June 2010 archive

Jun 27 2010

4 Days:Not Enough

Four Days is not enough for a complete detox cycle but it is enough to smell the hydrogen sulfide when approaching the Massachusetts border.  One can also tell by the increasing insanity of lane changing idiots on the Maine Turnpike.

ho

So I am back from the isolation that is the peace of people free deep Maine woods.  Did we nuke Iran yet?  Are we closer to major economic depression yet?

I see they have not fixed the hole in the ocean.  Unemployment is spending millions trying to figure out how to throw people off benefits.

Did they ban guns yet.  Have they prevented Luke Rudowski from entering Canada for the G20 based on “intel” reports.  Are the sheeple watching the retarded World Cup yuppie games with those stupid recycled plastic horns.  Does the human race suck more or less than since I left to unwind in the peace and clean air of the magical Maine woods.

Welcome back to Mass, unemployment says money all gone.  The financial planner creep says there are plenty of 7-11 gas station attendant jobs and another 200 units of crap 40B housing are going up in a community under continuous water bans.  Still say 7 bucks a gallon by November.

Jun 27 2010

Rain falls in Imladris

The year 1998 was the year of eternal autumn for me.  Now, it feels like those days are here again.

It’s raining here.  Water world, Caladan … Global warming run amuck.  Is here the last bastion of humanfolk?  The last bastion of the free people of middle earth?

Our climate is changing.  I have lived here all my life, and I can feel it.  As the economy dredges, one hundred years to a halt, here, the Rocky Mountain High, is becoming a temperate rain forest.

And I think .. Rivendell.  The autumn leaves swirl.  From my childhood, I can smell the smoke of burning leaves.  Burning pine needles as our forests turn brown with the ravages of the pine beetle.  Burning leaves.  It’s a smell from my youth, from innocuous and unknowing people and causes, plying the results of their uncaring into the atmosphere.  But I remember it fondly, alongside the acrid diesel of the airport.  The end of days, the burning leaves, the hubris of human technological triumph.  Twinned in complex carbon compounds.

Last refuge in the dying light.  Perhaps.  Perhaps elsewhere.

Seven billion people.  And callousness.  The earth has 7 times 70 billion ants .. but they work together, in colonies, and the bones of their evaporation feeds the earth.

Rain fall.  Light grows dim.  The comfortable grab the remaining tidbits in the dregs of the hot afternoon, while clouds build and those inclined yell at them.

How will we survive the dying of the light?  Will we make greenhouses, to feed the last few?  Will we establish a bastion against the darkness?  Will we stand?

Jun 26 2010

Confronting the inner teabagger

Read the article at HuffPo yesterday, got pissed and wrote something angry, then went to work. While at work I read some comments, though, admittedly, not all of them, and realized why so many people have a beef with HuffPo. I’m not trying to throw HuffPo under the bus, writing in anger leads to this, and I wrote in anger and put too much trust into a single source. Just because you are using a BIG NAME for a source doesn’t mean that source is right, they are just as likely to misinterpret something as you are. That is human. But there is a difference between misinterpreting and deliberately misconstruing, and since our political guard is always up about deception, and since many of us are partisans, we often frame things within our own pre-made narrative. All of these things I have been guilty of, but who among us can plead innocent among such charges?

More below the fold

Jun 26 2010

G-20 Protest in Toronto

While world leaders descended upon Toronto to discuss financial reform and the global economy at the G-20 summit, protesters clashed with riot police.

Jun 26 2010

Open Future

Photobucket

Jun 26 2010

“Well, I didn’t mean CLOSE Guantanamo!”



“They bought it, Rahm!“

“I mean, I meant it when I said it. You know?”

“But… heh. That was a campaigning thing, you know? And it worked, too! Right? Right.”

“You don’t really expect me to go all bipartisany on you and do what Lindsay Graham wants me to do, do you? DO YOU? He’s a republican! WTF do you want from me?”

“Heh. Shut the fcuk up, Helen.”

“Next question?”

…………………………

NYT friday:

WASHINGTON – Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that  President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”

[snip]

 

Jun 26 2010

Rapidly Expanding Veterans Care Needs, Finally!

And many more related, long needed but ignored, other area’s as to Veterans Issues!

VA secretary visits project

Jun 26 2010

Docudharma Times Saturday June 26




Saturday’s Headlines:

Is it time to consider barring BP from federal oil leases?

