Clear and cold this way-too-early Tuesday on California’s north coast, and if the forecasts prove correct, we should be getting warmer weather this week.
Outside right now, it’s a balmy 35 degrees!

However, for a big chunk of the US, it’s still freezing-ass-cold: “I don’t think things are going to warm up any time soon,” said Bruce Sullivan, an NWS meteorologist.
And it’s not even officially winter yet.

Meanwhile, I woke up this morning with a near-scream on my lips — and no, don’t believe it was the notion Sarah Palin was doing a TV series again — a primeval urge eager to escape out into the air. However, my apartment-complex neighbors escaped being frightened out of their sleep by an old guy gone pure crazy.
I just cried a little while.

(Illustration found here).

One asshole is the US Congress — yesterday, the Senate and House of Representatives Armed Services committees agreed to another quick-fix in okaying a new defense authorization bill, which left out a major, much-needed new item.
Via Aljazeera:

The defense bill does not include an amendment seeking to overhaul the way the Pentagon handles sexual assault complaints, which was proposed by New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
The Gillibrand measure, which would have taken responsibility for prosecuting such cases out of the hands of the military chain of command, is opposed by most Pentagon leaders and congfressional committee heads, but has attracted fairly wide support among lawmakers.
There were 3,553 sexual-assault complaints from October 2012 through June 2013 — a 50 percent increase compared to the same period a year earlier.

The 113rd Congress is as worthless as a tit on a boar hog.

Or maybe, could this never-ending NSA bullshit get any worse/creepy/stupid? Yes.
Via the Guardian:

The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players.
Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life.
There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games’ tech-friendly users.
Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players.
What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.

Jason Ditz at antiwar.com adds this: The NSA document claims al-Qaeda terrorist target selectors are associated with World of Warcraft, but there’s no evidence that the surveillance ever accomplished anything, and they had so many NSA players that the agency had to set up a whole group just to make sure the players weren’t wasting time spying on each other.
The NSA is so whacked, out of control, it’s ridiculous.

However, my quiet weeping this morning most-likely had nothing to do with the horrible shit above — that’s bullshit at the bullshit level — but more to do with my children, and your children, and kids everywhere who face one fuck-up world mainly because the fuck-up adults don’t give a fat-rat’s ass who’s hurting or who’s actually dying.
Cry for the doomed planet, which apparently is coming to pieces before our very eyes.
Easy to cry early in the morning, a little hard later.

Just remember not to scream.