In my email this evening, a retired top executive from a major multi-national corporation looks at the laboring of our political mountain that has, again, brought forth midgets. He is not amused.
What a dreadful situation. The whole process has perplexed me for years.We often hear someone put forth the premise that the U.S. President is "the most powerful person in the world" (However arrogant that may be.). Yet we require very little of the actual candidates for the office.
No major corporation would hire most of the individuals that have run for the U.S. presidency in my lifetime - at least not before they became President.
On top of that, our political dialogue is not about the kind of person a candidate should be, and the basket of traits that a candidate should possess, but focuses on all manner of irrelevant crap.
Continued...
"Here he is in El Paso meeting with some schoolkids. This was right after he fed an entire auditorium with just a single stick of French bread and a pack of hot dogs" - The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Barry is rocking the world down in TexasPosted at 11:18 AM
-- Two hours later, second thoughts. --
The original title for this entry was "Suffer the little children to come unto me in Texas." That was, it seemed to me in the moment, a light enough touch for the illustration supplied this morning by "The Secret Steve Jobs." Over at that site I also entered a glib, cheap comment:
Does this mean we are headed to the passion, the crucifixion,and the subsequent ascending into heaven stuff? And will this be before or after the election?
Now the web draws out the cheap shot and the glib comment like no other medium, and I find myself guilty as charged across all the 20 years I've been a part of it.
But after a moment's reflection the chilling subtext of that glib rim-shot started to occur to me as I recalled recent reports of lax security at Obama appearances. ( ABC News: As Obama Security Rises, Lapses Remain ) And since I am of an age where I can remember the 1960s, I was chilled even more as images from the more violent of those days came back to me. Chief among them were November 22, 1963, April 4, 1968, and June 6, 1968. These are, as I'm sure you know from the first date, the days on which John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
"An abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict."
Review:Absolutely amazing video for lovers of food and global conflict.
Guide to the nationalities of the foods in the fight is HERE
It began when my brother, Jeff, reached into his cupboard one evening in Black Mountain, and pulled out a small can. "You want to see some vague food?" he asked holding the tin out.
"Vague?"
"Yes, vague," he said. "Just what is "Potted Meat" anyway? Has it been smoked, drenched, strained, and then slammed into the can with extreme prejudice? What animal gives potted meat?"
I looked carefully at the can and turned it to the list of ingredients "as required by law." Not vague in the least.
Mechanically Separated Chicken, Beef Tripe, Partially Defatted Cooked Beef Fatty Tissue, Beef Hearts, Water, Partially Defatted Cooked Pork Fatty Tissue, Salt. Less than 2 percent: Mustard, Natural Flavorings, Dried Garlic, Dextrose, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrite
Continued...
Rare picture of "The Team"
Today I have discovered, via my close reading of "The Blog That Nobody Reads" a new source for breaking science news that will, dare I say it, change the world. It is India Daily Technology Team!
This is science reporting as it should be but never is. This is science reporting that goes where no science has gone before and beams down the goods. This is science reporting that probably has Al Gore's unlisted brain chip on direct download. This is science reporting that passes through a chronosynclastic infundibulum into a brand new universe; a universe that puts the lie to those who say, "You can't make this shit up!," with a rousing "Yes. We can!"
The archives of the India Daily Technology Team are vast and daunting. Here's a small selection of this crack science reporting that can crack science and your skull at the same time. Strap on your tinfoil hat!
Continued...
by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg
For Karl Rove Solomon
I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, unelectable, and not looking too sharp naked,
bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at cocktail hour looking for a Prozac refill,
aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of moonbats,
who warred on poverty and Halliburton's Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like "Let's all worship Zero!",
Six Frames in Ten Minutes on a Cold Day in 1936
"Seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers' camp ... because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food." -- Field Notes by Dorothea Lange, Nipomo, California, March 1936 on "Migrant Mother"
"You can see a lot just by looking." -- Yogi Berra
1. Photographers to Fauxtographers
Once we were wrapped in a web of words but now, more and more, our web is woven of images. When wrapped in the images of our age -- especially those images backlit by history -- we see what we wish to see or, more insidiously, what we are told we see.
