Happy While Unhappy
Filed Under Cloud gazing | Leave a Comment
Early mornings has always been the best time of any day for me as life is still fresh and the earlier the better — optimism and hope swell the mental membranes.
The air is clear (even with thick coastal fog) because the mind is still clear; all the problems facing this wretched planet seem far away and not as dangerous, ugly and dominating as it seems as the clock swings southward.
In the coming day, there’s promise of something neat, of maybe a good thing happening somewhere down the line.
Of course, this is just bullshit — morning gives way to afternoon and the same old crud.
(Illustration found here).
Happiness is both a warm gun and the morning staying put.
And according a most-modern study, most people agree:
People around the world are happiest in the morning, according to a US study on Thursday that analyzed hundreds of millions of messages on the microblogging site Twitter.
…
Mood peaks were detected early in the day but began to dip mid-morning, about the time most people are starting their workdays.
Another positive peak was witnessed around midnight, followed by a “sharp drop in NA (negative affect, including distress, fear, anger, guilt, and disgust) during the overnight hours,” said the study in the journal Science.
The highest numbers of good mood words indicating enthusiasm, delight, activeness, and alertness were found on Saturdays and Sundays, “which points to possible effects of work-related stress, less sleep, and earlier wake time.”
That’s why we’re working for the weekend.
And what brought on all this happy/unhappy introspection is President Obama’s three years at the helm of this disastrous ship of state — he is without a doubt the most disappointing US leader in all of this republic’s history.
Never was so much become so little, or worse.
In the silent corner as opposed to the loud, drum-banging war room, are those quiet civil liberties all of us has taken for granted, though, now could be just a little tick away from a bad shift in the 200-plus years of a country which was for a time the ultimate place on earth.
Jonathan Turley, in an op/ed in the LA Times yesterday, summed up the disappointment in Obama’s disaster for freedom.
Key notes:
However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them.
The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly.
Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture.
In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture.
Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the “just following orders” defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised.
He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists.
His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.
But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself.
It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama’s personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush.
Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected.
Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.
Nobody, however, had been raptured yet — all are still prowling around, banging on that pessimism pipe dream.
If it’d only stay morning forever.
Happy Birthday!
One of the all-time, good-looking and talented actresses turns 80 today.
Angie Dickinson is one of those performers who was nearly taken for granted during her heyday.
She made a shitload of movies, but always seemed to stand out as a female member of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Rat Pack’ and was seen in the best of places, both on and off the screen.
Not only was Dickinson gorgeous — her legs was the toast of Hollywood — she also had some acting chops, and appeared in one of the best films from the 1960s, John Boorman’s ‘Point Blank,’ playing Lee Marvin’s girlfriend.
Always a favorite, but like everybody else, age slows — she looks happy in that photo at left, mainly because it was shot in 1970 when it was still morning all over the world.
Happy eighty!
(Illustration found here).
Bad Eye on High — Seeking ‘Adversarial intent’
Filed Under Terror, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts.
“A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we’ll know it was the same guy that went in.”
– Description of innovative drone technology, from Wired
(Illustration found here).
Even as the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is becoming worse — an uptick of nearly 40 percent more violence this year than in 2010 — the sky-ways above the war-spattered country has become alive with the whine of unmanned drones.
The conflict there, however, is getting bad, real bad: Three NATO soldiers were killed Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan, while nearly at the same time, eight Afghan policemen died in an ambush in the south, and all this horror in the wake of the US embassy attack in Kabul earlier this month, followed by the assassination of a former Afghan president who was trying to work with the Taliban on a peace plan.
No country for young or old men.
Emboldened by the successful slaughter in Afghanistan, the US reportedly are building new drone bases in Ethiopia and in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean — all in secret, of course — to enable better attacks on insurgents in Somalia and Yemen.
Use of drones surged 134 percent in 2010 over the previous year, and President Obama has apparently made these machines the focal point for modern war — only five drone attacks in Pakistan during 2007, 36 in 2008 (most of those in the last half of that year) and in Obama’s first year in office, the tempo of such attacks in Pakistan increased 47 percent.
