jesus ball

When Jesus Montero hits a home run, it invariably goes out to center field, and doesn't just barely clear the fence, either, but always falls deep in the seats.

He hit one just a couple innings ago, just like that. One of these days he'll hit a ball that leaves the park.

The perennial story of the Mariners is "good field, no hit," but I expect them to lose that designation as this season progresses. Yesterday in Colorado they went bananas and scored 10 runs.

Montero is going to fill a key role in the team's renaissance. I had this guy pegged as a ringer the first time I saw him play.

Photo: Seattle Times

oil, jobs, and money

We don't need them.

We need land, peace, and freedom.

Give us the land ruined by monocropping and pesticides use by Monsanto and Cargill, and we'll make it right.

US out of Afghanistan, out of Iraq, out of Pakistan, out of Yemen, and out of our faces.

Tax the rich.

The Earth: love it or leave it.

jesus & the money

Ya, ya. Let's take a walk down memory lane; just 3-1/2 years ago, this birther delusion Assrocket here alludes to was #1!

Coming up next in the wingnut hit parade -- another oldie but goodie: Remember Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Yes, you do? Well let us refresh your memory anyway.

So here are the Mussolini Sisters with "You know he's Mister Wrong, though he says he's Mister Wright."

roundabout seattle

I'll be traveling to the forest this morning as I usually do, so chances are that my career as a blogger and know-it-all will be temporarily compromised. Forecasts are for light-to-nonexistent posting for the next couple of days, as I attack the weeds in the garden and the food at the local cafe.

I'm glad to say I'll be moving away from the city very soon, but as cities go, this isn't a bad one. If you depart from the beaten path just a block or two, you're liable to run across considerable civic pride, expressed in such little projects as this lovely traffic roundabout at 112th and Fremont. It's maintained by the totally voluntary, unsolicited, and anonymous efforts of neighborhood residents, although probably their immediate neighbors know who they are.

heartbreak of ods

Absolutely, can't stand him and won't vote for him.

But I don't have Obama Derangement Syndrome. Don't know what that is? See anything by conservative media star Michelle Malkin, especially her Twitter™© feed.

I wrote her this morning with the good news: ODS is treatable.

politics

It's an observation older than Jesus: "Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you" (Pericles, quoted by Thucydides).

temporary victory

A federal judge appointed by Obama has temporarily struck down ("preliminarily enjoined") the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides for indefinite detention without charges of US citizens deemed by the military to be supporting terrorism, because it violates the First and Fifth Amendments.

Glenn Greenwald has all the details.

The decision will stand only as long as it takes for the neocon fascist majority on the Supreme Court to get their paws on it. In this case, Roberts, Scalia, and Associates ought to be able to swallow supporting something that Obama signed.

goldfish gorgonzola

Melvin Finnacle of Costa Mocosa, Florida, poses proudly with the ginormous salt-water goldfish he caught in the ocean, not far from his home.

Although goldfish are a type of carp, which is not a noted delicacy, Melvin swears they're delicious when baked at a medium temperature, topped with a mixture of gorgonzola cheese, blueberry yogurt, and graham cracker crumbs. Bon appetit.

trashnation

The city of Seattle's ban on plastic bags takes effect on July first, and that's all right by me, and by anyone else who's the least concerned with our trash crisis.

We've ignored that plastic trash midden the size of Texas which is killing wildlife in the North Pacific for way too long. In fact, we've ignored the trash crisis much longer than we should have, and at our extreme peril.

The capitalist class of owners and manufacturers endlessly touts the ease and convenience of our disposable society, but if we look at what's resulted from it at ground level we recognize that it's not the least bit easy or convenient.

Wendell Berry grew up alongside the Kentucky River near where it joins the Ohio, at a time when the surrounding landscape was mostly small, gem-like farms, lovingly worked by hands and mules. Today the prospect has radically changed for the worse, and a large part of problems is trash.

"When the river rises," Berry writes, "it carries a continuous raft of cans, bottles, plastic jugs, chunks of styrofoam, and other imperishable trash. After the floods subside, I, like many other farmers, must pick up the trash before I can use the bottomland fields." Noting that he has seen the Ohio so choked with this debris that an ant would be able to walk "dry-footed" from Kentucky to Indiana, Berry complains that "Our roadsides and roadside fields lie under a constant precipitation of cans, bottles, the plastic-ware of fast food joints, soiled plastic diapers, and sometimes whole bags of garbage."

