pfeh

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and since i bitch so much about the food there

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... they thought I would enjoy this....

I still don't feel very well, and I'm thinking I oughta watch this one before I watch Trumbo, in case it makes me feel worse. I'm thinking I'll just turn my monitor to face my bed and watch from bed to keep from succumbing to the nausea in this untoward position. I'll of course drag myself back up to let you know how it went....

[Thoroughly depressing. Already knew all of it. If you don't, you should watch it.]

they're freaking out at the video counter

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They think I'm sick or something. Which, well, I am, or something. But they went out and ordered a couple of videos with me in mind because I was bellowing about being poor and the frickin' holocaust themes about to send me screaming naked off a cliff. So they tried to go as lefty as they could think, but I've still been stalling because of my finances, and so tonight the really awfully too fat one finally just popped and gave me two to watch anyway. Another thing people forget about in the midst of all these awful bloodsport political polemics... that even when they think you're probably just nuts, they also want you to be happy....

[Yes. Last time we tried to fight off the fascists, they blacklisted us and assassinated us and then started buying us... separated the men from the boys... and left seriously not enough men.]

interview with seymour hersh

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You can download the video or the audio on iTunes. I guess this is as close as we are going to be able to get to hearing the lecture where he discussed Obama's problems with the military at Duke University last month. I asked the provost... whose office responded with this swiftly and helpfully, but not exactly giving a straight answer. It looked as though to say that, no, there will be no video of the lecture being put online, but this interview is out there for us free at the iTunes Store....

we are in a depression

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Just drop all the bickering and bitching and take a look.

this is bad, oh, truly, this is despicably bad

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The moldy pulp of our shredded and flushed Constitution seems to have been shot off world. At least, it seems, the change we can believe in is that it will be utterly ignored when operating on a global level... and President of the Earth, Barack Obama has so avidly embraced secrecy, opacity, and outright fascist maneuvers under the rubric of national security, here at home, that it must feel great to just be able to dispense even with appearances abroad.

This, indeed, is despicably bad.

I've put the proof, the evidence of the offending document at the image link -- with the most salient bit at Thomas not returning the necessary document -- and it's part of a larger piece here, but the short and short of it is expressed bluntly by Cory Doctorow here.

[On a semi-related note... seems they figured out something less permanent but equally scary to replace dirty bombs, enhance our terror of identity theft and excuse their invasion of our privacy. Yes, ever so much more elegant than Fudd's incessant blundering, don't you think?]

real celebratin'

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Palestinians break Israel's wall
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 09, 2009
20:43 MECCA TIME, 17:43 GMT

Palestinians and foreign activists have torn down segments of Israel's separation wall in a demonstration marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the town of Qalandiya in the occupied West Bank, a group of masked activists using a lorry pulled down a two-metre cement block before Israeli security forces confronted them with tear gas grenades.

Several of the estimated 50 demonstrators passed through the hole they had made, hoisting a Palestinian flag and setting ablaze tyres on the other side.
Protesters were wearing shirts with the text "Jerusalem we are coming", which was the slogan for the protest.

Abdullah Abu Rahma, leader of the People's Campaign to Fight the Wall, said: "Today we commemorate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"This is the beginning of the activities, which we do, to express our hold on our land, and our refusal to this wall - the wall of torture, the wall of humiliation."

Activists have vowed to hold a week of protests in the Palestinian territories and around the world, including a campaign calling for the release of all anti-wall activists currently imprisoned.

Last Friday, Palestinian youths almost toppled a segment of wall using a hydraulic car-jack in the West Bank village of Nilin.

Regular protests

Protests against the wall have become a regular event in Nilin and in the nearby village of Bilin, where Palestinian, international and Israeli activists are commonly confronted by tear gas and rubber bullets fired by Israeli troops.

Israel began building its barrier, consisting of fences and walls, in 2002, citing security reasons.

The wall is up to 8m high in places, twice the height of the former Berlin wall. Palestinian sources anticipate that it may be more than 750km-long when construction is finished, more than four times the length of the Berlin wall.

Palestinians say the route of the wall has been set in such a way that it grabs land that could have been included in a future Palestinian state.

The International Court of Justice, in a non-binding decision in 2004, said the Israeli-built barrier was illegal and should be taken down because it crossed into occupied territory.

A report by Stop the Wall, a Palestinian coalition of NGOs opposed to the wall, said that in 2007 alone, Israel demolished more than 160 houses and appropriated more than 3sq km of land in the Palestinian West Bank in its construction of the wall.

are you antiwar?

