Yes James…I Too Long For The Days When I Could Be Burned To A Crisp In A Nuclear Firestorm At Any Moment
Via AmericaBlog, I see that right wing republican crackpot James Inhofe (r – Loonyville) longs for the good old days …
Iraq, as Inhofe described it according to the Tulsa World, is a markedly different place than what the rest of the world seems to think it is:
Contrary to most reports, Inhofe said, many Iraqis are pleased about the U.S. intervention.
"Iraqi security forces now number 275,000 trained and equipped," he said. "The commanders in the field and the Iraqis say when this reaches 325,000, that would equal 10 divisions, and that’s what we need to take care of our own security."
Inhofe has visited Iraq 11 times.
"What’s happened there is nothing short of a miracle," he said.
Nevertheless, Inhofe said the current international situation makes him "wistful for the Cold War."
Understand…this babbling nutcase didn’t just live through the cold war, he is part of the generation that gave it to mine. And you just know he was as much of a war hawk back then as he is now. Wistful is he? I’ll bet. But the point of view of those who were wielding the nuclear bombs was a tad different from those of us who were being told that as long as we practiced our duck and cover drills everything would be okay…
Flashback: Rockville, Maryland – 1966
It is a warm sunny summer weekday. I am 12 years old and school is out. I have the whole day long (except for when I am in Vacation Bible School) to myself. This day I’ve taken a walk down Rockville Pike to Children’s Supermarket, to check out the model car kit section, and then over the Congressional Plaza shopping center and the model car kit shelves at Kresge’s 5 and 10 cent store, and the G.C. Murphy’s. There is a small toy section at the J.C. Penney’s store, but it never amounts to much so I seldom go there. I have a routine. First Children’s…then Kresge’s…then Murphy’s…then back home with a stop for a burger, fries and a shake at the McDonalds along the way, or the Minute Mart to get a Sprite and some candy, whatever trading cards I happen to be collecting at the time (I still have my complete collection of the first two James Bond sets), and maybe this month’s issue of Mad Magazine.
It is around 3 in the afternoon on a weekday, and when I get to Congressional Plaza it isn’t very crowded with shoppers. There are just a few of us wandering the arcade. There are cars in the big parking lot in front of the stores, but it isn’t even close to full. I check the Kresge’s and then I am on my way down the arcade to Murphy’s. My mind is off in some day dream somewhere. Then I hear the civil defense siren at the front of the parking lot start revving up.
I’m here to tell you that unearthly sound from those Federal Signal Corporation Thunderbolts is something most of us of my generation will probably take to our graves. It was an uncanny, wailing noise with a ragged buzzing undertone that pressed close to you, and faded into the distance, and then pressed close to you again as the horn rotated slowly around on top of its pole.
In Maryland, in Montgomery County, every first Saturday of the month at 1 o:clock they’d test the damn things, and there was one on a pole just a hundred yards or so from the apartment my folks and I lived in. The thunderbolts had this a big metal box at the base of the pole that housed an air compressor of some kind that you could hear kick on before the siren made any noise. It would force air up a long stand pipe up to a square horn that looked like it had been stretched too thin at its base. I later learned that the shape was deliberately designed to overload the horn’s throat and give it its weirdly distorted sound. The horn would rev up to a loud ragged wail, rotating around 360 degrees for as long as it was on. Then it would wind slowly down to a stop with a warbling dying noise that just sent chills through you. The whole thing was painted bright Civil Defense yellow and mostly it just sat there quietly behind the apartments I lived in, giving me the creeps.
(An aside: It took me years to make the mental switch from associating the letters "CD" to compact music disks and not the logo for the Civil Defense bomb shelters and sirens that were everywhere. AM radios back in that time had two frequencies marked with the "CD" logo on them, that you were supposed to tune to in case of a nuclear attack. That was how I first learned to associate the letters "CD" with music.)
You could hear the sirens for miles and no matter you knew it was only a test, they still sent a slight chill through you whenever you heard them begin revving up. There were two signals we’d been taught to listen for. The long winding rev up to pitch, held for a long while, was the incoming attack signal. It meant proceed to the nearest shelter, the bombs are on their way. Then there was the one of my nightmares, the one that for some reason they only tested here in Maryland occasionally: a quickly repeating revving up and winding down of the siren, over and over again, up to pitch, back down, and then up again. That was the imminent attack signal. It meant the bombs are here, now, right now, take cover wherever you are.
And…kiss your ass goodbye… The joke among my friends was that Saturday at 1 o:clock would be the best time for the Russians to launch an attack, since nobody was likely to take the warning seriously then. But it was one of those grim jokes that cold war kids tell each other. We’d all done our duck and cover drills, and we all knew that as close to Washington D.C. as we were living, none of it likely mattered anyway. If the a-bombs started falling, face it, we were all toast.
