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told attendees at the Wyoming Pandemic Flu Summit that it would be a good idea to start hoarding cans of tuna and powdered milk.

“When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish, buy a fourth and put it under the bed,” Leavitt said. “When you go to the store to buy milk, buy powdered milk and put that under the bed.”

We know you’re all scared crapless over the looming threat of the bird flu, but as you can plainly see, the problem is already solved. Our intrepid federal government, the same folks who showed how us to neutralize the threat of bioterrorism with duct tape and who did such a bang-up job of protecting New Orleans both before and after Hurricane Katrina, have ridden to our rescue again! Glory!

Sure, there may be those out there who think the multiple recent scary bird flu warnings from federal officials are just their way of passing the buck in advance for the day when the pandemic hits and they’ve done nothing to protect us. But, as we’ve said many, many times before, the type of people who say such things are objectively pro-terrorist and hate America and also probably French.

Last month, I sent out an APB to the tech peeps, asking what tool(s) they would recommend to lock down the 14 brand new public access computers my library had purchased. Based on their feedback, I finally settled on the Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit, and sang its praises in a post which was subsequently swallowed up when the database for this website crashed. (I’m kind of glad that post is gone, because I was feeling guilty about praising Microsoft, anyway.)

Anyhoo, I’ve decided to return the favor by kicking some helpful knowledge for y’all. When I finished installing the new computers, I then was confronted with the problem of what to do with the 14 old computers they had replaced. It was decided that our agency would give the older computers to the families of our neediest students (amazingly enough, despite the large percentage of families who come to us with nothing but the clothes on their backs, many of them have their own computers.) But this raised a new set issues, namely: what software would be on these computers? I would have to erase all the expensive and/or proprietary titles (ie Windows XP, Office, subscription-based filtering and antivirus software). What would replace them?

That’s when, via a tip from my favorite free software website, I checked out The Open CD. Basically, what these folks have done is bundle together all the best freeware and shareware programs (Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, PDFCreator, 7-Zip, etc) together on one cd. (You can also download each of these programs separately for free, but having them all in one place is more convenient.) You can download the entire cd image from their site and burn it on a disk, or have them send it to you via smail mail. I installed Windows 2000 on the old computers, loaded them up with titles from the Open CD, added a free antivirus suite, and they were ready to go. (For the Windows-phobic among you, there’s a bootable version of Linux, called Ubuntu, included on the cd.)

See? I’ve just told you how to completely outfit a computer with software, for free. I am very, very helpful. You’re welcome.

Perhaps, if I am very lucky, the feeble efforts of my lifetime will someday be noticed, and maybe, in some small way, they will be acknowledged as the greatest works of genius ever created by man.
– Jack Handey

Multiple Emmy and Oscar-winning star of the big and small screen.

Trusted corporate spokesman.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Rock and roll god.

Object of religious veneration the world over.

Truly, William Shatner is a towering intellectual and philosophical giant whose accomplishments will one day be ranked alongside (and probably dwarf) those of King, Gandhi, Da Vinci, Buddha, and the late J.H. Christ.

Thankfully, the world is finally beginning to take long-overdue notice. Last week, the History Channel began airing “How William Shatner Changed the World,” a loving and reverent tribute to the Great Man and his incalculable impact on world civilization. Overwhelming public demand will no doubt ensure that it is replayed many, many times. You will watch it. You will watch it repeatedly. And then you will get down on your lousy, stinking knees and give fervent thanks that you were lucky enough to be alive during the time that he graced the world with his magnificent presence.

After all Shatner has given to you, it’s the least you ungrateful wretches owe him.

The song Willie McBride was originally written to commemorate the millions of soldiers of World War I. The song’s author, Eric Bogle, wrote it after a visit to the massive Allied cemetary in Flanders Fields, France. It has been a staple of Irish folk bands for years.

As of St. Patrick’s Day, 2006, we have lost 2,310 soldiers in Iraq (2,176 of which have died since the day our lying fratboy of a “President” stood on the carrier deck in his rented flight suit and proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.”) The war that took all their lives is every bit as stupid and pointless as World War I.

Today, the lyrics seem more appropriate than ever.

Well how do you do Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
And rest for awhile beneath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day and now I’m nearly done
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in 1916;
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean,
Or, young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Refrain:
Did they beat the drum slowly,
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the Death March
As they lowered you down?
Did the band play
“The Last Post And Chorus?”
Did the pipes play
“The Flowers Of The Forest?”

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And although you died back in 1916,
In that faithful heart are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enclosed forever behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn, and battered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Refrain

Ah the sun now it shines on these green fields of France,
The warm summer breeze makes the red poppies dance,
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds;
There’s no gas, no barbed wire, there’re no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard is still No Man’s Land,
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
To a whole generation that was butchered and damned.

Refrain

Willie McBride, I can’t help wonder why,
Did all those who lay here really know why they died?
And did they believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end war?
For the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain,
The killing and dying were all done in vain,
For, young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again and again and again and again.

Refrain

We’re already almost three months into 2006, which means only 290 days until the year-end Best Of List! Might as well start assembling the early contenders right now, eh?

Wolfmother, Wolfmother
They’re Australian. They sound like they’re channeling Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin simultaneously. They will be the biggest band on the planet by the end of this year. Then the critical backlash will begin. The critics will be wrong.

Soledad Brothers, The Hardest Walk
Detroit’s best band continues their evolution away from blues revivalism to dirty, stripped-down Southern garage rock.

Motorpsycho, Black Hole/Blank Canvas
This criminally underappreciated Norwegian band has been around for 16 years and dabbled in every style under the sun, from metal and grunge, to acid rock, country, power pop, Krautrock, and jazz. This is their first new studio album in three years, and finds them mixing the psychedelic power trio sound of their late 90’s work with the jazziness of their more recent material. As with all their albums, it will be totally ignored in America, which proves that Americans are stupid.
(Note: I couldn’t find an English-language review online yet, so I linked to their homepage instead)

Boris, Pink
Kables clued me into these Japanese sludge-metal masters. If you play this loud enough, you can actually feel your eardrums being pressed inwards by the waves of distortion and feedback. This is a good thing.

The Strokes, First Impressions of Earth
The critics landed on this one, and I’m not sure why. Yeah, it’s too long, and could have benefited from chopping out four or five filler songs. Yeah, Julian Casablancas can’t write lyrics to save his life – but then, he never could. At least he’s finally dropped that annoying “singing in a telephone booth” vocal effect he used on every single track of the first two albums. But the band rocks harder than ever, and they’re trying new things sonically. It’s no Is This It?, but it’s a million times better than that turd sandwich Room on Fire.

Bonus St. Patrick’s Day Rotation
These aren’t new releases, and won’t figure into the year end list, but they’re currently in heavy spin on the mp3 player. Erin Go Bragh!
Flogging Molly, Drunken Lullabies
Dropkick Murphys, Live on St. Patrick’s Day from Boston, MA