Continued...
After the predictable killings comes the predictable vigil. Effectiveness? Zero.
They had candles. They had prayers. They had tears. They had everything they needed except the means to defend themselves.
Paper Proves Once Again that Academics Never Outgrow Their Need for Bullshit
Prize Winning Sociology Thesis at Hebrew U.: Lack of Rape Among Israeli Soldiers Achieves Same Aims as Rape
"A Hebrew University Sociology department M.A. thesis entitled "Controlled Occupation: The Lack of Military Rape in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict" notes that the relative absence of instances of rape by Israeli soldiers is an alternate method of achieving the same kind of degradation of Palestinian Arabs that would be achieved through a directed policy of raping Arab women."
"Come on home, girl,"
He said with a smile
"You don't have to love me yet,
Let's get high awhile.
But try to understand,
Try to understand,
Try, try, try to understand
I'm a magic man." -- Heart
"In savage society there is commonly to be found in addition what we may call public magic, that is, sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole community. Wherever ceremonies of this sort are observed for the common good, it is obvious that the magician ceases to be merely a private practitioner and becomes to some extent a public functionary.
"The development of such a class of functionaries is of great importance for the political as well as the religious evolution of society. For when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king.
Continued...
[Note: In the last week or so, I've heard -- here and elsewhere -- a lot of carping about "not voting." Worse still is the plan of voting for someone you think is bad in order to make the country worse than it is that, at some moment in time, it becomes better from the experience. Both poses -- and poses they are -- strike me as malicious and childish. And I think of this conversation with Paul on Election Day in 2004. He knew what faction and party politics brought. He knew it from hard experience.... ]
Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll'd
Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc!
-- America A Prophecy by William Blake
Meanwhile in Milton's Paradise Lost, the war in heaven is between the angels loyal to Satan and the angels loyal to God. We all know how that turned out. Something similar is burning out of control with the raising of John McCain to the godhead of the Republican Party. It didn't take long to acquire a name, a flip of the right's favorite moonbat diagnosis, "BDS -- Bush Derangement Syndrome." Of course, you had to know that that phrase -- a personal favorite of mine -- would come back to bite the presented posterior. And it has in less than a month with "MDS -- McCain Derangement Syndrome."
This catchphrase has legs....
Being only a man, I often tire of the things of man; of his bottomless vanity and his endless violence which, as all the things of men must, resides in me as well as in you.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us.**
Many years ago, I was browsing through a newsmagazine and came upon a photograph of the machete-hacked corpse of an African child floating like some half-chewed chunk of jetsam in a backwater of Lake Victoria. This was during what we now think of, because we have to think of it as something distinct from our normal run-of-the-mill massacres, as the Rwandan genocide.
It was a crystal clear photograph showcasing an act of genocide like any other, only the meaningless details changed: children, machetes, an African lake. As a professional in the pornography of violence, the photographer had gotten in close. The child's eyes could be seen. They were without pupils, the irises congealed into a dead fish-belly white; the white of clotted milk. The photographer had done his job well. The smell of it came off the page.
Continued...Some years ago I recall leafing through a slight volume of the collected sayings of New York City taxi drivers. One that stuck in my mind was that of a Bengali driver who observed, "Bicycle messengers, they thirst for death."
Watching the blistering salvos fired against a McCain ascendency throughout the net in the past week has put me in mind of that observation, only applied to the incondite arguments of recondite Republicans:
The gist of the Republican argument against McCain seems to be that he is not pure enough for many conservatives. I submit that that is precisely the point. The pure products of extreme ideology don't win elections in this country. The pure products of ideology start, well, civil wars.
NeoNeoCon has a long exegesis on this bizarre phenomenon at Conservatives jump the shark: party purity über alles where she states the obvious:
Continued...
He's not a "Liberal." He's a "Progressive!"
Bigger promises need bigger icons. As I remarked only yesterday in Hope, Change, and the New Old NOW "the people do not want POLICIES, the people want PROMISES! Promise, LARGE PROMISE, is the soul of politics." Today we can see this essential truth continue to reveal itself from two widely opposing viewpoints in the blogosphere.
