Catboxx

unforgettable

2012-02-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

She was Mad's cover girl in May of 1954. I first saw her in the magazine rack at the supermarket, and I've never forgotten her.

Artist: Basil Wolverton; collage and ink on paper.

Click on the image for a larger view.

invisible finger

2012-02-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

There's an article at Think Progress this morning about how oil prices, now over $100 a barrel, keep rising even though demand keeps dropping, and is now lower than it's been in 15 years, since 1997. Industry analysts say the price rises are due to speculative money flooding the oil markets since the beginning of the year in anticipation of rising gas prices. Most of the cash is coming from hedge funds and Wall Street money managers, who seem intent on constructing a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In this way, the "invisible hand" of universal social benefit, which is activated by everyone acting in his or her own self-interest, and was theorized in 1776 by the prophet of capitalism, Adam Smith, this invisible hand can now be seen giving us the invisible finger.

by their fruits and nuts ye shall know them

2012-02-15T17:18:00.000-08:00

The group Megadeth's lead singer, Dave Mustaine, has endorsed Rick Santorum for the presidency. Read about this surprise move here.

The Santorum camp had no immediate comment on this unexpected development.

truth in advertising

2012-02-15T15:13:00.000-08:00

A patron of the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas collapsed from a heart attack today while eating a "triple bypass burger." Photographed profusely by tourists as paramedics carried him from the restaurant, the man survived.

I toleja this was likely to happen. Readem hia.

feelin gnarly

2012-02-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

Good morning, students. This is your old funkadelic moth funky bodacious humungous outrageous perfesser comin at chew with today's kibbles of wisdom.

Rein in, comrade, you dollop too lively;
You've got to make the butterscotch thick.
Lurching over Glenaven's bricks,
Lookin for gnirvana and feelin gnarly.

note to liberals

2012-02-14T12:51:00.000-08:00

This is for liberals who support, or at least do not criticize, the continued operation of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the killing of people in the Middle East with drone aircraft.

You are not liberals.

End of note.

Schnorred from Whateveritisimagainstit.com

radical extremists

2012-02-14T06:33:00.000-08:00

We all know extremism is a bad thing. And radicals are extremists. And crazy.

I remember well those extremist radical abolitionists, and what crazy, abnormal freaks they were. And when that radical abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy began publishing his wild ideas in the formerly normal, peaceful town of Alton, Illinois, the disruption he visited on that place was so extreme that the good, normal citizens were compelled to burn his shop, smash his press, and hang him, in order to restore their peaceful, normal atmosphere.

In their normalness, goodness, and conventionality, they were confident in the knowledge that some humans will own others as property, and that's just part of the natural order of things.

Problem is, when we take a look around at the shape of the society we're living in and ask who was right, back then in the 1850's? Only the "extreme radicals" appear to have had a sense of what the future held!

As it turns out, it was the conventional point of view back then, the reasonable and normal sorts of opinions held by reasonable and normal people, you know, people like us, that appear to have been extreme.

Photo: Pennsylvania Congressman and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the radical Republicans, by Matthew Brady.

putting on airs

2012-02-13T17:42:00.000-08:00

A late-sixties group called Procul Harum sang this:

We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale

I don't know what that means but I like it. Even better I like the Hammond B-3 organ repeatedly laying down an instrumental interlude said to be based on Johann Sebastian Bach's "Sleepers Awake" from Cantata 140, but which sounds closer to Air on a G String to me.

"One of 16 vestal virgins who was leaving for the coast; and though my eyes were open, they might've well been closed."

democracy and same-sex marriage

2012-02-12T11:58:00.001-08:00

Here in the Enchanted Forest of Wet Wash we are proud webfoots. Or maybe it's webfeet. The leaders of society around here wear coveralls and rubber boots, and it's sometimes hard to tell what gender they are.

Things are different here in Chimlockdale. We don't worry too much about what our neighbors are up to, or if they enjoy themselves in their own way, without harming others.

gold fever

2012-02-12T11:53:00.000-08:00

I'm still flabbergasted by Rick Santorum's declaration at CPAC that "climate change is a leftist scientific conspiracy to destroy America."

One of the peculiarities of the white race's presence in this hemisphere is its overwhelmingly exploitive nature. The first permanent European toehold in this half of the world was established by an Italian who was looking for Japan. Nearly all who immediately followed him were afflicted with gold fever, and after the initial luck of Cortez and Francisco Pizzaro, this orgy of gold seeking has continued without letup down to the present.

The stock speculation bubble of the 1920's which led to the Great Depression, and the real-estate-and-derivatives frenzy of the double-zeros which caused the Lesser Depression, still ongoing, were a manifestation of this same exploitive hysteria.

And it's not done yet. As long as there are any resources to be plundered and the possibility of getting something for nothing, bankster brigands and capitalist buccaneers will be on it, employing ideologues like Little Ricky Santorum to demonize anyone who calls for a little sanity. It never seems to occur to such people that there are some who would prefer just to make a life here, without setting up a fort and buying the place with beads.

Maybe Senator Santorum is not worried about life here on earth, and he might possibly be planning a trip to heaven soon. I certainly hope so. However, some of us are planning to live here, and this is the only planet we've got.

as nukes go by

2012-02-11T16:35:00.000-08:00

As I was in transit late Thursday morning, and at the entrance to the innermost domains of the Enchanted Forest, I found myself stuck on the Hood Canal Bridge.

This is by no means an unusual occurrence, and when it happens one always hopes that the drawbridge is opening for some little one-masted fishing vessel or some such, rather than for one of the nuclear submarines which travel in and out of the pod at Bangor. The bridge opens when these fearsome weapons of mass destruction are still far to the north of the draw span, and it won't close again until the vessel is several miles or knots or sea furlongs or whatever the aquatic measurement is to the south, and this necessitates a travel delay of at least half an hour.

At first I thought it was going to be a quick stop as only one little vessel, less than twenty feet long, was in view, but it turned out to merely be one of the pilot fishes that inevitably accompanies the nuke. And eventually the long, vaguely shark-like shape of the silent monster hove into view, its tower and tail fin the only parts visible above the surface, with the rest of its dark mass riding just below the water. I walked to the south side of the bridge with my cell phone to snap a picture of the sub as it headed down the canal accompanied by its small retinue, framed by a backdrop of the cloud-enshrouded Olympic Mountain range.

I don't know, but if I had to guess I'd say we were witnessing the passage of an Ohio-class nuclear submarine, which is nuclear because it is both powered by a nuclear reactor, enabling it to remain submerged and at sea for months at a time, and also because it carries nuclear weapons -- up to 24 Trident II missiles, each missile equipped with up to four MIRV's (multiple independent re-entry vehicles). Each MIRV costs $31 million and is tipped with a nuclear warhead. Submarines like this one carry about half of the total American active inventory of strategic thermonuclear warheads, according to the article on Ohio-class nuclear submarines in Wikipedia.

"Our world," said the famous World War II American general Omar Bradley after hostilities had ended, "has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”

Photo ©Dave B; click on the picture for a larger view.

this is just adios and not good-bye

2012-02-11T12:21:00.001-08:00

Ron Paul waved and said good-bye to hundreds of supporters and well-wishers as he stepped aboard an extraterrestrial vehicle piloted by aliens in Nye County, Nevada Saturday night. The libertarian candidate, who runs as a Republican, promised to return within a fortnight, to unveil "dramatic new plans and directions" for the campaign.

It's not exactly clear what Ron Paul is hoping to achieve with his candidacy which is radically different from anything else out there. He's having an impact, but it's hard to gauge how much.

When asked on CNBC Monday night if he would accept a speaking role at the convention, Paul said he'll wait to see what the circumstances are.

"They are not going to give you a primetime spot if you talk about bringing back the gold standard and bringing the troops home," said Paul.

A reporter embedded with the Paul campaign, the AP's Etaoin Shrdlu, said "I don't know about this flying saucer gambit. It looks like the strangest thing he's done since he decided to concentrate on the states that have caucuses rather than primaries, and reach out to Hispanic voters."

really truly sweartagod conservative

2012-02-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

My girlfriend, Catboxette, unlike yours truly owns a TV, so I'm sitting here watching it this morning, re-acquainting myself with the reasons I generally avoid it.

There's something going on in D.C. right now called the Conserative Political Action Conference, which provides one more opportunity for Republican candidates to make nebulous, totally unsubstantiated claims about who and what they are.

"I'm really, really actually very conservative" says Mitt Romney.

"Shut your cake hole, Willard," groans Newt while cracking his knuckles and rolling his eyes. "I'm the real conservative here."

Then Mrs. Santorum's favorite son Little Ricky chirps up: "But I was tea party before tea party was cool."

As their voices echo deeply from within history's garbage can, it seems that this kind of clueless posturing has become a competition and a performance art. It also seems to me that there's a very fine line sometimes between comedy and tragedy, as these guys compete for the votes of cross-eyed, foaming, fanatical lunatics wearing three-cornered hats with teabags dangling off them.

Boy, whatever happened to Joe Sikspak?

Meanwhile, Obama has confused everyone this morning by muddying the water around the contraception issue, and saying the new rule will be modified to "accommodate" employers who are also religious institutions. Nobody knows what that means, exactly, but that's OK, because the object of the exercise is to confuse everybody so we can't focus clearly on the issue. This is classic Obama, and one of the reasons I really can't stand him.

We desperately need some real leadership in this country, and instead we've got a bunch of goddam politicians. I guess we're going to have have to just forget them, lead ourselves, and make our own damn future. Without TV.

social immobility

2012-02-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Kristof, bless his heart, since he's one of the few actual liberal columnists at the NY Times who survived 2011, today wrote about Charles Murray's new book, "Coming Apart; the State of White America, 1960-2010."

Murray is the reactionary sociologist who wrote "The Bell Curve" a few years ago, and Kristof agrees with his conclusion in the new book: that white, working-class Americans now suffer from the same types of crippling social malaise that have troubled minority communities for generations, primarily a drug plague and devaluation of marriage, with a corresponding erosion of values which characterize a society whose structure is based on the nuclear family.

Kristof concludes, "Today, I fear we’re facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility. We need a national conversation about these dimensions of poverty, and maybe Murray can help trigger it. I fear that liberals are too quick to think of inequality as basically about taxes. Yes, our tax system is a disgrace, but poverty is so much deeper and more complex than that."

Of course Murray reflexively blames "liberal social policies" -- the orthodox fascist response -- which describes the details of social dysfunction but misdiagnoses the causes and oigins. Because when people start living just for whatever gratification or pleasure they can get in this moment, and give up any thought of making efforts or sacrifices for future rewards, the society they live in has already collapsed.

