Sunday Morning Review of Books...

...and comics.

Well, at least an overview of some recent and upcoming publications that may be of interest to some of you.

An opening morning thought (compliments of HomeyM, thanks, Homey!):

"The creative process is a process of waiting, trusting, acting, it has a deep wisdom, if we will surrender to it. The power of the unconscious rises to the page. It can be frightening. It is difficult. But it is in the vitality of this struggle between the writer and the word that we can create transformative work. Each book I have written has transformed me in the process. I write myself to the other side of my question..."

- Terry Tempest Williams

This past Friday, Charlito and Mister Phil

of the popular podcast venue Indie Spinner Rack

visited the Center for Cartoon Studies and interviewed yours truly at great length; that'll be online soon. As CCS fellow faculty member Robyn Chapman points out, Indie Spinner Rack has been a great supporter of CCS -- "they are donating half of the profits from their upcoming anthology to CCS," Robyn says -- and they are excellent promoters. Charlito is also a fellow XQB (Kubert School graduate), and it so happens we first met and he was a student there when I visited the school and presented an early version of the ever-expanding Journeys Into Fear: A History of Horror Comics slide show lecture.

Anyhoot, among the many things Charlito and Mister Phil grilled me about was "Why isn't there any new Bissette comics?," a question touched upon ad infinitum here from time to time. Which leads me to this morning's subject:

My work appears in a number of new comics and books! Here's a quick review of those goodies, now out and/or about to hit the shelves:

* Rick Veitch's King Hell Press is just releasing Rick's new anthology Shiny Beasts; for more relevant info, memories and details, and a peek at the story and artwork I had a hand in that appears in this anthology, check out

this previous blog posting,

and this one,

and then there's this, too! All worth visiting or revisiting.

Best of all, though, is Rick's own preview section he's posted online, here!

* The latest issue of Bob McLeod's magazine Rough Stuff #4 features an illustrated overview of some of my Swamp Thing pencils, with insights by yours truly, and best of all a lengthy illustrated interview with my venerable amigo and fellow Swamp Thing vet John Totleben. Pick it up, and pronto -- it's on the shelves now, or you can order your copy immediately

at the TwoMorrows publisher website.

I wrote about this issue on the blog

here

and here, including art, links, etc. of interest and delivering some immediate gratification and eye-candy delights.

* So much for vintage Bissette -- there's new stuff, too. here's the upcoming (shipping in May!) Accent UK Zombies anthology, for which I drew a cover, some interior spot illustrations, and completed a brand-new four-page Edward-Gorey like humor piece working with my son Daniel Bissette,

which I first announced here,

discussed at some length here,

blathered more about with this post,

and provided bios for the anthology's fellow contributors here.

That Zombies also features some stories and art by Center for Cartoon Studies students is a plus in my book, too!

I'm not sure if this anthology is going to make it over to the US, so best you check out

the Accent UK site and see about ordering your copy online, just in case.

I'll be posting more info, links, and tidbits on Zombies -- and the planned US followup, featuring much all-new work (including new material by yours truly!) -- later this coming month and spring. Keep your eye on this blog!

* In stores right now is the third (and, alas, final) issue of Mark Martin's most recent anthology Runaway Comics

which prints the complete version of "Blog Opera," the amazing story featuring me, Steve Bissette, trying to rescue my friend Mike Dobbs's severed head, which I previewed here

(lifting the images from Mark Martin's marvelous blog "Jabberous," which is forever linked on the menu at your immediate right), and which places me at last in the Brain That Wouldn't Die pantheon I secretly forever longed to belong to.

Thanks, Mark! Do I give head as well as I take head? You'll have to buy Runaway Comics #3 to find out!

I also have a teeny, tiny li'l drawing that's part of Mark's eye-popping back cover painting,

and you can find out the secrets of this back cover painting here, including my part in it -- scroll down the menu at the left Mark has created, and click on the contribution by everyone Mark invited to "come draw with me!" (which is also covered -- pun intended -- in the pages of Runaway Comics #3)!

So, don't hesitate, run right out today and pick up your copy of Runaway Comics #3! While you're at it, get Runaway Comics #1 and 2, too -- all great, fun reading -- and all available

here, where you can also preview every issue as well, right now.

Check 'em out, and tell Mark I sent you.