Despite all evidence to the total contrary, last summer, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, blubbered “there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death” in Pakistan and since drones are perfect, “exceptionally surgical and precise” and “do not put… innocent men, women and children in danger.”
Such bullshit — there’s been 236 attacks under Obama, one every four days.
And with drones, it’s quiet, easy killing with machines themselves making life-and-death decisions.
War has gone beyond human control:
And the machines being used to do the killing are also being enhanced, moving the United States one step closer to an apparent goal of constant low-intensity warfare capability worldwide.
The United States government is reportedly working to develop pilotless military drones that are fully automatic, identifying and destroying human targets on the ground without any intervention from an operator or pilot back in Nevada, and this is generating virtually no public outrage.
The drones would reportedly seek their targets based on facial-recognition software or other biometrics. The Defense Department planners have dubbed the technological leap “lethal autonomy,” meaning that the life-or-death decision can be made instantaneously and independently by the machine without any slowing down of the process due to a human being having to make a decision whether to fire or not.
The key words ‘generating virtually no public outrage‘ is where the US war effort is moving in an attempt to keep the Long War going even longer — out of sight, out of range.
And it’s topical — this week, the FBI arrested a 26-year-old US citizen on charges of “plotting an attack on the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled model aircraft” and although authorities claim there was no real danger, the ability of this guy armed with a physics degree to plan something like this might become common place in the near future.
So these unmanned drone future is kind of scary, even for US peoples.
From the Wire link above:
The Pentagon isn’t content to simply watch the enemies it knows it has, however.
The Army also wants to identify potentially hostile behavior and intent, in order to uncover clandestine foes.
Charles River Analytics is using its Army cash to build a so-called “Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS)” tool.
The system would integrate data from informants’ tips, drone footage, and captured phone calls.
Then it would apply “a human behavior modeling and simulation engine” that would spit out “intent-based threat assessments of individuals and groups.”
In other words: This software could potentially find out which people are most likely to harbor ill will toward the U.S. military or its objectives.
Feeling nervous yet?
“The enemy goes to great lengths to hide his activities,” explains Modus Operandi, Inc., which won an Army contract to assemble “probabilistic algorithms th[at] determine the likelihood of adversarial intent.”
The company calls its system “Clear Heart.”
As in, the contents of your heart are now open for the Pentagon to see.
It may be the most unnerving detail in this whole unnerving story.
Not only watch your back, but watch your emotions.
Dope Heads
Filed Under Bullshit, Double Standard, Politics | Leave a Comment
Living in the nowadays apparently makes a lot of people scared of just about everything, and the real ‘new normal‘ is the high-abundance of paranoia.
And this delusion of persecution, this extreme, irrational distrust of others is not induced by any ingested drug, but comes from a shitload of people’s own natural body fluids.
Marijuana has a vast history of bad press, but most of it came from within the head of dopes.
(Illustration found here).
Marijuana has a much-longer history than just from the 1960s.
And until 1930s America, pot had a favorable past, but then fright, lies and bullshit took effect:
For most of human history, marijuana has been completely legal.
It’s not a recently discovered plant, nor is it a long-standing law.
Marijuana has been illegal for less than 1 percent of the time that it’s been in use.
Its known uses go back further than 7,000 B.C. and it was legal as recently as when Ronald Reagan was a boy.
Then the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which without any other reason other than politics, banned the smoke and highly-demonized it.
The act was pushed through the US Congress without much ado: Member from upstate New York: “Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?” Speaker Rayburn: “I don’t know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it’s a narcotic of some kind.”
There we have up to this day.
What induced this particular marijuana-subjected post was GOP politics — twitch-faced, neurotic-acting Rick Santorum’s queasy take on another Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry, and Perry’s view of the bud.
Stone-headed Perry proclaimed in his epic tome, ‘Fed Up,’ that marijuana is just like gay marriage — it’s up to the states: “If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas,” Perry wrote. “If you don’t like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California.”
What an asshole.
Anyway, Santorum took a snort off some Bachmann Booze and jumped into Perry’s shit.