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"Propaganda, only propaganda is necessary. There is no end of stupid people." - Adolf Hitler
If the Arctic should doff its polar cap
in deference to excessive heat,
Mother Earth will be up to her crack
in more H2o than tantalised
the Ancient Mariner. Yet some forecast
drought, Saharas, parched disaster.
Which fate awaits this spinning Ark:
death by drowning or dehydration?
There can only be one apocalypse.
For those who live by final warnings,
beware of hot air -
the true cause of global warming.
Only fools and fanatics claim
to know the Creator's mind;
without the cloudiest doubt
occluding theirs, they proclaim
the end of the world is nigh. Doom
even makes athiests believers of a kind.
"It is deceit that makes hypocrisy what it is. The true hypocrite wants others to think better of him/her than is actually justified. Absent this deceit, there is no hypocrisy, just error or human frailty. That's what the hypocrisy-excuse people don't understand - or pretend not to understand - about church people. What may appear to be church people's hypocrisy is almost always just simple failure to meet the standards of our faith rather than deceit. Why? Because the standard is so high...."
Mocking Obama - that's the last taboo.
"The price of abandoning myth in order to travel where No Man Has Gone Before, via our home entertainment centers or Internet terminals , is that we have lost our place in our own story." - Belmont Club - Who wants to know?
"Our democratic institutions today, though far more distributed and open than the systems of Goebbels or Vyshinsky, are basically designed to run on an information system that funnels truth down from the top of the mountain. This is a brittle design. If it breaks - if it starts distributing sewage along with the rosewater - it loses its credibility. If it loses its credibility, the government loses its legitimacy. When a government loses its legitimacy, you don't want to be standing under it." - Unqualified Reservations: OLXIV: rules for reactionaries
"To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life,- and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many non-believing hearts… an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live fully, richly, exuberantly - no matter how their days may be numbered." - A Meditation on Life, from a Dying Man | The Doctor Is In
where the obvious is not an option. I heard more interviews with learned politicians informing me that "drilling for oil" will not affect anything, least of all the quantity of oil. We must apparently wait until 2015, when a magic engine that runs on unicorn flatulence is invented. I have to ask: why is anyone investing in unicorn flatulence today, when it won't make any difference for several years? The answer's simple: the engine will Appear at the chosen moment, borne from the clouds by starlings, but only if we have repented of our foul ways, and the last of the sinners has left the cul-de-sac to reside in a home located a sustainable distance from his or her place of employment. When the last suburban outlying development is empty, when the homes of whose size we disapprove has been abandoned, when the last citizen has been gathered unto the bosom of the urban center, where his profligate ways are sneered upon and the measure of his yard shall be no greater than the standard lot size decreed in 1902, then shall the magic engine appear. Until then, the wind and the sun will bear us onward." -LILEKS (James) the Bleat
NYT Co. stock took another nosedive today, dropping 2.73 percent to $12.85. That means in the last week, Times Company stock has fallen $2.21, or 15 percent. - The New York Observer
Every Obama's nut is unique with various properties and characteristics and has the ability to induce hope, as well as store, receive, and transmit energy. Other legendary properties include the ability to attract compassion and understanding of the media, reveal the location of other people's money, ward off unwanted inquiries, and prevent drug overdose.
"When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." -Pauline Kael & trash cinema
"There are no turbines on my ranch, because I think they are ugly." - T. Boone Pickens to Newsweek
"Bush Says Drill, Drill, Drill -- and Oil Drops $9! -Kudlow
A nonscientific survey by the dating site Match.com found that 77 percent of respondents believe Obama would be a better kisser than the Arizona Republican. - Obama beats McCain in kissing contest
"Environmentalism is instinctively and relentlessly illiberal, and it is doing more to inculcate people with fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could. If you believe in freedom, you must reject it." -Brendan O'Neill: Greens are the enemies of liberty
In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).
