beautiful hero, tony judt, has died

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It is a mercy most profound. I thank the buddhas of the ten directions for breaking my heart, now, instead of any later. Such a beautiful spirit, with such a cruel end, I am so grateful you are free at last.

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who was it, lately lamenting that vampires are being made chic?

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Such a sense of humor that global elite has, eh?

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Why did they shut down my favorite loop current graphic?

Why do all the sources for viewing its activity STOP sometime back in June?

Do you think they even actually plugged the blowout? HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?

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How very creepy/odd. I went off to keep trying elsewhere, and coming into ostensibly the same information from another angle rendered a current look at the loop current... I think...? It would, I admit, be optimal if I could find my marbles, but right in the middle of searching I had another contact lens catastrophe and so may have to just give up this line of inquiry until I can get this straightened out and those damn marbles pried from wherever they're hiding....

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WHAT started all those fires?

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Has anyone mentioned that? Does anyone know?

I'm not liking a monster conflagration guaranteed to keep Russian troops occupied at home right now. No. I'm not.

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i can't find my marbles anywhere

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I so way slept in today, needing at least a week's worth of REM as I did and seemed to be getting it all in one shot. Well. So. Then. Then it came upon me to wake up my computer while making my coffee. I didn't get two feet from my machine when all sorts of bells and whistles started going off... emails from every corner of the known universe. One of them was the email with a comment from BB2 on it that seemed to be saying Fidel wanted Obama to nuke Iran, start WWIII.

THIS WAS AN HALLUCINATION.

Not realizing yet that my marbles had been lost, I set immediately about finding the refutation for this outrageous state of affairs, and did a FINE job of it, you will have to agree, if you read all my updates to my Fidel post.

Except. Well. BB2 didn't say that and neither did anyone else. It was completely about my lost marbles and no coffee. I got my coffee finally, but, well, my marbles are not showing up. I gotta go find my glasses now and do some serious marble hunting. If I can't find my own, it would be unwise to use any stray marbles from others. This might get loud.

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canadians are not exempt

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I wish it were otherwise, but maybe we can rely on their help when/if we ever stand up.

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i should just stop blogging

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We got the word to the wise 25 years ago, did not heed it then, are not heeding it now.

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scott horton and scott horton, no relation

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Scott and Scott discuss the Wikileaks/Assange/Manning scene....

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fidel will attend the cuban parliament today

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I think this is going to be very important.

Saturday's appearance will be particularly interesting because the last time Fidel Castro attended parliament was a month before his health emergency. Since then lawmakers have convened with an empty chair set aside for Fidel.

The special session will deal with a topic followed closely by the elder Castro brother: the threat of global nuclear war.

A brief statement read on state television's Friday night newscast did not say if Castro would address the assembly, which will be broadcast nationwide. But it's hard to imagine that he won't since he requested the special session.

I hate to say it, but I feel things beginning to shift into place. I think Fidel does too.

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UPDATE: BB2 points out in comments [*HE DID NOT! I MISREAD IT!] that so far today people are saying Fidel is urging Obama to attack Iran. I think that [*MY MISREADING] is [*WOULD HAVE BEEN] a misreading of the end of Fidel's most recent regular column:

"’You are backing a country that has hundreds of nuclear weapons [Isreal] but you are saying that you want to stop Iran, which could possibly have them some day…’"

The Iranians have stated that they will fire 100 rockets against every one of the U.S. and Israeli ships that are blockading Iran, as soon as they inspect any Iranian merchant ship.

In that way, when Obama gives the order to comply with the Security Council resolution, he will be decreeing the sinking of all the U.S. warships in that area.

Never before has such a dramatic decision fallen upon a president of the United States. He should have foreseen that.

On this occasion, for the first time in my life, I am addressing United States President Barack Obama:

You must know that it is in your hands to offer humanity the only real possibility of peace. Only on one occasion can you make use of your prerogatives by giving the order to fire.

It is possible that later, on the basis of this traumatic experience, solutions might be found that will not lead us once again to this apocalyptical situation. Everybody in your country, including your worst adversaries of the left or the right, will doubtless be grateful to you, and also the people of the United States, who are not in any way guilty of the situation created.

I ask you to deign to hear this appeal that I am conveying to you in the name of the Cuban people.

I understand that a rapid response cannot be expected, nor would you ever give one. Think it through well, consult your specialists, ask your most powerful allies and international adversaries for their opinion on the matter.

I am not interested in honors or glories. Do it!

The world really can be liberated from nuclear weapons and also conventional ones.

The worst of all the variants will be nuclear war, which is already virtually inevitable. PREVENT IT!

I am pretty sure Fidel meant for Obama to use his prerogative NOT to inspect Iranian ships, to NOT go so far as to force Iran to protect herself. I admit that is not so clear from this wording, but the rest of it, here, and in everything he's written over the years, doesn't make sense if he is urging Obama to provoke the Iranians.

I'm still looking.

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UPDATE: From the end of a piece at the Miami Herald about his speech in the parliament today:

Castro noted that after months of warning of the risks of nuclear war over the enforcement of sanctions against Iran — he even gave a deadline in June — he's now less pessimistic.

"At first I thought that the imminent danger of war had no solution possible," he said. "I am sure, however, that it will not happen that way and that, on the contrary, the conditions for a solution (...) are being created at this time."

"One man alone will have to make the decision: The president of the United States," Castro said, because Iran will not bow to U.S. and Israeli demands to halt its nuclear program.

If Obama approves an attack on Iran, he added, he will trigger a war that will spread through the Middle East and Asia and cause "the instantaneous death of hundreds of millions people, among them an incalculable number of people in his own country."

The "established order of the planet ... will inevitably collapse, the reigning social order will disappear abruptly" and all currencies will be worthless, he added.

Castro noted that "as luck would have it,'' Obama's father was Muslim and his mother was Christian and added he hoped the U.S. president will become conscious of the threat to world peace.

In comparison, he called Richard Nixon a "cynic," branded Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman as "ignorant" and called Jimmy Carter "a decent person."

So I guess we settled that one anyway.

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UPDATE: I really hate wading through MSM propaganda for any good bits, but this one was worth the work:

"Fidel attracts more people. There's nobody better than him," said Pedro Gonzalez, a 90-year-old retiree who watched the session of parliament on a nationwide broadcast. "Look how well he's recuperated. It's incredible. Fidel makes us feel better."

Me too, Pedro, me too.

I don't think there will be a reliable translation of his eleven-minute speech until after the weekend, but I'll keep looking.

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OKAY. PRIME EXAMPLE WHY YOU NEVER TRUST THE AP.

