January 21, 2012 archive

Spiritual Bath

Anybody still home?  Lamestream talks about Obama singing something and there was this other big flap about Eye of Newt’s open marriage wife.  Yeah, well I’m not into kiddie porn either.

It’s snowing.  The pretty fluffy kind too.  It’s my daughter’s birthday, the one into horses so the girls are out shopping for tonight’s meal.  The cat is watching the birds on the back deck and I have these weird thoughts.

Palmetto State

Update: Newt Wins!  MSNBC @ 7 pm.

Stephen Colbert’s unfunny run for president

By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post

Published: January 20

I don’t find comedian Stephen Colbert’s involvement in the Republican presidential race the least bit funny.



I fail to see the humor in Colbert urging South Carolinians to vote in Saturday’s primary for businessman Herman Cain, who dropped out of the presidential race but whose name remains on the ballot. Throwing away votes degrades a system already brought low by the unprecedented airing of negative ads so early in the nominating process.

Besides, too much has gone into getting the right to vote to treat the ballot like a game. Cain, who held a joint rally with Colbert in South Carolina on Friday, should know better.



Acquiring the millions needed to get a presidential campaign off the ground requires grueling hours of asking people and groups to part with their treasures on behalf of your cause.

Now introduce into that mix an entertainer who takes neither himself nor the political process seriously, who lives for laughs and satire, and has the prominence and enough dough to form a super PAC and try to muscle his way into the nominating process. The result is a mockery of the race.

Maybe I’m becoming a curmudgeon. But I don’t see the humor.

As nearly as I can determine, that is his real name and he is a real contributor to the Washington Post.  You can’t just make this stuff up folks.

Chuck Todd @ Winthrop University

Part the First

Part the Second

Moron.

Stephen Colbert shows Republicans how to draw a crowd

By David Horsey, L.A. Times

January 21, 2012, 8:16 a.m.

Reporting from Charleston, S.C. — Under the looming live oaks at the College of Charleston on Friday, Stephen Colbert delivered a clinic on how to produce a whiz-bang political rally. Significantly, not one of the Republican candidates this year has exhibited the star power to bring off such an extravaganza themselves.



Before Colbert delivered his satirical address, he allowed Cain a good chunk of time to give a speech very similar to one he delivered the day before to a sparse audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. The multitude Colbert provided him was at least 20 times bigger, but Cain’s platitudinous profundities would have been better saved for a Kiwanis luncheon. Even if sexual harassment allegations had not caught up with him, it’s clear that, by now, he still would have been sidelined alongside Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman and Michele Bachmann. Colbert is not only more funny, he is a far sharper analyst of contemporary politics.

The pertinent question raised by Colbert’s attention grab on the day before South Carolina’s primary vote is why the four remaining Republican candidates are not drawing crowds as big and adoring as Colbert’s. Yes, Colbert is a celebrity. He’s an expert entertainer. And it’s not too hard to get a few thousand college kids to skip class on any day of the week. But four years ago at this point in the campaign, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were pulling in crowds as big or bigger. John McCain was packing the gymnasiums pretty well too. And, later in the campaign, Sarah Palin proved she could rock an arena.

This year’s candidates are avoiding big events because they do not want to be photographed in half-empty halls. Gingrich actually refused to speak to the GOP leadership conference because so few Republicans showed up.

Rally

Stephen on Morning Joe

Hardball

What’s up with that Occupy Wall Street stuff?  I don’t get it!

30 Rock

WH Correspondents’ Dinner

He’s talking about you Chuck.

I’m putting this up while it’s still early enough to get to the polls in South Carolina, home of sedition, treason, segregation, and slavery (not that I’m under any illusion about the penetration of our readership in the Palmetto State), but I’ll bump it to become our anchor Open Thread when the results start coming in.

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Regular Features-

These Weekly Features-

This is an Open Thread

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Cartnoon

For the next two weeks we will be finishing Season 2 of Duck Dodgers with the 2 part Of Course You Know, This Means War and Peace that aired February 25, 2005.

As always with these transitions it’s hard to know how complete the record of the 3rd Season is in advance and it’s always subject to change at the whim of the YouTube posters that originated them.

I hope it’s been an entertaining and educational experience for you because it certainly has been for me.

On this Day In History January 21

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 21 is the 21st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 344 days remaining until the end of the year (345 in leap years).

On this day in 1911, the first Monte Carlo Rally takes place.

The Monte Carlo Rally (officially Rallye Automobile Monte-Carlo) is a rallying event organised each year by the Automobile Club de Monaco who also organises the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix and the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique . The rally takes place along the French Riviera in the Principality of Monaco and southeast France.

From its inception in 1911 by Prince Albert I, this rally, under difficult and demanding conditions, was an important means of testing the latest improvements and innovations to automobiles. Winning the rally gave the car a great deal of credibility and publicity. The 1966 event was the most controversial in the history of the Rally. The first four finishers driving three Mini-Coopers, Timo Makinen, Rauno Aaltonen and Paddy Hopkirk, and Roger Clark‘s 4th-placed Ford Cortina “were excluded for having iodine vapour, single filament bulbs in their standard headlamps instead of double-filament dipping bulbs.”  This elevated Pauli Toivonen (Citroen ID) into first place overall. The controversy that followed damaged the credibility of the event. The headline in Motor Sport: “The Monte Carlo Fiasco.”