* I've also written the introductions for two new graphic novel collections -- one a partial reprint extensively revised and expanded into a whole new graphic novel, the other reprinting for the first time a seminal body of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle work by Michael Zulli. Both, though, are well worth picking up, and pronto!

If you scroll down a bit, you'll find my writeup of Michael Zulli's excellent TMNT: Soul's Winter here,

and you can order a copy here (with Michael's exquisite & exclusive signed bookplate as a bonus)!

* The amazing new graphic novel I proudly scribed an intro for is Rob Walton's masterpiece Ragmop, which doesn't "just" collect the existing pair of Ragmop series from the mid-1990s -- don't believe those know-it-all online putzes and pundits who claim otherwise.
Ragmop, the book, is not a reprint edition -- Rob completely revised, revamped, redrew, rewrote, and expanded the whole into a complete, self-standing and mighty hilarious satiric epic that is hands-down one of my favorite graphic novels of all time!

Here's Rob's blog and site, always worth a visit (on a regular basis),

and here's where you must immediately go and purchase a copy of Ragmop with the limited edition signed color bookplate -- no, right now. No excuses.

You think I refer to something as "my favorite graphic novel of all time" lightly?

So, there. Some new Bissette, some old Bissette -- all in print now, and in comics shops and bookstores now.

Now, I personally know how many of you did (and most of all how many didn't) order my son Dan's zine Hot Chicks Take Huge Shits last year, with my first-ever all-new comic story of the Millennium. A vast yawn greeted Dan and I with that little wonder. There's a stack of 'em signed sitting here in the SpiderBaby backstock; Dan was so discouraged with the cosmic indifference to his first effort he damn near killed himself -- good thing I talked him down out of that tree. That's right -- and it would have been your fault!

You don't really care whether I draw comics again, you just like to gripe about it, and expect me to post whatever I do online so you can dig it for free. Well, I'm on to your little game. I can just glance over at the huge stack remaining of Hot Chicks Take Huge Shits and I know what's what.

So get out there, or just click your fucking mouses, and buy the books and comics above. They're all great! I'll know if you did or didn't, bunky. Quit whining about my not doing anything and go buy 'em all, or leave me alone!

_____________________

On another matter all together, which Ragmop creator Rob Walton and I talked about during his visit here, and which Clan Apis and The Sandwalk Adventure creator (and biologist) Jay Hosler had a lot to say about during his visit to CCS, check out the comments on yesterday's blog posting for a lengthy comeback from Luke Przybylski about

this Easter blog posting, which I still stand by (your writing still played to the prejudices I noted, Luke).

I've replied in kind in the same comment thread, so check that out, too, and feel free to weigh in

(and feel free to read the local article in this recent post, too -- scroll down past the Grindhouse writeup -- as followup; that goes for you, too, Luke!).

Happy to talk about it, if anyone wishes to.

______________________

And this just in, Naomi Wolf's sobering Guardian story about how we're currently perceived overseas, and justifiably so.

Thanks to Tim Lucas for the link -- and y'all have a good Sunday, now, y'here?

Man, I Would Love This Poster on my Viewing Room Wall...

Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse was a high-octane blast, period; most fun I've had in a movie theater in ages. My stepson Mike (Bleier) and I caught the matinee yesterday, and we had a fantastic time, giddy and punchdrunk by the end, juiced on the energy of both films and having laughed more than either of us have at any comedy in recent memory.

I'll post a full review later on, but want to note a few things up front:

1. If you're an old sot (like me), avoid drinking soda or water until the end of the second feature. Man, did I ever have to piss by the end of Death Proof! But I didn't miss a frame of it, and did stay through the credits crawl. Unlike Joe Dante, Tarantino and Rodriguez do not reward we credit-crawl diehards for our loyalty; having to piss even more was my reward.

