moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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(and my Wish List)

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Excellent & Intelligent Post from SusanG at Daily Kos  
You can stop protecting me now
www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/14/14711/6701

Mr. Bush, You Can Stop Protecting Me Now

by SusanG
Sat Jan 14, 2006 at 12:07:11 PM PDT

Bush Says Gitmo Is 'Necessary'
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2006
(CBS/AP) At a joint White House news conference, President Bush rejected a plea by German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be shut down. He called the four-year-old camp "a necessary part of protecting the American people."

Mr. Bush, I've decided the price is too high for my conscience. If Gitmo - and the torture and denial of due process accompanying it - is a necessary part of protecting me, I hereby officially release you from the obligation. I'm opting out of this protection racket you've set up. Think of me as just one less tile on the human shield you've created, using the safety and fear of American citizens to hide behind while you seize more power.



More ...After years of soul-searching, I've decided to take my chances in a risky and unpredictable world - one from which your administration can't fully insulate me anyway, even with the best of intentions - than to live my life duct-taped and "safe" in a wire-tapped American closet where I'm not free to tell you I think you're a nincompoop and a danger to humankind.

Besides, I've seen New Orleans on TV. Color me unimpressed with your ability to protect me while you strip away my rights. Even if I were willing to cower and cringe and hurl my notorious "freedoms" in your lap willynilly, you'd hardly be the "protector" first on my speed dial. (Don't believe me? Check out my calls in the bloated vacuum bag attached to your illegal NSA operations.)

But let me make my stand crystal clear: This "protection release" is not a matter of your documented incompetence, it's a matter of principle. Stop using me. Stop trying to terrorize me with Islamic boogeymen. Stop trying to convince me that if I just never, ever criticize you or question you, I will never, ever die. That might work with your Christian fundamentalist fellow travelers (who for all their professed and righteous belief in a blessed afterlife seem awfully averse to actually getting there), but I'm not buying it. Unlike an apparent majority of American voters, I don't think membership in our national cult of exceptionalism has automatically exempted me from personal death. The fact that I was born on a certain continent in a certain era does not automatically signal to me that nothing bad - especially dying - will befall me.

I can live with the fact that someday I will die, no matter how many of my "freedoms" you take away. Please, direct your future energies toward protecting those who think denial of death and bargaining away the raucous, electrically vivid and unpredictable present moment is a wonderful way to live a life. Count me out.

And another word to the wise .... I noticed the following passage from the same article:

Mr. Bush said the prison camp would remain open "so long as the war on terror goes on, and so long as there's a threat."

Psssst. It's time to crack open those history books you were too busy partying to delve into at Yale. Human beings and their self-constructed civilizations have been terrorizing each other since we crept out of the amniotic pre-historical seas (and yes, we did crawl out, despite the histrionics of your faith-based friends - and I suspect you know it). Hell, my neighbors terrorize me and mine when they drive too fast down the street, an immediate threat of the first order. I doubt I'm going to get around any time soon to constructing a prison on my block and picking up the speedsters - and whatever innocent walks by - for permanent incarceration.

See? I live with risk and terror and threat every day without resorting to illegalities. I suggest you try doing the same.

I'd like to think you're simply ignorant that you've effectively declared "Forever War," but I'm convinced you - or at least your speechwriters and advisors - are not.

On a final note, please tell me the following quote from you - ostensibly about Iran - is an example of that Texas humor I confess to not getting:

"It's very important for non-transparent societies to not have the capacity to blackmail free societies," Mr. Bush asserted.

Secret prisons. Surveillance. American citizens held and tortured for four years without charges. Pacifist groups being spied on by the DOD.

Please assure me this "non-transparent society" statement is a gag, kinda like looking under that table for WMD's or joking about your binge drinking in New Orleans while bodies floated face downward in the streets. You know, tasteless but funny in Dallas, yet leaving the rest of the nation appalled.

Because if you're not joking, I'm really terrified. And no matter how many rights you take away from me, you can't protect me from my biggest fear: You.

[permalink] posted by Mez at 9:41 pm