Spring is around the corner, so sayeth that Phil rodent, anyway.

I believe my own eyes better. My dogs are already shedding, so yeah, it is. And since I was born on this very day, way back in the way back of 1963? I can speak with authority.

Funny how I can in one breath be looking to Spring with such anticipation, yet be disappointed that the snow-pocalypse was a veritable dud. Just a regular grade snow, made a bit more treacherous by blowing winds. I wanted more. (I always want more…. oh bejuzuz, that reminds me of a girlie weekend up North last summer: Flash to Oliver Twist impersonations, “Please sir may I have some more?” – HAH! You had to be there.) Yeah, yeah, just like a (weather) man, always promising more inches than they can deliver. More is still coming, though. I guess 3 inches twice does add up to getting 6 inches sometimes. Heh.

I love real world-stopping snowstorms. The hissssshhhh of snow falling and the soft indescribable sound of wind in the pines, that is so much more subtle and yet richer than wind through the deciduous ones that drown them out in summer. I love how pristine and clean it looks, before the first tracks are made in it, how there is no people-sounds in a world slowed to standing and witnessing. No car sounds, no lawn mowers, nothing but the world and whatever utterances the natural beings make in it.

I wonder if I will miss it, should I reach my nirvana safe-haven in the Tropics, my Costa Rica or Caribbean Islands?  I did spend 3 hours searching images for decorating the blog last night. Only me, I know… spend the night looking at palm-lined beaches, and wishing for 2 feet of snow. You learn to love what you have. Its a much better state of mind than always pining for what you cannot have. Besides, Spring is coming, and I have my own Palms to bring out into it, and plenty of Lakes and Beaches.

The world has not stopped today, but it has slowed. Which is a good enough Birthday Present for me.

And I can put myself in that picture anytime I want to, in the Costa Rica of my mind, so rich, vivid and satisfying in my dreams…. surrounded by love, and safe from the insanity in the world.

Happy Groundhog’s Day, everyone – and godspeed to Spring!

(poll below)

There is nothing I can add to this!!!

and I doubt very much its where our little dream would have it go. Yet, anyway.

Lets face it, its already a United Elites of America World. We run the joint, and run it like rum-running gangsters. I mean, seriously dudes, you cannot throw a dart randomly and NOT HIT some ratbastard dictator we have propped up for playing poker with us.

Mr. Cheney’s new Prize Pupil, President Peace Prize certainly isn’t going to demand anything resembling full-on Democracy when an F-18 can suck down 20 gallons of fuel a SECOND. Seriously. There’s no way in hell we are going to risk the Lefty Pinko Arab masses think they can have a piece of the wealth from all OUR oil under their Sand.

How unfair this life I have given you. You are wise beyond your years, but underneath that sunny disposition life has already lain fears that no child should carry.

You floored me when over your bowl of cereal, sitting next to me at the table this morning with your nonchalant, “I don’t want to grow up.” I figured it was just you riffing off what you had said a moment ago, teasing the dogs. “Poor dogs!” as they begged you to pet them and you complied, “It must be such a bad life, laying around, doing nothing, playing, getting fed… no work, no school, no problems. Being a dog is the Life!” You were laughing and light. But you what you said about growing up you said with such solemn commitment, I knew you were serious.

So when I asked “Why?” I didn’t see your answer coming. “I don’t want to die.”

You equate growing up with dying now, not surprisingly after watching your Gramma die, and then seeing your Dad get sick with cancer the following month. “Even at 80 or something, I don’t want to get old and sick and die. I’d rather just stay a kid.” Most kids cannot wait to grow up – you equate it with dying now.

That sucks on so many levels.

Its not easy to keep from becoming paranoid about the increasingly Orwellian creep of our Nation. Losing our right to privacy seems to be the precursor to a Police State. Pouring money and research into Tasing and Microwaving weaponry meant to subdue large masses within our own borders seems to point out that they see US as the enemy. Rape Scanners at airports makes “Guilty until Proven Innocent” the new decree of the land.

Its one thing that the Federal Government data mines our every electronic move, and taps our phone conversations without warrants, but now they want to allow Local Law Enforcement to have that right as well. The latest military gadgetry they want to use on us? Drones.

Ah, yes, versions that weigh as little as 7 ounces, the size of small birds, armed with cameras that pick up imagery from visual to infrared that from 400 feet up can count the freckles on your nose. But they can fly much lower undetected too! Oh, yes, within 2 years, the FAA is going to change their codes to allow these “security” devices to buzz your back yard, so silent you probably will never notice them.

They have already been widely used for border patrol, but at least 3 Police departments are using them in a pilot program: (shouldn’t that be pilot-less?) Queen Anne’s County, Md., Miami-Dade County, Fla., and Mesa County, Colo.

Where is the public outcry? Oh, wait. That is relegated to the gnashing of teeth by the Purity Police for some show called “Skins” that reportedly undermines America so horribly that public demand has made sponsors jump ship, for showing teens doing what teens have done since the beginning of mankind – making out and experimenting with mood altering substances like (gasp) pot!

Some days “What the FUCK !?!!?!!!” does not even begin to cover the cognitive dissonance that reading my morning headlines induces.