How ‘Rolling Stone’ was able to bring down a general

USA

Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority

Lawmakers guide Dodd-Frank bill for Wall Street reform into homestretch

Europe

France’s National Front: Will Marine Le Pen take the reins?

Middle East

ElBaradei leads anti-torture rally

Dark days for Iraq as power crisis bites

Asia

India seeks a symbol for the rupee to underline its economic power

China rewrites history of Korean War

Africa

Playing for Africa, Ghana faces US at World Cup

For African soccer, days of juju men have mostly passed

Latin America

Mexico nabs alleged Sinaloa cartel leader

Jun 26 2010

Late Night Karaoke

OPEN THREAD

Jun 26 2010

Pirates & Freak Flags

The captain of a pirate ship had one of the rarest luxuries in the world. He flew not the flag of a nation-state, but his own. His banner against the world. Very few people in the course of history get to do this, fewer yet get it recorded by history.

Much less turned into legend.

We also live in such a time. Each citizen of this republic, at any moment, can raise their own jolly roger and speak out for their rugged individual sovereignty and set sail for the pursuit of happiness.

And that my friend is our freak flag.

Funny thing about a freak flag is you need arms to wave it high; I’d like to see a corporation do that. Them corporations do like it freaky, though.

They cannot wave a flag because corporations only exist in our collective imaginations, paper tigers crafted by the plutonomy playing Monopoly. But with no arms, or legs, or even a jaw to clinch it with, the corporations could never raise a freak flag.

That is why they have stolen Old Glory, because they have no flag of their own.

One thing we can all agree on, to be an American, you need to at least be breathing. Even mouthbreathers count. And figments of law have captured our flag, all Americans’ flag.

And We, The People, need to get our freak flags flying and  take back the Stars and Stripes off the corporation’s pirate ship before they sail off with it.

Pony Expressed from Pinche Tejano

Jun 26 2010

England Out of Afghanistan in 2015 (or 2365)

What a beautiful headline in the Guardian!

Afghanistan withdrawal before 2015, says David Cameron

David Cameron yesterday gave the first clear indication of the timing for a full withdrawal of British soldiers from Afghanistan, saying that he wanted troops home within five years.

During the election campaign, he said he wanted to see UK troops start to come home by 2015. But this was the first time as prime minister that he has indicated a timetable for withdrawal.

Obama has committed himself to a review of the US counter-insurgency strategy next year.

Okay, there’s some good news for you! The Prime Minister of England “wants” his troops out of Afghanistan before 2015…

…only 14 years after they invaded that God-forsaken wasteland.

And for any of you beyond-the-fringe leftist radicals who doubt that Barack Obama is capable of making a real commitment to anything…

How about that commitment to… review our counter-insurgency strategy next year?

Pound that into your pointy little negativism, you pin-heads!

And meanwhile, in Afghanistan…

Only nine out of Afghanistan’s 364 districts are considered safe, with the rest under some degree of security threat, Mohammad Munir Mangal, the Acting Interior Minister said on Wednesday.

Nine safe districts after almost nine years of military occupation!

At that rate it would take another 355 years to pacify the other 355 districts of Afghanistan, and David Cameron’s goal of withdrawing by 2015 would have to be pushed back to 2365!

Jun 26 2010

Random Japan

BAH HUMBUG!

A forward-thinking Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force major-general had his pay cut after trying to dig up a 4m-tall fir tree on a Shizuoka base to use as a Christmas tree.

A weekly magazine claimed the Imperial Household Agency asked administrators at Princess Aiko’s elementary school to add ADD medication to school meals to calm down “unruly” boys who were scaring the little princess. The agency denied the story, and demanded an apology and a correction.

Police in Beppu were on the lookout for a sicko who placed a plate of dog food spiked with nails in a local park. An unlucky dachshund had to have a dozen nails surgically removed from its stomach after eating the food.

The president of a cutlery company in Hyogo was busted for producing “double-edged ninja-style knives,” which are illegal in Japan.

Tadashi Nakauchi, the former owner of the Daiei Hawks ballclub and son of the founder of the Daiei group, was arrested in Saitama for dodging about ¥200 million in gift taxes. Seems he forgot to declare some ¥500 million his old man gave him before his death.

Load more