Passion 2: Alien Jew v. Predator Jesus ON ICE!

There is no such thing as clean coal. Eviscerate the black through the severed head of a mountain, down the hatch and all the coal is dirty. Mountaintop removal mining makes it all seem dirtier, especially to a kid from the Mountain State, who sees West Virginia failing in many ways, but at least we have pristine and beautiful mountains. Until they're decapitated in an effort to reach the dark kernels of dirty energy found inside.

What passes for a news cycle some weeks really makes me itch. George Will wrote in apparent advocacy for a "global cooling" cycle, and supported his columnistic efforts with a few discredited magazine covers from the 1970's. Now he has been taken behind the blogoshpere's virtual woodshed, and probably won't care and will write about something else, maybe Japanese terrorism or the overwhelming success of the Iraq War. Anyone who can't look at a simple graph and see a disturbing global warming trend is being willfully stupid. Those who seek to advance some debate are just being contrarians, and avoiding obvious facts on purpose in an effort to satisfy...what exactly? This "debate" has been ended by scientific fact, and any ideology involved with denial of global warming has no credit and no usefulness.

Afghanistan will probably fail to do what we think we want it to do, but will do what is has always done: not be centralized and be run by tribal warlords. The path to Taliban control of Afghanistan isn't hard to follow - what has the surge done in Iraq? It provided security, which was designed to allow for American political goals to be met in the new, more secure environment, but raise your hand if you can tell your brother or your sister what goals have been achieved. The elections went well, I guess, but Iraq is in limbo. That's the best we could expect from a surge that followed the inept execution of a tragically misguided war policy. We can hope that Afghanistan is different, but what would make it different? 17,000 more troops? The Soviet Union had far more than that total, and retreated in defeat not long before their state collapsed.

It's a lot easier to point out where the fuck-ups are than to offer solutions, but we are overwhelmed right now. Solutions come from necessity and ideas, but so much is necessary to fix and the ideas only manifest themselves through the will of a corruptible legislative body. And when corruption is absent, ideology and mistrust and careerism drive much behavior in Congress. So this is not an entry about solutions, but about a couple of problems that came to mind while I was sitting here. The news media should be ashamed of its non-coverage of anything this week - if you've trolled some news sites this week you know what I'm talking about. Fluff city, as if nothing is going on worth discussing. I declare otherwise.

I'm thinking about a different bloggish structure, one that would require me to move on from this rough draft-ready blog and probably the other one I do to one which I program myself. Because I don't go out much on the weekends any more, and I need something to do and I want to do it with a lot of pictures. I'm thinking about counting pawn shops and payday loan joints next weekend, in Covington, KY. I wonder how many people are served by these wonderful and useful establishments? You can see gallons of blood in the water.