- Stephen Den Beste
"Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it'll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset." -- Obama: Man of the World - New York Times
Global warming may raise kidney stone riskGlobal warming could do more than hurt polar bears: It could force a rise in kidney stones, scientists warned Monday. "We see a relationship between kidney stones and temperatures everywhere," says study co-author Margaret Pearle of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. "Even in places with air conditioning, warmer temperatures mean more stones."
"But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won. I wish I could say the same for Afghanistan." -Michael Yon: Dispatches
"The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure guarantee uncontrollable escalation once the nuclear threshold is crossed. Therefore the 'rational' American response to the initiation of terrorist WMD attack would be all out retaliation from the outset.... It is supremely ironic that the survival of the Islamic world should hinge on an American victory in the War on Terror, the last chance to prevent that terrible day in which all the decisions will have already been made for us." - The 3 Conjectures @ Belmont Club
At the beginning of his remarks, Obama said, "I'm still looking for my mimosa," as many of the several hundred people in this ballroom were holding drinks. -Lynn Sweet: Obama, at fund-raiser in Newport Beach, Calif. takes one sip of a Mimosa.
"Our Unbreakable Umbrella has no unusual parts, no more metal than an average umbrella, it does not arouse suspicion, can be carried legally everywhere where any weapons are prohibited, unlike a walking stick it does not cause strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person, and it does protect from rain. Anyone who can use a stick for defense can use this umbrella." -The Unbreakable Walking-Stick Umbrella
"As well as the roads, Beijing has promised to repair 2,000 miles of largely defunct railways, build 32 hospitals and 145 health centres, install two electricity distribution networks, construct two hydropower dams and two new airports. In return, China has won the rights to five copper and cobalt mines in Congo's southern minerals belt which boasts some of the world's richest ore deposits. Victor Kasongo, Congo's deputy minister of mines, said: "To be honest, China was Plan B. We first approached the Europeans but they said they did not have the muscle to do what we needed. China has stepped into that opening, very quickly."" -China's 8 Billion drive to buy Africa's mineral wealth - Telegraph
"Climate change is a big scam, probably the biggest one ever successfully perpetrated. But California’s 'salary' is about to depend on the folks in charge never, ever figuring that out. Even though, in the hearts-of-hearts, they know it already." - House of Eratosthenes
Doing the Job American Journalism Won't Do By Counting the Jobs They Will:
Obama Media BJs To Date - "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
"The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans." - Big Shot Bob in Texas
China Takes Dog off the Menu for Olympics
"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that Israel and the Palestinians have never been as close to a peace deal than now." - CBS News
"I looked down at the loaf of bread and realized it is about two thirds the size it was last month. Then it clicked: All kinds of edible goods are shrinking in China these days. The rice crackers I like to nibble on at the office are in the same sized package as always, but the crackers themselves have shrunk dramatically." - McClatchy blog: China Rises
"The signature performance of the modern revolution is the irregular military parade. Ie: cars or pickup trucks full of well-armed youths in their colorful native attire, driving up and down your street while (a) honking, (b) waving hand-lettered banners, (c) chanting catchy slogans, and (d) discharging their firearms in a vaguely vertical direction. Occasionally one of the vehicles will pull up in front of a house and discharge its occupants, who enter the building and emerge with an infidel, racist, Jew, spy, polluter, Nazi or other criminal. The offender is either restrained for transportation to an educational facility, or enlightened on the spot as an act of radical social justice. Yes, we can!" - Unqualified Reservations: OLXIII: tactics and structures of any prospective restoration
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
-- Auden
"... our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary."
YouTube - I'm Not Here to Make Friends! HT: Morgan (He whom nobody reads).
