November 2009 archive

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

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The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

I know you have talent.  What sometimes is forgotten is that being practical is a talent.  I have a paucity for that sort of talent in many situations, though it turns out that I’m a pretty darn good cook.  ðŸ™‚  

Let your talent bloom.  You can share it here.  Encourage others to let it bloom inside them as well.

Won’t you share your words or art, your sounds or visions, your thoughts scientific or philosophic, the comedy or tragedy of your days, the stories of doing and making?  And be excellent to one another!

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

Get Out And Vote!

Goodness knows we have little enough control over our government and political class but if you snoot this opportunity to make your voice heard I have no respect for you at all.

You see, unlike some Admins, I’m not afraid of controversy.

Stockton

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way.

Anybody who thinks that ‘it doesn’t matter who’s President’ has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World – or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property – or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons – or locked up in a New York City Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower.

That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief.  That is when you will wish you had voted.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully.

We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.

We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us.  No redeeming social value.  Just whores.  Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.

Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?  Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands?

Who are these swine?  These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks.

They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character.

They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan.

I piss down the throats of these Nazis.  And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not.  Fuck them.

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear – fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these Abu Ghraib photographs did.  I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line.  Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.

I take no pleasure in being Right in my dark predictions about the fate of our military intervention in the heart of the Muslim world.  It is immensely depressing to me.  Nobody likes to be betting against the Home team.

The Rumsfeld-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax.  They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less.  It is genuinely incredible.  The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us.  We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me…  The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families.

Exactly.  You and me, sport – we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively.  This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be – the end of the world as we knew it.

Own it or prove me wrong you chickenshit bastards.

You Better Recommend THIS Diary

crossposted from Daily Kos

It is one of the many mysteries of this blog.  Whether you’re an innocent newbie or a battle-hardened veteran of blog wars, anyone who has written diaries lately on Daily Kos has to wonder about this

How in the world does a diary get on the Recommended List?  And, how come my brilliant diaries — well-researched, written in superb prose, with thoroughly persuasive arguments, and always timely — never make it the the list while those others with titles like “Naked Pooties Gone Wild,” “Breaking: Disco and Donna Summer Are Back,” “Alan Grayson Forgot to Brush His Teeth Today,” “I’m No Obamabot,” and “Rush Limbaugh Eats Babies” annoyingly hog the rec list?

Does anyone know the answer? puzzled Pictures, Images and Photos

This mysterious enquiry continues below the fold.

Is Rupert Murdoch Picking His Partner’s Pockets …

… or is NewsCorp just an Old Media Dinosaur that cannot keep up?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Also available in Orange

Breaking the Silicon Cage is for breaking down those barriers that prevent us from leveraging the full potential of the netroots for progressive populist action – whether that involves using the internet for collaboration on works to be delivered live on the street, or breaking down barriers between different social networks on the internet itself.

The latter is what we have here. The progressive blogosphere, if people are to believe our words (though not always our actions) is an enemy of Rupert Murdoch and his Iraq-Invasion-supporting, Conservative-Politician-electing multinational media empire. We in the US know him primarily for the Faux News Channel, but in the UK and Australia they know him for his grossly biased newspaper oligopolies.

If Progressives were indeed intent on taking power (something Cassiodorus questions), we would be eager to take any shots at Rupert Murdch’s Media Empire that we could.

Now, I’m game, and a few others have expressed their interest, but for the most part the reaction of the blogosphere is a big, “why should I become outraged by that in particular”. If the thousands of US service members and hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted – hundreds of thousands of Iraqis kills and millions of Iraqi lives disrupted – is too big a reason to grasp for being outraged at Rupert Murdoch and his media empire … then be outraged for the mother (above right) of Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, killed in action in a War of Choice that Rupert Murdoch loudly banged the drum in favor of choosing.

Overnight Caption Contest

World Series Liveblog

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end

To be stuck inside of Mobile

With the Memphis blues again.

