Tea Party Blowback
Filed Under Politics | Leave a Comment
Despite the over-abundance of mustard, a shit sandwich is still a shit sandwich.
US peoples know stupid when they realize it — something ain’t right: Just 32 percent of respondents viewed the tea party favorably, while a record-high 47 percent had a negative view of the movement that propelled Republicans to dramatic Congressional victories last November. Fourteen percent had no opinion, and 7 percent said they’ve never heard of the tea party.
One really wonders about that 7 percent, though.
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
The American voter is a fickle sum-bitch.
And now nearly six months after the November mid-term elections, anyone with any kind of walking around sense can see those assholes powered into office by right-wing fringe peoples, i.e., Tea Party, are not real bright and are NOT for the best interests of the county — especially is funding the federal government.
From Raw Story:
Senate Democrats on Tuesday posed an ultimatum to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on the budget: Bring your tea party “extremists” in line or prepare for a government shutdown come April 8.
…
“Our problem is that we see now that Speaker Boehner is yielding to the extremes of his party, basically saying he’s not going to negotiate, take it or leave it,” Cardin said, insisting that Democrats were eager to compromise and cede ground to reach a deal.
“The anchor around the neck of these negotiations is a relatively small, extreme group of ideologues on the Republican side,” Blumenthal added.
“They are an anchor that needs to be cut loose. Only Speaker Boehner can do it, and he needs to do it now, otherwise we will have a shutdown.
The ball is in his court.”
Does The Boner have a court?
Of course, anyone with a TV and walking around sense knows the Tea Party wouldn’t exist, much less put people into public office, without Fox News, which pushed the movement in 2009 into becoming a cloutish, oafish group without a moral, ethical or Constitutional center.
And the US Constitution is supposedly what rules — not a mean document, most likely one of the best put-together such items in all of history.
The fine print, however, can’t be seen by the far-right fringe.
Even the GOP, which has gathered strength from Tea Party wing-nuts, can see the sloppy handwriting on the out-house wall and are running scared.
From Capitol Hill Blue:
Tea party advocate Sen. JIm DeMint (R-S.C.) admits his party is in trouble without the tea baggers.
“Unless the tea party stays active, we will wilt,” he said Tuesday.
Around the country, prominent Republicans show a shift away from the rabid right-wing rhetoric of the Tea Party.
Barbara Bush supports gay marriage, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels says the GOP should spend more time on budget and economic issues and less time on social agendas and Sarah Palin’s poll numbers are plummeting.
Tea party supporters plan to rally in Washington today and some Republicans plan to stay away from the event, fearing that aligning themselves with the increasingly unpopular movement will hurt them in the next election.
Operative words there: ‘the increasingly unpopular movement.’
And voters have developed a kind of political buyer’s remorse: A PPP poll of registered voters released today shows that in a hypothetical re-do of last year’s gubernatorial election, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) would lose to Democrat Alex Sink by a nearly 20-point margin, 56%-37%. Scott won a squeaker of an election last year, edging out Sink by about one point.
A nasty similarity to Wisconsin GOP/Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker and others as US peoples get wind of the stink.
And when the ignorant gain power, it’s just a short jump to pure stupid.
In Wisconsin, the asshole behind the curtain could be naked.
From HuffPost:
The Republicans are walking a political fine line by moving ahead as if the law is in effect while apparently defying the court, said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
“They naturally want to continue to support their side of the argument, but I think they run the risk of making this look like a claim to being able to do whatever they want regardless,” Franklin said.
“At some point strength starts to look like arrogance.”
Tea Party then becomes a big laugh as it strikes hard the garbage pile of history.
Sleep Not, Sweet Prince
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
This story from last week (via Forbes):
Federal safety officials are investigating a report that two planes landed at Reagan National Airport without control tower clearance because the air traffic controller was asleep.
An aviation official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the incident, said the single controller — a supervisor — was scheduled for duty in the tower at that time but had fallen asleep.
What’s a body to do?
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
Apparently, it’s not to sleep.