Today's warriors have a tremendous advantage over their antique brethren in the struggle for survival, however: the West's pathetic, if endearing, concern for human life, even when that life belongs to a murderer of epic achievement." - PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Summer 1994
"In an age haunted by cataclysms real and imagined, in this era of disappointment and wracking international failure, men and women will prove increasingly vulnerable to anti-modern, anti-rational explanations for their misfortunes and their inextinguishable impulse to vanity. Even in the United States, many of those least able to keep material, intellectual, and spiritual pace with the demands of modernity turn to primitive or exotic religious forms, from revivalism to New Age God-candy. -- Vanity and the Bonfires of the "isms" by Ralph Peters PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Autumn 1993
"A conservative estimate provided by Robertson Economic Information Services, a Southern African consultancy, says that prices are now three billion fold greater than seven years ago. That's right, billion. The exchange rate is currently an astronomical 90 billion Zimbabwe dollars to one U.S. dollar." -How Inflation May Topple Mugabe - WSJ.com
"After discussing famine in Africa, the peckish politicians and five spouses took on four bite-sized amuse-bouche to tickle their palates. The price of staple foods may be soaring, but thankfully caviar and sea urchin are within the purchasing power of leaders and their taxpayers - the amuse-bouche featured corn stuffed with caviar, smoked salmon and sea urchin, hot onion tart and winter lily bulb." - Just two of the 19 dishes on the dinner menu at the G8 food shortages summit (The Guardian)
"Children seem to be 'diagnosed' with lots of things lately. It has become customary for at least one of their parents to be somehow 'enthusiastic' about said diagnosis, sometimes even confessing to having requested or demanded the diagnosis. Said parent is invariably female. Said child is invariably male. The lopsided gender trend is curious, and so is the spectacle of parents ordering diagnoses for their children, like pizzas or textbooks." - House of Eratosthenes
Please study this evidence carefully. The saints of San Diego and surrounding areas in California NEED TO BE WARNED of the MAJOR JUDGMENT coming upon them that will be MUCH WORSE THAN 911. This evidence shows JULY 8, 2008 is hard coded in the Word of God as the next Major Judgment Date that will fulfill scripture just like the attack on the Twin Towers Sept 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina fulfilled scripture . It cannot be prayed away and It will not be delayed. -- !!! 2,492 DAYS !!!
"I'm surprised at how finely calibrated every single word was measured. I wasn't saying anything I hadn't said before, that I didn't say a year ago or when I was a United States senator," said Obama, who is still a senator from Illinois. -- Obama puzzled by Iraq comment frenzy
A woman fell into a tank of slurry as she tried to make "manure bombs" using her stockings, German police today said. The unfortunate woman stripped off her foul smelling clothes and fled the scene naked, along with a female accomplice wearing just her bra and pants, a police spokesman told Reuters. - Cow dung fate for 'manure bomber' | World news | guardian.co.uk
"As Marie-Antoinette is said to have remarked about her starving subjects who were demanding bread, "Let then eat cake," our elected Democratic members of Congress are in effect saying of Americans, "Let them ride bikes." -- It's Time for Rage - HUMAN EVENTS
"500 years ago, oil was not a resource. Neither was uranium. People around at the time didn't know how to use them. Things that weren't resources became resources. Our ability to use new resources made old resources obsolete. Now, no home in the UK needs to burn wood for heat, for example. Or, as Bjorn Lomborg has put it, the Stone Age didn't come to an end because we ran out of stones." - Climate Resistance: Infinite Regress
"Seattle Police opened fire on a suspect in Downtown Seattle this morning who they say robbed a West Seattle bank wearing black shoe polish on his face and a wig." - Police shoot bank robbery suspect Seattle, Washington
So there I was, in the lion's den, calling Joe Lieberman an asshole. And people applauded and cheered. - Kos: Into the tiger's den
- All the President Midgets
- The Passion of the Obama
- Food Fight
- Vague Food Found Inside the Food Lion
- The Wild, Wild Science World of the India Daily Technology Team
- Growl
- Something to do while waiting for the Internet
- Unwilling Icon: Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson, the "Migrant Mother"
- Candles to Gun Fights
- Not Raping = Rape ... If You Are an Israeli Soldier
- Obama: The Sorcerer's Method Behind the Madness
- "I will vote always for best, always:" Conversations with Paul
- MDS ("McCain Derangement Syndrome") Mainstreams
- "Let My Cry Come Unto Thee:" An Ash Wednesday Confession
- The Conservative No McCain Zone: Big Arguments for a Bad Idea
- Obama: A Progressive for Progress! Now with Liberal Substance!