Point Five (Dialup)

I can remember a time when I used to feel safe.

But every day it seems a new climate horror is revealed, a new sickening disaster that takes the lives of thousands of our fellow world citizens at some point in the future:

• Rising seas swallow up entire coastal community of millions, scientist predicts
• Killer “super storm” heading straight for Florida, within three decades
• Critical food shortages as arable lands rapidly covered by rising rivers, fifty years from now
• Climate-shift-caused drought causes famine in Africa

Holy hell, if not even Africa is safe from famine, we are well and truly fucked. I don’t know everything, but I do know this: these future humans dying their predicted deaths in anticipated disasters are going to be righteously pissed off at us for dithering away their environment. And the fear that really keeps me awake at night– drenched in cold sweat and surfing basic cable to find some independent short film rated TV-MA that may have some tasteful nudity in it– is that these future citizens may just do something about it.

(more…)

So President Obama it is.

The taxes, the freedoms, the lies I could give a shit about.

I just hope the fuck he doesn’t get my son killed.

and mind you, I’m not saying that I am. But if I were–

If my whole election-winning philosophy was creating buzz, and hype, and perceived momentum…

The real problem, of course, would be the polls. Sure, I could offer free beer and sausage, free rock concerts– that would pack them in the arenas. I could pay staffers to post moby comments on websites, jam online polls, and create the illusion of internet buzz. The media– well hell, I wouldn’t really need to do a damn thing there, now, would I?– so they’re already a gimme.

But how could I fool pollsters? What with all that whiz-bang science they use to randomly ask questions to people to stupid to screen their calls.

Possibilities:

1. Pay enough random Americans to lie to the pollsters. This idea has the downside of being batshit crazy. And even a $600,000,000 budget couldn’t possibly cover it.

2. Bribe the major pollsters. This has the same disadvantages of #1 (bugfuck insane), with the additional problem that the pollsters would be writing the end of their own credibility. Plus, you’d have to get them all on board. So no, wouldn’t work.

So what to do? What to do? Mind you, I’m already paying low-level staffers to generate false buzz. This is part of my standard operating procedure. As the King of the Astroturfers– this is what I’m known for.

If only there were some crappy job at the major polling outfits that allowed me to insert one or maybe two of my own people in an assembly line job, who might occasionally mark off the wrong answers on the polling sheets. Maybe, say “Barack Obama” instead of “John McCain”. Mind you– creating fake buzz is what I’m paid to do. Maybe, if I really wanted to be subtle, I might tell my people how to do nothing more than manipulate the answers to show a high degree of enthusiasm for my candidate, that caused the actual analysts at these hypothetical polling firms to wildly overestimate the party split in their released polls.

No major conspiracy. Just the odd staffer at the dozen major polling firms. I’m sure I could find room in my $600,000,000.00 budget for that.

Of course, the real problem then would be on election day. Because if I didn’t actually suppress the vote of my opponents supporters, the results might look like

this

or this

or this

or this

or this.

Then I’d have to come up with an excuse for why all the polls were wrong, like maybe the voters were all racists or something.

Anyway, just saying…

I must admit I feel a bit dazed and disoriented myself after listening to Barack Obama for any length of time, so I can hardly blame the man for not quite knowing where he was, what month it was, and how much time he had until the general election.

One can only assume some of the vacuousness of a particularly rarefied stump speech breached the walls of his sphenoid sinus and leaked rarefied hope-phlegm into his braincase. That, or perhaps his soul-sucking opponent used that Lifeforce vampire alien trick to prematurely dodder him. I just hope to hell she wasn’t naked like in the movie.

Hey– Anybody out there remember what it means when it flashes red?