The drug plagues that have rolled through Americans generations from the bottom up -- heroin, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine -- are cries of despair from people who have no future. Why invest the commitment and sacrifice maintaining a family requires when the future is a blank?

toenails for president

2012-02-08T16:29:00.000-08:00

Suppose they held an election and nobody came?

Suppose a majority of voters refused to endorse our binary political system with its false dichotomies, by refusing to vote for either a Republicrat or a Demolican.

Suppose they went beyond politics and expanded their activities to embrace all aspects of culture, refusing to choose between Coke and Pepsi, not listening to either rock or country, driving neither Fords nor Chevies nor Toyotas nor Nissans. The very pillars of what passes for civilization these days would certainly collapse.

Vote for your cat! Drink green tea! Connect with the wisdom of the ancestors by opening your ears to antique music! Drive a hard bargain!

There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the most hideous nightmares of a dying world order, and more fascinating and educational objects of interest in my one-bedroom apartment than in all of the hollowed out void which calls itself our political system. What can you learn from elephants and donkeys except how to be a beast of burden? Better we should look to the example of our Dear Leader, Chairman Meow.

the antidote

2012-02-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

William Broad, a New York Times science reporter and Pulitzer winner, is making the rounds of the interview shows to promote his new book, The Science of Yoga: the Risks and the Rewards. Last night he was the guest on Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" on NPR.

Broad, a yoga practitioner himself for over 40 years, is singularly well equipped to address the subject, which he successfully de-mystifies by describing both the mechanics of asana (yoga movements) and the psychology of its contemplative aspects in modern scientific language. He avoids jargon, however, and the interview, transcribed alongside the MP3 file here, is as entertaining as it is informative, at least until towards the end Gross veers off into a conversation about Iran's potential nuclear weapons capability, or lack of it. But that's another story.

In the last decade, yoga has metamorphosed from a popular exercise activity (and, for some, a spiritual path) into a mass movement, and shows no signs of slowing down. The risks of practicing asana -- and they are significant -- needed to be better publicized, along with the profound benefits of a prudent asana regimen. The good news Broad delivers is that modern science shows yoga to be an effective antidote to "civilization and its discontents," and a counter-activity to the busy, restless, obsessive nature of an industrialized and regimented society.

I think of it as the Anti-Super Bowl, in which organized gangs of highly specialized professional gladiators engage in a dangerous and desperate competition for money, status, and fame. Yoga, neither a competition nor a performance art if it's pursued in the intended spirit, is an amateur activity whose sole purpose is to improve the quality of life of those who practice.

Photo, "Sweep," ©Whole Life Yoga, 2010.

a person who is nice

2012-02-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

A person who is nice to you but is not nice to the waiter is not a nice person.

halftime

2012-02-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

Now that the weekend dust has settled and we're back in the work week, the most significant take-away from Super Bowl XLVI seems to have been the commercial Chrysler ran at halftime.

With an obvious bow to the shrine of St. Ronald, the two-minute, politically-charged "Halftime in America" semi-documentary is narrated by a grizzled, grandfatherly Clint Eastwood, who at 81 is still photogenic enough to appear on camera, but curmudgeonly enough to do the voiceover. It's a tired cliché, this analogy of "the football game of life," but in this case it works well enough to rouse Republicans from their dreams of grinding down peasants and workers to object strenuously to what they see as Chrysler's "pro-Obama" stance, a quid-pro-quo for the auto industry bailouts of 2009-2010.

See more at the Christian Science Monitor site.

Personally, I don't find the bounce-back rhetoric as reassuring as Clint Eastwood apparently does, and the "roar of American engines" just reminds me of the amount of oxides of nitrogen and unburnt hydrocarbons those engines will release into the atmosphere. I don't know if the Democrats put Chrysler up to this, but the news both of them still need to find out is that the future isn't going to look anything like the past, and life is not a game.

I still like better the proles in flannel shirts who survived the Mayan apocalypse in their tuff Chevy trucks. I must be cycnical.

Speaking of the past and speaking of halftime, Sunday's halftime show took us back 30 years to the sights and sounds of the early 1980's, as a bottle blonde cougar hoofed through a highly vigorous and entirely meaningless frenzy of movement, accompanied by a platoon of dancers and acrobats, to the busy, staccato audible-wallpaper sounds of synthesizers and chattering drum machines. It was a puzzling, incoherent performance, like the national consciousness at the moment.

sotru

2012-02-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

It's the state of the real unyan -- "sotru" -- as opposed to the SOTU cartoon the president draws every year, a week or so before, and it's called Super Bowl.

In the entrails and commercial emissions of the game, we can read the pulse and gauge the mental state of our beloved country, and the news isn't too encouraging. In one commercial, three guys -- Jim Kunstler calls them "plucky American male lumpen 'worker'" dudes -- realize they have survived the Mayan apocalypse of 2012, solely due to the rugged superiority of their Chevrolet Silverado™ pickup trucks.

Of course, the first thought that naturally occurs to anyone watching this very short (but not short enough) drama is to wonder where these plucky survivors are going to gas up in a landscape in which all technological capacity looks to have been utterly erased. It may not, however, have occurred in the minds of the creators of this terse message from a corporatocracy losing its hegemony while unconsciously prophesying its own doom.

Judged strictly as a show put on by gangs of professional gladiators-for-hire, who nominally represent one or another of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, it was skillfully rendered this year, with a cliffhanger ending and a fairly low but very close score. As a day to measure the psychological temperature of the American people through an advertising analysis, this year's super bowl was chilly. And finally, as one of those rare days I use as an excuse to eat ordinarily-forbidden foods like potato chips and hamburgers, I enjoyed pigging out, but not nearly as much as in the past.

The final score was New York 21, Boston 17, visitors 12, others 9, with Krebbs and Vronsky subbing for Horner and Johnson who were disabled by hostile proofreading.

lost in the woods

2012-02-05T05:51:00.000-08:00

A family of mushroom pickers who were lost for six days has been rescued from the coastal Oregon forest. The couple, both 47, and their 25-year old son had no warm clothing, food, or water, and sheltered some of the time in a hollow tree. Rescuers said the family didn't realize they were lost.

In North Carolina, police used a stun gun on a woman who blocked a McDonald's drive-through window for 20 minutes after apparently suffering a Big Mac™ attack.

terrorist shmerrorist

2012-02-04T11:49:00.000-08:00

If there's a "terrorist threat" it's in two places: al Qaida which is spiritually and materially a Saudi Wahabbist thing, and Pakistan's nuclear capability.

Neither one of those countries is on an axis of weevils list or anything. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran (the one now in the crosshairs), none of them was ever any part of this terrorist threat.

The threat is only in those countries that are our noble allies.

Watch your close friends, baby,
Then your enemies can't do you no harm.

--Robert Johnson, "When You Got a Good Friend."

sunshine deh yeah

2012-02-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

Sittin here in starbutt's waitin for my honey to come back from her phrenology appointment.

The sun is shining bright. Actually, that's supposed to be the sun is shining brightly. But I've become a believer in the idea that it's OK to break any rule in that very large book as long as you know what rule you're breaking, and why. And anyway, proper grammar is no good in certain kinds of songs:

Alberta, Alberta, where'd you stay last night?
Alberta, Alberta, where'd you stay last night?
You never come home, dear, until the sun is shining brightly.

The bright sunshine reminded me of this very short song, which, if you haven't heard it before, it's time you did.

how it spoze 2 b

2012-02-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich believes everybody should eat steak and mashed potatoes, as God intended. They should live in detached houses which they own (actually, are paying for) and drive to work in cars.

At the National Association of Home Builders, “Rally for Homeownership” in South Carolina, Gingrich said, “Those who, you know, live in high-rise apartment buildings writing for fancy newspapers in the middle of town after they ride the metro, who don’t understand that for most Americans the ability to buy a home, to have their own property, to have a sense of belonging is one of the greatest achievements of their life, and it makes them feel like they are good solid citizens.”

Ah, yes, those coastal elites, who just don't understand, in their coffee-drinking, arugula-eating snobbery, the agonies and ecstasies of the real Americans who live out in the burbs. How could they, insulated from Real Life as they are in their little high-rise apartments, and riding tax-subsidized subways to their jobs as overeducated propagandists for Euro-style newspapers?

I'll bet most of them never even go to the mall or watch "American Idle." They are not solid citizens. Porous is what they are.

donkey dance

2012-02-03T08:34:00.000-08:00

Obama and the Democrats, just as corrupt although less exotically delusional than the other party, are dancing that old two-step coverup of the MF Global scandal. The most scandalous thing about it is not that Jon Corzine, the former Democratic governor of New Jersey and his associates stole a billion dollars or so from their customers, but that Obama's Justice Dept. is going to let them get away with it.

The first step in this elaborate dance, as Atrios points out, is to throw a blanket of complicated double-talk over a very stark and simple situation -- blatant theft. The second step is to publicly conclude that justice can't be done because the situation is so complex.

The reason Corzine is not going to be indicted or tried for stealing all that money? He's a bagman for Obama.

Once enough people accurately perceive that Democrats and Republicans are outdoing each other to skin us alive, the day of the "legacy parties" will be over. There's no going back.

the lion

2012-02-02T20:02:00.000-08:00

This song has been done and overdone, but I still like the original one the best: Mbube by Solomon Linda and his Evening Birds, South Africa, 1939.

manifesto #5

2012-02-02T15:48:00.000-08:00

At the Adbusters site, a short essay at which bears the style if not the signature of Kalle Lasn, the godfather of the #Occupy/99% movement, lays out our prospects for the near and the long run precisely and unemotionally.

we awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.

And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?

If you see this analysis as accurate in any degree -- and I do -- then it's apparent that the most potent creative tool in our arsenal at this moment is the wrecking ball, and that we need to identify demolition sites. Several come easily to mind.

1. The mega-banks -- Bank of America, Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Wells-Fargo -- all will be gone by the end of this decade, since these are the very institutions whose reckless greed crashed the economy, then proceeded to vacuum up more in tax monies than there was money in existence before 2008. They no longer serve the needs of the communities where they do business, so what good are they? These gigantic institutions, along with their illegitimate cousin, the trading house Goldman-Sachs, are parasites who have corrupted our political system beyond redemption, in order to promote a permanent, institutionalized parasitism.

2. Satan's bracelet, the Pentagon, which over the past 70 years has unleashed perpetual war on the wretched of the earth, has been with us much too long. The pentagram, that ancient symbol of evil, has the shape of a pentagon at its heart, and the infernal aura of the place is amplified by its short history, bookended by the building's dedication on September 11, 1941, and the message delivered there by a raggedy band of radical and violent Saudi Wahabbists exactly 60 years later. Since then the bureaucrats inside this unnatural pile have tried to carry on as if nothing has changed. They're soon to discover that the world has changed, and no longer has room for a tribe of predator-parasites in a five-sided building, whose only purpose is to inflict pain, misery, and death on the planet's voiceless and helpless populations.

