oscar night

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I would much rather just see the movies. I would not mind watching the whole Oscar night shtick if I had a huge screen tv and could turn off the sound on the yammerers. Then I could point and gasp and be catty and dribble champagne on my new sweater... properly take it in....
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woopsy daisy

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Wrong covert op... or did they have to let him go and make up a cover story?
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breaking discipline in a fairly big way

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I gained six pounds while visiting my poppa. I came home and immediately took them back off. Then Trish came and I put three of them right back on. Sheesh. So AGAIN it falls to me to hop right back on the austerity thing and I just couldn't quite make myself do it with as much alacrity this quickly. Besides, Mondays seem like much better days to start being tough again, don't they?

I think Laura Linney is a FABULOUS actress. So. I decided on this one... with a coffee/brandy milkshake for dinner....
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Well, dammit, there wasn't much Laura Linney to it, but all the acting was very good. I didn't like how the realization of social "inferiority" changed everything, but I did not shrink the screen so as to play computer solitaire while listening to it, glancing at it, so that means it was definitely an above average production. No special effects. No chase scenes. Suspense. Twists. Clues not so subtle as to not even be there, but not beating you over the head either. I'm giving The Other Man a B+.
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as though horton and giraldi set out to bolster all my arguments

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Right after I got done with my last post, I proceeded to listen to this interview. These are guys from the conservative end of our bipolar spectrum. Tell me what they are saying that is so offensive to you. Tell me these two aren't completely on our side.
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stop falling for the partisan propaganda

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Every single day I go to Antiwar.com first. I always check to see if Scott Horton has new interviews up and immediately begin listening to them as I'm poking around the tubes to see what else went wrong while I was asleep. I just adore this kid. He's in Los Angeles, but he's from Austin, Texas, and his Antiwar interviews are in tandem with KAOS radio in Austin. You might think that your master C.O.N.T.R.O.L. spy has gone over to the other side to be listening to K.A.O.S. radio, but it is quite apparently a sting operation on that crusty old group of perfidious dolts. You should never miss what Scott puts up on the Antiwar podcasting, and if any site is worth your support it is that one.

Scott Horton is a fierce Libertarian. He very frequently—in fact most frequently—interviews people on the left side of the political spectrum, and very often it is The Other Scott Horton, from Harper's and the Antiwar Scott heaps praises on the Harper's Scott as effusive as those he heaps on Ron Paul, his hero, here. With the exception of his position on 9/11 and some of his ideas about social issues, I think this kid is just fabulous. He tries harder to get at the truth than just about anybody out there, and I cannot recommend your attention to him highly enough.

I want to point out to you that he identifies most solidly with the libertarian end of conservatism and frequently interviews conservatives who sound damn lucid to me... even when I disagree with them... even when I know what they are saying is wrong or false... because it's never more wrong or false than some of the stuff we hear from liberals, and all of it is aimed at getting down to the kernel of being well-informed enough to wrest a sane society from this appalling hatchet job we call our country now.

In this particular podcast, the thing that struck me the hardest was the good light—deservedly so—it cast on the dreaded CPAC. We have all seen Max Blumenthal's outrageous and entertaining hit jobs on the CPAC people. We have all seen the sundry hit jobs on the Tea Parties. We have all seen the "hilarious" hit jobs on the American man-on-the-street. I have been pointing out for years that these things, while maybe showing SOME reality, are like that bogus O'Keefe video about ACORN. Editing is everything. The videographers, for the most part, will deny editing to make people look worse, or sound stupider, and maybe even some of them don't even realize they are lying, or that they had in fact not bothered to turn on the video cam at all when speaking with the more lucid people, but they are producing videos that fit their own world views, NOT bringing you unbiased reportage. They may not have had as evil intent as this O'Keefe jerk... OR it may be that the little shit is every bit as unaware of the perfidiousness of his work as they are.

Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll this year by a landslide, and while I absolutely do NOT agree with him on some damn crucial issues, it cannot be denied that he is a GOOD man and that people follow him for GOOD reasons. He makes Arianna Huffington, John Amato, Josh Marshall, Markos Moulitsas, Max Blumenthal, Brad Friedman and many, many others on the supposedly progressive side look like dog meat. I'm preferring to think of them as fascists-in-denial just now, and hope that they awaken to the offenses against decency, comity, the constitution and freedom they commit every day. I think if you did something like try to listen to Scott Horton interviewing people every day that you might start to see this, start to see where the "left" is as brainwashed and manipulated as the "right".

