Every Dirty Fucking Hippie Knew This Years Ago

But we do have laws in the country, laws Bu$hCo decided he did not have to obey. This ruling is welcome, however, but way late & the sonofabitch who decided he was above the law will never be held accountable.

Bad Idea

Allowing oil companies to drill offshore will not lead to an lesseningof our dependence on foreign oil. All the money the government & the oil companies will waste will only push the development of affordable solar, wind, geothermal, et al., further into the future. What hasn't President Obama learned from the health care fiasco? The ReThugs have no interest in working with him, so why does he keep this charade of bipartisanship up? It's a sad mystery to me.

Obama's plan offers few concessions to environmentalists, who have been strident in their opposition to more oil platforms off the nation's shores. Hinted at for months, the plan modifies a ban that for more than 20 years has limited drilling along coastal areas other than the Gulf of Mexico.

Change I can't believe in, at all. My emphasis.

Arkansas, 2010 Style

At least one state in the south appears to have remembered, & is doing the right thing. 

Homegrown

Real patriots, these morons.

Authorities unsealed charges Monday against nine members of an armed militia group, accusing them of seditious conspiracy and attempting to deploy weapons of mass destruction, in a case that highlights a strain of extremism focused against the federal government.

The Michigan-based group, known as the Hutaree, allegedly had plotted to attack a law enforcement officer and then detonate improvised explosive devices to kill more officials gathered for the first officer's funeral procession. Members of the homegrown Christian militia accumulated weapons and explosives to target employees of the federal government, the law enforcement "brotherhood" and other participants in what they called the "New World Order," the indictment says.

& what is it about dirty, fucking hippies not liking the cops?  I can't wait for the right-wing to start talking about events that happened 40 years ago, as if they happened yesterday in MI,  IN, & OH.

Ai, R.I.P.

More dead. More on Ai's life here.

Nothing But Color

by Ai

for Yukio Mishima

I didn’t write Etsuko,
I sliced her open.
She was carmine inside
like a sea bass
and empty.
No viscera, nothing but color.
I love you like that, boy.
I pull the kimono down around your shoulders
and kiss you.
Then you let it fall open.
Each time, I cut you a little
and when you leave, I take the piece,
broil it, dip it in ginger sauce
and eat it. It burns my mouth so.
You laugh, holding me belly-down
with your body.
So much hurting to get to this moment,
when I’m beneath you,
wanting it to go on and to end.

At midnight, you say see you tonight
and I answer there won’t be any tonight,
but you just smile, swing your sweater
over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck.
I hear you whistling long after you disappear
down the subway steps,
as I walk back home, my whole body tingling.
I undress
and put the bronze sword on my desk
beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper.
I smooth it open
and read its single sentence:
I meant to do it.
No. It should be common and feminine
like I can’t go on sharing him,
or something to imply that.
Or the truth:
that I saw in myself
the five signs of the decay of the angel
and you were holding on, watching and free,
that I decided to go out
with the pungent odor
of this cold and consuming passion in my nose: death.
Now, I’ve said it. That vulgar word
that drags us down to the worms, sightless, predestined.
Goddamn you, boy.
Nothing I said mattered to you;
that bullshit about Etsuko or about killing myself.
I tear the note, then burn it.
The alarm clock goes off. 5:45 A.M.
I take the sword and walk into the garden.
I look up. The sun, the moon,
two round teeth rock together
and the light of one chews up the other.
I stab myself in the belly,
wait, then stab myself again. Again.
It’s snowing. I’ll turn to ice,
but I’ll burn anyone who touches me.
I start pulling my guts out,
those red silk cords,
spiraling skyward,
and I’m climbing them
past the moon and the sun,
past darkness
into white.
I mean to live.

Source: Vice: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1999)

Marva Wright, R.I.P.

Marva Wright was a great blues artist. She died way too young.

BLUESIANA MAMA MARVA WRIGHT

Wayne Collett, R.I.P.

American patriot.

“I couldn’t stand there and sing the words, because I don’t believe they’re true,’’ he once said, adding, “I believe we have the potential to have a beautiful country, but I don’t think we do."

Absolutely true.

Headlines Like This Are What's Wrong With America

Saving U.S. Water and Sewer Systems Would Be Costly

This problem, & it is a problem, should be fixed right now. Why are we even debating something so horrible? Oh yeah, torture.

Danzinger Bridge

The corruption in the New Orleans police department hasn't changed much. This editorial explains a lot. The most important paragraph is the following, something everyone with a uniform & a gun should be more than willing to do. Unfortunately, all too often, cover-ups ensue & justice is denied.

But Mr. Lehrmann showed neither compassion for these innocent victims nor the courage to stand up for them when it counted: when he and fellow officers were conspiring to make the deaths of two people and the shootings of four others appear to be justified actions on the part of police.

With Mr. Lehrmann pleading guilty now, he will probably receive less punishment than he deserves. & I would add one thing, the compassion & courage should have preceded the plans for the cover-up, before the murders & injuries occurred.

Why Businessmen/Women Are Parasites

Anyone who stays awake for a few hours a day anywhere in the US of A knows just how bullshit these tax breaks for jobs programs are. They just don't produce anywhere near the jobs they claim, but the owners of the businesses keep raking in taxpayer money. This is one reason why we need to punish these companies, not continue to reward them with tax breaks.  Here's a look at what happened in Massachusetts.  & remember, this has nothing to do with liberal politics, but everything to do with businesses & corporations completely reneging on the social contract implied in their getting the tax breaks.