3. The oil giants, Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco, British Petroleum and Royal Dutch shell appear to have no interest in facilitating a transition away from the sunset industries of oil and gas, and toward a future in which forms of energy we presently call "alternative" predominate. These dinosaurs continue dominating and cumbering the landscape, but if they persist in their folly, will, in the phraseology of Ambrose Bierce, "cease to cumber; they fertilize." (s.v. "aboriginies")

Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.

In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.

As the demolition proceeds, we need to take care not to disturb the rubble too much. We're going to need a lot of what's in it for salvage, for building the new structures of the world to come.

Photo and colored pencil drawing: the Five of Diamonds, by Dave B and ©Dave B, 2012.

adios pink stuff

2012-02-01T15:48:00.000-08:00

Hamburger eaters who recognize that all politics is ultimately about food will rejoice at the news that McDonald's will no longer be using the infamous pink slime (ammonium hydroxide) to treat the beef that goes into their burgers.

"At the beginning of 2011, we made a decision to discontinue the use of ammonia-treated beef in our hamburgers. This product has been out of our supply chain since August of last year," says a company spokesperson.

The ammonia was probably intended to double as a preservative and disinfectant, the way I understand such things. It's strictly business -- McDonald's trying to stay on top of the public's preferences -- and "The bidness of this nation is bidness,"* as we all know.

I consider it a good move even though I never eat at McDonald's. But of course, I realize there are probably people out there who actually like pink slime -- you know, the ones whose palates prefer the zing of ammonium hydroxide, so tingly compared to boring old sodium chloride.

*Quote: Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of the United States.

here comes tha train

2012-02-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

In the not-too-distant future, railroads in the US will move more freight and passengers than diesel semis and commercial airplanes do now. It's just a matter of time.

Our established one-party politicians, ever resistant to change, are in major denial about this. But the hardiest US investors, people who will make or lose fortunes depending on how effectively they respond to history's unfolding, are more realistic.

Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will invest $3.9 billion in upgrading its Burlington-Northern-Santa Fe Railroad this year. BNSF is the road that services this part of the world.

About half the money will go into upgrading the road itself, and a lot of the rest will buy new rolling stock. The upgrade is strictly for freight service, as Amtrak still has the government monopoly on passenger traffic.

The future is coming down the track whether the politicians like it or not, and when the train pulls into the station, they'd better be ready to ride, if they don't want to be left behind standing in the depot.

How long, how long has that evenin train been gone?

--Leadbelly, "How Long Blues"

rombot wins fla but nutes won't quit

2012-01-31T17:36:00.001-08:00

Right. Willard "Mitt" Rom-Ney has defeated wheezy, mean old mr. Newit Gingrich, who now looks like a soft round faded puff ball lying on the beach at Miasmi, but he says he'll fight on.

Well, of course he does.

Still, one can't help but think this is the end of America's moon base.

forget the sideshow

2012-01-31T11:16:00.000-08:00

Over at Buzzflash.com, David Swanson has a list of 15 items more important than the Republican horse race the corporate media are running 24/7 to distract us from focusing on real news and our real problems.

And since the horse race will be over after today anyhow, ending the way most of us thought it would all along, there's no excuse for not paying attention.

Here are the three things out of the 15 I think are the most important.

War with Iran: Obama says, "America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible . . . if Iran changes course." Meanwhile his Defense Secretary, Panetta, says Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. Stay tuned for more garbled messages and consonant dissonance, and watch for an Israeli first strike.

The justifications are wearing real thin and not selling well, but the warmongers are still in charge.

Independent Republic of California: Swanson says, "California has until Tuesday and is two senators away from enacting single-payer healthcare. This is far more significant that anything that has been done at the national level for healthcare." And it's being done in the most populous and arguably the most important of the 50 states. California could conceivably exercise a limited autonomy in this and environmental matters.

General Electric is not a person and therefore not a citizen: (From Buzzflash) The Montana Supreme Court has refused to comply with Citizens United. Cities and states are taking action. Stronger bills are being introduced in Congress all the time. The latest is HJRes 100. Rallies were just held in over 100 towns and cities. Join this movement: http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5236

Don't be taken in by trivialities like the Republican horse race. The world is changing fast, and things are moving ahead.

the oceanic sense

2012-01-30T13:41:00.000-08:00

Jack Johnson knows about the ocean, having spent his life as a surfer-musician on the north shore of Oahu. There isn't space or time here to recount the many facets of JJohnson, a complex artist who has directed films in addition to writing and performing hit songs, mostly in the soft rock and acoustic genres. (Wikipedia)

This one is deep, and that's no pun. I haven't heard too many pop songs about eternity.

craisins

2012-01-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the history of past presidential elections, and one stands out as possibly telling us where we are, in light of our present political meltdown and systemic dysfunction. The Wikipedia article on the election of 1852 says in part:

(The Democrats) went on to win what was at the time one of the nation's largest electoral victories, trouncing (the Whigs) 254 electoral votes to 42. After the 1852 election the Whig Party quickly collapsed, and the members of the declining party failed to nominate a candidate for the next presidential race; it was soon replaced as the Democratic Party's primary opposition by the new Republican Party.

After Obama and the Democrats make barbecued pork chops out of whatever candidate the Republicans finally pick to haul their road apples in the fall election, the Greens might not be a third party for much longer. And if not the Greens, then some other entity will need to step forward to fill the power vacuum created by the collapse of the GOP.

The Whigs never really stood for anything, and so fell apart under the pressure of the country's need to deal with slavery. The Democrats split into two regional factions under the pressure, and the new party, the Republicans, opposed to the spread of slavery and slavocracy, quickly ascended to the majority.

The Republicans still stand for something, but unfortunately for them, what they stand for has degenerated into a mess of heavy bullshit, and in their choice of standard-bearers they've become self-destructive, so much so they may not answer the bell for 2016.

The American political configuration was re-made in the 1850's due to the political establishment's inability to deal with slavery, and the country's and society's need to deal with it. Today we need to deal with misallocation of resources and maldistribution of wealth. The Democrats, like their 1850's ancestors, are split by the issue, and the Republicans have nothing constructive to offer. They're going out on the tide.

Drawing: "lunacy of insomniacs" by neogothic-jam.

the gilded age

2012-01-29T15:31:00.000-08:00

Wealth inequality in the US is at its highest level since the tail end of the Gilded Age, which unsurprisingly was characterized by the most outrageous spectacle of political corruption ever seen until the present day.

Now that the owner of enormous hotel-casinos the world over, Sheldon Adelson, has purchased the campaign of Newt Gingrich for $10 million, we can draw exact paralells with the sort of payoffs that greased the rails of the Crédit-Mobilier scandal, and the drilling contracts sold for the oil of the Teapot Dome by the Secretary of the Interior.

And in the earlier case, we at least got a railroad and some oil out of the deals. All we could hope for from a presidency owned by Mr. Adelson would be a war with Iran, since the multi-billionaire is an extreme Zionist and one of the US's most enthusiastic cheerleaders for attacking Iran.

the candidate

2012-01-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

Dr. Jill Stein is a Boston physician now running for president as the nominee of the Green Party.

She recently gave the Greens' answer to Obama's State of the Union speech. It's as long as the original and quite detailed. Here are some pertinent out-takes.

To be clear: the greed for record profits is what got us into this mess in the first place. Of course it wasn’t greed alone. It was the capture of both political parties by Wall Street and other powerful corporations that buy influence with campaign contributions and lobbyists. Using this routine currency of American policy making, Democrats and Republicans alike dismantled protections against waste, fraud and abuse by Wall Street.* This bipartisan cooperation enabled greed to crash the economy.

… That not only killed jobs, it also depressed tax revenues – which has been one of the biggest drivers of the federal deficit. That deficit has also been made worse by unconscionable spending choices: notably the 4 trillion dollars spent on the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and trillions more spent on the bloated Pentagon budget, tax giveaways for the wealthy, and bailouts for Wall Street.

All of this adds up to the ongoing crisis we face – the cumulative result of many years – decades – of policies under both Democratic and Republican presidents that enrich the few while exploiting the many.

The political establishment is telling us there’s little we can do to change our direction. I don’t believe it and I suspect you don’t either.

It's time for those who have eyes to see with to turn away from the Demolicans and Republicrats, and unite behind a candidate who a) isn't insane, b) is uncorrupted, and c) doesn't double-talk. Jill Stein satisfies those criteria and has my vote.

what is it?

2012-01-26T16:27:00.000-08:00

"What is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" is a very early pop-art image made by Philip Hamilton (London, 1956). He clipped most of the images in the picture from American magazines. It was the first pop work to achieve the status we call "iconic" today, due to its wide circulation.

To see a larger version of this wonderful image, go here.

stormy weather

2012-01-26T15:52:00.000-08:00

Went for a walk for the first time in a long time today -- no drops, no freezing temps, even a little weak sunshine.

But the weather here is still not at all settled, turbulence is always threatening even when it's not storming, and I'm sure we'll be getting a lot more of the wet stuff, but hopefully not the white stuff.

Which all makes for a natural if somewhat obvious intro to this wonderful old song; Lena Horne is beautiful, theatrical, and dynamic in a classic performance.

evil nasty sinister george soros

2012-01-26T08:25:00.000-08:00

Soros is a billionaire investor with uncharacteristically leftist political leanings. He funds a lot of causes like the ACLU, and it's probably no exaggeration to say that some leftish landmarks, such as San Francisco's Tides Foundation and the website Media Matters, wouldn't exist without him.

This, of course, makes him the Devil incarnate among the wingnuteratti, periodically stirred into major Soros hissies, the most recent detonated by a Newsweek interview in which Soros calls attention to the depth of the global economic crisis now under way, and the social unrest and violence that would result from a collapse of the Euro.

These somewhat-less-than Luciferian predictions are the source of the current spasm of Sorosphobia in the noise machine. Echoing the miniskirt Mussolinis at the Foxist News Network, one correspondent at BNet (PC users: be cautious opening the link) maintains "that GC is a truly evil, sociopathic person...that his life story and his current glee at the thought of the world in ruins, which he can make a buck on, is a testament to what I say."

And Dr. Evil himself, the geriatric boogeyman mothers scare their daughters with ("George Soros will get you!") has now committed what for right-wingers is the ultimate political blasphemy, saying there's not much difference between Obama and Romney.

That sounds an awful lot like what I and others among the leftish blogs have been saying. Crumbs! Does this mean we're evil, nasty people, like Satan incarnate Geo. Soros?