While it was the first time the brothers have appeared together publicly since Fidel fell ill, neither made any effort to approach the other, and they never even seemed to make eye contact.

There is no rift between the Castro brothers. Jesus. Give it a rest.

And, man, being something of an expert on the topic of old men, I can't tell you how great it is to be poring through pages and pages of images of Fidel looking so well. There was almost no hope for his survival, and he damn well has DONE it. I hope he never dies.

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UPDATE: * Sheesh. I have GOT to train myself not to start blogging before I've had at LEAST a few gulps of coffee. Bad enough I try to comment without enough in me, or while waiting for it to be ready. That's embarrassing enough! I'm leaving this all up here because it's still cogent stuff you need to know, even if I started in on it assuming the preposterous was what was coming of it all... which... in my own defense... is lately a fairly safe assumption....

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i am like SO ready to go off into my light body

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Learning may be painful, but, dammit, it's vital.

People seem to think that denying or ignoring uncomfortable stuff makes it not so. Well. That is not so, and being as how that is not so, actuality plays out without you. You are the victim of it. You have no participation in improving it. You might think it's best to leave this to others, but guess which others get control of your reality then.... C'mon, I know you can figure it out.

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You know, I was looking all over for my computer glasses while listening to that ibuprofen-inducing audio earlier, and it wasn't until sometime after snapping this image that I realized that streak of green up in my hair was not the camera, but my long-lost computer glasses....

Just thought you should know that....

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That was pretty interesting... for someone who has studied the ancients for decades, anyway. Sort of puts a fine point on why gaping at horse-faced girls with surgically altered sexual attributes and prurient shaves is such a bummer. It's only cosmic when there's love. Otherwise it is wiser, kinder, more spiritual to masturbate. But it isn't even sexual intercourse, really, in this sacred marriage business. It's merely about a kind of intimacy that transcends naked bodies, transcends The Battle of the Sexes, transcends time and space and the walking around world altogether. It requires a kind of truthfulness in which I am dirt certain very few of you have ever even dreamed of finding yourselves engaged. It gives the notions of respect and of trust whole new universes of meaning. It turns into what you call telepathy and you never even had to lay a finger on the other.

I have never in my life spent any length of time with a man who was remotely suspicious of my relations with other men. I have men friends with whom I visit, and stay overnight, sometimes even sharing a bed, and I never in all my completely outrageous amount of experience had a lover who was remotely suspicious of my faithfulness to him. I wouldn't have one. So many people think that possessiveness and jealousy is a sign of real love. It is a sign of real sickness and a terrible relationship that will only cause miseries of all sorts. Ask anyone engaged in one. Disregard the excuses.

And if you ever get to the kind of intimacy I'm talking about, you will heartily agree, it is radically better even than sex.

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And for math geeks....

See? I don't forget you.

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i don't know if you have the moxie to listen to this

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It starts out with that unendurable jaguar purring at Kerry Cassidy's door, the ENTIRE endurance test of it, and then proceeds straight into a discussion of the death of the Gulf loop current, and psychic reports of Atlantis rising again, and the near approach of our solar system's dwarf star, and the impending ice age, and the global elite doing this on purpose, and global famine, and lort only knows what more lies ahead of me as I listen, but, dammit, I'm getting that PhD. I don't care how crazy you think I am. Fantastical as it is so far, and irksome with creepy personalities, all that, there's a bunch of interesting things to consider here. There's some guy over at CERN who has been studying this problem with the loop current for a decade or so, and he's telling people this heralds the very quick onset of glaciation in Europe... which is great news for the polar bears, but means famine for humans. So. It's not all horseshit.

If you feel Olympian, by all means, join me.

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Oof dah. That was agonizing. I thought the first hour was doable, but the second hour made me head for my tub of mega-ibuprofen. Learning of the multifarious ideas and beliefs of sentient beings can be very hard on the nerves. I'm next sucking on some B12....

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i notice the financial crowd has taken to calling them 'pig fuckers'

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I have seen it a bunch of places lately. I beg to differ. They are human-fucker pigs. They take your money and gamble with it. When they lose they charge you for it. They do NOT lend you any of it anymore. Why should they? They have a license to piss away everything you've earned and saved. Our broken government has been making that airtight for the last fifteen years. They just signed into law a "reform" package that pretends they are still banks, while letting them be mobsters and you just fuck off and die. So unless you consider yourself a pig, you should stop calling banksters "pig fuckers". That's just dumb... and too nice.

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get me a bucket of ice water!!!!!

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A World War III scenario.

I don't know if we need to be more alarmed than the practically-dead-of-alarm we usually are, but this sounds pretty dire. My face is beat red. I gotta soak it in something cold.

I seem to be this much more alarmed because of the totally outrageous number of wildfires besetting Russia just now. Do we know how they started? I don't believe we do. Do we know how devious our murderating fucks are? I believe we do.

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Also, not a good sign. Good excuse to build up at the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz. Nossirree. Not a good sign.

Tanker damage blamed on attack, Japan seeks details
By Erika Solomon and Kiyoshi Takenaka
DUBAI/TOKYO | Fri Aug 6, 2010 11:51am EDT

(Reuters) - Militants attacked a Japanese supertanker with explosives near the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important shipping routes, the United Arab Emirates state news agency said on Friday.

The crew of the 333-meter-long M.Star reported an explosion shortly after midnight on July 28, injuring one seaman though causing no oil spill or disruption to shipping in the strategic waterway, bordered by Iran, Oman, and the UAE.

"An examination carried out by specialized teams has confirmed that the tanker has been the subject of a terrorist attack," state news agency WAM said, quoting an unidentified coastguard source.

"UAE explosives experts who collected and examined samples found a dent on the starboard side above the water line and remains of home-made explosives on the hull," the source said.

Two days ago, a militant group calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, which is linked to al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the incident.

Security analysts based in the Gulf, some previously skeptical of suggestions the ship was attacked, said they believed the state news agency report.

"The UAE has no interest in portraying this as a terrorist attack," said Theodore Karasik, a security analyst of Dubai-based INEGMA. "So saying that it is, that's significant."

The M.Star incident has provoked several theories about the cause, ranging from a freak wave to a collision with a U.S. nuclear submarine.

The ship's hull was damaged on the starboard side, and a lifeboat was blown off the deck and windows and doors were smashed.

OWNERS AWAIT DETAILS

A spokeswoman for shipowner Mitsui O.S.K. said the company could not confirm details of the WAM report.

"The investigation on the tanker is still continuing, and while we are looking at all possibilities, the company has not heard anything that will help determine the cause of the damage," she said.

