SemiConscious Dot Org

Attention, Citizens of Oceania,

Oceania is at war with Afghanistan Iraq Iran. Oceania has always been at war with Afghanistan Iraq Iran.

All statements to the contrary, by order of The Party, are hereby deemed Double-Plus Ungood and against the principles of Ingsoc.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

When the earth’s crust cooled, and the first primitive, single-celled organisms wriggled in the primordial ooze, Tenacious D was there, rocking out. When Cro Magnon man scratched his first tentative drawings on his cave walls, Tenacious D was there, rocking out. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Tenacious D was there, rocking out. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, Tenacious D was there, rocking out. Four billion years from now, when the Sun swells into a red giant and cooks the Earth to a blackened cinder, Tenacious D will still be here, rocking the fuck out.

This evening, I have in my hot little hands two tickets to a concert. Nay, less a “concert” than a CATACLYSMIC EXPLOSION OF ROCK!!!! On February 16th, at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, I will be one of the privileged few to witness the appearance of The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the History of the World…the one, the only, the Mighty D.

You may commence with the jealousy.

Nation’s Gays Demand Right to Library Cards

“What’s next—gay people at the DMV, being granted licenses to drive cars?” Rev. Brian Peters of Verona, WI said. “Will we be soon seeing gays and lesbians at our local post offices, being sold stamps and mailing packages? We must protect our nation’s public institutions from relentless encroachment by those who threaten our values.”

And once more, the public library resumes its ferocious assault on traditional American morality. Step even one foot inside your local library, and The Gay Agenda will corrupt you, instantly turning you Gayer than the Gay Mayor of Gaytown.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Of all the year-end lists that populate the blogosphere, by far my favorite is The Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome Americans. Each eagerly-awaited annual installment is a masterpiece of bilious mockery and remorseless character assassination, couched the most spiteful, profane, inflammatory language imaginable. Once the sins of each honoree have been described in all their gory detail, sentence is passed; punishment is swift, severe, pitiless, and most importantly, hilarious. (Example: Rush Limbaugh’s punishment for yet another year of unmitigated douchebaggery is “Parkinson’s disease, triggered by oxycontin abuse.”) The descriptions of and punishment of each vile character would almost be over the top, if everyone on the list didn’t so richly deserve every hateful word.

As always, half the fun is dissecting the list and debating the relative (de)merits of each ranking… (more…)

Four lousy yards.

Four lousy yards were all that stood between the New England Patriots and another Superbowl. 2:17 to go, leading 34-31, third down and four. Make those four lousy yards, and the game’s over. Even if you don’t make another yard afterwards, you take a knee three times, punt the ball, and the Colts get it back with maybe 25 seconds remaining, no timeouts, and needing to go the length of the field. But no, the universe burped, and for the first time since…well, ever, the Patriots failed to come through in the clutch. That they were outperformed by their opponents in the final two minutes of a playoff game is shocking. That those opponents were the Indianapolis Colts is so shocking that I half expect to see the sun rise in the west tomorrow morning. And did I mention that the sky will be covered in purple polka dots and dogs will be walking people?

The outcome of today’s game confirms my long-held suspicion that God is a cruel and malicious diety who delights in torturing those he claims to love. If he can turn on his favorite team in such a callous, gut-wrenching manner, then truly, nothing and no one is safe. The phrases “Peyton Manning” and “choke,” long assumed by everyone in the universe to be synonyms, now have to be separated by a “didn’t.” How mindbendingly bizarre is that?

The universe has turned so askew in the past few hours that I now am in the awkward position of having to spend the next two weeks as a de facto Chicago Bears fan. Seven hours ago, I was dreaming of beating the Bears in the Superbowl and thus earning long-awaited revenge for the drubbing in Superbowl XX, and now I’m suddenly in the position of rooting for them instead. The thought of a title for Da Bears is not one I particularly relish, but it’s nowhere near as unpalatable as the alternative. Or, to put it another way:

In two weeks the future of the world will be at stake. I question the sanity of anyone who can even bother with next week’s State of the Union; war is hell, but hell is other people—people like Peyton Manning. Yeah the world’s in a fragile state right now, but just imagine the horror of a world in which Peyton Manning is a champion.

For the sake of the future, for the sake of the children, for the wellbeing of the human race, this must not be allowed to pass. Won’t someone think of the children?

