Dear Extrovert: Please Put A Sock In It. No. Really.

Caring for Your Introvert

"..Are introverts arrogant? Hardly.

I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts.

Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. ...The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward..."

"Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion...

Atlantic Monthly

Holy Wahabi Psychopath, Batman!

the powerless satisfied vicariously

"According to Batman's creator, Batman is going after Osama bin Laden. Finally, we'll get the satisfaction we've been waiting for, when Batman kicks al Qaeda's ass! This is pretty pathetic, no? Our military and political establishment can't -- or won't -- get the job done, so we're turning to Batman. How else will we get the release we seek, the justice we deserve?

Unfortunately, this is par for the course. .."

Catharsis from The Shining Wire

As If the Middle East Wasn't Weird Enough

Now there's Rampant Antisemitic Vampirism and Reverse Oedipulism

For Haaretz
By Nadav Shragai

"We are a blood-drinking people and we know that there is no better blood than Jewish blood."

Great.

The new governors of the Palestinian Authority are apparently connoisseurs .

They entertain some refreshing new concepts concerning Family Values as well:

"The video also shows a good-bye scene between mother and son as he gets ready to leave for the attack, with the mother helping him put on the explosive vest..."

Children blow up so quickly these days...

Seriously: read this in conjunction with the previous post. If this isn't blowback, then the concept has no meaning. Its irrational and demented... but also predictable.

Apocalypse Soon

We should be so lucky as to have him hate us only for our freedoms. He's never even discussed that kind of thing.

BIN LADEN'S GAME

- a very ominous interview with Michael Scheuer

They Hate Our Freedoms!

The following letter got VA Nurse, Laura Berg, investigated by the FBI for sedition.

Wake Up, Get Real

Dear Alibi,

I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government. The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes! Bush and his team partied and delayed while millions of people were displaced, hundreds of thousands were abandoned to a living hell. Thousands more died of drowning, dehydration, hunger and exposure; most bodies remain unburied and rotting in attics and floodwater. Is this America the beautiful?

The risk of hurricane disaster was clearly predicted, yet funds for repair work for the Gulf States barrier islands and levee system were unconscionably diverted to the Iraq War. Money and manpower and ethics have been diverted to fight a war based on absolute lies!

As a VA nurse working with returning OIF vets, I know the public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder; now we will have hundreds of thousands of our civilian citizens with PTSD as well as far too many young soldiers, maimed physically or psychologically—or both—spreading their pain, anger and isolation through family and communities for generations. And most of this natural disaster and war tragedy has been preventable ... how very, very sad!

In the meantime, our war-fueled federal deficit mushrooms—and whither this debt now, as we care for the displaced and destroyed?

Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence. This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil.

Katrina itself was the size of New Mexico. Denials of global warming are ludicrous and patently irrational at this point. We can anticipate more wild, destructive weather to occur as a response stress of the planet. We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit. Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.

Laura Berg
Albuquerque

Respect, Cartoons, and Secular Piety

Respectful Cultures & Disrespectful Cartoons

Michael Nuemann makes an interesting point:

..."I cannot say whether the official Western culture of piety, enthusiastically promoted worldwide, played a role in the reaction to the cartoons. I do know that Western piety has left the West without a leg to stand on in this dispute. It is no good trumpeting rights of free expression, because these rights are now supposed to have nebulous but severe limitations. From the moment Western countries started criminalising topless posters in locker rooms, hate speech, emotional abuse and many other sins of impurity, free expression was at the mercy of Western piety. It cannot be invoked against piety of another sort..."

It was fun while it lasted

The End of the Internet?

"The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online...

"...To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future..."

Every day in every way, seccession seems better and better...

Now it All Makes Sense!

Dubya, the Child, blew up frogs.

Perhaps Barbara should have payed a bit more attention:

"Warning signs that you may be raising a little psychopath in the making are:
1. Cruelty to animals [see above]
2. Longer-than-usual bedwetting [we can only guess]
3. Pyromania [see Iraq War...]"