I just wanted to go on the record that what has happened in Cyprus, with the seizure of bank accounts, is a trial balloon. If the world give it a collective shrug, that a first world central bank seized money from its citizens with no due process, then it will happen again, and it could happen here even. But as of right now, it is no longer safe to hold significant assets in a bank account, and I would recommend removing significant amounts of cash from the bank asap.

Mark my words. This will happen again, perhaps before the year is out.

So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to hipsters, wiggers and goths. I’ve concluded that these groups exist on a continuum, with small overlaps in between. Let’s explore each of these groups, their overlaps, and then conclude with a Venn diagram.

Let’s start with hipsters. Deliberately ironic, mustache wearing PBR drinking cool kids, generally insufferable, and generally white. Wiggers, of course, are white kids who try to act and dress like black inner city rappers. Their overlap? Well, one ironic overlap is that the word “hipster” was the 1940′s equivalent of the word “wigger”. But the real overlap? Nerdcore of course, white hipsters rapping about things like math and dungeons and dragons. It’s a small contingent, obviously, but there they are.

Goths claim to take everything so seriously that they are depressed all the time. Wearing all black and often black and white makeup to emphasize just how depressed they are. They seem to believe that they are the only authentic voice in a world of phonies. They are, in effect, Holden Caufield in makeup. But combined with wiggers and who do they become? Juggalos, wiggers in black and white clown makeup obsessed with the Dark Carnival, a sort of purgatory.

But what happens when you cross Goths with Hipsters? I struggled with this for a while, because Goths are so deadly serious, and hipsters, well, not so much. But after a while I realized that combining the two creates the Steampunk, a guy obsessed with esoterica from a more gothic age. The Steampunk gets to dress up like a goth and act serious, but about totally frivolous things, imagining a world where everything is run by steam. It is the ultimate hipster/goth fusion.

Which of course brings us to the final combination, the so-called theoretical Steampunk-Nerdcore-Juggalo. What is this creature exactly? Does he sport a mustache? Does he homebrew? Does he rap? The one thing we can be absolutely certain of with respect to this person:

He is white.

So Daylight Savings Time has occurred again. Even earlier this year. It seems that they keep pushing it back further and further. I suppose some form of energy savings is the so-called goal. But it’s not spring yet, either according to the solar calendar or even just colloquially. It’s still cold out. Daylight Savings Time seems to take up 9 months of the year now making it the norm, and Standard Time the interlude. That was never supposed to be the case. My feeling is always been that if people want to get up earlier in the summer, then just go ahead and do it. There is no need to mess with everybody’s clock to get up earlier. But the powers that be keep pushing and pushing. Soon enough we’ll barely have a few weeks of standard time between Thanksgiving and New Years. It’s unacceptable. We need an alternative to the desire to keep pushing the envelope of Daylight Savings Time.

The answer, I think, lies in an additional Daylight Savings Time.

That’s right. We have Daylight Savings time from before the Spring Equinox until after Halloween now. But what we really need is a second daylight savings time, one in which we move the clocks forward a second hour, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Look, two daylight savings times isn’t going to be significantly better than one, but if we don’t give the daylight savings time fanatics something else to mess with, eventually, they’ll keep pushing the boundaries of daylight savings time, until they cross over in the other direction, with daylight savings time ending before it even begins. That concept is entirely intolerable.

So let’s give them another hour in the actual summer. Keep them busy with something else. What do you think?

So due to my previous status as interim pope, a number of readers and friends have contacted me to ask if I intended to become pope again, and if I had any thoughts on the resignation of Pope Benedict. Well, I finally have a few minutes to myself uninterrupted, so I thought I would address these concerns.

First of all, I am now married with children, which I believe precludes me from becoming pope of any sort, interim or otherwise. But even if I were able to become pope, there is no need for an interim pope because the current Pope will apparently reign until the new pope is selected. So the question itself is moot, unless I suppose Benedict dies suddenly.

The larger question is what to make of the resignation of the Pope. Many people have conspiracy theories, mostly revolving around blackmail about what Benedict knew about the child rape scandals that have plagued the church in recent decades. I doubt that these theories have much merit. I suspect that Benedict is old and tired as he says. But his resignation goes deeper than that. His resignation directly involves the Prophecy of St. Malachy.