I’ve never been a heavy sleeper. Even when I was a kid, I seldom conked out for more than six or seven hours per night. In the past year or two, however, things have gotten worse. I wake up before the alarm goes off, feeling like I’ve been asleep for five minutes, more tired than when I went to bed; I snore like a freight train, regardless of whether I sleep on my back, stomach, or on either side; and my fiance tells me that I stop breathing when I sleep, sometimes for as long as ten or twenty seconds at a time. Just about the time my non-breathing begins to freak her out and she moves to wake me up, I rouse myself back to life with huge, roaring snorts that shake the bed and can be heard in neighboring apartments. I can’t remember the last time I had a dream.

The constant fatigue has started to have an increasingly negative effect on my waking life as well. I’ve spent most of the past few months in a dull, fuzzy haze through which no emotions seem able to penetrate. I’m so utterly tired that it’s been ages since I was able to summon the energy to feel angry or sad or happy about anything; an occasional sense of irritable surliness is all I can muster. I have trouble concentrating on what anybody is saying to me, losing the thread of conversations easily and getting irritable as a result. I’m messing up at work.

I’ve been told by someone to whom I told my symptoms that they felt something very similar when they were on anti-depressants. If this is what anti-depressants are like, I think I’d rather be depressed.

On Monday, I’m going to the hospital to get tested for sleep apnea. Given that I exhibit the most distinctive symptom of this disorder, it seems likely that I have some form of it. What freaks me out is that there are many forms, of greatly varying severity, requiring treatments ranging anywhere from losing weight to medicine to surgery to wearing an oxygen mask to bed for the rest of my life. Depending on how long one has had it, apnea can also cause long-term damage to one’s heart and respiratory system. And I’m pretty sure I’ve had it my entire adult life.

Or maybe it’s all in my head. Maybe I’m just paranoid and overreacting. Lack of sleep will do that to a person.

Although this blog is no longer in the political snark business, I still voraciously read political blogs of all sizes and colors from across the ideological spectrum. I feel it’s important to look at current events from all sides, so I try to make an effort to broaden my horizons by seeing what the right wing has to say about the crucial issues of the day.

Ok, that’s not really true. What I actually do is read all the liberal blogs to whose feeds I subscribe… and then, to get the conservative perspective, I read other liberal blogs that specialize in reading right wing blogs and making fun of them. This allows me to keep some sanity, because if I actually had to read the “Nuke Iran,” “Democrats are Traitors,” “Islamofascists are Hiding in Your Closet,” “Teh Gays Will Subvert Your Children,” “Armageddon is Next Tuesday After Lunch” swill emanating from the 30 Percenters at the bitter, bile-filled end of the Bush-worshiping Right, I would go well and truly insane.

My preferred sites in the “We Read The Wingnuts So You Don’t Have To” genre include TBogg, World O’Crap, Happy Furry Puppy Story Time With Norbizness, and my current favorite, Sadly, No! It is through Sadly, No! that I was introduced to the wonders of perhaps the looniest wingnut website on the entire Internets, Alan Keyes’ Renew America. (If you don’t know or have forgotten who the hell Alan Keyes is, here’s a quick refresher.) The beauty of Renew America, and the quality that makes it The Looniest of the Loony, is that unlike other rightie sites, they don’t pluck the cream of the homeschooled, Bob Jones University-educated, DC Conservative Think Tank crop to write their “Why Hilary Clinton is a LesboCommunoFascist” columns. Nope, as far as I can tell, they just walk up to batshit crazy people who mumble to themselves in the streets, and offer them jobs. It’s a veritable Perfect Storm of Dementia.

Don’t believe me? Check out some of their columnists:

Hey stupid, you’ve got this day off for a reason. It’s somebody’s birthday.

And, unlike certain other holidays, it’s not the birthday of someone who may or may not have existed.

It’s the birthday of someone who actually mattered.

Normally, I don’t post to this blog while I’m at work, but today is different: with approximately one half-inch of snow on the ground, school here in Seattle has been canceled for the second straight day. However, my boss apparently couldn’t handle the thought of her employees having a five day weekend, so she made us all come into work, even though there are no kids here. With very little to do other than reshelve some books, I’m sitting here in the empty library, cranking the AC/DC in anticipation of tonight’s Hell’s Belles show, and surfing the Intertubes. (“Aren’t you worried that the IT guy will see that you’re visiting tons of non-work sites and get you in trouble?” To which I reply, “Hell no, since I’M the IT guy.”)

