Edward Snowden, Sentenced to a Lifetime of Hiding for Telling the Truth

Well, we'd hardly lob missiles into a non-enemy country ... would we?

Once upon a time, Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful garden called Paradise. The caretaker of the garden, a being called God, told them that everything in the garden was good and wonderful. They had dominion over everything in it, as long as they did not eat from a certain tree called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If they ate of the tree, God said, they would surely die.

But the fruit of the tree looked good, as everything else in the garden was, and they wondered why there should be one thing in Paradise that didn’t seem to be as good as everything else. And a serpent heard them and said, “Oh, you will not die if you eat the fruit, but you will understand good and evil, just like God.” God, it seemed, knew that there was both good and evil in the garden even though he kept saying how everything in the garden was beautiful, and kept trying to chase the serpent out of the garden, and the serpent was tired of it.

So Adam and Eve ate the fruit and lo, their eyes were opened. And they looked around the garden. And what they previously thought was all good, they now saw as corrupt. There was fruit that was poisonous, animals that killed and ate the others and maggots fed upon the remains. Yes, there was still much good, but there was equally much evil. And they were sad and ashamed, because they could no longer believe in the pristine beauty of the garden and so Paradise ceased to be. And because of this, they hated the serpent, and now whenever people see snakes, they try to kill them, whether they be venomous or not.

It doesn’t matter–it was the serpent who destroyed Paradise, they said.

I’d watch my back the rest of my life, Edward. A nation that lies about spying on its own citizens will be relentless in taking revenge upon the man who showed it. And to Nancy Pelosi and the other Democrats who think it’s OK because a Democrat is in charge–ask me again in 2016…

Disclaimer: I’ve bought things from Hong Kong and the UK during the past year (art supplies, LEDs, old records)–does that mean I’m a potential target for surveillance? Hmmmmm?

We’re back after two successful convention at AnimeNext in New Jersey and Anime MidAtlantic in Virginia. My thanks to the organizers of the events and to everyone who stopped by my artist alley table to admire (and sometimes buy) my work 🙂 And thanks to all my friends who made the events so enjoyable (too many to name!) and to all the cosplayers who had such marvelous costumes! No more conventions until August! I shall be attending Otakon in Baltimore (with art for sale in the Art Show) and will be in Artist Alley for InterventionCon in Rockville MD. See you next week!

ANNOY YOUR FRIENDS! CONFOUND YOUR ENEMIES! PRESS ONE OF THESE BUTTONS--OR ELSE!

Perhaps it was auto-erotic asphyxiation?

Arturo Gatti lies strangled as his wife, Amanda Rodrigues, tries to explain to a policeman how she did not notice he was dead for ten hours--after all, Americans didn't know the CIA was spying on them for eight years...

He always looks like this when he is drunk...

It does sound a little strange, doesn’t it? Arturo Gatti, welterweight champion, has a knock-down drag-out fight with his wife, pushing her to the floor and bruising her on the elbows and chin and then the next morning he’s got a purse strap around his neck and has turned blue. Word has it they were always fighting–in this instance about Amanda Rodrigues, Gatti’s wife, wearing clothes that were too revealing–is she the model? I can’t seem to get this straight–and other times over allegations of infidelity–probably both ways–and were, surprise, surprise, in the process of separation. A marriage not exactly made in heaven.
The police are charging Amanda with the murder–now, I can’t see how a boxing champion could manage to get strangled by his wife UNLESS he was already unconscious–and he was supposed to be very drunk that night. And the police think it’s fishy that she could be in the same house as he was and not notice that he was dead–but if she’d had this battle royale with him early in the evening, I could see her locking herself in a bedroom and not emerging till the next morning. However, the idea that someone would wander in and strangle him–with a PURSE STRAP–does make things rather interesting and makes you ask, if it wasn’t her, didn’t she HEAR something?
On the other hand–we have here the spectacle of Vice Presidential assassination squads and illegal surveillance on American citizens, which no one in Congress seems to have heard about despite the CIA saying that of COURSE they had been informed. It can be taken for granted that Cheney lied–but to be fair, Dick Cheney has demonstrated over and over again that he has no concept of objective reality, so you really can’t say he’s LYING when he doesn’t tell the truth because he’s brain-damaged–but the CIA are experts in prevarication. It would be easy for the CIA chief to report something to Congress in such a way that nobody really knows what he’s talking about. “Oh, we’ve also instituted surveillance on a number of terror suspects in the United States,” buried in a laundry list of actions of such mind-numbing detail that no one thinks to ask–what KIND of terror suspects? On the other hand, Congress had been reduced to a rubber stamp organization from Sept. 12, 2001 until January 1, 2007. This wasn’t simply because of the party of the Administration holding majorities in both houses, it was because the Democrats were at first as gung-ho as the President about kicking Islamic butt, whether it was the right butt or not, and later on, were cowed by their own acquiesence and scared by the apparent popularity of the President and his Iraq war. Only after Bush demonstrated how totally out of his depth he was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina did the Democrats acquire enough backbone to stand up to him–once in a while. Hell, Obama still doesn’t think that the alleged illegalities and abuses of power by Bush, Cheney & Co. should be investigated because the rules of the game say that you don’t go after the previous administration. I mean, it’s poor sportsmanship to complain about someone cheating after the game, even if you have videotape that shows they were offsides on every other play, right?
But we’re not talking about a football game here, are we? Ler’s hope Attorney General Holder has the backbone to at least appoint the special prosecutor he’s thinking about…

ANNOY YOUR FRIENDS! CONFOUND YOUR ENEMIES! PRESS ONE OF THESE BUTTONS--OR ELSE!