Are you like me? Do you, every once in a while, pause, take a breath and ask yourself silently (or out loud if particularly frustrated): what in the hell is happening to the world?

I’m in one of those moods at this specific moment. I wonder where we’re going as a nation, as a people, as a planet. So little seems to be familiar to me now. Change is rampant, ongoing, incontrovertible. That’s a given. But so little seems to make sense now. I try to deal with it, mentally, as best I can. But every once in a while, like now, I feel like screaming: that’s it! Enough! My head is full! That’s all I can take!

Consider the following from today’s internet headlines:

A visiting professor at North Carolina State University says the solution to the problems faced by many blacks is the extermination of “white people off the face of the planet.”

Kamau Kambon, who taught Africana Studies at the Raleigh school last spring, told a panel at Howard University Law School Oct. 14 this action must be taken “because white people want to kill us,” the Carolina Journal reported.

Kambon, a Raleigh activist and bookstore owner, was addressing a panel on “Hurricane Katrina Media Coverage,” broadcast on C-SPAN.

Of course we all know you can’t be black and a racist at the same time. Or:

A Palestinian from the village of Dir-Nizam west of Ramallah was killed by IDF gunfire late Saturday.

IDF sources said that soldiers spotted two Palestinians as they placed a suspicious looking bag near the settlement of Neveh Tzuf (Halamish) and fired at them.

The second man was detained and in his interrogation he revealed that the bag contained a dummy bomb, but an inspection of it uncovered rocks.

Earlier, soldiers from the Haruv battalion staging a routine arrest of wanted Palestinian fugitives nabbed 10 kilograms of explosives in a West Bank village and then made a dramatic discovery.

“The wife of the one of the fugitives held her baby with two hands and held a bag with a hand grenade underneath its shirt to hide it from the soldiers,” said Lt.-Col. Arik Chen, commander of the battalion.

Okay, fine; the old “live baby hides the hand grenades” trick. Or:

New York City’s top disaster planner and fire department chief isn’t planning for another 9-11. He’s preparing for something far worse – nukes.

Chief Joseph Pfiefer, speaking to a panel of security experts this week, said a terror attack employing crude nuclear weapons or dirty bombs is a scenario the Fire Department of New York is currently training to address.

“It’s the training we do that’ll make the difference between who gets saved and who doesn’t get saved,” Pfeifer said.

Right. I look forward to nuclear devastation. Or this:

Edinburgh University in Scotland will begin banning Holy Bibles from its student halls of residence due to concern they are the source of discrimination against students of other faiths. The ban was a response to student association protests as well as an agenda to equally support all faiths, a university spokesman told the Times of London.

Or how about:

China will close its borders if it finds a single case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu there, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Saturday, while a defiant Taiwan said it would copy a patented antiviral drug.

Is it wrong that I desire “simple” in my life? Or am I just so damned far out of touch that I should be lined up against a wall and shot? At this precise moment in time, I feel so very, very out of control. Helpless. Mired. You ever feel that way? Surrounded? Overwhelmed? Tell me.

Coonie and cat.

Okay, so after the sun went down I filled a small metal bowl with cat food, because I wanted to see my Coonie buddies and the local cat people.

They didn’t disappoint.

The fattest local coonie made his initial appearance and, though the side door was opened to take this photo, he kept on eating and stuffing the food down his gullet with little hands. I must admit, it’s fascinating to watch raccoons eat with their hands like humans.

I have my own little kitten now; she’ll be an indoor kitty for the most part, because I’ve lost a few treasured cats to the regional predators in these mountains. I’m sure some of them were nothing more than appetizers to local coyotes; perhaps even bears, bobcats and cougars.

Goodbye to Ziggy, Max and perhaps even to Burbank. You were wonderful little animals and, moreso to Ziggy, helped to keep me sane during a succession of trying years.

But not quite making it. Witnesseth:

If Al Franken speaks on the radio, and no one is tuned in to hear him, does he make a sound? And what would it be? — the sound of money and coke flushed down a toilet? Getting a little jowly these days, Al? Age catching up with the disappointment, sir?

That could be the question being asked these days in the nation’s capital, where Franken’s liberal network, Air America, has no measurable audience according to the Arbitron rating service.

It only gets better:

The Washington Post reports the dismal ratings are in for the summer seasonal ARB “book”:

Air America, the liberal talk network carried on WWRC-AM (1260), went from bad to nonexistent. After WWRC recorded a mere fraction of a rating point in the spring with syndicated shows from the likes of lefty talkers Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Stephanie Miller, Arbitron couldn’t detect a measurable listenership for the station this time around. Notes Chris Field of the conservative publication Human Events, “Static would fare about as well.”

And static most definitely describes Air America.

Whilst perusing the internet once again, sifting through the legion of “1s” and “0s”, I found the following article from the Wall Street Journal — occasionally a bastion of right-thinking editorial philosophies. In this piece, Robert Bork (he of the “Borked” origin) writes about the nomination by President Bush of Harriet E. Miers to the US Supreme Court.