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I find myself going to Antiwar.com first every day because they do such a good job of rounding up all the most important news about our multifarious adventures in murderation out there. Jason Ditz does an astonishingly good job with that, and Scott Horton's interviews on Antiwar Radio are almost never less than riveting. I'm not so big on Justin Raimondo's stuff, though there's a lot good in it, but, hell, that site is just brimming with really important information.

Seems they've decided to go with the fund drive model this time instead of the massive emergency freakout they hit a couple months ago. So, well, I thought I'd mention it here since I'm already at the point where I can't forgo anymore food or video rentals to squeeze out some of my legendarily no money for good causes.

Right now I'm convinced that Antiwar.com and Peter B. Collins are the absolute best possible uses of your philanthropic intertubes change. Both provide just astoundingly good content and would be getting some paltry sum from me every month right now if I weren't on the dying in the ditch kind of poor right now from my computer replacement and speeding ticket. Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post is one to watch for consideration too.

Of course, there is always the failsafe method of casting about for my wealthy socialist gentleman and then I might be able to take orders for your pet most-urgent-to-support lists and my own. I tell you, I'm NOT a gold digger! I am just too poor to do enough good to suit my saving sentient beings thing....

zenyatta

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Just thrilling. A truly historic moment.

[Here's just the race, without the post race blather....]

trying really hard to look awake

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trying really hard to look upbeat about being out of bed

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they can't figure it out

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You do not say you support nuclear power and dis Russia in Iran unless you're working your butt off to turn Iran into an American colony. There are no two ways about it. It's plain as day. Again, if you want WWIII, this is the perfect way to get it.

i love the russians' dry reporting on the house squeaker

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The bill, if passed [into law], will oblige all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine, while the majority of employers, with the exemption of some small businesses, would have to provide insurance coverage to their staff. It would also bar companies from refusing medical insurance to people with the so-called pre-existing conditions or to charge more from people with unfavorable medical record.

yup, it was the doxycyline

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I waited to take it yesterday and didn't get sick again until after I did take it... and then I got spectacularly sick... so... well... guess what? I'm not taking any more doxycycline now. But I am nuking myself with probiotics to try and tame my raging innards.

So after being up with the miseries all night and going wild over the races today, I'm, like, whupped right now... ready to keel over.

ho-lee jumpin' jehosephat!!!!!! ZENYATTA!

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What a day! Zenyatta, the mare, just won the Classic in absolutely boggling style. Dead last most of the way, against monster good colts, and blew past them at the end like they were stopped.

Fucking aaaaaawesome!

Fourteen for fourteen. First time this distance. Beat a bunch of monsters. Holy shiiiiit! Astoundingly good day at the races.

I'm going to be looking for the YouTube of this one tonight, for sure. Just outrageous. Big freakout at the gate. Had to scratch the maniac and back everybody else out for a reset. Doom. Doom. Messing with everyone's game... and... whoa! Zenyatta just waltzed through it.

I was pounding and slapping my desk and screaming.... My heart's still pounding.

[They just showed the race from the camera that followed her wire to wire, and it was a thing of beauty. She starts out lumbering and boxing and bouncing, and the jockey's just kicking back for a smoke. Then you see her switching back and forth between the normal gallop and the back hooves digging the track in unison, jockey enjoying a beer and fumbling around for the remote. And then, and then, suddenly it looks as though he's riding a horse finally, but just riding, not really doing anything and Zenyatta's smoothed out and those hindquarters just hammering with an incredible mixture of force and elegance. Finally, their heads go down simultaneously and they just fly past everyone, using whatever hole there is in any lane, ending up clear on the outside and going away.... Easy as pie. The crowd was batshit crazy, roaring so loudly I think I could have heard them from here if I hadn't been screaming even louder.]

BTW, IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW, THE BEST RACEHORSES FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD COME FOR THE BREEDERS' CUP RACES.

Mine That Bird, this year's Kentucky Derby winner, was dead last. So we're not talking about just any old win here. We are talking about an historic moment. It doesn't get any better than this.

Daily Racing Form

National Thoroughbred Racing Association special

NTRA stats [...without earnings update for today's five-million-dollar purse. You can get slow-loading video of this race on this page too.]

Very slow-loading video of race here....

