…the scenario would not end here. With the systematic reduction of Iran’s capacity to respond, an amphibious force of Marines and special-operations forces could seize key Iranian oil assets in the Gulf, the most important of which is a series of 100 offshore wells and platforms built on Iran’s continental shelf.

North and South Pars offshore fields, which represent the future of Iran’s oil and natural-gas industry, could also be seized, while Keogh Island at the far western edge of the Persian Gulf, whose terminus pumps the oil from Iran’s most mature and copiously producing fields (Away, Maroon, and Achaean, among others), could be rendered virtually useless. By the time the campaign was over, the United States military would be in a position to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch…

…[our war plan] must therefore be predicated not only on seizing the state’s oil assets but on refusing to relinquish them unless and until there is credible evidence of regime change in Tehran or—what is all but inconceivable—a major change of direction by the reigning theocracy.

Then Hewitt worshipfully interviewed this lunatic on his radio show.

Yes, that’s just the reasonable, non-partisan voice Gen. Petraeus should choose for honest questions about Iraq.

On those hot Sacramento nights, we’d take a blanket, some chicken littles and a bottle of wine and sit out there all night…

mikey

Note: If you’re a crankster of a certain age, you’ll remember chicken littles. Yummy little chicken sandwiches KFC sold for $0.29/each. We’d be so geezed up all the time it was hard to eat, so we’d buy ‘em ten at a time and just try to pack one down every couple hours…

If he’d at least brachiated through the door I could feel my drug/ghost experiences were complete. Sadly, I guess I have to do more! In a haunted cemetery! *sigh*

I suppose I should point out that a couple weeks before this happened, one of my dumbass roommates and some mutual dumbass friends had rampaged through a neighboring town’s cemetary, knocking over some headstones and breaking others (they didn’t have a shovel with them, thank Eris). If that wasn’t fucktarded enough, they kept souvenirs: pieces from various tombstones and statuary. Soooo, if one was inclined to go with the ghost hypothesis, there’s some “evidence.” Angry spirits, going through doors, booga-booga.

(Punchline is that all involved were caught and convicted. How? They were turned in by my roommate’s best friend. It turns out that one of the desecrated graves belongs to best friend’s grandma. Justice is served, I guess.)

Oddly enough, years later I did in fact spend a drug-addled night in an extremely creepy cemetery (Evergreen Cemetery in Everett, WA). I saw nothing out of the ordinary, besides the dug up bones around the makeshift pentagram no doubt made by moronic goth tweens, or the other bones just poking out of the ground, or the big spooky looking 40 foot tall pyramidal crypt. And the people making out on the top of it.

Seldom had to go down that rutted dirt path, living as I did in the land of Bear Owsley and Charley Cherry. When real chemists knew the real Lysergic Acid synthesis, and you didn’t even have to stretch to reach heaven…

mikey

Ah, shit. It wasn’t the brown acid, was it, Mikey?

I think those things should be dealt within the boardroom, not in the courtroom.
And I think that some other activities should be dealt within the bar-room, not in the courtroom, but unfortunately the barman insists on pressing charges.

mikey

It’s like Mmnffmf (some comedian whose name escapes me) once said: “I can’t bring myself to say ‘I guess I’ll mosey along now.’ It’s not that I can’t see myself moseying — I just can’t see myself guessing that I’ll mosey.”

I was like so totally “Whoa Dude, did you see that?” but of course nobody was there. I checked carefully. No MBA monkey in the back yard. Shit.

Left with no other explanation, I’ve decided it must have been a flashback…

mikey

I always felt ripped off that I didn’t get flashbacks. Acid was looking so cost-effective.

And I’ve seen a ghost. I hold no opinions on whether it was an hallucination or “real” in some sense, but I quite clearly watched a man I’d never seen walk into my house through the front door and close it behind him. When I went inside he was nowhere to be found, and hadn’t been seen by the half-dozen some people inside. Unusually for the time I was stone sober when I saw it, and it weirds me out to this very day.

I also heard mysterious footsteps from the attic in that house too, though that could be explained by the colony of rats that lived up there.

The ghost hunter people are silly persons who use lots of equipment they don’t entirely understand for uses for which it was never designed, and get all freaky about every little blip. It’s the equivalent of hearing voices in white noise. If they were ever to find anything, there would be compelling video, and the existence of ghosts would cease to be a topic of controversy.

Really, it’s also much like Right Blogistan pulling out and displaying, as a shiny bauble of truth, anything that might possibly be twisted into something that apparently seems to confirm the idea that there just me be a Global Islamofascist Conspiracy. They start with a conclusion, and then look for evidence. Ditto homeopathy, which has not only been discredited a thousand times over, but was so silly to begin with that it should never have even needed discrediting.

And Bigfoot. Like the WMDs that just gotta be there somewhere, not a single bit of decent evidence has ever been produced.

It’s important to keep an open mind, but no so open your brains fall out.