Hmmm. Now my website seems to be behaving like normal.

Well, business as usual until the time comes to migrate, I suppose. For now, anyhow. Perhaps when I habe a little more time, I will migrate anyhow and leave this website be as a ghost of what was.

I swear, sometimes it feels like the Universe conspires to rob me of dramatic effect. I make a big dramatic announcement yesterday, and now it is back to normal, nothing to see here, move along. Every time I leave a comment somewhere or otherwise write something and think “Well, that is sure to get me in trouble!”, people just plain do not respond.

It is that kind of thing that makes my inner lunatic want to do something really fucking crazy that nobody could ignore, just to get a little freaking validation.

You know, do something like take a walk through Richmond stark naked and see how far I get before I am arrested. Surely a naked fat guy walking down the street all casual, like this was perfectly normal, would attract some sort of attention.

Thought I must admit, even in my imagination, I see the distinct possibility of my walking as far as I can walk, and back, without getting even so much as a mild gasp of scandalized astonishmnet, and ending up just going home, dispirited and defeated, and putting some damned clothes on.

I realize that is not logical or likely, but the image still haunts me.

I mean, what does a fella have to do to decloak around here? Maybe that would be a good name for a blog about my struggles with depression and whatnot : Struggling To Decloak.

Of course, that could also be the name of a one man play starring George Takei.

But I better make some sort of point before I start to ramble. Hey, remember the Nash Rambler? Me neither, because I am not that freaking old, but apparently they looked like this :

It just screams burgers and malteds at the drive-in, doesn’t it?

You can click that bad boy for a bigger pic. Imagine, back then, there were like a dozen American auto makers and the idea that any American who was not super rich would ever buy a car from another country was completely laughable and downright insane.

And speaking of laughable insanity, let’s talk Republican shenanigans.

The Texas Republican Party has finally come right out and said it : Republicans are against critical thinking and higher thinking skills.

Specifically, they do not want them taught to children, as explained in this bullet point :

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Nice of them to come right out and say they are against higher order thinking skills. I have been saying that this is the root of conservatism for a long time but I hardly expected them to come right out and say “me no like thinky, thinky make Og brain hurt and make Og scared and confused. NO MORE THINKY OR OG BASH!”

Now, to be fair, after massive ridicule rained down on these prims via the Internet, the poor schmuck with the job of Texas GOP Communications director claimed that the inclusion of that clause was a “mistake” but that they could not go back and fix it now because they would have to basically hold another Texas GOP convention to do so.

So hilariously, they are stuck with it. They officially oppose the teaching of higher order thinking skills. Primitive thinking skills are all you need to be a conservative, apparently, and that whole higher order thinking part of the brain is therefore suspect and liable to just be a liberal trick invented solely to destroy faith in the family and in Jeebus.

But if that is not enough proof that Republicans suffer from a major reality issue, how about this story about how a recent poll shows that 15 percent of Ohio Republicans think that most of the credit for the Seal Team Six raid that killed Osama Bin Laden goes to….

C’mon, guess. Nope, not Seal Team Six. Not whichever of that team actually fired the bullet. And you know they are cognitively incapable of giving Barack Obama credit for anything.

Nope, according to this select elite, most of the credit for killing Osama Bin Laden goes to… maestro can we get a drum rool, please… the credit goes to… MITT ROMNEY!

What an exquisite case study in the complete and utter failure to think, even a little bit. They saw “credit” and “killing Bin Laden” and the only possible answer that could form in their tiny tiny reptile minds was it could have only been their current Leader Daddy Alpha figure.

Anything else, to them, would probably be literally unthinkable. After all, it would likely involve some of those forbidden higher order thinking skills that they hate so much.

It is not for us to question the Lawgiver!

It does not matter to them that this answer, that Mitty Romney is responsible for the death of Osama Bin Laden, makes absolutely no sense and flies in the face of even the current very flimsy sense of reality the Republicans permits.

It does not matter that, back in what the rest of us call reality, Mitt Romney not only had absolutely nothing to do with the death of Bin Laden but is actually on record as saying we should not “move Heaven and Earth” to get the guy in the first place.

You know, in that weird way that Republicans, en masse, totally forgot about the guy who killed thousands of Americans on American soil when the war in Iraq first got the push.

No, what matters to these people who decide what the truth is and only then go on to judge the facts by what they already know to be true, and therefore any so-called facts which disagree with what they already know to be true can only be filthy, filthy lies…

All that matters is that the answer is acceptable to their emotions.

Congruity with reality in comparison to their desire to never, ever have to think about things.

And that is conservatism in a nutshell.