n e u f n e u f

ridiculously transparent

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:26:00 +0000

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This is just entirely too convenient for the kind of people we've been trying to subdue since 9/11 and, of course, I'm not talking Muslims here. I'm talking plutocrats and corrupt capitalist pigs... the kinds of guys Obama is eager to please.
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ya know, it's probably too late to ask this question

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:36:00 +0000

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... but did anybody ever think to ask whether Obama was any good at community organizing? Did he, like, get everybody together to demand better community services and then just cave when the local big shots said no? Has he always been a crappy bad faith negotiator who can just talk a good line... if you don't listen too closely?

You know for sure that this would all be handled by now if he were not dicking around, trying to bully even Russia without giving anything worthy in return.
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i hope people take this as the teaching

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 07:24:00 +0000

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In fact, the world is an abode of truth
for one who is truthful with it
and an abode of well-being
for one who understands it.
It is an abode of riches
for one who learns from it
and an abode of counsel
for one who takes the warning from it.

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It started out with well-being
and created misfortune,
awakening desires and fears,
causing alarm and alert.
So some people revile it
on a morning of remorse,
while others will praise it
on the day of resurrection,
for the world reminded them
and they bore it in mind,
and it spoke to them
and they verified what it said,
and it cautioned them
and they took the warning.

The world is a transitory abode,
not a permanent abode.
And the people in it
are of two sorts:
one who sells his soul
and ruins it,
and one who ransoms his soul
and frees it.

—Counsels of Ḥaḍrat 'Alī
[translated by Thomas Cleary]

There's no hope if they don't learn.
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[Heh, nice try....]
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oh crap, we'll have to LOOK at him while we're listening

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:41:00 +0000

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I took a lot of ibuprofen, and if yer looking for me in the next three hours, just click this image.
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[Ugh. My head didn't stop pounding until about 8:30! Had to take TWO 800mg ibuprofen. Must be China pumping more toxins across the sea to me. OR all this awfultude is just too much for me.]

move your money

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:49:00 +0000

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tell me if this doesn't seem the most plausible scenario

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:39:00 +0000

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He was shaking. He didn’t resist anything. It’s just hard to believe that he was trying to blow up this plane. He was in a trance. He was very afraid.

The guy's father reports his recent religious fervor to the embassy, just in case, thinking he will prevent his son from doing anything foolish; the intelligence guys in charge of failed terrorism headline grabbers keep him off the lists, nab him on Christmas, shoot him up with something disorienting, dress him in these underwear, put him on a plane, and one of them hits the detonator in the talcum powder sac sewn into his new underwear at the correct moment. End of story for fervent Muslim rich kid.
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[You'll pardon me, I hope, for neglecting you. I was up till dawn reading about ways to do my own website myself, got a few hours' sleep, with fast-escaping dreams, and woke up with a bad headache and telling someone their image of a face was really an image of a black hole, only upside down. I've been continuing with my reading on the own site thing and I gotta get ready to do the Malloy fill-in gig again tonight... starting at 6pm Pacific... so... well... I'm out of it. The good part is that it may lead to something really cool.]
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just shoot me

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:20:00 +0000

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Jane for President. Katrina for Latrina Cleana.
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if you want me

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:02:00 +0000

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... me and Marley's ghost will be over at this asshole's joint, hosting the Malloy show chat for the next three hours.

[Yeesh, I'm too old for that stuff. Chat rooms are damn disorienting! I'm glad that's over. Only four more evenings to scramble myself left to go...]
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i want you to get mad

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:47:00 +0000

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And this really is just a snippet of this looong piece. Still, we should put on our cheaters and take it in:

A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, documented how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US that comprised corporate, military and government elites in a centralized power structure working in unison through “higher circles” of contact and agreement. This power has grown through the Cold War and, after 9/11, the Global War on Terror.

At present, the global dominance agenda includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. Only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations share board director positions with the major defense contractors including:

William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group

Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.

Given an interlocked media network of connections with defense and other economic sectors, big media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America. Media critic and historian Norman Solomon described the close financial and social links between the boards of large media-related corporations and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment: “One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media.” The Homeland Security Act Title II Section 201(d)(5) provides an example of the interlocked military-industrial-media complex. This Act specifically asks the directorate to “develop a comprehensive plan for securing the key resources and critical infrastructure of the United States including information technology and telecommunications systems (including satellites) emergency preparedness communications systems.”