I have written previously about the prophecy. Let us review:

It’s gotta be tough predicting the future, via psychic means, that is. I mean surely, the further out into the future you try predicting, the more hazy the future must become. No wonder so many prophets use coded language like quatrains to try and describe what they’re seeing. It’s because they’re not really sure what they’re seeing in the first place. It’s no different than trying to gaze over long distances, where two objects standing next to each other may appear to be one.

And so undoubtedly it was with St. Malachy, who famously prophecized about every pope from his own time until the last pope ever. The funny thing is that his list has basically run out. Going sequentially from his time forward, Pope Benedict XVI is the penultimate pope, the so-called Olive Pope.

The previous pope was “De labore Solis”, or “Of the Labour of The Sun”. This correlates to Pope John-Paul II because he was born and died on a solar eclipse. The penultimate pope is described as “De Gloria Olivae” or “glory of the olive”. This has been interpreted in a number of different ways, including that the pope would hail from an olive growing region of the world, or that he would be olive skinned or even black. None of these adequately describe the current pope, though he did place an image of a Moore on his papal crest, a piece of iconography that comes form his home town in Germany.

I went on to posit that Malachy got his final pope confused with that of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, who would, according to the prophecy, be overthrown by “Petrus Romanus”, or General David Petraeus. With Petraeus out of government entirely, it seems unlikely that he could conduct such a coup, though I suppose he could raise an army Aaron Burr style, theoretically. No, what I suspect is that Benedict, knowing the prophecy well, knew damned well that he wasn’t the Glory of the Olive, and decided to step aside to let the correct pope take his place.

Benedict’s only real connection to the prophecy is the Moor he placed on his papal crest, a weak connection at best. And his selection as pope was generally a surprise. In a Catholic Church that is now predominantly southern hemispheric, choosing an elderly German because he gave a nice funeral oratory for the previous pope hardly seems like a wise move. In fact, Benedict himself must have been surprised by it, and felt it impulsive. And after 5 years of it, at his advanced age, he could pretend no further. He was never meant to be pope, and so he called it quits.

In short, Rob Sama was never the interim pope, Benedict was.

And so I suspect that the Church will now obtain its true Glory of the Olive, a dark skinned pope from the Southern Hemisphere who will be able to address the issues most important to the majority of its congregants, whether it be Mormon and Evangelical encroachments into Latin America, or Islamic incursions into Africa. The new pope will be younger, more energetic, and attuned to the issues facing the Church in the Southern Hemisphere.

The bigger question, to my mind, is does Benedict get to participate in the new conclave, or does he sit it out?

I suppose I ought to make some predictions for the upcoming year. It’s not an election year, so I suppose the predictions won’t be about any election results (well, regular election results). But we can have some fun nevertheless. Feel free to play along at home or in the comments:

Q: What new products will Apple release?
A: Since I have already stated that they will do a watch and it has since appeared in print that they are in fact working on one, I’ll stick with that. I’ll also stick with my earlier prediction of an iPhone nano. Regarding a TV I’ll say this, if they so come out with a TV, it will be reminiscent of the new iMac, super thin with tapered edges.

Q: What will happen with the fiscal cliff?
A: We will go over it, and eventually negotiations will cease as everyone slowly realizes that this is exactly what the President wants. In other words, there will be no deal.

Q: What will happen with the debt ceiling?
A: Boehner will extend it in exchange for some token concessions or even promises of concessions some years out.

Q: How much longer does Boehner remain speaker of the house?
A: He’ll be out by Memorial Day.

Q: Who will replace Boehner as speaker of the house?
A: It will be a dark horse. Somebody unexpected.

Q: Is Hillary Clinton actually sick? What is she up to?
A: She is not sick. I think she is just done with politics, and wants out. She especially doesn’t want to answer for what happened in Bengazi, because she’s being set up to be the fall guy when she doesn’t think that what happened was her fault.

Q: Will David Gregory be prosecuted for violating Washington DC’s gun laws?
A: You’re kidding, right?

Q: Will any new gun control laws be passed at the federal level as a result of the Newtown massacre?
A: No new gun laws will pass the house, thus no new gun laws will pass.

Q: Will Scott Brown win the special election for John Kerry’s seat in Massachusetts?
A: I’m going to say no on this one. Radicals are pretty energized and they won’t let him win again. Plus Brown pissed off a lot of his base, making them less than energized.