The malign mental conditioning of which we complain so loudly, so bitterly, as it pertains to self-styled conservatives isn't a bit less effective in its application on the self-styled progressives, and it is so way past time we woke up to this fact.

It kind of blows my mind that the bald facts of Obama's presidency, even with those who admit his egregious offenses against us, didn't awaken us all immediately, but, whatever, I'm begging you to jump out of what you already think, realize the bullshit tricks being played on you by people who want to stoke your fires, and find ways to form solidarity with those who are not really on "the other side" at all.
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time for a parenti fix — now that the link is fixed

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LINK IS FIXED. MOVED UP AGAIN SO YOU CAN CATCH IT. I'M SORRY. I COULD HAVE SWORN I CHECKED THE LINK. BUT YOU ARE STILL AN ASSHOLE IF YOU DON'T LISTEN TO THIS LECTURE AND BE REMINDED OF HOW THIS STUFF IS DONE.

XOXOXOX
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I do sometimes have to hear it... loud....

If you think I'm being hysterical about the drumbeating against Iran, a good listen here might help tune you up.

In fact, yer an asshole if you don't take the time to listen to this again.

He was saying all this in 1999... BEFORE Dubya and Fudd. We only woke up because they were so clumsy and arrogant and... honest... but way too many of us are going back to sleep.
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more and more and more and more and more

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Just never seems to get better....
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norman in prague

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The sound is good and loud... and maybe we all ought to play it simultaneously... see if it raises some consciousnesses....

Of course, for those of us who listen to Norman every chance we get, we could almost give this lecture for him....
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Actually, you know what? Even though Norman is my hero and I wanna marry him some kind of fierce, I sometimes, not that often, but often enough to mention it, think he's a little drunk while giving his talks... as though he's giving himself a bit of liquid courage... or something... maybe stoned... maybe pain pills... just a little on the giddy side. The guy is outright brilliant. It's, in a sense, a waste that he should have to spend his whole life working on turning us sensible about Israel. He is more courageous than any number of other people you want to lump together to balance him. He rocks so hard I can barely ever find any words beyond I-WANT-TO-MARRY-NORMAN-FINKELSTEIN in praise of him, but I do wonder about this sometimes.

Take this lecture. He's seated, with a bonk on his forehead and very ponderously repeating points over and over, even when he's given himself a time limit. Is that him fogged up or is this what it takes to drill it in? I really would like to know.
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since i'm a serious woman about the coen brothers

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I decided to blow $3.25 on a good movie.

Pure profligacy, I know, but, well, it is TIME for me to lose myself in a masterwork... and I can't imagine that it won't turn out to be another masterwork. The Coen Brothers just don't ever miss.
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An apology to the world for all the fucking holocaust films inflicted on us over the last several years.

That is the ENTIRE purpose of making this movie.

Thanks, boyz.
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ten times the president we've got

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Iran's Ahmadinejad: Sept. 11 attacks a 'big lie'
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI (AP) — TEHRAN, Iran

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday called the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks a "big lie" used by the U.S. as an excuse for the war on terror, state media reported.

Ahmadinejad's comments, made during an address to Intelligence Ministry staff, come amid escalating tensions between the West and Tehran over its disputed nuclear program. They show that Iran has no intention of toning itself down even with tighter sanctions looming because of its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.

"September 11 was a big lie and a pretext for the war on terror and a prelude to invading Afghanistan," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by state TV. He called the attacks a "complicated intelligence scenario and act."

The Iranian president has questioned the official U.S. version of the Sept. 11 attacks before, but this is the first time he ventured to label it a "big lie."

In 2007, New York officials rejected Ahmadinejad's request to visit the World Trade Center site while he was in the city for a U.N. meeting. The president also sparked an uproar when he said during a lecture in New York that the causes and conditions that led to the attacks, as well as who orchestrated them, still need to be examined.

At the time, he also told Iranian state TV the attacks were "a result of mismanaging and inhumane managing of the world by the U.S," and that Washington was using Sept. 11 as an excuse to attack others.

He has also questioned the Sept. 11 death toll of around 3,000, claiming the Americans never published the victims' names.

On the 2007 anniversary of the attacks, the names of 2,750 victims killed in New York were read aloud at a memorial ceremony.