US peoples have a tendency to place awake over sleep, we be tough.
And we’ve a debt beyond the house, the car and kids off to college…
From the New York Times:
Sleep Machismo means valuing sleep loss over sleep, placing all activities above the basic human need of sleep and celebrating the machismo of the sleep-deprived.
Americans perceive sleep as an expendable luxury, rather than a biological necessity.
Day after day, week after week, we choose to defer bedtime in the interests of a favorite TV show, reading one more article, answering one more e-mail, or catching up on the phone.
All the while, we are accumulating sleep debt — a debt which, like financial debt, incurs steep penalties.
But we can brush it all off with a nice afternoon nap.
The big problem, I believe, is what happens when we actually get to sleep.
This from a horrific new study:
A study conducted at the University of San Diego found that during an average night’s sleep, at least 14 different animals, ranging from ants to Gila monsters to wounded possums, are likely to scurry, slither, or crawl across a slumbering individual’s body.
“You become a virtual playground for these creatures mere minutes after you fall asleep, inhaling dozens of insects and swallowing up to 17 spiders during an eight-hour period,” lead researcher Jack Paulette told reporters Thursday, adding that earwig colonies spend each night hatching thousands of their young in and around human genitalia.
“If you’re lying in bed and feel as if something has just brushed across your leg, that’s because something actually has. In most cases, snakes.”
Paulette added that it’s not uncommon for a baby mountain goat to clamber upon one’s shoulder at night in an attempt to find purchase, and that people who awaken with mountain-goat afterbirth in their bedsheets should know they aren’t alone.
(The Onion).
Good morning, hope you slept well.
There’s still a nuclear holocaust brewing in Japan, a crazy no-fly flying war in Libya, and if you can’t sleep, try acupressure, yoga and tai chi.
If nothing else, sleeping beauty, lose them dumb-ass PJs.
Climate Chatter — Fiddling with the Fiddler
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment | Leave a Comment
Even as radioactivity from Japan’s shredded Fukushima nuclear plant has been detected all over the globe, from China to the eastern part of the US, one killjoy piped up: Lake Barrett, a nuclear engineer and former staffer for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the risk of exposure from the Fukushima plant is very small, “much less than that we encounter in everyday life.”
Infamous last words, most likely.
And who knows the impact this has on ever-accelerating climate change — can’t be good.
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
A brittle example of bad news washed clean by bullshit is the ongoing lawsuit in Ecuador between Ecuadorean indigeneous people and oil giant Chevron, which entered a new phase Monday when a new three-judge panel was installed to analyze the entire case, all 215,000 pages.
Last month, an Ecuadorean court ordered Chevron to pay $9.46 billion in damages, including $860 million for the Amazon Defense Front, a coalition formed by the plaintiffs, but both Chevron and the Ecuadorian plaintiffs appealed the ruling.
From the Wall Street Journal this bit: While plaintiffs appealed the ruling asking for the awarded amount to be increased, Chevron has said that its appeal is tied to the evidence, saying that the plaintiffs’ lawyers falsified data and pressured scientific experts to find contamination where none existed.
Some more of that famous bullshit last words.
Read a background of the Ecuador/Chevron legal mess here.
In the US House this Thursday is a full Science Committee meeting, titled Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy, but most of those scheduled to blubber their thoughts on the matter are climate-change-denying assholes.
And as DeSmogBlog put it, the whole shebang is another display of agnotology, which is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.
Just as Rome the US burns.
And all this as another UN climate report indicates that earth’s cities will be the front line on the horrors of climate change and its horrendous side effects.
From the BBC:
The assessment by UN-Habitat said that the world’s cities were responsible for about 70% of emissions, yet only occupied 2% of the planet’s land cover.
While cities were energy intensive, the study also said that effective urban planning could deliver huge savings.
The authors warned of a “deadly collision between climate change and urbanisation” if no action was taken.
…
Joan Clos, executive director of UN-Habitat, said the global urbanisation trend was worrying as far as looking to curb emissions were concerned.