Q: What will the price of bitcoins be at year’s end?
A: Around $30.

I guess that’s it since I can’t think of anything else. Let me know what you think. We’ll revisit this in a year as usual.

I think I did pretty well last year. Here goes:

Q: Who will be the Republican nominee for President:
A: Mitt Romney
Result: Correct, Mitt Romney was the nominee for President.

Q: Who will win the apparent Romney-Obama matchup?
A: Obama.
Result: Correct, Obama did win the matchup.

Q: What will the electoral map look like?
A: Almost identical to 2008, though Florida may flip to the Republican column. NH will also flip. I should emphasize that this is true if Romney is the nominee, as predicted above. If Romney is not the nominee, then the electoral map will be very different.
Result: More or less correct. NH and FLorida did not flip, but Indiana did.

Q: Will the Euro survive 2012?
A: Probably, though it will be very weak by year’s end.
Result: Probably incorrect. Euro does not appear to be going anywhere.

Q: Will Scott Brown win re-election?
A: No, but it will be a close election.
Result: Correct.

Q: Who will Ron Paul endorse in the general election?
A: He will not endorse either the Republican nominee nor Gary Johnson.
Result: Correct.

Q: What percentage of the vote will Gary Johnson get in 2012?
A: Around 2%. He will break 1 million votes.
Result: Johnson did break 1 million votes, but thsi was only about 1% of the vote.

Q: Will SOPA pass and be put in to law?
A: Yes.
Result: I was wrong on this one, though it’s probably only a matter of time before something like it happens.

Q: Will the next major terrorist attack be carried out by Americans against their own government?
A: Yes, though it certainly won’t happen until after the election, and not likely to happen in 2012.
Results: No major terrorist attacks yet. This prediction was made too early. But let’s wait and see what happens as Obamacare is rolled out.

Q: What price will Bitcoins be in $US at year end?
A: $50
Results: Way off, we’ll be lucky to break $15 by year end.

So there’s this link on Drudge saying that Obama is threatening to use his State of the Union Address to vilify Republicans on the fiscal cliff or some other such nonsense. Well, there’s an easy way to deal with that:

Deny him the opportunity.

The President cannot speak to the House and Senate except by way of an invitation. So far as I understand it, he can’t even step foot onto the floor of the House without an invitation. So play hardball: deny him the invitation.

Every State of the Union address from Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson was written, not delivered as a speech. Wilson, a progressive who understood theatrics, began the modern tradition of delivering the address as a speech. But there is no requirement for the address to be delivered as a speech, or for the House to let the President deliver a speech.

So turn him down. And if you really want to show him up, have Boehner deliver a speech himself instead. Of course, you’d need balls to execute such a move, and one wonders whether our teary eyed leadership has such gumption. But we can always fantasize, can’t we?

Lots of twelves.

So the campaign manager for the Mitt Romney campaign wrote a full scale apologia in the Washington Post today. Too bad that it’s premised on insane lies. I’m just going to fisk the relevant paragraph here:

I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians.

Seriously? Now that may have been true when he ran in 2008, but by 2012 he had lined up every conceivable endorsement imaginable. He had the full backing of the RNC from the get go. Remember how they kept screaming that this guy was electable? For Romney’s handlers to now claim that he was some sort of outsider to the RNC political circuit just compounds the rank dishonesty that mired the candidate and his campaign.

That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination.

No, that’s why he was being called Mr Electable by every pundit and RNC consultant that Romney’s money paid for. The claim is especially rich when the Washington Post’s own Jennifer Rubin was perhaps the single biggest Romney apologist in print. Perhaps the author believes that the Post’s readers will have forgotten her incessant whining and defense of the man with whom she was smitten.

But that was indicative not of any failing of Romney’s but of how out of touch so many were in Washington and in the professional political class. Nobody liked Romney except voters.

Except when tehy had an opportunity to vote for someone else, anyone else, sure, the voters. That’s why they lurched form one “not Romney” to another “not Romney” until they all had fallen by the wayside in scandal or due to a lack of money. But yeah, they liked him, they really liked him…

What began in a small field in New Hampshire grew into a national movement. It wasn’t our campaign, it was Romney. He bested the competition in debates, and though he was behind almost every candidate in the GOP primary at one time or the other, he won the nomination and came very close to winning the presidency.