And there I am, one sunny summer weekday afternoon, a 12 year old kid out on a mission to find a model car kit, with perhaps a half dozen adults also shopping nearby, and we’re all walking down the arcade in front of the stores at Congressional Plaza, just strolling from one store to another, when this CD siren in the parking lot starts going off and it isn’t Saturday and it isn’t 1 o:clock in the afternoon…
I remember this vividly. We all stop, dead in our tracks. We look at the horn on its pole out there in the front of the parking lot. We all kind of nervously look at each other. One man sort-of shakes his head and sort-of laughs, and it is the most unconvincing laugh I’ve ever heard in my life. And then we all go on about our business.
I go into the Murphy’s, walk the beaten path to the model car kits, check the inventory, and if the kit I am looking for that day is dancing on the shelves with a little squeal of delight at the sight of me I don’t notice it. I remember what a friend of mine whose father works for the Atomic Energy Commission told me about what a nuclear attack would probably look like from our point of view. "You’ll see the bright flash, but there won’t be any noise. You’ll feel a flash of heat like a really intense flashbulb just went off right next to your skin. Then you’ll see the tops of the trees in the distance catching fire…about a few seconds before the blast wave hits…" I am stoically going on about the business I’d been about before the siren started going off and I am not paying the slightest bit of attention to what I am doing. My eyes glance at boxes of model cars from Aurora, AMT, Revell and IMC while inside I am bracing myself for the bright flash. I am thinking to myself, it’s probably a fluke…it’s probably a fluke…it’s probably a fluke…but inside I am bracing myself for the flash. Nothing’s going to happen…nothing’s going to happen. It’s just a fluke…it’s just a fluke… All the adults around me are going on about their business too, but nobody is looking at anybody else.
After a few minutes the siren goes silent. I began walking back home. After about an hour and not hearing the imminent attack signal, I began thinking it really might have been a fluke after all. See? See? It wasn’t anything… Just some malfunction… A couple hours later and I am home again and I haven’t been burned to a crisp. I am willing to let myself feel a tad relieved. I sit down on the bed. I notice that I am trembling.
There is a news report next day, about how some of the CD sirens had been switched on by accident.
Face it, if the a-bombs start falling, we’re all toast anyway…
Terrorism worries me, but it doesn’t scare the shit out of me either. Terrorists disgust me more then I have the words to relate, but not nearly as much as the people who once thought that destroying nearly every living thing on planet earth was a moral, let alone a logical self defense plan. And surprise, surprise, those are the exactly the same folks who are now busy thumping their chests trying to get world war III started in the middle east. The Soviet Union is gone, and you work with what you have to work with I guess. But some of us still remember what it was like to live under a real and not an imaginary threat of weapons of mass destruction, when the United States, and for that matter the whole goddamned world, really was at the brink of nuclear annihilation. Maybe that’s why we aren’t jumping around every fucking time the republicans start ginning up a terrorist hysteria for votes.
You know what nothing short of a miracle is Inhofe? Nothing short of a miracle is that there is still a world for all of us to live in despite the best efforts of your kind to drag us into nuclear war with the Soviets. I still have dreams some nights, rarely now, but still, when I hear the sirens wailing out the imminent attack signal. And you know what Inhofe…Fuck You.
Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.
That absence apparently indicates that students in the evolutionary sciences do not qualify for the grants, and some observers are wondering whether the omission was deliberate.
The question arises at a time when evolution has become a political hot potato at all levels of education. While the theory of evolution has overwhelming support from scientists, some conservative Christian groups argue for alternative explanations of the origins of life, including "intelligent design," which holds that an intelligent agent guided the creation of life.
Joe explains that the grants are worth up to four-thousand dollars, and are awarded in addition to the Pell Grants.
The [Department of Education] has an index of classification numbers — referred to as "CIP codes," for the Classification of Instructional Programs — for all academic areas of instruction,
Under that classification scheme, there is a heading for "Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology," under which 10 biological fields are defined. For instance, ecology is 26.1301, and evolutionary biology is 26.1303.
But on a list that defines majors eligible for the grants, issued by the department in May, one of those 10 is missing. On that list, the classification numbers rise in order from 26.1301 to 26.1309 — with the exception of a blank line where 26.1303, or evolutionary biology, would fall.
Tell me that’s not deliberate. Go ahead. Tell me that some Bush gang religious right policy wonk didn’t redline evolutionary biology from the list of eligible majors either because God told them to, or because Karl said it would keep the base happy. I have a modest proposal. If these kooks are that dead set against the study of evolution, they should all be willing to sign pledges stating that they will not partake of any medication or treatment of any kind, nor life enhancing technology, that was developed using evolutionary biology in some way, even if their doctors tell them it would mean saving their own lives.
But then…they don’t keep their own marriage or virginity pledges very well do they…
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. – Complaints about young people who spend time in downtown naked have prompted the Select Board to explore an anti-nudity ordinance.
Groups of young people have been congregating in a downtown parking lot and enjoying the warm summer weather without clothing, and that bothers some local residents.
