News Cycle Dump
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Raining hard this morning in the pre-dawn hours on California’s northern coast, upchucking a similar blistering shower of news gasping for air already.
In the old but about time category, George Zimmerman has been nailed with a second-degree murder charge and is right now in jail awaiting to see if there’s going to be bail — his brand-new attorney, Mark O’Mara, says it might beyond just finances: “I think nobody would deny the fact if George Zimmerman is walking down the street today, he would be at risk,” he said.
Six weeks ago, who was at risk then?
And Sanford, Fla., where the incident took place, has become a suck magnet for dangerous assholes on both sides of the racial divide — neo-Nazis and the New Black Panther Party nearly hand-in-hand keeping the streets safe.
WTF!
(Illustration found here).
Meanwhile, across the vast oceans, there a seemingly noticeable quiet in Syria this morning as a ceasefire appears, though, Bashar al-Assad is keeping his tanks in place and the guns trained on anybody: “Interestingly, we have been only hearing the sounds of birds,” said Abu Salah, a Homs resident.
The UN estimates at least 9,000 people have been killed since the protests began a year ago, however, locals say the total is beyond 11,000.
Syrian boys and girls, don’t turn your backs on the bastard.
And in US politics, the real campaign has cranked up with no-brainer, all nit-twit Rick Santorum finally leaving the party, leaving Mitt Romney all alone to chatter his way to November.
President Obama is in the easy — from at least last November he knew the winning way.
“I don’t think it requires us to go negative in the sense of us running a bunch of ads that are false or character assassinations,” he said. “We may just run clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment on them; we’ll just run those in a loop.”
For great laughs, see Obama’s new wonder video at ABL.
Plus a shitload of other stuff, but I gotta go to work.
And remember, advice on the best way to endure comes from the late, great George Carlin:
“I figured out years ago that the human species is totally fucked and has been for a long time,” he claimed on his website soon after his 70th birthday.
“I also know that the sick media-consumer culture in America continues to make this so-called problem worse.
But the trick, folks, is not to give a fuck.
Like me.
I really don’t care.”
One cares, but only for the reality of the real.
Not Tomorrow
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There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.
– George Carlin
On occasion there’s just too much going on to actually get a hold on some subject for a morning’s blog post, which happened today — plus I didn’t sleep too well and crawled out feeling a bit of the WTF.
This is Thursday and payroll day at the liquor store I manage, a lot of paperwork, checks cut and a day’s worth of work whittled down into a few minutes.
(Illustration found here).
Although there’s the news the French have killed that nutcase killer; a shitload of a shitstorm has sprouted up over the killing of that Florida teen-ager last month — what’s to be expected of a state that’s gone freakin’ nuts — and a small Wisconsin town is getting the Twilight Zone treatment:
But that’s what’s been happening since Sunday night.
Booming noises have shattered the air and rattled the ground, wrenching many residents out of their sleep.
“We’ve checked everywhere,” city Administrator Lisa Kuss said in a telephone interview.
“We checked the dam, the landfill.
We’ve consulted with the military.
There is nothing going on.
We’ve checked with local businesses, and there’s nothing there.
There’s no blasting.
We’ve checked mining, quarries and pits.
Nothing.”
The mystery booms began around 9 p.m. Sunday and ran to about 3 a.m., affecting mainly the northeast quadrant of the city, Kuss said.
But the sound and vibrations were felt in many other parts of the city, sending people from their beds outdoors into the dark — sometimes in their pajamas.
Unfortunately, officials have little to say to the hundreds of residents who have called: The cause of the noises — which occurred a third time yesterday — is unknown.
But authorities have scheduled a city meeting to discuss the events.
And, of course, some most-famous last words — from European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi (via Raw Story): “The worst is over, but risks remain,” Draghi told the daily Bild, Germany’s most widely-read newspaper. “Key indicators such as inflation, the current account balance and above all budget deficits are all better than, say, in the United States,” the Italian central banker said.
Well, let’s just wait and see.
Not to be out done — zombies in DC?
Arlen Specter (thought he was dead): “Like cannibals eating their own, that’s what’s happening in Washington,” he said on CBS News…“The cannibals have taken over and it has produced a gridlocked Senate and a dysfunctional government,” he added. (also at Raw Story).
And keeping up with the war news — a Denver woman attempted to get out of jury duty by inventing battle stress:
District Judge Anne Mansfield dismissed the cosmetologist and author from jury duty after Cole said she “broke out of domestic violence in the military” and had post-traumatic stress disorder.
