2011 archive
Reselling out the Children 0
More wingnut cruelty.
Afterthought:
No, there really isn’t another word for it. Maybe also “spitefulness.”
Stray Thought, Smells Fargo Dept. 0
My Wachovia branch is not even flying the Wells Fargo flag yet and already I dislike Wells and am considering going through the hassle of changing banks.
Happy Easter 0
Celebrate yourself some Easter bunny hype:
The trouble is that they are wrong. The colourful myths of Eostre and her hare companion, who in some versions is a bird transformed into an egg-laying rabbit, aren’t historically pagan. They are modern fabrications, cludged together in an unresearched assumption of pagan precedence.
The Eostre bunny is like the fairies those little English WWI era girls photographed–made up.
The real Easter Bunny is good enough, thank you.
Read the whole thing, It’s a nice commentary on modern mythology.
Republican Economic Principles at Work 0
Take over cities and sell them to the highest bidder, while making the rich richer and punishing the poor for being poor.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Via Bob Cesca, who has more.
TSA Security Theatre, Facebook Frolics Dept. 0
Offered without comment.
Federal agents also allege that Transportation Safety Administration Officer Thomas Gordon Jr. of Philadelphia, who routinely searched airline passengers, uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform.
Light Bloggery 0
Spring cleaning.
Lies and Lying Liars 0
John Kyl takes a do-over.
Spill Here, Spill Now, Punk’d Dept. 0
Persons purporting to represent Buccaneer Petroleum and the feds promise to do the right thing.
Naturally, it was a hoax.
From Facing South:
Alas, it turned out too good to be true. The officials were imposters, and the scene was a clever piece of political theater organized by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a leading critic of energy industry pollution and advocate for stronger environmental health standards.
Romney Ruminations 0
Dick Polman wonders why no one’s clamoring to see Mitt the Flip’s birth certificate.
His answer:
1. Romney is a Republican.
2. Romney has a red-blooded American name.
3. Romney is white.
Yes, it really is as simple as that.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Proselytizing, the polite way:
According to Southfield, Michigan police, Jones’ .40-caliber handgun fired accidentally as he was leaving a television studio there on Thursday night. This is presumably the same handgun he said he intended to bring to his planned anti-sharia law protest in Dearborn, Michigan on Friday, though he’s said he’s come to Dearborn “totally in peace.”
And the War Drones On 0
As my two or three regular readers know, I did not think that getting into Libya was a good thing from the git-go.
Never, when the United States has involved itself in the strictly internal affairs of another country, however vile those internal affairs may have been, has it ended well for anyone involved. Now . . .
Mr Gates said their use had been authorised by President Barack Obama and would give “precision capability” to the military operation.
There’s nothing precision about them.
I know a soldier whose job included calling in drone and air strikes in Afghanistan.
He didn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t even like to think about it.
He was close enough to his job to understand the consequences of a mistake; he agonized about it every day.
To the suits in Washington and other capitals, it’s a board game.
Soldiers and civilians are markers on the board. What’s a few markers more or less?
Meanwhile, in the Asia Times, Tom Engelhart, in an article written before this announcement was droned to the press, is not optimistic. A nugget:
We just don’t treat it as such, tending instead to deal with the foreign and domestic as essentially separate spheres, when the connections between them are so obvious. If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station and fill up the tank. Of course, who doesn’t know that this country, once such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it’s hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for planning how to get off that drug), or that it’s living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history? And who doesn’t know that a crew of financial fabulists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?
How To Deal with Birthers 0
Paul Harris in the Guardian:
Follow the link for his take on why this isn’t happening.
Down at the Farm 2
I was just greeted with the dreaded “Unable to connect to database” error message. (That’s the same error that led to my losing three months of posts three years ago and into my first venture in BASH scripting).
Not good.
I logged into my hosting account and, fortunately, was able to connect to the blog database with phpmyadmin, so the database wasn’t toast, just slightly singed. I ran a check, a repair, and an optimize on it and, violin, I’m back.
Now back to studying Grub.
Trump Chord 0
While David Brooks wastes his and our time again (or still or whatever), this time trying to claim that Donald Trump’s erratic possible candidacy for the Republican nomination has some substance other than Brylcreem and bullshit, Daniel Ruth of the St. Petersburg TImes gives Trump the treatment he deserves.
A nugget: