The religious war you’ve always hoped for is apparently on the way.  Surprisingly enough, though, it won’t be Obama’s Rev. Wright that starts it off.

Instead, we can thank John “100 Years Is A Conservative Estimate” McCain’s new pastor kerfluffeller, televangelist Rev. Rod Parsley.

The angry garnish feels that Islam is not only a false religion, but that it is the spiritual duty of the United States to wipe it from the face of the planet.   I have to say, it takes a certain amount of blissfully self-unaware chutzpah to deliver a sermon about exterminating an “evil religion” on the basis that there’s no “God of love” in it.

McCain, who would seem to want to get as far away from pastors as Obama after the issues he’s had with John Hagee, not only welcomes Parsley’s endorsement, but recently called Parsley “one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide.”

It’s not exactly “spiritual mentor”, but the difference is semantic.

Which brings up an interesting question that doesn’t seem to be asked nearly enough.  Obama’s spiritual mentor loses his shit publicly in the most impressive, offensive way, and Obama has to spin faster than a figure skater in a death spiral to make things right, delivering what many have termed the defining speech on modern race relations in the process.  John McCain, on the other hand, openly welcomes not only the endorsement of a pastor eager to fight a religious war with the fastest growing faith on the planet, but the support of an anti-Catholic,  anti-Semetic pastor who sees Hurricane Katrina as a divine punishment because some folks in New Orleans were doing live reenactments of And Tango Makes Three.  Yet, does he have to do a media tap-dance to save his political bacon?  No.

Why is that?

I can think of a number of unpleasant possibilities.  First, because those who support John McCain seriously aren’t bothered by either of these stances.  Not only are they themselves eager for yet another poorly conceived and planned open-ended war, but they also feel that destroying a city because some people aren’t toeing a line that God may or may not have drawn is perfectly acceptable.  I’ve never been exactly confident in Obama’s supporter’s sanity and compassion, and let’s not even talk about Ron Paulites (if any of them still exist…personally, I think they’ve sort of gone semi-underground like Baltar’s harem of willing sex-slaves followers on Battlestar Galactica…or maybe like early Christians…but Battlestar Galactica is more relevant and has higher production values).  However, both sets of supporters would seem positively beatific in comparison to McCain supporters as described.

Two, the race card.   I don’t want to play it.  I take no enjoyment or relish in its playing.  I would rather saw off the right hand side of my body than play it unnecessarily.   And yet, I have to wonder if this isn’t the starkest example of race affecting perception in this race to date.  Rev. Wright says hideously unconscionable things and the “crazy nigger” has to be taken to task.  Hagee and Parsley spew and are given a pass because they’re white.  I don’t have any hard evidence for this, but I am starting to wonder.

Third, and perhaps most embarrassing for McCain, they just don’t matter.  Either everyone in the nation who supports McCain is saying to themselves, “Meh, they’re crazy old crackers who just have to have enemies to make themselves feel sexually potent,” or they’re saying, “McCain isn’t going to win anyway, so let him get supported by whoever, it hardly matters.”  Personally, I don’t feel confident that either of these things are the way of it, but perhaps I’m wrong.

In the end, though, Obama got crucified for Wright, as he should have been, but McCain is now working on his second religious brouhaha and still no one is pointing the same level of finger at him.  Why is that?

I’m a forgetful person. It runs in my family. I lose shit all the time. Indeed, I lose my shit all the time as well.

But, to date, I have never lost a motherfucking laptop. A USB memory stick? Sure. A cable or power supply? Yeah, it happens. But an entire festering laptop?!? How the hell do you lose something bigger than your damn head?

The fact that I have managed to keep close tabs on the lion’s share of my expensive electronic equipment is just one more example of how I am far superior to the United States Government.

Seems that the U.S. State Department has managed to lose track of around 1,000 laptops, 400 of which belong to the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Department, each one of which costs around $3,000.

Let’s say that again for emphasis: The U.S. State Department has managed to lose 1,000 laptops, 400 of which were involved in maintaining our anti-terrorism network.

Do you like math? I do. Let’s do some math!

1,000 x $3,000 = $3,000,000

Three million dollars in lost laptops. Although, the initial inventory suggests that there’s actually $30,000,000 in missing equipment, so there seems to be some disparity between exactly how many laptops were lost.

Who’s going to pay for this? The people who lost them? I mean, I assume someone has to sign something when they check a laptop out. You do when you get one from any other business and, should you lose it, you’re usually liable for its replacement.

Yeah, no, I think we all know who will be paying for it. That would be us, the taxpayers.

