Ophiuchus? No way.

They have taken away my Zodiac sign. I was a proudly skeptical Sagittarius and even though I don't believe in that stuff I believed in my Zodiac sign as part of who I was because, well, it was my Zodiac sign.

But because of an unfortunate accident of birth, my dates no longer fall under the archer's sway.

So now, what. . .a name that sounds like the bile that accompanies a bad head cold? Or a klutzy kind of elephant?

Please, Zolar, tell me you're not really doing this. The stars, at least, are supposed to be well nigh immutable, no? Are you telling me we've changed so much in the past ten thousand years that you have to add not only a new sign, but really stupidly-named sign? Was there really no other way?

Couldn't you have maybe shifted the dates around a little, or at least come up with a kick-butt name for the new sign, like "iPadLightSabre"--you know, something really attractive to the weenies who give two shakes of a mare's tail about any of this?

I am saying here and now I am sticking to my old sign, and I don't even care what the stars say any more, so there!

Sagittarius is my past, and I say: Sagittarius now, and Sagittarius forever!

Enough with the Free Speech Thing Already

Hating to pay even meager additional attention to the Magilla from Wasilla that is Sarah (sigh) Palin, it has now become impossible not to comment on her latest, and perhaps most egregious misapplication of the notion of "freedom" since she burst upon us fully formed as the elderly McCain's doomed VP choice.

We won't spend a minute talking about the Tragedy in Tucson, since we can add nothing to the discussion not already said.

But we will talk about the notion of what "freedom of speech" really means, and why Palin and everyone who has ever invoked "free speech" when stung by criticism, has it all backwards. As a case in point, the bespectacled Palin, in a wanna-be-Presidential moment, took to the viral-video-sphere with a Tucson-inspired diatribe about how people who criticize her are somehow invading her right as a citizen to speak out.

Gag me, as was once upon a time asserted quite effectively, with a spoon.

Here is the news:

The constitutional notion of freedom of speech posits that the government can make no law preventing free expression of ideas.

And that's it.

If people don't like what you say, if people criticize you, if your words make them angry and not want to vote for you, if they call you names and find you tacky--too bad. In no way does "freedom of speech" ever, ever mean "freedom from criticism by other citizens". When your words are criticized, that is a function of OTHER PEOPLE exercizing their right to free speech. No amount of opprobrium from others who disagree with you can ever amount to an abrogation of your free speech rights.

"Freedom of Speech" means only this: that the government can make no law restricting it.

Get used to it, Ms. Palin, and stop being a crybaby.

Why Do They Come?

No particular additional proof was needed for me to accept and understand that so-called "UFOs" are based on some kind of actual phenomena. But having read Leslie Kean's recent book "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On Record", I feel like the notion of debate as to the reality of the phenomena is not particularly relevant.

No more relevant, really, is the question about who they are, where they are from, etc. etc. There is little to be gained from this inquiry. Perhaps they operate from a base in the Pacific Ocean and have always done so. Perhaps they are from Alpha Centauri. Does it matter?

There are two questions, it seems, that do matter.

The first is, what can we learn from them? From an aeronautical perspective, obviously quite a bit. From a time-space-continuum (aka physics) perspective, equally much. Science, and all humanity therefore, is the poorer for a failure to spend more time on such study.

The second and more intriguing, in my opinion, is, why do they come?

Had "they" wanted to take over our planet, it would seem they could have. Or, perhaps not. We are a formidable race with sharp teeth, and perhaps this was of particular note to early extraterrestrial observers. One assumes therefore that takeover/enslavement is probably not on the alien agenda.

Had they wanted to communicate openly with us, one assumes they might have done as much; again, perhaps we have managed to scare them away from direct communication. They seem to hover, to observe, and then to depart without much physical impact.

The abiding mystery, then, would be--why bother with us? Having apparently not changed their overall approach to us over the many years they've been noticed by us, they must have a reason to keep up their observations; and it isn't because we pose some kind of interstellar threat. Nor do I believe they have some kind of benevolent message for us, as it is most likely quite obvious to the student of humanity that we are immune, as a race, to advice good or ill.

Allow me to suggest they are here on this living speck of blue we call Earth for one overarching reason: we are both unique enough and perhaps even marvelous enough to merit the attention of those who might go anywhere in the intergalactic region.

Perhaps they wonder at our carbon-based physiognomy; or our quite obvious fecundity; our apparent sensitivity to our surroundings; perhaps they marvel not so much at humanity but the variety of earthly life-forms; the riotous beauty of our planet's many facets. Maybe they are intent on our abundant water-resources. Or perhaps, overall, they are fascinated with the human creature's intelligence, adaptability, relentlessness and relative mastery of our environment. And perhaps they are comfortable with studying us from their atmospheric perch, letting us go about our business; learning what they can from us--perhaps even deploying some of these lessons in their own foreign worlds, wherever they might be.