The company's president, Koichi Muto, said he did not rule out the possibility of an attack, according to the Nikkei business daily.

Oil prices were not affected and there were no indications of shipping being more carefully patrolled in the Strait of Hormuz, oil traders said.

"No shipowners are panicking," a trader, who asked not to be named, said.

However, analysts said if a strike were confirmed, security for shipping would have to be increased.

"If the attack on the M.Star is not a one-time event, but others follow, it does place additional stress on both the shipping industry and the navies of the world," said J.Peter Pham, a strategic adviser to U.S. and European governments.

The narrow Strait of Hormuz handles 40 percent of the world's seaborne oil and is patrolled by U.S. and other warships. Karasik said while there were no signs of it yet, the incident may lead to changes in naval patrols in the region.

"You'll see more warships patrolling in, around, and outside of the Strait," he said.

Industry sources said the tanker carried more than 2 million barrels of Qatar Land and Abu Dhabi Lower Zakum crudes, equivalent to about half of Japan's daily oil needs.

Carsten Fritsch, an analyst with Commerzbank in Frankfurt, said the oil trade would not be affected by the attack because high inventories and spare OPEC capacity.

JAPAN SEEKING SAMPLES

A spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, part of an international coalition of navies that patrol Gulf waters, said U.S. Navy divers had taken part in examining the ship.

"Our experts will be in contact with UAE officials about their findings and the Fifth Fleet will continue to assist the Mitsui investigation," he said.

"Our coalition and regional partners have maintained constant vigilance in the area and we will continue to do so."

The UAE report said the M.Star had left local waters to resume its voyage to Japan, which trade sources confirmed.

A Japanese Transport Ministry official said that samples from the tanker, including some taken from the dent, were on their way to Japan to help pinpoint the cause of the damage.

"We've asked for any remains that could help us identify the cause. Some kind of soot may be among them. Something melted could be among them," the official said.

Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Center said while details were still vague, it appeared that inexperienced militants had made a "very amateur attempt" at mimicking the 2000 suicide bomb attack on the U.S. warship Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, where a boat rigged with explosives killed 17 U.S. sailors.

The French-flagged oil tanker Limburg was attacked off Yemen using a bomb-laden dinghy in 2002, killing one crew member. Al Qaeda-linked militants linked to both attacks escaped from jail near the Yemeni city of Sanaa in 2006.

I know I've mentioned lately how much I hate these guys.

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so badger the wuss into prosecuting the lot of them or shaddap

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I am SICK of them throwing this heinous shit in my face and NOTHING decent coming of it. It's like an anesthesiologist pricking your feet every few minutes to make sure yer still OUT COLD.

Somebody get me a nice hefty truncheon. I'll FIX this. I swear.

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loan us all your money so we can rob you

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Makes perfect sense. Why didn't I think of that?

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ya know

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I don't think those fires know quite who they're dealing with or they'd've given up already.

Of course, it was a hunnert and four there today, and nearly as hot for the last couple weeks, unprecedented heat, so nothing and no one would be acting quite normally. Everything dry as a bone and wilted firefighters and difficulty breathing. NOT optimal. I thought I read they were flying in help, but even with help, I don't think Moscow has been equipped for this kind of dry, this kind of fire-happy heat. I think summers in Moscow have always been more like we think of as late Spring here. If California were not burning down AGAIN, ALREADY, we could have sent in some firefighters to help... or I'd like to think we would anyway.

I'm pleased as punch, though to have read about Putin laying down the law with the bureaucrats about getting the detailed reconstruction plans NOW. Used to be, here, nobody even had to say that. It just happened. Now it not only does not happen, but nobody, at any level, except of course us peons, says it.

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No kidding, guys:

Fires lay ghostly shroud of smoke on Moscow
By JIM HEINTZ, Associated Press Writer – Fri Aug 6, 3:11 pm ET

MOSCOW – A miasma of smoke from wildfires cloaked the sweltering Russian capital on Friday, turning the city's spires into ominous blurs and grounding flights while glum pedestrians trudged the streets with faces hidden by surgical masks and water-soaked bandanas.

The smoke crept into many buildings, hovering about the ceiling in entryways. The State Historical Museum, on Red Square was forced to close because it couldn't stop its smoke detectors from going off.

Airborne pollutants such as carbon monoxide were four times higher than average readings — the worst seen to date in Moscow, city health officials reported. The concentration appeared likely to intensify; the state news agency ITAR-Tass reported smoke was thickening in the city's southeast late Friday.

The fires, which are raging across much of western Russia, come after weeks of extraordinary heat — daily highs of up to 100 (38 C) compared with the summer average of 75 — and practically no rain.

Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trenev said Friday that there's no water shortage yet because officials had kept reservoir levels high. But he noted that river levels are down by more than 20 percent, due to increased demands for water to battle the fires and practically no water flowing in.

The fires drew comment from officials and activists at international climate-change talks in Bonn, Germany.

Chief U.S. delegate said Russia's situation and the recent floods that have devastated Pakistan are "consistent with the kind of changes we would expect to see from climate change and they will only get worse unless we act quickly."

But the environmental group Greenpeace said the negotiators weren't getting the message.

"Russia is burning and Pakistan is drowning -- yet they seem happy to continue as if they have all the time in the world," the group's climate policy director Wendel Trio said in a statement from Bonn.

Dozens of flights were grounded and others were diverted away from the capital's airports as visibility deteriorated to as little as 200 yards (meters) during the day. By Friday evening, the three airports reportedly were resuming normal service.

Visibility in the capital was down to a few dozen yards due to the smoke, which is forecast to hang around for days due to the lack of wind.

"It's just impossible to work," said Moscow resident Mikhail Borodin, in his late 20s, as he removed a face mask to puff on a cigarette. "I don't know what the government is doing, they should just cancel office hours."

Russian health officials have urged those who have to go outdoors to don face masks and told people staying inside to hang wet towels to attract dust and cool the airflow. The Health Ministry said hundreds have needed medical attention due to the smog.

Ken Donaldson, professor of respiratory toxicology at the University of Edinburgh, said people with asthma, bronchitis, lung disease or heart problems were the most vulnerable to the smog.

"For people with underlying health problems, the particles in the smog could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," he said, causing them to have a serious lung problem or a heart attack.

He said concentrations of carbon monoxide, even at four times higher than normal, was not alarming unless people became trapped in an enclosed space. The more dangerous gases are ozone or sulfur dioxide, he said, but those are not usually produced by burning.

More than 500 separate blazes were burning nationwide Friday, mainly across western Russia, amid the country's most intense heat wave in 130 years.

"All high-temperature records have been beaten, never has this country seen anything like this, and we simply have no experience of working in such conditions," Moscow emergency official Yuri Besedin said Friday, adding that 31 forest fires and 15 peat-bog fires were burning in the Moscow region alone.

At least 52 people have died and 2,000 homes have been destroyed in the blazes. Russian officials have admitted that the 10,000 firefighters battling the blazes aren't enough — an assessment echoed by many villagers, who said the fires swept through their hamlets in minutes.

To minimize further damage, Russian workers evacuated explosives from military facilities and were sending planes, helicopters and even robots in to help control blazes around the country's top nuclear research facility in Sarov, 300 miles (480 kilometers) east of Moscow.

A wildfire last week caused huge damage at a Russian naval air base outside Moscow.

Moscow faces temperatures approaching 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) for the next week, according to the forecast, in contrast to its average summer temperature of around 23 C (75 F).

This is a serious bummer.

HOW do you put out a peat-bog fire? I mean, don't the Irish go out and cut hunks of peat to heat their homes? But doesn't peat also soak up more water than anything in the natural world short of sponge? And wouldn't wet burning peat put out more smoke than anything short of a burning oil well? I think it would. It seems in my head to be a logistical nightmare....

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if you like hummers

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You'll love this.

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someone has put something in your coffee

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That has to be it....

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oh hell yesss

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The Duder in OK is the BEST! His old channel that YouTube ripped down was FULL of fantastical and exotic and riveting and heavily-laced-with-truth material. What this guy says is a thousand times true, and I could get almost all of my basic course work for my PhD in Space Lizardry from right there on his channel. He's really busy on his new one/s, and if they fuck with him again, I say we revolt!

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someone dared call alex jones a liar

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I can't believe it.

So, no matter what, even if Jones is being hysterical, you can't trust the Rhodes Scholar at Wired. Nossir. I'm serious. He called Alex Jones a liar. Whatever else he is, he is NOT a liar.

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tra-la tra-la-la-la-la-la

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But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America's financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy — and then decided that it didn't have the stones to wipe out our country's one dependably thriving profit center: theft.

...

Dodd-Frank was never going to be a meaningful reform unless these two fateful Clinton-era laws — commercial banks gambling with taxpayer money, and unregulated derivatives being traded in the dark — were reversed. The story of how the last real shot at reining in Wall Street got routed tells you everything you need to know about how, and on whose behalf, our government works. It was Congress at its most cowardly, deceptive best, with both parties teaming up to subject reform to death by a thousand paper cuts — with the worst cuts coming, literally, in the final moments before the bill's passage.

...

What happened next was a prime example of the basic con of congressional politics. Throughout the debate over finance reform, Democrats had sold the public on the idea that it was the Republicans who were killing progressive initiatives. In reality, Republican and Democratic leaders were working together with industry insiders and deep-pocketed lobbyists to prevent rogue members like Merkley and Levin from effecting real change. In public, the parties stage a show of bitter bipartisan stalemate. But when the cameras are off, they fuck like crazed weasels in heat.

...

First, in what amounted to an open handout to the financial interests represented by Brown, insurers, mutual funds and trusts were exempted from the Merkley-Levin ban. Then, with the floodgates officially open, every financial company in America was granted a massive loophole – one that allowed them to skirt the ban on risky gambling by investing a designated percentage of their holdings in hedge funds and private-equity companies.

The common justification for this loophole, known as the de minimis exemption, was that banks need it to retain their "traditional businesses" and remain competitive against hedge funds. In other words, Congress must allow banks to act like hedge funds because otherwise they'd be unable to compete with hedge funds in the hedge-fund business. With the introduction of the de minimis exemption, Merkley-Levin went from being an absolute ban on federally insured banks engaging in high-risk speculation to a feeble, half-assed restriction that will be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce.

The driving force behind the exemption was not Scott Brown, but the Obama administration itself. By all accounts, Geithner lobbied hard on the issue.

...

"It's not a total nothing burger," sighs one aide. "But, by the end, it didn't change a whole lot."

...

Lincoln, who was never considered a particularly strong advocate of finance reform, had originally proposed her ban on derivatives – the most radical reform in the entire bill – during a re-election campaign in which she faced a stiff populist challenge from Bill Halter, the lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Rumors circulated in Washington that Democratic leaders were cynically holding off on gutting Lincoln's proposal until she got past Halter in the primary.

If that was the plan, it worked. In early June, only a week after she defeated Halter in the runoff, Lincoln set about gutting her own rule.

And I did NOT excerpt all the outrageous parts. There are many, many more in Taibbi's piece. If you can read it and keep the contents of your stomach from hopping, you are a very sturdy creature.

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tra-la

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It's too lucrative. It's too damn lucrative to pass up. And nobody's making them stop.

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for those of you consoling yourselves that he's less embarrassing

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I have news for you....

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And, you know, I think TRNN edited this interview with Gareth Porter to the point where he doesn't sound like Gareth Porter anymore. He sounds like liberal fascists-in-denial might prefer him to sound. Too many punches were pulled. He was not as blunt as he usually is. There were spots where I know damn well he had more, and the cogent kind of more, to say, and I don't believe he did not say it.

So... pretty soon we're going to have to leap to our guard whenever we see or hear the word "real".....

BTW, does ANYBODY know who's in charge of Iraq yet?

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today in black like me

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I was very young when I saw the movie, and felt it was a metaphor for certain parts of our society. I was a little older when I read the book and it made me think of Martin and Malcolm. I didn't know until a few years ago that a black man wrote it. It made me sooooo angry that they had a white man play the part in that masterpiece. I guess there are good arguments for and against, but what I really want to say is I am SO sick of the race thing.

For a long while I just refused to believe racism, to any measurable extent, was still at work in America, because nowhere in my experience could I find it, but friends from other parts of the country insisted I was dreaming, that it was alive and well all over the country, telling me ugly story after ugly story after ugly story to convince me the country was NOT as progressive as Northern California. So I caved, but I may be on the verge of going back to my former position on the matter because I am beginning to think the whole business is a manufactured-by-the-fascist-media bullshit wedge issue, generated on purpose to keep everybody frightened and confused and resentful.

I just DON'T believe it. People don't want to hate each other. People don't want to kill each other. They have to have some sort of environmental conditioning to get them there. We're being played. We've always been being played.

We can stop playing.

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don't be evil

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Be mean.

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i'm not even from the same planet as these people

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And I don't want to live on it with them, but do for you.