But when Cole told a radio show months later that she went to court disheveled to appear mentally ill, the judge was listening.
The Denver Post reports that prosecutors charged Cole on Wednesday with perjury and attempting to influence a public servant.
Have a good day before Friday.
‘Obvious Satire’
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“I mean, with the other guys, you can dig into their past and find at least some shred of rational thinking, even if they’re cynically downplaying it now,” Gallardo continued.
“But I get the sense Santorum is speaking nothing but his completely unfiltered thoughts.
I know it’s weird to say this about a politician, but I sort of wish he were lying to my face at least a little.”
– The Onion
Apparently, the process of US life is really getting nuts — on this slow, news way-too-early morning, the joke is on the ignorant.
(Illustration found here).
And to be ignorant can also be just plain, dumb-ass silly.
Via a poll at Raw Story:
Political pundits often refer to election years as “the silly season,” to denote when politicians are working so hard to get the public’s divided attention that they’ll say almost anything to rate a media mention, even if it sounds jarringly idiotic to the average American.
By that standard, the silly season arrived rather early in 2012 — in part, due to the ongoing and as-yet undecided Republican primary.
And a list of worst stupid idea is included for readers to vote:
1. Cracking down on adult pornography.
2. Starting a pre-emptive war with Iran.
3. Making English the official language of the United States.
4. Reducing women’s access to contraception
5. Creating a colony on the moon.
6. The Girl Scouts are “sexualizing young girls” and “a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood.”
7. And, of course, another ‘other’ category for participants to list
WTF — and all of that came from the minds, then mouths of GOP assholes.
Although Mitt Romney slaughtered yesterday in the Illinois GOP primary, the remaining dipwads ain’t letting go — this from Romney’s state campaign honcho: “My state has already gone to bed now,” Rutherford said in a statement. “We’ve already put this in the bank. I think that it’s about time some of these candidates step back and say what’s the best interest for the nominee to be able to take on Barack Obama and the White House, and when is it they need to say ‘OK, I gave it my best shot, and now let’s move to the next chapter in our lives.’ “
And from the other guys — Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich — F*ck you, Mitt!
Monday night, actor Robert De Niro opened a can of sweet worms at a fundraiser, fluffing the skirt of straight-laced Gingrich.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Actor Robert De Niro opened a fundraiser starring Michelle Obama by listing her Republican rivals and jokingly suggesting that America isn’t “ready for a white first lady.”
Newt Gingrich was not amused, and the Obama campaign says the quip was inappropriate.
…
Gingrich on Tuesday called De Niro’s comment “inexcusable” and demanded an apology from President Barack Obama.
“I think that Robert De Niro’s wrong,” Gingrich said at a campaign stop in Shreveport, La.
“The country is ready for a new first lady, and he doesn’t have to describe it in racial terms.”
Gingrich said the president should be held accountable “when someone at his event says something as utterly and totally unacceptable as Robert De Niro said last night.
And I call on the president to apologize for him.”
Obama didn’t apologize, but his campaign didn’t stand by the actor’s sense of humor, either.
“We believe the joke was inappropriate,” said Mrs. Obama’s campaign press secretary, Olivia Alair.
She declined further comment.
De Niro and his wife, Grace Hightower, were the hosts of the New York fundraiser Monday night.
The tough-talking star of “Taxi Driver,”"Raging Bull,”"Casino,” and “Meet the Parents” opened the evening’s remarks by listing the wives of Republicans running for president.
“Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney,” he said.
“Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?”
The crowd of big-dollar donors waiting to hear from the nation’s first black first lady roared in approval, and De Niro finished: “Too soon, right?”
Publicist Stan Rosenfield said De Niro wouldn’t respond to the criticism.
“It was obvious satire,” Rosenfield said in an email.
Thin-skinned, ignorant assholes, obviously.
Fun or Not — Time’s A Flyin’
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Musings | Leave a Comment
Now we’re taxiing in, she says, “Welcome to O’Hare International Airport . . .”
Well, how can someone who is just arriving herself possibly welcome me to a place she isn’t even at yet?
Doesn’t this violate some fundamental law of physics?
We’re only on the ground for 4 seconds; she’s coming on like the fucking mayor’s wife!
“. . . where the local time . .”
Well, of course it’s the local time.
What did you think we were expecting — the time in Pango Pango?
– George Carlin
(The guy quoted above touched the dumb-ass lives of well-beyond an entire generation — I use his shit here a lot along with my stuff).