Now the evil Mr. Soros is apprehensive about what he calls "extremist conservative" types like ~~Cardinal~~ Senator Sanatorium, you know, that sweater-vest guy who thinks nobody should ever use Trojans, but then he says, "If it’s between Obama and Romney, there isn’t all that much difference except for the crowd that they bring with them.”

In reality, if I can broach that delicate subject, the evil Dr. Soros is a quite aged guy who doesn't look very well. Knowing that his time is drawing near, I believe he'd really like to see some substantial changes in the way the world runs, and is doing what he can to see that it happens. He's not a lot different from the occupiers who rattled Wall Street, got pepper sprayed, and got arrested at the Brooklyn Bridge. Just a hell of a lot richer.

He's sort of like Rupert Murdoch would be if he had human DNA.

spaaace ghooost

2012-01-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

Gingrich is saying that under his presidency the US will establish some sort of base on the moon.

That's all I know or want to know about it, but if you want more you can go here.

portrait

2012-01-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Schnorred from TPM.

california blues

2012-01-25T17:43:00.000-08:00

About this time each year, when the Northwest is oppressed by the incessant late-winter gloom, I start reminiscing about my SoCal days, and memories of people running around Palm Springs in shorts and tank tops on Christmas Eve.

The high today in Palm Springs was 81, and tomorrow they're expecting 85.

Got the California blues, and I'm sure gonna leave you here;
Got the California blues, and I'm sure gonna leave you here;
I may ride the blinds; I ain't got no railroad fare.

Hear it warbled sweetly by the singing brakeman, the late, great Jimmie Rodgers.

poster boys

2012-01-25T10:09:00.000-08:00

All the Republican candidates are poster boys for something.

Senator Sanatorium is the poster boy for birth control, for example. Use Trojans or this could happen to you. Do you want a grown son wearing a sweater vest?

And Romney, thanks to his worst-of-all-possible way to release his tax information, is now the poster boy for wealth inequality and the unbridled greed of the .01%.

By stalling for so long, he drew more and more attention to the issue. By the time he released the thing it had become major news. Having put himself in the spotlight, he became the image people have in mind when they talk about systemic abuses.

There are several ways a person can handle being filthy rich. One would be the way Warren Buffet has called attention to the basic injustice of wealth distrubution via the inequities of the tax code. Romney chose not to go that route.

Paul Krugman wrote of Romney's taxes today:

...(T)he point here is not that Romney did something wrong by paying the low rates current tax law lavishes on people like him. It is, instead, that in an election campaign that will be in part about issues of inequality, the likely GOP candidate is a living, breathing, coupon-clipping example of how favorable our system is to the very rich; and he also happens to be advocating policies that would greatly benefit people like him, while hurting the poor and the middle class.

PS: Yes, my tax rate is a lot higher than Romney's. And I support policies that would raise it further.

The whole piece here.

nada

2012-01-25T09:19:00.000-08:00

It's a midweek morning, and I have nothing.

A good friend has survived a 10-day stomach flu. Congratulations.

The best reaction I've seen to the State of the Unyon speech is here.

communique from an outpost

2012-01-24T14:48:00.000-08:00

Garkon! Fresh burgers and fries and corn syrup mixed with soda water for my men, s'il voo plate, and ¿have you any vehicles for sale at this place?

It was a cold, crisp day when we rolled into Attu, the land of the origins of the sperm of the grandfathers of antiquity.

We haven't seen home since can't remember when,
Lookout, you rounders, we're on the road again.

pax hoax

2012-01-24T14:41:00.000-08:00

Obama's massive, aggressive slashing of the "defense" budget may be seen by the Islamofascists as an invitation to attack us. We're down to only 11 aircraft carriers!

The United States will not cut America's fleet of 11 aircraft carriers to help trim the budget deficit, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Saturday, citing tensions with Iran as an example of why the massive ships are so critical to national security.

I couldn't help but notice that Secretary Panetta neglected to mention how many aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines those terrorist Iranians have. But why confuse the issue with statistics, or for that matter, reality? We've got a script to read, and it says right here that Iran is an Islamofascist terrorist country and that they also don't like us or Israel. And they're going to pay for it!

And also, because they may threaten us someday with bombs they don't have yet.

flat foot

2012-01-23T19:24:00.000-08:00

It's a chestnut of a tune about a flat-foot floogie, done here by Thomas "Fats" Waller and an enthusiastic mob of horn blowers.

fixation

2012-01-23T14:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sure that by now everybody knows the Democrats want to force us all to watch black and white TV...and "use sandpaper for toilet paper," says Atrios, "and bring back New Coke!"

Then he adds for emphasis, Of all of the recent mostly pointless wingnuttery, the lightbulb fixation has been the most amusing/bemusing. Boy, ain't that the truth?

He also includes linkage to the Media Matters story whence this is derived.

...the efficiency standards...have been met with outrage from conservative media who spent the last year claiming that they infringe on consumer "freedom of choice." Led by Fox News, right-wing media outlets have repeatedly told consumers that the standards would "ban" incandescent bulbs and force us all to purchase "mercury-laden, ugly and smelly compact fluorescent light bulbs," to the chagrin of electrical manufacturers. Fox has even gone so far as to encourage consumers to "hoard" the old, inefficient bulbs.

So, you didn't know that compact fluorescent bulbs are a socialist plot? Well now you know.

your tax dollars at work

2012-01-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

Even though the soldiers, sailors, and Marines are gone from Iraq, Uncle Sam still has a lot people of various kinds there. A reliable source informs me:

The 15,000 workers include private contractors rebuilding some of the damage done by the war. Some are under contract with the US and some with the Iraq government . [That number includes, The US Agency for International Development (USAID), Corps of Engineers, Depart. Of Agriculture (USDA), Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) ,Private companies include KBR, Bechtel, General Electric, ITT Corp and several companies middle Eastern countries companies employing foreign nationals (3rd counties).

That's quite a rogues gallery of the usual suspects.

What are the narcs over there for? Are they afraid someone might smoke a joint in the ruins?

not this year

2012-01-22T10:02:00.001-08:00

Barack Obama is not an acceptable candidate, and I won't vote for him because he hasn't done anything to address or even acknowledge the ongoing crises that prevent the US government and American society from functioning in a civilized way.

These include the regime of corruption and payoffs under which the political system operates. Corruption is both a result and a cause of the massive wealth inequality under which the majority of us suffers grevously.

Likewise, he has done nothing to loosen the grip of the war machine on our public treasury, our culture, or our reputation abroad. He has increased levels of spying and the potential for the security state's illegal mischief against citizens to levels unknown even under the fascist regime of Bush and Cheney.

I can't vote for Obama because the continuation of his presidency is incompatible with government and society. So Obama must go.

But the thought of replacing him with any of the grotesques the Republicans are attempting to sell is inconceivable, whether you consider the semi-human, semi-conscious "corporations are people too" stance of the billionaire Romney, the sexual phobias verging on true insanity of Santorum, or the calculated rage of Gingrich, a person who became an animal living entirely by instinct. If we had opposed King George III with material like this we'd still be living under Queen Elizabeth today.

Obama is not the "lesser of two evils;" he's just another part of the problem. "Lesser of two evils" thinking perpetuates the problems, and do we want to perpetuate this mess, or solve it?

hail caesar

2012-01-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

This is unbelieveable! Newtonianus Flatus Gingrichus wins South Kalina with 40% of votes cast.

Nero and Gaius Caligula would be so proud that someone is carrying on the tradition of enthused sexual deviants carving and cutting their way into the highest orofice in the land.

mittens 4 eva

2012-01-21T06:53:00.000-08:00

Is there nothing else happening in this world? Do we have to be subjected ad infinitum to this un-story, this tale of a robot-oaf and his ham-handed attempts to get people to like him?

How "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable" must seem all the events of this economically depressed world, if the Times and the Post and the Wall Street Yurnal and all this great republic's cable news networks from sea to shining sea can find nothing more interesting to jabber about than Mittens's ordeal, his agonies, and his ecstasies.

The story right now is that the anticipated Mittens victory in South Carolina and his subsequent wrap-up of the nomination is being re-evaluated, and that our media friends will be able to extract even more horse-race hysteria and more of the torture of incessant monotony out of their reality TV show, "The Great Republican Clusterschnazzle," now at 17 debates and counting.

And now it's Mitt...and now, it's NotMitt again this morning...Oh, Jeeziz, the Rehooliganz are all going to plotz!

Ah, the drama. The DRAMA of it all arouses emotions in me I've never felt before he said as he barfed copiously up his sleeve.

Really, this is about the third time Mittens has come close to putting it away, then there's a glitch in the polls or he gets PMS or something and then falls apart like the Seahawks in the fourth quarter.

Whatever gave a guy as tentative and unsure of himself as Mittens the idea that he's qualified to be preznit? His current stumble seems largely due to his blowing a simple tax-return release -- something that's standard operating procedure, but Mittens has managed to dick around and screw around with it, calling attention to it until his taxes and his disproportionate wealth become a .45-calibre issue pointed at his head and about to discharge.

Do we really even want to consider putting somebody able to blow a simple move like that one in the White House? He's even less qualified than the present current occupant, old What'shisname.

swallowing hard in florida

2012-01-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

Now that giant Burmese pythons are breeding and growing more numerous in the Everglades, the US has gotten around to banning importation of these fearsome serpents, which are known to eat native species as large as adult deer and even alligators.

Noting that years of efforts to eradicate the snakes from the Everglades have failed, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the ban this past Tuesday, along with prohibitions on African pythons and the South American anaconda.

The one documented case in which a python was known to have swallowed a full-grown, six-foot alligator ended with the snake dying of indigestion.

Other foreign-originated species infesting the subtropical parts of Florida include a small dragon, the Nile monitor lizard, and African rats the size of raccoons.

Reuters has the whole story.

joke time

2012-01-20T12:49:00.000-08:00

Some might say Mittens's finances are nobody's bizness but his, but as long as he's paying like 15% when there are working people paying higher rates, it's everybody's bidness.

Paul Krugman says he's "actually enjoying the spectacle of Mitt Romney doing the Dance of the Seven Veils —... it’s about time that we had this discussion."

The theme of his dance ... is taxes — his own taxes. Although disclosure of tax returns is standard practice for political candidates, Mr. Romney has never done so, and, at first, he tried to stonewall the issue... Then he said that he probably pays only about 15 percent..., and he hinted that he might release his 2011 return. ...

If Mr. Romney is telling the truth about his taxes, he’s actually more or less typical of the very wealthy. ... The main reason the rich pay so little is that most of their income takes the form of capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent, far below the maximum on wages and salaries.

So, what gives with these capital gains? They're income, right? Then they should be subject to...Oh, yeah, I forgot, "job creators."

ROFL

armchair quarterbacks

2012-01-19T09:45:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times calling Seattle residents "snow wimps" makes one wish that the City of Angels could be lucky enough to get half an inch or so. That way Angelinos could show us how it's done.