2. Death Proof's title music is borrowed from one of my all-time favorite exploitation/drive-in scores, Jack Nitzsche's title tune ("The Last Race") for Bert I. Gordon's Village of the Giants (1965), a film which also boasted a bit of the Beau Brummels. The Nitzsche tune always outstripped Gordon's entertaining but lameass flick; it plays beautifully here, and definitely got me in the groove (though the fake previews between the two features already had me there in spades). The Village of the Giants score was Nitzsche's first, followed by his mindbending Performance (1970) score --

which Tim Lucas most eloquently discussed in this Video Watchblog post --

-- and a truly lovely score for Robert Downey's Greaser's Palace (1972). Hollywood didn't note Nitzsche's skills until a full decade after his debut for Gordon's giant-teen opus: it took his haunting, mournful music for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) to wake the studios up. Nitzsche further cemented his place in my personal fave film composers pantheon by having Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart himself!) sing "Hard Work Driving Man", with Ry Cooder on the guitar -- the title tune for Paul Schrader's excellent Blue Collar (1978). A Nitzsche soundtrack compilation album is long overdue. "The Last Race" alone ensures my picking up Grindhouse's soundtrack CD.

3. Favorite overheard dialogue going in to buy my ticket: "I swore after seeing Kill Bill I'd never, ever watch another damned Quentin Tarantino movie again!" (elderly woman to her friend, en route to Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others)

4. For most horror fans, whether weaned on drive-in/nabe fare or the DVD renaissance of exploitation and import sf/horror titles, Rodriquez's Planet Terror wears its blood-drenched influences on its sleeve, fusing them into its own confection from the outset (its closest to Rodriguez's The Faculty in its marvelous conflation of genre staples into its own distinctive blend). But Tarantino plays a tighter, odder game. Death Proof's initial structure and pacing (slow, languid, leisurely, dialogue-heavy buildup to a jarring first-third climax) felt eerily, precisely like some of the Crown International films of the '70s, particularly Earl Barton's unforgettable Trip With the Teacher (1975). Tarantino finds and maintains his own groove, too, but Death Proof had me practically flashing-back to those Crown In't opuses, which I have to revisit ASAP.

What made them work was the way the first third of their films seemed to just piss away screentime with chit-chat, bits of business, and inducing a sort of diversionary torpor -- it was shameless padding, in most of the Crown In't films, natch, but it worked to lull and set up the viewer for having the rug yanked out from under one's feet when the film finally kicked into gear. That's what Death Proof does -- and once it's in gear, it doesn't let up. Also like Crown In't fare, there's troublesome loose threads left blowing in the wind (just as one can't help but wonder what happens to the actress left with the Dodge Charger owner here), but that's part of the package, and kudos to Tarantino for having the chops to just end the film -- bam! -- when it's over. Most viewers with any grounding in '60s exploitation will likely invoke Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill! (1965) as Tarantino's model, which is fair (and accurate) enough for the film's third act, but the whole is a major Crown In't flashback for me. Listen, just go for the ride.

5. The faux trailers are a gas. Rodriguez's Machete is perfection (and it precedes the first feature, so don't arrive late), and Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS is a hoot, too, but it was Edgar (Shaun of the Dead) Wright's Don't that had Mike and I absolutely doubled up with laughter. For Mike, it was just funny -- for me, it summed up the whole Don't school of cheapjack horror flicks with spot-on speed and style; along with Machete, it's the best of the lot. Eli Roth's Thanksgiving is funnier in concept than execution until that last, fleeting shot of -- I think -- the killer humping the turkey with a human head attached to it, which induced helpless laughter again. Roth accurately captures the horrible, washed-out maladroit nature of the worst of the post-Halloween slashers in and of themselves, but is perhaps too young to have experienced the trailers in a theater, which always successfully disguised the utterly drab essence of the films they were promoting. Funnier still, though, was the ad for the Tex-Mexican restaurant, with its vomitous color drainage and singularly unappetizing tableaus of 'food.' All that was missing was the beloved ad for Pic -- but that was unique to drive-ins, not grindhouses, hence its absence.

6. There's an "original" title card fleetingly in view -- I think it read Thunderbolt -- before the "retitle" title card Death Proof is cut into the print. A brilliant touch, that, and one drive-in and grindhouse mavens recognize as an all-too-familiar trope from the '70s and '80s; as a diehard Mario Bava fan, this was a staple of my diet; I saw my all-time favorite Bava films on drive-in screens and 42nd St. theaters under multiple titles. For instance, Twitch of the Death Nerve and Last House Part II were the same film -- which was test-marketed in Boston as Carnage! -- as were Kill, Baby...Kill! and Curse of the Living Dead. The kind of 'spliced in' title card Death Proof uses was more typical of the '80s retitles: Horror on Snape Island becoming Beyond the Fog, Italian gangster films being repromoted as faux-horror films (Almost Human, etc.). Anyhoot, back to Death Proof and that first title visible for a couple of frames -- anyone catch that first onscreen title?