The media elite, a key component of the Higher Circle Policy Elite in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources. Their goal is to create symbiotic global news distribution in a deliberate attempt to control the news and information available to society. The two most prominent methods used to accomplish this task are censorship and propaganda.

Sometimes the sensationalist and narrow media coverage of news is blamed upon the need to meet a low level of public taste and thereby capture the eyes of a sufficient market to lure advertisers and to make a profit. But another goal of cornering the marketplace on what news and views will be aired is also prominent. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times. The losses in supporting conservative media are part of a strategy of ideological control. They also buy bulk quantities of ultra-conservative books bringing them to the top of the NY Times bestseller list and then give away copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications. They fund conservative “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. All this buys them respectability and a megaphone. Even though William Kristol’s publication, the Standard, is a money-loser, his association with it has often gotten him on TV talk shows and a column with The New York Times. Sponsorships of groups like Grover Norquist’s anti-tax “Americans for Tax Reform” regularly get people like him front-and-center in any debate on taxation in the United States. This has contributed to extensive tax cuts for the wealthy and the most unfair tax laws of any industrialized country – all found acceptable by a public relying upon sound-bites about the dangers of ‘big government.’ Hence media corporation officials and others in the health care, energy and weapons industries remain wealthier than ordinary people can imagine. Their expenditures for molding opinion are better understood as investments in a conservative public ideology.

[emphasis mine]

What I want to know is WHEN will the denizens of Outer Blogistan, let alone the vast general population, internalize the fact of this and proceed from here... from fundamental reality...?

Hmmmm?
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again, iranian authorities appear to be telling the truth

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:32:00 +0000

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Ahmad Reza Radan, Iran's deputy police chief, acknowledged that "several people" had been killed, but denied that police had used guns to contain the protests.

Referring to four of the deaths, Radan said: "One fell off a bridge, two died in car accidents and one was killed by a bullet."

"As the police [force] was not using firearms this [death] is suspicious and it is being investigated," he said.

I have been looking at what images I can find of the current rioting in Iran and I can't find any police with guns, but plenty with truncheons and tear gas canisters... which would be the way I'd be playing it if I were in the position of the Iranian government, having to keep the streets safe from rioting and looting... and the protesters are even more violent this time than last. Plus, the video of Mousavi's nephew being killed is eerily like the Neda video.... They're working their hearts out to become card-carrying members of "The West" and don't seem to mind the danger of this turning into WWIII as they do it. Their government seems to mind. I mind.
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this list is creepin' me out

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:04:00 +0000

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I must be getting old... or... something....
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the moon will be full on new year's eve

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:36:00 +0000

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worth a skim

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:50:00 +0000

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I mean, the guy obviously doesn't think much of yer basic American boob, but, well, he also blends in some good points made by Hedges and Sunstein in their latest books....

Of course, the Founding Fathers knew public debate could get ugly. Sunstein notes Alexander Hamilton's belief that the "jarring of parties" was a good thing because it would engender deliberation and, over time, a "republic of reasons."

Are we one today? Not as much as we could be, Sunstein thinks. His fundamental concern in Republic.com 2.0 is the Internet's potential for impeding deliberation between groups with opposing viewpoints, eventually increasing ideological rigidity and polarization to a point of no return. It's vastly easier to join like-minded Internet "enclaves" across the world than to drive across town for a meeting in which someone might challenge one's pre-established beliefs and positions. Sunstein walks readers through behavioral studies finding that when groups of like-minded individuals are isolated from different viewpoints, they tend toward consensus on the most extreme position held within the group.

At worst, Sunstein says, Internet-induced polarization could lead to social instability. "The danger is that through the mechanisms of persuasive arguments, social comparisons, and corroboration, members will move to positions that lack merit," he writes. "It is impossible to say, in the abstract, that those who sort themselves into enclaves will generally move in a direction that is desirable for society at large or even for its own members. It is easy to think of examples to the contrary, as, for example, Nazism, hate groups, terrorists, and cults of various sorts."

Clearly, the Internet has potential to create political good. Citizens have access to vast amounts of information and commentary. Even like-minded enclave proliferation can be good: The more there are, the greater the potential for inter-enclave discussion.

