The SF Chronicle's
Mark Morford knows that you are withering under the full catastrophe of life:
I know how it is. You might say to yourself, just this month alone: "I cannot take any more, over 35,000 people dead from a massive quake in Pakistan and India and hundreds more buried alive in mudslides in Mexico and Guatemala as a result of Hurricane Stan, still more piles of dead in New Orleans and dozens (hundreds?) dying in unimaginably brutal ways every day in bombings and vicious warfare in Iraq, and that doesn't even include the everyday gunfire and the murders and the rapes and the busload of elderly people bursting into flames in Dallas, and the questions cannot help but emerge: Where to put all this bleak information? How to possibly sort through and find solace and hope? And by the way, what the hell is going on? Why so dark and violent and dour all of a sudden? What is happening to the world?"
Morford's answer, plus a word on Bush's legacy from Toledo and Today's Cartoon...
Morford's suggestion is to take in a deep dose of cosmic context, provided courtesy of the latest discovery from deep space:
It's called HUDF-JD2 (for Hubble Ultra Deep Field) and it's officially the most distant galaxy on record, meaning it was formed when the universe was but a squealing, gurgling 800 million-year-old infant, and if it's as dense and mature as some scientists believe, then it throws all galaxy-forming theories into confusion and you may take what Nigel Sharp, program officer for extragalactic astronomy and cosmology at the U.S. National Science Foundation, had to say as mantra, as gospel, as balm for your troubled spirit. It is this:
"One of the standard problems with the universe is that it's large enough that unlikely things happen pretty often."
Write it on your hand. Scribble it in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. Tattoo it onto your tongue and then lick it onto your lover's tailbone because it is perhaps the most beautiful truism you will hear all year.
Morford adds that a hot bath and a bottle of cold sake are the ideal accompaniments to comtemplating this cosmic mystery.
I'll only add that the unfathomable size of the knowable universe (including 7 x 10(22) stars--that's 10 to the 22nd power, not 10x22) and Nigel Sharp's comment are all you need to know to retort the Intelligent Design idiots in your path.
Bush's failed legacy
Retired diplomat and Toledo Blade editorial board member Dan Simpson comments on the dismal legacy developing for Bush:
The Iraq war is a failure - misconceived, falsely sold, undermanned, and now just very expensive in terms of American lives and money badly needed at home. The economy becomes increasingly a travesty of the American dream. The rich get richer, and America's big businesses look more and more like the price-fixing trusts that President Theodore Roosevelt tried to bust, literally a hundred years ago.
The price of gas and heating oil, from which Mr. Bush's friends profit mightily, soars on the backs of the rest of us. Consumer prices are rising steadily, with the promise of more to come. The increase was 0.5 percent in August, with September's 0.9 percent expected to be announced on Friday.
So take that, for starters, and chop away at Mr. Bush - his popularity, his mandate, his credibility, his ability to lead us as a country. Pile 16 tons of it on him and what do you get? Answer: a president who will still be in charge of the country until January, 2009, another 39 months.
Simpson notes that the Bush regime's response to these troubled times is to worsen matters by turning ever more to loyalist cronies (e.g., Miers) and to rely more on military and intelligence powers.
He calls for stronger real leadership, not just power maneuvers, from Bush to salvage the remaining 3+ years.
After the past six years, I'd take a few years of gridlock until we get a real President.
Today's cartoon
From Mike Luckovitch at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: