Truth…

Dear Friends,

The following is copied from an anonymous but astute blogger. I might have put the points and notions in the letter below more diplomatically, but I cannot quarrel with a one of them.

Res Ipsa Loquitur,

S

Dear bug eaters,

Shut the fuck up. Just for five fucking minutes.

We know you want to end taxation. We know you don’t care that every reputable economist on the goddamned fucking planet has tried to explain to you inbred sisterfuckers that austerity budgets and tax breaks for billionaires and transnational corporations makes joblessness worse, not better. It makes the recession worse, not better. It makes the deficit worse, not better.

But you don’t care what experts have to say, do you, knuckle-draggers, because all you care about is what makes you feel better. And what makes you feel better, apparently, is waddling up and down the street with powdered wigs and little flags and misspelled signs with pictures of the president wearing a turban, and you think that makes your opinion equal to those of educated experts who do research for a living. Don’t you get how utterly fucking bug-stupid that makes you look?

We know you want to drill for oil in Yellowstone and downtown Detroit and fucking Disneyland and two miles down through the fucking Antarctic ice cap and on Mars and every goddamned place you can think of, until the entire solar system is a polluted piece of steaming shit just like fucking Texas.

We know you email each other ape jokes and watermelon jokes and other racist Ku Klux Klan fucking bullshit–just what, three years?– after screaming TREASON! at anyone who dared disagree with George W. Bush, and two years after deciding to tell everyone you’re not actually Republican because that would mean you voted for the moron who destroyed our economy.

Guess what? The 80 percent of us who think you’re a bunch of fucking retarded clowns are sick and tired of hearing about you. The 80 percent of us who think education is actually a good thing are tired of hearing you pontificate about shit you don’t know because you can barely spell your own names.

Like how you think the Internet is a bunch of fucking tubes.

How you think evolution isn’t real because the other monkeys haven’t evolved into people yet.

How you think we’ll still have roads and courtrooms and jails and people checking for e.coli in your WalMart burger meat without paying any taxes.

How you think it’s okay for you to accuse the president of being Muslim without any evidence—and then act like it’s a bad thing if he WAS a Muslim because you loathsome asswipes judge people by what group they belong to—not by their credentials as individuals.

How you hate Affirmative Action until it’s used to give preferential treatment to white students over students from Asia, or preferential treatment to the underachieving white children of the wealthiest donors. What a fucking bunch of racist hypocrites.

How you think lesbians have taken over the public university system—despite the fact that all the trustees and presidents and football coaches and most of the professors and most of the students and every evil fucker in any position of power happens to be in possession of a snow white penis.

How you think unions are the bullies with all the power and all the money while corporations are the victims with none of the power and none of the money, with no incentive to screw you because for some reason you’d rather pay them double, triple, quadruple for the same fucking services your taxes used to provide before they were used to pay for tax cuts to people who own yachts and jets. You dumb fucking idiots.

How you think some stupid bitch from Alaska actually knows any goddamned fucking thing about Russia just because Alaska is closer to Russia, than say, the Russian embassy in Washington Fucking D.C., you geopolitically-challenged shit-for-brained nine-year-olds! Meanwhile not a single one of you can say a single specific thing about any specific policy this stupid bitch has ever advocated. But you will of course scream at the top of your lungs that calling her bitch is sooooo wrong because Lord knows you’ve never called Hillary the c-word after wiping the beer foam off the ends of your snouts. What a bunch of misogynistic hypocrites.

Fuck you and your own personal fucking “news” channel, where you’re invited to spew your fucktarded bullshit with Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and the rest of the animal house twenty four hours every fucking merciless day. If they told you the only way to love America was to take a dump on on a downtown street corner, you’d be pushing each other out of the way to be first. Did you know they laugh at you behind your backs every two weeks when their seven-figure paychecks arrive, you stupid tools?