"A parking lot is not a strip club. It’s a parking lot," resident Theresa Toney told the Select Board last week. She said she has seen repeated instances of naked people hanging out downtown.
"This is a problem. What about children seeing this?" Toney asked.
Actually…I’ve always thought dolls without genitals were more likely to warp impressionable young minds. But I digress…
Vermont has no law against nudity, though some cities and towns ban it by ordinance.
News that the Select Board had asked Town Attorney Robert Fisher to research a possible local ordinance drew a protest of sorts Friday, as five young men gathered downtown and stripped their clothes off in protest.
"There’s no real valid way to justify the banning of nakedness," said one of the men, Adhi Palar, between licks on his clarinet. "Nakedness does not violate any human rights whatsoever."
With no law to enforce, Police Chief John Martin was taking a laid-back approach.
"What’s the harm?" Martin asked. "It’s a problem to the extent that it bothers people, but we’ve always had it here."
"We get calls and we check out what’s going on. Even though there’s often no criminal violation, we want to be sure there isn’t a confrontation. Or that someone is not emotionally disturbed."
A criminal charge might result if the nudity is sexual in nature, with the purpose of "gratification or the intent of arousing oneself or another," Martin said.
Well…there go all my stereotypes about taciturn New Englanders. You have to like the laid back approach the police are taking here. I guess if I couldn’t step outside all winter long without looking like the Michelin tire man I might get a tad giddy in the summertime too. I wonder if it’s a vitamin D craving or something…?
So for some god forsaken reason I was watching the network news last night. Oh…right…I know what it was. I was watching for stories about that escaped convict that killed two people down in southern Virginia. First of all I have family down there, but secondly the crime itself seemed just dumbfoundingly stupid. Stupid beyond stupid being its own excuse. Here’s this…kid, basically…who was in jail for attempted armed robbery, and he tries to escape and in the process kills two people and now he’s facing a death sentence. Far as I could tell it was his first arrest so there was no "three strikes" kind of thing going on there. What kind of drooling moron turns a few years in prison into an appointment with the gas chamber? Making an escape attempt if the opportunity just threw itself at you I could see (it’s still dumb, but not catastrophically dumb), but when the guns come out, hey, just go quietly man. It’s just attempted armed robbery. Just do the fucking time and deal with it. But no…and now he’s 24 and headed for death row. So I was searching for any insight into this guy I could snatch from the news stream. That’s why I happened to be watching CBS News last night…
…and among the stories Bob Schieffer read to me was a little nugget about the Jose Padilla case. Padilla, you may recall, had been in a South Carolina brig for over three years as an ”enemy combatant”…an American citizen accused but never charged in the Bush administration way of doing things, of planning to set off a ”dirty bomb” somewhere in the U.S. Padilla is one of the guys the Bush administration has been holding out as a reason for doing away with that troublesome bill of rights that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and liberals. But rather then loose a fight over it in the supreme court before he could pack it with enough right wing lunatics who were willing to declare Bush King George The First, the Bush administration finally brought Padilla into court. Schieffer casually informed me last night that the judge had thrown out one of the three counts against him. And as I was busy searching for news about the Virginia killings, I casually shrugged off the story just as Schieffer did while he was reading it.
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — A federal judge in Miami on Monday dismissed a terror count against Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen once identified as a "dirty bomb" suspect and detained as an "enemy combatant."
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said in a written opinion that the charge — conspiracy to "murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country" — duplicated other counts in a federal grand jury indictment handed down last year.
"An indictment is multiplicitous when it charges a single offense multiple times, in separate counts," Cooke wrote. As charged, she added, the indictment exposes Padilla and his co-defendants to multiple punishments for a single crime.
The indictment, Cooke noted, "alleges one and only one conspiracy" and that the same facts are "re-alleged in each of the consecutive counts."
Cooke also ruled that a second count against Padilla and his co-defendants was "duplicitous" — charging them with the same offense under two sections of federal law. She ordered the government to choose between the two counts, which provide for different penalties, by Friday.
The counts in question are conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists.
The main terror charge against him was thrown out. Not just …one out of three. And…in case you haven’t been following this…remember that the accusation the Bush gang had been throwing around, that he was plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S., was never even part of the indictment. So now it’s just two charges of conspiracy to support terrorists abroad, and get this, the charges are that he was involved in a plot for five years, and the other charge is that he was involved in Exactly The Same Plot, for 15 years.
What the fuck? I’m shocked that the Bush gang didn’t manage to find fifteen squared charges in that fifteen years of plotting to…er…support terrorists abroad. Count one: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year. Count two: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for two years. Count three: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year, and then again for one year more. And so on until you get fifteen times fifteen counts against him that you can wave around as proof that the president needs more power then the constitution gives him, because these are very dangerous times. What the judge said was, no…that’s all just one conspiracy.