He sounds just like the hero Aaron Russo....
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realism abounds politics

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Something must be mentioned. The stock response to me from "activists" when I mention that they are not active, or when I mention that they are dwelling on completely beside-the-point folderol, or when I mention that we do not have decades, generations, to fix this stuff, is that there are political realities that simply cannot be ignored, that whether I like it or not, my idealism is only maniacal because these political realities ARE reality, that "realists" put their noses to the grindstone and never look up until the job is finally done.

This is COMPLETE horseshit.

And they can get away with saying it to me because there is so much agreement on this, a consensus, a veritable infinitude of citations from impressive named sources to bludgeon me with.

THEY ARE WRONG.

Reality does not give a fig for consensus. Oblivious to this fact, the culture wars are purely humans warring over what is most pleasing to CALL reality, to agree is reality, even if there's a huge population that doesn't agree. Once it is settled one way or the other, we can call the losing camp all kinds of names, completely secure in the idea that they are lesser beings for holding outlier views, while continuing to be vexed by how this did not solve the original problems. And once it is seen these original problems were not solved, the pendulum of public opinion is quite likely to devolve into some form of what we would by then have agreed was nothing more than brute ignorance out of which we thought we had already so manfully struggled. Demoralized thus, we will wonder again if wars are human nature, if racism is human nature, if feudalism isn't after all the only way humans can organize themselves... all sorts of things.

It isn't going to occur to us that we continue to have these lethal problems because we NEVER deal with the real... ONLY with establishing a ruling consensus that we find agreeable.

In one of my fabled vacations from legalese I was an innkeeper. I ran a very fancy bed and breakfast inn for an absent owner. He was, alas, not absent enough. He would show up fairly regularly because he had a girlfriend near the inn. This woman was a twit, a fairly attractive one. She thought very highly of herself, confessed to me once that she had fantasies of having a best friend servant who worshipped the ground she walked on. Her ideas about how to make this fancy inn cuter made me want to puke, but she would articulate these ideas to her boyfriend, who wished to be as accommodating as possible. Never mind that his contract with me stated that I was in charge. He would wheedle constantly for gewgahs his girlfriend was dreaming up. I developed such a hatred for her it's a wonder she's still alive.

It struck me some weeks into this roiling hatred that there was no reason on earth that such an idiot should merit this much loathing from me. WHAT was my problem that I was so obsessed by it that I could rarely even speak of something else, and even could rarely ever dream of anything else? I stepped outside myself to have a look.

She was not the problem. He was. It was completely unacceptable to me to be that angry with him because that meant I could no longer work for him. So I'd transferred all that feeling over onto her, a far safer to my happy position object for my ire.

Of course, upon seeing this, it meant I had to quit. It meant I would not keep living in my blissful situation and doing something I really enjoyed, spending a great deal of my time so angry and full of hate that it would peel off my freckles. It meant that I had preëmpted living a quantum of wasted years thinking up ways to call whatever deserved decapitating the owner by some more acceptable name... like calling them his girlfriend's bottomlessly perfidious tricks... or, I'm sure, a whole cosmos of other excuses. Instead, I just left. I realized my idyl would never truly be any such thing and the best I could ever do was to keep repainting it as one, wasting my life and talents on CALLING reality something else.

Take the immigration wars. The right is righteously angry about this huge influx of people and all the social costs, and the left is righteously angry about the right's xenophobia, and generally wanting to treat the starving hordes pouring in something akin to how we treat stray dogs. The ire is always pointed either at the immigrants themselves or at those in the opposing political camp. The ENTIRETY of the problem lies with the plutocrats starving them out at home, and exploiting them here, but NONE of us ever do ANYTHING to fix that. Fucking with those guys can make one VERY sorry. So we pick on someone more our own size. WE DON'T DEAL WITH THE REAL. We figure out what is safer and can seem to address the problem, and then throw all our weight behind THAT... just CALLING it dealing with the immigration problem.

At the image link is a discussion that shows the weakness of the IPCC, the mistakes, the wobbly basis for what is the most solid science we have... and it puts on display this human tendency to shift attention from the actual to a less threatening to our comfort theoretical basis over which to fight to the not actual death. [Ignoring, of course, that there may be no way our deaths from this won't be actual this time....]

It is true that climate science can only give us best guesses. It is true that what we fear might not actually happen, that some mechanism of which we are still ignorant might kick in and save the day. It is true that we don't 100% know, and even truer that the whole thing has been turned into something that cannot be settled lucidly since it is not lucid now.

