We filed last week. I am glad you weren't referring to my gentle reproof of Rapaire, to which by now, I am sure, he has grown well accustomed, not to say immune by reason of induced mini-responses of the psychic immune system over time.

Which thread? Politics? I am aghast at the density, logical failure, bitterness and despondenmcy of some of the "very best pessimists" on some of these threads. The substitution of a sort of jaded maundering for analysis, the defaulting to snarling innuendo and implied threat instead of clear dialogue--these things are soooo depressing.

I am reminded of an interesting book I read recently called "Influence", a study of some of the trigger-response mechanisms which veteran sales people and other persuaders and manipulators learn to use in order to gain compliance from customers, or voters, or whatever.

In this well-researched book a series of vignettes was reported of instances where people had threatened, struck, assaulted, cursed and otherwise maligned weathermen from television stations.

The reason? Bad weather. An old lady slapped a weatherman with her umbrella blaming him for the rain. One man wrote a weatherman and told him "If it snows on Christmas, you'll be dead by January". A farmer (drunk at the time) nearly decked a weatherman because his house had been hit by a tornado. The poor sods get hate mail of the wildest variety, all predicated on the proposition that since the weatherman describes the predicted weather, he must be responsible for the actual weather, by the law of associative magick.

This is the same law that says since Obama's middle name is a reflection of ancestral Muslim heritage, it follows by association that he, himself, must be not only a Muslim buit a terrorist! Well, of course. It's quite obvious, isn't it?

God save us from morons of this kind. I mean, we all do the associative-thought linkage dance in some small degree, but these people are doing it naked on the table tops, and it isn't pretty.


A