I discovered what the implications of the ruling were not from CBS News, but via Americablog, which had a link to a Miami Herald article that gave me the details CBS News didn’t feel like I needed to have, and once again I hit the roof. I hate those bastards. I really hate them. I used to watch the evening network news avidly. I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley. Maybe it was just living in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Maybe it was just the hungry curious about the world mind I always had. But I had to have my news fix every day after dinner, even when I was an elementary school kid, and anxious to watch Astro Boy too when the news was over. And now I can’t really bear to watch TV news anymore. Why even bother, when I have to double check everything I hear them tell me anyway?
First he dismissed 81-year-old Mary Lambert from the Diaconate Board of the First Baptist Church along with two members, claiming there were attendance issues.
Now the Rev. Timothy LaBouf has dismissed Mary Lambert as a Sunday School teacher for an adult class after she’s been on the job for over 50 years, claiming that his interpretation of the Bible is that a woman is prohibited from teaching men.
Lambert has been a church member for 54 years and a long time Sunday School teacher but got a letter dated Aug. 9 from LaBouf and the board saying that the Bible says a woman can perform any job, as long as its outside of the church.
LaBouf, who has been pastor at the church for about two years, and is also a member of the Watertown City Council, quotes the first epistle to Timothy which hold "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent".
Lambert received the letter signed by Kendra LaBouf, wife of the pastor. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission" the letter said. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became sinner".
The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city’s day-to-day operations is a woman.
Allegations arise after failed gay rights referendum attempt
The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating alleged election fraud in the failed attempt of a group called Equal Rights Not Special Rights to force a ballot referendum on whether over gay people should be protected by Cincinnati’s anti-discrimination law.
Equal Rights Not Special Rights officially withdrew its petitions Thursday, saying it discovered one paid signature gatherer had fraudulently signed 18 names in the more than 7,600 signatures that were validated by the Hamilton County Board of Elections last June.
Thousands of those validated signatures were to be challenged Thursday by a pro-ordinance group called Citizens To Restore Fairness, which said the referendum sponsor was systematic in its use of fraud and tampering of petitions to push the issue onto ballots this fall. A protest hearing at the Board of Elections, scheduled for Thursday, was canceled when Prosecutor Joe Deters started his investigation.
According to 365Gay.com, Fidel Castro and Cincinnati Reds owner Bob Castellini were among the signees. Maybe Castro gave Phil Burress a box of his best Cohibas while he was there…
Phil Burress, chairman of the group behind the referendum, said he referred to Deters the name of the signature gatherer who he thinks committed fraud. Burress said his staff alerted him to the 18 questionable signatures, and he didn’t look at any beyond that because it was clear they wouldn’t have enough signatures to force a referendum.
"No one else from staff has said anything about (other) signatures that are corrupt," Burress said.
"Why would I be required to check that out, when it’s the homosexual activists making the claims (of massive fraud)."
They pulled the petitions because they went a little too far this time, and Phil has somehow sensed this. The election process in Ohio has been corrupt for so long now under republican rule that the kook pews figured they could get away with anything now and threw caution to the wind. Citizens To Restore Fairness had only just started looking at the signatures and they found Fidel’s name in there and that was too much, even by Ohio standards. And true to form, Phil is looking for a scapegoat. Oh yes…it was that guy we paid to collect signatures. You sure it isn’t the gays Phil? Isn’t it always the gays?
No Phil, it’s you. Someone who feels utterly no compunction about lying through their teeth to incite the mob cannot possibly have any moral brakes when it comes to a little thing like election fraud. Your kind will lie, cheat and steal any election you come anywhere near and not feel the slightest twinge of guilt or remorse about it either, because you’re on a mission from God and God doesn’t mind it when people lie and cheat and steal for Him. God is that big mafia boss in the sky…right Phil? He likes it when you bring Him bling.
This is the republican party in a nutshell. I wander the liberal and progressive blogs and constantly I see amazement over how completely amoral the republicans have become. There’s Bush wiretapping Americans right and left at will as though he can do as he damn well pleases a fuck the rule of law. There’s the bogus rationals for the war in Iraq, in-your-face lies like Saddam was involved in 9-11 that have been debunked over and over again and yet the Bush administration keeps repeating them. There’s the whining petulant sense of entitlement and bitter resentment towards everyone who isn’t One Of Us. I’ve been seeing it for decades in the anti-gay kook pews: That Fuck The Constitution, Fuck Democracy, Fuck The Rule Of Law we’ll do to you as we damn well please attitude…that ritualistic waving around of one damn stupidly transparent lie after another, long after the lie has stopped convincing anyone, because as long as the lie can still incite the mob it’s still useful…that whining, petulant sense of entitlement by virtue of heterosexuality, and bitter resentment toward gay people who stubbornly refuse to hate themselves like they hate us. I’ve had to face that open sewer of arrogance and hate and resentment ever since I left puberty behind. And then I watched as the republican party became that.
This Tom Tomorrow cartoon has been my favorite, ever since he put it up right after 9-11 (click on the link to see the whole thing). In it, Uncle Sam exhorts Americans to hold firm in their basic American values in the face of the threat from Osama bin Laden and his Taliban backers.