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he doesn't deserve the honor of hugging her toenail clippings

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Even on his birthday.

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very, very big on rollneck sweaters

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As you may or may not have noticed, I spend most of my time in HUGE rollneck sweaters. I have a pretty good stock of them. Even having gotten back down to a size six pants, the chest is still outrageous and I don't want to deal with it. Never have. Whenever I'm thinking of wonderful things to wear, which is always BEFORE going out there to look for them, I think of HUGE, Omar-the-Tentmaker-style shirts and sweaters. This has been so for my whole life, even back when I was still staring at my flat chest in the bathroom mirror, willing my boobs to grow.

Well, Harley was so happy to be spared the kennel for two weeks, he cut loose with some of his mad money as a present to his pack leader... who will be wearing this sweater, in size ginormous, very soon.... My birthday sweaters both turned out to be entirely too impractical for schlumping around in the boondocks, especially on a woman known for coffee disasters and her boobs managing to get places no one ever thought of before. So THIS one, albeit supposedly only for Christmas time, will do in their stead very nicely indeed.

Also stocked up on nearly a year's worth of the good kind of vitamins the doctor says I should take for the rest of time. My blood levels of vitamin D are now in the spectacular range and STAYING there. My lifelong problem with staying in the semi-anemic zone has been cured by some fancy-ass B12 lozenges... and did you know B12 is excellent for your brain tissue and nerves? I did not, but I do now and my vaguely anemic thing is gone. My ratio of good triglycerides to bad ones ROCKS. My blood pressure, unaccountably, remains as low as an athlete's.

I'm practically Mary Poppins, dudes.

Now, if Goldie can just hang on until I relearn to fly, we're happening.

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i'd wanted a tugboat captain the most, but I get seasick

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Once again I am waaaaay behind in my New Yorker thing, waiting too long to get in bed, and I only seem to be doing my magazines in bed. Was hoping this wouldn't be only for subscribers, but there's an abstract there. The piece was so interesting because you only think of tugboats parking ships in harbors or hauling a barge from one side of a bay to the other. They do a heck of a lot more than that, and it's pretty darn Wild West stuff.

I used to gaze wistfully at them from the ferry on my way to work every morning....

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to reïterate

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I had been trying hard to etch out the driving it would take to get my old Mac to the Genius Bar clear down in Corte Madera, thinking I'd surely need to get to the dermatologist down there, and I surely do, but have not been able to get to it, what with the train wreck with my father's situation and my lack of funds, and Goldie's advanced old age, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.... The et ceteras needing to remain inexplicit or all our heads will explode.

Suddenly, my friend Jim sent me a link to the instructions on how to diagnose the problem myself. OMG! Turns out, after all that, you don't need no stinkin' geniuses. You need yer trusty little computer screwdriver, the proper diopter cheaters and Bob's yer uncle. I followed the instructions to a T and my old Mac yelped at me that its logic board was pau. Dead. Not coming back. Sayonara. Pft. A pang of longing shook me hard.

Plan A had been to replace the power source, which I believed to be the problem, and give it to Old Uncle Dave, who hankers after a good G5, trusting the old Motorola chips so much more than Intel chips. I would ferry all my old stuff off there and onto this one, clean my shit off the hard drive and make a present to him of his heart's desire. Damn.

Plan B has been to remove the RAM cards and send them to Billy, who has the identical Mac with less RAM, and remove the hard drive, stick it in one of those boxes they make for them and plug it in here to be my backup drive, and we are now in the midst of executing Plan B... but wondering if there is a way to convert a dead iMac into just a damn nice monitor for someone without it costing too much money. That is one gorgeous monitor and I hate to think of it going to the dump... the computer grave yard. Going to ask around about that one.

Anyway, yesterday I was on the phone with Billy, informing him that his RAM cards would be hurtling toward him, when he told me how much he hated my funny-ferocious image here, and started in on his shpiel about how young people could probably start learning things from me if they didn't think I was some ornery old white broad. My whole Buddhist me leapt up out of her repose at the prospect of another means of speaking all-sentient-beings-speak to all sentient beings, but I was bucking at it nonetheless. I think it's despicable that so many people post images of themselves when they were radically younger, or radically airbrushed, or both. How vain. How approval hungry. How shallow. Yiiiiiick! But that part about the poor younger things with the purposefully shitty educations getting glimpses of some true things grabbed me by my bodhisattva throat.

It turned out that Billy had only been setting me up to receive a stream of porn images to do in its stead, but it left me still considering the wisdom of changing the image. Strangers don't get the joke, don't understand the irony, the taunt for wimps, and why should I scare them off my page before they get a chance to really become frightened anyway?

I shouldn't.

So, after over a day of consideration, and NO help from you guys, thank you very much, I decided that this image is the truest one. It will still not resonate with young people looking for their peers, but it catches the expression of truth freaks when faced with this world. I'm not bringing back up my babe pictures so Billy can think back on all the times he chased me around the warehouse when I was nineteen. Nope. I love you Billy, but yer a damn perv and I'm not going there.

I started this blog merely to be on Blogger, thinking it was some way to be of service to Inter-Way Atriot-Pay, and then ended up deciding to start blogging stuff I knew my busy friends would never find on their own. Over the years it has come up for me over and over and over again, mostly by way of trying to accommodate others who are concerned with the popularity of their blogs, to start doing things in the manner known best to optimize one's appearances on the search engines, all sorts of ways to get yourself noticed by more people, but they're all tricks, all the same kind of shit car salesmen give you whenever you happen past their showrooms. And none of it shows the least reverence for KARMA, for karma landing someone where they are supposed to be. So I still shun it and rely on karma to do what it does. But it occurs to me that you could help send desperate people in this direction when you come upon them in your wanderings on the tubes... if you are so inclined... a kind of karmic enhancement device that isn't dishonest. I don't do Twitter and MyFace, but maybe some of you do. Or, when you comment somewhere, you could put this page in the URL field on comments forms if you don't have your own.

I actually have found myself happy that most of my visitors are about my age and not flaming maniacs, get most of the historical references, know how old Jack Benny was, that sort of thing, but my conversation with Billy reminded me that this is not exactly appropriate to the bodhisattva vow and so I have bothered with all this. Don't tell me the image of me blubbering is going to scare people off now, please... at least not for a while... I go through too many changes about this stuff.

Bottom line: I love you.

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Oh, oh, and I am NOT a white broad, okay? I'm a quarter indian, a quarter Portuguese, a quarter Dutch and a quarter Cherman. I may have alabaster skin with a bunch of little brown speckles all over, but I'm not a goddam old white broad! Please keep that straight.