In exchange for more than $2 million in state and local tax breaks, the Canadian telecommunications equipment maker promised a decade ago to expand its campus in Billerica, keeping 2,200 existing jobs and adding as many as 800 more. But instead of adding jobs, the struggling company has steadily slashed its operations for years.

Today, it has 145 employees. It also still has those tax breaks, set to continue through 2014.

*****

Other projects that sounded great on paper, such as the Nortel expansion plan, have fallen far short of what was promised. A Fall River rubber parts maker pledged to create 20 jobs, but cut 36 instead. A manufacturer in Orange promised to add five full-time jobs, but cut a half-dozen or more instead. But even when jobs are cut, the state often takes years to end a tax break, if it takes any action at all. And officials could not name a case in which they asked a company to repay subsidies already pocketed

I'm not opposed to giving employers tax breaks in order to provide employment, but I am opposed to giving away tax payer money when there is not accountability or mechanism in which to reclaim this money.  My emphases.

Pi Day

I guess I'm just not as thrilled as some people are about today being Pi Day.

pi = 3.14159265

"What The Hell Is Going On Out Here?"

To quote Vince Lombardi (see video below). I've been opposed to these Bu$hCo wars from the start, which, of course, makes me a dirty, fucking hippie who is always wrong. After reading this from the Washington Post, I wonder what the point of the whole war has become? Apparently, the Marines are not only a separate military force, they are a separate country, with beef that goes back to WWII.

...have riled many up the chain of command in Kabul and Washington, prompting some to refer to their area of operations in the south as "Marineistan."
*****

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, recently noted that the international security force in Afghanistan feels as if it comprises 42 nations instead of 41 because the Marines act so independently from other U.S. forces.

"We have better operational coherence with virtually all of our NATO allies than we have with the U.S. Marine Corps," said a senior Obama administration official involved in Afghanistan policy.
*****
"If our focus is supposed to be protecting the population, why are we focusing on a ghost town?" said a senior officer at the NATO regional headquarters in Kandahar.

I guess the obvious question here, even if you agree with what the Marine Corps is doing, is where is the civilian control? The facdt that the military is, or ought to be in this case, under civilian control is to me one of the pillars of our weakening society, culture, & country. My emphases.

Cool Camper

Anyone every see or own one of these campers? Talk about easy to park at a campsite. I wonder if there are plans out in the internets somewhere? Anyway, enjoy this short video.

Texas: A State Of Idiots

There is nothing really to say about this, other than to be happy my grandchildren live in Minnesota.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

Hell, yeah. My emphasis.

The Roman Catholic Church - Hateful Bastards

I don't think this moron, Federico Lombardi, understands what the words "swiftly" & "decisively" mean. It is just criminal what the Roman Catholic Church has done to the world. The whole bunch at the Vatican should be tried by the World Court for crimes against humanity. One obvious problem is that they keep electing Nazi popes. The present Nazi also has a brother who also likes to abuse children.

A bishop in Germany on Friday acknowledged sexual abuse of members of a boys' choir in the southern city of Regensburg that was directed for 30 years by Pope Benedict XVI's elder brother Georg Ratzinger.

The following Lombardi has this to say the shitheads running the Roman Catholic Church:

Now it is true that some people, particularly those living in Wisco, believe Vince to be god, me, I'm not so sure.  Actually, I'm an atheist, so I think he was just a very good football coach.

In The Land Of The Idiots

Top home schooling books claim Darwin is wrong. Yes, that's the ticket to freedom, prosperity, & a chicken in every pot. Not to mention a bunch of stupid Christians holed up in their plywood cabins.

Just Plain Stupid

Needs help, won't get it. So much for change we can believe it? Not so much. Disappointed? That would be an understatement & an under emotion.

Jerret Raffety/Rawlins Daily Times, via Associated Press

Bob Biniak, R.I.p.

One less skater boy.

Eight Centimeters

Or 2.7 milliarcseconds*,  it's making me think too much. I'm not too worried about the day being shorter by 1.26 microseconds, however.

Gross said that even though the Chilean earthquake is much smaller than the Sumatran quake, it is predicted to have changed the position of the figure axis by a bit more for two reasons. First, unlike the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which was located near the equator, the 2010 Chilean earthquake was located in Earth's mid-latitudes, which makes it more effective in shifting Earth's figure axis. Second, the fault responsible for the 2010 Chiliean earthquake dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. This makes the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth's mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth's figure axis.

*Go here if you really want to know more.

UPDATE: Sunny CA

I've been having a fabulous time out here. I've only been here a few days & look what the city did:

Nice, eh?

I also did some cool recreating while visiting Seal Beach. Here I am just entering the surf.

BIKINIS!!! - You'll notice the two bikini-clad young lovelies in the background observing my kite boarding.

Here I am just zipping along.



More zipping.



Actual oranges on a real tree.

More oranges, real oranges on real trees. &, these trees are found in people's yards, not an orchard.

& roses are blooming in sunny CA, along with other flowers. Damn.

& for those of you who have given up all hope, here is what green grass looks like.

I'm a bit concerned, however, that the good time may be coming to an end. I fear they may have located me.