Thoughts and meditations while burrowed in for the new years' Canadian invasion.

I fucking hate winter.

This year, Thanksgiving brought my extended family a flu outbreak...complete with putting my mother(72) in an ambulance twice(the first time, I thought she was kicking the bucket), and me spending a lot of time camped out (uncomfortably)in her guest bedroom, in order to nurse and watch her.
Then the cold began....and the 24th anniversary of my life changing wreck, and my usual over-sensitivity to jingle bells and cinnamon smells and mannerless hunters stopping on my dirt road to ogle at the hippie in clown pants, carrying a hammer on his own property(if I did the same in their deep east texas cowboy-chic suburban warren, they'd surely call the law, if not shoot me)...and it's colder than a Teabilly pericardial sac, and as wet and nasty and all I wanna do is run off to Belize or somewhere and lay naked in the sun(which I am certain still exists, despite appearances).
The flu, though...that set things off on a deleterious track.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/01/when-you-get-the-flu-this-winter-you-can-blame-anti-vaxxers.html

It seems that, once again, the Faux Newt surreality has leaked into the world the rest of us inhabit...otherwise reasonable folks don't “believe” in the science around vaccines.
Those cracks in the Right Wingers' reality bubble are at the root of a whole lot of things that seem intractable.
To whit:

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/29/no_civilization_would_tolerate_what_america_has_done_partner/

Maybe this guy reads me...or maybe I'm somehow tapped into the Noosphere...but I've been hollering about all of that for years: our inability and unwillingness to look Reality in the face-- instead preferring to believe real hard in our various Mythos and ever so comfortable in our numerous unexamined Assumptions, Frames and Memes.
Ah...the Warm Herd....

More tea colored crap oozes from the cracks:
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/01/beyond_the_foreign_policy_lies_our_compliant_media_and_the_truth_about_american_exceptionalism/#comments

Again...Where's everybody been?
Lol.
Reagan's Amurca has been an unamerican shithole for a long time.
(yes, it goes back at least to Truman, who was “a democrat”...sigh)...and the further down that fork in the road we go, the more the ghosts of the John Birch Society infect the mind of America.
I've made the attempt at working on the part of the Mighty Tome, for months, about the all but unacknowledged but widespread anti-Hippie discrimination, hostility, and outright Eliminationism...and what that says about Us, and how we've been bamboozled, lo these past 40 years, but I have been so fucking depressed. The Ferguson, et alia hatefest has not relented(comments sections, throughout the web).
The Torture Report made little difference.
The Republican Party has been shameless in their Triumphalism(and they still appear to be ignorant assholes)...and the Democratic Party is still eyeless and ball-free.
I've been on Deep Space 9 and Battlestar Galactica for 2 months as a result.

These three excellent articles are my return to paying attention.
I'm glad that I ain't the only one who has looked at the roots of things.
It sure feels that way, sometimes.