The big boys, the plutocrats, the apocalyptically powerful do not want to lose the cash cows that would have to be killed in order to act in accord with what our science tells us. What in the hell would make them deny this stuff? If nothing else, it is already abundantly clear that we have turned our planet into a sewer and living things are being harmed by it egregiously. We wonder how in the hell they could ignore this, ignore that their kids will sicken and die from it exactly as ours will. Being as how I know these guys are NOT as stupid as to ignore the threat to their own existence, I'm pretty sure the truth is something akin to my original sardonic take on it... that they plan to obviate the climate catastrophe—which might only be the manmade toxicity catastrophe—by drastic population reduction. Do the math. That keeps them in the driver's seat, makes the world more livable AND leaves them in control. Game. Set. Match.

THEY are dealing with the real.

WE are finding ways to fight them that are safer than fighting them... which... by the way... is Obama's approach to "fighting" them on our behalf... and they heavily approve of this. They also heavily approve all media outlets—INCLUDING BLOGS—SNAP THE FUCK OUT OF IT—that keep the polemics and the distractions front and center. You are SO unlikely to wake up from it and point your ire at the true problem, move with the speed and accuracy that is mandatory to save the whole world, as long as you're so heavily engaged in the culture wars and the prurient interest distractions are coming so hard and fast that it is kaleidoscopic.

You are showing them that you will stay safely on your consensual acid trip, sparing yourself the exposure of dispositive action—the kind of stuff likely to get them REALLY mad—and their approach to averting the mass extinction event will be the dispositive action that really IS mandatory to a healthy planet with any people on it.

If you can't tear yourself away from yourself long enough to see this, then their solution truly is the best one open to us, and it will, IN FACT, be a good—albeit extremely unfair, extremely harsh—thing.

Chew on that.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The most perfidious fucks ever born might actually save Planet Earth because you're too self-absorbed, too obsessed with safer polemics, to get it done. They have taken this to the bank, and it has made them fabulously wealthy. I don't care what your EXCUSE is. Even if it's perfect, even if it's the most understandable and even laudable excuse ever conceived, it's an excuse.

And it is insufficient in the face of reality.

In fact, this is SO ultimately irrefutable, this explains how they can all still consider themselves good people while so cruelly treating their brothers and sisters. THEY don't want to think of this global herd of clever but useless consensual hallucination junkies and abjectly destitute progenitors of mud cookie eaters as kin. In a sense, that isn't even nice. If none of us can rise up out of the herd to FORCE kinder solutions, theirs is cosmically, if not karmically, beautiful.

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[Completely ON topic: The straight answer is they are raising their rates so outrageously to force the vote to mandate healthcare insurance. This makes pressure to pass it, even if it's wrong, and it IS, much more intense, AND signals what they can do to any bill that tries to put in any competition or any other impediments to maximum profitability. I mean... duh... and don't think for a moment Obama needs straight answers. He knows them all by heart.]
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dumbstruck

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I find I just can't find the words for the amazingness of this performance. Never has a puppet done such a brilliant job of following orders. I hope Russia snips his strings on this. I hope the world hands him his ass on this.
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email moyers

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And say, "SINGLE PAYER."

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight. —Albert Schweitzer
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whipping up another storm

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The United States is bent on making a hairy deal out Iran, and others go along with us, not because there is anything to sanction Iran over, but because they would rather not piss us off. We're only doing it because that's what the lobbyists are paying for and so, in a nutshell, Israel wants to punish Iran.

If you care to endure the execrable Michael Ledeen debating Flynt Leverett you will get a whiff of what pisses me off so much about this whole question of diplomacy with Iran. Beside his outrageous spewing of baldfaced lies, Ledeen's shtick is pitch-perfect American exceptionalism, and it is precisely this that Iran will not tolerate... to their everlasting credit. This is courageous, but it is ALSO the most loving way to proceed with deluded bullies. I think Leverett has an idea that we should not keep playing this my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours game with them, but I don't think he quite sees that Iran is treating us PRECISELY as is warranted when one side gets out of phase with their proper relation to the other. WE act as though Iran is subordinate to us. Iran acts as though we are equal to them.

Which side do you think is right?

