fun fun fun

I was jumping up and down today because I had coffee on eight hours of sleep and thought wow, I can still jump pretty well, then I stopped and my right ankle started throbbing. Ah, prospects of the grave, the slow atrophy of the body and original sin.



Otherwise, it's been a pleasant day spent thinking about the prospects of the Republic and the earth in general. It was depressing to think about but it was sunny out.

Polar bears are getting thinner, oil is $72 a barrel (why? asked cnn.com -- well, do the math geniuses...what's Exxon's profits these days? How much oil is left...about three years to go before non-OPEC nations will be unable to keep up with their current output while demand will rise to about 90 billion barrels per day by the end of the decade and a few years down the road OPEC, which will have a couple decades of market dominance will also begin to find itself unable to keep up with demand) and Rumsfeld is proud of the decisions he's made as Secretary of Defense. What decisions could he be proud of? Does he give himself points for not wetting himself? Polar bears are drowning, we're running out of oil while whistling in the dark and Rumsfeld, the dark himself, thinks he's the cat's pajamas.



There's a lot of whistling in the dark these days, but it's getting shriller, more determined. It could be argued this is progress. With more people asking harder questions, it makes it all the more disappointing that there is no true opposition party in the United States. With the Democrats looking everyday more and more like the bloated Whigs of the 1830s and '40s and the major anti-Republican organizations like moveon.org offering only cautious rebuke of the plutocracy it appears that a potential turning point in progressive politics is being pissed away.




Kind of like the 1960s.

There is a sense in this country, and it runs deep, that if a person has money, they must not be that big a fool. Friends, Dick Rumsfeld is a rich, rich man. And Dick Cheney is enormously wealthy. And enough with the evil genius comparisons. It pays him too much credit. The man is an ass.

“The plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios. But with every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.”
Dick Cheney

There's the evil genius on Iraq in the early days. Later on he had this one to say:

"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." --Vice President Dick Cheney, on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005

Genius, it can be argued, is the marriage of vision and understanding. The best that can be said of Cheney is that he has a decidedly strong survival instinct.

The day is sunny, Greg Maddux is still Greg Maddux and yesterday was a masterpiece at Dodgers Stadium, there's genius. Once Maddux was winning against the Astros 8-0 in mid August a few years ago. He grooved a pitch to Bagwell in the bottom of the 8th on a 2 and 2 count. Bagwell ripped it. A home run, not just a home run, a staggering shot, a little satellite of love to summer and the Braves won 8-1. A few weeks later Maddux faced Bagwell again in a much tighter game with all kinds of play-off implications, it was 3-2 Braves in the seventh or eighth inning and the Astros had two on. Again it was 2-2 and Maddux dropped a little hammer on Bagwell and made him look like a pig at a swan convention. Bagwell shook his head all the way to the dugout. Later he said he'd been looking fastball middle-in. When Maddux was asked about that at-bat, the key at bat in the game, he smilled a little but didn't say anything. Leo Mazzone did though, a bit later, on that at bat he mentioned that Maddux had set up Bagwell for it in AUGUST, weeks before that key at bat. He'd grooved that fastball on purpose to get Bagwell in a certain frame of mind. Bagwell is a smart hitter, and Maddux knew he'd remember what he hit on that 2-2 count. And weeks later, for that satellite of love, Bagwell paid heavy. There's genius. There's the greatest goddamn pitcher that ever walked out into the center of a diamond.