Liberal media, huh? One million Latinos march for immigration reform in Los Angeles, but on every donkeypissing television station across America all we see is a tribe of twenty assholes in plaid picketing on a street corner in Arizona because they flunked economics AND history in high school and don’t know the first thing about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, the history of our court system, OR the history of the last eight goddamned years in this country we love more than you do. Yes, more than you do—because we care enough about it to protect everyone’s freedoms—not just our own. Everyone’s property, not just our own. Everyone’s tax money, not just our own.

What a smarmy drooling circus you fuckers are.

Shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes, just for once. A town hall meeting is not for screamers. No one wants to smell your Cheetos breath from across the room. No one wants to smell the sweat stains under your armpits as you flail, spraying spittle. A town hall meeting is for people to discuss things, not scream. Stop fucking playing the victim when the SEIU dares to use YOUR OWN goddamned town hall tactics against you. Just because most of the rest of us fear all you scary, hooded, screaming, violent bastards doesn’t mean we all have to just sit there and take it. Fuck you. We want you to go away, back to your basements, back to your generators and your canned peas and your mistranslated bibles and your pregnant daughters, waiting for the rapture while you leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

You lost the goddamned fucking presidential election, you bastards.

Go away!

Down on Main Street…

Dear Friends,

My long-suffering Mother bought me a fancy new iPhone with the 5Mp camera. I gave it a test run. Here's a few shots of what you see when you poke around down on Shakedown Street.

 S

Res Ipsa Loquitur

A Man of Some Experience

 The Preacher

Your Needs Can Be Met

A Trip to a Far Away Moon…

Dear Friends,

1,216 billion kilometers, about a billion miles away from the pale blue dot that is our home-world, is a very small world that we humans call Enceladus. It is a moon of Saturn, and it circles and swims amidst the most dense portion of the gaseous, ringed and giant planet’s E-ring. Enceladus is so tiny that its entire diameter could be nestled in the distance between Montreal and Washington, D.C.

Something interesting is happening out there. On a patch of dust where ice serves as the fifty-mile thick rocky mantle and crust of a deep frozen speck of creation, there are geysers. How can this be? Perhaps, we thought, under that frigid presentation to early robots visiting from Earth, there is an ocean. The founts that emerge from this world’s surface are rich in water and the chemicals sodium and potassium. Nitrogen makes up a good portion of the ice that cloaks the roiling, hidden ocean that is bubbling in the massage of Saturn’s titanic gravity. Beneath that ocean lies a core of iron, silicates, and carbon. On Eceladus there is the chemistry of life.

We wonder, what sort of life might be bubbling in that dark ocean that has never seen even the dim light of a distant sun? The clever machine, Aldrin II, completed its seven year voyage to the Saturnian system in 2028. It threaded its way through the debris of the great rings to orbit Enceladus and then descended to its surface. There it deployed Aldrin’s cryobot, Armstrong. It took six months (in Earth time) to bore down to the ocean through the mantle of ice. Eventually, however, there the great question was answered; at least in part.

The briny deep was a soup of pre-biotic and biotic materials, detectable to the robot’s “senses.” Amino acids complexed into RNA, DNA and proteins, flakes of what could have passed for earthly flesh and weird bits of what seemed to be vegetation but contained no chlorophyl were abundant near the ocean floor where sulfurous fumaroles vomited out the substances of the ancient world’s core. Peering into the murk, Armstrong detected in this exobiology what appeared, at first, to be bacteria to any doctor born of our terran orb. On closer examination, this first judgement was precisely wrong.

The bugs of Enceladus were all inside out. Exterior to their lipid cellular membranes was their genetic material. It makes sense that nature might direct such an evolution. In a cozy but constrained womb such as this weird ocean, evolution had opted to make the exchange of genes as convenient and speedy as possible. Higher up the food chain were similarly constructed creatures. Their bodies had the appearance of flattened eels that squiggled through the waters. Their guts secreted their gastric juices through a slimy skin that was covered with long cilia that captured their digested food and swept it into pores and thence, apparently to an alimentary canal that had no mouth but the being’s surface. It did, however have an anus, from whence the rich broth of the Enceladan biosphere was, in part, derived.