And SINCE you know Iran is right, WHY the fuck do you put up with this EVIL shit from Washington?
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another frickin' petition

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Ordinarily, I think this stuff is a waste of time, but I think we owe it to Howard Dean to give it another try. I'm really worried about what's going to happen to him when Obama rams through mandatory insurance with NO protections for us. Obama has shown he will go the distance to please the plutocrats, and Dean is going the distance to disappoint them. Let's stand with the one who's on OUR side.
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it's friday, pretend to have a life night

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It actually occurred to me earlier to take myself out for a pleasant dining experience tonight, before I remembered that it is Friday and there is no such thing as a pleasant dining experience out on Friday nights. If a restaurant finds itself too tranquil of a Friday, it either starts in with karaoke early or the wait persons hover so I-wanna-get-outta-here-early-and-you-damn-well-better-tip-me-the-moon that they might as well have done the karaoke thing. So I'm going to just contemplate the serenity of jellyfish in the deepest reaches of the acidifying sea instead....
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i'm beginning to think wwiii is the only way

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Do not mistake that for me wishing it upon us, but I don't think certain of our more intractable problems will ever be solved without it. Just... uhm... whoever wins... please get on the climate thing... or make sure a minimum of two thirds of us are dead.

Thank you.
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just shoot me

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Sneak up behind me, or position a sniper, whatever, but just quickly, now, quickly, get this over with.
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mister despicable: rahm emanuel

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He's George W. Obama's Karl Rove.
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a pyromaniac's dream

[click image of methane bubbles, because you can't SEE it when it's being released from thawing permafrost on land]

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Agent BB2 is endeavoring to make clear to you the seriousness of methane being released from thawing permafrost. He provides a short video of the "silver bullet" argument in favor of immediate action against global warming, EVEN if you don't believe the science. That video appalls me because, simple as it is, it is way more complicated than the dirt obvious reasons everyone should get behind all out, no holds barred, global action against climate change... but you should go take it in.

And while we are about pondering the dirt obvious, have a look at methane in action in the science lab... and then, just in case the nomenclature is still too abstract for you, take a look at a dirt simple explanation of exactly WHAT methane is....

They tell you in earthquakes you should immediately turn off the gas main to your house. This is because one of the biggest risks in quake damage is the fires from broken gas lines. Many people who wish to kill themselves simply close their kitchen windows and doors, stuff rags and towels into any other areas that might still let too much airflow pass through and then turn on the burners and oven in their gas stoves, omitting to light them. The kitchen fills with METHANE and they asphyxiate. Ask anyone.

We are turning our planet into Sylvia Plath's kitchen.

Or maybe you'd prefer to wave it off....

this is fascism

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Chapter and verse. Americans mostly are completely ignorant of our own constitution AND we are also mostly completely ignorant of what fascism is. If you wonder why I keep pointing to obviously fascistic stuff and doggedly reminding you that this is fascism, it is because not even people who THINK they know what fascism is actually grok what fascism is. So I continually point it out.

You know all those supposedly stupid tea partiers? Well, they're NOT stupid. They know something is seriously wrong and seriously unAmerican, but they don't know the word for it. Someone screams on the MSM that it's "socialism" but it is FASCISM. If they could be clued in on the tricks being played on them, they would amend their rhetoric and we could be not only scaring public officials into abiding by the constitution, but helping to educate everyone whose education did not include civics classes.
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now that i've caught up on my bumping-into-walls thing

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Trish and I watched "Home" last night and I could feel the hysteria rising from my inner cosmos when they were getting to the permafrost part. Even though I'd already seen it twice, I was wanting them to show bubbling methane, show people lighting the burning methane bubbles in arctic lakes, instead of being so "no one knows" about it. I was wanting them to somehow have edited in the part where fashion models burst through the screen and their faces dissolve into methane bubble flames so we'd get the picture about what supposedly no one knows. We know methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂. So how unknowing can we be?

Anyway, the visit messed with my already outrageous sleep disorder thing and I had to have me some REM sleep after Trish started for home. I dreamed her daughter and her friend were arguing with her in the other room about throwing a party, that I was working on my computer at her house and they were in the other room and raising their voices about this and also almost arguing over who I was there to visit. Somehow, mystically, I'd been upgraded to cool old bat from my twenty-year firm position next to her mother and father as just plain unbearably old and embarrassingly—HUMILIATINGLY— strange.

I could hardly believe my ears and popped my head out to look at the scene. Trish was nowhere to be seen, but her daughter was holding a baby and her friend was there next to her, vying for baby cuddling time. Outrageous as this scenario is to even contemplate from the innocence of one's sleep, both girls beamed at me as though I were a hero and I recoiled, going back to my pressingly busy whatever on the computer. Some young men, but not young enough men, were there to take the girls to this party in contention and one of them stopped me to speak admiringly to me, but I just went back to my machine. These young people thought I rocked because I believed in the same revolution they did. I got it about the plutocratic perfidy and the methane bubbles. I guess I validated their righteous anger. There was all kinds of turmoil out there, and there started to be lots of turmoil on my computer, where every page was switching to some pink—I hate pink— spam page and all my efforts to reboot were only bringing up this pink page in windows all over the place.