Anyhow — tomorrow starts Daylight Savings Time, and also tomorrow marks one-whole freakin’ year since that earthquake and corresponding tsunami created that corresponding nuclear horror at Japan’s Fukushima power plant.
One year — 12 months passing like a snap of broken fingers.
During this past week, I’ve been pestered by time — the actual movement of life through periods that can actually be timed — and a totally unfamiliar-déjà vu sense of how seemingly fast these measured intervals appear to be traveling.
(Illustration found here).
One personal illustration is the seemingly-accelerating Wednesday-to-Wednesday cycle — payday is Thursday at the liquor store I manage, so Wednesday is the end of the work week and the subsequent time-card paperwork — so Wednesday feels like it gets here way-fast.
So fast in fact, I usually end up somewhere along that day saying to somebody, either co-workers, customers or salesmen: “I just can’t believe it’s Wednesday again!”
And by now, most just nod, look off, like into a camera on ‘Parks and Recreation,’ and make a WTF face.
Crazy alone, however, I just ain’t.
As a discovery that Albert Einstein’s theory that nothing moves faster than the speed of light might be wrong, time then itself and how we calculate/view time could be wrong — as shit happens, time correspondingly travels faster.
(For a look at the neutrino experiments at OPERA, an over-my-scientific-head background story can be found at Wired).
Age does have something to do with it — us older folks feel time has quicken.
From NPR a couple of years ago:
As people get older, “they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are,” says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University.
This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world.
No one is sure where this feeling comes from.
…
The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever.
But that’s an illusion.
…
“Of course, you can see this in everyday life,” says (neuroscientist David) Eagleman, “when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there.
But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you’re not really writing it down anymore.
There’s nothing novel about it.”
Apparently, everything nowadays is novel — so the confused time speed.
Machines make the novelty and technology fuels the accelerated pace.
Even in the the mundane world of cell phones — if there’s nine billion of us on earth right now, then reportedly, just about every other guy you’d meet on the whole-freakin’ planet would have a cell phone.
There are about 234 million US peoples age 13 or older using a mobile phone.
And beyond just chatting, there’s 101.3 million smartphone subscribers in the US at the end of January, a jump of 13 percent from last October.
Just can’t live without them sonofabitches.
And life has so quickened that we’re even walking faster: It is something many of us have long suspected — if only we had time to think about it. The pace of life is speeding up, with stressed-out men and women walking 10 per cent faster than just a decade ago.
(New York the fastest-walking US city).
And it’s time-warping machines that creates a desire for time to quicken: “With mobile phones and email, you expect almost instant responses. You email someone and if they don’t get back to you in 20 minutes, you think ‘What’s that about.’”
All these devices indicate a growing perpetual contact between all of us, and with so many voices in so many different rooms, time can become confused — go faster even, looking for results.
And there’s an App — Time Flies is designed with simplicity and purpose: Use it to keep track of how long it has been since you did something.
Accelerating boxed-in confusion.
Michael Tchong‘s view of ‘Technology’s Time Compression‘ is it’s all mental:
Time compression is the driving force behind many lifestyle changes.
Just 15 years ago, most people, when asked how they were doing, would say “good.”
Today’s answer is much more likely, “busy.”
The state of mind has become a state of time.
…
Technology, of course, is the chief engine propelling time compression.
While the trend began some 150 years ago with the introduction of time zones, it got a big boost in the ’40s with the debut of fast food and the microwave oven, instant photography, and commercial jetliners.
The jet age helped compress time zones, an advancement that unfortunately came to a halt with the demise of the Concorde.
Technology added yet another twist, Moore’s Law and 18-month cycles, which moved the product development needle from steadily to fast.
The media also rose to the challenge with Sesame Street and MTV, turning Generation X and Y into adept multitaskers, a computer-derived solution to making things happen faster.
…
At the core of the time compression hurricane lies a little understood technology called “codec” — a compression/decompression algorithm — that holds the key to squeezing more bits into ever smaller packages.
Who could have guessed that something that geeky would one day rise to dominate the online mindset?
Sure, the term had become lingua franca for music, but the techno savvy knew that the codec had finally achieved global recognition.
And time can be manipulated; eventually it will as the first steps have already been taken.
From ABC News in January:
Forget wrapping an object — say, Harry Potter — in a cloak of invisibility.
How about hiding an event using time?
…
The approach is dubbed “temporal cloaking,” and it builds on experiments researchers have already conducted to demonstrate that they can hide objects from view.
…
University of Rochester physicists Robert Boyd and Zhimin Shi, who are not members of Dr. Gaeta’s team, liken the phenomenon to traffic at a railroad crossing.
