Which Ones are Our Lunatics?

Another lunatic with rage and guns went to work in San Bernardino, California.

Congress went to work, too. It offered prayers and condolences for the victims. Nothing else. More lunatics.

Does Congress, do the American people, have any idea why there is a Congress, or what it should do?

Do they really think that prayers will make it rain, or stop raining, or provide health care for people? Do they really think that all we need to do is send troops to Syria or San Bernardino? They can't even say that plainly and directly: they talk about "boots on the ground".

Has anyone ever seen a wackier lineup of presidential wannabes than we are witnessing this year? The pyramids are full of grain! We should build a big, beautiful wall and Mexico will pay for it! Round up the immigrants and send them back to Norway and Ireland and Italy and Germany and England and China and Japan and Guatemala: let them walk across the land bridge to Siberia all the way to Asia and Africa, now, quickly, before the ocean rises! Repeal health care! Repeal education! Form a volunteer church group to rebuild the bridges and fill in the potholes! Make it hard for people to vote! Get more guns into the hands of good, god-fearing lunatics who think they would make fine presidents! Arm kindergarten teachers and tell the kids to duck!

Ah, ah, ahh!

What if Ben Carson is right? What if the pyramids are stuffed with oats and mice? What if Carly Fiorina is the finest CEO God ever created, with the possible exception of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Tom Cruise or whoever it is?

What if prayer is our best hope for Congress? Guns and prayer.

But I thought that was our problem.

I am beginning to find strange comfort in the suggestion that climate change is not real, but that weather is, and that is why there is water in the basement.

We do not even have a basement.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

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