"Great Novels Of The 21st Century That Will Never Be Finished" is a continuing series in a new genre that promises to kill dead the Western literary tradition.
"It was easier during the famine," Felix mused.
Copyright © 2009 by S. Ridgway Thornton
"Great Novels Of The 21st Century That Will Never Be Finished" is a continuing series in a new genre that promises to kill dead the Western literary tradition.
One of the advantages of being a writer is that you can go to work drunk," reflected Austen Pillory as he stumbled into his den/office, tripped over Fiddlesticks, his ancient cocker spaniel, and banged his head against the edge of his vintage, 1950's Army surplus desk.
When he awoke groggily the next morning, head pounding, eyelids glued together, dry mouth tasting of sewer, Pillory didn't immediately see the man slumped in the ergonomic swivel chair with a knife protruding from his back, face down on the computer keyboard of Pillory's writing work station, which he thought of proprietorially as "the cockpit" as if, instead of a humble writer, he was the valiant pilot of a World War II Spitfire weaving through an enemy squadron, creating a bold new literary genre for the 21st Century.
Copyright © 2009 by S. Ridgway Thornton
The only puzzling aspect to this story is how The Onion missed it.EconomyThanks to Republican economic policies, the U.S. economy is robust and job creation is strong.Republican tax cuts are creating jobs and continuing to strengthen the economy, yet there is still more to do so that every American who wants a job can find one. Congressional Republicans understand that many Americans are working hard to make ends meet. That is why the GOP continues to push for pro-growth policies that create jobs and oppose tax increases that would add a burden to working families and set back our economy. Republicans believe we should:
- Allow families to plan for the future by making tax relief permanent.
- Encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending and reducing regulation.
- Make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy through a comprehensive national energy policy.
- Expand trade and levels the playing field to sell American goods and services across the globe.
- Protect small business owners and workers from excessive frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across America.
- Lower the cost of health care for small businesses and working families through Association Health Plans, tax-free Health Savings Accounts, tax credits for employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts, Medical Liability Reform, and health information technology.
Additionally, to keep our economy growing, we must reform the tax code to make it simpler, fairer, and more pro-growth. Embarking on a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the tax code is one of the goals of the Republicans in Congress.
Warning!!!
If you are a little bitty kid, listening to the below video may possibly make your ears and nose drop clean off, thereby disfiguring you for life. You should immediately go back to that porn site you were exploring.
Responsible adults may now view the below video of the first graduate of the Bill O'Reilly School for Reasonable Journalism™.
Yeah, I know. It's usually a show-stopper for me, too whenever I see the words, "Ron Paul" in print.
Mr. Paul owns the distinction of falling for every half-wit and/or loony theory that has ever come down the pike in the history of the world, then waxing prolix about it in that boring-annoying way of his.
Most people credit his political longevity in Congress to the fact the voters in his district are morons.
I beg to differ. The voters of the Texas 14th Congressional District, stretching along the Gulf Coast from Mustang Island in the West to Chambers County in the East, are among the most highly intelligent people in the nation. They also have an extremely well developed and wicked sense of humor. I ought to know. I used to live there.
I can tell you for a fact that you can almost hear them thinking in the election booths just before they pull the handle for Rep. Paul. "Call us Lone Star voters morons, huh bub? Let's see how you deal with this jackass."
Which is pretty much what all Texans are thinking in the voting booth when choosing their Congressional delegation. Explains a lot, doesn't it? The Fighting Fourteenth is preeminent because it just happens to own the dullest tack in the box. And the best sense of humor.
Remember back in the Good Old Days when for years and years we were slaughtering all those pesky farmers in Southeast Asia because each succeeding President "didn't want to be the first American President to lose a war?"
Guess what.
The ad said, "Obama's IQ is 128, Is your's higher?, Take this test and see."
I'd already taken the test, so I knew mine was higher. How weird is that? He got the Oval Office and all I got was this lousy blog.
But the frisson I felt wasn't about being theoretically smarter than the President of the United States, it was that number, "128."
You see, that was my late father's IQ. My father was a notorious con artist who specialized in faking different roles in life. In his time, he successfully faked being everything from a motor pool manager to a psychologist to a ship's captain.
Rather than put in the years on the job for the experience or go to school for the training, he'd simply go to a library, find a book on the subject, and show up the next day for the interview. He was always hired. Must have given a hell of an interview.
And he always got caught. He was smart enough to fake it, just not smart enough to avoid pissing somebody off so they'd try to get something on him. Background checks are a bitch.
It's a funny story how I found out my father's IQ, but I'll let it slide.
As for Obama, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
From the same folks who let Osama escape. Maybe we now know why they were so distracted. Full story here.
Even though some overly excited opponents of the President have called him a Hitler, Mr. Bush can take comfort in the fact that no one has suggested that Hitler is another Bush.
Henceforth, this blogger will refer to himself entirely in the third person.
That is all.
Have I ever mentioned my childhood friend who, when he grew up, decided to have a sex-change operation so he could date lesbians?
Remind me later and I'll tell you about it.
Alex Castellanos, one of the premier GOP hit men in the McCain Campaign (bio here), recently regurgitated one of his signature, fact-challenged Jeremiads at the Huffington Post, targeting Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Castellanos first fumes that on his European trip, "Obama was not only treated with respect, he was received enthusiastically, a public affront to an administration, lest we forget, still in power," then pats himself on the back with, "McCain's recent attacks have worked." Got to love these dead-enders.