[Bred in Kentucky by Maverick Productions Ltd., Zenyatta, who is out of the Kris S. mare Vertigineux, boosted her earnings to $5,474,580 with her 14th victory from as many starts.]

it's breeders' cup weekend

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... and you can watch online. Easy to sign up and lots of topnotch Thoroughbreds to ogle.

This is, without a doubt, my mother's biggest deal of the year. Nothing unglues her from it, and she has dreamed of having one of the horses she's bred win here for decades and decades. After all that effort she really does get checks a few times a year from one of her horses winning something... it's just never very much. Her very last race horse, the one she's running and going to use as a broodmare if she does well, has won both of her starts. The problem is: she keeps getting minor injuries between races and has to lay off until she's healed. I figure this will end up producing a nice completely solidly developed race horse and she can then win a bunch of races and then go on to produce a bunch of extremely valuable foals... making me an heiress at last....

[Yipes! This is some transcendental horse racing today. Goldikova knocked me out! And Conduit just blew my mind too. Big day for coming from the back of the pack late bids... which are the most exciting kind.]

not their prezident

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The people of Georgia seem to be about as effective at protest as we are.

Used to be that governments just about everywhere paid attention to protests and made some accommodation to get that blot off their landscapes, but I guess that was just a short window in history or something. And, of course, you have places where mass protest really is more effective because the protesters aren't willing to just go home, denied. They press it until the offenders coöperate, or are ousted, but, well, this involves quite a bit of pain, and not infrequently loss of life, to accomplish. Power does not cede itself unless it is forced, forced as in the use of violence or the strong likelihood of violence being used on it by dint of sheer numbers. It doesn't just go, oh, they don't like what I'm doing, I guess I better stop. That just never is the way it goes. Power wants power over that too.

So even though the evil jackass tool, Saakashvili, is thoroughly reviled in Georgia, and they protest in big numbers all the time, he just says, nope, yer stuck with me till 2013 and, uh, for some completely opaque reason that seems to hold. No, really. So shortly after the huge success of our American-backed Rose Revolution, suddenly the people are completely helpless? Is that right?

third millennium reprehensible warfare

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Ann posted something about the status of taking the humans out of making war today too....

If they would just figure out how to take the humans out of the receiving end, Bob would then, of course, be our uncle....

wtf?

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Does this make you feel tired? Doesn't this endless acid trip make your muscles ache a little?

jean-luc showed up in support of gore's latest book

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...which completely upstages anything Gore had to say, for sure... and no contest on whose picture graces this post either.

For any of you out there seriously looking for my wealthy socialist gentleman for me, THIS is my man. I want him to be Jean-Luc Picard. Perhaps even Patrick Stewart would find he didn't mind just living out this role with me....

Sigh.

i don't mean to sound cranky, but WHAT does it take?

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Even forgetting what a fabulous tool for fascist disinformation and the police state in general this deuced twitterage is, WHAT does it take to convince you that our government is not in our service? Not at all.... That acting like a bunch of feuding chimps is killing everyone?

Fed’s Search of Twittering Anarchist Upheld
By Ryan Singel | November 4, 2009 | 7:25 pm

Federal authorities can resume combing through the notebooks, memory cards and computers of a twittering anarchist being investigated for violating an anti-rioting law, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday.

U.S. district court judge Dora L. Irizzary found no reason to throw out the government’s search of the home of a 41-year old social worker who used the micro-publishing service Twitter to help anti-globalization protestors at the recent G-20 convention, clearing the way for the feds to look through the evidence they collected. Madison and his attorney sought to have his possessions returned unexamined, on the grounds the search violated his constitutional rights to free speech.

The Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Elliott Madison’s house in a dawn raid on October 1, seizing myriad computers, unpublished manuscripts, phones and books from the social worker, his urban planner wife and his housemates. The materials were seized as evidence in a federal grand jury investigation of whether Madison violated a rarely-used federal statute that makes it a crime to help rioters.

Madison, an anarchist and prolific writer, seems to have drawn the attention of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office after he was arrested in a Pittsburgh motel room on September 24 for legally listening to a police scanner and then tweeting the information. During the G-20 summit, heavily armed police officers reacted to the anti-globalization protesters with tear gas, sonic weapons, rubber bullets and mass arrests. Madison was in jail during the height of the confrontation, charged with criminal use of a communication facility.

When protesters in Iran similarly used Twitter to organize anti-government rallies, the U.S. State Department hailed the micro-blogging service as a boon to democracy.