Via Raw Story:
“It’s certainly Gov. Perry right to believe marriage can be redefined at the state level, that marijuana can be legalized and that tax dollars should be used to give illegal aliens special college tuition rates, but that’s completely out of touch with what most Americas believe,” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told The Washington Post.
Santorum recently told CNN’s Piers Morgan that he had smoked marijuana while in college.
“I admitted back when I was running for the Senate that when I was in college I smoked pot, and that was something I did when I was in college, and it was something that I’m not proud of, but I did it,” he said.
“And it is something I wish I hadn’t done, but I did and I admitted it and would encourage people not to do so.”
Dude, anything would help your dip-wad, pathetic existence, but a bowl a day would surely settle your ass down, and, encourage people to think you’re somewhat normal.
Fecal matter Santorum is the one out of touch — US peoples are wanting the pot ban lifted.
In a recent Angus Reid Public Opinion poll 55 percent of respondents reported marijuana should be legalized and the issue is broken down by politics — Democrats favor legalization by 63 percent, Independents at 61 percent, and, wouldn’t you know it, scared Republicans are dropping at 41 percent.
The GOP is running against the vast majority of US peoples in a variety of stuff.
Even if the official line is hatred of marijuana, the US government is an asshole hypocrite and has been doping the public:
The U.S. government considers marijuana among the world’s most dangerous drugs, classifying it as a highly-addictive substance that has no medical use.
But there’s a catch: The government also supplies four people with 300 marijuana cigarettes each month. They are patients in the government’s Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program.
…
The pot is grown in Mississippi as part of the government’s research into marijuana. It’s then sent to a facility in North Carolina, where it is rolled into cigarettes.
The government distributed more than 100 pounds of high-grade marijuana to patients between 2005 and 2011.
WTF!
Lock, load and light up — a shot of Jack Daniels, now, that’s some scary shit!
Aggravating Tuesday
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
Early Tuesday here on California’s northern coast and listening to neighbors act like loud assholes at this early hour makes me want to scream, lash out into the dark, pierce the clear, clean air with a shitload of curses.
Although I’ve been awake awhile, and I’m fully awake right now, the disturbance to the quiet upsets the creative juices — hard to be innovative when there’s anger.
And this is one of those morning when I can’t come up with any decent, well-meaning subject in which to post, despite a ton of weird, frightening, sad, and more than just a little bat-shit crazy news out there, from that simple seamstress mutilated in Syria, to the dangers of selling booze in Iraq, to Michele Bachmann knowing for an absolute certainty President Obama is a one-termer.
Plenty of news, but nothing overwhelming as unique or even beyond the ‘new normal.’
And apparently if there wasn’t bad news, there’d be no news at all.
US peoples are glum, too, feeling bad about everything — in a new Harris Poll:
Looking at the President’s ratings, just one in five Americans (21 percent) give him positive ratings on his handling of the economy while 79 percent give him negative ratings.
In July, 26 percent of U.S. adults gave the President positive ratings while 74 percent gave him negative marks.
When it comes to his handling of the economy, even large majorities of Democrats (58 percent) and Liberals (64 percent) give President Obama negative ratings.
…
In July, one-quarter of Americans (23 percent) expected the overall economy to improve in the coming year, two in five (41 percent) thought it would stay the same and a little over one-third (37 percent) thought it would get worse.
This month, 45 percent think the economy will stay the same, 34 percent believe it will get worse and 21 percent think it will get better in the coming year.
…
Two-thirds of Americans (67 percentage) rate the current job market in their region of the country as bad, one in ten (11 percent) rate it as good and 22 percent say it is neither good nor bad.
In July, 64 percent of U.S. adults said the job market was bad, 12 percent said it was good and 24 percent said it was neither good nor bad.
Misery and no end in sight.
In all this woe, the economic situation for the non-rich is making more and more US peoples to ‘double up:’ This spring, there were 21.8 million “doubled-up” households across the nation, a 10.7 percent increase from the 19.7 million households in the spring of 2007, the Census Bureau said. That means 18.3 percent of all households were combined households.