Now, consider that many persons on the right side of the aisle have taken Mr. Bush to task for this nomination — most prominently the National Review and the Weekly Standard — both right wing bastions; and myself as well (see my Tuesday, 10-18-05 post). In retrospect, I have nothing on Mr. Bork when he writes, in his very first paragraph from the article:

With a single stroke–the nomination of Harriet Miers–the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That’s not a bad day’s work–for liberals.

Eeee-yow! Not bad — if you’re Vlad the Impaler. Instead of pulling the pike through the wound, Bork may as well pull it back out the way it came:

There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association’s journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no “ability to write clearly and argue incisively.”

Holy crap. As a child I used to salt snails and take a magnifying glass to slugs — but I outgrew that. Bork continues:

By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” admonition to would-be judges. It is a blow in particular to the Federalist Society, most of whose members endorse originalism. The society, unlike the ACLU, takes no public positions, engages in no litigation, and includes people of differing views in its programs. It performs the invaluable function of making law students, in the heavily left-leaning schools, aware that there are respectable perspectives on law other than liberal activism. Yet the society has been defamed in McCarthyite fashion by liberals; and it appears to have been important to the White House that neither the new chief justice nor Ms. Miers had much to do with the Federalists.

In many ways President Bush is like most conservatives; in some very unsettling ways he is like many Democrats. I fear that some of his recent conciliatory moves (new immigration reform emphasis) are too little, too late — and is posturing at best. When he stands to place more Border Patrol agents on our southern lines (and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, GA can only kick out 1,500 per year), he leaves totally unaddressed the issue of federal court judges sufficient to hear the number of immigration cases that would come before that bench. As one Border Patrol agent said: “We can make all the arrests we want; they’ll just get kicked because we can’t hear them and handle them.”

Heavy sigh.

FRESNO, Calif. – A glacier-encased body believed to be a World War II airman who crashed into the Sierra Nevada in 1942 was flown off the mountain and into a Fresno laboratory for identification, the county’s deputy coroner said Thursday.

Blustery conditions kept rangers at Kings Canyon National Park from reaching the frozen remains for two days after two ice climbers reported last weekend they had seen a man’s head, shoulder and arm protruding from the thick ice. About 80 percent of the body was buried in the glacier on the side of the 13,710-foot Mount Mendel.

The remote wilderness area can only be reached by hiking two or three days, or by helicopter when the weather allows, rangers said.

Six park rangers and a military forensics expert started chipping away at the ice on Wednesday, freeing the body after about six hours of meticulous work, said ranger Alexandra Picavet.

“The body barely got out before dark hit,” said Picavet, explaining the experts were able to free the body faster than she expected. “The ice initially wasn’t bad to dig through, but then as they got deeper it became more difficult.”

The crew had to be careful not to damage the remains, and that made the work slow because they didn’t know how the body was positioned, Picavet said.

The remains were then flown to the Fresno County Coroner’s department.

Deputy Coroner Robert Glasbie said local experts are planning to work with officials from the Joint Prisoner of War Accounting Command, which recovers and identifies missing military personnel. The team will include a forensic anthropologist and a pathologist, who will determine the body’s state, Glasbie said.

Park officials summoned the military agency because the man was still wearing a parachute with the word “Army” stenciled onto it. They believe the serviceman may be part of the crew of an AT-7 navigational training plane that crashed on the mountain on Nov. 18, 1942. Several military planes crashed among the craggy peaks in the 1930s and 1940s, and many are still missing.

The wreckage was initially spotted by a climber in 1947. It’s impossible to tell if this body is really connected to that expedition until experts go through the identification process, which will include a thorough examination of the clothing and a search for any documents that may have survived the decades, and may include dental records, X-rays or DNA testing, experts said.

Experts said the body was probably not seen for decades because the desolate landscape doesn’t attract many casual visitors, through it is popular with ice climbers. The finding surprised Michael Nozel, one of the climbers who first located the body on Sunday.

“It was quite a windy day and I could see the fluttering of the parachute and that was the first thing that kind of caught my eye,” Nozel told KFSN, a local ABC television affiliate. “As I got closer, I started to think, gosh, that doesn’t look like a rock sticking out of the glacier. And I thought at first … no, even though it does look like a body, I don’t think that’s what it is. And then of course, as I got closer, I thought, my goodness I think that is a body.”

Military officials said there are 88,000 Americans still missing from past wars, most of them, 78,000, from World War II. Only about 35,000 are deemed recoverable.

Officials with JPAC said they have located and identified remains found in glaciers before. The last one was a Cold War-era serviceman found in Greenland.

Bob Mann, the deputy scientific director with the command’s Central Identification Laboratory, said sometimes remains found in glaciers are reasonably well preserved. Often even soft tissue like skin can keep well in icy conditions.

Glaciers are living things, Mann said, slowly melting around the edges and grinding over rock as they move, and sometimes leaving behind long-hidden secrets like this one.

The agency processes hundreds of cases a year, and has an average of two identifications a week, said spokeswoman Rumi Nielson-Green.

“To those families, those are the ones that count,” she said.

My father, who is 85, recently told me of an airman who crashed into a mountain during training in World War II.

I wonder. . .I think I’ll give my dad a call.