Of course, the creator of This Modern World sees those basic American values a tad differently then the president and the congress we unfortunately happened to have on 9-11. Uncle Sam brings forward a political dissenter who says he still thinks Bush is a dufus ("That’s the spirit son!"), a feminist who says women make their own choices in this democracy ("Yow! Take that Osama!"), some gays, and an atheist to step up to the podium and flaunt themselves in the enemy’s face for America. Finally Sam says "The only way to beat these terrorists is to stand up for tolerance and diversity and everything else they hate about our free society! Are you with me Americans?" It was irony of course, but I think with tongue only partially in cheek; and I found myself thinking wistfully "If only I lived in that America…"
Well…we all know how things have gone since. Some days it seems like the religious wackos here at home are a grim mirror of the ones throwing bombs abroad, their views on social justice, women, gays, human sexuality and liberal secular democracy are so much alike. So it was with pleasure that while I was scanning the news today and I came across this…
Israel’s military campaign against Hizbullah in Lebanon was a "failure" and demonstrated to Palestinian groups the Jewish state is weak and can ultimately be defeated, a senior terror leader told WorldNetDaily in an interview.
The leader, Abu Oudai, chief rocket coordinator for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank, said Hizbullah’s "tremendous victory" has emboldened his group and other Palestinian terror organizations to immediately coordinate violence against Israel and to focus their "resistance" on rocket attacks.
"I think the most important achievement this war in Lebanon demonstrated is that Israel – with all its power, its air force, its tanks, its navy and its unlimited budget – can be defeated," said Abu Oudai.
"If we do (what Hizbullah accomplished), this Israeli army full of gay soldiers and full of corruption and with old-fashioned war methods can be defeated also in Palestine."
Star of gay adult films to entertain Israeli troops
A star of gay pornographic films is traveling to Israel to entertain the troops and shoot two films, PageOneQ has learned.
Michael Lucas (picture, right), head of Lucas Entertainment, is planning to give troops free admission to a live sex show in Tel Aviv. It will be his third appearance there.
"I toured Israel before with Rob Ramos in 2004 (Haifa and Tel-Aviv) and with Wilfried Knight in 2005 (Tel-Aviv)," he wrotes in the announcement on his blog. "I haven’t decided yet who will be my partner for the live sex show I’m doing there (Israel has no problem with that type of entertainment)."
Taaaake thAT you miserable bunch of gutter crawling flea bitten human hating religious wackos…
A friend of mine passed on this link to a really cute AIDS prevention video. It’s the kind of thing you’ll never see here in the Excitable States of America. What makes this video so remarkable, and I think far more likely to drive its point home, is that it isn’t so much about having sex, as finding love in a world that seems horribly stacked against it. You watch this thing and by the end you’re really on the edge of your seat wondering if this poor little lost cuteling will ever find love, and cheering when he finally does. And as the lovers drive off into the sunset, the film makers drop the message on you…and it works brilliantly.
It’s done with computer animated characters and the hero of the piece is just adorable (see above!), it’s hilarious in spots (and a tad unsafe for work in others so be warned. This was obviously made somewhere that human sexuality isn’t considered a wicked dirty thing) and the message is a positive one, not a negative one; not an appeal to fear, but to hope and dreams of love. The religious right would collectively have kittens if anything like this was produced here in the U.S. Let’s hear it for the Internet.
[Update…] I had to update the link because the original location wasn’t playing this video anymore. The good news is it’s all over YouTube now and it wasn’t when I first posted this. I’ve linked to the one I thought had the best video quality.
Also…a reader was looking for the song played here and I think would have missed it if not for seeing a pingback from another post in the comments. It’s Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes.
Okay…so I’m 52 years old now and I shouldn’t eat a heavy meal before bedtime anymore. So I ate a Checkers burger and fries late last night, and then didn’t sleep very well the rest of that night. So I was kinda tired when I came home from work today and walked in the door to my little Baltimore rowhouse and right up the stairs to my bedroom and took a nap. And I had three very vivid dreams in a row. And then a forth very short one that kicked me back awake.
In the first dream I was having a pleasant conversation with someone I used to know, who passed away many years ago. We were walking around my old high school neighborhood and chatting pleasantly. In the second dream I was watching some co-workers at Space Telescope assembling some sort of space probe. There were people standing around watching the process who were all smoking cigarettes and the room was thick with it, and someone said they needed to back off or the cigarette smoke would contaminate the probe. In the third dream I was sitting on the floor in front of my TV watching some strange cartoon show. It was a comedy about three klutzy super heroes, each of whom had been independently assigned to fight the same two dangerous evil nasty super villains…but somehow each of them mistook the other two super heroes for the two super villains, and so they were constantly fighting each other to a draw in every episode and never realizing they were fighting the wrong people.