Idiots.

So far the only negative outcome of the storm Catboxette and I have experienced is cabin fever. Yesterday our favorite cafe, Farm's Reach, was closed due to frozen pipes.

However, it's going to get tougher when the rain comes and the branches of all the trees in the Enchanted Forest begin to bend and break under the weight of the wet snow. Power outages will become a near-certainty then. It'll be a miracle if we escape unscathed.

It's still snowing here, but Seattle is having an ice storm right now and the governor has declared a state of emergency. This isn't going to go away as soon as we thought.

hugee pipilini (updated)

2012-01-18T12:02:00.000-08:00

The word as reported by Politico.com is that the Obama administration will announce at 3 pm today that it will not allow the permit for the controversial XL pipeline.

But Republicans were unsparing in concluding that Obama had chosen to assuage his environmental base instead of creating U.S. jobs. They also said the responsibility for the decision rests with the president, not anyone else in his administration.

Read more.

This is a big, big deal. Those of us who have been highly critical of Obama are behind him on this one, says the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben:

"Assuming that what we're hearing is true, this isn't just the right call, it's the brave call. The knock on Barack Obama from many quarters has been that he's too conciliatory. But here, in the face of a naked political threat from Big Oil to exact 'huge political consequences,' he's stood up strong."

McKibben's blog.

UPDATE: The thing is, you have to really parse the stuff Obama says, and read between the lines.

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a statement.

What I'm getting from this is that he's going to approve the pipeline, but not until after he's re-elected. That's called "politics." He's simply refusing to play the stupid games the Republicans are trying to run. That's politics too.

Bill McKibben's celebration is premature.

No stars.

Previews

2012-01-17T16:48:00.001-08:00

If and when domestic unrest becomes too much for local police forces to handle, the central government will need to be able to call in the military.

With the passage of the National Defense Appropriation Act (NDAA) (takes effect March 3), the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. "And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until 'the end of hostilities,'” according to former NY Times reporter Chris Hedges.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is hard at work preparing for such an eventuality, and we can be sure that Big Brother's big eye is watching us closely now. With their mystical mantra, "Darpa," and the Latin motto which means "Knowledge is power," the agency s ready to move against individual outbreaks of wilfull or unconscious terrorism.

For mass outbreaks of disobedience, DARPA has other plans and is currently developing terrestrial drones in the desert near Las Vegas.

See more here

snowed in

2012-01-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

I'm snowed in at Catboxette's house on the Peninsula. Driving would probably be possible this morning, but not worth the risk.

Tomorrow is going to be worse -- or better, depending on how one feels about heavy snowfalls. So it looks like I'm here for the week -- a minor inconvenience. I'll call my apartment manager in Seattle this morning, and if he can empty my mailbox, I'll have no problems that money can't solve.

Snow muffles all sound, and this kind of silence is ideal for meditation and reflection, but other than my own concerns I've got very little to think about at the moment. The state of the (dis)-Union offers no cause for alarm. With the remains of a dying capitalistic economic system based on predatory exploitation and a collapsing empire contested this election year by Republican fascist reactionaries on the one hand and the corrupted "Me Too" party of Democrats ("I believe in 'free' enterprise too; "We're on board with a strong 'defense' too), there's not much for it but to say "Good-Bye to All That."

Over here on the Peninsula the future is to some extent already here, and it's cold, frequently difficult to negotiate, and vastly superior to the past, with its theme parks, its cholesterol-laden dreams of endless hot dogs, and its obscene, chest-thumping ideological posturing, all of which now take a back seat to fresh pears and parsnips in the root cellar.

greenman in winter

2012-01-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

The forest has crystallized. No significant precipitation yet, but condensed moisture has turned into a thin film of ice coating everything, especially the less-traveled roadways.

We're told that now comes the snow, which will be like a fluffy frosting on hard ice cream. The man of the evergreens doesn't mind this in the least; he actually enjoys it.

866

2012-01-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

The world is being run from this room, where the conclave of high priests of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the technocratic College of Cardinals, makes the decisions which inform the writing of the software programs that the main network, housed deep in the bowels of Fort Knox, Kentucky, uses to run all television programming, the political Punch-and-Judy show, the cash registers of all retail activity, etc.

This is the heart of Area Code 866. I know the Book of Revelation says the Number of the Beast is 666, but St. John the Divine got it wrong.

Simultaneously with controlling all activities in the public sphere, the computer system at Fort Knox eavesdrops and keeps an eye on everything everybody is doing, all the time.

The only way to get away from it is to load up a backback and tent and hike up to a higher elevation in the heavily forested Olympic range, and survive by living off the land. But even there, a spy satellite or Department of Homeland Security helicopter might spot you in a clearing.

I can't cite any sources for this information, which I learned from transmissions received via my tinfoil hat.

far away nearby

2012-01-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

Left Seattle humming along in the cold sunshine this morning, caught a boat, and crossed over to the other side.

As soon as I get over here there's a feeling that I've left "It" behind -- the machine, or more properly the machines -- the war machine, the automatic teller machine, and all those other clanking things that sustain us and kill us.

It's colder over here, because it's in the deep forest, but bracing if you bundle up for it. Word wars get frozen fast, and stop. I'm gone for the weekend, will return maybe Monday.

Photo: "Spirit of the Forest" by Ramone Monegal.

a whiter shade of pail

2012-01-12T16:36:00.000-08:00

Rounding out my bucket list, Rick Santorum, rumored to be campaigning for his party's nomination for president, said today the Republicans can win back the White House only by offering a "clear contrast" to Obama.

Seemingly directing his remarks toward his chief rival, the Mittens man, Santorum added, “We need contrasts, not just a paler shade of what we have.”

I was hoping to hear some Republican say something like that before I die.

Found this item at Atrios's place, eschatonblog.com.

poor, but empowered

2012-01-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

Americans are steadily becoming more aware of the conflict between rich and poor, as the income gap between the wealthiest citizens and the rest of us widens, and as political power becomes the sole possession of those with enough money to buy access to politicians, and is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

This is the conclusion of a Pew Research Center study, detailed in today's Washington Post.

The 99% movement has had a lot to do with raising people's awareness of these issues, but mostly the growing popular hostility toward America's plutocratic oligarchy stems from the our collective awakening to the fact that we've been robbed and our political power usurped. Knowledge is power, and this is just the beginning.

foop-ball

2012-01-11T12:05:00.001-08:00

Free-radical quarterback Tim Tebow and his merry band of totally convinced Denver Broncos play in New England on Sunday, but he is not afraid.

That's OK, Tim, don't listen to what they say, just keep on thowin that foop-ball.

Believing in Tebow requires a person able to believe the impossible. Sometimes it works.

on top of old smoky

2012-01-11T10:15:00.001-08:00

One of the more interesting flecks of debris from the New Hampshire primary is a blast leveled at a female heckler by New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie, as he spoke this past weekend on behalf of Mitt Romney. As she berated him for the employment rate "going down" in his state recently, Christie shot back, "You know something may go down tonight, but it ain’t gonna be jobs sweetheart"

Fans of the governor have been falling all over themselves since then, trying to sell the notion that Christie was saying that Rick Santorum was "going down," or something, but I'm sure they know as well as the rest of us that big Chris was telling this gal that before the rooster crowed, she might conceivably penetrate the deepest recesses of his voluminous trousers and, moving aside the folds of his pendulous abdominal tissue, be subjected to a close encounter with Smoky the Log, or whatever Mrs. Christie calls it.

good riddance

2012-01-11T08:52:00.001-08:00

This ugly thing is about to join cigarettes and the medical practice of bloodletting in the museum of ubiquitous threats to health and safety.

If Washington State legislators have their way, the nation's first statewide ban on plastic grocery bags will take effect this year. Actually, "ban" is the wrong word, since the Seattle Times reports that:

Senate Bill 5780 and House Bill 1877 are similar. Both bills would allow plastic bags for fresh meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts or other bulk items, dairy products, ice and cooked foods.

Besides endangering marine wildlife and polluting the landscape, these nasty, non-biodegradable things symbolize the prodigal waste and careless excesses of a mindlessly materialistic society.

The Washington cities of Edmonds and Bellingham have already de-bagged, and a ban in Seattle will be enforced starting in July.

Henceforth, shoppers will need to carry their own bags to the store, which requires summoning a monumental effort that the perennial victims of eco-terrorism are sure to howl about, or pay a nickel for a paper sack.

too much snow

2012-01-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

Winter has been extraordinarily dry in Seattle, but meanwhile Anchortown has been hit with record snowfalls, and there's more to come.

Photo from the Anchorage Daily News.

smart shopperz

2012-01-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

Started writing down what I spend at the store every day, and it's worse than suspected.

Shelling out 11.62 on average every time I go for groceries means almost 300 a month, assuming 25 trips this month, which is also outrageous.

Figure to cut both of those back by at least a quarter without even trying, just by paying attention. You gotta pay attention to what you need, write a list, and scan the papers and throwaways for deals. Just basic stuff, I know, but I never really thought about it that hard.

So today it was Anjou pears at Top Market in Shoreline, three pounds for $2.74. These are organic, locally grown fruit, as are the yellow onions I got for a buck .27. Also picked up some avocado and tomato on sale. Screwed up on the 2-lb, cheese though, and paid too much knowing that deals on the same thing are out there all the time. Note: if you're paying more than $2.50 a pound for Tillamook cheddar (a very good price), you're getting ripped.

On balance, I think Miss Moneypenny would be proud of me.

the sacred tablets

2012-01-09T16:12:00.000-08:00

Sharia and Christianity are opposites, says my faithful correspondent from another universe.

Sharia is uniquely Muslim, 'tis true, my fine feathered fiend. However, whenever any society is governed according to rules laid down by the dominant religion, that's the same thing all over the world -- theocracy.

It worked about the same way in Puritan Massachusetts as it does in present-day Saudi Arabia. In 1660's Mass, if a guy got caught having an affair with a sheep, both he and his wooly friend were executed.

Even though we have our own kind of faith, The US today is not a theocracy, and the same guy nowadays would be sent away for observation, Xanax™, Valium™, and possibly a libido depressor. The sheep would receive post-sexual-abuse trauma counseling and maybe a little Trazadone™.

See how that works? The Puritans had their religion, and the Muslims have theirs, and we have ours. As Karl Marx always says when you turn him upside down or read him in the mirror, "Opium is the religion of the people."

future past

2012-01-09T10:11:00.001-08:00

Zach Walland stands beside one of his vegetable row fields at his Dharma Ridge Farm just off Beaver Valley Road near Chimacum, Washington, already living the life that many of us will need to learn for survival, comfort, and fulfillment in the days to come.