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I have been lobbying for a position as the goddess of replanting for a huge timber company. I don't hold out a lot of hope as they have a very large backlog of laid-off workers who would be miffed about it, but I do have that completely-fantastical-if-it-were-not-true survival rate that might edge me into it somehow. I mention this because, despite the terribletude of so much, and my intractable sleep disorder thing, I feel radically better than I have in years. My eyesight is trying to ratchet down yet another long notch and that is irking me big, and I think I need a few precancers that are beginning their run for actual cancer frozen off of me, but, hell, THINK of all the revolutionary zeal I could pour into the repopulation of the redwood forest! I could go back to killing myself every winter toward this end with renewed vigor... and better pay. You would then be treated to a long string of hilarious images of me in my savage state, covered with mud and more bedraggled than the most forlorn mutt you ever saw... bellowing epithets over my not-a-tub... the works.

Somebody needs to teach me how to train my Mac to wake up and blow Reveille at me.

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I really mean that love you part. I really mean all of it.

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yeah, right, suuuuure....

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You know damn well the Commander in Chief could have done this himself on 20 January 2009. Instead he ordered up a shitload more drones from the war profiteers. And you'll pardon me if I feel like telling you this is a load of crap, because it's nearing election time and they will try to act like perfectly shiny murderating fucks until the polls close. Then the slaughter will double or triple or worse. We know this drill. The same people who have been running it straight along are still running it and the whole playbook is blinking neon in our eyes.

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Same deal. Pure PR, not a lick of truth to it. Detainees are STILL being tortured, and it seems only Fudd, damn his unspeakably despicable hide, is the ONLY one honest enough to just brag about it... which... Jesus... is, IN FACT, an improvement over lying about it and covering it up... cold no-kind-of-comfort as that is.

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the inexhaustible nightmare

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I don't think I've mentioned lately how much I hate these people. I propose that we mitigate the horror by blocking them from returning after their summer break. Instead of bodily removing them from their offices, let's just bodily prevent them from getting back into them.

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i told them so and told them so and nobody would shut up

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I was nearly dead of the ceaseless sensationalizing of wedge issues, the endless obnoxious cleverisms in opposition to the great unwashed, the unenlightened thumpers of Bibles, the bearers of inferior genetic material who dared be nervous about this sort of thing.

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge overturned California's gay-marriage ban Wednesday in a landmark case that could eventually force the U.S. Supreme Court to confront the question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to wed.

I pleaded with them to put a sock in it, that it was in fact a nonissue they should not try to keep as a wedge, that our gay brothers and sisters would win it in court, take this off the street, don't perpetuate the divisions utterly needlessly and so lethally to the whole world's detriment... oh, I am weak with the oceans of reasons I remember employing to beseech them all to please, for the love of life itself, desist, desist, stop making this worse. But they only became incensed that I should feel that unburdening themselves on the matter in public was only incendiary, not helpful, not pro-Constitution, not pro-gay marriage, JUST heating the branding iron to be used on their own butts. I was accused of homophobia!

I told them so.

They fucking would not listen.

Now, of course, they've switched their energies over to the Tea Partiers.

I think I will have some of that brand new tub of aspirin I got in town today.

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How much more do we revile each other out of any possibility of unity because of this stuff? Are you really incapable of seeing that the same forces you can spot so clearly on the "right" are at work IDENTICALLY on the "left"? It would certainly seem so. The Democratic-Fascist Party plays you like a fiddle. You are their goddam Stradivarius, a vast symphony of priceless violins. The Republican-Fascists have armies of master fiddlers and bows rosined for the duel.

My money's on Johnny.

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i submit a big part of the problem is our unwillingness to see for ourselves

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I think it's time I mentioned Arthur Silber here. I can barely read his stuff because he is so damn self-regarding and self-referential and other failures of character I shall not enumerate rear their ugly heads too often for me. Chris Floyd is stuck on him or something, constantly referencing him, till I have to leave and not come back for long enough to get over my urge to email him and ask him if Silber is his brother-in-law or something smartass like that. The fact remains that no matter how badly Silber gets on my nerves, he very frequently makes impeccable points. The guy too frequently makes MY points... that is, as far as I can tell, from my infrequent visits to his blog... and probably to a larger audience as well... though not if you believe his caterwauling about it.... Anyway, he's really going to town on the Wikileaks thing, and it is needful, it is needful in the extreme. So I'm getting over myself to just splat his latest bit right down here whole for you to chew on. I only altered the style just a jot, to better fit this blog, and fixed a typo for him.

UPDATE: Yes, I just rearranged this post to make it clearer that Arthur Silber wrote it. Evidently, people used to my blog format were confused. Very sorry. So sorry. It was going to be too much work to put the whole thing into a blockquote format, but I guess eyeballs are skimming and not seeing the author's name. As I've stated below, notwithstanding my not standing Mr. Silber that well, this is outstanding and even I can see it makes the point better than my fuck-you-I-hope-you-choke-on-a-pretzel approach. It is very worth reading all the way through.

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On Wikileaks
Part IV: A World Without Obedience or Authority: Toward a Life of One's Own, and a Real Revolution
By ARTHUR SILBER

Part I

Part II

Part III

* * * * * * * * * *

If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution ... there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. —Hannah Arendt

Leaking is inherently an anti-authoritarian act. It is inherently an anarchist act. —Julian Assange

Wikileaks' Threat to "Order" and Authority

In her essay discussed in the second part of this series, Hannah Arendt argues that what we commonly call obedience cannot, in the political context, properly be regarded as obedience at all. In fact, it is support — for a country's constitution, its laws, and its panoply of requirements concerning how we act.

By creating Wikileaks and utilizing it in the manner he does, Julian Assange has withdrawn that support, and he has chosen to act in the manner condemned by those who insist on obedience to authority: he acts "irresponsibly" (the term used by critics of those who disobey, as Arendt notes). When obedience means that one supports a system of brutality, oppression, cruelty and death, to act "irresponsibly" is the only way to express one's loyalty to the values of freedom, truth and the sanctity of life.

The power of Wikileaks does not lie in the fact that it challenges a particular authority or only one system of obedience; its power arises from its rejection of authority and systems of obedience as such.

or how about the sighted person act without glasses?

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Don't you think this might make young people feel warmly enough toward me to want to hang out at my blog? I think I look like a darn geeky twenty-six-year-old here, don't you? Like a mole woman who has just emerged from her tunnel and can't believe her almost totally blind eyes....

