Cuba Libre, Free Cuba, has a fine ring to it, and Obama has just freed the Castro brothers from sanctions that were on the verge of toppling the murderous pair, thereby making certain there would be no Cuba Libre to disturb the sleep of his pals Raoul and Fidel. Or maybe Obama just likes his rum and coke.

For fifty years or more
The Castros sure were sore
The US treated them like Commie swine
But then Obama came
And overturned the game
By buying into Raoul and Fidel’s line
And to negotiate
He sent his current date
A team that had no business in the bigs
They signed it all away
On a table by the bay
You know, the one they call the Bay of Pigs

I believe the North Korean attack on Sony has deeper roots than a perceived insult to Dear Leader. Sony is a Japanese company, and the Koreans, north and south, fiercely hate the Japanese and everything Japanese. And with good reason. Remember that Japan ruled the Korean peninsula for a good many years, and not gently either. The Japanese treated the Koreans as less than human, with the men sent to slave labor camps and the young women sent to Japanese Army brothels. It is my understanding the decision not to release the movie was made in Tokyo, and may very well have been the Japanese version of White guilt syndrome. Not that any of this relieves Obama from his obligations to protect and defend the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic, which now seems a conflicted obligation since it is Obama who is the domestic enemy. And yes, we live in interesting times.

Yes some wars are often phony
As is this one now with Sony
With North Korea saying now it’s clean
With Obama on vacation
Sony’s movies on location
Have to stop and wonder what it all can mean
What it means is that the Other
Now positioned as Big Brother
Has determined that Obama will not fight
And the enemies befriended
And the allies he’s offended
See the world go dark as Hussein dims the light

Christmas Day arrives with all the shopping done, the tree trimmed and presents gaily wrapped. There is dinner and wine and laughter and good talk. But we must not forget just whose Day this is.

The days crept by, as well the nights
And now the day is here
The Christmas tree bedecked with lights
Gave happy Christmas cheer
And yet let’s take a moment’s pause
To think to whom we pray
It isn’t jolly Santa Claus
We celebrate today
The Christ child in the manger born
A bright star overhead
We celebrate that soft, still morn
With sacred wine and bread
This morning all the church bells rang
In joyous Christmas glow
For Christ was born while angels sang
Two thousand years ago

There are those who live in the world as it is, in the world as they find it, and there are those who live in the world as they would wish it to be. Often, those who live in the world of the mind do so not by choice but by circumstance.

There are those who live in castles
There are those who live in hovels
There are those who live in daydreams
There are those who live in novels
As for me my life is centered
On the outskirts of my vision
Where a world of light and beauty
Comes to life with sharp precision
Where each varied leaf fair glistens
In the sunlight as the rains pass
And the ear of God still listens
To the swishing sound of plains grass
As the breeze ruffles the green tops
Showing undersides of gleaming
Molten silver in the ceaseless
Motion of my endless dreaming

Murderous Muslims have stormed a school in Pakistan and killed over one hundred and sixty people, most of them children between the ages of eight and twelve. Just another example of the murderous mentality of Islam. Fourteen hundred years is a long time to be at war with a religion that is determined to kill us all. The adherents of the religion of peace see the current seeming weakness of the West as an opportunity to do what they had failed to do at Vienna and Lepanto, and when they acquire nuclear weapons they will use them on us without a moment’s hesitation. It is time to be unabashedly bloody minded.

It is time to build the pyre
It is time to get it done
It is time to light the fire
Of the all consuming sun
Time to burn out the infection
Tear their hearts out with our hands
No debate and no reflection
Kill them as their god demands
Let the flames grow ever higher
Finish off what they’ve begun
It is time to light the fire
Of the all consuming sun

Many physicists today believe there is more than one universe, that in fact we should not think of it as the universe but as the multiverse. The multiverse does not exist. We are one infinitely tiny part of the infinitiverse. There are, in our own universe, billions of galaxies, each with a black hole at its center. Each of those billions of black holes contains a universe similar to ours, each with billions of galaxies, each galaxy with a black hole at its center, each black hole…and so on. There are, therefore, an infinite number of galactic center black holes, each with an infinite number of galaxies, a concept I examined in my sci fi novel Almost Paradise, and sadly, in the end I didn’t know if my characters were alive or dead, and equally sadly, neither did they. On the other hand, since I typically post a verse only once on any given day I suppose that makes me a uni versal poster, though there is an occasional multi verse.