There was more. That plant like detritus was revealed to be the dissolved remains of plankton-like beings that had evolved to bio-fluoresce to signal each other in the otherwise impenetrable darkness of their home in an encapsulated deep. With this talent they gained the ability to form jelly-fish-like colonies, massive creatures that captured and consumed the eel-creatures. They lived on top of the alien food-chain, died and just fell to pieces.

Twenty years after his arrival in the alien deep, Armstrong still swims this strange ocean. It continues to report back. Alas, almost nobody is listening but kids who are strange, have never kissed a girl, and have time on their hands. The governments of The Allies have cut back budgets for space exploration. There are wars to pay for. Meanwhile, the people of our gloom benighted orb may yet hear news of a species that might want to speak to us through a piece of our technology made from junk made from stuff we dug from this Earth, and flung toward the stars.

Hic Finis Est,

S

A Transcendent Moment…

Dear Friends,

I was walking along the old state highway by my Mother's house. As a big, noisy semi hurled by, I strode over the shattered corpse of a small turtle that had wandered up to the shoulder of the road from the swamp down the gully. The was a the moldering body of a dead robin not to far along and in plain view. The ghost of my Father made an appearance in broad daylight.

Res Ipsa Loquitur,

S

A Complicated Story

Dear Friends,

Here is a complicated story of a Nazi photographer's photo album. In war, nothing is simple, and both winners and losers take a beating. But, this tale also has more layers and meanings from the vantage of 70 years passed and this newfangled technology, the 'Net. Of course, this tech allowed the mystery in this story to be solved, new meanings in photos in an old album to be deciphered… it is a product of our striving to survive in the wars that folks brought upon themselves. Life is rich with meaning, as well as puzzles.

Res Ispa Loquitur,

S

A Latter Day "Dark Star"

Dear Friends,

Here's a jazzy, midified latter day "Dark Star". It's from RFK in July of 1990. The boyz play a rather gentle game of catch me if you can, at first… then things get a little rough. Things get weird. Time and space bend as the Hyperthruster kicks in. Corners turn round, the circles are squared and broken and the door flies open on a strange wind. The very atmosphere shatters in sonic icicles. Then the air melts. Who let that dragon into the room!?! Where'd that big rabbit come from?

Suddenly, there's the ghost of Coltrane playing through the fingers of an old professor on a bass guitar whose neck is made of rubber. The troublesome kid on the rhythm guitar seems to be trying to just screw everybody else up, but the drummers will not be deterred; they are busy building a castle in the void. That guy with the keyboard is apparently intent on mutiny as the Fat Man supposedly in charge, The Captain, has his shaded eyes spinning like two compasses lost in a galactic magnetic storm. He strains to guide the ship and its bewildered and bewildering crew toward an unseen horizon that can never be reached. The crew and their charge are upon an ocean of Nothing frothing with Reality a'borning.

Then, without resolution, the recording ends. What has become of our crew and their passengers?

Res Ipsa Loquitur,

S

A Latter Day "Dark Star"

Dear Friends,

Here's a jazzy, midified latter day "Dark Star". It's from RFK in July of 1990. The boyz play a rather gentle game of catch me if you can, at first… then things get a little rough. Things get weird. Time and space bend as the Hyperthruster kicks in. Corners turn round, the circles are squared and broken and the door flies open on a strange wind. The very atmosphere shatters in sonic icicles. Then the air melts. Who let that dragon into the room!?! Where'd that big rabbit come from?

Suddenly, there's the ghost of Coltrane playing through the fingers of an old professor on a bass guitar whose neck is made of rubber. The troublesome kid on the rhythm guitar seems to be trying to just screw everybody else up, but the drummers will not be deterred; they are busy building a castle in the void. That guy with the keyboard is apparently intent on mutiny as the Fat Man supposedly in charge, The Captain, has his shaded eyes spinning like two compasses lost in a galactic magnetic storm. He strains to guide the ship and its bewildered and bewildering crew toward an unseen horizon that can never be reached. The crew and their charge are upon an ocean of Nothing frothing with Reality a'borning.

Then, without resolution, the recording ends. What has become of our crew and their passengers?

Res Ipsa Lloquitur,

S