But hey, don’t sweat it. You should be getting that $300 rebate check any day now…

Oddly enough for a person who’s writing tends to ramble more than a drunken singing cowboy with heat stroke, I’ve always had a secret hatred for Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.  It’s long, it’s dense, I believe at one point he spends an entire chapter describing a wave or an ocean or something that is utterly tangential to the actual story.  Sure, in high school I, along with all sorts of other theater geeks, creamed my jeans over the musical.  One can only hear “On My Own” belted out by painfully earnest high school girls auditioning for the school musical so many times, though, before one begins to realize, “This song sucks and all who sing it suck as well.”  So I tend to sort of chalk this up to peer pressure and a perverse desire to be liked by and fit into all sorts of social groups.  I mean, I also smoked, performed in a Renaissance Festival and had a three way with two girls.

Everyone makes mistakes.

For me, Hugo is like Ayn Rand:  Interesting ideas wrapped in prose that was obviously paid for by the word.  In Rand’s case, I find it doubly hilarious that her prose is so bad since she’s all about people being good at their jobs.  In Hugo’s case, though, I just feel tired and used.

With that said, I have to admit that I’ve always found the central question of Les Miserables fascinating.   How criminal is too criminal and can the mistakes of the past ever be washed away by good deeds in the present.  It’s also why I like Thomas Hardy’s…well, pretty much anything he wrote, but specifically The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Incidentally, if you’re looking for an excellent movie adaptation of Hardy’s Casterbridge, I can’t recommend The Claim highly enough.

See, I ramble, like those I despise.

Anywho, I think I like Hardy’s take more than Hugo’s in terms of exciting moral questioning.  Hugo’s Jean Valjean’s moral journey is really pretty flat.  He starts out a reasonably good man who breaks the law not because of a fault in his character but because of his family’s hunger and spends the rest of his life willfully atoning for his “mistake”.  In contrast, Hardy’s Michael Henchard starts out a drunk and things just get better from there as he sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in a fit of drunken rage.  Stealing bread or human trafficking?  Yeah, give me the one with a receipt any day of the week.

Hardy goes on, though, to show Henchard not as a perfect man making an imperfect choice under duress, unlike Hugo’s insufferable do-gooder.  Instead, Henchard is firmly in the sights of his Nemesis and his downfall comes from his own choices and not from a cruel or unjust world.  In a way, I’ve always considered this a far more noble portrayal of humanity; sure, Henchard becomes his own worst enemy, but at least he’s exerting some sort of control on his life and not playing the stoically suffering victim at the whim of an unjust legal system.  Seriously, Valjean needs to just grow a damn pair already.

What makes the question of forgiveness most interesting to me, though, is not when you have such obvious examples of moral situations.  What about when you have someone who’s neither particularly good nor bad but then does something that’s sort of bad, gets away with it and prospers for a number of years, only to come out as a morally-ambiguous leader?  Real life is more gray than black and white, more James Joyce than either Hugo or Hardy.

Which is probably why I find the case of Tony Krvaric both so chuckle-worthy and ponderable, all at the same time.  Back in the dawn of the cyberage (late 80s or so), there was a group of crackers who went by the name Fairlight.  For those who don’t know, Fairlight specialized in “warez”, or illegal, pirated software.  Fairlight was big on the scene in terms of breaking the copy protection of games for the Commodore 64 (oh, my old, gentle friend, how I miss thee) and distributing them for free.  Just about everyone I knew from my Commodore 64 users group had one or more games so cracked and mostly from Fairlight.

I, of course, would never indulge in anything so nefarious and you can’t prove otherwise so let’s just leave it at that.

Needless to say, Fairlight’s activities, while a boon to gamers everywhere, cost developing software companies mucho dinero.  Indeed, back in 2004, many members got busted in an international sting, codenamed Operation Fastlink, that supposedly netted the group’s archive server and some 65,000 pirated titles.

For non-gamers out there, that’s a shitload of money.

So where does Tony Krvaric come into all this?  How can the current  chair of the San Diego Republican Party be involved in any of this?  Well, it turns out that Mr. Krvaric may be Strider, the codename for one of the original founders of Fairlight.

I beg of you to resist the temptation to make jokes along the lines of, “A pirate chairman in the Republican party?  Figures.”  I know, it’s hard.  It was hard for me as well, but I overcame and I challenge you to do so as well.

What’s more, as the article points out, this possible revelation comes hot on the heels of another cracker getting 30 months in jail and 3 years of probation for his cracking activities between 2003 and 2005.

Now, I do understand statute of limitations, although I have no idea how they would apply in a case like this.  Ostensibly, after founding Fairlight in the late 80s (and after being a part of another notorious cracker ring, the West Coast Crackers), Krvaric left the group in the early 90s, roughly the same time when he emigrated to the US from Sweden.   Supposedly lured to the US by Reagan, it’s terribly amusing to think that someone who so desperately wanted to save the US from the scourge of Socialism was at the same time busy working hard to undermine Capitalism.