I was both lethally alarmed and transcendentally serene about this, and the strange psychic pitch of the tussle between mother and daughter was still going on in the other room. Briefly we cut to me being using some nonexistent neighbor's internet connection and him coming home and finding me at it but ignoring me. Then we slide to some little used stairwell space where there was a mound of very wildly colored, glitzy material pillows, semi-stuffed and semi-heaped behind the banister and I'm griping to some invisible girl about what in the world does her mother need to buy all this crap all the time for as I'm settling back to my computer work, to make the unspeakable Mac virus or malware or whatever go away, but it was involving some physical moves probably not actually involved in this work in real life. My body was trying to make these moves and very, very alarmingly could not because, well, because it was actually tangled up in my comforter in bed and all attempts to push back from my machine in my desk chair were failing abysmally.

So this ended up ending my nap in a fairly heart-thumping manner just after I saw the not young enough men going off to the party with the girls....
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And, having done a lot of tromping in the forest and on the beach and by the lily fields and through the timber barons' graveyard in the last couple days, my sinuses are so swollen that it's effortful to suck in enough air and my legs are a little on the wibbly side from more mileage than they usually do, so bed just keeps being my main interest today. And I keep replaying "Home" in the background to help drown out my wrath over stuff like this... and this....

I think I'm going to pack it all the way in spectacularly early-for-me, and see how it goes tomorrow.
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al greenspan? al qaeda?

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It comforts me considerably that the Russians have Max Keiser to keep them fiscally sane.

Don't skip this episode of the Max Keiser Report on RT. Beside the usual informative and funny reporting, he interviews DAVID DEGRAW and this verrrrrry seriously rocks.
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running out of colors

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And, personally, I feel that it won't come a moment too soon.

I can hardly wait for the puce/chartreuse revolution....
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the right is wrong; the left is stupid

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We all know the old saw about not-right-or-left-but-right-or-wrong, but THIS is MUCH more to the REAL point! I want one of these stickers! Hell. Maybe I want it tattooed on my forehead.
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you won't do anything about this

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You were supposed to see this yesterday. I messed up. Sorry.

Notice that the people in this clip are from ALL across the political spectrum, from every angle—EVEN the psychopathic Glenn Beck, sounding perfectly lucid, disorienting as we might find that—TELL THE TRUTH—be HONEST—and they're ALL pointing at the same perpetrators.

So, wanna explain to me again WHY we're fighting EACH OTHER?
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reagan tells obama to grow a pair

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Lafingas is at it again....
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And then even Mullen piled on!
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you aren't doing anything about it

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Are you? Those right wing fundamentalist maniacs are at least as upset about the rulers of the world as we are. Both sides revile it. EVEN those who aren't sure what it's called. We ALL have the same enemy. We are billions. They are so very few. The ONLY thing that keeps them safe from us is keeping us fighting amongst each other.

The ONLY thing.
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24 hours later: I put in the wrong link... too sleepy... and I can't find the right one now. Doesn't completely matter because you won't do a thing about any of their perfidy... but... well... I'll keep looking when I get up in the morning... but in the meantime I've linked a different piece I think you oughta consider....

Sorry.

Oh, no! Wait. I just remembered how to track it down. Here. I'll post it up top again and leave the replacement link here.

Sorry. What a sleepy old twit.... :-P

this is not a civilized country anymore

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In case you were still laboring under our native exceptionalism....
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waiting for my old friend

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Trish and I were roommates back when we were in our twenties. I'd given up on roommates. What an appalling way to try to live in this world! I was SICK of bullshit knocking my life to bits every time I turned around. So swore off it.

Trish found a two-bedroom flat she was just crazy for, but couldn't afford, and begged me to reconsider. I will be grateful for the rest of time that I relented. We lived together for quite a few years and never once had even part of a fight about anything! It was total solidarity the whole time. When she left to go live with Scott, I thought I was going to die without her. I told her I'd rather she married me... that she could keep Scott as her boyfriend, but just stay with me. I don't have a homosexual cell in my body, but I meant that I wanted to spend my life with her. She is one of the miracles of humanity for sure.