“We are seeing how urbanisation is growing – we have passed the threshold of 50% (of the world’s population living in urban areas),” he told BBC News.
“There are no signs that we are going to diminish this path of growth, and we know that with urbanisation, energy consumption is higher.
According to UN data, an estimated 59% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2030.
Every year, the number of people who live in cities and town grows by 67 million each year – 91% of this figure is being added to urban populations in developing countries.
The main reasons why urban areas were energy intensive, the UN report observed, was a result of increased transport use, heating and cooling homes and offices, as well as economic activity to generate income.
And if one wanted to see what happens to big cities in trouble with its environment, just look at Japan’s current situation.
Via The Seattle Times:
Tokyo’s iconic electronic billboards have been switched off.
Trash is piling up in many northern cities because garbage trucks don’t have gasoline.
Public buildings go unheated.
Factories are closed, in large part because of rolling blackouts and because employees can’t drive to work with empty tanks.
This is what happens when a 21st-century, technologically sophisticated country runs critically low on energy.
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami have thrust much of Japan into an unaccustomed dark age that could drag on for up to a year.
“It is dark enough to be a little scary. … To my generation, it is unthinkable to have a shortage of electricity,” said Naoki Takano, 25, a pony-tailed salesman at Tower Records in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, normally infused by neon lights.
Grease up the strings there, Nero.
Krugman at 4 AM — Hey, They’re Orwelling My Privates!
Filed Under Bullshit, Lying, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
As these modern times gets more complicated, the ability of government to stare way-down into your bowels to catch a terrorist turd has come a long way, baby, and the future of freedom doesn’t appear too inconspicuous, either.
In fact, any private aspect of our daily lives is open to be scrutinized, filmed, recorded and posted on some government watch list just in case there’s a need, any need at all.
And the shit part is that you don’t have to be a terrorist, a criminal, or even a bad person who kicks puppies, or slaps little babies hard in the face — you just have say or do something the powers-that-be, or in our particular case nowadays, the right-wing hard-cases, do not like or agree with and whim-wham, thank-you ma’am, you’re under surveillance.
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
A case in point is from the illustration link above (Wired magazine) which details a situation reported from September 2007 where a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network is placed under an unknown government observation routine.
As if:
Flynn is a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network.
One day before an AHN rally, she went to New Jersey to visit her parents.
She noticed a car with New York plates parked outside their house.
When she drove home to Brooklyn that night, the car followed her — and was joined by two others.
She did all the detective story check-your-tail maneuvers: making random turns, changing lanes, parking. They continued to follow.
And when Men-In-Black like cars followed her home, two other vehicles were already there with occupants watching laptops — even at 4 a.m. the assholes were still there.
Despite a personal investigation, Flynn could not discover the IDs of the culprits.
Since her experience, Flynn has continued to organize, though she says she’s not so enthusiastic before, and has seen other activists pull back.
Was she really followed?
We might never find out.
But when we hear stories about political activists losing their civil liberties, we shouldn’t assume that they’re potentially violent folks bent on smashing Starbucks and the capitalist state.
They might just want a cure for AIDS.
One sad, fearful tale.
Similar to this story reported in early March: An Egyptian-American college student who says he has never done anything that should attract the interest of federal law enforcement officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI for secretly putting a GPS tracking device on his car.
And, of course, the FBI replied that they were just following “well-established Department of Justice and FBI guidelines,” which should tell you everything.
And to unsettle one’s self, there’s the government’s use of biometric technology, which in its actual defintion is freakin’ frightful – The word “biometrics” is derived from the Greek words ‘bios’ and ‘metric’ ; which means life and measurement respectively. This directly translates into “life measurement.”
No shit, Sherlock.
From Raw Story:
A recent announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigations detailing plans to embark on a $1 billion biometrics project and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon has the American Civil Liberties Union on red alert.
…
The FBI’s forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.
To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven’t been arrested or convicted of a crime.