Zach and his wife Haley Olson along with their three kids and a varying number of hired helpers run this successful 10-acre operation. Central Market in Poulsbo, among other retailers, stocks Dharma Ridge produce.

Haley Olson grew up in Chimacum as a farm girl, and met Zach Walland in 1997. He came from Upstate New York where he made a life working on small organic farms starting as a teen-ager. There he learned how to do everything that wants doing on a farm including putting up buildings and making his own processing equipment. Besides the family's house, Walland erected barns and all of Dharma Ridge's outbuildings, and improvised most of his own equipment such as strainers, washers, and sprayers out of salvage.

Looking at the lives of people like this makes me realize I was born 30 years too soon. Also, too, I think I shoud reread the essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson called "Self Reliance;. And ain't it kind of funny? The future is now the also past, and "History ain't what it used to be," to quote the inimitable Yogi Berra.

Click on the picture to embiggen.

peaceful forest

2012-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

Here in the peaceful forest, Barack Obama and Mitt Romneybot and the MidEast wars and shrill yakkety-yakking of our political nightmare are all very far away. At a quarter to seven it's still completely dark outside, and the totally still.

The forest, frigid and stiff this time of year, with faint mists hanging low among the trunks or caressing the treetops, lives at its slowest pace in December and January. Death comes now to the oldest and weakest plants and animals, which then begin to fertilize the hard earth with their decomposing bodies, providing food for scavengers and laying in future nourishment for the wave of onrushing life due to arrive four months down the road.

No comprehensive knowledge of life is possible without peace, and peace can't visit us if we are never able to slip out of our restraints and escape the tyranny of self.

the pope

2012-01-07T11:32:00.000-08:00

Pope Shenouda III, patriarch of Egypt and the See of Alexandria, sings the Christmas mass in Cairo this past Saturday. The very ancient Coptic Church split from the other main stream of Christianity in 451. The main body in turn split later into the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches.

About 10 percent of Egyptians are Coptic Christians.

charade

2012-01-07T07:12:00.001-08:00

So will the Obamanator lose his bid for a second term?

Is the question important?

The thing is, we're going to end up once again with two candidates who are totally acceptable to the .1%, rich and powerful movers and shakers who are actually calling the shots in this country -- a circumstance totally unacceptable to me and people like myself.

And with the Republican coronation of the Romneybot now assured after his landslide victory in Iowa, the stage is set for the silly season during which this pair of ruling class tools carpet bomb each other in the media for the next ten months. It's a good time not to own a TV.

I wonder how much longer the vast majority of Americans will remain dim enough to be taken in by this dumb charade whose only purpose any more is to fool them into thinking they're participating in a democracy. I'm hoping that this is year a significant number of us will wake up and reject both the Demolicans and Republicrats, and demand real democracy, free of corruption.

bo billy

2012-01-05T18:42:00.000-08:00

Bo Billy endured an inauspicious start in life as the seventh of five children. His father was an old bear hunter, but he ran out of old bears to kill. But that's just the romantic version; the truth is he was just an old fart who ran out of gas.

If this isn't the ultimate one and only greatest thrift-store masterpiece ever, I can't imagine what a better one would look like. This is an unsigned, anonymous original oil painting, found today at a second-hand store in Portland, Oregon.

lincoln vs douglas

2012-01-05T16:56:00.000-08:00

Jan 5, 2012 -- 7:53AM, Ed.W wrote:

I don't understand the Liberal obsession with the GOP nominating process.

That's easily the funniest thing I've seen here this year, so far.

Turned on the teevee or radio news lately?

Sheesh.

Personally, I don't give a hoot in hell which "looser" they nominate. It looks like it's going to be either the Romneybot or Precious Little Ricky, the all-around mama's boy and hater of all other women.

My only interest in the Republicist's party's candidate is which one presents the richest prospect for good material.

And by the way, just to head off the inevitable response, I can't stand Barack Obama either, and won't vote for him.

This has been another episode in the ongoing-too-long series, "How Wrong Can They Get It?"

Photo schnorred from the lady who writes Under the Mountain Bunker blog, but I don't know who made it.

yoga discipline

2012-01-05T11:31:00.001-08:00

On days that I teach, it's always best to take a couple hours to prepare. Even though I can easily wing it if necessary, I'm a lot more confident if mentally prepared, and if I have a holistic sequence mapped out.

Today's class is at a senior center, so we won't be doing extreme postures like the kurmanasana pictured here. But my clients, some of whom are in their 80's, will be put through a vigorous routine of strenuous poses, modified to suit the needs of joints which are somewhat less flexible and bones more brittle than they used to be. The point is not to demand that practitioners rise to a physical standard established by heavenly bodies, but for all practitioners to realize the optimum benefit of each movement, and to adapt the movement in response to changed anatomies.

Yoga is (or should be) primarily about function rather than form. Feeling better is the point, not conforming to an ideal shape. As my grand-teacher and founder of American Viniyoga, Gary Kraftsow, is fond of saying, "This is not a competition, and it's not a performance art."

survival

2012-01-05T08:37:00.001-08:00

Nø maNN3 15 an iland
YNTYR3 øf 1T53Lf,
Butte 3v'rY MaNN3 15 a Part øf y3 WhøLe,
A PeeCE of ye MAINE.

--by John Donne, who, as he lay dying, was asked,,,

But I don't want to bore you with that. And, needless to say, the dear old fellow did in time pass away, without ever sending to know for whom the bell tolled.

it's about the oil, you big dummy!

2012-01-04T14:33:00.001-08:00

US preparations for a war against Iran are not directed at stopping the country’s alleged nuclear weapons program, but at furthering Washington’s hegemony over the strategic, energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The US has not abandoned the aim that drove the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: to exercise control over the oil and gas supplies of its European and Asian rivals.

--Peter Symonds

coffee break

2012-01-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

How about a little Truth with your mid-morning coffee? It won't make your day any brighter, just realer.

words fail

2012-01-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

It would be fruitless for me to even attempt commenting on the results of yesterday's Iowa Republican caucuses, the mental and spiritual condition of Midwestern Republicans, or the American electoral process.

So I'll leave that to a fellow-blogger, the manly General JC Christian, who tweeted last night:

we keep on waiting

2012-01-03T15:44:00.000-08:00

Through alien influences and suggestions being transmitted to me via my tinfoil hat, I've been urged to listen to more contemporary music, to expand my awareness. And since I'm horrified at the thought of becoming a clueless, doddering old fart who hasn't a clue, I'm listening to quite a bit of it.

Listen to bunches of three-minute tunes, you quickly adopt favorites -- favorite songs and favorite artists. My current favorite is a young singer-songwriter-guitar player, John Mayer, who I hear is big-time right now. His song "Heartbreak Warfare" is gorgeous, but my favorite tune of his is a more modestly-crafted, unassuming work, one which, though devoid of drama, captures the spirit of our turbulent times.

got all your fingers?

2012-01-03T14:12:00.000-08:00

Italy is apparently a lot like Port Hadlock, where I was staying Saturday night. The residents in both places take advantage of all possible opportunities to splode stuff and set things on fire.

Reuters reports that Two men were killed and 561 other people were wounded as Italians celebrated the New Year with massive displays of illegal and homemade fireworks, the Interior Ministry said on Sunday.

The most serious incident took place in Rome when a 31-year-old man lit a large firecracker which exploded in his apartment before he could throw it out the window. The explosion set off a bigger blast of the remaining fireworks that killed him and wounded several others in the apartment, including three children, police said.

There were no reports of deaths or serious injuries in Hadlock, however, and the worst damage at our house appears to have been when the cat came in at 3:00 in the morning with a haunted look on her face.

dum & dummer

2012-01-03T06:46:00.001-08:00

I learned from a Reuters story this morning that "Iran threatened Tuesday to take action if the U.S. Navy moves an aircraft carrier into the Gulf, Tehran's most aggressive statement yet after weeks of saber-rattling as new U.S. and EU financial sanctions take a toll on its economy."

Apparently the reporter, Parisa Hafezi, in the process of learning English as a second language has confused the meanings of "aggressive" and "defensive." Either that, or she (he?) is geographically challenged, and doesn't realize that the Persian Gulf is in Iran's back yard, rather than adjacent to the US's west coast.

Also, too, if the Iranians had an aircraft carrier and parked it at the entrance to San Diego harbor, that would by "saber-rattling," but at the moment, unlike us, they have no "saber" to "rattle."

But in the Land of the Free and the Home of TV-induced idiocy, such fine distinctions don't matter. Politico reports that according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, half of us would favor "military action" to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuke, should the current sanctions lodged against that country fail.

Asked whether the U.S. should take military action to prevent Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon, 55 percent of voters said it shouldn’t, while 36 percent said it should. However, asked if the U.S. should take military action if sanctions against Iran to prevent its nuclear weapons program proved to be unsuccessful, 50 percent voted in favor of using military force.

So less than a week after our Excellent Adventure in Iraq comes to its ignominious conclusion, and as an objectiveless war in Afghanistan rages on, half of us are ready to go charging off to the Middle East one more time to secure access to "our" oil. I'm sure that a concerted propaganda campaign run jointly by the State Department and CNN can work that figure up to 70 percent in no time, just as it did during the runup to the Iraq invasion.

When I was teaching school, I noticed that there are some people so stupid they're incapable of learning anything, but their numbers were nowhere near 50 percent of the student population. However, it would be foolish to ever underestimate the power of incessant televised propaganda directed at a naive and vulnerable population.

Some of us are capable of learning, while others, given time and enough bogus information, just get dumber. Which one do you want to be?

new year

2012-01-02T12:58:00.000-08:00

We made it to 2012, el taco grande, now designated as the year of the Mayan Apocalypse.

Not that I believe in that kind of thing. After all, none of us has a crystal ball, and the future is discernible only as an array of probabilities, and combinations thereof. But having said that, signs point to a very rough economic year ahead, for a couple of reasons:

1) The depression isn't over, and no government or group of influential capitalists seems the least bit interested in taking the obvious measures necessary to alleviate or end it, because

2) Our rulers don't care about us.

Continuing on with current conditions remaining static means among other things that the prices of houses and other real estate will continue dropping in most places, as more people are foreclosed out of their homes and the banks continue to refuse to lend money for new mortgages. Unemployment will continue at its current levels or may worsen somewhat. There will be continued inflation mostly centered in the prices of absolute essentials -- rent, food, and fuel. Money will be tight.

That's the positive prediction. The negative one would see failures among some of the largest banks in Europe and North America, with the European debt crisis shoving what used to be called "the free world" into a new round of massive depression. But I'm hoping that won't happen, and that the monopoly capitalists who rule our world will be able to stick enough duct tape on their problems to keep the seams nearly together.