I may have been this disinclined to blog all day because we're having to sue the president to prevent him murdering someone in cold blood... an American someone, because, of course, because he can murder as many foreigners as he likes and we will all go about our business as though nothing at all is wrong with that sociopathological murderating fuck.

I'm also being a fucking pansy about this bit with Billy and my pleasingly-ferocious goofy image. I'm too goddam serious. I take everything to heart. I think my beloved old friend has accidentally tripped over some dharma to impart, and am all giddy about the karma of it, feeling very warmly toward him for making no bones about his hatred of that image, trying to plot out a way to take the buddhas of the ten directions' advice... and then, and then... and then it turns out that he was saying all that as a setup to allow him to email me endless images of horse-faced babes with fake tits, fake buns, shaved twats and idiotic postures. I should have known. He's telling me I gotta get with it, understand that THIS is how the young people are doing it these days. Goes to show you how with it he is! He's ten years older than I am and the ONLY young people he sees are these poor little slutty things out there begging—debauching themselves avidly—for their big break.

Times are hard.

It is to be expected.

But I don't expect men over, say, thirty to be interested in that crap. Silly me. I know. But I really seriously don't. Can't help it. I go on about wanting my wealthy socialist gentleman, and you are already positive I need one of those REALLY badly, and in fact I really do miss having man energy in my proximity, someone who can lift things, someone with a deep voice... but the problem with that is that you have to endure puerile shit like this. I know it's some sort of imperative of the DNA and men are not wired for nuance and c'est la vie type of thing, get used to it, but I can't get used to it. It's too stupid. It's too caveman. No! That's the wrong term. Cavemen are groovy, courageous, serious, THERE for you. It's too second grade.

And they fart. And they breathe entirely too audibly. And if they're not total slobs who need a maid running around after them, then they are prone to going brain dead at regular intervals for sports. I can't stand effete liberal men. I want to brutalize them for drill and for the cosmos. I want a left libertarian with a monster IQ and that deep voice. I want what I always wanted: a genius logger. I had him. He ROCKED. He was perfect... except... except he lost to the booze. Dammit.

Oh, well.

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I could hang just fine with the insane part. I have always been a magnet for barking mad people—the right kind of barking mad, I might add—because if you can live in this world and act "normal" something is irredeemably wrong with you. I can't hang with that. Madmen are responding to reality appropriately.

Don't you forget it.

But don't you use it as an excuse.

Take responsibility for it. Get down to the love. Tell the truth. Be a true human or you're worse than the rest.

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I suppose I should be proud or pleased or grateful or at least amused that Billy turns to me whenever he's feeling particularly frisky behind ogling all these surgically "enhanced" sex toys that breathe, but, well, it's depressing, ruins the sublimity of interpersonal relations, always makes me start hearing despair out there wailing on the headlands for my attention. I race past it naked frequently on my way to screaming off my cliff, and pay it no mind, as though it were not there, but this stuff makes me hear it. I have not yet donned my THE END IS SO NIGH sandwich board, but I don't like hearing that creep out there, seeking to render me comatose.

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i think maybe the death penalty for rogers instead

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No? I don't believe in capital punishment, but I think someone calling for it to be carried out upon a guy who stands accused, basically, of doing the right thing, would be an exception to my rule.

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i'm sorry i've been ignoring you all day

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But I've had a couple thousand distractions, not the least of which was my friend Billy having a purple spotted cow about how much he hates my grouchy old woman image at the top of my sidebar. He wants me to put up one of my youthful babe shots so he can reminisce and young people might be tricked into paying attention to me.

This is goddam DHARMA coming out the the mouth of Billy Bulldog, legendary sex fiend, who doesn't hold with no eyeball straining on those irritating strings of words they bind up and expect you to flaunt on your bookshelves. I gotta tell you all about Billy, but at this moment I'm too busy reeling from the sterling point he made on the phone to me while we were hashing out his inheritance of my RAM cards for his old Mac and the apocalyptic travails of your darling, soft-spoken and never-endingly sweet hostess here. I had particularly liked that image because the expression was a good mixture between disapproval and suspicion, and the color and shadows had been so irredeemably botched on it that I'd had to do all kinds of crazy things to it to keep the expression, make myself look older and meaner, the pleasing, pleasing, pleasing-to-me OPPOSITE of vanity, and I liked the wreck I made of it. Billy hates it. My mother whines about how old it makes me look, which, of course, by extension, makes her at least a hunnert an' twenny....

So for now I just made it look a little less ferocious, while I'm thinking over some of the teaching that came tripping off Billy's tongue earlier, just exactly as though he had the first part of a clue what he was talking about. And I'll probably add more to this post, or go off posting madly on all the stuff your comments have brought up for me and the other bits of news that have poked me in the eye today, or both, or neither... but probably not neither.

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i'm appalled

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I have been ducking around in the tubes to see what people are saying about Julian Assange and I am appalled. Some paragon of groupthink is pissed because Assange reminding us that Taliban are also Afghans will supposedly give rightwing warmongers something to bludgeon us lefty peaceniks with. Excuse me, Agonistas, but yer fucking Democratic-Fascists are every bit as warmongering as yer Republican-Fascists, and I personally appreciate the man using the attention he's getting to remind the public of certain fundamentals we seem to have completely forgotten.

People are accusing Assange of being an "attention whore". Mother fuck. You get out there and do that and see what it's like. People seemed to lap up Sibel Edmonds' intermittent attention-gathering blitzes, which drove me crazy, because she NEVER came out with anything to add to the nothing we got from her to begin with, but the woman had to be plenty scared that the public forgetting her would make her disposable. And how much the MORE so does this have to be for Julian Assange, who IS splatting it all out there at every opportunity?

I know, I know, some of you are suspicious of his motives, or of the fact that he's still walking around, or whatever it is you are skeptical about, but just SUPPOSE for a moment that everything you've been hearing about Wikileaks' mission is TRUE, and Assange is their frontman. I find myself afraid to mention in pixels the people I know are supporting him in case it gets some really great journalists in trouble. I believe it. I believe it because I've been watching it play out, and I've been noting all these people I respect giving him support, and I know goddam well anyone working that hard to wreck the lethal secrecy of criminal governments is heavily in danger of being assassinated. The only protection he has is popularity with the public. AND HE DESERVES IT.

Fuck you.

No. Really. Fuck you.

You scumbucket groupthink bloggers are empowering the bad guys with your petty bitching.

I hope each of you chokes on a pretzel.

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LISTEN UP!

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yuh, i just put brandy in my blueberry smoothie

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Whatter ya gonna do about it?

I finally got my chance to take the adam's apple off Grimshaw's Iris.... I feel smug, healthy and vaguely tipsy.