But a study of 1,400 liberal and conservative blogs found the vast majority of bloggers link only to like-minded blogs. Worse, another study showed that when "liberal" bloggers comment on "conservative" blog posts, and vice-versa, a plurality of comments simply cast contempt on opposing views. "Only a quarter of cross-ideological posts involve genuine substantive discussion. In this way, real deliberation is often occurring within established points of view, but only infrequently across them," Sunstein reports.

bundled up in mountains of sweaters and leggings

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:03:00 +0000

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...which is one of the best things about winter. You can become a walking mound of soft and warm things. I've been listening to music that would send my father to his deepest happy place. I've been mending things with my fancy embroidery thread... a hippie pastime... and intermittently looking in at the news... and... well... I don't have anything to blog about so far. I've been talking about the latest pretend terrorist thing over yonder, but I don't really want to talk about it at all. I have to trust you to be smart enough not to need any hints about this shit by now, or, really, what's the good in living on the same planet with you at all?
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hunting around about the $14 trillion

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 07:36:00 +0000

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I keep hearing people gripe the bailout's gone to $14 trillion and so I spent a little time looking around after that....

Here's nobody saying it six hours ago....

Here's the last from ProPublica, with a good link to Bloomberg, from October....

CNN has it at $11 trillion, including all kinds of not-bailout spending, so knowing it's bogus if CNN will say it, that's getting us to at least $14 trillion, wouldn't you say?

While the stimulus spending, or promise to spend, has finally topped the half way mark....

But Congress isn't worried....

The "village idiots" have the sense to be pissed off about this... and don't exactly hold with all the slippery talk to skirt the perfidiousness of it all. It's really easy then to tell them it's the socialist liberals trying to rip them off and make them pay for ever and on into generations from now... because that's what they are doing... only just not in the sense they've been told. If you ask me, it's more idiotic to keep up with the slippery talk than to identify it as socialism. The former is a life and death deception, even when deceiving oneself as much as others... more... while the latter is just a little mistake that can be fixed with a little tiny bit of education that can come from anywhere... even from slippery liberals.
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i'd go to norquist to fight this

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:58:00 +0000

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The 150,000-member NNU, the largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in the U.S., condemned Reid's bill ... as a deeply flawed measure that grants too much power to the nation's largest private and for-profit insurers.

Specifically, the union that takes in the powerful California Nurses Association, cited 10 fundamental flaws in the Senate bill:

1. The individual mandate forcing all those without coverage to buy private insurance, with insufficient cost controls on skyrocketing premiums and other insurance costs.

2. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.

3. An affordability mirage. Congressional Budget Office estimates say a family of four with a household income of $54,000 would be expected to pay 17 percent of their income, $9,000, on healthcare exposing too many families to grave financial risk.

4. The excise tax on comprehensive insurance plans which will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies, especially as more plans are subject to the tax every year due to the lack of adequate price controls. A Towers-Perrin survey in September found 30 percent of employers said they would reduce employment if their health costs go up, 86 percent said they'd pass the higher costs to their employees.

5. Major loopholes in the insurance reforms that promise bans on exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and no cancellations for sickness. The loopholes include:
· Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail "wellness" programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.

· Insurers are permitted to sell policies "across state lines", exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.

· Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

· Insurers may continue to rescind policies for "fraud or intentional misrepresentation" – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.
6. Minimal oversight on insurance denials of care; a report by the California Nurses Association/NNOC in September found that six of California's largest insurers have rejected more than one-fifth of all claims since 2002.

7. Inadequate limits on drug prices, especially after Senate rejection of an amendment, to protect a White House deal with pharmaceutical giants, allowing pharmacies and wholesalers to import lower-cost drugs.

8. New burdens for our public safety net. With a shortage of primary care physicians and a continuing fiscal crisis at the state and local level, public hospitals and clinics will be a dumping ground for those the private system doesn't want.

9. Reduced reproductive rights for women.

10. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay. Nothing changes in basic structure of the system; healthcare remains a privilege, not a right.

In fairness to Reid and his fellow Senate Democrats, most of the flaws in their bill are also present in the House bill. And that's the really depressing part.