Sunny Jim Kunstler says of our political life that the biggest shock awaiting us this coming year is "the massive disruption of the major party nominating conventions next summer, when thousands of angry citizens descend on Tampa and Charlotte demanding a reality test. The parties will attempt to go about their ritual business, ignoring the mischief outside the convention centers, and both parties will make the mistake of siccing the cops on the protestors."

This is true and eminently predictable, of course, and the show at those stupid conventions ought to be spectacular. But I don't believe it will be as much of a long-term revelation as the presidential election which follows, as Obama is re-elected by an enormous margin over the yet-unnamed Republican moron, whoever it is, despite the fact that the vast majority of us either hate Obama's guts or, at best, are somewhat cool concerning him. And participation in this election will be shockingly low, as more and more of us bail out of the political system altogether, recognizing that its inherent corruption has rendered it irrelevant to our problems, needs, and lives.

As for me, I'll vote for any candidate for Congress or president who signs a pledge promising to support a constitutional amendment ending corporate personhood, forbidding private money in politics altogether, and providing for publicly funded elections at the federal and state levels. Anyone who refuses or hesitates to take such a pledge can go fish as far as I'm concerned.

On a positive note, I believe the coming year will see more Americans learning to live within their means, even when those means are slender, and more of us will continue to get involved with growing food, which is gradually moving back to the center of people's lives, on a seasonal rhythm.

Photo: the US Supreme Court, photoshopped by Dan Volper.

fyi ron paul

2011-12-30T15:38:00.000-08:00

There's a difference between what the Federal Reserve is now doing and the traditional lending practices of local banks. The Fed waves their magic wand and declares that $7.7 trillion bucks that didn't exist yesterday now is available to banks. I read on some econ site -- Barry Ritholtz's blog or one of them -- that the US money supply has increased 3x since 2007, thanks to the Fed's magical production of fiat dollars.

This is nothing like the First National Bank of Podunk lending $10K to a local business person with the expectation that it will be paid back in "real" dollars. If the bank has done its homework, its risks are minimal, and that's how modern economies operate and actually create wealth.

For anyone to claim equivalency between this kind of standard lending practice and the Federal Reserve's voodoo production of trillions of supposed "dollars" is silly. I know there are primitives such as Ron Paul who believe all banks should be required to have precious metal holdings equal to whatever amount of money they've lent out, but by the same token there are also people who believe that Jesus is coming back any day now -- literally -- and that they will soon be with him in the garden eating cookies and drinking apple juice.

A freshman Econ 101 course will acquaint anyone, including Ron Paul, with the array of tried and true standard practices employed by sound financial institutions in modern economies. To learn abut what the Federal Reserve has been doing the last three years would require another text, possibly the Book of Ceremonial Magick by Arthur Edward Waite.

What the declining metals markets are telling us is that the Fed has gotten away with it -- for now. Inflation is seriously affecting the prices of things everybody needs (primarily rent, food, and fuel) but is still under control. However, I don't think our Federal government is out of the woods yet, and what with the big banks still shaky, we're on very thin ice.

I'm going to hang on to my physical silver, because a) I'd take a loss if I sold any of it now, and b) I didn't buy it to speculate or make money; it's insurance. I keep watching the Federal Reserve improvising, and recalling the experience of Weimar Germany in 1923, and thinking it never hurts to have insurance.

low gravy

2011-12-29T14:42:00.000-08:00

Put a fine pork chop in the fryin pan,
Turn the fire down low, and man oh man,
Let it simmer on down, down, down --
Low gravy.

Right. Well you might be thinking right about now that this is going to be an impassioned screed about the low gravy they're licking up on Wall Street. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong, it's about the meat, not the gravy.

Meat is a funny kind of thing, because we're all made out of it, and so are all our animal friends. When somebody asked Dorothy what kind of dog Toto was, she said "He's a meat dog" (in the book, not the movie). So when we decide to eat some of our animal friends, I think it's well to remember that we're ingesting creatures very much like ourselves.

Having said that, I learned from the New Yahk Times yesterday that our meat supply is mostly tainted.

A study earlier this year by a nonprofit research center in Phoenix analyzed 80 brands of beef, pork, chicken and turkey from five cities and found that 47 percent contained staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can cause anything from minor skin infections to pneumonia and sepsis, more technically called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), and commonly known as blood poisoning — but no matter what you call it, plenty scary. Of those bacteria, 52 percent were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. So when you go to the supermarket to buy one of these brands of pre-ground meat products, there’s a roughly 25 percent chance you’ll consume a potentially fatal bacteria that doesn’t respond to commonly prescribed drugs, writes the food columnist Mark Bittman.

Staphylococcus aureus sure sounds like low gravy to me. Great song, by the way.

So, to avoid having steak with staphylococcus sauce, it's best to avoid the massive slaughter operations like Cargill and Tyson, and shell out the extra bucks for small-farmed locally-grown beef, pork, and chicken. If and when you don't have that kind of money -- and most of us don't have it all the time -- then I've got a great recipe for a vegan spaghetti sauce for ya.

murder most foul

2011-12-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

Consider the contrasting executive styles of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The former, always the swaggering Philistine full of "Bring it on" and "Mission Accomplished," invited contempt and seemed energized by it. Compared to Obama's timid reticence and cautious double-talk, George's yahooliganism was always entertaining, even when it was harnessed to murderous and/or larcenous policies.

And after all, their differences are only style-deep and inconsequential in practice, as their pursuit of foreign wars of aggression are practically identical. Both are bloody-handed murderers, and if one killed with gusto while the other attempts to hide his crimes under a veil of secrecy, their victims are equally dead in either case.

George Bush's Excellent Adventure in Iraq is now history, but Obama's secret drone-warfare campaign in Pakistan and elsewhere is a tale of mayhem in progress, and to tell it I can do no better than defer to Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com and the Washington Post article he cites which reads in part, "(N)o president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals."

What those goals are, exactly, must also be a state secret, for I have absolutely no clue what might be accomplished by a campaign which uses robots to target low-level anti-American militants in the hills of Pakistan but ends up killing mostly innocents, including children, then calls those predictable deaths "collateral damage" rather than what they are -- murder most foul.

We had such high hopes for Obama and the Democrats when they took charge of the government three years ago, but now, as the Washington Post declares, Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.

Somebody needs to page Julian Assange at Wikileaks, for there is nothing secret that cannot, and will not be revealed.

decline and fall

2011-12-28T07:54:00.001-08:00

Reading the daily headlines any more is kind of like getting updates to the American version of "The Decline and Fall of the ("empire name here") Empire.

Sears/KMart is closing over 100 stores in the wake of their bringing up the rear in the Christmas season retail sweepstakes. Most informed watchers are anticipating the 125-year-old company will fold by spring, following other dinosaurs like Woolworth's and the Oldsmobile into the boneyard of extinct behemoths.

Some people might think this is relatively unimportant, but they're wrong. Sears and Roebuck was at one time a major pillar of American civilization, and its ubiquitous mail-order catalog the game-changing retail sales innovation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, similar in significance to on-line retailing today.

Gone is the free-enterprise capitalism of my childhood, when we had a garage door named Stanley and a refrigerator named Leonard, and the neighbor's car (not his dog) was named Kaiser. We used to have a country here, but now we're an empire, and the decision to go that way is what triggered our precipitous decline.

lay down, saleh

2011-12-27T20:47:00.000-08:00

One of the tyrants we do business with over there in the Near East, Old Man Saleh in Yemen, is going to visit here soon, and that's causing problems for the administration. According to the AP story on this visit: Fearful of appearing to harbor an autocrat with blood on his hands, the Obama administration was trying to ensure that Saleh visits only for medical care and doesn't plan to stay, U.S. officials said.

Old Saleh has ruled Yemen like it was his private property for 33 years, and is probably more willing than anyone else except Assad in Syria to shoot his own people. He's coming over here to get high-powered treatment for injuries he sustained during an assassination attempt.

Sounds to me like a visit from Cousin Eddie.

life in the key of b♭

2011-12-27T14:36:00.000-08:00

Got up this morning with my ugly face on. It was worse than ugly, actually. Hopeless is more like it.

After a couple hours of that I accidentally took a double dose of my a.m. medication. I thought one pill got away from me, but now I'm thinking it fell into my coffee cup, never to be seen again even though it was consumed along with a second pill. Honest mistake.

Within a matter of minutes, despair was banished, and I went from b♭ to b#. It's disconcerting to think that emotions as messy and destructive as that can be dispelled by a pinch of pale yellow powder, but there it is. I'm learning that some kinds of brain degeneration have emotional as well as physical symptoms.

I'm following up my morning with a generous helping of medicated banana bread, the world's most delicious anti-depressant. Yum yum.

revolution now

2011-12-26T11:35:00.001-08:00

With the US Federal Reserve continuing to give low-cost loans to the European Central Bank, it's past time to ask why this administration is bailing out banks all over the world while demanding austerity for ordinary American citizens.

The greed and recklessness of the banksters led directly to the housing price bubble of the double-zeros and the economic collapse and unemployment crisis which followed. And yet the government is asking ordinary workers to tighten their belts while saying "we all have to sacrifice." But the banksters get to keep their multi-million dollar salaries via bailouts, so what are they sacrificing?

At Salon, Simon Johnson writes "The rationale behind supporting big banks is that they are needed for the economy to recover. But this position looks increasingly doubtful when the banks are sitting on piles of cash while creditworthy consumers and businesses are reluctant to borrow."

This goes way beyond unfairness, and reveals precisely the acute necessity of a second American revolution. At this point, voting one party out of power and replacing it with the other is inadequate, since neither party is addressing our fundamental economic problem, namely bailouts for them and austerity for us. The protesters at Occupy Albany describe the problem this way:

The interests of those who purchase influence are rewarded at the expense of the People, from whom the government’s just power is derived. We believe that this failure in our system is at the core of many interconnected issues we face as a society, and its resolution is key to a just future. We therefore demand true democracy, decoupled from the corrosive influence of concentrated economic power, and we call all who share in this common goal to stand with us and take action toward this end.

Government of the corrupt, by the well-connected, and for the wealthy must go.

crap analysis

2011-12-24T12:55:00.001-08:00

Here's an example of how political writing in the mainstream press can get the facts right only to follow with lame analysis.

The facts are that More than 2.5 million voters have left the Democratic and Republican parties since the 2008 elections, while the number of independent voters continues to grow.

Rather than post his own thoughts concerning what's mainly responsible for the decline of party identification in the US, the reporter Richard Wolf turns the podium over to Doug Lewis, a minor political functionary, who believes that "The strident voices of both the left and the right have sort of soured people from saying willingly that they belong to one party or the other. If both sides call each other scurrilous dogs, then the public believes that both sides are probably scurrilous dogs."