"Moreover," Berry says, "a close inspection of our countryside would reveal, strewn over it from one end to the other, thousands of derelict and worthless automobiles, house trailers, refrigerators, stoves, freezers, washing machines, and dryers; as well as thousands of unregulated dumps, in hollows and sink holes, on streambanks and roadsides, filled not only with "disposable" containers, but also with broken toasters, television sets, toys of all kinds, furniture, lamps, stereos, radios, scales, coffee makers, mixers, blenders, corn poppers, hair dryers, and microwave ovens."

Berry sees the avalanche of trash appliances and furnishings as a result of "intentional flimsiness and unrepairability" of this stuff, and concludes, "There are days when I would be delighted if certain corporation executives could somehow be obliged to eat their products."

Obviously we're looking at a massive job cleaning up this mess, but even more obviously, the worst struggle occurs at the source, putting an end to the production of this garbage. And that's the hard part, because in this modern and up-to-date nation, anything that turns a profit and for which there is a demand is the holy of holies -- sacred and untouchable.

We live in the only country in the history of the world where people lobby for war, death (the weapons industry), and making more trash and garbage. But not here in the good old Northwest, where banning the bag is an important first step.

All quotes from Wendell Berry appeared in his essay "Waste" (1989).

indignados

There was an enormous demonstration and march in Madrid yesterday and last night to mark the one-year anniversary of the first protests against fiscal austerity in Spain.

There were also large 99% protests in London and in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This movement is not going away, and it appears to be gathering strength with the return of good weather.

No mention of any of this on the front page of the New York Times, of course. We're back to playing the news blackout game in the US, but comprehensive news and photos are always available at the Guardian (UK) site where I got these pictures.

Besides protesting the ongoing felonies and follies of our plutocratic overlords, demonstrators in New York had something to celebrate, as the first OWS trial in that city ended with the acquittal of photographer Andrew Arbuckle (they must be trying the cases in alphabetical order), who was found not to have been blocking street traffic after the jury saw defense evidence provided by other photographers and videographers which clearly showed the only traffic impediment at that time and in that place was da police.

And there's a nice little irony here too, in that Arbuckle was not a 99 percenter, but a conservative journalism student who thought the police were being abused by protesters, and wanted to document it. Details here.

back to the drachma

With one possible exception, that of the extended swan song of General Francisco Franco, the late fascist dictator of Spain, I've never seen a death agony as drawn-out as the ongoing demise of the Greek banking system. People can be excused for thinking it will go on indefinitely, or perhaps even forever.

Except it won't, and thank God the end is finally here. The financial site Zero Hedge reports: Anxious Greeks have withdrawn as much as 700 million euros ($893 million) from the nation’s banks since the inconclusive May 6 election, President Karolos Papoulias told party leaders yesterday, according to a transcript of the meeting posted on the presidency’s website today.

So, after Greek depositors clean out the Euros that remain in their banking system, Greece can go ahead and default (they should have done it a year ago), the Euro will give way to the drachma, and we'll know just how ugly the ripples of Greece's fall on the US and western European economies is going to be.

crime doesn't pay well

I'll tell you what would deter

crime would be if every

time a criminal does

a crime, someone

would let the air out of

all four of his tires.

you got to move

The time has come, the walrus said, to put a penny-per-ounce tax on soda, and a similar tariff on chips, etc.

With 2/3 of all Americans overweight, and 1/3 of us having crossed over into obesity, the time has definitely come.

Some say you can't legislate behavior with taxes, but that's bologna. Remember how smoking used to be glam? But then most advertising was banned, and cigarettes were taxed out of reach. Result: few children take up the habit.

This is a national health issue, and the only thing standing in the way of our dealing with it is lobbyists for the agribusiness industry.

Seize the carrot. And lose the high-fructose corn syrup.

the handwriting on the wall

I keep coming back to this thought because I love the name of it, which comes from the prophetic OT Book of Daniel Ch. 5.

Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, made a big feast for a thousand of his nobles, and used the gold and silver plates and cups that his old dad, Nebuchad-nezzar, had stolen out of the temple in Jerusalem. "They drunke wine and praised the gods of gold and of siluer, of brasse, of yron, of wood, of stone," says the (original) King James Version, (1611).

