Hmmm. Well, it's another rainy day in Zephyrhills. Something new for us. There is, apparently, a recurring system that continually brings rain in from the Gulf over Tampa to Zephyrhills lately (since I moved here, but I'm hoping that's coincidence). We got out from under it Tuesday with the Orlando trip, but from what I've heard, here in Zhills Tuesday was wet and miserable all day long, just like it has been for the past week and is today. It's rather depressing. I desperately need a trip to a drugstore just for basic supplies, but in this shit I don't want to talk anywhere.

Paul had his first day on the job, a training day, yesterday. He didn't enjoy it much... according to him, the trainer didn't do much in the way of teaching, just pointed him and few other suckers to a room full of manuals, computers, and training devices (cash registers and credit card machines)and told them to 'learn at their own pace'. He said that any time anyone had a question for her, they had to go find her in another room, and her attitude was not exactly welcoming. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

However, he got through it and today is his first actual day of work. His major dread now is having to learn to use the Lotto machine, and from how he's described it, it doesn't sound like much fun. I never realized how much convenience store clerks must love me, since I only ever get the one QuikPik per major Lotto drawing. I guess there are literally endless combinations that a customer can ask for on their Lotto numbers and the various other games that they can play, and many customers do indeed come in with these vastly complex pyramids of wagers that require lengthy and exact strings of digits to be entered. Me, I'd just put up a sign saying the damned Lotto machine was broken, but I guess these places make a lot of money off the shit and the bosses wouldn't like my strategy over the long term.

I've heard from Jonathan, my Australian editor, but only briefly, a blow off note assuring me that 'all is well'. 'All is well' isn't exactly the detailed update I was looking for as to how the issue of Thrilling Mysteries In Space that contains my story is selling, and what's going on with The Fantasy Worlds of Jeff Webb, but on the other hand, it's better than ringing silence, so I'll let that go for the time being.

Another infrequent correspondent of mine, Colin Campbell, read one of my longest Martian Vision articles and sent me a long detailed note yesterday correcting many of my factual errors in the article. And I thought I had no life at all. I don't mind Colin correcting me, and given how long the article is, I apparently had a pretty good batting average given that I wrote the article (like most of my Martian Vision articles) based nearly entirely on spotty childhood memories backed up by no research at all. But I do have to marvel at the sort of instinct that makes someone sit down and type up an email as long as Colin's was, that basically tells me stuff like 'the Orb first appeared in Marvel Team Up #15' (I'd said #8, just off the top of my head), and that then lists all the places that story has been reprinted since, and all the places that the Orb has reappeared in various other Marvel comics since his debut. (I am mildly interested to know that the Orb, a truly dreadful villain who rides around on a motorcycle wearing a hypnotic mind control helmet that looks like a great big eyeball... I am SO not making this up... actually appeared many many times in the Marvel Universe back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I'd hoped he had only shown up the one time and Marvel's writers had had the good sense to leave him gruesomely dead afterward. But it's a mild interest that is very similar to the mild interest you have when you find out that one of your long dead uncles that you always really liked when you were a kid actually drank a lot and had an unfortunate tendency to date transvestites. Mildly interesting, but still, you kind of shake your head sadly and then move on.)

I don't mean to sound like I'm pissed at Colin or anything for his corrections. Feedback is always welcome, even if it is just carping... carping, in fact, about an article that opens with the disclaimer "I'm writing this from memory and therefore many of my statements of fact are absolutely going to be wrong and I don't care, either", or something much like it. I wrote the article for the same reason I wrote all my Martian Vision articles; to entertain myself and hopefully others, and I think it's one of my most hilarious articles, as it lists many of the most freakish characters published by Marvel and DC in the Silver Age and describes them in frequently uproariously funny terms. Whether those characters appeared in Marvel Team Up #8 or #15 doesn't strike me as particularly important in that context, and if there is anything I DO find annoying about Colin's very long note, it's that at no point in it does he tell me whether he enjoyed the article or got a good laugh out of it at various points. That just exasperates me. But, never mind... attention is attention, and thank you, Colin, if you're reading this.