And maybe there’s no loud, obnoxious neighbors because more and more US peoples live on the street: “The economic downturn and the government’s deep cuts to welfare will drive up homelessness over the next few years, raising the spectre of middle class people living on the streets, a major study warns. The report by the homelessness charity Crisis says there is a direct link between the downturn and rising homelessness as cuts to services and draconian changes to benefits shred the traditional welfare safety net.”
And man-folk can’t find work, the worse male jobs situation since WWII: “Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man. Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “That takes men and puts them back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s,” Greenstone says. “That has staggering implications.”
(h/t AlterNet)
People much wiser than I am said,
“I’d rather have my son watch a film with 2 people making love
than 2 people trying to kill one another.
I, of course, can agree.
It is a great sentence.
I wish I knew who said it first.
I agree with that but I like to take it a step further.
I’d like to substitute the word Fuck for the word Kill in all of those movie cliches we grew up with.
“Okay, Sherrif, we’re gonna Fuck you now, but we’re gonna Fuck you slow.”
– George Carlin
(Illustration found here).
Have a most-tantalizing Tuesday.
Flogging the News Biz
Filed Under Media | Leave a Comment
Not only do politicians spew forth much bullshit, the organization that’s supposed to separate shit from bull is itself full of crap.
US peoples don’t trust journalism:
Only one-quarter of those surveyed say news orgs get the facts right, a new low since 1985 when the question was first asked.
Two-thirds (66 percent) say stories are often inaccurate, a new high.
And nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that journalists try to cover up their mistakes, rather than admit them.
(Illustration found here).
Also in the Pew Research survey: …and 80 percent say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.
And local news are trusted more than those national organizations — 69 percent vs 59 percent.
No wonder the US (and the world) is going to shit in a wire basket — much better information, and less biased information can be gathered from the foreign press, at least from what I’ve gathered.
In an example from The Daily Howler on the execution of Troy Davis last week — no real details on evidence were presented by anybody, including the fabled Gray Lady:
The headline on Wednesday’s editorial called the impending execution “a grievous wrong.”
Among other things, you read this:NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/21/11): Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial.
Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis.
The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime.
There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.Say what? The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime? And Davis was executed anyway?
What happened to the guy who confessed? The editors didn’t say.
Some mess there.
A mega-major problem is media attention span.
Firedoglake on Sunday looked at the nearly-unreported dust-up on Wall Street last week via an interview with Paul Weiskel, a photographer who has been taking photos of the occupation.
Weiskel talks reality:
They had to continually bring in more people and towards the end I honestly felt like it was very close to a police state.
I’ve been very hesitant to say the phrase “police brutality” because we don’t live in Syria.
We don’t deal with that type of police repression but today the New York Police Department did violently crack down on peaceful protesters, who definitely have legitimate claims, and I was flat out disgusted.
And the media interest tends to be non-so-called professionals:
I think with the increase in technology the ability to exchange this news, what’s going on, is pretty much equal if you look at the quality of video coming out, if you look at the quality of pictures coming out—if I could say that.
The main difference is the audience that you have.
There were a lot of tweets saying that right now CNN is running a segment on have dating rules changed in the best decade while people are getting pepper sprayed and beaten by cops on street corners in New York. So, it is a very orchestrated blackout by the media but once we get the audience they’re going to see the images and they’re going to be very high quality and very thought-provoking images.
And black outs?
One must remember that if the national media don’t want you to know something, you won’t know it.
Case in big point: In 2008 the New York Times ran a massive expose on those TV “military analysts” who gave most-wonderful commentary in the opening days of the Iraqi war and how they were in fact on the payroll of the Pentagon in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
The NYT even won a Pulitzer Prize for the story, but a vast, huge chunk of US peoples haven’t a clue — the TV news outlets, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, etc., all blacked out the story — and the only news report on the expose was a segment on PBS.
In the mid 1970s when I started at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, right out of J-school into the entry-level slot of police reporter, journalism was in its golden age buzz.
On the strength of Watergate, us news room types were a proud bunch as we thought what were doing was not only the neatest job in the whole-wide world, but we were there for the public’s right to know and understand.
That was way-long ago and really far, far away.