(5) "In the same houre came forth fingers of a mans hand, and wrote ouer against the candlesticke vpon the plaister of the wall of the Kings palace, and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. (6) Then the kings countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the ioints of his loines were loosed, and his knees smote one against another."

So it means the same thing today as it did then, that something bad is going to happen.

I agree in a way with conservatives who see this development of gay marriage as another sign that civilization as we have known it is falling apart. You're not wrong; it is.

I'm just not sure that civilization as we've known it, and what we today think of as "tradition," is all that groovy. For one thing, our way of life -- the industrial age -- only began to evolve a couple hundred years ago, and only really began to spread and dominate everywhere about 150 years ago. So what we think of as tradition isn't really all that traditional.

I try as much as possible to live in the future rather than trying to hang on to the past. The future I see coming will rely much more on old, semi-forgotten ways of life than we experience now -- people living in smaller places, getting (or growing) their food locally, and depending on local business. 90 percent fewer cars and no Wal-Mart.

It will be a democratic society, where nobody bothers about whether the neighbors enjoy themselves in their own way.

down the drain

Jamie Dimon says he doesn't know exactly what happened to the $2 billion. The head of the JP Morgan/Chase mega-bank may seem clueless, but I'm reasonably certain he's not.

Neither is John Corzine, the former chief of the now-defunct MF Global hedge fund, who sat in front of a congressional committee not very long ago and claimed that the $1.6 billion his firm had lost track of seemed to have "disappeared," to use his word.

Only a naif would believe a word these two grifters are putting out. They know perfectly well in both cases what happened to the "lost" money, but the last thing they're going to do is make that information public.

Don't believe it when they tell you that they're bankers, either. They're gamblers, and in JP Morgan's case, they've taken taxpayers' TARP money and now gambled a bunch of it away with the same kind of reckless double-downs and re-doublings that crashed the economy four years ago.

Just because the corporate press convey the mumbled evasions of banksters without blinking an eye doesn't mean we have to, even in polite society. Our lives will be a little less confusing once we start calling weasels and coyotes what they are -- varmints. Then maybe we'll be able to deal with them appropriately.

reflection

If you would like to get a better look at yourself, avoid looking in the mirror.

Instead, close your two eyes and see if you can activate the other one, between your eyebrows. It's the one eye that looks in the opposite direction as the two eyes -- inward rather than outward.

dead man walking

From the AP at Yahoo News:

In Egypt, Hamdi Hafez al-Nubi, a 28-year-old waiter, collapsed at work. Co-workers quickly took him to a hospital where he was found to be dead from a suspected heart attack.

The dead man's relatives retrieved his remains from the hospital, took him home to wash the body and prepare it for a Friday evening funeral and burial, and called a doctor to fill out the death certificate.

When the doctor arrived, he noticed the corpse was unusually warm. The funeral, now postponed, quickly became a party and family reunion after the doctor awakened Hamdi Hafez al-Nubi, whose mother promptly fainted. She was soon brought around and joined the festivities.

deep forest

Mr. and Mrs. Gnome, the mute gatekeepers standing permanent sentry at the doorway, graciously permitted me entry into the forest yesterday. Our minds have doorways too, like the one that snaps shut when we suddenly awaken from dreams which almost immediately begin to recede from memory.

Moving into the first layer of the woods, the traveler encounters a dream from the past, the fossilized remain of a 19th-century company town which prospered in a simpler time, when people's lives were organized on a much smaller scale. It's an early dream, like those which flit through our minds when we're still semi-conscious. The main gate into the depths is close at hand.

I've never seen the keepers of the main gate, who hide from view in their short towers and operate the fragile, temperamental mechanisms which permit, impede, or prevent access to the deep woods. I've heard them talking on the radio though, speaking in a cryptic, bureaucratic dialect that reveals as little information as possible.

Yesterday the gate was wide open. With the city, civilization's superego, receding into the distance behind, and the deep forest directly ahead, the mind prepares for the dream more real than any conscious perception, an egoless encounter with what religious devotees call "the soul," and which my late doctor, the famous Herr Jung, called "the collective unconscious."

It's a thrilling voyage, but you must be forewarned that you are likely to encounter your worst fear when you travel into the deepest part of the woods.

best new site

When Obama endorsed marriage equality, we were all like...

mental dirigibles

I'm sitting here on my couch tonight listening to all that "modren" jazz and thinking really huge, ginormous thoughts, some the size of blimps. Have you ever thought of one nation, under God, in a dirigible? That's a very large thought, and would require a monstrous fat blimp.