The crossing gate falls, interrupting traffic (the laser beam) as the commuter train passes.
From the perspective of the train, for a brief period there is no traffic and it can freely pass (the hidden event).
Yet once the gate rises, traffic resumes and speeds up.
To an observer a mile or two away, the flow of traffic shows no evidence of interruption — no evidence from traffic flow that a train had ever been there.
Real, actual time, most thusly, may not be on our side.
Time compressed in the worst possible way: A waterspout made landfall on the Hawaiian island of Oahu Friday morning on the east shore town, becoming a rare Hawaiian tornado as it moved through the towns of Lanikai and Kailua. The twister, rated an EF-0 with winds of 60 – 70 mph, tore holes in roofs and downed trees along a 1 1/2 mile long, 20-yard wide path of damage. No injuries were reported.
From Dr. Jeff Masters at his WunderBlog today.
Weather’s getting too freaky way-too quickly — seems just yesterday when talking about the weather was social blather, now it’s serious, confused and dramatic discourse on the shape of bad shit.
Last month, four US Senators — Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse — took to the floor of the Senate for about an hour to make a plea for saving mankind.
In the 500 trillion hours articulated year-round in such an august body, publicly bullshitting on thousands of mundane subjects, and then contribute just one hour…
Bernie Sanders explained reality in accelerated time: And people are mistaken if they believe that the impact of global warming will just be in decades to come. We are seeing very negative impacts today, and what the scientific community tells us, if we do not begin to reverse greenhouse gas emissions, those problems in America and around the world will only get worse.
(Via Climate Progress).
Jim Hansen recently said the same thing, and asked, “…what would you do if you knew what I do?…”
And what Hansen knows (along with a shitload of similar types) is this change in earth’s entire life is way-quickly here already.
See and listen to Hansen on a TED video at Climate Central.
And these foretelling words of Anote Tong, president of Kiribati: “We would hope not to put everyone on one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it,” Tong said. “It wouldn’t be for me, personally, but would apply more to a younger generation. For them, moving won’t be a matter of choice. It’s basically going to be a matter of survival.”
Kiribati is a Pacific archipelago that will disappear due to climate change — Tong was talking about relocating the entire population of 103,000 people.
Time is also relative.
State of Mind
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Out here on the so-called ‘Left Coast,’ life is about the same as anywhere else, but it’s CALIFORNIA.
And according to a new poll, most of US peoples hate us:
Only five are in negative territory, led by California (27% favorable and 44% unfavorable), Illinois (19-29), New Jersey (25-32), Mississippi (22-28), and Utah (24-27). Only seven other states have net-positive ratings in the single digits, and another breaks even (Louisiana).
…
Black voters dislike 10 of the 14 Southern states.
(Illustration found here).
One could fairly-well understand why African-Americans dislike the south — Duh!
But hating us Cali-fornies?
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
“I’m actually quite surprised California fared so poorly,” said Albert M. Camarillo, a professor of history at Stanford University.
“I think the national public knows of our difficult budget situation, our higher than average unemployment rate, the still very expensive housing market.”
The “Left Coast” is distinct in another way — more people have an opinion about California than any other state — only 28 percent of respondents couldn’t decide whether they liked the state or not.
“No one knows anything about Delaware.
No one has a clue about Wyoming — but everyone knows California,” said Dowell Myers, a professor of policy planning and demography at the University of Southern California.
“Its visibility is really high.”
There’s some good news for California — at least if you’re a female Democrat.
Women were less likely than men to rate California as unfavorable, and there was a massive partisan gap. Democrats love California; Republicans can’t stand it.
The opposite is true of Texas.
“I’m sure that for a lot of purple America the extra red Texas and blue California may seem a little far out there,” said Roger Salazar, a political consultant in California.
But whatever the reason, most Californians took the news that their state was the least popular in stride.
“They’re just jealous,” Salazar said.
Not so much jealousy, as ‘the dream.’
Prior to moving out here in the early 1980s, California was the ultimate destination for all the pleasures of modern life — “Californy is the place you ought to be” So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.
What a rack of shit that…
Life out here was just as bad as anywhere else, and there was way-way-more poor people than swimmin’ pools.
The biggest asset for here was for the most part was the ‘live-let-live’ attitude of most people — a much-refreshing change from Alabama.
George Carlin’s own personal view:
“California is a small woman saying, ‘Fuck me.’
New York is a large man saying, ‘Fuck you!”
Have a good weekend no matter where you be.