When looking into deepest space
For just a sign, a friendly face
To tell us we are not alone
That E. T. has someone to phone
But what if what we see out there
Is but a part of what we share
With all who live in one black hole
Contained in baby’s porridge bowl
Where all the stars we see alight
Are torches marching home at night
From hours working in the mines
While searching grumpily for signs
A universe exceeding strange
Where passing Go induces change
And black holes beckon so intense
Upon horizons with events
And thinking so I fall asleep
And pray the Lord my soul to keep

Maybe one day rural Siberia will look like Beverly Hills. – Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club, in an essay on the probability of our current world turning upside down.

I spoke to a young lady the other day and asked why it was so cold in Beverly Hills. She thought for a moment and then said:

“It’s all because of all this talk
Of galaxies and such
And guys who like to walk the walk
But don’t do very much
Where universes come in threes
And things are upside down
And that is why we have a freeze
In this my old home town
Siberia is rich and warm
With their Rodina Drive
While I now live in an old dorm
And barely keep alive
I tell you bro it isn’t fair
The good life it has flown
Siberia is now the there
And if I’d only known
That things would flip on us so fast
That they’d be warm, me cold
With every breeze a wintry blast
And icy fingers hold
Me in its grip till I turn blue
It’s all George Bush’s fault
They say there’s nothing we can do
It’s just that damn gestalt!”
She walked away, wrapped in her furs
Of warm Siberian mink
A stranger in a world not hers
By gosh, it makes you think

Those in Washington who think nuking up Australia and Japan will solve all the problems in the Western Pacific are delusional. In WW2 Japanese destroyers had names like Phosphorescent Foam and Mist Of Flowers. If they do build a Boomer they’ll probably call it Soothing Whispers or something. As for Australia, the Aussies proved themselves fierce fighters, but there’s just too few of them. We can only hope if things blow up they will blow after noon on 20 January 2017. But if the Chinese move they will not move on Australia or Japan. The Chinese military knows there are no roads to Australia, they will have to go by sea if they decide to go, and so they have wisely decided to head north and west instead, for in that direction lies the oil of Russia and the Middle East.

There are no roads
To the antipodes
You cannot drive to Oz
A swell place I hear
With its dinkum beer
And the sheilas wear no bras
In the northern isles
There are no smiles
From Honshu south and north
The IJN
Will not again
Rise up and sally forth
The Chinese smirk
And get to work
The Gulf oil they will have
While in the West
Our very best
Speak only soothing salve

The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, no thanks to Obama and the whacko environmentalists who tried to stop it. Nevertheless, fracking shale has turned the world upside down, with Russia and Saudi Arabia wondering what happened to them on their way to destroying the United States by bankrupting us with two hundred dollar a barrel oil. I spoke to an environmentalist recently and she stopped driving spikes in trees long enough to give me a withering look.

“You think you’re winning now,” she sneered
“Your fracking and your shale
But you can stuff this in your beard
Your horrid plans will fail
You want to level every tree
Despoil each waterway
But this green world will not be free
Until that wondrous day
That greens like me will truly rule
And you will be in jail
We’ll shut down every mining school
And dig up all the shale
And oil rigs will be all aflame
And nuke plants all destroyed
We’ll round up everyone to blame
And give the unemployed
The job of seeing all of you
Be strung up by the neck
My child will have but nature’s view
From my new redwood deck”
I left her to her furied sneer
Without a backward glance
But in the distance I could hear
Her gentle green earth dance

The talk now is about mining the asteroid belt, with the mineral value of even a small asteroid calculated in the billions of dollars. The plan is to capture an asteroid, move it out of its orbit, and steer it toward Earth, where it will somehow be safely landed or maybe mined in low Earth orbit. If all goes well, if everything goes perfectly, there will be no danger. But nothing is ever perfect. Accidents will always happen. Might a runaway asteroid of the proper mass and velocity do to us what one of them did to the dinosaurs and ninety-five percent of all life on Earth some sixty-five million years ago?

A dinosaur stood idly in the rain
As in the distance rose a brilliant flare
At breathless speed it bore down on the plain
Passed overhead as forests were stripped bare
The tremor as it struck caused fluid rock
To burst to fire as the pluming dust
Began its circling, turning on the clock
That killed most of the life on this world’s crust
We know that accidents will surely come
The early trains and the steamboats come to mind
A death or two is a small price to some
But asteroids can sometimes be unkind
The dinosaurs knew not that they would die
But we would know beforehand what’s in store
As telescopes tracked death across the sky
And most of life on Earth will be no more