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

Now with World and U.S. News.  52 Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Abdullah pulls out of Afghan run-off election

by Sardar Ahmad, AFP

Sun Nov 1, 7:10 pm ET

KABUL (AFP) – Challenger Abdullah Abdullah on Sunday pulled out of Afghanistan’s run-off election, plunging the country into fresh political chaos amid international pressure for the one-horse race to be scrapped.

Two-and-a-half months after Afghans went to the polls to elect a president for the second time, Abdullah’s move appeared to guarantee President Hamid Karzai a second term but flung his legitimacy into doubt.

After Karzai snubbed a series of demands promoted by his rival as a chance to avoid a repeat of massive first-round fraud, Abdullah said he saw no point in standing, but stopped short of calling for a boycott.

Apathy and Attack

I have been involved in lots of groups. In all of these groups there have been people who insist that just about whatever we are trying to get done….simply cannot be done.

Among these people there are a subset who actually get angry at the idea that we are going to do something. Some are so adamant that this thing cannot be done that they actually start to attack the people who say it can be done, who have worked hard to plan this thing, prepared for this thing, and are asking/telling (in a work venue) other people to help do this thing.

They do this…in some if not most cases….because they feel hopeless and powerless.

And asking someone to do something that they feel helpless to do or powerless to do is VERY upsetting to most people. They have been told all of theor lives that they are hopeless, powerless and in many cases, worthless. To challenge them to go beyond that conditioning is running right into a wall of belief that has been built since the earliest days of childhood.

Which brings us to politics …and blogging.

Nowhere…nowhere in our lives do we as a People feel as hopeless or as powerless as we do when we address the political realm. We have had that helplessness and powerlessness hammered into our consciousness since birth. “You can’t fight City Hall” is just one of the powerful and obvious rhetorical bludgeons used to keep people from participating…and particularly participating Loudly…in politics.

Bad education, (hell they don’t even teach civics in High School anymore) various forms of voter suppression, a comfortingly dishonest news media and a slew of cultural messages from the movies and particularly the teevee shows that make up the circus side of the ages old bread and circuses strategy of politics that USED TO allow those in power to do what they wish without the spotlight of their pesky citizens/consumers being shined upon them all have produced a feeling of apathy and hopelessness and powerlessness that is precisely what allows our political system to be indemnified from the scrutiny participation by We, The People.

We have been told repeatedly, resoundingly and continuously throughout our lives that we are powerless, and we believe it.

And so we settle into our specifically engineered little lives, going to work everyday to produce the tax revenue that allows our government to kill and torture our Brothers and Sisters, pick up some unhealthy prepackaged Corporate food product on the way home to our little ticky tacky boxes, to sit in front of the teevee and let the very Corporations that are using us as revenue generating units program our minds some more….

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Into thinking we are powerless to change their world.

Remember, Remember, The Fifth of November: An Opportunity for Leftist Activist Infiltration

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

V for Vendetta Pictures, Images and Photos

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is urging Americans to come to Washington, D.C., next week to roam the halls of Congress and lobby lawmakers against the House Democrats’ healthcare reform plan.

The strategy aims at resurrecting the momentum Republicans enjoyed during the August recess, when many critics challenged their members of Congress on healthcare reform. Since then, Democrats have regained their footing and have captured some political momentum to pass a bill.

__________

She said the plan on Thursday afternoon will be to walk through the House office buildings to look for lawmakers: “We can walk through Cannon, Longworth and Rayburn [office buildings], walk through the Capitol …”

http://thehill.com/homenews/ho…

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The Approaching Muni Bond Implosion

   New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch made a statement last week that should have gotten headlines, but didn’t.

 “I believe that the states across the United States will face deficits a year after stimulus ends of $300 billion to $500 billion a year,” Ravitch told about 200 people gathered at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “You’re going to begin to see cracks in the municipal bond market well before then, because that’s an inexorable casualty of unfundable state deficits.”

 To put this into perspective, the total state budgets for 2010 was about $1.4 Trillion. If his predictions are anywhere close to being true then the budget problems of the states are essentially unfixable.

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