7. In all my years of drive-in and nabe viewing, I never saw a "Reel Missing" insert title. And I had at least two decades of viewing experience, from the New England drive-ins to the last gasp years of 42nd Street and New Jersey grindhouses (during my Kubert School and initial XQB years), and baby, those were grindhouses. I savored a number of reel-out-of-order projection fuckups, primarily at drive-ins, but never reels missing. Still, Rodriguez and Tarantino use the device cleverly and with perverse, calculated intent.

OK, more later! Just see the movie, if it sounds like your cup of tea. It sure was mine!

_____________________

Following up on yesterday's Easter Sunday post, the ever-thoughtful Luke Przybylski (not) emails, "It's come to my attention that the link I provided in my last email is not working. The video can be seen by searchin [sic] on Google Video for THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE." Which you can, like, do or not do. Up to you. I post this info here only for the sake of completion; the video Luke references is bunk, IMHO, but fascinating in and of itself.

Also following up on yesterday's post comes the following from the Stamford Advocate, compliments of my sister-in-law and artist/photographer extraordinaire Patricia Lambert and from Cathie Kovacs, President/Founding Director of The Wildlife Orphanage, Inc. in Stamford, CT. We're seeing these accelerated birthing cycles in VT, too -- further localized evidence of the climate change's impact on regional flora and fauna:

Local warning on warming
By Tim Stelloh
Staff Writer

April 8, 2007

The impact of climate change on wildlife may seem like a distant issue for this area - affecting polar bears in the Arctic shelf, for instance. But the increasingly mild weather may be changing the mating cycles and migration patterns of animals in the region.

Squirrels and raccoons are being born far earlier than usual, said Heather Bernatchez, director of development for the Stamford-based Wildlife Orphanage, which rescues and rehabilitates animals in
Fairfield County.

Newborn gray squirrels arrived almost two months earlier this spring than they did a decade ago, she said. "They used to be born in May," Bernatchez said. "Now they're coming in at the beginning of March."

Raccoons are being born about a month earlier and nursing mother raccoons are turning up in daylight near homes and searching for food, she said.

"We had a fox rescue last Friday, and this guy was 4 weeks old, which means they are also a month early," Bernatchez said.

The influx of calls about newborn squirrels discovered in felled trees and foraging raccoons has increased the workload and strained the Wildlife Orphanage, she said.

"We can't get ready early enough in the season. It's a much longer season than it used to be," she said.

The orphanage does not care for deer because of space restrictions, Bernatchez said.

But deer stay healthier during mild winters and in turn have higher reproduction rates, state Department of Environmental Protection biologist Howard Kilpatrick said.

That means Fairfield County - which has one of the most dense deer populations in the state - could see a spike in deer-vehicle accidents and deer-related homeowner complaints.

But Kilpatrick could not say how deer fared last winter.

A report released on Friday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of hundreds of scientists from around the world, says the mating changes the Wildlife Orphanage has seen are becoming more common.

"There is very high confidence, based on more evidence from a wider range of species, that recent warming is strongly affecting earlier timing of spring events." Egg-laying is listed as one of those events.

Bird migration is another. Milan Bull, the senior director of science and conservation with the Connecticut Audubon Society, said that warming affects species differently.

"Usually, we have diving ducks in the Long Island Sound," he said. "This winter was so mild all across the East that they weren't forced to come down and winter here."

Farther north, the lack of ice forced far fewer bald eagles out of Maine and northern Massachusetts and onto the banks of the Connecticut River in this state, Bull said.

While 50 to 100 eagles usually winter near the river, about 25 did this year, he said.

Birds such as the wood thrush that migrate north from Central America are also changing migration patterns, arriving a week earlier than a decade ago, Bull said.

The number of seals following fish south from Canada and Maine into the Sound was also down this year, according to Tim Gagne, spokesman for the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk. which is completing its annual seal census.

While all the data from the count has not been analyzed - and a warm winter does not necessarily correlate with a low seal count - "it stands to reason that milder conditions in all of New England made the annual winter migration south less necessary for many seals," he said.

It's not a matter of 'choose your reality' -- it's a matter of 'choose to ignore reality' or 'choose to engage.' As I said yesterday, the duality argument is a false one. 'Nuff said.