…
“That’s what we’re really talking about here: a shift in American values, from a place where you can live your life unencumbered by government scrutiny to one where you really have to worry whether the government is watching you either through a video camera, or a police officer who could step up and potentially ask you for a fingerprint at any time,” (Chris Calabrese, an ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington, D.C.).
…
“What we have instead is secret watch lists, where people don’t know they’re on the list, they don’t know the standard for putting them on the lists and there’s no way to get off the lists,” Calabrese said.
“That’s a serious problem.”
“We’re not opposed to technology, but we are seeing technology advancing rapidly and often times legal protections aren’t keeping up.
When it’s now technologically possible to do things like capture a facial recognition image and use the various cameras across a city to track somebody using that image automatically … When that’s technologically possible, the only barrier between us and widespread mass surveillance is legal protections.
They don’t exist right now, in many cases.”
And what got me interested in this shit this morning was a Monday column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, who flashed on the recent situation where a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin started a blog on the nefarious doings of the state’s GOP.
The historian wrote the Republican governor, the infamous Scott Walker, has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”
So what was the G.O.P.’s response?
A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point.
The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
…
Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.
What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down.
It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.
Shades of the AIDs worker, huh?
Just watch that camera angle, and don’t use e-mail.
Saturday’s Weather — ‘The idiot bird’
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment | Leave a Comment
While the northern California coastline continues its monotonous weather — Rain showers and isolated thunderstorms. Some thunderstorms may produce small hail — the US Upper Midwest is way-beyond the quiet isolated thunderstorm routine with a record-level snowpack.
Dr. Jeff Masters has a most-excellent post at Wunderblog on the situation: National Weather Service models show this year’s snowpack contains a water content ranked among the highest of the last 60 years, which is similar to the past two years.
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
Here it is Saturday morning and outside right now it’s near-beautiful.
Just back from a cigarette break and the skies are sunny and blue, tingled with clouds and a bit warm compared to the last few weeks — one characteristic of the weather up here this year (beyond more wet and more cold) is the close-to-gorgeous gaps, or holes, in these storms.
For a few minutes the environment is serenely beautiful, near-quiet and really nice.
But alas the dark approaches, and even as I tap, tap the keyboard, the windows are starting to shade, foreboding the approaching far edge of the storm-hole, indicating rain will soon be pounding on us again. (I can already hear the wind re-start its whining, whistle sound effect).
And it’s been pounding this winter for a long, long time, it seems and the ground here is fairly saturated — after the latest nasty storm front moved through last Thursday, the Eel River, its mouth just south along the coast, appeared near flood stage, but apparently the moisture in this particular system wasn’t enough as the Eel never peaked.
The storm caused about 2,500 homes and businesses to lose power for awhile, according to Pacific Gas and Electric, including the liquor store where I work — a problem on a power pole behind the store knocked us and a couple of other stores in the shopping center off the air — and the incident played havoc with the store’s ancient computers, and we were closed for the first three hours of business on Thursday.
Increasing the dramatic human tragedy, local PG&E spokeswoman Brandi Ehlers: “Mother Nature packs a powerful punch, and she’s hitting us hard this week,” Ehlers said.
Of course, Brandi, we all know our bad shit is way-relative to other peoples’ bad shit.
In that before-mentioned US Mid West, the water is thick everywhere.
From the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune comes report the Mississippi River is approaching what forecasters call a “major flood stage,” expected to arrive by Wednesday.
And with the snow-pack and the rain, forecasters say there’s a 20 percent chance of suffering at least one top-five flood starting next month — the situation already dire enough to flood riverbanks and even put a crimp to a melody:
The Frank Theatre company has canceled its Sunday afternoon performance of “Cabaret” on the Centennial Showboat, moored at Harriet Island in St. Paul.
Harriet Island is projected to be nearly underwater by 11 a.m. Sunday.
Wendy Knox, Frank Theatre’s artistic director, said the show has been selling well.
“Having to cancel Sunday is just heartbreaking,” she said.