I've been beating my brains out (don't get excited, not literally) trying to figure out who the hell it was who posted that brief, unfinished comment to my last blog entry about boys and girls socializing... it was just a bunch of quotes from the article, without any comments, posted by someone with a 'tampamain' server. I don't know ANYone who lives in Tampa who reads this damned thing, just off the top of my head, and if Jess has somehow found the blog (it would be easy, she has my other website addresses and I've posted links to the blog on them; I simply would never have expected her to go to any of those websites for any reason since she kicked me to the curb)... well, if she has and she's been reading it for a while, I could very well have three large men named Otto searching Zephyrhills to give me a good asskicking right now. So, to everyone who has my current address and phone number... if three large men named Otto, or a rather attractive and very tall redhead, show up at your door claiming to be old friends of mine, please tell them I recently moved back to Syracuse, okay? ;)

I doubt it was Jess, but honestly, I don't have the slightest idea who in Tampa could be reading this thing. I've been kind of careful giving the URL out to locals who could read something here, get pissed off at me, and actually drive over to my house.

Leaving aside all that, in more depressing developments, I've spotted (and instantly killed) two cockroaches here in the back room over the past couple of days, so Paul and I may need to break out the anti-roach caulk again. Two cockroaches doesn't sound like much, but I've been blessedly roach-free here the last week or so, and I'd like very much to keep it that way.

I'm nearly done with watching the fourth season of Buffy on DVD, and it hasn't surprised me... the opinion I've held of it since I first watched it on TV remains pretty much my overall opinion. On several commentary tracks, Whedon claims that this season was supposed to be about how friends grow apart when they go off to college and find different interests, and that's all fine, but what I'm sure someone as smart as he is understands, and yet, he will not under any circumstances admit, is that that was a really shitty idea to base an entire season's story arc around. One of the many reasons people watch Buffy is because of the core interrelationships between Giles, Buffy, Xander, and Willow, and while you can play with that stuff a little, when you really start to mess with it and send that essential four drifting further apart, people feel shitty and really start to loathe your show. Whedon and his writers are quick enough to say 'well, it's only fantasy' when they depict something grotesquely unrealistic as a plot element, but they don't seem to understand that the eternal bonds of friendship between Buffy and her buds are a fantasy element that we all tune in for, and when you fuck with that, you piss us off and make us want to watch something else.

Anyway, I'll have a more detailed entry here on Season 4 after I watch the last episode ("Restless") again, and then watch it with Whedon's commentary track turned on. I've discovered that Whedon's commentaries are quite interesting and valuable when he does them by himself, but he's a complete ass when he does commentary with other people... but I'll get into that, too, in another day or so.

And I'm sure you just can't wait.

GLOBAL WIMPING

As I've often noted before, I began blogging long ago (August of 2002, I believe) as a leftie liberal political blogger, in the vein of Tom Tomorrow and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and, you know, all those other stuck up semi-professionals that all the other leftie liberal bloggers put on their blog rolls in the hopes of eventually getting some sort of shred of attention in return from. However, I sucked at it, and Tom Tomorrow and Skippy are both arrogant assholes who ignore my email and my links to them (to be fair, Tom has answered a couple of my emails, but he's ignored most of them) and I just wasn't getting enough attention that way, and in a world way overcrowded with amateur political analysts from all points on the political spectrum, I wasn't going to start getting any more, either. So I gave up on the political stuff and just started bitching about whatever I felt like bitching about, and now I have my little audience of (I'm guessing) about ten regular readers, and at least most of you people post comments occasionally, so life could be much worse.

Nonetheless, every once in a while something political happens and I just have to say something about it, so here we go:

Apparently, Dubya's EPA has put together a very comprehensive report on the state of the environment, both here in America and world wide, and most of this report is all well and good, but the comprehensive section stating that global warming was a problem of cataclysmic proportions and if we don't take steps now our entire planet may simply die within another century didn't sit well with the Bushies.

This section didn't go over well with our current White House Resident for various reasons we are all aware of and I won't go into, but which mostly come down to, 'if we take global warming seriously we have to stop using fossil fuels and then all us really really rich people with petroleum and coal stocks are going to lose money and that would suck, so never mind'.

Anyway, Dubya's Administration, in very Emily Litella-esque fashion, is indeed saying 'never mind', which is to say, they've completely cut the entire section on global warming. And I'm not even here to comment on that except in passing, because Dubya is a criminally negligent, rapaciously opportunistic, and utterly irresponsible piece of shit and I didn't vote for him, nor did a majority of voting Americans, and what do you expect? No, what I'm going to comment on is the chortles of glee that will be shortly forthcoming from my fellow lefties in the blogosphere, as they point their fingers and begin to knowingly sneer that at last, at last, Dubya has made a mistake that will cost him dearly in the political sphere.