The Department of Justice is not so easily persuaded of the service’s usefulness. While Madison has not been charged by the feds, the rioting law he’s suspected of violating carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.

After the subsequent raid of Madison’s home in Queens, New York, Madison’s lawyer Martin Stolar won an emergency stay, prohibiting the police from looking through the evidence they’d taken. Stolar sought to have the search thrown out on the grounds it violated the Constitution, but in a short ruling, the judge rejected those arguments Monday and lifted the temporary stay.

Now police must sort through the evidence, make copies of hard drives and memory cards and return the electronics and the non-germane possessions.

Stolar asked the judge for another emergency stay while he appealed the decision to the appeals court, but the judge rejected that motion and warned Stolar to stop pestering the judge with non-emergency phone calls to chambers.

Madison is a social worker in New York with no previous convictions. He argues that the so-called anarchist gear the feds seized, including handheld radios, a pick axe, knee pads and gas masks, are for his civilian defense work. That assertion is backed up by a YouTube video made prior to the raid, describing the usefulness of the various tools in case of a disaster, such as Hurricane Katrina, which led Madison and his wife to volunteer in Louisiana.

The U.S. Attorney’s office says it can not comment on an open grand jury investigation.

I want to know what it is about bits of news like this that is ambiguous... how you can read it and go about your thing without seeing that all this partisan squabbling and even all this tearing out tufts of hair over election integrity is just outright ludicrous in the face of what's really happening....

Why the hell aren't we in the streets by our millions getting this FIXED?

aw, hell, let's just let our hair down here for a few

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My apologies for daring to blur Jimmy Page's hand and guitar, but, well, it just didn't go with the moment....

I started to dip into the Friday news dump and came up with the news that the Zelaya reinstatement thing in Honduras fell through, and it was set to completely ruin the one thing that completely accidentally has gone unequivocally completely right around here in completely quite a while, my November coffee shipment arriving moments after brewing the very last cup from my last month's stash, and so I'm taking refuge in Led Zeppelin... buddha/dharma/sangha... and a completely transcendental cup of Peet's at this moment. It's completely hell being me and you don't even know how much I spare you here. Totally.

just as an aside

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I've never been able to be a snob about Eddie Van Halen.

Here's eleven minutes of him going pretty damn nuts solo....

But I have to muster myself to find the guitar heroes thing he did something like 25 years ago, where he REALLY put out everyone's lights....

we're not talking about something negligible here

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Half of US kids depend on food stamps during childhood: study

(AFP) WASHINGTON — Nearly half of all US children, including an overwhelming majority of black children, will eat meals at some point during their childhood paid for by food stamps, an indicator of poverty, a study showed Monday.

"If you get food stamps, you are by definition in poverty and your household doesn't have many assets," said Mark Rank, a co-author of the study with Thomas Hirschl of Cornell University.

"The fact that half of American children at some time during their childhood find themselves in this position really ought to be a wake-up call to America," he told AFP.

The study found that 49.2 percent of all American children will at some point live in a home that receives food stamps.

Among black children and children living in single-parent households, the percentage is much higher: around 90 percent live in homes that receive food stamps at one stage or another.

And nearly all black children in single parent homes where the head of household has less than a high school education live in financial and food insecurity during part of their childhood, the study says.

The study, which was published Monday in the American Medical Association's Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, is based on an analysis of a 32-year study of some 4,800 US households.

It concluded that American children face the highest levels of poverty and social deprivation of any children growing up in Western developed nations, and they have the flimsiest social safety net to fall back on.

"It's always been weak, particularly compared with European countries or Canada or other industrialized countries," said Rank, a professor at the school of social work at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

"One of the reasons why our rates of poverty are so high is because we do so little in terms of trying to protect families from getting into poverty. We have to cast our safety net wider," he said.

Poverty and food insecurity are "two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child's health" and tag 22 billion dollars a year onto US health care costs, the study said.

"Children in poverty are significantly more likely to experience a range of health problems, including low birth weight, lead poisoning, asthma, mental health disorders, delayed immunization, dental problems and accidental death," it said.

"There's a strong connection between poverty, health and mental health," said Rank and the detrimental effects of growing up poor, even if just for a short period, often carry over into adulthood, he said.

An earlier study conducted by Rank and Hirschl showed that half of American adults resort to food stamps to put a meal in their stomachs.

