Iran's route to the sea

Indecision Forever

Honestly, I have to laugh at these Obama's Anger Translator videos by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. I'm hard-pressed to keep from posting all of them, they're so funny.

In fact, I don't know that this one is any funnier than the rest - as I say, they're all just hilarious - but I had to post it because of that map scene.

In the last presidential debate, Mitt Romney declared that Syria was "Iran's route to the sea." (And that wasn't just a slip of the tongue, either. Romney has apparently repeated that gaffe six times this past year.)

In reality, of course, Iran already sits on the sea. It has a very long coastline already. Plus, it doesn't even border Syria! I realize that Americans don't know geography - and don't care about any other countries, anyway - but do we really want a president who's that ignorant?

Why hasn't Romney been laughed off the political stage by now? I just don't get it. How could this election even be close?

Well, I've been wanting an excuse to post this cartoon, anyway:

(Deep Cover)

This isn't just Mitt Romney's foreign policy, but every policy: just ignore everything he's ever said and replace it with whatever you want him to think.

Still, it was particularly ridiculous in that foreign policy debate, because Republicans have been complaining for three and a half years that Barack Obama can't do anything right. They've been especially hysterical about Obama's foreign policy, alternately because he's "appeasing" the terrorists or because he keeps flaunting his success in killing so many of them, including Osama bin Laden. (Remember him? He was the guy who actually attacked us, unlike Saddam Hussein, who was just unfortunate enough to rule over a country with a lot of oil.)

But in this debate, Mitt Romney suddenly became Obama's biggest supporter. Yeah, he'd do everything Barack Obama has done. He's just like Obama, only even better. He'll out-Obama Obama, apparently.

Say what???

(Mike Luckovich)

But see, Mitt Romney's handlers told him that he must appear "presidential." He must seem to be "plausible" as a president. So Romney shook that Etch A Sketch and pretended to be Barack Obama. After all, you can't get more plausible than someone who already is the president of the United States, right?

The fact that this contradicted everything Mitt Romney has been saying, everything the Republican Party has been saying, previously... well, you really haven't been paying attention if you think that mattered in the slightest.

Sadly, half of our country hasn't been paying any attention, and won't. So lies work. So changing positions to suit your audience works. So pretending to be whatever voters seem to want at the moment works.

Certainly, the mainstream media won't call him on this, not really. Who cares about the facts? Who really cares what the fact-checkers say? And, of course, Fox 'News' will back him up, no matter what he says.

It's lucky that we have America's comedians, because we don't seem to have anyone else willing to point out these things.

(Jim Morin)

The Lost World

(Travellerspoint)

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World is still a great read 100 years after it was first published. There's a lot of humor in it, and it really holds up very well.

You might be more familiar with the various movie and television treatments of it, but the basic idea behind the story is pretty well known: Professor Challenger finds living dinosaurs on a high plateau in the heart of the Amazon jungle.

Anyway, until today, I guess I never realized that the story's setting was real. Oh, not the dinosaurs (unless you include their little feathered descendents). But those high plateaus really exist.

From the New York Times:

Looming over the northern edge of the Amazon rain forest are some of the most remarkable mountains on earth. Known as tepuis, or tabletop mountains, they are typically ringed by sheer cliffs that rise thousands of feet from the surrounding lowland jungles. Instead of peaks, tepuis have enormous flat expanses at their tops. To reach the tops of many tepuis, the only choices are scaling the cliffs or flying in a helicopter.

For all their isolation, the tops of tepuis are not barren. They are like islands in the sky, covered with low forests and shrublands that support a diversity of animals likes frogs and lizards. Many of the species that live on top of the tepuis are found nowhere else on the planet. ...

Tepuis owe their fame in good measure to “The Lost World,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, in which he drew from accounts of early explorers to imagine an isolated ecosystem on top of a tepui where dinosaurs and pterosaurs still lived. Tepuis have also figured in Hollywood movies, from the 1925 dramatization of “The Lost World” to the 2009 animated film “Up.”

I just thought this was neat. Why did I never realize these were real? I guess I just assumed it was all fiction, instead of just part of it.

I'm sure you already knew this, but somehow, I'd missed it. Well, you learn something new every day, huh? :)

(James Bowie)