He may have bested Obama in the debates, but that’s not saying much. It certainly can’t be said he decisively won any of the primary debates.

Romney was a rotten candidate, who convinced many libertarian minded voters that he wasn’t substantively any different than Obama, and that they thus shouldn’t vote for him or the party apparatus that demanded he be nominated. That is why so many house seats were lost to Republicans, but could have been won had the Libertarian candidate’s votes gone to the Republican. Seats like those lost by Mia Love and Richard Tsei. Romney not only lost, he had negative coattails.

There is nothing to crow about in the Romney candidacy, either with respect to the candidate or with respect to the campaign. His campaign manager should be ashamed of what he did, and certainly shouldn’t be publishing defenses of it. What we need is not an apologia, but an apology.

And so it was, yea verily, when some 5,000 years ago, or so, as there are some disputed among theologians, the Earth was born. And some seven days after the birth of the Earth, all the plants and animals had been born. Mankind was vegetarian, of course. And by mankind we mean the only two of the human species who cohabited the Earth with every animal that ever existed, dinosaurs included. They lived in Missouri. At some point, the first man and woman decided that they wanted knowledge of how the world worked, which the acquired not by observation of the world around them, nor by hunting and eating meat and growing their brains, but rather by eating from a magic tree. And upon gaining said knowledge, they noticed that their genitals were exposed, and that they enjoyed eating meat. So they set forth, and populated the Earth.

A small tribe of people, who existed at the nexus of three major continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, was made up of some 13 tribes, some of whom departed from their homeland never to return. As it turns out, those very people were the original settlers of the American continents. In their homeland they were known as the Jews. In their new land, they became the Nephites and the Lamanites. One of them was white, and they got eliminated by the dark skinned Jews, who had completely lost their way with the Lord. At some point, the last white man alive in North America (before the arrival of Columbus) wrote down the history of these lost Jews on gold tablets, ad buried them in the hills of upstate New York.

Some 128 years after Columbus became the first non-Jewish white man to set foot in the Americas, religious zealots from England landed in Massachusetts. They nearly died in their first winter, but the Jews, who the pilgrims thought were from India, helped show them how to farm the land, and thus they had a bounteous feast that year. The centerpiece of their meal was a bird that the English speaking peoples had mistakenly named believing it has originated in the Ottoman Empire. This is the bird that we typically eat this time each year.

Some 210 years after the pilgrims arrived in North America, a man named Joseph Smith discovered the tablets buried by the last white North American Jew/Indian, and he launched the only true church according to the wished of Jesus Christ, all others being an abomination. Joseph Smith himself ran for President of the United States, as sort of a theocratic candidate. He lost obviously, but not before he made a prophecy: that someday the US Constitution would be “hanging by a thread” and that it would be a member of his Church who would become president, and set things right.

Almost 200 years later, the US Supreme Court declared that the power to tax includes the power to tax not for the purpose of raising revenue to act upon its enumerated powers (as the constitution says), but rather that it can be used to compel behavior in the citizenry. The case which was being decided was over a bill designed to eventually socialize the medical care industry, such socialism being well outside the framework of the Constitution or the thinking of any of the framers.

And so it came to pass that a Mormon was running for president, just at that moment, when the constitution was hanging by a thread. But alas, something was amiss. This Mormon had himself implemented a miniature version of this form of socialism in the state in which he was governor. And when running in the primaries, he had said that he didn’t want to repeal the offensive law, but just to fix the most offensive portions of it. And after obtaining the nomination, rather than going hard against the man after whom the legislation is colloquially named, he went hard after the most strict constitutionalist in the Republican party, the Ron Paul acolytes, who were playing by the rules to gain positions in the party to prepare for an eventual Rand Paul presidential run. Got that? Going against the man who is eviscerating the constitution, use kid gloves. Going against the Ron Paul folks, go for blood. Perhaps they weren’t white and delightsome enough for him.

Eric Fehrnstrom, the Mormon candidate’s campaign manager or whatever you want to call him, was so devoted to the Mormon candidate that he was fond of saying to the rest of the staff that they should all feel privileged, thankful even, to have had the opportunity to work with such a great man.

Whatever.

So what am I thankful for this year? That we’re rid of that douchebag once and for all.