The central question here, though, to my mind is: Is Krvaric Valjean, Henchard or just a no-holds-barred, ultimate Capitalist?  Morally speaking, could he have changed enough from lawless cracking to be in charge of the finances and direction of a large metropolitan city’s Republican Party and, even if he can, is it a good idea for the GOP to associate itself with him?

If it’s all about “gotcha” politics, this is a pretty big gotcha, all things considered.

Two things I have in common with Anne Sexton:

1. A profound respect for fairy tales.
2. A unease and dislike for our birthdays.

Still, if Tina Youthers can get through it, I suppose I can.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I was a fan of cheap, schlocky sword-and-sorcery films.   Cable was charging into people’s homes and mom and pop video rentals stores dotted the strip-mall landscape.  Both were prime sources of less-than-savory fantasy content.  You know the ones I’m talking about, right.  The one’s that make the production values and plot lines of films like Conan The Barbarian (and, to my thinking, the far superior sequel, Conan The Destroyer), Beastmaster and Red Sonja seem like Oscar material.  I’m talking about crap like She and…well, that’s the only one I can think of at the moment because I don’t necessarily want to put Willow, Dragonslayer and Krull in this category.  Although Krull comes pretty damn close…but it had a pretty kick-ass video game timed with its release, so it gets a walk.

Films of this nether genre usually began with some extraordinary montage setting up what little background was needed in a standard plotline of “hero has bad luck, hero finds out he’s chosen one, hero goes on one man killing spree (possibly accompanied by either small furry animal sidekick or young boy), hero takes a breather to bed scantily clad girl, hero goes back to first love of killing.”  There was frequently a voice-over actor, usually some poor unfortunate Brit or Brit-like substance that used their golden tones to tell of omens and portents and whatnot.  You knew it was going to be really good if, at the end of the montage, the title appeared and a sword flew out and pierced it with a “sssschtinginginginging!”

I can’t really say why, exactly, I enjoyed these films.  I suppose for a young boy dealing with sexual urges, they offered an endless bevy of jack-off material and they presented it in such a way that one might say, “I’m only looking at She-Ra, ONLY AT SHE-RA!” and still maintain a thin veneer of believability.  They’re also completely escapist and what young man doesn’t want a little escape from the pressures of being a young man?

In any event, all this came rushing back to me as I read this post over at DailyKOS about how Obama is basically foretold to be the chosen one.  Yes, I know.  My fault for reading DailyKOS period, but seriously, this is just so precious that it makes me want to bust out my paints and tart up a small tin figurine of a seductive sorceress who bazooms are, magically, bigger than her head.

In what I can only hope is a…*ahem* stellar example of political satire regarding polling and politics, diarist mjjt manages to weave an enchanting argument concerning a comet, Obama and Greek Mythology that made me desperately want some popcorn and a plastic viking helmet.  Seriously, how can you not fall madly in love with a post that begins with a quick lesson in historical anthropology and the meaning of comets, takes a moment to establish Obama as the Solar Hero archetype Perseus and Clinton as Medusa,  drives home the notion of divine guidance in Obama’s actions (a notion that, when last we heard it, was being used to paint George W. Bush as a religious wacko…I guess this is different…) and ends with the phrase, “So let us have hope, the gods are on our side, and the Hero will prevail.”

Fucking A!  I would so rent that shit and watch it at home, alone, while manipulating various bits of my pubescent body under a blanket and hoping my parents didn’t walk in before I was done.

Part of the upside of this weekend is that I now have a reason to follow recipes exactly. The downside is that desire to follow the rules may get me killed faster than the blood pressure

My Aunt Sherry is an amazing cook. Seriously, she’s one of those people who you can give any three ingredients to and she’ll come back with a dish so good that it would make Gordon Ramsey stop swearing. She’s been trying to teach me how to be a better cook and, while I love her, I can’t stand her approach.

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This morning, driven by pain, I decided to be proactive with my sinus infection.  It had been plaguing me all week and, after another sleepless, painful night and actually developing conjunctivitis in my right eye at some point, I swore I would get up and go to the walk-in clinic near my house.  The rates were reasonable and all I was after was some antibiotic and some sort of pain medication for the godsdamned sore throat!  Even with two prescriptions, I figured that with the $35 clinic fee, I wouldn’t be out more than $100 and I was willing to pay that.

So, like a good little health consumer, I was there before the official 9 am  opening and was ushered in an examination room.  Shortly, the doctor entered and with the strained and quiet ruins of my voice, I told him all about my allergies, how they lead to sinus infections and post-nasal drips, how those then lead to tonsillitis and occasionally thrush and lots of pain.  He took it down and started talking about what he was going to prescribe.  Great, I thought, my plan is working.  In here at 9, out by 9:15, over to Costco by 9:30 when their pharmacy opens, back home and drugged up by 10, 10:15 tops.

And then he pulled out the blood pressure cuff.

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