I began, as I sometimes do, to realize I was dreaming, and I thought to myself "These are pretty idiotic dreams I’m having now. The guy I was talking with in the first dream has been dead for years, and he never talked much to me in real life anyway. We don’t assemble space probes at the Institute, and nobody in their right mind assembles space probes in a smoke filled room. And that cartoon’s central joke would get old after just a few episodes…"
…and then…
…suddenly it was as if I had been pulled back to another place. I was looking down at a table with three, open three ring binders on it. Each binder was open to a page of some sort of software code print-out. Somehow I knew it was code anyway. But I’d never seen its like. I realized…somehow…that each binder was open to the page with the code on it for one of the three dreams I’d just had. It…felt like…something said to me something along the lines of "okay…you don’t like those dreams…then fix them."
I looked more carefully at the code. It was strange. Just a series of one line statements, one after the other after the other. It had been run through a print formatter, similar to what my programmer’s editor will do if you print code out from within it, with certain keywords and values in bold or italicized fonts to make it easier to read. But the character set was weird. I can’t reproduce it here, but the format of the statements was something like this:
XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x
Just that…one line after another after another, for about fifteen to twenty lines per dream. Each statement began with something like…I dunno…it seemed to be some kind of big and bolded keyword that I somehow knew was an identifier of some kind. Then there were between two and three smaller italicized words that…again somehow…I knew were modifiers of some sort. Then a sentence like structure of maybe a dozen or so more words that…somehow…I knew was an expression of some kind. One complete dream might look something like this:
XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx xx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxx XXXXXXXXXX x xxx x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxx XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXXXX x xx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxx xx x x x xx xx x xxxxx XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx xx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxx XXXXXXXXXX x xxx x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx XXXXXXXXX xx x xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxx xxx xx x x XXXXXXX xx xxxx x xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xx XXXXXXXXXX x xxx xx x xx xxxxx xxx xxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx x XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xx XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxx XXXXXXXXXX x x x x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xx xxxxx xx x x xx
It was weird. I stood there looking at it and thought to myself "This is the most monotonal code I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s too uniform. I don’t see any flow control, operators, conditionals branching… What the hell?" And while part of me was thinking "I can’t edit this…I don’t understand it" another part was thinking "You’re kidding….This is what makes a dream?"
And then I woke up…
Mothers…don’t let your kids grow up to be programmers…
NEW YORK, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Bankrupt Northwest Airlines Corp. advised workers to fish in the trash for things they like or take their dates for a walk in the woods in a move to help workers facing the ax to save money.
The No. 5 U.S. carrier, which has slashed most employees’ pay and is looking to cut jobs as it prepares to exit bankruptcy, put the tips in a booklet handed out to about 50 workers and posted for a time on its employee Web site.
The section, entitled "101 ways to save money", does not feature in new versions of the booklet or the Web site.
Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said some employees who received the handbook had taken issue with a couple of the items. "We agree that some of these suggestions and tips … were a bit insensitive," Blahoski told Reuters.
The four-page booklet, "Preparing for a Financial Setback" contained suggestions such as shopping in thrift stores, taking "a date for a walk along the beach or in the woods" and not being "shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."
The booklet was part of a 150-page packet to ground workers, such as baggage handlers, whose jobs will likely be cut after their union agreed to allow the airline to outsource some of their work, Blahoski said.
I have a proposal: From now on the board of directors of Northwest Airlines and their families will have to fly to all their destinations on board airplanes that are being maintained and operated by people who need to dumpster dive in order to make ends meet.
"But I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Homosexuality is an alternative lifestyle," she said.
Cinq…
"That doesn’t make it a marriage. Some people have group sex. Should we allow two men and three women to marry? Should we allow polygamy with one man and five wives? For some people, the alternative lifestyle is bestiality. Do we allow a man to marry a sheep?"
Le Curtian…Applaus a Voux…
[Edited a tad…] I found a copy of the actual quotes she made about having gay friends and having the utmost respect for them…
A ceremony to honor the achievements of six high profile gay Californians erupted into a political fight at the State Capitol Monday with some Republicans storming off the Assembly Floor.
The Legislature’s Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender Caucus (LGBT) sponsored the first Pride Recognition Awards, a program they say is designed to recognize the accomplishments of people who happen to be gay in their respective fields.
Conservative Assemblymembers boycotted the program.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise," said Assembly Republican Leader George Plescia, R-San Diego. "We’re wasting a lot of time we have a lot of bills on the floor."
The honorees included several celebrities, including former NFL tackle Esera Tuaolo and Reichen Lehmkuhl, the million dollar prize winner of the "The Amazing Race 4" reality television show. Watching quietly from the back of the room was Lehmkuhl’s partner, Lance Bass, a singer with the former boy band ‘N Sync. Bass recently went public with the fact he is gay.
Assemblymember Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he hoped the event would benefit Republicans by showing them the "strength of our diversity and the many accomplishments in a variety of disciplines." But about 10 Republicans either walked out or boycotted the event altogether.
"So it’s a great disappointment that they’re acting like such children," Leno said.
MEADE – Two Meade boys have confessed to cutting down a rainbow flag outside a hotel here, the proprietors said Monday.
The Lakeway Hotel became a focus of controversy last month after owners J.R. and Robin Knight hung the colorful banner, a gift from their 12-year-old son, in front of the place. Locals uncomfortable with such a symbol – it also stands for gay pride – decried the flag’s presence and then, in the early-morning hours of July 31, someone cut it down.
The disappearance had remained a mystery, but the father of two local boys brought them to the Lakeway on Friday and they owned up to their involvement.
"They apologized and said they’d replace it," J.R. Knight said. He didn’t name the boys, and Meade County Sheriff Michael Cox said only that officials are investigating.
Meanwhile, Knight said replacing a 5-foot-by-5-foot plate glass window smashed in at the hotel’s restaurant – also apparently due to the flag flap – probably would cost about $500. Two neon beer signs destroyed in the same incident probably will cost another $1,000.
Someone tossed a brick through the window early Friday morning, according to the Knights and local authorities, who are investigating. Scrawled on the brick was the word "fag."
An 18-year-old gay man who was badly beaten in Edgewood on July 30 might have been assaulted because a man at the party believed the gay man had touched his butt, a statement of probable cause filed in state District Court says.
William York, 21, of Edgewood, and Leroy Segura, 19, of Moriarty have been charged with aggravated battery, kidnapping, false imprisonment and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Bond for each man was set at $100,000 cash only by District Judge Michael Vigil on Monday. Two juveniles, a boy and girl, are also being held in connection to the case.
York believed the victim tried to grab his butt while they were at a party in Edgewood on July 30, the statement says. He said Segura, who is known by the nickname “Half Pint,” told him the victim tried to grab York’s butt, the statement says.
In an interview, York told state police the comment upset him and made him want to fight the 18-year-old man, the statement says. York said everyone at the party made fun of the 18-year-old man because he was gay, the statement says. York said he wanted to “scare” the victim to “make him straight and to get him to stop acting the way he was,” the statement says.
The juvenile male arrested in the case said he, York and Segura tied the gay man’s hands, placed a torn black T-shirt over his head, walked him into a deserted field, pushed him onto a downed fence and beat him, the statement says. The juvenile, the statement says, said he egged on York by calling the gay man joto, a derogatory Spanish word meaning gay.
The documents did not contain statements from Segura, who wore a rosary around his neck in court Monday.
The gay man suffered bleeding on the brain, a concussion, facial lacerations and bruising from the beating, which lasted for hours, state police have said. York, Segura and the juvenile male have been charged under New Mexico’s hate-crimes law.
The 18-year-old victim went to the party with a girl, who was also beaten and held inside the trailer house where the party took place, the statement says. She told police “the male subjects would knock (the gay man) down and if he did not get up off the ground within a certain count or if he did not make any noise, they would jump on him, hitting and kicking him,” the statement says.
The female victim said the beating stopped as “the sun was coming up,” the statement says.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise…"
What…Did The Greeks Threaten To Sue You Or Something…?
That Oliver Stone sure knows how to tell an incisive and gripping human drama about real people, doesn’t he. None of this puerile Hollywood tinseltown fairlytale crap for him. He tells gripping human dramas about real people. And he gets the facts right. Sort of…
‘World Trade Center’ omits Black soldier
The World Trade Center movie tells the story of the rescues of New York Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno from Ground Zero, as well as that of the men who rescued them. In real life, the officers were rescued by sergeants Karnes and Thomas. In the film, however, they were rescued by Karnes and PFC Dave Thomas; a composite character, played by William Mapother, a white actor, who is meant to represent Thomas.
World Trade Center producer Michael Shamberg said that they knew about Sgt. Thomas’s role in the rescue, but were unable to find him when creating the film. He said producers didn’t discover Thomas was a Black man until after they had started the movie. He also said that in spite of the fact that the film was co-written by McLoughlin and Jimeno was consulted for authenticity, no one ever asked them for a physical description of the man who helped save their lives.
“Frankly, we goofed–we learned when we were filming that he was an African-American,” said Shamberg. “We would change it if we could. I actually called him and apologized, and he said he didn’t mind. He was very gracious about it.”
And I’m sure Alexander The Great would have been equally gracious about being turned into a heterosexual too. Him and his…best buddy…Hephaistion. And…no way are you the kinda cowardly bottom feeding slug who would think about how much box office he’d loose in flyover territory if one of his 9-11 heroes was a black man…
Shamberg also apologized for another African-American officer, Bruce Reynolds, who was also portrayed as white in the movie.
Er…make that two black men. So…you gonna leave these guys out of the director’s cut? Make them more white?
It’s been a long six years of George Bush…but it looks like all those folks who thought the old politics-as-usual were still preferable to "partisanship" and "divisiveness" are finally starting to get what they’re dealing with now. This from Oliver Willis:
I can completely identify with Josh Marshall here and his portrayal of the bare-knuckle style of our politics nowadays.