Some of these thoughts are so huge they're flowing out my ears now and running around the room like those tiny bunny rabbits scampering among the creosote bushes in the shadow of San Jacinto on that spring morning in Desert Hot Springs so long ago.

I have seen the work of sorcerers and magicians.

I've been a visitor in hell and seen the suffering of the damned.

I went to the mountain and saw it burning when I was on fire too.

But now I'm here to tell you about it.

the handwriting on the wall

Actually, it says "Some come here to sit and think," but nevermind.

Belshazzar's Feast was painted by Rembrandt.

grabbing it with both hands

The Rude Pundit weighs in on the issue we're all talking about with his usual restraint, modesty, and razor-sharp perception.

No shit that it was a political calculation. In one of the most ignorant, backwards-ass editorials you'll read on the subject, the conservative roach swatter known as the National Review (motto: "Consistently against civil rights since before the Mulatto president was born") opined against President Barack Obama's statement that "I think same-sex couples should be able to get married." Said "the Editors"...Obama's "dishonesty is not merely a matter of pretending that he has truly changed his mind about marriage, rather than about the politics of marriage."

Of course it was political. The nation, as whole, has shifted towards supporting gay marriage. Actually, let's be a little more cynical about this. The Rude Pundit believes that when you see a poll that says, as a recent Pew one does, "65 percent of college-educated white women and 68 percent of whites under 30 backed the idea," what you're really seeing is that large swaths of the population just don't give a jolly rat shit about who's marrying who. The Rude Pundit talks on a regular basis to voters under 30 and to college-educated white women. You know what most of them say about gay marriage? "I don't care. If you wanna get married, get married. Now, pass the bowl."

moms

Don't forget, Sunday is Mother's Day. It's a holiday we can all celebrate because everyone has a mother. Even Jesus had a mother.

Photo schnorred from Huffpo.

green & clean

Vermont is a very small state, the second least populous and geographically the sixth smallest of the 50 in area. However, Vermont's state government is leading the way in environmental law, and this past week banned fracking within its borders.

With a 103-36 vote in the House of Representatives, Vermont on Friday became the first state to ban hydraulic fracturing to extract oil or natural gas. The bill passed the Senate earlier this week.

Learned this at John Aravosis's Americablog.com.

hip-hope

On a discussion forum I frequent, on a thread concerning the president's change of heart re: same sex marriage yesterday, one correspondent mused:

"Now if we can just get him to admit his actual thoughts on legalizing marijuana! :)"

That's easy.

His actual thought is it's his ace in the hole.

memorail park groc...

...is the name of a corner grocery in Delano, CA.

Some other fun facts to know and share with friends:

Obama changed his mind about gay marriage today in a carefully choreographed decision which, of course, took everyone by surprise.

Fox News commentator-pundit type guy Shepard Smith, who seems karmically destined to play the role of San Miguel in Hell, approved of Obama's words. Will this make him an icky pariah among his peers? Stand by.

Romney is still opposed to same-sex marriage, of course. For some reason, I doubt that he'll re-consider.

There is a widespread belief that we could see the great wall of China from the moon. But the belief is mistaken; we would not be able to see China's wall any more easily than we could see our own houses from the moon, even if we were able to get up there for such a pointless reason as to look.

There is no such thing as a live sardine.

grafœtus

Yes, I know, Noth Kalina voted in their law last night prohibiting same-sex marriage.

Nevertheless, the handwriting is on the wall, and it says

new days, new ways

So North Carolina yesterday became the 29th state to ban gay marriage, as well as all forms of domestic legal partnership. So be it.

If you happen to live there, and you're gay or lesbian, or any sort of non-conformist or free-spirited person, possessed of some sort of talent, and willing to work, maybe you ought to think about leaving.

You'd be welcome here, and probably lots happier than you are now. As long as you contribute something to your community, nobody cares if you enjoy yourself in your own way.

Just drive, bicycle, or walk west, trending slightly north until you can't go any farther and you'll be here, in Ecotopia. We haven't seceded from the US (yet), but things are definitely different here than they are east of the mountains, and a whole lot better than anyplace I've ever been.

hokusai's manga

Today I discovered Katsushika Hokusai, the greatest of Japanese artists, who lived between 1760 and 1849. I was already familiar with the best-known of his work -- I think everyone has seen his "Great Wave" and block prints of Mt. Fuji, but didn't know him by name.

Even though I'm just learning about Hokusai, I've already concluded that one cannot fully appreciate his stature without seeing the manga, which is simply the Japanese term for "sketches." The Hokusai Manga is about 3,000 small drawings rendered as woodblocks and published serially between 1815 and 1878. They show scenes from everyday life, animals, monsters, and other fantastic creatures. The two-block, two-page work shown here is "The Dragon Ascending Mt. Fuji."

As soon as I began looking at Hokusai's Manga, I realized he was one of the great ones, a member of that exclusive club of artists whose names function as cultural ideals, but I couldn't tell why. Looking at the greatest European artworks, say those of Leonardo or Jan Vermeer, I know why they're great, because I'm cognizant of the values for which they are seeking the perfect expression.

I began to understand more about Hokusai's skills when I went to a neurobiologist's site to see portions of the manga that illustrate an article explaining how the motion that is only implied in the master's sketches might fool the brain into thinking it's seeing a moving image.

"Hokusai," the proprietor of Neurophilosopy.com says, "used a different and innovative technique to convey motion. The simple line drawings in his Manga strips lack all of the commonly-used motion effects, yet give a strong impression of movement by depicting the human body in highly unstable postures. As a new study just published in the journal NeuroReport shows, the figures in the sketches are perceived to be moving because their gravity-defying postures activate regions of the visual cortex that are sensitive to motion."

I think I need to get a print copy of at least some of the manga, and study this artist some more.

blake's wisdom

"The cut worm forgives the plow."
--Wm. Blake
"Proverbs of Hell"

jesus saves; moses invests; b of a forgives

Bank of America is making plans to offer about 200,000 homeowners mortgage reductions averaging $150,000, provided they meet certain criteria. The majority of them will get letters "by the third quarter," which begins in July.

In order to qualify, homeowners have to a) be underwater, with the property worth less than the remainder of the mortgage, b) be 60 or more days behind in payments, and c) the loan has to be owned OR serviced by B of A.

Full story at the New York Times -- an excerpt:

The principal reduction offers from Bank of America Home Loans are the result of a $25 billion settlement agreement earlier this year with 49 state attorneys general as well as federal authorities who had been investigating allegations of abuses over the handling of foreclosures.

“To the extent principal reduction and other modification tools help us turn mortgages headed for possible foreclosure into long-term performing loans, it will be positive for homeowners, mortgage investors and communities,” Ron Sturzenegger, a legacy asset servicing executive, said in the statement.

It goes without saying that this will help homeowners and communities, but Mr. Sturzenegger doesn't clarify why -- or just how much -- it will help the bank. To know that you have to know what kinds of fines were levied against them when they signed that settlement agreement with the states' attorneys-general, and what they have to do to get those fines reduced or forgiven.

For that you need to read David Dayen at Firedoglake, who adds some more pertinent information to the mix:

I'm generally happy to see any principal reduction happening, though of course these are letters and not actual principal reductions. BofA sent out the letters to 200,000 borrowers, and now they can pick and choose on whom to bestow these benefits. And additionally, BofA will build in a three-month trial period where borrowers will have to pay the mortgage at the new rate. This was the trap in HAMP, as borrowers didn’t get an answer on a permanent modification after three months, waited, and were then hit with a denial and a demand for the difference between the trial payments and the original mortgage within days to avoid foreclosure. Looks like BofA may be setting the same trap.

photo finish, or oil painting?

From Pollingreport.com:

White House 2012: General Election

Gallup Daily tracking poll. Based on a 5-day rolling average. N=approx. 2,200 registered voters nationwide. Margin of error ± 3.

"Suppose the presidential election were held today. If Barack Obama were the Democratic Party's candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney were the Republican Party's candidate, who would you vote for: Barack Obama, the Democrat, or Mitt Romney, the Republican?" If unsure: "As of today, do you lean more toward Obama, the Democrat, or Romney, the Republican?" Options rotated


Obama Romney
45% 45%

(As of 4/29 - 5/3/12)

How many voters will decide by flipping a coin?

How many will decide it doesn't really matter and stay home?

These polls are generally conducted among "likely voters." What percentage of us would that be, I wonder.

romney going down

To Mitt Romney: "You're going down, bro."

No less an authority than noted former professional basketball star Charles Barkley has said so.

eyes looking up

Today was a big planting here in Chimacum Creek. As you can see about 3/4 of our little plot is now under cultivation.

Onions of two kinds, red and sweet, are now in, along with beets and shallots. I planted a long row of potatoes according to my instructions, with the eyes looking up. We also got dahlias and zinnias in, because they will attract honeybees as well as look really cool.

Today was the first drop-dead gorgeous day of the new season, and the yard was humming with life. There's only one tree in the yard, but there are dozens in the immediate vicinity of it, with hundreds of birds flying about and resting in their branches. Thousands of small creatures such as chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, voles, and mice move invisibly through the neighborhood's underbrush and along the creekbed, and as I sat on the deck basking in the warm sunshine after our moderate labors were done, I could hear the millions of worms working within a few yards of where I sat, the relentless renewers and fertilizers of the dirt ball we live upon.

freedom of speech

This spurious exercise in character assassination by association is funded by the Heartland Institute, a right-wing agitprop mill which spread a lot of Philip Morris's propaganda back in the days when the tobacco giant was disputing the science which documented the health hazards of second-hand smoke.

The Institute keeps its sources of funding secret, but Exxon-Mobil is known to have kicked in at least $800,000 between '98 and '05, and the omnipresent shadow of the Koch Brothers is discernible in the deep background.

Lots of information on this creepy organization and the creeps whose water they carry is in the Wikipedia article, s.v. Heartland Institute. I know of no other individual piece of evidence as telling as this particular history to support the charge that reactionary ideology in the US today is completely driven by big bucks.

the alienated war baby report

I mostly grew up in a suburb -- the community of Lakewood Park. Or maybe it was Parkwood Lake, or Lakepark Wood; I don't remember all that clearly. What I do remember is that it wasn't a bad place to live if you owned your own car (I didn't) and could escape once in while.

When I was 19 and still living at home as a sophomore in college, we moved to another suburb, the fabled Marin County, reputed to be paradise on earth.

I left home and became a hippie in San Francisco, then a clerical worker working various low-level paper-pushing jobs, then a musician working in bars from San Fran on up to Anchortown. At 45 I decided I was old enough for a real job, and taught high school English in the Central Valley, CA the next 15 years. And now:

Sometimes I live in the country;
Sometimes I live in town,
And sometimes I take a great notion
To jump ahead into the river and drown.

Okay, that last part isn't true, but it's still a great song. Anyway, we don't have a river around here, just the creek, and it's too shallow to drown in. And if I jumped in I'd get really cold and probably ruin my shoes. Luckily, there's another song that describes things better:

You can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need.

keyotic

It's not exactly news, but earlier in the week Newt Gingrich called off his presidential campaign.

It was a very strange primary season altogether for the Republicans, who began with a crowded field of nine candidates, five of whom emerged leading the pack at one time or another. First it was Michele Bachmann, who opened her mouth thereby depth-charging her candidacy, then Rick Perry, ditto, then Herman Cain who was found to have more money than sense, and finally Gingrich, before the party faithful came around to accepting Mittens as a fait accompli, and their density for 2012.

Newt's run was sort of tragic from the beginning, and reminds one of the brave, bold, and unconventional military campaign of Otto, the Palatine of Kleinlichen-Schwanaufkleber, who in 1818 led his army of 1,500 men against the combined armies of Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Montenegro, numbering over 50,000, at the Battle of Plotz in Moravia.

He was soundly defeated.

odds n ends

There's not much happening today, so it's a good day to revive the spirit of Look magazine and put up a couple unrelated photos.

The first, apropros of nothing at all, is from Fail.com.

Other than that, all I have is a cell phone shot of the garden I took this morning, showing the growth of the leafy greens after one week. Potatoes are going in tomorrow.

barack obama's excellent adventure

I wrote up this topic a couple days ago, but I wanted to revisit it in order to direct readers to Professor Juan Cole's wisdom in this matter.

The war in Afghanistan is a lie, and everybody knows it.

reunited and it feels so good

A stray parakeet in Japan was returned to its owner after telling the police where it lives.

The flyaway bird first landed on a hotel guest's shoulder in the town of Sagamihara, and the traveler turned him over to local police. That was on Sunday. After perching silently as a cathedral in the police station all day Monday, he began chirping on Tuesday.

Piko-Chan, for such is the keet's name, told the cops who he is and that he considers himself pretty, then proceeded to rattle off his address.

Addresses in Japan are approximate, and letter carriers have to memorize the individual residences on numbered streets within named districts, but the bird had been taught the names of the city and district where its owner lives.

"It then produced the home's block and street number as a trio of astonished police officers listened to the now talkative bird," the Agence France Presse story at Yahoo says.

The woman who owns the bird had another beloved parakeet fly away from her never to return, so when she bought Piko-Chan two years ago she taught him to say his address.

benchwarmer

Chris Christie may be interested in the job, but he's not going to be Mittens's running mate. His party's high rollers are seeing to that.

The Republican Politburo (i.e., Karl Rove, David Koch, and the rest of the boyz who make the decisions) have decided that Christie has an "Islam problem," and on Monday used their main sewer pipe, the National Review Online, to announce it.

Christie, according to the NRO hit piece, "has sided with Islamist forces against those who worry about safeguarding American security and civilization." That's another way of saying he doesn't exhibit the necessary irrational fear and hatred of Muslims to qualify as a "real conservative."

Too bad for Romney, since the big guy is a talented and creative speaker who avoids bureaucratese, uses direct, plain English with good effect (when he manages not to lapse into misogyny), and would have brought a little life and spark into the foundering Republican campaign.

I don't actually know what motivated this take-down. Possibly, there was nervousness in the Romney camp over having a VP candidate who speaks with force and verve, which might underscore Willard's awkwardness and deficiencies as a public speaker.

controlling ourselves

The Seattle Times reports this morning that there were "spasms of violence" punctuating the "mostly peaceful" protests downtown yesterday. Still, it was a bad scene in Seattle, especially early on.

Most of the violence was vandalism of the broken-windows type, directed primarily against financial institutions. Now, there's no question in my mind that NikeTown deserved to have its windows busted and its store trashed, but at the same time doing that is a very bad idea, because it causes the protesters to lose the one battle they have to win -- the battle of the mass media.

If a movement like #OWS is to overcome the tyranny of the corporate bottom line and dictatorship of money, it will have to use force, just as Gandhi's followers did, and just as the civil rights people did 20 and 30 years later in the US. Repressive regimes will only yield ground under the pressure of force, since they can't be persuaded and they have no concscience people can appeal to.

But the force must be applied with great restraint and self-control. If the insurgents resort to violence, then they lose the battle of the media, and then it's checkmate and lights out.

My advice to the 50 or so people who split off from the main demonstration yesterday to break stuff is to control your vessel. It may feel good to resort to violence, and of course Bank of America has it coming.

I'd be in favor of it too, if I thought it would do any good.

Photo: John Lok, Seattle Times

k'bool nights

Even as we speak, the preznit is in K'bool, where he was flown on a secret mission, except now it's not.

Apparently he's going to double down yet again on Afghanistan, and try to get Hamid the K to sign a pact that would extend American involvement "into the next decade" according to the story at Huffington Post.

Live televised speech from Bagram at 7:30 eastern -- that's about five minutes from now.

This guy is totally unrestrained in the Middle East, and is trying to act like Dirty Harry or something. The only way out of this Afghanistan clusterschnazzle now is for Congress to withhold the money, but I'm not holding my breath.

of ducks and dogs

The Obama campaign has chosen a nice, shiny new platitude to replace "hope" and "change" in the 2012 campaign. The slogan "Forward!" may seem innocuous enough, but a right-wing propaganda source has seized on it, saying it reveals this administration's Marxist/socialist agenda.

The headline reads "New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism."

Obama? A Marxist/socialist?

The same Barack Obama who bailed out the banks? We are talking about the same guy, aren't we?

Here's the thing; if it doesn't look like a duck, or walk like a duck, or quack like a duck, it's not a duck.

Somebody needs to ask the editors of the Washington Times, "Have you ever really looked at a duck?"

mayday

Happy Mayday everyone.

Today is a good day not to work, if you can get away with it. It's also a good day to eschew consumerism, and avoid buying anything. You can use a small, pocket eschewer to eschew each purchase 32 times (SJ Perelman, "The Strange Case of Philip Forceps").

Instead of working and shopping, it would be a good day to walk over to the village green and watch local virgins festively entwining that old pagan fertility symbol, the Mayday phallus, with ribbons of brightly-colored crepe.

Or maybe you'd prefer to stay home and do something domestic, like making gay potholders out of your husband's old socks.