NOPE, STILL NOT NEGLIGIBLE AFTER ALL THESE YEARS....

just remember what the golden boy is going to bat for

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I know it's a damn relief to hear Alan Grayson talk the way he talks, but... please... we have seen where talk gets us. He's actually turning the passage of a totally crappy bill that probably harms far more than it helps into the great cause of Democrats with "conscience" with all his heartstring-tugging pronouncements about Americans dying because they can't see a doctor. This is, in fact, no matter how good it feels, WRONG, STUPID AND UGLY. Truly, now, it's almost as bad as that insulting shit about not looking backward to prosecute war criminals.

Don't wuss out now....

I'm not denying that he's gooood... and maybe he even believes himself... but not even Papantonio, one of my heroes, is looking past this rush of love for a strongly progressive-sounding voice. He lauds Barney Frank, here, and, uhm, Barney Frank has been doing underhanded dirty deed after underhanded dirty deed since at least September 2008.... These guys are members of the Progressive Caucus, but, well, how progressive in FACT is strongly supporting a crap mandatory insurance bill as though it were altruism itself or surreptitiously killing badly needed regulations on vampire capitalists?

No. REALLY. I'm not mentioning this to paint myself as a crabby and clever leftist. Fuck you. I'm pointing directly at the actual while these guys are swindling you... us... all of us... the 99% of us having to fight over the 25% of the wealth the 1% haven't snatched from us yet. THESE SELF-STYLED PROGRESSIVES WHO HAVE YOUR HOPES IN THEIR GRUBBY POCKETS ARE TALKING LIKE HEROES WHILE HELPING TO ROB US BLIND. It's not a secret. It's right in front of you. They are just using your hearts and aspirations and strongly-held desires to blot out your vision by pouring ecstasy in your ears.

Snap out of it. Have a strong cup of coffee. Turn on a fan. Take a cold shower.

HEY!

why did it have to be a muslim?

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Most unfortunately, from all the innocent, set-up and framed Muslim young men we've seen paraded across the headlines over the last few years, there just isn't really any way we can outright take their word for it that Dr. Hasan was the shooter, or knew what he was doing, or that he's miraculously still alive, or, when you come right down to it, that he was even there. Just in general terms we can believe that he was antiwar because he is a doctor, and believe that in any case he is saner than those up the chain of command from him. Guilty or framed, we can tell that much, and the thing that makes me the most suspicious, beside this horrific track record of people being set up, actually harried into doing or saying something halfway incriminating, Dr. Hasan, of all people, would be the least likely to plot something like this because of what it would do to the prospects for all Muslims everywhere.

So. I'm as clueless as anyone about what really went down, but I just ask that we act like decent and informed citizens and retain our doubt about his guilt and the un-American forces that put him in such a situation.

Even in the worst case scenario, if the authorities were being honest, they'd just be griping that he had no right to take out those troops before they could die for Halliburton.

just outstanding

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Now that Peter B has moved to podcasts, he's even better than the seriously great he was on the air. Here's an hour and fifteen minutes of simply excellent listening. The guy he's interviewing in the middle section, David DeGraw, is awesome. I'm getting so I have to check Peter's site for new podcasts every five minutes. PLEASE, if you have any nickels for philanthropy, I wish you'd help keep him happening.

still thinking about norton

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Still watching videos and wishing we had them from all those nights at the clubs. He was so versatile he could, and did, play with anyone, and you can't even tell from what's on the tubes the amazing extent of that. Can't see him there next to Robert Cray driving Meg and Frannie batshit bonkers like teenyboppers screaming over the Beatles and zenning me out past the stratosphere. Great as this medium is: it just can't capture that. And he was doing that regularly for decades. I always liked it the best when it was Norton without Steve Miller, with whoever he cobbled together for a gig at the last minute because that meant he'd be doing more singing. I liked his voice the best, and just how he could turn any night into something you never forget.

Peter B did a nice little tribute to Norton's huge heart at the end of his podcast here too. Looks like all us old California hippies are holding him in our hearts, trying between us to see how to keep his alive... not exactly going to let him pass like just another scene out the window of this freight train to hell.

out bushing the bushes

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Awesome.

contemplate our dictators in relative terms for a moment

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Listen to Craig, in two parts, at the bottom of the page.

Think about the outrage in the American public, demonstrating in our thousands to free the Uzbeks. Think about GM's brand new plant in Uzbekistan. Think above the psychedelic cloud of smoke being blown in your face every damn time you connect with the media, even the internet. All you little green WWIII mongers! Think!