The facts are clear: these are actual phenomena; they appear to be intelligent. Therefore, my position is they are collecting data. Perhaps they are both pleased enough and smart enough to simply observe without interfering.

Let's keep up the show.

Obambi Turns into Chief Knockahoma?

I am looking at stories one, two and three at the Daily Beast. Senate Ratifies START treaty. Obama Signs DADT. Senate Passes 9/11 Health Bill. And that does not include the surprisingly well-received tax bill he got passed.

Is this not like the champion coming off the ropes near the end of his stamina (it seems)--then flying forth with a left right left that lands hard upon the Obamahaters' collective chins?

Does this not show a man resilient enough to come off the ropes with plans intact and executable? Almost by slipping through a closing portal, he emerged with these votes in his favor, first the tax bill, then three fairly major pieces of legislation the success of any of which no one was even talking about a month and a half ago.

This is akin, for what it is worth, to a third baseman down on his luck in the playoffs suddenly going 3 for 4 with several ribbies in a deciding contest. Kind of stuff stars are made of.

Anyone who forgot Obama is a Brainiac had better remember now. Whether you like him or not, he's got the bully pulpit and he's got more grey matter and fortitude than a dozen others like him. And this one-two-three salvo is the opening of Obama 2012.

We've always suspected Obama simply has to "not be lame" to be re-elected, given the Republicans' distinct lack of big-tentedness (Sarah: 30% and holding; Barbour: Confederate confederacy; Romney: Mormon with dog on car roof; Pawlenty: oh, that was last time, sorry; Huckabee: Christer homilies'll get you to the Arkansas statehouse but not the White House; Jindal: okay, as long as this is for extra credit; Rand Paul: too smart for you guys); but there have been times when, having lost his footing some, Obama may have appeared vulnerable to a creditable primary challenge. I believe now when people look back on years one and two,they will have to admit: Saved Economy From Depression On First Day in Office; Created Platform for a National Health; Appointed Two Super-smart New York Women to the High Bench; Kept Sharron Angle out of the Senate; Extended Middle-Class Tax Cuts; Ratified START; Ended DADT; Passed 9/11 Health Bill. 'Nuf?

Anyone who cares, and understands what it would be like with the Insane Clown Posse in charge, knows that, whether or not you feel he gets a big smiley face on his half-term paper, you will be swinging the lever for the big O come 2012.

Liberals and Airport Security

Hello Liberals, ye so-called true patriots and defenders of all that is good and fine in our troubled union.

Now that your tarnished lion is nursing a split jaw behind White House curtains, and as the Bush-spawned TSA is putting you through an i-see-your-hiney bodyscanner in vain search of that lone gramps with a shiv up his kilt, where is your powerful voice in defense of all that is good and fine?

There is nothing good and fine about the body scanner or the disgraceful pawing of American citizens as they prepare meekly to travel from Oklahoma City to Portland, Oregon by air. There is only blunt, careless, ineffective, insulting disruption of the fourth amendment of the United States Constitution in which we are protected against illegal search and seizure.

O Liberal, have ye lost your voice? Are ye now waking to the call of yon Partisan Idol who whispers to you that you must defend Bad in the long term interest of Good? So it seems. And it is certainly a surprise that the so-called Liberal Media has decided that, since Republicans seem to be leading the charge against invasiveness (because they are "against the government snicker snicker"), you must downplay and poo-poo the whole thing as Redi-Whipped hysteria.

American pollsters seem to say you are politically correct to do so--most Americans seem either to support the erosion of their own rights (didn't need 'em anyway!) as long as it provides that infinitesimally small measure of additional security for them that they will not be confronted with boxcutters while cramped on the way to Tampa. But Americans, having elected GWB not once but twice and then apparently duped by a man who claimed he was Change Itself, need not apply for the National Perceptiveness Award.

But you, Liberals! Ye who saw early the insane clown folly of the WMD farrago, who railed against torture and illegal detention, who bawled in our faces that we would have a Better, Finer America if only Liberals were empowered to see to our collective betterment--where are ye now that we are being driven like cattle to machine-enabled nakedness; or, if we refuse that, a ten-times-more disgraceful manhandling by rubber-gloved flunkeys (who probably mean well, as do so many flunkeys)? In either case our hands are up like perpetrators; cops are searching us as if we had been pulled over on the highway drunk like Charlie Sheen and shotgun shells littering the floor of our car.

We are stripped bare in the name of airtight security but without good reason or sense, and certainly no sensibility. And Liberals are just pretty okay with it for some reason only the electoral map can help us discern.

Our rights deserve better than that.

Hating on Air Travel

I am a hater.

Of air travel.

I did not used to be.

Now I try to avoid it unless it cannot be avoided (trips over 1500 miles; overseas).

The MAIN REASON: airport security.

One supposes there is an argument for all the security on airplanes these days but I doubt it could not be done as efficiently and at no inconvenience to the traveler. Our current mindset (post-Osama) is that rights can be abrogated without a second thought.