In the spirit of pointing out that the Emperor isn't actually wearing any clothes, yours truly offered this scintillating observation:
Thanks for the laughs, Alex. Your post rivals some of best satires available here. Considering the fact that you admit you're on the McCain Campaign payroll in your bio info, I'll keep an open mind on whether you intended the humor or are just being the good, little soldier. Best wishes.
In his August 3, 2008 article on the Huffington Post excoriating New York Times Op-Ed columnist Michael Gerson for inventing facts for a column, blogger David Sirota said:
"Michael Gerson's column suggesting Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter for vice-president is the latest example of someone paid to report the facts actually refusing to do 5 minutes of work to, ya know, report the facts."
Is this the same Michael Gerson who was President Bush's head speechwriter, 2001-2006? [it is] If so, it might explain a lot. Maybe it's harder to get rid of the stupid than we think.This Socratic-like witticism was summarily deleted by the always challenged Huffington Post Censors. The rats!
We've all had the experience. You craft a snarky, non-profane, non-ad hominem comment on a blog and the darned blog censors blitz it out, forever putting paid to your attempts to be a half-wit.
Well, to heck with all that. From now on, each Huffington Post comment reject goes here. Entries may contain additional material (such as how dumb the HP censors are and why), thus offering further demonstrations of why I don't do this for a living.
Candidate numero uno: "Marketing, Nationalism and the Olympics Launch an Era of Volunteerism in China" by Courtney Woo, 8/3/2008, in which Blogger Woo extols the glories of the thousands of Chinese "volunteers" fielded to serve as minders and whatnot during the Beijing Olympics.
The comment:
The beautiful thing about volunteering for something in a totalitarian state is that if, for example, you don't volunteer for building that rail line, you're arrested and sentenced to work building that rail line. The upside is that as a prisoner, you get a free uniform. Keep smiling, Chinese volunteers.
In a previous post, the possibility was raised that John F. Kennedy's assassination might have been prompted by concerns within the government about possible mental instability brought on by Kennedy's prescription drug abuse.
Feeding into that possibility is the claim by CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton that he found evidence Kennedy experimented with LSD during his affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, ex-wife of another CIA official, Cord Meyer.
Ms. Meyer said she obtained the LSD from Dr. Timothy Leary, the era's most well-known counterculture guru.
Mary Meyer was found dead October 12, 1964 as a result of two close-range gunshot wounds, one to the back of the head and one to the heart. The murder remains unsolved. Biographer C. David Heymann reports that when he asked ex-husband Cord Meyer in a February 2001 interview who had killed his former wife, he replied: "The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy."
Imagine an energy source that is unlimited, clean, safe, and available now. An energy source that is so scalable, it can be used to power anything from an 18-wheel truck to a city the size of New York. An energy source for which all the science and most of the engineering has already been done. An energy source so clean that it has a zero carbon and nuclear footprint. An energy source so safe, you could put an infant care center next door to it. An energy source that can be retrofitted to every fossil fired or nuclear fired power plant on the planet. An energy source for which you'd pay a tiny fraction of what you pay today for electricity. A technology which the United States could export and earn trillions of dollars in foreign exchange credits.
Sound like a fairy tale? It's not. It's been available since October 2006, but the Bush Administration killed it because it needed the insignificant amount of money required to fund it's final engineering development for the Iraq War. What's worse, its inventor and project leader died in 2007.
Dr. Robert Bussard, the inventor of what's called the Polywell Farnsworth-fusor, was one of those rare individuals able to bridge the gap between theoretical physics and practical engineering. While at NASA, he developed a nuclear propulsion system that could have taken us at a fraction of current costs in a single-stage rocket from the surface of the Earth to the surface of Mars in two weeks and back again, instead of the months and billions required for multi-stage chemical rockets. It would have reduced our moon landings to day trips. That project was killed as a result of internecine warfare at NASA. NASA's big ticket contractors correctly saw the end of their costlier, less effective systems in that developed by Dr. Bussard and successfully lobbied to kill it. While still at NASA, Dr. Bussard also designed an interstellar ramjet that could propel a vessel to the stars. That, too, still sits somewhere on a forgotten NASA shelf.
When the Navy decided it needed a smaller, safer power plant for its nuclear fleet, it hired Dr. Bussard to make it happen. He succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, coming up with the now scrapped fusion reactor that could have changed human society and history and saved the planet.
There are three obstacles that need to be surmounted before this technology can benefit us. The first are scientifically illiterate Washington politicians in Congress and the White House who seldom make wise decisions on anything more complex than bridges to nowhere. Next are the web of university and private research organizations that benefit from the non-performing but enormously lucrative big ticket programs administered by the Department of Energy. Finally, there are the private energy companies whose fossil fuel and nuclear products will be rendered obsolete by this new technology.
Taken together, these obstacles may well be insurmountable. It may take a private actor like a Warren Buffet or a Bill Gates to provide the roughly $200 million required to fund a demonstration project. Make no mistake, however. If this is funded in the private sector, whoever steps up to the plate will become not only a social icon but the planet's first trillionaire.
For a good explanation of Dr. Bussard's technology, see the WikiPedia article on the Polywell Farnsworth-fusor (also known as Electrostatic Confinement Fusion).
Before he died, Dr. Bussard gave a talk to Google employees about his new fusion technology:
Listen also to this earlier interview.
Dr. Bussard's original website: http://www.emc2fusion.org.