I wish she'd hurry up and get here!

However. NOBODY can hurry up and get here. I live many hard miles from anywhere.
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vote for moonbeam

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Even though he's the worst, most unrepentant health nazi I have EVER met, I still love the guy. He has been a man about stuff that turns most mortals into mice for his whole career, and sat in the Zendo with me one morning long ago. You get a real feel for people that way. You can hear their thoughts, their true thoughts. He meant that homage to Buddhism, and anyone who ever saw him arguing on Buckley's tv show knows the guy is SERIOUSLY smart, and MEANS his progressivism.
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mickey kaus cracks me up

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He's a kick... and REALLY smart.
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shit

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This will make Mondays utter hell for postal workers, slow the service even worse, and, I don't know about you, but I'm SO sick of the MISERY capitalism imposes on us. WHEN will we get the straw that breaks this camel's back?
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partisan bullshit

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I just don't see what's wrong with Bunning's position. It isn't as though they've been on fire to spend the stimulus and it just seems to me that unemployment benefits are every bit as stimulating as not spending the already too small stimulus.

So they're just vilifying Bunning for more seats. If they were actually working to help us, I'd feel differently.
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let's send police from everywhere

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Australian police and passport officials are being dispatched to Israel to meet with three dual Australian-Israeli nationals whose passports were used in the slaying of a top Hamas operative in Dubai, a spokeswoman for Australia's department of foreign affairs said Tuesday.

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that was then

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This is now.

I got this clip from Norman Solomon... who also mentions Martin, as well as Lillian Hellman... who was married to Dashiell Hammett... who is also still one of my heroes.
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hey, now, hey, now, pilger's a fountain of sterling deeds

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Saved Palast's ass at The Guardian. Not just anyone could do that.
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nails it

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Just cleans their clocks... a little harsh on the unwashed masses, but nails it on liberals.

...the liberal establishment is ... still whining about the same-old riddle that’s paralyzed them for 30 straight years: “Why don’t Republicans debate fairly and honestly?!” And their answer comes down to the same feeble: “It’s because Republicans aren’t as good as we liberals are.”

Flippin' over and over and over and OVER again, day in and day out, 24/7/365, it NEVER stops being liberals bragging about how educated and smart and truthful and honest and virtuous and dignified we are. Pander to that shit and yer in 'em in Liberal circles. No matter what. It makes me want to puke. I am SO sick of it. I might even be able to endure it without bellowing about it every five minutes if everybody would just skip the elevation of themselves at others' expense even PART of the time, but it is RELENTLESS.

It's a black hole.

Unable to take one's attention from any opportunity to think well of oneself, one continually misses the opportunities for effectiveness. Bark at one to wake them from such lethal revery and righteous indignation, punctuated by sparks and flashes of incendiary sophistry, swirl in a fathomless ocean of smoke, sucking sense out of the air at an event horizon the precise demarkation of which describes the range of audibility.

A black hole.

Believe me. I've done the math. I know what I'm saying.
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very concerning

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Obviously, this document is not well translated, but gives the general impression that giving an interview to al Jazeera can be extremely hazardous to one's health. It could as easily be a ploy to discredit the Qatari news organization, but I'm bringing it up because I have repeatedly found myself a tad vexed by the suddenly awfully America-friendly and Israel-neutral tone of the place. It is my main general news site and since it became more operative and user-friendly for the United States, it also seems not to be anywhere near so keen on giving things from a Muslim perspective, which I felt was one of its finer attributes. Beside being almost without exception nearer to the truth, it was immense help in balancing the fascistic blather coming out of our media outlets. I'm not so sure anymore.

They are still about the best news outlet we have... though RT is catching up.

Maybe corporate headquarters just decided it's more profitable to aggravate Christians and Jews less. Or maybe we don't even know who in Qatar is in charge anymore. Or maybe too many of their reporters and offices were getting bombed by American troops. Or maybe their operation has become so huge and their employees so diverse that the frickin' ISI/CIA/MI-6/Mossad/anybody axis can get their moles in there to track down whomever. Or not. I don't know, but I'm bothered enough, uneasy enough, to mention this.

As for Abdelmalik Rigi, of Jundullah fame, I barely believe he was a terrorist/drug dealer who was coöpted by the United States. More like he was flat out installed by the United States to start his enterprise. If you hunt around in my Jundullah label, I think there are some whiffs of him being entirely too near JSOC/Blackwater installations recently and I won't be remotely surprised if he somehow manages a fantastic escape from Iranian custody. Even if they keep him and try him and hang him, it will only be because the Iranians are much less corruptible than the Pakistanis. At the rock bottom bare minimum he and his group have been supported by United States taxpayers for at least three, but probably six, years. This has been reported by both ABC and The New Yorker, and so there is NO doubt about that much.