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Yes. That's the part everyone already seems to have forgotten. The House bill was for shit, too. Just less so than the Senate's. And Walking Eagle says, "“I think, right now, that the Senate and the House bills – if you look at their overlap, the 95 percent that they agree on – if that bill was presented to me ... I would sign it.”
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i gotta mention

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 05:09:00 +0000

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All you nitwits freakin' about the way the right is smearing Obama have really, really short memories... and he deserves it every bit as much as his predecessor did. Yer reacting exactly as the right did. So, now, all you have to do is get over that last little hurdle about your perspective being more righteous than theirs and maybe we could get somewhere. The problem hasn't got anything to do with political parties, or even right and left. Yer barkin' up the wrong trees. Yer worse than lost in a maze of mirrors. Snap out of it.
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puppet regime

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:15:00 +0000

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I heard some agonized young man yelling over the tubes about where's our Democratic Karl Rove? And, well, I know what he meant, and it sure isn't what we've got, but we have just as bad, and even, honestly, possibly, even worse.
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someone was grousing about my history of redwoods on earth

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:09:00 +0000

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... but I can't remember who it was. I had mentioned that the whole planet had once been covered with redwoods, and that the Gobi and the Sahara had once been vast forests, and somebody, somebody, somebody was giving me shit for that.... Anyway, it wouldn't do any of us any harm to contemplate it, and while I was reading about the magnetic pole moving to Russia, I found this:

Arctic Redwood Fossils Are Clues to Ancient Climates
Bijal P. Trivedi
National Geographic Today
March 26, 2002

Axel Heiberg Island, at 82 degrees north and just a stone's throw from the North Pole, was once a great vacation spot—during the Eocene epoch, about 45 million years ago. Lush redwood forests, ferns, flowering plants, and a huge variety of animals, now extinct, once thrived here.  Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is using wood fossils from Axel Heiberg to discover prehistoric weather patterns that enabled this now bleak, cold, and dry desert to support such a rich array of life.

"I've always been enraptured with the idea that the Earth can change so dramatically," said Jahren "The Earth today is very different compared to how it was millions of years ago."

During the Eocene epoch, Axel Heiberg and much of northern Siberia and Alaska were covered in temperate forests with redwood-like trees called Metasequoias, similar to those now seen in Northern California.

The trees were between 30 and 40 meters tall (98 and 131 feet) and densely packed, providing a canopy for a plethora of ferns and flowers, said Jahren. The largest tree found had a diameter of three meters (ten feet). What remains of these ancient redwoods today is "rather extraordinary," said Jahren.

"These trees look like driftwood on the beach—they are dry and flaky, with almost no other alterations," said Jahren. Unlike these trees, ancient forests often become petrified through the steady infiltration of minerals over many years, which eventually replaces the wood tissue with stone.

Chemical Record

Because the wood is unadulterated, the tissues hold a chemical record of weather patterns during the period the tree lived. Jahren studies carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen because these elements are taken from the soil, water, and air and incorporated into the tissue of plants and animals.

Jahren and her colleague Leonel Silveira Lobo Sternberg of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, are examining chemically different forms, or isotopes, of oxygen in these ancient redwoods to reveal weather patterns during the Eocene period.

Oxygen that a plant uses, said Jahren, comes primarily from water. Determining the chemistry of that water could reveal exactly where it came from. Rain that arrives after traveling long distances over land has a very different chemical signature than rain that travels over the ocean or just very short distances, she explained.

The researchers' analysis of the oxygen content of the wood revealed "a bizarre absence of oxygen-18, the heavy isotope," said Jahren. Water contains both oxygen 16—the more common and lighter isotope—and the more rare oxygen 18. The analysis suggests that the water contained almost exclusively oxygen 16.

The study appeared a recent issue of GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America.

One way to get water with these characteristics, said Jahren, is for that water to have traveled large distances over land. As water travels over land, she explained, the heavier oxygen is removed as it rains.

The only route allowing moisture laden air to travel thousands of kilometers over land before reaching Axel Heiberg would be across North America, possibly from the Gulf of Mexico, said Jahren. "This idea is compelling because it would supply water rich in oxygen 16 and supply warm air to this very northern region"—warm enough to nurture a forest.

Different Weather Patterns

Jahren finds this model of water transport intriguing "because this weather pattern is radically different from today." Current weather systems over North America tend to travel from west to east. In the Eocene epoch, a much warmer period when the poles were free of ice, weather systems could shift from south to north, said Jahren.