_________________

Oh, shit, I misplaced my Criswell book yesterday while cleaning up.

I'm still amid chaos with my books and such as the post-move transition continues. There's hope, as David Gabriel (and his coworker Josh) started work in earnest last week on the basement renovations, which will result in shelving for all my library. But that's still at least a month away from completion, the unpacking and shelving of the collection even further off, and I'm daily tripping up on my inability to lay my hands on books I need (for CCS class, primarily).

Anyhoot --

I predict -- as soon as I find the Criswell book, I'll post today's prediction.

Have a Great Monday, one and all!

HAPPY EASTER, one and all!

Hey, it's the Easter -- uh, canine?

Though there's nothing particularly Easter-like about this post, let me wish you one and all a great Easter. And leave it at that, save for the Easter Egg of sorts: another Criswell Predicts!, closing this post. Enjoy!

[Illo: Ross Wood Studlar, "Deranged Canine", copyright 2006]

The illustration I'm heading off with today is by Ross Wood Studlar, one of the stellar seniors at CCS I've been yammering about all week.

This is one of Ross's wilder creations, as much Seussian as Big Daddy Roth-like, but it's a particular favorite of many of us who know and love Ross. It was an experiment in wash and animal forms that is emblematic of his love of smearing pigment on paper and fusing and stretching elements of earthly lifeforms into -- well, see for yourself. I dig it.

I've got a lot to show you this morning, so maybe you should treat all the following as Easter eggs, though they might bite, and I sure won't be hiding them.

____________

I've been posting the student Center for Cartoon Studies links all week, and as promised will wind it up today with a peek at some of the art I didn't post (due to time constraints) for some sites, and a little more.

Among that "more" be the two links I've saved for your Easter Sunday,

Robyn Chapman's amazing "Unpopular Comics" site,

and the "Make Comics Forever" blog, which is a collective blog by a group of cartoonists, including Robyn, who are clearly obsessed with the medium we all so love.

Both are sorely in need of updating (the most recent blog post is February, for instance, and Robyn no longer lives in Brooklyn, she's White River Junction/CCS all the way now!), but it's all new to you, I bet, so just check 'em out, and now! Robyn, BTW, is the first-ever CCS Fellow -- and a fellow faculty member. She's an excellent cartoonist, a tough editor (kicked my sorry ass out of an anthology last year, justifiably so), and a great all-around person.

[copyright 2007 Robyn Chapman]

Just go with the flow, now --

I have been coyly dishing out these links so as to open your eyes to the students themselves, cartoonists, all! But

here's the all-purpose CCS student websites/blogs link I've been hoarding, which I'll now post in the permanent menu of links on the right for future easy access.

But that isn't all: I still owe you some peeks at the CCSers whom I didn't post art from this time around. Here's a mini-gallery of images from everyone I previously short-shrifted in the image department.

Along with Ross and Robyn, here's peeks at images by (from top to bottom, in no order other than my random access to art this AM) Adam Staffaroni, Sam Gaskin, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Josie Whitmore, Andrew Arnold, Jon-Mikel Gates and Colleen Frakes:

[copyright 2007 Adam Staffaroni]

[copyright 2007 Sam Gaskin]

[copyright 2007 Alexis Frederick-Frost]

[copyright 2007 Josie Whitmore]

[copyright 2007 Andrew Arnold]

[copyright 2007 Jon-Mikel Gates]

[copyright 2007 Colleen Frakes]

Hmmmmm, there's also these good folks and cartoonists -- vet pro Rich Tommaso, CCS students Caitlin Plovnick, Emily Wieja, and the effervescent Ignatz-Award-winning CCS fellow (and what a fellow) intern Ken Dahl (aka Gabby) -- who don't have sites, that I know of, but are selling comics via the link below the four images, below, by Rich, Caitlin, Emily and Ken, natch:

[copyright 2007 Rich Tommaso]

[copyright 2007 Caitlin Plovnick]

[copyright 2007 Emily Wieja]

[copyright 2007 Ken Dahl]

And as a reminder, for those in need of more material, "in your hand" access, to this new fountain of comics,

here's where you can buy, one-stop, much of the new published work emerging from the CCS stew of creativity,

which now accepts both PayPal and credit card orders, so there's no reason to hesitate ordering some goodies right now, today, this morning;

and here's where you can order the first-ever, all-new graphic novel to emerge from the CCS student experience, Alexis Frederick-Frost's extraordinary Xeric-Award winner La Primavera (2006)!

