May 30 2009
As usual, on Fridays, I post a series of, sometimes related shots, & sometimes random ones.
I`d call this set random, though I often do have a common thread in the set.
If you find such a thing tonight please advise me.
The only common theme in tonight`s shots is that they should distract you from conformity.
To set the mood, I`ll put this shot up to pique your curiosity.
YUCCA MOON
May 30 2009
On the way to Baghdad in 2003, in the aftermath of “prolonged, ferocious combat” in the Euphrates Valley around Najaf, General David Petraeus talked about the invasion with journalist and historian Rick Atkinson. When the interview was over, Petraeus hooked his thumbs into his flak vest and adjusted the weight on his shoulders. “Tell me how this ends,” he said.
The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley could have told him how it ends. It ends in death and desolation, it ends in ruin. No ruler, no matter how powerful, no matter how arrogant, can escape the judgment of history. It does not redeem tyrants, it exposes them as posturing frauds . . .
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay,
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Round the decay of that colossal wreck Dick Cheney, the boundless crimes of his torturers are being exposed and laid bare. But with a sneer of cold command . . .
he has told America to look upon his mighty works, and despair that Obama will not keep America “safe” like Dick Cheney did, with rape and sodomy and torture.
May 30 2009
Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.
Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.
Here in NYC the sun has gone down. That’s the time to prowl.
You’re in kindergarten and some strange large being is telling you about reading and showing you something called an alphabet. And you go with the flow and recite all the letters and hear how they’re put together and daydream and look out the window and listen some more and sneak candy from out of your desk and make faces at the other children when the teacher’s not looking and take naps on mats.
And then one day you can read. You look at a page with black squiggles on it and all of a sudden they’re not squiggles any more, they’re words and you can read them. You’ve taken the leap.
May 30 2009
You. Yeah, you. You pontificating white males (so unrepresentative of the vast majority of your fellows in race and gender) that think that one bloody word in one speech years ago, a membership to an organization with a Spanish name and a decision upholding a city’s move to limit its liability and scrap a bad test because its results uniformly favored one racial group over another one…
…get real.
You think that Judge Sotomayor is worse for the country than the Confederacy winning the Civil War? You seriously believe that Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would have locked arms with you in protesting her nomination to the Supreme Court?
You believe that if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today he would be on the Sunday talk show circuit talking about how she’s a “reverse racist”?
May 30 2009
I can’t say it has been a top of the line week. Given that last week included the death of the faculty colleague I work most closely with, one might have expected this week to have little direction to go but up. But one apparently would would have been wrong about that.
Of course leading off with Memorial Day weekend was a giant indication the week wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ramps up for veterans, whether the public is supposedly honoring the live ones or the dead ones. As a former draft dodger who was arrested by the FBI and forced to serve as an alternative to spending five years in the Oklahoma State Pen, I’m not terribly proud of my service…but I did the best I could while I was there.
Irony is one of the things the military does best. What better MOS for a draft dodger than military police. There was method in the madness, however, since at the time, Nixon had told the public that draftees would not be made into combat troops and combat troops would be brought home from Nam. What he failed to mention was that MPs were not combat troops, that the combat troops would be replaced by MPs and the draftees would be trained as, you guessed it, MPs.
May 29 2009
One of the most famous pieces of ancient art might not be so ancient, after all.
From Agence France-Presse:
May 29 2009
So, the former president of the United States has just admitted to torture:
George Bush has defended his decision to allow the use of torture on terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
This is unbelievable. Torture is an illegal crime and the former PRESIDENT is defending it and making tons of excuses. He says it saved lives. He says it was completely necessary.
He’s not being as forceful as Dick Cheney and he won’t use the word torture.
He mentions these unnamed confessions it produced. I do not recall reading anything about legitimate confessions produced by torture. Every single confession has been questionable. KSM confessed to the 9/11 attack as well as a lot of others that he either had no involvement with, or the plots didn’t actually exist in the first place.
May 29 2009
The Guardian reports Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank.
Climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people, according to the first comprehensive study of the human impact of global warming.
It projects that increasingly severe heatwaves, floods, storms and forest fires will be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year by 2030, making it the greatest humanitarian challenge the world faces.
Economic losses due to climate change today amount to more than $125bn a year – more than all the present world aid. The report comes from former UN secretary general Kofi Annan’s thinktank, the Global Humanitarian Forum. By 2030, the report says, climate change could cost $600bn a year.
Civil unrest may also increase because of weather-related events, the report says: “Four billion people are vulnerable now and 500m are now at extreme risk. Weather-related disasters … bring hunger, disease, poverty and lost livelihoods. They pose a threat to social and political stability”.
Nature News reports Geological survey quantifies undiscovered gas and oil in the Arctic. “Around a third of the world’s yet-to-be discovered gas resources and 13% of its undiscovered oil reserves may lie north of the Arctic Circle,” according to research published in Science. The results “fills in details of preliminary mapping results announced last year by the US Geological Survey”.
The estimates are based purely on geological data, and take no account of whether the oil and gas stores are technically recoverable or how much it would cost to exploit them. Nor do they address the environmental and cultural damage that might be inflicted by attempting to drill for oil or gas. Nonetheless, claims Donald Gautier, who led the research, “they give us insight into future petroleum resources, political relations, and places that environmental conflicts may occur”.
The LA Times adds Arctic fossil fuel estimates are small in comparision. “The estimate is relatively small compared with known reserves in the major oil-exporting countries, but it is likely to greatly benefit Russia, which has the largest territory in the region, the researchers noted. However, they said, the most likely place for oil in the Arctic is off northern Alaska in the Chukchi Sea.”
McClatchy notes that One-fifth of the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world live on the coast of Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas. “Two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, including those along the coasts of Alaska and Russia, are projected to disappear” due to the “loss of vast expanses of polar sea ice” caused by climate change.
Four at Four continues with a timeout for wilderness exploitation, hard times for organic dairies, and Doctor Who squeeeee!
May 29 2009
The Single Payer Scourge.
There is already a very large single payer health care system operating in this country. It’s called Medicare. It has been around since 1965, beginning 44 years ago. The relevant Wikipedia article reads, in part…
“Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the United States government, providing health insurance coverage to people who are aged 65 and over, or who meet other special criteria. Medicare operates as a single-payer health care system …(emphasis mine).”
Did you note that the first sentence described Medicare as a “social insurance program?” If the talking heads on the major television networks are to be believed, doesn’t that sound like socialism, which is at least a first cousin, if not an identical or fraternal twin of communism?
May 29 2009