Anyhoo, I happened to be checking out The Goat’s site and noticed that I’ve been tagged. And as we all know, when you get tagged with one of them there memes from the intertubes, you either pay mad cash for the surgery to remove it (which can be quite painful for a male over 35) or you just give in and post. I chose the latter. So here goes:

You wanna know the real reason I erased the political satire blog that I used to maintain on this site? You wanna know the real reason I banished Pope Nixon to the pages of a virtually unread DailyKos journal? It wasn’t, as I previously suggested, that I had run out of the necessary level of fury to maintain two blogs simultaneously. And although I’m certainly happy that we’ve finally put the adults back in charge of Congress, it’s not like I think that our six-year-long national crisis is suddenly over.

Nope, the real reason I killed the other blog is because I broke my satire bone.

In actuality, the murderous reign of George W. Bush and his hand-picked cabal of liars, thieves and killers ceased to be funny, in even a “gallows humor” sense, the second New Orleans flooded. As American corpses bloated in the Louisiana sun and our “President” strummed his guitar and told Brownie he was doin’ a heckuva job, the last vestige of snark potential drained out of his “Presidency.” There was nothing funny anymore about this stupid, incompetent asshole we elected to the most powerful office on the planet, if there ever really had been to begin with.

But still I kept at it, vainly trying to extract some humor from the godawful sinkhole of spitefulness and resentment our country has sunk into since the cursed day he took office. And the comments dropped off, and my attempts at satire grew more rote and half-hearted, as we all lost interest. So I finally gave up and decided to blog as myself again, instead of the fake “NeoCon” persona I’d created for myself.

Besides, the blog wasn’t really very funny. Jesus’ General can pull off the “damning with fake praise” schtick. Sister Nancy can pull it off. Jon Swift can pull it off. Conservatives for American Values can pull it off. I couldn’t, at least not anymore.

Case in point: Our “President,” a man who has been handed everything he’s ever received in life, a man who’s had Daddy and Daddy’s friends around since Day 1 to bail him out of his innumerable fuckups, a man for whom the concept of taking responsibility for one’s actions is meaningless, a man who knows absolute jack shit about “sacrifice,” has been blathering about “sacrifice” for weeks now, as some sort of cure-all that will magically extricate us from the blood-soaked clusterfuck he created in Iraq. Yesterday, a mere two months after the American voter put the Democrats in charge of Congress in a desperate attempt to stem the tide of his insanity, the man who has singlehandedly shattered American credibility sternly warns those same Democrats that pulling troops out of Iraq “would shatter American credibility.” You can’t make this shit up!

And tonight, he outdid himself! Tonight, our Emperor With No Brains gets on national television to announce that he’s “surging” 21,500 additional American troops into Iraq. 21,500 troops who will serve no purpose other than to create more targets for the insurgents, 21,500 troops will who bring the total number of American personnel in Iraq to less than half the number that the actual generals were telling him three years ago he would need to occupy and pacify the country.

Oh, and did I mention that, barely a week after pleading for a new spirit of bipartisanship and cooperation with Congress, he sent the first surge of new troops to Iraq, before bothering to tell the public he had decided to send more troops?

I mean, c’mon, people! This is comedy gold, and I got nothin’! I’m long past jokes and snark. All I can do is sputter in impotent rage at the spectacle of a pitiful, vindictive little man, who has so much blood on his hands already, getting ready to spill some more blood. More Americans will come home in flag-draped coffins that we’ll never see, dead for no reason whatsoever. More Iraqis will be slaughtered, for no reason whatsoever. And all because this arrogant little shit can’t admit that he fucked up.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

Update 1: Not only will Bush’s “surge” make absolutely no difference in the Iraq Quagmire except to get more Americans killed, it will also draw critical troops away from Afghanistan (you know, where the guy who attacked us actually lives) just as the Taliban is planning a major new offensive.

Update 2: But hey, at least the Democrats in are charge of Congress now, right? We elected them to stop Bush’s insanity, and that’s what they’re going to do, right?

Well, no, not really. They’re just going to complain about it instead. Go, Dems!