From 1973 to 2008 the rally was held in January as the first event of the FIA World Rally Championship, but since 2009 it has been the opening round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC) programme. As recently as 1991, competitors were able to choose their starting points from approximately five venues roughly equidistant from Monte Carlo (one of Monaco’s administrative areas) itself. With often varying conditions at each starting point, typically comprising dry tarmac, wet tarmac, snow, and ice, sometimes all in a single stage of the rally. This places a big emphasis on tyre choices, as a driver has to balance the need for grip on ice and snow with the need for grip on dry tarmac. For the driver, this is often a difficult choice as the tyres that work well on snow and ice normally perform badly on dry tarmac.

The Automobile Club de Monaco confirmed on 19 July 2010 that the 79th Monte-Carlo Rally would form the opening round of the new Intercontinental Rally Challenge season. To mark the centenary event, the Automobile Club de Monaco have also confirmed that Glasgow, Barcelona, Warsaw and Marrakesh has been selected as start points for the rally.

Late Night Karaoke

Random Japan

Photobucket

Official statements

   The commanding general of the Ground Self-Defense Force admitted that he thought Japan “was done for” in the early days of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

   The Supreme Public Prosecutors Office has requested that officials in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Yokohama allow social welfare experts to sit in on police interrogations of “possibly mentally disabled suspects.”

   Among the themes addressed by the Emperor in his traditional year-end waka poems were his wife’s 77th birthday and the evacuees of the March 11 disaster.

   During a visit to India, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said Japan would contribute ¥4.5 billion toward a large-scale development called the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.

Popular Culture (Music) 20120120. A Brief History of The Who. 1974

Whilst 1973 was a roller coaster year, 1974 was downright bizarre.  The main reason for that was the extreme domination of time and energy by the film version of Tommy.

This is as close to writing a piece about that motion picture as I am going to get, because I really did not like it very well, and though that it was just a caricature of the outstanding album.  I also blame that motion picture in part for the demise of Moon a few years later, mostly because of Moon’s relationship with Oliver Reed.

This year also provided a dearth of material from the band, with only two singles and one album being released.  There were also personal conflicts, particularly betwixt the band and their management.  

Notes on Stoneleigh

(listen to her actual interview here; obviously, this is nowhere near an accurate transcript; it’s merely “what I heard.”)

The song is in your body,

The song is in the world

The giant scheme of things

Unfolding faster than alarm bells

Global dimming, global warming

Flipping quasi-stable states

Feedback loops, uncertainties,

artificially inflated carrying capacity,

One giant Haiti, one fell schmoop.

Elbow room?  Undershoot.  

Absolutely horrible thing to say.

Energy, finance, and preparation

Not much people can do about it,

Enormous forces overwhelm;

Don’t dwell on Mental paralysis.

Nitrogen availability.   Soil fertility.  

Hard walls to hit.  

Industrial agriculture eats Seed capital.  

Permaculture is not optional.

Forces aligned against decentralization.

Wealth conveyance to the centers

preserving the unpreservable,

Non-existent Ponzi wealth disappearing overnight

Too many claims on too little wealth

Infinite re-hypothecation (whut?)

Squeeze the periphery for drops of blood.

Everyone reaching for the same chair

Peripheral pockets are being picked.  More to come.

The music stops.

Liquidity is pile of un-made choices

Trust horizon contracts

Rules favor the few

no longer in our interest

Adolf America Obama

Coercion, surveillance, kettling

Occupied heads cracked

from here to Tunisia

Occupy locales, locally

Trailers in driveways,

Homegrown food arrest warrants.

Existing central powers fight tooth and nail.

Living off-grid.  Raw milk.  Unprocessed

Human food.  Oppo research.  

We must do it, cross the river, all at once.

To get to the other side.

Crocodile infested waters.

the government holds you

while corporations rip your flesh.

Letting the first wildebeest die alone

Hurts us all.  

Animosity.  Right-wing hate radio.

Divisive political divides.

Unfocussed, vague, angry.

Misdirected blame, straw men.

Ponzi, ponzi, ponzi,

Predators and willing victims.

misdirected emotions make it harder,

rather than easier.

Forget top down solutions.

Demagogues, all.  Hitler, hitler.

Fear anger and fear.

unfocussed passion works against you.

Think.  Do.

Don’t let them take your money.

Navigate the appropriate challenge first.

Children, grandchildren.

The threat of the internet to hegemony

Survey from the highest mountain now.

Oh, yes, they will.  Shut down.  The net.

Knowledge.  Like-minded people.

The wealth of the world.

Get hold of it, download while you can.

Mega-upload of wealth:

Mordor picking-up steam

Sometimes People Change

When a person exhibits personal growth, I think it is apropos to acknowledge it…especially if it is a public personailty and more importantly, if it is a public personality to whose ideas people give credence.

It is with that in mind that I present to you the new edition of Bernice King.  Bernice is one of four children of Martin Luther King, Jr, the others being Yolanda Denise King (now deceased), Martin Luther King III, and Dexter Scott King.

As background, I would suggest reading John Blake’s essay, What did MLK think about gay people?