What are you waiting for? Hell to freeze over, or the Earth to bake?

___________________

The current era of 21st Century duality we find ourselves in is endlessly fascinating. Debate is debased to the unwieldy sham of presenting two "opposing views" -- best of all, extremist "either/or" "views" in complete polar opposition -- as the only viable "views" to be considered. It's bullshit and it's doing immeasurable, perhaps irrevocable harm to us, as a nation, as a culture, as a people and as a planet.

President Bush, Karl Rove and their pack of junkyard dogs have refined this form of "dialogue" to a perverse art, subverting debate entirely by eliminating any measure of conversation, consideration or due logic. They are culpable, but hardly the sole or even key culprits -- the media, so addicted to sound and image bytes, has played a prominent role in this reductionist insanity, as have the citizenry of the US. It's a form of collective madness, really, though it's not yet been diagnosed as such -- and the mad, well, they just don't see a problem.

When your "choices" are false choices by definition -- "stay the course" or "cut and run," for instance, in the case of one ongoing sore point in the international arena -- presented with such vehemence that one is also prevented from addressing the initial actions or inactions that precipitated the untenable situation one finds oneself in, four-to-six years later (choose your case history to apply this to), rational discussion, debate or action is rendered nearly impossible.

This is, of course, a strategy as well as a symptom of collective madness, and it succeeds brilliantly all too often.

It's a false duality, though, and typical of the obscene 'black or white' think this current generation has embraced like sheep.

Over the past few weeks,

this link has been spam-emailed to me more than once, most recently from one Luke Przybylski, which claims to link to "a recent BBC production, [which] is constantly dissapearing [sic] from Youtube and Google Video, only to be uploaded once again by concerned members. See it while you can..."

I love the intro to these spammed "science" exposes: "Before we all subscribe wholesale to the secularist rapture theology we've come to know as Global Warming, I think it's important to hear from the dissenters; climatologists and other scientists who were effectively barred from the mainstream (politicized) scientific "community" after their findings diverged from the manufactured consensus presented by the UN."

There is, of course, no 'rapture' whatsoever implicit or explicit in the science of climate change research and investigation.

The affixing of that term to the sentence is in and of itself misleading, with intent: it plays to two sets of prejudices. On the one hand, it's an alert signal to those predisposed to belief, in some measure, to 'the rapture,' and thus suspicious of anything that smacks of secular science. On the other hand, it ridicules science in the eyes of those who do not subscribe to belief in 'the rapture.' Thus, the cynical adoption of the phrase "secularist rapture theology" cuts both ways, a masterstroke of manipulative agitprop of the worse (and most seductive, to many susceptible minds) kind.

First, though, let's frame the subject itself -- Global warming -- with some objectivity.

Clearly, something is going on, and on a global scale.

But the reduction of the legitimate questions associated with "What is going on?" to this false battle -- over which extreme "side" is "right" or "wrong" -- ignores the obvious.

Something, globally, is changing with the Earth's climate. What is it? What's causing it? What, if anything, can we do about it? Those are the vital, literally the life-or-death, questions.

Where ever one lives, the evidence is manifest: there were never annual wildfire seasons on the mindboggling scale we see (or experience); the winters have clearly changed in Vermont and New England in a significant, measurable way (this year was the warmest winter ever on record), and the climate changes have already yielded measurable results. It's all around us, here, and if you talk to those who have worked all their lives in the affected arenas, sometimes carrying on generations of tradition it's irrefutable that something fundamental is changing: ski seasons abbreviated to a mere six weeks; maple syrup yields down and maple trees showing limb damage, loss and degeneration; apple orchards blooming too early; etc. These are all having momentous impacts upon our home state: the life cycles, ways of life, traditional livelihoods.

Of course, the 'dissenters' habitually refer to the scientists on "their side" (most of whom are corporate-funded shills) as now besieged and ignored "experts," neglecting to note that "their side" has held sway for decades now, actively undermining any advances the 1970s environmentalist movement gained in the wake of a prior generation's most obscene excesses: Lake Erie rendered toxic, rivers that could be lit on fire, etc. The nay-sayers have had the full weight of the current Bush Administration behind their ongoing campaign to deny any climate change -- or, admitting that, any human culpability in said climate change -- for the past six years.