Besides perpetuating the "they're both the same and equally bad" falsehood, Lewis's narrative implies that the "correct" political position is roughly equidistant between "the strident voices of both the left and the right," in the mythical, nonexistent, and irrelevant middle.

"Left" and "Right" and the background static of extreme partisanship, however, is just part of the show, and has little to do with the eclipse of party politics. More and more, American adults consider the paralysis of government, the large Republican presidential field of morons and misfits, a Democratic Party corrupted and so demoralized it has no plan, and turn away in contempt.

Late in his story, Richard Wolf offers that "The decline (in party identification) is due to a variety of factors," one of which is "people revolt in disgust." But overall the analysis is typical MSM stuff which seeks to avoid the obvious: that we have to both make our own damn future and get a new political system, because the one we've got now is dead as a smoked oyster.

no demands

2011-12-23T11:16:00.001-08:00

Writing at Buzzflash/Truthout, Barry Eidlin, a PhD candidate in the sociology department at UC Berkeley, explains with grace and clarity why the various Occupy movements not only have no specific demands, but don't need them, and why such demands would be excess baggage.

The role of broad transformative social movements like Occupy is not to generate specific demands. It is to identify fundamental injustices and to refocus political debate on those injustices. And the Occupy movement has done this very well. Its central slogan of "We are the 99%" has articulated a unifying vision that has resonated with millions of people, who have protested, marched, and camped in hundreds of cities in over eighty countries around the world. Moreover, the movement has fundamentally reshaped our national political discussion. Whereas talk this summer was solely about how much to slash the federal budget, the discussion now is about the fundamental injustice of an economic system that allows the top 1 percent of the population to control 40 percent of the wealth. "They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism," admitted Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz to a recent gathering of the Republican Governors' Association.

(Snip)

For now though, the focus needs to be on creating new political possibilities. The movement needs to grow, needs to reach out to more people, and needs to keep the discussion focused on those responsible for today's massive wealth inequality. Any call for concrete demands at this point is simply an attempt to shift the discussion back to what we were talking about before Occupy came along, to close off those political possibilities.

This process of moving from protests to demands is messy, unpredictable, and uncertain. But that's how successful social movements actually work, and that's how social change actually happens.

Read the whole thing here.

Those who say they're sympathetic to the movement, then criticize the protesters for "not doing it right" are mostly not sympathetic at all, but hostile, and those who are truly sympathetic but baffled because #OWS didn't come up with a 10-point legislative program need to chill, sit back, and watch what happens this spring. They might learn something.

space junk

2011-12-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

"On Christmas Eve," said Norad, "A soviet Sputnik hit Africa,
India, Venezuela, Texass,Kansass,
It's coming fast -- Peru too -- It keeps coming..."

And now I'm mad about Space Junk
I'm all burned out about Space Junk
Ooh walk and talk about Space Junk
It smashed my baby's head, and now my Sally's dead.

--Devo
"Space Junk"

It's coming fast -- Namibia too -- it keeps coming.

This is a pretty good-sized thing from outer space, a little over 3-1/2 feet around and 14 inches in diameter. Nobody knows whose it is or why it was orbiting because it's now a hollow ball. Maybe it always was. Also according to the Associated Press report, the ball is made of a "metal alloy known to man" and weighs 13 pounds.

And the warnings of the prophets have come to pass.

So why are we bailing out banks and warring in Afghanistan when there's space junk raining down upon us?

eurozone doubt

2011-12-21T20:20:00.000-08:00

In the lost city of Moo, a high priest of the neo-Arian Platonist Keynesians visits the shrine of the sacred Euro, prior to making a sacrifice.

those good old ff's

2011-12-21T17:05:00.000-08:00

The Iraq War is over and it sucked. Bush sucked, The Afghan War sucks big time. And yes, Obama sucks too.

But don't take my word for it. Heed the words of one of our revered and sacred founders:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
--James Madison
"Political Observations," 1795

I've noticed the good old FF's are practically worshiped by some of us. What they actually thought and said, not so much.

ho say canna u c

2011-12-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

Following up on the story that appeared here four days ago ("Backward") concerning the federal government's recent and ongoing attempt to put an end to state-sanctioned medical marijuana co-ops and dispensaries, I've been trying to unscramble the "why" of it. I've now found a few pieces of the puzzle, but it's still coming together.

Back in February of 2001, the US Patent Office received an application for a new invention, a cannabinol-derived substance called cannabidiol. Many names are associated with the development of this chemical, but when the patent was granted in the fall of 2003, the inventors were listed as Aidan J. Hampson of Irvine, CA, and Julius Axelrod, and Maruizio Grimaldi, both residing in Maryland.

The US Department of Health and Human Services is presently the holder of the patent for this substance, which appears to be an effective treatment for limiting the damage caused by strokes and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease, and HIV dementia. It does so without producing any intoxication in the patient.

So far so good, until we learn that The government has now granted exclusive rights to develop and market cannabidiol-based medicines to a New York firm, KannaLife Systems, Inc. I'm deeply suspicious of the timing of this monopoly grant, which is occurring precisely at the moment the feds are suppressing the home-grown and democratically-sanctioned medical marijuana industry.

Dean Petkanas, founder and head honcho of KannaLife Systems, Inc., is a heavy hitter, a banker and self-described "visonary entrepreneur," and a well-connected member of the .01%. His blog is here.

There are still a lot of holes in this narrative, a lot of twists and turns and Israeli connections with the science behind these developments, but several things are now clear. First of all, the federal government in its infinite wisdom is finally reversing itself and accepting the fact that marijuana has medical applications, but has apparently specified to researchers that acceptable medicinal agents cannot be allowed to produce giggles or euphoria in the users. Our rulers are tortured by the knowledge that somewhere, despite all their efforts, somebody might be having a good time.

Secondly, they've issued a patent for a product derived from a substance which has occurred in nature for millions of years. This is like claiming that Louis Pasteur invented calcium. At most, the process of deriving this medication might be patented, but not the substance itself, an end product which, like refined gasoline, is arrived at through extraction.

Thirdly, and most interestingly to me anyway, what did Dean Petkanas do in order that he should be handed a multi-billion-dollar monopoly, and who has he been doing it with?

parlay voo

2011-12-20T15:39:00.000-08:00

I found out today that Mitt Romney spent two years of his youth working as a Mormon missionary -- in France!

Picture it -- an earnest young man sits down with a group of worldly, middle-aged guys at a sidewalk cafe in Paris. They're smoking Gauloise cigs and eating Camembert and they're about half cooked on Bordeaux, and this clean-cut young dude starts rattling on in English about a hoard of golden plates inscribed in an unknown language with ancient secrets, discovered by a farmboy almost two hundred years ago in a cave in upstate New York.

His job was to convince them that he's not totally out of his mind. Sounds like hard work to me.

the highest bidder

2011-12-19T16:28:00.000-08:00

Politico is reporting that Sheldon Adelson, one of the world's richest people, is seriously considering majorly funding Speaker Gingrich's sinking Iowa campaign with about 20 million dollars.

Part of the money would be spent for a massive TV advertising blitz to neutralize "a weeklong anti-Gingrich on-air assault that is already taking a toll on his front-runner status in the Hawkeye State, according to private and public polling," Politico reported.

Sheldon Adelson is the legendary "casino king" whose personal fortune has been growing in leaps and bounds in recent years, since he carved himself out a corner in the Asian casino market. For a long time he's been a financial backer of right-wing groups in Israel, and was the primary bankroller of a group called Freedom's Watch, a pro-Republican, pro-Iraq War and pro-Bush administration outfit, now defunct.

He's a seriously authoritarian person, and very dangerous, His fortune grew by about a third in the last year, and he's now worth 21 and a half billions. And now this Putz means to buy some outcomes in an attempt to stick us with that flatulent fool Gingrich.

ruptured ducksauce

2011-12-19T15:28:00.000-08:00

On the Facebook page called "Stop the Machine! Create a New World!" which is put up by some of the people from OccupyWashingtonDC.org, today's post reads:

Sunday a group from Occupy Washington DC and Occupy DC went on a march against NDAA (the National Defense Authorization Act) to the White House. We knew we would not be able to be on the side walk in front of the White House so we were told to get to the street. Before we moved to the street police tape was all around us. We have protested many times in the street in front of the White House. But for some reason we were moved completely across the street and taped off. We counted 8 snipers with guns aimed at us and the largest police presence i have seen since October. We had two arrest but they are safe and back at camp.
NDAA is a serious sign of were we are headed. People need to stand up against this bill. Consider NDAA when its time to vote this year. The lesser of two evils IS NOT the answer anymore.

Eight snipers were necessary to deal with this band of raggedy protesters! I guess our rulers are feeling pretty threatened.

sunday funnies

2011-12-18T16:57:00.000-08:00

I'm posting very late today, with very little to say, except that life changes. Then it changes back again.

This has been a yoostabee-type Sunday. I'm over here with my girlfriend in Port Feelmore, WA, where we're both lazing around being sleepy after watching foop ball almost all day. I'm a TV watcher and a sports fan (Seahawks) once more. They beat Chicago today on the road, have won five of their last six, and with a little luck look to be playoff bound.

Afterward we watched the Denver-New England game, because we wanted to see this new media star, the Broncos' quarterback Tim Tebow, and maybe discover the reason for all the hoop-la. He turns out to be a very physically strong, athletic player, but very undisciplined -- the kind of guy who drives coaches nuts, because they never know what he's going to do next, and neither does he. However, that makes him much fun to watch.

New England won the game in a cakewalk.

The Hebrews and Muslims are right: everybody needs a down, homey, cozy day once a week.

backward

2011-12-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

Last week when I went to the co-op to buy my month's supply of pot, there was a bunch of people there I hadn't seen before. Everyone was uptight and paranoid, and in the room where the *medicine* is dispensed, in addition to my regular dispenser there was a small, roundish guy in a baseball hat who looked like a cop, looking at my patient profile on a computer screen. I was tempted to ask this dopovitch how things are hanging among the swinging schmucks of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Even though I resisted the temptation, the experience was strained and uncomfortable. What the hell is going on?

Apparently Barack Obama has ordered his Department of Justice to demolish the medical marijuana industry. The evidence for this contention is all circumstantial, because the prez has made no statement nor issued any "smoking gun" document. Apparently he's not satisfied with having become our first black fascist president, and is now determined to establish his credentials as a petty tyrant capable of earning the contempt and hatred of even the apolitical.

We know this is happening because dispensaries all over the west coast, from San Diego to Seattle are either busted out of business or feeling the heat.

We voted on this. The will of the people on the issue is clear and unmistakable.

I'm going to get myself invited to a cabinet meeting in the White House, and volunteer to serve refreshments.