Although this sudden “end of contract” for which neither Kieth nor MSNBC supposedly has “nothing to do” with the acquisition of the network by Comcast/GE, I am left hoping that he can find a spot in Cable, where he can speak more plainly, and less hindered by the overwhelmingly neo-con television media.  

I know many of you consider Kieth a sell-out, not quite “liberal” enough, but every fucking time they shut down a voice that dares to challenge the status quo, we all hurt.

(transcription ~ and my extended commentary ~ below)

Olbermann, before leaving the show with a final signature toss of his script toward the camera, thanked his audience for sticking with him. As was often his habit on Friday nights, he read a James Thurber short story, this one titled Scottie Who Knew Too Much and published in 1940.

The story’s final line: “It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all of the answers.”

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This week I have the honor of interviewing Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project and the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a public interest research center located at George Washington University (Washington, DC). He is co-author of The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New Press), author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New Press) and co-author of a forthcoming book on the untold history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba.

This NSA was Wiki before Wiki was cool, and did it through relentless legal pressure to declassify the documents that hid in our Nation and Other’s “redacted” files so that the Public would know what had been done in our names.

His most recent efforts have been pivotal in Chile addressing its human rights abuses and in the trial of Luis Posada, former CIA asset going to trial for the acts of terrorism he escaped Venezuelan prosecution for, after blowing up a Cuban Airliner.

Author of 6 books, including “Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba,” this man is a veritable wealth of information.

Want to really learn something new? This is the show.

Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm EST, via Blog Talk Radio, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….  her Joplinesque voice speaking straight from the heart about the real-life implications of the Political and the Class War on everyday American Citizens like you.

Controversy? We face it. Cutting Edge? We step over it. Revolutions start with information, and The Wild Wild Left Radio brings you the best in information and op/eds from a position that others on the Left fear to tread…. all with a grain shaker of irreverent humor.

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This should have shocked me. It didn’t. Extremists almost always go the “smiting” clause for their perceived enemies. If there is a God? He certainly needs better editors than the plague of the planet called humans. Especially the unholy triad of religions that beget themselves off of the “Old Testament,” Christians, Jews and Muslims. No God of Creation would possibly tell any of these fuckers what the power hungry men who were his editors twisted his words into.

…an Israeli Orthodox “family magazine,” Fountains of Salvation, which suggests that Israel will create death camps for Palestinians in order to wipe them out like Amalek. The article attacks Israeli rabbis who dispute the letter recently circulated from pro-settler extremist rabbis which urged that no Israeli Jew rent apartments or homes to Israeli Palestinians. It chided them for being “politically correct” and refusing to do their jobs and educate the populace in the true path of Torah (which is presumably to hate Palestinians).

(snip – the money quote)

It will be interesting to see whether they leave the assembly of the Amalekites [Palestinians] in extermination camps to others, or whether they will declare that wiping out Amalek is no longer [historically] relevant. Only time will tell…

(a second source, since I am unfamiliar with either)

If that isn’t enough to twist your knickers? Go below.

Cross posted from The Wild Wild Left

He won’t look in a mirror now. Its not just the hair loss, either. It is the way his skin sags from the weight loss, and the aging stress and pain puts in one’s eyes. I think it was always a kick for him when people never guessed he was 15 years older than I am, that his lifelong peers always ribbed him about how they were aging, and he was not. He says there is a stranger in the mirror now, some old man that doesn’t compute for him, with who he is and has always been inside. At 62, he fears that the damage will not reverse if he regains his health.

Then there is the coughing. It hasn’t been this bad since we started this journey and it was the pneumonia that made them find the cancer. Its scaring the shit out of him. He doesn’t want anyone to see him, hides under blankets and hats if anyone stops by.

The thing is? He is still beautiful to me. Beauty emanates from more than just hair, or seasonal weight gain or loss. Short, tall, weathered, youthful, black, white, skinny, heavy, or any combination thereof still all looks beautiful to me. It all emanates from within.

I have my weaknesses though. One or two, anyway.

Ah yes. Being female, as all females are e’er defined by this wrath made legend, I know this tale. No one endures scorn well, once they have involved their heart in another. The one thing the human psyche cannot abide is being ignored. Feeling unimportant. Worthless.

We patch the cracks of the agony of rejection by focusing on the minutia that is imperfect in the objects of our affection, trying to cover the pain of bereavement with anger. Any tiny flaw has to become more important than all the things that made us swoon, flaws that become our armor against knowing who we love do not value us.  For women never truly un-love once their heart has been taken, and it is far too easy to let the things we adored drag us back into the misery of missing what scorned us.

As any female can attest, men scorned are no different. Their methods are not the same, but their armor is twice as effective, and just as vicious ultimately. A woman who scorns a man ceases to exist to him. The difference, is that there is no way back to a man scorned.

So. What happens when a nation in its entire is scorned? Will we rage at the flaws, or turn our backs forever, when neither natural human reaction can be effective against the systematic disenfranchisement of a whole population?

Here’s the show!!

We had a couple little techno demon glitches as BTR always does… but he was brilliant, gracious and NOAM!!!

It was lovely, and I think he will be back!

Thanks DD for your support and I hope you got hits from our show 🙂