No, he hasn't. And no, it won't.

Here's the thing: elected politicians only get in trouble when they offend their core constituencies. The opposition is always, well, the opposition, and very few elected officials have ever been so effective, or so charismatic, as to manage to sway those idealogically opposed to their views to saying nice things about them. When right wing Presidents are in office, the left wing sneers at everything they do, and similarly, when left wing Presidents are in office (even those who are only nominally left wing, like Clinton, who was actually simply a fairly moderate conservative) then the right wing screams abuse and vituperation at them, no matter what they do. It's just the way of things. If the current President is from your party, you talk about respect for the office of the President no matter how badly he fucks up, and waggle your finger at his detractors and say that they are being divisive during a time of crisis (it's always a time of crisis) and this is a period when Americans should come together and support the President and put aside these petty differences. If, on the other hand, the current President is from The Other Side, you bitch endlessly about every single thing that he does or doesn't do, and if he doesn't provide you with enough fodder, you make shit up. (Mind you, no one has had to make shit up about Dubya and nobody ever had to about Clinton, although, I note, conservative pundits like Limbaugh did anyway, pretty much every day.)

This is just how it is, and Presidents survive this easily. As long as they are not offending their core supporters... by which I mean, the people who voted for them in the first place... they will shrug off whatever the opposition says about them.

Now, a lot of my fellow liberals are hoping that Dubya is a bit more vulnerable in this regard than, say, Presidents who actually managed to win an election, because regardless of how perceptually impaired conservatives like Robert Prather and Dean Esmay eternally spin and churn the numbers, Resident Bush actually got several million fewer votes than his opponents did. It is, therefore, hoped that if he only offends those who voted against him (as he often does, being a gigantic gaping sphincter of a human being, husband, father, and El Jefe), then in the next election, he will once more get several million votes less than his opponent, and this time, for some reason I am currently failing to grasp, that will matter.

However, the problem with that is, Bush's constituency makes up pretty much half the country. When political pundits say we are a country divided almost exactly in two, they're pretty much correct. The last Presidential election was very nearly a tie in terms of actual votes cast, with only the horribly shameful political chicanery of the Florida electoral process, and the unabashedly conservative Supreme Court, managing to throw the race to someone who clearly did not in any way legitimately win it. Nonetheless, he came very very close, and in fact, had a few thousand more conservatives shown up at various polls throughout the country, he most likely would have managed a legitimate democratic win.

All of which is to say, Bush's core constituency makes up about half the country.

Now, if he ever does anything that offends the morons who avidly support him, Bush will be in trouble, because if he loses even a significant percentage of those gun-totin', book-burnin', nigger-hatin', queer-bashin' redneck masses, he's a dead man politically. He needs ALL their votes, and then he needs a million or so more votes from moderates who think keeping him in office will make their lives better in some discernible way (like, for example, Lower Taxes).

However, this 'global warming' thing is simply not an issue for the people that vote for Bush. And however much Tom Tomorrow and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and various others may hope and pray that Bush's insane, malicious and irresponsibly corrupt attitude towards global warming will be the lit match that burns his entire re-election down, they're just kidding themselves. Bush's core constituency does not care about 'global warming'; to them, that's just egghead talk. Since pretty much everyone who voted for Bush is either (a) a poverty stricken rural pinhead who thinks Bush is a 'real man' and that's what we need to teach the goddam commies and fags and towelheads a good lesson about America or (b) an intelligent, educated, sociopathically short sighted member of the rapidly dwindling affluent class, who is quite consciously aware that Bush's policies benefit the rich enormously at the expense of the poor and the working class, and they LIKE that, well, again, 'global warming' isn't an issue for them. The poor jobless pinhead doesn't understand it, it's just a buncha college perfesser eggheads tryin' to find some way to shut down more American factories, by God, and Dubya will put a stop to that right quick. Dubya's relatively few educated supporters may well understand global warming, and even accept that it's a genuine problem, but, hey, it's a genuine problem for a century from now, and they'll be dead by then, so let somebody else's grand kids sort it out.

This is, unfortunately, the core constituency of the illegal junta chieftain that is currently running/ruining our country... those who can't understand the crisis because there are way too many big words in it, and those who can, but really don't care as long as it doesn't threaten their affluent lifestyles within their effective and expected life spans. Our nation is, at this moment, being administered by twits and highwaymen. And as long as Dubya does nothing to offend them, he's fine.