With all those caveats though, there is a difference. And I think at some level or another, it’s one almost everyone in the center-left can relate to, at least at some level. For my part, I don’t feel my politics have changed much over the past half dozen years, if by that we mean my basic political orientation, policies I believe in and don’t, basic understanding of how the world works and so forth. Many people who read my site are much more to the left politically than I am. And occasionally, some issue will come up where that fact suddenly becomes evident, often to people’s surprise and sometimes anger.
I was going to start by saying that what’s changed for me is that the country I know and value is under attack. But that’s not quite it.
I live in Manhattan and have a certain perspective on the country. Folks in Oklahoma or evangelicals in South Carolina have a different one. And that’s fine. It’s their country too. What I think is that a certain political movement has taken over the country — call it movement conservatism in its late, degraded form — and wants to govern it by all or nothing rules.
I’ve not really moved an inch on my positions on the important issues, but the insanity of the Bush presidency makes my center-left proclivities appear to be on the far, far, left (which, in a Democratic presidency will probably be the second biggest pain in my butt).
I dislike the two-dimensional political spectrum. I seem liberal on some issues (censorship, victimless crime, minority rights, war, immigration, church-state separation, education) conservative on others (gun control, free trade, national defense) and moderate on still others (regulation of the economy, taxation, state’s rights, science and research). I don’t see myself so much as liberal or conservative, as a social engineer. A rule of law is social engineering. A constitution is social engineering. Societies either engineer themselves to work or they don’t. Ask the children of Marx and Lenin, ask the shades that walk the fields of Gettysburg what happens to a society when its understanding of the human identity and society is profoundly wrong. I am of the party of Whatever Actually Works.
But in these times anyone who isn’t with Bush is a liberal, so I reckon that’s what I am now too. And it’s not because we’ve all actually become liberals. It’s because the Bush gang has deliberately, cynically, and with malice, sought to up-end politics-as-usual in America, destroy the American political consensus and, quite literally, destroy the democratic political process. And they did it so they could seize power for themselves and hold onto it indefinitely. Pat Buchanan saw it back when he was working for Nixon, and called it "positive polarization": divide the country, and they’d have the bigger half. But the Bush gang has gone beyond that, into the destruction of the democratic process itself. They are radicals, in the mold of the 1930s brownshirts, who reject not just social liberalism, but democracy itself, as decadent.
In an interview with the London Guardian back in September 19, 2003, Paul Krugman spoke of when he saw it himself…ironically through the words of Henry Kissinger…
Even more confusing for those who like their politics to consist of nicely pigeonholed leftwingers criticising rightwingers, and vice versa, will be the incendiary essay that introduces Krugman’s new collection of columns, The Great Unravelling, published in the UK next week. In it, Krugman describes how, just as he was about to send his manuscript to the publishers, he chanced upon a passage in an old history book from the 1950s, about 19th-century diplomacy, that seemed to pinpoint, with eerie accuracy, what is happening in the US now. Eerie, but also perhaps a little embarrassing, really, given the identity of the author. Because it’s Henry Kissinger.
"The first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine," Krugman writes of A World Restored, the 1957 tome by the man who would later become the unacceptable face of cynical realpolitik. Kissinger, using Napoleon as a case study – but also, Krugman believes, implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s – describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself.
This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the US today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn’t comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger’s theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections – as opposed to, say, from God.
But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." Exactly, says Krugman, who recallss the response to his column about Tom DeLay, the anti-evolutionist Republican leader of the House of Representatives, who claimed, bafflingly, that "nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes".
"My liberal friends said, ‘I’m not interested in what some crazy guy in Congress has to say’," Krugman recalls. "But this is not some crazy guy! This guy runs Congress! There’s this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we’re facing." But those who point out what is happening, Kissinger had already noted long ago, "are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane." ("Those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word are usually accused of being ‘shrill’, of going over the top," Krugman writes, and he has become well used to such accusations.)
Which is how, as Krugman sees it, the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn’t have the evidence. Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."
Why anyone would be surprised to see all this in that open sewer that is the Bush base after the election of 2000 is beyond me, other then, as Krugman says, people just find it nearly impossible to take at face value what they’re seeing, when it comes to dealing with a group of anti democratic radicals who are actually in power. Somehow, power is supposed to moderate the radical impulse. But sometimes it just feeds it.
I came of political age during Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate. Back then Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, in response to a reporter’s question about desegregation, said something that I have thought ever since should be engraved on every ballot presented to every voter in every election, in every polling place in America: "Watch what we do, not what we say." I never thought I would see a president tell a bigger lie to the American people then Nixon’s "I am not a crook." But George Bush has looked us all in the eye and said "I’m a uniter, not a divider", and now America is more divided then ever, and that was deliberate. They knew they couldn’t govern from a majority consensus, but they figured they could have the biggest piece of a factionalized America. So they waved the flag in our faces, while they were busy ripping the America it stood for apart, and now there is no more politics-as-usual.
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