October 2007 archive

A terribly misreported diary is climbing the Recommended List at Daily Kos. The erroneous title:

Gore will not run – breaking news in UK (Updated)

And the text includes the following:

Because of the importance attached to it by so many, I am reporting breaking news on Sky News in the UK at the moment.

This is that Al Gore will not be throwing his hat in the ring and has formally annouced that he will not stand as a presidential candidate.

As has often been the case, however, Gore has made an ambiguous statement, and the media have misreported it. The diarist now has, too.

The actual quote, from Reuters:

“I don’t have plans to be a candidate again so I don’t really see it in that context at all,” Gore said when asked in an interview with Norway’s NRK public television aired on Wednesday about how the award would affect his political future.

In other words, it’s essentially the same thing he’s been saying all year: he has no plans to run. That doesn’t mean he won’t eventually have such plans.

Gore knows what he’s doing, and he’s deliberately leaving the door open, a crack. If he wanted to definitively rule out a run, he’d say something to the effect of: I am not running for president, and I will not run for president. It’s also absurd to think he would first make such a definitive statement to a Norwegian reporter.

In other words, this is nothing new. It’s not breaking, and it’s not Gore ruling out a run. It’s being badly reported, in Europe, and it’s being badly reported by a diarist on Daily Kos. Don’t buy it.

I will also say this: don’t buy all the diaries and essays suggesting Gore is running. We don’t know. We won’t know until he says something definitive. He hasn’t.

Ok, I know America’s all filled up, and that bombing Mecca would solve all our foreign policy problems. I even know that Miami is like a third world country and that the only way to solve all this nation’s problems is to build a giant wall and outlaw the Spanish language.

But now even by his own absolutely insane standards, Colorado Congressman, and Republican Presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, may have actually stepped over the rather broad line that separates wingnuttery from sheer lunacy.

On the same day the diminutive, Coloradoan, tough-guy registered as the first Republican Presidential candidate in the New Hampshire primary,  he introduced a bill in Congress that would require all foreigners  seeking visas to visit family members in the US to supply DNA samples to prove their family ties.

Of course their citizen, or legal-resident family members would also be required to supply a corresponding sample to it check against.

Frontline on PBS aired a new program called Cheney’s Law. It was one hour of pure visual and mental hell. There were no new revelations, but the condensation in one hour of everything Cheney and his team of evil as fuck lawyers, Yoo and Addington, with Abu Gonzo thrown in at the end, have done to the constitution and this country in the last seven years has again made me sick to my stomach with rage and despair.

If you missed the program and would like to see it, the whole thing is available online here:

Cheney’s Law 

(Originally posted at the Great Orange Satan)

There is no doubt that the policies of BushCo have gotten us lost deep in the wilderness, a desperate feeling apparently intensified by middle age.  The majority, or at least plurality, of this site’s users is middle-aged, the mean age being around 45 or so.  (I arbitrarily, and some would argue, ruthlessly, divide life evenly into three parts: Youth: 0-30 years; Middle Age: 31-60; and Old Age: 61-90).  Being middle-aged and lost in some Medieval wilderness rings an old bell, doesn’t it? 

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che’ la dirritta via era smarritta

In the middle of this walk of our life
I came to myself in a dark wilderness
Where the straight way was lost.

These are my favorite trippy flicks.  Either because they are about altered states of consciousness, or because I enjoyed them while tripping, or both.  For me an LSD or shroom session usually lasts 8-12 hours between ingestion and returning to ‘normal’ baseline.  After about 6 or 7 hours I get to a point where even though I’m mentally tired, there is no chance of going to sleep.  This comedown time is also when I tend to start churning through uncomfortable psychic stuff and it helps to have a distraction.  A nice way to get through this transition is to watch a movie.  For the most part these should be colorful, upbeat and not too deep. Animation, documentaries and SciFi/fantasy are usually my favorite.  In my heightened emotional state I get lost in the story and have an abundance of empathy for the characters so anything too weird or heavy can be a bummer.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
It was December 31, 2000.  We stayed home that New Year’s Eve and celebrated with some L.  The local Public TV station was showing Kubrick’s 2001.  I don’t even know how many times I’ve seen this movie, but it was completely new and different in my altered state.  The special effects were amazing given that it was released in 1968.  I imagined that Kubrick made this movie with tripping people in mind.  The final scene, where the guy ages and dies blew me away.  I started having my own ‘god realizations’ at that point and felt like I was dying too.  It was very intense but I wasn’t scared at all. That was probably one of my top experiences ever and for my husband also.  It wasn’t just the movie that triggered it.  It took about three or four months to come down – that was my Kundalini phase. 

I posted this yesterday at Daily Kos – under a different title “Nuclear is Not the Answer”.  The pro- nuke shills immediately descended upon the diary and I’m only now coming up for breath.  Maybe some folks here will read it for what it’s about – our current (and future) shortage of cool water is a major problem for nuclear plants.

Here’s the diary:

Nuclear power is not the answer to global climate change. Other than the safety issues connected to nuclear waste, which are pretty well-publicized, there is a major problem with thermal load, which is not so well known.

Nuclear plants need cool water for cooling.  Hotter water temperatures in the Tennessee River this summer caused TVA to suspend operations at their Browns Ferry Plant.  Browns Ferry is downstream from 3 other TVA nukes which had already heated up the river to a point to prohibit further heating.

France and Germany have had the same problem – in the 2003 heat wave.  The rivers on which their nuclear plants were built were heating up beyond their environmental agenies’ standards for aquatic life. A choice had to be made between nuclear power and the health of their rivers and aquatic life. 

As folks who read the great diary this weekend on Atlanta’s water shortage must recognize, with climate change and rising temps, the cool water necessary for nuke plants will be a scarcity

I love it when I have responded to an email, then realized I have created a blog post.
A friend sent me a piece of an article from the Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch, dealing with the Republican netroots  – or their efforts in that respect, to be more specific.
This excerpt refers to Republican presidential candidates shunned CNN’s YouTube debates:

“Republicans cannot write off the Internet” the bloggers wrote on the Web site. “If you approach the Internet from a position of paralyzing fear, you will be outgunned, outmanned, and out-raised at every turn. It is fundamentally unacceptable to surrender to the Democrats on one of the most important battlefronts of this election.”
In Virginia, many Republicans disagree that their party is behind the curve,
pointing to state legislators’ efforts in stumping for re-election. Even
former Sen. George Allen, with his blog, has stepped back into the medium that
shredded his re-election bid.
“Most Republicans want a policy debate,” said Republican Party of Virginia
communications director Shaun Kenney, who has also blogged about state
politics. “They don’t want to talk to a snowman.”
He said Republicans are not lagging behind Democrats in using the Internet,
but they are doing it differently. Republicans tend to look to pundits, he
said, which is one reason why talk radio has done so well for them. Democrats
tend to look for opportunities to be more active, he said.

Emphasis mine.
Shaun, do you realize what you just said?
Go below the fold.

This is a review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, a detailed, journalistic history of neoliberalism which emphasizes its connection to “shock therapy,” torture, and other means of tearing down people and society so that they can be rebuilt along the lines of “perfect,” ideological models.  My review differs from others in that it focuses upon a sequential review of important themes and close analysis of key quotes within the book.