I mean, Brian Ross, alone, reporting it, would mean Fudd wanted to brag to Tehran that he was murdering their people, but SEYMOUR HERSH reporting it means somebody who knows for certain about this stuff isn't at all happy about it and wants it to stop... for all the good THAT does them.

I'd say either Iranian intelligence really got their act together to nab him, or someone in the ISI is bloody furious with the United States and tipped them to get even with us. I don't know if al Jazeera had ANY connection to it, but here we have a convergence of two items that have been bugging me for quite a while. So I bring it up for you to file in your Big Maybes folder....
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how many?

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Must watch documentary.
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General Information:

The good old html search button gizzy here has been working for shit for quite a while. It seems this is because Blogger has given us a new search widget, which also, thus far, works for shit, but, going off the premise that it is new and they will be hassled to improve it, fix the frickin' code, whatever, I replaced the search mechanism for this blog. It quite probably will end up working really well. A few weeks ago I added what they call a "label cloud" to the bottom of the page. So these changes improve your chances of retracing your steps, or investigating the history, of this blog.

If you think it irritates you, just THINK how it is for ME when trying to link back to prior posts I know damn well are back there... somewhere. I have a little list of things of my own I hope to stumble upon again myself....

I am sorry that my way of blogging things does not lend itself to searching and finding stuff very well. Part of me wants to get obsessive about helping you find again stuff that you found here to begin with and want to revisit, but the part of me that does not want to coöperate with strictly popularity-enhancing protocols bucks and bucks and bucks. I am not doing this for popularity. Yes, I could look at it that what I bring up is frequently important for EVERYONE to know and there is a pat bodhisattva rationalization for making sure all my post titles contain key search terms, being conventionally precise with my labels... yadda yadda yadda... but I remain a staunch believer in the workings of karma. Not personal karma. Cosmic karma. YOUR karma. So people who should stumble upon me will, and if they want to alert friends and other denizens of the tubes, they bloody well will. If they don't, they won't.

I had started to cede some of this basic outlook to the needs of my fellow bloggers to be raised in the estimation of certain stats mechanisms, popularity gauges, being as how so many were so concerned with them, but NONE of the services for this sort of thing are the least reliable. You get different measures from each of them—wildly different—they are there for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue off bloggers' ego problems, contribute to the dread human propensity for group think, and they are monstrously repellent to me. So. I'm sorry if I test your patience with this stubbornness.

And, something everyone ought to know, sidebar links to other blogs do not count toward their popularity anymore. They only did less than half the time before, because we had to have our feeds set to "full" in order for our links to others to count for those others, but now they don't count if they are in the sidebar. Stats services ignore sidebars. Also, even linking in the main body of your posts doesn't count for anyone unless your feed is set to "full" and so mine is. Plus, with the craze for shortening URLs, lots of people link using link shortening services and those links never show up on any stats service either. So. If you are a blogger, give up on trying to measure up in the stats wars. They have always been based on nothing, unreliable in the extreme, easy to game by the stats people themselves... and... I don't think this is even marginally better for those who PAY for fancy stats measurements.

This last bit should make those wishing to make a living at their blogging cease sleeping immediately.

If you are not a blogger, the badge of good citizenship of Blogistan is to recommend blogs you like wherever you comment, when it is applicable to the discussion in point, and to email your friends with the links.

Lastly, my dearest and most beloved Trisha is coming to visit me tomorrow, and I'm going grocery shopping and getting the guest bedroom straightened out for her today. I don't know how long she's staying, probably only a day or two, but we should have a number of things to do, which means there won't be much blogging going on here for the next couple two or three days. Not none. But probably not much.
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pie

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Pie.

Pelosi said that "in a matter of days" Democrats will have specific legislative language on health care to show to the public and to wavering lawmakers. She predicted voters will warm up to the bill once they understand its details.

"When we have a bill," she said, "you can bake the pie, you can sell the pie. But you have to have a pie to sell."

At that point, added House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, top Democrats will make their pitch to their members.

"Within the next couple of weeks we're going to have a specific proposal and start counting votes to see whether or not those proposals could pass," he said.

Pie.
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