But there is another possible interpretation of Jahren's findings, cautioned Scott Wing, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

"Water from snowfall also contains low quantities of oxygen 18, thus matching the water profile from the wood," he said. He suggested the possibility that snow, formed over the then ice-free Arctic Ocean, may have supplied the island with water. This would indicate that the northern regions were actually much colder than Jahren suggests.

"Isotope levels are very difficult to interpret, and there are lots of questions remaining," Wing said.

If Axel Heiberg were actually colder, it would imply that animals such as alligators, which were known to live at these latitudes, as well as plants must have been tolerant of the cold.

Whether Axel Heiberg actually received waters originating from equatorial regions is "still up for debate," said Wing.

But there are other questions left to answer. "These forests had four months of daylight and four months of complete darkness. Finding trees that could survive under these conditions is as flabbergasting as finding humans that live underwater," said Jahren.

Uncovering ancient weather patterns provides greater understanding of how ecosystems work, opening a window into the Earth's capabilities. It also offers new ideas about the kind of conditions that plants and animals might be able to survive in.

You don't say....
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residents of never never land are using this as an excuse

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:45:00 +0000

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There's a newer piece than the one I'm quoting below, a Christmas Eve piece, but I'm showing this one because it says more:

North Magnetic Pole Is Shifting Rapidly Toward Russia
Brian Vastag
for National Geographic News
December 15, 2005

Santa better check his compass, because the North Pole is shifting—the north magnetic pole, that is, not the geographical one.

New research shows the pole moving at rapid clip—25 miles (40 kilometers) a year.

Over the past century the pole has moved 685 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Arctic Canada toward Siberia, says Joe Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State University.

At its current rate the pole could move to Siberia within the next half-century, Stoner said.

"It's moving really fast," he said. "We're seeing something that hasn't happened for at least 500 years."

Stoner presented his team's research at the American Geophysical Union's meeting last week in San Francisco.

Lorne McKee, a geomagnetic scientist at Natural Resources Canada, says that Stoner's data fits his own readings.

"The movement of the pole definitely appears to be accelerating," he said.

Not a Reversal

The shift is likely a normal oscillation of the Earth's magnetic field, Stoner said, and not the beginning of a flip-flop of the north and south magnetic poles, a phenomenon that last occurred 780,000 years ago.

Such reversals have taken place 400 times in the last 330 million years, according to magnetic clues sealed in rocks around the world. Each reversal takes a thousand years or more to complete.

"People like to think something special is happening in their lifetimes, but despite the dramatic changes, I don't see any evidence of it," Stoner said. "It's probably just a normal wandering of the pole."

The north magnetic pole shifts constantly, in loops up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide each day.

The recorded location of the pole is really an average of its daily treks, which are driven by fluctuations in solar radiation.

The pole is currently at about 80º north latitude and 104º west longitude, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

Importance of the Pole

Pinpointing the precise location of the north magnetic pole is important for navigation: As you move closer to the pole, the direction north indicated by your compass becomes less accurate.

The pole also plays a role in the Northern Lights, which form when solar radiation bounces across the magnetic field in the upper atmosphere. As the north magnetic pole drifts, it will take the Northern Lights with it.

But for scientists, studying the field provides a tantalizing glimpse into the fiery center of the Earth.

The planet's outer core of molten iron spins constantly, acting as a giant dynamo, or electromagnet.

This energy interacts with the rocky mantle of the Earth, which is also shifting, resulting in a complex, ever-changing magnetic field.

"We're close to having a much better understanding on how the field fluxes," Stoner said.

First Reading

The first readings of the north magnetic pole date to 1831, when Sir John Ross and his ship searching for the Northwest Passage became ice-bound.

To pass the time he sent out a team with a compass to take readings, and the team soon found a dipole—an area with compass readings pointing both north and south—in what is now Nunavut. It was the north magnetic pole.

While historical readings date back almost two centuries, Stoner's team wanted to take a deeper look into the past.

They went to the Arctic and pulled 4.5-meter-long (15-foot-long) cores of mud and clay from the bottom of frigid lakes.

Each year, snowmelt deposits a layer of silt at the bottom of the lakes, which is then covered with a layer of clay. "There are these distinct couplets every year," Stoner said. "It's a lot like counting rings in a tree."

Back at his laboratory at Oregon State University, Stoner and his team sliced the cores into thin sections.

