March 26, 2011 archive

from firefly-dreaming 26.3.11

Essays Featured Saturday the 26th of March~

Late Night Karaoke has the spotlight on Pink Floyd, mishima DJs

Six Brilliant Articles! from Six Different Places!! on Six Different Topics!!!

                Six Days a Week!!!    at Six in the Morning!!!!

Alma talks about Librarians in Saturday Open Thoughts

an update on The Dream Antilles from davidseth

Gha!

A reminder to conserve from our newest member ALifeLessFrightening  It all comes out in the wash.

The most recent Popular Culture  from Translator, The Who Sings My Generation

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these articles-

Special live blogging of the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournament-

The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – “I Have Here in My Hand a List of…”

Note: I kept getting errors about text being corrupted while trying to post the complete diary.  This is only half the diary.  There are many more sections and editorial cartoons in this diary that I posted over at Daily Kos.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette



Peter King – Ghost of Hearings Past by Taylor Jones, Politicalcartoons.com, Buy this cartoon

The Curious Libya ‘opposition’

Who exactly are these rebels we’re supporting?

A short quote from a very exhaustive annotated article:

The so-called Libyan opposition itself is a hodge-podge mix of political opportunists, ex-CIA-trained Mujahideen guerillas such as Abdel Hakim al-Hasidi of the so-called Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who openly admits to close ties to al-Qaeda going back to Afghanistan.12 That certainly raises the level of incredibility of Washington’s most bizarre military crusade of recent times.

As well, the opposition includes former senior Gaddafi regime members who saw greener grass on the US, British and French-backed opposition side, and outright cutthroats who, encouraged by Washington, London or Paris smelled the chance to grab control of one of the richest lands on Earth.

Their “opposition,” unlike in Tunisia or elsewhere, was never “non-violent.” It was an armed revolt from the git-go, a war of tribe against tribe, not of surging aspirations for democracy. NATO member countries are being told by Washington to back one band of tyrants to oust another whose agenda does not comply with what the Pentagon calls Full Spectrum Dominance.

Can you eat gold?

You can take all the gold in the world and put it in two Olympic swimming pools.

There is not an economy on the planet that ties its economy to gold. Not one. You haven’t been able to turn a note in to gold in decades. It is a medieval view of the modern world. Steve, do you use a calculator or an abacus?

Olympic swimming pools are 8 lanes wide and 50 yards long.

(h/t John Amato @ Crooks and Liars)

This Week In The Dream Antilles

Nothing like Internet interruption to get the priorities re-oriented.  Nothing like the Mac announcing that it’s “looking for networks” and the persistent message from Vonage that things are not well in VOIP land.  Friday brought high winds.  First, phones out.  An otherworldly, beeping, static laden dial tone.  And then, when the phones mysteriously returned all on their own, no Internet.  Red lights on the modem.  Whirling beach ball email symbols.

According to the consoling voice at the so-called “Internet Help Center,” they are very sorry, very sorry indeed, but your bloguero might be disconnected until, wait for it, Monday or Tuesday.  This news raises the specter of no Port Writers’ Alliance digest this week, or writing it on the crusty Blackberry, or scouting out a local Internet hotspot.  It also raises the fear of no Netflix on demand.  It only occurs to your bloguero after he realizes that no Internet might mean he has a legitimate excuse for no Digest this week and that maybe he will finish reading the first book of Eduardo Galeano’s masterful trilogy, that he first wonders how he will be able to do any work this weekend.  Exactly how good an excuse, your bloguero wonders, is no Internet?

These fertile introspections, of course, can’t last.  They can’t get played out.  No.  The phone rings on Saturday morning and the tech guy at the “Internet Help Center” says all is well and that your bloguero should now re-cycle the router.  Of course, he’s right.  It works.  Your bloguero’s growing reveries about being Robinson Crusoe on an island without WiFi  are shattered.

This week the Dream Antilles marked the passing of a lawyer hero, Leonard Weinglass.  He was held in contempt 14 times by Judge Julius Hoffman during the Chicago 8 7 trial, inspiring me and dozens of other lawyers with his fearlessness in defense of his clients.

Haiku about clouds.  These were inspired by a brief passage by Galeano.

Our Nominee For Understatement Of The Week is about the administration’s pathetic understanding of the US role in the centuries long oppression of Latin America.  Your bloguero thinks he should make a reading list for US officials and take them on a tour of Central and South America so that they can understand how dreadful and anti-democratic US policy has been in the region.

Cops of the World is about Simultaneous War III in Libya.  It was written on Wednesday.   The questions remain unanswered.  One might wonder why the US isn’t lobbing million dollar missiles at Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen this morning.  Meanwhile, Phil Ochs’s song of more than  40 years ago fits the situation.

And an obituary for Pinetop Perkins, a helluva blues piano player.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance and is now posted early Saturday morning.   See you next week if the creek don’t rise if there’s still Internet.

Have a wonderful weekend.

To Combat Human Rights Abuses

This is one of those reports many may find extremely interesting and much more should be reported about. But that’s why we have and need a PBS and an NPR, they Report as to their news shows.

AIR DATE: March 25, 2011


To Combat Human Rights Abuses, California Company Looks to Computer Code

Six In The Morning

Fear and devastation on the road to Japan’s nuclear disaster zone

Daniel Howden travels through a post-tsunami wasteland to the gates of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power station

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Once this road was thronged with traffic: an expressway, one of the arteries of a nation’s economic life, as familiar and modern a sight as you would find anywhere in Japan. The only barriers on the route to Fukushima Daiichi were the other people heading in the same direction.

Today the journey is different. It is a journey to the heart of a catastrophe. About 10 kilometres beyond the half-deserted city of Iwaki, the coastal road is blocked not by commuters but by landslides; the satellite navigation system that might once have flashed up traffic jams shows clusters of red circles that denote barred roads.

Gha!



Past medical testing on humans revealed

Late Night Karaoke

Random Japan

They Passed The Test  

Despite The Governments Best Efforts To Ensure Failure    

Violate Traffic Laws  

You’re Fired  

Safe Cracked By Tsunami

Money Grows Legs Walks Off  

Residents feel isolated in movement-restricted areas near nuke plant



FUKUSHIMA    

While residents who live closest to the troubled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture have evacuated, those who have remained in a movement-restricted area 20 to 30 kilometers away from the plant say they are feeling increasingly ”isolated.”

Towns were abandoned by many people apparently scared by the government’s instruction to shelter indoors for fear of radiation exposure, local people said.

Residents said they were also troubled by a misperception prevalent among people outside the area that they live in ”a contaminated area,” expressing discontent about what they see as slow actions for help by the central government.

Are There No Prisons?

In 1833 after decades of controversy, since borrowers owing as little as 60 cents could be held indefinitely in squalid jails until they paid off their debt … let me introduce our contemporary version Debtors Prison Redux.

‘Are there no prisons?”

‘And the Union workhouses. Are  they still in operation?’

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”

Starting at 2:10 Christmas Carol

In an era where the lines have been all but erased between Wall Street and Washington DC it seems the Corporatocracy has no interest in taking a haircut of any size in this debt fueled implosion. Yet annual bonuses equal to 3 or 4 years of wages for most are continually handed out … and the losses ….. are non-existent. Backed by tax payer dollars the theft continues while no investigation or prosecutions are even on the horizon.

Unless… you are one of the peasant debtors …

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