Life might just be a cabaret, old chum, but drowning plays out a little differently.
In the US northeast, however, the situation is near-reversed to the St. Paul region.
From HuffPost:
Of course, scientists have already documented the effects of climate change in the Northeast.
Since 1970, the region has warmed by about two degrees Fahrenheit, and winter temperatures have increased even more.
One study found that, using a fifty-year data set, almost all weather stations in Maine had already reported a decrease in the winter snowpack.
Projecting into the future, the same study estimated that winter temperatures in the Northeast could warm, on average, about 6.5°F this century (using the same A2 scenario), and that the first frost in autumn will come 20 days later.
Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.
Peoples do try, though.
And of the weather, or even the lack of it, as in the middle of Texas, where there’s been a big tear in the normal fabric of life, resulting to a big shift in population.
A portent of a future of cheeky environment situations.
From Climate Progress:
One of the major reasons that there’s such a radical population shift is that central Texas is changing from arid grassland to uninhabitable desert, in part due to greenhouse pollution from the fossil fuels once buried under the ground.
Other unsustainable practices, such as overpumping of groundwater, unregulated sprawl, and poor conservation practices are accelerating the desertification.
The region has been in a drought since 1995-1996, with brief respites in 2007 and 2010 from catastrophic, flooding rains…
No weather is a bitch just like too-damn-much weather.
And the process ongoing in Texas, desertification, allows one of those strange, contradictory-seeming lapses about global warming/climate change — to me, a way-non-scientific person, a desert is a place absent of obvious weather, and climate change, to me, is what’s happening to the entire freakin’ planet while weather is how this climate change affects/effects my little, dingy part of that planet.
Weather has shifted for most US peoples from a near benign, natural part of life, to a much-more complicated, irritating and dangerous animal.
A good post popped up today at Skeptical Science, aptly titled, “Weather vs Climate.”
The core bit:
A change in temperature of 7 degrees Celsius (°C) from one day to the next is barely worth noting when you are discussing weather.
Seven degrees, however, make a dramatic difference when talking about climate.
When the Earth’s average temperature was 7ºC cooler than the present, ice sheets a mile thick were on top of Manhattan!
A good analogy of the difference between weather and climate is to consider a swimming pool.
Imagine that the pool is being slowly filled.
If someone dives in there will be waves.
The waves are weather, and the average water level is the climate.
A diver jumping into the pool the next day will create more waves, but the water level (aka the climate) will be higher as more water flows into the pool.
In the atmosphere the water hose is increasing greenhouse gases.
They will cause the climate to warm but we will still have changing weather (waves).
Climate scientists use models to forecast the average water level in the pool, not the waves.
A good basic explanation of climate models is available in Climate Change–A Multidisciplinary Approach by William Burroughs.
Hence, climate temperature change has a great affect/effect on the weather of Manhattan, for instance.
On the north California coast, the weather forecasts for this winter has been for more wetness and more coldness — hence some recent weird, and unsettling hail storms.
Last month, I watched the SafeWay parking lot turn quickly into a scene straight out of New Hampshire in deep winter, except instead of snow, the dense white was hail — the entire storm lasting only a matter of minutes, ending as if turned off by a faucet.
I’ve worked on this post on-and-off during the day, and now it’s near 7 p.m. here and it’s stopped raining again, but no sun, but just thick, gray-dark clouds.
Earlier this morning, I performed my usual surfing the Internets for new news, updates on the current smorgasbord of on-going events — from Japan to Libya — and those odd, little noddles of informational subjects/stories that seemingly portray this unique, exciting and most-interesting time in human history.
And without knowing how I arrived there, maybe going links-to-links, word-to-word, or something, I came across this: ‘Doomsday,’ by Sylvia Plath.
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Out painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.The monkey’s wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Sylvia Plath was a sad character, as most poets seem to be, but more sadder than most — she committed suicide at age 30 — and as in true and good talent with true and good poetry, there’s also an essence of insight. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously.
And if you go out tonight, don’t forget your rubbers!