They then ran each section through an instrument that reads tiny magnetic particles in the silt to reveal both the direction and intensity of the magnetic field.

Each section comprises five to ten layers, or five to ten year's worth of magnetic readings.

"We can't get down to the yearly scale yet," Stoner said, "but that's getting to be a pretty tight resolution."

In contrast, similar techniques used to measure magnetism in rock have yielded much coarser resolutions of thousands to tens of thousands of years.

Besides recording the movement of the pole, the silt cores also show a recent drop in the strength of the magnetic field, Stoner said, a phenomenon that often accompanies north-south reversals.

But research by French scientists published in 2003 suggests that such "jerks" in the magnetic field—abrupt shifts in intensity and direction—occur often, not just during reversals.

My point continues to be that no matter what is causing it, or even if there is no "it" being caused, immediate and heroic measures to clean up our act are completely necessary anyway. There is no question but we have trashed the place. Nor is there any question that this is sickening and killing many beings, including us. Even if it were NOT, just out of respect and gratitude we should be doing it. It's stunning to witness the denial of this in play.
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shove yer self-glorifying street parties

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:00:00 +0000

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Activists appeal to Mubarak over entry into Gaza
(AFP) – 6 hours ago

CAIRO — International activists planning to enter Gaza from Egypt for a march appealed to President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday to allow them to enter the blockaded enclave through the Rafah crossing.

Organisers of the Gaza Freedom March had earlier said they would try to defy the ban after Egypt turned down their request to pass through Rafah, the Gaza Strip's only crossing that bypasses Israel.

"We plead to you to let the Gaza Freedom March continue so that we can join the Palestinians of Gaza to march together on December 31," the activists said in a statement addressed to Mubarak.

Egypt said it would prevent their passage because of the "sensitive situation" in Gaza and warned Monday of legal repercussions for anyone defying the ban.

Around 1,300 international delegates from 42 countries have signed up to join the Gaza Freedom March which was due to enter Gaza via Egypt during the last week of December.

On the morning of December 31, participants were due to join Palestinians "in a non-violent march from northern Gaza to the Erez/Israeli border," organisers said on their website.

Gaza-bound convoy stranded in Jordan after Egypt rejects Red Sea Port entry
2009-12-27 | 01:10:27 (China)

AMMAN, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) — Viva Palestina humanitarian convoy, led by British MP George Galloway, was still stranded in the Jordanian port city of Aqaba on Saturday for a second day, following a dispute with Egypt over the caravan's point of entry.

The convoy, which includes over 200 cars and trucks laden with medical supplies and other human assistance and accompanied by over 450 activists from across the world, was scheduled to leave Aqaba on Thursday to Egypt to cross into the besieged Gaza Strip on December 27th.

However, Egypt's foreign minister said in a statement posted on its website last week that the entry point for the convoy should be El Arish on the Mediterranean sea, while the convoy insists that Egypt allows them to enter through Nuweiba Port so as to enter Gaza through the Rafah Crossing Border, saying goring to El Arish port will delay the whole convoy.

"We are stuck here for two days because the Egyptian authorities want us to enter Egypt through El Arish port and that will delay the whole convoy and make the process very difficult and complicated," Zuheir Birawi, the convoy's spokesperson and member, told Xinhua from Aqaba.

"To go to El Arish means we have to cross the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean and we will have to enter the Israeli waters and have to coordinate the entry with the United National Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and that will delay us," Birawi added.

The convoy, which started its trip on December 6th from London, has already crossed several European countries including France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy as well as Turkey, Syria and Jordan, hopes to enter Gaza on Dec. 27th on the anniversary of the passage of one year since the Israeli offensive on Gaza.

Meanwhile, Birawi added that dozens of activists taking part in the convoy will hold a hunger strike on Sunday in front of the Egyptian consulate in Aqaba, some 340 kilometers to the south of the Jordanian capital of Amman.

"The activists seek to place pressure on Egypt to allow the entry of the convoy through Nuweiba so that we get to Gaza soon. They also want to urge Egypt to accept mediation efforts underway to speed up the entry of the convoy through Nuweiba," said.

According to Birawi, Malaysian and Turkish officials flew to Cairo on Friday and Saturday in an attempt to convince the Egyptian authorities to allow the entry of the humanitarian caravan through Nuweiba.

