Doug's Darkworld

Well, I guess I should have expected that. It’s been pretty much the story of my life lately. There comes a point where one gets really tired of making lemonade out of all the lemons zinging their way, and I never much liked lemonade in the first place. Life goes on though, as does Doug’s Darkworld. So there.

However, Doug’s Darkworld is going to slow down a bit in the near future. I am launching  a new site where my vast and varied collection of writings will be easily accessible with a click or two. Including a great number of my old and popular posts on Doug’s Darkworld. This will both make a lot more of my writing available to people, and allow me to streamline Doug’s Darkworld and concentrate even more on making each post a quality post. I’ve written some sci fi and psychological fantasy stories too, different fare indeed from this blog. Brace yourself. In other local news, a Princess has contacted me regarding getting one of my cats cloned. How many people can make that claim? My cat and I are of course very flattered (cats show being flattered by acting exactly as they did before, talk about savoir faire.) How did my cat, Sir Handsome Fungus Bug, come to be famous in some quarters? Damned if I know.

In world news, people are protesting the G-20 summit, claiming “capitalism has failed.” The truth of the matter is, they’re probably right.  As far as I can tell, for the most part when talking about both classes and nations, the rich are getting richer are and the poor are getting poorer. It’s certainly the case in the USA, where the middle class has been losing ground since the seventies. It’s not surprising really, in the modern world capitalism is just a  euphemism for “let the rich make the rules.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that’s probably not the best strategy for  a nation state in the long run, thought it will make the rich fabulously wealthy.

They caught some wannabe terrorists in the USA. Wannabe terrorists so clueless that they left piles of evidence leading the authorities right to them. Some of them are even being charged with conspiring to build a WMD. Right, now a home-made bomb is a WMD. None of these jokers sounds like they were much of a threat, and it’s a good bet before the dust settle it will turn out that FBI informants were the main instigators of the plots to begin with. Of course the media is making a huge deal out of these non-events and treating it like the country has been spared from some terrible threat. Right. When I was a kid some nutbar making bombs was considered what it was, some nutbar making bombs, not a threat to the nation at large. And if these cases fizzle when they get to court, which they so often do, the media won’t say a peep.

Which leads me again to the oft uttered liberal media claptrap. In the 60s when we actually had an independent media in the USA, Americans saw pictures of US forces in Vietnam almost every night in the news. It in fact was one of the major factors that convinced millions of Americans that the war simply wasn’t worth the cost. Now show even one still photo of a dying American, and it’s a huge controversy. Right, can’t have people seeing the reality of war. As for the “it shows disrespect to him and his family argument,” spare me. The people who are showing disrespect for the dead Marine and his family are the people that sent him to a godforsaken land on the far side of the world to die. In any event, the media does have a slight liberal slant and always will, because, d’oh, liberal types tend to go into academia and the media while conservative types are more drawn to the military and business. Go figure. In any event, my point is that comparing coverage of Vietnam to today’s media coverage of our foreign wars, the idea that the media has a liberal bias is a joke. For the most part today’s media just repeats White House talking points as if they were news. How is that a liberal bias?

In some final non-depressing news, for those who missed my tweet, there has been an amazing discovery in the Solar system. It turns out there’s water on the Moon, far more water than anyone ever dreamt of. Granted it’s in the form of chemicals in soil for the most part, although there appears to be actual ice in some craters. Still, the Moon is far wetter than anyone imagined, which is both an intriguing mystery that scientists will have to unravel … and more importantly, a huge boost for the idea of human exploration and bases on the Moon. It’s literally the biggest Moon news since the Apollo missions.

And frankly the way we keep screwing up here, we may need to settle on the Moon sooner than we think. I’m ready. Have a great weekend everyone.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is central to illustrating the post. I got in on this fine site. I’m guessing the credit and copyright belong to Buell Motorcycles. It’s actually a crushed motorcycle, but it was the best cubed vehicle picture I could fine. And for those who may have suspected such, this post was written backwards. I came up with the title first, and liked it so much I wrote a post to match it. It’s like the old joke, what does it mean when your feet smell and your nose runs? It means you’re built upside down.)