This is one reason why politicians like Dubya, Clinton, and Reagan all managed to survive huge scandals and emerge relatively unscathed. None of them ever got involved in anything that would have offended or alienated their most avid supporters. Were Dubya to get enmeshed in a sex scandal similar to Clinton's, he would most likely not even make it to re-election; his core constituency would be so grotesquely offended that the Republican movers and shakers behind the scenes would quietly but firmly insist that Dubya resign. However, Clinton's core supporters were more thoughtful sorts who weren't so easily aggravated by a simple sexual pecadillo, and while I personally was grotesquely offended by Clinton's actions in re Monica, it wasn't so much the sex as it was the fact that she was obviously dangerously disturbed, and he was her boss, and took advantage of the relationship, that bothered me. And it didn't bother me enough that I was willing to vote for Dole instead of Clinton, and that's what, ultimately, mattered.

In order to lose his mandate, a President must do something that ultimately alienates his most faithful followers. A left wing President can get a blowjob in the Oval Office from a nearly teenaged intern, and can be involved in fund raising irregularities, because the intellectual liberals don't care a whole lot about that, as long as he isn't doing anything really dangerous like, you know, removing civil liberties right left and sideways and telling every lie imaginable to justify a blatantly imperialist invasion of a sovereign nation that has a lot of oil that we want. Had Clinton done what Dubya has just done with the war on Iraq, he would most likely have been chased out of office, because it would have horribly offended his loyal supporters.

On the other hand, Dubya's supporters simply don't care about the niceties of international law, nor do they much care if Dubya lied out both sides of his face and made them all look like the drooling morons they are for believing his nonsense, because frankly, they don't have the attention span to really remember any of that. Dubya would have gotten in trouble if he'd started a war and America had lost, because his good ol' boy supporters won't even support a football team that loses a few games, much less a President that gets so much as one American soldier killed in a battle we don't win. But Dubya doesn't pick fights he can't win, so Iraq couldn't possibly hurt him. A sex scandal like Clinton's would destroy him, but that's never going to happen; say whatever else you want about Dubya, but you can't even imagine his wife going down on him, much less anyone else.

Basically, right wing Presidents need to do something prurient, something taboo by basic Bible belt standards, to offend their core constituencies enough to do themselves serious political damage. For the vast most part, they need to have sex with someone that the conservative right does not believe they should be having sex with. And since one can just barely imagine Dubya having sex with his actual wife (and conservatives like Presidents that you have a hard time imagining in the sack with anyone; they're all completely repressed sexually, at least, in public), there's little hope we're going to find out he's had sex with anyone else while in office, or, for that matter, during his marriage.

There are other things Dubya could get caught doing that would offend his 'manly man' constituency that aren't sexual, like beating his wife or his kids, or kicking his dog, or making a really offensive racial remark, but he isn't going to do any of that, either, or at least, nobody's going to find out about if he does. Like Reagan, Dubya is a mostly incompetent, highly charismatic figurehead surrounded by extremely intelligent handlers; they simply won't let any potentially offensive screw ups he might make become public knowledge.

Dangerous as this calculated, conscious, and willing refusal to acknowledge the hazards of global warming is, it's not anything that will hurt Dubya politically. I wish I didn't believe that, but unfortunately, there's simply no evidence to suggest that right wing voters anywhere even remotely care about the issue. Those of us who think about things, and who stay even mildly informed, are certainly aware that this particular stance is insanely irresponsible, but hell, so is pretty much everything else the Dubya Administration has done or left undone since it was illegally sworn into office. This global warming thing will simply piss off all the people who are already pissed off at Dubya; it won't make a dent in his support numbers.

Doonesbury recently did a strip I thought was brilliant. In it, Ari Fleischer announced that from that point on, the Administration's answer to all questions from the press would be '9/11'. Sometimes Trudeau exaggerates and occasionally he's simply flat out wrong, but with that strip I think he hit his intended target with deadly accuracy. The Bush Administration has already announced that it will kick off its re-election campaign on the anniversary of 9/11, and as long as it can wave that particuarly bloody shirt around, more than likely, Bush will get his second term.

And even if he actually loses the election, I'm sure the Republicans are perfectly capable of fiding some way to steal the race again. After all, now they have experience at it.

But global wimping by Bush is not going to hurt his re-election chances. I hate that, but it's true.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.