This is brewing up to be a debacle of monstrous proportions. Israel is picking off Gazans again right now to help make Egypt sound credible to stop marchers and aid. It is also a dire sign that they plan to make it very, very ugly for whoever gets to the border to demonstrate.

Which might all redound to the ultimate demise of Israel, but it's shaping up to gonna be costing a lot of people their lives if they get any nearer.... I don't think the organizers are going to be into that. I don't think the non-Palestinian marchers are going to be into that. This stuff is fun for comfy Westerners who want to feel themselves making a better world, and it's very good for one's self-esteem in that department, as long as nothing SERIOUS, like your life, is at stake.
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pilger's socialism 2009 speech again

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:31:00 +0000

[click image, video lecture, half hour]

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I am reminded again this morning of this speech I know I linked before, but think that link may be broken, and you need to hear it again anyway... I do... we all do. George Kenney reminded me:

Being lied to on such a breathtaking scale is something of a shock. Clearly, most people on the left are still struggling to wrap their minds around the huge disconnect between what Mr. Obama says and what he does. But having more context from his personal background, which anchors the deception, could make it a little easier to accept and to deal with.

Indeed. Who's working on the bombshell Pilger dropped?

[Any who would prefer to read the transcript of the Pilger speech, it's linked at Kenney's post... which may end up being your resort here, because YouTube is not liking to download this video whole. I have had to refresh the page and move the gizzy on the player bar to where it stopped the last time three times now... and am finally almost all the way through it again. Maybe all the kiddies on there today are messing with the strength and speed of downloading, or my computer is being pissy about videos again... dunno... but... well... the whole speech is there and it might just be a little harder to play than usual....]

At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. —George Orwell
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86 again

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:14:00 +0000

[click image]

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The first time I met him he had run out of his house violently angry with his girlfriend. I was at the very end of Peter's bar, as far away from the craziness of the night club as possible, so I could visit with him when he had a moment while he worked. He sat 86 down next to me and ordered him a double one of those seeerious rums. I was fascinated. This man next to me was glowing with a strange light. His eyes were forest in the full moon, with flecks of light spraying gently from them as somewhere universes collided. His hair was very, very short, equal parts black and white, and he hadn't shaved in a day or so. He drank his drink, and then another, and left... having only nodded to me as Peter was introducing us, and, really, just inches from me, had not seen anything at all the whole time he was there. He might as well have been sitting atop Everest.

A couple of years later I was at Peter's again. This time for a political evening with a bunch of famous leftists. There was this tugging behind me, even though no one was near me as I stood listening to the speaker up on the stage. The tugging became more intense. It turned me around. About twenty feet away, splayed in a chair against the wall, he was seeing me with those forest moonlight fountains. Almost got the ground out from under my feet. He'd left her.

She was five years older than he was and so I guess that means she's about 61 now. She's had eyeliner and lipstick tattooed on her. She goes regularly for fruit chemical face peels. She has had a boob job and a tummy tuck and something done to her butt. She's never had a visible means of support, a way to pay for all this, beyond part time work in boutiques, but it turns out she grew dope, lots of it, and so always had the money for cosmetic surgery, fancy wheels, clothes... all the important stuff.

She never stopped trying to get him back.

The portrait of hyper-vanity, someone who acts as though everything she makes is haute cuisine, everything she buys is the epitome of chic, she is also just plain hard as nails. Her emotional development froze somewhere around age sixteen.

I think 86 went back to her after I left him. He was going to quit drinking and move in up here with me, but at the very last moment he gave up to go back to the booze, drink himself to death. No one knows if this is possible, but he was sick enough from it to make me leave, make me do the last thing I could to try to save him. But I don't think he's dead. I think he's back with her so her dope money pays for him while he's drinking himself to death.

I dreamed last night that I was in the face of this beast, this terrible excuse for a woman and my terrible excuse for an ex. I felt again the kind of pain that is so intense you can't do anything but try to burst out of your skin, but I didn't hate her, didn't want him back, didn't try to burst out of my skin.

I just felt it... sort of like being dipped slowly into a lake of lava. I just felt it.
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ho ho ho

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 08:48:00 +0000

[click image]

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A little Dickensian diversion for the holiday....

[Maybe you'd prefer to watch it at the Moonbase....]
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she'd be california

noreply@blogger.com (99) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:50:00 +0000

[click image of young tea partier]

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... if California was a girl....
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