The dressing down at the gates had become distasteful enough (and time-consuming)--an exercise in authoritarian-induced paranoia and humiliation--but now we hear it's to get worse, with more invasive pat-downs and full-body scans at the gate.

I actually don't give a hoot about full-body scans. It does not inconvenience me. Let them do it for everyone at the airport, all the time. Fine. And if you find a weapon, go for it. Or, put an armed air-marshal on every flight (which cannot be more expensive than the current horror).

But the current innocent's perp-walk through the officious security line reeks of the police state we have become, and I would love to know how many bombers have been caught this way. Can I have some hands for "none"? Maybe they are just being deterred. Or maybe we just had to stop being utterly effing lame about letting people on with weapons.

My personal opinion is that the TSA itself should be abolished and replaced with a police force trained to spot trouble. The notion that everyone must wait in line to be scanned and their liquids examined, seems lazy and wildly inconsiderate of the American "leave me alone" spirit. To me it seems a disgraceful waste and a huge entitlement program for security wannabes now dressed in gray and having far too much authority over the typical citizen traveler.

At worst, keep the TSA around for international flights and/or non-US Citizens. But the sight of US Citizens traveling from, say, LaGuardia to Tampa being patted down as if they are likely to be minions of Qaeda strikes me as a national disgrace.

In another post, I may complain about the tininess of airline seats but this is a consumer complaint and market driven, so there really is little in fact to complain about in writing but instead many plane tickets not to buy.

But I am a hater of the flying experience because my rights and privacy are brutally violated each time I encounter the security checkpoint. I feel it is a near certainty we are slowly being made immune to a near total lack of rights which may at some point become the norm. And like the frog that slowly boils in water, we will not notice until we are cooked enough to be nearly dead and able only to jerk spasmodically in anticipation of the total death of freedom.

Govern!

Not two weeks into the Tea Party Era in Washington and we already know the basic tenets of the TP are untenable, or at least unsellable in practice.

For instance--Jim DeMint, Tea Party's own pre-elected Senator from the South, has already said the debt ceiling shall be raised (even though the Tea Party insists it cannot be, or else they will sweat blood until we are drowned in it); and Rand Paul, that intemperate enemy of Pork, has realized that his own district might like a taste of bacon now and then, and that this in fact is what gets folks re-elected more than anything else; so he's going to get some earmarks for his hometown crowd, lo and behold. Finally, when confronted on television (by Chris Matthews) on what exactly would be cut from the budget, a lame-looking TP spokesperson said "discretionary spending" which meant nothing of course, and promptly exempted the military, social security, medicare and pretty much everything that costs all the money.

One can almost feel sorry for these electees, now they are stuck with the promises they made. The trouble is not that "across the board cuts" are a bad idea.

The trouble is that Americans won't tolerate cutting any real spending. And they also won't tolerate taxation.

It is the American people who have made themselves ungovernable. Mainly this is through an almost exquisite flavor of economic hipocrisy comprised of the belief that we are a nation of self-reliant pioneers in need of unfettered "freedom"; while in fact we are a nation of slack, subsidized, overprotected, aggressively militant, pie-hole-stuffing crybabies who want what we want when we want it and who collectively stop our ears with our fingers when anyone talks about the real sacrifice needed to achieve this so-called "independent spirit" none of us really want (except to bray about it in town halls).

The states that get the most subsidy from the Feds crow loudest about taxes. This is because, since they are small in population and relatively uneducated in general, they have become cheap, easy pickings for spindoctors employed by the cynical megawealthy who court these simple voters with utterly false notions that there is solidarity between the no-tax desires of the billionaire and the food-on-the-table needs of the slogger and his wife and kids and pickup truck and dog and ATV and rifle(s).

We are in this mess, at least partly, because since the days of the Reagan Administration, intelligence itself has been attacked as somehow a betrayal of American values; therefore it is more American to be dumb. And how well this has worked for the wealthy elite! They have created a polity so easily manipulated they can actually win time after time in elections against candidates who might benefit someone besides the no-tax megawealthy.

Tea Party--go ahead and try to govern. You will soon find that we are where we are because the wealthiest manipulators want us here: jobs being performed overseas at a tenth of the pay (boosting profit quite magnificently); giant military to protect the interests of the wealthy everywhere; no costly safety net for the wretched and the screwed in this country; and enough existing subsidy for homeowners and corporations so that not one small thing gets changed in a land too big to fail. Oh and the other thing--the government just keeps borrowing from China to make it all go-round. And when it collapses, the megawealthy will have their gates and their military and their foreign accounts and la-de-da.

Let me finish, however, with optimism. In the end, we always seem to pull a trick out of the hat. We come up with something nobody's ever heard of before and that everybody wants. It's happened many times in our nation's history. The good, smart and driven people here, despite all, will probably make it happen again.

But it won't be thanks to the Tea Party.