Reality has caught up with them. Hence, they are now besieged and ignored.

The wording of this particular piece of spam is telling. The nay-sayers are embracing tactics familiar to those of us invested in the more-than-a-century-old conflict between Darwinism and Biblical literalists. Note the now-current contextualizing, the cloaking, of global warming and the related sciences in the vocabulary of matters of faith.

This is accomplished in a heartbeat, almost invisibly to the casual reader, via the inverted logic of the phrasing, "the secularist rapture theology we've come to know as Global Warming" -- it's a cynical adoption of the Creationist/Intelligent Design tactics which deliberately plunges science into the realm of religion.

This conceit, born of and insistently refined by the Creationist and Intelligent Design corruption of science (neither is, of course, a 'science' at all), is the most insidious aspect of this spam, denying science as having any validity whatsoever by framing science, as a whole, as a matter of faith; that is, science recontextualized into the arena of religion.

This is a complete misrepresentation of the reality and function of science -- all the sciences -- by instantly relegating science, per se, from the natural world to the supernatural realm, the realm of religion, faith, and belief.

Thus, any 'science' one objects to, be it climatology or paleontology, Darwinism or ecology, geology or biology, can be handily refuted if one redefines science, or 'the' science deemed objectionable, as not being science at all, but a religion -- a matter of faith, of inherently fallible interpretation of unknowable, unquantifiable supernatural phenomenon (which, being supernatural, cannot in fact be properly defined, observed or measured), not analysis of natural phenomenon.

This is, at best, delusional projection, and at worst reprehensible misrepresentation and caricature. It is a lie, a lie built upon a lie, an abomination in terms of both science and of religion.

I always wonder what motivates such generation of falsehoods -- a knee-jerk breaking of one of the Ten Commandments, a lie -- and what the person insisting upon such inherently corrupted logic stands to gain. "Follow the money" is applicable, though "follow the faith" is the more religious (Christian) thing to do, really.

Why this refusal to grasp a measurable, quantifiable, and increasingly obvious reality? Is it just too scary?

In this case, the only human beings who could possibly benefit from an orchestrated denial of the realities of climate change are those who will profit from that denial -- corporate energy providers, corporate polluters, etc. -- and those who still buy into the corporate falsehood of "free market" as having any validity in an economic environment increasingly controlled by multinational corporations who function above the law in every arena.

This past week found one of the GOP's most insistent nay-sayers on the topic changing his tune a bit, arguing now that Global Warming "may result in the relocation of 600 thousand South Sea Islanders" but will be a boon for real estate values in the northern states -- to which one can only respond with either laughter, despair, or the pragmatic solution of working to ensure this bozo is canned in the next election cycle.

Huh. Interesting. Now that a few of the nay-sayers have to admit that, indeed, something is going on, their spin is: "how can we profit from this?" The only ones to profit, of course, being the rich. Fuck the poor. Those 600 thousands South Sea Islanders can bake if there's no money in it.

Anyhoot, Tony Millionaire responded to being on Luke's Easter weekend spamming of the link by emailing all receiving the above link and attendant bogus "science"

this link to another online video that competently refutes all the crapola being shoveled about Global Warming by its "opponents," as if one could be "opposed" to climate phenomenon (in reality, simply pretending nothing quantifiable is going on).

The naysayers will continue to refute the evidence of their own eyes, bodies and experiences until they're either dislocated, relocated, drowning, burning to death, starving, or profiteering from the new real estate boom in Wisconsin and the Dakotas.

If that's the current scraping-belly nature of "the debate," fuck it, give me what Drinky Crow's drinking!

Tony, wit that he is, also opened his email reply by saying, "First of all Luke, I'd like to thank you for adding me to the 120 people on your Cc list."

Yep, thanks, Luke! Thanks, Tony! Thanks, Drinky Crow!

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Criswell Predicts!

I predict that our Scientists will be concerned aobut a mysterious cloud appearing over the moon two years after we land there! The cloud will stay there, hiding the moon from earth view, much to the amazement of the world! Many will say it is created by living people beyond the moon to deter our new progress in space! I predict it will be Mother Nature's warning that we are going too far and to immediately stop!
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Happy Easter, One and All!