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gonna give the climate change deniers burst aneurysms everywhere

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Stacy Herbert is SO cool. I love her on the Keiser Report and I love her on their blog. She just keeps hitting it out of the park. Wow. You go girl.

You gotta read this, AND watch the videos. This is stupendously good stuff.

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what i expect and never get

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Can't help but contrast our pathetic responses to disasters here.

Dmitry Medvedev declared the emergency on Monday in the regions of Mairi El, Mordovia, Vladimir, Voronezh, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Ryazan.

The decree allows the authorities to restrict public access to areas where their presence could pose a fire hazard, and to call on the armed forces to put out and prevent fires.

Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, also ordered regional governors at an urgent meeting to present a detailed reconstruction plan.

I guess the victims from NOLA and environs can console themselves about their homes STILL not being rebuilt because they would be adding the toxins from the Gulf Blowout to the toxins in the FEMA trailers to their bloodstreams now if we'd had a government capable of functioning even enough to handle reconstruction of decimated homes. That is NOT hard. That does NOT take a rocket scientist, and OUGHT to be one of the FIRST things on any budget, and something similar to what Putin said should be one of the first things out the mouths of those in charge.

The article says the Russian people are griping about how SLOW their government has been to respond to these wildfires. Yipes! They've been lightning fast to compare. Faster than THAT.

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dave is not budging on his pessimism here

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You might think I'm the very portrait of gloom and doom, but my dearest old friend makes me look like Snow White before the prince rescued her from her own innocence. Sheesh. He's NOT going to overlook Assange's weird and callous statment about 9/11 and grumbles that if the MSM is giving Assange this much play, he must be performing a service for the wrong people.

I don't like what Assange said about 9/11 conspiracies, but I know that several other highly respected and important people have made similar statements, to my shock, and have had to allow as how they cannot have credibility with their work if they do not do this sort of thing. I feel it would be best for them to simply nut up on the matter, not to besmirch the people working their hearts out to bring out the truth, but that simply won't do the trick for most of the people who are working at blasting some actuality out of our criminal government. If you are dealing with ANYTHING the power elite will try to downplay or minimize, their very first tactic is to diss you as some sort of conspiracy nut, and nothing works better to head off that action from interviewers than a gratuitous swipe at Truthers. I don't like it. I hate it. I understand it.

I don't think we should shut our minds to people because of this. Just like we shouldn't shut our minds to people who think the Queen of England shape-shifts back and forth between a large dragon-like space reptile that eats virgins and her dowdy old impeccable human form. Despite the fantastical, despite the despicable, despite any amount of disagreeable things coming out of people's mouths, we should NOT shut our minds to what else they have to say or teach. We all know that there are plenty of well-motivated people who diss Truthers. We would like to slap them silly for it, but we don't doubt that they wish the best for the world anyway. I don't think we should be harder on Assange in this respect than we are on Uncle Barney who rescues stray cats and gripes about the conspiracy nuts who think 9/11 was an inside job.

Anyway, anyway, there, to my mind, IS something kind of fishy about all this; to wit: They keep saying they can't find Assange. Give me a break! He's done a shitload of interviews over the latest leaks. I know our guys aren't as smart as James Bond by half, but, truly, this is unbelievable.

Notwithstanding anything less than glorious about his character, or EVEN if he's somehow playing a role meant to feed us propaganda, EVEN if it's all just some sick theater, the very NOTION of someone doing this is laudable enough all by itself. It is good for people to see men standing up against the terror machine, EVEN if they're faking.

Some heavy hitters are on his side, people I trust, and they might be being taken in like the rest of us, or the fucker at Cryptome who hates him and those who are outraged about his 9/11 comment are using him to illustrate their anger, not exactly thinking it all the way through... snapping their minds shut because of their anger... snapping our minds shut because of our confusion... just generally being in SUCH a state of horrified exasperation that our brains are pretty much globally attempting to shut down on us. We have to WORK at keeping them functional. One can't just point to the sleeping masses, believe oneself to be above it, and then succumb to the tons and tons and tons of sleeping powder being dropped on us daily.

The enemy is VERY good at this, and your own ego can kill you. Times like this demand putting a sock in that screaming from the ego and drinking as much coffee as it takes to get and stay awake.

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bailing out a sunken boat is not just futility: it's slavery

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For any of you who caught the link at the Elizabeth Warren post below, here is part three of the Real News piece and it is the one, of course, where they finally get down to cases about our supposed financial reform. I really hate that about that organization. They chop their interviews into segments and wait a day or two between them to force you to go back to their site to look for the rest of it time after time. They're griping about their "fiscal crisis". Maybe if they didn't play these stupid games they wouldn't have one.

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and

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Baa, baa....

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this is angel this is angel

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"Let Them Eat Cake"
A handful of oligarchs are becoming billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain
by Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research, July 31, 2010

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.

When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.

The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.

Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.

Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.

The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.

Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?

How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office?

Who was Blair really serving?

These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.

While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.

The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”

Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.

The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.

Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.

The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.

The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.

And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.

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and what's more

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He's a murderating fuck who's being a total jackass about the Wikileaks thing... but who's counting?

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i'm not letting go of the honduran thing either

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Most of the time it is the first thing that leaps to mind when I want to start listing the betrayals, all this unbelievable change. And I wonder often what kind of freaks we've become that so few of us have the kind of courage you see on display almost everywhere else in the world whenever things get bad. It makes me so ashamed.

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oh, sheesh, petras, please

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Are you going soft?

Likely, the combination of a new phase of the recession, perpetual austerity and mindless imperial wars can turn the current mass malaise and diffuse hostility against the economic and political elite toward socialist movements, parties and trade unions.

Those are already too long in place, PLUS apocalyptic insults to the environment, PLUS still record numbers of foreclosures, homeless and jobless, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Think massive giveaways of testosterone patches or something. Crikey.
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it's politically correct to invest in a supply of specific feathers

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But not to just flat out invest in repopulating the species we have decimated.

I see the restoration people down on the Mattole, after twenty years of billing themselves as river and watershed restoration types, receiving untold millions in grants along the way, have only recently been furrowing their brows about the coho that have been needing restoring all that time. I'm remembering the rednecks there bitching to me full time about the DEARTH of restoring the environmentalists were accomplishing. They were getting fancy new driveways that were graded wrong, such that they'd start sliding right on down into the Mattole again come the first storm, but marking them on their foundation's books as restoration work anyway. But I guess up here we are at least managing to pay some indians to figure out the problems none of us will be able to get corrected. That's something.

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